If Raising Arizona starred Ryan Gosling

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Is that Ryan Gosling?" he asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can't you just see Gosling doing that?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And I only just now realized something truly astonishing:

That recasting post was also inspired by Ryan Gosling.

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

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

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

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

Hells yes. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Where's Maw?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Perfect Pauses: Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice

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

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

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

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

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

Cool image, right? 

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

Watching 2001 on my 18th wedding anniversary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How cool is she?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here's the first pairing:

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

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

And here is the second:

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

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

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

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

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

Then it occurred to me:

The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, of course. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So it worked out perfectly for everybody. 

Borgli on the brain

Don't know who Kristoffer Borgli is??

You should.

You might not have loved the movie that brought him to our attention in the U.S., because I know Dream Scenario had some detractors, but hopefully you at least became aware of him through it. He's just followed that up with The Drama, the new Zendaya-Robert Pattinson film that I like almost as much.

I deepened the dive two days after seeing The Drama with his film immediately prior to Dream Scenario, when he was still making films in Norway, which is called Sick of Myself. That leaves only one Borgli feature (2017's DRIB) that I have yet to see.

I don't usually see consecutive films by the same director, but that did happen on Tuesday and Thursday of this week. And wouldn't have, except that one of my writers brought it up in this ongoing Facebook chat we have going with two other writers and ReelGood's former editor. 

He recommended it, which turned out to be the right call. I don't think I like Sick of Myself as much as I like Dream Scenario or The Drama, but I like it enough to give it the same rating I gave the other two (4 out of 5 stars). 

The thing I like most about these films? You can tell they are from the same director but only just, and only in ways I'm having trouble trying to explain. I think you could say all of Borgli's films that I've seen are the end result of some high concept social experiment. Or maybe that they depict one of the options in a game of Would You Rather? They are only mildly surreal looks at some mildly absurd scenario, and they examine how the characters would realistically react to such a scenario. That might not even be the right classification for Sick of Myself, in which character reactions are slightly more satirical, but they're all in the same neighborhood without directly shouting out each other and begging to be compared to one another.

For example, when I saw Dream Scenario -- you know, the one where everyone in the world simultaneously starts dreaming of a character played by Nicolas Cage -- I loved it, but still reserved a part of my brain that said snidely "This guy might just be the latest person to attempt to rip off Charlie Kaufman." In fact, I even wrote a post about it.

But The Drama has nothing about it that would evoke Kaufman, and yet I can still tell it's Borgli. The concept of this one is that a couple questions their upcoming wedding after a revelation she makes in the days leading up to it. That doesn't sound particularly high concept, but the high concept is what the thing is that she reveals, and we spend the rest of the movie debating ourselves whether it's disqualifying or not. It's a highly unexpected and unusual thing, and if you want to read me reviewing it while dancing around that spoiler, you can check that out here. I don't actually have a filmmaker in mind who might have influenced the making of this film, and that's exciting in itself. 

Sick of Myself? I wasn't planning to review this, unlike the other two, because it's from 2022. So I hadn't considered whether I would spoil things about it or not. Let's just say it's about the crazy, self-destructive lengths to which a personal will go to be noticed, either within their relationship or independently of it. And I suppose it made me think a bit of the films of Ruben Ostlund, though that could just be the Scandinavian connection.

It's notable alone to like three consecutive films by the same director, about the same amount, especially when that same amount is in the four-star range on Letterboxd. It's then more notable to say that each of these films balances a profound sense of the absurd with a real honesty in the way its characters interface with each other around that absurdity, without the films directly resembling each other in style.

And the fact that he's a new discovery makes it all the more exciting, and really prepares me for whatever he might make next. 

So yeah, I've got Kristoffer Borgli on the brain. And if I'm not running out to rent DRIB, it's probably only because I really don't expect to find this one -- having already been surprised enough already to find Sick of Myself available to rent on AppleTV. 

This and That

Here is one of the leftover observations from my long Easter weekend of viewings on the projector in my garage, which totalled 12 viewings over five days (I got started after work on Thursday), five of them new viewings and seven of them repeats.

One of the repeats was a movie I never in a million years imagined I would watch again, except for the crush I've developed on its star.

I don't usually like talking on this blog about crushes I have on actresses -- that can be skeevy if done incorrectly, and sometimes even if done correctly. But we're all human beings and I am a heterosexual male human being. I think to entirely deny that this is part of my DNA is to be dishonest. So let's just hope I do it correctly.

