Killing two hours before a movie

Hello.

I'm supposed to be in a movie right now, but instead I'm here, talking to you. 

Let me back up and explain.

You know how I've always loved the after work double feature? The one where I stay in the city after work, have dinner, and watch two movies, sometime at the same theater and sometimes at different theaters, finally returning home sometime around midnight or a little after?

Well I do. But I don't get to do it that much anymore.

My kids have games or practices on three of the weeknights -- Monday, Tuesday and Thursday -- and on the fourth night, Wednesday, I usually play tennis. Well, lately I haven't been, because my partner has an injured elbow, though we did resume yesterday after a two-month break. But even with Wednesdays nights "off," I haven't utilized any for double features, even though Wednesdays are in fact one of my two days in the office. And it's not like I couldn't go on another night, but then I'd be leaving my wife in the lurch for the games and practices and I feel bad about that. 

But this is the second week of school holidays, and -- at least I thought anyway -- there would be no training this week. Turns out my younger son's soccer team came back a week early -- they're mad for soccer, I swear -- but at least my older son wasn't also at basketball practice on Thursday, which is what makes Thursdays so hard, even when I'm at home. Anyway, I didn't even know about the soccer practice when I proposed to my wife last week that I should stay in the city for two movies after work on Thursday -- "like I used to do." She agreed without a second thought. 

The only thing was, a double feature wasn't really lining up. I realized that Olivia Wilde's The Invite was opening this week, which was very promising, but then I couldn't find anything that I really wanted to pair it with. I'm still not sure if I'm going to see the live-action Moana, ever, let alone in the theaters, so that wasn't it. At the theaters in the city that had this movie, the best options for double feature partners were things I had already seen, things I had no intention of seeing, or things that were so old that I felt like a real heel trying to use my critics card to see them. (You're supposed to only use it for movies in the first two weeks of their release.)

So I cast the net a bit wider, out to the Sun in Yarraville, which is my regular theater, and would be on my way home from work anyway. Not one of the city theaters, but there was no rule that said I had to go to this double feature at a city theater. It's just that I enjoy it as part of the novelty of the after-work double feature. The bottom line is the two movies and the yummy dinner. 

And the Sun, being a bit more independent (and just having more screens than these other places), had a movie I hadn't heard of called Saccharine, which had a sort of discomfiting poster. Here, see?

Aren't you glad I didn't put that at the start of the post? You would have never started reading. 

Without even knowing anything about it, I knew that it might be in a similar category to other gross-out movies I've seen and loved in the past few years, including my last two #1 movies, The Substance and Together. And once I did know something about it, the thing I newly knew was that it was directed by Natalie Erika James, the Australian director who made the films Relic and Apartment 7A. 

Now I should say my relationship with Natalie Erika James is somewhat complicated. James made a short film called Creswick that played at the ReelGood Film Festival about ten years ago, and I was on the committee of people who voted it to get the top award at the festival that year. I loved it, you should seek it out if you can find it. Unfortunately, the feature-length version of Creswick was Relic, and that movie really didn't work for me. It was enough worse than Creswick that I didn't even prioritize seeing Apartment 7A, though I probably would have seen it in time to rank it that year if it had been a bit more accessible online at the time I needed to watch it. 

But James would be a good filmmaker to wrestle with, even if I didn't like her film, especially on an Australian review site that's theoretically slightly more interested than average in Australian content. And the promise was always there. 

The only question was, would it be The Invite first or Saccharine first? Both options existed, with gaps in between them that were either too brief or too long, meaning neither option was the hands down choice. 

In theory, a movie like The Invite is what you watch first, when the evening is young, when ribald comedy (I don't actually know if this movie is ribald) and zingy dialogue are vastly improved by the drink you had at dinner. Saccharine is more the "midnight movie" selection, when you've added a bong hit to that drink from dinner. 

And so I first envisioned a 6:40 The Invite followed by a 9:30 Saccharine. This might leave as much as 50 minutes between the movies, but at least I wouldn't be rushing. I could go get a little something else to eat as a complement to my earlier than usual dinner. 

But then I got to thinking, "Do I really want to only be leaving the theater at 11:30?" I also newly knew that Saccarhine was nearly two hours long, and given the uncertain transportation prospects for getting home, I didn't want to leave it too late. (Make note of this. This comes back in to our story shortly.)

So then I more seriously considered the skin-of-my-teeth option of a 6:50 Saccharine and an 8:50 The Invite. That would get me out at more like 10:40, and it would also give me ten more minutes to get there from work. 

And though the turnaround would be tight, the movies would probably be showing just down the hallway from each other. This cinema plays only five minutes of combined ads, trailers and short films before a movie, so it would give me about seven minutes to go to the toilet etc. I could probably even pick up both tickets before I went in, even though I again feel like a bit of a heel when I ask a ticket clerk to give me not one but two free tickets. (Side note: It does not actually matter how many minutes of trailers they play before a movie in order to make my point. Assuming the pre-show is consistent across all movies, whatever the length, the difference in relative starting times would be the same whether they played five or 20 minutes worth of trailers.)

So I finished up my ramen dinner in the city by about 5:35, spooning and slurping up all the spicy goodness and then emerging into the coldness of the winter night. This gave me an hour and 15 minutes to walk to the train station at Melbourne Central and ride two stops to North Melbourne, where I would get a bus to Yarraville.

Ah well here is where our story gets interesting. Or maybe really boring. (Maybe it's been boring all this time. If so, don't tell me.)

Conveyed by train only, I should have gotten to Yarraville no later than about 6:20, leaving me a full half-hour to stretch my legs before sitting down for four hours. But I allowed extra time for the buses that were replacing trains along my usual train route, because they are doing track work. My wife had told me yesterday that this was going on, and then I experienced it myself on the way in. 

The factor I didn't properly consider: How much extra time to add to that journey for a bus weaving its way through rush-hour traffic. The usual buses replace trains scenario is only later at night, usually after 8, and I'm usually only confronted with it after one of these double features. Although it's pretty tedious relative to a train, at that time of night the buses move at a nice clip and get you where you're going with probably only an extra 25% of the time tacked on. 

During rush hour, these buses do not move at a nice clip.

And so I watched the clock steadily tick down as we crawled through the inner and immediately outer city traffic, as the conveyance took something like a full 35 minutes just to get to its first two stops, which would have taken about five minutes on train. It quickly became clear to me that there was no way I would make my 6:50 Saccharine, even with the extra ten minutes. In fact, at a certain point I actually willed the progress to slow down, since it would mean less time I had to kill in Yarraville.

But then suddenly, miraculously, it was like the bus found an opening in the defense. It was like a running back who hit the gap and then had an open sprint to the endzone. Suddenly, I was disgorged in Yarraville at 6:51 p.m. There was still hope.

Until I got there and the line was going out the door. And this is where the five minutes of pre-show material actually finds its relevance.

