Baboon shamed

One thing I'm envious of that other writers have, but that I don't think I really have, is their ability to talk about things in detail. Whereas I might say there was a dog walking down the street, they'd say there was an auburn cocker spaniel walking down the street. While I'll give the generic, they'll give the brand, and this goes to things such as fabrics, types of clothing, cars, types of metal or other solid material, etc. etc. The list goes on until I hang my head in shame.

I'm really hanging my head in shame today over my inability to name the sort of simian that appears in one of Gladiator II's fight scenes.

In my review -- which I am not willing to go back and change -- I described these creatures as "these sort of man-sized, hairless monkeys fed with a dose of the rage virus from 28 Days Later." And while I regain some little bit of pride from the apt cinematic reference, I can't shake the awkward way I described this animal while lacking the vocabulary, or at least the recognition, to explain what it actually is.

Which is a baboon. 

I discovered this while randomly reading another critic's review, and then I thought "Well duh, of course it's a baboon." (I also discovered from this review that I had spelled "Colosseum" wrong -- for some reason believing, without any inclination to even check it, that it was spelled "Coliseum." This I did change in the review.)

But it wasn't like I could just note my failure and move on. Oh no. The next day, while listening to a podcast, I heard a random ad that made mention of a baboon. Not only that, the ad specifically made mention of it in the context of the person, a child, not knowing what the "monkey with the funny butt" was called. That might give me comfort, or it might mean that I have a child's inability to parse the taxonomy of primates. (As you might guess, it had the latter effect.)

It could just be that I don't think about baboons very much. I must think about orangutans more. If Lucius Maximus Aurelius (I think that's his name) was fighting an orangutan in Gladiator II, I would have named it as such. Plus there's the whole thing where these digital baboons are such insane, artificially enraged creatures that any link to real creatures in the animal kingdom was severed.

The larger point, though, is not that I failed to identify a baboon as a baboon. It was that I lack one of the tools in the writer's toolbox.

I feel like I am observant, which I share with most writers. What I don't have is the ability to name things. Whereas I see a sweater, they see a cashmere sweater. Whereas I see something as metal, they see it as an aluminum-copper alloy. The rule of three dictates I give another example, but frankly, it's just too depressing.

If I were a fiction writer creating scenes from whole cloth -- though don't ask me what kind of cloth -- this might be a bigger problem than it is. The finer details are not always required in a review, and if you notice a moment where you think the writing would benefit from it, you can always google to find out what material it actually is, and look like you knew it all along.

Still, it makes me feel dumb that I can't do this better, though I also don't know how to improve it. As I collect items from the world in my head, like anybody does, do I need to make more of an effort to evaluate their core properties and store that away too? But how can I decide something is a cashmere sweater if I never knew what cashmere was in the first place?

I'll survive this. A baboon is just a baboon. But I would like to get better at it, somehow.

Editor's Note: I posted this on Wednesday morning, and Wednesday night I attended a talk by cultural commentator Jon Ronson, in which a baboon was also mentioned. I can't escape. 

Top ten sequels to best picture winners

It's been a minute on this blog since I've sat down to do some sort of top ten list. What was once the bread and butter of this blog has taken the back seat (to mix metaphors) as I have taken a more "catch as catch can" approach to blogging over the past, I don't know, decade. (My second son was born a little more than a decade ago. This could explain it.)

But the release of Gladiator II prompted me to decide to get back in the driver's seat, to return to the second part of my mixed metaphor. (Or to start slathering butter on the bread, to return to the first.)

So I decided to go through and look at all the sequels to best picture winners that I've seen, and decide which were the worthiest and least worthy. Or more correctly, to isolate the worthiest, meaning the least worthy will get shut out of discussion altogether.

Sorry Gladiator II. No spot on this list for you. 

(So if you want substantive discussion of Gladiator II, you can check out my review.) 

I ran into a tricky issue right away. While it would probably not surprise you to know that the vast majority of best picture winners have no sequel, there's one that has -- count 'em -- eight sequels, all of which I've seen. 

How to handle all the offspring of the 1976 best picture winner, Rocky?

Ultimately, I did include them all separately for consideration. If I only included one, I might not get to a top ten at all. 

First, though, just to give you a bit of an idea what we're up against.

I wouldn't say that I am familiar with all the possible sequels that may exist for the more obscure best picture winners. But as far as I can tell, no best picture winner had gotten a sequel until 1944's Going My Way had The Bells of St. Mary's come out the following year. I haven't seen The Bells of St. Mary's, so it won't be up for consideration on this list, and I didn't even know about it until I started research for this post.

It then takes all the way until 1967's In the Heat of the Night for there to be another BP winner to get a sequel, which is They Call Me Mr. Tibbs! -- making it the first BP sequel, chronologically, that I've seen, since I watched it only this year for my Blaxploitaudient series. The phenomenon becomes a little more common after this, but still not especially so. The French Connection in 1971 gets a 1975 sequel, which I also have not seen, and then of course The Godfather follows the next year, and we know what happened there.

One thing to clarify before we get started. I don't consider Peter Jackson's Hobbit trilogy to function as a sequel to the 2003 best picture winner Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. It's a separate franchise and in any case, it wasn't solely the success of the best picture winner that prompted its existence.

So I have to say I started writing this post before I knew how many options there actually were to choose from. As I have now done that tally, I have seen 15 sequels to best picture winners, more than half of which are Rocky movies. 

So let's just make it a top 15.

15) Rocky V (1990) - The worst Rocky movie is easily the worst best picture sequel (that I've seen). No two ways about it.

14) The Godfather Part III (1990) - Nineteen ninety was a bad year for best picture sequels. It's likely Godfather III is not as bad as I remember, but I'm not eager for a second viewing to find out.

13) Gladiator II (2024) - I have to admit I came in a little biased against this film, because my former colleague at ReelGood told me beforehand that he hated it and would give it a 0/10. Having watched the film, I don't understand where that sort of vitriol comes from except this guy is given to extreme dislike (not so much to extreme like) and that he's younger than I am, so the original Gladiator was a foundational movie for him. But I don't think it's great. 

12) Hannibal (2001) - I remember the first sequel to Silence of the Lambs (I've only seen the two Hannibal Lecter sequels that feature Anthony Hopkins) having some unforgettable material -- like, the appearance of Gary Oldman's Mason Verger is permanently burned into my brain -- but that overall it's a bit all over all the place.

