MIFF: Duelling masters at my MIFF Astor debut

Asghar Farhadi and Hirokazu Kore-eda have a shared lineage in my personal film history as well as my personal MIFF history.

Both had a film in the early part of last decade that bowled me over, the first I had seen by the director in each case. For Farhadi, it was A Separation, my #1 of 2011. For Kore-eda, it was Like Father, Like Son, my #2 of 2014 (though its release year was 2013 in Japan). 

Both then popped up regularly at MIFF, each time feeling like a slam dunk in terms of films I wanted to be sure I got on my schedule. In the case of Farhadi, that meant seeing The Salesman in 2016 and Everybody Knows in 2018. With Kore-eda, I saw After the Storm in 2016, Shoplifters in 2018 and Monster in 2023. And in each case, only one of their films I saw was not in the very upper reaches of my list that year, as Everybody Knows was my #3 of 2018, and Shoplifters and Monster finished #11 and #4 of their respective years.

If Kore-eda got ahead of Farhadi, it's only because Kore-eda is prolific and Farhadi is not, though Farhadi is also from a country that punishes filmmakers for defying the government. In fact, MIFF in 2016 and 2018 both featured a film from each director. I'm not going to say they synched up like women spending a lot of time together and getting on the same cycles for their period, but if you want to say that, I won't disagree with you.

When I heard both directors were again having a film in 2026, I knew I had to get tickets for both. And when I learned both films were playing on the same day, a plan started to take shape.

And when I learned both films were playing, six hours apart, at the Astor Theatre on Saturday, August 8th, a plan really started to take shape.

You see, this would be my first time attending the Astor as part of MIFF. About damn time, I'd say.

The Astor Theatre is an old single-screen movie house in South Yarra with a ton of history. I don't see a lot of movies there, in part because it specializes in repertory screenings, in part because it does not take my critics card, and in part because of its location (more on that in a moment). But it's the place I saw The Hateful Eight in its properly projected 70 mm format, and I've seen a few repertory titles there as well. It's the kind of place you feel like it's a treat to attend.

The reason I don't go to its MIFF showings? Well, it's not in the CBD.

The benefit most MIFF venues have -- outside of the regional Victoria screenings -- is that you can ping pong between a half-dozen different theaters in Melbourne's central business district. If you are trying to go to two back to back, you need at most about 25 minutes to hoof it between the theaters, even if it's between the IMAX at the Melbourne Museum (where I saw I Saw the TV Glow a few years ago) and ACMI, which are probably the two venues most distant from each other.

You can't hoof it to the Astor at all. South Yarra is at best a train ride from the CBD, and enough of a train ride that you couldn't make it there after another movie in the CBD unless you had at least an hour between the two showings. Not that it would take you an hour, necessarily, just that you'd want to allow that much time to make sure nothing went wrong. After all, mechanized transport is outside of your control the way travelling on foot is not. You wouldn't feel good planning a night around it, in any case.

But two showings on a Saturday, when the CBD doesn't even need to enter to it? Now that was something I could go for.

Kore-eda's Sheep in the Box was playing at noon, and Farhadi's Parallel Tales was playing at 6. So all I had to do was leave my house around 11 to make sure I had plenty of time to get there, and then bring some stuff with me to kill the 3+ hours between the two movies. And because South Yarra and neighboring St. Kilda are nice places to spend an afternoon, it sounded quite nice to just make a day of it -- unlike the night before, when my MIFF downtime was more nebulous and unsatisfying.

So I found parking more easily than I thought, though only between movies could I confirm that I had, indeed, parked legally, and that there wasn't a ticket waiting for me. I know the general rule of thumb is that if you can't see a street sign that speaks to how long you can park, you can park there forever, but my spot was only a few blocks from the Astor, so it seemed too good to be true.

My first impression of the Astor, which I had not attended in any form (could it be?) for almost ten years, is that it was an heir apparent to the Comedy Theatre (which no longer shows MIFF movies) in terms of the comfort of the seats. Which is to say, no comfort at all. Like that other theater, the Astor seems to have most of its original fixtures, including hard wrought-iron seats with cushions that hardly meet the definition. The bigger problem, for a tall guy like me, was that there was no good place between the seats in the row in front to wedge my foot, which I often need to do during a movie. Suffice it to say that I learned my lesson in the first movie, and in the second one, opted for a chair that had no row in front of it, and plenty of room to stretch my legs.

And so started Sheep in the Box, which was, sadly, firmly in the lower half of the nine Kore-eda films I've seen. 

The director is known as a humanistic director of realistic family dramas, which places him as an heir to Ozu, though I don't know if that thought is original to me. In saying that, I forget that one of the first films he ever made, After Life, was about a posthumous bureaucratic waystation, making it not realistic in the slightest. However, let's just say that all his other films I've seen are safely within the bounds of the realism of our present day world.

Sheep in the Box deviates from that in that it is set in the near future, where drone delivery has become common, and refrigerators try to keep you to your diet. And unfortunately, its actual subject is derivative in a way a film by Kore-eda rarely is. 

The film is basically Steven Spielberg's AI: Artificial Intelligence, if it was made by a Japanese director who liked realistic modern-day films that are humanistic at their core. It imagines a company that can make replacements for your loved ones, specifically your children, should they die prematurely, and it invites all the familiar questions of whether an AI can have a soul and the capacity to love -- and whether we have the capacity to love it in return.

I'm not going to say this film is clumsy, nor that it isn't mildly touching in spots. But my concern was that Kore-eda doesn't do enough with the ideas that I personally first remember thinking about in AI, especially given that the 25 years since AI have featured a lot of other variations on that theme, particularly in the last five years. Nearly every director is freaking out about AI these days, and I guess I just don't feel like Kore-eda has ever, in his career, done what "nearly every director" is likely to do. He brings his own touch to it, to be sure, but it wasn't enough for me, and the film went on for 20 minutes longer than I thought it should.

After checking to be sure I didn't get a parking ticket -- and that was just for my ease of mind, since I wouldn't have bothered to move it once I'd already gotten the ticket -- I continued walking in that direction to St. Kilda, which took another 30 minutes or so of walking. Which was good, because I needed to get my steps in for the day.

I got to a cafe just as it was about to close, but not before they made me a flat white and an almond croissant. (They didn't make the croissant fresh. They already had it.) I noodled around on my computer while enjoying these, and would have liked to linger longer, except that people want to get out of there ASAP when they close their cafe for the day. They didn't rush me, but I rushed myself.

So then I spent another hour-and-a-half on the beach. This was really nice, as I set myself up at a picnic table for a restaurant that was closed, meaning they weren't using it. They didn't rope off their seating area, so I didn't feel like I was trespassing or anything. And I took my shoes off and kneaded my feet in the sand, which added to a sense of relaxation. I caught up on more computer stuff, including writing part of yesterday's post about my first night of MIFF. Sooner than I imagined, it was time to get back, especially if I wanted to grab a kebab on my way back for my dinner.

I again arrived in plenty of time and even ran into someone I knew in the lobby of the Astor. I caught up with him a little bit about film and MIFF in general, though I then extricated myself, because he was with a friend and I didn't want to be a third wheel. 

Farhadi's Parallel Tales, like Sheep in the Box, was a bit of a deviation for the director. We say we want our favorite directors to expand their repertoire and not limit themselves, but do we really? I'm not so sure.

At its core, the film still has the sort of "he said she said" social dynamics of what I have often referred to as the domestic thrillers he makes, whose conflicts arise from semantics and misunderstandings. That's there in this film, but it's a bit more high concept, which I didn't think suited him as well. And sadly, the film, set in Paris, contains zero Iranian content. 

I thought the first character we meet, played by Adam Bessa, might be Iranian by heritage, but IMDB says nothing about that. He's "just" a Frenchman, it would appear. And we know the others are French, because they are played by such French legends as Vincent Cassel, Isabelle Huppert and (in just one scene) Catherine Deneuve. 

