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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What do these two posters have in common?

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

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

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

Okay so the similarities.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But I rankle at it a bit for two reasons:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So "Babe" it is.

Am I really upset about this?

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

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

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

Pride Month: Stonewall (1996)

I can say with pretty good confidence that this is the first series I've ever done on The Audient, of any length, where two films had the same title. 

What can I say, once I decided I was all in on the Stonewall theme for my four Pride Month viewings in 2026, I was all in.

Nigel Finch's Stonewall from 1996 predates Roland Emmerich's Stonewall from 2015 by 19 years, and that may not be entirely a coincidence, because there are a lot of plot elements in the 2015 version that we first see in the 1996 version. And no, it's not just because they're about the riot outside the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village in June of 1969, which unofficially launched the gay rights movement in the United States, at least in terms of the public conversation. 

For starters, they both feature a central relationship between a new clean-cut kid from the country, just arrived in New York, and a rail-thin young Latino -- or maybe we should say Latina, since both protagonists are drag queens, to the extent that pronouns get discussed. 

Then in both cases, the new kid from the country also has a relationship with a more straight-laced man from the Mattachine Society, where the activism hoped for mainstream acceptance achieved by homosexuals themselves becoming more mainstream -- for example, wearing suits and other sophisticated attire, rather than dressing in drag. 

We know that Finch's film was based on a memoir with the same title by gay activist Martin Duberman. Wikipedia does not attribute any source material to Emmerich's version, so perhaps we can include among the many demerits for that version that it's a light theft of Finch's material. 

The reason I wanted to watch another fictionalized Stonewall story that was underpinned by real events was that I heard this one was supposed to be a musical. I thought that sounded really fun and like a really spirited way to leave off my Pride Month viewings in 2026. 

Well, it turns out that wasn't quite right. There are "musical sequences" in this film, but they mostly involve drag queens lip-synching songs from the 1950s that might have appeared on a jukebox in 1969, sung originally by women. These sequences are entertaining, but they aren't even full numbers, usually about 30 seconds of material apiece. Then there is also a protest song or two sung by folky guitarist Matty Dean (Frederick Weller), the fresh-off-the-bus transplant to Greenwich Village, who differs from his counterpart in Emmerich's version because he's a lot stronger with a lot more agency. 

So no, it wasn't the full musical I was expecting. But was it worth watching? Most definitely yes.

Which would be no guarantee from the chintzy promotional materials you see above. Even for 30 years ago, that poster art is really cheap. And I wouldn't be surprised it would have made no one want to see this movie. 

But would you believe I could actually identify more actors from this movie than from Emmerich's better budgeted version? Weller is someone I know but whose name I didn't know. More easily recongizable to me was the lead, who goes by La Miranda, and who is played by Guillermo Diaz -- who I thought was a regular collaborator of Spike Lee's, until I looked up his filmography and realized he hasn't appeared in a single Lee film. Well, I recognize him anyway. John Doman and Bruce McVattie also appear here, but the most easily identifiable in all the cast, though in a small role that couldn't get predict his future stardom, was Luis Guzman.

The big advantage this version has over Emmerich's is its sense of honesty. The polish someone like Emmerich can bring to a film is clearly a substitute for truth. You just believe these characters more. You believe the things they're saying and the things they're doing. Now, you may remember I was more positively inclined toward Emmerich's movie than most people, though still not positive on it overall, but it's clear to me how much it suffers in terms of the depictions of its characters. This depiction always feels charitable toward them, while the movie that you'd think should be more 20 years more enlightened is considerably more tone deaf overall.

I don't want to make this whole post a comparison of these two movies, but I do want to give one more. Both essentially have to fill a movie's worth of material prior to the riots, because those were a fairly self-contained event, even if they spread out over a few additional nights after the original riot. Finch's version seems to be even a bit more character focused than it's interested in laying the precise historical groundwork for the riots, which would understandably interest Emmerich's version more because of its larger budget and larger sense of historical importance. Finch's Stonewall feels more important overall precisely because it doesn't think of itself as important. It thinks of itself as an eccentric little Stonewall movie with true-to-life characters, some of whom serve as a Greek chorus while lip-synching 50s pop. 

I was disappointed by this version in one small way: Marsha P. Johnson does not make an actual appearance. The titular character in my first film, The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson, showed up almost immediately in Emmerich's version, and I'm quite sure could be seen in the footage of last week's Before Stonewall. Here, I thought for sure one of the characters was her, but the character is then introduced as Princess Ernestine. Oh well.

That concludes another Pride Month on The Audient. And I do want to remind myself as I leave: I don't have to wait for Pride Month to come around to watch these movies and further educate myself on the LGBTQI+ experience. Of course I do come across these films during my ordinary viewing, but usually only for new year releases. I should fit in the older ones whenever I can. 

The Buster Brown horror movie you didn't know you needed

I sometimes call my younger son "Buster Brown," as a synonym for "buddy" or "sport" or "champ." As in "Okay Buster Brown, it's time for bed."

This week he asked me what it means, and I didn't actually know. Though the history is consistent with how I use it. I'll just regurgitate what AI has to say about it:

"Buster Brown is a classic American comic strip character created in 1902 by Richard F. Outcault. Known for his wealthy background, bowl haircut and mischievous antics, the character and his dog Tige famously became the long-running mascot for the Brown Shoe Company."

