Before Cloverfield, Apes and Batman, there was The Pallbearer

Most people think of Matt Reeves for all the high-profile projects that have made him a respected name in Hollywood over the past 15 years.

Me, I always think of him as "the guy who directed The Pallbearer."

The Pallbearer is a largely forgotten romantic comedy from 1996, Reeves' first feature, which might be a touch more melancholy than your average rom com as it starts out with a suicide. Its cast suggests it deserves to be remembered, if not for its quality then at least for the abundance of talent present within the frame. You start with Gwyneth Paltrow, David Schwimmer, Toni Collette, Michael Rapaport, Carol Kane and Barbara Hershey, but by no means do you finish there. I'll get into that a bit more later. 

The reason I remember The Pallbearer so well -- or at least, so fondly -- was that it made my first-ever top ten list in 1996. As you know I'm rewatching my #1s in 2022, and by no means do I intend to expand that to other films in my top ten -- not in any formalized way, anyway. But I decided to watch this one, my #9 of that year, just to interrogate whether or not I was crazy to have chosen it. Incidentally, it's the only film in my top ten I hadn't already seen twice other than Secrets and Lies at #5.

It was also worth revisiting because Reeves' latest film, The Batman, is due in theaters in two weeks.

It's certainly an interesting start for Reeves, indicative of the immediate next step in his career but not of the later steps that have come to define him. After co-writing and directing The Pallbearer, he co-developed the TV show Felicity with J.J. Abrams, himself a future maker of prestige tentpoles. Felicity of course launched the careers of Keri Russell and Scott Speedman, not to mention Abrams favorite Greg Grunberg, who appears in The Pallbearer. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

After these two properties concerning the melancholy romantic lives of young people, Reeves went full blockbuster. Cloverfield may not have initially profiled that way, and it did sort of concern the romantic lives of young people as a bridge with his prior work. But once you add a Godzilla-type creature into your movie, it's got a blockbuster mentality whether it's a success or not. And Cloverfield was a success, spawning an eventual franchise of increasingly diminishing returns.

The returns did not diminish for Reeves. He followed Cloverfield with a remake of Let the Right One In, called Let Me In, which I actually thought was really good. I shouldn't say "actually" like I'm surprised, since Reeves' first two features made my top ten of their respective years. I say "actually" more because those American remakes of foreign films are usually truly inferior in quality, and while this obviously wasn't as good as the original, it made some excellent choices and even included some interesting deviations from Tomas Alfredsson's film. Plus Reeves' technique really stood out, particularly some choices with where to place and move his camera.

Reeves disappointed me for the first time with his Planet of the Apes movies, but not until the second one. Twenty fourteen's Dawn of the Planet of the Apes proved Reeves could truly do no wrong -- at least at that point -- as again he used interesting camera setups, particularly regarding the moving of vehicles or characters on vehicles. More importantly, I really liked that film even though I had really disliked Rise of the Planet of the Apes, which kicked off the new trilogy in 2011. It wasn't until War for the Planet of the Apes in 2017 that I thought Reeves made his first stinker. Maybe he shouldn't have gone back to the well a second time, and his creative drive suffered for it.

Now apparently he has spent the last five years making The Batman, whose nearly three-hour length suggests he needed every one of those five years. I'm skeptical, of course, but Reeves' name on the project indicates I have good reason for optimism.

It's hard to fully comprehend the trajectory of Reeves' career, if not recently then at least from where it started. We tend to think that you're either the rom com guy or the blockbuster guy, and never the twain shall meet. But maybe Reeves was one of the first MCU directors, in effect, someone who was effectively plucked from obscurity and ended up making some of the best movies in that series -- you know, like Joe and Anthon Russo. Except Reeves did his own plucking, teaming up with J.J. Abrams, a genuine fellow collaborator, to will Cloverfield into existence. The rest is history.

Speaking of history, let's start to look a bit at my history with The Pallbearer, long in length but short in quantity.

The outlier you want to honor

I suspect I knew even in 1996 that The Pallbearer was not destined to be a classic. It wasn't heralded at the time -- though it did play Un Certain Regard at Cannes -- and I probably knew even then it was more of a "me movie."

It just goes to show that even from the start, I have never been interested in only honoring films that had a chance at a best picture nomination or an independent spirit award.

I suppose The Pallbearer actually did have those credentials -- the movie was put out by awards darling Miramax, and Paltrow would win best actress only two years later for Shakespeare in Love, also a Miramax film. I knew that this particular film, though, did not have much hope for that sort of recognition.

From the start it has been important to me to recognize films that had spoken to me specifically. The Pallbearer was not that for any of its plot reasons -- which I will touch on in the next subheading -- but it definitely caught me at about the same age as the characters, who are supposed to be 25. I was 23 in early 1997 when I named it my ninth best movie of the year, though I may have been 22 when I saw it. (The movie came out in May of 1996, when I was definitely still 22, but I have no memory of whether I saw this on the big screen or on video. Probably the latter.)

The risk, of course, is that by the cold light of day 25 years later, you might regret the choice. Having watched The Pallbearer a second time now, I don't regret it. At the start I thought "This is a bit broad, and I'm not sure I get what I liked so much about it." By the end that had changed to "Oh yeah, I get it now."

I'm not sure it would make the top ten of modern re-ranking of these movies -- in 1996, The Pallbearer found itself ahead of stalwarts like Trainspotting, The English Patient and Jerry Maguire, so that's a pretty tall order. But with every new movie Reeves made, it strengthened my certainty that there was something there in The Pallbearer, and this viewing has proven me correct. 

The Graduate meets Dear Evan Hansen

I said I would touch on the plot, and now it's time. Spoiler alert if you really don't want to know anything about this 26-year-old movie. 

The story reminded me of two other stories, one that came out twentysomething years before it and one that came out twentysomething years after it.

David Schwimmer's character, Tom Thompson, is identified as the possible best friend of a young man who has just killed himself, even though he barely knew him. In order to help soothe the man's grieving mother, he stumbles into a number of lies and increasingly greater intimacy with the dead man -- including giving his eulogy, and of course acting as a pallbearer at his funeral.

If Dear Evan Hansen wasn't directly inspired by this movie, I have to think its creators were at least aware of it. The plot of that film involves a high school student who, through a sitcom-worthy succession of miscommunications, is believed to be the best friend of another boy who has just killed himself, and accidentally leans into it after first lying to help soothe the grieving parents. 

The movie of Dear Evan Hansen came out last year -- and was terrible -- but the play dates back to 2016. So just barely twentysomething years.

Part of Tom's comforting of the man's mother, Ruth Abernathy (Hershey), involves sleeping with her. Like his initial lies, of course this is not intentional. Nothing Tom does is intentional -- that's one of his defining character traits -- and most of those things are born out of his overdeveloped sense of empathy for other people. The escalates when Ruth is just a little too handsy, gives him a few too many meaningful looks, and before long they're having sex, not once, but regularly.

Of course, this only happens because Tom is spurned by the woman he actually loves, his old high school crush, Julie DeMarco (Paltrow). She turns him down politely -- she says she's about to leave on a trip, which eventually turns out to be true -- but it's enough to throw Tom into Ruth's arms. When Julie does ultimately return his affections, the fact that he's been sleeping with Ruth creates complications for everyone.