It's not the first time Farhadi has made films outside Iran, though The Past at least contained Iranian characters. Everybody Knows does not contain any Iranian characters and is set in Spain, but in that case, I don't know, it just worked for me. (I'm sure Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz had something to do with that.)

This one? I missed the Iranian connection for sure. It felt like "just" a French film, which was not what I was looking for.

And the meta story worked for me only sporadically as well. Without going into too much of a synopsis, let's just say Huppert plays an aging writer whose publisher (Deneuve) tells her her books are old-fashioned and won't sell. So she essentially throws out her current manuscript, which is a love triangle based on what she imagines is happening in an apartment across the way in which the two men and one woman produce foley work for films. Adam, the character played by the aforementioned Adam Bassa, is an ex-con who has been hired to be sort of an assistant to the aging writer, and he essentially fishes the manuscript out of the trash and passes it off as his own. He uses it has an excuse to meet the female foley artist, who has caught his fancy, and a "life imitates art" situation arises out of her imagined story in the manuscript and the actual reality of the three foley artists.

Parallel Tales deserves more than that quick synopsis if we want to pull apart everything it's doing, but I've got to be honest with you: I've got to go make dinner.

Suffice it to say that although the film grew on me as it went, and I found there to be some interesting elements in how the story wraps up, before then I did not get enough of a sense of what makes this distinctly an Asghar Farhadi film. Like, I wouldn't say I was surprised if you told me he'd directed it, but that certain something that has allowed almost all of his films to profoundly impact me -- save the aforementioned The Salesman -- just wasn't present here in the quantity I wanted it to be.

Okay, I now have almost a week off from MIFF before I return for another double feature next Friday. Back to our regular programming for a few days. 

MIFF: Expensive hamburgers and long downtimes

It used to be that when I went to the Melbourne International Film Festival, I felt like the time between when my work gets out and when the first film starts was full of food, errands, and other activities that only enhanced the experience of watching a pair of movies before the end of the night. Walking through the city on a brisk winter night, it felt like the world was my oyster.

For my first MIFF movies of 2026, well, there was a lot of thumb twiddling and downtime. 

I don't know whether it had to do with leaving work earlier than I usually do on a MIFF night (in other words, on time, rather than staying late) or a later start time for the first movie (6:45), but I found myself with more than an hour after I finished eating but before the movie started, during which I had no idea what to do with myself. (I ended up messing around on my computer unproductively, which was pretty unsatisfying.)

And before that, I spent a fortune on burgers.

Five Guys is a burger concept that began taking off in the U.S. right around the time I was leaving back in 2013. I assume the chain existed long before then -- in fact, the internet tells me it started up in 1986. But I'm guessing it was one of those things that was regional for at least the first 20 years of its existence, before it finally started creeping to areas I lived.

Anyway, I never tried it before moving, and only in the past year or so have I noticed there are restaurants open here. Fancying myself a bit of a burger connoisseur -- or at least the less sophisticated sounding "lover of burgers" -- I had been wanting to check it out.

But a number of times in a row now, I've gone to my favorite ramen place after work but before a movie, and when I continued walking on, it was only then that I remembered the Five Guys was just two doors down. This happened most recently on Wednesday when I went to see Ice Cream Man. 

Only two days later, it was easy to remember that I wanted to try Five Guys, so I took out a second mortgage on my house and bought a burger, shake and fries. 

The main sticker shock came from the burger, which was priced at either $26.50 for the bigger one or $24.50 for the smaller one. Now I should say that this wasn't just the plain burger, it was a bacon cheeseburger -- I could have gotten the plain one for a few dollars less. But I decided if I wanted to give Five Guys a real shot, I should get the sort of burger I would normally order, and that would have bacon on it. 

During a little banter with the checkout woman over the price -- very jovial on my side, I can assure you -- she explained that it was the ability to add as many as ten extra toppings, free of charge, that made the burger more expensive. I say, keep your toppings and charge me $3 less for the burger.

In the same vein of wanting to give the place a fair shot, I also ordered a small fries and a peanut butter milkshake.

It was all fine.

In fact, everything was pretty big, especially the "small" fries. Maybe they inherited the sizes from the U.S. too. So I don't really feel like I didn't get enough food for the $40 (!) in total I spent on it. 

But the reality is, it didn't make my toes curl with its special mixture of flavors, and so I can just as easily say that this is probably both my first and last Five Guys visit. Not because I would never eat there again, but because the prices are just so inflated that I'd rather have a nice Chinese sit down meal in neighboring Chinatown (which I also plan to do during MIFF) than fast food burgers for the same price.

The slightly less than satisfying meal was followed immediately by the realization that I had too much time and not enough to do. Sometimes when I'm in this situation, I go and lie on the lawn outside the State Library, but they had it fenced off to allow the grass to recover from the footsteps of 10,000 feet. So I ended up just sitting on a bench next to it, a bit glumly, with my computer. After about five minutes, six police officers started some very elongated and gentlemanly arrest proceedings for a motorcyclist who had no plates and a suspended license. He ended up sitting right next to me on the bench. I might have moved except the whole thing was, in fact, very civilized.

When it finally came time for the movies, I didn't like either of the first two movies as much as I would have liked. 

The first was my annual choice for "outsider animation," of which I try to get at least one every year. (In fact, I prefer it to be exactly one, but there is another coming later in this festival.) It's from China and is called Light Pillar, and though I enjoyed a lot of the experience of watching it, halfway through I decided I was glad I wouldn't be reviewing it. (Forgetting, of course, that I planned to give you a mini review here.)

There isn't much in the way of narrative, but the film takes place largely in the winter and at a basically abandoned movie studio somewhere in China. We see the staff do mundane activities like lean against walls, smoke cigarettes, and suck drops of snot back up their nose. (One character is doing this every time we see him, which is unnerving.) Their overlord bosses -- really just middle management functionaries, one of whom is never seen without a microphone, even when it doesn't make any sense for him to have one -- come through and try to inspire them by telling them that this year, they will get paid every three months rather than every six. Guilted into lackluster applause over this, the employees applaud with zero enthusiasm.

We follow one guy, who seems to be a wallflower teenager, and talks just about as much as anyone, which is to say, almost none at all. Small laugh-out-loud absurdities occur all over the place, including, for example, the fact that there is a Roomba that lines up along with the rest of the employees, and wordlessly engages in the same activities they engage in. The director, Zao Xu, has captured a great sense of a mouldering future, where everything is dingy but the technology is advanced enough that you realize it isn't quite right now. The fact that snow is covering everything makes it even more desolate and lonely, though I suppose, if you are of the right mindset, oddly cozy as well.

The "hook" of this setup is that our main character has an escape from this dreary dead-end world through a VR headset, and when he goes into the VR world, it's our world. Or, not exactly our world as this is also quite expressionistic, and filmed so. But it's live action, and in this version of the world, he can come to life a bit, he can venture toward another online character who interests him, and he can try to become the best version of himself. 

What I would have said in a review if I'd written one is that this is a clever setup, but the animated world is so drily funny and rich that we feel a little bit disappointed anytime we see real human actors, even if this is undeniably adding thematic dimension and distinctiveness to the project. I'd have also said that I started off kind of loving this film, and as it became clear to me that it wasn't going to have a satisfying payoff, I became increasingly uncertain about my own reaction. I am also having strange difficulty remembering all the details of it, which could have been the result of nodding off every once in a while. So it feels a bit like a dream, but a dream that I mostly enjoyed.

After another hour's break in which I loaded back up on drinks and snacks for the second movie, I returned upstairs into Hoyts Melbourne Central -- it occurs to me that I hadn't named the venue previously -- for my second of a Hoyts double feature. And if the whole first evening was a bit sluggish, that could be because Hoyts is kind of a disappointing place to start MIFF. It's not one of the unique venues that only get used for movies during MIFF, which presumably have other uses that keep them in business during the rest of the year. Hoyts is just a regular movie theater multiplex that I visit to see regular movies, having just seen The Odyssey and Spider-Man: Brand New Day there, and it doesn't feel very festivalish. 

