That time I put my family ahead of Spotlight

Spotlight is the likely best picture winner this year. At least, I thought that for certain until The Revenant won top honors at the Golden Globes, which sometimes means nothing. The Globes really love Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, as evidenced by the fact that they awarded him a best drama globe for Babel, then the only Oscar it won was for its score. The point is, Spotlight is a major awards contender, and I'm not going to get to rank it this year because its release date is January 28th.

But I could have. I sure could have.

I was invited to a critics screening of Spotlight yesterday, Wednesday the 13th in Australia. The only problem is, it was a morning screening, and I had both of my kids home with me. Their daycare doesn't reopen after a brief summer break until today. (My older son will be there for two weeks more before he starts proper school.)

In the past, I might have moved heaven and earth to make this happen anyway. I'd get to that screening come hell or high water. Whatever other cliched expression you want to stick in here.

I'd have asked my father-in-law to watch them (even though he's only ever watched one of them at a time). I'd have figured out if there were a commercial day care center near the screening, one that you can use on an informal, one-off basis (even though that would be very expensive). I'd have seen if someone could come to our house to babysit them (even though that would also be very expensive). I'd even have momentarily toyed with the idea of the five-year-old babysitting the two-year-old. He's demonstrated the maturity for that responsibility, right?

In the end, I didn't. In the end, none of this scrambling left the confines of my mind, where it really only scrambled around for two minutes here and there in the first days after I'd learned about the screening.

As Dominic Toretto would say, "Family comes first."

So am I growing up? Growing into the responsible parent we knew I had the ability to be, one who has his priorities straight? Or am I just getting worse at thinking up outside-the-box solutions?

It's got to be the former. Because in the end I said to myself, "Yes, having an accurate year-end movie rankings is very important to you. Far more important than it has any right to be. But it's just a movie. You can see it two weeks later, and even though it won't be part of your rankings, it'll become part of the larger cinematic tapestry that is anyone's ongoing relationship with the movies. It will, or it could, join other cherished favorites that were not seen during their release years, but still went on to become cherished favorites all the same."

If maturity means accepting inevitable defeat with equanimity, then I'd say I've gotten there.

If priorities means putting my family first, then Dominic Toretto would be proud of me.

The original dimensions of an independent film

Independent film, like independent music, was once quite marginal. It goes without saying that you'd have to specifically seek it out, but more likely than not, you'd even have to seek out any discussion of it. Year-end top ten lists would frequently be limited to studio fare, and if you did end up learning about one of these movies it would usually be by accident.

Both independent film and independent music crossed over to the mainstream at some point, and of course, it was probably at different times for both, if you could even pinpoint a specific moment. For film, which is what we care about today, I'll call that moment the 1990s, when movies made by Miramax started to get regularly nominated for Oscars. The whole era was probably shepherded in by something like sex, lies and videotape in 1989, if you want to focus it down to an exact movie.

Before independent film came knocking on the door of even mainstream cinephiles, it had a certain perception, which was probably not unwarranted. Those old-school independent films usually dealt with people at the fringe of society who did not play traditional roles of hero or villain, and often had no satisfying narrative arc to speak of. A satisfying narrative arc was too bourgeois, or something.

In other words, basically exactly like Josh and Benny Safdie's Heaven Knows What.

Heaven Knows What is the adaptation of the unpublished memoirs of a junkie named Arielle Holmes, who courageously plays herself in the film -- even more courageously because people she knows and cares about have died from drug use, and not too far in the past. The directors discovered Holmes in New York City while working on another film and encouraged her to write the memoirs, paying her by the page. At some point it was determined that she'd have the chops to play herself, which would certainly bring authenticity to the project -- even more authenticity than the Safdie brothers usually bring to their projects (I assume, as this is my first exposure to them). However, professional actors played some of the other key roles, including Caleb Landry-Jones.

I watched it on Monday night as the unplanned second half of a homeless double feature, the first being Oren Moverman's Time Out of Mind, in which Richard Gere plays a homeless man. And though there were certain things about it I found pretty captivating, including the commitment of the actors and an early 80s synth-influenced score, I ultimately came around to the notion that the Safdies are just trying to deliver pretty much exactly the kind of independent movie that once made the form so inaccessible.

The movie really has no beginning or end. It's all middle. Every character is some degree of unlikable, and their motivations usually defy the need to conform to something that can be logically explained. Characters will begin and stop appreciating one another for no reason that can be determined. And through it all, grim events will bleed into one another until they are just one blurry continuum of grim.

I mean, that's a movie about drug users at its core. The difference is that nowadays, a movie that stares at this life without blinking also gives us at least a loose three-act structure and a moment of catharsis. Heaven Knows What does not.

I realize the stance I'm taking is somewhat problematic. I don't want to box filmmakers in, especially if that can be construed as an attempt to make them more digestible to the mainstream. In a day or two you will be seeing films in my top ten that are not mainstream at all, so that's clearly not what I'm going for. But I do think that just presenting a series of unfortunate episodes without comment, without much connective tissue and with only the slightest hint of readily identifiable motivation, is an approach that belongs to another time. A time when these movies were sidelined from public consumption for good reason.

Josh and Benny Safdie want to get back to that time. I don't, particularly. I don't need a film to end with either explicit tragedy or explicit hope, and some of my favorites are the ones where you can't tell which way it might go. But I do need to feel like there's something that's in some way instructive in the films I see, and I just don't find that in Heaven Knows What.

Heaven knows why.

Straight Outta Luck, or The rules of availability

I don't know how we got to this point.

When I made a conscious decision to pass on Straight Outta Compton in the theaters, it was for two reasons: 1) I knew it was nearly two-and-a-half hours long, and couldn't figure out a good time to fit it in, and 2) I'd heard that although the first half was great, the second half becomes much more of a standard biopic, and straightforward musician biopics are something I strive to avoid.

