Monty Python and the Holy Grail, live and on stage

Or, "I finally saw: Spamalot."

Spamalot, the musical adaptation of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, has existed for 21 years. Now, those 21 years have not been a particularly fruitful time for musical theater in my life, though we have tried to make up for it some in the past decade. In the seven years immediately before its Broadway debut, I lived in New York for three years, where I went to a handful of Broadway shows, and I dated a woman for nearly two years, who was involved in the promotion of musical theater, so I saw a fair bit of that in Los Angeles.

But Spamalot came along at just around the time I started dating my wife, who is not a musical theater buff -- though she does like going to shows. I'm not sure we ever went to a live musical during the eight years we were together in Los Angeles before moving to Australia, where we have tried to make up for it a bit lately.

All this is to say that my first exposure to Spamalot is long overdue. Not only am I huge Monty Python fan, which you might not know because I don't have occasion to touch on it here, but The Holy Grail is my sacred text. In fact, there are two things in particular you should know about the film, which I may have told you before, but if so, that was ages ago:

1) My first time seeing King Arthur's fight against the black knight is the hardest I have ever laughed. Is that definitely true? No, of course not. I might have laughed harder at some random thing somebody said sometime. But I can't remember that random thing, and I can remember The Holy Grail. So if ever asked my memory of my hardest laughter ever, this is the answer I give.

2) From the days when I performed Monty Python skits on stage at the place I used to work in the summers -- and I may have performed a half-dozen of them -- I still, to this day, have the dialogue memorized from the "Constitutional Peasant" sequence of the film. I did this on stage in 1987 as all the three speakers in the scene, back when I was a guest on that island rather than staff. I have no idea if it worked at all, though there was at least polite laughter. Anyway, it became permanently ingrained and I can still dictate it, if anyone were ever interested in that sort of party trick.

My actual interest in tracking down Spamalot, though, has been fairly low.

I'm not sure why this is, really. A sense that it could never be as funny as the film? A slight wariness from having read Eric Idle's memoirs and finding them a tad self-indulgent? (He's a relentless name dropper.) Whatever the reason, I never leapt at the opportunity to see it nor did I feel any FOMO that I hadn't seen it. Nor do I even know if I ever actually had the opportunity to see it. (According to Wikipedia, it probably would have been on North American tours in 2008 and 2009.)

That opportunity finally came this past weekend, when my sister-in-law got us tickets to it for a Saturday matinee for its nascent run in Melbourne. She's been initiating all sorts of cultural activities this year, though many of them are with my older son, who dutifully accompanies her even if he doesn't have any actual interest in these things. (Oh to be a fly on the wall when they watched Anthony LaPaglia in Death of a Salesman.) These were the end of the previews, and the proper Melbourne run is now launched. (The only thing, incidentally, that distinguished this from the proper run is that they addressed the audience after the final curtain, which I'm sure they will no longer do.)

The story, such as it is, pretty closely follows the plot from The Holy Grail, though some of the scenes are out of sequence. But the actual title is a callback to a separate Python sketch from 1970 called "Spam!" And because this was the likely to be the only time Python material would ever be staged, Idle -- the show's co-writer with John Du Prez -- needed to fit in "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life," which is actually from the Python film Life of Brian. 

Before I get too deep into the show, I should tell you that someone famous played King Arthur. Or at least locally famous. Australian actor Stephen Curry -- and yes that is the same name as the basketball player -- has 84 credits on IMDB, most of them Australian content, though not obscure Australian content. I took notice of him in a film I really like called Hounds of Love. But he's also been in The Castle and Rogue, and you might know him from what I assume was a very small role in Thor: Love and Thunder. (Anyway, small enough for me not to have remembered he was in it. Though then again, I was not particularly following the career of Stephen Curry with the foreknowledge that I would one day see him in Spamalot.)

I thought the second act worked a lot better than the first. Even though there is a professorial type who occasionally says things in his capacity as a narrator -- which reminded me a little bit of the similar character in The Rocky Horror Picture Show -- I still feel like this story is fairly lacking in context, and its first act density of songs without any plot momentum further complicates the problem. Plot was never the strong suit of Monty Python, as even in a generally coherent story like The Holy Grail, they were fundamentally stringing together unrelated sketches that followed a central theme. That feels like even more of a problem on stage, when you are relying on a narrative spine to carry you through, particularly when the songs are inevitably going to slow down that progression. Here I felt that there were sometimes only about four lines of dialogue before it was time for another song, and because Python has a wicked digressive streak, these songs rarely actually furthered the narrative. (There's one song where a character complains about the fact that her part is too small, although this is actually in the stronger second act.)

This is a good time to pause and acknowledge how Idle has made gestures toward preventing this from just being a sausagefest, like the film. (The Python ensemble themselves usually played the female roles, with one important exception that I will touch on two paragraphs from now.) One way to gender diversify is that there are four women who basically serve in the role of backup dancers, though there are many actors doing multiple duty in order to keep the total ensemble to under 15 people, so they do have other, more consequential showcases. But there's also a female lead, who does sing that song about her small role, and this is The Lady of the Lake, who in the film is responsible for bestowing Excalibur on King Arthur and making him king -- though is not an actual character. Here she keeps showing up and has about five songs, so it's strange that one of those songs is that the story hasn't checked in with her in a while. 

One of the reasons the second act is better is that it has most of the actual skits we enjoy. I thought they might not be able to include the black knight fight due to the impossibility of knocking an actor's arms and legs off on stage, but instead they just make use of the large screen at the back of the stage that plays animations throughout, including Idle playing God. In this instance, they have the black knight on the back screen and Arthur fighting him, coordinating his sword clashes with those of the two-dimensional image. And then at four key junctures, his two arms and legs are lopped off. It works, but of course did not make me laugh like in the mid-1980s. 

I could continue to list the various scenes, but it's probably better to mention what they don't include. And one of those is the scene alluded to earlier that has the lion's share of the film's women, which is that scene where one of the knights spends an interlude in a castle full of sexually aggressive women. This is the only part of Holy Grail that totally turns me off -- it's just not remotely funny -- and I thought it was a wise decision of Idle to consign this to the dust bin of history. The only set piece that I enjoy that they didn't include is the one where the knights must cross the chasm and are asked a serious of questions, where if they get them wrong they fall into the chasm. I think this might have just been cut for time.

Unfortunately, the overall impression of the scenes they do include is that they sort of pale in comparison to my love of the sacred text. I realize this would not be a problem for everybody, but it is for me. For example, during the scene where the French guard taunts the knights, all I could really focus on was how the actor was intentionally changing the inflection on the lines so it was not a direct impersonation of the actor from the film. While I certainly understand that instinct, I guess the thing that I loved about Python was the familiarity, the exact sound of the words and the exact line deliveries, that resonated so much with me that I still have them in my head today. I know a piece of original stagecraft is not just trying to regurgitate the film, but most of these scenes just weren't that funny to me. Maybe I've heard them too many times before.

There were some "cute" executions of famous moments from the film, which were, I believe, intended as a wink at the meager options available in a stage performance. For example, a rather small inflated cow is catapulted on the knights by said French guards, while the catapulting of the Trojan Rabbit is on the video screen on the back. Then I was wondering how they would do the fight against the other rabbit, the one that kills so many of the knights in the film. It's a stuffed rabbit thrown at the neck of one knight, who holds it to his throat and mimics it chomping his neck. Obviously you can't get a rabbit to fly around the stage. 

Spamalot shows its age in a couple spots. I didn't love the bit where it starts to talk about itself as a Broadway musical, which would have tickled us in 2005 but feels a bit old-fashioned now. More problematic is the song where they talk about how you can't have a Broadway show if you don't have any Jews. My wife and I agreed that this became dated very fast. Not only don't we want to teach people like my children that Jews are associated with the entertainment industry, but the last few years have also not been a great climate for making light of anything related to Judaism. I suppose that's in the text, so if you want to mount Spamalot, you have to include it. Then again, these are sketches, so any individual part lifts right out.