So the 9:15 movie was Radu Jude's The Diary of a Chambermaid. If you don't recognize that name, Jude is the latest Romanian sensation whose film Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World perplexed me more than it seemed to perplex most people, and whose Dracula I haven't seen yet. (He also directed the provocatively named Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, which I also haven't seen.) Even though I didn't particularly care for End of the World, it did indicate to me that Jude's films were ones I wanted to grapple with, which is why I prioritized this one. 

There's nothing as audacious in this adaptation of the Octave Mirbeau novel as the 40-minute unbroken take of a safety video that ends End of the World, but that's not to say there is nothing convention-breaking in this otherwise fairly straightforward film. The film is conceived as a satire of class politics in Paris, where a Romanian maid is looking after an upper-class family while earning enough money to send back to her daughter and mother in Romania. And at most of the points, Jude is content to let little telling moments speak for greater indignities, in a way that is fundamentally based in realism.

The break from conventions comes from interspersed stage performances of Mirbeau's original novel. These do have a literal existence in the narrative of the movie, since the lead character (played by Ana Dumitrascu) has been cast playing the titular chambermaid. Some of these scenes are wild, ostentatious and overtly sexual portrayals of what I have subsequently learned are actual plot developments in the novel, such as a man's sexual fixation on the boots of his chambermaid. These are played loudly and with some intent to discomfit us. The chambermaid also has some narrative asides when she's telling stories to the Parisian boy she's looking after.

Still, it always returns to the spine of the story, which is the way her employers use and abuse her in passively aggressive ways, in order to bring about what's best for them even if it's worst for her. To his credit, Jude doesn't exaggerate any of these, he just lets the actual way upper-class Parisians would handle this -- aware of the need to not come across as monsters, but only just -- speak for itself. The story takes place, sort of in the diary format of the title, in the three months leading up to Christmas. And if you think this woman is going to get back to Romania for Christmas to see her daughter the way she promised, well, that's probably not going to go exactly as planned.

I was getting a little bit of Jeanne Dielman from this at first, but I brushed that away as a stretch ... until I saw the poster you see above. It can't be a coincidence that it looks so similar to this, can it?

In any case, Chambermaid is less than half the length at only 94 minutes. 

I definitely liked The Diary of a Chambermaid better than End of the World, but I think I might have gone for it even more if it did not have such an abrupt ending. And I don't mean an ending that doesn't work out for the protagonist, I mean an ending that seems to come without a resolution one way or another. I suspect for a rule breaker like Jude, that might have been the point, but I still think that actual ending needed to be rethought. It doesn't even end on a moment of dramatic irony, which I thought would have been our bare minimum expectation.

Okay, back at it tomorrow with another two movies to wrap up a busy first weekend. 

Right-wingers are still ruining IMDB

Why does there have to be such overlap in the Venn diagram of people with right-wing politics and people who know how to commandeer the internet for evil?

Okay, maybe artificially inflating and deflating user ratings for movies is not your classic definition of "evil," but it is still subtly and inaccurately shaping the larger sense of truth in our world, and I do think that that can be construed as evil.

You never hear of groups of liberals teaming up to upvote a movie on a website like IMDB, or shout down a movie that might be putting bad things into the world. Only right-wingers do that, and usually, the movies they shout down are actually putting good things into the world -- just not things they think are good. (They're wrong, of course.)

My latest is not an example of something they're making seem shitty that isn't shitty, and fortunately, the prominent examples of this in the past are not jumping immediately to mind. (For some reason I thought of Emilia Perez, but it's possible that film's 5.3 rating on IMDB is as much a product of upset progressives as upset conservatives, and then there were probably others unaffiliated with either, who had a beef with it just on the level of its production.)

No, it's an example of them making something a bit fringy and definitely right wing seem like it might be a new classic. 

I mentioned in yesterday's post that one of the films I reviewed this week was Young Washington, a film released a month ago in the U.S. and only yesterday in Australia. I knew right from seeing Kelsey Grammer's name in the credits that there might be something fishy about this movie, since Grammer only seems to work these days if he's pushing his right-wing agenda. None of the other cast were people I could identify as conservatives, but I was pretty sure the movie was still coming from that place. 

And sure enough, I found later that it was produced by Angel Studios, which specializes in "values-based entertainment," according to their own promotional materials. There are a bunch of standard faith-based type movies in the list of their movies on Wikipedia, though to be fair to them, a movie they made last year called Sketch was one I really liked -- and I didn't get a whiff of Christian propaganda from it. (Though now that I know this, I sort of want to go back and check.)

Anyway, I don't hate Young Washington at all. I gave it a 5/10. It's competent, but it feels pretty mid. And to be fair again, it is not overtly right wing. But in my review I referred to it as "dog whistle conservatism," meaning you could hear it if you were looking for it but might miss it if you weren't. Grammer was the tip-off for me, but if you are looking at just the subject matter, it celebrates a great white man from history and puts that man's origins (and therefore the origins of the whole country) on a pedestal, making it pretty Trumpy indeed.

I could understand some people, even some people who don't share its values, liking it more than I did. There are some good battles and the whole thing looks decent. 

But if some people liked it better than I did, some people would also like it worse. An IMDB rating about 6.0 would be pretty generous for it.

Young Washington's actual rating? 7.4.

Come on.

It's really telling to click into the rating and see the breakdown by country.

In the U.S., a full 44.9% of those who rated it rated it a 10 out of 10. That's patently absurd. We might expect it to be better appreciated in the U.S. than elsewhere around the world, but nearly half of the people giving it the highest rating? Total bullshit. 

And you can pretty much tell it's grade inflation because even a more measured rating of 8 or 9 is down to 15% apiece, with 7s at 10.6%. Every other grade accounts for under 5% of the total vote.

So I guess the way we look at this is, only people who already have some bias in this area even see Young Washington, probably, and among those, most like it, or at least pretend they like it. Some are willing to be honest about how much they like it, some not. Few really dislike it, and among those are probably people like me, who aren't bringing in a pro-conservative bias.

The contrast is really significant as soon as you leave the country. 

Canadians? They drop down a little bit to 6.7 overall, and they still have 10 as the highest percentage with just over 21%. Eight comes next at almost 20, but then the third highest percent is those who rated it only 1 out of 10, which accounts for more than 17% overall.

Switch to England and you see just how much a totally disinterested group of people dislikes it. (Or maybe they're still bitter about the Revolutionary War. Who's to say.) The overall rating drops all the way down to 4.3/10, with more users (29%) giving a 1 than any other ratings. Interestingly, though, the second most is still 10. 

Sri Lanka and India are the only two other countries. The top rating is over 50% in India and in Sri Lanka, it's 93%! Then again they are weirdly worshipful of light skin colors in that part of the world.

Okay this may not be definitive within IMDB itself, but let's compare IMDB to formats that include only critics, who are, in theory, free from these pesky political biases, though I suppose it's possible that they lean progressive.

On Rotten Tomatoes, Young Washington has a score of 60, so still positive, but not as positive. In fact, that aligns exactly with the 6.0 I thought it should have on IMDB. Even there, though, the top review is from something called AARP Movies for Grownups, which is pretty suss.

Metacritic is actually my preferred port of call, even though it doesn't have RT's name recognition. This is the most similar to my own assessment, with a score of 49, which would basically be 0.1 lower than my 5/10. And some of the snippets I glanced at seem to lay into it pretty heavily. 

So are the right-wing trolls really gaming the system on IMDB for Young Washington?

I don't know. Maybe. Or maybe they're just overflowing with patriotism in the year celebrating America's 250th, and this nourished those instincts without them having to fake it, just to make it seem like the world is full of people who think like they do.

