Pride Month: The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson

I'm back for my fourth straight year watching four movies in the month of June in honor of Pride Month. 

And for the fourth straight year I'm going for a theme, though I'm not sure entirely how that theme is going to come together.

Just to recap, in 2023 I watched two movies about gay men and two movies about lesbians, one from present day and one from the past for each. In 2024 I watched LGBTQI+ movies from around the world. In 2025, the focus was on trans movies. 

This year? I think I'm doing movies about the history of the gay rights movement, but the movie that inspired the theme may not actually be available. 

I'm not a Roland Emmerich apologist, but I do have an outsized amount of love for one of his movies that went beyond his wheelhouse of large-scale disaster movies. That movie is the 2011 film Anonymous, a highly accomplished film that helped establish my controversial and largely debunked view that William Shakespeare was not actually the author of his plays. (Let's not get into it.)

And so I always thought there was a chance I would like, more than the average person, Emmerich's 2015 film Stonewall, which has a much more significant negative reputation attached to it. It looks at the Stonewall Riots that were considered the birth of the gay rights movement in the United States.

But it's a pretty elusive movie. I didn't find it on any of my streaming sites, even for rental. Until it popped up on AppleTV, but only with the caveat that I try Cinemax for free for a week before subscribing for $9.99 per month. (Please remind me to cancel this subscription before it kicks in.)

I don't usually like to sign up for these sorts of deals. They stress me out. I know some people work this system to perfection, but I'm always worried I'll get a head injury or a sudden bout of amnesia and forget to cancel the subscription. Or that there's another way they will secretly "get me."

But I took the plunge this time, because indeed, my 2026 Pride Month theme sort of depended on it. 

When I went to press play on Tuesday night, I got the message that the movie wasn't available in my country. (Then why show it to me in the first place, dammit.)

I should tell you that I am betwixt and between on my Apple subscription. It's a U.S. account, and that usually means anything they show me on iTunes is available for me to rent. But ah, iTunes no longer exists, as of these past few months. Now it's all AppleTV, and though the functionality for most things seems to be the same, it may be that there's now actual geo-blocking for certain apps and movies, rather than all that being determined by the country with which my account is associated. If true, that will be a big disappointment come the end of the year, when I usually rely on this resource for accessing some films that came out earlier in the U.S. but are not yet available in Australia. 

I don't want to take too much more time from the actual movie I watched, but let's just conclude by saying my ability to watch Stonewall is now very much in limbo. It could be as simple as needing to set up a VPN, which may be something I'll try. 

For now, though, I needed to watch a Pride movie on Tuesday night, and I tried to stay on my expected theme by picking up The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson on Netflix.

This was already on my Netflix watchlist, so I suspect it was a candidate for a past version of my Pride Month viewings. It's a documentary about the death/suspected murder of the title character, a trans woman who was a leader in the gay liberation movement, back in 1992. The case has been cold since the documentary's 2017 present tense, 25 years after she died, but now crime victim advocate Victoria Cruz is trying to heat it up again. 

Barely a minute into the film, Stonewall is evoked. So then it made me wonder: Should I devote the entire month of viewings to movies that are in some way about Stonewall? I don't know a lot about it, and I'm sure to improve that significantly if I watch four movies about it. And there are plenty of other options, as I discovered in my fruitless searches for Emmerich's film. 

David France's film is constructed in a similar way to any documentary about a person uncovering clues and evidence about a cold case, with one big difference: It barely pretends, even for the sake of drama, that there is going to be anything new forthcoming from Cruz' investigations. It's entirely contrary to the point of the documentary that this would even be possible.

What The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson makes clear over an hour and 45 minutes is that those who wanted to bury evidence of hate crimes against LGTBQI+ people have always been successful at doing so. The system is set up to help them bury this evidence. That would have been particularly the case when Marsha Johnson and the film's other main character, Sylvia Rivera, were dipping their toe into the protest racket back in the 1970s. It was still quite definitely the case in the early 1990s, when Johnson's body was found floating off the Christopher Street Pier in Manhattan, and officially deemed to be a suicide, even though all those who knew her swore up and down that Johnson was not the sort of person to take her own life. And it's even still the case in 2017, a comparatively liberated time, when the detectives who investigated Johnson's death, now mostly retired, tend to speak angrily to Cruz and hang up on her, barely concealing their disdain for the victim.

Watching The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson nine years after it was made, it was interesting to watch the changes that have occurred when talking about trans people, even between then and today. In this movie there is very little consistency about the pronouns used to talk about Marsha. Most in the know try to use she/her, but many others use he/him, even loved ones and other supporters. Of course, some of this has to do with the fact that these standards certainly weren't codified back in 1992, much less than when Marsha first came on the scene as what some consider the mother of the gay liberation movement. 

If I have a regret about The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson, it's that it does struggle, to some extent, to bring Johnson to life as a character, even though the movie's title promises to do that. It's no accident, of course, that the word "death" is listed before the word "life" in the title. We have no choice but to focus on her death more than her life, because the video footage of her prior to 1992 was scant, and filling in with photos only covers that gap a little bit. It's not the movie's fault. I suppose this was just inevitable to some degree.

We do get a lot more of Sylvia Rivera, who is also no longer alive at the time of filming, but who recorded a lot of video in the years after Johnson's death, as she was a crusader in trying to get the probable murder of Johnson properly investigated. We follow her personal struggles as she becomes homeless and is even kicked out of her shanty town "home," in one of the film's many sad scenes. Unfortunately, she's an imperfect replacement for Johnson as the film's central character, as she's not the force of great charisma that Johnson seems to have been. 

Ultimately the story's main character would have to be the investigator, Cruz, whose tireless work tracking down leads forms the focus of the narrative. We see her reconstructing the timelines that led to Johnson's death, and we even see her using one of those corkboards where evidence gets attached with pushpins. This was the only part of the movie that really rang false to me, and that's probably only because I listened to a podcast about how these corkboards with their strings connecting pictures of people is largely a creation of screenwriters and not actual practice in criminal investigations. Of course, that doesn't mean that an intrepid everyman/everywoman couldn't use such a practice as a form of imitation of what they've seen in the movies.

Cruz is a very placid character, unassuming. As the film goes along, and as one metaphorical door is closed in her face after another, we see the rage start to build in her. It never has a traditional outlet in a climactic moment, but where it leaves us -- in a way, no closer to the truth than when she began -- is a powerful reminder of the uphill battle still faced by victims of hate crimes based on sexuality.

I'll be back next Wednesday with my second Pride Month viewing, which will in some way be connected to this first one. 

Remembering Rob Reiner: Stand by Me

This is the third in one of two 2026 bi-monthly series with the same name, Remembering Rob Reiner, but different focuses. In February, April, June, August, October and December, I'm rewatching my second through seventh favorite Reiner movies, having already rewatched my favorite, This is Spinal Tap, before the series began. 

Stand by Me, my #149 on Flickchart, was considered one of the great coming-of-age movies of the 1980s, possibly of all time. That means that, of course, a wide range of people in a wide range of age groups related to its observations on growing up, especially at the characters' fragile age of 12. 

But I bet there were two groups of people for whom this effect was particularly profound:

1) Those who were 12 years old in 1959, when the movie is set;

2) Those who were 12 years old in 1986, when the movie came out.

