R.I.P. Glen Hansard, a.k.a. Him

I only ever saw Glen Hansard in one movie. I thought he was only ever in one movie -- the way we think of traditional narrative features, anyway -- but I guess I still have contributions from him to look forward to in Power Ballad, the latest from Hansard's one-time director, John Carney.

But once was enough to become enchanted with a man whose greater enduring presence in my life was as the voice on the Once soundtrack, which I listened to repeatedly, and which he wrote with the woman who was briefly his romantic partner, was his on-screen partner in Once, and was his touring partner in a band they called the Swell Season, Marketa Irglova. 

It was impossible not to be taken aback, in the best possible way, by the scene you see above, our first introduction to the character -- who was known only as Him in the credits. (She, predictably, was Her.) 

When Hansard belts out "Say It to Me Now" to open Once -- a song so powerful and so melancholy that it's actually the last song featured on the soundtrack -- we're almost discomfited by how passionate he is, how much the lyrics mean to him, and how all that emotion pours out of him via his voice and his strumming of the guitar strings. It's like it should have been the finale of the film, yet they plopped it right out there at the beginning, to get the film's hooks in us and to never let go.

The character is called Him because the love story that continues to play out in Hansard and Irglova's songs -- never consummated, which makes it all the more powerful -- is a love story that could occur between any two people who connect with each other for a short time and then go their separate ways. Of course, any film purports to give us a universal experience, and you're meant to dream away your own life into it, especially into the connection between two people that's depicted in so many tens of thousands of movies. In those other movies, the characters all have names. That they don't in this one just makes it feel a bit more timeless, a bit more classic.

Although he more than held his own in the acting department, this was of course not Hansard's day job. For much of his career, the Irish singer-songwriter was the frontman for a band called The Frames, and surprisingly, I know very little of their work. That might change now in the wake of Hansard's death via motorcycle accident yesterday. 

Once was my #2 movie of 2007, but it took an all-time classic behemoth like There Will Be Blood to eject it from the top spot. In most years, the experience given to us by Carney, Hansard and Irglova in this movie of music and opportunity and hope and wistfulness would have been easily my movie of the year.

Once has lived with me so much over the years that my wife and I went to see the Swell Season play the Hollywood Bowl in July of 2010, with the Zooey Deschanel fronted band She & Him opening. Quite the interesting name for an opening band, given the "names" of the characters played by Hansard and Irglova in Once. I wrote about that experience here if you want to read it. 

Because of who he was -- a musician, not an actor -- Hansard should not cause me to wax poetic as much on a movie blog as a genuine cinematic luminary who leaves before his/her time, or even when that time comes. (It was definitely before Hansard's time. He was only 56.) 

But let's just say my poetry is waxing as a way of keeping up with the poetry Hansard gave to me in one of my favorite films of the 21st century, which has occupied a place quite close to the surface of my heart and soul in the nearly 20 years since I first saw it. 

Rest in peace. 

An advanced screening of the "brand-d-d new" Spider-Man movie

Spider-Man: Brand New Day is a movie my younger son has been anticipating for months. Six months, he said, though it's probably longer than that. At age 12, he's not yet all that polished on estimating times.

You see, Spider-Man is officially his favorite superhero. He also loves the Flash, and last year's Halloween costume was the Flash's archenemy, Reverse Flash. But now that he's made it through the Flash TV series and is not interested in the 2023 film starring Ezra Miller, having been indoctrinated by the negative memes on the internet (I actually quite like that movie), Tom Holland's Spider-Man has claimed the largest percentage of his heart. 

In fact, he likes Holland and Zendaya so much that we considered whether maybe he would like The Odyssey, and since my wife and my older son missed their chance to see The Odyssey last night, that may still be on tap.

They chose Wednesday as Odyssey day, before ultimately missing out because there were only tickets remaining in the front row, because my younger son and I were attending an advanced screening of Brand New Day at the Hoyts Melbourne Central. I'd be working in the city, so he'd need to take the train in to meet me. And he was all set to do that by himself until he learned that the train ride was 30+ minutes and he thought he would get bored. So my wife accompanied him, which she'd always wanted to do anyway, before returning back home.

I jumped on these tickets as soon as I saw my email for the advanced screening through ReelGood. I know events like this tend to sell out quickly, and it so happened that I checked my email just at the right time to get them, knowing it would make my son delirious.

I've talked in the past about an advanced screening doesn't mean much to a kid, at least you wouldn't think. Playground bragging rights are likely not what they used to be, and seeing a movie for free is irrelevant for a kid because their parents pay for their tickets anyway. And really, this was only 24 hours before everyone else could see it -- less than that if they went straight after school. 

But with a Spider-Man movie, the appeal was more clear than for something like GOAT, which was the last advanced screening he and I attended at Melbourne Central. He was giddy for the Brand New Day advanced screening, and we made sure to get there plenty early to take in all of the festivities. 

In fact, it was almost not early enough. We got to Melbourne Central around 5:25 and weren't supposed to start queueing up until 5:45 for a 6:30 start, so I took my time eating two slices of pizza in the food court downstairs. He didn't opt for anything to eat, knowing there would be free popcorn and wanting to save his appetite for that. 

But when we did go up around 5:50, there was a huge line to get in. This is not something he usually experiences, so he likened it to the David Byrne concert we went to earlier this year, his only such previous memory. The line to check our QR codes was not so long that there was any danger of missing the start of the movie, but I did have enough time to panic slightly about the quality of the seats we would get. It turned out those fears were unwarranted, as they'd allocated two adjacent auditoriums, the fanciest two they had (more on that later), and there were plenty of optimal seats when we got in wearing our special Spider-Man wristbands and plopped down our jackets to claim our seats. (Remember, it's winter here.)

The lobby had most of the usual jazz you would expect. A number of Spider-Man displays where you could take photos, including a classic red carpet, though it does not appear there were any actually Hollywood dignitaries in attendance. Plus some classic comic book covers framed lovingly. In fact, the whole Melbourne Central was decked out in Spider-Man fanfare. Here are some pics:

There were other good pictures I took that capture the scene, but unfortunately, all of them have either my son or me in them, and you know I try to avoid posting photos that violate my family's privacy. 

The Takis? There was one on each seat. I was more charmed by this at the start of the movie than when I saw product placements for Takis about four times during the movie. 

We posed for photos on the red carpet and in front of another display, our wrists set in the classic Spider-Man web-slinging pose. It was good fun. 

In any case, we were excited enough by the lobby stuff that I forgot a crucial movie ingredient for my son: the lollies. When he worried about the size of the free popcorn, I told him we could probably get a second one on our return from the bathroom, which worked out just fine. He already had one drink, which was enough in that regard. 

