The best and worst of Ben Wheatley

It's not often I see two films by the same director within a two-week span, and it's really not often that those would be the director's best and worst films.

But that's what's happened with Ben Wheatley. And for those of you who like current releases, I'm pleased to say that his best is the one that's in theaters right now.

That would be Free Fire, a giddy, goofy action comedy that also gets away with being downbeat and even melancholy in spots. It reminded me most in spirit of The Nice Guys, but really, anything directed by Wheatley has a spirit all its own. I saw it on Tuesday night.

Unfortunately, that would leave the worst as A Field in England, which I watched two Friday nights ago, and which I couldn't properly follow from its very first moments. Heavy accents had something to do with that. A muddled concept and extremely poor execution of that concept had a lot more to do with it.

Until a few moments ago I thought two other things about Ben Wheatley that I no longer think:

1) That A Field in England was his first film. It being a first film is the only way to excuse its miniscule-budget, single-location aesthetics. In fact, he made it in 2013, after his two best films I'd seen before now: Kill List and Sightseers.

2) That I had completed the Ben Wheatley filmography. His actual first film, Down Terrace, was a 2009 release that I have yet to have the pleasure, or possibly displeasure, of seeing.

That's right, as I was discussing with a friend last night, Wheatley is a really hit or miss filmmaker. It seems like you are always getting either his best or his worst, in terms of what he's capable of if not in absolute terms. He's just as likely to hit as to totally misfire, if we want to use the gun lingo inspired by Free Fire. You really have no idea whether a film of his will be a pleasure or a displeasure.

In my own personal Wheatley viewing sequence, it's been pleasures followed by displeasures. Kill List and Sightseers really interested me, the first for its unwillingness to be shackled to the genre it starts out with (and that's all I'll say for those of you who haven't seen it), the second for following its black comedy into casually murderous arenas.

But then I fell off the Wheatley wagon a bit. Actually, it's all come this year as Free Fire is actually the third Wheatley I've watched in 2017. The year started out, almost literally, with High-Rise, the fourth full feature I watched in 2017, an unsatisfying satire on class warfare played out in an apartment building set against a barren landscape. Then A Field in England, which I had a sense would be pretty WTF, was WTF in all the wrong ways. A black and white period piece with unintelligible dialogue in which the survivors of some poorly specified battle cross over the same patch of land about a hundred times while searching for treasure and eating mushrooms? I tried to make it sound bad just now, but it sounds a lot better than it actually is.

But hey, Free Fire! It's a ton of fun. And it's certainly the director's biggest move toward the mainstream, starring the likes of Brie Larson, Sharlto Copley, Armie Hammer and Cillian Murphy. But where that kind of slouching toward commercialism can really queer an artist's vision, Wheatley has figured out a way to make his work accessible (possibly for the first time) without compromising his own particular perspective. I have a lot more I could say about it, except I already did, here.

Who knows if Wheatley will give us more of his best or more of his worst with the next film I see, but I can tell you that the next two films of his I see will continue to represent another type of dialectic within his filmography: his newest and his oldest. Since some of his old stuff is better than some of his newer stuff, but then his newest is the best, I have no idea whether I'll gravitate more toward Down Terrace or toward Freakshift or Untitled 'Ideal' Film (IMDB is unclear on which might come out first).

Either way, I do think Wheatley will continue to make interesting films. Whether they are interesting successes or interesting failures remains to be seen.

Annual Bunuel

I've taken a real liking to the films of Luis Bunuel in the past few years, enough so that I feel like I've seen more of them than I actually have.

And as I look back on my notes, I'm not actually seeing them "annually," as implied in the subject of this post (chosen primarily for its play on words). I saw The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie in October of 2013, and it wasn't until last June that I saw the film that really sealed my new crush on the noted Spanish director and sometimes surrealist: The Exterminating Angel. But those two movies in four years have, I guess, made me think I'm building toward an appreciation of his filmography in a regular, systematic fashion.

Unfortunately, that appreciation of his filmography took a step backward with Viridiana, which I watched on Sunday night.

I should have known it was unwise to try to watch a foreign language film starting at 9:30 the night after I got a bad night's sleep camping, but the first movie I was planning to watch -- another foreign language movie, a documentary, in the form of The Five Obstructions -- was one my wife saw me starting and said she'd watch with me on another night. So I switched over to Viridiana, another film I had out from the library.

But I don't know that exhaustion played a big role in my judgment of Viridiana, even though I paused it to take short naps about four times in its last 20 minutes. More than anything, I think it was the strangely misanthropic subject matter that bothered me. The two previous showcased Bunuel the prankster, the satirist. This is more Bunuel the sadist. I suppose there's a certain sadism built into a man who made famous the image of a blade slicing an eyeball, but for me, it hasn't come out in his themes until this movie.

The movie is about a nun (the striking Silvia Pinal) about to take her vows, who pays a last visit to her uncle (Bunuel regular Fernando Rey), who has supported her financially but whom she dislikes. Although he initially comes off as generous and harmless, barely even eccentric, there's a good reason she dislikes him if his forthcoming behavior is any indication. Struck by a resemblance in his niece to his late wife, he enlists another woman indebted to him to drug his niece and have his way with her. Although he decides not to violate her at the last moment, he does later on propose to marry her. And it only gets weirder from there.