Given that I didn't know this history, why, you might ask, is it a phrase I use?

AI again:

"'Buster Brown' is a piece of American slang used as a playful nickname or mildly condescending form of address (similar to "Chief" or "Pal")."

Ha, that's two synonyms I didn't include in my opening sentence of this post.

Continuing:

"It is often used casually to get someone's attention, sometimes with a teasing edge."

Okay it all checks out. I inherited it from my own elders I'm sure, because I sure as hell wasn't around in 1902. (Even my grandparents weren't around for a couple years yet in 1902.)

Why am I writing about this on a movie blog?

Well I thought the images of Buster Brown that came up when I googled were really interesting, and in one case, really eerie. 

Like the kind you'd find in a horror movie.

Most are pretty innocuous. In the one I've included above, the dog looks pretty demented, but the kid just looks cheeky. Though I have to say, there's something unnatural about how he has one eye completely open and the other completely closed. The closure of the second eye should cause at least a partial sympathetic reaction from the first eye. But I'm not going to get stuck on that. For the most part this is innocent.

This one is even more innocent:

But then I got to one that has entered my nightmares and never left:

I think you need to see a close-up of the serial killer in this artwork:

How about even bigger?

It's like the Babadook or something, am I right?

I'll go start writing the script. 

I'm not sure if I know what Jack O'Connell looks like

Jack O'Connell has been part of our movies for more than 20 years. Including some prominent ones, such as last year's presumed runner up for best picture.

But do I know what he looks like? Not really.

Don't worry, this is a compliment.

When I've thought of cinematic chameleons in the past, Vincent D'Onofrio was always the name I've come up with most. He quite simply did not look the same in any two films. Now, the longer your career goes on, the more this falls away. I have no trouble identifying D'Onofrio now, even on the rare occasions he does still go outside the more familiar default mode of an actor in his 60s. 

O'Connell? I still have trouble identifying him. And he might really be the new D'Onofrio.

The examples go way back, but let's first look at his two big roles from the past two years.

Here's how he looks in 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, which I watched on Saturday night:

And here's how he looks in Sinners a year before that:

Same guy? I don't know, maybe?

Back to Black the year before that? Same guy? Could be. Might not be.

Now how about Money Monster back in 2016:

Okay the last two look a little more alike. 

I could give you an image of him from Starred Up in 2013, when I first became aware of him, but I'm not sure whether it helps prove my point or starts to detract from it.

I'm not sure, Vance. Three pictures that look pretty much the same and then one where it's the same guy with a blonde wig.

So maybe this chameleon quality is something more intangible. Like I feel like I never know where Jack O'Connell is going to show up. So when he does show up, I'm never sure it's him. Plus he's rarely if ever billed as one of the reasons to see a movie, remaining in the realm of a character actor rather than making the sort of cash-grab romcom his looks could probably get him. 

So maybe it's just a me thing. But one fact is clear: O'Connell is doing interesting things on our screens, and his work in The Bone Temple -- the focus of the movie rather than just a cameo in the previous one -- is further confirmation of that.

The movie overall? I feel like I ended up liking it about the same as the previous one. I think I felt more inclined to nitpick 28 Years Later than I am to nitpick The Bone Temple, but I also think 28 Years Later has higher highs. Whatever the case may be, I definitely felt primed for the final movie in this new trilogy when I reached the end of The Bone Temple, which is not something I would have taken for granted coming in. 

Resonant themes, boring movie

We got our upstairs carpet professionally cleaned last week. This is exactly the sort of thing I would never do. I might live in a house for 25 years, and probably only in the 25th year, when I was trying to sell it, would I order a professional carpet cleaning. But this is why I have a wife, who knows about the appropriateness of doing it more often than that.

The reason I wouldn't have done it is now clear to me. It required moving everything out of my wife's office space, our bedroom and my younger son's bedroom, and down into the basement. It almost felt like we were moving house, that's how big of a production it was. This area also contains bookshelves with more than 500 books, so we went up and down the stairs with armloads of those as well. (The timing was that we were getting a new bed, finally replacing the one we've used ever since we moved here in 2013.)

But it wasn't just for logistical reasons I was wary about the task. It was for sentimental ones. 

A child's bedroom, undisturbed for four-and-a-half years since we moved here, is like a museum to the history of all his former taste in toys. It shows everything he acquired from the ages of 8 to 12, plus quite a lot of stuff he had before that. They're either still actually on display, or squirreled away in cabinets and drawers that are easily accessible at a moment's notice. 

A child's bedroom disturbed by a carpet cleaning? Well, it forces that child to choose what's returning to that bedroom and what's going into storage (scary!) or being given away (even more scary!).  

And my wife had my son make these decisions this week. 

I'm glad to say that he takes after his old man in terms of sentimentality. When separating the wheat from the chaff, the chaff pile included clearly random bits of plastic detritus that had basically no attachment for him. (Or for me, I should note.) The stuff he kept was the stuff I would have kept, which is to say, most of it. 

That's a win. But it doesn't mean my son is actually playing with any of this stuff, not halfway through his 12th year. Nor should he be. I might have still been playing with toys, only just, at age 12, but it surely would have been nearing the end, and that was back in the 1980s.

