Jim Carrey existed ten years before I thought he did

Jim Carrey didn't come into existence with Ace Ventura: Pet Detective in 1994. Of course he didn't.

Everyone knows he was Fire Marshall Bill and other characters on In Living Color. In fact, he starred in all five seasons of the show, from 1990 until 1994. In fact, it kind of seems like In Living Color ceased to exist the moment Jim Carrey no longer needed it, though I'm not going to look into that now to see if there was any actual correlation. 

But he definitely didn't exist before 1990. Right?

Wrong. Jim Carrey was the star of a "major motion picture" five years before that. And it wasn't even his first.

If you want to drill down into his IMDB, Carrey technically first appeared in a TV movie called Introducing ... Janet in 1981. That must have been pretty bad because it's got only a 3.5 on IMDB (out of 10). That range is usually reserved only for when someone is trying to sink a movie because they think it was made by libtards or something. But it doesn't get much better from there, because his next two were the hypothetically theatrical feature All in Good Taste (2.8) and the TV movie Copper Mountain (2.2). (Seriously? How terrible does a TV movie have to be get to get 2.2 out of 10 on IMDB?)

Skip ahead four more projects I've never heard of and finally you get to the first one I had, which is also the movie I watched Thursday night: Once Bitten (1985). 

I didn't like it very much and I suspected its prospects were not very good before I even started. But as a big Jim Carrey fan -- he has three movies in my top 100 -- I had to watch it, just to see "where it all began."

I think the reason I didn't imagine Jim Carrey had done anything before In Living Color is because that's usually how it is with sketch comedians. You get hired to appear on a show like Saturday Night Live -- of which In Living Color is basically an "urban" (Black) version -- and usually you've made people laugh in The Groundlings, but Joe Public has not heard of you yet. Your charms get unleashed on the world in this variety show format, and only then do you go on to have a great (or in many cases mediocre) film career.

I guess Carrey was more of a Kenan Thompson. Why Kenan? He had a whole career with things like Kenan & Kel and Good Burger before appearing on 37 consecutive season of SNL. Carrey was only in five seasons of ILC, but it was the whole run. 

So yeah, Carrey went on In Living Color despite having an entire 14 credits in the 1980s, including two other movies I've seen: Peggy Sue Got Married and Earth Girls Are Easy. (I sort of remember him being in EGAE, because I only saw it 13 years ago. I haven't seen Peggy Sue since it first came out, when I definitely did not know who Jim Carrey was.) 

Anyway, the point of this post was not to drill down into the minutia of Jim Carrey's career. I'll save that for when he dies. (Hopefully not soon.)

No, I really just wanted to see this movie to see how many of the "Carreyisms" we know and love (some people don't love them) were already in place back in 1985, when he was only 23.

It's not a very broad performance, though it is a pretty broad movie. Carrey is sought after by a vampire (Lauren Hutton) with a flaming familiar (Cleavon Little) because he's a virgin, a conundrum that is dramatized in a funny drive-in movie scene, where Carrey tries to get busy with his prudish girlfriend (Karen Kopins). When she rebuffs him, he's confronted by all sorts of images of other drive-in patrons in flagrante delicto, including one guy in a convertible whose naked ass you can just see humping up and down. 

I wish the movie were consistently that funny. I have to be honest and say that I was very sleepy on Thursday night and I might have missed some (or very large chunks) of Once Bitten, but I did get the gist. There's nothing "big" about Carrey's performance here, but I saw certain facial expressions and other moments that reminded me of what's to come -- most of which I love.

Incidentally, I do remember the song from this movie that I thought had the same title as the movie and might have been sung by Tina Turner. 

In fact, it is indeed called "Once Bitten" but is sung by a band called 3-Speed. Who?

You can't judge a movie by its title

You're probably thinking this post is going to be about good movies with bad titles. 

It's actually a lot dorkier than that. Get comfortable, because this is another one of my project posts.

I keep a list of all the movies I've seen more than once, and that list is currently 960 titles long. I've got something big planned for #1,000. It won't likely be this year, but it should be next year. 

As I was adding Invasion of the Body Snatchers to that list (see Monday's post), I had an idea. It's an idea nobody but me would get. It's an idea definitely nobody but me would write about.

I wondered: 

What's the highest percentage of titles that start with any one letter that I've rewatched?

You're like "Um, what?"

I'll explain.

In my big spreadsheet in which I keep track of all the movies I've ever seen, I have a running total at the bottom for how many movies I've seen whose titles start with each letter of the alphabet. For example, right now I've seen 736 movies that start with letter S, or 10.17% of my total movies watched. There is no reason to keep track of this. I do it anyway. 

So I thought I would go through the smaller rewatch list, count up the titles rewatched that begin with each letter, and see what percentage of all the titles I've seen with that letter that I have also rewatched.

Still don't get it? I don't know if I can explain it in another way. 

When I first started, this was just a bit of a curiosity. I was writing the information down, but I didn't expect to do anything with it. 

Then after the letter B, I noticed something interesting: Both the A totals and the B totals were exactly, or could be rounded to, 15%. 

I started to get more curious.

Like any statistical exercise, there should be a fair amount of random noise. There should be one letter where I happen to have rewatched a way higher amount of movies than another letter. But there really wasn't. 

Oh they aren't all 15%. But they are all between 10 and 15%, which seemed strange enough to write about. 

Here's the total list:

A - 56/381 (15%)
B - 85/564 (15%)
C - 64/454 (14%)
D - 48/375 (13%)
E - 28/206 (14%)
F - 51/355 (14%)
G - 38/302 (13%)
H - 51/381 (13%)
I - 33/246 (13%)

I'll stop here to note that to this point, it's even more consistent than that five percentage point range. It's a range of only three percentage points. Which is not a lot of random noise at all. But after that the range widens a bit:

J - 13/132 (10%)
K - 14/135 (10%)
L - 35/360 (10%)
M - 58/528 (11%)
N - 26/195 (13%)
O - 17/178 (10%)
P - 48/363 (13%)
Q - 2/21 (10%)
R - 43/285 (15%)
S - 108/736 (15%)
T - 59/458 (13%)
U - 12/82 (15%)
V - 11/72 (15%)
W - 52/339 (15%)

And here it falls down, only because the sample size is so small:

X - 0/11 (0%)

When you've only seen 11 movies that start with the letter X, there isn't actually any number of movies you can rewatch that fall into 10 to 15% of that number. If you rewatch only one of the 11, it rounds to 9%. If you rewatch two, it rounds to 18%. So I was not going to hit on this regardless. As it so happens, I rewatched none of the 11, which means I have never rewatched an X-Men movie. I didn't consciously realize that until right now. Hence the poster for this post. 