Let's just say no one comes out clean, no one gets off easy, and the only person who shows a hint of personal charity is punished for it. In case you don't want me to spoil a 56-year-old movie, I won't tell you where it goes from there, except that its direction is reflective of a steep pessimism about human nature.

As this felt like a departure for me for Bunuel, it didn't sit particularly well with me. Both of the previous two films are satires about the bourgeoisie and their proclivities and social habits, one largely whimsical, one a bit discomfiting, but both clearly tongue in cheek in some important way. Viridiana is far more despairing, though I guess it's wicked in some similar ways. However, maybe Viridiana is the norm and those later films were the departure, or perhaps, not the departure but the finding of his true voice. The Exterminating Angel was his very next film in 1962, and Bourgeoisie came some ten years later.

How it all stacks up in the grand sweep of his career is something I still know comparatively little about, as the only other Bunuel film I've seen is the previously referenced silent classic Un Chien Andalou.

Viridiana notwithstanding, I plan to keep deepening my understanding of this always challenging filmmaker ... on about an annual basis.

The war's first victory

It all started maybe two weeks ago when I saw something scamper across the bathroom floor while brushing my teeth late at night.

The thing was only a blur, but it had indeed scampered. I got a better look at it just as it exited the bathroom.

I walked down the hallway to my wife, who was already in bed but not asleep, and said one ominous word:

"Mouse."

Since then our lives have been turned upside down by at least one and possibly as many as three of these speedy, persistent, and noxious little creatures.

That may be an exaggeration of their impact on our lives, but it's only a slight one. And indeed, I've thought of the 1997 Gore Verbinski movie MouseHunt on several occasions, undistinctive as it otherwise is. (I had always thought of it as Mouse Hunt, but it looks as though the title is more correctly jammed together like that.)

In that movie, brothers played by Nathan Lane and Lee Evans practically kill themselves trying to rid their house of the pesky little vermin. In a series of wildly exaggerated sequences involving repeated injuries to the two, kind of like they were Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern being repeatedly bludgeoned by a young Macaulay Culkin, Lane and Evans drive themselves to the brink of insanity in their ultimately fruitless quest.

I'm not insane yet, but my wife is getting there. And though we have yet to hurt ourselves, outside of the occasional snapped finger while setting a mousetrap, emotionally, we feel as though we've been stumbled through a room full of mousetraps and they've attached themselves to our every appendage.

It's worse for my wife, as I get to escape our invaded home five days a week for more than nine hours. She's freelancing at the moment, so that leaves her sharing her days with the mice, obsessively scrubbing the house of tempting scraps of food and deep-cleaning rooms where she's discovered deposits of mouse poop. Typically they are not brazen enough to actually show themselves to her, but at least once one scuttled through the living room while she was eating her lunch a few feet away.

Then there was the time one had the audacity to crawl behind my three-year-old's little plastic toilet that rests on our bathroom floor -- while he was actually sitting on it. He didn't see it and in fact my children have only even seen one mouse on one occasion, lucky little devils. At first this seemed like a great opportunity as my wife quickly shut the bathroom door, thinking she had the little bugger cornered and could make quick and nasty work of it. But by the time she opened the door again, it had disappeared into one of the many little crevices you never knew your house had until you get a mouse infestation. The little bastard.

We call it an infestation, rather than just a single terrorist holding us hostage, because we know there are at least two. We know this because of the biggest previous victory we'd had in the mouse war, which came about five nights ago when we heard one of them crinkling through a bag of clothes in our bedroom in the middle of the night. I would have slept through it but my wife woke me. As I lifted one of these bags to see if I could quickly close the top and nab myself a captive, it slipped out and ran under my son's change table. There I cast a light on it in the corner, where it eyeballed me back nervously. We didn't manage to catch it but we did scare it out into the hallway and out our front door, where my wife confirmed seeing it scurry down the stairs. Not ten seconds later she saw another one down at the other end of the hallway, confirming at least two.

We hope there's not more than two, but the quantity of poop my wife has found in recent days has started to convince her of the possibility of three or more. That's the trouble -- when you're talking mice, you don't know how many "or more" could really be. You usually only ever see one at a time, and they don't tend to have distinctive markings that let you know which one you're seeing.

There have been two chosen methods of combatting them, beyond the obsessive cleaning and vacuuming. Or really, two different types of the same method,

I'm talking traps.

Now, when you first go and buy a mousetrap, there's probably some part of you that imagines the horror of actually killing them. Especially when you have children around, and they could walk up to a traumatizing mouse corpse on any given occasion. (To say nothing of getting their little fingers caught in one the traps.)

But the longer the scourge goes on, the more bloodthirsty you become. From originally gasping in surprise as they scurried around on the same floor where I was walking (you always gasp when you see a mouse, even if it's for the fifth time that week), I quickly started to wish I was always wearing my shoes, on the off chance I'd be quick enough to actually stomp on one of them. At this point, I suppose I'd even stomp on them with bare feet if I got the chance.

But we were indeed concerned about the potentially traumatizing element of the mouse corpses for our children, so at first my wife bought a circular contraption which the mouse had to crawl inside if it wanted to get at the cheese. Its body would be crushed entirely out of view, and you'd know you had a victory by seeing a little dial on the outside switch from "set" to "caught." Our mice, however, showed not the slightest interest in these traps. We imagined them laughing at us over them.