Usually there are two lines at the Sun, the one on the left for the suckers who have to buy popcorn and drinks, and the one on the right for people like me who just wanted a ticket. The second one is always way shorter than the first one (usually just me, or maybe one person ahead of me). But on this night, when a bus had taken 45 minutes for a 15 minute trip, the right cash register was also out of order, meaning suckers and film critics alike needed to wait in that line going out the door.

Some quick math in my head left only one conclusion: I had to bail on Saccharine and only see The Invite.

In two hours. 

Which means the math in my head changed to how many activities I could actually find to fill up two hours and whether any of them would prevent me from prematurely burning out my phone battery, which was already down to about 50% and needed to still have some juice in case of shenanigans trying to get home after the movie.

Which brings you to now, or rather, to the last 45 minutes or so. No, this post has not killed the full two hours, but right now I'm within 45 minutes of the start of The Invite, and I can always figure out a way to kill 45 minutes. (And after proof-reading, that's down to about 25.) 

Especially now that I've charged my phone battery up to 66% and counting. For a while there I thought it would be a fully zero sum game between my laptop and my phone in its current symbiotic relationship where the phone is receiving a charge from the laptop and the laptop is receiving internet from the phone. I figured the juice used by the phone's internet would be entirely offset by the power going into the phone, leading it to hover at that 48% of even lose some. But instead it went up nearly 20 percent, and now I'm sure it can withstand whatever shenanigans my night still might have ahead of me.

Other than writing this post, I've also:

1) Done my Duolingo for the day (yes I'm still learning Japanese, working on a streak of 67 straight days);

2) Done my Connections for the day (the streak there is at 28);

3) Updated some fantasy baseball stats, and

4) Sent out an email about a fantasy baseball competition centered around next week's home run derby. 

The only thing is, I've been sitting in this little park by the train station and it is ass cold out here, so my little fingers are starting to feel like little icicles. Maybe I need to use those 45 minutes to go find a hot chocolate.

So if it seems like this post was excessively long, shared details you didn't need, and ultimately was nowhere near as profound as such length and details would suggest it was, well, now you know why.

Then again, you always did. I put it right there in the title. 

Remembering Rob Reiner: Shock and Awe

This is the fourth in my bi-monthly series Remembering Rob Reiner, in which I watch the six remaining films I hadn't yet seen by the slain director. Not to be confused with my other bi-monthly series, Remembering Rob Reiner, in which I rewatch my six favorite of his films.

Usually, a film being shorter than you expect it to be is a good thing. It's a contradiction built until loving movies: The more you love them, the more you want them to be over sooner. (Or maybe love doesn't have to do with it. Maybe it's the more of them you watch, the more you want them to be over sooner. There are probably people out there who love movies but for whatever reason can only see one a month, and in their case, they probably wish they were double the length.)

Where was I?

Oh yes -- I usually like it when a movie is shorter than I expect it to be. Get out of there faster. Get on to doing something else. Or more likely, get to sleep at a reasonable hour.

But a short movie can also have a lack of weight to it, and that's what I felt when watching Shock and Awe, the third-to-last movie directed by Rob Reiner that I hadn't seen, which had its festival premiere in 2017 and briefly hit theaters the following year. 

Oh that's not to say Reiner doesn't take this movie seriously. He takes it very seriously. It's about the George W. Bush administration's fabrication of evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in order to justify a military campaign and remove Saddam Hussein from power. It's the kind of thing we liberals were most aghast about, politically, before we knew the extraordinary depths of disgusting governance of which Donald Trump was capable.

But the movie is only 90 minutes long, which seems strange for that sort of film.

In the moment, I was very glad of its shorter length, mostly because I didn't think it was very good. But also for the reason stated previously, that I wanted to get out of there at a reasonable hour and go to bed. As it was, I fell asleep near the beginning, and didn't finish until 1 a.m. 

But part of the reason I didn't think it was very good was that I knew it was going through these events in a cursory way. Or maybe just that these events didn't require more than a 90-minute movie, and perhaps devoting more than that to the journalistic efforts of some courageous Knight Ridder reporters and editors wasn't warranted. One wonders if their efforts were even worth memorializing in this fashion. 

I have to say, part of my impression of Shock and Awe was formed by my sense of it as a technical failure. The lighting was terrible. But before I went off all half-cocked in blaming the director of lighting (a title that does not exist, and in fact, when looking this person up just now on IMDB, I couldn't figure out who was the best person to, um, not blame), I thought I should check to make sure there wasn't something wrong with the actual picture on my TV. And indeed, at some point since the last time we watched something on this HDMI port, someone seems to have dimmed the lighting, a surely inadvertent adjustment that I quickly corrected. I went back and watched a few moments of Shock and Awe and they all looked fine now.

But poor technique would have been true to my experience of the decline phase of Reiner's career. Although I don't recall having any technical issues with the last new Reiner movie I watched -- LBJ, which also starred Woody Harrelson -- I thought Being Charlie really looked like crap, and it wasn't a setting on my TV in that case. 

It isn't a given that a director loses their visual instincts as they entered their 70s, which Reiner would have been doing when he made Shock and Awe. You can name numerous examples (Ridley Scott, Martin Scorsese) of directors who haven't lost a step in that regard as they've aged. But Reiner in particular seemed to care less about how a movie looked and more about how it sounded, if you follow me, the older he'd gotten. I've noticed that even the opening credits seem a little bit tossed off in these most recent efforts.

He certainly has a good cast on hand. Harrelson is joined by the likes of James Marsden, Tommy Lee Jones and himself, in one of his final prominent acting roles where he didn't play himself or Marty DeBirgi. There's name value in the characters' wives and girlfriends, who include Jessica Biel and Milla Jovovich, who do a particularly poor job of rising above the level of the heroes' wives and girlfriends. 

But the experience of watching this movie is kind of like watching a single political essay play out over 90 minutes, in which actors hand the baton from one to the other and speak a continuous stream of Reiner's thoughts. (Reiner did not write the film; that credit goes to Joey Hartstone.) That includes a lot of exposition and a lot of opinion. Opinion I agree with, of course, and that the facts have retroactively borne out. But nonetheless, something that's a bit dramatically inert, even though it's told in an efficient enough package that obviously moves from one point to the next with good momentum. 

I think there's a real struggle to make us care about and recognize these people as individual characters. There are scenes of each of the leads, save Tommy Lee Jones, at home with a wife or significant other, reading in bed or having a beer, which are meant to humanize these men. See? They have lives outside the office, outside of trying to hold the administration's feet to the fire. 

But these scenes feel really perfunctory, and they lack the instinct to add nuance to the portrayal of characters who are walking ideas. There's a moment that seems deliberately designed to give Jovovich's character more agency, in which she gets paranoid about Harrelson's character talking over their phone about the leads he's following regarding the government potentially lying to the public. She starts talking, without evidence and in a way that is never followed up in the plot, about phones being bugged and mysterious government figures who could come and harm their family. If you are going to introduce this sort of thing, you have to pay it off in some way, but Shock and Awe doesn't.