11) Creed II (2018). I'm not sure if the first sequel to Creed (which of course is itself a sequel to Rocky) truly belongs outside my top ten, but I am putting it here in deference to two other films that have just one sequel and therefore likely would have made my top ten, for the sake of variety only, if I had been going for only ten movies. Given my affection for the first Creed, I really wanted to love this movie, but it just pales in comparison.

10) The Evening Star (1996) - One of only two sequels on this list that we would not consider to be part of a franchise. The sequel to Terms of Endearment was fine, as I recall. I think I may have seen it before I saw Terms of Endearment. 

9) They Call Me Mr. Tibbs! (1971) - The other non-franchise sequel. This really has nothing to do with In the Heat of the Night, as it only features the main character, Virgil Tibbs (Sidney Poitier), spun out into a blaxploitation progenitor that takes place in San Francisco. It's pretty good, not great.

8) Red Dragon (2002) - I do not have significant memories of the second Silence of the Lambs sequel except that I remember I thought it was better than the first.

7) Creed III (2023) - Creed III may not be four slots better on this list than Creed II in terms of real-world quality, but there's an indistinct middle section here where the difference is negligible between the movies. A slight improvement on Creed II, it still convinced me that we don't need any more Creed movies.

6) Rocky IV (1985) - That this movie ranks as high as it does is an indication of a) how few good best picture sequels there actually are, and b) how this movie has gained in cultural cache over the years. I still think I've only seen it once, and I think about it more for its gloriously absurd extremes than for actually being a good movie.

5) Rocky II (1979) - I only saw this for the first time in the past few years, and in fact, it was the final Rocky movie I saw -- or close to it anyway. (I can't remember if I saw it just before or just after Creed III.) I think this movie gets sort of retrospective respect applied to it because it was the movie that likely allowed this series to continue as long as it has. If the first sequel had not worked, that might have been the end of it. And so it paved the way for three Rocky movies still ahead on this list.

4) Rocky Balboa (2006) - It seems unlikely that the sixth Rocky movie is quite as good as I remember it. After the disaster that was Rocky V, I didn't prioritize seeing this in the theater and eventually caught it on a plane. But I really enjoyed it on that plane, and it might be the Rocky movie I am most interested in revisiting just to interrogate that reaction.

3) The Godfather Part II (1974) - Blasphemy. Utter blasphemy that this would not be #1, you are probably thinking. But here we take a big jump upward to a truly beloved top three. Then again, maybe I can't quite call the second Godfather movie -- itself a best picture winner -- "beloved," which is why it does not beat out the two movies ahead of it. Infamously, the first time my wife and I watched this movie -- neither of us had seen it as recently as the late 2000s -- we watched it out of sequence, putting in the second DVD before the first. I eventually saw it correctly sequenced, but I think by then I had already missed the boat on loving this movie. What can you do. I can only ever give you my true perspective on the movies I see.

2) Creed (2015) - My #2 movie of 2015. I eventually watched this four times, including twice in the theater. It did lose a little bit on each viewing -- not a lot, but a little bit -- so it failed to scale the heights to the top of this list. 

1) Rocky III (1982) - If you put Rocky III and Creed up against each other in a duel on Flickchart, I might pick Creed. In fact, Creed is currently ranked #243 on my Flickchart while Rocky III is at #268, though I suspect they have never actually had a face-to-face duel. Creed is definitely the "better" movie in all the traditional ways you define the craft of cinema. But Rocky III is the movie I watched on repeat on VHS in the mid-1980s, and it has so many beats that I love. Creed will continue to diminish by small amounts if I go much beyond my current four viewings. At 10+ viewings -- though granted, only about one this century -- Rocky III has not yet lost any of its luster. The one this century was enough to confirm that. 

So was it worth writing a post tagged to the release of Gladiator II that just effectively became a ranking of Rocky movies?

Perhaps not, but at least it's done now.

Exactly halfway back through Sandra Bullock's 30

I hadn't fed myself any post-election comfort food until Sunday night.

Yes, before that I'd soldiered on through a good eight new releases, none of the viewing of which really suffered from my underlying distant foul mood the past two weeks. (Fortunately for me, here in Australia removed from it all, it has managed to be very distant, as my coping mechanisms for dealing with this disappointment have been working.)

But having given myself a little comfort food in the form of Friends episodes on the very night of the election, I finally gave myself a little of the cinematic kind on Sunday night.

The comfort came in the form of a romantic comedy in general, and The Proposal in particular. 

Anne Fletcher's romcom is not a great movie, not by any stretch of the imagination. (Which, arguably, might have made it more effective as comfort food.) But it's a far better one than you might think, and it benefits from starring the darling Sandra Bullock, always a personal favorite. More on her in a moment.

The last time I watched The Proposal was the second time I'd seen it within the space of a year, while in the hospital after my older son's birth in 2010. It was only just new the year before that, but I didn't see it until the calendar flipped to January in order to include it in year-end rankings. 

So I do think about it sentimentally for that reason. In the state of emotional fullness of becoming new parents, my wife and I watched The Proposal in her hospital bed -- her actually in the bed, me in the neighboring chair -- while we waited the comically long amount of time to be discharged. It helped pass the time quite well and we were both highly vulnerable to the charms of Bullock and Ryan Reynolds, to say nothing of the ways they lower their defenses and show each other their hidden fragility over the course of the narrative.

I did find myself mildly pushed in those same emotional directions while watching The Proposal on Sunday, but only mildly. I thought I remembered a few more moments of getting all the feels. 

One thing that did not disappoint was the comic charm and comedic timing of Bullock, and it caused me to ponder that it has now been 30 years of having Sandra Bullock in our lives.

I'm usually the sort of pedant who would point out that Bullock's acting career began in 1987 with a movie called Hangmen -- or would have been if I'd bothered to look it up on IMDB. (Just so you don't think I'm the kind of freak who can spontaneously produce the name of Bullock's first feature, made when she was only 23.) That's closer to 40 years ago than 30.

But we all know that Sandra Bullock really became SANDRA BULLOCK with the release of Speed in 1994. In fact, so striking was that movie as an introduction of "new" talent -- even if it was her 15th credit on IMDB -- that she is the person I think of any time I think about movies that introduced a future star to us.

