Useful swag

The days of taking my 12-year-old to advance screenings of animated movies may be numbered -- he already seemed a bit suss about the prospect of the new Pixar movie Hoppers -- but they haven't come to a close just yet.

And so on Saturday we went to an advanced screening of GOAT, a title which I believe is properly capitalized due to the play on words (it's both an acronym and a reference to the protagonist's species). Yes the movie is out in other parts of the world already, but we Australians can be a bit slow on the uptake.

Because he's at that age where he's changing, or has already changed, tastes -- we've made our way through five movies featuring either Spider-man or Captain America in 2026 alone, a topic I will probably write about at length another time -- there was a lot riding on this advance screening having something good. Fortunately, it did.

But first let me discuss my realization, come to gradually over the past couple years, that an advanced screening doesn't really mean diddlysquat for most children. 

For one, kids don't really have a good idea of when a movie is coming out. Not my kids, anyway. And because movies are less a part of a culture than they used to be, there's no playground bragging rights to be had from getting to see a movie before your friends can see it. My son probably wouldn't know if GOAT is coming out in March or July -- though he has consumed some content related to it on YouTube, so that certainly helps in elevating the prestige.

And getting a ticket for free? That obviously doesn't mean shit to a kid. All of their movie tickets are free. 

Getting free food is cool, and my kids do appreciate it. (I'll include the older one here as well, even though he hasn't gone to one of these screenings with me in a while.) But that's another case where it isn't usually money out of their pocket anyway. I think they do get a sense of thrill that even their dad isn't spending any money on it, because in theory your parent could actually deny you something you wanted from the snack bar. There's something about going to a table and picking up a drink and a box of popcorn feels special, and in this case they were also handing out ChocTops, which are ice cream cones covered in a hard shell of chocolate topping. (Though it's possible he actually lost out in this deal; he asked if he could get a bag of Maltesers, chocolates that are probably most similar to Whoppers, before he knew about the ChocTops, and I denied him on the basis of us already getting something sweet for free.) 

So the only real thing I can offer as an incentive is the fanciness of the advanced screening itself, where there's usually a big poster up you can pose in front of, and there are often other special details tailored to the specific movie. In this case, there was a little basketball court in the part of the Hoyts Melbourne Central lobby that was set up for it, and about three kids were shooting baskets. Even though my son is a soccer guy, he loves playing HORSE with me in the pool, so I thought he might be in on that activity, but he wasn't.

In fact it was almost a disastrous idea to go into the city on Saturday for this. We took a series of trains to get there, and my wife joined us, even though she didn't have (and wouldn't have wanted to have) a ticket to the movie. There are five new train stations that have opened in Melbourne since the end of last year, and we thought this would be a good opportunity to ride through four of them and actually get out in two of them -- even though our regular route into the city would have been faster without this detour. Hey, when there's new infrastructure, you have to experience it, just because. We'd get in early enough that we could have lunch before the movie, and my wife would occupy herself in the city in other ways while the movie was going on. 

Well you know what else is no big deal to a 12-year-old? New train stations.

Actually he did get into the spirit of looking at them, when we finally got there, but the trip to get to the new stations involved a lot of heel dragging and complaints of being tired. I may not always want him to grow up, but I won't mind if he does grow out of this particular phase.

In any case, by the time we were actually in the city and eating lunch -- he said the pizza at Brunetti's was the best he'd ever had -- he was, indeed, on board with the whole thing. In fact, he even preferred to chatter about things he was seeing on the big slide for GOAT that was up before the movie started, than to play Connections, which is another habit of ours.

But the one truly tangible thing about the GOAT screening -- which set it apart from a normal screening, at least as far as my son was concerned -- was the thing I teased in the subject of this post and am finally getting to: the GOAT athletic towels they gave out beforehand. Here's what those looked like:

And why am I labelling this as useful?

Well I play tennis on Wednesday nights, and each week I have to remember to bring a towel to de-sweatify myself. This past week, I forgot it, so I used the sleeve of my jumper as my very ineffectual towel. Even in the weeks I do remember it, which is most of them, I'm bringing with me a washcloth, which does the trick but is still not really designed for this purpose.

Well, the GOAT athletic towel, inscribed with the name of the team from the movie, is by all means designed for this purpose, and I've just now gone and put it in my tennis bag, so there's no chance of me forgetting it.

My son? Well, he wouldn't be 12 years old if something hadn't gone amiss somewhere.

He most certainly left the auditorium with his GOAT athletic towel, but he lost it somewhere in the few minutes afterward. I know he had it when we left because I've become religious about checking places we've been sitting to make sure we haven't left anything. But he most likely lost it in the bathroom, though it's funny he should have even gone in with it, because he offloaded his sweatshirt to me before he went in. We realized it was missing soon enough later that we could have actually gone back into the bathroom to look for it. But maybe the specific location of the loss was unappealing enough to stop us in our tracks. If it had fallen on the bathroom floor, well, we wouldn't have wanted to carry around the things it would have been absorbing.

If you were keen to hear what I thought of GOAT, well, I'm sorry to disappoint you, but if you read this blog with any regularity you're accustomed to that sort of disappointment. Though I will of course be reviewing it, and that review should be linked on the right by Wednesday. 

Audient One-Timers: Rain Man

My 2026 monthly series involves rewatching my 12 highest ranked movies on Flickchart that I've seen only once, in reverse order of their ranking.

Barry Levinson's Rain Man, currently #157 on my Flickchart, occupies a very curious place in my personal viewing history. Forthwith:

1) It is almost definitely the first best picture winner I ever saw. My big movie spreadsheet says that I saw this movie in the theater -- which I think is correct -- so that means I would have been 15 when I saw it. I don't think I'd seen any of the other best picture winners when I was 15, with two possible exceptions: Chariots of Fire, though I would not have guessed I'd have actually sat down for a full viewing (I may have seen some of it on cable), and The Sound of Music, which I am pretty sure I was taken to see when I was young, but all I remember is that I found it incredibly long and I think I might not have watched the whole thing. It definitely would have been the first I made an intentional decision to see. 

2) I'd say it's certainly the first best picture winner I saw before it was named best picture, though there is some small chance that I went to see it as a result of learning that it had won best picture. That's not really a thing anymore, or at least not to the same extent, but back then, a best picture win would get a movie an extended theatrical run after the ceremony, because it was sure to make a buck at the box office with so few other ways for people to see it. 

3) It is definitely, beyond a shadow of a doubt, the one of these dozen movies I'm watching as part of Audient One-Timers whose single viewing was the longest ago. Whether I saw it in 1988 or 1989, it's clearly a longer ago single viewing than the rest of these movies. There are a couple I may not have seen since college, but college started for me in 1991.

4) Even though I've seen it all the way through only one time, I feel like I know Rain Man pretty well just because I've seen snippets of it on cable, because it was thoroughly entrenched in the zeitgeist of the time, and because it has a lot of single images that feel iconic, most of Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman in some unusual pairing, like walking that long road outside of Wallbrook, the institution where Raymond Babbitt lived, or coming down the Vegas escalator in their matching gray suits. This movie was fully central to the culture for a while, and I know a lot of us liked to quote lines like "Definitely time for Wapner," even though that is probably a blend of two lines, and even though today, doing an imitation of a character with autism might be pretty cringey. 