So after about four unsuccessful days of this, she went the old-fashioned route.

That's right, those traps we first saw on old episodes of Tom & Jerry, which always seemed to backfire on Tom, leading to lots of pulsating paw injuries and bouts of caterwauling. These would leave the dead mice in plain view of our children, but that seemed a small price to pay for starting to win the war.

These, too, were a failure. At first they seemed to ignore them, then they seemed to actually beat them. After about two nights of untouched traps, my wife soon discovered that the cheese had actually been purloined from two of the traps without them triggering. Given how sensitive they were when we'd try to set them, this almost seemed unfathomable, and our foe assumed an even greater mythic status than they already had.

Discussion of contacting an exterminator finally began in earnest. We didn't want to shell out a couple hundred bucks to have somebody come and do whatever they do, and we hoped the landlord would pay for it. But knowing our landlord -- a faceless entity we communicate with only through our property manager -- that would never fly. They'd somehow blame us for leaving too much food out. No way it could be an act of God, or any imperfection in the structure of a house that has plenty of them. And so even though we didn't want to pay $300 to an exterminator, we started to brace ourselves for the possibility. My wife even discussed reaching out to them in the morning before we left for our Saturday night camping trip.

And then, finally, we got a victory.

On Friday night I'd fallen asleep on the couch after finishing I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House (certainly not a description of our mice). I awoke around 2:30 and decided to do 15 minutes of computerizing (as we call it) before retiring to bed.

And that's when I heard a snap in the other part of the house.

I couldn't be sure it was the snap of a mousetrap, but as I made my way down the hallway, I felt hopeful. And sure enough, in our very bedroom, a trap had triggered and flipped itself upside down. Eighty percent of the body of a tiny mouse was sticking out from under it, the other 20 pinned under the bar that had instantly killed it.

With the flashlight on my phone turned on in the room, my wife stirred enough to wonder what I was doing. I invited her to come over and see the fruits of her labors. Somewhat disappointingly, she didn't want to lord over her defeated foe. She just asked me to put it in a bag and throw it out on the front porch, and she went back to sleep.

Me? I'm full of the thrill of victory. In fact, I can't get to sleep now. It's 4 a.m. and this all occurred about an hour ago. After 20 fruitless minutes of trying to get to sleep, I woke up and wrote this.

The war is not over. Far from it. At least one other mouse still exists, as the one we chased down the stairs was certainly brash enough to return through one of umpteen entry points that must exist to our house.

But I'm starting to get the sense, for the first time in two weeks, that our own version of MouseHunt could have a happy ending.

And in our version of MouseHunt, we'll get to be the protagonists, not the mouse.

Watch the comments section of this post for further updates.

Rethinking the new Disney classics

There tends to be pretty conventional wisdom on what constitutes the "new Disney classics," which I can define in a way that should be pretty recognizable to you, if you aren't on the same page as me already.

The Little Mermaid starts a run of four great films that gave the Mouse House what is either its first or second of an eventual two or three revivals. Following these were Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and The Lion King.

By Pocahontas, it was over.

(Which is also the year that Pixar made its first movie, which is probably not a coincidence.)

Or was it over?

I got a chance to watch Tarzan on Tuesday for what I thought was only my second time, though my list of films seen multiple times included it already. If I did see Tarzan twice, it was within the space of its first two years of existence. And it seems likely that I did, since I really fell in love with it.

I remember my first viewing quite clearly. A new service that really heralded the arrival of the internet age was responsible for bringing it to me. I lived in New York City at the time, and I'd just learned about a place where you could order online and they would deliver to your house. But not pizza or Chinese or Indian or what you would usually expect. This place -- and boy do I wish I remembered its name -- would deliver movie rentals and groceries, but by groceries, I really mean sweet treats and other naughty things. I remember reveling in and celebrating the discovery of the existence of this site via a rental of Tarzan and a delivery of Krispy Kreme donuts (a novelty to me at the time) and Ben & Jerry's ice cream (probably Cherry Garcia). It was a grand old night, sometime in early 2000 it must have been.

I'm a bit surprised I did not prioritize seeing Tarzan, which had come out the previous June, in time to rank it with my year-end films (yep, I already did that back then), but maybe that's just an indication of how little I expected to like it.

Oh how wrong I was.

The movie's storytelling really swept me up. The use of cutting-edge visuals (the deep canvas and the inspiration of Tony Hawk's skateboarding for the movements of Tarzan through the trees), the perfect usage of a rousing Phil Collins score, terrific vocal work (hello, Minnie Driver) and an emotionally generous story had me putty in this movie's hands. When Tarzan first unleashes his trademark feral holler after vanquishing the tiger that had tormented his people, I think I even teared up.

Over the years, while never forgetting Tarzan's impact on me, I did revise my impression of it. I'd floated the idea of its greatness over the years, and I'd gotten a lot of quizzical looks in return. Every once in a while someone would throw me a bone, but I got the sense it was little more than that. To them, Tarzan was a Pocahontas-equivalent footnote in the great Disney oeuvre. I mean, better than Treasure Planet or Home on the Range, but a lesser entry than The Hunchback of Notre Dame or Hercules.

So I started to think I had been wrong about Tarzan.

But oh how wrong I was about being wrong.