By coming out in 2009, The Proposal now represents the halfway point between Speed and this moment in time. 

And because it took Bullock until she was 30 -- or about to turn 30 six weeks after Speed was released -- to get this sort of role, that means she was halfway to the age she is now at the time she made it. That's right, Bullock turned 60 years old in July.

Even though it would make sense that this is how old she is, seeing as how I just had my own 51st birthday, it made me a bit sad to consider it.

Sad not because I think a 60-year-old should be thrown in the bin. If you're a man, you might just be getting started at age 60.

Sad because as a woman, Bullock won't get that chance, and she has already begun her inevitable receding from the public spotlight. She doesn't have an acting credit since 2022's Bullet Train -- which I haven't seen, which reminds I still have plenty of unseen Sandy Bullock to look forward to -- and though I see that Practical Magic 2 is in the works, I don't have much hope of any more films where she gets to work her series of facial expressions and low-level physical pratfalls. (Just think of that great shot in Miss Congeniality where she takes a spill while walking in high heels, which combines both.)

I feel like a little Sandra Bullock retrospective might provide me any more comfort I might need, whenever I might need it.

But lest my 30-year crush on this actress comes too much to the forefront, I may need to keep it on the down low a bit. I already survived a couple entrances into the living room last night in my which wife surely wondered why I was watching an old Sandra Bullock film and could probably even identify which one it was. If I follow that in short succession with The Heat, The Lake House and While You Were Sleeping, I'll probably have some 'splaining to do.

How the hell do you punctuate this film?

I saw a film with the words "mother" and "couch" in the title last night, but almost everything else about the title seems to be up to the interpretation of wherever it's printed.

On iTunes this movie was called Mother, Couch when I purchased it for rental. It was renting at only $1.99, which was a minor miracle as I rarely pay less than $5.99 for a current year iTunes rental these days, $4.99 if I'm lucky, or $3.99 if it's a movie from the past. Mother, Couch seems to be the most common way to list the title around the internet. 

There are two possible semantic meanings to the title when listed this way. I prefer the one that suggests they are being introduced to each other, like "Mother, Couch. Couch, Mother." I include the second half of the introduction just to illustrate exactly what I mean. I like this one because indeed, the story revolves around an 82-year-old woman (Ellen Burstyn is actually turning 92 in three weeks) who sits down on a couch in a furniture store and then refuses to leave.

Or there is the simpler "This is a movie about two things, and the two things are listed with a comma so you know they are not part of the same thing. One is a mother. The other is a couch."

In the movie itself, though, the title appears as Mother, Couch! in the opening credits. I thought it might have been Mother Couch!, but I went back this morning and saw that indeed the comma was present. Which I was glad to see, because otherwise that would mean someone made up a comma out of whole cloth. 

The possible semantic meaning of this is less clear. It could be the same as meaning 1 above, only it indicates the excitement of this introduction, particular on behalf of the mother. (We have to assume that the couch, as an inanimate object, is indifferent to the introduction.) Or it could be that the mother is ordinary, but the couch is extraordinary, which is certainly her impression of it. Though that is not spoken in so many words, nor is it clear this particular couch has any particular value to her other than as a symbol of arriving at a moment in time where she is not going to budge anymore, and this happens to be where he was physically located at the time she passed this point of no return in her head.

But then on IMDB it is just listed as Mother Couch, with an acknowledgement of the original title Mother, Couch -- which is still not accurate from the film itself. Mother Couch offers a new possible interpretation in terms of meaning, which is similar to "mother country." Like, this is the couch from which all the characters -- who include three grown children -- originate. Or more literally -- but then I suppose more figuratively -- she is the mother in a family of couches, and they are all baby couches, albeit grown baby couches.

So then I started to think about other possible punctuations that would give us other meanings.

The one I like best here is mother! Couch. And the reason for starting it in lower case is that it evokes Darren Aronofsky's mother!, another film with an exclamation point that befuddled people. It's appropriate because as this film goes along, it leaves behind some of the shackles of realism to provide us with material that is more chaotic and symbolic, or just projections of what the characters may be seeing in their minds, which is akin to the most common mode of mother! Then there's the connection that the last time I saw Burstyn as anguished as this on screen was when she was in Aronofsky's classic Requiem for a Dream.

Not that mother! Couch makes much sense considering our ordinary grammatical rules, but even less sense would be Mother Couch,. Yes, that would be ending the title with a comma. There I suppose the comma would serve sort of the same function as an ellipses, which suggest there is more to say on this topic -- and in watching the film, you would know for sure that there is. 

So how about going outside the punctuation marks already provided?

Mother? Couch. - This would be asking the question if this character is a mother, and then returning the answer that no, this character is a couch.

Mother Couch? - This would be questioning whether this is indeed the couch from which all the younger couches emerged, or do we have a case of mistaken identity.

Mother? Couch? - This would be where both the mother and the couch got lost in the woods, and as the kids are searching for them, they are calling out their names to see if they will answer.

(Side note: I always think it's funny when people are searching for other people in the movies and they have to individually call the names of each person they are searching for. Let's say there are four lost children. You have to rotate through calling each of the names, as though a lost child hearing this call would not respond unless their own name had been called. Maybe the parents just don't want to have to explain, after the fact, why one of the kids did not have their name called. Do the parents love that kid less than the other kids?)

Mother; Couch - The couch gives us additional understanding of the mother, but the two concepts don't have a close enough literal connection to be separated by something so simple as a comma.

Mother > Couch - It is better to have a mother than it is to have a couch.

Mother "Couch" - It is only a symbolic couch, and this is its mother.

¿Mother Couch? - The same movie, but dubbed into Spanish.

On my blog and in all my lists, I have decided I will refer to this movie as Mother, Couch!, with the last comma only for the structure of this sentence, and only the first comma and exclamation point as part of the title. That's how it appears in the movie.

However, when I put the label in on my blog, I will have to go with mother couch! -- which I do not see as the actual listed title anywhere -- because Blogger interprets the comma as a separation of two different labels, not part of a single label that happens to contain ambiguous punctuation. 

When space is at a premium

I was looking through my work notebook today and I saw some notes I scribbled while on the plane to Singapore last month, reminding me that I never actually wrote the post I intended to write from those notes.

So let's pretend it's still three weeks ago -- a much more innocent, simpler time -- and we'll go from there. 

