Mission: Letterboxd submission gag

This post could have also been titled "I finally saw: Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning: Part 1," because indeed, I'd been one of the last holdouts. 

I wasn't opposed to seeing it in 2023, even though the entries in this series since my favorite, Ghost Protocol, have underwhelmed me. It seemed especially likely that I'd see it since I saw the mini featurette about the making of Tom Cruise's motorcycle cliff jump about six times before other movies. But I just never worked it out, and the lengthy two hour and 43-minute running time certainly didn't help, though that is of course a standard running time for a blockbuster these days.

If you read the post I wrote yesterday, you wouldn't think it was particularly likely I'd be seeing a 163-minute movie now either -- but then my son was invited over to his auntie's for a sleepover last night, meaning his usual informal claim to the living room was non-existent. So I started watching it at just after 7, and still didn't finish until after midnight -- though that was also because I stopped for dinner and to watch a show with my wife, as well as, yes, have a short nap.

There are any number of things about the movie itself I could write a whole post about, given my low bar for writing a post, but I'll just touch on a few quick ones before getting to what I'm actually writing about today. 

One thing I wanted to know is, why doesn't Ethan Hunt ever think about his wife anymore? You know, the one played Michelle Monaghan? I'm not sure if she left the franchise on bad terms, but any time Ethan has to think about his past, he thinks about another woman who died (did we see her in other movies?) as well as Ilse Faust. What happened to poor Michelle? Maybe she didn't die (I don't think she did) which is why he doesn't need to think about her.

Also, I found some of the execution in this movie really hammy. I was really distracted by a scene near the beginning when a bunch of government bigwigs are telling the CIA director about this new "entity" that's the MacGuffin for this movie and for the one coming out next week, and there's one full line of exposition about it that goes on for about two or three minutes, with cutaway images showing the "entity" in the background -- efficient screenwriting you will agree. The thing I thought was hammy was that the characters continue one long thought about it, but they trade off who's speaking at intervals of about every sentence. And there are like five characters participating in this exposition. I know that's supposed to be more interesting than if just a single person were doing the exposing, but it's artificial as hell.

The thing I'm writing about is what happens when you add Dead Reckoning on Letterboxd.

I went to add it this morning, and as soon as I clicked the submit button, the whole screen was taken over by a black computer screen with green writing on it, coming in little bursts, as green writing on computer screens does. For half a second I was like "Oh shit, what just happened," which was probably the point. I quickly realized it was a movie tie-in as it started talking about my review self-destructing in five seconds, and then a notification that Ethan Hunt had short-circuited the self-destruction sequence.

Cute. But since it went on for about 15 seconds, eventually, kind of annoying.

It made me wonder if there has been any other movie that has partnered with Letterboxd for this sort of promotional tie-in, which, when you think about it, is kind of unnecessary. I mean, I'm adding it because I've already seen the movie. I resented it a little bit, because I was able to conflate the promo with Tom Cruise's ego, and I imagined that Letterboxd isn't getting anything out it. In reality, they probably are, but maybe I'm still a little bit annoyed.

Anyway, if you haven't added Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning: Part One to your Letterboxd yet, you might do it just to see this little bit -- which I am now myself promoting, I guess. 

Losing my ability not to sleep through movies

The poster for Bumblebee accompanies this post, but if you are reading this within the first 12 hours or so after it's published, you won't see Bumblebee listed as my most recently watched movie in the area to the right.

That's because despite starting it two nights ago, I still haven't finished watching it.

I guess as you age a little bit, you lose a step on some of the things you used to do well. As a prime example, as I type this, I am wearing reading glasses, which I've had for maybe a year now, despite always seeing perfectly for my first half-century on the planet.

More pertinent to today's post, I appear to be losing my stamina for watching a movie at night -- and also, sometimes, my ability to pause it.

It's not that I never fall asleep during movies. I do frequently have a nap during a movie, which probably plays havoc with my actual sleep later on, but what are you going to do. However, in those situations, I have always, invariably, almost without fail, paused the movie for the entirety of my nap. Which I could often keep to a reasonable length of 15 to 20 minutes, leaving me slightly more refreshed for the home stretch.

I have, in fact, paused during the "nap" -- more like a prelude to my full night's rest -- that has gotten me each of the last two attempts on Bumblebee. It's just that after starting around 11:30 last night, it didn't end until 1:50 -- at which point I just decided to save the remaining 25 minutes of the movie for today.

However, there are some examples recently of movies I've finished the same night I watched them, with some pretty sketchy details of what happened in the second half of the movie.

On Tuesday night, for example, I watched and loved Paper Moon. However, there's a lot I don't remember about how the father and the daughter he refuses to acknowledge is his own -- played by real-life father and daughter Ryan and Tatum O'Neal -- went from scamming people on bible sales to the moonshine business. There's some stuff related to an exotic dancer played by the incomparable Madeleine Kahn that is also pretty fuzzy.

Across Sunday and Monday, I feel like I saw all of Abigail, but it did take me two nights to do it. 

Then last week it was Another Simple Favor, which I wasn't really liking anyway, so I didn't consider this such a loss. And though I was there for the very end, I couldn't remember what had happened with the movie's main villain, played by Alison Janney. I had to look it up online later on, and it wasn't that I couldn't remember what happened with her -- I'd never seen it. And I couldn't be sure if it was just a crucial 30 seconds of sleep or if there's a whole ten- to 15-minute chunk of that movie I didn't properly experience.

I suppose this is not going to get better anytime soon. My younger son, who says the internet doesn't work properly in his room, doesn't clear out of the living room until 10 o'clock most nights, and even if he did, my wife would still be doing household chores until at least that time, and I feel like a heel if I don't try to keep pace with her. Plus, I'm getting older and probably sleepier, though life is making my pretty damn sleepy these days due to my busiest period ever at work. 

So if I'm not going to start watching movies earlier, and if I'm already trying to watch shorter movies to compensate for my likely failure to finish them in one evening, then not only am I missing out on the longer movies that might be an organic part of my viewing schedule, we might start seeing a lot of weeks where I watch three movies rather than six movies. 

Which most people would consider fine. I'm not most people. And especially in the short run, I am trying to watch as many movies as I can. For reasons I won't tell you now because they will become clear in another six weeks, I am trying to watch another 40 movies before the end of June in order to accomplish something, viewing-wise, that I "need" to accomplish by the end of that month. So yeah, I'll be trying to squeeze in as many cheeky afternoon movies as I can until then.

As for Bumblebee ... although it's unfair to make a final pronouncement on it, since I haven't finished watching it, I'll say I was hoping it would be a lot more different from a standard Transformers movie than it has been. I mean, it is different for sure ... but it still has Transformers in it, which is pretty damning to the prospects of any movie. 

Is this the career Dan Stevens thought he'd have?

Don't get me wrong, Dan Stevens has had plenty of work, especially compared to the other alumni of Downton Abbey. Possibly only Lily James has had a comparable level of post-Abbey success.

But is the career he's having now really why he left the green pastures of Julian Fellowes' show for the seemingly greener pastures of Hollywood?

Because he left a hit show at the height of its success, Stevens follows in the footsteps of cautionary tales like David Caruso, whose snubbing of NYPD Blue saw him out in the wilderness of middling movie success until he scurried back to television with CSI: Miami. 

Stevens has done better than that, but he'll still carry with him -- at least with me, and I'm sure other Abbey watchers -- the reminder of having bailed on the show at the height of our shipping of his Matthew Crawley and Michelle Dochery's Mary Crawley. (Don't worry, it's not as gross as it sounds. They were distant cousins, if memory serves.) It's probably not a spoiler at this point to say they killed him off in a car accident at the end of season 3, I believe it was, at the actor's request, in a way that always seemed sudden if you're being generous, abrupt if you're not. (The only reason we wouldn't say they Poochie'd him was because he requested it instead of being fired.)

The reason I'm considering this today is that last night I watched Abigail, the perfectly acceptable horror movie from last year in which Stevens stars. There's actually another reason thinking back on Downton Abbey is particularly appropriate with Abigail, but I'll get to that later on.

"Perfectly acceptable" describes Stevens' career in general. Let's look at some of the highlights, or maybe I should say, mid-lights:

The first movie I remember him being in after he left Abbey was The Guest, which is not anyone's idea of a big, "announce yourself to everyone else who doesn't watch Downton Abbey" role. It's a sort of home invasion thriller directed by Adam Wingard, who yes, was a name there for a bit and directed a couple Godzilla movies. But I don't really hear anyone talking about The Guest in any of my cinematic circles.