Y - 4/51 (8%)

This is the only deviation. If I'd rewatched just one more Y movie, that would have been 10%. 

Z - 4/30 (13%)

It's kind of astonishing, isn't it?

But all it really means -- if it means anything -- is that a film's title has nothing to do with whether I want to rewatch it or not. Which you would have surely known without even reading this post. 

I do think it's kind of strange that there is not more randomness. But the range bears out even to the grand total, which is 960/7240, or 13%. Which I guess is not such a surprise, since it would be the average of all these other figures. 

Does this mean anything?

Hardly.

Was this worth writing a post about?

I don't know, but I sure did it.

The default four-star documentary

I've fallen into a pattern with documentaries, which is that if they are competently made with even a hint of outside-the-box thinking, I am automatically going to give them four stars on Letterboxd.

Even if I found getting through them somewhat tedious, as I did with the 115-minute Paul McCartney documentary Man on the Run. 

Star ratings, it should be said, have two primary functions, in my view:

1) To indicate how much you personally liked a film;

2) To indicate how good this film is relative to its own goals/potential limitations. 

When it comes to documentaries, I often default to the second, more objective usage of the star rating, disregarding the more subjective usage. 

With documentaries, it is a given that you will not be equally interested in the subject matter across the whole genre. There are going to be films about things that speak to you personally, and films about things that don't. However, if you are a critic, you feel like your personal interest should be removed from the equation in assessing how well the film does what it sets out to do. In a way, this is true with any genre, since any individual critic is going to gravitate toward some and not toward others, and the star rating shouldn't suffer from that personal preference. But with documentaries I think it's even more clearly delineated.

So whether I am fully interested in the film the whole time may be more a function of whether I am fully interested in the subject matter, though I think you would also agree that a truly great film makes converts out of even people who are disinclined toward its topic. And that's why I do tend to give a well-made documentary four stars out of five, but no more than that, even if I find that its length or other parts of its execution try my patience. I think I assume that the length would try my patience less if I were more interested in the subject matter, though that's not a given, and unfortunately you can't really test it. 

The thing is, with Man on the Run, I am actually plenty interested in the subject matter. Although I am not nearly as familiar with Paul McCartney's solo career, I love the Beatles and have done so for a good 30 years now. And what McCartney did in the ten years following the Beatles' breakup is actually something I would like to know more about.

But ... 115 minutes of this was quite a lot. 

And here's the issue: it was largely undifferentiated. There are no talking head interviews in this doco, only archival footage. I should clarify that. Subjects are interviewed, but you don't see their talking heads. You see the archival footage and you hear their answers to questions -- but not the questions by documentarian Morgan Neville themselves -- over that footage. 

Even when the archival footage is as priceless as that included here, and even when it is strung together by interesting techniques in which images are played with on screen and bleed into one another, it's still too samey without the talking heads. And that leads it to feel quite repetitive, even as the narrative is moving forward through the approximately ten years that are covered here. 

Of course, there's a bit of a fallacy in saying that I missed the talking heads. Talking heads are generally the least interesting part of a documentary. So am I really saying Man on the Run would be better if I were looking at images of Paul McCartney sitting against a bland background in his early 80s?

I'm not saying that. I think all I'm really saying is that a movie does not deserve four stars if you are frequently checking to see how much time it has left, and if you don't feel specifically inspired or moved or uniquely informed by it. And that's kind of how I feel about Man on the Run.

So I didn't do it. I didn't give it the four stars. I gave it only 3.5.

And this is when I remind you, and myself, that 3.5 stars is a perfectly acceptable rating, and among some fellow critics who are harder on movies than I am, it's a great one. 

There's a funny footnote to this story.

I wrote this piece yesterday to get a head start on today. Truthfully, I just write the ideas whenever they come, and if that happens to be three in one day, I'll write them in one day (if I have time) and save them for the next available opening.

On my way home from work, after I had already written the rest of what you read above, I was listening to a podcast about pop chart history, and they were talking about one of the later albums by David Bowie -- one that critics recognized as a superlative example of his craft, but which didn't particularly connect with them or endure in their memories. The interviewee referred to critics giving it a "respectable gentleman's four stars." Which seems to suggest this is a struggle in the broader critical community, in situations where we want to show our respect for a piece of art, but also to indicate that something about it doesn't quite do it for us personally.

So maybe by this definition, Man on the Run is a four star-movie that I gave 3.5 stars -- opting, for once, for the subjective. 

The shoddy fonts of low-budget press releases

When you send out press releases to savvy film review sites, you can't really fool anyone that the movie you're advertising is better than what we would have called "straight to video" back in the day. You, dear reader, won't be surprised to learn that I receive a lot of such press releases from PR people, since they want coverage of their movies a lot more than the big distributors seem to want it -- even though we would seem more likely to give those movies bad reviews.

But just because the movie's probably bad, does that mean that the press release also has to look so shit?

As if typefaces themselves cost money, these press releases tend to rely on blocky, unsophisticated fonts, and usually compound the matter by justifying the text, such that the spacing between words is weird and stretches the words so that the final letter on the right side aligns down the page. Which is not a sophisticated look. 

Because it is necessary for me to provide examples, but not necessary for me to crush the spirits of these little movies, nor of the nice people who try to get me to review them, I will block out identifying information from these examples.

This is another one of those that thinks I live in London, as I discussed here. 

How bad does that third line of text look? If you have to go for justified text, there are more sophisticated ways of doing it, such as slightly spacing out the letters in the words so you don't notice it as much. Not leaving giant spaces between the words that are two to three times greater than all the other spaces in the paragraph.

It turns out I've deleted a lot of the offending emails, so I don't have a huge number of other options to choose from. But here's another that doesn't look nice:

Why are you screaming at me? I think you can use all caps if you have to, but then choose a less severe font. 