But he didn't mention a bag of lollies, which we would always get in a situation like this because we wouldn't normally be getting free stuff, and sometime the free stuff would include something sweet, either lollies or an ice cream. It was only during the middle of the movie that I realized we'd forgotten about this, and it actually caused me about five minutes of anxiety as I worried my son would be having a somehow less perfect experience as a result. I even offered to run go get him some, but he told me in no uncertain terms that I should not do that. 

In any case, I really liked the movie, and here is a link to my review, just posted.

Oh, I have to explain the subject of this post. 

You may recall from this post that the radio ads for our streaming service Stan include a try-hard broadcasting school grad who insists on pronouncing the D in the phrase "brand new." Most normal people say it the way Jason Hervey says it in Back to the Future -- if you know you know -- which is "bran new." It flows off the tongue more easily and everyone understands what you are saying, even though you have excised one of the letters.

But no, the true broadcasting school style would be to include the D, so the announcer says, as I've written it and as my family jokes about it, "brand-d-d new." Just try saying it with a D. You'll hear it and you'll notice how ridiculous it sounds.

Well, apparently the woman who introduced the movie to us had also had this broadcasting school education, because she also announced it as "Spider-Man: Brand-d-d New Day." My son and I looked at each other and laughed.

And here are some other related thoughts (no spoilers):

Apex in Apex

No, in this case, the Charlize Theron vehicle on Netflix from earlier this year is not actually involved, though I did think it would be funny if you saw the movie Apex in the Apex screen format.

I mentioned earlier that this was one of Hoyts' fanciest two screens, both of them relatively new, carved out of an existing space. (If you knew the layout of Melbourne Central, you'd know there is no space for new building.) The other screen is one I talked about in my post about seeing The Odyssey on opening day, the "LieMAX" theater that passes itself off as a true IMAX screen. 

This one? It's called Apex, though it was not immediately clear to me what that meant. 

Well, here's an explanation for you from the internet:

HOYTS APEX is a premium cinema format featuring super-sized curved LED screens, high brightness, and Dolby Atmos sound. It replaces traditional projectors with direct-view LED technology for a sharper and more immersive picture. [1, 2, 3]

And here's a picture that shows what it looks like:

As you might guess from me having written a post about "LieMAX," I'm somewhat skeptical of this theater's tendency to be honest with me about the experience it's providing, and specifically, its justification for charging more for that experience. (Under ordinary circumstances. Obviously I wasn't being charged anything here.) But I have to say, I did find the curvature of the screen to be cool in the way I found the original curved TVs appealing, and the picture did look quite good.

Ret-conning May Parker's death date

This is as close to a spoiler as we'll get here -- well, maybe one other -- but it's a spoiler for Spider-Man: No Way Home, not for Spider-Man: Brand New Day. And, well, I guess it's too late to warn you now that I've included the spoiler in the sub-heading.

Anyway, you've seen No Way Home so you know that Marisa Tomei's Aunt May buys it in that movie. R.I.P. Marisa. You are still as beautiful as you were in My Cousin Vinny.

That movie came out in 2021, so by the general logic that these movies take place in our present tense, that would have been the year Aunt May died. Yet there are several pointed shots of Aunt May's gravestone in this movie that list the year of her death as 2024. 

This is confusing to say the least. 

My first thought was that they were trying to establish a sense of the recency of the event. They want it to have occurred more recently in the story than five years ago, so they are ret-conning it so it was only two years ago, if we take the present day to be 2026.

But I just looked it up, and the present tense of the MCU is supposed to be 2027 -- a little confusing as that is only one year (or really, five months) away. Wouldn't it be easier just to make it align exactly with the release date of the movie?

But let's say it is 2027. That makes her death three years ago. Fine. 

But in the movie, we're supposed to believe that at least four years have passed since she died. Because in this movie, we see (very mild spoiler, don't worry about it) the entire college careers of MJ and Ned pass at MIT. Last time I checked, an undergraduate college career is four years. Meaning that either the death should have been 2023, or the present tense should be 2028. 

It's confusing enough that the easiest solution would have been just to deemphasize the death year. You can shoot a gravestone in such a way that you can see the name but the years of the lifespan are out of the shot. Instead, the camera focuses on it so much that you'd almost think it was an intentional instance of getting us to think about the years. 

One thing I will say is that the birth year is listed as 1964, so that means May was 60, or about to turn 60, when she died. Tomei is only just now 61, so in 2021, when May's death was actually shot (it was really probably 2020), Tomei would have been only 56, because her birthday is in December. The rare case of aging an actor up rather than down. 

A traveling troupe of 2026 collaborators

I thought about making this last one its own post, but might as well just squeeze it in here and totally abuse today's word count, not to mention your patience as you read. It'll save me from having to do two consecutive Spider-Man: Brand New Day posts, in any case. 

The other spoiler that I think is not actually a spoiler is that the Punisher is in this movie. Everyone already knows that, right? At least I think they do. He's played by Jon Bernthal, and interestingly, I don't think he is ever once called the Punisher. In fact, he's only ever called Frank. His last name, Castle, never even makes it in.

Bernthal has something in common with Holland and Zendaya, which is that all three of them appear in The Odyssey.

That got me thinking about the weird coincidence of how many actors appear in the same movies as each other in 2026. If it is just a coincidence. Who knows, there are so many of them that maybe they formally aligned their schedules so they could all be available for the same projects.

We wouldn't necessarily be surprised if that were the case for Holland and Zendaya. They are married, after all. But how about these others?

1) Zendaya and Robert Pattinson are in three of the same movies in 2026: The Drama, The Odyssey and Dune: Part 3. I don't think I'd be worried just yet if I were Holland, but it might raise an eyebrow.

2) Florence Pugh and Zendaya are together in two movies, Spider-Man: Brand New Day and Dune: Part 3. Oops, is it a spoiler that Pugh is in Brand New Day? Maybe I should stop telling you I'm avoiding spoilers while continuing to include spoilers. 

3) Anne Hathaway is in everything. But I'm not really sure that fits the exercise.

I thought I had more. I guess it's good I didn't make a separate post of it.

Okay you can go now. 

I needed a low ticket alert for Frozen Jr.

The Los Angeles-based group Cinespia, which hosts screenings at the Hollywood Cemetery, still sends me emails. Why wouldn't they? I never removed myself from the mailing list. 

I only actually attended two of these screenings, when I saw Lolita in 2005 (Kubrick version) and The Philadelphia Story in 2006. The movies they show nowadays are more mid and populist -- it would be almost impossible that they would screen a movie I hadn't already seen. That's in keeping with today's movie trends and it's something I might like to write about at length sometime, but I haven't yet reached critical mass on that. 