Oh and do you want to know how it ends? Famously, the film doesn't have a proper ending. The remaining knights get arrested by London police officers. Here, after they use the holy hand grenade of Antioch (which was a pretty funny scene) to blow up the rabbit, they get a clue to the location of the grail, which is that it's under one of the seats in the audience. Sure enough, that unwitting audience member gets to come up on stage with the cast. We debated afterwards whether it was the same seat for every performance or if they vary it up. I took the former position and my wife took the latter. My thinking: they could improvise the dialogue that's related to the specific seat number, but it would be easier just to use the same one every time. You don't usually have to worry about repeat audiences, and if anyone's coming back for a second time, surely it means they love the show and are not going to fault it for using the same seat over and over again. 

And then, because they've previously acknowledged that a Broadway show has to end with a wedding, Arthur gets married to the Lady of the Lake, revealed to have a name: Guinevere. Which brings thing back in sync with Arthurian legend. 

My overall impression was eventually a positive one. I'm glad to say that the show was salvaged a bit by its second half. But I found the first half to be pretty groan worthy, I'm sorry to say. 

My kids? Well there's not much chance this will push them down a Monty Python rabbit hole, to make yet a third reference to rabbits. The whole thing must seem very odd and dated to them. While we were taking our seats at the start, they used that back screen to play skits from other films and from the TV show, and the kids just looked at them dumbly, without having any context or without being on their wavelength. My older son even asked "Is this the thing we're here to see?" which I thought was funny.

The director came on stage afterwards to thank us, as a preview audience, and to award us by emailing every ticket purchaser with a discount code to come see the show again during its proper run. I was impressed to learn that they had only rehearsed for 13 days. It's not a show heavy on sets or staging logistics, but I still think that's pretty impressive. 

I definitely would not see Spamalot again, so my sister-in-law can use that discount on herself or maybe a friend. But it does feel like by seeing it, I've finally scratched an itch I may never have known I had. 

Audient One-Timers: Greed

This is the ninth in my 2026 monthly series Audient One-Timers, in which I'm giving a second watch to my top 12 films on Flickchart that I had seen only once.

The most one-timery movie on my list for this series, if we are thinking only of length-related obstructions to a second viewing, is Erich von Stroheim's silent film Greed from 1924. Also my oldest film in the series, you won't be surprised to learn.

The version of this movie I saw almost exactly ten years ago, in December of 2016, was one of the longest films I have ever seen: 239 minutes, the result of a 1999 "reconstruction" that was attempting to restore von Stroheim's original vision. 

Which it never had any hope of fully doing. Von Stroheim's first cut was more than nine hours long, with most of that footage having been lost -- and of course that was not the version released theatrically. The reconstruction sought to put back some of that material in the form of still photographs, and I found that effect profound. It was one of the primary factors in me awarding the film five stars and a healthy spot within my top 100 on Flickchcart. (It's currently sitting at #95.)

But a viewing of a 239-minute movie feels daunting no matter when you're trying to fit it in. A weekend in the middle of September is better than the heart of Christmas season, as I did in 2016, but it's still not optimal. 

But the version of Greed on Kanopy was not 239 minutes. It was 130 minutes. 

Interesting.

It wouldn't be the first film in this series that was a different version than the one I'd loved. I saw a longer version of Das Boot a couple months ago, and unfortunately, in that case, the extra length hurt the movie, making many of its set pieces more interchangeable. And that choice was, indeed, dictated by what was readily available.

Now, I wish every movie had exactly one version and there would be no doubt as to its absolute quality. I hate this approach of continuing to revise movies after they've already been released. But with Das Boot I recognized it would make an interesting exercise to see how my love stands up to a different version of the material. I can't control that multiple versions exist, I can only choose how I'm going to engage with them. 

With Greed losing nearly two hours of its running time, there was a chance that what I'd loved about it would be severely truncated. But when you watch at least five movies a week, shorter is usually better. Add in the fact that it was easily accessible for free on Kanopy, whereas I'd likely be paying to watch the reconstructed version, and it was easy to give myself a break here.

So this was my first viewing of Greed in which all the images were moving. And I'm glad to say that Greed also works quite well as a conventionally constructed film. 

Whatever may have been missing from my four-hour version, and I don't remember that version all that well, it did not feel like an absence on this viewing. As I acknowledged the last time I wrote about it, a lot of the missing material was from sub plots that were only tangentially related to the central narrative. So purely as a streamlined viewing experience, I shouldn't be surprised that Greed did not disappoint. One of the core principles about any sort of narrative art is that you should "kill your darlings," so a more economical version is usually better at least in that respect.

I'd say Greed probably did not have the same impact on me this time, though. That could be the general phenomenon of second-time syndrome, though with my favorite movies, they only exhilarate me more with each viewing. I think it also points to how much of an integral part of the viewing experience I found the effort to reconstruct the original movie. 

But the things I remember liking about Greed, I still liked on this viewing -- nay, loved. 

What I forgot was that this movie is not actually, primarily, about the greed of the film's protagonist, a decided anti-hero in the form of McTeague, played by Gibson Gowland. We meet McTeague when he's throwing a man down the side of an embankment in a gold mine, which isn't fatal for the victim but which showcases McTeague's miserable temperament. McTeague is also weak, as he later kisses his future wife while she's a patient in his dental chair and while she's unconscious. So not only is he weak, he's also rapey.

However, he doesn't seem to be particularly greedy. In fact, for a time in the middle of this movie, he mostly seems to be doing the right thing, trying to make an honest career as a dentist and do the right thing by his future wife, after the initial transgression that she doesn't even know about. The fact that his future wife, Trina (Zasu Pitts), wins $5,000 in the lottery isn't a factor in his decision to propose to her, as it occurs after they are engaged but before they are married.

No, it's her who has the Scrooge McDuck tendencies. She doesn't have enough gold coins to try to swim in them, but she does frequently visit them and go wild-eyed with obsession over them. There's even a great shot where you only see her arms, looking skeletal and gnarled, allowing the doubloons to sift through her finger. 

What Trina displays goes beyond greed. As the text says at one point, it's almost like a mental illness. She's unwilling to spend almost any of the $5,000, even when it sends her to scrubbing floors at a local kindergarten. But you sense it is almost a paranoid sense of miserliness more than actual greed, though I suppose they might be two sides of the same coin. Someone who is truly "greedy" fixates on the acquisition of more wealthy, not necessarily the extreme protection of the wealth she has. However, the damage it does to their relationship, and their lives, makes whatever it is perhaps even more pernicious than greed.

I was thinking about how this film deals with many if not all of the deadly sins, beyond just greed. Envy is hugely at play here, as the film's third most important character, Marcus (Jean Hersholt), comes to greatly regret his initial generosity in stepping out of the picture so McTeague can marry Trina. See, he was originally dating Trina, and it was McTeague's heartfelt confession of his love for her -- based on sexually assaulting her in the dental chair (though Marcus doesn't know that) -- that caused him to magnanimously make way for his friend. He may not have truly loved her, otherwise he wouldn't have given her up so easily, but after she wins the lottery, he becomes increasingly miserable until he morphs into McTeague's main rival and antagonist.

There's also a bit of sloth. After McTeague loses his dental practice due to not having attended an accredited dental school, he loses all ambition and becomes a total layabout. It's at this point that his inclination toward the drink starts to turn him into a truly miserable character after he'd spent an hour of screen time fighting his instincts and doing better than that. 

Pride, gluttony, wrath and lust are in there as well. Gluttony really only has one showcase, which is at the wedding scene where the characters are seen stuffing their faces and the text even talks about them gorging themselves. Wrath? Well, McTeague is wrath incarnate, even if he sometimes gets it under control. We know about the lust, of course, that caused him to kiss Trina while she was sleeping. Pride is the hardest one to specifically pull out, but it is probably also the most generic of the seven deadly, applicable as you choose to apply it.

It's interesting to me that my inclination is to talk more about its story than the film's technical merits on this viewing. But I found many of the shots quite profound, as von Stroheim has a good instinct for framing and for the use of lighting. The close-ups are confronting in the way you want, and he even has a knack for some symbolic imagery, such as when he intercuts scenes of a cat waiting to pounce on McTeague's birds in their cage as a metaphor for one character trying to attack another. 