It just strikes me as odd that there is no one out there who has said "Hey, you have a shit movie? I can dress it up and make it real nice." This is an imperfect comparison, but it's kind of like how there are very few -- I'm not going to say none at all -- scammers who can send out fake emails that don't include typos. You just get one scammer who is semi competent at imitating a real email, and you'll have scads more personal information you can release on the dark web. 

Okay, I'll let these poor PR people off the hook today. 

Never trust the opinions of random punters

When you're a good writer and someone else is not, you feel like a bit of a bully talking about their bad writing. (And my apologies if I seem a bit big-headed calling myself a "good writer." If I've been a film critic for 30 years and I can't call myself a good writer, there's something really broken about my self-esteem.)

But that doesn't mean that other people's bad writing doesn't sometimes bug you.

Actually in this case it's more bad thinking than bad writing. It's the logic behind the conclusions in the thing I'm about to discuss, more than the expression of those conclusions, that I'm interested in today.

(Before I continue, I should define "punter" for you. It's a word I didn't hear before coming to Australia, but I like how it works in conversation. Although the term has its origins in betting, in this context it translates roughly to an average person, customer or member of the public, though in a slightly derisive way.)

I'm not sure if you know much about Quora, but it's a question answering site where someone posts a question and whatever Quora user wants to answer it will write them a response. And usually the asker is soliciting opinions, not facts. AI provides factual answers quite well (most of the time, anyway). 

I got involved with Quora because I once had to ask whether we should be worried about cooking in an oven where there had been rodent poop. The response led me to Quora, I signed up, and maybe as many as ten years later, I still get emails about things people are talking about on Quora, which seem generally to be tailored to my interests. 

And I should state that a lot of the Quora users are not native English speakers, but that's not even a significant part of why I'm writing about this today.

The thing that prompted me to write this piece was an answer to the Quora question "Who is the best actress in the United States?"

Before I get to the answer, I'll say that the question is already problematic. It's not saying the best American actress, and the answer this person gave is proof that they know this is not the question, because the actress given in the answer is not American. Then what does the question mean, exactly? The best actress in Hollywood? The best actress who is currently physically located within the contiguous 48 states, or possibly Alaska or Hawaii?

So the Quora answerer apparently just wanted an opportunity to talk about Ana de Armas, who should not be the answer to this question under almost any circumstances. 

I want to start by saying that Ana de Armas is fine. I've liked her plenty of times. Sometimes she's really good. Sometimes she's not so good. So basically, I think she is a more than competent working actress who is obviously very attractive, so she's gotten plenty of work. She does have one Oscar nomination, so that's in the answerer's favor.

But the only reason to call her the "best" in the craft of acting is if you are basically in love with her and you just want to write about her for a bit. (I actually do have one friend who is in love with her. I myself understand that she is quite beautiful, and yet she has never risen above that level into a personal favorite of mine.)

So here's what the guy says:

"In today’s Hollywood, defining the “best actress” is never simple—but one name is dominating the conversation right now: Ana de Armas."

That made me chortle.

The way he phrases this, it takes it out of the subjective and into the objective. It's not that this guy thinks Ana de Armas is great; anyone can have a personal favorite, and even if I might argue with them about that, I would never write a blog post about it.

No, what this guy is saying is that 

a) there is a constant and strenuous debate about who is the best actress in Hollywood, and 

b) in this hypothetical constant and strenuous debate, Ana de Armas is leaving the other contenders in the dust.

He goes on to argue:

"She isn’t just another star—she’s a rare blend of elegance, intensity, and raw physical commitment."

No problem there, and it's actually rather elegantly written, speaking of elegance.

But then he continues:

"Often described as the female counterpart to John Wick, Ana has carved out a space where performance meets precision."

Huh? 

Let's break down this hilarious sentence:

1) Why is "female counterpart" in italics? Nobody knows.

2) You do know that John Wick is a movie character, not an actual person, right? When you were talking about Ana de Armas, you were talking about an actual person. 

3) I get why this person is saying this -- de Armas appeared in a movie (Ballerina) where she was the literal female counterpart to John Wick, as that movie is actually set in the JWU (John Wick Universe). But even so, she would not need to be "described" as a female counterpart to Wick -- she would just be one. 

4) What does it mean for performance to meet precision? Isn't precision usually a component of performance? 

The writer then includes a fairly defensible paragraph in which he discusses de Armas' accolades for Blonde, but follows that with:

"Then came her unforgettable turn as Paloma in No Time to Die. In just minutes of screen time, she delivered one of the most electrifying performances in the entire Bond franchise—effortlessly balancing charm, danger, and lethal precision."

Maybe this is where my personal opinion comes into play, but in what universe (not the JWU for sure) is de Armas' work in No Time to Die "unforgettable"? If anything, I thought of it as sort of a footnote in that movie, something that doesn't move the needle at best, and is sort of a waste of the actress' charms at worst. To discuss the prominence of this performance within the history of a film series that has been going on for more than 60 years and features more than 25 movies is just the most irresponsible sort of hyperbole. Oh, and there's that interest in "precision" again.

The next three paragraphs are fairly innocuous discussions of de Armas' preparations for Ballerina and some of the other roles that she is known for, though the writer seems to find the titles themselves to be proof of her star magnitude, when they just aren't. 

But he lands the plane hilariously with the following conclusion:

"Right now, she’s not just part of the industry—
she’s defining it.

Ana de Armas isn’t just among the best. She is the moment."

What did I say about hyperbole?

I don't want to be that bully here. This guy is not as good of a writer as I am. Few people are. (Ha ha, now I'm just fucking with you.)

But come on. I feel like if you are participating in the Quora community, and the readers are expecting that you have some kind of expertise on the thing they've asked about, you should at least try to keep your comments within the realm of our commonly accepted reality. 

Audient One-Timers: Invasion of the Body Snatchers

My 2026 monthly series involves rewatching my 12 highest ranked films on Flickchart that I've seen only once. 

I've always found it to be a bit of a mystery that Don Siegel's original Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) is ranked so prominently on my Flickchart. 

To be sure, it was a movie I knew was great, in addition to being seminal, the moment I saw it, which I would guess was sometime in my early- to mid-20s. But a personal favorite? Its ranking as #151 on my Flickchart certainly seems to suggest it should be. There are a lot of movies I've seen five, six, seven times that are ranked below it.