Today I'm writing about the fact that they send out emails that warn of a LOW TICKET ALERT, which I actually think is a pretty useful feature. Surely they are not the only organization that does this, but this is where I've noticed it. It helps get your butt in gear to pull the trigger on completing a ticket purchase that you might have already completed if you weren't waffling or procrastinating. 

And this is something I needed for the performance of Frozen Jr. at my kids' school.

If you know me, you know that I don't particularly care for Frozen. Now I'm talking about the Disney movie here, not the movie where skiers are trapped on a ski lift with hungry wolves below. Though a musical version of that could be interesting. 

My "dislike," which is too strong a word, for Frozen has to do with my undying love for what I consider to be its chief rival, Tangled. Unfortunately, in that case, probably only Tangled-heads like me consider it a rivalry. It's like if you have a really good sports team and a really bad sports team that have a geographical proximity that would cause you to consider them rivals. Only the really bad sports team thinks of it as a rivalry. The good team probably only thinks of the bad team on the day that they play them. 

I'm getting sidetracked.

If you know me, you also know that I love musical theater. I don't talk about it often on here, so I guess you would have to really know me, maybe IRL. In any case, I did it throughout my childhood and on into college, appearing in no less than a dozen musicals all told. 

When we used to live next door to a school at our old place in North Melbourne, I took my older son, who was then probably about six or seven, to see their staging of The Wizard of Oz. It was an all girls school, so that was sort of funny -- like the opposite of the old Shakespearean days, when all the parts were played by men. The production itself was a bit chintzy too. But I was very glad to go, to support the school and to nourish that live theater part of me that doesn't get nourished as often as I would like. 

It's something I'd like my kids to do, but they have no interest. That's fine. But failing that, I want to see it at least available an option, as it was in the U.S. throughout the 1980s and presumably into today, and as I know it is at private schools here in Australia.

Public schools, like the ones my kids attend? Not so much. 

Enter Frozen Jr.

I haven't been aware of many, if any, musicals at this school, which my older son has been attending for four years, and which my younger son just started attending this year. I was so thirsty to see a musical at this school that I would have gone, no matter what it was.

So I was set to go to Frozen Jr. Even if my family didn't want to go. And even if I would have preferred Tangled Jr. 

But I didn't act quickly enough. The last email I got from the school on this subject read "Frozen Jr. - SOLD OUT."

Darn.

I don't know why I hesitated. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that I was the only person in my family who wanted to go. I felt a little bit weird, in advance, about being a 50-something year old man going by himself to such a show. Even though it's a school musical and 95% of the audience is parents, including presumably a number of single dads. 

Another source of hesitation? This school has kids from prep (the equivalent of kindergarten) all the way to year 12. I suspect the Frozen Jr. cast is comprised mostly of the youngest kids at the school, making it not very closely resemble the sort of high school musical experience I was hoping for. 

I would have gone anyway. 

But I really have only myself to blame. And really, I already sort of got my LOW TICKET ALERT.

The previous email I got about Frozen Jr. had the subject "Frozen Jr: Extra Tickets Release," and contained the following:

Due to overwhelming demand, more seats have been released for the Thursday Performance on August 13th.

There are still seats available for Wednesday night as well.

I think the thing here was that I felt like I was calling a bluff. Like this was a false LOW TICKET ALERT. You have to release new tickets, but you still have tickets for the first show? It sounds like maybe you haven't actually sold that many tickets to either of the shows, and this is just a desperate ploy to goose sales.

Nope. Six days later they were gone.

Ah well.

At least the existence of Frozen Jr. suggests the school is actually involved in this sort of activity. It's seemed to me like musical theater is, generally speaking, a far less popular activity in Australia, either due to lesser resources (most schools don't even have their own sports teams, as that is handled at a community level), or to the change to the current generation, in which musical theater is naturally less interesting to kids. 

Next time, I won't wait for a LOW TICKET ALERT. 

And maybe next time, it'll be Oklahoma! or Anything Goes or The Music Man.

(Yes, apparently I am only interested in stagings of shows I was actualy in.)

Audient One-Timers: Ordet

In 2026 I am rewatching my 12 favorite films on Flickchart that I've seen only once, and writing about them each month.

Carl Theodor Dreyer's Ordet, my #121 on Flickchart, could have, maybe should have, been the first film in this series I could not get my hands on, therefore forcing me to go and rewatch my 13th highest ranked film, which was my stated back-up plan at the start of this series. In fact, due to an error I made along the way that required one double-up, it would have been my 14th.

But I did finally source a copy of the movie that was watchable -- only just.

The usual suspects were all out as places to possibly find Ordet, which I first watched back in April of 2012, when I was still in America. (It was actually for a series on this blog, getting to know Dreyer.) My best bet was Kanopy, but it was not there. I thought YouTube might have a version, but it did not. It actually had the original Swedish film from 1943, of which Dreyer's version is a Danish remake, and though that might be interesting to watch at some point, it's not part of the exercise at hand.

But as you'll know if you read my post on Murmur of the Heart, there are some slightly sketchy places a person can go, which aren't pirating but sure feel like it, to find movies that are otherwise inaccessible. And indeed the Russian streaming site I used in that post did have it, but it only had it with subtitles in Arabic, which was obviously of no use to me.

But the Internet Archive -- which I've used maybe a dozen times before and certainly feels safer than this Russian site -- did have it. Two versions, actually.

One version was out. No subtitles at all.

The second version had a little CC icon for closed captioning, and indeed, I could turn on English subtitles here. But there was a problem with these English subtitles: they were very poorly synched to the Danish. The thing that was also a problem with Murmur of the Heart, where the subtitles preceded the dialogue by about seven seconds, was even more of a problem here. The subtitles were out in front by more than twice that length. In the first ten minutes I watched this way, I did eventually time it, and the delay was 45 seconds, though it didn't feel that long when I first started watching. In any case, this was the point where I decided I had to give up on this viewing method.

I started to look deeper into possible YouTube copies, totally without good reason, before going back to the Internet Archive copy and noticing that there was a second version of the closed caption titles. I had tried "En," but there was also "Eng."

And "Eng" saved the viewing, but not without a cost. 

Here the subtitles were behind the dialogue, rather than ahead of it, but only by a couple seconds. Very manageable. I should say that this started to get worse as the movie was going, and by the end, there was about an eight-second delay between the dialogue and the subtitles. Even more distracting, the dialogue was not in sync with the mouths either, though I think it did start that way. So there were, in effect, three different moments of the dialogue being spoken: when the mouths moved, when the words were heard, and when the words were translated.