But I also knew for certain that I'd watch it before my ranking deadline. Now, it looks like that may not happen.

Movies released on the 14th of August in the U.S. -- and only two weeks later in Australia -- always make it to video by the beginning of January. Always.

Well, not always.

Sure, I could buy Straight Outta Compton from iTunes now. But I won't be able to rent it until January 19th, and I won't be able to rent it from a Hoyts kiosk until Thursday, which is the day of my ranking deadline and is already overstuffed with three theatrical viewings of new movies that release that day. I even checked on our Fetch box, the thing that functions like pay-per-view for us, which we never otherwise use, to see if it had snuck on there early. But it had not.

So consider this my elongated explanation why the NWA movie won't be getting ranked this Thursday.

This seems like as good a time as any to discuss what I'm calling my "rules of availability." At this time of year, I'm always trying to figure out what movies I can get in time and what I can't. When the truth of the matter is, I can get all the movies, if I want to.

With the way people illegally torrent movies these days, it's worth asking why I still haven't crossed that line. It's only partly a moral stance. Without realizing it, I think I do protect filmmakers' rights to profit from their work. I don't really do the same for the makers of television, as we've illegally streamed seasons of Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones, though we didn't do that for this past season of Game of Thrones. In those instances, it's because I've worried that watching it in a timely fashion was the only way to ensure I preserved the enjoyment of watching -- otherwise, what happened in the shows would be spoiled before I had the chance to discover it through a legal viewing. (And in fact, when not illegally watching Game of Thrones last season, I did learn a major spoiler that surely will impact my eventual viewing of the season.) So it's been a cost-benefit analysis -- the cost to the makers of the content vs. the benefit to me to appreciate their art unspoiled.

But then there's also the virus factor. What caused us to ultimately stop streaming Game of Thrones was the sketchy websites we had to interact with, many of which forced us through ungainly layers of unwanted advertising, some of which would actually be characterized as porn. Even though our computers seem to have emerged unscathed -- as far as we know, anyway -- the awkwardness of seeing a version that actually worked properly was symbolic of our moral rot in stealing the content.

But then there's the fact that I just don't really know how to do it. There any number of people I could ask, who watch new movies on their computers all the time, and they're DVD quality. It's something they do so regularly that they no longer even think twice about it. I could ask them, and they'd tell me, but the actual act of asking draws attention to my moral opposition to the practice. I know it's probably no more difficult than typing something into Google like "Anomalisa full movie" and I'd be watching it five minutes from now. But then that gets us back to what sites to trust and what not to trust.

I think I'm just not cut out to be a pirate.

And even if I were, I'd surely be using those skills on the aforementioned Anomalisa or Spotlight, and not on Straight Outta Compton, which will be available legally only a few days from now.

So the rules of availability are basically thus:

1) Available in the theater.

2) Available to rent on DVD/BluRay (or borrow from the library).

3) Available to stream legally via Netflix or download a legal rental from iTunes.

4) Available through a screener copy. This is a different type of cheating, though it's one that has no consequence to my computer, and since I'm a critic anyway, I can justify any other moral qualms that way. Unfortunately, I don't know anyone who gets screeners in Australia.

5) Available through an advanced critic screening. That's how I was able to add Room, which doesn't come out until January 28th, to my 2015 list.

If I can't get it through one of these five methods, I have to give it a miss.

Of course, I could have gotten Straight Outta Compton through one of those methods, but at the time, I didn't know it would be my only method.

There. Was that elongated enough for you?

Not far from the reading

I finally got around to watching Thomas Vinterberg's Far From the Madding Crowd, nearly two years after I first started anticipating it.

That anticipation started in January of 2014, in my year-end wrap-up post in which I honored Carey Mulligan for having such a good year at the movies in 2013, and noted that she'd be the star of Vinterberg's upcoming adaptation. Unfortunately, I missed it when it was in the theater (this was just before I got my critics card, and each viewing still represented a specific financial cost) and kept putting off the viewing until near my ranking deadline.

So what was it about this adaptation of a Thomas Hardy novel that was worth starting a two-year anticipation clock?

Well, two years ago was when I was actually reading the book, for reasons unrelated to the fact that there would be an upcoming movie. I discovered during the reading that Vinterberg was making a movie of it, and as soon as I was blown away by his most recent feature The Hunt not long after that, I became all the more excited. In fact, the only reason I was reading the book at all was that I had randomly picked it off of a shelf of my wife's books, having loved Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles.

I'm sure many people read books that are about to become movie adaptations much more regularly, but for me, it's somewhat rare. See, I only make it through about five books a year. That can be explained by a couple factors: 1) With the number of movies I watch, I simply don't allow myself the same amount of reading time that many people do; 2) I'm a slow reader, always have been; 3) If I'm reading something I don't like very much, it's rare that I'll give up on it entirely. Instead I'll just let it stretch out interminably over months.

When these situations do arise, though, they represent a unique opportunity for me to assess the success or failure of a screenplay. In theory, it should not matter the way an adaptation deviates from its source material, assuming those deviations are still within the logic of the world people originally fell in love with, and assuming they don't violate some essential purpose of the original book. A movie needs to stand on its own, and both a movie and a book of the same material can be very good despite being very different. (Starship Troopers is one example that comes to mind.)

But it still gives a person like me an interesting perspective on the very project of adaptation, one I will try to write about today.

For starters, I will say that I liked both the book of Far From the Madding Crowd and the movie quite a bit. But there were some interesting differences, or at the very least, ways I may have interpreted the original novel incorrectly.

Next I should say that I do plan to spoil major plot details, so turn away if you want the details of this 140-year-old story to stay a secret.

Since I'm not sure the best way to delve into this -- and since the chances are better than average that you've neither read this book nor seen this movie anyway -- I'll just kind of start in wherever and go from there. But I suppose a little plot synopsis is warranted first.