The only thing I found worse this time was the performance of Zasu Pitts. In my previous post about Greed, I talked about how the performers weren't "playing to the back of the theater." That wasn't my impression of Pitts this time. She widens her eyes at the drop of a hat, almost as though she thinks she's about to be eaten by that cat. When this is in reaction to monstrous behavior by McTeague, it makes sense, but there are a lot of points where it seems to totally unmotivated. In fact, if I were seeking a motivation, it would be to play to the back of the theater. 

And to finish with just one more story bit: The climax in Death Valley is as arresting as it was last time.

I feel like I could say more about Greed, but great films are like that. If I want to watch it again, I'm glad to know I have a very acceptable shorter version I can watch without having to set aside an entire weekend to watch it.

In October I will be watching Edward Zwick's Glory, my #90 on Flickchart. 

Resident Evil prep, and sleeping through large chunks

I went into Thursday night with a rare lack of agenda in what I'd be watching, but since I'd been going a bit heavy on 2026 movies, I thought I'd go for something from a different year. 

I thought it would most likely be a new movie, but when I saw Paul W.S. Anderson's original Resident Evil from 2002 streaming on Stan, I thought it would make a good time to revisit it. After all, yesterday was also the release date of Zach Cregger's new version, which I may watch sometime this weekend. 

Besides, although I did not particularly like this movie, there were some deaths in it that had a big impression on me at the time. 

You may remember the scene. If not, spoiler alert.

The paramilitary strike force trying to infiltrate "The Hive" gets trapped in a hallway by the Red Queen, the AI that controls the whole testing facility that's been infected with a virus and overrun by zombies. The Queen shuts off all the exits and then goes about eliminating the four soldier in the room with a laser beam that cuts from one end of the hallway to the other.

On its first pass, it takes care of one woman by getting her in the neck. She has a thousand-yard stare as her head slowly slides off her neck hole. A man next to her is screaming because he's lost the tops of four fingers, leaving stumps of different lengths as his hand was at an angle to the laser at the time. 

The second pass gets one guy in the midsection, halving him. I can't remember what happens to the screaming guy, but I'm pretty sure this one gets him too.

That leaves only the team leader, who's just made a gymnastic move involving a beam on the ceiling to improbably avoid the most recent laser. He's got another laser coming that doesn't seem to present too much difficulty, until it shifts into a cross-hatching pattern that is impossible to avoid. He utters one last expletive before resigning himself to being diced into a hundred pieces.

This, I thought, was the innovation of Resident Evil. The zombie stuff? Booo-ring.

Yet on this viewing, I slept through it. 

Now you have to understand my situation regarding sleep in movies. I touch on it regularly so you probably already know some of this stuff.

If I feel a slumber coming on that is impossible to deny, I will pause the movie. I will either sleep for a short time (sometimes I set a 10-minute timer, and then snooze it or reset it) or for like three hours, at which point I give up on the viewing and go to bed. But this is almost always a proactive gesture.

If I nod off during the movie, I usually catch myself and wake back up after only a second or two. I think it might have been longer, but then I go back and I see that I missed about one line of dialogue. It's the amount of time you nod off when you're driving. A lot less dangerous, but I snap awake as though the stakes were the same. 

I never fall asleep for 20 minutes in a movie without catching myself, but that's what happened during Resident Evil. With having seen the movie already, I guess maybe the pressure was off?

But it was funny to awaken, not really sure how long I'd been asleep but assuming it was only one of those nod-offs, but then being totally disoriented within the movie. And noticing that none of that strike team were still with the living characters. 

Did I sleep through the only scene that caused me to want to watch this movie again?

Apparently I had. And it hadn't been just five minutes before where I was. It was like 15 minutes before. At least.

Well I wasn't going to waste the viewing by just going on from there. I had to see that strike team sliced and diced by lasers. So I did go back and watch it again through from there, even though that meant watching the same five minutes again twice, and added on to my bedtime. (On nights like this I don't usually go to bed until after 1. But at least I've already slept some before then.)

I did enjoy, and feel discomfited, by the slicing and dicing once again. Good on ya, Paul W.S. Anderson.

The rest of it? Pretty mediocre, and by the end I was already sleeping again, small amounts, through some of the end-stage scenes. I did not go back to rewatch those.

I don't think the new Resident Evil is anything like an exact remake of this movie. For one, there's no Milla Jovovich character, that I can tell, as the movie stars the suddenly hot Austin Abrams. But just generally, a guy like Zach Cregger doesn't want to make a movie set in a high-tech facility with an AI that's trying to kill everyone. There are plenty of hacks who can make that movie, and Cregger is horror's newest visionary. 

So my takeaway of the viewing is that I need to develop a new level of alert regarding my sleep tendencies during a movie. It is possible for me to sleep unbidden through large chunks of a movie, so I have to become ever more vigilant if I feel the dreaded sleep monster coming on. 

Schnabel channeling Coppola

I finally carved out the time for the 2 hours and 35 minutes of In the Hand of Dante, which showed up streaming on Netflix a couple months ago without any fanfare. When I determined that was Oscar Isaac in the still image that went by in Netflix's screen saver mode, I was even more surprised at the way the film creeped up on me/us. That was hardly the end of the surprises. 

Julian Schnabel's film is being discussed on, well, not the most recent episode of Filmspotting: SVU, but the one I've finally caught up to. Which means it actually dropped on June 30th. During baseball season, when a daily fantasy baseball podcast takes up a significant amount of my listening time, I get very far behind on my other podcasts. And need to scramble to catch up before the end of the year, so at least I can catch the best-of-the-year discussions in real time. 

But at least being behind means I'm more likely to have seen the movies they discuss by the time I get to each episode, though that wasn't the case with In the Hand of Dante, in part due to that ominous runtime. And because I like to listen to my podcasts in sequence if at all possible, I decided to force myself to find the time for Dante, even if it meant starting to watch it on my phone on the train ride home from work. Which is not ideally what I want to do with a film made by a painter. 

As it turned out, any visual interest in the film, and there is some, was almost totally nullified by the strange "failed magnum opus" quality of the film, which takes place both at the turn of the 21st century and the beginning of the 14th century, with a handful of actors playing roles in both timelines.

Yeah it's got Cloud Atlas vibes, but Cloud Atlas is waaaaay better. No, what it really reminded me of was Francis Ford Coppola and the weird passion projects that have consumed him for the past 20 years. Those also are better than In the Hand of Dante. Yes, even Megalopolis. 

Perhaps this kind of thing is a symptom of crossing over into your 70s. Schnabel is 74. 

And used to be great. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and Before Night Falls are examples of him at his peak. Basquiat and At Eternity's Gate both find him just below that level. Miral is not great, but every director is allowed one.

Now two.

There are telltale signs of too much creative control all over this thing:

1) Multiple film stocks used, depending on time period, but not exactly, because the black and white is actually used in two different time periods;

2) Poetic voiceover that sometimes is lucid and sometimes makes no sense at all;

3) A great actor who was trying to vibe with the creative vision of a genius, but who may have made the worst turkey of his career instead;

4) Even a reference to 9/11 in the storytelling.

All of which sound like things Coppola would do. 

Then you have the odd casting, which made me think of something like Richard Kelly's Southland Tales. Also a late period Coppola movie.

You know what the best part of In the Hand of Dante is? Gerard Butler. And if you can remember the last time you thought Gerard Butler was the best part of anything, you've got a better memory than I do.

Laughably, Butler plays a 14th century pope. But the more interesting performance, even though it chews a bit of scenery, is when he plays a turn-of-the-21st century New Jersey hoodlum, a mob enforcer type who goes and puts the fear of God into people who owe money, and more often than not is actually there to kill them. He carries out that task against one person who is otherwise unrelated to the story near the beginning of In the Hand of Dante, and the way Butler really leans into the material, in all its profanity, I found fun and invigorating. At this point, I was still on board with Dante, or at least withholding judgment. 

But then you know who else shows up? 

1) Al Pacino, in one scene, looking very old and decrepit. I didn't feel like this was a coincidence, since we often think of Isaac as an heir apparent to Pacino.

2) Gal Gadot, also playing multiple roles, neither of them well. And this pains me to say this, because I am still smitten with Gadot from the original Wonder Woman. 