5) And speaking of winning Oscars, it's also the only of these 12 movies in Audient One-Timers that won the top statue, though there are some other nominees in there.

What I wanted to interrogate on this viewing was, how the heck did Rain Man make its way into the stratosphere of my Flickchart rankings, presumably continuing to win duels against films you might think I'd like better?

Let's dispense with the word "presumably." I have same data that might be useful here, that I've been keeping for no good reason, and can finally put to use. If I'd thought about it, I would have started using it when this series started, but better late than never.

I maintain my Flickchart rankings in a spreadsheet, as kind of an online backup to the website in case the website should ever go offline for any reason. And as I add new films and insert them in the correct spot in the list, I also record when a lower film beats a higher one. I've been keeping this for probably close to ten years, so I can tell you exactly when Rain Man has won or lost a duel in which one of the films switched places.

To be honest, I thought the results would be a bit more telling. It originally jumped inside the top 200 (from #204) when it beat The Untouchables and momentarily went as high as #125 in my rankings. Within only a month or two after that, it was beaten by Rabbit Hole, which went to #128 on its way up to its current lofty position of #55. (Yes I do love that movie, which was my #3 of last decade, while I have lost some of my original love for The Untouchables.)

With Rain Man dropping another 30 spots to its current ranking, that just means that 30 movies have catapulted it in the rankings, some of which are probably original entries from newly watched films. But since it does get a lot of duels, that means it has continued to hold off the films that were ranked lower, the data for which doesn't show in my spreadsheet because I only record the instances of films changing positions, not instances where the status quo is maintained.

Okay let's get back on track after that unscheduled diversion that was not as illuminating as I hoped it would be.

I think the thing about Rain Man is that it was one of the first "adult" movies I watched, around the same time that I saw movies like Broadcast News as well. I mean, it wasn't totally adult in the sense that it starred Tom Cruise, who was obviously appearing in movies that were geared toward me. At around age 26, he wasn't an "adult" in the same way that Broadcast News' William Hurt and Albert Brooks seemed like adults. But the subject matter was clearly adult, and that's the important distinction here.

I remember having a conversation with myself when I watched it, thinking that this was not a movie that I should love, and yet, by the end, I did love it. It was probably also one of the first movies I watched where a self-centered prick made himself over as a caring individual for whom material gains were less important than family, a message that I've had peddled to me a thousand times since -- though rarely as well as in Rain Man.

Watching it this time, there's a part of me that thinks yes, #157 is too high. Not having watched it again since the late 1980s, and not really having had a huge inclination to watch it again either, should tell me something about where this movie sits within my personal pantheon. 

But I did really appreciate what a competent version it is of the thing it's trying to be. The word "competent" is a bit backhanded as a compliment, but I was really noticing Levinson's visual sense here. That's not to say that Levinson was/is a director without a visual sense, but I think of a movie like Diner as first and foremost a movie about dialogue. Dialogue is important in Rain Man too -- Levinson's gifts for people talking over each other, that we would have seen in Diner and that we see in Robert Altman's movies, is fully on display. But the reason there are so many iconic shots in Rain Man is because Levinson conceived them visually. I mentioned the two above, but there are also shots of the characters and their car against various backdrops of the American landscape that really stood out to me. 

Other observations I appreciated as I went along:

1) Bonnie Hunt has a small role as a waitress in a diner, whose phone number Raymond memorized when he was reading the phone book the night before. 

2) Hans Zimmer was the composer here, which I thought was interesting because I was just discussing Zimmer's career recently with friends in the context of having watched Terminator 2, which a couple of us thought he had scored. Another friend clarified that Zimmer didn't really get big until the 2000s, but Rain Man shows that he was clearly working long before then. This score was actually Zimmer's first Oscar nomination, and I found it interesting to ponder how little it sounded like what I would come to think of as a Hans Zimmer score. He was barely 30 and would not yet have developed a signature style, though you can hear little notes of the bombast of a future Zimmer score -- though those future scores would have considerably less pan flute.

3) Speaking of the changes since then, I appreciated the fact that Raymond has a Sony Watchman portable TV set with an antenna that's longer the TV itself, and that Charlie, with the cell phone still a glimmer in our collective eye as a society, is wedded to pay phones for the regular succession of phone calls he must make. (I think Gordon Gekko had a car phone in Wall Street, which came out a year earlier, but Charlie, despite his flashy smile and bro attitude, is about to go out of business in his company leasing exotic cars, so a car phone would have been an unaffordable luxury.)

4) I like that the lower stakes option is consistently chosen in this story. When we see the pit bosses start to talk among themselves about Raymond and Charlie's card counting, which then moves to the security video room, we're preparing for violence to be done to the brothers, or at least a harrowing escape through the streets of Las Vegas accompanied by some sort of rambunctious score. Instead, Charlie's just told he needs to take his winnings and leave, which they do. The story realizes it doesn't need additional set pieces or anything like that. It just wants a way to explain why Charlie doesn't stay in Vegas and use Raymond as a cash cow to become a millionaire, and that's all we need. 

One big thing I of course considered was that they probably couldn't make Rain Man today. Even though autism is not a form of special needs in the same category as someone with Down's Syndrome, for example, there would be a debate about whether it was right to have a mainstream intellectual actor portray someone like Raymond Babbitt. What would probably happen is that the politics of it would seem like too much trouble and they just wouldn't make the movie at all. 

Okay next up on the schedule in April is the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers. That should be fun. 

I don't live in England

My list of PR contacts for ReelGood is mostly something I inherited from the previous editor. I might have had to switch to get my name on some new lists, because they would have had his email address and I can't remember how much of that he did on my behalf before he left. But I don't maintain it at all, so it's a bit of a mystery box of emails I get from various sources.

I don't really understand, though, how I became part of a list of London area film review websites.

As you can see from this email, I have been invited to a "stink-o-vision" viewing of a movie called Dead Lover. Considering that I have never once seen a movie that involves smells pumped into the theater, this would be something I would absolutely do.

Of course, it's in London, so never mind.

They may think I'm Irish, I guess. Dead Lover is also coming to Irish cinemas, as you can see.

But I'd kind of think the .au at the end of my email address might be a dead giveaway that I'm not. 

Outside of this one source, usually the worst I have to deal with is that I get invited to a screening that's in Sydney. At least in that case, the .au email address wouldn't cause a disconnect.

I suppose if I got an unmangeable quantity of email, it might be worth it to unsubscribe. But I usually get on the order of 25 to 50 emails a week, only half of which are really relevant. (I probably need to unsubscribe from the list that keeps sending me housing-related news.) 

So in the meantime, I'll continue to receive these, and to think fondly of all the things I might smell if I lived elsewhere. 

Remembering Rob Reiner: Being Charlie

My two 2026 bi-monthly series have the same name but different focuses. On the other alternating months, I'm watching six favorite Rob Reiner films. On these alternating months, I'm watching the six I haven't seen.

Being Charlie is not a good movie. Let's get that out of the way at the start.