Today, screens take care of toys a lot earlier than that, and a few days later that that, Saturday, was a reminder of that. Not of toys vs. screens, but of the dominance of screens in general. 

My wife and I went to an afternoon BBQ to celebrate the winter solstice here in Australia. It's held annually at a vineyard about 90 minutes from here that's in the family of one of my wife's friends. Naturally they have a lovely selection of wine, though my wife's friend's brother also distills gin so there was that too. On the food side, they roast a whole goat on the spit -- actually two of them, back to back. It's scrumptious. 

We used to take our kids to this, but none of the other friends' kids come anymore, so this year we didn't. When we got back, it was clear that my younger son had just been on screens all day, and why wouldn't he have been? At least then I transitioned him to watching a movie. We watched Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 2. 

You might be wondering where I'm going with this long preamble, except you've seen the poster I've attached to this post, not to mention the title I've chosen, so you've figured it out. 

Basically I wanted to set the scene for how resonant the themes of Toy Story 5 are with me, particularly at this moment generally, particularly this week specifically. And yet I still thought it was pretty boring and an increasingly redundant entry into this series that has now been going on for 31 years. 

What I said in my Toy Story 5 review, which will post on Monday so check back, was that the reason, beyond financial incentives, for doing a Toy Story 5 was that devices had not yet played their logical role of antagonist to the toys in a Toy Story movie. I thought Toy Story 4 in 2019 might have been a better time to do that, making this one feel late to the party, but obviously, given my firsthand experience with screen use in my own family, I felt it was a topic worth exploring. 

And so I thought it was strange to watch Toy Story 5 and feel mild annoyance at how obvious the choices were and how much everything felt like a rehash from something earlier in the series. Here's another line from my review: "Is it really possible that 31 years later, the most compelling material they can come up with for a new Toy Story movie is the toys worrying, once again, about their kids ditching them?"

The film shifts to Jessie as the protagonist -- a welcome move away from Woody and Buzz, who really do feel shoehorned in -- but in a way that just makes this issue more acute. Toy Story 2, 27 years ago, was already Jessie's big reckoning with her abandonment issues over Emily leaving her at the side of the road in a donation box. This movie goes back into the same territory and even revisits material from that movie. It's kind of how I felt when I watched Creed 2, which still devoted a significant portion of its thematic heft to reckoning over the death of Apollo Creed. I was like "Didn't we already do this in the first one?"

I don't want to rehash all my points from the review. You'll have a chance to read it soon, possibly even now depending on when you're reading this. But I'll just say that I also have positive things to say about Toy Story 5 and that I've given it the marginally positive three-star rating. There's material involving a lost shipping container of Buzz Lightyear toys that I thought was pretty exciting and inventive. 

But it's a problem that I was clearly primed for a movie about toys being sunsetted by technology -- so primed that I've written more than 600 words about it before I even started discussing the movie -- and yet I still found it a bit tedious. It's still an easy call to describe the Toy Story franchise as Pixar's best, especially since there's only one other that even has more than two movies. But they chipped away at the overall effectiveness of the franchise with Toy Story 4, and they've done even more of that here. 

And when I did get to the theater to see it, part of a 1-2 Pixar punch with Hoppers within 24 hours across Thursday and Friday, it was not with my younger son. 

Too bad, maybe he could have benefitted from its conclusions. 

Pixar proxy

I had hoped to see Toy Story 5 last night on its opening night here in Australia. That shouldn't be confused for an excessive amount of enthusiasm for the movie. Really, I just need to see a movie on Thursday night if I want to have any hope of posting a review before the weekend. If I miss that window, I'll post it on Monday or Tuesday, but it's not as good an option.

The vibes were a bit off in my house, though. My older son might be having an issue with gluten and we're all a bit worried about it/him. "Hey, I want to go see a movie!" didn't seem like the right play.

So I scratched the Pixar itch with Hoppers, which is also just available to me in the past few days, having debuted on Disney+. (And I'm not totally sure that's the perfect usage of the word "proxy," but you can't beat the alliteration.)

Hoppers seemed to me to be emblematic of post-Pixar. And by that I'm speaking personally. It's post me caring about Pixar, at least potentially. It's post my kids caring about Pixar, definitely, although my younger son did see this with his aunt earlier this year, though I'm sure he would have skipped it if he weren't trying to do something nice for his aunt. 

The basis for this judgment?

I guess because it involves primarily animals? That had something to do with it. Movies where animals communicate with each other don't seem as sophisticated as I want. I didn't care for The Wild Robot, even though others did, and I'm still processing what this means for my interest in animation on the whole.

Also for a long time I thought Hoppers was an Easter movie. It came out a few weeks before Easter, and the title made me think of what rabbits to, which is hop. (There's also an actual Easter movie called Hop.) Having seen the movie, I couldn't tell you if there is actually a single rabbit in Hoppers, so obviously I got that one wrong. However, even if I had been right, I'm not sure why being an Easter movie would lower Hoppers in my estimation, but it did.

I never saw a trailer for the movie, which I think might have excited me for it and might have gotten me over some of my Wild Robot worries, though it's hard to say. If I were to watch that trailer now, I'd have a whole different impression of what it portended for me, because I've already seen the movie, so the viewing itself was my first impression of the movie and I can't go back and have a different one. 