Also in 2014, among the movies I saw, were The Cobbler and Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb. The former, an Adam Sandler vehicle, was sort of a laughingstock, even though it was directed by a director with credibility (Win Win's Tom McCarthy), and I don't think he even had a particularly memorable role in the third Night at the Museum movie, though I don't really remember that movie so it's not surprising I don't remember his role in it.

I saw him in Colossal in 2016 -- don't remember him in that but he wasn't the star -- but probably his first really "big" showcase was as the titular beast in Beauty and the Beast in 2017. And while this is certainly a prominent showcase, it is also, notably, a showcase that does not put his real face on display for all but a very small percentage of the running time. 

I suppose the best movie I think he's made since leaving the show was Alex Ross Perry's Her Smell, which ranked in my top ten in 2018. This is not the sort of movie you make, though, if you are leaving a show because you want bigger and better things, because you want to see your name in lights. (More on that thought in a moment.)

His concentrated efforts in the year 2020 may be both the most sustained interesting period since he left the show, and also the most illustrative of where he finds himself at this point. I really liked both Dave Franco's The Rental and especially Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga, which was just outside my top ten for the year. However, in both films he's clearly the member of an ensemble, not the star. The same can also be said for Blithe Spirit, but the interesting thing about this film is that it is almost exactly back in the milieu of Downton Abbey -- which could be kind of interpreted as the equivalent of Caruso running back to TV with CSI: Miami. 

And TV really is where Stevens found himself the past four years, for the most part, until Abigail and Wingard's second Godzilla movie, both last year.

Look there are some good titles in there. I'm not saying there aren't.

But I think if you leave a show like Stevens left Abbey, when we had come to love him so much and felt like there was so much that could be done with his character that we would enjoy watching, he should expect us to scrutinize his choices, and to wonder if it was all worth it.

Then there's the other possibility: Dan Stevens just doesn't care.

There's the possibility -- and maybe reading just a little bit on the internet could confirm this, though you know how I don't like to do that -- that he just didn't think Downton Abbey was challenging him enough. We know David Caruso thought he could be a movie star. I'm only assuming Dan Stevens had the same goal, and maybe I'm wrong about that. So what seem to me like misses on his part, failures to take off in the way he surely wanted, might just be him trying to choose an interesting array of roles that didn't always require him to be a rich lord dressing in 1920s garb.

I said there was a Downton Abbey element about Abigail that I wanted to come back to.

A big reveal at the end of the movie -- and this only counts as a spoiler if you care about "surprises" in the cast, though this actor is not really big enough to qualify -- is that a Big Bad vampire, who is only referred to previously in hushed tones, is played by Matthew Goode.

And what is the significance of this, you ask?

Well, after Mary Crawley lost her new husband to a crash in one of those newfangled automobiles, she eventually took up with quite an ironic new partner in that regard: a race car driver. This is who she ended the series with, as her happily ever after.

And that race car driver was played, of course, by Matthew Goode.

I'm not sure if Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, the directors of Abigail, really cared about this connection or made the choice with any intentionality, though they do have Goode's character and Stevens' character do battle at the end. Whether that was fighting to decide the matter of Mary Crawley once and for all, I do not know.

Movies as imitations

I don't like true crime very much. 

I had been thinking about this on the very morning I watched Joel Anderson's Lake Mungo (2008), which is not a true crime story but is told like one, with interviews, old photos, old videos stopped into freeze frame, and a central mystery. It's actually more like part of the ghost hunters genre than the true crime drama, but you'll agree those have a lot of overlap in their basic structure.

Anyway, I'd been thinking, with no small amount of superiority -- and my apologies if this offends you personally, dear reader -- that loving true crime means you are not a very interesting person. You are much more interesting if you spend multiple hours each day obsessing over the professional performances of a bunch of men who hit a tiny ball around a field, because you assembled them into an imaginary team that competes against other imaginary teams all season long. (The point is, we all have our comfort food.)

But a movie that imitates the true crime format? Hell yeah, I like that a lot. Maybe even love it.

Lake Mungo is in the broader found footage/mockumentary genre that had plenty of life back in 2008, but it feels like a more sophisticated effort than many of the things you would typically find in that genre. More sophisticated for how it looks, but not because it looks slick or visually dynamic in the ways we usually aspire to see in motion pictures. No, it's more sophisticated because it looks and feels exactly like real true crime, with actors giving performances that mimic the rhythms of real people so closely, you'd swear these were actually Australians living in regional Victoria circa 2008.

In fact, I was surprised to discover that the movie is set in the town of Ararat, surprised because I had never been to that town until a week ago. I can't actually say I've been to it, because we decided against stopping there to charge our car on the way back from camping last weekend, opting to continue on through to the larger Ballarat about 45 minutes later. But I've driven through it, and only a week ago. A week later, I randomly watched this. (It's been a week of quite a lot of movie coincidences. I also saw, but have chosen not to write about, two different movies set partially on the Italian island of Capri, which were Contempt on Monday night, which I wrote about for other reasons, and Another Simple Favor, which I saw Thursday.)

Anyway, it's about a teenage girl who drowned -- not actually in the titular lake, which is not actually a lake but an arid desert-like climate -- and about her family trying to piece together what led up to it, and also what came after it. The latter being that they may still be seeing her around as a ghost. 

It's one of those ghost stories that you'd think would be less chilling because of the documentary-style format surrounding the spooky details. But it's pretty damn chilling. It put me in mind of the scariest real documentary I've ever seen, The Nightmare, in that the talking head interview format not only doesn't sap the movie of its scares, but might actually increase them in some conterintuitive way.

But back to what I really came here to talk about.

One of the core reasons we like movie is because they imitate. One of the highest pieces of praise we can give a movie, albeit a somewhat broad and simplistic piece of praise, is to call it "realistic." The closer something on screen seems to resemble something we can actually recognize, the more successful we think a movie has been.

Of course, there are obvious exceptions to that. Sometimes you want a movie to be fanciful, to purposefully explore the artificial. But even in wild fantasies or experimental films, we want to connect to something that is emotionally true or observant about whatever it is the movie is exploring.

I don't suppose this is a surprising revelation, or that it is even a revelation. All art attempts to communicate emotion truth to the observer, something we can relate to our own lives or experiences, even if the art contains subject matter that is vastly different from our own experiences. 

But a movie like Lake Mungo can reveal things that may be obvious to us in new ways. Specifically, that there is something in the very act of imitation that is, in itself, fascinating, and that, in itself, elevates the material even beyond our own particular preferences.

I have no particular preference for true crime/ghost hunter material, in fact, quite the opposite. But I have peripherally caught enough of it to understand the basic narrative details of the genre. And Lake Mungo certainly appeals to me for two reasons: 1) because it scared me, which may be the most important part; 2) because it is so good at reproducing the core narrative building blocks of a familiar genre that this act of reproducing is itself an engrossing fascination, leading me to spend 90 minutes watching a thing I might not care to watch if it were a documentary. Since it's only an imitation of a documentary, I love it.

Insufficient evidence to damn Jean-Luc Godard

When I added Jean-Luc Godard's Contempt (Le Mepris) to my film spreadsheet after Monday night's viewing, I noticed that the auto-fill of the director's name wanted to add it without the hyphen. That meant I had previously typed it that way, so I searched for his name to make the correction.

And was surprised to find I had only seen two other Godard films. (One of which did have the hyphen on my spreadsheet.)

Those two films are Breathless (1960), which I watched during my series Audient Audit in 2019 to see if I had correctly or incorrectly added it to my big list of movies watched (incorrectly, I decided), and Notre Musique (2004), which isn't even Godard in his French New Wave prime. 

I have a much more well-established notion of the strengths and weaknesses of Godard than I should for having seen so few of his films. There was a lot of assuming going on here, it appears.

For a long time the impression I thought I had of Godard was of a proto Jim Jarmusch, whose characters all wore wife beaters and smoked cigarettes. That's actually only an element of a few Jarmusch films, and I actually like some of them. Only a few of Jarmusch's films that meet that description actually irk me.

Anyway, this impression was obviously formed by Breathless, some small amount of which I think I saw in a French class (that was my conclusion during Audient Audit anyway). So that impression was with me when I saw Notre Musique, sometime after 2004 but I think fairly close to 2004, which was actually my first Godard. 