But it is a fascinating document of Rob Reiner's relationship with the son who murdered him.

I was anticipating with some trepidation the viewing of the film that Reiner directed in what would seem like a favor to his son, Nick, who co-wrote this screenplay as a reflection on his own struggles in and out of rehab and living on the street. I mean, it's possible Reiner himself wanted to tell Nick's story, but without delving into the details, I'm assuming he thought having a screenwriting credit could help launch Nick in some unspecified way -- which was never going to happen in any other way. Plus perhaps unburdening himself might be therapeutic.

But you can tell this film did not get the A version of Reiner, or of anyone else. Let's start with the cast.

Nick Robinson is a legitimate actor. In the same year Being Charlie came out, he was also in Jurassic World. He's since been in such films as Love, Simon and Damsel. They got a credible lead to play the Nick Reiner character. That's not to say Robinson is great in this role, but he's credible.

The rest of the cast? Common acquits himself best, but Cary Elwes -- undoubtedly doing Reiner a favor from their Princess Bride days, and in need of some juice in his career in 2015 -- never seems any better than uncomfortable in the role of a California gubernatorial candidate who is also Charlie's father. (He's an actor who became famous for a series of pirate movies -- think if Johnny Depp had run for governor but had been a lot more straight-laced than he is -- which is an interesting nod to Elwes' own career, since he was technically a pirate in Princess Bride.)

Everyone else in the cast? A few faces I'd seen here and there, but otherwise, unknowns. No one willing to add any star wattage to the project. Any potential stars probably looked at this and said "Thanks, but no thanks."

On the surface, you'd think the worst this movie could be is generic. The sad reality of addiction is that addiction stories follow a series of very predictable patterns, because the character arc of an addict is very predictable. And Nick Reiner was an especially predictable version of an addict. Still is, other than the killing his father part, though that is just an extreme version of the familiar addict spiral.

You'd figure that with a successful veteran like Reiner at the helm, this movie would at least look professional. It does not. The lighting is shoddy. The editing is questionable. The cinematography is indifferent. Even the credits look like they were made on the machine my friend bought from the store back when we made a short film in 1990, and returned after we were done. (A story for another time.)

Before I get into the interesting part of the film, I'll give you a little bit of the plot.

So Charlie is an aspiring stand-up comedian who has sobriety issues. I mean, major sobriety issues. He's been sent to rehab multiple times (like Nick) and released himself of his own recognisance (like Nick, I'm sure). And he has a contentious relationship with his famous father, like Nick. 

Let me stop here for a minute to talk about the dimensions of Rob Reiner's generosity in making this film. I watched part of an interview with the two Reiner men that occurred around the release of this film. You probably know which one I'm talking about, it was making the rounds.

You can call it the polish of a man who has spent 40 years in the spotlight if you want to, but Rob Reiner seems sincere as he discusses this project and the struggles their family had had. And what I found really interesting is that the film makes zero attempts to let the father, David Mills, off the hook for prioritizing the wrong things in his relationship with his son -- his career and perceptions in the media rather than what's best for his son. I don't know that Reiner would have been in a similarly vulnerable period of his own career where he thought Nick's troubles would have a measurable impact on him, because Reiner's biggest run of success was before Nick was born. But Reiner's willingness to let the Elwes character look like a shit -- for most of the movie, anyway -- was quite generous.

And then there's the tragedy of Michele Reiner. If you consider the mother character here, played by Susan Misner, to be an accurate stand-in for Nick's mother, then that just makes his decision to kill her all the more heartbreaking. As you might expect from a mother, especially compared to a father, Charlie's mother repeatedly takes the approach that is more directly focused on showing her son love. Charlie's father claims also to love him, but he says it's tough love and he says that was a conscious choice. His mother is more about nurturing love, and if that was Nick's impression of her, one wonders how far gone he must have been to have killed her.

I said I was giving a plot synopsis, but the components of Being Charlie are so standard that I needn't even provide much more on that front. Charlie meets people in rehab. Charlie has a friend who has a negative influence on him. Charlie falls for a girl in rehab who also has a negative influence on him. Charlie has short-term successes and falls off the wagon. There is some sort of tragedy along the way, but I won't tell you what. The film ends on a positive note.

So I think I can now transition into the ways the film is interesting, both in and of itself and as a reflection of a relationship that turned fatal.

In the inevitable reconciliation scene at the end between father and son, it's crucial how Charlie characterizes the nature of that reconciliation. There are three words you might expect Charlie to speak to his father in that scene: "I love you." Instead, this is what Charlie says:

"I don't hate you, Dad. I don't hate you."

That's a really smart way to say "I love you" without being trite, but it also reveals their true dynamic that never got resolved by the time Nick killed Rob ten years later. 

Maybe the most Nick could ever say about his father was that he didn't hate him. But maybe he really did.

Certainly that's what's been alleged, that he hated his father despite what we would think of as olive branches offered by his father, such as Being Charlie. However, you can also imagine a version of this from Nick's perspective in which his dad really is some version of an ogre.

We have a tendency to think generally about how it's hard to grow up in the shadow of a famous person, but Rob Reiner in particular makes a strange version of that narrative. As discussed earlier, his biggest career successes were long before Nick was sentient, and although he was certainly a recognizable public figure, it's not like there were paparazzi snapping pictures of him wherever he went. Yes, Rob's success could have engendered an overdeveloped sense in Nick of needing to measure up, but how much of that was inspired by pressure coming directly from Rob, we don't know.

Still, you can imagine a version where Rob Reiner is that ogre. Where he talks to his son while poking him in the chest with an index finger. "You're doing this movie, you're getting yourself back up on your feet, and I don't want to hear another word about it." After all, we know that at least that character played by Cary Elwes was envisioned as a practitioner of tough love.

There are a lot of interesting insights buried in the generic surface of Being Charlie, insights that would not have been interesting ten years ago -- just another Hollywood rehab story -- but have become a lot more interesting in the past four months. Does that make this a good movie?

Well, no. I said at the start it wasn't. 

But I was thinking about giving it one or 1.5 stars on Letterboxd for most of the time. By the end, I landed on two stars. Which is just shy of what I think of for 2.5 star movies, which is "interesting failure."

And even though this is not any sort of example of the craft of Rob Reiner as a filmmaker, I do remain touched by his decision to make the movie, and of course think about that decision in its best possible light. I don't really believe in the above image of Rob pointing his finger into Nick's sternum and telling him to shape up or ship out, though I'm sure some version of that conversation happened between them on more occasions than they could count. (And also that Rob poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into rehab, which might understandably raise a person's frustration level -- especially when the person in that rehab had all the advantages any child could ever hope for.)

And even if Rob was a bad parent to Nick, didn't manage those responsibilities as well as he could have, was learning on the job like we all are, I do think the olive branch of Being Charlie means something, if only that he continued trying to fix his son in any way he could. 

Disconnect movies

I watched two movies this past weekend, and they can both be described as "disconnect movies."

What do I mean by a "disconnect movie"?

It's a movie where any two storytelling elements -- whether that's genre, tone, time period, sets, props, etc. -- create a notable contradiction with how you've seen these elements used separately on previous occasions. They create a disconnect in your mind. 