3) Jason Momoa, who I believe is supposed to be an actual Italian, since part of this story actually takes place in Italy. (It's about Dante Alighieri, not Dante from Clerks.) He is also a mob enforcer type.

4) John Malkovich. Also a mafioso. Though I thought he was good.

5) Martin Scorsese. Yes this is the third 2026 movie I have seen in which Scorsese acts. 

Anyway that's a pretty odd collection of characters. Except for the fact that most of them are or at least were big movie stars -- I mean there are two members of the Justice League in this movie -- you'd think they were all Schnabel could get, because some of the actors he really wanted got a whiff of this being terrible even if Isaac didn't. But no, Schnabel seems like he could have had a lot of people and yet he chose these people.

I haven't told you anything about the plot. But it involves a modern-day plot to steal and sell an original manuscript of The Divine Comedy, which was thought not to exist anymore. Isaac plays both a writer who is brought in for his Dante expertise, and Dante himself, while Butler is the man with the gun, shooting any and everybody. 

This plot actually interested me. I liked most of what it was doing, at least for the first half.

The part I really did not like was the 14th century portion, in which everybody, including Isaac, seemed over their heads, and the narrative itself was impossible to follow. Let's just say that the film makes some suggestion that Dante and his 14th century love interest, played by Gadot, might be souls who get reincarnated in the modern writer and his own modern love interest, also played Gadot. To put it in the terms of a Coppola movie I love, Bram Stoker's Dracula, it's as though they've "crossed oceans of time" to find each other.

But to be honest, I'm not really sure that's what Schanbel was trying to convince us was happening. There came a point, early in the film's third hour, where I had written it off and was messaging someone on Facebook on my phone in the final stretch.

Didn't give the movie a chance, did I? Ha. When you know you know, and I know this was a turd.

At least with something like Coppola's Megalopolis, there's a kind of madness that you have to appreciate because it comes from a place of sincerity. I'm sure Schnabel was equally sincere, but this just felt like empty madness. 

Adjectives ending in -ed

In between movies of my Tuesday night double feature -- an advanced screening of Heart of the Beast and the Korean film Hope, neither of which I apparently want to talk about here -- I saw a trailer for a new animated film in the lobby of the Village Cinemas at Crown Casino.

I wasn't sure at first which company it was, but I found the animation compelling. I'd lose my sense of optimism if it turned out to be a Dreamworks movie, but then the Disney logo came up, and I realized this was why the character animation/movements reminded me a little bit of Tangled. 

I kept watching all the way through. It involved a girl who apparently has magical abilities and lives in a world involving witches and their ilk. It seemed fun. Now just for the title.

Hexed. Of course.

I say "of course" because I realized for the first time: This is a Disney thing. Titles that are adjectives ending in -ed, I mean.

You have Tangled, of course. That should be obvious.

But then it goes deeper than that. There is both Enchanted, from 2007, and its sequel, Disenchanted, from 2022. 

And here are some others I found, in the larger Disney family:

Godmothered (2020)
Swiped (2025)

And expected in the future, in some cases without release dates:

Spooked
Ripped
Tangled (live action) (2028)

Okay that last one does not count as a separate movie.

I'd actually credit Tangled as the progenitor of this, since they (correctly) thought this would be a more inclusive title for the movie than Rapunzel. However, Enchanted does predate Tangled. 

If I wanted to cast the web wider, Wikipedia will allow me to do that. The larger production apparatus, which involves subsidiaries, had movies called Shipwrecked and Deceived in 1991. But neither of those really fits the description of Disney content as we're describing it here. 

I can see why they wanted to can Coyote vs. Acme

When the world heard that a movie with a very promising concept -- that famous Roadrunner hunter Wile E. Coyote was suing Acme for their faulty products -- was being shelved by Warner Brothers so they could take a tax write-off, the outcry was swift and deafening. And for sure, I was part of that outcry. In addition to an idea that sounded good going down the drain, meaning I'd never see it, it was an ominous development to learn that a movie studio could just stymie the creative efforts of thousands of people, at what seemed like the drop of a hat. 

And then it started happening with other movies. I'm not sure if I actually have the sequence of events right here, but Batgirl was a very public casualty of the same mindset. There were others whose names I'm not remembering right now (and am apparently uninterested in doing a very simple Google search). 

But Coyote vs. Acme was not done. The bad press and public disappointment was so great that Dave Green's film was resuscitated. It opened in the U.S. a few weeks ago, about the time it was playing at the Melbourne International Film Festival. In fact, this film was so much of a curiosity that it played MIFF even though this is not the kind of movie you usually see at MIFF. 

And early word of mouth was good. A friend of mine raved about it on Facebook.

Well, I can see why they wanted to cancel it.

My wife and I watched this last Friday night, a screener version with my email address watermarked right into the center of the image. Pretty obnoxious. They could have put it in one of the corners and still achieved the desired impact of the watermark. I guess they thought some enterprising pirate might try to video the image and crop out a watermark in a corner? An absurd suggestion, but that's all I can think of.

Surely that played some small part of why it disappointed us. But the movie bore the lion's share of that disappointment.

Coyote vs. Acme starts out in a very promising manner. You get a montage of Wile E. Coyote's most spectacular equipment fails from his many dogged days pursuing the Roadrunner. (Meep meep.) Then you see him spot an ad for a local ambulance chaser (played, in what seemed like a very promising development, by Will Forte), and get the idea to sue Acme for product malfunctions that should have killed him a hundred times over. If not for the fact that he's, you know, indestructible.

It turns out this great idea is no greater than an idea for a seven-minute Saturday Night Live sketch. In fact, you can imagine an excellent version of that sketch, and it might have even starred Forte when he was a cast member.

And that gets at part of the issue with Coyote vs. Acme. Forte was on Saturday Night Live from 2002 to 2010, and even back then, the Looney Tunes were already starting to fade from the zeitgeist. To me personally, they're nowhere near it now. My wife and I asked my younger son to participate in the viewing, and he initially agreed when he thought we were talking about going to the cinema to see it, not that we meant "No, starting in the next 15 minutes." But if he had watched, I feel like he wouldn't have gotten any of the jokes or Easter eggs regarding this musty IP, and to be certain, whatever charm Coyote vs. Acme has relies on that sort of familiarity. 

There are other promising elements. John Cena plays Acme's lead attorney, a cowboy hat-wearing smooth talker, and I like him too. But like Forte, he ultimately feels wasted. 

And the problem is, everyone gets wasted because they are working so hard to turn a seven-minute idea into a 103-minute movie. Realizing they had so little, the filmmakers could have made this movie 85 minutes. That would have been perfectly fine. In fact, it probably still would have been 78 minutes too much, but it would have been better.

So what did they do with those extra 78 minutes, or rather, we should say, those extra 96 minutes? Unclear.

The movie doesn't even delve into back stories for its human characters. We know Forte's character is a bit lost because he lives in a motel. But we learn nothing about his family life or what brought him there. Cena, as the "villain," obviously doesn't warrant any such introspection either. Then there is Forte's assistant? legal clerk? who is played by Lana Condor, and she's on screen a lot but has no inner life. To say nothing of the fact that this actress, star of the To All the Boys movies, has zero charisma.

Instead this movie has a lot of "legs spinning fast, no forward momentum" -- both literally and figuratively.

Let's talk about the literal first. I thought I would be charmed by the Looney Tunes stuff, with things bouncing around the screen and characters receiving should-be-fatal injuries by blasting through walls or being flattened by pianos. But you know what, no. I was not. It felt tedious. Every time.

I should say that I don't really care for many of the previous movies done in this style. Like, I never liked Who Framed Roger Rabbit? all that much and I have still seen it only that one time in the theater. 

But strangely, I did quite enjoy Space Jam: A New Legacy, with Lebron James, a few years back. I don't like the original Space Jam, but the sequel really worked for me, even when it did not work for anyone else. 

A New Legacy tells us two things:

1) The Looney Tunes are, actually, sort of still in the zeitgeist. This movie is only five years old, and since it came out, there has also been The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie, released only two years ago. So in the context of Warner Brothers' continuance of the public visibility of its IP, Coyote vs. Acme is not totally out of left field. 