Busy as heck, and it isn't even MIFF yet

I've owed you a post for about six days now.

In fact, I started writing one last Friday, which, if I'd finished, would have been my fifth straight day with a post and my tenth in 11 days. Yes, it's generally been a fertile period for my movie thoughts on this blog.

Amazing how a weekend trip to Sydney will derail you. 

We went up to see my younger son's favorite team, Chelsea, play another EPL team, Tottenham, at Accor Stadium, which was built for the Sydney Olympics. Tottenham beat Chelsea with a goal with about 30 seconds remaining. A thrilling way for a soccer game to end -- unless you're the losing team.

I expected to have time to continue writing that post at some point in Sydney, but it didn't work out that way. I was sharing a hotel room with my wife, who sleeps later than I do and who doesn't like the clacketty clacking of my typing even if she's awake. (It distracts from her morning reading, which I get.)

And then there was the fact that that post required some research to produce some additional movie titles, so it felt easy to procrastinate on it.

Since I've returned, I've had to watch two films for a MIFF preview (Mile End Kicks and Dead Man's Wire), write the MIFF preview, watch a screener for another movie I'm reviewing (Young Washington), write that review, and then attend another advanced screening at the theater (Ice Cream Man). That was just last night so I haven't written that review yet.

In fact, I've been so busy that I haven't even updated Letterboxd with my new viewings, nor my Microsoft Word documents and Excel spreadsheets, and I only just updated the most recently reviewed section of this blog prior to posting this. 

But I don't like to go very long without updating the blog, certainly not six days. When Glen Hansard died last week and I wrote about it, you might have thought I died along with him. 

So this post does not contain much of substance, but it does serve as an unofficial MIFF preview.

Yes MIFF begins tonight with the gala opening night screening of Wicker across a number of venues, or maybe just a number of screens in one venue. I'm not attending that. But I do get into the full swing of things in this first weekend, seeing two movies apiece on Friday and Saturday, before then taking another six days to get back at it again next Friday. The following Tuesday, the following Friday and the following Sunday will round out my expected 11 screenings. 

I say "expected" because some things do tend to change once MIFF actually begins. Sometimes I have to exchange for another viewing, and sometimes I even lose a viewing, though I can't remember any actual examples of that last happening -- I just have a vague sense that it's happened. 

In any case, I've already done one switcheroo in 2026, since Mile End Kicks was one of the movies I was planning to watch at the festival. As I was going through the giant list of titles (384! though some of those are shorts and VR experiences), this was one of the few I found that I knew might already be available on U.S. iTunes, meaning I could watch it as part of my two-movie MIFF preview along with Dead Man's Wire. So I cancelled my Mile End Kicks screening on Tuesday the 18th and exchanged it for a screening in the final time slot of the festival on Sunday the 23rd.

I won't preview the specific movies I'm planning to see, because my tradition is to write about all of them in some form or another. That should start as soon as Saturday. 

And will I finally get to finish the draft I started last Friday, possibly for tomorrow's slot on this blog?

It's not seeming likely at the moment, but let's see how the rest of today goes. 

R.I.P. Glen Hansard, a.k.a. Him

I only ever saw Glen Hansard in one movie. I thought he was only ever in one movie -- the way we think of traditional narrative features, anyway -- but I guess I still have contributions from him to look forward to in Power Ballad, the latest from Hansard's one-time director, John Carney.

But once was enough to become enchanted with a man whose greater enduring presence in my life was as the voice on the Once soundtrack, which I listened to repeatedly, and which he wrote with the woman who was briefly his romantic partner, was his on-screen partner in Once, and was his touring partner in a band they called The Swell Season, Marketa Irglova. 

It was impossible not to be taken aback, in the best possible way, by the scene you see above, our first introduction to the character -- who was known only as Him in the credits. (She, predictably, was Her.) 

When Hansard belts out "Say It to Me Now" to open Once -- a song so powerful and so melancholy that it's actually the last song featured on the soundtrack -- we're almost discomfited by how passionate he is, how much the lyrics mean to him, and how all that emotion pours out of him via his voice and his strumming of the guitar strings. It's like it should have been the finale of the film, yet they plopped it right out there at the beginning, to get the film's hooks in us and to never let go.

The character is called Him because the love story that continues to play out in Hansard and Irglova's songs -- never consummated, which makes it all the more powerful -- is a love story that could occur between any two people who connect with each other for a short time and then go their separate ways. Of course, any film purports to give us a universal experience, and you're meant to dream away your own life into it, especially into the connection between two people that's depicted in so many tens of thousands of movies. In those other movies, the characters all have names. That they don't in this one just makes it feel a bit more timeless, a bit more classic.

Although he more than held his own in the acting department, this was of course not Hansard's day job. For much of his career, the Irish singer-songwriter was the frontman for a band called The Frames, and surprisingly, I know very little of their work. That might change now in the wake of Hansard's death via motorcycle accident yesterday. 

Once was my #2 movie of 2007, but it took an all-time classic behemoth like There Will Be Blood to eject it from the top spot. In most years, the experience given to us by Carney, Hansard and Irglova in this movie of music and opportunity and hope and wistfulness would have been easily my movie of the year.

Once has lived with me so much over the years that my wife and I went to see The Swell Season play the Hollywood Bowl in July of 2010, with the Zooey Deschanel fronted band She & Him opening. Quite the interesting name for an opening band, given the "names" of the characters played by Hansard and Irglova in Once. I wrote about that experience here if you want to read it. 

Because of who he was -- a musician, not an actor -- Hansard should not cause me to wax poetic on a movie blog as much as a genuine cinematic luminary who leaves before his/her time, or even when that time comes. (It was definitely before Hansard's time. He was only 56.) 

But let's just say my poetry is waxing as a way of keeping up with the poetry Hansard gave to me in one of my favorite films of the 21st century, which has occupied a place quite close to the surface of my heart and soul in the nearly 20 years since I first saw it. 

Rest in peace. 

An advanced screening of the "brand-d-d new" Spider-Man movie

Spider-Man: Brand New Day is a movie my younger son has been anticipating for months. Six months, he said, though it's probably longer than that. At age 12, he's not yet all that polished on estimating times.

You see, Spider-Man is officially his favorite superhero. He also loves the Flash, and last year's Halloween costume was the Flash's archenemy, Reverse Flash. But now that he's made it through the Flash TV series and is not interested in the 2023 film starring Ezra Miller, having been indoctrinated by the negative memes on the internet (I actually quite like that movie), Tom Holland's Spider-Man has claimed the largest percentage of his heart. 

In fact, he likes Holland and Zendaya so much that we considered whether maybe he would like The Odyssey, and since my wife and my older son missed their chance to see The Odyssey last night, that may still be on tap.

They chose Wednesday as Odyssey day, before ultimately missing out because there were only tickets remaining in the front row, because my younger son and I were attending an advanced screening of Brand New Day at the Hoyts Melbourne Central. I'd be working in the city, so he'd need to take the train in to meet me. And he was all set to do that by himself until he learned that the train ride was 30+ minutes and he thought he would get bored. So my wife accompanied him, which she'd always wanted to do anyway, before returning back home.

I jumped on these tickets as soon as I saw my email for the advanced screening through ReelGood. I know events like this tend to sell out quickly, and it so happened that I checked my email just at the right time to get them, knowing it would make my son delirious.

I've talked in the past about an advanced screening doesn't mean much to a kid, at least you wouldn't think. Playground bragging rights are likely not what they used to be, and seeing a movie for free is irrelevant for a kid because their parents pay for their tickets anyway. And really, this was only 24 hours before everyone else could see it -- less than that if they went straight after school. 

But with a Spider-Man movie, the appeal was more clear than for something like GOAT, which was the last advanced screening he and I attended at Melbourne Central. He was giddy for the Brand New Day advanced screening, and we made sure to get there plenty early to take in all of the festivities. 