When you've seen more than 7,200 films -- that's a milestone I passed last week -- you've seen every storytelling element at some point in isolation, on the spectrum from the most anodyne children's movie to the most hardcore fusing of sex and violence you can imagine in a mainstream movie. 

It's when things from very different parts of the spectrum get mashed up into the same movie that you take notice and sort of remember it. 

So the movie I saw on Friday night was The Bluff, a new Amazon movie directed by someone with the "can't be real" name of Frank E. Flowers. I've been trying not to watch most of the junk Amazon has pushed at me early on in 2026, but this now makes two straight 2026 viewings on Amazon Prime (after Relationship Goals on Wednesday night), so I guess my resolve is cracking. 

The reason The Bluff qualifies as a disconnect movie? It's a pirate movie, but it also has the violence of a Quentin Tarantino movie. 

You never see that, do you? 

Almost every pirate movie you've ever seen was designed to be consumed by viewers younger than 15. Sure people may die, but they die bloodlessly. The reason for this is that the production costs of a typical pirate movie mean it's going to the movie theaters and it's supposed to be seen by as many people as possible, to make back as much of both the production costs and the marketing costs as possible. 

No one dies bloodlessly in The Bluff. There's a man who gets his head smashed in by a seashell. There are arms and legs coming off. There's a man being blown apart by a cannon, although at least this one is from far away. 

The reason I suspect The Bluff gets away with this is that it has only about one scene at sea, with the rest taking place in a village in the Cayman Islands. So you can probably more than halve the production cost right there, and you aren't relying on the under 15 set buying tickets. 

I liked The Bluff more than I probably should have, awarding it three stars when it's likely no better than 2.5, simply because I found it interesting to watch a pirate movie with believable gore. You just don't see it, and after more than 7,200 movies, there's nothing I like more than something I've never seen. 

Then Saturday morning, I got in a cheeky 10:30 a.m. viewing of The Testament of Ann Lee. That makes two 2025 movies, after Sirat, that I have seen in theaters despite no longer being able to rank them, which I think is a commentary both on my anticipation for those movies and on the theatrical alternatives early in 2026.

The reason The Testament of Ann Lee qualifies as a disconnect movie? It's a period piece, set in the 18th century, and yet it is also a musical. I haven't seen one of those before either, and unless they make the movie version of Hamilton, I probably won't any time soon.

(If you want more of my thoughts on either of these two movies, I expect to have reviews up of both within a few days.)

Instead of just capping this post at "here are two examples of a term I just coined," I thought I would give you ten more examples -- five good, five bad. 

Before I do, as usual, I have to set out some rules. Actually, only one this time:

1) I am excluding from my list what you would call "mashup movies." That's not to say that there won't be two different sorts of movies mashed together among my choices -- that's kind of what I'm getting at here with the term "disconnect movies" -- it's just that I don't want to spend a lot of time on the movies that exist purely to mash two unlike things together. So you won't see me talking about Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, or Pride & Prejudice & Zombies, or Cowboys & Aliens. In short, I want these movies to come by their status as disconnect movies incidentally, as part of the more laudable goal of just making entertaining movies. 

I guess there is a quick other rule, or more of a disclaimer:

2) I'm not saying these are the five best or the five worst disconnect movies. There may be better or worse examples out there. I'm just saying these are the first five good examples I thought of and the first five bad examples. I don't have unlimited time to write these posts you know. Nor, I should say, are these listed in the order that I like them or dislike them. 

Five good disconnect movies:

1) The End (2024, Joshua Oppeheimer) 
Qualifiers as a disconnect: A movie set in a post-apocalyptic bunker that is also a musical.
Thoughts: Yes, there would be a cheeky, mashup-movie style mentality in Oppenheimer's film, but it isn't really possible to consider Oppenheimer's work in the same vein as mashup artist extraordinaire Seth Graham-Smith. After all, this is the man previously known for the deadly serious documentaries The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence. When he makes a musical set in a post-apocalyptic bunker, he means it. 

2) Winnie the Pooh: Blood & Honey (2023, Rhys Frake-Waterfield)
Qualifiers as a disconnect: Beloved childhood character Winnie the Pooh, murdering people.
Thoughts: Good? Didn't I put this one in the wrong category? No; you may recall from this post that Blood & Honey haunted me in the right way, even though it has among the tawdriest and most depressing explanations for its existence: that the copyright on this material had fallen into the public domain. It earned from me a marginally positive three-star rating on Letterboxd. 

3) The People's Joker (2022, Vera Drew)
Qualifiers as a disconnect: Well-known DC characters and transgender themes. 
Thoughts: Clearly the best of the movies discussed so far, Joker could only exist as a violation of copyright laws, not a result of them lapsing. But I'm glad it does exist because this is very moving in addition to being very funny, and more than besmirching the names of these DC characters, which DC and Warner Brothers would have been worried about, it just shows the reach and impact on them on all sorts of people in overcoming their lives' challenges. 

4) Prey (2022, Dan Trachtenberg)
Qualifiers as a disconnect: Murderous aliens and comanches of the 18th century. 
Thoughts: Although this is not altogether dissimilar from the central dynamic of a movie I already excluded from discussion, Cowboys & Aliens, you can't see Trachtenberg sitting in a room and pitching it as a mashup, can you? His intentions were purer than that, and they gives us a movie without an ounce of cheek but plenty of excitement, the best in the Predator franchise to date.

5) Hamlet (2000, Michael Almereyda)
Qualifiers as a disconnect: To be or not to be, and a Blockbuster video store.
Thoughts: This may be a little bit of a cheat, or rather, a catch-all for a particular sort of trend when adapting Shakespeare: to set it in modern times with purposefully anachronistic elements. But it's still usually good, so it qualifies here. Usually; Tim Blake Nelson's O, the 2001 Othello adaptation, could go in the other list. 

Five bad disconnect movies:

1) Wild Wild West (1999, Barry Sonnenfeld)
Qualifiers as a disconnect: The old west and steampunk.
Thoughts: I have to admit, I had a harder time thinking up the bad ones, and I'm not sure how much this qualifies, because steampunk is, by definition, a sort of futuristic form of technology in a time where the steam engine was new. And in truth, the steampunk aesthetic may have been the only thing that actually worked about the movie. 

2) Colossal (2017, Nacho Vigalondo)
Qualifiers as a disconnect: Kaiju and toxicity brought on by alcoholism.
Thoughts: Rarely have I struggled with competing tones as much as I did in Colossal, in which characters can make a kaiju appear halfway across the world by standing in a particular location in their town, and also display the sort of hostility toward one another that belongs in a Cassavetes film. 

 3) Nasty Baby (2015, Sebastian Silva)
Qualfiers as a disconnect: A gay couple struggling to conceive through a surrogate, and the murder of a homeless man.
Thoughts: I suppose what I just told you qualifies as a spoiler, but Nasty Baby a) is more than ten years old, and b) does not deserve to have its bizarre plot twist hidden. 