It's no way to watch a movie. But is it better than not watching it at all? That's hard to say.

And making the whole thing more problematic is the fact that I did, demonstrably, like Ordet worse than when I first saw it. I don't know if that was the circumstances of the viewing or whether I just overrated it the first time.

I've come this far without giving you a plot synopsis at all. And that's not hard to do because this is a movie where not a lot happens, and it takes more than two hours to not happen. I'm not sure how acquainted I was with the concept of slow cinema when I first saw this back in 2012, but if I didn't recognize this as an example of slow cinema back then, I surely do now.

Which, to be clear, is not a problem for me. My #1 movie of 2018, First Reformed, is considered slow cinema. Slow cinema has a big place in film in general, and in my heart specifically. But it can also try a person if they aren't quite in the mood for it. 

In any case, this is the story of a Danish farm family in 1925, the Borgens, who have three generations living in the same house. The oldest generation features the patriarch Morten, who is in the last years of his life. His three sons are Mikkel, an atheist who is happily married to Inger; Anders, who longs for the hand in marriage of a girl on a neighboring farmstead; and Johannes, who might be touched in the head, who is going around talking about how he is the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The youngest generation is the two daughters of Mikkel and Inger, who will soon be joined by a third sibling, whom Inger believes to be a boy, and who is due any day.

The core of the story is their attempt to figure out what to do with this son, Johannes, and their attempt to get the other son, Anders, the approval of the father of his love interest, Anne. Anne's father rejects Anders' petition because the two families believe in two different denominations of Christianity. I won't really talk about the role the resurrected Christ character plays in the outcome of the story, because it isn't necessary to spoil it, even though the movie is 71 years old. But let's just say there is something quite significant that occurs at the end of the story that falls into the category of a miracle.

The first time I watched Ordet, I was haunted by it, given the awesome spiritual themes and the uncanny way the son Johannes seems to be in a trance. For most of the movie, there is no other soundtrack than the whistling wind, and indeed, this feels like a lonely and desolate world, a world that could almost be removed from a literal existence and just represent a spiritual one.

Those feelings about Ordet were still there. But I started to nitpick the reverence I felt for it, pun sort of intended, in relation to another master of slow cinema who Dreyer undoubtedly influenced, which is Ingmar Bergman. 

When I first saw Ordet, it reminded me of a Bergman film, maybe specifically something like Winter Light. (Oops, that's not possible; I didn't see Winter Light until two years later.) And though I know I like Ordet better than Winter Light, I found myself wondering if it's correct that I should rank Ordet above all the Bergman films I've seen. I've seen 11 Bergman films, and the highest ranked of them, Wild Strawberries, is only #268 on my chart. There are two Dreyer films that beat this highest ranked Bergman film, the other being The Passion of Joan of Arc, which is in my top 100. And before I get to my second Bergman film, The Seventh Seal at #343, you get to one other Dreyer film, which is Vampyr at #330. 

Is it right that there should be three Dreyer films that beat all but my highest ranked Bergman film? In fact that's three of the four Dreyer films I've seen in total, the other being Day of Wrath down at #2761. 

And then I wondered, and am still wondering: What is the point of comparing the entire body of their works? Does loving three Dreyer films mean my love for Bergman is in any less?

But I can't deny that these thoughts were in my head as I was watching -- and still appreciating, mind you -- Ordet. 

I can't say that I was bored during Ordet -- sleepy, due to the circumstances of my day and watching it in my bed when I should have been having an afternoon nap, but not bored. But I do kind of marvel at how long it takes for so little to happen. And that also means that there is quite a lot of dialogue that spells out what each character is thinking, in a way that almost made me think of the modern Netflix mandate to repeat the core issues of the story in dialogue every five minutes in order to make sure that people doom scrolling on their phones won't miss anything. 

Now that I've used the phrase "doom scrolling" sort of arbitrarily in the last paragraph, let me use it to a purpose here. There's something about Ordet that is sort of like a long, drawn-out doom scroll, but I mean that as a compliment. There is something ominous and frightening about the existential issues at play here, as they point ever more inexorably toward some real dour turns of events in the plot. And I do, ultimately, think that the time Dreyer takes for this "doom scroll" does increase the way that it chills us and discomfits us. 

But Ordet does not end on such a note, and I won't spoil what does happen at the end, or the events leading up to it, because that's the part that transcends and turns this into a real wonder. One other word for "slow cinema" is "transcendental style," and indeed there is something transcendent about Ordet.

It's still possible I am ranking it too high. One of the reasons for this year-long exercise is to make those sorts of determinations, though not necessarily to re-rank any such movie down to a more appropriate position in my chart. 

And some of the position it has attained is the result of randomness. Because I keep track of such things, I can tell you that Ordet would be a bit lower if it hadn't won a duel against Planes, Trains & Automobiles, which jumped it from #351 to #156, and then later a duel against The Great Dictator, which jumped it to its peak position of #106. It has since fallen 15 spots to its current position. However, when I did first rank it into my chart, it was only in the mid-300s -- and in fact behind the current position of the other two Dreyer films and the two Bregman films I've mentioned in this post.

In any case, still quite a good film, and maybe next time I see it, everything will be properly synched.

My August viewing will finally jump us into my top 100 movies, when I make time for Malcolm X, my current #97. It'll be a busy month with MIFF, but I'll have to fit in those three hours and 22 minutes because the series demands it. (And there's still a movie ahead that's even longer than that.)

Closing credits, greatest hits

I was going to call this post "Madonna is not a terrible actress," as a callback to last weekend's post on fellow singer Britney Spears, but then I decided most people will grant Madonna a certain minimum competence at her craft without me having to push it on them. She also tried harder at it and longer than Spears. Madonna may not have won or even been nominated for the Oscar she so coveted for Evita, but at least it did earn her a Golden Globe. For whatever that's worth.

So instead, I'm choosing to discuss the closing credits of her 1987 movie Who's That Girl?, the movie that gave us both the title song and "Causing a Commotion," and Madonna her fourth acting credit.

And I don't have some great observation about these closing credits, only this: There was an era when the closing credits of a movie were conceived as a review of that movie's greatest hits. 

Yes, Who's That Girl? is one of those movies where we see a bunch of stills from the movie we've just watched, images that the movie would like to present as "iconic" -- at least within the context of its own world, if not generally in the larger cinematic landscape. And they proceed in story order, making it a bit of a Cliff's Notes recap of the movie we've just seen, one single frame at a time. 

Certainly, James Foley's film is a good candidate for this sort of thing. I don't think Madonna has a lot of costume changes in this movie, but her character is consciously designed as a style icon, though not in the glamorous sense that would appeal to Madonna later in her career. This character is an ex-con and petty thief, and her fashion is sort of in the same punky mid-80s aesthetic as her character in her film debut, Desperately Seeking Susan. 