My reacquaintance with Tarzan would likely have been as long as a year ago, which is about when we picked it up at a garage sale in our neighborhood (along with Toy Story 3 and Monsters, Inc.). It wasn't my children's request, with my younger too young to state much of a preference and my older already kind of getting out of these movies (he claimed never to have liked Toy Story in the first place, which is a blatant lie). No, this was all me telling them what they should want to watch, and I was secretly most excited about Tarzan.

But only did it finally make it into the DVD player two days ago, and only after a colossal failure to find something else. It was Anzac Day on Tuesday, and my wife needed the day to work. So I agreed to take the kids for the day. Persistent rain limited our choices of activities to the indoors, and it was the older one's idea to go to Scienceworks, the child-oriented museum where we have a membership (hence saving tens of dollars from my idea, which was one of those indoor play areas that charge you about $15 a pop to enter). My idea for the second activity was to watch a movie in our garage with special treats, the locale and the treats being my ploys to actually finish watching the movie. (Which we did, despite the harassment of mosquitoes.)

We went by the Hoyts kiosk to find something we could all agree on, but agreement was highly elusive. This was where stubbornness met stubbornness, as all three of us were stubborn in our own ways. I only wanted to watch something that I considered to qualify as a "real movie," like Moana, Trolls or Sing. My six-year-old only wanted to watch one of several Pokemon movies available for rental, though his version of a compromise was watching a Lego superhero special. The youngest? Paw Patrol. Nope, there was to be no common ground here.

We deferred the decision to home. I was not very hopeful, resigning myself to rewatching something I didn't have all that much enthusiasm for, but at least met my definition of what counted as a movie. And we weren't going to just watch one of their TV shows. If Daddy was buying chocolate milks and chocolate bars, then Daddy was going to dictate what other ways this would conform to his own definition of "special occasion." And damned if I was going to sit there and watch episodes of some stupid TV series they rented from the library. (In case I am sounding entirely too inflexible, I'll have you know that I had decided to relent and watch one of the Pokemon movies, but fortunately, the three-year-old nixed it, giving me the ammunition I needed to hold strong in my resolve.)

When considering the possible options, I hadn't remembered Tarzan. As soon as I saw it, my eyes widened ever so slightly. And the six-year-old selected it as the only one of our movies to go in the "maybe" pile. The three-year-old was over his opposition to anything at this point. He just wanted his chocolate.

Miracle of miracles.

And though we did have to fend off biting insects and a few moments that the younger one considered too intense, not to mention a couple ill-timed requests for additional snacks, we made it successfully through the movie, as the rain varied in intensity just outside of our field of vision. In fact, something about our garden reminded me of the house in the trees in which baby Tarzan is first discovered by mother ape Kala, saved by her in the first of the film's several great set pieces.

And a few interruptions did not prevent me from falling into this film's embrace. It wrapped itself around me like a giant gorilla cradling a newborn infant.

I shouldn't go on much longer for fear of a) boring you and b) making you doubt my sense of taste for loving such a "Disney footnote" as this. But I did want to contrast this Tarzan viewing with the one I had of Beauty and the Beast about a year go, which heretofore I had considered my favorite of the new Disney classics. I had loved the purity and simplicity of the story of Beast when I saw it in 1991, not to mention its technological advancements in the field of animation. But when I saw it a year ago, its animation was far more dated than I would have ever expected -- shockingly so, really -- and the story felt efficient almost to the point of seeming hurried and lacking in nuance.

Tarzan is no spring chicken, either, as it will celebrate its own 20-year anniversary in a little more than two years. But it struck me as just as modern as when I watched it while injecting myself with sugar in pastry and ice cream form in the spring of 2000. It's not really modern, of course -- although the character design of the humans is sharp, angular and impressionistic, some of the ape stuff seemed a bit broad-brushed and rudimentary. But this story is told with a wit and charm and astonishing sense of heart that made it feel modern in all the right ways.

Now, I can't really say how it stacks up with real modern Disney animation, part of the second (or is it third?) revival that has graced us with the likes of Tangled, Frozen, Wreck-It Ralph and Zootopia. (And Moana, which we would have watched on Tuesday if I'd had my druthers.) I may have -- in fact, I'm sure I have -- more love in my heart for Tangled than I do for Tarzan.

Though if you squint, those titles not only look the same, alphabetically, but they share a same visual innovation and sweeping narrative that make them both classics in my eyes.

And the real takeaway is how Beauty and the Beast now seems to sort of pale in comparison to them, at least in my eyes, at least on this viewing. Which possibly explains why I haven't made an effort to see the live-action Beast in theaters this past month. It's been more than 20 years since I've seen Aladdin or Little Mermaid or Lion King, but perhaps I'm not so eager to ruin my positive memories of them by being reminded of the ways they've aged.

Like great movies shouldn't, Tarzan hasn't aged. And indeed, I think it's my favorite Disney film of the 1990s.

As for the kids ... yeah, they liked it too. My six-year-old acknowledged it was good, refusing to elaborate (as he did recently with something like My Neighbor Totoro) but also giving it the genuine props he would not need to give it with his increasingly sarcastic attitude. And the three-year-old? He said he "loved it."

Yep, little guy. I agree.

Four heads are better than one

A possibly accidental, probably intentional arrangement of paste-up movie ads really brought my attention to a marketing trend that is probably not new, but is definitely having a moment.