Said crush is on Addison Rae, an influencer who became an actress and a pop musician, and is the star of Mark Waters' 2021 film He's All That -- the gender-flipped remake of Robert Iscove's 1999 film She's All That, which has become a dubious cultural touchpoint over the years.

Why Rae? Well she's certainly an attractive enough person with a fair bit of charisma, and enough acting chops to get by. But these were things I could observe five years ago when I first saw and reviewed the movie, and they didn't hold particular sway over me then.

But then, while gathering songs for my annual mix via Shazam after hearing them out there in the wild, I came across Rae's song "Diet Pepsi." My process here is that when I first hear it and Shazam it, I merely add it to my spreadsheet of mix candidates, and then only in January, when I'm actually making my mix, do I revisit these songs and become more familiar with them, deciding whether they ultimately make the cut. (And speaking of mixes and He's All That, I actually got a song from this movie for a mix back when I first watched it, Mackelmore's "Dance Off.")

So this past January was when I became obsessed with "Diet Pepsi," specifically its video:

Now, you could argue that what Rae gives us in this video is specifically sexual and that this is the source of my interest in her. But I don't really think that's it. I think it's an amalgam of everything this video is offering that has made me watch it enough times (probably a dozen) that YouTube presents it to me as a likely option every time I go to the site. (A source of a little bit of embarrassment, because this account is logged into our TV, so my younger son uses it as well.)

Let me break down what I perceive as the appeal of the "Diet Pepsi" video, that doesn't just make me a dirty old man:

1) The song itself. I would never have even watched this video if I didn't dig the surprisingly mature song -- mature if not in subject matter or lyrics, then in production and the sophistication of its construction. What do I mean about "sophistication" in this context? Well I think my absolute favorite part of the song is the key change in its final 30 seconds, which works so well precisely because it is so unexpected. Most pop songs don't dare to do a thing like this, wouldn't even consider it. And then actually vocally, I think this is quite a good song, as the whole vibe reminds me of one of my favorite new discoveries of the past ten to 15 years, Lana del Rey, who I think is just brilliant and a staggeringly accomplished vocalist. There's an ethereal quality to the whole thing that really immerses me in it, and the lyrics themselves add a small bit of titillation to the experience. Even naming the song "Diet Pepsi," when those two words are only mentioned once in the lyrics, is a highly sophisticated impulse. 

2) The video is incredibly shot. It's kind of a masterpiece of both cinematography and editing. It's kind of in the tradition of old perfume ads, where it exists only to make the people look as beautiful as possible, but I don't think it's fair to suggest this means it's utterly vapid and devoid of value. Making people and things look beautiful speaks to some core part of us that wants to see pretty things, and they absolutely hired the finest craftspeople to accomplish this.

3) And then finally we get to Rae. She's beautiful at times, cute at times and sexy at times. It's a winning mix. There's something about this quest for her to get to the convenience store to get a can of soda -- though the video doesn't have even that much narrative rigor -- that I find kind of adorable, especially that bit where she flits through the store to the refrigerated case, wearing her perfectly appointed brand name party clothes. She may be on another planet than we are in terms of glamor and enviable life events, but for a moment, she's bringing us into it.

That was a lot more than I expected to write about "Diet Pepsi."

In any case, this is all background for why I decided I would rewatch He's All That. I wanted to see just how much of Rae's charms I hadn't fully appreciated back when I first watched it.

And you know what I discovered? I actually like He's All That better than She's All That. 

The presumption would be that this could never be true. But here's the thing. I had not actually seen She's All That yet when I watched He's All That. I only rectified that last year in Europe, when I watched She's All That as a way to wind down one of our nights in Rome, a viewing that I wrote about here. 

And I really didn't like it. Not only has this movie dated worse (I assume) than many other films from the 1990s -- though it's not every day that I'm seeing films like this for the first time, making comparisons tricky -- but I have a hard time even putting myself back in the place I would have been as a 25-year-old in 1999, imagining myself liking it then. There is nothing in this movie that delivers well on even what would have been important to me then, at that age. I don't find the performers charming (Rachael Leigh Cook probably comes off best) and I don't find anything funny, even by the standards of late 1990s romcom humor. I found the whole thing pretty cringe.

And I found He's All That a lot cuter and more darling this time. 