Obviously Reiner thinks of this as his All the President's Men, and perhaps because it was unavoidable, Harrelson and Marsden -- the Woodward and Bernstein stand-ins -- even evoke Woodward and Bernstein at one point in their discussion of what they're doing. That would make Reiner's character the courageous Ben Bradlee character. (I don't know who it makes Tommy Lee Jones, since I never totally figured out his character's role in the whole thing.)

Let's just say it's a pale, pale imitation of that Alan J. Pakula classic, which I am now evoking for the second straight day on this blog. 

I'll start to wrap up here, but I did want to leave with one final look at a narrative choice that doesn't totally work. Even though the movie does largely get wrapped up in analyzing what the politicians said, when -- and they all appear as themselves in archival footage from the time -- it recognizes there needs to be a human face on this, and that human face is a soldier, played by Luke Tennie, who got paralyzed from shrapnel that severed his spinal cord after his convoy ran over an IED in Iraq. 

Because so much time has to be devoted to chasing leads and speaking to sources who are surprisingly (and conveniently, and unbelievably) liberal with how much they reveal to the reporters -- liberal as in generous, not as in progressive -- this soldier can't really get visited with during the narrative. So it's really just a bookend, with the soldier testifying before a committee at the start, and finally, near the end, with us following him through training and into Iraq, where his accident occurs. 

I guess maybe I'm just too jaded by the last two Trump administrations these days, but I found myself thinking "Is this all you got? A wounded soldier?" 

Indeed it was wrong for the Bush administration to cook up evidence of WMDs that were not there in order to finish the job of removing Hussein from power. Whether it was actually Bush's intention to do right by his father, or whether it was just supervillain-style, moustache-twirling scheming for oil by Dick Cheney, is besides the point. 

But through no fault of its own, Shock and Awe ends up feeling quaint if viewed in 2026. It feels like a luxury of a comparatively enlightened society that a phantom war was the only thing we liberals only had on Bush. (I'm sure there were other things, but I'm conveniently not remembering them right now.) By today's standards, George W. Bush was a model president. 

As for Reiner himself, I do feel sort of sad knowing that this was his last truly political film that I hadn't yet seen. His staunch liberalism was something I always loved and respected about him, even if it didn't always make for the best movies. Even when he didn't hit the sweet spot between entertainment and politics, I appreciate that his voice was out there and that he was always trying. 

A split diopter extravaganza

Given the fascination I've developed with this technique in recent years, it's hard to believe there's only a single reference on my blog to the split diopter. And it wasn't even the focus of the post, it was just a random reference in a piece about Bride of Chucky. 

Well, I saw a movie last night that commanded me to bring this technique to the forefront of my discussions. 

The movie was Lee Cronin's The Mummy, which is, I think it's fair to say, lousy with split diopter shots.

What the heck is a split diopter, you might ask?

It's a shot in which both the extreme foreground and the extreme background are in focus at the same time. It isn't possible to achieve this effect with just a normal movie camera. Here's what Wikipedia says about how the effect is accomplished:

A split diopter is half convex glass that attaches in front of the camera's main lens to make half the lens nearsighted. The lens can focus on a plane in the background and the diopter on a foreground. A split diopter does not create real deep focus, only the illusion of this. What distinguishes it from traditional deep focus is that there is not continuous depth of field from foreground to background; the space between the two sharp objects is out of focus. Because split focus diopters only cover half the lens, shots in which they are used are characterized by a blurred line between the two planes in focus.

Okay, but what does it look like?

It's something you immediately notice and don't soon forget, because it looks so ... strange. The textbook example is probably the newsroom shots used by Alan J. Pakula in All the President's Men, including the following:

If you look closely at this shot, you'll notice that both Robert Redford and the gathering of journalists waaaay in the background are in focus. Which, in the context of this film, has thematic implications, though I won't go into those right now (possibly because it's been at least 15 years since I've seen this movie and I don't remember what those implications are). 

However, in many ways this is not the typical split diopter shot in the sense that it is naturalistic and does not draw attention to itself. This is a better example of the sort of uncanny appearance of a split diopter shot, from Brian De Palma's Carrie:

You notice this right away, and you wonder for a moment if something has happened to your sensory perception, like someone slipped a drug into your popcorn. Nope, that's just a split diopter.

These shots are not very common because I believe they are quite difficult to execute. I'm not going to go into why that is because this is not a technical movie blog, and without refreshing my memory on what makes them so difficult, I couldn't actually tell you why anyway. And so it is that I tend to notice them whenever I see them, and feel like I have been treated to something truly special.

The Mummy, then, was quite the treat.

In fact, we get so much split diopter in The Mummy that it almost becomes a signature part of the movie's style and overall look. 

I don't know Lee Cronin from a hole in the ground, but he obviously thinks he's pretty special because he's put his name above the title of this movie. Looking him up, I'm reminded that he wrote and directed the last movie in the Evil Dead series prior to this year's new entry, that being Evil Dead Rise in 2023. 

And I'm not surprised to find there's at least one split diopter shot in Evil Dead Rise. The image below combines one from that previous movie with one from the new movie that's composed similarly:

But there's definitely more than one split diopter in The Mummy. They just keep coming, and coming, and coming. Like this one:

And this one:

And this one:

(Sorry for the poor quality of that last one. I grabbed it off my computer during a replay of the movie, when the options available online ran out.)

Regarding the second one, it may not seem like a split diopter because the character in the foreground is not totally in focus. But I think that's because she's moving, not because she's actually out of focus. In any case, this was offered up as an example of split diopter shots in The Mummy, so I'm not questioning it. 

I didn't go in depth on the online reactions to all these split diopter shots, but I did see someone mention that by using so many of them, Cronin weakens the impact of any individual one, and they lose cumulative impact as well. (If there's an actual distinction to be made between those two things.)

That may be true to some degree. But I'll say that each time I saw a new one -- and there had to be at least a dozen in the film -- I felt freshly exhilarated, just because it is something rare in filmmaking. And after nearly 7,300 films, I need all the rare I can get. 

And I wouldn't necessarily say a split diopter shot even looks better than a normal shot that might use a rack focus to shift the focus between a foreground and a background object, or might leave one of them fuzzy for the duration of the shot. You might even argue that by looking "weird" it creates an unnecessary distraction, something that takes you out of the moment as you are forced to consider the filmmaking rather than the story being told by the filmmaking. It's a bit unnerving, kind of like watching a movie in high frame rate for the first time.

But there's something old school, film school try hard -- in the best possible way -- of what Cronin is doing here, and I will always reward that, even if it is overused by ten to 25 percent, even if it is more indulgent than it needs to be.

And hey, it finally gave me the occasion to write about one of my favorite nerdy film techniques.