As you can likely guess from this picture, it's the use of character heads from the movie -- one per poster -- to sell the movie in and of themselves.

Usually it's characters you're familiar with from at least one other movie, as in one of these examples, but sometimes, the strength of the brand is enough. Or I guess, Rogue One was enough of a hit that the heads of brand new characters can now sell it -- though maybe that would have only worked for a BluRay release, not the original theatrical.

As both Star Wars and Marvel are owned by Disney, these posters are likely in cahoots with each other, but I like to think of their placement as random, as it would do more for my thesis that this advertising strategy is gaining in popularity. (There are also four Rogue One posters, but I had to cut off Felicity Jones as Jyn Erso for framing reasons. I was stopped at a red light so I'm kind of lucky I was able to snap this shot at all.)

And there's no doubt there's something really captivating about it. The Guardians posters benefit from their color scheme, to be sure, as the array of pastels is really pleasing. The Rogue One posters stand in contrast to that, though, their uniform blue and black color scheme probably subliminally functioning as a way to make you think of the packaging of a BluRay itself. (Or not so subliminally, as an actual Rogue One BluRay figures into each poster.)

I suppose I don't have a lot more to say about this -- it doesn't really strike me as indicative of some greater trend in the advertisement of movies, or some underlying psychology about the modern-day viewer. It's just smart design.

And thanks in part to the proximity of two ad campaigns with similar concepts, I'll now surely be on the lookout for it elsewhere.

The Star Wars movie we didn't know we were getting

Asian Audient: Eat Drink Man Woman

This is the next installment in Asian Audient, my monthly cinematic tour through the great continent of Asia.

Didn't I say I had plans for a trip to South Korea in April?

I did, didn't I.

Well, despite having four solid choices for movies I wanted to watch -- five if you include Park Chan-wook's The Handmaiden, but I consider that a bit too recent for a series like this -- I couldn't find any of my candidates easily available to source. True enough, I could not find Bong Joon-hoo's Memories of Murder (2003), Kim Jee-won's The Good, the Bad, The Weird (2008), Lee Chang-dong's Poetry (2009) or Park's Lady Vengeance (2005), the only film in that trilogy that has still eluded me, available for streaming, iTunes rental or from the library. And yes, I know there are plenty of other Korean movies I haven't seen. But after this I just felt a bit defeated, and moved on to China.

Actually, that decision was made sort of passively as I came across Eat Drink Man Woman in the video section at the library. It's considered to be Ang Lee's breakthrough, as it was immediately followed by Sense and Sensibility, but I've never seen it. Lee is, understandably, a director who interests me quite a bit -- I've seen every film he's made since this movie, which came out in 1994 -- so I thought this would slot in nicely as April's film. I'd seen two straight films made in Japan, and a return to greater China -- which includes Hong Kong, and in this case, Taiwan -- was the obvious step in the absence of a ticket to Seoul.

Before I start to tell you about my experience of watching it, I'll tell you about the dinner I had to accompany it. I wish I could say it was some nice spread of steamed Chinese dishes, like the ones we see in this movie, but it was more appropriate than that for this particular blog series. I had, and enjoyed, our grocery's pre-packaged "Asian Salad." I thought that seemed about right, as Woolworth's seems to have as little ability to distinguish between the countries of Asia as I do, if we're going only on the broad title of this viewing series.

Eat Drink Man Woman immediately struck me as a likely take on King Lear, as it involves an older man (Sihung Lung) and his three adult daughters (Kuei-Mei Yang, Chien-lien Wu and Yu-Wen Wang). However, the dynamic appears to be more of a coincidence -- or rather, one of a handful of fairly common compositions for a nuclear family -- because only a few references on the internet explicitly link Shakespeare's play with Lee's final movie before coming west. I don't think the plot details mirror Lear either, though to be honest, I don't remember Lear all that well, having only read it once and having never seen it performed. In any case, Lee's film is certainly not a tragedy.

It actually reminded me a bit more of the last movie I saw in this series, Yasujiro Ozu's Late Spring, as one of the central plot points involves an adult daughter caring for her aging father. In this case, though, it's not something sought after. The eldest daughter, Jia-Jen, worries that if her two sisters leave home, she will be saddled with the responsibility for their aging father, one of Taipei's greatest chefs. And this is a realistic possibility, as the middle daughter (Jia-Chien) has just bought an apartment in a fancy new complex, and the youngest (Jia-Ning) is impetuous and a poor fit for domestic responsibility. The story basically follows all four characters on their journey through present-day Taiwan, both in their interactions with each other and in their romantic and other social entanglements that function as independent storylines, often involving their work.

I was surprised, though maybe I shouldn't have been, about how conventional this film actually is. Lee is not an abstract storyteller, so explicit repetitions of major plot points and reinforcements of character relationships is probably par for the course with his work. Occasionally these struck me as a bit on-the-nose, but I have to admit they were also helpful, as it can be difficult to orient yourself (sorry, bad choice of words) in foreign language films without some additional help at the start. Lee is very obliging in giving that help.