So yeah, we get a lot of good Madonna poses in the closing credits, but also plenty of Griffin Dunne, who is pretty funny as the put-upon lawyer and groom-to-be who is only trying to get Madonna's Nikki Finn on the damn bus to Philadelphia.

If you can't tell, I quite enjoyed this movie. For about the first five minutes, I wasn't sure what its tone would be, and there were certain moments you could interpret as a tonal miss if you didn't know what the film was going for. But pretty quickly you learn it's a screwball comedy, and a successful one at that. In fact, before too much longer -- when a large cougar is introduced into the story -- you realize that this is a loose re-interpretation of one of the great screwball comedies of all time, Bringing Up Baby. 

The credits, both opening and closing, made me aware of a number of other noteworthy things about this movie. For instance:

1) As mentioned, this is directed by James Foley. Foley would also direct Glengarry Glen Ross, a personal favorite. And while GGR is more of a writer's movie (David Mamet) than a director's movie, it still reserves a special spot in my cinematic hall of fame for Foley, who also directed the guilty pleasure Fear, and just passed last year.

2) You know who the DP is on this film? Jan de Bont! That's right, the director of Speed and Twister. Given that he was known for filming action, it's funny to see him before that proclivity was established. 

3) I was reminded of some familiar faces from films of this era who didn't go on to do much else, and who I haven't thought of in years, but were somewhat important to me back at that time. Such as Haviland Morris, known for her role in Sixteen Candles, where she gets drunk and gets her hair stuck in the door, meaning her friends have to cut her out. Anthony Michael Hall's character's debate about whether to take advantage of her in her compromised state reminds us of an era when potential sexual assault was played for laughs. 

4) I didn't notice it during the film itself, but again, the closing credits came through. You know who plays "Second Dock Worker" in this movie? Stanley Tucci! It's his fourth credit on IMDB overall and second film credit. Unfortunately, Google does not have an image of him from the film, and I'm not going to go back and find one.

But I could see myself watching Who's That Girl? again some day. It's a fun movie, and that's in no small part due to what Madonna brings to it. 

5,000 good movies

Milestone alert!

Olivier Assayas' The Wizard of the Kremlin -- which I saw on Wednesday via a screener for its Thursday release in Australia, in order to review it (see here) -- is the 5,000th film that I've ever liked.

To put that in a better context, it's the 7,311th film that I've seen at least once, according to my carefully manicured list, meaning there are 2,311 movies that I don't like. Or, that I don't like enough to give them a thumbs up in my spreadsheet, which is usually equivalent to three stars. Of course, only half or so were movies I saw when I was even giving out star ratings. 

If you want to go by percentages, it means I like 68.39% of the movies I've ever seen. It's been hovering at just over 68% for some time now, and this is about the highest it's ever gotten. Considering that I am probably a little easier, if anything, on movies the older I get, this number will probably continue to go up slowly, but likely will never get over 69%. (Never say never. Maybe the movie industry will just become unfathomably brilliant in the coming years.)

I'm not sure what to make of the milestone, and I should say that The Wizard of Kremlin only just barely qualified. I started out liking it at about a 7/10, 3.5 star level, before eventually tiring of it and landing it at only 6/10 and 3 stars. Although there is at least one Assayas movie I love (Personal Shopper), I find myself disappointed by his movies a lot more than I am ... um, appointed by them. And perhaps unsurprisingly, Personal Shopper might be the movie he's made that's most unlike him. 

I know it's hard to tell from the poster, but that's Paul Dano next to Jude Law's Vladimir Putin -- an uncanny casting choice if ever there was one. (Law, not Dano.) Even being the star of two of my former #1 movies of the year, Dano could not elevate this one above middling. 

For the sake of fairness, I should say I am not uniquely qualified to discuss what is or isn't like Assayas. This is his 20th feature over 40 years, and I've seen only six of them, and all but one of those since 2012. So it may be that there are hidden Assayas gems that would be exactly what I wanted from him. Among those I've seen, I like Kremlin better than The Wasp Network, Something in the Air and Clouds of Sils Maria, in any case. One of his most famous works is probably Carlos, a TV mini-series that I also haven't seen, but which I suspect to be very similar in structure to this newest one. 

But back to the milestone. I suppose it's more of a milestone of total movies seen, though I wouldn't be celebrating #7,311 on its own. It just so happens that I once decided to mark every movie I'd seen as either good or bad and then keep a running percentage as I went. 

It did take a little while to finally arrive. I noticed when I got to 4,999 thumbs up (it was The Odyssey, which would have been thematically perfect for the milestone), and then the next three movies were all close but no cigar, coming in at 2.5 stars each. I might have even been a little harder on them than I would have ordinarily been -- I said I was close to giving Crossroads three stars in a post earlier this week -- except I wanted #5,000 to be, I don't know, distinctive. But I finally gave in and decided that The Wizard of the Kremlin was slightly more good than bad, rather than slightly more bad than good. 

And so I release you. Nothing more to see here today. 

A seemingly unnecessary defense of The Odyssey

Neither of the first two people I spoke to about The Odyssey actually liked it.

One of those impressions was more middling. I know on Letterboxd he gave it three stars, but the words he wrote in his Letterboxd review were more indicative of his true dissatisfaction with the film.

The other guy? He quoted me two stars, but his words, in our Facebook chat, read more like a one. 

So does this make them the only two who didn't like it?

Surely not, but the overwhelming general consensus on The Odyssey is that it's great. Still, having those be the first two opinions I encountered personally tended to shake my own feelings of love for the film. 

I've since spoken personally to one other guy who loved it, though maybe not as much as I did. Many of the others with whom I regularly discuss film haven't yet seen it for one reason or another. 

A Christopher Nolan film is usually a safe film to like. The last one won best picture, the one from 2017 was praised through the roof, the one from 2014 is considered a modern sci-fi classic in some groups, and before that you get to Inception and the Batman movies. Only the one from 2020 (Tenet) is a bit of a head scratcher and enjoys less general appreciation among critics and fans alike. 

So why do I feel as though liking The Odyssey makes me a less discerning cinephile? Maybe even a bit of a bimbo?

It's because the way I like it reminds me of another film that I and a lot of people cherish, but that true film snobs trashed from the start: Titanic.

I think if you told Nolan he'd made a film that operates on a person in a similar way to Titanic, he'd respond by saying "Fuck you." But I think it's true, and I mean it as a compliment. Titanic was, after all, my #1 movie of 1997, and it remains in my top 100 on Flickchart. 