4) The Book of Henry (2017, Colin Trevorrow)
Qualfiers as a disconnect: A brilliant young terminally ill kid plotting to murder the abusive father of his neighbor.
Thoughts: Maybe you didn't know this was the reason you were supposed to stay clear of The Book of Henry, but there it is. 

5) Hancock (2008, Peter Berg)
Qualifiers as a disconnect: A superhero comedy and ... a very weird sort of serious superhero movie about eternal beings.
Thoughts: If you saw Hancock, you know what I'm talking about here.

Well I think you can tell I pretty much ran out of steam. I started this three days ago, so I better publish it and move on with my life. 

Together didn't have the votes

I've just discovered exactly how far out on a limb I may be with my #1 movie of 2025.

The Australian Film Critics Association, of which I am a member, did not even consider it one of the six best Australian films of 2025.

You may recall that in this post, in which I took a deep dive into my first Australian #1, I said the following:

"Usually when I get the email that contains the nominees for this year's Australian Film Critics Association awards, which mostly focus on films with a strong Australian connection (they do have one "international" category so they can include something like One Battle After Another), it's a bunch of fringe nominees indeed. Yes an Elvis sometimes sneaks its way in there, but this list is usually comprised of films made by, but also only seen by, Australians. I've heard of these movies because I live in Australia, but most outside Australia won't know them from a hole in the ground.

That email has not yet come out this year, but it when it does, I suspect it will include my #1 movie of the year."

Yeah, no.

In fact, I tried to stack the deck in favor of this happening by finally voting on the nominees myself. I've never done it before, though the emails we get remind us of the fact that it is an obligation of membership to do so.

I ranked Together as high in every category -- you give preferential rankings to an existing list of eligible options -- as I possibly could, and yet it did not score a single nomination. Not in any category.

Instead, the six best picture nominees are:

Bring Her Back
The Correspondent
A Grand Mockery
Inside
Lesbian Space Princess
The Surfer

A grand mockery, indeed.

I've only seen half of those films, and I've only heard of five of the six. A Grand Mockery was completely unknown to me. 

Bring Her Back, which was in my top 20 overall (exactly #20), was my second nominee in all those categories, and I like Inside and The Surfer as well. But my third nominee, Spit, also got shut out, while my fourth nominee, Dangerous Animals, only got a lead acting nomination for Jai Courtney.

I guess the pickings weren't as slim as I blithely assumed them to be.

I have two theories on the zero love for my beloved:

1) It may have been a film made in Australia by an Australian crew and director, but in most respects it is not an "Australian film." In other words, while the location is never named, all the characters have American accents, so at best it's set somewhere in Canada. I can imagine, at this moment in our geopolitical history, that a bunch of Australian critics are not interested in rewarding an Australian film that is basically passing itself off as an American film.

2) There's a controversy regarding Together that I haven't touched on previously, because my love for the movie has prevented me from digging too deep into it. I've just read the Wikipedia summary to refresh my memory, and the creative team behind the 2023 film Better Half sued the creative team behind Together because the idea for Better Half was supposedly pitched to Dave Franco and Alison Brie in 2020, but they rejected the offer because they wanted to produce it themselves and bring in their own writer. Considering that movie was ultimately made with stars I've never heard of, I'm skeptical that it would have ever been the correct size of project for Brie and Franco, though now I feel like I should eventually see this film just to assess the similarities for myself. In any case, if the AFCA critics were already biased against Together for passing itself off as American, they certainly wouldn't have appreciated claims that it might have been plagiarized. 

Although I understand the logic behind both of those factors above, I'm still peeved enough that I might not actually vote to crown a winner.

Watch Bluff because you watched The Bluff

So I guess you should judge movies by their titles?

This one is pretty self-explanatory, but come on Amazon. I'm not going to watch a movie just because it has (almost) the same title as another movie I watched.

The Bluff is a 2026 pirate movie, and a pretty bloody one at that.

Bluff is a 2022 movie about an undercover cop trying to bust up a heroin ring.

There is no intrinsic reason why watching one should make me want to watch the other. (Or maybe they just know that my goal is to eventually see every movie ever made. Then again, if that were the case, they could have recommended me The Spongebob Movie: Search for Squarepants or A Serbian Film and it would have been no less arbitrary.

The Three Musketeers rec? That's spot on. Both the movie I saw and the movie they're pushing on me involve swashbuckling.

Miami Vice? The TV show, not the movie? We're getting a little strained there, but at least The Bluff was set in the Cayman Islands, and I'm sure Crockett and Tubbs went there at some point?

Bull? Okay now we are seeing some of the same algorithm shortcomings. Bull could have been a mispelling of The Bluff if someone was really drunk. The movie is also set in London (like The Bluff) and also involves dalliances in the criminal underworld.

I just hope that Amazon is not recommending that anyone who watched Disney's Frozen should also watch Frozen, the movie about trapped skiers on the lift threatened by bloodthirsty wolves, because those are two very different movies. 

Amazon Prime, doing a service to drunk movie searchers since 2011.

A longevity record for original sequel numbering

There aren't many good excuses, IMO, for a Scream 7, but here's one:

I think Scream may now have set a longevity record for any series still using numbers to denote sequels and still using the original numbering.

I mean, it may have already set that with Scream 6, but if so, it's just broken its own record.

How many other series can you think of that have been going on for 30 years and are still numbering the movies according to a plan set out at the beginning?

Granted, Scream has not stuck to the numbering at every step of the way. The movie that is technically Scream 5 was just called Scream. Also with the sixth Scream, they technically switched to Roman numerals for one movie. It's technically Scream VI. 

But yeah, a few small asterisks aside, this is still the original numbering system, 30 years later. 

If you think of other series with a ridiculous number of sequels, they either haven't been doing it as long, stopped using numbered sequels a long time ago, or never used numbers in the first place. Some examples of some of these would include James Bond, Saw, Friday the 13th, Star Wars and Star Trek. And some of those are examples of more than one phenomenon at once.

But I've thought about it, and I can't think of another series that's done what Scream has done -- which, granted, it was only able to do by missing 11 years in there from 2011 to 2022, in which there were no Scream movies. Maybe if they'd had a Scream movie every three years during that period, they'd already be at ten and would have decided to go with Scream: Ghostface Returns for one of the ensuing titles. (As if that could ever be a specific enough title within the series. Ghostface returns in every movie. It's kind of the point.)

I have to state that it doesn't really count if you have only one sequel. For example, The Odd Couple II (1998) came out 30 years after The Odd Couple (1968). It doesn't count or a lot of reasons, but primarily, they wouldn't have even established a numbering system until there was a second movie, so you can hardly say that they have maintained a sequel numbering system for that long or longer. (Bambi II is a particularly hilarious version of that, coming out 64 years after the original.)

Even before Melissa Barrera made her controversial Gaza comments -- which, it seems, effectively cancelled her, and not just from the Scream series -- I was not a fan at all of Scream VI. So I think I'm sitting Scream 7 out. Though it's coming out so early in the year that I'll obviously have many opportunities to watch it before my ranking deadline, and that could easily happen almost accidentally.

Okay I found one other contender, but for now, Scream still holds the record. Just for a few more months though. And this one benefits from fewer movies and more lengthy gaps, but it still definitely qualifies.