It's the story of Bathsheba Everdene (Mulligan), a headstrong young woman in the rural England of 1870, who inherits a farm from her deceased uncle. Although she has men willing to propose to her after knowing her for all of 15 minutes, she's determined that she wants to make her own way and never become the "property" of a man. One of these suitors is a kind farmer, Gabriel Oak (Matthias Schoenaerts), whose proposal to Bathsheba is turned down even before she inherits the farm, though he does through circumstance come to work for her in a strictly platonic capacity. The next suitor is another farmer, the good and reverent William Boldwood (Michael Sheen), who might have been immune to Bathsheba's charms except for a prank Bathsheba is encouraged to play on him by an incorrigible friend, in which she sends him a valentine. The third is a handsome solider, Francis Troy (Tom Sturridge), who tries to ensnare Bathsheba with his aggressively masculine and sexual brand of seduction, but who has been responsible for the ruin of a woman (Juno Temple) he impregnated but did not marry. (Which, to be fair, he does not know at the time -- but he does certainly know he "spoiled her virtue.")

So let's talk about Mr. Troy here. For one, I'm not sure how Sturridge is supposed to be the most handsome of these three, as he looks a bit weaselly and has the cheesy mustache to match. But the really interesting thing about this character is how the movie makes him more morally complex than the book, as I understood it. In the book, I got the impression at the start that Troy had no interest in marrying Fanny Robin (Temple), though also that he did not yet know she was pregnant (nor did she at the time). The book has this comical scene where she's trying to speak to him from outside the window of his barracks, and he's pretending he does not know her. No such scene exists in the movie, and more crucially, there's a scene instead in which Troy goes to a church to be married to her, only she went to the wrong church, or the right church at the wrong time. (It's not entirely clear because even though there's cross-cutting between the two characters in this scene, Vinterberg could also be playing with time a little bit.) So instead of Troy doing Fanny wrong, he believes she's done him wrong.

This is an important difference, if it is indeed a difference. Although Troy is still a jerk and behaves amply so, eventually marrying Bathsheba more for the gambling money it will provide him than for any desire to do honest work or make an honest woman out of her, the jilting at the altar gives his back story a decidedly different tone. In fact, this is a man who might have come good entirely -- he slept with a woman out of wedlock, but then did intend to marry her -- if it hadn't been for a miscommunication. The book does show him displaying feeling for Fanny later on when he sees her again and she ultimately dies, but in the book it introduces complexity to him late in the narrative. In the movie, that complexity was present all along. At the very least it makes him less of a hissable villain. Oddly, movies are usually more interested in making villains one-dimensional rather than the reverse being true.

Then there's Fanny Robin. Perhaps because she's got someone with the name recognition of Juno Temple playing her, it seemed like she would have had more scenes in the movie, even though her role in the book is also comparatively small. The book does spend time on her making a trip to meet Troy near the end, to obtain a sort of alimony that might save her from ruin, though she's very sick and ultimately dies in childbirth -- though it seems like she succumbs to the existing sickness rather than the rigors of giving birth. This scene goes on for a number of pages in the book, but is glossed over in the movie.

Then there's William Boldwood (Sheen), whose role also feels comparatively small. Much more time is spent inside his mind in the book, and crucially, you get a sense of his building resentment toward his ultimately successful rival, Troy. In the movie, the two don't share any screen time together until the moment Boldwood kills him. Thinking Troy dead (he swam away from the beach, leaving only his uniform behind and never materializing again), Bathsheba tells Boldwood she'll answer him by Christmas whether she will consent to marry him (an arrangement that will help pay off the debts run up by her thought-deceased husband). Troy takes the opportunity of a Christmas party thrown at Boldwood's house -- which is meant to double as an engagement party, Boldwood hopes -- to show up again and lay a claim on his wife (who in the book had been mourning for something like six years, but it's more like six months here, which I totally get -- timelines often need to be collapsed in the more urgent medium of cinema). Without even going to a shot of Boldwood looking frustrated, Vinterberg has him just gun Troy down.

Let's not forget the guy we introduced to you first, Gabriel Oak (Schoenaerts). Because of his two other rivals for Bathsheba's affections, one of whom is a friendly rival (Boldwood), Oak gets pushed to the background sometimes in the book. We always remember that the narrative started on him and we do routinely check in with him, but Hardy manages to reduce in our minds the certainty that he will end up with Bathsheba. In fact, I was kind of surprised by the ending, as I thought it very possible that it would just end tragically, like Tess of the d'Urbervilles does. The movie, on the other hand, makes it impossible not to conclude that the two will ultimately be united. Not only is Schoenaerts the most handsome of the three, he's also the most good. Then there's also the fact that longing, meaningful glances, the type that telegraph that two characters will end up together, are a movie's main currency, whereas you have to kind of imagine those moments in a book.

If this seems like a lot of complaints, I'll have you know that this is still a four-star movie for me, and I even toyed with four-and-a-half stars. As I tried to indicate above, the changes from the novel are not necessarily bad -- nor are they even all necessarily changes. (In fact, checking Wikipedia now, I'm not surprised to find that it was I who misinterpreted the nature of the Troy-Fanny relationship in the novel, not Vinterberg who changed it.)

What I love most about this film are the performances of Schoenaerts and Mulligan, who are just aching with romantic chemistry and who are perfectly cast for their roles. (Actually, all the casting is spot on, except I don't think Sturridge is really handsome enough to play Troy.) Mulligan in particular deserves an adjective I have used to describe her before, which is "luminous." Having just seen and been disappointed by her in Suffragette earlier in the week (or really, disappointed by the movie), I am now reminded just what Mulligan can do with the right director and the right lighting. Although that sounds like a kind of backhanded compliment, to suggest lighting plays a role in how effective an actor is, I actually mean it as more of a straightforward compliment to the production. Vinterberg's film is distinguished by how bright it is -- the cinematography (by Charlotte Bruus Christensen) is wonderful, and the colors really pop, which is a notable change in approach from other directors, who have purposefully made Victorian England drab and dreary. In fact, that approach was used by Roman Polanski in his adaptation of Tess of the d'Urbervilles, called Tess, though I do like that movie a lot as well.