That second group was me. 

Stand by Me was released on August 22, 1986, and I did not turn 13 for another two months. And I definitely saw it in the theater, surely before my birthday, though it would have been possible not to since movies stayed in cinemas a lot longer back then. 

It's hard to believe they didn't know what they had on their hands with this movie, and released it in the doldrums of summer. August has never been a great release date for a movie, even early August. And even though the summer blockbuster era was not, back then, what it is today, surely that logic still applied.

But the release date did also have a certain timeliness, as this movie also takes place at the end of the summer of 1959, just before its four 12-year-olds are going to junior high school and expecting their friend dynamic to change irrevocably. Labor Day, when the movie takes place, is about a week after the film's August 22nd release date. 

Whether this was canny timing or just an accident, I'm sure the end-of-summer melancholy, combined with my age, meant that everything about the themes of Stand by Me really hit home with me. Because of the way my schools were set up, it was not actually a summer of transitions between schools for me, as I still had one more year of middle school left before going to high school. But perhaps, having already undergone this transition once, I was better capable of understanding what the characters were going through. 

As I was rewatching this movie for the first time this century -- and I can't be absolutely certain I even watched it in the 1990s -- it occurred to me that this film has a similarity to the first film I wrote about back in February, The Princess Bride, which wouldn't come out until the next year. 

On the surface? Nothing in common. But when I was writing about Bride, I was inclined to list just a bunch of great, memorable quotes, which I jotted down as I was watching -- reaching a total of 42 before all was said and done. 

I don't think of Stand by Me in terms of memorable quotes, though there are those. The concept for the advertising campaign, as exemplified in the poster above, was based on quotes, which had a certain currency to them even if you hadn't seen the movie yet. 

No, I think of it in terms of memorable scenes, which is sort of the same thing -- and which is also something we would credit to the screenwriter more than we would necessarily credit to the director. (To name names: Stand by Me was written by Raynold Gideon and Bruce A. Evans. I've never heard of them either, unlike Princess Bride scribe William Goldman.)

The common element between the two movies is obviously Reiner, and I think he excelled at making these things memorable through his approach to filmmaking. Coming in at only a scant 89 minutes, Stand by Me is nonetheless chockablock with three- to four-minute scenes where something happened that had quite a strong impression on me. 

A list? Okay. Though it's not going to be in order.

1) The scene where the boys get leeches while going in the water. 

2) The scene where the junkyard dog is sicced on their balls. 

3) The scene where they have to outrun an approaching train.

4) The scene where Lardass prompts a contagious vomiting episode among those watching a pie-eating contest.

5) The scene where Kiefer Sutherland threatens to kill River Phoenix and you really believe he will, like killing somebody doesn't make a damn bit of difference to him.

I'm actually going to stop there, though I could continue. I'm going to stop there because I want to transition to a related point. 

The thing that (almost) all of those scenes have in common is that they involve real danger for the characters. When I'd seen bands of kids together in the movies -- like, say, The Goonies the previous year, which also starred Corey Feldman -- I never felt like they were actually in danger. Don't get me wrong, I love The Goonies. But there's a difference between the peril in which those kids find themselves, and the danger that befalls the Stand by Me crew. There's a reason I use the word "peril" for one and "danger" for the other. Peril has no bite to it. 

Watching Stand by Me, in 1986, was an experience of wondering if these kids would actually make it out of this movie alive. And there was good reason in the story for that fear, because there's death all over this movie. Wil Wheaton's Gordie has already lost his brother (The Sure Thing veteran John Cusack!) to a car accident, just four months before the events of this movie, and the actual point of their journey is to go see the dead body of a young man hit by a train -- who provides the title of the original Stephen King novella, The Body.

(I don't want to get sidetracked, but I will include a parenthetical thought here, one of my only reservations about Stand by Me. In what world do multiple people know about the existence of a dead body that has not even been found by the police yet? And in what world do they clash over who's going to find and report the dead body? That part of is a bit strange, though it does provide good thematic heft.)

So with death hanging over this movie at all points -- and one death that occurs later that we don't learn about until the end -- it was easy to worry about whether our characters would actually survive their interactions with rambunctious golden retrievers, leeches, trains, guns, knives, and even cigarettes. (Yep, it was definitely a grown-up thing for me to see other 12-year-olds smoking cigarettes, which was no part of my personal experience, and would never appear in a movie nowadays except maybe the most grungy indie movie you can imagine.)

But these fears of death are as much about the impending change in our lives -- both the characters and mine -- than any actual fears of death. In my privileged suburb of Boston, we didn't know anyone who had died, not even including any of my friends' parents. Heck, most of us even had all our grandparents. Death was very remote for us in August of 1986.

But change? We already sensed it was coming. We already knew that we weren't going to be friends with the same people in a few years that we were now. It was right around this time that I had a falling out with one of my friends who had been among my best friends to this point, and I'm ashamed to tell you that it wasn't him, it was me. I was the one who decided he wasn't cool anymore, and I actually ended up punching him in the forehead at one point.

It was a volatile emotional time, 12 years old, and that's another impression you get from Stand by Me. Every kid except Jerry O'Connell's Vern has an episode of crying in this movie, and it's not over something like getting hurt. It's over genuine emotional trauma from big, existential things. Gordie lost a brother. Chris is thought of by everyone as a criminal. Teddy's father is crazy and held his ear to a hot stove, permanently mangling it. Even the relatively stable Vern gets shit for being fat. 

So it wasn't only the physical dangers that Stand by Me perfectly encapsulated, it was the emotional dangers. And they all got wrapped up into one intense viewing experience, the sort I'd never had before at age 12, the sort that played a role in maturing me beyond where I had been when I entered that theater.

So even though it may have been more than 35 years since I saw Stand by Me, and there was reason for me to wonder if it still belonged in my top 200 on Flickchart, I can confirm that this viewing brought back all the formative experiences I had when I first watched it. It brought back that feeling that the world was not, in fact, safe, and probably never had been. 

This post was not a lot about Rob Reiner. But Reiner was definitely a key ingredient in bringing this all together, getting incredible performances from child actors, effortlessly blending the comedy and the drama, and giving the whole thing the necessary epic sense to entrench it in all of our minds and hearts -- and not just those of us who were 12 in the summer of 1986. 

In touch with the actual ScarJo

No, you aren't doing a double take -- the title of this post is intentionally playing off the title of the final post I wrote on my trip to Japan.

That's because while in that post, I was spiritually communing with Scarlett Johansson's character from Lost in Translation, but in this post, I am in touch with what the actual ScarJo is doing these days.

And that is ... directing movies?

I don't know why I should be surprised by that. Her instincts as an actor show she has an understanding of storytelling through film, so the next logical step would be directing. 

Eleanor the Great, which was the first of two movies I watched on the plane back from Tokyo (My Dead Friend Zoe does not get its own post), is actually Johansson's third effort as a director. The first two are quite different: something called American Express Unstaged: Ellie Goulding in 2015, and a 2009 short called These Vagabond Shoes. 