Toy Story 5 is coming out in June. I'm not any happier about it than you are. I don't know, maybe you're happy about it.

Toy Story came out November 22, 1995, which was just about 13 months before the original Scream. (The original Scream was released on the last release date before Christmas. Who knew?) 

I suppose if the world ended tomorrow, Scream would finish by holding this record, because none of us would ever seen Toy Story 5. But Scream will have to pass the baton in just a few more months. At least until Scream 8. 

But maybe, hopefully, there won't be any more movies in either of these franchises, and Toy Story -- the much better franchise by any measure -- will get to retire in victory. 

It's perhaps a more deserving champion as well, having stuck this whole time purely to numbers, without even involving the Romans or reboot titles at any point. 

Eyes heard, loud and ... cleard

It had been nearly 14 years since I'd last seen my #31 on Flickchart, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, a movie I've seen more than a dozen times overall. And when I saw it on Thursday night, it was like no time I'd ever seen it before.

Hear My Eyes is a periodic Melbourne series where a local musician creates an all new score to accompany a classic film, and it gets showed a small number of times with live musical accompaniment. I've attended the series exactly once before, when it appeared during MIFF of 2017 and allowed me a new experience of a new favorite, 1972's Fantastic Planet, which I saw for the first time in 2008 but have now seen five times in total. That was a trippy experience, and so was this one. 

The musicians in this case were all electronic, led by lead composer and performer Peter van Hoesen, with a cohort called MESS Snythesiser Ensemble on stage with him, and a laser light show orchestrated by Robin Fox. More on the laser light show in a minute.

You pay $89 for the experience, but trust me, it was well worth it. 

Here are a couple ideas of what Hamer Hall in Melbourne looked like prior to Thursday's show, the middle of three. I had to take these photos a bit surreptitiously as there were already several people walking around holding up an iPad which showed a camera with a red Ghostsbusters-style cross through it. I know that was meant for once the performance started only, but I didn't want to unnecessarily anger anyone with what seemed like a blatant violation of the thing they were requesting of me. 

Under the screen you can see a DJ station that was eventually occupied by about eight people. I should say that I don't totally understand live DJing in most contexts. I get that many DJ sets are not totally pre-planned, or if they are pre-planned, then they do the transitions live anyway. I mean, I don't think they're just up there pantomiming. 

But for something like a score, where the music is timed out exactly to what is happening in the movie, there would be no reason I could see why they couldn't just press play on a pre-recorded sequence of music when the movie starts. I guess because then it wouldn't that cool. I do wonder if there is the freedom to interpret in the moment -- I mean, I can't imagine all the eight people up there were just pressing a button when it came time to press a button. But obviously there were certain moments within the movie that had to be respected, without any chance that a freestyle musical interpretation would step on them, such as when the music goes down in time for Arnie to say "Trust me" before he's about to not kill anyone with his gatling gun. 

I wondered, as I was watching, how they managed to squelch the original score, which I have subsequently learned is by a composer named Brad Fiedel. (I had always assumed the score was by one of the household name industry giants, like a Hans Zimmer.) And this gets us to the elephant in that very big room, which is that Terminator 2 is a particularly difficult film score to replace because of how iconic it is. The "dum dum dum da-dum" that we all think of when we think of T2 is so inseparable from the movie itself, would we miss it? But I'm getting sidetracked and I will come back to that in a moment. 

What I mean about this question of squelching the score is that I would have thought there'd be times that the score would be playing over key sound effects or dialogue in the movie. How would they erase the score without erasing the sound of smashing metal or human beings crying out in pain? 

I did wonder if it was similar to how you can reduce a song to individual tracks. There's a podcast I listen to once in a great while called One Song where they do just that, playing only individual parts of a song to analyze those parts unto themselves, in the course of considering that single song over a 45-minute period. Maybe Van Hoesen et al are doing that here. In any case, it was seamless.

The score itself? Pretty great. The word "cyberpunk" came to mind as I was listening to it, but "industrial" would have worked -- a lot of metallic scratching sounds, deep bellows, that sort of thing. The word "atmospheric" also came to mind, because there are moments in the film where I believe there probably was no score originally -- though I am eager now for a comparison viewing -- and they were accentuated here by a background humming, a howling of wind, or a sinister sonic wallpaper that added to the overall sense of dystopia. If I were a music critic rather than a film critic, I might be describing this better.

I did wonder, if just to throw us a bone, whether it might have been nice to acknowledge the "dum dum dum da-dum" of Fiedel's original, especially in the opening credits. I don't think anyone would have accused them of being too influenced by Fiedel if they'd just done the equivalent of a shout-out to that. But no, the music over the opening and closing credits was a bit more like what I would call "technical malfunction music," the sonic equivalent of a robot going on the fritz, with scraping and springing sounds reminding us of a future gone haywire.

Okay now it's time to talk about the lasers.

I don't think they ever got any better than the opening. As you recall, we start on a future battle between the human resistance and the machines, and there are literal blue lasers being shot in the movie. These same blue lasers strobed through the theater, prompting oohs and ahhs from all of us. The use of lasers continued to be interesting throughout, though none as effective as our first experience of them. There were lasers to accompany the lightning as the terminators arrived from the future, for example. There were lasers, thinner in their thickness and more diffuse in their spray patterns, during the film's big explosions. There were single lasers that held, for things like a sudden knife thrust through somebody's skull, though I didn't think these were the best use of the gimmick. When Sarah has her gun sight set on the back of Miles Dyson's head, a single laser pointer from the back of the theater mimicked this, which we all loved. There were also lasers creating patterns on the screen any time we saw something through the eyes of the terminator, which as you remember are through that computer readout.

The whole thing was just generally enthralling, as an alternative to our normal T2 viewings though certainly not a replacement for it. I reckon Peter van Hoesen conceived of this project not because he thought "I can do better than Brad Fiedel's score" but rather, because he loved it so much that he wanted to add his own interpretation to a movie he loved dearly. All the rest of the times I watch that movie, I will get Fiedel's score, so I'm glad I got van Hoesen's once.

And the cumulative impact of this experience was having a strange emotional impact on me. I don't usually get emotional during T2, and if I ever did, it would probably be what we think of as "spectacle tears," where the sheer size and scope of something moves us. In this case, I found myself getting a bit choked up at the film's actual emotion moments, something I don't think I'd ever experienced with this movie. 

Before I let you go for the day, I did want to include a smattering of first-time observations about the movie itself. Or if not first time, then things I was reminded of that I wanted to mention to you now.

1) There's something inconsistent about Sarah's behavior when she's in the mental institution. Clearly she's been working on a campaign to be released, or at least get a visitation from her son, which has involved six months of good behavior. Good behavior that her doctor acknowledges. Why, then, has she also recently stabbed the doctor in the knee with his pen? Surely she would realize this sort of thing would be disqualifying for her release?

2) I think we're supposed to believe that the T-1000 finally getting into a close quarters fight with Sarah at the end is significant, because he's finally sampled her physically and can finally mimic her. When in reality, he already touched her way back at the institution, when his metal sword arm slashed down through the elevator roof and cut a groove into her shoulder. I know they never subsequently shared any spatial dynamics where mimicking her would have been a benefit, but he could have mimicked her at any point from the mental institution onward.