The backfiring of my cheeky 10 a.m. movie

You know I've been in Australia for too long when I start incorporating the word "cheeky" into my daily
language too often. But here we are.

When you have a certain hobby you're passionate about -- let's say, movies -- the goal can be to fit it in when it doesn't cause a conflict for the people who rely on you. A good time of that is late at night, but you're often tired late at night.

Another good time for it? A weekend morning, when the rest of your family traditionally lounges around until lunchtime. 

The only problem is, movies don't usually play early enough in the morning for it to truly not interfere with the rest of your day. 

But they can, sometimes. Like the showing of 100 Nights of Hero I attended Saturday at 10 a.m.

Combine the fact that it's only 91 minutes long with the fact that the Sun in Yarraville only plays five minutes of trailers before the movie, and there was a chance I'd get all the way back to my house before noon. (I didn't, because I decided to go next door to get some fried zucchini -- like french fries but with breaded zucchini instead of breaded potato -- at Grill'd.)

I left a little too late, but it wasn't because I was sleeping in. I was up before 8 as I almost always am. But my wife did text me within ten minutes of when I planned to leave, asking if I could bring her a tea. (Don't worry, this is a thing I do for her almost every weekend morning. But she usually wakes up earlier than 9:30.)

So I was definitely squeezing the lemons (catching every yellow light I could) while driving to Yarraville, mildly cursing drivers who didn't react to the changing of the lights quickly enough, and opting for the first available parking spot I could find. But I sat down just as the theater's final pre-show message was playing, this being the locally produced documentary short that appears before every movie at this theater, and for three minutes looks into some local phenomenon. 

The movie was really good. Four out of five stars, though I did consider 4.5. I'm trying to be a bit more judicious with the second-highest rating.

So why was this a "backfire," then?

Because the movie doesn't actually count toward 2026! 

I don't know when is late enough in the year to assume that a new release is from the current calendar year, even though we sometimes get things in Australia later than they do in other parts of the world. Apparently, July is not late enough. 

100 Nights of Hero actually came out in the U.S. on December 5th, as it turns out. And the U.S. release date is the standard I use when deciding whether the movie belongs among the films I'm ranking in the current year. Or really, whichever comes first, the Australian release date or the U.S. release date. If a movie is released in Australia one year, and I see it that year, but it doesn't get released in the U.S. until the next year, I'll still rank it. The reverse, unfortunately, is not true. 

So I still got to get in my cheeky movie, and it was still really good, and I still got to eat some yummy zucchini chips. I just don't get to rank it.

I guess three out of four ain't bad.

Celebrating a country that is no longer worth celebrating

America turns 250 today.

Ho hum.

(Today in Australia. It's all about the time stamp on this post, and it will show as July 4th only if I post on July 4th in my own time zone.)

It's a Saturday, so I could have really done something extravagant, movie-wise, to celebrate it. I could have set up a day's worth of Revolutionary War movies. I could have set up a marathon of movies about American politicians who did good in the world. I could have even done a less overtly patriotic series of movies that I felt exemplified the "American spirit" -- the best version of that concept, not the worst. 

Instead, I'm doing nothing.

I might sneak in a cheeky 10 a.m. viewing of the movie 100 Nights of Hero, about which I know nothing. But that's it.

The U.S. has just fallen too much in my estimation to feel like really celebrating anything this weekend. 

I know that at any given time, somewhere close to half of the people in the U.S. share my personal values. Sometimes it's a little more, and sometimes it's a little less.

But in 2024, that percentage was not enough to keep Donald Trump out of the White House a second time. And just look at extraordinary amount of grift, corruption, malfeasance, hatred and general negativity that decision has introduced into our world, for a second time.

Some people thought the states' fall from grace dated back to 2016, when Trump was elected the first time. Heck, if you want to go more broadly, you can wring your hands over any number of moments in those 250 years, in which America ceased to be the thing the founders created it to be. But let's not get so macroscopic that we ruin the ability to examine this most recent version of America.

In retrospect, I can't blame Americans for voting in Trump the first time. Sure his behavior was ghastly in that election season, and the revelations we learned about him, beyond those we already knew, should have been disqualifying. But he had not yet been president and it was not yet possible to know how he would do the job, and whether his vaunted business instincts would be surprisingly great for the country.

Once they learned these instincts were not great, Americans wisely selected a different choice in 2020. And restored my faith in them as recently as six years ago. 

Four years after that, though, they voted him back in. Even knowing who he was. Even knowing how he had tried to overthrow the government when he was not reelected. Even knowing he planned to establish policies that would be terrible for brown people and immigrants. Even knowing that he was guilty of criminal conspiracies, sexual indiscretions, and possibly pedophilia, and that he would use every available arm of government to try to punish his political enemies.

That's when America lost me.

The thing is, when you are in an abusive relationship -- as are many of us with the country we are supposed to love -- it's usually a rollercoaster. It's never permanently up, and it's never permanently down. There's a very good chance that this November, I will feel some renewed pride when congress is handed back to the Democrats. Two years after that, it is very likely the presidency will also be handed back to the Democrats. The "good guys," if I want to try to bring this post back to movies in some way.

But even with a country that was founded on promise, I can't celebrate America today just on the basis of that promise. I can only soberly acknowledge what I see, which is a country that has displayed its worst instincts a lot more often than its best. 

A lot of Moana for a ten-year period

If you really like something, there's no such thing as too much of it.

Well, I only sort of like Moana. So a third Moana movie in ten years seems like a lot, especially when Disney has other franchises you would expect them to nurture.

The original Moana came out in 2016. Hard to believe but that is ten years ago now. I liked this movie but did not love it. 3.5 stars. 

Possibly because Disney was nurturing its other franchises, it took until 2024 for Moana 2 to come out. I thought this movie was meh as hell. I barely remember what happens in it. I think there might have been coconuts and a chicken. 

Now only two years later, we're getting the de rigeur live action Moana. It's too soon, I think.

Now I should say, the ordinary "sequel every two years" rhythm of many popular franchises could give you way more than three movies within a ten-year span. In fact, depending on how popular it was, you could get as many as five. In fact, there are some series where they basically make one movie a year until the box office no longer supports that pace. I'm looking at you, Saw. 

For animated movies, though, the timeframe gets distended. Even if you determine the first movie was a hit and you want to make a second, you're starting all the way over at the beginning again, even if you've already gotten some of the technology assets lined up to easily create these characters again. We probably would have seen Moana 2 a lot earlier than eight years after Moana if you could churn out animated movies any more quickly. 

So I really think it's the close proximity of Moana 2 and the live-action Moana that seems like testing our Moana-related good will. I'm so not ready for another Moana, this soon, that I might not even see this one.

I think it seems particularly strange when you look at Disney's other franchises, particularly its most popular one.