But one truth about Flickchart is that a movie is only as good as the duels it's had. Sure there was a ground zero when I first added Invasion of the Body Snatchers to my chart, when it beat a lot of stalwarts to land where it landed. I must have been feeling pretty favorably toward it that day, though it was not the day I saw it, since, as I said, that was sometime in the late 1990s (I'm guessing), and Flickchart has only existed since 2009.

It would have held that spot, though, if it never randomly came up against any movies in the next 100 that I might like better. It's conceivable that this movie -- that any movie ranked a little too high on my chart -- might have only had "slam dunk duels." In other words, either it faces a top 100 movie, where it loses but does not lose any ground in the overall rankings, or it faces a movie outside my top 500, and is an obvious winner. I'm guessing that if Invasion of the Body Snatchers ever came up against my #178 -- I just chose that number randomly, but it happens to be Romancing the Stone -- then it might lose, and enough such losses would drive it steadily downward to a more appropriate spot. And yes, I'm pretty sure Romancing the Stone, specifically, would win that particular duel.

One indication that it is not a personal favorite should be that I've never seen it fit to watch it again. Yes for sure I am less likely to rewatch black and white films -- especially nowadays, when there are barely any streamers that carry them -- but this one in particular would have been an easy watch. It's only 80 minutes long, and it contains almost zero fat, meaning it feels more like an hour than an hour 20.

And that's really the first thing I want to talk about here: how frigging efficient this script is. No fuss, no muss. Every single occurrence on screen contributes to the thrust toward the inevitable, with nary a wasted moment. It gives the film an extraordinary momentum. In fact, I was even thinking that this could be a great black and white entry point for my kids, considering that I don't think they've ever seen a full-length black and white film. They saw The Wizard of Oz, but that's only about a third black and white. So maybe my third Invasion of the Body Snatchers viewing will come a lot sooner than the second. 

So yeah, there was no time to get bored, and this flew by in the darkening, daylight savings hours of a Sunday late afternoon. 

We all know the story here. It's a chilling parable about conformity, and specifically about McCarthyism. I don't need to delve into the themes. You've seen this subject matter reinterpreted multiple times, such as the also superlative 1978 version with the famous final shot of Donald Sutherland pointing. These Audient One-Timer posts are not about delving deep into the film itself.

So there are only two other things I want to write about it today:

1) I don't want to spoil an entertainment property you didn't even know I might be talking about today, so I'm going to be vague here. But it struck me, as I was watching, that one of the most popular new TV shows from the last year is essentially a version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I didn't think about that as I was watching that show, but when watching IOTBS, all I could think about was the show. It's funny that I didn't actually hear pod people evoked in any of the discourse around that show. The Borg from Star Trek was a more common reference point. I'm sure those comparisons are out there on the internet if I wanted to search for them. 

2) Although I find the rules to be generally as complete as needed to establish the chilling ideas we see here, there was one nitpick I had on this viewing that isn't sitting right with me. Okay so we know that one of the keys of replacing these people with pod versions of themselves is that an actual physical replacement has to be grown in a seed pod, a process that is faster than you might expect but still takes some time. What happens with Kevin McCarthy's love interest, played by Dana Wynter, is a bit problematic, then. Although we know these replacements occur while the person is sleeping, they do actually involve a physical swap-out of new organic material with the same weight, size and mass. So how is it that Becky Driscoll, unable to fight sleep any longer, dozes off for five seconds, and awakens as a pod person? Where is the seed pod that needs to be next to her body in order to assume her identity? 

The internet likely also has an explanation for this one, but I'm not going to go looking for it.

My May movie will be ... well I've just realized I've made a grievous error. 

I created a Letterboxd listing for the top 15 movies I'd seen only once on my Flickchart, since I might have to go beyond 12 if I can't source one of the top 12. I thought I'd put them in that order in the list. But when checking now, I can see that I somehow skipped over the great Hitler movie Downfall, my #171 on Flickchart. It should have come up in March after I'd watched Smoke Signals (#181) and Solars (#176). Instead I went straight ahead to Rain Man (#158). So obviously this means Smoke Signals was my #13 and should never have been included. 

There's no doubt that the eight films I have left in this series are all ranked higher than Downfall, so either I skip Downfall or I extend the series to a 13th month. Or I could just double up one month.

If I do double up, May will include both Downfall and my #141, Judgment at Nuremberg. If not, just the latter. But the felicitous thematic relationship between those two films makes it seem like a double feature would be just about the perfect solution. Who knows, maybe I'll even try to watch them on the same day.

Flickchart Friends Favorites Fiesta: A Woman Under the Influence

When I wrote this post back in September of 2022, I imagined I might regularly share with you the writing I do for Flickchart Friends Favorites Fiesta, a monthly viewing challenge I do on Facebook where we get assigned the highest movie on another person's Flickchart that we haven't seen. You're suppose to report back once you've watched it, and almost everyone does -- or, I should say, they all do, but they don't all get to the movies they were assigned in anything close to a timely manner. Believer in commitments that I am, I always watch my assigned movie in the month in which it was assigned.

In any case, after sharing that review I wrote of Fandango, I haven't shared one since.

But I was proud enough of what I wrote earlier today about John Cassavetes' A Woman Under the Influence, which I watched yesterday, that I decided to break the drought and share it. Without any further ado, here is that piece, with names redacted to protect the innocent:

                                                         ***********

The thing that’s frustrating on some level about watching A Woman Under the Influence (1974), which I got from [REDACTED]’s chart, is the thing that made John Cassavetes such a unique and vital voice in independent cinema. Those of us weaned on traditional movie narratives know that you are almost always going to get the “why” that explains a character’s behavior. In this case that would be the lead character, Mabel Longhetti, played by force of nature Gena Rowlands. A traditional treatment of the subject matter about a housewife cracking up would give a clear antecedent in the narrative about why she no longer has possession of her faculties.

Cassavetes is not interested in that. He gives us this mental breakdown already in full swing, and allows us to live with it for two and a third hours. We can glean, along the way, that perhaps Mabel’s shitty husband, played by Peter Falk, has left her unable to properly cope with her three young children, who are typical examples of the sorts of underdeveloped brains that lead them to run around in circles and remove their clothes. But then again, it’s not like this doesn’t describe half the children out there.