3) There's one single moment I find kind of cringe that I started thinking of as "the most Michael Bay moment in Terminator 2." It's the moment where Sarah, John and the T-101 pause to watch two kids at a service station pointing toy guns at each other and screaming at each other, that leads them to conclude that human beings are doomed. It's not that James Cameron is above hitting you on the head with a message, but the subsequent slow-mo image of the two kids wrestling with their guns, silhouetted just a little by the sun, made me think of that as right out of the Michael Bay playbook. I mean, when you come down to it, Bay is basically just a very shitty version of Cameron, right? 

4) This is something I always say about T2, so it's not new, but I continued to be annoyed by the fact that John and the T-101 just watch for five minutes as small puddles of the T-1000 reassemble themselves after being heated up following the liquid nitrogen freeze. They could have been miles away by the time he fully reformed, yet instead they're barely 50 paces ahead of him. 

5) And speaking of John, I really appreciated how good Edward Furlong is in this movie. I think there might be some people out there who find his at-times squeaky performance to be cringe in the same way Jake Lloyd's performance as Anakin Skywalker is cringe, but I feel just the opposite about Furlong. I feel like this is one of the great child acting performances out there, to be honest. I was noticing little details of his performance, like the moment when he's looking at his mother as she tries to bury him under bulletproof jackets in the fleeing police truck. In this one prolonged expression you see three things: 1) sorrow that he never took his mother seriously all these years, 2) a sense of pride that his mother is so strong and capable, and 3) a desire to take in every part of her face, because it may be the last time he ever lays eyes on her. All in one expression. 

I feel like there is a cohort out there -- maybe even the majority of people -- who think of The Terminator as the masterpiece in this series, and T2 as just a capable follow-up. Maybe even a great movie, but nowhere near in the league of the original Terminator in terms of creativity, world building, that sort of thing.

I just don't see it. I've seen the original Terminator only one time all the way through. Maybe twice, but no more than that. There's just nothing in that movie that makes me want to come back to it the way this one does. This is the masterpiece. 

I said earlier that I might want to do a comparison viewing, especially while my Hear My Eyes experience is fresh. Well, I might get that chance. When the movie came up over dinner this week, in the context of discussing where Daddy would be on Thursday night, we thought it might be okay now to show these movies to our kids, even the 12-year-old, despite the violence. I think they could have more trouble with the nuclear annihilation scene -- that's the one that gave me trouble when I was 17 -- but I think the 12-year-old could probably handle all of it, and the 15-year-old certainly could. So that may be in the offing sometime soon.

If you happen to be in Melbourne and you happen to be reading this shortly after it's posted, there's one more performance tonight. 

Audient Bridesmaids: A Room with a View

This is the latest in a periodic series in which I'm watching all the best picture nominees I haven't seen, in reverse chronological order.

When I first envisioned the Audient Bridesmaids series, I imagined myself building up a head of steam on the project and occasionally rattling off a couple in a row. I did expect there also to be droughts, which is why this is periodic series rather than committed to some regular time interval. But I figured I'd still make steady progress on it.

Well, before now, the closest two posts in the series were the four months between viewings of My Left Foot and I'm Still Here -- an old bridesmaid and a new bridesmaid -- last year between March and July. There was a similar gap in late 2022 and early 2023. If you take those two out, these have never come any closer than seven months apart.

I guess I must be getting serious now, because I just posted one of these 11 days ago when I saw Hope and Glory. And now I'm back with the unseen best picture nominee before that, James Ivory's A Room with a View, which I'll call from 1986 because it was nominated alongside the other 1986 nominees, even though many sites list its release year as 1985. 

Watching A Room with a View also enabled me to confront a childhood fear, which sounds like a strange thing to say about a movie that in almost every respect is a very light period romantic comedy. Considering this childhood fear, that certainly isn't how I would have pegged the movie.

The phrase "childhood fear" is a little misleading. It's not like I was afraid of A Room with a View the way some children are afraid of the dark or of a monster under the bed. But I did have a traumatic experience of sorts with the movie, one that has stuck with me all these years later.

It occurred on an airplane. I'm guessing it was the summer of 1987, because that's consistent with when this movie might have appeared on an airplane. My family would have been going on a trip to the Rocky Mountains. However, it's possible it was a year earlier than that, when my family did our summer trip to the UK -- which would make a bit more sense because a) the movie is set in the UK, and b) that trip would have been only about three months after the film's theatrical release. Whichever year it was, it was almost 40 years ago.

I hadn't paid to get headphones for this movie -- which I don't think my parents would have done even with a movie that was tailored to a 12- or 13-year-old -- but that didn't mean I was immune to seeing its images. And I clearly remember getting up from my seat to go to the bathroom and seeing this:

I think I might have literally stumbled backward.

Seeing the context that led up to this -- a brief fight in a Florence square that otherwise has nothing to do with the story, with minimal impact on the characters -- might have made it less shocking. But it was first laying my eyes on the screen and seeing this soon-to-be-dead man covered in blood, and eyes wild with the fear of approaching death, or maybe already dead -- well, it was a lot for preteen me to handle.

I don't think I had nightmares about it or anything, but it did always surround A Room with a View with a certain fascination on my part. 

As I said, this ends up being a complete anomaly within what amounts to one of the most whimsical Merchant-Ivory movies of this period -- or any period. And I enjoyed all of it quite a bit.

There isn't a huge amount to the plot. It's basically a chamber piece set across two settings, Florence and England, in which Helena Bonham Carter's character tries to forget her brief infatuation with Julian Sands' character, while entertaining a more practical engagement with Daniel Day-Lewis' character, in the first decade of the 20th century. Incidentally, this is the youngest I would have ever seen Day-Lewis on screen. This performance wasn't enough to get him Oscar nominated -- the nominations in this movie went to Denholm Elliott and Maggie Smith -- but he does play quite the clueless prig. And he'd win his first Oscar only three years later, in the aforementioned My Left Foot. 

Although I enjoyed the story, which went by for me on a cushion of delight, it was perhaps the performers that I enjoyed most here. I didn't anticipate how many names I might know in this film. There were the character actors from my personal favorites, like Elliott (Raiders of the Lost Ark) and Simon Callow (Four Weddings and a Funeral). There were the dames, one of whom we've lost (Smith) and one of whom is still with us (Judi Dench). There was poor Julian Sands, lost on that hiking trip. There's of course Bonham-Carter in the earliest of the two types of film for which she would become known (Merchant-Ivory films and Tim Burton films). And then any film with Day-Lewis is worth a watch.

I must admit, I didn't know Merchant and Ivory had such senses of humor, though of course credit there should probably go to their frequent collaborator, screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. It's a really funny film and the actors are on board for it. She also earned an Oscar nomination for this script. 