When I was scrolling through the movies available on the plane, I noticed something funny. They didn't allocate enough space to fit in the full movie title for titles that were more than about four words long, which I get. It's some of the abbreviations themselves that I didn't get, since many of them were lacking the most important word, the word that really orients you and provides you the most relevant information about whether this is something you really want to watch -- namely, the franchise title.

And so it is that the following options appeared on the plane for my viewing pleasure:

The Chamber of Secrets
Let There Be Carnage
Here We Go Again!
The Meaning of Life
Order of the Phoenix
Prisoner of Azkaban
Return of the King
The Two Towers
The Half-Blood Prince

Of course, you know what franchises these movies are a part of, because you're a cinephile. But your average punter (to use the Australian term), who only watches movies when they're on a plane? Imagine their surprise when they click into the movie with the incredibly cool title Let There Be Carnage and find out that it's just another dumb superhero movie. 

If I'm this airline -- and it was nearly a month ago so I'm not even sure I remember which airline it was -- oh yeah it was JetStar -- I feel like I'm better off, on a limited word count, going with something like Harry Potter: The Chamber or Mamma Mia: Here We. The name of the franchise is actually what you really care about, not which of the many sequels it is. And if you then do care about which sequel it is, at least you have a couple unique words in the subtitle to help distinguish it from other sequels.

The funny thing about this was that they did not do this for the Spider-Man movies.

Each of the three Spider-Man movies available contained their full title, likely because each subtitle (No Way Home, Far From Home, Homecoming) contained just few enough additional characters to meet the space limitations. It seemed like an exception for this franchise, but it was more like a coincidence driven by the shorter and snappier Spider-Man titles. By contrast, titular brevity has not been the strong suit for the Harry Potter series. 

Blaxploitaudient: Coffy

This is the penultimate entry in my 2024 monthly series Blaxploitaudient, in which I watch a blaxploitation film I haven't seen each month.

It has not been a great last week for Black women.

They are just about the only voting demographic who did not show significant support for Donald Trump. The others all had their reasons, I suppose. I hope we don't have to examine those reasons through the ashes of a destroyed country. (Really, I'm still fine. In fact, I'm only regularly mentally engaging with the election whenever I sit down to write a new blog post.)

Black women? They supported Kamala Harris, perhaps because she was one of their number. But perhaps also because they can see things clearly in a way others cannot. 

So it felt good to watch a movie in which a Black woman was empowered to seek vengeance against those who would keep her down, of multiple races. She comes up against just about every other demographic -- the demographics that were acknowledged in 1973, I should say -- in Jack Hill's Coffy. 

In the big brawl/food fight that is the "funniest" part of this movie, she may even come up against another Black woman, though I think that's more collateral damage than the target of her righteous fury.

In her third movie in this series, Pam Grier stars as the title character, an emergency room nurse who pulls out a metaphorical spray gun of revenge after her younger sister is hospitalized with her heroin addiction. When riding in a car with the only good man we meet in this movie -- her honest police officer friend Carter, played by William Elliott -- she tells Carter that she wants to get everyone involved with delivering drugs into her poor sister's hands. He counters with the fact that it all leads back to "a farmer in Thailand," and when asked whether she was going to get them too, she responds "Well why not?"

And so she decides to go undercover as a prostitute, which will give her access to the various bad men she's picked out as the first recipients of her punishment. Only, it doesn't take very long for someone to get wise to her plans, putting her in harm's way herself.

Harm's way is a familiar place specifically for Pam Grier in blaxploitation movies. Thinking back to the first time I saw her in this series, Foxy Brown, I remembered being taken aback by the extent of the violence and debasement against her before she finally rises up as the victor at the end. In that movie she is actually drugged and raped. In this movie there is an attempting drugging and raping, intended to be followed by her murder, only Coffy had earlier switched out the dope with sugar, as part of the plan to point dealer King George (Robert DoQui) toward the grave even before she might have a chance to do it herself. Without actually being laid low by heroin, she is able to escape, and take out a couple henchmen with her.

But some of what befalls Coffy before that is even more vile, in a sense, and separates this from some of the other blaxploitation movies I've watched that have one foot clearly on the side of trying to be fun. When the gangster Vitroni (Allan Arbus) first has her in his room one night, having been impressed by her fight when taking on the other jealous prostitutes and covering them in salad and other edible artillery, he is rough with her and uses every combination of expletive and N-word to degrade her. She's supposed to be a prostitute, so she realizes this might be part of his kink -- or at least has to be pretend she thinks this as a form of deference to "her client." When he spits in her face, she's not so sure. And I might have audibly gasped. 

And then there's the uncomfortable stuff that does not have anything to do with her. Coffy is caught trying to kill Vitroni with a gun she smuggled into the room in a teddy bear, but he was wise to her and had his henchmen lurking. She frames King George for the setup -- which might be a bit of a dick thing to do, if King George weren't a monster -- so the same two henchmen pick up George the next day. He thinks it's a friendly visit, until one of the henchmen pulls a gun and they drive out to a remote location. I could not totally believe what I was about to see unfold: George with a noose around his neck, dragged behind their car, first on foot, then struggling on the ground, then just a lifeless corpse crashing into nearby obstructions as the car fishtails around corners. You get one final shot of what's left, though Hill mercifully does not hold it for more than a second.

Films like Coffy remind us that there was a fierce political agenda behind these movies, in addition to trying to give us entertainment. It's hard to imagine someone putting such imagery up on screen without an understanding of the moral responsibility that accompanies it. An image of a Black drug dealer being steadily murdered through a high-speed lynching, or a Black prostitute being spat on and called the N-word, could never be part of any but the most vile people's definition of fun. 

But it must have been a really tough balancing act, because there would be no point to make a blaxploitation film if it couldn't be profitable. You can say that about any film, really. Even in cases where they've wildly miscalculated a film's potential profitability, the desire was there to make money. The genre aspects that fall short of this level of confrontation are there to do that, but these others were not deemed to be deal breakers, and indeed they were not, since Coffy became one of the more iconic blaxploitation films. For Blacks living in America in 1973, there was no such thing as pure escapism, no such thing as joy without nearby pain swooping in to remind them of its presence. These films understand that, and they give audiences an outlet through the ultimate victory of the protagonist over the male forces that try to hold her down and kill her. (May we be so lucky with our outcome over the next four years.)