But I don't think Nolan would want to have his work compared to anything made by James Cameron, just because I imagine Nolan was one of those snobs who didn't like Titanic either. (And if you, dear reader, are also one of those "snobs," please don't take my phrasing personally. My own wife does not like Titanic and I obviously think quite highly of her.)

But wait, maybe I shouldn't be so quick to assume I know what Nolan thinks of Titanic. Here is what AI tells me about Nolan's thoughts on the movie:

Christopher Nolan deeply respects Titanic and frequently praises director James Cameron's ability to pull audiences into a different world, even when the audience's foreknowledge of the ending (the ship sinking) is absolute. [1, 2, 3, 4]

Nolan has pointed to Titanic as a masterclass in how a film can build emotional suspense and create a powerful sense of wonder within its own narrative text, contrasting it with his own approach to historical suspense in movies like Dunkirk. [1]

If I am to believe this -- and we know AI is never wrong -- then maybe he did set out to make The Odyssey have a similar emotional impact on a viewer as Titanic. 

It occurs to me that I haven't even told you yet why The Odyssey gives me Titanic vibes.

Aside from them both being high-budget epic period pieces, I actually think the drawing of characters as good or evil has a sort of epic quality on the level of myth. And that may be a strange thing to say about a lead character (Odysseus) who demonstrates numerous flawed moments and moments of poor judgment. But I think where we land with Odysseus is to feel great investment in his journey home and to love him, warts and all. That's especially the case when contrasted with Penelope's suitors, who are so nasty that you might even say the portrayal approaches camp. 

And I think that might be where I get my most notable similarity to Titanic. Robert Pattinson's lead suitor is such a hissable villain, such a poor match for our leading lady, that it put me in mind of the campy but great performance of Billy Zane in Titanic. 

The people who don't like The Odyssey seem to focus on nitpicks about the story (the sacking of Troy is barely mentioned in the poem, and yet it's a primary focus here!) or the accuracy of the costumes (those uniforms are from the wrong century!). They seem to want a purely intellectual Odyssey, the kind designed as a History Channel series rather than a rousing cinematic epic.

Me? I want the rousing epic. Always have. Always will.

And it's not that I don't want good verisimilitude, or moral complexity, or knotty storytelling that doesn't easily resolve itself. I do want those things, sometimes. 

But if a filmmaker sets out to make a movie that will leave me quivering with adrenaline in the finale, and near tears on several occasions -- maybe even more than near -- then that is more valuable to me than a perfectly historically accurate Odyssey as a professor of antiquity would have commissioned it. 

We go to movies to feel, I say. And people who lose their love of movies over time often do so because the movies cease to accomplish that for them. 

Because it is increasingly unusual to really feel scared in a horror movie, or really laugh at a comedy, we really remember and appreciate new movies that makes us do those things.

And so it is with sitting in a movie theater, watching a giant epic play out on the biggest screen possible, and feeling your fists unconsciously ball with rage, your heart unconsciously increase to a fever pitch in time with the score, and your eyes start to press tears through the ducts that usually keep them dammed up in reserve. 

That kind of movie is worth celebrating. 

And if your mileage varies on The Odyssey, well, maybe you didn't like Titanic either. 

You snob. 

Mixed reviews on verifying yesterday's post

After writing about the Netflix screen saver mode yesterday, I naturally found myself on the couch in front of a series of loops of this screen saver that very night. 

So naturally, I thought I should test the things I said in yesterday's post with actual numbers. 

I was pretty spot on with the timings and quantity. Here is what I said yesterday about the duration each slide spends on screen:

"It puts single images from other Netflix shows and movies on the screen for about 15 seconds before switching to the next one."

Actual time? A little more than 14 seconds. I tested it consistently and the only differences were natural margins of error in how long it took me to press stop on the stopwatch app on my phone. Why 14 and not 15? I don't know, seems like they would just round up. 

And here is what I said about how long it takes for the title to come up, giving my son and me the chance to guess the title before it comes up:

"The image appears about two seconds before the title."

Actual time? Two seconds! I'm glad I opted for two, because I originally considered writing "one or two seconds," before realizing that one was too quick.

And here is what I said about the quantity of slides in the loop before it starts over again:

"They go in a loop of maybe 40 titles before repeating."

Actual quantity? Forty-five titles. That might be the one I'm most impressed with, given that I have never counted and only ever estimated. Forty-five still seems like a bit of a random number, just like the 14 seconds rather than 15 seconds. I probably would have either rounded down to 40 or up to 50, but that's why they're doing that job and I'm not.

So that was all pretty good. I am pretty good with numbers. I have a weird ability with them that I sometimes think verges on freakish. 

But the actual premise of the post? A bit flimsy.

I said it was weird for Netflix to be advertising a random old movie, even if it was new to their service, rather than concentrating on newer movies or TV shows, the kind you'd think they'd be more invested in if trying to figure out how to spend their money on future original programming.

Well, do you want to know some other movies that were featured among these 45 titles, in addition to the subject of yesterday's post, Cleaner?

Lost in Translation
Crazy Stupid Love
The Truman Show
American Psycho
Fight Club
Take Shelter
Wieners
Zoolander
The Devil's Advocate
Go
The 40 Year Old Virgin

If you include Cleaner, that's 12 of the 45 titles expended on advertising old movies, at least in this incarnation of the screen saver, which I believe only lasts a couple days before changing. So that's 27 percent. 

Now, I would argue that only one of those besides Cleaner is truly "random," that being the movie Wieners, which I had to look up. It's from 2008 and it stars Kenan Thompson and Zachary Levi. Unlike Cleaner, I don't think I need to watch this one. 

The rest, at least, are considered classics from between the mid-90s and the early-10s. 

I do think it's funny how much this content changed since I last watched the screen saver and was inspired to watch Cleaner and then write about it. I may be wrong, but I don't think any of those titles were in the loop the last time I watched, other than Cleaner. It's almost like they changed the content in response to what I wrote yesterday, doubling down just to prove me wrong. 

I also wanted to mention that in two instances, the movie was being advertised because it was leaving the streamer soon. I believe those two titles were Lost in Translation and Zoolander. 

I won't talk about all 45 titles in the loop, but I do have a couple other observations:

1) There were only two new Netflix movies in the loop, only one of which has actually come out already, that being Voicemails for Isabelle. The other is the Kevin Hart vehicle 72 Hours, which I believe is due out in the next week to ten days. Given that I've probably already seen a dozen movies that debuted on Netflix in 2026, if I were them, I would include more of those. Especially something like Enola Holmes 3. 