And conventionality does not mean it wasn't worth my time. Far from it. I really liked Eat Drink Man Woman, which felt so familiar to me that I got overwhelming senses of deja vu throughout. I feel like there's a movie out there that mirrors this movie's details almost exactly, probably something that came after it, actually. I just can't quite figure out what that movie is. I even scanned AllMovie's helpful section devoted to related movies, but did not see the title I was looking for. I suppose it reminded me somewhat of The Joy Luck Club, which came out only a year earlier, but that's probably only a superficial similarity as they both involve family dynamics between Chinese characters. (Though Eat Drink does also make frequent reference to the west, mentioning characters who live in America and making heavy suggestions about how American culture is changing Chinese culture). It may just be that tightly structured stories with familiar character arcs tend to resemble one another, when made by people who really know how to do it.

And Lee is one of those people. We recently talked about Lee on an episode of my podcast on Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, in which one of the others argued that Lee has many very good films but no great ones. My co-podcaster also argued that he had no bad ones, though I thought the film we were actually discussing qualified as bad. I also do think he has a few great ones. The point is, he's really good at making solid B+ or A- movies, and Eat Drink Man Woman is another one of those. It doesn't do anything flashy from a technical standpoint, which differentiates it from Lee's future work, but otherwise it fits in pretty well with his continuum of films. Which is kind of odd to say in and of itself, as Lee's career has been characterized by a constant changing of genres and moods. He's never made two films that directly resemble each other, but with a few exceptions both good and bad, the common thread has been that B+/A- level of quality.

What more to say about the details of Eat Drink? Probably not a lot, though not in a bad way. It's a really humanistic look at the way the three daughters are trying to make their way in the world, fumbling through life with good and bad decisions, and the ways they are tempted by love. It also nicely contemplates aging and the sacrifices one makes. And it also lovingly showcases the food made by both the chef and his middle daughter, who secretly would prefer to be a chef than her high-powered job as an executive at an airline. Watching the dumplings being twisted into existence and vegetables steaming to perfection, I really wished I had something to eat other than my "Asian Salad."

Okay, so how will we handle this Korean outage going forward?

I will source at least one of my Korean films, but I don't know when, and I don't want to even predict what I might view for this series in May. I have, however, arrived at a logical way to structure the rest of this series. I figured it makes the most sense to break down the 12 months, four of which have already elapsed, this way: Four movies from China (which includes Hong Kong and Taiwan), four movies from Japan, and four movies from other countries. I've already gotten two movies each from China and Japan, leaving two more for each. So now I need to scrounge the likes of Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam, Laos and others for the four other picks ... with expected support from Korea, of course.

The one movie I hadn't seen, part 2

Finding it difficult to find a movie I haven't seen has been the theme of the last week. As first discussed in this post, and now set to be discussed again just below.

On my podcast -- which is now available on iTunes, so subscribe, rate and review! -- we recently decided to start a rotating informal series in which one of the hosts will pick a movie he loves that the other two haven't seen, to watch and then discuss on the next episode. We'll go to this well whenever we're not all that enthused about the new releases hitting theaters during a particular fortnight. (As I live in Australia, I am obliged to refer to a two-week period as a "fortnight." That's also about how often we record our episodes.)

It was my idea, and naturally I felt prepared to go first. As I am more than ten years older than my co-hosts and have also dedicated myself to watching movies more single-mindedly than they have, I knew I could easily find candidates from my list of favorites that were new to them. But since I'm not the founder of this website or the "host" of this podcast -- that honor goes to my friend John -- I suggested he make the first selection. (So magnanimous, aren't I?)

John agreed, but he did state a reservation: He figured it would be difficult to find a movie he loves that both Blake, our other co-host, but especially I had not seen. As I said, I've got the years on them, and 4,791 films that would immediately be removed from contention the second the series started.

Fortunately, he hit on a film outside of those 4,791 on the very first try.

John's suggestion was Barry Lyndon, a member of his personal top ten and a fortuitous choice in any number of ways. As the last really prominent Stanley Kubrick film I had yet to see, it had been on my list to watch for some time now, and I likely would have already if it weren't for the three-hour running time. But what really made it a perfect choice was that I actually had the movie at my house at the very time he suggested it. I'd borrowed it from the library just a week or two earlier, and it was easily renewable.

Did I like it as much as Nocturnal Animals, the first film I talked about a couple days ago that landed in that increasingly smaller set of movies I've never seen?

You'll have to listen to the podcast to find out.

I'll include a link here to the ReelGood website, since I don't think you can link to iTunes. But what I'd really love you to do is subscribe, rate and review, as that does good things for us and eventually will make us famous or something. It's called The ReelGood Podcast, not to be confused with ReelGood Podcast, another podcast available on iTunes that technically predates us, but has not had a new episode since February of 2016, so screw them.

As the Bartles & Jaymes guys used to say, thank you for your support.

The one movie I hadn't seen

Picking a movie to watch in our house can be a bit of a hassle, since I've always already seen most of the good candidates.

Which is not a problem for me, since I don't mind rewatching films if I liked them. But my wife finds it a bit disappointing as she likes to be a part of my first time watching a movie if she can be. Especially if the movie has surprises, you want to ingest them for the first time at the same time as the person you're watching with.

The odds of resolving this age-old dilemma seemed particularly thin on Sunday night, when we were only just getting organized our possible viewing options at about 6:30, and needed to download something before we intended to start watching it around 8:30. Streaming wasn't an option because we were going to watch it in the garage, where the noise would not keep our kids awake, but where our WiFi is shit.

My wife was tasked with searching iTunes for something she would like to watch, knowing she was under a time crunch.