Coffy does lean into another dominant aspect of the genre, rarely so dominant as it is here. Even with a number of the other movies I've watched involving the sex industry, I've rarely seen such a parade of bare breasts in any movie. Let's go back to that "funniest" scene. When Coffy and a jealous prostitute played Lisa Ferringer, who is King George's girlfriend, have their "catfight" that involves a whole food setup at a party, and eventually involves about five other women, each other woman has her breasts exposed as she's dispatched. It's almost as though it's some sort of finishing move by Coffy, that the ripping of their dress to reveal their ladies is going to render them combat deficient. But we get lots of other topless shots throughout this movie, including Grier several times. Which maybe still surprises me, since once we got into the 1980s, it was always the supporting characters who did nudity in movies, rarely the lead.

Before I get to my summation, there's one other person I'd like to mention here, and that's Sid Haig. He's of course the horror icon who I first met in Rob Zombie's movies (and in Spider Baby: The Maddest Story Ever Told), but this is now also the third blaxploitation movie in which I've watched him this year. In fact, he's appeared in both of Grier's other movies, those being Foxy Brown and Black Mama, White Mama. He's part of a package deal with Jack Hill, it seems, as Hill also directed him in Spider Baby and Foxy Brown. Grier and Haig now become the two most regular participants in this series, appearing in a quarter of the films each -- or what will be a quarter once I've watched my 12th film next month. His comeuppance here is pretty great.

Although this series does not wrap up until next month, I'm going to be ending it on what I think will be a lighter note, so this seems like a good time to be reflective about what I've watched. Especially in light of the fact that a man was just put into power who abuses, disrespects and degrades women and people of color.

Coffy does not distinguish itself from the other movies I've watched this year in terms of the greater story arc and where the film ends up. In fact, it is sort of the prototypical blaxploitation movie, if what I've watched this year gives me any additional expertise to make that sort of assessment. There are prostitutes (real and fake). There are pimps. There are drug dealers. There are corrupt cops. There are mob bosses. And there's a woman -- yes, more of these than not involve a female avenging angel rather than a male -- who is going to rise above it all to set things right, narrowly escaping with her own life, and unable to escape without severe damage. (The image of Coffy at the end, with deep lacerations above her cleavage, is memorable.)

It does, however, distinguish itself in the details. Moments that are a bit more disquieting than they needed to be. A deliberate choice to direct our gaze toward something we can't unsee. A purposeful question about what it means to be watching something like this, even as it points toward a "happy" ending in which the female protagonist has achieved some measure of her ultimate goals. As we see from the image of an exhausted and quite injured Coffy walking down the beach, toward what I hope is a metaphorical sunrise, we know that she wishes she never had to be here in the first place. She'd much rather be saving lives in a hospital room than in the streets. 

I'm going to hope that the Black woman in America can rise up today, as she did 50 years ago -- even though we know much of that was fantasy. It's just a shame that Kamala Harris could not quite make it there. It reminds us again of all the malevolence we're up against. It is perhaps too strong to call today's male Trump voters a series of pimps, drug dealers, corrupt cops and mob bosses -- but I wish it were further off the mark than it may be.

I'll wrap up this series in December on what I hope is a lighter note: Shaft in Africa. Which somehow also came out in 1973. (Were there a hundred blaxploitation movies in cinemas in 1973?)

Watching Tuesday to mourn Tuesday

Every loss is like a little death.

The most despair I've felt recently, outside of Tuesday's loss, was when the Boston Celtics lost the 2022 NBA Finals to the Golden State Warriors, the ultimate proof that the experience of loss is utterly subjective. It was a luxury to feel sad over that outcome, as it really had no bearing on, was no commentary on, the world we live in. It was just a guy bummed out that the team he loved could not get over that last hump. (A hump they did make it over two years later.) Nevertheless, I remember telling my family, even a few days later, that I knew it would be okay eventually.

Ha.

The results of the presidential election should have thrown me into much deeper despair than that, and my intellectual mind knows that it's in there, somewhere. It may come out in some strange way later that I'm not expecting. I think of 2016, when I broke down sobbing while watching the very thematically appropriate The Purge: Election Year, an outpouring of emotion so profound that I ended up ranking the film in my top ten for the year just for touching me so deeply, something it likely never would have done in more even times. 

But I've continued to do well with the "putting one foot in front of the other" pragmatic approach that I espoused in my last post. Mind over matter. Mind over matter. It's working, and my mind has been plagued by nothing worse than a distant sense of disappointment as I have been able to get joy out of the small things in life.

As you recall, I returned on Friday night to watching movies, and selected something that I thought didn't have much chance to be a great love or a great disappointment. On Saturday, I dared to go for a choice that had the potential to reach the same rarefied air as The Purge: Election Year, my year-end top ten.

But it couldn't be just any acclaimed 2024 film. I wanted it to be on-the-nose in terms of dealing with despair, for better or worse.

So I went with Daina O. Pusic's Tuesday, a film that deals exclusively with actual death. It also deals with Death with a capital D, as a character in the film in the form of a talking macaw parrot. 

I'd wanted to see this for many months now, as at least one of the Filmspotting hosts listed in his top five films of the year as of the midpoint of the year, in a tradition they've been doing for several years. Actually it was their guest who for sure listed it, but at least one of the hosts may have as well as they all admired it greatly. It was also one of my potential viewings at MIFF this year, only the timing didn't work out.

But choosing this movie had other reasoning. For one, it seemed like an intentional echo to the movie I watched a few days after the 2016 election, Arrival, which also deals with the death of a child. And though that movie has never quite impacted me the way it has impacted other people, I recognized that watching it during a time of mourning was probably the best way of getting something out of it, not the worst way, as it might be with other films. 

Then there was the fact that Tuesday stars Julia Louis-Dreyfus, a huge champion of progressive causes. I got a number of emails from Louis-Dreyfus during campaign season -- maybe even before campaign season -- and I know she's hurting right now, just like the rest of us.

Well, my reaction to Tuesday was similar to my reaction to Arrival. I was very impressed by its craft. I understood it to be touching without actually feeling my own emotions well up to the same degree. And I ended up on a mere 3.5 star rating on Letterboxd.