Smell The Graduate, do you?

That one would be intentional. You can't intentionally allude to a property that doesn't exist yet -- obviously -- but Reeves et al would have definitely wanted to make us think of one of the great movies of all time that has the tone they wanted to emulate.

Effectively uncredited pallbearers

I mentioned Greg Grunberg earlier. Well, he wasn't the only familiar face in The Pallbearer who gets no lines of dialogue.

Both Grunberg and Zak Orth, a guy who went on to act a lot back then but has been heard from less lately, appear as "Abernathy cousins." The camera actually goes to them three different times over the course of the narrative, but they never get to say anything. Would have cost more I suppose.

The really interesting one, though, was Kevin Corrigan, who appears as an actual pallbearer -- and I could only tell it was him by catching a glimpse of the side of his face. This is a bit strange as Corrigan had just played a starring role in Nicole Holofcener's Walking and Talking the year before, to say nothing of appearing in films like Goodfellas and True Romance. Hardly a face who should just disappear into the crowd.

Interestingly, although Wikipedia lists Grunberg as uncredited in this film, he does appear in the end credits. You can't make a guy who hasn't done anything yet uncredited, can you?

The heyday of David and Gwyneth

Today, we may think of David Schwimmer as the guy who became super whiny and annoying on Friends, and Gwyneth Paltrow as the woman who introduced us to the concept of vagina eggs. It's easy to forget they could both once be enormously effective screen presences.

Schwimmer makes a perfect neurotic schlub, though neurotic in ways far more human-sized than Ross Geller. You can easily see him being the heir apparent to Dustin Hoffman, which this film was obviously trying to position him to be. But he shows really great comic timing and line readings here, while projecting a sympathetic quality that can't be faked. His peak period may not have lasted long, but it was rich.

Paltrow stayed in our good graces a bit longer before all the Goop stuff. She was really just ascendant at this point, having made a lasting impression in Seven but still being pretty unknown, despite being the scion of Hollywood royalty. The Pallbearer shows us why she became such a go-to for this sort of role for a decade to come. Without wanting to suggest I judge her by different standards than I judge Schwimmer, I must also admit I am a heterosexual man, and I find her simply adorable in this film. She has this way of listening with her mouth half open and her eyes half closed that just turns me into pudding. But the effectiveness of this performance is no mere function of her physical attributes. Her reactions are all completely naturalistic, and she communicates hesitation that spills over into standing up for herself with remarkable fluidity. She basically just lights up the screen.

                                                              **********

That's probably way more subheadings than anyone needs about The Pallbearer. I probably should also talk about the early appearance of Toni Collette, but I've already written too much. Hey, when I find myself in a fruitful period for my writing, I'm really writing, I guess. 

The long way I've come since Ponyo

How can I have come a long way since a film I only saw two days ago?

Well, it wasn't my viewing of Ponyo that I'm talking about, though I do want to talk about that in this post. It was the way I prejudged Ponyo in 2008, and by extension, all others of its ilk.

I have this distinct memory -- not where I was, not when I was, but a distinct memory nonetheless -- of seeing a poster for Ponyo, most likely the one to the right or some slight variation on it. And I remember thinking "My, that doesn't look very sophisticated." 

My standard for sophistication would have been whatever Pixar's latest was, which at that time was Wall-E. While Pixar was delivering bells and whistles -- with the space-age Wall-E being a particularly appropriate example -- Studio Ghibli was stuck back in the hand-drawn limitations of yesteryear. To be honest, I'm not even sure I knew what Studio Ghibli was back then, having only seen Spirited Away at that point. The indictment I was delivering was of Japanese animation in general, which I always thought of as "anime," though I no longer think that term truly encompasses what we talk about when discussing Hayao Miyazaki and his creative partners.

Needless to say I made no effort to see the movie in 2008, and only finally just got to it two days ago, when it was my February assignment in Flickchart Friends Favorites Fiesta. 

I've come a long way in my understanding/appreciation of Studio Ghibli since 2008, much of it accomplished in the past five years. 

Um, exactly five years.

It was February 18, 2017, when I had my watershed Ghibli moment. I had already overcome a certain barrier in my mind by deciding to watch six anime movies in the year 2017 -- I still called it anime then -- as part of the bi-monthly series Audient Anime. But I didn't know if I'd really take to them until that first viewing, which was My Neighbor Totoro. 

Boy did I take to My Neighbor Totoro.

I gave it five stars on Letterboxd, but I would have given it five-and-a-half or six if that had been available. I was swept away into Miyazaki's world and I loved it so much that I couldn't stand it.

But maybe the real turning point, which pointed out exactly how wrong I had been in the previous decade since my Ponyo snap judgment, was when I watched Kiki's Delivery Service two months later. Also five stars.

I have not since given another Miyazaki movie five stars, but there's only been two that have received fewer than four. Here is how I have made my way through Miyazaki's filmography since then:

Castle in the Sky (6/18/17) - 4 stars
Howl's Moving Castle (1/26/18) - 3.5 stars
Princess Mononoke (5/10/19) - 4 stars
Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (3/4/20) - 4.5 stars
Porco Rosso (6/19/20) - 3 stars
Ponyo (2/16/22) - 4.5 stars

Which leaves me only his first feature (1979's The Castle of Cagliostro) and his most recent feature (2013's The Wind Rises) away from being a Miyazaki completist, though as fans desperate for more of his magic would know, he's slowly but surely working on another feature called How Do You Live?, which currently has no release date. 

I possibly could have waited until I finished those two to write a piece like this, but, you gotta strike while the iron is hot and while the idea is in your brain. 

Of course, Miyazaki is not the only purveyor of Japanese animation I dismissed when I dismissed Ponyo. In the time since My Neighbor Totoro, I have also seen and loved In This Corner of the World (directed by Sunao Katabuchi), Your Name. (directed by Makoto Shinkai) and Only Yesterday (directed by Isao Takahata), Takahata having directed my favorite Japanese animation film before this fruitful period, Grave of the Fireflies. 

A few films during this period have not really hit with me -- Porco Rosso and Takahata's Pom Poko being examples -- but never have I disliked one of these films. (Actually, the one small exception to that is Earwig and the Witch, directed by Miyazaki's son Goro, but as this film was made digitally, I hardly think it earns a spot in this discussion.)

In 2008, I thought I disliked all Japanese animation films, even with the obvious exceptions to that rule that existed, like Akira and Paprika. (Other exceptions, like Fireflies, Ghost in the Shell and The Secret World of Arriety, would come later.) I clearly thought they were just that, exceptions, and your average such film was destined to disappoint me.

And I don't even know which movie I saw that once cemented this impression in me.

Well like I said, I've come a long way. I now realize that what I thought were "unsophisticated" choices were often just that -- choices on how to portray the characters, not financial or creative limitations. The faces of characters in Japanese animation will never approximate photorealism, and that's the point. They want to avoid the uncanny valley, but they also want these characters to have a distinctive appearance that is not indebted to some other style, nor trying to seem as realistic as possible. Why would we watch animation if our desire was to approximate realism?

