Characters who play the same song over and over again

I was going to call this post "Characters I don't understand doing weird things," but I thought that would make me seem even more obtuse in my inability to "get" Wong Kar-Wai's Chungking Express than I'm already going to seem. 

And before I go deeper into that, I just wanted to tell you how much it pains me that I didn't get it. 

It pains me generally because I really dislike the experience of not vibing with a movie that I know many people adore. It sends an instant shooting pain to my inner core of self doubt. 

Adore? In fact, Wikipedia has this to say about the movie:

The film premiered in Hong Kong on 14 July 1994 and received critical acclaim, especially for its direction, cinematography, and performances. Since then it has been regarded as one of Wong's finest works, one of the best films of 1994, of the 1990s, of the 20th century, and of all time, as well as one of the best anthology films and romantic comedies ever made.

I'd call that hyperbole, but they've got the receipts. It was at #88 on the 2022 Sight & Sound poll. 

But it also pains me because I had been looking for this movie for a very long time. It had previously eluded me. I'd gone to the various streaming services and rental sources on multiple occasions in the past, and I'd never found it. 

In fact, I was so looking for it, that I watched it on the very day I realized it was available on Kanopy. I mightn't have, but only a few minutes after I saw it was available, I also saw that it was in the "Leaving Soon" category. I didn't bother to test how soon. 

But no, I didn't end up getting it, making this another mortal wound to my credibility as a cinephile. Obviously only one mortal wound is enough to kill you, so I'm using that metaphor poorly.

Instead of further berating myself for not getting on Wong's wavelength, I think I'll tell you instead the ways the movie triggered me. And they have to do with another heralded, influential film that left me even colder than this one, made a decade earlier, and watched by me a decade ago.

I'd already seen plenty of Jim Jarmusch films by the time I saw Stranger Than Paradise in February of 2015. Given that I'd liked most of them, I thought it was time to go back to where it all started. (Almost. He'd made Permanent Vacation four years earlier, which I watched two years later.)

But boy did I loathe Stranger Than Paradise.

There were lots of things I loathed about it, some of which repeated themselves in Chungking Express, where I did not loathe them but I did not like them either. But let's start with the one I've alluded to here in the subject of this post.

One of the things that immediately took me out of the movie was the fact that the character Eva, played by Eszter Balint, is so obsessed with Screamin' Jay Hawkins' "I Put a Spell on You" that it is literally the only song she ever plays. In fact, I think listening to the song might be the only thing she does. She stands around, holding her boom box below her waist, playing "I Put a Spell on You," and when it ends, she starts it over and plays it again. (I don't know if it was a boom box. This is my memory of it.)

I don't believe this as a character trait for a person. 

You may like a song, but you can't listen to the same song over and over again, even if you love it, particularly if you want to continue loving it. You might listen to it a couple times a day, but they would be spread out. And after about a week of this, you'd have gotten it out of your system. 

I don't remember the timeframe of Stranger Than Paradise, but in my memory of it, Eva never gets it out of her system and just keeps listening to this song over ... and over ... and over again.

Incidentally, I think this movie plays a significant role in why I don't like that song. 

It's an unbelievable trait she shares with the character Faye, played by Faye Wong, in Chungking Express.

It's not Screamin' Jay Hawkins that Faye plays. That would be too on the nose for Wong, even though I suspect he was influenced by Stranger Than Paradise in some ways, if not others. 

No, Faye is into "California Dreamin'" by The Mamas and the Papas. This is the song she plays over ... and over ... and over again. 

I do still like "Dreamin'," not so much Screamin'. 

I just don't really understand the narrative function of having a character listen to a song over and over again. Chungking finds this character to be quirky, for sure, but she's also glamorized as pretty cool, with her short hair and her whimsical relationship to her surroundings. Chungking Express is not making fun of Faye. 

The best reason I can tell for Faye listening to this song on repeat is that she really is dreaming of California and she does eventually go there. (Spoiler alert. Wait, you can't spoil a movie like Chungking Express.) However, I find this an excessively literal usage of the song, which is not great either. 

If you don't know the structure of the movie, it basically contains two halves that focus on two different Hong Kong cops and their odd flirtations with two different women (with the shadow of a second woman hanging over both stories). I was cautiously on board with the first one of these, where the cop is in a 30-day period of hoping his ex will get back together with him, and each day of the month of April -- they broke up on the 1st -- he buys a can of her favorite canned pineapples with the expiration date of May 1st, which is also his birthday. If he gets to the end of the month and she has not gotten back together with them, he will give up and consider their relationship to be expired.

In the meantime, he's also sort of becoming interested in a woman he barely meets who wears a rain slicker and sunglasses at all times of the day, who is involved in drug smuggling with Indian mules. To be clear, I am talking about Indian men and women who are smuggling her drugs. This is sort of a weird combination of story bits, but I am still on board.

It's when Wong wipes the slate clean and starts over with two other characters in the second half that my patience got tested and that I decided I was not really liking the movie. 

I appreciated Chungking in a basic visual way. There are some very compelling tricks going on here, some of which involve a blurry slow motion in which forward movement is captured by a bunch of individual frames of movement (not sure how to describe this any better). Then there's also the effect where two planes of motion are established at the same time, the character moving in regular speed in the foreground and the background speeding by. I liked all this stuff. I just wanted it to be in service of a narrative that spoke to me more.

But I should tell you that I was also being further alienated by another of my triggers.

One of the things I don't like about a certain period of Jarmusch, which also reminds me of a certain period of Godard, is that it relies too heavily on guys wearing wifebeater undershirts and smoking cigarettes. This was also something I didn't like about Wong's Days of Being Wild, made four years earlier in 1990, so I suppose it should be no surprise that it also features heavily here.