Movies that take big swings like Tuesday can impress you with their big swings even while failing to penetrate through in that way you are hoping. I find that a person's feelings about a movie can be boiled down most succinctly to "when you know, you know." In other words, you shouldn't have to convince yourself that a movie worked like gangbusters for you. Gangbusters is a state of affairs that cannot be faked.

And so although I toyed with the four-star rating for Tuesday, I decided this was a conflict between "should" and "did." I thought I should love Tuesday, but in actual reality, I did not. 

Some of you would, and therefore, now is probably a good time to watch it. There's some really big ideas in here, and they are all in concert with how progressives are feeling right now. There's very direct textual material about coming to grips with an impending loss, and then when the loss actually occurs, figuring out how to soldier on rather than letting it consume you. In fact, the film's very final shot is probably the kick in the pants all liberals need right now. 

The period of immediate mourning is not over for most of us. We probably need that kick in the pants a week from now, rather than right now.

But when you're ready for it, Tuesday is ready to give it to you.

A return to watching movies

When Donald Trump won the presidency on Tuesday, which was Wednesday my time, I vowed not to repeat the mistakes of 2016.

Namely, there was no way I was watching a movie that night.

In 2016, over the next couple nights, I watched the movies Mascots and I Saw the Light. Neither of those were movies I probably would have liked very much even without post-election malaise, but in the dark shadow of that awful time, I hated them. I was then forced out to see Arrival sooner than I might have liked because I was on deadline to review it. I didn't hate Arrival, of course, but it's possible I would have liked it more if my mind hadn't felt diseased by grief.

This time, I was just going to take a couple nights off from watching movies.

Now, I had to watch something. Yes I could finish the night reading, or listening to music, or whatever the alternatives are to the boob tube. But those seemed like situations where my mind was much more inclined to go down rabbit holes it did not want to go down. Pass.

But anything I would watch, whether it was a movie or TV, would be something that would taste sour to me, even if it was good.

So I watched three episodes of Friends. 

This didn't come out of the blue. I started a periodic project of rewatching the series at some point earlier this year, can't remember when exactly. A friend of mine did this a couple years ago, which planted the seed, and that seed germinated into starting that project myself. 

But I haven't been doing it intensely. For example, it hasn't ever taken the place of an evening where I might otherwise watch a movie. The project's role has been to finish off an evening when I got home late, or had some other project that occupied me until 10:30 or 11. Cap off the night with Ross, Rachel, Joey, Chandler, Phoebe and Monica, and steadily make it through the series that way.

On Wednesday night, I chose to watch three episodes, which are shorter than a movie. I probably could have watched one more and made it feature length. In fact it was the classic three episodes in Season 2 where Rachel leaves the drunken message telling Ross she's over him, leading to their first impassioned kiss at Central Perk, which he immediately screws up by making a list of pros and cons about Rachel and Julie that Rachel finds, and then the episode after that. 

And this helped immensely, swaddling me in a blanket of some sort of comfort. I even laughed a few times. I watched another one the next night, along with the second episode of the Netflix series about the 2004 Boston Red Sox, The Comeback.

The irony is not lost on me. Friends is a show featuring, essentially exclusively, white characters. Symbolically, it is not the thing I should have watched on a night when white people elected the worst white person of all time. (The worst American white person, anyway.) (And yes, I am considering him worse than serial killers and other awful people because his potential to inflict damage is so much more widespread.) It's not something I should have watched if I wanted to symbolically protest what had happened. 

But comfort is comfort, and this comfort got me through two nights. And besides, there was no one to judge the symbolism or lack thereof other than me. (And now you, because I'm telling you about it.)

Honestly, though, I am doing better than I was last time. That's for several reasons:

1) A few weeks ago I reminded myself of a few important things about the candidacy of Kamala Harris, in preparation for this possible outcome. I reminded myself that the replacement of a presidential candidate from a major political party only 100 days before the election is essentially unprecedented in American history, if not actually unprecedented. The conditions of desperation that exist to make that sort of move must be so profound that it's effectively a Hail Mary. Probably 95% of Hail Mary passes in football are not caught. That this one almost was was a miracle.

2) People, in general, seem to be racist and sexist, so I should not be surprised by this. I was surprised in 2016. I didn't want to be surprised again. (The optimist in me takes a lot of hits, unfortunately.)

3) I vowed to do what I called "robot mode." I would intentionally divorce myself from feelings of sorrow and despair in order to model composure for my kids and to trick my own brain into feeling better than it actually did. It worked. In fact, I am surprised at how well it worked. By forcing myself to try to feel better, I actually did feel better. And this was even without intentionally avoiding coverage of the election on social media or the news. I still haven't read many news stories, but I've read some, and I've engaged on social media about it. All while feeling less sick to my stomach and more able to be productive. I am now a firm believer in mind over matter, if I wasn't before.

4) I told myself if Trump won the election, my reaction would not be shock and rage but acerbic laughter. If a country knowingly votes in someone like this, you just have to laugh because it just means human beings are weak and docile and mean. 

With all these things combining to give me actually a pretty okay mental state, I thought I could have returned to watching movies on Thursday night. But I allowed myself one more night to be sure.

Then I dipped my toe in the water with a movie that I doubted would be either a big hit or a big miss, and I ended up being right about that.

On Friday night I watched the new Netflix time travel serial killer movie, Time Cut. And yes I did think about how there was a time travel serial killer movie on Amazon last year called Totally Killer. And yes I did think fondly about the real-world desirability of having a time machine right about now.

The movie was almost the perfect three-star viewing experience: A clever enough story of a watchable cast of people who were unfamiliar to me, with a little bit of heart and some interesting causation conundrums, but not excelling enough in any of these areas to truly be memorable. In other words, just what I needed to get back on the horse.

What will I be watching tonight? Is it safe to watch something I actually might love?

I don't know, but my mind is there I think.

Look this is an awful time. Anyone who mopes for the next two weeks is well within their rights. Anyone who mopes for the next four years is well within their rights. It's that bad.

But for me? Mind over matter. Movies over despair. 

My last post did not age well

Let's fire the worst candidate for this job

When The Apprentice came out a few weeks ago, I wanted to see it in the first few days of its release. I wanted to contribute, in whatever small way I could, to the downfall of Donald Trump. Even just a ticket bought -- or in my case, a ticket acquired for free with my critics card -- might be one more nail in this man's political coffin. Better yet, I'd review the movie, hopefully like it, and use my small bully pulpit to remind the world of the sort of charlatan that we could not afford to elect to public office again.