It's Miyazaki's divorce from the constraints of realism that make him such a great artist, and Ponyo is a shining example of it. This film has Totoro's sense of low stakes wonder, though also the high stakes of the earth possibly being destroyed, which is mentioned almost as an afterthought. (When the title character, a goldfish with a human-like face, flirts with becoming human, it throws the earth's gravity out of orbit, leading the moon to careen ever closer to the planet -- making this a funny film to watch with Roland Emmerich's Moonfall still in cinemas.) 

The choice of milieu is also key here. After umpteen movies in which Miyazaki fetishized the skies -- and at least one more yet to come as his next feature after Ponyo -- Miyazaki directed his attention below his feet to the ocean, rather than above his head to the clouds. Turns out his creative animals and vehicles and landscapes are just as suited to Ponyo's oceanic themes, plus there's a sense of something new being explored, which is always great. Not that Miyazaki doesn't explore something new every time out, but there's new and then there's NEW. 

I was also really taken with the film's color palette, which struck me as different than he had ever used before. There are lush greens and yellows here that blew me away, which is interesting as it is not even a case of the expected new uses of the color blue.

Well, Hayao, I hope this post has atoned for my initial slight of you, your oeuvre, and the entire animated tradition from which you sprung. 

Now get busy finishing How Do You Live?, will you?

It's hard out here for a Black-themed #1

I said I probably wouldn't write about the next previous #1 I rewatched during a 2022 full of rewatching #1s.

I say a lot of things.

Who knows, I might end up writing about all of them. But I'm writing about this one for a number of particular reasons, certainly not listed in the order of their importance, or if anything, listed in the inverse order.

1. The cover of this DVD I bought from a closing video store back in 2015. It's like an archeological find that captures the video store at the exact moment before its death. At this point they were renting out videos for a whole week for only $1.90. So it went from $1.90 to borrow it for a week to $3 to own it for the rest of my life. RIP, video stores.

2. Something funny I noticed on this cover. It has a picture of Taryn Manning with her eyes closed and her lips basically touching the microphone that she turns a trick in order to acquire. But she never actually sings in the film. I suppose maybe this image was just intended as a metaphor -- almost like a sexual relationship with the microphone? -- or maybe it's from a scene that ended up on the cutting room floor.

3. My region-free DVD player, one of our first purchases after moving to Australia, might be dead. For a while now I have had trouble with its tray ejecting properly. When I watched Looking for Richard the other week, which I also bought during the closure of the aforementioned video store, I got the tray to eject well enough to receive the disk, but it could not identify the disk. I thought it might have been an issue with the DVD itself, but it played fine on my computer, which is where I ultimately ended up watching it. My computer was where I ended up watching Hustle & Flow, though I did connect it to our TV via HDMI so as to get the maximum size of the image. I had to do this because in trying to wrench open the DVD tray, I ended up pulling it out of the player entirely. I'd like to take a pass at opening it up and fixing it, but it might finally be time to replace this stalwart piece of technology -- or else admit to ourselves that DVDs are a thing of the past and not get a replacement. I can watch DVDs from the correct region through my computer, but any of my collection originating in the U.S., which includes dozens of titles, will be inaccessible to me if I go this route. Sad face.

4. Because it was a shitty video store DVD, the image quality was not great. I don't think the video store pirated it or anything, that would be pretty shady and this was a legit store. Plus Hustle & Flow is supposed to look a little, or a lot, grungy. But I reckon the image quality would have been a lot better on BluRay or streaming, and I hope this didn't impact my feelings about the movie as I was watching it. (Incidentally, when I was having those problems getting the DVD player's tray to open, I checked to see if I could find it streaming anywhere for free. Nope, only for rental.)

5. As I was updating my list of rewatches on Letterboxd, I noticed I had given Hustle & Flow only 4.5 stars when I retroactively assigned star ratings to all my previous viewings upon first getting started with Letterboxd, just about exactly ten years ago. (Hey, another occasion for an anniversary post if I weren't already flooded with content just waiting for its chance to get posted online.) This is significant for two reasons: 1) I was much less generous with my star ratings when I first started on Letterboxd. I gave Tangled only 4.5 stars, which now seems insane. 2) I had previously thought Parasite was my only #1 I had given less than five stars on Letterboxd, a star rating I would now boost to five if I were putting it in the first time. Parasite remains the only #1 I gave less than five stars in real time on Letterboxd, but having at least Hustle & Flow joining it in a retroactive assessment is an interesting wrinkle.

6. It's Black History Month, and this is the only #1 I've ever chosen that has Black themes of any kind.

This is what I really want to talk about.

I've only had one #1 film that contained more than a token representation of Black characters, and it couldn't even be directed by a Black director.

Craig Brewer does not seem guilty of cultural appropriation in Hustle & Flow -- this is not something we were talking about so much back in 2005 -- but it has always gnawed at me that the one time I picked a film about Black people, it's directed by a white guy.

But it's the only one time selecting a film about Black people that really gnaws at me.

I'd say I need to do better on this, but making it a conscious thing is a recipe for disaster. A #1 movie of any year is such a cherished object -- by me, anyway, as evidenced by the rewatch of #1s I'm doing in 2022 -- that if you try to boost a movie to that spot artificially, even based on admirable goals like trying to be more woke, you aren't being honest with yourself or anyone else. If I purposefully set out to "do better," I'd be polluting a process that should be pure.

The closest I've gotten in recent years was when Spike Lee's BlacKkKlansman was my #2 of 2018. I felt it had a real shot at #1, but in the end I knew my appreciation for Paul Schrader's First Reformed was greater. And since I saw First Reformed first, I don't think it even spent any time in the #1 position before ultimately ending up at #2.

I'm desperate for this to occur organically, as you can probably tell. But there have not been any serious contenders since then, and I can't remember the last serious contender before that. If Beale Street Could Talk would have been a serious contender, as it finished even higher in my top 25 of the decade than BlacKkKlansman, but I didn't see it in time to rank it -- it was a very late release in Australia, not until after I'd closed my list. Besides, that was also the year of First Reformed, which was a very tough competitor -- I've already seen it four times in less than four years since I first saw it. 

The real dispiriting element to this is that Black characters are few and far between in all of my #1s. I ran through them in my head the other night. I won't list all the titles that are painfully white, but instead, list the remaining options that at least have some decent Black representation on screen. And I can count them on one hand, other than Hustle & Flow: Children of Men, First Reformed, Our Friend. Crap, I don't even need all the fingers on the hand. That's not to say there are zero Black characters in the other films, just that they don't have any significant role in the story.

To be fair, it was more common back then for films to feature exclusively white people and for this not to raise any eyebrows. Only in the past decade have we made genuine strides on representation in film. Plus, five of those are foreign language films, where you are even less likely to find people of color.

Still, the whole thing feels pretty shameful.

I'd examine how this state of affairs has come to be, except it increases my sense of shame. Well, this is my blog and I always try to be honest with myself in this space, so let's do it.