Surprisingly, it was not specifically Rae I was responding to on this viewing. In fact, I specifically noted that my toes did not curl while watching her, as I thought they might. However, I did appreciate what she was capable of providing to this project, and half-wondering why she hasn't tried for any more similarly prominent star vehicles in the past five years, because she's certainly got the minimum necessary charisma and ability to support such a project. I'm guessing she's just more interested in the music side now, and that'll be even more the case after the album containing "Diet Pepsi" was received well by critics. (And I've actually watched a couple other videos from that album. They are shot equally well, and objectively, Rae looks nice in them. But neither the songs nor the specific video entrance me the way "Diet Pepsi" does.)

Jeez I'm talking about "Diet Pepsi" again. But here's one more thing before I leave that topic: Is Diet Pepsi, the drink, actually more popular than Pepsi Max? I shifted from Coke Zero to Pepsi Max about five years ago and haven't looked back. 

So while I did appreciate Rae, it was about the same amount that I appreciated her when I first saw the movie. I just liked everything else a bit better. I just thought it was a pretty sweet movie that accomplishes its modest goals and is full of the kind of sunny cheer you would want in a romcom aimed at young people. It has its mean characters who do mean things, including Rae's character herself, though she doesn't mean to (sorry to mix the meanings of the two uses of "mean"). The difference in tone between a movie like this and the movie I wrote about yesterday, Rebel Wilson's The Deb, is that this is a movie that doesn't feel fundamentally mean even with characters who do mean things, while Wilson's film does feel a bit more fundamentally mean -- perhaps an extension of its director's persona.

When I considered the premise of this post, I thought I would lead with the fact that I had given She's All That a higher star rating on Letterboxd but had actually liked it less. I assumed that would be the case. 

But looking at it now, I see that I gave them both 1.5 stars. That's correct for She's All That, but it is not correct for its gender-flipped remake. While I don't know if I can go so far as to give this a fully positive assessment, because it still has the shortcomings I noticed the first time (including an absurd amount of product placement -- I wonder if, considering "Diet Pepsi," that is just Rae's thing), I'd go up at least a full star to 2.5 stars. 

Maybe I was just grumpy at the end of 2021. When this came out in September of that year, it was nearly the end of another lockdown, and Netflix movies continued to be one of the few sources of new movies, a reality I wrote about the only other time I've written about He's All That on my blog. Maybe nearing the end of two long years in COVID, you're inclined to be more cynical about this sort of movie than in other contexts.

But it was, I'm glad to say, nearing the end. It was only a month later that we saw our current house for the first time, and we were only able to see it because they widened the distance you were allowed to travel from where you lived under lessening COVID restrictions. I guess you could say it's all been pointing upward since then, except that we reelected Trump and started a number of violent conflicts on foreign soil that have lost us huge amounts of credibility on the world stage, plus in my family we've lost two grandparents in those intervening years. 

Even so, the arrow is pointing upward, and my general mental composition is a lot better now than then, making me able to embrace He's All That after shunning it then. 

I never expected this post to run the gamut from "Diet Pepsi" to COVID to the war in Iran, but you never know where a blog post will take you. 

A legit reason to rake Rebel Wilson over the coals

The first time I saw Rebel Wilson, it was in Bridesmaids. My impression of her was: "Who is this asshole who thinks it's cool to call everything stupid, and to be vulgar and inappropriate, often in a confrontational sexual manner, in any and every situation?"

It felt to me extremely immature, but also Wilson was only 31 then. Her mind had only finished developing six years earlier. Perhaps a little immaturity could be forgiven. 

Certainly there are other comic actors who profile this way, so I've tried to keep my Rebel Wilson opinions -- which have not significantly changed in the 15 years since then -- to myself. Complicating the matter, and softening my impression of her to some degree, was that Wilson was an oversized performer, which was part of her shtick and which excused, at least a bit, her sort of desperate need to be looked at and to be considered shocking. 

But especially now that she's lost weight, such that you might never have known she was overweight if you were first encountering her today, I'm finding what remains of her shtick to just be irritating. And now I have good reason to believe that she may not just be playing an asshole on TV -- she may actually be one.

My latest review on ReelGood, posted just today, is of Wilson's directorial debut, The Deb. I was cautiously optimistic about the movie, because I feel like I might have been on a bit of a personal Wilson upswing, having really liked her 2022 film Senior Year. I noticed that The Deb actually debuted at TIFF as long ago as 2024, but I didn't think much of it. "Distribution can be weird," I thought.

I started out liking the movie well enough -- it's a musical, if I didn't say that -- but as it went along, it dropped from a possible 3.5 stars, down to clearly no better than 3, down to where I landed on it in my review: 2.5 stars.