The truth is, we don’t really know why Mabel needs a spell in a mental institution, though there can be no doubting that she does need one. And that is the clean-film-narrative-defying nature of mental illness. There is not always a “reason” that a person is mentally ill, other than that their brain does not work properly, taking their low self-esteem, their past failures, their irrational fears of impending disaster, and elevating them to dangerous levels.

What I’ve written so far may indicate that this movie was a struggle for me at times, and it was. However, I like it infinitely more than what I consider to be the lesser versions of Cassavetes’ craft. One film of his that particularly gives me the shits, to use the Australian phrase, is Faces, which I dismissively refer to as people just yelling at each other for two hours. Though to be clear on the way Cassavetes can work for me, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie is my #249.

A Woman Under the Influence does not rise to that level, but it gets a lot closer to it than you might think based on what I’ve written so far. In truth, all you really need in this movie is Gena Rowlands, who commits to celluloid what is often considered one of the greatest acting performances of all time. The only thing – and I mean the only thing – that makes me hesitate to give the performance that level of praise is what I said earlier, that there is a nagging part of me that wonders WHY she is like this. But the actual technical brilliance of the performance has nothing to do with the screenplay decision not to explicate Mabel’s illness.

How to describe Rowlands’ performance in this movie? I’d say it’s like the famous subway station scene by Isabelle Adjani in Possession stretched out over a whole movie, except that this undersells the moments of quiet in Rowlands’ performance, where you just see her confusion, her alienation, wash over her face in a blank look propped up by an artificial smile that she thinks is a real smile. This almost seems like a method performance of mental illness, and I would not be surprised to learn that Rowlands spent time in an institution to research her role.

As for the script itself, I do find that there is a little something, I don’t know, arbitrary? about the scenes Cassavetes shows us and the scenes he does not show us. For example, I like the strange breakfast scene where Mabel feeds her husband and his 11 (!) coworkers a spaghetti meal after working an all-nighter fixing a burst water main. But I guess I just don’t know why this scene is the scene that’s best designed to dramatize her mental health issues. It’s almost like an inciting incident scene in the narrative, though if anything I think she just has an improperly modulated sense of gregariousness. The fact that this scene is supposed to be the dividing line between what was supposed to be a romantic, child-free evening with her husband, which was cancelled by the water main break, and multiple characters being severely concerned about her mental health, just feels like a scene was missing. But then again, I think this is the nature of Cassavetes’ filmmaking, and if you don’t go for it then maybe you are trying to make Cassavetes something he was not.

Obviously I’m very glad to have seen this film and I’m genuinely curious to see where it will land. And this will be my first film ranked for this series on v. 2, though I think I can still list the duels the way I normally would.

A Woman Under the Influence > The White Crow
A Woman Under the Influence < Magic in the Moonlight
A Woman Under the Influence > The Old Oak
A Woman Under the Influence > Professor Marston and the Wonder Women
A Woman Under the Influence > Easy A
A Woman Under the Influence < Bottoms
A Woman Under the Influence > Hatching
A Woman Under the Influence > The Hangover
A Woman Under the Influence > My Girl
A Woman Under the Influence > The Measure of a Man
A Woman Under the Influence > Willow
A Woman Under the Influence > 12 Years a Slave

1793/6720 (73%)

Thanks [REDACTED]!

                                                        ***********

Okay, back to me. Or, back to the post, I should say, since it's all me. 

Oh, that mention of Flickhart v.2? Stayed tuned, I'm going to write a long piece about that in the near future. 

If Raising Arizona starred Ryan Gosling

So I finally did it last night: I showed my younger son my favorite movie of all time.

If you read this post, you'll remember I showed the whole family the first ten minutes of Raising Arizona on my birthday last year, almost exactly six months ago, though of course my wife had already seen it multiple times. (And congratulations to RA on its tenth tagging on my blog. Double digits baby!) 

The only one out of the two kids who showed any interest in a full viewing was my younger son, then 11, now 12. In fact, he had mentioned it again when the movie came up for other reasons, without me prodding him or forcing the issue for my own benefit. 

And in truth, maybe there was a little trepidation on my part about completing the full viewing. When you show someone your favorite of anything, you are exposing yourself to their ridicule if they inevitably don't like it as much as you do, though even if he hadn't liked it, my son is sensitive enough that he surely would have cushioned the blow. 

In fact, his response might have been a cushioning. I have no reason to think he didn't like it, but during the credits I did have to ask what he thought, without him volunteering it. He said he thought it was good, with that little uplift in your voice that suggests the statement is genuine, but maybe only to a certain extent. He did make some interesting follow-up comments, even an analysis about whether Leonard Smalls is supposed to be H.I. McDunnough in the future, given that they have the same tattoo. This led to a discussion of symbolism vs. realism in films, which is the sort of conversation I want to have with my kids about film, if they'll have it.

The other thing that caused me a little trepidation about the viewing is stupid. In linking back to one of the other times I tagged RA on this blog, I had been on a coincidental streak of watching my favorite movie almost exactly every four years, which had been pretty organic to that point. Left to my own devices, I might not have watched it again until 2028, as those four year stretches were aligned with presidential election and summer Olympics years. This viewing caused me to deviate from that, but really, I want any of my viewings to be organic and not to think too much about them. There was no point to wait another two years to show my son Raising Arizona, not when he had already asked about it more than once. 

The thing I thought was interesting enough to write about today, though, was what he asked me about Nicolas Cage very early in the movie, during the opening ten minutes he'd already seen, in one of the shots when H.I. is lying on his prison bunk, thinking about Ed. 

"Is that Ryan Gosling?" he asked.

At first I thought this was pretty funny, though my response did not illustrate that. Although I knew my son didn't know the exact year Raising Arizona was released, he had to know, just by looking at it, that it was not a recent movie. I said "No, Ryan Gosling would have been about five when this came out." (Actual age: six.) 

"Oh right because it came out in like 1980," he responded.

"1987," I said. Gosling himself was born in 1980.

But then I got to thinking how interesting it was that he had seen Gosling in a then 23-year-old Nicolas Cage. (And how weird it was, in retrospect, that the Coen brothers had seen it appropriate to case a 23-year-old in this role, considering H.I. has already served a half-dozen sentences and been paroled a half-dozen times. Wouldn't they at least want someone over 30? Holly Hunter is about six years older than him, so I guess they're both playing her age in this movie.)