If I were being as harsh on myself as possible, I'd say I need some sort of white character for a film to achieve maximum resonance for me. Even Hustle & Flow has two significant white characters, the sound engineer played by DJ Qualls and the prostitute played by Taryn Manning. (Interestingly, I noted Manning plays the ultimate white character in 2021's Karen, a multi-Golden Raspberry nominee, which I have rented and will watch within the next month.) BlacKkKlansman is notable for being told almost equally through the eyes of Adam Driver's character as John David Washington's character. I hate that the evidence suggests this is a contributing factor, but I'm not going to ignore the evidence either. 

This is not to say that movies without white characters don't resonate with me. Take the If Beale Street Could Talk example. The only two white characters with any sort of dialogue are a malicious police officer played by Ed Skrein and a nice landlord played by Dave Franco. It would be silly to suggest that either character's perspective had anything to do with why the film resonated with me. It's just that a film starring exclusively people of color has yet to achieve the maximum resonance implied by naming it your #1. Barry Jenkins' film had two things going against it, the latter of which made the former moot: 1) It was going up against the juggernaut that was First Reformed, and 2) I didn't see it in time to rank it anyway. 

In letting myself off the hook a little bit with this, I have to recognize exactly what I've concluded in the paragraph above: Some of this is just random. Had Beale Street been released a little earlier, and had I not caught First Reformed at MIFF, one might have been #1 and the other might have been the one I didn't see, given that First Reformed had a weird release strategy in Australia and I never actually observed it playing in theaters. It happened the other way around, and the history is what it is.

But speaking of history, Black History Month is a good time not only to rewatch this #1 -- remember I still had more than 20 others to choose from -- but also to examine some of the reasons it's so lonesome in my history of best films. I can tell you that as a cinephile surveying the slate of new releases each year, I sit there in a constant state of optimism -- some might say desperate hope -- about new Black-themed projects directed by Black directors, and the impact they could potentially have on me. 

One hasn't risen to #1 yet, but I hope it's only a matter of time.

R.I.P. to the Reit man for the job

It's unforgivable to start out a tribute to someone's life with a pun about their name. 

But I suspect that as a lifelong humorist, Ivan Reitman would approve.

I used to always confuse which movies Ivan Reitman had directed with which movies Harold Ramis had directed. They had much of the same on-screen talent and many of the same sensibilities. Turns out, Reitman directed most of them and Ramis, not all that many but some really big ones (Vacation, Groundhog Day). 

Now they're both gone.

Reitman lived just long enough to see his son Jason direct a proper sequel to the two Ghostbusters films he himself directed, and then a few months later, he passed away in his sleep at age 75.

I made a pun in the subject of this post, but I think it was apt. Reitman really was the right man for the job with the comedies he made. That may seem like an obvious statement, but when I say that, I am thinking of his role as director in the same way you think of a manager of a major league baseball team, if you ever think of such a person. 

Recently there has been a theory that a baseball manager doesn't actually do that much. The general manager brings in the players the manager must use, and lately the notion has even been put forth that in-game decisions often come down from the owner's box during games, since those decisions could affect such things as how much a player makes in arbitration etc. The manager is left being a personality who can gather everybody together and inspire them by being affable but strong, and projecting a sort of leadership other people want to follow.

I wonder if that's kind of what Reitman did. He gathered together people who were already really funny and did not require specific guidance from him how to be so. Because his movies didn't usually feature technique that called attention to itself, it seems more like he got behind the camera and called "Action!" rather than trying to execute some grand vision for the film. That sort of grand vision is not usually needed in a comedy, of course, and Reitman instinctively knew that.

Of course, some of his visions were grand. Ghostbusters was a sort of unprecedented melding of comedy and special effects, and though we laugh at some of those effects in 2022, we all remember them being amazing in 1985. He tried to marry effects with comedy again in 2001's Evolution, with significantly lesser returns, but the effort is what I'm talking about here. Even though I've characterized Reitman as a good production leader more than a creative visionary, neither was he content just to get funny people together to do funny things.

Then there was also the Frank Capra side of him. Dave is one of the best imitations I've ever seen of a modern-day Capra, perhaps even with more heart than a Capra film -- and it's also really funny. 

He also had an ability to turn something that shouldn't have worked into something that did work. When we think about his collaborations with the likes of Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd and Ramis, we tend to forget that the most regular star of his movies was Arnold Schwarzenegger. Kindergarten Cop looked like a gross misfire when we first saw it advertised -- Schwarzenegger doing warmth and comedy? -- but I still cherish that film and am realizing that a rewatch of that would probably be an excellent tribute to Reitman. Maybe this weekend. Their other collaborations were not as big a success -- I didn't even see Junior -- but Twins rightly has a fond place in people's hearts as well. (Wikipedia says Arnold was also in Dave, but I don't remember that.) And if I said earlier that Reitman didn't need to direct his comedic actors, Schwarzenegger flies in the face of that. Arnold surely wouldn't have realized he had the ability to be funny if Reitman hadn't seen something in him and brought it out of him.

If I'm considering revisiting stuff, it might be wise to go back to two of his early efforts I saw ages ago but don't remember at all: Meatballs and Stripes. Yep, if any one person launched Bill Murray, it was probably Reitman.

As seems to happen with talents like Reitman, eventually the good ideas dry up. The 21st was not a good century for the director, as he followed up Evolution with My Super Ex-Girlfriend (bad) and No Strings Attached (almost as bad). However, I can genuinely say I liked his final film as director, 2014's Draft Day, which was a pleasant surprise that called up some of the Reitman of old.

I won't get into his producing credits, but there were some great ones there too.

The deaths of Ramis and now Reitman are a reminder that we're going to start losing more of these guys who either started out in SCTV or had some affiliation with it. It probably won't be that long from now -- hopefully at least a decade -- before I have to write one of these for Murray. So we should enjoy these guys now while we still can.

And if you want to look at Reitman's lasting influence, the examples are everywhere in comedy. I needn't name them. But one big example is his own son, now a successful director in his own right, who has made some good comedies, some not-so-good comedies, some interesting dramas, and a fascinating little body of work in and of itself.

Reitman was definitely the right man to make the comedies of my childhood, whether I remember them all perfectly today or not. I might have to make a little run through some of his work in the next couple months. And maybe I'll even watch Junior.

Rest in peace.

The Cable Guy gets its Super Bowl moment

I didn't watch the Super Bowl. Living in Australia, I gave that up quite some time ago, and even when my Patriots were regular participants, I couldn't watch until later that night due to my work being in its busiest period of the year. Even then, I did not get the ads that play in the U.S., and stopped trying to seek out all but the most newsworthy ones after we'd lived here for a few years.

Well, there was one particularly newsworthy one for me personally this Super Bowl.

Through Facebook, in a post where the child of one of my high school friends was asking her mother what cable was, I learned that The Cable Guy is having a moment in the sun -- 26 years after it was largely dismissed by everybody, critics and audiences alike.

The film has gained in stature some over the years, more in a cult way, but I never guessed it was ripe for a tapping of our collective nostalgia, especially so long after the moment of its greatest cultural relevance. 

As you would know if you watched the game, Verizon played an ad in which Jim Carrey dressed up for presumably the first time in 26 years as Chip Douglas -- that's not his real name -- to comedically reflect on how times have changed since we all once had a cable coming into our homes, providing us access to movie channels. If you haven't seen the ad, you can find it here. 