Notre Musique offended me in a different way to how I thought I had been offended by the little amount of Breathless I actually saw. Although I'd be hard-pressed to call up a lot of details of it, this was a far more experimental film, abstract in different wrong ways than I thought Breathless had been abstract, but still pretentious as hell. 

And then I must have thought I'd seen another three to four Godard films that I never saw. 

I did have one more way my Godard impression was molded, but that's been more recent, and I'd say it probably confirmed my impression rather than molding it. This was the director's brief appearance -- I say "appearance" because it was notable for being an absence -- in the Agnes Varda film Faces Places, in which the director is sort of taken to task for his lack of warmth or sentimentality or anything remotely resembling genial behavior, in a way Varda portrays generously, leaving most of it up to our interpretation. He's talked about but doesn't appear on screen, apparently because he opted out, coldly. 

So on Monday night I finally saw Contempt, having first become aware of it on this awesome tumblr site some 15 years ago. 

And look, it did not vastly change my impression of Godard. However, it made me appreciate him a lot more. (Um, that sounds like a vast change in your impression, Vance.)

I still think there's a lot of intimate talking that doesn't really go anywhere, that could be cut in half without seriously damaging the narrative. You get a lot of that in Breathless, in addition to the guys smoking cigarettes in wife beaters.

But there were a couple things about Contempt that really drew me in:

1) It has a fourth-wall breaking aspect that I thought was pretty ahead of its time for 1963. That's not to say no one ever talked to the camera before then; they certainly did. In fact, no one talks to the camera here. But what I mean by breaking the fourth wall is that it steps out of a fictitious world and into our real world by using real people playing themselves. For example, Fritz Lang is in it as ... Fritz Lang. He may be the only real person playing himself, but the film is about a director trying to push through a troubled shoot of The Odyssey, and he's well suited to playing himself in it. (And fortunately it does not require a huge amount of scenes from him.)

2) The incredible last 20 minutes or so in Capri. There are parts of Contempt that spin their wheels before this point, but when the production shifts to this Italian island that's subbing in for ancient Greece, the camera just drinks it in. Raoul Coutard's camerawork is not only beautiful on a sheer travelogue level, but Godard has him set up his equipment in such a way to accentuate strange angles in the architecture that disorient us and deepen the feeling of strangeness that the film has slowly built up. There's one particular staircase shot from above that I can't stop thinking about. Here, I'll show you.

3) Brigitte Bardot. Sure, some of the extended aesthetic about Godard that sort of bothers me is his very French worshipping of female beauty. But she was quite the beauty, and the camera also lovingly caresses her clothed and sometimes tastefully nude body. (Tastefully nude = always seen from behind only.)

4) Jack Palance. He's in this! My knowledge of Palance extends mostly to some older and some newer westerns, so it was interesting to see him show up here as a smarmy movie producer.

Look I don't have to list a lot of things. I wasn't even sure I really liked the movie until its last 30 minutes, and especially its last shot, started to leave me -- um -- breathless. There's still a lot of back and forth between the screenwriter (Michael Piccoli) and his wife (Bardot) about whether she does or doesn't still love him and why. I could have done with 25% less of that.

But it did make me realize that the cinematic world of Jean-Luc Godard probably contains some multitudes I didn't realize it contained. Which I really should have realized before now, considering that the two movies of his I've seen are not very similar at all.

I've got another, let's see, 37 features to get to, if I've parsed his filmography on IMDB correctly, and pulled out all the things that were shorts, segments of omnibus features, uncredited films and other bits cinematic ephemera.

Better get to it, tout de suite.

Strange blind spots in movie years

My project to re-add all the movies I'd missed since 2022 into my big movie spreadsheet -- which is now finished! -- has brought me regularly in contact with the number of movies I've seen in each year. 

These totals are vastly weighted toward the last 12 years, the time I've been in Australia, when there have been two big differences from my previous life: 1) fewer social activities at night, a function of both exiting my former social context in Los Angeles, and just getting older; 2) no nighttime conflicts from watching sports.

The patterns are humorously predictable in many situations. For example, for any year that's already in the past since I've been in Australia, I've seen at least 182 films from that year, and the lowest on that list is, unsurprisingly, last year. There are a few years that spiked in the middle when I was watching extra movies for the human rights film festival whose program I used to help select, but the years unaffected by that are remarkably consistent in my viewing patterns, with between 182 and 200 films watched.

Maybe that one's not so surprising, but the consistency goes back to years when the randomness over time should have created more of a spray chart of viewings. But I have seen exactly 77 films from 1991 and 1992, and in the years 1985 and 1986, the number is 58 for both.

It should seem obvious that the farther you get back in years, the less likely I am to have seen many films from that year, and that logic holds to a point. But today I am writing about an exception. 

Let's look at the films of the 1950s. I'm underrepresented in these years generally, as I'd like to have watched more older films than I have. But what can I say, I've never been a classic film fetishist. I have a bias toward new releases, always have, and have still seen more classic films than your average person, just maybe not more than your average cinephile.

For example, I've seen 19 films released in 1955. That's pretty good actually. I'm fine with that number. There are some other decent totals in the 1950s, such as 17 in 1957 and 16 in 1953.

But you go just one year before that to 1952, and the number is six. 

Three months ago, that number was four.

Only four films from a year only 70 years ago? Out of nearly 7,000 films that I've seen? How can that be?

And yet until I watched Otto Preminger's Angel Face on February 4th, I had seen only The Greatest Show on Earth, High Noon, Kansas City Confidential and Singin' in the Rain. 

I watched The Greatest Show on Earth for my blog series to catch up with the remaining best picture winners I hadn't seen back in June of 2015, and Kansas City Confidential for another blog series, Audient Noir, in July of '21. So if you want to take this back even farther, ten years ago today, when I was already 41, I had seen only two movies released in 1952.

What does this mean?

Nothing. Just randomness.

The reason I'm writing about it today is that yesterday I got up to an even half-dozen from '52. I watched Vittorio De Sica's Umberto D. on Kanopy, only my third De Sica film despite my love for (what I will always refer to as) The Bicycle Thief. Although the other I've seen, Marriage Italian Style, is not very much like The Bicycle Thief, this one is clearly a spiritual successor. I won't go into all the comparisons because I'm about to go away for the weekend for a camping trip, and my brain is not in a particularly analytical mode at the moment. But let's just say you could rename both movies The Dignity Thief, as the title character here shares a lot in common with the protagonist of the earlier film. Both characters are trying desperately to stay afloat financially in post-war Italy, and both have to do things they're ashamed of to do so. If you wanted to be really reductive about it, both characters' efforts are disappointing another loyal character who loves them, though in this case it's a dog rather than a child. 

In case you were wondering if this is just the start of a steep viewing decline, that's not the case. We're back up to 10 in 1951, and then every year in the 1940s has between seven and 11 movies seen, with the exception of another anomaly: only four in 1943.

Is this all much ado about nothing? Possibly. After all, what's really the difference between six movies seen in 1952 and seven movies seen in 1947 and 1950? And why am I not writing this post about 1943 instead? 

Obviously, there is not much difference -- now. But two months ago, it was only four, and ten years ago, it was only two.

Maybe I should have written this post ten years ago. 

Poetry double feature

My usual disclaimer: I did not plan this.

On Monday, the final day of our four-day Easter weekend (Australia does Easter right), we still had the projector set up in the garage from the Sunday family viewing of Hunt for the Wilderpeople, which I wrote about yesterday. Because I'd already rewatched five movies since Friday night -- it's a favorite of mine to use long weekends to rewatch movies -- I decided to go for two new movies, one in the afternoon and one before bed. 

In the afternoon I chose a longer foreign film, probably subconsciously remembering the daytime viewing of Wim Wenders' Perfect Days, which I wrote about here. I selected Lee Chang-dong's 2010 film Poetry, which came highly recommended from Filmspotting guest Michael Phillips way back near the beginning of my listening to that podcast. As I was watching I was reminded that Lee also directed the 2018 film Burning, which some people love but which I only like, finding it a bit inscrutable.

After a nap on the couch that we positioned in front of the projector -- I actually napped a couple times during and after the film, which I really liked, but was tired from waking up early to watch the Celtics' first playoff game -- I loaded a bunch of new films on my Kanopy watchlist, having watched Poetry on Kanopy. I determined to watch one of these after going to play tennis that night.