In fact, it was almost not early enough. We got to Melbourne Central around 5:25 and weren't supposed to start queueing up until 5:45 for a 6:30 start, so I took my time eating two slices of pizza in the food court downstairs. He didn't opt for anything to eat, knowing there would be free popcorn and wanting to save his appetite for that. 

But when we did go up around 5:50, there was a huge line to get in. This is not something he usually experiences, so he likened it to the David Byrne concert we went to earlier this year, his only such previous memory. The line to check our QR codes was not so long that there was any danger of missing the start of the movie, but I did have enough time to panic slightly about the quality of the seats we would get. It turned out those fears were unwarranted, as they'd allocated two adjacent auditoriums, the fanciest two they had (more on that later), and there were plenty of optimal seats when we got in wearing our special Spider-Man wristbands and plopped down our jackets to claim our seats. (Remember, it's winter here.)

The lobby had most of the usual jazz you would expect. A number of Spider-Man displays where you could take photos, including a classic red carpet, though it does not appear there were any actually Hollywood dignitaries in attendance. Plus some classic comic book covers framed lovingly. In fact, the whole Melbourne Central was decked out in Spider-Man fanfare. Here are some pics:

There were other good pictures I took that capture the scene, but unfortunately, all of them have either my son or me in them, and you know I try to avoid posting photos that violate my family's privacy. 

The Takis? There was one on each seat. I was more charmed by this at the start of the movie than when I saw product placements for Takis about four times during the movie. 

We posed for photos on the red carpet and in front of another display, our wrists set in the classic Spider-Man web-slinging pose. It was good fun. 

In any case, we were excited enough by the lobby stuff that I forgot a crucial movie ingredient for my son: the lollies. When he worried about the size of the free popcorn, I told him we could probably get a second one on our return from the bathroom, which worked out just fine. He already had one drink, which was enough in that regard. 

But he didn't mention a bag of lollies, which we would always get in a situation like this because we wouldn't normally be getting free stuff, and sometime the free stuff would include something sweet, either lollies or an ice cream. It was only during the middle of the movie that I realized we'd forgotten about this, and it actually caused me about five minutes of anxiety as I worried my son would be having a somehow less perfect experience as a result. I even offered to run go get him some, but he told me in no uncertain terms that I should not do that. 

In any case, I really liked the movie, and here is a link to my review, just posted.

Oh, I have to explain the subject of this post. 

You may recall from this post that the radio ads for our streaming service Stan include a try-hard broadcasting school grad who insists on pronouncing the D in the phrase "brand new." Most normal people say it the way Jason Hervey says it in Back to the Future -- if you know you know -- which is "bran new." It flows off the tongue more easily and everyone understands what you are saying, even though you have excised one of the letters.

But no, the true broadcasting school style would be to include the D, so the announcer says, as I've written it and as my family jokes about it, "brand-d-d new." Just try saying it with a D. You'll hear it and you'll notice how ridiculous it sounds.

Well, apparently the woman who introduced the movie to us had also had this broadcasting school education, because she also announced it as "Spider-Man: Brand-d-d New Day." My son and I looked at each other and laughed.

And here are some other related thoughts (no spoilers):

Apex in Apex

No, in this case, the Charlize Theron vehicle on Netflix from earlier this year is not actually involved, though I did think it would be funny if you saw the movie Apex in the Apex screen format.

I mentioned earlier that this was one of Hoyts' fanciest two screens, both of them relatively new, carved out of an existing space. (If you knew the layout of Melbourne Central, you'd know there is no space for new building.) The other screen is one I talked about in my post about seeing The Odyssey on opening day, the "LieMAX" theater that passes itself off as a true IMAX screen. 

This one? It's called Apex, though it was not immediately clear to me what that meant. 

Well, here's an explanation for you from the internet:

HOYTS APEX is a premium cinema format featuring super-sized curved LED screens, high brightness, and Dolby Atmos sound. It replaces traditional projectors with direct-view LED technology for a sharper and more immersive picture. [1, 2, 3]

And here's a picture that shows what it looks like:

As you might guess from me having written a post about "LieMAX," I'm somewhat skeptical of this theater's tendency to be honest with me about the experience it's providing, and specifically, its justification for charging more for that experience. (Under ordinary circumstances. Obviously I wasn't being charged anything here.) But I have to say, I did find the curvature of the screen to be cool in the way I found the original curved TVs appealing, and the picture did look quite good.

Ret-conning May Parker's death date

This is as close to a spoiler as we'll get here -- well, maybe one other -- but it's a spoiler for Spider-Man: No Way Home, not for Spider-Man: Brand New Day. And, well, I guess it's too late to warn you now that I've included the spoiler in the sub-heading.

Anyway, you've seen No Way Home so you know that Marisa Tomei's Aunt May buys it in that movie. R.I.P. Marisa. You are still as beautiful as you were in My Cousin Vinny.

That movie came out in 2021, so by the general logic that these movies take place in our present tense, that would have been the year Aunt May died. Yet there are several pointed shots of Aunt May's gravestone in this movie that list the year of her death as 2024. 

This is confusing to say the least. 

My first thought was that they were trying to establish a sense of the recency of the event. They want it to have occurred more recently in the story than five years ago, so they are ret-conning it so it was only two years ago, if we take the present day to be 2026.

But I just looked it up, and the present tense of the MCU is supposed to be 2027 -- a little confusing as that is only one year (or really, five months) away. Wouldn't it be easier just to make it align exactly with the release date of the movie?

But let's say it is 2027. That makes her death three years ago. Fine. 

But in the movie, we're supposed to believe that at least four years have passed since she died. Because in this movie, we see (very mild spoiler, don't worry about it) the entire college careers of MJ and Ned pass at MIT. Last time I checked, an undergraduate college career is four years. Meaning that either the death should have been 2023, or the present tense should be 2028. 

It's confusing enough that the easiest solution would have been just to deemphasize the death year. You can shoot a gravestone in such a way that you can see the name but the years of the lifespan are out of the shot. Instead, the camera focuses on it so much that you'd almost think it was an intentional instance of getting us to think about the years. 

One thing I will say is that the birth year is listed as 1964, so that means May was 60, or about to turn 60, when she died. Tomei is only just now 61, so in 2021, when May's death was actually shot (it was really probably 2020), Tomei would have been only 56, because her birthday is in December. The rare case of aging an actor up rather than down. 

A traveling troupe of 2026 collaborators

I thought about making this last one its own post, but might as well just squeeze it in here and totally abuse today's word count, not to mention your patience as you read. It'll save me from having to do two consecutive Spider-Man: Brand New Day posts, in any case. 

The other spoiler that I think is not actually a spoiler is that the Punisher is in this movie. Everyone already knows that, right? At least I think they do. He's played by Jon Bernthal, and interestingly, I don't think he is ever once called the Punisher. In fact, he's only ever called Frank. His last name, Castle, never even makes it in.

Bernthal has something in common with Holland and Zendaya, which is that all three of them appear in The Odyssey.

That got me thinking about the weird coincidence of how many actors appear in the same movies as each other in 2026. If it is just a coincidence. Who knows, there are so many of them that maybe they formally aligned their schedules so they could all be available for the same projects.

We wouldn't necessarily be surprised if that were the case for Holland and Zendaya. They are married, after all. But how about these others?

1) Zendaya and Robert Pattinson are in three of the same movies in 2026: The Drama, The Odyssey and Dune: Part 3. I don't think I'd be worried just yet if I were Holland, but it might raise an eyebrow.

2) Florence Pugh and Zendaya are together in two movies, Spider-Man: Brand New Day and Dune: Part 3. Oops, is it a spoiler that Pugh is in Brand New Day? Maybe I should stop telling you I'm avoiding spoilers while continuing to include spoilers. 

3) Anne Hathaway is in everything. But I'm not really sure that fits the exercise.