Without going too much into my personal psychology, the wifebeater, for me, signifies a form of masculinity that I do not relate to. I'm not devoid of traditional forms of masculinity -- I love my sports, for example -- but a guy who would wear around a wifebeater, even in the privacy of his own home, represents to me a guy who would treat women with casual malevolence and imagines himself as some sort of icon of cool. (I should say that I also don't like wifebeaters for practical reasons, which is that I don't like my neck area and I prefer to have tighter fitting undershirts.) 

I mean, I don't suppose I'm telling you anything new here. There's a reason we call it a wifebeater. 

But for directors like Wong and Jarmusch, and I guess Godard, it seems to represent this ideal incarnation of the human male. I feel like they are trying to tell us that these guys are cool and that we are not, unless we are also willing to throw on a wifebeater and smoke a cigarette while directing casual malevolence at a woman.

The malevolence toward women is absent here, but the associations still stick. And so I find myself feeling negatively toward the Chungking charactes who spend so much time in wifebeater undershirts, and also who feel unselfconscious about the tighty whities they're wearing.

Do my personal hangups constitute real reasons not to like a movie? 

They don't, but when you take enough of them in combination, you can see why the movie doesn't work for me:

1) The song "California Dreamin'" gets played a dozen times, because one character keeps playing it;

2) The plot is alienating in its eccentricity, rather than good in its eccentricity;

3) Too many wifebeaters.

If my goal with this post was not to seem obtuse in my reasons for not liking Chungking Express, well, I may have failed in that regard. But unlike some of the characters in this movie, I'm not going out of my way to show you how cool I might be. I'm happy enough being somewhat lame. It's more honest.

And I do wonder if all the others who say they love Chungking Express are being similarly honest with themselves. 

The precise quality of a Thea Sharrock movie

If you don't know who Thea Sharrock is, it wouldn't surprise me. She has directed four features, two of which I've seen (Me Before You and The Beautiful Game) and two of which I haven't (The One and Only Ivan and Wicked Little Letters).

The reason I'm talking about Thea Sharrock today is that the only two movies of hers I've seen are exactly next to each other on my Flickchart.

And why does this matter? 

Because I have 6676 movies on my Flickchart, so any two from the same director being next to each other is highly unlikely -- especially when those are the only two movies I've seen by the director.

I guess I am not the world's biggest Thea Sharrock fan, because those movies are #5645 and #5646 out of those 6676.

If you don't understand how Flickchart works, you are developing a big list of the movies you've seen from your favorite to your least favorite. The movies land in their positions by duelling other movies that are already on the list. So when you add a new movie, it duels against the movie that's at the 50th percentile on your chart. If it beats that movie, it then duels the movie that's at the 75th percentile. If it loses to that movie, it duels the movie at the 62nd and a half percentile. And so forth until an exact percentile is determined and an exact ranking is handed out from the total number of movies on your chart. 

I saw The Beautiful Game in July of 2024, which gives you some idea how far behind I've gotten in adding my movies to Flickchart. I used to add them right after I'd seen them, but then I decided to try to nullify the effect of recency bias, so I vowed to wait to add movies until 30 days after I'd seen them. But then when you get out of the habit, you get way behind, and at times I have been more than two years behind on adding my films. I'm trying to catch up, but I don't devote a huge amount of time to it, so I'm not making much progress.

Anyway, when I went through this process for The Beautiful Game, the last film it didn't beat was Me Before You at #5645, while it did beat Brett Haley's 2020 film All Together Now at #5646. So that's how it ended up at #5646, pushing All Together Now down to #5647.

This would have meant nothing to me, except that part of this process means adding the movie to an Excel version of my Flickchart rankings that I also maintain, sort of as a backup to Flickchart in case it ever goes offline. So when I went to add The Beautiful Game, I was gobsmacked to see Thea Sharrock's name already appearing on the line above it. I wondered if I'd blacked out for a minute and forgotten that I'd already written her name, but written it on the wrong line.

But no, I looked it up, and Sharrock directed Me Before You, the weepie starring Sam Claflin and Emilia Clarke, where he's paralyzed and she is his health aide who falls in love with him. (Vanessa Kirby is also in it, I just noticed, though I would not have known who she was in 2016.) 

The funny thing is, when I saw it was coming up against Me Before You, I clicked on Me Before You rather quickly as my choice. In theory, when you get down to the very end of the ranking process, you should agonize over decisions because the movies are very much of a similar quality, if you've done everything correctly. When you are very quick to choose one of the two, it probably means the one you've chosen is too low on your chart -- an unavoidable hazard of Flickcharting, given that none of the movies would be in exactly their correct spot, and some can end up off by a couple hundred or more. I like Me Before You better than this ranking, though I do have some qualms about how it ends. 

I should pause here to say that I don't hate The Beautiful Game either, though the fact that I apparently only like a thousand films less than it would suggest that. I just remember thinking it was pretty mid. We watched it for and with my son, who loves soccer, but I don't think even he thought very much of it. It was no Next Goal Wins, anyway, which we all loved.

I'm making a whole post out of something that is obviously just a coincidence. If it weren't just a coincidence, and there was actual meaning behind it, something like this would have happened to me previously. But I do think it's interesting to consider whether a director's movies can be winnowed down to a precise mathematical value for their effectiveness. Which in the case of Sharrock, for me anyway, would be the 15th percentile of all the movies I've seen.

That seems way too harsh. So the least thing I can do, to be fair to Sharrock, is watch The One and Only Ivan and Wicked Little Letters. And if I do like them better, I'll certainly come back here and make sure the internet knows that Thea Sharrock deserves better than this assessment. I mean, perhaps she's even reading these words right now -- it never cease to amaze me how high up a little blog like mine appears in Google search result. 