Last night I still had to chew over the remainder of the review I'd started the day before, and happened to mention the movie to my wife. She said "Oh is that the one with all the legal troubles?"

Indeed it is, and I'm glad I learned this before finalizing what I planned to write.

I'm not going to go into all the different blows that have been traded over this movie, though the Wikipedia page does so, if you're interested in reading up on it. Suffice it to say that what appears to have begun as a dispute over a writing credit morphed into defamatory comments about the producers and even the star of the movie. Much time was spent in court, and in the meantime, the film was in limbo.

Things like this are always "he said/she said" -- or in this case, it appears to be "she said/she said" -- but given what I already know, or at least feel I know, about Wilson as a person, I'm inclined to find her culpable for much of it. As a typical example of the spraygun nature of her attention-grabbing sense of vulgarity, she seems to accuse the producers of abominable behavior toward the star (Charlotte MacInnes), but then also reserves separate contempt for MacInnes herself. It's a very Rebel Wilson thing, it seems to me, to be defending a person and attacking them at the same time.

But the thing that seems really strange, especially since she's just made a movie in which mean girls are supposed to learn not to bully, is that Wilson really comes off as a bully herself here. Who knows what actually transpired between her and MacInnes, but what is indisputable is what she wrote on social media about her 26-year-old star, a relative newcomer with obviously a lot less industry power than Wilson. According to Wikipedia, which is never wrong (ha ha), here's what Wilson wrote:

Wilson captioned a video of the performance "Charlotte MacInnes in a culturally inappropriate Indian outfit on Len Blavatnik's luxury yacht in Cannes — ironically singing a song from a movie that will never get released because of her lies and support for the people blocking the film's release."

Oh, and she used the movie's own Instagram account to post this.

A 46-year-old, 20 years the senior of her star, can no longer get off the hook for shit like this on the grounds of "immaturity." Even if she's no longer literally the bigger person, she should be the bigger person metaphorically. 

It may be unfair for me to call out Wilson when I obviously haven't done my due diligence by reading up on all the history. Honestly, that's not worth my time.

But the truth is, I feel like I am a pretty good judge of character, and I feel like I determined, as long ago as 2011, that Wilson doesn't have much of it. Any conflict like the one that plagued The Deb has its nuances, and I'm sure all involved parties were probably dicks at some point. But Wilson has made a career out of being a dick, having no nuance at all in her public persona. Sometimes, when a person appears to be a dick, they just are. 

An astronaut movie with no space in it

Given this poster, you'd be surprised if you didn't get a little space in a movie called The Astronaut, wouldn't you? I mean, even just from the title, even if you didn't see the poster?

Well, no. Total bait and switch, it turns out.

I clearly had astronauts in peril on the brain after watching Sunshine on Saturday night, so on Sunday night, Easter night, I watched this 2025 film by director Jess Varley. (And no, I had not seen any previous work by her, even though that name feels familiar.)

It turns out it's actually about an astronaut's return to Earth, and what may or may not have come back with her from outer space. Which we never see. (We never see the outer space, not the thing that did or did not come back with her.)

Even in a movie like The Astronaut's Wife, a clear source of inspiration for this film even if that film is also not great, we get maybe 15 minutes of outer space stuff before the bulk of the movie takes place back on terra firma. 

Not here. No space. No ma'am.

I guess if you want to make a movie that deals with the mysteries of the extra terrestrial, and you don't have much of a budget, you can skip the outer space entirely and save a couple bucks. Then again, no film that takes place in outer space is actually filmed in outer space. It's all digital, and without spoiling The Astronaut, let's just say they did have a budget for other digital effects we're going to see here.

So maybe it was just a miscalculation by Varley?

Or maybe the mysteries of the extra terrestrial are just more mysterious if the entirety of what happened off Earth, that led to the astronaut having the shattered helmet you see above when she returned, is left to the imagination.

I suppose if The Astronaut is undone by anything, it's not the lack of outer space, but rather the kooky twist in the third act. Which I'm not going to say didn't work at all, but just ... it's a choice.

Death music

When I was fishing around for the second movie of a double feature last night on the projector in the garage -- I always try to bust out the projector on long weekends, and this is a four-day one -- I came across Danny Boyle's Sunshine, and decided that Project Hail Mary had put me in the headspace for a second viewing of a movie that I'd always considered to be a bit undone by its ending. Or was it a third viewing? (If you want to read about the disastrous circumstances of my attempted first Sunshine viewing, read here.)