"It's all so hopeless because you've already seen everything," she said, coming into the kitchen. I feared our evening was destined for a Plan B or even a Plan C.

"I know you've already probably seen it, but what about Nocturnal Animals?"

I hadn't seen it. Miracle of miracles.

We started downloading immediately, and with the benefit of shutting off other wireless connections around the house and plugging directly into the ethernet cable, we had it downloaded and ready to watch by 8:40.

It was pretty unlikely that I hadn't seen this, as it was a prominent 2016 release with big stars and ambitions, and it was released in plenty of time for me to watch it before my ranking deadline. But it just got lost in the shuffle, as November releases sometimes do, and having seen the trailer about five times kind of diminished some of my eagerness to prioritize it.

But had I seen it, it would have been a candidate for my top ten.

Not only is this a satisfying and engrossing thriller, with an intense yet relatable psychology underpinning it, but it also pulls off the nifty narrative trick of following three parallel storylines, involving the same characters in different time periods and the same actors playing themselves and characters in a book, without once being confusing to follow. I admired Tom Ford's first feature, A Single Man, though my actual affection for it was limited. So I had no idea he was capable of something like this. Perhaps that's also the case because I had pigeonholed him as a guy whose projects would focus on homosexuality, him being a gay man himself, but that was clearly unfair and I feel like a fool to have ascribed limited ambitions to him. (Many times when someone crosses over from another visual art -- in Ford's case, fashion design -- it's to pursue very specific thematic interests, but that's not the case with Ford. Neither was it the case with John Cameron Mitchell, a one-time actor, who pursued LGBT subject matter in Hedwig and the Angry Inch and Shortbus before going completely the other way with Rabbit Hole. But I'm getting sidetracked.)

The other exceptional aspect of this movie is the acting, up to and including incidental characters. Acting nominations went to Michael Shannon (Oscars) and Aaron Taylor-Johnson (Golden Globes), and they may be the standouts. But Amy Adams and Jake Gyllenhaal are doing great work as well, and I think I prefer what Adams is doing here to what she did in her more widely acclaimed 2016 work in Arrival. Gyllenhaal seems to set aside some of the tics that he can sometimes rely on too heavily and just gives a performance that's truthful.

To nitpick for just a moment though ... what the hell is going on with Amy Adams' age in this movie? She's playing a character who has been divorced for at least 19 years. She says at one point that she hasn't seen her ex (Gyllenhaal) in that long, so the divorce could have been even longer ago. Add another year or two on to that and she must have gotten married when she was like 20, though the character says she is in grad school. Amy Adams is 42 ... could she be playing older here? Unusual for an actress. Or maybe it's just weird to think that she and Gyllenhaal (age 36) are old enough to have teenage children.

But that's just a nit, and now that I've picked it, I'm not even sure it doesn't add up.

And let's hope we have as much luck the next time my wife blindly attempts to identify something I haven't seen.

Is it better before, or after?

I'd seen Peter Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock before, and I'd been to the actual Hanging Rock before, but neither in close enough proximity to each other for one to provide meaningful perspective on the other.

For my second of both, I vowed to do them both in the same weekend -- but the question became which one to do first.

My conventional thinking was to see Weir's 1975 film, which I'd first seen in 2005 as one of the Australian films my Australian girlfriend (now wife) wanted to show me, first. Then I'd have it in my mind as my family and I spent Easter on "the Rock," our first visit in three years. (Which I found kind of an interesting corollary to the events of Joan Lindsay's novel source material, which takes place on a different holiday, Valentine's Day, of 1900.)

But the opportunity was lost when I motioned to make it our second movie of Saturday evening, but my wife hemmed and hawed. I could have just watched it myself, but she expressed enough interest in seeing it, though not that night, that I was compelled to wait. She did suggest it as probable/possible Easter night viewing, so that seemed good enough.

I guess I thought Hanging Rock, a dramatic and anomalous geographical formation about 45 minutes' drive from Melbourne, would have an extra creep factor for me if I'd seen the movie -- in which three school girls go into a trance and disappear into its crevices -- the night before. But with the place absolutely swarming with people, that tended to diminish some of its more ominous properties.

Oh, there's a photo in case you want to get a sense what it's all about:

And one from the movie, during the key scene:

Bye girls. See you never.

Creepy.

So instead of having the viewing recently in my mind, I took pleasure in seeing the movie with the recent visit in mind. We did indeed watch it Sunday night after a great day up on the Rock -- or, as close to a great day as you can come with a six-year-old and a three-year-old, who don't want any of the foods you brought for your picnic (yes, we did) and are constantly coming dangerously close to killing themselves.

It was wonderful to be reminded how good movies looked back in the 70s, when film was king and when period pieces had an indefinable air of mystery to them. It was a lot better reminder than I got when watching the comparatively cruddy looking Carrie on Thursday night. This movie is lyrical and mysterious and entrancing. I am listening to Gheorge Zamfir's haunting pan flute score as I write this. (And might as well link it for you here in case you want a listen, which alone might prompt a viewing.)

Although the rock formation is, unsurprisingly, identical now to how it would have been 40-some years ago, it was difficult to say "Hey, we climbed that one today!" or "I remember that exact view" because there are so many different rocky outcrops that are easy to mistake for one another. I imagine it was this very maze-like quality the rocks have, with their various nooks and crannies and secret passageways, that inspired Joan Lindsay to write her 1967 novel.