I must say I also really liked that I already knew the plot. Often that can be a drawback to a person's enjoyment of a story, since nine times out of ten you actually want to be surprised by what happens in a movie. Here I felt the opposite. Not having to work out who characters are, how they're related to each other and what their motivations are freed me up to just admire the production design and appreciate how the actors were interpreting characters I already knew. It's a bit like watching a Shakespeare adaptation in that way. I'd say it made Far From the Madding Crowd far more satisfying than if I hadn't read the novel, which is pretty much a complete reversal of my usual thoughts on seeing a movie after I've already read the book.

One thing I still don't know: the exact meaning of the title. I'm sure there are places on the interwebs that are devoted to unpacking that meaning, and I'm sure it has something to do with the damaging aspects of gossip or other ills of a social environment, but neither the book nor the movie makes the meaning of the title manifest. I guess it could just be what it literally is: in this remote agrarian environment, they really are far from the bustling of the cities.

So what film adaptation of a book I've recently read do I have to look forward to next? Funny you should ask. That would be Ready Player One, which I read about a year ago, and which Steven Spielberg will be directing for a December 2017 release. Another two years of anticipation, as it turns out -- from this point until then, anyway, though I've known about the upcoming adaptation for nearly a year now. As that book actually sort of disappointed me after a terrific beginning, that's a film adaptation I'll also be eagerly anticipating -- to see if the movie figures out how to right the things the book may have gotten wrong.

Preposterous and preposterouser

Preposterous? The Fast & Furious movies.

Preposterouser? That I marathoned the last five of them -- over the course of more than six months, but still -- in order to rank Furious 7 with my 2015 films.

Less than a week before my ranking deadline, I've finally finished the project.

And I think I don't need to watch another one of these movies for a while, if ever. I apparently have about 15 months until Furious 8 to change my mind on that topic.

While "preposterous" is an adjective that could apply to any of these movies, it's remained a subjective assessment to this point. With Furious 7, it becomes objective.

The trajectory of these films has been to take the characters beyond anti-heroes to actual heroes, those that have the backing of even law enforcement. It's the best way to keep the widest number of potential audience members interested. They're criminals, sort of, but they're also fine, upstanding young gentlemen, sort of. And ladies, sort of.

But it's a real stretch to imagine these guys actually being employed as a government-sanctioned strike unit, as though there is not some group of Navy SEALs that would be better equipped to a obtain a surveillance gadget so powerful that it could have found Osama bin Laden in "a matter of hours." Who is the best person for this job, you ask? Frequently wanted and incarcerated drag racer/bank robber Dominic Toretto, and whoever he considers to be his "family" that week.

Oh, and the plan for this mission? Let's drop them out of airplanes in cars with parachutes, because how could anything possibly go wrong?

And assuming that part of the mission goes well, let's have them jump some other cars between adjacent skyscrapers in Abu Dhabi. And not the tops or anything, but from random floors, hoping that the random floor where they land in the other skyscraper has strong enough floors and enough open space to safely receive a car and its two passengers.

Okay, that wasn't part of the plan, that was improvisation. Sorry. Now it's more realistic.

Actually, I did admire the sheer go-for-broke "fuck it" quality of these story details, on some level. That's why the movie gets a mediocre 2.5 stars from me rather than the lowlier two stars I was pondering.

These story details do tend to create even more of a disconnect with what the movie came to represent, which was a sentimental send off to Paul Walker, who died before shooting could be completed on the film. Probably to the movie's credit -- and probably because they couldn't go back and reshoot many scenes to gain a more melancholy tone, especially the scenes with Walker in them -- they play it straight as just a dumb action movie for nearly two hours. The last ten minutes or so are when they choose to honor Walker via a montage of Walker moments in the previous five films in which he'd appeared, which then give way to that uncanny scene where a beaming, digitally manipulated Walker stares lovingly -- almost too lovingly -- over at Diesel from the driver's seat of the next car over. I'm not sure if I would have noticed the effect if I hadn't known Walker was dead, but I sure did with that knowledge. (And in truth, seeing how they handled this moment was probably the deciding factor in forcing me to finally watch the other movies in this series.)

I must admit, I did feel a bit of a swell of emotion at the end of the movie -- not tears or anything, but definitely chills. And sure, that Waz Khalifa/Charlie Puth song "See You Again," which is admittedly catchy, surely helped with that. But it probably also helped that I had indeed recently seen all these movies and that some of their corny thoughts on loyalty and family did rub off on me. They didn't lose a member of that family in the movie, as Brian O'Connor gets to live on (and just presumably never again put his life at risk for Toretto, now that he's going to have a daughter to join his existing son). But Diesel and the others surely feel like they lost a family member in real life, and those last few must have been really emotional scenes to play.

That is, if they weren't grossed out by the exploitative logistical ickiness of it all.

So Fast & Furious, done and dusted.

And 2015 not far behind it.

Buying Clear

I've rented maybe a hundred movies from iTunes by now, but until this past week, I hadn't bought a single one.

What changed that? The right price, I guess.

Remember this post from a year ago -- exactly a year ago, to the day -- in which I bemoaned the high cost of adding Tim's Vermeer and Jodorowsky's Dune to my 2014 viewings in time for my deadline? (Still haven't seen either movie, by the way.) As they were not available for rent, I'd have to pay at least $15.99 to own them if I wanted to see them in time.

Well the same won't be said for Alex Gibney's Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief, which I must see as some kind of burden because I've put off watching it about as long as I could while still getting to count it for 2015. Oh, like the two movies above, it isn't available to rent either. But its purchase price was a mere $5.99 -- or a dollar less than what I paid to rent the disappointing I Smile Back.