I went with Alexander Kronemer's 2021 film Lamya's Poem, which I'd never heard of, but I was captivated by the animation style, plus I have a proven affinity for animated films set in the modern-day Middle East, having named The Breadwinner among my runners up for the best of last decade. Lamya's Poem is a Syrian refugee story, and I ended up liking it quite a bit, though not as much as The Breadwinner. 

I chose Lamya's Poem because I always think animation looks especially good on our projector, which is part of the reason I scheduled my eighth (!) viewing of Tangled on Sunday. It had nothing to do with the fact that I'd already watched a movie called Poetry earlier in the afternoon, though I noticed the connection about 15 minutes in.

If you want to know how unlikely it is that I would have watched two movies in the same day that evoke poetry in the title, only one of the other 6,945 films I've ever seen also does so. If you guessed Dead Poets' Society, you'd be right.

How do I know this? Well, lists of course. I searched my movie spreadsheet for "poe," and the only other hits I got were for movies directed by Amy Poehler (I've seen two of those). Actually, I also saw a movie directed by Tayarisha Poe, that being 2020's Selah and the Spades.

It was, I'd say, a contemplative double feature in that both films use lyric and verse to try to make sense of a world that often doesn't make sense. It doesn't make sense that you have to raise your shithead grandson because his mother abandoned him, and that he's implicated in the raping of a classmate that led to her suicide (Poetry). It doesn't make sense that a senseless war lost you your father, and now you have to leave the only home you've ever known to try to make a new life in Europe (Lamya's Poem). But maybe with the words of poets, we can somehow figure our way through to going on.

I'm giving myself credit for a full Hunt for the Wilderpeople rewatch

Family movies at my house are often driven by me, but not always.

For possibly as long as two years now, my wife has been wanting to show my kids Hunt for the Wilderpeople. In fact, with my older son turning 15 in August, his best possible window for it may have already passed, but he sat through it dutifully enough and laughed a few times, though he didn't venture an opinion of it afterward and we didn't ask.

I think she feels a certain ownership over this film, having quite the affection for New Zealand as a neighboring country (separated by a fair amount of water). It may not be introducing our kids to more Australian culture, but it's close enough.

And I was not about to let a pesky little thing like dinner get in the way of that.

And so it was that we were scheduled to start watching it around 6 o'clock on Easter Sunday. That got delayed to about 6:20 while we were reworking things in the garage in order to create a new projector viewing environment on a different wall. See, the place we used to project it now has a linen cabinet, which got pushed out of the place where our rabbits now live in the laundry room. Consequently, the projector has been accumulating dust since before September. 

But we did get an alternative worked out, where a sheet would hang down from above our garage door, though we had to change sheets midway through our setup when my wife agreed that one of our "antique" sheets would be better than anything we currently have. I'm not sure she would have volunteered the antique sheet for one of my movies, but for hers, it worked just fine. :-)

Now, if I were in charge of this, I'd schedule it to end before dinner, start after dinner, or involve a dinner that was delivered to us by Uber Eats. Making a normal dinner, with all the fussy details involving my younger son's standard dinner, would not be the way I'd have drawn it up. 

My wife doesn't care about that, and she doesn't care about stepping away from a movie for however long that takes. It irritates me when she does this, and I'm sure I've written about it before. If it's a family movie, the whole family should be watching it.

I'm sure she thought she was going to be the one to step away to do all that. There was no way I was going to let that happen.

I slipped out about 15 minutes into the movie to preheat the oven, then went back another ten minutes later to put in the pasta bake that the other three of us were going to have and that needed to cook for 45 minutes. She didn't realize that this was the reason I'd left either of those times, so after the pasta bake was already cooking for about 15 minutes, she volunteered to start preheating the oven. At which point I got to tell her that it was already taken care of and that we were farther along than that. (And good thing, too, because on her schedule the dinner probably would have arrived after the movie ended.)

My two quick departures hadn't eaten up more than about two minutes each, so there was no question as to whether I'd basically caught the whole movie up to that point. I hadn't really anticipated that the last stage -- when I had to remove the foil from the pasta bake for the final ten minutes and put in the garlic bread, plus make my son's special pasta, his toast and the fruit for both of them -- would really knock a good chunk out of the movie for me. That one took at least 15 minutes.

I usually don't like to give myself official "credit" for a rewatch if I didn't sit down and watch the whole thing. But that usually applies to a situation where I came in late to a rewatch already in progress, or started a rewatch and didn't finish it. If I'm there for the beginning and there for the end, I think it counts, probably assuming no more of the middle was missed than the 20 minutes collectively I missed here. 

Besides, I got to show my wife that I'm not so precious about the usually sacred experience of watching a movie. I can take one for the team, especially when it's her movie.

She does the same for me, but the thing is, I don't want her to. Even if it's "my movie," I want her to be there for the whole thing. That's a better service to me than missing 20 minutes doing dinner stuff. If our roles were reversed, I'd have been distracted to no end.

But the roles weren't reversed, and she couldn't have been happier to have an uninterrupted showing to our kids, even if I couldn't be there for the whole thing. As far as I know, this doesn't bother them either.

It only bothers me, which is maybe why I'm the only one in our family who can be classified as a true cinephile these days.

A cinephile who can let his own rigid rules slide on occasion, if it's for the good of the family.

The part of Marvel that rubbed off on Ryan Coogler

Ryan Coogler doesn't seem especially likely to direct another Marvel movie. I don't believe there are any more stand-alone Black Panther movies in the works, and even if there were, Coogler himself probably figures that two is enough, and he doesn't want his career to be defined by becoming a Marvel company man.

But there sure seems to be a part of the Marvel experience that has stayed with him.

I won't say much about Sinners. Before I write my review, I'm trying to figure out how much of the plot is known from the trailers or from the press coverage in general. I can tell you that from the one trailer I saw a couple months ago, I did not remember key elements of the movie, just a general vibe -- which is what a good trailer should do. I can also tell you that I loved it.

I'll tell you one more thing that is important to know, though, and it's not a spoiler. In fact, it is a public service of sorts.

Sinners has not one, but two extra scenes -- a mid-credits sequence and a sequence after the credits.

Sound familiar?

Although there are surely other movies that do a thing like this, it was popularized by Marvel and most of the other movies that do it are trying to ride the MCU coattails in some way. In other words, it is very clearly a superhero or at least superhero adjacent move.

Sinners is only superhero adjacent in the sense that its director directed two superhero movies.

But he's pulled the Marvel move, and you need to know, because I was the only one in my screening who didn't walk out of the movie before the second sequence. 

Now, I'll also tell you that the first mid-credits sequence is a lot more important, to the story, than the second. The second is effectively not important at all.

But it does qualify as more movie that Coogler saw fit to make, and with a movie like Sinners, you want to see all the movie there is to see.

It's hard to determine if Coogler would have made this choice without having made Black Panther and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. In fact, as a sort of sign of respect of the passed Chadwick Boseman, I think the second one might be one of the few MCU movies that does not interrupt its closing credits with more movie. Because these sequences are often cheeky in some way, it's maybe not the tone for it if you are also, I don't know, honoring the passing of the star of the franchise.

Wait, I can check. Yes, confirmed. Only the words "Black Panther will return" after the credits end. (Though, presumably, not in a stand-alone movie.)

Maybe Coogler thought this decision shorted him two mid-credits sequences, and he had to fit them into his next movie.

Ranking the best movies with the same titles

I've finally finished my project of adding all the 600-some movies that I hadn't added in real time to my big movie Excel spreadsheet.

I talked about that here if you want a fuller discussion. That's a pretty long post, and only part of it is about that. The short version: I was keeping up this spreadsheet of all the movies I'd seen, to accompany the Word document I have of the same, but I fell off in early 2022. I started catching up earlier this year, periodically when I had a few free moments, and now I'm finally all caught up.

So I thought I would celebrate with a little blogging project. We have Good Friday off, so I've got the time for it.

As I was adding these movies, I had to remind myself what convention I used for alphabetizing movies with the same titles. The question is the same as in the Word document, though I handle it a bit differently there. In the Word document, if two movies have the same title, I put the year after them in parenthesis, listing the older one first. So the logic is the same in Excel, except I don't need to use the parenthesis because the year gets its own column in the spreadsheet. 

This short conversation I had with myself in my head, though, prompted an idea. It was an idea I could have done from the Word document, but it works better here, because this Excel spreadsheet also reminds me whether I liked the movie or not, as exemplified in a column with either the word "Up" or the word "Down." (The thumb is implied.)

So I thought: Why not look at all the films I've seen with the same title, and decide which title, itself, provides me the best value?