There isn't even a live-action Frozen in the works yet. I find that odd. Granted, they're making an animated Frozen III that will be coming out next year. But that'll be eight years since Frozen II, which seems like a long time without giving us anything from this franchise. (Though it does mirror the previous gaps in this and other franchises, and is exactly the same gap as the one just discussed between Moana and Moana II.)

They are, however, making a live-action Tangled, news that I greet with both excitement and trepidation. As possibly my favorite non-Pixar Disney movie of all time, at least that's what my Flickchart says, Tangled is both the sort of thing I really want to see in live-action form, to see how they handle it, and don't want to see in live-action form, for fear of how they'll ruin it. However, it does have the benefit of being directed by Michael Gracey, who made sort of wondrous things happen in Better Man a few years ago, so maybe there's some chance for the gravity-defying elements of Tangled to really make it onto the screen here. 

But that movie doesn't even have a release year yet on IMDB. Which means it might be almost 20 years since the 2010 release of the original that they've nurtured that "franchise," if you can even call it a franchise without there ever having been an animated sequel. 

Compared to these two, indeed, three Moanas in ten years feels like a lot.

And I can feel it in my own sluggish response to the possibility of seeing the film. Even the prospect of seeing Dwayne Johnson actually play Maui, rather than just voicing him, doesn't really move the needle for me. 

I should say that almost none of the Disney live-action remakes have really done it for me. If you forced me to try to figure out which one was the most successful, I don't even know that I'd have a ready answer. Maybe Maleficent? Almost all have been various levels of disappointing. 

But at least in the case of the others, I hadn't just had my fill of them with a decade of regular exposure. 

Spoiler subtitles

I had an experience watching a movie on Sunday afternoon that I don't believe I've ever had before. That's right, after nearly 7,300 films, I'm still having new experiences.

The subtitles were not in sync with the dialogue.

That's right, they were coming about six seconds before the actual spoken words they were translating, though strangely, this gap narrowed as the movie was going until it was almost imperceptible. 

The movie was Louis Malle's Murmur of the Heart from 1971. And why was I watching Louis Malle's Murmur of the Heart from 1971, you may ask?

It was June's assignment in Flickchart Friends Favorites Fiesta, a Facebook group of Flickchart users, in which each month we are assigned the highest ranked movie from another person's chart that we haven't yet seen. Murmur of the Heart was someone's #2, which I find a strange choice, but then his #1 is also pretty strange: The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey, which I also had occasion to watch in this group maybe a year ago, and which I did like a fair bit. 

You'd think this guy and I might not be very well suited for one another, but his top ten is a strange mix of movies I've never heard of and movies that are in my own top ten. Examples of the former? Twist and Shout (1984), Young Hearts (2024) and Friends (1971, and what is it with this guy and the year 1971?). Examples of the latter? Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Princess Bride, though Bride is technically just outside my top ten at #11.

In any case, the comparative obscurity of half of his top ten meant I might have had to skip all the way down to his #5, Young Hearts, as a possible viewing for June. If you can't get your hands on the movie you're actually assigned, you just go to the next one that you can find. 

But when I posted in the group that I'd been unable to track down Murmur, he posted a link to a Russian streaming site where I could watch it. 

That sounds extremely dodgy, but I have actually used this site once before, also in this group. It feels like this would be piracy, or at least expose me to malware, but I trust the guidance of others in this group, most of whom are younger than I am, and in any case, the last time it didn't cause me any problems, that I am aware of. (No identity theft since then, at least.)

The Russian stream of Murmur of the Heart did cause me one problem, though, and by now you know it's the subtitle delay -- or rather, the subtitle head start. 

It took me a minute to figure out what was going on. At first I thought there were no subtitles at all, because there were characters speaking words that were receiving no translation. But then I had already seen subtitles, so that was obviously not it. 

I suppose even if I didn't speak a decent amount of French, I would have soon figured out that the subtitles were coming early, but my knowledge of French landed me on that conclusion a lot sooner. I timed it and found it to be about a six-second delay between the two.

At this point I had to decide whether I was going to abandon the movie. I had already determined I could rent Young Hearts on Apple. 

But then I decided, how much chaos could this actually cause? I might as well just keep watching.

The truth is, it did not cause very much chaos. The way a scene proceeded was still largely unaffected by this problem. You'd get a "spoiler" of sorts if there was dialogue in a new scene that hadn't come on the screen yet, but this is not the kind of movie where big things are happening where you don't want even a five-second preview. (There's a big thing that happens at the end, which I won't spoil, but by then this problem had been largely mitigated, which I will explain in a moment.)

The most challenging aspect to it, I suppose, is that you'd get dialogue without actually knowing which character was speaking it, because they hadn't actually opened their mouth yet. By the time they were actually speaking it, there might have been three or four more lines that appeared, and it was difficult to go back and determine who had said what. However, I also found that this did not really matter, and a lot of it could be sorted out in the context of what was being said. I mean, there are certain things that would only be said by a mother and certain things that would only be said by a son. 

I should tell you a bit about what this movie is about. It's a coming-of-age story set in 1954, about the sexual awakening of a 15-year-old (or so) boy, who has an overprotective mother. She was the only actor I was really familiar with, as she's played by Lea Massari, an Italian beauty who was also one of the stars of L'Avventura. (She only just died last year at age 91.)

I should also tell you why the dialogue eventually caught up with the subtitles. 

One of the things that struck me as dodgy about this Russian streaming site was that it would have these little "blips" in the movie. When the first one came, it had all the hallmarks of the movie stopping for a brief ad. Except no ad came. Instead, after about a second, the movie resumed. 

Although I didn't realize it at first, each of these blips was slightly bridging the gap between the subtitles and the dialogue. There might have been one about every ten minutes, and maybe they were actually less than a second each, because it took until nearly the end that the dialogue and subtitles were essentially in sync, with only a mildly perceptible delay of the dialogue after the subtitles. I wondered if the movie had gone on another 30 minutes, whether the subtitles would have actually fallen behind.

After watching the movie, I still think it's a weird choice as someone's #2. I suppose a coming-of-age movie can have quite an impact on a person, depending on when they see it. But I reckon that either you have to be at that age when you see it -- which is why movies like Stand by Me and My Life as a Dog had such an impact on me -- or the movie has to be set during the time period when you were that age. (So, as an example not from the movies, maybe something like Stranger Things, when I was the same age as those characters in the mid-1980s.)

Perhaps one of those two things describes this guy, who I otherwise don't know. The rest of his top ten includes other older coming-of-age stories I've seen but which did not connect with me the way they did with him (like Au Revoir Les Enfants), though then also one from 2024 in Young Hearts. So who knows, really.

One thing I can tell you is that something very shocking, that does not involve violence, happens near the end of the movie, which I can only recall seeing in one other movie -- and which also would make a person have questions about any viewer who ranks this movie as high as this guy does. Then again, the other movie where I've seen this is my #682, meaning it's in the top ten percent of my Flickchart, so maybe I should be cautious about any untoward implications. 