(The first in the double feature? Last year's remake of The Naked Gun, now streaming for free on Stan, which I watched for the second time in the space of three months.)

Mild Sunshine spoilers ahead. 

I'm really glad I watched Sunshine again, because even though I still don't like that "serial killer ending," it does not fatally undermine all the rest of the things the film does right. Which is quite a lot, as it turns out. Including a number of what at least I come to space movies to see: scary deaths that only occur when you're on a space ship. 

What I want to talk about today, though, is the music. 

As it becomes clear that the heroic Captain Kaneda (Hiroyuki Sanada) of the ship Icarus, which is trying to deliver a nuclear payload to "restart" the sun, is about to expire while outside fixing the solar shield, and that his sacrifice must be celebrated through inspirational yet somber music, I heard a piece of music that I've heard in a ton of different movies. Little did I know, this was the very first instance of its usage. 

The piece of music is called "Sunshine (Adagio in D Minor)" by John Murphy, but of course you won't be able to identify it by that title, because there are no lyrics, unless you are my friend John, who is a violinist himself and knows a ton about movie scores. 

But this should probably clarify it for you:

And you'd probably be able to tell from the title that, yes, it originated in this movie.

Now, I do not know about movie scores the way John does -- my friend John, not John Murphy, but I assume he does too. But if this hasn't become the most used new piece of film music in the past 20 years, I don't know what it is.

Just check out the number of uses listed on Wikipedia. There's a special section on the Sunshine soundtrack page addressing just the widespread use of "Adagio in D Minor."

The only one I was sure I remembered from that list was Kick-Ass, when I believe it plays both at the end and possibly during Nicolas Cage's death scenes. (Oops, spoiler for Kick-Ass.)

Because when you hear this song start in a movie, it means, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that a character is about to sacrifice themselves for the greater good. There's just no other possible outcome once that music kicks in. That music is basically a promise that this is serious, and there are no takesies backsies. Some other character, at some other point in the movie, might be improbably revived or saved by a deus ex machina, but not this character in this moment. This character is going down with the ship, going out in a blaze of glory, and probably saving a lot of other characters from certain doom.

I do find it remarkable that I happened to look this up during Sunshine, because I've heard this piece a dozen other times at least, including in some of those trailers mentioned on Wikipedia, and I would have had no reason to believe it would have originated in the film where I finally Shazam'd it. 

Although this is the thing I'm writing about Sunshine, my biggest takeaway is that I feel this film is rehabilitated in my opinion now, after a disastrous first viewing experience with Danny Boyle (now you want to click on that earlier link I bet) and then the eventual full theatrical viewing, which revealed the disappointing serial killer ending. Nineteen years later, I'm glad to know that this is a truly interesting addition to the genre of films where people fight great odds in space and die in horrible ways, and that it reduces Boyle's number of misfires -- an already very low number -- even further.

Remembering Rob Reiner: When Harry Met Sally ...

This is the second in one of two intertwining bi-monthly 2026 series with the same name. The movies in February, April, June, August, October and December involve revisiting my six favorite Rob Reiner films, except for my favorite, This is Spinal Tap, which I rewatched in conjunction with Spinal Tap II: The End Continues before the series started. 

When I was considering the Rob Reiner movies I'd be revisiting in 2026, I of course came to When Harry Met Sally and thought "Yeah, might as well. I've seen it fairly recently, but it's been a minute so I should see it again."

Nope. It's been more than a minute. In fact, it has been more than 20 years.

I had to double check both of the places I keep track of rewatches, on Letterboxd and in a Microsoft Word document, and true enough, I could not find it in either. I started keeping track of rewatches in July of 2006, so that means that unless I watched this in the immediate few months before I started keeping track, it's been more than 20 years since my last viewing of When Harry Met Sally.

It could not be. It simply could not be.

I feel like I definitely watched it with my wife, and we only started dating at the start of 2005. So probably in that first year together we watched it. But it clearly has not come up for viewing again since then, unless I'm derelict in my records, and I'm rarely derelict. 

I'm reminded again that certain movies are so familiar to you -- this would definitely be double digit viewings for the movie overall -- that you feel like you've seen them recently, even when you haven't. Maybe I just couldn't believe that I feel like I clearly remember my last viewing, or at least that such a viewing had taken place, and yet that was at least two decades ago now. Nor could I believe that I wouldn't have been inspired to watch it again in those two decades, just for old times sake.