Especially since he has become primarily a comedic actor, there's something about Gosling's physicality that indeed does recall a young Cage. Thinking particularly about films that required considerable physical comedy from him, such as The Nice Guys. 

Since my son had asked this question early enough in the movie, I started seeing Cage's performance through the lens of decisions I could see Gosling making as an actor. And this little bit in particular seemed like a perfect Gosling moment:

Can't you just see Gosling doing that?

I was, of course, inclined to do a modern recasting of Raising Arizona, though I suppose it wouldn't really be "modern." Although Cage seemed too young to play H.I., I don't think we want him being played by a 45-year-old Gosling either. 

But actually, if you look at Gosling in Project Hail Mary, he's still wiry and physical. And I think maybe the themes of Raising Arizona are more resonant with actors who are at least in their mid- to late-30s, who really are staring a childless existence in the face, and really can't afford to wait for any hypothetical medical breakthroughs that will allow them to conceive. At 45, Gosling can certainly play 37.

So let's do this. "Let's go get Nathan Jr.!"

Sorry. Let's recast Raising Arizona with Gosling in the lead. And let's be a little flexible with the ages. There's going to be a little "first thought best thought" here too. I can't sit here all day and think about this. 

So we start with H.I. obviously. I think these pictures are an even better indication of just how Gosling fits in this role. They both wear the Hawaiin shirt well, of course, even though my favorite clothing worn by Cage in RA is the shirt he wears during the lunch with Glen and Dot. I realize I've got to filibuster a bit here so that I can align the photos with the text. So this is me doing that. I think I've got it now. 

Ed could be played by Kathryn Hahn. She's actually a couple months older than I am, which means she's 52. But let's not tell Kathryn Hahn she can't play 37. She can do anything, so playing 37 certainly qualifies. These photos are not particularly flattering to either Hahn or Hunter, but I've chosen them to illustrate why I've cast Hahn here. We need an actress who can go big but is also capable of a genuine emotional connection with the audience, and I think that's Hahn. 

If looking for bounty hunter Leonard Smalls, our mind should automatically go to the physically largest presences we have out there. And so in this case I thought of Jason Momoa. I think the thing that makes Randall "Tex" Cobb so scary in this role is that we don't get even a whiff of sympathy from him as an actor; he makes a great evil incarnate. I do think it would be hard to ignore the jovial associations we have with Momoa, who has almost always played a good guy. But I think Momoa can do it. Let's not typecast him and limit what he can bring to the screen. 

Next up is Nathan Arizona. The huckster furniture salesman and bereft father is one of the movie's true comedic highlights, so we need someone pretty funny here too. I struggled with this one, and have no idea if I came up with the right answer. For some reason, Shea Whigham popped into my head and wouldn't leave. I don't actually know how well Whigham does comedy, because that's not how he's usually cast. But looking at how Trey Wilson was cast before RA, I'm not seeing comedies in there either. It could be a Leslie Nielsen thing, that once they discovered he could do comedy, there was no turning back. I can see that path for Whigham. 

The final four characters of note come in pairs, so let's look at them that way.

For jailbirds and bad influences Gale and Evelle Snoats, I'm thinking David Harbour and Michael Pitt. These are based on physical matches, of course, but I also think Harbour has the expansive personality necessary to step into John Goodman's shoes -- or rather, his muddy boots fresh from cutting into the sewer line. With Michael Pitt, I'm seeing the same baby face as William Forsythe, though I really have no idea if Pitt can be funny -- and I should say, traditionally he has not been a favorite of mine. Fortunately, he has less work to do in that regard than Harbour. Although my friends and I have some Evelle Snoats quotes we love -- "You hear that? We usin' code names" is one example -- the heavy lifting here is from the older brother, the alpha, Gale. So Harbour can carry the load and Pitt can follow his lead. Forsythe is the least essential of these actors in establishing RA's tone, and so I think Pitt can fill that role here. 

Lastly we get to Dot and Glen, the swingers, absentee parents and crass idiots played by future three-time Oscar winner and Joel Coen wife, Frances McDormand, and the lesser heralded Sam McMurray. And let's just finish off with a couple of SNL alums. We already know Kristen Wiig can do the high volume and wild gesticulations of McDormand's Dot. Jason Sudeikis hasn't in his career played as zany, generally, as McMurray is here, but there's something about the eminently more sympathetic Ted Lasso that shares DNA with Glen. Ted is obviously more intelligent and less selfish than Glen, but they both have a sort of bumpkin gregariousness that makes them appear less intelligent than they really are. (Yes, I think there's intelligence to Glen, in that he sees through H.I. and Ed's lies about how they acquired their infant boy.)

If you're curious about a previous time I did this exercise, check out this post on Glengarry Glen Ross. (Speaking of Glens.) 

And I only just now realized something truly astonishing:

That recasting post was also inspired by Ryan Gosling.

What the hell? I swear I didn't know.

But yes indeed, that post was inspired by seeing a similarity between Gosling and another actor about Nicolas Cage's age, Alec Baldwin. (Baldwin is six years older. I said "about.") Truly astonishing coincidence there.

Does this mean Ryan Gosling is the greatest cinematic chameleon of our era? Because I don't think of Cage and Baldwin as very similar at all. 

Probably not, but does it mean I love watching him?

Hells yes. 

What does Black Widow know about an alien blown out an airlock?

Watching Avengers: Infinity War last night with my younger son reminded me just what an extraordinary feat of coordination by Joe and Anthony Russo that movie is. And we've still got another equally impressive, if not more impressive, feat of coordination coming up in Avengers: Endgame. One of Kevin Feige's smarter moves was to entrust some of his most important MCU movies to the directors of You, Me and Dupree. 

In fact, it's such an accomplishment that you might actually be more inclined to notice its imperfections, considering how few of them there are.

I'm here to talk about one of them today. Mild Avengers: Infinity War spoilers to follow. 

So the next most dastardly character to be introduced to us in this film beyond Thanos -- who was in other MCU films, but so briefly that he couldn't even make an impression on us -- is Ebony Maw, Thanos' lead henchman. You probably remember him, but he looks like this:

Maw is no Thanos, but he's pretty powerful in his own right. He's got the ability to move things through the air like a Sith Lord, which I believe is what he's doing in this shot. 

But apparently you can outsmart him, as long as you've seen the movie Aliens. 