Eleanor the Great is also different, in that it's different from what we might expect Johansson might direct, if we had any preconceived notions of that. We might assume she'd follow in the footsteps of a director who had brought her one of her more iconic roles, maybe even make a Sofia Coppola-type film if Lost in Translation still felt like a defining text for her all these years later. 

Instead, she's following in the footsteps of another actor-turned-director, Sarah Polley.

Polley's Away From Her was what came to mind for me as I watched Eleanor the Great. Both films were made by young actresses about elderly women, and both surprised with that choice because it would not seem to be any outgrowth of their own lived experience. I guess the difference is that Polley was really young when she made Away From Her, only 27, while ScarJo has now crossed (gasp!) into her forties, only just. (She's 41.)

Indeed the general subject matter is not the only surprising thing about Eleanor the Great, the June Squibb-led film that deals with a 94-year-old woman who has just lost her best friend, with whom she'd been living for more than a decade. (Squibb is actually two years older than that, now 96, though the movie did come out last year.) It's the specific deception Eleanor gets involved in that's quite the controversial matter, though I won't tell you what that is -- it would be a bit like telling you the central controversy of The Drama, and just about as controversial. 

In any case, I'm pleased to say that Johansson proves herself quite capable on this side of the camera, though not to the level Polley achieved with Away From Her. This is a more mainstream, conventional movie, even with the controversial topic I'm not talking about now. 

So yes I'm back now, and was pretty useless the first few days, as that cold I told you about in my last post didn't get any better. I can tell you it was a lot of fun rolling my bags through multiple airports, stopping every minute or so to sneeze or blow my nose, and just hoping that no busybody airport worker would see me and ask me if I should really be flying. (My cover story for having a runny nose and watery eyes was that I was emotional over saying farewell to a loved one.) I didn't get stopped, but that didn't make the redeye from Tokyo to Brisbane, and then another flight to Melbourne, any less miserable.

In touch with my inner ScarJo

When I mentioned Lost in Translation in a post last week, I likened myself to Bill Murray's Bob Harris arriving bleary eyed in Tokyo, even though I counted four major differences between Bob and me.

I probably should have likened myself to Scarlett Johansson's Charlotte -- no last name, just Charlotte -- because that was the character whose Japanese explorations mine have most resembled.

Okay you have to set aside the age thing, the gender thing, and the one of the most beautiful women in the world thing. Or maybe ScarJo's appeal is more abstract than pure beauty. 

Otherwise, though, it works, in one particular way:

Like Charlotte, I was along for the ride on this trip, while my spouse worked, leaving me to consume Japanese culture on my own for four solo days.

The first three of these were in Kyoto, where my wife was attending a games conference. So I saw her at night. No need for me to find a fellow lonesome traveller with whom to wile away my evening hours. 

The last was in Tokyo, and that was mostly designed that way because my wife had been on the go for two solid weeks, first on a walking trip with her friends, then at the games conference, then as part of our two days in Hakone, in between the two cities, where you can get some of your best views of Mt. Fuji. She needed a solo/hotel day on Wednesday, where she was not beholden to anyone, which was not a great sacrifice for her because this was actually her second time in Tokyo on the trip. So I had another day of solo exploration that day.

I didn't consciously pattern any of these explorations on things Charlotte would have or did do. She would never go to the top of the Tokyo Skytree, for example, and I don't think a sumo show would have made her top 20 options in either Tokyo or Kyoto, the latter being a city she did visit on a one-day solo trip, the internet reminded me.

But I did find myself solo visiting a temple, not either of the ones she visited but rather the Senso-ji temple in Asukasa, not far from the aforementioned Tokyo Skytree. And though this place is overrun with tourists, I did find myself alone in a small temple off to the side, trying consciously, like Charlotte did, to "feel something."

For Charlotte, her not feeling something is a sense of lamentable spiritual emptiness for her, but also gets jumbled up with the crisis she's having about her two-year marriage to the low-key lout John, played by Giovanni Ribisi. She feels she'd potentially be capable of getting herself in the necessary mindset to have a spiritual experience in this temple, and when she can't, it brings her to tears.

Me? I kind of feel like I'm on fast forward on these trips, if I lump this in with the whirlwind Europe trip last year. I'm collecting experiences as quickly as I can, and not marinating in them. So while I did feel a bit of hushed awe in this sacred space, imagining those who had prayed there over the years, I was never going to actually have an experience that changed my perspective on my life or the universe. I'm not super spiritual anyway, and also, I'm not secretly regretting my marriage. So I collected this brief experience and moved on to the next thing. Which was the twice aforementioned Tokyo Skytree, a 634-meter structure that is Japan's tallest, and probably as opposite to that temple as can be.

One final similarity with Charlotte? We both had medical troubles on our trip, though for me this is a bit of a stretch.

Bob had to take Charlotte to the hospital for a fractured toe. Me? I got the sniffles.

They started with a dry throat, bad night of sleep on Wednesday and zombified me a bit during the day on Thursday, which still managed to be another 25,000 step day -- 24,803 to be exact. And that bad sleep finally gave me some of the feeling of the insomniacs from the movie, even if it wasn't due to jet lag.

And my sniffles did, unfortunately, cut a bit into my enjoyment of the Tokyo Hyatt, our last Lost in Translation tourist stop on Thursday night. (We did the Shibuya Crossing earlier that day.)

By the time we found the place (we had to circle the building) and got two different elevators to the 52nd floor (one of which only went to 51), I had already gone through almost all of the tissues I'd stuffed into my pocket before leaving our hotel, also in Shinjuku. It was feeling very much like a box that needed to be ticked at this point.

But you know what? The experience soon seduced us. 

They know what those of us making this pilgrimage are looking for. There's a Lost in Translation cocktail which we ordered, and which was delicious, but what really capped it was that they had a lounge singer and small jazz band on hand:

(I thought I might as well just throw in all the photos.)

The songs they performed that I recognized were "The Look of Love," "Dancing Cheek to Cheek," "Natural Woman," "What a Wonderful World" and "Sway."

So yes we did linger a bit, and ultimately had two cocktails, in part because of the $33 cover charge per person (3,300 yen). So yeah, they know why we're there and what we'll pay, which was ultimately around $180. Oh well. But they gave us a good show, too, and more than that, a memory.

Even crazier? We arrived at the right time, apparently, as we were able to sit down right away. Not the case for the poor bastards in the queue when we left.

And tonight we leave the country, back to Melbourne after eight memorable days for me, and nearly three weeks for my wife.

This beautiful fan

That is all. 

Walk down that road, but not in that road

As I was watching Craig Brewer's Song Sung Blue on the plane to Japan, I was reminded of an old movie trope that I find fairly inexplicable:

Why do movie characters always walk down the middle of the road?

I mean not always. Sometimes they use the sidewalk. But a lot more often than they should. And a million times more often than real human beings walk down the middle of the road.

Which is especially dumb for the characters in Song Sung Blue, though I have to issue a SPOILER WARNING before I explain why that is.

Have you heeded this warning if it applies to you?

Good.

The thing I didn't know about Song Sung Blue, which they wisely withheld from the trailers, was that Kate Hudson's character loses her left leg below the knee when she's hit by a car while gardening outside her house. The driver loses control of the car, and though this is just one of those freak things, you can't make up the fact that it almost happened a second time. (The movie is based on a documentary, so I'm going to assume this detail is real.)