But my wife wanted me to hold it until I could watch it with her.

If he wins the election today, I don't know if I can ever watch it. It may be too painful. That's what happened with Weiner, the 2016 documentary that I had intended to watch, but which now only reminds me of the thousand small factors that contributed to him getting elected the first time. 

But I don't think that's going to happen.

I think Kamala Harris will win the presidency today, becoming the first woman ever to do that. It'll be vengeance for Hillary Clinton, but for also for all the women Donald Trump has wronged in his 78 years on this planet.

It will also be a watershed moment for a populace that I think has more good in it than bad. It will be an embrace of the different face of the United States in the 21st century, and all the beauty of that different face. 

I have always contended that the human race, despite occasional evidence to the contrary, continues to evolve in the direction of enlightenment. Issues that once were a strength for bad people are now not even issues. For example, did you hear anyone talk about gay marriage even once in this campaign season? To say nothing of the limited range of what we believed was the correct sort of human experience a hundred years ago, and a hundred years before that.

I believe it will continue today. And with any luck -- and to also finish on a note of hope, not a note of the sourness of what Kamala calls "the other guy" -- this will be the face of our next president:

If there is even one persuadable voter reading these words, please get out there today and make it happen. 

Mid-wedding movie

Yesterday I ended my longest yet drought between weddings, since I attended my first wedding in September of 1994. Yes, I have a list so I know these sorts of things.

Don't pity me, dear reader. As a 51-year-old, I don't expect to get invited to many weddings. Most of my contemporaries married around the time I did or are never going to.

Fortunately, in Australia I have become friends with a decent number of people who are not my contemporaries, and are at least ten years younger than I am. The one who was getting married on Sunday is 15 years my junior, and that helped me not build any further on the seven years and eight months it had been since my last wedding in March of 2017, involving a guy who is 13 years younger than I am.

The thing is, this wedding was unlike any I have ever been to in that there was a large time window in between the ceremony at the church and the reception. Usually these things more or less run into each other, with no more than an hour gap in between. The gap on Sunday was 3.5 hours between the end of the church service and the start of alcohol-related celebrations. I don't really get the logic behind that, but I was just happy to be there. 

If the wedding had been closer to my house, I could conceivably have gone home in between and then gone back. But it was more than 30 minutes away by car, and because I intended to drink at the reception, I got there by a bus and a train, with plans to get home the same way. 

Then there was the fact that another friend of mine was coming for both the service and the reception. We were effectively each other's dates, and he was coming from a lot farther away than I was. 

So what was my call?

To see a movie in the middle of the wedding, of course.

The wedding and reception were both just a short walk from a nearby shopping center -- a short yet painful walk as I was breaking in new shoes that were killing my heels -- and this shopping center came equipped with a Hoyts cinema. As luck would have it, the 3:30 showing of Robert Zemeckis' Here would perfectly kill the remaining time before the reception began at 5:30, with the 2 p.m. end of the service having given us just enough time to walk over and get a beer and a small bite to eat before the movie. 

When I first thought of this gambit, I thought it was unlikely to succeed -- or not without some guilt on my side, anyway. My friend and I bond on the basis of baseball and our former shared workplace, not on movies. He tells me he only sees four or five movies a year, both in and out of the cinema. 

But facts are facts. Due to the, in my view, slightly awkward way the various wedding activities were timed, it required a plan for the portion in between. I'm sure some people who lived closer did go home, but the rest of us had to figure out what we were going to do. And according to another former coworker who was at the wedding, who worked with the groom at their next job and was there with a contingent from that workplace, we made the right call. He said they passed the time initially at the same place we had our beer, which we knew because we ran into them, but then engaged in sort of aimless and fruitless shopping that was a less than ideal way to pass the time. Two hours can be quite a long time to walk around in a shopping center if you have no specific goal in mind and don't want to be encumbered by any potential purchases for the remainder of the evening. 

I was also initially worried that the start time for the movie was just a tad too late to get us back for the start of the reception, which indeed it was. Although the movie is less than two hours long, Hoyts plays a ton of ads, and it had already turned 5:30 by the time the credits started. We still had to get out of the theater proper and walk back, though given the worsening blisters on my heels and our impending potential lateness, we opted for an Uber instead. 

When we arrived at around 5:45, the dining hall was not yet ready to seat us, so we essentially missed just a few minutes of people milling around in the lobby with a drink. 

As for the experience of going to the movie itself, it was a bit surreal to be sitting there in our suits and ties at the movies. It prompted me to recount the only other such experience I think I've had, which was in 1999 when I was in journalism school. My classmates and I attended a funeral for a classmate's father, and then attained a necessary release by going straight to a showing of Office Space. 

Given the way my shoes were murder on my feet, I was also glad to have the chance to kick them off for two hours as we reclined and watched the movie. My friend said he didn't mind, so I availed myself of that option right quick. 

Perhaps making a small 11th hour attempt to redirect the plans, my friend said he also wouldn't mind sitting in the Sporting Globe -- the sports bar where we got our beer -- for the remaining time before the reception. Although I am usually susceptible to such subtle attempts to steer things in another direction, I held firm in this case, making the sound argument that there was no point in drinking another two to three beers at this establishment when all the free alcohol we wanted was surely waiting for us at the reception. 

And then I also just went for honesty: I need something to review this week, and the newest film by Robert Zemeckis would make a golden opportunity for me to do that without otherwise inconveniencing my family with a trip to the theater.

I didn't know a lot about the movie beforehand, only that Tom Hanks and Robin Wright appear de-aged in it. (It strikes me as a little ironic, considering that Wright made an entire film about signing over the digital rights to her likeness so it could be repurposed for any use, which is Ari Folman's The Congress.) Once the movie started, I realized this was not even its most prominent "gimmick," as the entire film is shot from the perspective of a single spot of land that comes to be the living room of a house somewhere on the east cost of the U.S. (Reading up on it a bit, I am convinced that the exact location is intended to be vague.) The camera never moves from its perspective, but the action jumps between eras to show what was happening on that exact spot of land -- which I naturally like, given its similarity to the narrative choice made in David Lowery's A Ghost Story.

Given that it involves key moments in the lives of a couple different families, Hanks and Wright among them, I also found it a profound thematic companion to attending a wedding, which is one of those key moments. At the reception we later found out that the bride is due to give birth to a baby girl in a couple of months, which made it all the more poignant in retrospect. 