Audient One-Timers: Das Boot

This is the sixth month (but seventh movie) in my 2026 series Audient One-Timers, in which I'm watching the 12 (it turned out to be 13) highest ranked movies on my Flickchart that I'd seen only once. 

Of the six previous movies I'd watched in this series, each was the same version of the movie I'd seen previously.

That streak was broken with Das Boot, my #124 on Flickchart. (Or The Boat, as it was called on Amazon, where I ended up renting it. Way to make a movie sound less interesting than it actually is.)

When I first saw Wolfgang Petersen's 1981 film in April of 2019, I was worried about its notorious length. And then I found that the notorious length was only the director's cut of the movie. The regular cut was only a reasonable two hours and 30 minutes. And given its ranking, obviously I loved it. 

The director's cut adds another hour to that, and the director's cut was the only version I could find today when I wanted to watch it again. 

I don't mean literally today, I mean "today" in the general sense. I actually watched it across Friday and Saturday.

I thought I had started early enough to watch the whole thing on Friday. It was the last day of school before winter holidays, and considering that my job involves communicating with schools, there wasn't a huge amount to do after about 2. Everyone at the schools is just trying to get the hell out of there for two weeks.

So I threw on the movie about 3:30, figuring I could remain at my post for the last hour of my workday and watch the first hour of the movie, even with its subtitles, while keeping one eye on my emails. Then I'd have enough time before dinner to finish watching. 

Well, it didn't quite work out that way. My older son had his first school formal on Friday night, and I needed to deliver him there by 6. That kind of threw me off the pace, and then it was dinner, and then I watched Stranger Things and Pizza Movie as I told you about in a blog post a few days ago. 

I finally finished Das Boot on Saturday afternoon between 4 and 5 o'clock.

The piecemeal way I watched it didn't help, but the real thing that made me like Das Boot less this time -- not a huge amount less, but definitely less -- was the extra hour of material. Which I probably could have predicted, considering that I rarely prefer a director's cut of a movie I already love, and in most cases try not to watch them at all. 

Das Boot's director's cut is particularly problematic, though, in terms of separating it from the original. And to illustrate this, I'll use the example of another director's cut that I actually haven't seen.

The thing I've heard about the director's cut of Apocalypse Now -- one of them, since I guess there are two -- is that there's this long sequence on a plantation. It's 20 minutes of footage that otherwise does not exist in the version we're most familiar with. As such, it's easy to note when you've come across that footage and assess whether it strengthens or weakens the rest of the movie. Perhaps more importantly, it's easier to pull that section out entirely and sort of ignore it in making an assessment about the film on the whole. 

There was no way for me, me personally, to tell what made up the extra hour of footage in Das Boot. The whole movie takes place on a submarine, save three shorter sections, one each at the start, middle and end. And I feel quite certain those three sections are all in the version I saw in 2019. So that meant that the hour's worth of extra material just blended into a general indistinct stew of claustrophobic sub scenes.

Was it extra content in set pieces that were already in the shorter version? Was it new set pieces? Having seen the movie only once, I didn't know, but there being no obvious lines of demarcation, like the plantation scene in Apocalypse Now, made it impossible to tell. 

The effect, though, was quite clear. The whole thing felt like reduced stakes to me. There were any number of scenes where the boat is getting shaken around by depth charges that break lightbulbs, such that the significance of any scene individually was totally lost. It made me wonder why they'd even bothered to shoot different scenes where essentially the same thing happens.

However, watching a director's cut does have a clear benefit: It makes you appreciate the original movie, and particularly that movie's editing, even more. 

Now that I know that these superfluous scenes existed, and that someone deemed them unnecessary to the film most people saw at the time, I have a renewed respect for those decisions made. And sometimes, a renewed skepticism about the director, though that's a minor complaint. 

Indeed, the idea of a director's cut suggests that the director felt hard done by the original cut, and wanted to show his "true vision." That makes sense in a situation like the Apocalypse Now plantation sequence, which is a truly different element in the film. It doesn't make sense with yet another scene of the sub emerging intact after taking another fusillade of depth charges. Rather, it kind of makes you wonder if those people delivering the depth charges on the surface were just really bad at their jobs.

I've spent most of this post throwing mild shade at Das Boot. It's not really deserved. These are still great underlying materials, and I will still look forward to my next viewing of the abbreviated, theatrical version. I just don't need to see this version again. 

And the set pieces that do distinguish themselves -- the opening debauchery at the nightclub that leads to everyone getting sick, the initial tense testing of the submarine's dive capabilities, the middle sequence where they go ashore and are reluctantly feted by other German military, the bailing of the boat and desperate hope to get it surfaced after it gets grounded on the ocean floor, and finally, the gut punch ending -- are all just as good as they ever were. 

Next up in July? Carl Theodor Dreyer's Ordet from 1955. 

My Supergirl dilemma

Supergirl opens this weekend.

Meh.

I have a big dilemma about this movie.

On the one hand, I want -- with every fiber of my being -- to support movies focused on female superheroes. We don't need that corrective as much as we once did, but we still need it. As many female superheroes as there are, it's still comparatively rare that they are front and center in their own movie.

On the other hand, I hated James Gunn's Superman. And even though this movie is not directed by Gunn, it comes from the same universe that Gunn imagined, and it has the same stupid super dog that I hated so much in Superman. 

And how is this conflict going to be resolved?

I don't know yet.

It would be very unlike me to let one of the more prominent releases of the summer season go completely unwatched. I might skip it in theaters, but by the end of the year, I'd want to have seen it in order to rank it with my other movies from the year -- even if I expected not to like it.

But I've become a bit more selective with my viewings in recent years. That's not to say I avoid watching garbage. In fact, I kind of like watching garbage. Instead, I'm more likely to want to deliver a message to a movie by not watching it, even if no one hears that message but me. The most prominent examples are movies that involve potentially positive portrayals of Trump, from The Apprentice (which I still haven't watched) to Melania (which I may watch before the end of the year). 

The question is, is Supergirl, just by association with Superman, worthy of such a message?

I don't know yet. 

One issue I have with it? Milly Alcock, though it's nothing about her personally. (Though I do think the scowl seems a bit exaggerated.) 

No, it's that I feel like they cast a promising actress as Supergirl, Sasha Calle, only three years ago, and they've already chucked her in the bin and replaced her with someone else. I guess I liked 2023's The Flash a lot more than most people, because that was the final gasp of that iteration of the DC Cinematic Universe. Now under Gunn's new regime, it's Alcock, and Alcock comes with an advanced bias from me because I didn't like the way this world was introduced in Superman.

It's not like I didn't have a dilemma regarding Superman as well. That one I also wanted to support for political reasons, because of the flap involving Gunn's likening of Superman to an immigrant. But I just disliked the actual movie too much to actually go there. 