I also didn't realize how few quintessential Merchant-Ivory films there actually are. This one is probably the most quintessential. They were such a known pairing at the time that it was almost as if they were a genre unto themselves. But really the only other significant M-I films from around this same time were The Bostonians (1984), Mr. & Mrs. Bridge (1990), Howards End (1992) and Remains of the Day (1993). Could there have been so few? Their producer-director collaboration featured a lot more movies than just these, of course, but then you get into a bunch of pretty obscure titles both before and after, films that were not responsible for whatever time they had in our zeitgeist. I guess they had a strong imperial period but then left the center of the culture. 

Fun fact: James Ivory is still alive! He's 97. Merchant, though, has been gone for 20 years now.

Don't expect another post like this in another 11 days, but when I do get to the next movie in this series, it will be Prizzi's Honor, the John Huston film from 1985. 

The limits of hype

I came across this on my phone this morning. You only get the first line before you click to reveal more, so all I saw was:

"The end starts here. Are you ready for the final"

The final what? THE FINAL WHAT?

Oh yeah. Mission: Impossible. 

Which came out last May. 

I know you still have to hype a movie on its streaming debut -- or even if it's not the streaming debut, its streaming debut on your streamer -- or even if it's not the streaming debut on your streamer, you just have to hype your streamer anyway. 

But the language of that hype feels a little inflated when it's a movie we've all had easy access to for nearly a year. 

As a side note, I think it's funny that the still they chose to advertise this movie is not Tom Cruise, but Angela Bassett, whose role (as far as I remember) is comparatively small in that movie. She isn't even one of Ethan Hunt's spy gang, which has collected some new names over the years but still has some of the originals as well. Isn't she just some sort of bureaucratic functionary?

Of course, if they had used Tom Cruise, there would have been no mystery about "the final what" and I probably wouldn't be writing this post at all. 

Audient One-Timers: Solaris

This is the second in my 2026 monthly series in which I'm rewatching my 12 favorite films, according to Flickchart, that I've seen only once.

The second movie in this series, Andrei Tarkovksy's Solaris, a lot more closely conforms to what you'd think I mean by the term "one-timer" than the first movie, Chris Eyre's Smoke Signals. Both films do have in common the fact that I saw them for the first time in 2013 -- and that comparative recency probably explains more than any other factor why I haven't yet seen them again.

Solaris, as you would know if you've seen it or if you know Tarkovsky, is long, ponderous and slow-paced, the sort of film you would definitely only watch once if you didn't care for it, and might take a while to get back to even if you did. In fact, given that the other two Tarkovsky films I've seen in the years since then -- Stalker and The Sacrifice -- have not worked for me as well as the #172 ranked Solaris obviously did, I was definitely concerned about the possibility of this just going over my head and seeming as ponderous as the other two, on a second viewing. 

But I don't think "ponderous" always has to be a negative appraisal of something. Tarkovsky's film is ponderous, and I think that's the best thing about it. (And it made me want to revisit Stalker, which I didn't dislike but which definitely tried my patience more with fewer rewards, while actually bearing a lot of similarities to Solaris otherwise. Before I do that, it would probably be best to see the three Tarkovsky features I haven't seen: Ivan's Childhood, Andrei Rublev and Mirror, the latter of which also has a good copy on YouTube, which is where I saw Solaris. Not even any ad breaks!)

My affection for Solaris was especially noteworthy given the baggage I brought in, which was seeing Steven Soderbergh's remake ten years earlier and not caring for it. I suppose that might have made me more receptive to a good version of Solaris, but it could have also made me wary about the possibility of any good version existing. Now that I've seen the original two times, and confirmed my affection for it with a rewatch, I'm wondering if I might be more open to what Soderbergh was doing, or just more critical of it. That's another rewatch to consider some day.

My first viewing of Solaris was around the same time that I decided I really loved Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, to which Solaris owes a few very small debts. My two twenty teens viewings of 2001 were what elevated it all the way up to #12 on my Flickchart, the first of which was only two weeks after I watched Solaris (and no doubt inspired by the fact that I'd just seen Solaris). 

Tarkovksy's film does capture the eerie and unnerving qualities of unexplained occurrences in outer space that Kubrick gave us in such a memorable way four years earlier, but it doesn't really use space the way you imagine it would. Although the sense of being on a space station is clear, especially with our views of the ocean planet below, we get almost none of the traditional space backgrounds you'd think you'd get in a movie like this, with stars twinkling against a sea of infinite blackness. I recall exactly one, and it serves more as a transition between the scenes set on Earth (which run longer than a half-hour to start the film) and those set in space. Once the characters are in space, Tarkovsky is not that interested in continually reminding us of that fact through shots of space or footage of anyone doing a space walk. Everything we see can be, and obviously was, shot on Tarkovksy's very earthbound sets in Russia. (2001 was not shot in space, of course, but when I was younger, I believed it was.)

So it's a credit to Tarkovsky's movie magic that we never doubt our location. The sets themselves look like we imagine a space station would look, or rather, a space station that was inhabited entirely by Alzheimer's patients, as it's been left in disarray with various objects strewn about and loose wiring letting off sparks. Then the images of the swirling surface of the ocean planet, whose swirls ebb and flow and change according to the mysteries that are unfolding for the characters, are chilling in their otherworldliness.

Though I think if there's one single key to why Solaris gets under our skin, it may be the sound design. Every sound is chosen for its maximum pscyhological impact on us, as it mirrors the mental dissolution the characters are experiencing as they walk this space station and see the physical embodiment of some person from their past, inexplicably walking the corridors next to them. I don't find the moment-to-moment experiences with these characters, one in particular (the dead wife of Chris Kelvin), always chilling, though individual moments are quite so. The scene where she's banging on the door to get out of it -- and then bursts through the metal as though it were wet cardboard, leaving jagged edges -- is quite effective in that regard.

Because of its length (2:42) and the practical necessities of my Sunday schedule, I split Solaris in half the way the movie itself splits itself in half after about 1:19. Although you'd think you'd be under the movie's spell more as it reaches its climax, I found myself more gripped during the first half, which include those establishing scenes on Earth and all the shots of nature around Chris Kelvin's home. This film definitely relies on anticipation of what's to come in creating its mood.

I really get a lot out of the portion of the film that you wouldn't think would really be eerie, which is the character Burton explaining his experiences while on a previous rescue mission to the surface of the planet to try to find two lost crewmen. We see an older version of Burton, alongside Kelvin and a few others, watching a hearing of a younger version in which Burton explains what he saw. A hearing does not seem like the sort of place we'd become entranced by the film introducing its concepts to us.

But here is where Burton talks about seeing a massive infant four meters long on the surface of the planet's oceans, and later reveals that the infant had the appearance of the orphaned son of one of the lost crew members, something Burton only realized later when he met that son. Even twice removed from the actual events -- a character watching his own verbal account of this experience -- it sets our imaginations alive. 

And here I think is part of the film's very small debt to 2001, only because the ending of 2001 also involves the image of an infant, the Star Child. It's such a small debt that I hesitate to even mention it, because Tarkovsky is clearly doing his own thing here and not ripping off Kubrick in any way. Maybe both of them realized that seeing images of small children in outer space, where they certainly should not be, is pretty eerie.

Okay I've used enough synonyms for "eerie" and "unnerving" and "chilling" for one day.