It's actually an idea I had for the first time a while ago, and this was the kick in the pants I needed to finally do it. 

When I went through the list, I found 47 qualifying instances. That's not too many to rank, if you have a few (or 15) minutes. I'll keep my comments on each short. 

So let me explain the rules here. First, exclusions. 

1) No sequels or remakes or adaptations of the same material. I'm excluding any films that have the same title because they are interpretations of the same subject matter. It might be interesting to see which movies have the best remakes, but that's a difference exercise. 

2) No movies that are clearly in conversation with another movie, even if they don't have the same plot. This rules out movies like Nate Parker's Birth of a Nation, Julia Leigh's Sleeping Beauty and Ladj Ly's Les Miserables. Those titles would not have been chosen for those movies if they didn't intend to invoke some other source material for thematic purposes, which each of these movies does. 

3) Possessives matter. Disney chose to call their movie Disney's The Kid, at least as far as I've seen it listed most commonly, so that can't be the same title as Charlie Chaplin's The Kid. 

4) Subtitles matter. People may refer to Luc Besson's Joan of Arc film as The Messenger, but its full title is The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc, meaning it can't team up with Oren Moverman's The Messenger. (Weirdly, I just checked on IMDB and they are currently calling Besson's movie Joan of Arc. Huh?)

5) Spelling matters. Even though Twentynine Palms and 29 Palms would clearly rank last on this list -- I discussed their awfulness in this post -- for the purposes of this exercise I am not considering these to be the same title. That's possibly arbitrary but it's what I'm going with. I gave the two movies their own separate labels when I wrote about them in that post, which tells you all you need to know. This rule also knocks out Nine and 9. 

6) Punctuation matters. I would love Darren Aronofsky's mother! to help strengthen the case of the two other movies I've seen called Mother, but it's not the same title. Nor is After.Life the same title as After Life, even though the period does create a space of sorts between the two words.

7) Articles matter. The Apostle is not the same title as Apostle. Same with A Hero and Hero. 

Okay, now the rules for how I will rank them:

1) Each movie will be listed with the title, the year and director of each one I've seen, and whether I gave them an Up or Down. 

2) Every title that has all Up will come in before any title that has at least one Down. Even if the other movie paired with the Down is one of my favorites of all time, the Down collectively drags them, um, down. 

3) Quantity matters. Any scenario where I've seen three movies with that title, and they are all Up, will have to be ranked ahead of any movie with only two Ups, even if I may like the movies in the second pair much better than any of the movies in the first trio. A bit arbitrary but it's what I'm going with. There are only a few instances of seeing three different movies with the same title and no instances of seeing four.

Okay, since I'm already on the verge of losing you, let's gets this started. Because this is not a situation involving building up the anticipation toward a big reveal, I'll rank them from best to worst.

1) The Silence 

Movies: 1963, Ingemar Bergman (Up); 2010, Baran bo Odar (Up); 2019, John R. Leonetti (Up)
Comment: There were two trios of movies where all three were a thumbs up, and to help me decide which I preferred, I consulted my Letterboxd ratings for them. These three had a combined 11.5 stars whereas the next trio I'll discuss had a combined 11, so this gets the #1 slot -- even if I suspect the 2019 A Quiet Place ripoff probably did not deserve 3.5 stars. Incidentally, I will not continue to use this tiebreak method for the most part. Bergman's is one of my favorite of his films and Odar's is a moody murder mystery. Incidentally, Odar's gets the poster for this post because I have already written about each of the other two Silences and used their posters in those posts. 

2) Lamb

Movies: 2015, Yared Zeleke (Up); 2016, Ross Partridge (Up); 2021, Vladimar Johannsson (Up)
Comments: The first two of these both got ranked in the same year, so that was confusing. The stories of an African boy and his lamb, an unusual relationship between a man and a girl who is not his daughter, and an Icelandic couple with a strange offspring could not be more different, but they are all good.

3) Swan Song

Movies: 2021, Benjamin Cleary (Up); 2021, Todd Stephens (Up)
Comment: Speaking of movies ranked in the same year, these movies were my #6 and #20 of 2021. It may be recency bias that places these two ahead of all the double Ups, but I was profoundly moved by both the story of a terminally ill man considering whether to give over his life to a healthy clone, without telling his family, and a gay man in a nursing home trying to have a last hurrah from his old life.

4) Birds of Passage 

Movies: 2015, Olivier Ringier (Up); 2018, Cristina Gallego & Ciro Guerra (Up)
Comment: My intense appreciation for the five-star look at an indigenous family and its role in the South American drug trade elevates the very sweet coming of age story that I watched while selecting movies for the Human Rights and Arts Film Festival.

5) The Harder They Fall 

Movies: 1956, Mark Robson (Up); 2021, Jeymes Samuel (Up)
Comment: I watched these movies in the same night, as you may remember from this post. (You don't remember it. I'm fooling myself.) I went surprisingly hard for the Humphrey Bogart boxing movie as part of a conclusion of my Knowing Noir monthly series in 2021, and then was enthralled by the style of the western that followed.

6) Mother 

Movies: 1996, Albert Brooks (Up); 2009, Bong Joon-ho (Up)
Comment: This title does quite well with or without the help of mother! It'd be higher if I only liked the Brooks movie a bit more, but Bong's is probably my second favorite of his, behind only Parasite. (Actually it's higher on my Flickchart than Parasite, but I suspect if they came up in a duel I would choose Parasite.) 

7) The Girl Next Door 

Movies: 2004, Luke Greenfield (Up); 2007, Gregory Wilson (Up)
Comment: This might be higher just on the strength of the personal favorite, better-than-a-guilty-pleasure story of a high school kid and his relationship with his new porn star neighbor, but the 2007 Girl Next Door is a rough sit. This is the one about the kids who rape and torture their neighbor in the basement for weeks on end, with the knowledge and support of their mother, based on a true story. It's good but yikes. 

8) The Interview 

Movies: 1998, Craig Monahan (Up); 2014, Evan Goldberg & Seth Rogen (Up)
Comment: My wife and I were some of the biggest supporters of the otherwise generally dismissed movie in which a pair of journalists try to kill the supreme leader of North Korea, but it's the Australian film with a pre-Matrix Hugo Weaving that is the key here, moody and sinister. 

9) Proof 

Movies: 1991, Jocelyn Moorhouse (Up); 2005, John Madden (Up)
Comment: And we have our second straight pairing involving a young, even younger this time, Hugo Weaving. He plays a blind man in Moorhouse's very good film, but I was a big sucker for the Madden version starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Anthony Hopkins -- though I have not revisited it as I suspect it might not hold up. 

10) Life Itself 

Movies: 2014, Steve James (Up); 2018, Dan Fogelman (Up)
Comment: James' documentary about Roger Ebert got five stars from me, so obviously I loved it. I actually quite liked Fogelman's film too, a "hyperlink" melodrama starring Oscar Isaac and Olivia Wilde, but I was in the minority on that one. The guilt keeps me from ranking this pair higher. 

11) Monster 

Movies: 2003, Patty Jenkins (Up); 2023, Hirokazu Kore-eda (Up)
Comment: Kore-eda is one of my favorite directors and this coming-of-age story is a top three of his films. Despite the Oscar-winning performance from Charlize Theron, though, I would say I respect Jenkins' film more than I love it. 

12) Look Both Ways 

Movies: 2005, Sarah Watt (Up); 2022, Wanuri Kahiu (Up)
Comment: This pairing might be lower except I was sucked in deep by Kahiu's Netflix movie that was surely designed to hook in women and not give us much else, but it did give us a lot else, including wonderful work from Lili Reinhart. Watt's film is really strong, too, and my wife knows the sister of the director, who sadly passed. (The director, not the sister.)

13) Thelma

Movies: 2017, Joachim Trier (Up); 2024, Josh Margolin (Up)
Comment: Trier's artistically accomplished look at a girl with telekinesis is more a curiosity I respect than a film I love, but I was quite charmed by last year's film about the vengeful senior citizen going after the man who scammed her.

14) Last Night 

Movies: 1998, Don McKellar (Up); 2011, Massy Tadjedin (Up)
Comment: Both of these movies are mid-strong. The first is a quiet -- well, quiet by the standards of this sort of genre -- Canadian movie about how people are spending what they know is the last night on earth before some unseen apocalypse that is otherwise not visible to anyone. Sandra Oh is in it. The second is a mature movie about potential adultery with really good performances by Keira Knightly and Sam Worthington. 