I haven't actually heard anything yet about how this movie has been received, in part because I rarely seek out that sort of information. It usually trickles down to me, but it hasn't yet in this case.

I suppose I want the movie to be good. I mean, I want every movie to be good. If the new DC Universe were salvageable for me, that would be the best possible outcome. There are going to be a lot more of these movies. 

But just from the few images I've seen, there's a lot of Gunn in this movie. A lot of off-earth stuff that just doesn't really work for me, even though I generally like the Guardians of the Galaxy movies. And the funny thing is, I really like one Gunn movie for DC, that being The Suicide Squad. 

So why not Superman? It's too much to get into now. There are too many reasons. It's just bad.

But I may have to give Craig Gillespie the chance to right this ship. Just maybe not in the cinemas, and not on opening weekend, in any case. 

A Gaten Matarazzo sort of evening

We finally started the final season of Stranger Things last night. I know, a long time coming. 

Once we didn't prioritize it as soon as it came out, then we talked about watching it with our younger son, who had belatedly plowed through all the seasons leading up to it. We thought he might demand a more immediate viewing, in case he wanted to talk about it with his friends or something, but my 12-year-old is a pretty patient kid. A lot more patient than I am, anyway. 

But there were various reasons we couldn't start right away, one of which was, it was a mood thing. We had some family stuff earlier this year that sort of killed the mood for something dark involving a lot of death. I guess we're past that enough now that Stranger Things made it onto the docket again.

A reason we didn't prioritize it straight away, though, is that my wife and I are a bit over it. I don't think this is a unique sentiment, at least among people in our age group. The first and the third seasons, in my opinion, were really great. Everything else showed diminishing returns, not to mention far, far longer episodes. It was the latter consideration that really made it seem like such a chore to start. When you're watching a Friday night TV show with your dinner, you don't really want it to go on for 170 minutes. (I don't think there were any ST episodes that were actually that long, but I'm only exaggerating a little bit.)

And yes, I felt a sense of "when is this going to be over" tedium from the first 71-minute episode. The content was still fine, though "Vecna" is starting to feel like a sillier antagonist the longer I live with him. It's just I'm ready for this whole thing to be over, and I still have at least ten hours of content to wade through before that can happen. 

This post is not about Stranger Things. It's about one of Stranger Things' stars, Gaten Matarazzo. 

Who was also in the second thing I watched on Friday night, Pizza Movie.

Just how Stranger Things is now clearly directed at an audience younger than I am -- I mean, it always was, just now it's more clear to me than ever -- I worried that Pizza Movie, which I had heard mildly positive things about, would be intended for young people, who got all the jokes about brain rot that I didn't get.

Nope. Funny is funny. And Pizza Movie is funny as hell.

If you aren't familiar with the premise, it's about two college roommates who are desperate for a pizza that they've ordered. But in order to get it -- only on the ground floor of their dormitory -- they have to survive all six? seven? stages of a drug they consumed that fell out of their ceiling panels in a little mint tin. 

One of them is Matarazzo, of course, but the other is a new discovery for me, a 27-year-old actor by the name of Sean Giambrone. IMDB tells me most people would know him from The Goldbergs (haven't seen it) but also that he's done a lot of voiceover work in animated films, which I can see. There's a joke about how he "sounds like an old man," which is actually true in a way. Anyway, this is the funniest debut I've seen for an actor in some time -- and I don't mean that he's actually new to the movies. But he's debuting for me. He's got terrific comic timing and line deliveries.

There are a lot of great set pieces demonstrating the stages of the drug, and each fully commits. I don't want to give too much away, but there's a part about exploding heads that just goes on and on and becomes funnier as it goes. Add in terrific supporting performances, especially by Jack Wilson as a sadistic RA who leads a gestapo that's cracking down on drugs, and you've really got the complete package in terms of comedy. 

This movie left me on such a giddy high from moment to moment that I was considering giving it the hallowed 4.5 stars on Letterboxd. Cooler heads prevailed and I went with a 4, but the fact that it's rubbing elbows with 4.5-star movies means I'm recommending it in the highest possible terms. 

There were some funny similarities between this and Stranger Things. Because it's Matarazzo, of course there are some similarities between the characters, though season 5 of ST finds his Dustin Henderson in a lot angrier place than the character in Pizza Movie. 

No, the thing I'm really talking about it is that in both, his character has to fend off bullies who have a bone to pick with him for something he's done. 

In ST, it's something having to do with the Hellfire Club and the damage wrought on Hawkins that is blamed on the club -- forgive me if I'm forgetting some of the details, as it's been at least two years since I watched those previous episodes, and even a lengthy recap didn't fully bring it all back. 

In Pizza Movie, it's a poor judgment call that led to some unspecified disaster involving the college football team, though again I'll leave you to watch the movie to have that revealed, because it's pretty funny. As is the whole movie, if I haven't made that sufficiently clear by now. 

Die Hard on a bus ... Fall on a shark

We all know how Speed was originally pitched as "Die Hard on a bus," right?

Whether that moment was real or apocryphal, we know it as a prime example of how movies are pitched to someone who has the chance to greenlight them. This hypothetical pitch hypothetically occurs on an elevator up to the office of the person who's making that decision, so they don't have very much time to receive it before they have to turn their attention to indisputably more important things. So it has to be quick, like 20 seconds or less -- or in some cases, just five words.

The other common way of pitching something, other than "such-and-such popular movie in a different setting," is "such-and-such movie meets such-and-such movie," like "Terms of Endearment meets Mad Mux Fury Road." But we only care about the first one today.

The movie I saw last night? Yeah, it's "Fall on a shark."

If you're having trouble remembering Fall, well that's too bad for its producers, who are relying on your memory of it in order to release Fall 2: Deadpoint in September.

But in case you are, here's its poster:

Which really tells you everything you need to know about this particular movie in one image. Making it like a good elevator pitch in that way. 

What do these two posters have in common?

Well, you can hardly see her in the Fall poster, but you can see her better in Killer Whale. That's Virginia Gardner, the blonde, who is the star of both movies. 

I can tell you the other reasons that Killer Whale is "Fall on a shark," but first I'll have to give a big fat SPOILER WARNING for both films, but perhaps more importantly -- and first, to give you time to avert your eyes -- I'll have to tell you why I'm talking about sharks when the movie is clearly about a whale.

No the movie is not literally about a shark. But it's about the sort of threat traditionally posed by a shark, and in that case, this whale is a "shark," especially in the quick and dirty terms that are required to give this studio executive instant clarity on the project he's about to greenlight and how much money it will make him. (Or her, but usually him.) Besides, you can't use the same word in the title as you use in the pitch. Saying this movie is "Fall on a killer whale" and then calling it Killer Whale is kind of like saying it's "Die Hard on a bus" and then calling it Speed Bus.

Okay so the similarities.