Here had the potential to be one of my favorites of the year, though I think it will fall a bit short of that mark. It's still quite good though. I was hoping my friend would feel a bit more strongly toward it than he did, because of course that would be a validation of my decision to take us there. He described it as "pretty good," which either could have been his honest assessment or a slight politeness. I think we were both glad we saw it, though, especially if the alternative were aimless shopping as I continued to complain more and more about my feet, or dropping a small fortune on alcohol that we would get for free if we waited two hours.

I'll have a review up in a couple days if you want my further thoughts on Here. 

The movie most shown in other movies

"They're coming to get you, Barbra."

There are a lot of quotes we throw around from movies -- "I see dead people," "We're gonna need a bigger boat," etc. -- but steadily gaining on those, building up its cultural currency over the course of 56 years, is the most recognizable line of dialogue from 1968's Night of the Living Dead. 

The familiarity of the quote is not due to any higher number of people seeing the movie than have ever seen it, though I would argue that it's required viewing for any cinephile, and horror fans in particular. In fact, I would argue that I don't even need to argue that, because it is self evident.

No, we all know this quote now because of just how many other movies it appears in. 

A movie showing footage from another movie should be the ultimate sign of respect for that second movie, but it also depends on the context of why the movie is being watched by the characters. For example, Citizen Kane may be the greatest movie of all time, but there are not a lot of scripts that require the characters to be watching it for narrative purposes. And though there are plenty of contexts where we see a small snippet of a familiar movie playing in the real world of a different movie, the most common, by far, is characters watching a scary movie on TV when something scary is about to happen to them in their real lives. (Seven times out of ten, maybe more than that, that scary thing is their death.)

By overwhelming consensus in the filmmaking community, the most likely film to be used in this context is George Romero's seminal zombie film, the one that launched a genre that today has over 1,937 entries. (Note: Number may not be accurate.)

I started thinking about this topic early last month when characters in one of the movies I watched were watching Night of the Living Dead. Doing a quick google search now, I find that this movie was the original Halloween II from 1981, when NOTLD was 13 years old and was already firmly established as a cultural touchstone. To round out the month, the characters in All Hallows' Eve -- which I did watch late on Halloween night after bypassing it the night before in favor of Oddity -- can also briefly be seen watching it. I can't remember if the Barbra line made its appearance in the Halloween II footage, but it definitely does not in All Hallows' Eve -- perhaps considered too on-the-nose by 2013.

What prompted me to actually write this post was watching Borderlands on Amazon Prime last night. The Eli Roth film -- which started off terribly before salvaging itself into merely misguided -- has nothing to do, as far as I could tell, with zombies, though there are some mindless masked characters that sort of resemble war boys from Mad Max: Fury Road. Whatever the reason, Amazon delivered Night of the Living Dead as the next film up in my queue, and because I did not stop it, the movie started to play. 

It's been a long time since I've seen Night of the Living Dead. Or I thought it had been -- my notes now tell me I saw it in 2015, which I don't really remember. In any case, given that it had been on my mind, I was tempted to sit there and watch it. And might have, had it not been 1 a.m., which is actually on the early side for when I've been finishing movies recently. (I try to tell myself that the naps on my too-comfortable couch contribute to my total amount of sleep that night, but I'm not sure it works that way.) And now that I think of it, there's another reason it was on my mind in October, since I saw Ganja & Hess, which stars NOTLD lead Duane Jones.

Sense won out, but I couldn't turn it off without watching the "They're coming to get you, Barbra" line. So I forwarded through the opening few minutes of chit chat between Barbra (Judith O'Dea) and Johnny (Russell Streiner) before getting to that line I'd heard uttered in so many other movies. Hearing it felt almost surreal, the way your mind snaps to a different sort of attention when you're listening to a famous speech from history, and then the part that always gets quoted suddenly arrives.

I watched a few more minutes to see Johnny's immediate comeuppance for his mischievous torturing of his sister, and then forced myself to turn it off.

I wanted to see if there was a way to get a definitive list of the other movies where NOTLD gets watched, but even Google's AI -- which takes over in any search situation whether you want it to or not -- could not give me more than a few titles. But given the age of those titles, and the fact that I haven't seen some of them, this is just the tip of the iceberg on the true results list.

Here was what the AI said:

There isn't much info about movies where characters watch Night of the Living Dead, but here are some other movies that reference the 1968 film:

• Christiane F. (1981)
• Halloween II: (1981)
• Terror in the Aisles: (1984)
• I Drink Your Blood: (1971)
• Let's Scare Jessica to Death: (1971)
• Dracula vs. Frankenstein: (1971)

I can't be sure those are characters watching the movie, and in some cases they likely wouldn't be. But I've seen only two of those movies, Halloween II and Let's Scare Jessica to Death, and I feel I have seen this trope -- it's common enough that we can upgrade it to a trope -- in probably a dozen films.

Oooh, I did a slightly different search and got a slightly different result. Check it out:

Here are some films that feature characters watching Night of the Living Dead:

• Fade to Black (1980): Eric watches this movie during a night out
• Halloween II (1981): The Elrods and a security guard watch this movie
• Document of the Dead (1980): This film features Night of the Living Dead
• Christiane F. (1981): This movie features Night of the Living Dead in a cinema room at a "sound" club
• Terror in the Aisles (1984): This film features Night of the Living Dead

You can see the AI teething here, as in some cases it is able to give specific information about what's happening in the movie, and in others it just notes a positive hit. Also it's now clear that the search is in some way limited by the age of the film, or forcing itself to only show a subsection of the results given that an AI search may not have been what I wanted in the first place. But this search gives us another two films that didn't come up in the previous search, neither of which I've seen.

I won't continue with slight alterations of these search terms to see what else I can get.

But you know it to be true. If a screenwriter is trying to prime a character to suffer an "ironic" death -- if it's by an actual zombie in the movie, even better -- then he or she will have the character watch Night of the Living Dead, and more likely than not include Russell Streiner's iconic line.

Now that I'm primed to watch this movie, and I know it's on Amazon, I may have to select my own late-night rewatch in the next few days, despite having missed Halloween. I'll just have to hope there isn't some sort of reanimated rotting corpse outside my window ready to get me.