When she's rehabbing and testing out her artificial limb, we see her and her husband/singing partner, played by Hugh Jackman -- their banding Lightning & Thunder covers Neil Diamond -- walking down the middle of a road, arm in arm for support. (The support might be mutual; Jackman's Mike also has a heart condition.)

When you've recently been hit by a car, and are very traumatized by that fact (which is dramatized elsewhere in the narrative), why the HELL would you walk down the middle of a road? Even if there are currently no cars on it? (Which of course there aren't, otherwise you could never do it.)

To double down, we later see her doing it again, this time by herself. Without even Mike to throw her out of the way if a sudden out-of-control car -- not unprecedented in their neighborhood -- came careening down that road.

Real answer? Because of the way it looks in a film. Because it's an iconic pose.

The sidewalk? That's for old people with walkers. Vigorous people who take life by the lapels walk right there in the street, come what may. 

It's the same reason passengers are often shot without wearing seatbelts in movies, and movie motorcyclists are often shot without helmets. As much as movies frequently strive to portray real life, they also want the characters to be epic.

It's just that Song Sung Blue is the sort of movie that draws attention to the contradiction, just because of what happened to poor Claire.

But I agree, it does work. At the same time I was noticing this contradiction, I was also appreciating the composition of the shot, with houses on either side of the pair, equidistant in the frame.

It also works symbolically, in a way I hinted at in the subject of this post. The characters are walking down a road, metaphorically. They are not walking down a sidewalk. 

We notice this specifically when a character runs down the middle of the road, which is not a scene in Song Sung Blue, but which is a common scene in film otherwise. Whether they have tears in their eyes, revenge on the brain or joy in their heart, a character who runs down the middle of the road reads to us as focused on whatever that thing is, not on traffic safety.

As for the movie itself, well, I went for it like a sucker. And I don't mean that the movie isn't worthy of someone loving it. I just mean it played on my emotions like a guitarist strumming my heartstrings. I even got a little verklempt during the finale, which I have no reason to spoil today.

Watching The Mandalorian and "Glogoo" (seriously!) in Kyoto

We know native Japanese have difficulty distinguishing the R sound and the L sound. They are effectively one in the same. It has to do with mouth shapes they are not traditionally accustomed to making, and it has set in at a biological level.

This can be seen in perhaps their most famous cultural export to the world, a beast we know of as Godzilla, though when they anglicize it, they write it as "Gojira."

If I am going to extrapolate from that, I'd figure that their preference is to use an R over an L. It's the same sound anyway, so you'd think they'd choose one and just have it be the default.

But lo and behold, when I was checking out the movie times at Kyoto's Toho Cinemas Nijo, I saw the title for the new Star Wars movie listed as follows:

The Mandalorian and Glogoo.

The stranger thing was, right below that, the correct title was written out.

Don't believe me? Here:

By the way, tomorrow I'm going to see Super Beaver Live and Documentary.

Even if I'm willing to shrug off the explanation for the L appearing instead of the R, what's the deal with the "oo" instead of the "u?"

Anyway, I just found that interesting.

My date with a movie when on holiday was an easy choice this trip, considering that the 12th live action Star Wars movie actually released on the very day I saw it, Friday, a day after it released back in Australia, and a bit before the U.S. release by time zones. I was probably especially driven to get this one in after I never got to go see One Battle After Another in Greece last year, and just to make sure there were no shenanigans, I went the very first day. (My wife? She's at a conference during the day, which is one of the reasons we're here.)

In fact, I even had a perfectly appropriate shirt to wear to the movie, which I actually got in Europe last year:

Which is further appropriate because "sensei" is one of the words I've gotten to in my very slowly paced Duolingo lessons -- too slowly, really, to be of any use on this trip.

I'm not going to review the movie for you. Not in this post, anyway. I will be reviewing it for ReelGood, so there will be a link up to the right in a couple days -- or already now, depending on when you're reading this. (Or possibly ten years ago, depending on when you're reading this.)

But I did want to "review" the experience of going to the movies in Japan -- and by that I really just mean tell you about it.

For starters I should say that I was careful to choose the subtitled version of the movie. The website is good about distinguishing, which I would not say is a given in what I've experienced of Japan so far. The word "impenetrable" has been used among my wife and me in relation to certain logistics, let's just say that. Until the film actually started, I didn't feel 100% certain I hadn't messed it up.

The cinema itself was nothing too unusual. I ended up opting for just popcorn and a drink, but it did come with a plastic carrying tray that helps hold it in your seat:

I considered for a second something more adventurous, but I wasn't very far removed, time-wise, from having gotten at the market a chicken skewer with caviar eggs on it. So the memory of that kind of squelched any ambitions in that regard. It did have caramel seasoning on top.

While we're on the topic of the popcorn, I'll skip ahead to the end of the movie and mention how carefully the Japanese sort their trash. The plastic lid and straw went in one bin, the paper in another, food waste in a third (I had none of this myself), and of course finally the plastic trays in their own rack to be washed and reused. I'm sure some dumb tourists don't discriminate, but all the Japanese were doing it and I certainly didn't want to be "that guy." (Also, I suspect it's at least somewhat unusual for tourists to go to the movies on holiday. Only crazy people like me.)

The other thing I grabbed going on was one of these:

They had them handily organized so you knew which ones were for boys and which for girls. (The lighting is bad, but I can assure you those are pink.)

I wasn't sure if they would be needed for comfort. I didn't find my seat to be significantly different from other cinema seats, so I didn't use mine. (That didn't mean I was comfortable as such. I couldn't really find the right position and there was no good place to put my foot.) Maybe they were meant to be boosters? Which I certainly didn't need, being 6' 4."

The pre-show is the real place you observe cultural differences in the moviegoing experience. There were some ads, but in general the content was more focused on movies. Before the proper trailers started, there was a hosted section, sort of like a movie news with a pretty young woman. This included such bits as Shawn Levy introducing Ryan Gosling as part of the cast of Star Wars: Starfighter, possibly at Comic-Con, that sort of thing.

The actual trailers were mostly English with subtitles, but both the Toy Story 5 trailer and the Moana trailer were dubbed. And one interesting thing to note was that you got a lot more of them, but they were shorter, some of them no longer than 45 seconds. (Side note: Do we need the live action Moana already? Moana 2 only came out in 2024. Anyway it's a lot of Moana for a ten-year period.)

In general these trailers conformed to some of the funnier presentations you see in movies and TV of the Japanese doing American culture. The VO guy would be speaking a steady stream of Japanese and then scream out "Masters of the Universe!" (Oh yeah, a bunch of films that are already out in Australia haven't come out here yet, such as the aforementioned Masters of the Universe, Mortal Kombat 2 and Michael.)

In the movie itself, the only thing I wanted to comment on that isn't substantively about the movie was the perfectness of the Japanese subtitles for this movie in particular. Because the title character is sort of a samurai figure, who talks about ancient codes ("The Way"), and his adopted child is an Eastern religion style figure of supernatural power, the Japanese subtitles almost felt like accompanying art.

My last strange impression? It was pretty strange indeed.

When the credits rolled, I turned on my phone, as I am accustomed to doing when credits roll. I was sitting closer to the screen than most people, as I am also accustomed to doing, so I just assumed everyone behind me was filing out.