I thought I had more. I guess it's good I didn't make a separate post of it.

Okay you can go now. 

I needed a low ticket alert for Frozen Jr.

The Los Angeles-based group Cinespia, which hosts screenings at the Hollywood Cemetery, still sends me emails. Why wouldn't they? I never removed myself from the mailing list. 

I only actually attended two of these screenings, when I saw Lolita in 2005 (Kubrick version) and The Philadelphia Story in 2006. The movies they show nowadays are more mid and populist -- it would be almost impossible that they would screen a movie I hadn't already seen. That's in keeping with today's movie trends and it's something I might like to write about at length sometime, but I haven't yet reached critical mass on that. 

Today I'm writing about the fact that they send out emails that warn of a LOW TICKET ALERT, which I actually think is a pretty useful feature. Surely they are not the only organization that does this, but this is where I've noticed it. It helps get your butt in gear to pull the trigger on completing a ticket purchase that you might have already completed if you weren't waffling or procrastinating. 

And this is something I needed for the performance of Frozen Jr. at my kids' school.

If you know me, you know that I don't particularly care for Frozen. Now I'm talking about the Disney movie here, not the movie where skiers are trapped on a ski lift with hungry wolves below. Though a musical version of that could be interesting. 

My "dislike," which is too strong a word, for Frozen has to do with my undying love for what I consider to be its chief rival, Tangled. Unfortunately, in that case, probably only Tangled-heads like me consider it a rivalry. It's like if you have a really good sports team and a really bad sports team that have a geographical proximity that would cause you to consider them rivals. Only the really bad sports team thinks of it as a rivalry. The good team probably only thinks of the bad team on the day that they play them. 

I'm getting sidetracked.

If you know me, you also know that I love musical theater. I don't talk about it often on here, so I guess you would have to really know me, maybe IRL. In any case, I did it throughout my childhood and on into college, appearing in no less than a dozen musicals all told. 

When we used to live next door to a school at our old place in North Melbourne, I took my older son, who was then probably about six or seven, to see their staging of The Wizard of Oz. It was an all girls school, so that was sort of funny -- like the opposite of the old Shakespearean days, when all the parts were played by men. The production itself was a bit chintzy too. But I was very glad to go, to support the school and to nourish that live theater part of me that doesn't get nourished as often as I would like. 

It's something I'd like my kids to do, but they have no interest. That's fine. But failing that, I want to see it at least available an option, as it was in the U.S. throughout the 1980s and presumably into today, and as I know it is at private schools here in Australia.

Public schools, like the ones my kids attend? Not so much. 

Enter Frozen Jr.

I haven't been aware of many, if any, musicals at this school, which my older son has been attending for four years, and which my younger son just started attending this year. I was so thirsty to see a musical at this school that I would have gone, no matter what it was.

So I was set to go to Frozen Jr. Even if my family didn't want to go. And even if I would have preferred Tangled Jr. 

But I didn't act quickly enough. The last email I got from the school on this subject read "Frozen Jr. - SOLD OUT."

Darn.

I don't know why I hesitated. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that I was the only person in my family who wanted to go. I felt a little bit weird, in advance, about being a 50-something year old man going by himself to such a show. Even though it's a school musical and 95% of the audience is parents, including presumably a number of single dads. 

Another source of hesitation? This school has kids from prep (the equivalent of kindergarten) all the way to year 12. I suspect the Frozen Jr. cast is comprised mostly of the youngest kids at the school, making it not very closely resemble the sort of high school musical experience I was hoping for. 

I would have gone anyway. 

But I really have only myself to blame. And really, I already sort of got my LOW TICKET ALERT.

The previous email I got about Frozen Jr. had the subject "Frozen Jr: Extra Tickets Release," and contained the following:

Due to overwhelming demand, more seats have been released for the Thursday Performance on August 13th.

There are still seats available for Wednesday night as well.

I think the thing here was that I felt like I was calling a bluff. Like this was a false LOW TICKET ALERT. You have to release new tickets, but you still have tickets for the first show? It sounds like maybe you haven't actually sold that many tickets to either of the shows, and this is just a desperate ploy to goose sales.

Nope. Six days later they were gone.

Ah well.

At least the existence of Frozen Jr. suggests the school is actually involved in this sort of activity. It's seemed to me like musical theater is, generally speaking, a far less popular activity in Australia, either due to lesser resources (most schools don't even have their own sports teams, as that is handled at a community level), or to the change to the current generation, in which musical theater is naturally less interesting to kids. 

Next time, I won't wait for a LOW TICKET ALERT. 

And maybe next time, it'll be Oklahoma! or Anything Goes or The Music Man.

(Yes, apparently I am only interested in stagings of shows I was actualy in.)

Audient One-Timers: Ordet

In 2026 I am rewatching my 12 favorite films on Flickchart that I've seen only once, and writing about them each month.

Carl Theodor Dreyer's Ordet, my #121 on Flickchart, could have, maybe should have, been the first film in this series I could not get my hands on, therefore forcing me to go and rewatch my 13th highest ranked film, which was my stated back-up plan at the start of this series. In fact, due to an error I made along the way that required one double-up, it would have been my 14th.

But I did finally source a copy of the movie that was watchable -- only just.

The usual suspects were all out as places to possibly find Ordet, which I first watched back in April of 2012, when I was still in America. (It was actually for a series on this blog, getting to know Dreyer.) My best bet was Kanopy, but it was not there. I thought YouTube might have a version, but it did not. It actually had the original Swedish film from 1943, of which Dreyer's version is a Danish remake, and though that might be interesting to watch at some point, it's not part of the exercise at hand.

But as you'll know if you read my post on Murmur of the Heart, there are some slightly sketchy places a person can go, which aren't pirating but sure feel like it, to find movies that are otherwise inaccessible. And indeed the Russian streaming site I used in that post did have it, but it only had it with subtitles in Arabic, which was obviously of no use to me.

But the Internet Archive -- which I've used maybe a dozen times before and certainly feels safer than this Russian site -- did have it. Two versions, actually.

One version was out. No subtitles at all.

The second version had a little CC icon for closed captioning, and indeed, I could turn on English subtitles here. But there was a problem with these English subtitles: they were very poorly synched to the Danish. The thing that was also a problem with Murmur of the Heart, where the subtitles preceded the dialogue by about seven seconds, was even more of a problem here. The subtitles were out in front by more than twice that length. In the first ten minutes I watched this way, I did eventually time it, and the delay was 45 seconds, though it didn't feel that long when I first started watching. In any case, this was the point where I decided I had to give up on this viewing method.

I started to look deeper into possible YouTube copies, totally without good reason, before going back to the Internet Archive copy and noticing that there was a second version of the closed caption titles. I had tried "En," but there was also "Eng."

And "Eng" saved the viewing, but not without a cost. 

Here the subtitles were behind the dialogue, rather than ahead of it, but only by a couple seconds. Very manageable. I should say that this started to get worse as the movie was going, and by the end, there was about an eight-second delay between the dialogue and the subtitles. Even more distracting, the dialogue was not in sync with the mouths either, though I think it did start that way. So there were, in effect, three different moments of the dialogue being spoken: when the mouths moved, when the words were heard, and when the words were translated.

It's no way to watch a movie. But is it better than not watching it at all? That's hard to say.

And making the whole thing more problematic is the fact that I did, demonstrably, like Ordet worse than when I first saw it. I don't know if that was the circumstances of the viewing or whether I just overrated it the first time.

I've come this far without giving you a plot synopsis at all. And that's not hard to do because this is a movie where not a lot happens, and it takes more than two hours to not happen. I'm not sure how acquainted I was with the concept of slow cinema when I first saw this back in 2012, but if I didn't recognize this as an example of slow cinema back then, I surely do now.

Which, to be clear, is not a problem for me. My #1 movie of 2018, First Reformed, is considered slow cinema. Slow cinema has a big place in film in general, and in my heart specifically. But it can also try a person if they aren't quite in the mood for it. 