Well, you might have figured out what I'm leading up to: I kind of loved this movie.

The poster you see above is a pretty mid encapsulation of what this movie has in store. Set against a blank yellow "studio" background, it gives an impression of shenanigans that are very character-based, possibly very silly, which would be the style for movies aimed at an even younger audience -- like a Minions movie. (Yes, there's another one of those coming out soon too.) 

But this is a lush, verdant film with scenes of a glade that are so beautiful you want to eat them. While some animation studios seem to reach a certain level of sophistication and then level out, Pixar continues pushing its capabilities so that each new film feels like a step forward, and Hoppers is one of the best examples of that I've seen. 

What's more, that animation style is a bit weird, and that is most assuredly a compliment. In a way that sometimes reminded me of how Turning Red tried to push the house style in the direction of anime, this too has a kooky perspective in which animals are made to look less "realistic" in certain moments and more expressionistic, like something you might see in an old Road Runner cartoon. 

That decision totally works with the humor, which is also a bit weird. Some of the line deliveries here made me laugh out loud, which is not something I remember doing in a Pixar film for half a decade or longer. These animals, and indeed some human characters as well (the plot is Avatar, even though the movie itself funnily decries that it's not Avatar), have slightly oddball personalities, ones that a screenwriter (or screenwriters) had to specifically conceive in a manner that was outside the path of least resistance. There is thought put into these characters, even ones who have relatively small roles.

One of the best examples of this was the lizard voiced by Tom Law. I don't remember this lizard doing much more than chiming in as a fifth voice in any scene, but every time he did it made me laugh. There's this one scene I will take with me that occurs in a car, where the beavers and other animals are trying to communicate with a human by using emojis on a phone and text-to-type. The lizard says, in a sort of formal and proud voice, "I too have something to say," and then jumps down and starts mashing lizard emojis on the phone.

Maybe you have to see it to get it. And you definitely, definitely should. 

Pride Month: Before Stonewall

Once my first two movies made it clear that I was winnowing down my focus for this year's Pride Month viewings from the history of the gay liberation movement to movies touching on Stonewall in particular, it was easy to pick my last two movies of the month, one of which I don't need to reveal until next week. In fact, my four picks have the nice aspect of being available on four different platforms: Netflix, Cinemax, Kanopy and Amazon. 

The Kanopy viewing gave me a handful of choices, but I decided to opt for the 1984 documentary Before Stonewall rather than its counterpart (and sequel), the 1999 documentary After Stonewall. 

I was curious to see how Greta Schiller's film, made 42 years ago, would have both differing techniques and differing sensitivity levels when discussing a subject like this than a documentary made today. And I (thought I) got a pretty good preview of it right from the opening line of text.

Which I will have to paraphrase because Letterboxd was being really fiddly about letting me get back to the very start of the movie to write it down, after I'd finished watching. From the main menu, the only option I had was "Continue watching," which put me back into the movie at the very end of the closing credits. But when I tried to move the progress bar back to the beginning, I could get no earlier than about 40 seconds in. Annoying.

In any case, the opening line of text was something like this:

"None of the people interviewed in this movie should be assumed to be homosexual."

Oh boy. Disclaimers right from the start. 

Then the next screen came up:

"... or heterosexual."

Cheeky. I liked it. 

And I liked the movie a lot too. Indeed documentaries made 42 years ago are very different from documentaries made today, in many respects. Although there are talking heads over the large trove of historical footage captured in this film, the talking head interviews are conducted in a very different manner than today, caught on the fly rather than in a controlled studio setting or makeshift studio setting, and appearing only in little snippets without very much background information on each person. (This even extended to luminaries as significant as Allen Ginsburg.) All we know is that they're either homosexual or heterosexual -- or, I suppose, possibly neither. 

The one thing I should say is that the movie is not actually that much about Stonewall, which I might have figured out if I'd analyzed the semantics of the title with a little more depth. Given that Stonewall provides a line of demarcation, and the movie specifically discusses what was before that, I should not be surprised. 

What this movie is more about is setting the stage for the cultural moment that occurred in June of 1969 at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, when a bunch of gay men and women spontaneously rioted after yet another police raid of that known gay club. Those riots lasted several more nights, as the energy generated by them was contagious, and quickly swelled into a long-term political movement that continues today.

But maybe I didn't need to dive further into the actual events of the night, which were in fact covered, albeit not in documentary form, in last week's film, Roland Emmerich's Stonewall. It strikes me that the actual details of the riot were probably not exceptional, considering that they did not result in any deaths or even any significant injuries, as far as I recall, obviating the need for a forensic analysis of the blow-by-blow.

And this film does a good job, sometimes a bit quaintly but usually on point, of giving us a brief history of the public face of homosexuality in the U.S. prior to Stonewall. This includes footage from old movies in which the characters on screen were implicitly gay, though likely that was not stated out loud, as well as depictions of men in drag in the movies. We also see a man walking around on the street in drag, sort of unsure if he should actually be doing it or whether there might be someone about to pounce out for the shadows and beat him to a pulp. There are newspaper headlines and other sorts of news footage, in giving us a sort of collage approach to these pre-Stonewall days.