15) Joy Ride 

Movies: 2001, John Dahl (Up); 2023, Adele Lim (Up)
Comment: Lim's buddy comedy among Asian women was just pretty good, not great, but I was a big fan back in the day of Dahl's movie about three young people being stalked by a malicious trucker, though I didn't like it quite as much on a recent revisit.

16) Frozen 

Movies: 2010, Adam Green (Up); 2013, Chris Buck & Jennifer Lee (Up)
Comment: Perhaps because of the very short window between the release of these two movies, I remember the release of the Disney movie really making me think about the phenomenon of reusing a title that was already out there rather than going with something distinctive. Of course, the movie about skiers trapped on a lift above hungry wolves would not stake very much of a claim to the title in light of the through-the-roof Disney phenomenon, which I don't like as much as most people do. (See other discussions on this blog about its rivalry with my beloved Tangled.)

17) Passengers

Movies: 2008, Rodrigo Garcia (Up); 2016, Morten Tyldum (Up)
Comment: Now we're getting into the zone where one of the Up movies has something fairly problematic about it. I really vibed with Garcia's film about survivors of a plane crash in grief counseling, but the troublesome aspects of the Chris Pratt-Jennifer Lawrence vehicle about awakened passengers on a hundred-year space journey have been well documented. (I still liked it overall though.)

18) The Square

Movies: 2008, Nash Edgerton (Up); 2017, Ruben Ostlund (Up)
Comment: There are people who like Ostlund's film a lot more than I do. I was expecting a bit more given my affection for Force Majeure, though the uncomfortable seats in the theater where I watched it probably made it more of a tough sit (literally) than it would have otherwise been. Edgerton's Australian crime drama is fine but a bit forgettable. 

19) Awake 

Movies: 2007, Joby Herald (Up); 2021, Mark Raso (Up)
Comment: Here are two genre films that are just three-star efforts for me, just on the right side of a recommendation; one a story of a woman who awakens during surgery where she's supposed to be asleep, and one of a world where human beings have lost the ability to sleep and trying to find a cure before they all die.

20) The Killer 

Movies: 1989, John Woo (Up); 2023, David Fincher (Up)
Comment: The Woo movie I remember more by reputation of the people who love it, and on that basis, it should drag The Killer ahead of Awake. However, I am fairly down on Fincher's movie the further I get from it, which drags the pair down. If I were giving out an assessment anew, I might go thumbs down on Fincher's movie. 

21) It 

Movies: 1925, Clarence Badger (Up); 1990, Tommy Lee Wallace (Down); 2017, Andy Muschietti (Up)
Comment: Here we get our first asterisk of this exercise; a couple asterisks, actually. The two more recent versions of It are both adaptations of Stephen King's novel, and the one from 1990 is actually a TV miniseries, though it has gotten grandfathered in to my list for reasons I won't bother to explain right now. However, obviously the 1925 It, starring Clara Bow, is not the same subject matter, so it should be included in this exercise. Because I believe I liked the Bow movie (it's a little hazy in my memory) and I know I liked Muschietti's It adaptation, I've included it at this pivot point where we're starting to include films I didn't care for -- especially since if I excluded the 1990 miniseries entirely, this would just be two films called It about different things.

22) Hero 

Movies: 1992, Stephen Frears (Down); 2004, Zhang Yimou (Up)
Comment: In trying to figure out how to choose which title to rank first out of the pairs where I liked one and didn't like the other, I looked to which of the films that I liked, I liked best. Assuming, that is, the other was not completely terrible. That describes Zhang's beautiful, painterly wuxia film and Frears' curious misfire about journalism and stolen valor. 

23) The Hunt

Movies: 2012, Thomas Vinterberg (Up); 2020, Craig Zobel (Down)
Comment: I believe I like Vinterberg's The Hunt more than I like Zhang's Hero, just barely, but I have a more negative appraisal of Zobel's The Hunt than Frears' Hero. The heartbreaking look at a teacher falsely accused of molestation by one of his students, which has a great Mads Mikkelsen performance at its center, is a minor masterpiece. The Most Dangerous Game-inspired movie about hunting humans is not.

24) Greed

Movies: 1925, Erich von Stroheim (Up); 2020, Michael Winterbottom (Down)
Comment: The gulf in quality between the two movies continues to widen with the two Greeds. Von Stroheim's is one of the great silent films of all time, in my top 100 on Flickchart, while I was really put off by Winterbottom's acidic look at a bastard played by Steve Coogan.

25) Kicking and/& Screaming

Movies: 1995, Noah Baumbach (Up); 2005, Jesse Dylan (Down)
Comment: About at this same level of difference in quality are my favorite Noah Baumbach film -- yes, I know that's a bold statement -- and just about my least favorite Will Ferrell film (although this year's You're Cordially Invited gives this one a run for its money). I suppose this requires another asterisk of sorts. I say punctuation matters in whether a title is the same or not, but I don't think that extends to the fairly arbitrary difference between an "and" and an ampersand. 

26) The Illusionist 

Movies: 2006, Neil Burger (Down); 2010, Sylvain Chomet (Up)
Comment: Back closer in quality, inspiring less of an extreme feeling from me, is this pair. Each can be compared to another film like it to color my impression. Although Burger's film was not a major misfire, it suffered majorly in comparison to the other contemporaneous magic movie, Christopher Nolan's The Prestige. And although Chomet's is undoubtedly a delight in his unique style, I don't remember nearly as much about it as I remember about his The Triplets of Belleville. 

27) Possession

Movies: 1981, Andrzej Zulawski (Up); 2002, Neil Labute (Down)
Comment: As awesome as Zulawskis' film is in its batshit craziness, Labute's film is that indistinct. I remember that Gwyneth Paltrow is in it and that I did not care for it, but little else. 

28) White Noise

Movies: 2005, Geoffrey Sax (Down); 2022, Noah Baumbach (Up)
Comment: It took my a little while to get on the wavelength of Baumbach's apocalyptic adaptation of a Don DeLillo period piece novel, but once I did, I was really on it. The thing I remember most about the 2005 Michael Keaton thriller is that it was a contender for my first date with my wife. Thankfully, we saw The Aviator instead. 

29) The Nest

Movies: 1987, Terence H. Winkless (Down); 2020, Sean Durkin (Up)
Comment: Durkin's movie about Jude Law and Carrie Coon trying to make a new life for themselves in a British castle in the late 1980s is a very good examination of domestic discord in an era of wealth acquisition. Winkless' movie is about killer insects.

30) Under the Shadow 

Movies: 2013, Fiona Lloyd-Davies (Down); 2016, Babak Anvari (Up)
Comment: I remember very little about Lloyd-Davies' movie, which, like with Birds of Passage, I was tasked with watching for HRAFF. Only enough to say that I didn't care for it. Anvari's Iran-set horror movie that turns elements of Islam into horror iconography, though, was quite memorable. 

31) Talk to Me

Movies: 2007, Kasi Lemmons (Up); 2023, Danny & Michael Philippou (Down)
Comment: I found Lemmons' look at DJ Petey Greene (Don Cheadle) compelling and engrossing, and the pair would have been higher had I not been completely out of sync with popular opinion on the recent horror film from a pair of Australian directing brothers, which I basically hated.

32) Joy 

Movies: 2015, David O. Russell (Down); 2024, Ben Taylor (Up)
Comment: I wasn't expecting to be quite as taken as I was with the story about the scientists and doctors who developed in vitro fertilization, but Russell's movie about Jennifer Lawrence is confused. When Russell misses, he misses big. 

33) Robots 

Movies: 2005, Chris Wedge & Carlos Saldanha (Down); 2023, Casper Christensen & Anthony Hines (Up)
Comment: Here is a very mild thumbs down and a very mild thumbs up. In fact, I was surprised to see that I had given a thumbs down to the animated movie starring the voice of Robin Williams, though I knew any affection I had for it was marginal. It might be a better movie than the recent story of Shailene Woodley and Jack Whitehall playing both people and their robot doppelgangers, but I enjoyed watching the latter better. 

34) The Freshman 

Movies: 1925, Fred Newmeyer & Sam Taylor (Up); 1990, Andrew Bergman (Down)
Comment: All I really remember about the vehicle for Marlon Brando and Matthew Broderick is that I saw it and that my spreadsheet says I liked it little enough to not give it a recommendation. I saw the Harold Lloyd movie during my silent movie series No Audio Audient about six years ago and thought it was pretty good. 