Well, high time for a viewing of my #26 movie on Flickchart, which has spent a significant amount of time within my top 20. It's crazy to think that I haven't even seen When Harry Met Sally since I started using Flickchart in 2009. 

Since I've never written at length about this movie on the blog, I should tell you that I've long considered it to be the greatest romantic comedy of all time. Actually, in the couple times I've written about Reiner himself, I have expressed that opinion. So I don't need to go on at length about it now. (And each time I do express this opinion, I also mention that I understand I am excluding many of the romantic comedies from earlier golden ages of cinema. What can I say, I grew up with When Harry Met Sally -- it came out when I was 15 -- and I didn't grow up with those other movies.)

The other thing I should put on record is that it is also one of my favorite New York movies. I had already been to New York at least once, maybe exactly once, before the movie came out, but this was the movie that likely cemented my impression of Manhattan as an idealized, romantic locale. Actually living there disabused me of some of that notion, but there's still a perfect version of the city that exists within the tight 96 minutes of When Harry Met Sally. 

I don't need to spend a lot of time on why the movie works so well, but it's a mixture of the sharp dialogue, the witty performers, the funny scenarios, the keen and sometimes uncompromising wisdoms about relationships between men and women, and the mood-setting jazz piano and crooner music that serves as wallpaper.

I'm willing to bet, though, that the little detail that had the greatest impact on my affection for the movie is the interviews with the old married couples placed sporadically throughout the runtime. I doubt this was actually an innovation by Reiner or by screenwriter Nora Ephron, but it could have been, and it is certainly something that's been imitated since. If I'm connecting Reiner movies, it's a bit of a documentary touch that points back to This Is Spinal Tap, and lends an extra bit of authenticity to everything we're seeing. (And looking forward, Reiner used this tactic in the most recent Reiner movie that I've added to my favorites, The Story of Us.)

Because I know this film so well, I was worried I wouldn't have a lot of new observations on this viewing, so I forced myself to jot down some notes. And as it turned out, there were a handful of things I wanted to mention when writing this post:

1) Did you know this was shot by Barry Sonnenfeld? I did not. 

2) I noticed that this movie uses an Ella Fitzgerald song, just as another favorite New York romantic comedy, Kissing Jessica Stein, would do in what I assume was a fairly explicit attempt to remind us of its forbear. Incidentally, I have seen Kissing Jessica Stein three times since the last time I saw When Harry Met Sally. 

3) When Billy Crysal is alone, depressed, sitting on the floor in his empty apartment, he's playing a little game of tossing playing cards into a bowl that's about five feet away from him. I never remember noticing this previously, but at one point he lands about five in a row -- a pretty impressive feat.

4) I know that some of Meg Ryan's reactions to Crystal's antics are genuine, and you can really tell when they occur. When he's speaking in his funny voice ("pecan piiiieee"), she gives a real laugh at one point and utters "Oh no." Such a genuine reaction because, well, it was.

5) I really like the scene where Harry and Sally are dancing cheek to cheek on New Year's Eve, and they are spinning around. It's a very clever way for the camera to capture what they are both thinking in that moment, at a moment when they know the other person cannot see their face, and in this case it's a moment of fear about the physical contact prompting them to do something they fear they will regret. The movie is full of these little mirrored moments, such as when they both make an awkward expression during the social gathering where they play Pictionary, upon seeing the other kiss their current paramour. 

6) I noticed there's a scene where Sally puts on a pith helmet, I believe it's while they're at the Sharper Image, about to be encountered by Helen and Ira. Reiner would also use a pith helmet for Michelle Pfeiffer's character in The Story of Us.

7) Speaking of the Pictionary scene, there are a lot of great lines in that scene, including anything related to the phrase "baby fish mouth." However, I was reminded how much I love Bruno Kirby's frustrated line "Draw something resembling anything!"

8) Speaking of mirrored moments, what I will call the "duelling telephone calls" scene is a masterpiece of execution. It's when Kirby's Jess and Carrie Fisher's Marie are asleep, and for some reason each has their own distinct telephone line on their bedside tables. (Will share a house but not a phone number?) Harry calls Jess at the same time Sally calls Marie, and it's the morning after Harry and Sally slept together. The overlapping dialogue in this scene is terrific, as both conversations go forward naturally while being able to interact with each other, as Jess and Marie realize they are having the same call about the same thing, and that they both invited the other to come over for breakfast at the same time -- an invitation they are relieved to find the other has rejected. It's some real Robert Altman stuff in terms of complexity of dialogue.