2) The tendency to advertise old content is not limited to movies. Also in this loop were the TV shows The Office (American version), Community, The Mentalist and Dr. House. Yes, you read that correctly. The show known as House was listed as Dr. House here. I don't know, maybe it's an Australian thing. 

3) There were a number of movies that are not "new" but are not "old" either. These were primarily horror movies: Tarot, Final Destination: Bloodlines and Heretic. Final Destination is actually coming to the service at the start of August (which will give me the chance to revisit it, especially the brilliant opening). Companion isn't a horror, but it can generally be thought of in the same category of "high-concept genre film." Interestingly, both Heretic and Companion feature actress Sophie Thatcher. (And Heretic also features actress Chloe East, star of one of those 2026 Netflix original films I've seen, Roommates.)

Okay it's time for you stop reading this and for me to go do something else.

New to Netflix, ancient history to everyone else

If you're like me and you have Netflix available as an app on your TV, I'm sure you sometimes let it go into screen saver mode, where it puts single images from other Netflix shows and movies on the screen for about 15 seconds before switching to the next one. 

If this mode is on while we're sitting in the living room doing other things, my younger son and I will play a game where we see who can be first to guess the title of the new image, since the image appears about two seconds before the title. We get so we know these titles just from this screen saver mode, and since they go in a loop of maybe 40 titles before repeating, sometimes you develop a sense of what's going to come next because you remember it from last time. I'm glad I have one person in my family who enjoys playing this game, because the older son and his mother certainly do not.

I also use this mode to identify movies that may be new to Netflix that I need to see. I try to keep up on release dates for new Netflix movies, but sometimes I get behind and use this as a nice refresher.

However, not all the movies (or TV shows) that appear here are actually new. Though I can't figure out a rhyme nor reason to why they're promoting certain old ones. 

Take Cleaner, for example. When I saw a single image of Samuel L. Jackson from Renny Harlin's 2007 film, for half a second I thought "Oh, what's this new Samuel L. Jackson movie?" In the remaining half of that second, I realized that this is not at all what Samuel L. Jackson looks like in 2026. So concluded it was an old movie.

Now I'd say it's obvious that this is new to Netflix. At least that much must be true. In fact, Google via its AI confirms that it started streaming on the platform in late May. 

But surely Netflix is adding old movies all the time, isn't it? Why was this random 19-year-old movie, which I don't remember from the time even though it also stars such big names as Eva Mendes, Ed Harris and Luis Guzman, given place of prominence within those 40 titles on the screen saver, which also include a bunch of genuinely new Netflix movies and TV shows?

I guess I don't know why Netflix is trying to "make Cleaner happen." Is there an incentive for them that this title in particular does well? And if so, what is that incentive?

Even AI is a bit confused about the logical sequence of events here. When I googled "when did cleaner start playing on Netflix," the answer was "The 2007 crime thriller Cleaner (starring Samuel L. Jackson and Eva Mendes) saw a major resurgence on the platform, and was notably added to the platform in the United States in late May 2026."

That almost makes it sound like being added to the platform was a response to its resurgence on the platform, which doesn't make a lick of sense.

Well, it worked. I watched it last night. 

And found it to be utterly middling. 2.5 stars. The kind of borderline competent but otherwise completely forgettable movie that I wouldn't have remembered the first time around because no one did very much to promote it even back then. 

And that would change 19 years later why, exactly?

If you figure it out, let me know. 

Britney Spears is not a terrible actress

Over the years I've conflated the critical response to the Britney Spears vehicle Crossroads with the critical response to the Kelly Clarkson-Justin Guarini vehicle From Justin to Kelly. 

I think there are four reasons for this:

1) Both movies star a singer or singers who are trying their hand at acting;

2) Spears famously dated a different guy named Justin;

3) Both movies are (sort of) road trip movies; 

4) Neither movie propelled the stars on to other acting roles. 

And so I assumed both were bad, and that the stars were a big reason why they were bad.

That's definitely true of From Justin to Kelly. This movie's reputation was so bad that I saved it for a special February 29th viewing back in 2024. If you don't know, I try to watch the worst movie I can find every February 29th, though sometimes it backfires, as I actually sort of liked the movie I saw on February 29, 2020 (Christian Mingle).

It didn't backfire with From Justin to Kelly. It wouldn't be exaggerating very much to say that this is one of the worst movies I've ever seen, though there are currently 22 movies ranked lower than it on my Flickchart. I guess that's still "one of the worst." And the poor craft of Clarkson and Guarini was certainly part of the problem, but by no means the biggest part. 

Crossroads is different. I wouldn't say this is a "good" movie, but it flirted with goodness enough for me to consider going with a three-star rating on Letterboxd, the minimum star rating for a movie to have been judged as "good." I opted for 2.5 stars instead. And though I don't do this myself, I know some people indicate the kind of "close but no cigar" feeling I have toward Crossroads by giving it 2.5 stars but also a heart. Me, I don't use the heart feature on Letterboxd.

And Spears? She ranges from perfectly adequate to actually quite touching. I was specifically watching her microexpressions to see how she was reacting to new information and other dialogue in the scene, and I really found them quite acceptable. Then there's a part where she has a big emotional breakdown that I thought was credible too. 

Of course, the caliber of the supporting cast has something to do with why this film is better than it might otherwise be. While From Justin and Kelly had essentially no known actors propping it up, Crossroads has future Oscar winner Zoe Saldana, as well as Taryn Manning, Justin Long, Kim Cattrall and Dan Aykroyd. But I also found the writing to be pretty decent and the direction to be, again, perfectly adequate.

While Spears never starred in a movie again after Crossroads -- she actually did appear in one earlier film, Longshot, as "flight attendant" -- she did have a couple appearances on TV shows, playing someone other than herself. But more often than not when she did appear again, she was playing Britney Spears, the role she was born to play.

I hope critics weren't too hard on her at the time, because a) we know she had a bit of a mental break in the long run, and that wouldn't have helped, and b) it wasn't deserved. She could have been a more than competent actress for a couple years if things had worked out differently. As is, I'm glad there's a little showcase for what could have been in Crossroads. 

Alluding to two titles from the 1970s (or close enough)

On Friday night, Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice became the first 2026 film I've seen twice. It's a lot easier when a new movie you like is on a streamer, which this is -- Hulu to be exact, but we get it through Disney+ in Australia. You just throw it on whenever you like. Feels a bit luxurious.

Three months seems to be about how long you should wait within the current year, at a minimum, before rewatching a movie. Another favorite of the year so far crossed that threshold a few weeks ago, was also available on a streamer, and seemed like the perfect thing to watch that Friday or Saturday night, whichever one it was. But my wife got wind of the fact that I was going to watch it, got a little synopsis of the movie from me, and said "Well what if I want to watch that?" Meaning not tonight but some other time. So it might be another three months or more before I get to that one for the second time.