So while I am still philosophically opposed to buying a movie I haven't seen, since there's not a great likelihood I will want to watch it again (especially with a documentary), at least now the simple math made this one too much of a no-brainer. My conscience is clear -- so to speak.

I can't quite figure out the logic behind pricing Going Clear at $5.99 to own, when you might theoretically make a greater return on renting it for $4.99. Then again, if a person is only going to watch the movie one time, does it really matter whether you rent it to that person or sell it to that person? I have no idea if it is intrinsically more expensive for a movie to be downloaded for purchase than downloaded for rental, but I wouldn't think it would be. The price seems to be set at what the value to the purchaser might be, and if that person has no expected desire to see the movie multiple times, he/she is not going to pay $15.99 or more to own it.

If only iTunes had realized this a year ago.

The other nice thing about owning Going Clear is that when we do get around to watching it, we won't be required to finish it within 24 hours before it expires.

Which could be really helpful in the final six days of my 2015 viewing season, when every viewing is catch as catch can.

However, do you know how this story ends? Take a guess.

When I belatedly reviewed our other two, Australian-based streaming services last night to see what 2015 releases might be available through them, I found Going Clear on Presto. For free.

Can you sell iTunes movies on eBay?

A late western surge

Either because of a conspiracy of release dates or the prioritizing of my own viewings, I'm finishing my 2015 viewing season with no fewer than four westerns in the final eight days.

All I'd have to do is schedule a viewing of The Ridiculous 6 on Netflix and I'd have a full house.

And without revealing exactly how much I've liked the two movies I've seen so far, let's just say we're off to a good start.

It was a double feature yesterday, as my wife being able to pick up the kids from daycare allowed me to watch Slow West on my laptop at a Starbucks, in anticipation of meeting up with a friend for an 8:40 showing of The Revenant. (The Revenant was playing only two blocks away from where I work, so it seemed silly to go home and get the kids only to return to that exact location two hours later, and fortunately, it worked out for my wife to help me avoid that.)

The second two will be a Kurt Russell double feature. I already know I'm committed to a Bone Tomahawk screening, since I've rented it from iTunes, and that viewing figures to transpire on Saturday night. Then the big news of the last few days: I've found a way to see The Hateful Eight in time for my ranking deadline. Only just. It doesn't open wide here until January 21st, but the road show version (the one I want to see anyway) opens a week earlier than that at exactly one cinema, and if I hadn't been driving exactly where I was driving with my kids on Tuesday, I wouldn't have seen the poster that informed me of that fact. I've already got tickets for a 10 a.m. screening next Thursday, which was scheduled as a day off for me anyway. That will be just 14 hours before the Oscar noms are announced, officially ending my ranking year.

Westerns are not my favorite genre, to say the least. That could explain me dragging my feet on getting to Slow West in particular. However, I'm starting to wonder if 2015 will make up some ground in changing my mind on that topic, and not even necessarily because of a film that came out in 2015. Early on in the year I saw (and was blown away by) Sergio Leone's 1968 film Once Upon a Time in the West, which immediately installed itself among my favorite westerns of all time. I've also got one western (Unforgiven) in my top 20 of all time. So maybe I just need the right kind of westerns, and maybe 2015 is finally introducing me to those.

How will Bone Tomahawk and The Hateful Eight stack up? And for that matter, how much do I like Slow West and The Revenant?

You have only a week more to wait to find out.

Boycott lifted

I've made exactly two boycotts that I can think of in the seven years of this blog's existence. One was explicit, in an actual post called "Boycott," which greeted the arrival of Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland. The other one was kind of understood, the result of me attacking the minions at regular intervals and swearing never to intentionally expose my children to one of their movies. One of those posts -- this one -- has become kind of my breakout post, visited and commented on by far more people than I could have ever imagined, and taking on sort of a life of its own. (That's 23 comments and 15692 page views.) I would almost call it my 15 minutes of blogger fame.

As of this week, one of those two boycotts has been lifted.

That's right, not only have I seen Minions, but so has my son.

The change came about as a result of two unrelated circumstances. One was that when we were on vacation in Tasmania last month, my wife saw a hand-knitted minion winter cap at a market in a small town. It being only $5 -- an exceptional price for a hand-made garment, even if it it's a minion garment -- she decided to buy it. This was weird for two reasons: 1) It won't be winter hat season here until about June, and 2) My son already has a minion winter hat that we bought for him in the U.S., as discussed in this post. It's not as nice as this one, but it makes this a duplicate in two ways -- not only is it another winter hat, it's another minion winter hat.

The second circumstance was that I learned a few days ago that I'd be watching my son on Tuesday. I usually watch my younger son, the one who just turned two, on Tuesdays, but usually the five-year-old goes to school that day. This being summer, though, the schedule is all out of whack, and I had both of them on Tuesday. That made it slightly more necessary for me to find something to do during the younger one's nap, especially since I'd also have both of them on Wednesday. And it being the time of year when I'm cramming 2015 movies, and Minions being a 2015 movie, and it containing almost no potential for scaring him ...

There was a third, less important reason, which is that I've been subtly made to feel like a bit of a Grinch for denying my son access to the minions. My wife doesn't like them (much) either, but whenever I'd make a comment along the lines of "He's not watching that movie with me," she'd give me a look of humorous sadness -- like she got it, but she still thought it was a bit of an ogre move to deny him something he would so obviously love.

So this week, I wondered: Is it time to let the minions into my heart?

So I rented the movie on Monday and we popped it in to the BluRay player on Tuesday, about 20 minutes after the younger one went down for his nap.

Conclusion: I still don't like the minions.