9) I always remember, when thinking about moments of romantic bliss in my own life -- when you are most keenly aware of its potential opposite -- the lovely exchange afterward between Jess and Marie: "Tell me I will never have to be out there again," she says. "You will never have to be out there again," he returns. It feels especially touching when you consider that both Kirby and Fisher are now gone. 

10) Random: I noticed the telephone number on the awning where Sally struggles to buy the Christmas tree by herself, without Harry's help. It's 662-4402. Why is this notable? They almost never put phone numbers in movies that didn't begin with 555. Just another touch of this film's effortless sense of realism.

11) If I want to make a really strange connection, between the great Reiner movie I saw this month and the not-great Reiner movie I saw last month for the other bi-monthly Reiner series, it's the ending lines that are meant to serve as a form of reconciliation between characters. When I wrote last month about Being Charlie, the drug addiction movie about and written by Nick Reiner, I noted that one of the few choices I really liked was the character's decision to end by saying to his father "I don't hate you, Dad" -- the closest that character could come to saying "I love you." Well, this movie ends in a somewhat similar fashion, with Sally saying to Harry "I hate you, I really hate you." Which is also a substitute for "I love you."

12) I noticed in the credits there are songs both by Rodgers and Hart (several) and Rodgers and Hammerstein ("Surrey with the Fringe On Top," from Oklahoma!, which Harry and Sally sing in the Sharper Image). I thought that was an interesting thing to see, fresh off last year's movie that featured all three of these characters, Blue Moon. 

These were the only notes I took in the movie, but afterward, when I was looking up other times I mentioned When Harry Met Sally on this blog, I came across this post, and I need to correct the record from it. 

In case you don't want to click, it was a post about the poor realism of the way batting cages are depicted in the Pete Davidson movie Big Time Adolescence. In that post I drew a contrast to how batting cages are depicted in When Harry Met Sally, but I didn't get it completely right.

While it's true that there is nothing that occurs in WHMS that is an actual defiance of the way batting cages work, in that post I stated that the pitching machine continues to pitch balls to Jess and Harry even after they have turned to speak to each other. On this viewing, I noted that's not the case. 

However, it doesn't necessarily undermine the realism of the movie. In fact, it just means that Jess and Harry took the opportunity of no longer being pitched to to turn and talk to each other. These guys are not cheapskates, but they do value a quarter, and they need to keep shovelling them in to get more pitches. (As Harry says to the young kid when they argue about whose turn it is.) They'd hardly let a bunch of pitches go by just to talk face to face about that time Harry made a woman meow.

Okay, if there could ever be enough When Harry Met Sally, we've reached that point for today. 

Next up in this bi-monthly series in June is the current #132 on my Flickchart, Stand by Me -- and it's been a lot more like 30 or even 35 years since I've seen this one. 

When the deaf girl isn't wise or special

When you've watched enough movies, you come to expect certain character types to be portrayed in certain ways.

Characters with any sort of disability fall into this category. While the disability is outwardly a challenge for them, usually there's something about this unique way of interacting with the world that helps them solve a problem the other characters can't solve.

I would say this is particularly the case with characters who are missing one of their senses. Blind characters would top the list, as they will always have a form of "second sight" that makes them a sort of chosen one, instrumental to overcoming a key challenge in the narrative. But deaf characters, specifically deaf girls, are not far behind.

Why specifically deaf girls? If I'm already making generalizations, I'll say that making the character a girl tends to emphasize the sense of vulnerability you are already attributing to the character by making them deaf. A deaf girl is, broadly speaking, even more fragile than a deaf boy.

Fortunately, this is a good thing in most stories. The deaf girl is sure to be there at the exact right moment to accomplish some goal that would have otherwise eluded our protagonists. 

Well, not the deaf girl in the new Amazon Prime movie Pretty Lethal. 

That deaf girl is a dumbass.

I'll need to get into spoiler territory for us to continue, so SPOILER ALERT for Pretty Lethal.

So Vicky Jewson's movie deals with five American ballerinas who are traveling through Hungary toward a competition when their bus breaks down in a remote location. There's the tough street one (Maddie Zeigler), the princess (Lana Condor), the goofy devout one (Avantika), the nervous one (Iris Apatow) and the deaf one (Millicent Simmonds). 

Now, Simmonds is actually deaf. If you recognize her, it will be either from the Quiet Place movies or from Wonderstruck, though I didn't see the latter so it was only the former for me. And we all know her character had a special sort of advantage by being deaf in the Quiet Place movies. 