It's too early in the year to begin confirming movies that are placed highly on your in-progress ranked list, because even if something is currently well within your top ten, there's a good chance that ten or more movies will displace it before you get to January. Which means a confirmation rewatch isn't really necessary because by that point the movie will be your #17 of the year, and any movie can be your #17 of the year. You don't have to confirm it to be sure. 

But on Friday night I didn't know what new movie to watch or what old movie to watch -- as in, what movie from either this year or from any other year -- so I decided to throw on a rewatch, which starts to happen a lot less in the second half of the year as I start ramping up toward finalizing my list. (My line of demarcation between watching a mix of old movies, new movies and rewatches, and watching mostly movies from the current year, comes with the start of MIFF, which is about three weeks off.)

So Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice it was. 

I would say I liked this time travel/comedy/organized crime movie just about as much the second time as the first. I did notice a little bit of wobbly technique here and there -- a couple of the fight scenes have quite bad choreography, and the director, BenDavid Grabinski, uses a dated "partial slowmo" effect here and there that I can't really describe in words -- but this movie sings on the strength of its screenplay and performances, which were just as strong the second time. There's a moment in this film involving Vince Vaughn that I find quite profound, and that's all I'll say about it. Some great needle drops too. 

What I do want to say, today, is that I didn't even really realize it as I was watching it the first time, but this movie -- in title specifically, but even in some of its themes -- is an homage to two movies from the 1970s. 

Here's the first one:

And already I'm breaking the rules because Paul Mazursky's film Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice is from 1969. There's where the "or close enough" in the title of this post comes in.

Having a title consisting only of four names separated by three ampersands would be reason enough to conclude an allusion, but the fact that the final name is Alice in both scenarios pretty much cements it. 

Thematic similarities? This could also be a stretch, because one movie is about people experimenting with affairs and processing the aftermath of those affairs, while the other is about time travel and organized crime. But there's also an affair between Alice and either Mike or Nick (it's not a spoiler -- okay it's Mike) in this movie, so that's enough to grasp onto if you're desperate.

The thematic similarities are perhaps more clear in the second movie:

Elaine May's Mikey & Nicky -- which is not always presented with an ampersand though that certainly helps in this situation -- is more directly appropriate for this exercise, having come out in 1976, and also being in the same general genre as Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice. The fact that the names of the two male characters are the same, albeit with Y's on the end, does not feel like a coincidence, especially when you have all the male names in the world to choose from when writing these characters.

There are quite a few similarities in the plot as well, in that one man is though to be a rat and becomes the target of a contract killer (though only a "cannibal assassin" in M & N & N & A), and the other tries to help him escape. 

This is the best kind of allusion, because it establishes your cinematic bonafides -- I love Mikey & Nicky, have less of a memory of Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice -- while actually not having all that much to do with the story you're currently telling. In other words, BenDavid Grabinski cannot be accused of ripping anyone off, because the meat and potatoes of his story really have nothing to do with the two previous movies. He just wants us to know he likes them, and that's fun. 

And Grabinski's movie, in my humble opinion, is good enough, clever enough and memorable enough that perhaps someday, someone will allude to it too.

The Odyssey in LieMAX

This is the subject I thought of for this post before watching The Odyssey. That is to say, before The Odyssey leapt to the front of the line among my favorite films of 2026, meaning a different sort of subject might be warranted. 

But I'm going to go with it anyway because I love this new term a friend introduced to me yesterday.

"LieMAX" of course refers to a screening auditorium that calls itself IMAX but isn't really. 

I'm by no means an expert on what makes an IMAX screen an IMAX screen, though I do know that the aspect ratio is significantly taller than your normal theater. And I also know that the entire space is usually custom built with a much taller seating area and higher ceiling overall, to accommodate the massive size of the screen.

Which means you should not be able to just convert an auditorium that had previously not been an IMAX auditorium into an IMAX auditorium, even if you do change the dimensions of the screen.

At least I'm assuming the screen dimensions were changed for the new "IMAX" screen at Melbourne Central, which has just become the second option for IMAX movies in the Melbourne central business district. I don't know how recently it's happened, but since I've last been there, anyway. (That's not saying much. They don't take my critics card there so I don't usually go there.) Without changing the screen size well then you really aren't doing anything but changing the name. 

The first and best option remains the Melbourne Museum, which houses what was once the third largest IMAX screen in the world. I was aware of this designation back when I saw Gravity in 2013, so I'm sure that at least three IMAX screens in Dubai alone have since surpassed it. But a different friend of mine told me yesterday that this is the only screen in the southern hemisphere -- could that really be? -- capable of showing the full height of what Christopher Nolan filmed with The Odyssey.

So why didn't I go to that one, if I wanted to see it yesterday in time to get up a review today? 

Well I was naive enough to rock up to their website earlier this week and try to get tickets, only to see all the sessions reading SOLD OUT for Thursday. That's not entirely true. I could have gotten one at 12:01 a.m., but yeah, I'm not going to ruin my next four days with something like that. The movie is 172 minutes long, after all.

When I told the original other friend, an American (the second is Australian), that I was going to see The Odyssey in three hours, I said the good one was sold out so I was going to the one that was probably IMAX in name only.

"Ah ... the LieMAX!" he responded.

Well, it didn't make a goddamn bit of difference.

I was plenty floored by what I saw even on this smaller IMAX screen, and whatever they don't have in size of screen, the Hoyts at Melbourne Central is compensating for in size of sound. That theater shook, rattled and rolled for nearly three hours of the ominous rumbling and up-tempo chaos of Ludwig Goransson's score, and feeling it in my bones was combining with the sense of adrenaline that increases as this movie reaches its fever pitch. This movie builds from a very good film to a great film as it enters its final section, and I don't think I could have loved it any more, even if I'd been seeing it on the best screen for it in the southern hemisphere.

Which I may still do. When I texted my wife how much I loved it, she said she couldn't wait to see it as she had read the original poem more than once. I guess I never had that discussion with her to determine exactly how important it was to her. As usual, my film critic's schedule won out, as I even left work a little early to catch this showing, just so I could write the review last night before I went to bed. (I ended up writing the whole thing on the train ride home and only just tweaking it a bit this morning before posting it. Link here.)

So yeah, when I said I would see it again with her, she suggested bringing my older son as well. Heck I think it would be fine for the younger one too, especially since he loves Tom Holland. 

You don't get a second chance to make a first impression, but my first impression was pretty damn great even on a less than ideal screen, so the second one can only be better.

And that's no Lie.