In any case, this is the story of a Danish farm family in 1925, the Borgens, who have three generations living in the same house. The oldest generation features the patriarch Morten, who is in the last years of his life. His three sons are Mikkel, an atheist who is happily married to Inger; Anders, who longs for the hand in marriage of a girl on a neighboring farmstead; and Johannes, who might be touched in the head, who is going around talking about how he is the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The youngest generation is the two daughters of Mikkel and Inger, who will soon be joined by a third sibling, whom Inger believes to be a boy, and who is due any day.

The core of the story is their attempt to figure out what to do with this son, Johannes, and their attempt to get the other son, Anders, the approval of the father of his love interest, Anne. Anne's father rejects Anders' petition because the two families believe in two different denominations of Christianity. I won't really talk about the role the resurrected Christ character plays in the outcome of the story, because it isn't necessary to spoil it, even though the movie is 71 years old. But let's just say there is something quite significant that occurs at the end of the story that falls into the category of a miracle.

The first time I watched Ordet, I was haunted by it, given the awesome spiritual themes and the uncanny way the son Johannes seems to be in a trance. For most of the movie, there is no other soundtrack than the whistling wind, and indeed, this feels like a lonely and desolate world, a world that could almost be removed from a literal existence and just represent a spiritual one.

Those feelings about Ordet were still there. But I started to nitpick the reverence I felt for it, pun sort of intended, in relation to another master of slow cinema who Dreyer undoubtedly influenced, which is Ingmar Bergman. 

When I first saw Ordet, it reminded me of a Bergman film, maybe specifically something like Winter Light. (Oops, that's not possible; I didn't see Winter Light until two years later.) And though I know I like Ordet better than Winter Light, I found myself wondering if it's correct that I should rank Ordet above all the Bergman films I've seen. I've seen 11 Bergman films, and the highest ranked of them, Wild Strawberries, is only #268 on my chart. There are two Dreyer films that beat this highest ranked Bergman film, the other being The Passion of Joan of Arc, which is in my top 100. And before I get to my second Bergman film, The Seventh Seal at #343, you get to one other Dreyer film, which is Vampyr at #330. 

Is it right that there should be three Dreyer films that beat all but my highest ranked Bergman film? In fact that's three of the four Dreyer films I've seen in total, the other being Day of Wrath down at #2761. 

And then I wondered, and am still wondering: What is the point of comparing the entire body of their works? Does loving three Dreyer films mean my love for Bergman is in any less?

But I can't deny that these thoughts were in my head as I was watching -- and still appreciating, mind you -- Ordet. 

I can't say that I was bored during Ordet -- sleepy, due to the circumstances of my day and watching it in my bed when I should have been having an afternoon nap, but not bored. But I do kind of marvel at how long it takes for so little to happen. And that also means that there is quite a lot of dialogue that spells out what each character is thinking, in a way that almost made me think of the modern Netflix mandate to repeat the core issues of the story in dialogue every five minutes in order to make sure that people doom scrolling on their phones won't miss anything. 

Now that I've used the phrase "doom scrolling" sort of arbitrarily in the last paragraph, let me use it to a purpose here. There's something about Ordet that is sort of like a long, drawn-out doom scroll, but I mean that as a compliment. There is something ominous and frightening about the existential issues at play here, as they point ever more inexorably toward some real dour turns of events in the plot. And I do, ultimately, think that the time Dreyer takes for this "doom scroll" does increase the way that it chills us and discomfits us. 

But Ordet does not end on such a note, and I won't spoil what does happen at the end, or the events leading up to it, because that's the part that transcends and turns this into a real wonder. One other word for "slow cinema" is "transcendental style," and indeed there is something transcendent about Ordet.

It's still possible I am ranking it too high. One of the reasons for this year-long exercise is to make those sorts of determinations, though not necessarily to re-rank any such movie down to a more appropriate position in my chart. 

And some of the position it has attained is the result of randomness. Because I keep track of such things, I can tell you that Ordet would be a bit lower if it hadn't won a duel against Planes, Trains & Automobiles, which jumped it from #351 to #156, and then later a duel against The Great Dictator, which jumped it to its peak position of #106. It has since fallen 15 spots to its current position. However, when I did first rank it into my chart, it was only in the mid-300s -- and in fact behind the current position of the other two Dreyer films and the two Bregman films I've mentioned in this post.

In any case, still quite a good film, and maybe next time I see it, everything will be properly synched.

My August viewing will finally jump us into my top 100 movies, when I make time for Malcolm X, my current #97. It'll be a busy month with MIFF, but I'll have to fit in those three hours and 22 minutes because the series demands it. (And there's still a movie ahead that's even longer than that.)

Closing credits, greatest hits

I was going to call this post "Madonna is not a terrible actress," as a callback to last weekend's post on fellow singer Britney Spears, but then I decided most people will grant Madonna a certain minimum competence at her craft without me having to push it on them. She also tried harder at it and longer than Spears. Madonna may not have won or even been nominated for the Oscar she so coveted for Evita, but at least it did earn her a Golden Globe. For whatever that's worth.

So instead, I'm choosing to discuss the closing credits of her 1987 movie Who's That Girl?, the movie that gave us both the title song and "Causing a Commotion," and Madonna her fourth acting credit.

And I don't have some great observation about these closing credits, only this: There was an era when the closing credits of a movie were conceived as a review of that movie's greatest hits. 

Yes, Who's That Girl? is one of those movies where we see a bunch of stills from the movie we've just watched, images that the movie would like to present as "iconic" -- at least within the context of its own world, if not generally in the larger cinematic landscape. And they proceed in story order, making it a bit of a Cliff's Notes recap of the movie we've just seen, one single frame at a time. 

Certainly, James Foley's film is a good candidate for this sort of thing. I don't think Madonna has a lot of costume changes in this movie, but her character is consciously designed as a style icon, though not in the glamorous sense that would appeal to Madonna later in her career. This character is an ex-con and petty thief, and her fashion is sort of in the same punky mid-80s aesthetic as her character in her film debut, Desperately Seeking Susan. 

So yeah, we get a lot of good Madonna poses in the closing credits, but also plenty of Griffin Dunne, who is pretty funny as the put-upon lawyer and groom-to-be who is only trying to get Madonna's Nikki Finn on the damn bus to Philadelphia.

If you can't tell, I quite enjoyed this movie. For about the first five minutes, I wasn't sure what its tone would be, and there were certain moments you could interpret as a tonal miss if you didn't know what the film was going for. But pretty quickly you learn it's a screwball comedy, and a successful one at that. In fact, before too much longer -- when a large cougar is introduced into the story -- you realize that this is a loose re-interpretation of one of the great screwball comedies of all time, Bringing Up Baby. 

The credits, both opening and closing, made me aware of a number of other noteworthy things about this movie. For instance:

1) As mentioned, this is directed by James Foley. Foley would also direct Glengarry Glen Ross, a personal favorite. And while GGR is more of a writer's movie (David Mamet) than a director's movie, it still reserves a special spot in my cinematic hall of fame for Foley, who also directed the guilty pleasure Fear, and just passed last year.

2) You know who the DP is on this film? Jan de Bont! That's right, the director of Speed and Twister. Given that he was known for filming action, it's funny to see him before that proclivity was established. 

3) I was reminded of some familiar faces from films of this era who didn't go on to do much else, and who I haven't thought of in years, but were somewhat important to me back at that time. Such as Haviland Morris, known for her role in Sixteen Candles, where she gets drunk and gets her hair stuck in the door, meaning her friends have to cut her out. Anthony Michael Hall's character's debate about whether to take advantage of her in her compromised state reminds us of an era when potential sexual assault was played for laughs. 