But when the lights finally came up at the end, only then did the rest of the people get up and leave. Just from my memory of how many people I'd noticed sitting behind me, not more than ten percent of those people could have filed out before the credits finished.

In the U.S., this number would be almost one hundred. An impatient lot, us Americans. Only for MCU movies is this not the case, but even with the same parent company, I don't think anyone was expecting The Mandalorian and Grogu to have a mid-credits sequence. They just stayed for politeness and decorum.

A politeness and decorum I'm hoping I didn't upend by jumping on my phone while the movie was technically still going.

The impracticality of Lost in Translation as travel prep

Having determined it was too early in 2026 for JetStar to have any current year releases available for viewing on my flight to Japan, I browsed all the offerings, and jumped at the opportunity to watch my #1 movie of 2003, Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation.

It seemed like the perfect choice. I have always associated the idea of arriving in Japan with Bob Harris' blurry eyed arrival at the start of this movie. But there are four major differences between me and Bob Harris:

1) He was arriving in Tokyo, while my flight landed in Osaka;

2) He was flying from Los Angeles, resulting in massive jet lag that never abates during his entire trip, while my disembarkment from Sydney meant only an hour and hour time difference and no jet lag;

3) He's a movie star, and I'm only a movie critic;

4) He's not real, but presumably I am.

Watching the movie was supposed to be the fulfilment of a desire to watch Crazy Rich Asians on my trip to Singapore, an activity that was thwarted by geoblocking on my Australian streaming service Stan. I got a lot of my ideas of things I wanted to do in Singapore from this movie. And given that I, in fairly typical fashion, did no advanced prep for our Japan trip -- which will include Tokyo in its second half -- I figured watching Lost in Translation would remind me of some of the things I wanted to do while here, given that it was similarly foundational in my desire to visit Japan. 

But while Crazy Rich Asians really foregrounds its tourist attractions -- the Maxwell Food Centre hawkers' market and the Marina Bay Sands Hotel in particular -- Lost in Translation isn't that sort of movie.

It's a vibe, not a travelogue. 

You can't really watch Lost in Translation and say "Oh, I really want to go to that one sushi restaurant Bob and Charlotte visited" or "Oh, I should really check out that 10th floor karaoke room" or even "That strip club seemed, um, interesting."

What Lost in Translation does for its viewers is it makes them want to have the sorts of experiences Bob and Charlotte had, not see the things they saw. And for most ordinary tourists not estranged from their partners or in some kind of mid- (or early-)life crises, that just ain't gonna happen. 

That said, visiting the "Lost in Translation Hotel" -- I'm not looking up the name right now,  because the point is it exists more for us as a concept than a real place -- is something we plan to do.

So don't be surprised if you ultimately get two Lost in Translation posts while I'm here.

Off to the land of Kurosawa

I'm getting on a plane today. In fact, depending on when I manage to post this, it may have already
happened. 

Japan is my destination. Land of Kurosawa.

I'm not yet sure if I will keep the blog updated regularly, or at all, while I'm gone. I'm sure I will be inclined to write something. I always am. But I have to remember what I did on my tablet to write blog posts back when I was in Europe last year. I remember it was a bit of a pain.

Will I be doing anything to celebrate the cinema of Japan? Will I be going to the Studio Ghibli museum? Will I be going to a Godzilla statue somewhere? Will I visit the Akira Kurosawa Library, which, if it doesn't exist, should exist?

Don't know. I haven't planned this one out very much.

I do know that I will be trying to see The Mandalorian and Grogu while I'm there, so, that's something anyway.

See you soon, or at the latest, at the beginning of June. 

Giving Maisie a happy ending

For the whole time I've loved What Maisie Knew -- it came out in 2013, so that's 13 years -- I've been fascinated by the fact that it was based on an 1897 novel by Henry James. I thought "I should read that novel someday."

I'd look for it absently in book stores, never finding it, never worrying too much about that fact. Then for some reason, in the past year, I became more interested in converting on this desire, even though it's been since 2019 that I've seen the movie, when I was reviewing contenders for my best of the last decade. (It finished 18th.) Back in February I found it at a book store in Carlton, and snapped it up.

The other thing reading What Maisie Knew would give me is it would allow me to stick to my plan of making every second book I read relate to cinema. This is not exactly what I had in mind when I set out to do that, but it worked for the exercise because it would allow me to compare and contrast a modern-day adaptation of a classic novel with the novel itself. Which I did as soon as I finished reading the novel on Tuesday, getting my reward by watching the movie for the fourth time that very night. 

Little did I know how different the book would be, and how much I ultimately didn't care for it.

I suppose this is my tried-and-true philosophy in action again, where I always say you like the first version of a thing you come across the best, even if someone could argue that the second version is "objectively" better -- if it means anything at all to talk about objectivity when it comes to taste. But James' original novel, which was printed over a number of weeks and months as a serial in the New Review, is quite a different, quite a bleaker view on these events and characters. Having loved the far more humanist view on them, it's not what I was expecting or hoping.

I hope you've seen What Maisie Knew by now, but I will include a SPOILER ALERT because I'm sure there are quite a few of you who haven't.

To synopsize the movie first, it's the story of the titular young girl, who would appear to be about six or seven, and who is the daughter of a warring unmarried couple who are both successful -- or, have historically been -- in the arts. Onata Aprile plays that young girl. Her mother is Susanna (Julianne Moore), an aging rock star who is still successful enough to be involved in a new album and a new tour. Her father is Beale -- the one character who keeps his name from the novel -- and is played by Steve Coogan. He's an art dealer. They are separated by the things that usually separate people, particularly successful people, and each takes up with a new partner in order to help their position in the custody battle over Maisie. Beale marries Maisie's nanny, Margo (Joanna Vanderham), in part because she's very pretty and in part because he imagines that Maisie's already close relationship to Margo will benefit him in any custody argument. As a fast and desperate reaction, Susanna marries Lincoln (Alexander Skarsgard), a bartender in her circle of friends and hangers on, even though it's unclear how well she really knows him and whether he has any experience looking after young children. He'll get a lot more really quickly, as Maisie's parents' neglectful ways leave them in the hands of these stepparents way too often, frequently without properly ensuring their availability, and in violation of their own custody responsibilities. Margo and Lincoln, who are both good to their core, develop a relationship with one another and create, effectively, a surrogate family that does not involve either of Maisie's original biological parents. 

And that's a happy ending. The last shot of the film is Maisie running down a dock toward a boat, this boat ride having been something she'd been anticipating for a couple days, with a huge smile plastered across her face. Aprile is astonishing in this movie and I'm sorry her career petered out by her mid-teens after only a handful of other roles.

The book has no interest in this happy ending.

The book, of course, was the only version of the story that existed for more than a hundred years. Actually there was a 1968 TV series and a 58-minute film in 1975, and a French TV movie in 1993. But I have to assume that these all stick more or less to James' novel. And until Scott McGehee and David Siegel interpreted the material in 2013, from a script by Nancy Doyne and Carroll Cartwright, it had likely always ended in disappointment for Maisie. 

First my general impression of the book.