Not here. In fact, her deafness does not actually factor into the plot in any way, except apparently for making her totally oblivious to things she should have picked up on, perhaps especially because she's deaf.

Now I don't want to make any assumptions about the deaf, but I would suspect they spend a lot of their time on high alert. They don't get the audio cues of danger that the rest of us get. So especially when they're in an unfamiliar place, I would assume, they remain very attuned to the environmental details they can observe, needing other indications of when there might be some sort of shift in the dynamics that might put them in harm's way.

But let's consider what happens with Chloe, the deaf girl in Pretty Lethal, when her four fellow ballerinas and their instructor come across a mysterious Hungarian mansion where they need to shelter from the rain and wait for help to arrive. The place is a sort of hotel/bar, and is peopled with seedy Eurotrash types who have been looking at them with a blend of lust and menace since they've arrived -- which should be enough, by itself, to raise her defenses.

So she and the instructor go upstairs to the bathroom, and while Chloe is in the bathroom, her instructor walks off down the corridor, snooping a bit in an attempt to figure out what she might need to protect her girls from. Turns out it's a lot: There's someone getting tortured in one of the rooms. 

The instructor abandons her charge -- we must assume this is some sort of flight instinct -- to run back downstairs and try to gather up the girls so they can leave. It's not necessary to get into what happens down there.

Upstairs? Chloe gets out of the bathroom and sees a cute boy, at whom she immediately starts throwing herself. Hey, no one's saying the deaf girl can't be sex positive, but the deaf girl should, you would think, default to prudence in a situation like this. Instead, she doesn't seem to have any interest in where the woman who was just accompanying her has gone, and pretty soon she's making out with the cute boy. 

The story sort of abandons her for a while as the girls downstairs are dealing with a different problem. This alone is pretty much of a disconnect. Due to the urgency of their situation, they sort of forget her. Less explicably, she sort of forgets them, unaware that any of this is going on downstairs. 

Chloe might have eventually returned to her group, but she gets waylaid by some more Hungarians and taken off to stay in a room upstairs. I can't recall if this is by force or not, but let's just say Chloe is still going with it. She isn't concerned about what happened to Miss Davenport, her instructor, nor why she is being taken off to this other room rather than being reunited with her fellow ballerinas. 

Instead she watches TV in this other room, which is where the other ballerinas find her, after quite a lot more has transpired for them downstairs, leaving them spattered with blood, little of it theirs.

I'm not saying that Chloe is blind in addition to being deaf, but she also doesn't seem to notice that the other dancers are caked in blood. When they first find her, she is resistant to leave because she is waiting for the cute boy to return to give her a tattoo. Huh? It's befuddling enough that the hearing ballerinas ask what they should do, and ultimately decide it's the problem of Apatow's character because she's Chloe's sister.

I guess in the confusion, they have not told the girl what happened to Miss Davenport (spoiler alert, she's dead), and when they finally do tell her, she doesn't believe them. Even though they are caked in blood, freaked out, and in a strange remote location in the backwoods of Hungary, with men who have been looking at them sideways and one woman (Uma Thurman) who doesn't really seem to be a sympathetic host. 

At some point, Chloe does get on board and falls in line with the rest of the ballerinas, but she doesn't really contribute anything in terms of an especially high amount of courage, or any unique abilities, for the remainder of the narrative.

Although I've spent quite a few words here going off on these narrative choices, I should stipulate two things:

1) I liked Pretty Lethal. I see just about all of these genre movies, and this one stacks up favorably with them. It's not as good as the last movie like this I saw, They Will Kill You, only a week ago, but that it's even in the same discussion is pretty impressive.

2) Maybe Millicent Simmonds is tired of being the "special deaf girl" with supernatural wisdom or skills that belie her apparent limitations.

If you are a deaf actress, you know that you are going to be cast in a certain type of role, and that role will almost always reflect positively on you. It feels downright mean to take a deaf character and make her a dumbass. (And to be fair, I might be exaggerating Chloe's shortcomings just a little bit.)

But as thankful as you are to have an opportunity in this industry, you probably don't want to be typecast for the thing that makes you different. Just as Peter Dinklage no longer wants to play roles where the character is envisioned as short, maybe Simmonds doesn't always want to play a saint. She'll always have to play deaf -- that is, assuming she's appearing in any film grounded in realism -- but she doesn't always have to be a magical deaf girl who will save the day in the end.

Maybe sometimes, she just wants to play a dumbass.