2) I myself have the potential to like the interacting of Looney Tunes characters and human beings, if it is done right.

When you watch Coyote vs. Acme, you are never struck by individual poor decisions. At any given moment, the next scene follows reasonably from the one before.

But the whole thing just feels flat and undifferentiated. "Flat" was my wife's choice of word, and she wasn't only talking about the 2D animation. (To be clear, it would not have been an improvement to make these characters CGI.) "Flat" as in unable to muster any sense of stakes, or intrigue, or emotional investment, or even interest. 

So when the suits at Warner Brothers were looking at Green's final cut, they must have thought the same. They must have seen the legs spinning in a dervish of potential energy, but the body itself not actually moving anywhere. 

Reason enough to seek a tax write-off if you ask me.

To be clear, I'm glad that did not happen. I still stand behind the fact that we should get to see every completed movie, even if it is an abomination. In fact, the greater abomination it might be, the more I want to see it. Coyote vs. Acme is not an abomination. It's just tedious. 

But then everyone seems to really like it. Holy crap, it's got a 96 on Rotten Tomatoes. 

How do I account for this? I expect there are two different things going on:

1) Many critics share my feeling of horror that a completed movie, one with such a delightful concept, could be completely "disappeared." They have to heap praise in order to show Warner Brothers just how wrong it was.

2) Nostalgia goes a long way.

But was Warner Brothers wrong? Maybe in their actual choice to seek the tax write-off. But not, in my estimation, in their judgment of the merits of the film.

I'd been struggling to start my review, but I better get on it because I have to post it one of the next three days. It comes out here on Thursday, and the idea with new reviews, especially when I've gotten a long lead time on watching them, is to post either the day before, the day of, or the day after the theaterical release.

This post has at least gotten my juices flowing about what I want to say. And there are, obviously, a lot of things I want to say.

I just wish I didn't have to say them. I wish I loved Coyote vs. Acme. But sometimes, the giant behemoth mega corporation trying to make a sketchy financial transaction is also right. 

The United 93 viewing that didn't transpire

On Friday it was the 25th anniversary of 9/11. I'm sure you heard it mentioned somewhere. 

As anniversaries go, this was "the big one." Won't be another one this big until 2051. 

I did think of trying to honor the anniversary with a viewing of the best 9/11 movie, and one of my favorites of the whole first decade of this century, United 93. I fished around for it on the streaming services, coming up empty. I even checked Disney+ of all places. It was not there.

If I had found it, I might have put it on while I worked in the afternoon. That wouldn't have been a great way to really engage with that movie, of course, but I've seen it three other times, so it wouldn't have been the greatest of insults either. 

But I guess I decided paying for it was the dividing line between trying to fit it in and not trying to fit it in. And it's not because I'm pinching pennies at the moment. It was just a measure of how much I wanted to revisit that day, maybe.

Or maybe how much I wanted to immerse myself in anything American right now.

For another two years, we are under the stranglehold of Donald Trump. I assume that after the midterm elections it will be a significantly compromised version of Donald Trump, but that could only make him more dangerous. More likely to lash out.

And of course he has to make 9/11 about himself. The latest is this ridiculous thing about how he was at ground zero and how two firefighters had to lift him up and run him away from danger. As if. I have an actual friend who was at ground zero in his capacity as an EMT and actually had to run away from both buildings as they fell, first one then the other. I'll ask him if he saw Trump that day, but I know what the answer will be. 

But even if we set aside the current state of American politics, maybe there's something else I'm thinking here.

Maybe the best way to remember 9/11 is to not remember it.

And I don't mean to forget it. I don't mean not to think about where you were that day, or how your sense of dormant patriotism was unironically activated, or how many consecutive hours of TV you watched. I come back to those things at random times anyway.

I mean to spare it a passing thought, but then to have a normal day of work, a walk after work, and a double feature of movies that couldn't have anything less to do with it: Coyote vs. Acme and a viewing of the movie Obex on a second consecutive night.

That's what I'm telling myself anyway.

Two for the price of one

I watched and really enjoyed a movie called Obex on Thursday night. Enjoyed the parts I saw, anyway.

I don't want to say I slept through a lot of Obex, but when I tried to form a distinct memory of it on Friday morning, it felt like an Alzheimer's patient grasping for threads in their brain. (I assume, anyway. Hopefully I won't have to deal with Alzheimer's for another 20 years, though I'm pretty sure I will have to deal with it at that point.)

I knew the experience had been a four-star experience. It's a very distinctive black-and-white film that, when speaking about it to a friend, I likened to things like Computer Chess and Pi, in that it is DIY and chock full of throwback oddities to the 1980s, including a ton of era-appropriate computer graphics and midi tunes. There's also some arresting imagery that makes it at least horror adjacent. I checked IMDB and horror is one of three genres listed along with sci-fi and fantasy. If that combination of genres sounds good to you, and you have at least a little appreciation of the two titles I mentioned above, then this movie is for you. It's directed by, written by and starring Albert Birney, a name that was previously unfamiliar to me.

But because I'd really liked what I saw -- which I have to say was at least 80 percent of it -- I wanted to be able to incorporate it better into my brain as an ongoing, living reference point. 

So I watched it again the very next night.

That's a rather extreme reaction except when you consider the following: my $5.99 rental was only going to last for 48 hours, and to watch it again at some point in the future, I'd probably have to pay that $5.99 again. This isn't the kind of movie that is likely to pop up on Netflix.

Plus it was only 90 minutes, so that made it easy, especially since I'd already watched one movie Friday night: Coyote vs. Acme with my wife. I'll probably write a post about that tomorrow, so I won't spoil my thoughts before then. 

This isn't unprecedented. I've watched movies twice in quick succession before. There's the famous story of how the (so far only) two times I watched Wristcutters: A Love Story, they were both in the same day. Just last year I watched the screener of The Dead Don't Hurt twice because I realized I'd missed something key about its narrative structure the first time, and that would prevent me from writing a proper review of it. 

But I'm having a hard time remembering the last time I watched a movie twice specifically to capitalize on a 24- or 48-hour rental window. (I have to remind myself that the 48-hour rental period is relatively recent, maybe only the last five to seven years.) 

Speaking of the last five years, the last one I can specifically recall was The Last Five Years, which I watched for the first time on March 2, 2015, and the second time on March 3, 2015. That would have definitely been during the standard 24-hour rental period back then. 

Now that I've watched Obex twice, I've determined that I didn't miss very much the first time. But I also must have slept through little bits the second time, because there were things I remember happening the first time that I don't remember the second time. Together I'm sure I have one complete viewing.

And I do remember those bits a lot better know. So, no Alzheimer's yet apparently.

But also this is the sort of movie that feels like a dream, in the best possible way. It involves flashes of bizarre imagery that don't necessarily have an antecedent in the narrative, plus the blending of a real world with a video game world, though that would be a 1987 video game world and all the more charming for that fact.

And now that I've deepened my appreciation of Obex through that second viewing, I can return to this dream in my mind at any time of my choosing.

This year's release date asterisk

It Ends was a movie I looked for last year, when it was recommended to me by a friend who saw it and ranked it as part of his own year-end rankings. (Which means it could only be one friend. There's only one other person who would be willing to go on this crazy mission with me each year.)

So why will it be a part of my own 2026 rankings?

I have fairly hard-and-fast rules about release years and when I count a movie toward the current year. And it usually has to do with the film's U.S. release date. Even though I've lived in Australia for 13 years now, Australian release dates are sometimes way out of whack and I just don't consider them to be a reliable gauge of the current film year, not when I'm comparing my own list to those from people who live in other parts of the world. 

If a film has a release in the U.S. in a particular year, it's part of that year for ranking purposes. That allows foreign films, which were often released in their home country in the previous year, to qualify for ranking in that second year.

But if you go to IMDB for Alexander Ullom's head-trippy road movie -- in that it is literally about a road that seems to go on forever -- you'll see the following under the U.S. release:

"United States - December 10, 2025 (internet)"

And then on the very next line:

"United States - August 21, 2026"

Huh? 