How I got 19 days ahead of last year's pace

When I closed off my 2024 list of movies ranked at a record 177 films, I exhaled massively. Not only is it exhausting to watch that many movies, especially since you've watched about 30 in the final three weeks, but in this case the exhale also was anticipatory. I wasn't going to watch that many movies again in 2025, no way no how.

See, my family and I were going to Europe for six weeks. That would knock me out of contention right there.

Nope.

The other day, after I watched the 126th film I plan to rank in 2025, I checked to see where that pace compared to 2024. Because I list the order I watch the films each year, I was able to find #126 of 2024 (Mikael Hafstrom's Slingshot) very easily, and then only had to check one more place to see what day I watched it.

I watched Slingshot on November 23, 2024. 

I watched #126 of this year, the Jacinda Ardern documentary Prime Minister, on November 4, 2025.

Nineteen days. It's almost enough to pull out an Ed Rooney quote. 

How on earth did this happen?

If I want to answer this question, I can't go through the year and second-guess every bad Netflix movie I've watched. That might depress me too much. And I haven't even watched nearly all of them. I've forcibly skipped some of them that in other years I might have caught.

But I can attack the assumption that I would see fewer movies during the time I was in Europe.

Which seems ridiculous on the surface. I only watched nine movies in the month of September. If you want to find the last month where I watched fewer than nine movies, you have to go back to March of 2014, when I watched only seven, part of a conscious "movie diet" to start that year. That "diet" was designed to help me focus and finally get a job after more than six months in Australia, more than three of which I'd been eligible to work. And I guess that diet worked, since I got a job that month and I've been with the same employer ever since, though in several different roles.

The point is, I actually did what I was trying to do. I enjoyed Europe rather than keeping up my movie pace.

Still: Nineteen days ahead of last year's pace.

Perhaps I couldn't have guessed how much the movies on the plane would fill in the gap.

So let's actually see what number movie I was on on the day I left in August, and the same number I was on the same day the previous year.

The last movie I watched before getting on the plane, on August 20th, was Eddington, my #86 movie of 2025. On August 20, 2024, I watched Doug Liman's The Instigators, which was my #78 movie of 2024. 

So I was already eight movies ahead of my pace this year, even when I left. Perhaps I had been subconsciously front-loading, knowing about the Europe trip. But also, the Europe trip was my second international trip of the year. And on that first trip, I watched exactly eight movies that can be ranked for 2025, on just the plane rides.

So I was on the exact same pace, if you take out that trip. But surely I should have then fallen behind when I went to Europe?

Let's look at my numbers on the date I returned.

We got back to Australia on October 4th. My last movie on the plane was Karate Kid: Legends, my 101st movie of 2025, an increase of 15 from when I left. In 2024 you have go to October 6th to find the closest eligible match, on which date I watched The Platform 2, my 100th movie of 2024, an increase of 22 movies from the total I had on August 20th. 

So being in Europe for six weeks only resulted in seven fewer current-year movies than I'd watched during the same period the year before, which was more than cancelled out by my previous international trip. 

And then since getting back, I've been piling them on, another 25 movies in 34 days -- and that's just the 2025 movies. Actually it's 27, because I've watched two more since I checked my pace. 

What the hell am I going to do?

I know I should not fret about what now seems the likelihood that I will set another viewing record this year. Some people would be proud of that. There was a time when I would have been proud of that.

But I had these wild ideas that I might watch like 25 fewer films this year. Ranking 150 movies would be a perfect number. I don't need to watch more than that, just so an additional couple dozen films can round out the lower tiers of my rankings. 

I'm at 128 now, so to stop at 150, I'd have to watch only 22 more films between now and January 22, when the Oscar nominations are announced. I'm more likely to watch 52 films or even 62 films in that period than I am to watch 22, especially since I keep on hearing about movies I hadn't heard about, and adding them to my Letterboxd watchlist. Which currently has 76 films on it. 

Well I've got at least one idea to slow my roll.

A thing I was going to tell you about separately, though I might as well mention it now, is that I am holding open auditions for a #1 movie this year. I've seen a lot of good films this year, especially recently, when I've added four movies to my top 20 in the past week alone. But I haven't seen the movie, the one I know I would be happy with as a #1 if my ranking deadline were today.

So I think I will set aside some time -- maybe late December, maybe between Christmas and New Year's -- to rewatch the contenders. Not only to decide if any of them is worth being my #1 movie of the year, but also to figure out where they truly belong compared to each other within my top ten, which is also quite a mystery to me right now. 

Even with this, I will probably still break my record, just because the titles keep popping up. 

I'm okay with this. I have to be okay with this. This is what I do.

I just won't ever fool myself again that I might have a "year off" ... unless I actually decide that this is no longer what I do. 

Understanding Editing: The Bourne Ultimatum

This is the second-to-last in a 2025 monthly series watching previous best editing Oscar winners, half of which I've seen and half of which I haven't, to get a better sense of what others think is exceptional editing.

The final film for this series I had not seen previously is The Bourne Ultimatum. Since I saw the first two films in the series, you'd have thought I'd have continued with this one. But I didn't really like those films, which is no surprise because spy movies, generally, do not do a whole lot for me. In fact, I wrote a whole post sort of inspired by this series called "Series I've abandoned." If you want to read that post, it's here. 

Understanding Editing is prompting me to de-abandon the Bourne movies, though I still don't plan to put The Bourne Legacy or Jason Bourne on my watchlist any time soon. You see, The Bourne Ultimatum won an Oscar for its editing in 2007, making it the most recent best editing winner that I hadn't seen. If you want to know now which is the most recent I haven't seen, you have to go all the way back to the 1960s with Z in 1969. 