Aboard Maw's donut ship somewhere in the cosmos, stowaway Peter Parker explains a plan to Tony Stark based on an idea he got from the James Cameron movie, which we don't actually know until we see it in action. And that plan is to blow a hole in the side of the ship -- I'm calling it an airlock in the subject of this post, because that's what it is in Aliens -- and to suck the unsuspecting Ebony Maw out into space. And then to leap into action to try to prevent Stephen Strange from following him out. 

It works -- which should not be something Natasha Romanoff knows anything about.

The erstwhile Black Widow is one of the most underutilized characters in this whole movie, which is okay, because she more than makes up for that in Endgame. But perhaps because of this lack of significant involvement, either the writers (Christopher Markmus and Stephen McFeely) or the Russos give the following line of dialogue to Scarlett Johansson's character:

"Where's Maw?"

Or something similar. She says this while speaking through a dome forcefield on Wakanda, when two of Maw's cohorts are standing on the other side. And she says it to taunt the two surviving henchmen, knowing that Maw can no longer be counted in their number. 

The female one -- Proxima Midnight, played by Carrie Coon, who knew? -- reacts just as Black Widow would have hoped, bitterly taking the bait and talking about how Maw's death would be avenged. (Don't talk to an Avenger about avengeance.)

The thing is, Natasha should not know about any of this. Although she did meet Proxima Midnight and her buddy, whose name I won't bother to look up right now, in an earlier fight in Scotland, Maw was not there, and there would be no reason for her to know that such a person -- such an alien -- even existed.

But let's say for argument's sake that Nat does know that there's a telekinetic creature named Ebony Maw who works for Thanos. She'd have no way of knowing he was dead. Unless I am mistaken, the earthbound Avengers have had no contact with the ones who are still off fighting Thanos in space. Considering that Tony Stark, Stephen Strange and Peter Parker had never been to space before, they certainly don't have any communications technology that would allow them to update the earthbound Avengers on their movements. I suppose if they did have that, there would be some chance they would have briefed the earthbound Avengers on the unfortunate fate of Mr. Maw, but that likely would not have been among the most urgent information that needed to be communicated at that moment.

But Black Widow needed to have a line of dialogue there, because she hasn't done much else in this movie.

Like I said, the fact that I noticed this only increases the level of achievement by the Russos. It seems like one of those situations where the dubious phrase "the exception that proves the rule" applies. To the extent that anyone uses that phrase correctly, I suspect it means that when you notice an exception, you notice just how strong the rule is otherwise. And this is an extremely strong film, which I have told my son is my favorite ever made in the MCU.

He didn't necessarily say the same thing himself, though he'd only just finished it so it would be too soon to reach that conclusion anyway. He's so in the bag for Spider-Man that I'm sure he prefers one if not all of those, none of which feature the (temporary) death of his beloved Peter Parker. 

But he was obviously pretty impacted by the movie. I felt for sure he would have seen somewhere on YouTube the footage of the various Avengers disappearing into dust, but no, he had managed to avoid that happening so far. He does know what happens at the end of Endgame, in part because it's a plot point in later MCU films that he's seen, but all the particular parts that make Infinity War such an achievement were largely unfamiliar to him.

The one I was bracing for happens in the very first scene. You may recall that at least three times before on this blog I have expressed a worry about my children seeing Loki strangled to death, which I still consider to be the single most traumatic moment in the entire MCU. Strangulation is a pretty brutal form of death to begin with, and the fact that Loki is a fun trickster, who starred in his own series that my kids watched, just made it all the more scarring.

At least that's how I've always felt. But, I had no indication in the moment that this was particularly difficult for my son to watch. I think I asked him if he knew that was going to happen, and he said he did not. That was my chance to assess his well being in the form of his response, and he seemed just fine.

To quote Vince Vaughn, my baby's all grownsed up. 

Perfect Pauses: Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice

It's been (checks notes) nearly three years since I've done a Perfect Pauses post, but I had a perfect pause on Saturday night, so it was time to end that drought.

This was from one of my new favorite films of the year, a clever and funny time travel movie that also has a decent amount of heart, Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice. 

I won't submit a laundry list of the film's merits today, instead just concentrating on the pause itself.

This is a shot of someone trying to jump start a car. I believe they were ultimately successful. When do you ever remember someone jump starting a car in a movie and it not working? No reason to even include it otherwise.

Anyway, this flash of light was obviously only on screen for a split second, and I happened to pause the movie during that split second. 

Cool image, right? 

Not sure why it looks so out of focus, it might just be the lighting. 

Watching 2001 on my 18th wedding anniversary

It's been a challenging few months on the home front, with new business ventures, deaths in the family, and everything else that leaves a person's head spinning around like a top, all in one four-month period. I kind of sensed, therefore, that our 18th wedding anniversary on Sunday needn't be a big deal.

My wife and I kind of discussed it a few days beforehand, and I was relieved that she hadn't yet bought me a present. I was already mentally scrambling about how I was going to do that for her without making a panic buy that would be a swing and a miss. But she was equally game to go present free this year -- which, to be honest, we've been doing the past few years anyway. 

When I asked her if we were planning to do anything for our anniversary, she asked "What day is it?" Not what date we got married -- she knows that -- but what day of the week the anniversary fell on. This gives a good idea of how little fussed she was by having it be more or less a regular Sunday.

But I upped the ante, just a little bit, the day before. I bought her a beautiful $100 bouquet of flowers from the nice florist in our town center -- their quality is nice, their demeanor to customers is only sometimes nice. I made clear that this did not create any expectations for reciprocation, it was just a nice thing I wanted to do. And I think she did, indeed, think it was very nice. She commented several times on how beautiful they were and wore a grin for a while afterward. 

I thought of holding them back to present them on the actual anniversary, but then that meant I'd need to leave them propped up somewhere in hiding, overnight, when they need to be transferred to water. I'm capable of doing that part, of course, but my success with that is mixed, and besides, she likes to do it.

But presenting them on Saturday meant there was no actual thing to do on Sunday to honor the day. When I was returning from my walk, she texted me to suggest brunch, and we had a very nice one, discussing the kids and our upcoming trip to Japan. 

When she said she would walk home from the cafe, and confirmed there was nothing going on in the afternoon, I got a look in my eye -- that look that says I have an idea of something I want to do, but I've been too shy to mention it before now.