One thing I found interesting was the linking of the gay rights movement with the civil rights movement and the women's liberation movement. It might not surprise us to know, given their general progressive bent, that many homosexuals poured themselves into these other movements as a way of expending their activist energies when they couldn't yet expend them on their own cause. 

Overall this film was a treasure trove of useful information in a tidy 87-minute package. If I have one complaint, it's about the narration by Rita Mae Brown, which felt stilted, even a bit like AI. I looked her up and she seems like an engaging figure, so I can't figure out why the narration is so rote, so removed from the images it's describing. 

Otherwise, this is a pretty solid compendium of information, and it reminded me that documentaries are not just an invention of the past 30 years. I mean of course they aren't, but documentaries are not something we tend to go back decades to dig up, a truth that I acknowledged when I did my series Audient Authentic in 2020, watching documentaries from earlier decades that I would never have sought out if not for that series. 

And one thing I really liked about Before Stonewall, which also relieved me, was that the presentation of this material was not noticeably less sensitive for being four decades in the past. Surely the filmmakers were sympathetic to the cause, but that didn't mean they wouldn't feel like they had to cover the subject in a more hush-hush way, especially at the beginning of the AIDS crisis. Sure some of the interviewees may not be as enlightened or as careful with their words as they would be today, but the film itself is not guilty of anything like that.

Also just as I was worried -- unnecessarily, except for the editor part of my brain that wants everything to work together neatly -- that Stonewall would be entirely forgotten within the scheme of this film, the film does end with images of Stonewall, a culmination of what we've been working up to. Well done landing the plane. 

I'll wrap up my Pride Month viewings next week with a final film that I think will be quite fun. 

Emily Blunt, then and now

The release of The Devil Wears Prada 2 earlier this year reminded me that this is the 20th anniversary of our awareness of Emily Blunt. The original film came out in 2006, and that's definitely the first time I had ever seen Blunt on screen. (She'd been working for three years before that, but not in anything I'd seen.) In those 20 years, she has become one of my favorite actresses.

Oh yeah, she's beautiful, and she's just my type. I'm not going to deny that. 

But from that very first role in The Devil Wears Prada, it was clear she had the chops as well. She has since appeared in a number of other personal favorites that have done extremely well in my year-end rankings, chief among them Your Sister's Sister, Looper, Edge of Tomorrow and Sicario. And her performances in those films are primary reasons why the films are so effective. (Maybe not Looper, I think her role was smaller in that.)

And yet awards love has largely eluded her. In those 20 years, she's earned only one Oscar nomination, that being for Oppenheimer a few years ago -- a role I don't even remember being very compelling. (The finer details of Oppenheimer did not really stay with me.) Specifically in the case of Sicario, I feel like that performance was served up on a platter for Oscar consideration, and I don't mean to suggest it was just awards bait. I mean it was a strong lead performance in a film that received three other Oscar nominations, and everyone could see that Blunt was central to the film's success. 

Maybe it's just the fact that she's British, and British actresses are usually feted by the Oscars, but I feel like Blunt not having more nominated work is a bit of a crime. Just this year, Brit Jessie Buckley walked away with an Oscar for histrionic work in a film that's way less good and way less subtle than some of Blunt's best films. 

I'm writing about Blunt today not because I just saw Disclosure Day, although I did just see Disclosure Day. It's because the next night I also saw a movie from very back at the beginnings of that career called Wind Chill, which was released in 2007. 

I didn't go hunting for Wind Chill. In fact, I had no idea what I wanted to watch when I started browsing on Netflix. And there's no doubt the algorithm pushed up Wind Chill higher in prominence due to the release of Disclosure Day, but I think I had to click into it in the first place to see that Blunt was involved. Once I saw that, it was a cinch to make it that night's movie. (The fact that the movie is executive produced by George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh, even stranger given the sort of movie it is, was the clincher, if the decision still needed clinching.)

First, Disclosure Day.

I'm not going to reveal spoilers, because it's only just opening in the U.S today. But I did want to give you my general impression, and I'll also link to my review (here) if you want to read it. I gave it a 6/10, or three stars. My primary two complaints, as it were: the story is a bit all over the place, and the ultimate secret being disclosed feels a bit too obvious within the history of Spielberg's career. (I don't know why I'm dancing around that secret, the advertising materials themselves don't try very hard to keep it.) 

But Blunt's performance is quite good. As a Kanas City weather woman undergoing a profound change, she herself has got to be all over the place, emotionally -- repeatedly struck with sudden knowledge upon meeting a new person, and at the same time, reacting with fear about what's going on with her. It's a performance that requires many of the same skills as a person playing someone with split personality disorder, and Blunt pulls it off with typical aplomb. There are also moments when she's in sort of a trance, as in the signature scene from the trailers, where she's on camera and suddenly starts speaking in clicking noises. It's a role that requires a lot of an actor, and there's no one better to do it than Blunt. 

Wind Chill was interesting because it strikes me as the sort of film Blunt would have only made if it were already in progress at the time The Devil Wears Prada was released, which it likely was, given that it came out only a year later. The story involves Blunt's character and a man played by Ashton Holmes, who I must be remembering from A History of Violence because he hasn't been in much else I've seen. They're on a road trip home from college to Delaware for Christmas, and get into a car accident in the snowy night on a shortcut, where they remain stranded without help. They're then haunted by the ghosts of people who died on that stretch of the road. 