The Cable Guy makes a perfect foil for Verizon 5G internet, also referenced in the ad as "5G ultra wideband." (And you can bet I sympathized with Chip, who says he's never heard of it.) But that doesn't mean that the movie itself would have been a slam dunk for this sort of treatment. Carrey probably didn't come cheap -- nor did buying an ad slot in the Super Bowl -- so they had to be really certain they were conceptually on track with this one, and felt like they were presenting a reference point that really resonated with the audience.

I'm surprised The Cable Guy fit that bill.

When concepts like this have been explored in the past -- dredging up old characters in pop culture to feed our nostalgia -- it's been with the likes of Ferris Bueller and Kevin McCallister, not Chip Douglas. (And if Matthew Broderick already appeared in the Ferris Bueller one, would it have killed him to show up here?)

The even stranger thing is that the writers play on specific moments in The Cable Guy that only someone who had seen it a couple times would probably remember, like Chip's reference to it possibly being illegal. It's not just Carrey's familiar look or the apartment setting, which could be gleaned from stills from the movie. It's actual dialogue.

Well, as a guy who has this ranked #16 on Flickchart, I feel vindicated. Although a lot of people I know certainly appreciate The Cable Guy and realize it's not the turd some people thought it was, no one loves it as much as I do. 

I'm so glad I stumbled over that particular Facebook post, otherwise I have no idea how soon I would have encountered this ad. I like to think that my love for The Cable Guy has been projected outward to everyone who knows me, and that people would bring me little nuggets of Cable Guy ephemera like peons bringing tribute to a king, but I could be wrong about that. 

Watching this movie/magic show/self-help thingy on Valentine's Day

The thing I know about Derek Delgaudio's In & of Itself is that you're not supposed to know anything about Derek Delgaudio's In & of Itself. 

I'm not even sure if the title is properly listed with or without the words "Derek Delgaudio" in it, so I've done it both ways in the opening sentence.

Of course, you can't know nothing about a movie, if this is even properly considered a movie. It runs an hour and 30 minutes so it already fits my definition in at least one way. From what I heard discussed on podcasts last year, this is what I do know:

1) Derek Delgaudio may or may not be a magician;

2) This may or may not be a magic show;

3) I believe there is an audience and there is some sort of interaction with the audience;

4) People in that audience, and in the viewing audience at home, tend to cry, possibly multiple times, while watching this magic show or not-magic show;

5) Some other people think the whole thing is manipulative.

This is what I got out of discussions of it on The Slate Culture Gabfest and Binge or Purge.

So, I have no idea if it has anything whatsoever to do with love, but we are watching it on Valentine's Day.

It was my wife's suggestion, after I first told her it was now available on Disney+ through the "Star" wing, which I think is the one that has all these movies that don't seem to be related to the Disney monolith. For a millionth of a second I considered quibbling that it was not the makings of a Valentine's Day viewing -- simply because I had no reason to think it was -- but it's so increasingly rare that she'll sit down for a movie with me, I'll take anything I can get. Even if it doesn't end up being a movie.

In truth, I'm pretty desperate to watch this, as I've spent on the order of a year being intrigued by it. I can't remember when I first heard of In & of Itself, but it was a while ago -- within 2021, but early 2021 I think. (The poster above says January 22, so that tracks.) For a long time it wasn't available on any service I had access to, but that's changed now.

In truth, the timing couldn't be better. Since I won't know until after I've seen it whether I think it qualifies as a movie, I'm now in a position where that discussion can be largely academic (as if it isn't always academic). I won't have to consider whether to include it or not on my 2021 film rankings. I already had one very highly ranked film whose status as a film was questioned by a lot of people, and even though I feel comfortable with my logic for calling my #2 movie of 2021, Bo Burnham: Inside, a movie, having another such problematic title would have started to throw off my equilibrium.

If I weren't interested for a dozen other reasons, I'd be interested because this guy's name is Derek, and that's my name. He even spells it right.

Whether this thing, whatever it is, prompts me to write a follow-up post tomorrow or not, I can't say at this point. If I don't think of it as a movie, probably not. If I do think of it as a movie, maybe. If I do think of it is a movie and I think it makes for a good viewing on Valentine's Day -- which will still be in the future for much of my reading audience -- then I'll be almost certain to chime back in saying so, no matter how many other completed posts I may have waiting in the queue. (Current count: five.)

Derek the maybe-magician, I'm in your hands.

The 2021 black and white movies I probably didn't give enough credit

The people at my Death on the Nile screening Friday night probably thought the color was out at the theater.

We saw trailers for two new black and white releases, one of which is already playing (Belfast) and one of which opens next month (C'mon C'mon). Those were the only two trailers that played. (There were promotions for the cinema that were in color, but go with me on this.)

Then the cold open of Death on the Nile also has no color. (Incidentally, being another Branagh film, this was also shot by Branagh's personal cinematographter, Haris Zambarloukos, who shot Belfast.) 

Finally, the color kicked in with the opening credits.

I'm not here to tell you about Death on the Nile -- my review is going up on Monday if you're curious -- but rather, the two trailers I saw. 

My God they looked gorgeous.

I have always been a fan of modern-day uses of black and white, despite my occasional reservations that they reveal an artist with a certain level of pretentiousness. It really looks great, if you've got a good DP. So great, in fact, that I wonder if a lot more movies wouldn't be made in black and white if it were considered commercially viable. All you have to know is that they made and released a black and white version of Mad Max: Fury Road, and you'll realize there's something magnificent about the chiaroscuro approach -- even in movies that must make back their large budgetary investment, so can't take this sort of risk on the most commonly available version of the film. 

I said these trailers looked gorgeous as though anticipating my first opportunity to see the films in question. In fact, I already saw both and was not particularly kind to either in my 2021 rankings.

Belfast was the one I liked better, ranking it at #71 for the year. That's still well within the top half of the films I saw, but it's pretty low for a best picture nominee. I kind of figured Belfast would be one of those movies that the Golden Globes feted, but it would have lost any heat it had accumulated by the time the Oscar nominations came out. Instead, it received seven nominations, including nominations for Branagh in both the screenwriting and directing categories. It's not a film that just eked in there.

So why wasn't it a bigger hit with me?

Fatigue certainly had something to do with it. Belfast was the third-to-last movie I watched before I closed my list, on a Sunday afternoon. Instead of finding a suitable showcase for its beautiful cinematography, I split my viewing between the pool and the garage. That's right -- I watched about 15 minutes of it while lying on a floatie thing in my pool. That turned out not to be very practical, so I shifted to the garage and that worked better. Still, it felt like a "catch as catch can" viewing.

Fatigue doesn't entirely explain it though. I watched fellow best picture nominee King Richard that night, and ranked it 30 slots higher. Maybe it was watching King Richard on my TV rather than my laptop. I allocated the afternoon slot to Belfast and the evening slot to King Richard after a friend tipped his hand on the comparative strengths of the two films.

No, I think it had more to do with a sort of shruggy feeling about everything that happens in the film. That's up to the point where it really sticks the landing with a sneakily powerhouse emotional ending. Before that, I found the events of the story charming but somewhat lacking in stakes, and they ultimately didn't make a huge impression on me. (That said, I have used an image from Belfast as the new banner for this blog. I am a little bothered by the inconsistency of my behavior in this regard -- my last banner was from Portrait of a Lady on Fire, which I dearly love -- but the image was too illustrative of my blog not to use it.)