"You want to go to a movie?" she asked. "You can."

How cool is she?

"Well yes," I said, "they're playing 2001 at the Sun in Yarraville."

See this was something I'd had in my back pocket for a while. The Sun is good at advertising their upcoming special features, so as long as a couple months ago I saw that 2001 was coming back. I say "coming back" because it does play the Sun periodically in 70 mm, though I don't remember seeing it programmed since the last time I saw it at the Sun, in July of 2018 for the 50th anniversary of the moon landing. I popped a reminder in my calendar just so I wouldn't forget.

My first impression was that it would play multiple times over a few weeks -- you know, maximize the time you have with the print. But when I checked on it earlier this week, I could only definitively see this Sunday -- which was, of course, our anniversary.

I didn't say anything to my wife, but I did check this morning to see if there were any seats left. There were about six. 

Fortunately, when I returned home from brunch, there were still seats remaining for the single 2 p.m. showing, and this was now about 1:25. But in a phenomenon I can't explain other than someone possibly cancelling their tickets, there were now two quite good seats in the middle of a mid-range row, one right in front of the walkway, meaning plenty of extra legroom. I only needed one of them. And though I usually get free tickets at the Sun on my critics card, the card is not meant for this scenario, so I happily paid the $30. 

And what did I get for a few extra bucks beyond the standard ticket price? How about this beautiful program I'm showing you above, with the H.A.L. eye peeking over its shoulder from the screen behind it?

It's gorgeous and I'm pretty sure I will add it to the cork board behind my desk, but obviously no pushpins through its lovely skin. 

The movie that went from utterly baffling (my first viewing in 1980) to still head-scratching but significant (my second viewing in 2001) to personal favorite (my third viewing in 2013) all the way up to #12 on my Flickchart (my fourth viewing in 2018) did not disappoint in this, my fifth viewing. If I can't move it up any more in my personal favorites, it's because there are only 11 films ahead of it now -- though let's just see how it does if it comes up for duels against those films. 

Some of the "new" observations I had on this viewing were actually things I talked about when I last wrote about the movie (here), so the takeaways from this viewing are going to seem a bit shallower by comparison. 

One thing I'll say is that I do like my astronaut in peril movies, and I'm on another small binge of them now. It started with Solaris for the Audient One-Timers series back in February, then carried on through to Project Hail Mary, Sunshine, and most recently, last year's The Astronaut, just seen last weekend. This makes five, and now I probably have it out of my system again for a little while. 

Speaking of large numbers, this now makes the fourth time I've seen this movie on the big screen. Only my 2013 viewing was on a small screen. I'd say that makes 2001 the most I've seen any movie on a big screen, except I also watched Pulp Fiction four times in the theater. It's definitely my largest number of repertory theatrical viewings of one movie. There may only be even one other I've seen twice (Donnie Darko, except one of those was the inferior director's cut). 

But the takeaway I want to finish with is that in this viewing, my one truly new takeaway that I'm certain of is that two of the movie's stars remind me of two icons from my childhood. See, I told you it would be shallower.

Here's the first pairing:

Yes that's William Shatner's Captain Kirk on the right, though that is certainly not the Captain Kirk from my childhood. I was having trouble finding a similar profile shot circa The Wrath of Khan. 

It's not just a similarity in the appearance of William Sylvester's Haywood Floyd, it's also something in the demeanor, in the slightly too confident means of presenting himself.

And here is the second:

Although the physical similarity is pretty striking, this is a bit of a demeanor thing too, though I can't really describe it. There are a few moments when Keir Dullea's voice gets a bit animated that remind me of Christopher Reeve's Superman in his moments of high stress.

Though of course we all know the real best appearance match for Dullea is Ed Harris.

My sister-in-law took my son to Super Mario Galaxy so I didn't have to

My son went to a sleepover at his aunt's house on Friday night, and we thought he might have been returned early in the afternoon on Saturday, as he usually is. 

When my wife told me that they wouldn't be back until later because they were at the movies, at first I couldn't place what movie they could possibly be seeing. They had just gone to see Hoppers the weekend before (I'll be happy enough to catch that on Disney+ in a couple months), and usually a bunch of children's movies don't come out in close succession. (Though it is school holidays, and they do usually try to stack up a few for that.)

Then it occurred to me:

The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, of course. 

I secretly did a little dance of rejoice. I mean, not an actual dance, but a metaphorical one.

I had, of course, noticed that this was coming out, seeing it on the sides of bus stops and buses themselves. That's aside from being the cinephile that I am, and knowing more about upcoming releases than most people do.

But my son had not put to me the idea of seeing it. When talking about movies we might see when my wife is in Tasmania for most of the next week, he mentioned only the continuation of our march through the MCU movies, which has now arrived at the big kahuna: Avengers: Infinity War. 

Now that my sister-in-law has taken him, I've obviously dodged that bullet. 

I think he assumed that I would go but that I would not really want to go. When we went to see the first one a couple years ago -- can't recall whether my older son joined for that or not -- I don't think I said to him/them that I hadn't liked it. But I imagine I was very lacking in any sort of commentary about it at all, which is what I do when I've just seen a movie that I think he likes but that I myself did not like. It was the same way I dummied up while walking out of Anaconda on his birthday. 

But he's a smart cookie. He can tell the difference between a movie I liked and a movie I fucking hated.

And that is not too strong of a description of my feelings toward The Super Mario Bros Movie. I felt assaulted by 90+ minutes of essentially that poster you see above, with its nauseating blasts of colour and its stupid Italian plumber jokes. I gave it 1.5 stars and ranked it 160th out of 168 movies I ranked in 2023. And in ranting about this new movie a couple minutes ago in a group chat, I said "I could live the rest of my life and not see (or more to the point, hear) Chris Pratt voice another animated character." Pratt = sucks. 

And I might not have to. At least, not in this movie.

When my son returned home and I asked him what he'd thought of it, he said it was "good" and that he liked it "about the same as the first one." 

Because he's my son and has inherited some of my proclivities, his brain immediately shifted to wondering if he should have saved the movie to watch with me -- if I had been hurt by being passed over for this. But he also knew he was probably okay to have excluded me. "I wasn't sure if you wanted to see it," was what he said, or something similar, which was basically like "I didn't think you wanted to see but I wanted you to know I did think about you first."

So it worked out perfectly for everybody.