I was actually with this movie for a while. I enjoyed the origins scenes, the ones that show these apparently immortal creatures moving from master to master, all the way back to the age of the dinosaurs. It was implausible to say the least, but carried off with enough panache to be watchable. And yes, I found myself laughing from time to time. I was even into it up until the movie's present day, which is 1968, when they connect up with the awesomely named villain Scarlett Overkill, voiced by Sandra Bullock. (My love of Bullock also probably helped knock down some walls between me and Minions.) I dug her act and that of her husband, Herb (Jon Hamm). I thought it was clever enough that the minions meet her at an event called VillainCon. It's all working well enough at this point.

Then the minion called Bob becomes the king of England, and, well, back to the status quo.

From this point on, the movie just annoyed me. Everything I had found moderately tolerable about the minions in the first half of the movie turned to moderately intolerable. And that's where my star rating ended up for the movie: 2.5 stars.

I guess that's a victory of sorts for the little yellow blobs, as I would have predicted something in the one- to 1.5-star range for a movie devoted entirely to them. I liked it better than The Good Dinosaur, anyway.

One thing that was especially strange, and also heartening, was that my son didn't really like it. I wish it were for a better reason, though. "It's banal, father," he didn't say. "These yellow sprites and their cartoonish antics are just not for me," he also didn't say. What he did say was, "It was too scary." In fact, at the hour mark he almost made me turn it off. Why? Because the minions were dangling from a chandelier that was about to fall. I didn't realize a fear of heights could be vicariously transferred to what's happening to characters in a movie -- I thought you're only supposed to be afraid of monsters and stuff, the kind of thing that can invade your dreams later on. But my wife later confirmed that she, who also has a fear of heights, has felt vicarious fear for characters in movies who were dangling from great heights. (A fact we may test if we watch The Walk this weekend.)

So is the boycott back on? It's too early for me to say. The fact that Minions made more than a billion dollars at the global box office means that anywhere from three to 14 more Minions movies will be made, even though the first one unintentionally boxed itself in by bringing us up to the moment when they take up with Gru, their master in Despicable Me and Despicable Me 2 (the second of which I still haven't seen). As is always the case, any part of the narrative continuity of these creatures can be dismantled or rebooted if it means more money in the studio's coffers.

So no, I'm not really inclined to see Minions 2, which surprisingly has not been given a release date yet, as far as IMDB knows anything about it.

Then again, if it's January of 2018 and I find myself stuck at home on a summer day with my sons, both of whom will be old enough to watch it at that point ... you never know.

Assuming, that is, there are no chandeliers in it.

The year movies were named like hurricanes

Have you noticed how many 2015 movies have just a woman's first name as their title?

Joy became the fifth on my list for this year, and there are two more prominent ones I'm planning to see over the next ten days. And Joy isn't even the only one starring Jennifer Lawrence. (Nor is it the only 2015 movie with a prominent character named Joy, thanks to Inside Out.)

Forthwith, we'll look at the candidates and their worthiness of being named after the main character, starting with ...

Joy
Directed by: David O. Russell
Worthiness of being named after the main character: High
Thoughts: Joy has a lot going on, to put it mildly, but it does mostly focus on this one character and her mop-inventing aspirations. It's also, I suppose, about her search for happiness, so yeah, she joins a storied cinematic tradition of characters with names that also function as intangible nouns. (If I see another movie character named Grace, I may have to kill myself -- and lookee here, there's a movie called Looking for Grace that came out two months ago.)

Serena
Directed by: Susanne Bier
Worthiness of being named after the main character: Moderate
Thoughts: The other film starring Jennifer Lawrence actually bears a 2014 release year in IMDB, but didn't get released theatrically in the U.S. until February, and I'm firmly counting it with my 2015 movies. Like Joy, this also co-stars Bradley Cooper (we just can't separate these two -- they've been in at least four movies together, three of them directed by David O. Russell). It's about a Depression era North Carolina timber baron who marries a headstrong woman named Serena. However, it does not seem very essential that the movie was named after her, even if his fortunes do turn on his relationship with the character.

Cinderella
Directed by: Kenneth Branagh
Worthiness of being named after the main character: High
Thoughts: I mean, it's the name of the story. Who are we to argue with that? However, as discussed in this post, I would have liked the movie better if the character had actually felt like the center of her own story, and not just a bystander letting fate buffet her around like a sailboat on a stormy ocean.

Maggie
Directed by: Henry Hobson
Worthiness of being named after the main character: High
Thoughts: Wake up, Maggie, I think I've got something to say to you. You've been bitten by a zombie, and I don't think you're ever going BACK to school. Indeed, this is the story of Arnold Schwarzenegger's emotional struggle to save his daughter from the inevitable: death at the hands of a zombie bite. Her name is Maggie. Seems like as good a reason as any to choose this as the name of the movie -- it works a bit in the same capacity as We Need to Talk About Kevin, because yeah, when you've got a bitten daughter, you do need to talk about that shit.

Victoria
Directed by: Sebastian Schipper
Worthiness of being named after the main character: High
Thoughts: As the single character who is basically on the screen for the entire length of this daring single-take movie -- "basically," because during one scene where she could afford to get away for a moment, she supposedly excused herself to answer a desperate need to use the bathroom -- Laia Costa's Victoria does earn having a movie named after her. She's the sole constant in this two-plus hours of one late night in Berlin that goes from banal to crazy, in a believable if sometimes tedious fashion.

And the ones I haven't yet seen, and can only truly speculate about ...

Amy
Directed by: Asif Kapadia
Worthiness of being named after the main character: Moderate to high
Thoughts: I understand this to be a stripped-bare look into Amy Winehouse's life, and the title certainly works to convey that type of intimacy. My question is, is the single name Amy distinctive enough to indicate that the movie is about Amy Winehouse without any other knowledge of the film? I'd say no. Not like the future documentaries Beyonce and Rihanna will be, anyway.