I was significantly harder on Mike Mills' C'mon C'mon (#138). I might have gotten off on the wrong foot on this one as well, watching it too late at night on a night I had planned to watch Annette but couldn't rent it due to a mismatch between the region of my Amazon account and the region of my AppleTV. (I later rectified that issue.) It shouldn't have been too late if my other choice was a 143-minute musical, but it felt late and like a clear second choice for the evening's viewing.

I can't blame the circumstances for this impression though. I found this movie really twee, constituting a hopelessly square look at a relationship between an uncle and a son, full of superfluous narration. I really didn't enjoy the running conceit about Joaquin Phoenix's character interviewing the schoolchildren about their thoughts on the future, which seemed to just make the whole thing feel more silly and unaware of its own terminal squareness. Don't get me long, I'm an earnest person at my core and can appreciate earnestness in movies, but this was not the right sort of earnestness. It left me rolling my eyes, and I thought the reason the movie is called C'mon C'mon is dumb.

Seeing trailers for both of these movies on the big screen, though, made me wonder if I'd missed the boat.

I don't know if it will be possible to go back and undo the impressions I've already created of these movies, and I'm certainly not going to devote my limited available theatrical outings to go see them on the big screen. But I am now encouraged, especially given their critical acclaim, that it will be worthwhile to watch them again in the future -- not on a night I was expecting to watch a different movie, or an afternoon I was lounging in the pool. 

I should remind you of a third black and white movie from 2021 that I loved: The Tragedy of Macbeth. I also did not see this on the big screen (though I had the opportunity), but this one connected with me so fundamentally, I had to rank it #10 for the year -- despite preceding my viewing of Belfast by only a single viewing. So, fatigue was obviously not a factor there either. (Maybe it was also that unlike Belfast and C'mon C'mon, Macbeth had a little black -- Denzel Washington -- in among all its white.)

I guess it just goes to show you that black and white cinematography can be the most beautiful thing you've ever seen, but it still comes down to something that has nothing to do with the visuals if you want to judge the film's effectiveness: its script. 

The boring awkwardness of real people

Has there ever been a more apt description of mumblecore? If I do say so myself.

I've had Funny Ha Ha in my Kanopy queue for ages, saving it to theoretically watch with my wife, though she barely watches movies anymore. Also, the reason I had been saving it proved to be flawed. It was meant to be a delayed homage to Lynn Shelton, who died in 2020. Only, Lynn Shelton didn't actually direct Funny Ha Ha.

That was Andrew Bujalski, as I discovered only after I'd started the movie, having decided it was no longer worth trying to pin down my wife to honor Shelton two years after her death. And not because I recognized Bujalski in the movie, but rather, because I just decided to randomly check IMDB, since the movie was not holding my attention as much as it should have. It turns out the two Shelton movies I/we haven't seen are We Go Way Back and My Effortless Brilliance.

The confusion arose from the fact that both Bujalski and Shelton are considered to be some of the progenitors of mumblecore, Bujalski himself informally considered the grandfather of the form. Shelton might make a good grandmother, since there's no other female director I think of when considering mumblecore. Those terms tend to overstate how old these two are/were, though. While Shelton was only 54 when she died, Bujalski is still only 44 today.

Funny Ha Ha, I discovered, is informally considered the first mumblecore movie, making the sobriquet appropriate for Bujalski. Given that I've seen a decent amount of mumblecore over the years -- and loved some of it -- that was probably a more urgent need to watch it than to mistakenly honor the director of one of my favorites of the form (Humpday), not to mention my #2 of 2012, Your Sister's Sister, which is more like mumblecore adjacent. 

Well, I'd say that mumblecore had not yet found its footing in 2002, except the definition of mumblecore is that it does not have any footing to find. Plot is virtually unimportant in quintessential mumblecore, and core components of cinema like acting, editing and camera techniques are intentionally amateurish.

Or rather, I should call them what they really are: extremely naturalistic. Actors in mumblecore movies should not be considered untalented, even though they are frequently not professionals. (Greta Gerwig and the Duplass brothers went on to big things from mumblecore origins.) Really, what it is about them is that they are very effective at conveying the speech rhythms and behaviors of real people, since many if not most (if not all) of the scenes are improvised, and they are exceptionally skilled at behaving like themselves.

Which sometimes is pretty boring. 

It can be delightfully boring, but it is still boring.

Funny Ha Ha is a good encapsulation of that. The characters felt instantly familiar to me -- I was only a few years older than they would have been in 2002, and I was in a social setting that felt eerily familiar to the one they were in. It was Los Angeles not Boston -- though I grew up in Boston -- but the dynamics were very similar. Lots of members of both genders around, lots of people secretly inquiring who liked who and "accidentally" divulging that to the other party. In fact, the relationship I started in 2002, which lasted for 18 months, was "brokered" by a proxy in the sense that I asked a mutual friend whether I had a good expectation of being successful when I asked this person out. The positive response helped me screw up my courage to do so.

But I don't know if that's the good makings for a movie.

From where I sit in 2022 watching this movie, whether someone "liked" someone or "liked liked" them seems about the lowest stakes you could possibly imagine. Apparently 9/11 was not reason enough to pursue more serious themes, though Bujalski probably had this in the works before then. And wouldn't have made a 9/11 movie anyway.

What I really noticed was how awkward these people were. They stammered within their stammers. It's all true to life, of course -- no one speaks in perfect sentences like they do in scripts of mainstream movies, and that would be one of the main instigators of Bujalski creating mumblecore, if it could even be said that he set out to create a genre or would accept that term as applying to his work. (Mumblecore filmmakers like the term "mumblecore" about as much as emo bands like the term "emo.")

The point is that this is all so very everyday, but maybe that sort of thing feels all the more archaic from a distance of 20 years. There are still very independent DIY films out there, of course -- this one has handwritten credits, for Christ's sake -- but mumblecore in its original form has been sort of wiped from the landscape. That could just be because the flagbearers of its original essence -- the Gerwigs and the Duplasses -- have recognized the ceiling of the form and taken their talents to more mainstream work. Or it could be because movies unselfconsciously about so very little just don't have a place in today's cinematic landscape, for social or political reasons. (I should say, it is also very likely a factor that films starring exclusively white people -- which mumblecore films basically are -- are not really welcome today, and with good reason.)

I'm glad to have seen Bujalski's film, and recognized its influence on future films, but how much did I like it? Really, it's again an example of exactly the sort of film I would have given the marginal pass of three stars in the past just for its historical significance, but would have secretly felt deserved 2.5 stars. Which is what I gave Funny Ha Ha on Letterboxd.

Even Bujalski has moved on to brighter and more mainstream things. His progression has been gradual, with Computer Chess (which I loved) diving deeper into the arthouse while becoming more high concept (it's about sentient computers), then movies like Results and Support the Girls staying independent-minded but featuring known commodities in the acting world. In 2019 he wrote Disney's live action Lady and the Tramp, which is about as mainstream as it gets. (Incidentally, if you want to see a little humor piece I wrote on this blog about Computer Chess, check it out here.)