35) The Stranger

Movies: 1946, Orson Welles (Down); 2022, Thomas M. Wright (Up)
Comment: You'd be forgiven for thinking I mixed up which one of these was up and which one was down, but I was surprised at how disappointed I was by the Welles film. The Wright film about Australian drifters, starring Joel Edgerton and Sean Harris, works better.  

36) Smile

Movies: 2005, Jeffrey Kramer (Down); 2022, Parker Finn (Up)
Comment: I appreciated, but did not love, the horror movie with the people and their maniac smiles from a couple years ago, which got a sequel last year that I still haven't seen. The one from 2005, though, is a really unfortunate movie about a person with a cleft palette, which has such a better message than its ability to present it. 

37) Damsel 

Movies: 2018, Nathan & David Zellner (Down); 2024, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo (Up)
Comment: My affection for Millie Bobby Brown is undoubtedly driving my positive feelings toward Fresnadillo's film, which most people dismissed and which I likely would have also dismissed if not for Brown. Most would prefer the Zellner western, but it left me unsatisfied and scratching my head.

38) Hush

Movies: 1998, Jonathan Darby (Up); 2016, Mike Flanagan (Down)
Comment: I'm similarly in the minority in having any positive feelings about Darby's film, another one that stars Gwyneth Paltrow, but it was one of the first movies I reviewed when I was doing my first reviewing gig at the weekly newspaper in Rhode Island, and I kind of got into its groove (even though it famously had to come back for reshoots, which I apparently did not notice at the time). However, it's really dragged down by Flanagan's film about the home invasion of the deaf woman's home, a big miss for me even though I like most of Flanagan's other horrors.

39) Christine 

Movies: 1983, John Carpenter (Down); 2016, Antonio Campos (Up)
Comment: I barely remember Carpenter's King adaptation, though the fact that it was Carpenter makes me wonder if I'd appreciate it more if I saw it today. I vastly prefer Kate Plays Christine as a movie about Christine Chubbuck, but liked this one just enough to give it a recommendation. However, it's telling that I couldn't remember, until I checked just now, which one was thumbs up and which one was thumbs down. 

40) Scoop 

Movies: 2006, Woody Allen (Down); 2024, Philip Martin (Up)
Comment: Last year's Prince Andrew movie essentially went in one ear and out the other for me, and not just because I saw it on a plane. I did give it a thumbs up though. I remember Allen's movie better, but found it terminally frivolous and not worth the time, even with the presence of Scarlett Johansson.

41) Fly Me to the Moon

Movies: 2008, Ben Stassen (Up); 2024, Greg Berlanti (Down)
Comment: The movie from the third-rate animation studio about flies who hitch a ride on an Apollo mission to the moon was mildly diverting, but it's not something that would make the cut for me to watch today. Last year's similarly themed movie, only with humans, just didn't really work for me -- again, even with the presence of Scarlett Johansson. 

42) Rage

Movies: 2014, Paco Cabezas (Down); 2021, John Balazs (Up)
Comment: And here we get to what I believe is our final asterisk. Cabezas' disposable Nicolas Cage vehicle was actually called Tokarev in some markets, and Rage in others. I recorded it as Rage for reasons discussed in this post (it's the American title, and I follow all things American when it comes to movies). Anyway, it's not good. Balazs is a filmmaker who contacted me directly to review his film for ReelGood. I did end up liking it, though I thought it had the not-quite-ready-for-primetime quality of a film made by a person who directly contacts critics to review his films. 

43) Crash

Movies: 1996, David Cronenberg (Down); 2005, Paul Haggis (Down)
Comment: It's hard to believe there are only five titles where I didn't like either of the movies I saw. This one ranks at the top because I think there are arguments to be made that I did like both of these movies, or would if I saw them today. With the Cronenberg, I think I was too new of a cinephile to appreciate what was going on there, though I have to say, his movies are hit and miss with me to this day. With the Haggis (remember when he was a thing?), I famously remember telling my then girlfriend/now wife, at the time we saw it, that it was probably the best movie I'd seen that year. How quickly that curdled into the total backlash state that has been its enduring legacy.

44) The Gift

Movies: 2000, Sam Raimi (Down); 2015, Joel Edgerton (Down)
Comment: These are both genre movies that are mild failures; both thrillers, if memory serves. Memory does not serve very well on the Raimi film, though. I just remember it not clicking for me. Edgerton's film is fresher in my memory and probably misses by about the same margin. Both Edgerton brothers have a film on this list (The Square for Nash).

45) Brothers 

Movies: 2009, Jim Sheridan (Down); 2024, Max Barbakow (Down)
Comment: Speaking of brothers. Now we are getting into the quite bad. I can't remember why Sheridan's remake of a Danish film I haven't seen, starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Tobey Maguire and Natalie Portman, was such a whiff, but I do remember my strongly negative feelings toward it. The strongly negative feelings are a lot more recent for last year's movie that many people thought was supposed to be a remake of Twins, with Josh Brolin and Peter Dinklage.

46) Employee of the Month 

Movies: 2004, Mitch Rouse (Down); 2006, Gregory Coolidge (Down)
Comment: For movies whose titles celebrate superlative performances -- even though I believe it's supposed to be ironic in both cases -- these movies are entirely lacking in superlatives. One stars Matt Dillon. One stars Dane Cook. Both are awful.

47) Serenity 

Movies: 2005, Joss Whedon (Down); 2019, Steven Knight (Down)
Comment: And lucky last goes to perhaps Lloyd Braun's favorite pair of movies, or would they cause him to scream out "Serenity now!"? I famously can't stand the Firefly movie, which we thought was so horrid that my wife and I used to quote from it for its terrible dialogue. Our favorite one was: "Everyone on this planet is dead for no reason." Maybe we just didn't get it. Then you have Knight's truly bizarre Matthew McCaughney starrer, whose absurdity I can't even get into without going into spoilers, though I've also blocked most of it out.

If you are still here, congratulations. That was a long and tedious exercise.

But at least it's done now.

Understanding Editing: The Best Years of Our Lives

This is the fourth in my 2025 monthly series watching the winner of the best editing Oscar to increase my appreciation of the craft, with movies I haven't previously seen in odd months, and movies I have seen in even months.

For a number of years now I have considered The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) a personal favorite. Whenever I hear it mentioned on a podcast -- and Filmspotting recently did an extended discussion during their William Wyler marathon -- I get a bit giddy, as you do when someone else endorses such a personal favorite. Since I'd seen it only once, it was a no-brainer to add it to the slate for Understanding Editing, arriving chronologically in April after Sergeant York (1941) and before King Solomon's Mines (1950).

But then recently -- in another moment of reflecting on it positively, the reason for which I can't now remember -- I checked its Letterboxd rating to ensure I'd given it the full available five stars. And was horrified by what I found:

3.5 stars.

I scratched my head. Maybe not literally, but possibly literally.

My first theory about the explanation for this star rating was that at the time I retroactively assigned its star rating when adding all my films on Letterboxd, I'd momentarily confused it with You Can't Take It With You, another best picture winner from around that time whose title is approximately the same mouthful of words. I confuse the two in my mind sometimes. That theory shouldn't hold water, though, because I also quite liked You Can't Take It With You, considering that at least a four-star movie. (Checking Letterboxd now and confirming the four stars for YCTIWY.)

My next theory had to do with the amount of time that had elapsed between when I first saw The Best Years of Our Lives and when I gave out that star rating, as I can have momentary dead spots in my memory of how well I liked a film. But that theory sputtered out as well. My viewing of TBYOOL was on December 19, 2010, and it was only in early to mid 2012 that I added all my movies to Letterboxd.

I guess it has to be the final theory: I was much more stingy with my star ratings back then. 

Because I was sure this was one of my 20 favorite best picture winners of all time, and possibly the best movie ever made -- that I've seen, anyway -- about soldiers returning from war. 

Well, I didn't get that one quite right either. In this post in which I ranked all 88 (at the time) best picture winners, it was about exactly halfway down the list at #44. Now, that was based only on my Flickchart rankings at the time, and on Flickchart, it was a healthy #916. I would say that all my top 1000 films are at least four-star films unless they've been misranked. Still, the following blurb about it indicates how much more I thought of it than the star rating I gave it:

"This one had a pretty big impact on me. Not only was it a profound consideration of men returning from war, but what about that incredible performance by Harold Russell -- who really lost his hands in World War II."