Although this is a book with a lot of clever language, the kind that occasionally gives you an exact and exquisite appreciation of the author's meaning, it feels quite a bit like a hundred pages of story in a 275-page book. The rest is description that is baroque enough in its construction that I frequently gave up the effort of trying to make out exactly what was being conveyed in any individual sentence. I'm no dummy, mind you -- I was an English major in college and have read all sorts of classic literature, much of it with relish. This, though, I found to be a bit of a slog, which is why it took me more than two months to read it. 

One thing that frequently makes it difficult to discern everything James is saying is that he refers to characters in euphemisms, like "their friend" rather than a character's name. The stepfather, too, has a bad habit of referring to Maisie, somewhat ironically I suppose, with phrases like "my good man" and "old boy." (I noticed the movie plays lightly on this. There's one scene where Lincoln calls Maisie a "wise guy," and when he protests that she's a girl, he changes it to "wise girl.")

The bigger disappointment with James' novel, though, is where it ultimately lands. 

To spoil the novel also, the larger narrative gestures are the same as presented by McGehee, Siegel, Doyne and Cartwright, only taking place in turn-of-the-century England and (a small bit) France rather than in New York City. And the Margo and Lincoln characters, there called Sir Claude and Miss Overmore, do appear to end up with each other, despite a lot more fighting and a lot less certainty. They just don't end up with Maisie.

That's right, at the end of James' What Maisie Knew, Maisie goes off with her governess, Miss Wix.

Miss Wix is meant to be a bit of a ridiculous character, an older woman who is quite proper and has an especial fascination with/fixation on Sir Claude. To give you an idea of how I imagined her in my head, though, I had her looking like Margaret Hamilton from The Wizard of Oz. Which is not a very good sign of her promise as someone Maisie should end up with. 

Why does Maisie go with Miss Wix at the end? Well, even though she loves Sir Claude and seems to be okay with Miss Overmore as well, she doesn't celebrate their potential union, their ability to become a new makeshift family free from either of the biological parents, who are even worse in the novel than they are in the movie. (The kinder portrayal of these two in the film is consistent with the collective humanism on display.) Instead, she asks Sir Claude to give Miss Overmore up. Unlike in the film, she comes across as potentially a lot less worthy than he is -- that's 1897 for you -- so we don't necessarily blame Maisie for making her choice. But when Miss Wix -- who, you remember, is prim and proper, as well as stuck on Sir Claude -- can't sanction the union, she actually takes Maisie off with her, and the stepparents let them go. The implication is that Maisie doesn't object to this because she thinks this relationship will end up the same way her parents' relationship ended up. 

Huh?

The Miss Wix character, who is perhaps even more significant than either of the absent parents in the novel, does have a corollary in Siegel and McGehee's film. And here she is indeed a replacement for when Beale poaches the nanny to make her his wife, though in the novel they call this a governess rather than a nanny, the one in charge of Maisie's education. But the Miss Wix in the movie isn't even named -- Paddy Croft does get credited as "Mrs. Wix" on IMDB -- and she's in about three scenes before disappearing entirely. One might think she died, given that we see her once falling asleep while looking after Maisie. 

It's interesting to me that the collaborators on this film should have felt that James missed so badly with the way he originally wrote these characters. I have no choice but to view their decision as correct, given that I have a 13-year relationship with those characters from the movie, and only a two-month relationship with the characters from the book. But their movie essentially changes the entire outcome of the events from James' novel, and in my estimation it is for the far, far better. 

I do wonder if they might have envisioned a more faithful adaptation of the book, but that there was no realistic prospect of this selling. I hope that's not the case, because I think the way this movie goes is truly brilliant, and the chemistry between Skarsgard and Vanderham is just heart swooningly romantic. But what if they wanted to make a What Maisie Knew that ended unhappily, but their backers just told them this would never sell in the 2013 cinematic marketplace?

I hope that's not the case, because there's nothing cheap about this happy ending. Some movies will end happily despite ample evidence that they should not, and those are the sort we should look on suspiciously. What Maisie Knew ends happily for Maisie but at the cost of the fact that both of her biological parents have effectively given her up. (Beale initially tries to woo her to return to England with him, before realizing it's just not practical, but then he proceeds with his plans to decamp from New York anyway. Susanna fights tooth and nail not to exit her daughter's life, but she's ultimately more committed to her career than her daughter.)

So while this is, indeed, a happy ending, and especially for the kind souls Margo and Lincoln, it might be the sort of happy ending that James himself could have gotten behind, if he weren't being poisoned by an ultimate sense of bitterness and misanthropy. 

Audient One-Timers: Two times the one-timers

This is the fifth entry in my 2026 series Audient One-Timers, in which I'm watching the 12* highest ranked movies on my Flickchart that I've seen only once. (*see below)

If you know me by now, after reading thousands of my posts on The Audient, you know I don't like deviating from the rules of my monthly series. (Or this could be your first time here, so you're hearing this for the first time.)

However, you should also know that I don't like failing the stated goals of my monthly series just because I made a mistake. 

That mistake was to have miscalculated the 12th highest ranked movie on my Flickchart. Smoke Signals, which I watched back in January, was actually my 13th highest ranked one-timer. 

The issue arose because I listed the top 15 movies in a Letterboxd list. Why 15? I wanted some extra titles in there in case I couldn't locate all 12, so I could then dig into my reserves.

But I discovered last month that I'd listed them in the wrong order on that list, so a higher ranked movie was below Smoke Signals, requiring me to fit 13 movies into a 12-month schedule. 

So I handled that in a way that seemed appropriate: I put the one that was up next, and the one that I had missed, into a double feature to write about this month, which was fitting because they are both about Nazis.

And so it was that on Sunday I watched a "day-night double feature" -- borrowing that term from baseball's "day-night double header" -- of my #167, Oliver Hirshbiegel's Downfall (2004), and my #141, Stanley Kramer's Judgment at Nuremberg (1961). 

If you think that's a lot of movie for a double feature, you're right -- 335 minutes worth. However, Downfall's 156 minutes actually made it the shortest of four movies I rewatched this weekend, which also involved the rewatch of Caligula I wrote about in my last post, as well as Avengers: Endgame with my son, as the conclusion of our series of about eight Marvel movies leading up to it. I should probably write about that, but to be honest, my conclusions from the final film were not very interesting, and I already sort of covered that topic in this post. 

I thought it would be good to watch Downfall and Judgment at Nuremberg exactly in that order, for maximum possible schadenfreude, to use the appropriate German term. These are two films that never for a moment depict the Nazis in anything but their very worst hour. Most movies you watch about Nazis feature some moment when they are defiant, victorious, and in the midst of carrying out cruelties toward Jews, the mentally handicapped, homosexuals, and others. In these two movies, they are only paying the price for those cruelties.

I first watched Downfall almost exactly ten years ago, in June of 2016. I raced to Letterboxd to give it an immediate five stars, and when I ranked it on Flickchart, which was likely not immediate because I've been behind on my rankings for some time (maybe even a decade), it placed comfortably within my top 200. Even more comfortably than its current spot of 167 -- my records show that its initial entry in my chart was at #138. 

Many people know Downfall because Bruno Ganz ranting as Hitler became a meme, and rightly so -- it's a great rant. (He has several, but there is one that's most famous.) But I hope that doesn't mean Downfall is accorded any less prestige in the public sphere than it deserves. 