I didn't see Lady and the Tramp so I don't know if you could see the original Bujalski somewhere in there, either screaming to get out or saying "It's okay, we all grow up."

For the sake of the grandfather of mumblecore, I hope it's the latter. 

Things to Come is no longer to come

I started watching Mia Hansen-Love's Things to Come in May of 2018. Kanopy still remembers how much of it I had watched, which was about ten minutes. (Come to think of it, this would have been a great choice in my bi-monthly Finish What You Started series from a few years ago, especially since there was one point where I was scrounging for a sixth title.)

The reason I stopped watching was that the image was going out of focus, and I could not read the subtitles. French is the language I know best other than English, but not well enough to follow a movie without the assistance of translation.

It's an interesting commentary on the change in our times in just those almost-four years. 

For one, I don't feel like the technology would still feature bugs like a streaming title going in and out of focus. This could have been my internet, since this may have been before we got the NBN (Nationwide Broadband Network), but I think even at the time I determined that the fault lay with Kanopy. I think I believed that internet issues would have caused lagging, as it did on other streaming prior to the NBN, but not the image itself going out of focus.

Secondly, I valued the currency of a Kanopy viewing credit a lot more back then. You get five per month, and I must have been watching enough on Kanopy to worry I was going to run through them that May. I actually emailed Kanopy to ask for my credit back given the focus issues.

This was an amazing response given that this is just one random title in a whole library of -- don't forget this part -- free titles.

"Thank you for your message. Our team is working to make a version of Things to Come available that does not have the subtitles burned into the video file so that they will still be visible if the image is out of focus. We will let you know once this is available. In the meantime, a play credit has been refunded to your account."

At the time, I thought this was great customer service. Now, I wonder why I even thought I was entitled to great customer service from a totally free resource, where the word "customer" does not have any real meaning. "Beggar not chooser" might have been more accurate.

I wasn't sure I was going to get through it on Monday night when I started watching it again.

I'm not sure if the memory of where I'd left off was the issue, but I of course started the movie over from the beginning, and only got about two minutes in before a timeout error occurred. The timeout error was so bad that I actually had to exit the entire app, something that was only possible by pressing random buttons on my AppleTV remote. (The button I usually use for such things was not working.) This happened twice more, and I was on the verge of giving up. But I decided to try one more time, and this time it passed the problematic point and I watched the rest of the film.

When I'd tried to start watching Things to Come in 2018, it was because I'd heard about this promising young director named Mia Hansen-Love and wanted to see what she was all about. I'd heard this title mentioned specifically. Since then, Hansen-Love seems to have made a name for herself on the international movie scene, her 2021 film Bergman Island (her first English language film) having won raves from critics. (This critic did not see it.)

I wasn't blown away by Things to Come. I don't know if I was expecting something more thematically bold or outside-the-box, but this is basically a standard French domestic drama starring the ageless Isabelle Huppert. Before you recoil at the word "standard" there, I should clarify that I consider a "standard" French domestic drama to implicitly have a high basic level of competence and watchability. The French do cinema pretty well. But I guess I thought that since Hansen-Love was positioned to me as this sort of breakout star to watch, I should expect something more distinctly cinematic, possessing some sort of original technique. What I got was an intermittently affecting consideration of a woman reaching a point in her life where the things she has counted on start to fall away, with the always effective Huppert delivering her usual strong work.

Now that I am reminded of Kanopy, what it has to offer and what good customer service it once gave me, maybe I'll start picking my way through my watchlist and go through those credits at a pace faster than one every six months. 

Assuming that my use of their service is in some way a measurable benefit to them, they deserve it. 

Shitting all over Space Jam

It's quickly becoming apparent that the most out of sync I was with 2021 popular opinion was when I named Space Jam: A New Legacy my #41 movie of 2021, putting it at the 76th percentile of all the movies I watched last year.

In truth, I actually sort of wanted to put it higher, given how much fun I had watching it in the theater with my kids, but the extraordinarily negative response to it had already gotten to me.

That negative response now has been etched in permanency with its four Golden Raspberry nominations announced earlier this week, including worst picture.

The other three: worst actor (LeBron James), worst remake, ripoff or sequel and worst screen couple (James and any Warner Cartoon character).

The nomination for James is especially surprising, since I thought people at least acknowledged he's a better actor than Michael Jordan.

How much different of a movie did I see than everyone else saw?

I was so taken with the movie, and James in particular, that I wrote a whole post about how the film prompted me to reconsider my stance on James as a cultural icon. Whereas I always hated him for his switching of teams, which was announced in the most self-aggrandizing manner possible, and most recently, his joining of -- and bringing a championship to -- the Los Angeles Lakers, I now considered the possibility that I may actually like him.

For everyone else, Space Jam made them stop liking LeBron James, or hate him even more than they used to.

I don't get it.

It's a fun movie, or at worst, an innocuous one. It takes familiar cinematic tropes about fathers and sons and tries to at least do right by them. And it has some good visual effects, some cheeky (and I believe intentional) references to the usage of intellectual property, and a really winning comedic turn by James, who actually does well in the sentimental moments as well.

But those in charge of the Razzies appear to believe they are tapping into the zeitgeist in their multiple nominations for Space Jam: A New Legacy, as these awards are designed to indict movies that are particularly terrible, that we all know are terrible, and whose very terribleness makes us laugh.

(There may be something to the zeitgeist dislike of the movie, or at least further evidence of it. Trey Parker and Matt Stone also dropped in casual rips of it in their two South Park COVID specials released at the end of last year, which I just finished watching.)

The even funnier thing -- or maybe I should say bemusing, or maybe I should say infuriating -- is that they usually only devote one or two spots to a big tentpole movie that comically underperformed from a critical perspective. Many of the nominees are actually not movies that are in the zeitgeist. The movie Karen, which trailed Diana: The Musical for the second most nominations with five, and the thrice-nominated The Misfits are not movies I have even heard of. And I hear of a lot more movies than the average person.

So of all the genuinely ill-conceived and cynical "remakes, ripoffs or sequels" that come out every year, this is the one they chose to pile on? This is the one they broadsided with the collective weight of their comedic power?

Like I said, I don't get it.

I did have a 2021 movie that would have slotted right in to the categories in which Space Jam was nominated, which was my #170 of 2021, The Matrix Resurrections. That was at the 0th percentile of my rankings. I could make arguments for Keanu Reeves as worst actor, for Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss as worst on-screen couple, easily for worst remake, ripoff or sequel, and certainly for worst picture. I mean, it was my own worst picture of the year. 

But I guess when you are out of sync with popular opinion, as every critic is at one point or another, it shows up in multiple films, not just the one. 

If you can honestly say you had a better time with Matrix Resurrections than with Space Jam, you're definitely out of sync with me. 

Lo and behold, Oscar nominations

I've been writing a heck of a lot on this blog lately, which also means thinking a heck of a lot about movies, yet it took a mention by a friend on Facebook to remember that the Oscar nominations were coming out today.

Maybe they're only an afterthought if they're not tied in directly to the release of my year-end movie rankings?