This one gets only two stars from me, despite the pedigree of the star and the producers. (The connection of Clooney and Soderbergh is that the director, Gregory Jacobs, is in their inner circle; he also directed Magic Mike XXL.) It was really interesting to watch what is essentially a low-budget horror movie starring someone with Blunt's natural instincts. She's definitely good in this movie, better than the role requires, but there's a strange disconnect to watching her smart reactions to horror stimuli that are clearly beneath someone of her talents. Hey, everyone has their beginnings. 

Blunt is 43 now, so her window to finally get that Oscar could be closing. Or maybe not. She's really showing no signs of slowing down, and she doesn't look like she's done any of the plastic surgery that can sometimes curtail the careers of an actress of her age. Sometimes actresses get their most award-worthy roles when they start to get a little older, and if we are already looking at this year's Oscars, we need to look no further than 75-year-old Amy Madigan finally getting a first Oscar halfway through her eighth decade. Let's just hope it doesn't take Blunt that long. 

Pride Month: Stonewall

I'm back on track with my original intention for this year's Pride Month theme thanks to a little thing called a VPN.

Forgive the stretch I am about to make, but it's thematically appropriate. I had always thought of a VPN as something you did in a dark alley somewhere, not unlikely a gay street kid in New York turning a trick. It was something to be ashamed of it and it exposed you to risk. 

Turns out, nowadays, a VPN is something built into your standard antivirus program, mine being Norton. 

As you might recall, last week I tried to watch Roland Emmerich's Stonewall as my first movie in this four-movie Pride Month series, focused on the history of the gay rights movement, but it was geoblocked. Because my AppleTV is linked up to the U.S., it showed me the movie as an option through a Cinemax subscription, which I would get free for a week before being charged $8.99 a month after that. But watching it? That's when it came up with the big "this is not available in your country" message. (And the mishap caused me to miss the week's grace period, so it's ended up being an $8.99 rental of the movie.)

When it came time for me to figure out the second movie in the series, and I was not willing to give up on Stonewall, I tried going to Norton first, as a better option to finding some VPN of unknown providence out there in the wild somewhere. Turns out, there's a spot on the Norton dashboard where you can turn on a VPN, easy peasy. And though mine connected me to Australia by default, which was no help, I found it was just as easy to change the country to the U.S. And boom! Suddenly Stonewall would play.

Funny the things you've written off as adjacent to piracy, that turn out just to be normal parts of a modern internet security setup. And when I googled what most normal people use VPNs for, the second listed choice was to bypass geoblocking -- as though this was such a perfectly legitimate usage of a VPN that mainstream companies like Norton have just made it a standard part of their offerings. 

Before we get into the particulars on this lightning rod of a movie, I could tell it was a great match with last week's movie, The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson, within the first five minutes, when none other than Marsha P. Johnson is introduced as a character. And there's something really funny about this. The actor playing Johnson was Otoja Abit. You wouldn't recognize that name, but I immediately did. You see, back in COVID, I happened to select one of the many new Netflix Christmas offerings, quite randomly, to review on ReelGood. That movie was A New York Christmas Wedding, which I wrote about positively, awarding it an 8/10 on our ratings scale. Who directed that movie? Otoja Abit.

"So what, Vance?" you say. "So you saw a movie directed by a guy who was an actor in another movie."

But the thing about Otoja Abit is that he is one of only a handful of directors who have ever reached out to me after reading my review of their movie. I can't at this point remember the form that reaching out took, but I believe he emailed me. (That would seem to be the only explanation, since I didn't post about the movie here, nor are there any comments against the review itself.) I exchanged a few emails with him and he was very appreciative of my coverage. (I should pause to say that I have assumed pronouns for this person. Otoja Abit could be a she/her or a they/them, so apologies if anyone reading this has identified a mis-gendering on my part.)

Okay so this movie. A lot of people hate it.

I did not hate Stonewall. Did I like it? I can't say that either.

The people who hate it seem to be a lot more qualified to hate it than I am, because it is a representation of them -- and a very failed representation at that.

I read a smattering of comments about it on Letterboxd after I'd posted my own 2.5-star rating. Their reservations resonated with me, to be sure. They found the representation of even the wide array of gay men in this movie circa 1969 to be highly problematic. The lead character, played by Jeremy Irvine, was white-washed, more like a straight white guy that they made gay in order to allow audiences to relate to him. The more effeminate men were too effeminate by half. And then there were too many scenes that reeked of gross dismissiveness of the gay experience, like one character crying while receiving a blow job from a stranger in the park.

These things did register with me as I was watching. But pretty early on in this movie, I decided that this was sort of like the Baz Luhrmann version of the gay experience: big, broad, and lacking in the sensitivity of the finer details. 

If you know me, this sounds like a compliment. I am a Luhrmann fan. But what I saw when I watched Stonewall was what I imagine Luhrmann haters see when they watch Luhrmann films. And this takes some putting myself in their shoes. I expect that a Luhrmann hater does not see an incompetently made film; they see a film whose pleasures are entirely disposable, like a pop song that they also hate but that they recognize is catchy. 