4) I didn't notice it during the film itself, but again, the closing credits came through. You know who plays "Second Dock Worker" in this movie? Stanley Tucci! It's his fourth credit on IMDB overall and second film credit. Unfortunately, Google does not have an image of him from the film, and I'm not going to go back and find one.

But I could see myself watching Who's That Girl? again some day. It's a fun movie, and that's in no small part due to what Madonna brings to it. 

5,000 good movies

Milestone alert!

Olivier Assayas' The Wizard of the Kremlin -- which I saw on Wednesday via a screener for its Thursday release in Australia, in order to review it (see here) -- is the 5,000th film that I've ever liked.

To put that in a better context, it's the 7,311th film that I've seen at least once, according to my carefully manicured list, meaning there are 2,311 movies that I don't like. Or, that I don't like enough to give them a thumbs up in my spreadsheet, which is usually equivalent to three stars. Of course, only half or so were movies I saw when I was even giving out star ratings. 

If you want to go by percentages, it means I like 68.39% of the movies I've ever seen. It's been hovering at just over 68% for some time now, and this is about the highest it's ever gotten. Considering that I am probably a little easier, if anything, on movies the older I get, this number will probably continue to go up slowly, but likely will never get over 69%. (Never say never. Maybe the movie industry will just become unfathomably brilliant in the coming years.)

I'm not sure what to make of the milestone, and I should say that The Wizard of Kremlin only just barely qualified. I started out liking it at about a 7/10, 3.5 star level, before eventually tiring of it and landing it at only 6/10 and 3 stars. Although there is at least one Assayas movie I love (Personal Shopper), I find myself disappointed by his movies a lot more than I am ... um, appointed by them. And perhaps unsurprisingly, Personal Shopper might be the movie he's made that's most unlike him. 

I know it's hard to tell from the poster, but that's Paul Dano next to Jude Law's Vladimir Putin -- an uncanny casting choice if ever there was one. (Law, not Dano.) Even being the star of two of my former #1 movies of the year, Dano could not elevate this one above middling. 

For the sake of fairness, I should say I am not uniquely qualified to discuss what is or isn't like Assayas. This is his 20th feature over 40 years, and I've seen only six of them, and all but one of those since 2012. So it may be that there are hidden Assayas gems that would be exactly what I wanted from him. Among those I've seen, I like Kremlin better than The Wasp Network, Something in the Air and Clouds of Sils Maria, in any case. One of his most famous works is probably Carlos, a TV mini-series that I also haven't seen, but which I suspect to be very similar in structure to this newest one. 

But back to the milestone. I suppose it's more of a milestone of total movies seen, though I wouldn't be celebrating #7,311 on its own. It just so happens that I once decided to mark every movie I'd seen as either good or bad and then keep a running percentage as I went. 

It did take a little while to finally arrive. I noticed when I got to 4,999 thumbs up (it was The Odyssey, which would have been thematically perfect for the milestone), and then the next three movies were all close but no cigar, coming in at 2.5 stars each. I might have even been a little harder on them than I would have ordinarily been -- I said I was close to giving Crossroads three stars in a post earlier this week -- except I wanted #5,000 to be, I don't know, distinctive. But I finally gave in and decided that The Wizard of the Kremlin was slightly more good than bad, rather than slightly more bad than good. 

And so I release you. Nothing more to see here today. 

A seemingly unnecessary defense of The Odyssey

Neither of the first two people I spoke to about The Odyssey actually liked it.

One of those impressions was more middling. I know on Letterboxd he gave it three stars, but the words he wrote in his Letterboxd review were more indicative of his true dissatisfaction with the film.

The other guy? He quoted me two stars, but his words, in our Facebook chat, read more like a one. 

So does this make them the only two who didn't like it?

Surely not, but the overwhelming general consensus on The Odyssey is that it's great. Still, having those be the first two opinions I encountered personally tended to shake my own feelings of love for the film. 

I've since spoken personally to one other guy who loved it, though maybe not as much as I did. Many of the others with whom I regularly discuss film haven't yet seen it for one reason or another. 

A Christopher Nolan film is usually a safe film to like. The last one won best picture, the one from 2017 was praised through the roof, the one from 2014 is considered a modern sci-fi classic in some groups, and before that you get to Inception and the Batman movies. Only the one from 2020 (Tenet) is a bit of a head scratcher and enjoys less general appreciation among critics and fans alike. 

So why do I feel as though liking The Odyssey makes me a less discerning cinephile? Maybe even a bit of a bimbo?

It's because the way I like it reminds me of another film that I and a lot of people cherish, but that true film snobs trashed from the start: Titanic.

I think if you told Nolan he'd made a film that operates on a person in a similar way to Titanic, he'd respond by saying "Fuck you." But I think it's true, and I mean it as a compliment. Titanic was, after all, my #1 movie of 1997, and it remains in my top 100 on Flickchart. 

But I don't think Nolan would want to have his work compared to anything made by James Cameron, just because I imagine Nolan was one of those snobs who didn't like Titanic either. (And if you, dear reader, are also one of those "snobs," please don't take my phrasing personally. My own wife does not like Titanic and I obviously think quite highly of her.)

But wait, maybe I shouldn't be so quick to assume I know what Nolan thinks of Titanic. Here is what AI tells me about Nolan's thoughts on the movie:

Christopher Nolan deeply respects Titanic and frequently praises director James Cameron's ability to pull audiences into a different world, even when the audience's foreknowledge of the ending (the ship sinking) is absolute. [1, 2, 3, 4]

Nolan has pointed to Titanic as a masterclass in how a film can build emotional suspense and create a powerful sense of wonder within its own narrative text, contrasting it with his own approach to historical suspense in movies like Dunkirk. [1]

If I am to believe this -- and we know AI is never wrong -- then maybe he did set out to make The Odyssey have a similar emotional impact on a viewer as Titanic. 

It occurs to me that I haven't even told you yet why The Odyssey gives me Titanic vibes.

Aside from them both being high-budget epic period pieces, I actually think the drawing of characters as good or evil has a sort of epic quality on the level of myth. And that may be a strange thing to say about a lead character (Odysseus) who demonstrates numerous flawed moments and moments of poor judgment. But I think where we land with Odysseus is to feel great investment in his journey home and to love him, warts and all. That's especially the case when contrasted with Penelope's suitors, who are so nasty that you might even say the portrayal approaches camp. 

And I think that might be where I get my most notable similarity to Titanic. Robert Pattinson's lead suitor is such a hissable villain, such a poor match for our leading lady, that it put me in mind of the campy but great performance of Billy Zane in Titanic. 

The people who don't like The Odyssey seem to focus on nitpicks about the story (the sacking of Troy is barely mentioned in the poem, and yet it's a primary focus here!) or the accuracy of the costumes (those uniforms are from the wrong century!). They seem to want a purely intellectual Odyssey, the kind designed as a History Channel series rather than a rousing cinematic epic.

Me? I want the rousing epic. Always have. Always will.

And it's not that I don't want good verisimilitude, or moral complexity, or knotty storytelling that doesn't easily resolve itself. I do want those things, sometimes. 

But if a filmmaker sets out to make a movie that will leave me quivering with adrenaline in the finale, and near tears on several occasions -- maybe even more than near -- then that is more valuable to me than a perfectly historically accurate Odyssey as a professor of antiquity would have commissioned it. 

We go to movies to feel, I say. And people who lose their love of movies over time often do so because the movies cease to accomplish that for them. 

Because it is increasingly unusual to really feel scared in a horror movie, or really laugh at a comedy, we really remember and appreciate new movies that makes us do those things.

And so it is with sitting in a movie theater, watching a giant epic play out on the biggest screen possible, and feeling your fists unconsciously ball with rage, your heart unconsciously increase to a fever pitch in time with the score, and your eyes start to press tears through the ducts that usually keep them dammed up in reserve. 

That kind of movie is worth celebrating. 

And if your mileage varies on The Odyssey, well, maybe you didn't like Titanic either. 

You snob.