I was happy to choose this movie because it was not, like some of the other films in this series, a film I could say might have only won the editing Oscar because it was winning all the other Oscars. That should mean that the editing here is being specifically isolated for praise. This is not, though, the only Oscar won by The Bourne Ultimatum. It also won two trophies that are related to the best editing Oscar, best sound mixing and best sound editing. I don't think those are still two separate categories. 

And unlike some other films in this series, it isn't difficult to determine why this film was honored for its editing, at the very least because it could win the Oscar for "most editing," if such an Oscar existed.

I sometimes think of the first decade of the 21st century as a time not dissimilar enough from 2025 to warrant calling it a different era. It may just be that we don't have a lot of nostalgic forms of entertainment that speak specifically to that time. Only in the past few years, I would argue, have we really start to sentimentalize the 1990s, and we may not have gotten there yet with the 2000's. So I still sort of think of it as essentially "now," even though 2007 was 18 years ago. 

It's movies like The Bourne Ultimatum, as well as the 2009 remake of Friday the 13th I watched a few weeks ago, that remind me that this was, indeed, quite a different time.

For one, 2007 appears to be the height of "shaky cam," a favored approach of director Paul Greengrass, which was also popular among many other filmmakers at the time. I can't remember the last time I've seen shaky cam in a new movie, though there may be people who still use it. It was also big in shows like The Office, of course, and for a time, we loved the apparent verisimilitude it brought to what we were watching.

That time is definitely over. As I was watching The Bourne Ultimatum, I kept on thinking to myself how silly it was that the camera is moving -- maybe only a little bit, but still moving -- in scenes even where there is not any sort of kinetic action whatsoever. At the time this felt gritty, but nowadays I don't like it. And no, it's not because I have any sort of issues with motion sickness, I just think it's a lame relic of its time that was probably never a great idea. 

Add in all the crazy editing, and you just have a non-stop dervish of a film that can manage to impress you on a basic technical level while still being unpleasant to watch.

The crazy editing, though, is pretty impressive in and of itself. So let's first of all talk about who did it.

The editor is Christopher Rouse, and this is his only Oscar. He made six films with Greengrass, the last of which was Jason Bourne in 2016. He was also Oscar nominated for United 93 the year before this, far and away my favorite Greengrass film, and far and a way the most vital use of both shaky cam and Rouse's editing style. More recently he edited IF for John Krasinski, in which we no longer see evidence of this style, if it was ever really properly characterized as a signature for him.

The thing Rouse does that's so impressive is that he captures movement within a scene with a fast succession of quick edits, maybe as many as ten over five seconds of screen time. A succession like this can get Jason Bourne up a set of stairs and around a corner in a bunch of half-second shots that are just fast enough to get the job done quickly but just slow enough to allow for a certain continuity within the viewing experience. He's fast without seeming herky jerky, which is kind of the definition of what we look for in superlative editing. 

Needless to say, this approach also pays dividends in fight scenes, where we can see two guys thrown around an apartment, and the various jabs and lunges thrown at one another, without having to linger on any one part of the fight. At worst, this approach is visually incomprehensible, but Rouse pulls it off in a way where we always maintain an understanding of the fight's spatial dynamics while being inevitably excited by the pace of it all.

The thing that may be impressive for other editors, if I'm guessing, is that each cut probably only uses a small fraction of the shot the DP took. While many instances of editing use most of the take, and the skill is in deciding how soon to cut in on the shot and when to cut away from it, Rouse is using only the most representative sliver of each take to forward the action. And from where I sat, he did this very well.

Does that mean I liked watching this movie? No it does not.

Look I'm already not a fan of the Bourne movies, and I did not expect this movie to change my mind. But I think I actually liked it least of the three I've seen, to the extent that I remember the other ones. That runs contrary to the conventional wisdom that this might be the best of the original three, which started out with Doug Liman's original movie before Greengrass took the reins from him. 

If I needed to summarize this movie, it would be thus:

"Jason Bourne ducks in and out of corners of a city while stressed out CIA operators behind closed doors bark orders about how to find him."

That's it. That's the entire plot of this movie, as far as I can tell. 

In looking at the plot synopsis now on Wikipedia, I have determined that there are at least three different cities depicted here, maybe as many as four. Yes, that's four: Moscow, London, Turin and New York. The fact that I don't remember Bourne transitioning between any of these cities tells you how samey everything felt, how much I thought of the movie, and ultimately, by the end, how much I was actually paying attention to it. 

Okay I've got one more of these left. In December I will revisit The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo -- the Fincher version, obviously, as that was the one that won the Oscar. I'm especially interested to appreciate how an excellent technician like Fincher gets the most out of an editor. 

A speculative initiative

There comes a point where you're not getting better at the thing you're doing just by doing it. You have to apply additional thought and training to it, if you want to see markedly better results.

I sometimes feel this way about watching movies, or more to the point, reviewing and writing about movies.

I can watch as many movies as I want, delve into the classics as regularly as I am able to find them, but those experiences are not fuelling my greater film knowledge unless I am supplementing them with something else. Something more.

And more, I have determined, means reading.

When the Filmspotting podcast spotlights new monthly subscribers on each episode, an incentive for creating more of us, it will run down that person's answers to a variety of questions. And one of them is their favorite book on film. 

I don't have a lot of favorite books on film. Because I don't read a lot of books on film.

And that, I have determined, is about to change.