A film may get only an internet release, or it may get an internet release after a theatrical release. In fact, I believe this second describes every movie that's been made in the internet era -- though to be fair, IMDB does not usually note the date a movie becomes available for streaming.

But an internet release and then a theatrical release? You don't usually see that.

What happened was that Letterboxd, for a limited time, had exclusive access to the movie as part of its Unreleased Gems series. I noticed in a recent email from Letterboxd that they're doing it again this year. 

In fact, the time was so limited that when I went to look for it a month later, in order to make It Ends one of my final half-dozen viewings of 2025, it was no longer available. I wrote it off as never rankable on one of my year-end rankings, a fate that befalls a large number of releases each year.

But most of those other movies burn their eligibility in that first year. Because of its unusual release schedule, I've now decided It Ends did not. 

It took another eight months to finally get a proper release, but It Ends came out in the U.S. last month, and washed up on our shows last week. I watched it Sunday night as a second movie after the family went to see Terminator 2, as discussed previously. 

I liked but did not love it. Not top 20 like my friend ranked it last year. To each his own. But that isn't really the point of writing this post.

No, the point is to talk about a sort of stretching of the rules that actually sort of pains me a little bit.

I know these are my rules and I can do whatever I want with them, but I also feel like it's good to be consistent. And the way it works out, only foreign films, not English language films like this one, usually get that "second chance" -- which is really just a first chance, since I literally could not have seen those movies in the year of their proper release, unless I'd flown to the country where they were released, or maybe caught them at a festival. 

If I had been a bit faster, I could have seen It Ends last year.

But then again I might not have even noticed it was a Letterboxd exclusive, might not have even had it recommended to me by my friend. And then it would have been like any other film that has a different release year on IMDB than the year of its actual release, a result of debuting at a film festival one year and getting a theatrical release the next. That's especially likely if the festival debut was a later festival, like TIFF. You can't expect all those films to get distribution in that first year, so you rank them in the second year.

And so I am treating the Letterboxd exclusive window on It Ends kind of like an online film festival. 

Hey, it works for me, and these are my rules anyway. Which doesn't mean I am always flexible enough to bend them. 

Watching along with Hitchcock/Truffaut

I'm dutifully continuing the endeavor I began almost a year ago, in which I vowed to alternate the books I'm reading between books that are related to film, and all other sorts of books. I've kept it up over the year, though there have been some big asterisks on some of the movie-related books. Turns out, I don't really want to read a book that is specifically about film every other book, even if it's good for me in terms of deepening my intellectual appreciation of my favorite medium.

For now I'm continuing to do it, and the latest I'm making my way through -- slower than I might like -- is Hitchcock/Truffaut, which was given to me as a gift at some point over the last ten years. 

If you aren't familiar with it, you probably should be, at least by reputation. It's a conversation between Alfred Hitchcock and Francois Truffaut conducted over a week in 1962, in which Truffaut is wearing his journalist's hat in discussing literally every movie Hitchcock had made to that point. (They could not, of course, discuss movies he hadn't yet made -- or could they? More on that in a moment.) 

It's delivered to us in a coffee table-sized book, in other words, the size of book you would find on a coffee table, not a book as big as a coffee table. There are a lot of stills from Hitchcock's films, sometimes covering whole two-page spreads, and the conversation is recorded as an exchange of dialogue, like you'd find in a script, with each man's initials and a colon before what he's saying. (I'm a little unclear on the logistics, because I don't think Truffaut spoke perfect English, and many of the thoughts he expresses are quite complex.)

I must admit I am a little confused on the timing though. Wikipedia says the book was not released until 1966 but that the conversation took place in 1962, and yet there are references to The Birds in the conversation, which was not released until 1963. Well, fortunately we live in the age of AI, which just explained to me that principal photography had already been completed on The Birds at the time the conversation took place, meaning it was front of mind for Hitchcock -- though obviously Truffaut would not have seen it yet, or at least not more than some isolated dailies. 

There are a couple reasons it's taking me a long time to get through this:

1) It turns out that reading a dialogue between two people doesn't feel the same as reading a book. It's more like listening to an audio transcript. When I'm reading a book, I'm looking for crafted sentences and other signs of compelling writing. I'm not interested just in what two men said, even if the content of what they said is inherently interesting. And that leads me to point 2:

2) The content is not all inherently interesting. A number of the movies they're talking about are movies I haven't seen, and others are movies I've seen, but not for ages. So a lot of it is a bit abstract in terms of resonating with me, even if some of Hitchcock's war stories have a certain appeal unto themselves. 

The first I can't do much about, if I do want to ultimately finish Hitchcock/Truffaut. And I'm a completist, especially when it comes to books I start, so not finishing it is out of the question. 

The second? I do have some options there.

And so I've started watching movies alongside the chronological discussion, projecting 20 to 30 pages down the road so I can have one of these movies fresh in my mind when it comes up. It's kind of like what I did last year with Quentin Tarantino's Cinema Speculation. Last night, I watched my third such previously unseen Hitchcock. At the very least, this project could get me closer to having only a dozen Hitchcocks remaining, meaning at some point in the future I can spend an annual viewing project on finishing off his filmography. 

The first was Sabotage (1936), which was among Hitchcock's final handful of films he made before coming to Hollywood. It concerns a terrorist planning a series of attacks in London while hiding in plain sight of owning and operating a small movie theater. 

The second was Foreign Correspondent (1940), one of only four Hitchcock movies nominated for an Academy Award for best picture, meaning my viewing knocks out one of my future viewings on my perennially in progress Audient Bridesmaids series. This one deals with the classic Hitchcock character of an innocent thrust into espionage and intrigue, the titular character sent to Europe to cover World War II but getting involved in an intricate spy plot instead.

Those first two were quite recognizably Hitchcock pictures. Last night's was not. The third was Lifeboat (1944), a classic frame story in which about eight characters are trapped on the titular vessel after their ship is sunk in the Atlantic during World War II, one of whom is a German. This one is more about human nature than deception and mystery. 

If I'm keeping with the four-year intervals, Hitchcock made Rope in 1948, though I've already seen (and loved) that one, and am due for a rewatch. So I guess it would probably be either 1947's The Paradine Case or 1949's Under Capricorn, both of which are unfamiliar to me.

What do these movies have in common, other than coming out at four-year intervals, which isn't really an actual attribute?

Well none of them blew my mind, and I guess I can't expect lesser Hitchcocks to measure up to the classics. I've seen almost all of the real household names in his filmography, so it was inevitable that some of the ones I'm watching now couldn't hold a candle to those.

But I was particularly surprised at how little Foreign Correspondent did for me, especially when you consider the Academy consider it one of the best ten films of that year. (One of his other nominees for best picture actually won it in the very same year: Rebecca, a stone-cold classic.) Although there's some good stuff in this movie, some stuff you would note as "Hitchcockian" -- the assassin escaping under the umbrellas, the titular character getting his overcoat caught in the windmill gears -- my overall impression of the film was disappointment. 

Sabotage was the winner of the bunch for me, even though Hitchcock's and Truffaut's dialogue about it is mostly negative -- the leader actor being wrong for the role, a key decision that I won't spoil being morally dubious from him as a filmmaker. 

Lifeboat? I was hoping the restricted locale would inspire some of the director's greatest cleverness, and that it might give me Rope vibes. Instead, this felt like one of the pictures Hitchcock made as a favor to somebody, not delving into his usual proclivities like I thought it might have. (I haven't gotten to that one yet in the book, so let's see what they say about it.)

The problem with this whole companion viewing I'm doing is that sometimes they don't say much about a particular movie at all. That hasn't been a problem with either Sabotage or Foreign Correspondent, but there are certain films that got little more than a cursory mention. If I had chosen to watch those, I would have felt like it was a wasted effort indeed. 

It is nice, though, to have some good counterprogramming as I start to ramp up on current year releases, which will become more and more of a preoccupation for me the closer I get to my ranking deadline in January.

And yeah, it'll get me a lot closer to the ultimate goal, which seems pretty hard to attain at the moment: making my way through all of Hitchcock's films.

At a glance, it looks like I have only about 35 more to go ... 