My impression of the movie on this watch is that its like a procedural for the end of a regime. Hirschbiegel has spared no detail on the downward spiral of the movements of key Nazi officials in a Berlin bunker, and to a lesser extent, their diminishing armies on the ground level. We know much of this comes from the memory of a real person -- Traudl Junge, played by Alexandra Maria Lara -- so we know Hirschbiegel and a trio of screenwriters (including Junge) did not have to just imagine what likely would have happened. But the accuracy of these details still has a sort of brilliant exactness to it, a combination of what did happen, and what must have happened, based on our general knowledge of these true believers specifically, and any cornered, doomed human beings generally.

Even though all the characters we meet are Nazis, the film does a good job giving us some characters we can root for. We know from opening footage of the real Traudl Junge that she regrets her inability or unwillingness to understand what was going on right in front of her face, but that doesn't mean the film goes out of its way to depict her doubts. In fact, her loyalty to Hitler is such that she even appears ready to stay and potentially commit suicide with the rest of them. Maybe it's just Lara's sympathetic eyes, but to the extent that we can excuse any of these people of any of their actions, we feel like maybe she really didn't know just how evil the Fuhrer was. The other truly sympathetic character is a doctor played by Christian Berkel.

Nearly every big name in the Third Reich makes some sort of appearance or other here, and we get a sense of the nuances in their differing personalities as well. All are damnable, of course, but we feel a slight surge of support for the characters we see defy Hitler -- and even feel a weird sort of respect for those who didn't abandon him, as they at least show a strange courage in knowing they are marching to their deaths. 

Although the rant is the scene most people know from Downfall, easily the most chilling scene is the one where Magda and Joseph Goebbels (Ulrich Matthes and Corinna Harfouch) sentence their own children to death. First they make them drink a bitter liquid that is pitched to them as preventing them from getting sick in the "humid" bunker (though the youngest child points out, poignantly, that it's not humid). The oldest daughter, fearing a nameless sort of doom but surely not understanding what is actually going on, resists this with all her strength, leading a doctor on hand to force it down her throat. Then there's the impossibly awful scene where Magda goes through the bunks of the anesthetized, sleeping children and one by one helps them bite down on a cyanide capsule. The movies lingers in this moment, showing us each child individually meeting their doom, just so there's no chance we can mistake how monstrous this was. In a film in which actual acts of Nazi barbarism are not otherwise emphasized, this is the key scene of the film.

I didn't re-read my previous post on Downfall before writing the above, but it does cover a lot of the same topics, even using some of the same language. I mean, ten years ago me is still me. If you want to read that piece, it's here. 

Judgment at Nuremberg is the newest film in my top 12 favorite films on Flickchart that I'd seen only once -- not in terms of its release date, but in terms of when I saw it. The film is 65 years old this year, making it actually one of the oldest of my one-timers, but I only saw it for the first time three years ago, in July of 2023. And of course immediately wondered where Judgment at Nuremberg had been all my life. I didn't actually write about Nuremberg on the blog previously, having written about if for Flickchart Friends Favorites Fiesta at the time. So I only have memories of what I wrote in that piece, though I could probably look it up on Facebook if I really wanted to. 

Like Downfall, this too is a procedural, only in the courtroom rather than in a Nazi bunker. One of the things I found most interesting about that process is the realistic portrayal of the way people of different spoken languages understood what each other were saying in that Nuremberg courtroom. They did this by wearing headphones, into which were being piped real-time translations of the others' words. The movie does eventually put everything in English so an English-speaking audience can understand it all, but the film makes it clear that this is a narrative device, and it never stops using the headphones, even when all the actors are speaking English. 

There is no actual connection between Downfall and Judgment at Nuremberg in terms of the characters, though I did learn from my earlier Downfall piece on The Audient that Albert Speer, the character who defies Hitler's orders, actually apologized for the Nazi atrocities at the Nuremberg trials. He's not a character here, though, as this trial focuses only on four judges who sentenced innocent people to death, with many of their crimes even coming before the war started. 

One of the things that compels me the most about this movie is the convincing portrayals of American actors playing Germans. These include Burt Lancaster, Judy Garland, and most touchingly, Montgomery Clift, who plays a mental simpleton who was rendered sterile by the Nazis' unforgivable medical policies toward people who were anything less than pure, undamaged specimens of their Aryan ideal. 

The movie really belongs to the solemn Maine judge played by Spencer Tracy, Dan Haywood, the film's moral center, who is the shining example of the jurisprudence that underpinned these trials. He receives this responsibility with enormous gravity, understanding the likely guilt of the men on trial, but unwilling to just make this the sort of empty show that these same men presided over when they sentenced innocent men to death. He's truly eager to understand the finer points of what happened, and you can see the struggle on his face the whole time, even as he is developing the closest thing this film has to a romantic relationship with the widow (Marlene Dietrich) of a man who had earlier been executed as the outcome of a similar trial. Even though as an empathetic human being -- and even possibly as a man attracted to Dietrich's character -- he might be inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt in that she didn't know anything, he never lets her off the hook. He knows these issues are thorny but he also knows that the earnest pleas of these people's innocence does not mean they were actually innocent. 

I'm sure there's a lot more I could say about Judgment at Nuremberg -- I wanted to mention also that Maximillian Schell, as the judges' lawyer, is magnificent -- but I've got a trip to prepare for (more on that in the coming days) so I will leave off there. I'll just finish by saying that these two five-star films gave me a lot to think about on Sunday, and I was never bored for a second of their combined 355 minutes. 

We'll be back to just a single movie in June, however, that movie could have been part of a triple feature of long movies about potentially sympathetic Nazis during World War II. That movie will be Wolfgang Petersen's 1981 film Das Boot, which I believe has multiple versions, but IMDB says it's "only" 149 minutes. I feel for sure that I saw a longer one back in 2019, but I'll take whatever version I can find of my #124 film on Flickchart. 

The question of how many times I've seen Caligula

I don't mind telling you, I rewatched Caligula on Friday night only for prurient reasons.

"Too right," you might say, especially if you were Australian. "What other reason to watch Caligula could there be?"

Indeed. It's infamous for its smuttiness. For its artless, gross smuttiness.

When I watched Caligula almost 20 years ago, on Halloween of 2006, I ended up seeing a truncated version of it. It was a lot shorter than I was expecting, somewhere in the neighborhood of 1:45, and had a lot less unsimulated sex in it than I was expecting. None, in fact. Indeed, I figured that version -- the one that famously revolted Roger Ebert and others, the one that so many of the participants were eager to remove their names from, the one that was financed by Penthouse magazine founder Bob Guccione -- was lost to time.

Until I saw that a version of Caligula was on Kanopy, called Caligula: The Ultimate Cut, and it was 2 hours and 58 minutes long.

Hello, unsimulated sex.

Now, I'm not just a perv. If I just want unsimulated sex, of course I can get it in 15 seconds on my nearest web browser. I don't need to watch a movie whose principal photography occurred 50 years ago (released to cinemas three years later). That's even before Debbie Does Dallas. 