In both movies, two young women in their late 20s/early 30s -- Gardner is currently 31 -- set out on an adventure of sorts that leaves them stranded in a place where they have no food/water, no means of communicating with anyone, and no realistic path to safety. In Fall, they are marooned at the top of a comms tower that looks like it's about two miles off the ground, when some of the rusty infrastructure they used to get there breaks off the tower and falls to the earth. In Killer Whale, they've travelled by jet ski to a remote Thai cove with some little clumps of what could generously be called islands, one of which becomes their home when a killer whale comes through and tries to start mauling them. 

In both movies, they come up with a variety of strategies to try to get off this island, each increasingly more desperate, each doomed to failure in the short run.

In both movies, one of the women is trying to forget a recent tragedy in which their boyfriend was killed. For the character in Fall, it's an opening rock climbing death, which makes it very similar in structure to both the recent Apex and the long-ago Sylvester Stallone vehicle Cliffhanger -- oops, spoilers for Apex and Cliffhanger, but you can see it coming from a mile away. For the character in Killer Whale, it's a robbery attempt that led to her boyfriend being hit by a car going full speed -- yes, another bad trope. (So yes, he survives a struggle with a gunman only to be hit by a car. It's a bit much.)

And in both movies, the friend who isn't going to make it -- because come on, they can't both make it -- is guilty of some sort of transgression against the friend who is going to survive. In Fall, it's having slept with/had a relationship with the boyfriend who died. In Killer Whale, it's having set up the robbery attempt, when they thought no one was supposed to be there. Anyway, they pay for it by becoming whale food or gravity food.

Biggest difference? Gardner plays the bad friend in Fall and the good friend in Killer Whale. What range! I guess she didn't want to be typecast?

Next biggest difference? One movie is pretty good and the other movie is terrible! 

Yes, I was not a Killer Whale fan, but I suspect not many people are -- which doesn't mean it won't be a hit on Netflix, or hasn't already been. I mean, if a sophisticated cinephile like myself prioritizes seeing Killer Whale, just think about all the people with less discerning tastes and how quickly they'll go for it. 

But truly, this is one of the year's worst, and if you want other tropes this movie uses and abuses in terms of its credibility, it's the scene where a character holds her breath underwater for, oh, eight or nine minutes. And when she returns to the surface, it really just takes one big gulp of air to regain her equilibrium. (It might have helped if she was supposed to be some sort of underwater pro, but the things we know about her is that she used to be a concert cellist but that she required hearing aids after the shotgun blast in the robbery attempt.)

I thought Gardner was quite good in Fall, but she's terrible here, which just goes to show you the importance of a good director. I don't know either Fall director Scott Mann nor Killer Whale director Jo-Anne Brechin from a hole in the ground, but from the evidence, it would appear Mann is good at his job and Brechin is not good at hers. 

Last catty comment: The set involving the little island clump the characters are stranded on is more of a set than any set I have ever seen in a movie, ever, even the ones back in the 1920s and 1930s where you knew it was impossible that it was anything other than a set. 

But you know, maybe see Killer Whale if you want a few laughs throughout. Shamu playing the role of a killer is never not funny. (I said the previous one was going to be my last catty comment. Oops.)

Babe: Pigs who are shitty, or words that are pretty?

Why is it that every single movie I see, that's set within the correct time period for this to make sense, includes romantic partners who call each other "Babe?"

"What do you think, Babe?" "It's time to go to dinner, Babe." "Do you know where I left my keys, Babe?"

There are all types of people in the world. I would guess that only a relatively small number of them call each other "Babe."

But it's become so common in modern film that it's almost like screenwriters have universally agreed that they are going to use this crutch and that we shouldn't analyze it too closely. 

On the surface, you'd think it would be a class signifier to some degree. If boyfriends and girlfriends, husbands and wives -- or please, especially within Pride Month, any other combination of gender types within that -- call each other "Babe," it's usually meant to indicate that they are a bit less sophisticated. Of course, this also means that the movie itself usually loves them. Only a person who isn't a genius sounds genuine when professing their love to another character. Nothing saps the romance out of a romantic movie than watching an egghead tell another egghead how they feel about them. 

But lately I've noticed that "Babe" has progressed beyond the guys in wifebeaters and the women in hotpants. It might be that even eggheads are trying it on for size.

And I should pause on that word "wifebeater" there for a moment, which you would likely know refers to a sleeveless white undershirt. A tank top.

There is the idea of domestic violence built into people who wear shirts like that -- probably unfairly -- and I do think there is a mild misogyny when a man calls a woman "Babe." It isn't actually sexist, but it is sort of infantalizing, like it's lengthier form "Baby." Although the term "Baby" goes back to the start of modern courtship and pop music, I have always found there to be something a bit problematic about it.

Of course, you can't be a sexist pig calling someone "Babe" if that person is calling you "Babe" right back, which is what you see most often in movies today. In fact, just to make sure it's not a problem, usually both characters will refer to the other using this term within the very same scene, just so we know it's an even playing field. 

But I rankle at it a bit for two reasons:

1) I myself don't like or use the term. I think if I called my wife "Babe," she'd have reason to be annoyed at me. Of course, it would be a break in my normal pattern, which would raise her eyebrows, but I also think she'd be mildly offended.

2) Not everyone in the world can possibly use this word, but the movies make it seem like they do.

If I'm analyzing why this trend is happening, and why "Babe" has become such a placeholder for any other form of familiarity used in a couple, it's precisely that: it communicates immediately what is intended while essentially disappearing into the woodwork. It is freed from the burdens of specificity.

If you wanted to put on screen as accurate a depiction of a couple as possible, you'd probably go for a word that more uniquely fits the little dualistic vocabulary that exists between these two people.

For example, in my marriage that would be the word "P." My wife and I call each other "P" as a shortening of "Person," though we sometimes use the longer version as well. As in, "You're my person." And then "P" for short.

It's a bit cute and schmaltzy. All these things are. It's probably less revolting than "Shnookums" but more revolting than some other options. 

The thing it isn't? Immediately clear what is meant by it. 

If you made a movie in which two characters called each other "P" in a scene, we'd have questions. We'd be like "What are they saying? P? Did I hear that right?" And then even if we could confirm it, we'd be like "And what does that mean in this context?"

Everyone knows what "Babe" means. It means two characters are in a pretty happy relationship and they have pet names for each other. But if we introduced actual pet names, the kind people really use, you'd be too confused and we'd have to stop and explain it.

So "Babe" it is.

Am I really upset about this?

Of course not, not really. It's fine. There are lots of shortcuts in screenwriting that are more unrealistic and more worth getting upset about, but that we accept because they keep the story moving. Screenwriting is all about efficiency, remember.

And look, there are a lot worse words it could be. "Babe" and "Baby" both show up throughout history in popular music. "Baby" was huge in the 1950s, and by the time Sony and Cher came around, "Babe" had gotten more popular as a potential replacement. 

I'll just have to accept that the percentage of people who actually say it is something less than what the movies and TV tell me it is.