T2 spoiled, but not ruined

It occurs to me that I should probably include a SPOILER ALERT about Terminator 2: Judgment Day before writing this post. I might assume that if you are reading this post, you've seen Terminator 2: Judgment Day. But if I were to do that, I'd be making the same outrageous gaffe made by the distributors of the movie's 35th anniversary re-release.

But first, some background. 

If you read yesterday's post, you know that we watched The Terminator on Saturday night as a family movie in order to prepare for yesterday's Australian Father's Day viewing of Terminator 2: Judgment Day. The first was a mild success, which I celebrated with a relieved exhale.

See, we'd already bought the T2 tickets. If the first had been a huge fail, the second would have been tainted from the start.

Which it almost was anyway.

When the pre-show ads finished at the Sun in Yarraville, an image of a robotic foot crushing a human skull came on the screen so quickly that it shocked me. Does Terminator 2 really have such an abrupt beginning? Isn't there at least a production company logo or something?

And a part of me knew this was wrong. For some reason I always remember that the first shot of Terminator 2 is of traffic on the 405 freeway.

This wasn't the movie. This was some little short film accompanying it.

And soon it was confirmed that this was some sort of short documentary, an abbreviated version of the kind of thing that once appeared as a DVD extra. Edward Furlong, Robert Patrick, James Cameron and producer Gale Anne Hurd were all being interviewed in short snippets.

What's worse, though, is that there were little snippets of the movie. 

Little snippets of all parts of the movie.

The beginning. The middle. The end. All the coolest liquid metal shots. All the most moving emotional beats. Everything.

The audience started howling. My wife and I started panicking.

See, one of the reasons we watched The Terminator was because we wanted to create the same preconceived notions in our children that audiences had coming into T2 in 1991, having only seen the original, and having only seen the trailers for this movie. (I don't know how spoilery the trailers were. Probably pretty spoilery.) 

We wanted our kids, like the movie hopes, to think, for at least a little bit, that Arnold Schwarzenegger might be coming back for his second chance to kill John Connor, and Robert Patrick might be filling the Kyle Reese role of John and Sarah's less physically imposing protector. 

Well, this little short film started to spoil that right away, not to mention almost everything else in the movie -- even though any individual snippet of the film was only one or two seconds long. 

Yes, this short film included the actual shot of the good terminator descending into the molten steel and giving a thumbs up as his final gesture. 

I repeat: THE DEATH OF ONE OF THE MAIN CHARACTERS WAS REVEALED IN THIS ACCOMPANYING SHORT.

Fortunately, my younger son didn't see it. Realizing pretty early on what was happening, he closed his eyes and put his hands over his ears. I can't remember if his mother told him to do that or if he just did it on his own. If it was his own instinct, he certainly takes after me, as I will sometimes do this when a trailer comes on for a movie I don't want spoiled.

My older son? He was too cool for that sort of evasive action. And he pretty much saw everything in this short film. Even if it was out of context, it was spoilerific as hell.

I made a lame attempt to put my arm in the path of his eyes when the Arnie thumbs up came on screen, but the damage was already done.

I have to imagine that 80 to 85 percent of our audience had already seen the movie. But surely there were at least 15 to 20 percent, which would have been maybe 20 to 25 people, who just never got around to it, or were too young and this was their first time. The audience was alive with people laughing in disbelief at what was happening.

I was beside myself. I even yelled "You're ruining the whole movie!" which got quite a big laugh. 

"I can't believe that just happened," I said to my wife. Neither could she.

Mercifully, this finally ended and we were able to watch the movie.

I guess I don't blame the Sun for this. The Sun is, by far, my favorite cinema, and they would never co-sign something like this if it weren't attached to the film itself. And I actually don't know if they even knew it was on there. I think this may have been the first (only?) showing of T2 at this theater. 

And even if they did know, and if they did consider it to be as sacrilegious as I did, what would be their capacity to start the movie late to skip this? And would that be communicated to the projectionist? 

In any case, if you do want to include this short video -- which also shows all these people looking very old and broken down by the world, particularly the 49-year-old Edward Furlong -- couldn't you put it at the end? And if you're worried people will leave before it shows, just include a message at the start "Stay tuned after the film for a short documentary about the making of Terminator 2: Judgment Day."

The movie is so good that I relaxed into the viewing pretty quickly and put it behind me. At least one of my children had largely avoided spoilers. I guess the other would just have to deal. 

To make myself feel a little better, I did watch the movie specifically from the angle of inspecting how closely it guards the secret of which terminator is which. And I decided it gives up that ruse pretty quickly. Even when Arnie goes through the biker bar to get clothes and a motorcycle, the scene is played for comedy -- violent comedy, but comedy nonetheless. There are no fatalities, and it ends with George Thorogood's "Bad to the Bone" playing. Way too light if this is your villain. And though we can't be sure that the naked T-100 actually kills the cop he knifes in the stomach -- in fact, we don't even know it was a knifing until we deduce it retroactively from his later behavior -- we can see that this cop is lying on the ground without moving. Seems like a fatality to me. 

I should mention one other concern I had about this movie, which was a concern I had (to a lesser extent) with the original, which was the gory deaths. The metal finger through the eye of the mental hospital security guard. The metal sword-arm through the head of Todd, John's foster father. But even more than that, the traumatizing (to me at least, in 1991) footage of the nuclear explosion that skeletonizes Sarah Connor and blows apart the kids in the playground "like leaves," to quote Sarah herself. I looked over at the younger son on each of these, and he didn't look as horrified as I was worried he'd look. I guess my 2026 12-year-old is probably more blase about violence and scary imagery than I was as a 17-year-old in 1991.  

Well, I don't know that their viewing of the movie was significantly impacted by anything that was spoiled for them. However, neither did they fall in love with the movie like I hoped they would.

They seemed to indicate the two Terminator movies they'd seen in the last 24 hours were of a piece. That in itself would have been a bit of a disappointment to me, but that's only because of personal preference. I know there are people out there who think that The Terminator is the "real" Terminator movie and that T2 is effectively a cash grab. They're wrong, but they're entitled to that opinion.

We went to Father's Day dinner at a neighboring burger place, and my wife and I filled the space that is typically left by my children in any dinner conversation with more praise of the film and prompts for discussion about the details of the film. We actually talked a fair bit about Schwarzenegger, whom they don't otherwise really know. 

And as for her? Well, she said she really enjoyed it -- she specifically commented on how different it was that all those stunts were done practically back then -- but she also said she thought it was "a little long." Yes T2 is a half-hour longer than The Terminator, but for my money, every second is exactly as it should be. Again, though, I can't quibble with other people's opinions. 

The kids did get involved in a couple of the discussions, my younger son more than my older one, but the things that engaged them were not the things I would have thought were their big takeaways. Because we had about 30 minutes to fill at dinner, I even got into a few of my nitpicks about the movie -- Sarah Connor is only 29 years old?? -- and one of these was actually something they took issue with. 

I said I thought it was funny that Robert Patrick came through looking like Robert Patrick, when he could have just come through as a metal blob, and that it was funny that when he sampled that first police officer, he incorporated only the uniform into his own shape while keeping the default Robert Patrick appearance. Shouldn't he actually look like the cop?

The kids decided -- my younger one, backed up by the older one -- that the T-1000 had actually taken the cop's clothes and was wearing them over his metal. Which of course doesn't make sense. Where does the fabric go when he takes another shape? They didn't seem to have an answer for this but were unwilling to move from their position.

All in all, it was a close approximation of the Father's Day experience I was hoping for. I mean, obviously I hoped they would love T2 as much as I do, would be as impressed by the visual effects as I was in 1991. But they've seen 35 years' worth of more advanced digital effects, and basically, anything they can imagine conjured in a movie. A liquid metal villain is inevitably not going to gobsmack them the way it gobsmacked me 35 years ago.

And there was a little something else in the movie that made it appropriate for that day. I really got the feels any time the movie either implicitly or explicitly evoked the father-son relationship between the good terminator and John Connor. The part where John stops Sarah from killing Miles Dyson -- or at least arrives to do so after she's already made that choice for herself -- is still the film's most emotionally resonant moment for me, but given that I'm a dad celebrating Father's Day, this other material worked on me more than usual as well. 