A couple years ago, I don't remember exactly when, someone gifted me Quentin Tarantino's film memoir? is that what it is? called Cinema Speculation. It was probably for Christmas. I remember thanking whoever it was, assuming they were present in the room with me, and thinking "That's cool. I like Quentin Tarantino, but I don't really read books about film."

And why don't I do this, exactly?

For one I am a slow reader. I read about six to eight books per year. I might be able to get through more, but I do tackle some long ones -- the one I read in Europe was 650 pages. The bigger problem, though, is that if I'm not liking a book, I don't stop reading it. I just read it very slowly, so that I might end up wasting four months on a book I didn't like very much, when I could have been reading three others.

As a result of this slow pace, there are so many classics I've never read, plus I'd like to keep up on my share of new fiction. Then there are potentially biographies or other non-fiction books. To say nothing of the fact that in theory, I'd like to re-read some personal favorites. I re-watch favorite movies all the time, but due to the far greater time commitment, I almost never re-read books that I love. 

Doesn't leave a lot of time for reading books about movies ... especially when I'm already devoting so much of my time to movies. 

But am I losing out? Is there some indefinable part of my knowledge as a cinephile that is incomplete because I'm not getting deep, academic dives into the texts of these films, and into their making? And wouldn't I like to be just a bit more conversant about the origins of Hollywood and those who ran it a hundred years ago? To say nothing of all the greats who came after that, even ones from my own time about whom I can and probably should know more?

I'm not sure that Cinema Speculation will give me a huge amount of that. But I've got to start somewhere.

And once I've started, I'd like to make every second book I read a book about movies.

I don't think this is a sustainable pace in the long term. But I think it's something I can try to carry out at least for the next year, and see if I feel, I don't know, more complete as a cinephile after that period. 

If I don't, I can just go back to reading whatever, whenever.

I also think that if I am always trying to get to my next book that is not "homework" -- enjoyable homework, mind you, but homework of a sorts nonetheless -- it may increase my overall pace of reading. Which I think would be a good thing in my general quest to read more. 

I don't know that I will report on these books to you here on the blog. I certainly won't commit myself to doing it. I suppose it depends on whether something I've read inspires me to write.

But I think this is worth doing, and I think I will do it, and we'll just see how I go. 

The Pixar directing quagmire

There are some credits given out rather loosely on a film. For example, a film might have dozens of executive producers, as that tends to be the kind of credit you give to someone when the actual thing they've done for the film is not easy to quantify -- or even sometimes if they just ask for it. It increases their ownership of the film in ways that can be useful. (This was explained to me recently as a reason Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross are listed as executive producers on Tron: Ares.)

Directing, you would think, should not be such a credit given out willy nilly. But sometimes it's hard to tell, especially with films where the director is not yelling "Action!" and "Cut!" because there is never any camera rolling. (I know it isn't actually the director who usually yells that. Just go with me here.)

Pixar makes movies like this. For every Toy Story, where John Lasseter is listed as the director and that's that, there is a Brave, where IMDB lists Mark Andrews, Brenda Chapman and Steve Purcell all as directors. I believe in some cases, one of them is listed as a co-director, which is just all the more confusing for me. 

I'm not going back to the credits of Brave to see how it's listed, not when I have a recent example from finally watching Elio the other night.

I'll just get this out of the way now, especially after I posted earlier this year that Elio was the first Pixar movie in ages I had intentionally passed on seeing in the theater: I didn't love Elio, but I certainly did not hate it either. In the end, I think I liked it better than I thought I was going to like it. Three stars.

As with most films, especially animated films, there are two phases to the credits: 1) a first section of credits that gives place of pride to individual names or pairs of names, while being designed according to the design details of the film and possibly even featuring additional footage, and 2) the second, longer section where all the remaining names steadily scroll by.

In Elio's first section of credits, the directors are listed as Madeline Shafarian, a name I did not know, and Domee Shi, who directed the most recent Pixar film I've truly loved, Turning Red. However they determine this at Pixar, Shi was the only credited director on Turning Red, and the positive feelings I ended Elio with, I attributed to her.

When the second phase of the credits rolled, I noticed a very odd first one:

                                                            Directed by
                                                          Adrian Molina

Huh?

Not co-directed, not assistant-directed, just directed. As though serving in contrast to Shafarian and Shi, or undermining them.

Now, this was also a name I recognized. Molina got a co-director credit on Coco, the Pixar film I loved most prior to Turning Red. Where, at the time, I wondered what the nature of his contribution was relative to Lee Unkrich, the man with the full directing credit on that film.

I fished around a bit on the internet and got some generic AI slop about directing credits being based on union rules, but then I also found a story that specifically addressed the role of co-director Angus McLane on Finding Dory, which was directed by Pixar regular Andrew Stanton. It is clear from Stanton's quotes in that article that the co-director has a lesser role, sort of a "jack of all trades" role, but that the role is indispensable. Of course that's what a generous collaborator would say.

The thing is, in Elio, there's no co-director credit. There are three distinct directing credits presented in the credits in two different ways.

Because Shafarian and Shi get the splashy credit, it looks like they are the film's "real" directors. However, the placement of Molina's credit, at the very top of the scroll credits, seems to say "Whatever we told you earlier, forget that. This is the guy who really did the job."

Well it turns out I just googled the wrong thing. My second google reveals that Molina was the original director of Elio, but left due to a change in the creative direction of the film. It couldn't have been a very acrimonious departure because it says that Molina is currently working on Coco 2. 

And this is where the union likely comes into play. Because of the work Molina put in on the film, he had to be credited in some way, but co-director was not correct because his directing work was not contemporaneous to that of Shafarian and Shi, nor should it suggest that he worked in any capacity as a helper to them. 