No, the real curiosity for me was the proximity of the unsimulated sex to a bunch of actors and actresses who have Dame and Sir in front of their names. (John Gielgud and Helen Mirren got that honorarium, though Malcolm McDowell and Peter O'Toole missed out. I would have thought for sure O'Toole was a Sir. The internet tells me it was offered to him in 1987 but he declined.) I just wanted to experience how unusual that would seem. 

I tried to experience it in 2006, but the nudity in that film was of a rather generic nature, nothing that would have shocked audiences and critics at the time. 

Well, I wasn't going to find that in this Kanopy version either. In fact, I was going to find a version of Caligula that isn't really Caligula at all.

And so we get to my question: Have I seen Caligula once, or twice?

When I started watching, there came a message on screen that almost made me stop watching. As part of a prologue containing about six pages of text with 20 to 40 words on each page, which established the film's troubled and sordid history, there came finally to a page that contained the following:

"This unprecedented edit is composed entirely of previously unseen footage."

What's that you say?

And:

Um, how is that possible?

How indeed. 

How could a film exist that would be considered the "same film" as another film, yet use not a second of the footage from that film?

I couldn't believe it, and in fact, I sort of still don't. 

How can a director get so much coverage as to be able to make -- not him personally, but someone else nearly 50 years later -- an entire almost three-hour movie that is nothing but outtakes? And have that movie be even slightly coherent?

One of the stories in the sordid history of Caligula is how the film ended up costing twice its budget. But even when a film is guilty of those sorts of excesses -- the same sort that a certain sadistic Roman emperor may have been guilty of -- how could there be zero scenes that two different people interpreting the available footage would both agree should be part of the final cut?

How? How? How?

As I was starting to watch the movie, I began doubting that I'd read the prologue's declaration correctly. Because this Caligula does feel like a complete movie, whereas the one I saw 20 years most decidedly did not. In fact, I remember that movie ending and me not even realizing it was about to end. Maybe I'd sort of stopped paying attention.

So I did continue watching Caligula: The Ultimate Cut, despite knowing that my hopes of unsimulated sex had been dashed. It may be that the curiosity of this entirely new footage spurred me on. How else to explain settling in for a three-hour movie you know to be terrible, without the promise of the single thing most responsible for it being terrible, the hardcore porn edited into it by the founder of Penthouse? (In this scenario I am arguing that the thing that makes it terrible is the only thing that makes it worth watching, which is contrary to your approach to most films.)

There were only two things I definitively remembered about Caligula from my first viewing, in terms of specifics. There were general things I remembered, like the fact that the movie had very few close-ups, and seemed to be filmed primarily at the depth of a person watching a play from about the 30th row. Which made it decidedly uncinematic indeed. But specifics? Only two for certain:

1) There's a scene that's stuck with me, where men are buried in the colosseum dirt up to their necks, and are decapitated by some sort of giant threshing machine as spectators watch;

2) Helen Mirren gets naked.

I thought, if I found that either of these things was in the movie, I would have to know that the opening text was lying to me, or that I had misread it.

Sure enough, both scenes came along. Though I should say, Mirren is naked enough in Caligula that I can't say for sure her nude scenes here are the same scenes as the ones I saw previously. 

So let's just focus on the thresher scene.

Indeed, one of the most callous acts by Caligula is to arrest and execute the very man who helped bring him to power. Macro, played by Guido Mannari, strangles the previous emperor, O'Toole's STD-infested Tiberius, when the man is on his death bed but just won't die. Caligula was going to bash his head in but is too much of a coward to do so. (We originally think he's had a crisis of conscience. We later learn that must have been wrong, because Caligula has no conscience.) So Macro does the deed and would justifiably believe he's now going to be in Caligula's good graces forever. Instead, at an opportune moment, Caligula has him arrested, buried to his neck in dirty and run over with a machine that lops his head from his shoulders.

Memorable, right?

And yes I remembered this scene, and yes it played out pretty much like I remembered it playing out.

So am I to believe that there is different footage of the thresher scene that was used instead of the footage I saw in 2006? Isn't one bit of footage of a thresher cutting a man's head off as good as another?

It's almost enough to make me try to track down the vastly inferior version of Caligula I saw previously, though that might be difficult because I think there are like a dozen versions of this movie out there -- probably almost none of which are readily available. (I think I rented it form the library in 2006, though I can't be sure. And that would be a library in Los Angeles anyway.)

So yeah. While I have to take the film's word for it that this is all new footage, I just can't believe that anyone in their right mind would have rejected all this good footage and opted for weaker versions of it. Because the producers of the Ultimate Cut wouldn't have rejected better versions of the footage, merely to be able to see that this version "is composed entirely of previously unseen footage," would they? What they say they wanted, and what they certainly achieved, was to make the best version of Caligula they could, no matter how they had to Frankenstein it.

The whole thing just seems highly implausible.

Even more plausible? I thought Caligula: The Ultimate Cut was pretty good. And certainly very watchable for three hours without me ever getting bored.

What it does that the other version didn't do is it gives a complete arc of this grotesque man, from rise to fall with every step of the way in between. In fact, the footage that they scrounged from over 90 hours of available archival footage only proves just how deliberately this narrative was conceived by director Tinto Brass. Supposedly this also sticks to the script originally written by Gore Vidal, which proves that that, also, was a good script, eager to make a fairly traditional story of the lifecycle of a monster. 

The interest by Penthouse was always in the fact that a true version of Caligula's life could only be depicted with (near) extreme sex, and violence that was more implied than extreme. So even in this version that doesn't contain Guccione's superfluous porn scenes, we get a lot of full nudity for both men and women, some simulated sex involving erect penises (though some of those are not real), and orgy scenes that would make the characters in Eyes Wide Shut blush. The movie still titillates on this basic level, even without the unsimulated sex -- though it should be said that most of it just feels sad and gross, which is also the point. Probably the only actual titillation I experienced was seeing Mirren's sex scenes, since she's such an icon and since she was so terribly beautiful back then. (She's still so beautiful, but a younger generation is only familiar with her from age 50 onward. When she was around 30, I feel like she could have played Helen of Troy.)

So yes, I'm glad I did watch all three hours of what seemed like a very different Caligula to me in many respects, but still familiar from the movie I saw 20 years ago.

As to the ultimate question of its categorization -- whether this should go in my lists as an entirely new movie, or a second viewing of a movie I'd already seen -- I think I'll just have to go with this being the same movie. They can tell me the footage is entirely new until they're blue in the face, but that just does not strike me as credible, so I choose not to believe it. Some of it had to be the same.

And since this is effectively an augmented version of a movie I've already seen, I won't accord it a second spot on my viewing list, just as I haven't accorded their own spot the quite different versions I've seen of Cinema Paradiso, Donnie Darko, Blade Runner and others.

The fact that I can't name a lot more examples than those three indicates how much I don't like watching "unofficial" versions of movies, probably for this very reason. I feel like once you've released a movie into the world, that's it. You can't keep tweaking it because you were unhappy with how it was made the first time. The time for doing that was while you were still in the editing room, even if factors outside your control were controlling you. 

But I guess I'm glad they did it with Caligula, because the special place this film always held in my mind for its notoriety now gets an additional special place, for its successful portrayal of a man of unsurpassed cruelty and baseness.