Actually they might have felt like a bit of an afterthought this year just because I really had no idea what was going to get nominated. It doesn't feel like The Power of the Dog would have been a frontrunner in most years, and in fact, when I first saw it I didn't think it had any chance of getting nominated. I liked it, of course -- my #17 of the year -- but best picture? Didn't even occur to me as a possibility.

Well Power of the Dog did lead with 12 nominations, meaning indeed, it is probably the frontrunner. 

In a year I was sure my top ten would be devoid of best picture nominees, it landed two with Drive My Car (#5) and Dune (#9). I suppose that means I am rooting for Drive My Car to win, but I'll happily take The Power of the Dog as the more realistic possibility. (In fact, Drive My Car even getting nominated is a bit of a surprise, what with its three-hour running time, and an extremely scant release thus far.) Though I guess you can't fully count out Dune, as its ten nominations were the second most.

My lowest-ranked best picture nominee was West Side Story at #74, narrowly edging out Belfast (#71) for that dishonor. I mean, it was good, but I kept asking myself why I was watching a new version of West Side Story in 2021. It was actually 2022 at the time I saw it. 

It's 1:02 a.m. in eastern Australia, so I won't give you an in-depth analysis of anything else right now. But if I wait until I wake up to post this, am I really doing a service to you, my dear readers? I mean, what does Variety have that I don't have?

I will say I was surprised by a full slate of ten nominees in the best picture category. Maybe they changed the rule on that again and I didn't notice.

I haven't seen two of those nominees, Nightmare Alley and CODA, though I should have seen both before I closed my list. A Nightmare Alley advanced screening was COVIDed out in my final week, and CODA was available on AppleTV+, though I failed to realize that. (Which makes me a bit surprised I could not find it for rental via iTunes. I guess they want to drive subscribers to AppleTV+ rather than making it available to any Tom, Dick or Harry.)

Surprise omissions? I'm sure there were some, but they did not immediately occur to me. I was hoping Mahershala Ali would get a best actor nomination for Swan Song, but that movie didn't end up getting a lot of buzz and was in fact shut out without the Ali nomination. Besides, Ali already has two and needs to learn to share.

I guess I was a bit surprised Jesse Plemons got nominated as that was the weakest of the four main performances in that movie, but it looks like the Power of the Dog sweep might be on. I mean, it probably won't win more than picture and director (Jane Campion seems like a shoo-in), though her screenplay could pick up an award and I wouldn't be surprised to see either the Batch or Kirsten Dunst take home an award.

The love for Don't Look Up surprised me a bit. I thought a fair number of people rejected that movie. I guess the right ones didn't.

Also it's a shame to see no nominees from Passing, as I thought either of the lead performances was a really good pick for best actress.

Oh and finally: Too many nominations for Being the Ricardos. Aaron Sorkin needs to calm down a bit. 

Okay, I guess I better go to bed before I join the chorus of people chiding Leslie Jordan for his pronunciation of Denis Villeneuve. Would have thought the last name would have been harder for him than the first.

Great minds think alike

The coincidences I write about on this blog are usually limited to my own internal film viewing schedule, or sometimes, something external that others might have already observed, but if so, I haven't yet read their take on it.

The topic of today's post is something probably no one but me could have recognized, lest they were both readers of my blog and listeners to a particular podcast I'm going to discuss. (Which describes at least one of my readers.) That makes it internal, but it very much involves something from the external world.

As you would know -- I'm assuming regular rather than first-time readership here -- I have just begun a bi-monthly 2022 series in which I watch the films of Martin Scorsese that I haven't yet seen. It's called Settling the Scorsese. 

So has Filmspotting -- only they announced theirs after mine.

The stalwart podcast, one of the first movie podcasts out there, has recently developed a pandemic-era recurring series called the "oeuvreview," in which they "review" all the films in a director's "oeuvre." A cleverer term I may never have heard, even if it doesn't roll off the tongue.

They started in 2020 with Christopher Nolan, rewatching all ten of his previously exiting feature-length films leading up to the release of Tenet, one of the few tentpoles that did actually come out in that COVID year. They repeated the series last year, in this case also filling in some blind spots, and watched all the Jane Campion they had or had not seen, culminating in the release of The Power of the Dog.

On Sunday as I was taking a morning walk, I caught up with their January 28th episode, in which they announced an oeuvreview with modified rules for 2022. Because they could not possibly watch all the films of Martin Scorsese leading up to the release of Killers of the Flower Moon -- unless they wanted to do little else with the available hours of their weekly podcast -- they selected only the films that one or both of them had not seen, which gave them about that same range of seven to ten films that had been discussed between Nolan and Campion.

I stopped dead in my tracks.

If it were possible to stop further, I would have done so when they announced the titles they were going to be watching -- five of which were five of the six I am watching for Settling the Scorsese. In fact, the only film I'm watching that they're not watching is New York Stories, which is not a proper Scorsese feature, since he only directs one of the three stories, though I was forced to use it because there were only five Scorsese features I hadn't seen. 

So let's review the coincidences as they pile up:

1. Filmspotting decided to watch Martin Scorsese films in 2022, just like I did.

2. Filmspotting had to modify their existing rules for the series in order to do this, making it all the more unlikely.

3. Their goal was expressly to become Scorsese completists, which is also my goal. 

4. Between the two hosts, they also had to have not seen the same films I had not seen.

The only title I remember them mentioning they were going to watch, that I had already watched, was Boxcar Bertha, which I picked off on a random Monday night in July of 2016. There may have been one other but it didn't stand out to me.

So one or both of the hosts shared my conclusion that Who's That Knocking at My Door, New York New York, The Color of Money, The Age of Innocence and Kundun all did not rise to the level of a viewing priority before now.

Adam Kempenaar was especially aghast that Josh Larsen had not yet seen The Color of Money, as Adam said it might have been the Scorsese film he'd seen most. Seems like Adam was probably in a position to watch this when it came out in 1986, and then rewatch it on repeat on cable, but Josh and I were not, and we never made time for it as adults. 

This seems like my best shot to get a third on-air mention on Filmspotting. The previous two came 1) when I emailed them to point out that a phrase they made a game of trying not to say -- "a whole nother" -- actually appears in the dialogue in Star Wars, and 2) when I made a donation to the podcast. I've emailed them one or two other times, but the witty observation of that particular message did not make the cut.

Even though they haven't been reading nearly as much listener feedback on the show recently -- really only during their "Massacre Theatre" segment, in which we have to guess the film scene they're massacring with their bad acting -- I do think I have a chance to get on air with Settling the Scorsese, which I emailed them about less than a half-hour after hearing their announcement of the upcoming oeuvreview. (In fact, the moment I got home from my walk.)

Especially since it is indisputable that I did not steal the idea from them. I posted my first announcement of Settling the Scorsese on my blog on January 12th, and their podcast didn't drop until 16 days later.

I've "stolen" ideas from them in the past. For example, I decided to catch up with, and write about, Krzysztof Kieslowski's colors trilogy -- Red, White and Blue -- after hearing them discuss it. 

But never has this granddaddy of film podcasts stolen from me, and it's a great day.

Of course, they didn't really. But there are enough coincidences with this one to make a person wonder.

If you listen to Filmspotting, keep your ears open. You might soon be hearing my name.