As a film critic, I think I just prefer it when it's some auteur like Martin Scorsese, and I can just assign him credit or blame for everything that works or doesn't work in the film. 

Scary clown movie #437

I know there's nothing new under the sun. But I think not enough of us are remarking on the fact that some things are totally, completely, and in all other ways not new, way more than other things.

Like, scary clowns.

There are enough truly iconic scary clowns in our culture that you'd think they'd have cornered the market on scary clowns. Yet people continue to give us new scary clowns.

The latest example -- that I've seen anyway, there may have been others since then -- is Clown in a Cornfield, which I watched on Halloween night.

You'd think this movie had great promise, considering that it was from the same guy who directed the horror comedy classic Tucker and Dale vs. Evil. Then again, that movie came out in 2010, and before Clown, he'd only had one other film in between, 2017's Little Evil, which was not great.

Then there was the potentially promising fact that the title states what it is in an exact enough way to be cheeky and postmodern, kind of like Snakes on a Plane. 

Nope. It's just a bad horror movie with people wearing clown masks.

Instead of going off on Clown in a Cornfield specifically -- which I could if I had the energy, or if I thought it was worthy even of my extended scorn -- I'm going to show you how many other examples there are of movies with scary clowns, to indicate the creative bankruptcy of the very idea. A list seems as good a way of going about it as any, though don't read anything into the order.

1) Pennywise the Clown in It and It: Chapter 2. Started as a Stephen King novel, of course, and then became a TV movie in the early 1990s. Now there's also a new TV show.

2) The scary clown in Poltergiest. A classic. 

3) Clown, Jon Watts' 2014 film in which a man gets trapped in a clown outfit that turns him into a killer.

4) Speaking of killers, there's Killer Clowns from Outer Space.

5) Art the Clown is the star of the grotesquely violent Terrifier films.

6) Lest we forget, the Joker is essentially an evil clown, even if Batman fans would probably not like to characterize him in such a reductive way.

7) There's Captain Spaulding, Sid Haig's character in House of 1000 Corpses, which he reprised in two other films.

8) The Spawn villain, played by John Leguizamo in a movie I didn't see, is a clown.

That's eight. I guess that means there must be 429 others. Or 428, if you consider Clown in a Cornfield itself to be #437.

And then I asked myself: 

Couldn't I find eight other examples of a thing in our culture that had repeated itself in a similar way, yet it doesn't offend me?

Maybe it's just that it feels like there is a specificity to the clown that makes us note the repetitions. The first person who came up with the idea of an evil clown landed on something quite complicated in the ways it scares us. 

For one, there is the inherent irony. A clown, as originally conceived, is supposed to bring joy to children in whatever way it can manage. So when you make this joy machine a vessel for murder and mayhem, you are talking about the very dissolution of our trust of things that are supposed to be innocent and make us feel safe. It's a terrifying assault on our basic sense of trust.

But because of the clown's outrageous appearance, it has never felt like a "safe" joy delivery device, like a teddy bear or, I don't know, a kitten. A person who would choose to dress themselves this way has to have a bit of screw loose, don't they? If we're being reductive, the need for attention, which would seem to be a common trait for most clowns, is a very close psychological neighbor to many darker and more desperate impulses. To become a clown is, in a way, to warn the world that there might be something wrong with you. 

The irony, though, is what I think makes the clown killer distinctive, and why I think we notice examples of it more than the -- literally this time -- 437 movies about killer sharks. 

And that's also why we seem to love killer animatronic characters from pizza restaurants. There have been multiple examples of that, too. Maybe not eight and certainly not 437, but in the past few years alone we've gotten Five Night's at Freddy's (with a sequel to follow this month) and Willy's Wonderland, the Nicolas Cage starrer. I could think of more examples, I'm sure, if I put my mind to it.

Really, anything that could exist to entertain children has been made into a horrible killing machine at one point or another. I mentioned teddy bears a moment ago. There's a killer teddy bear in that movie Imaginary, isn't there? And I'm sure that's hardly the only example of that.

But if we really want to look into why the maker of another prospective killer clown movie shouldn't be too chastened by a post like the one I'm currently writing, we shouldn't forget that the movie business is, first and foremost, a business. And you know what? Movies about deranged clowns make buck.

If we've learned anything about this business, it's that you give people more of what they want, rather than less of it. No disdainful observer pushing his glasses up his nose about how many killer clown movies there have been should dissuade you about greenlighting another and reaping the profits of such a decision. Heck, we might even grant the makers of Clown in a Cornfield with an uncommon desire to differentiate themselves from previous examples. 

Here's two ways:

1) This is the first movie where a killer clown has been in a cornfield!

2) This is the first movie where a killer clown has not actually been insane!

It's that second one that sort of holds some sway for me. Unlike, I believe, all the examples I mentioned previously, the clowns in this movie are not notably insane, and I guess here I need to give you a very belated SPOILER WARNING for Clown in a Cornfield.

It turns out there is not just one killer clown, but multiple local citizens wearing killer clown masks, based on the mascot for a corn syrup made in this town, who goes by the name of Frendo. These citizens, who include the mayor and the police chief, have some sort of conspiratorial agenda that I won't bother to get into here. 

The point is, they don't just have a screw loose. Yeah, you have to be a little touched in the head if you are resorting to killing people, but they have a mission that is something other than chaos. They're more like the various people who have worn a Ghostface mask in various Scream movies, none technically insane, but all with some sort of master plan for revenge or to achieve a particular outcome. 

This also, however, just makes Clown in a Cornfield more cynical. It doesn't even have the courage of any demented convictions. It's just wearing a mask to make money, and it doesn't really matter what's on the mask as long as it will make the money. 