And alas, it is just a novel. Although there are persistent rumors that the place is haunted, most of them stem from this story, which Lindsay once refused to classify as fictitious. It was probably a pre-Blair Witch Project attempt to lend an additional air of strangeness to something, pretending it was really in order to goose the buzz about it. Though we all now know that the girls of Appleyard College (which does not and never did exist) never made a fateful visit to the Rock on St. Valentine's Day in 1900.

The whole place is suffused with such a powerful and delirious oddness that I really wish they had.

I don't have trailers, but I have these

Damn.

Star Wars teaser posters are the things that will get me through to December, as I steadfastly refuse to watch the trailers (one of which has just become available, presumably for this Star Wars celebration that's marking the 40th anniversary of the franchise).

And this one for The Last Jedi is, simply, great.

I don't know what else to say about it.

The traditional route would probably have been to show Kylo Ren with his mask on, but how much more powerful is it to have him meet mano-a-mano -- humano-a-humano -- with his one-time mentor and trainer, Luke Skywalker. Unlike Darth Vader, Kylo Ren -- the erstwhile Ben Solo -- is a mask remover. Which may ultimately be the thing that's key to his salvation, even though he killed his dad.

In googling for this image, though, I also found another poster that captivated me, even though it's just a fan mock-up. It was nicely done enough that I thought it was worth showcasing it here:

Will a star destroyer actually be coming to Luke's secret island?

I guess we'll find out in December.

Edie McClurg was never a teenager

When an actor or actress becomes famous in a certain type of role, it can be damn near impossible to imagine them as anything else.

Which is why I found it particularly strange to watch Carrie (for the first time) on Thursday night and see Edie McClurg ... as a teenager.

It wasn't so much that I couldn't imagine Edie McClurg playing a teenager, although I couldn't. It was that I couldn't believe Edie McClurg was still of the right age range to be cast as a teenager in 1976.

If you aren't familiar with the name Edie McClurg, you obviously didn't watch a lot of movies in the 1980s. But since that undoubtedly describes some of my readers (and I don't begrudge you being younger than I am, really I don't), here's this picture to help you:

That's McClurg in one of her most recognizable roles, as Grace, secretary/assistant to principal Ed Rooney (Jeffrey Jones) in the 80s classic Ferris Bueller's Day Off. McClurg is only 34 in this picture (she was born in 1951 and Bueller would have been filming in 1985 for a 1986 release), but she certainly plays a lot older in the movie -- or an older character type, anyway.

It's hard to believe that just ten years earlier she was considered young enough for the role of one of the title character's classmates in Carrie. She was playing someone younger than her, but that's pretty much the last time McClurg would do that. After this, she went straight into middle age.

But for your reference, here's how she looked in Carrie:

Doesn't look all that much like a teenager there, in part because she wasn't -- she was 24. But maybe she just never really looked like a teenager. And since Carrie was her first role, we can't really know for sure.

But part of the reason there's a disconnect is that she started getting typecast as the quirky, folksy type who always seemed to reveal a streak of naughtiness under her sweetly square exterior. With that voice and those chirpy mannerisms, she was ready to play 50 even when she was only 30. She went straight into "age indeterminate," a period that would probably still be going on today if she were still getting cast in movies (she's still working, but it's been primarily on TV and voice work for Disney and Pixar).

Anyway, it was funny to see.

As for the movie itself, which I had rented from the library before but never gotten around to putting in my DVD player, I liked it -- but less than I hoped I would. At the start I thought I would rank it as one of those 70s movies that benefited from the new freedoms of the era in which it was made, without being held back by some of the period's cheesy excesses that might intrinsically make it a product of its time. You know, something great like Halloween. Instead, outside of a particular few sequences -- like the frightening bullying of Carrie in the shower -- it was mostly not as technically accomplished as I hoped it would be, and does indeed revel in a musical score and other signature design details of its time. I expected to be a bit more disturbed by the finale than I was, which was not much at all. The shower scene is really the standout in terms of discomfiting, visceral horror.

I also enjoyed watching a young William Katt in this movie, five years before The Greatest American Hero would make him famous. Probably another case where I wouldn't have thought he was the right choice to play a teenager (he was also 24) only five years before he was the right choice to play the bumbling Ralph Hinkley in that beloved show. Maybe my problem is just that adults all were "age indeterminate" when I was a kid, meaning that everyone seemed about 38 years old to me.

Speaking of people who are too old for things ... the only real criticism I have about the plot of the movie is its inciting incident, Carrie having her first period in the shower. Now, I don't have any daughters and I've never been an expert on female biology, so I did in fact have to google this, but most girls get their first period around the age of 12, with a range going anywhere from 8 to 15, the extremes being particularly unusual cases I would think. Carrie is supposed to be a senior in high school, placing her at a minimum of 16 years old if she were really gifted, but more likely 17 or even 18 if it's the end of her senior year (which it is, as that's usually when they hold the prom). And I don't think there's any indication she's gifted. So even with a sheltered upbringing in which her religious zealot mother prevents her from understanding even the most basic elements of her anatomy, there would be almost no chance she'd only be getting her first period as a late teenager. I mean, ignorance doesn't delay biology, does it?

Edie McClurg, wise for her years, certainly could have filled her in.