So I was still scratching my head when I went into Tuesday night's viewing of The Best Years of Our Lives for Understanding Editing, eager to see whether my true feelings are that I think it's great, which is what's in my memory, or that I think it's at least slightly middling, which is what's in my star rating.

I'm glad to say it was the former. 

This is an absolute banger of a movie -- an absolute banger that plays out slowly and determinedly over two hours and 50 minutes. 

And basically does not have anything distinctive about its editing at all. 

That's not an insult. It's actually part of a growing understanding of how an appreciation for editing can be expressed by one's peers, the other editors who do the nominating.

Daniel Mandell won one of his three editing Oscars for The Best Years of Our Lives, the others being The Pride of the Yankees (1942) and The Apartment (1960). What the three films have in common is that they do not contain anything resembling action or fast motion, sequences that would specifically benefit from the sure hand of an accomplished editor. That makes all three films different from the three I've watched in this series so far: Lost Horizon, The Adventures of Robin Hood and Sergeant York.

And though I had other choices for the fourth movie in this series, I'm glad I chose one that did not feature any ostentatious sequences like the ones that (presumably) won the Oscars for their editors in those films. If I only looked for films that had the most editing, I might have missed some that had the best.

But what makes the straightforward editing in The Best Years of Our Lives the best? That may be harder to determine. Though I do have a theory.

The other thing The Best Years of Our Lives has in common with one of Mandell's other Oscar wins, The Apartment, is that both films also won best picture. In fact, best editing was one of seven Oscar wins for TBYOOL. 

So now I have a theory that editing is one of those categories that can get swept up in the fervor of the love for a movie, whether this discipline actually does exceed the work of the other nominees or not.

Think about the other movies that have won basically everything, say, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, which was nominated for 11 Oscars and won all 11. (A feat it likely pulled off by not being nominated in any of the acting categories.) What are the chances that the movie actually had better cinematography, editing, makeup, costume design, visual effects, original song, original score and sound mixing than every other movie made in 2003, to focus only on the "lesser" categories it won? I'd say not great, but people loved that movie so much, and wanted so much to honor Peter Jackson's achievement with the trilogy, that a certain specificity of analysis was lost in favor of the wave of admiration and affection directed at the movie. Since this is a piece about editing, I'd say that at the very least, of the other 2003 editing nominees, Seabiscuit probably could have taken down LOTR if it had not already been winning everything else.

So something like that may have happened with The Best Years of Our Lives, which was very undoubtedly the Best Movie of Its Year. (Some would make an argument for the similarly titled It's a Wonderful Life, but they'd be wrong. Then again, my own word should not be taken about this because I have Lives at #651 and Life at #481 on Flickchart, as my past confusion about Lives continues to rear its head.)

But let's set aside this undermining analysis that Mandell's work was the collateral recipient of other praise, and try to figure out what he was doing that earned him this victory.

Although I didn't take a lot of notes while watching The Best Years of Our Lives -- I never usually take notes while watching a movie, even one I'm reviewing, but have been specifically doing so for this series -- I'd say that was for two reasons. For one, there weren't that many specific sequences I wanted to write about later. Perhaps more importantly, though, I was just fully engrossed in the movie, and would rather have that experience than to be scribbling down my thoughts. 

I did want to draw attention to one sequence, though, in which editing was a momentary focus. It's when the oldest of the three soldiers we're following, Al Stephenson (Fredric March), finds himself a bit overwhelmed and at loose ends, and forces his wife and daughter out on the town on the very night he returns home to Boone City. They are not into the idea but they placate him. We see their night's adventures captured in montage, with the neon sign of each new haunt dissolving in on the previous action to announce the next location. It's a beautiful example of compact storytelling.

And I think that's really what Mandell's editing is doing here, along with Robert E. Sherwood's script: compacting. That's a rather extraordinary thing to say about a movie that's nearly three hours long, the first hour or more of which takes place in a single 72-hour period as the soldiers catch a plane together to their hometown. But I found this film a marvel at the script level, as each scene comprising those 170 minutes contributes in a meaningful way to the journeys these characters go on as they return from war. The editing is the necessary companion to this script, the unseen collaborator that helps make it flow.

Because I don't have a lot of substance to say about the editing, I wanted to quickly discuss another element that my close reading of the film made me appreciate. 

The film did not win a best cinematography Oscar for Gregg Toland's work here, Toland being the DP on Citizen Kane and other great films. There were only two black-and-white cinematography nominees that year (the categories were separated into color and black and white) and Toland wasn't one of them. The Oscar went to Arthur C. Miller for Anna and the King of Siam.

But Toland's work here astonished me. My favorite sequence was one between Teresa Wright's Peggy and Virginia Mayo's Marie in a club powder room, the former being the one in love with Dana Andrews' Fred Derry and the latter being the one who's married to him, but does not love him. The latter doesn't have any idea about the former's feelings as she blithely discusses Fred's shortcomings and the former takes them quietly in. Toland's camera continues to move and reframe the two in the shot, at times using their reflection in the mirror, but always shifting to a new two shot. It kind of blew my mind, and underscored a shifting dynamic in the scene that only one of the two is aware of. 

You could say this is part of the editing in a way, in that the camera does the work that an editor might ordinarily do. When to edit and when to let a shot run is also, I would argue, part of great editing.

In summary: The Best Years of Our Lives is awesome, I have no idea what I was thinking about when I gave it 3.5 stars, and the editing does not need to call attention to itself in order to make it an essential component of the whole experience.

As mentioned earlier, I will move on to Compton Bennett and Andrew Marton's King Solomon's Mines in May. 

G20 was my #20 of 2025

I am writing today's post not just as part of my usual appreciation for coincidental numerology. I am also writing it to gauge just how far I've fallen off the pace of watching movies from the current year with all my recent distractions and general state of busyness. 

I might not have told you about all the things that have kept me busy, since many of them are not germane to a movie blog, but you certainly would have noticed, if you are a regular reader. The post I wrote yesterday broke a week-long drought in publishing -- a week where I went away for one night for a work conference, also did the single-night trip to Castlemaine that I wrote about yesterday, and had my anniversary and a visit from my mother-in-law as well. 

Yes it worked out to be fairly funny that my 20th film from 2025 was G20, the latest in the tradition of films where U.S. presidents are turned into action heroes. Air Force One is of course a classic of that genre, if not in terms of quality (I think most people like it more than I do) then at least in terms of being a consummate example of the form. This one has a very credible presidential action hero in the form of Viola Davis, though it plays a bit more like yet another reboot of Die Hard than Air Force One. There are some scenes that are effectively homages to that Christmas action classic.

But the reason I'm really looking at the topic today is that 20 films makes a good milestone, a good chance to compare when it was last year that I saw my 20th film. And I have a good way of doing this, since I note the order I watch the films I'm ranking as I rank them.

As I write this, I don't actually know what the answer to this question is. I may be way off the pace or I may just be a few days behind, but I suspect it's closer to the former than the later.

Okay hold on for a second as I go check. For you, this check will be instantaneous. So, when I said hold on for a second, you can scratch that.

My 20th movie of 2024 was Ricky Stanicky, which I liked quite a bit (48th overall in my rankings) and which I watched on March 23rd. Given that I watched G20 on April 12th, that means I am currently 20 days -- or nearly three weeks -- behind last year's record-setting pace, when I ranked 177 films before all was said and done.

Well how about that. G20 is my #20, and it is 20 days off last year's pace. 

In a way, this is something of a relief. My perspective on setting ranking records is that I would rather not. My perspective, stated several times over the years, is that each time I set a ranking record, it's cause for me to wonder if this is the best way to spend my one wild and precious life.

The slow start virtually guarantees that I will not set a new record this year, but that was already fairly likely. My family is spending six weeks in Europe from late August to early October. And while I'm sure I will keep up all my viewing commitments in that time, such as the series I'm running on my blog, and then will also sprinkle in a new release maybe once every five days, the overall impact on my viewing totals figures to be decisive. If I see more than about five movies in the month of September, I'll really be misusing my one wild and precious life, as well as my one wild and precious trip to Europe every 20 years (I last went in 2005). 

And there's that number 20 again.

A year where I rank a total of movies in the 140s rather in the 170s will be quite refreshing. And what will I really miss when I do this? Chances are, little more than a bunch of streaming slop. The movies I really want to see, I will still see. 

So what's my 20? In police shorthand?

My 20 is that I'm glad to be on only #20 with G20 while 20 days behind last year's pace and contemplating my first trip to Europe in 20 years.

And that's enough numerology for today.