Promising newcomer Jennifer Lopez

Do you know how old Jennifer Lopez is?

She's 56.

Do you know how long Jennifer Lopez has been famous?

About 30 years. Her first big movie, Money Train, came out in 1995, and Selena was two years after that. And this is to say nothing of her music career, which started a bit after that and is likely the thing that has made her the most famous. 

And yet Hoyts, in their incomparable wisdom, has seen it fit to put the following advertisement on my phone for Kiss of the Spider Woman, the remake of Hector Babenco's 1985 film starring Sonia Braga, Raul Julia and William Hurt:

Yes that describes her performance as "an extraordinary, star-making performance."

Like her or don't like her, it doesn't matter. If Jennifer Lopez is not already a star, then I don't know who is. 

Horror remakes: Night of the Living Dead

And I conclude on Halloween -- as a posting day, not a viewing day -- with my final horror remake of October 2025. 

Last night I finished with Tom Savini's 1990 remake of George Romero's Night of the Living Dead, and there was a point where I was considering making this a double feature of NOTLD remakes. It was hard to resist Jeff Broadstreet's 2006 version, only 80 minutes long and starring Sid Haig. But it's been a busy week at work and of finalizing my son's Halloween costume -- he's going as the Reverse Flash -- so even an additional 80 minutes was too much.

I suppose there's some scenario where I watch a horror remake tonight, but I seriously doubt it. I'll most likely be watching something with my wife, and I need to get busy figuring out what that is. 

And I have to say, it was a good way to go out. I pretty much loved this movie.

First though, Savini, who has been in my viewing life multiple times this month.

This would certainly be a name familiar to people who read Fangoria and watched a lot of horror movies when they were growing up. I didn't watch a lot of horror movies back then, but I've since made up for it. The name was familiar to me. Beyond that I was a bit in the dark.

And then I rewatched From Dusk Till Dawn, where Savini plays the hilariously named Sex Machine. They talked about him on the podcast that prompted the rewatch, The Next Picture Show, and I have since looked him up and realized he was an effects artist who worked for Romero on five of his movies, including two in the Dead series. Since he's also an actor and stuntman, it seems pretty clear how he would become an iconic personality to a certain subset of filmgoers and filmmakers tuned in to a certain frequency. 

Me? I'm just getting all my exposure to him in one month.

And of course he would have had Romero's blessing to make a remake of Night of the Living Dead, whether this was something he needed or not. (I'm not currently checking Romero's right to decide who remakes that movie, but presumably he does have some right.) In fact, even more than having Romero's blessing, Romero wrote him the screenplay for this remake, a role he split with John A. Russo. Romero is also credited for the screenplay of Broadstreet's film, so whether he was happy just to keep churning out remake scripts, or was credited more as the author of the original work that was being adapted, is not totally clear to me.

But that does bring me to another point: This is a proper remake! Like, the plot is almost identical to the original! Its primary deviation is how the movie ends. This is a refreshing way to end my month of remakes, many of which were more like reboots or reheats of the original, with differing plots. Nice to finish with a pure example of the theme I set out to explore this month.  

I wasn't sure what I was going to think of this film in its opening minutes. There's a lot of ADR in that opening scene. As we follow the car driven by Barbara (Patricia Tallman) and her brother Johnny (Bill Moseley) up to the cemetery where they will be visiting the grave of their mother, we hear an entire conversation between the two before we even see them on screen, with the car filmed from on high. This looks fairly cheap, or like they forgot to shoot this dialogue at the time they had the actors available on set, so they had to record it after the fact and dub it over. It was not a promising beginning, and put me in the mind of poorly made B movies like Manos: The Hands of Fate. 

Never is there another moment that feels cheap in this way. Oh this is not a film with a huge budget, that's not what I'm trying to say. However, it is a well-made film that uses its budgetary constraints to forge creative solutions, which it does throughout.

You'd think you'd judge the success of a zombie film on its zombie effects (good, but maybe not standouts like I was expecting from a person with Savini's reputation) or on the kills involving the zombies (also fine but not memorable). What made the movie really click in for me was the choices made by Patricia Tallman as Barbara.

It's not clear to me that Tallman is what you would call a great actress. Of her 52 credits on IMDB, the most recent of which was in 2023, many are actually uncredited appearances in bigger films, like two Austin Powers movies and two Roland Emmerich movies. She's very pretty -- in fact, she reminded me of someone I went to high school with -- but she obviously did not make a lasting name for herself in the industry, despite some more high-profile work. (She appeared in 47 episodes of Babylon 5, for example.)

But it's not often that I've so believed a person's reaction to a sudden zombie apocalypse.

In most movies where characters suddenly have to fight off zombies, they adapt to the scenario pretty quickly. There's some initial shock and disbelief, but 15 minutes later they're like "Okay, there are zombie. What's our plan?" 

Not Tallman as Barbara. She gets fucking rattled by this. When Tony Todd's Ben -- great choice, by the way, for the role originally played by Duane Jones -- has to introduce himself to her and start to get her focused on a solution to their problem, she is initially speechless. She can't even produce words for about the first five minutes of screen time after their first respite from attacking zombies. This is not to say she's weak or incapable in this situation -- she proves herself exceptionally capable, almost too capable, as the movie goes on. It's that her brain simply can't comprehend this change in circumstances, which, as far as she can tell, may apply to the entire planet, but at the very least the patch immediately surrounding her. She shakes and stares and just looks shell-shocked as hell. It's a great performance. Even after she's started using various weapons to dispatch various zombies, eventually with great skill, she still occasionally succumbs to the disbelief of this situation. After putting one particular woman out of her misery, she lets out the words "Oh God!" in this sort of rapid, involuntary shriek. 