So this didn't work for me like a Luhrmann film works for me, but it felt like a Luhrmann film in the sense of providing an "epic" version of the subject matter, one told with a big budget mentality, not a keen eye for the finer details of representation. 

Now, we know that this is a story it's okay for Emmerich to tell. Emmerich is gay. So the Stonewall haters shouldn't have a "how dare he?" component to their hatred. They just think he's out of touch, that he's sold out to a wing of homosexual activism that tries to mainstream gays rather than to celebrate their individuality, and that his career's worth of sub-par disaster movies indicate that he could never tell a story like this. 

My perspective as a film critic is a little different. The reason I wanted to watch Stonewall is that I was a big fan of Emmerich's 2011 film Anonymous, an opulent costume drama that questioned the authorship of Shakespeare's plays. I thought this was a really successful filming of a really intricate script, and it made its case so convincingly that I, too, now don't believe that Shakespeare wrote his plays. (So, perhaps my entire credibility is now out the window with you.)

So for me, I see a director screaming to get out of the career path that forced him to make a dozen movies in which the White House gets destroyed, and to make more intimate films. One of which is Stonewall, even if it's intimate only by Emmerich's standards. Let's say "more personal films" instead. 

Is his depiction of the June 28, 1969 Stonewall Riots a success? Not entirely. Not even mostly. In fact, I found the riots themselves to be oddly anti-climactic in the narrative. There's definitely a bit of a sound stage quality to how the riots looked on that street in Greenwich Village where all the movie's "gay street kids," as they are called, hang out. 

But I can't bring myself to fault the man for trying. This subject obviously feels near and dear to him. The thing is, Roland Emmerich does have significant limitations as a filmmaker. As much as I like Anonymous, and appreciate films like Universal Soldier and 2012, this is not a man who has ever been considered "good" by the critical community. He gets the job done, and his movies make money, but I think a lot of people don't even consider him to be as good as Michael Bay. If he makes an imperfect Stonewall Riots movie, maybe that's what we would/should expect. 

In any case, I was glad to have the opportunity to learn more about these riots than I did in The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson, which was not itself a Stonewall movie as such. If I keep watching movies this month that relate to Stonewall -- and there are at least a handful of other options available on my streamers -- then maybe I'll get a fuller sense of what turned out to be four days of protesting, the unofficial launch of the gay rights movement. And then maybe I'll see all the other ways Emmerich's film is deficient.

Before I go, there was one other thing I wanted to say about the movie. Although indeed the characters we initially meet, one of whom is played by Caleb Landry Jones, are quite effeminate, and perhaps not in the best possible way, I was interested to see the movie present the contrasting styles of gay activism at this juncture. A character played by Jonathan Rhys Meyers represents a less radical form of gay activism, but also the one the movie clearly sees as insufficient, in which they are trying to mainstream gays, put them in suits and ties, so that heterosexuals, the ones currently firing them from their jobs, will accept them more as equals. While we understand today that this is not helpful and is in fact an instance of suppressing what makes gay men (and a few lesbians) themselves, you can see why this was considered as a tactic at the time. 

The performances in the film vary in quality, but I did want to give a special mention to the film's second lead, a character named Ray, played by Jonny Beauchamp. He's the "gay street kid" that we are supposed to relate to the most, our most accessible in to the experience, if we are considering the lead, Danny, to be our surrogate. He's flamboyant but he's not being "aggressively sexual" with Danny, which is how others come across to him at first. And he goes through a pretty heartbreaking character arc in which he questions his worth. The performance by Beauchamp makes this one of the more resonant parts of the viewing experience.

Okay, back in a week's time with another Stonewall-adjacent movie, in all likelihood. 

Eric Roberts, the hardest working man in show business

If you were to ask me why I keep reading the mostly very stupid answers to questions by people on Quora, which get sent to me in multiple-times-daily recap emails, it's because every once in a while I come across something really useful.

When I saw the question "Who holds the record for the most films made by an actor in America?" I figured the answer would be interesting, no matter who it was. 

Just guessing, I was figuring it would be some kind of bit player who worked for a studio in the 1940s or 1950s, whose job it was to appear at least as an extra in whatever three to five movies they were filming that day on the lot. When making movies was more of a business with something more like set office hours, extras volumes like this would have been achievable. (Though, perhaps not memorialized on IMDB all these years later.)

Nope. It's Eric Roberts.

Which made me think "When was the last time I've actually seen Eric Roberts in anything?"

I guess Eric Roberts is just not making the sorts of films I see. But my God is he working.

If you go to Roberts' IMDB page, you'll see this:

And no, that's not a misprint. 

Those are not all movie roles, of course. That includes TV acting, of which he has a huge abundance as well. But to the Quora contributor's credit, they do make this distinction. I'm not going through to verify, but they say he has 455 film roles and 191 television roles. That doesn't add up to nearly 926, but after a certain point, you just wave your hand and say "It's a lot."

And he's only 70, so he's still probably got a long ways to go. He'll be over 1,000 in no time. 

(Incidentally, I didn't realize there was such an age gap between him and Julia. He's got a dozen years on her.)