Carol
Directed by: Todd Haynes
Worthiness of being named after the main character: Dubious
Thoughts: I say "dubious" only because I know this is a two-hander, meaning it is mostly about the two characters with (as I understand it) somewhat minimal acting contributions from others. If that's the case, naming the movie after only one of them seems to throw off the apparent balance. But I look forward to finding out for myself when this becomes one of the final films I watch before closing off my 2015 list next Thursday.

Other movies I've seen that would have fit well in 2015:

Amelie
Chloe
Coraline
Diana
Domino
Elizabeth
Emma
Evita
Frida
Gigi
Grace
Guinevere
Hanna
Ida 
Juno
Lucy 
Mallory
Margaret
Maryam
Miral
Mulan
Nell
Nena
Oleanna
Paprika
Selena
Tammy
Tess
Woo

That's only 29 other titles among all the 4,400+ movies I've ever seen. Makes the seven titles I will see in 2015 seem even more like a conglomeration.

A trend! I've identified it!

The bad dental advice of children's movies

It's bad enough that my five-year-old is regressing to his infancy in the month remaining before he starts school. He doesn't need any help from the entertainment that's geared toward him.

Regressing? Try a series of "accidents" that he had stopped having a full year ago, maybe longer. We've still got a few weeks to sort this out, but suffice it to say I'm concerned.

However, it's just poor hygiene that the TV shows and movies aimed at him are advocating.

Goosebumps isn't out here yet -- a strange fate for a Halloween movie, which will finally be rectified next Thursday -- but we've seen the trailer before just about every movie we've watched recently. I'm pretty sure that's three times, though to be honest, I can only think of two movies we would have seen during the time period they would have logically been showing Goosebumps trailers: Hotel Transylvania 2 (another Halloween movie) and The Good Dinosaur this past Sunday.

Anyway, the trailer has made quite an impression on my son, as it walks that line between attracting him and repelling him. He is of course drawn in by the images, but he's also scared of them. It's a tightrope act children his age must constantly walk.

The moment from the trailer he mentioned of his own accord yesterday, though, was a humorous one, when that kid jumps on the werewolf unleashed from one of R.L. Stine's books and bites him on the neck. It has the desired effect of driving off the monster because the kid has silver fillings. When the girl he has a crush on asks for an explanation, he admits it was because of the whole year he went without brushing his teeth.

Every parent in the audience cringes when he or she hears a thing like that. And then when your kid brings it up again on his own ... well, it looks like we may need to go back to monitoring our son's brushing more closely, like we did before we trusted him.

As luck would have it, this is also the time that we're trying to teach him the right routine for washing up after using the bathroom. (When he remembers to get to the bathroom in time, that is -- which, to be fair, is still most of the time.) He also watches a show on Australian TV called Lah Lah's Big Love Band, which features a perky female singer who waltzes through an animated playhouse with her equally perky male bandmates for about three songs per episode. One of those songs contains the lyrics

I like to wash my hands and wipe 'em on my pants
I like to wash my hands and wipe 'em on my pants
I like to wash my hands and wipe 'em on my pants
And that's the way I like to do it

Since he first heard that song, we haven't gotten him to use a towel once.

What are the writers of these movies and TV shows thinking? In the case of Goosebumps, they're probably thinking "Don't take your kids to see Goosebumps if they haven't mastered brushing their teeth yet." (And then I'm thinking, in response, "Okay, don't show the Goosebumps trailer before movies my brushing challenged son might see!") In terms of Lah Lah's Big Love Band, though, that is absolutely, definitely a show aimed at kids who are five or even younger. I guess it's never too early to try to tap into a viewer's sense of dormant rebellion.

At least there isn't a song that goes

I like to poop my pants although I'm starting school
I like to poop my pants although I'm starting school
I like to poop my pants although I'm starting school
And my parents don't know what the hell to do about it

Revisionist backlash

What better movie to watch on New Year's Day than one where the clock striking midnight figures prominently into the plot?

Actually, that had no bearing on my decision to rent Cinderella along with Spy when I ran out on New Year's Eve to restock our refrigerator. Neither did the fact that we could watch it with my older son while the younger one was napping, making it a two-birds-with-one-stone affair -- though he ultimately tuned out after about 45 minutes. The real motivations were that a) I could keep the movies for an extra night because of the holiday, and b) I'd been pressing my wife to see it for about a month now, because I'd heard everyone talk about how good it was.

After seeing it, my only conclusion about the strength of the praise is that it's revisionist backlash.

Oh, this is an okay movie. More than okay, maybe. But John Waters' second favorite movie of the year? What?

It seems like people are sick of seeing Disney make its movies overly politically correct, and are happy just to see revisionism kicked to the curb for a change. And Waters has certainly never been a fan of political correctness.

To be sure, I'd heard that this was an old-fashioned, straightforward telling of this familiar fairy tale. However, I didn't expect it to be quite so ... boring. Apparently, this is what people liked about it.

Disney's recent movies have tended to be ... not so boring. Or at least, not so straightforward in their approach to the storytelling. Hits like the much-discussed Tangled and the uber-phenomenon Frozen both show Disney bending over backwards to make sure that the female characters have their own agency, that they do as much prince-saving as being saved by princes, and ultimately that they don't need no man. While those movies are not outright revisionism, you can find an example of outright revisionism only last year, when Disney told Sleeping Beauty from the perspective of its villain, Maleficent. And despite some flaws in the presentation, Maleficent the movie ultimately did some interesting things with its choice to view the title character sympathetically, to make her the victim of male hatred. (At the very least, it was giving us mature stuff that probably went over the heads of its youngest viewers.)

Cinderella is not like that at all. Cinderella is straighter than an arrow. It gives us pretty much exactly the story as we're accustomed to hearing it. Except for the fact that Kenneth Branagh's 2015 version is 27 minutes longer than the 1950 animated version, I would not even be surprised to hear that the story beats are apportioned out at exactly the same time intervals over the course of the narrative.