Risking The Terminator on my kids

If you can believe it, I only just watch the original Terminator for the second time.

How is this possible, you ask? Especially when I've seen T2 at least eight times, and wouldn't be surprised if it were double digits?

Well I never saw The Terminator in the years between when it was released in 1984 and when Terminator 2: Judgment Day was released in 1991. My first exposure to the Terminator universe was in T2, at which point my mind was blown and I was on board for however many decades of later releases were yet to come. (Most of which have been disappointing, but with intermittent pleasures along the way.) I might have caught five minutes of the original on cable at a friend's house, but that was it. 

The actual date of my single previous Terminator viewing is lost to time. I didn't start keeping track of the dates I watched movies until 2002, so it was sometime between 1991 and 2002. I know I didn't rush out right away after T2 to watch it. It might have taken at least a few more years and happened somewhat organically.

The fact that I haven't seen the original The Terminator more than once until now seems even more absurd when you consider that I rewatched two demonstrably lesser Terminator movies, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines and Terminator: Dark Fate, before I got to a rewatch of the original. That's very strange on the face of it, though at least those two are my next two favorites in the series. (Leaving Terminator: Salvation and Terminator: Genisys on the outside looking in. Like, way on the outside, barely able to see the inside from their vantage point.)

There's a reason I haven't watched The Terminator again since the 1990s. It's not that I think it's bad. In fact, I think it's quite good. It's just that it pales in comparison to T2, feeling like a fossil by comparison, certainly technology wise, and possibly even narratively. 

We may generally prize practical effects over digital effects, but the liquid metal Terminator in T2 came along at a time when we weren't already ruined for digital, and it still looks good today. It's kind of like the digital effects in Starship Troopers. (In fact I've probably made that comparison before.) 

That's in stark contrast to the practical effects of The Terminator, which probably already looked quaint even by 1991. We may feel warm fuzzies about the Schwarzenegger mask and the Ray Harryhausen-style movements of the skinless terminator endoskeleton, but that's only because it reminds us of a lost, simpler time -- not because it actually looks good. 

The liquid metal, combined with some dynamite storytelling and action set pieces, levelled up the whole series, leaving that film's predecessor feeling antiquated and small by comparison. So when I'm looking to scratch a Terminator itch, I never think of being able to do that in the original Terminator. (You could also make the argument that I prefer my Arnie as a protagonist, which he is every other time he appears throughout the saga.)

And this was my thinking behind being uncertain about whether to show The Terminator to my kids, now ages 12 and 16.

Why is this even coming up, you ask? Well I'll tell you.

Sunday (today) is Father's Day in Australia. I'm not huge on days in my honor, and I treat it a bit like my birthday -- I'll take a few token gestures on my behalf, and I don't want to do anything I don't want to do, but other than that, I don't want a big fuss made over it. Especially this year, when my wife is overwhelmed with work-related things. 

She asked if there were any good movies to see, but this is a bad time of year for that. Although the theatrical release schedule is not as black and white as it once was, late August/early September is still not a great time for new movie releases. Especially new movie releases that might feel "special" in some way.

But I can tell you what does feel special: Terminator 2: Judgment Day. 

Which I've already seen once in the theater this year, back when I saw the altered musical score (plus added laser effects) for the Hear My Eyes series, as discussed here. But that wasn't going to stop me from making this our Father's Day activity.

It's playing today at 3:45 at my favorite theater, The Sun in Yarraville, for its 35th anniversary. And I guess I need to stop pooh-poohing random anniversary years (see this post), because this will now be the second time I'm celebrating the 35th anniversary of the release of T2. 

My last viewing brought home with me a resolve that we needed to show this to our kids, which I shared with my wife at the time, back in February. What a golden opportunity to do so, on the big screen no less.

The thing is, doesn't T2 have more impact if you've already seen The Terminator? My own personal experience notwithstanding?

I stand as living proof that you can love Terminator 2: Judgment Day on its own merits, not having consumed anything about this world previously, and not having your mind blown that there was a reversal from the first movie, where Arnold Schwarzenegger went from villain to good guy. I already knew that anyway, because of course it was in the culture back in the '80s.

But The Terminator isn't in the culture to the same extent, in that my kids don't appear to have grown up with its mythology. They've heard of the movie, but didn't even know the central tenets of the series, which is built on the need to kill John Connor before he ascends to command the rebellion against the machines, potentially even before he's born. In fact, they didn't even know who John Connor or Sarah Connor were.

So they were in a position indeed to be faked out by the start of T2, when you just think Arnie is back to try again to kill the young John Connor ... but only if they saw the original movie.

My wife could go either way on it. She left it up to me. I think she was excited to see the original again -- she's seen T2 few enough times that she actually thinks the original might be superior -- but she was willing to yield to my concerns, it being Father's Day and all. 

And I definitely had reason for worry. The things that blew our minds when we were young are, in some cases, just too old-fashioned for today's young people. I knew this wasn't possible with T2, given how modern it still feels, but its predecessor lacks those bells and whistles. And if you think I'm overreacting and that I should give my kids more credit, I still remember well the time my older son started to watch Jaws on the plane, but then abandoned the viewing after less than 15 minutes because it was just "too old."

The danger was, we'd already bought the tickets to T2. If they both hated The Terminator, it would put quite the damper on our Father's Day activity.

Well I decided we should do it. I set up the projector in the garage -- my first projector movie in ages -- and popped up some popcorn. We'd order dinner during the movie, to arrive for its second half.

And I think it was pretty much a success.

Neither kid was effusive in their praise. My older son said it was "cool," but that could have been diplomacy, knowing that there was a lot riding on this viewing and not wanting to poison the well in advance of T2. My wife and I quickly took over with our own effusive praise, so I can't recall my younger son's reaction. But later he showed his engagement with the viewing when he talked about being faked out by Kyle Reese, thinking he was another terminator -- at which point my decision to watch the movie, in order to support a similar sort of fake-out in T2, was totally vindicated. 

"Exactly!" I enthused. "You're supposed to not know and that's supposed to increase the tension!"

(That's not exactly what I said, but it was what I wished I'd said.)

I'm not going to include a lot of Terminator takeaways in this post, but one of them was just how little exposition there is in the first 25 minutes or so of this movie. In fact there's very little dialogue, and what's there is largely limited to Sarah Connor, her roommate and her roommate's boyfriend. Eventually the detectives played by Paul Winfield and Lance Henriksen get a fair amount of chatter too.

But exposition actually related to the time travellers? There's almost none. And indeed, that's designed to fake us out, but we're also just trying to get oriented in this world. There's some on-screen text at the start about the war with the robots being waged in present day, but after that, we don't really know who these guys are who materialized in a Tesla coil's worth of lightning. I noted specifically that we don't even see Schwarzenegger's POV computer readouts until it's firmly established that he's the villain, and definitely an android.

Once Reese gets talking it becomes a veritable exposition dump, making up for all the previous paucity of details. But we need it to fully acquaint ourselves with the stakes of Sarah Connor escaping her own assassination. 

The action scenes are pretty good. The visual effects are, I try to tell myself, quite sophisticated for 1984. And the relationship between Reese and Sarah is touching enough. 

But I know this is never going to stand a chance for me against T2, and a second viewing didn't change that. I need to remind myself that the concepts themselves -- among them the paradox of a person sent back in time to become the father of the very person who sent him back -- were part of what made the original Terminator so great. It's easy to take that for granted when you've lived with these ideas for 42 years. 

But even if this movie hadn't worked for my kids, I knew I had the ace up my sleeve that the sequel was the best in the series, which I had told them. In fact, I had told them that the first one was a little old-fashioned but the second one was not. And whether she actually believed it or not, my wife now co-signed, at least verbally to the kids, that the second one was the best in the series. I didn't know if she was able to decide that based on this viewing and a retroactive memory of T2, but she enthused to me privately that this had been really fun, so I suspect The Terminator didn't suffer for her on her most recent viewing. 

And so it's all down hill from here, in other words, now we can coast to Terminator 2, in about five hours. I'll let you know tomorrow how it goes.