Here are just a few tributes to Roberts' prolific output:

- In 2026 alone, Robert has 24 acting credits. The year is not even half over yet. 

- The section devoted to Roberts' upcoming endeavors, those that have not yet had their release, has 86 titles in it. Twenty-one of those are 2026 projects.

- He's got so many credits that a movie with a 2027 release date is already listed as a past credit for him. Roberts works so much that he can travel into the future. 

- Looking only at the most recent year that's already in the books, Roberts had 52 credits in 2025. I'm not going to say that was the record for his career, because that would require a lot of fussy counting. But let's just say if it isn't, it should be. 

I'm not going to delve further back into his history, because I think you get the point. Roberts will be in anything.

One funny example from that 2025: Roberts plays General Watts in a film called Pandora: Fire and Ice. If you are wondering for a moment whether he was in the most recent Avatar, and maybe it's just listed in a funny way on IMDB, well, that's what the movie wants you to think. But no, this is another one of those titles by the Asylum, designed to extract a $4.99 rental from your unsuspecting uncle. And I'd be willing to bet we'd find one to two dozen other Asylum titles in his credits. 

You might think my perspective on all this work would be to look down on it, but I've actually got mad respect for it. I can look down my nose at someone like Nicolas Cage when he's the star of eight terrible straight-to-video movies a year, because we know he could do better. Roberts? Roberts probably can't do better, though I always thought he was pretty good at what he does, not a total hack. And there's almost something physically impossible about what he's pulling off here, like he almost literally can't be in all these places at just the right points of their shooting schedules, yet somehow he's still doing it. 

And it's not like Roberts is actually one of those studio bit players I theorized about, who could be seen in the background of Bringing Up Baby. If you're hiring Eric Roberts to be in your movie, it's because of his very credibility as a known name and a sibling of the one-time most eligible A-list actress in Hollywood (not to mention father to Emma). If you're hiring Eric Roberts, you are probably featuring him prominently in the advertising materials. If you're hiring Eric Roberts, he's going to have at least 20 lines of dialogue and possibly as many as four or five days of shooting. 

So since Roberts had 52 credits in the year 2025, that means he averaged one role per week. Let's hope he managed to squeeze two or three into at least one of those weeks. This is a man who needs a vacation. 

Anyway, color me impressed. 

My first Letterboxd rental

I was going to say "And possibly my last," except I worked out the problem.

You may not think of Letterboxd as a source of video rentals, but it is. I was actually planning to rent a movie through Letterboxd back in January, through its Video Store application, but the movie a friend recommended that he'd rented there, It Ends, was not something I could find, for whatever reason. So I couldn't add that movie to my 2025 list, because it was a Letterboxd exclusive -- except not for me, apparently. 

When I saw that a movie from my 2026 watchlist, Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie (feels like there should be some punctuation in there), was available through Video Store, I felt the urge for a delayed scratching of that "new platform itch." I'm sure this movie is available to rent through other means, but that itch made me dive in for a Sunday night viewing.

A Sunday night viewing that almost wasn't. 

The rental went fine, it picked up my payment details and everything. Clicking the start of the movie registered the start of my viewing window, since it said I had 48 hours to complete my viewing.

But the movie wouldn't start. The little colored circle just kept on spinning, and this did not change through multiple refreshes, uses of the backward arrow on my browser and even a reboot. 

I was about to click "send" on a complaint message to Letterboxd, asking for a refund before quickly switching to another movie even though it was now 10:30 and we'd gone for a long hike earlier in the day, when I realized that perhaps the internet issues that had plagued me all weekend were a factor here. 

You see, my older son must be playing some sort of new game that sucks up the available internet, because starting with his student-free day on Friday, when I was at home working, I've struggled to complete normal tasks that involve the internet. And that's almost all tasks, especially since I am connecting in to remote servers for work, where I am accustomed to high-speed processing. He says this is a game he's been playing for weeks, but the evidence is pretty strong that something had changed, and that he was the one hogging our bandwidth.

He was still playing the game on Sunday night at 10:30, so I decided to switch to running my laptop off my phone, whose WiFi I would also turn off so I'd be running the whole thing just from mobile data. And suddenly, Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie was ready to play.

After this, no issues. Letterboxd is still in my good graces. Though I did check just now, and I could have rented it for the exact same price from Amazon anyway, so perhaps the novelty was only the new platform, not the scarcity of the movie's availability. 

And the movie did not disappoint -- or if it did, it only disappointed very slightly. How could this movie with a lofty 7.9 rating on IMDB disappoint? The only possible way is because Matt Johnson has such a successful track record with me. Of his three previous features, the one I rank lowest is Operation Avalanche, and that movie got four stars from me. The Dirties and BlackBerry were both 4.5 star movies on my Letterboxd. So when Nirvanna was "only" another 4 stars -- though I did consider 3.5 -- it couldn't help be not quite the level of achievement I was hoping.

But this is a very fun movie, which pulses with Johnson's trademark shaggy charm, not to mention an intense love of Back to the Future. Plus multiple scenes of people parachuting off the CN Tower in Toronto. Who could ask for more? In the end, I realized that it was a silly usage of the milquetoast 3.5 star rating on a movie with this much creativity, joie de vivre, and deployment of unsuspecting real Toronto citizens.