And this movie was a hit, especially relative to Maleficent, which had a much more tepid critical response (Cinderella's 67 on Metacritic puts it firmly in the green of "generally favorable reviews," while Maleficent's 56 leaves it in the murky orange of "mixed or average reviews").

So is this the artistic equivalent of a politician "getting back to straight talk?" Are audiences so frustrated with all this "liberal mumbo jumbo" that they just want someone who "tells it like it is?" And does "telling it like it is" entail female characters who, while not lacking entirely in agency, are happy enough just to be demure?

Another benefit I noted to the approaches of these other movies, particularly Tangled -- they're a lot more fun. A piece of wisdom I gleaned about Cinderella while seeing it through my son's eyes is just how damn sad the story is. First Ella's mother dies, which I had to explain to him and see how it impacted him. Then after another five minutes or so, her father dies, as another separate, elongated episode. Frozen at least had the decency to kill off both parents in one quick scene, showing nothing more than a ship sinking in the distance. Then of course Ella is subjected to a series of indignities at the hands of her wicked stepsisters and stepmother. By 30 minutes in you wonder if anything happy will ever happen in this movie, and that was about the time when my son said "Daddy, you know I don't like movies where things that happen are sad."

It caused me to think about Tangled, where no characters actually die until the very end, and then it's just the bad guy. That story gets its melancholy from a girl being kidnapped and her parents thinking she's dead, but the whole time we know she's alive and (basically) well inside a tower. Sure, that's kind of the exception as most Disney movies feature at least one dead parent, though usually only one. But the way Cinderella drags these things out and forces kids to focus on them is just kind of perverse.

I said my son checked out around 45 minutes, which was especially interesting because that's just when the magical stuff started to really happen -- the pumpkin turning into a carriage and whatnot. Well, when he came back to the movie later, it was when the prince's father this time was in bed, dying. So if you're keeping track at home, that's three dead parents of characters we like. No wonder my son quickly checked out again.

If your revisionism makes for a more fun movie and also gives the women a little bit of additional responsibility for the outcome of their own lives, by all means, revise these stories all you want.

And go sell your straight talk to somebody else.

I Spy with my little eye ...

New Year's last year entailed viewings of I, Frankenstein and I Origins, which both ended up being among the worst movies I saw in 2014.

Ending 2015 with I Spy was much better.

Okay, not actually I Spy -- that was a 2002 movie starring Eddie Murphy and Owen Wilson. It was just Spy, Paul Feig's Melissa McCarthy vehicle which I'd already seen and knew I loved. My wife hadn't yet seen it, though, which made it the perfect way to close out a New Year's Eve in which we didn't even land at the airport until after 6 p.m., and didn't have our kids in bed until more than two hours later. At that point, some laughter was really needed.

(And now you know why I haven't posted any of my typical year-end thought pieces: We were in Tasmania visiting my mother-in-law from the 26th onward, and I'd left my new computer back home. Oh yeah -- did I mention that my hard drive did actually die, which I forecasted in this post?)

Why was laughter so direly needed? Well, we returned home to discover that our power was off. It wasn't a power outage, mind you. It was just our power.

We can't say it was entirely a surprise. Our power had gone out earlier in the week of Christmas, and we'd needed an electrician to come out and set things straight. He blamed a slug in a wall outlet, which seems a bit farfetched, but we were willing to accept any explanation at that point. Really, it's just that our electricity in this house is faulty, a fact you can blame either on it being an old house or on the person who did the renovations cutting corners for budgetary reasons. Anyway, we're only renting this place so there isn't a lot we can do about it.

The problem with the power going out when you're out of town for six days is that you have no idea how long it's been out, and how tainted the food in your refrigerator is. Do you lose only the frozen foods and dairy products, or also your various sauces and other things that can last a little longer without a direct application of cold? By touching various things and finding them still mildly chilled -- on a day that approached 100 degrees in Melbourne, mind you -- we determined that it had probably only been that day that the safety had tripped. (And fortunately, the power did come back on just by resetting it, and has remained on for the 12 hours since then. Can you imagine having to summon an electrician on December 31st at 8 o'clock at night?) But we did have to dump a bunch of stuff, and I had to beat feet out to the grocery store to purchase some much-needed necessaries before a potential early New Year's Eve closure. Which was just as well, because I had to pick up Spy anyway -- and it meant I didn't have to corral two over-excited kids for their bedtime.

And even though chaos reigned in the first 90 minutes we were home, the kids gave us a New Year's miracle by both going to sleep without any trouble, and by about 9:15 we were settling in to Spy -- whose nearly two-hour running time would take us up to the stroke of midnight quite nicely, factoring in breaks, without anyone worrying about succumbing to pre-2016 exhaustion. 

And yes, we laughed quite a bit -- me for the second time, her for the first.

"I spy with my little eye" was actually relevant to our trip, as that was the game we played as we traveled the east coast of Tasmania with my wife's mother for the past week. Unbelievably, it was a game both my kids could play, even though the younger one just turns two today. It sounded more like "Ispymy" when he said it, but he delivered a setup and answer, just as the game would dictate -- though he didn't quite get that he was supposed to make us guess what he was spying. He just wanted to tell us what he spied. Which for a two-year-old is still quite good.

We had quite a nice time on the trip, staying in two different beach towns, going on a glass bottom boat, seeing an echidna crossing the road, spotting two different huntsman spiders within the space of about six hours (both inside the place were staying), going swimming at the beach on two different days (well, I swam at least, as the water was too cold for everyone else), eating lots of good food and admiring lots of natural wonders. It was a low-key time (in which I managed to watch only two movies!), but it was probably just what the doctor ordered after a very busy December.

Thoughts on the year just ended? Well, none right now, I guess. But don't worry. There will be plenty of that in the coming weeks, with my 2015 rankings a mere two weeks away now. 

Time to get back to reality ... and watching as many more 2015 releases as I can stand before then.