Details like this matter, and Savini gets it. It's been too long since I've seen the original to remember how well Judith O'Dea comports herself in this role, but if it were as good as Tallman does it, I think I'd remember it. Wikipedia does say that Barbara spends much of that movie in a catatonic state, which is not what this version of the character does, and it's probably right to give her a little more agency than she had in a film made 22 years earlier. So O'Dea may have done well with that, but maybe I don't remember it because there was a part of me that also loathed her for never becoming any more useful after the initial shock wore off. 

I enjoyed the dynamics between the other characters who eventually arrive in the house, which seem to mirror those from the original, now that I'm fully reminding myself of those details through the Wikipedia plot synopsis. Many of those details are the same, though there's a pretty big difference in how this movie ends, which I won't spoil if anyone reading this wants to treat themselves -- and it is a treat -- to this Night of the Living Dead on Halloween. There's a very good copy available for free on YouTube.

Anyway I will say, without going into specifics, that there's something about the ending of this movie that reminds me of the ending of 28 Years Later, though I'll be vague about what that is. I wouldn't be surprised if Boyle was paying homage to Savini, in his way. 

Does Savini get to be the auteur here, and not Romero? If a different choice is made in this movie than in the original, my inclination is to attribute that change to the person who was not involved with the original. Though if Romero wrote the script for both, perhaps he intentionally made the ending different, just to explore another way this could have gone. 

I do think it's a bit sad that I've written this whole post about a movie I really liked and not really said much about the gore and makeup effects. They are pretty tame by today's standards, though I never thought they were less than effective. And though I'm not usually "scared" by a zombie movie, I did find some of these walking dead to be eerie and unsettling in ways that approached fear, and the way Savini prepped them for our viewing pleasure certainly had something to do with that.

Happy Halloween to you and yours. 

Tirsesome tropes: Talking through the dial tone

Please note: The term "trope" is used very loosely in this periodic series. 

So I saw Roofman on Wednesday night, and all I have to say is "Why do movie characters always talk through the dial tone?"

(Actually I might have a second Roofman post, but tomorrow's Halloween so it will have to wait until the weekend.)

So what I mean is, this old trope, which appeared again in Roofman:

A character gets hung up on. We know this because we, the audience, can hear the dial tone on the other end. 

But apparently this character can't hear it, because the character keeps saying "Hello? [Name]? HELLO??"

So there are two choices here of what the character thinks is going to happen:

1) The dial tone exists simultaneously with a connected phone line. If the character keeps asking for someone on the other end to respond, just desperately enough, maybe a voice will emerge from behind the dial tone to continue the conversation.

2) The line has actually been disconnected, but by repeating the other conversant's name urgently, the line will magically reconnect.

I guess it's too dramatically flat to have a character just immediately give up when he/she hears the dial tone. The realistic sequence of events would be just to look a little bit embarrassed or frustrated and hang up the phone. 

But here are a few realistic alternatives to that:

1) Look at the reliever in disbelief. It won't rejuvenate the call, but it will effectively express the character's disbelief that it has come to this, being hung up on by the person on the other end, this person who was once so close to them.

2) Scream "Fuck!" and hang up the phone violently.

3) Scream "Fuck!" and smash the receiver against the phone chassis repeatedly until that cap that screws on the mouthpiece comes flying off.

4) Hang up quickly but efficiently in order to dig into your pockets for more coins in order to call them back.

Though I suppose, sometimes in moments of high stress, we can resort to the dumbest option possible: continuing to speak into a dead phone in the vain hope that you've mistaken the dial tone for a train passing by the other person's house, or a laser ray beaming them into an alien spaceship.  

My top ten five desert island movies from the same five years

That is a very complicated subject for this post. I will need to explain. 

Filmspotting recently (a couple months ago) tasked themselves with finding the answer to a specific question, the kind that my Flickchart puts me in a perfect position to answer:

"If you could take only five films with you to a desert island, and those five films had to come from the same five-year period, which five would they be?"

Now, my Flickchart would give me a very definitive answer to this question, if my ranking on Flickchart were an exact correlation to how much I want to rewatch a movie. If we assume that my #1 movie is the movie I want to rewatch the most, and each after that is a movie I want to watch progressively a little less each time, it's easy to come up with this answer. I just go down the list and cluster movies together until I get five from the same five-year period.

But we all know that this logic does not work perfectly. With this sort of thought experiment -- which the Filmspotting guys talk about in terms of an incinerator, as in, all films not chosen get sent to the incinerator -- it's never as simple as that. 

For one thing, you have moods. You want to feed all your different moods with as much of a diversity of options as possible. I mean, let's face it -- you will get sick of all of these movies long before you die on this desert island, but the idea is to forestall that for as long as possible, and variety helps accomplish that.

And then there are some films that you might like "better" than other films, but those other films are "better quality" films, so you have them ranked higher. We could get off track on a "best vs. favorite" argument here if we wanted to, but it's clear that in this particular thought experiment, "favorite" should win out. But is that how I've been ranking my Flickchart, with any consistency?

So instead of just choosing the first clustering of five that came up, I decided to give myself ten different options of five-year spans. 

Now, some of these clusterings actually cover multiple five-year spans. How is that possible? Well, I'll explain, and my first clustering is a perfect example of it. All five films in that first cluster come from three consecutive years, so that means they are the best five films of three different five-year spans: the one that ends with the last film, the one that starts with the first film, and then of course the one in the middle, where the first film is not the first year and the last film is not the last year. 

And as I was going through, I also came across films that couldn't strengthen any group because all the eligible year bracketings were already filled up with earlier films. 

So my top ten groups of films actually cover 15 different five-year spans, those that begin with 1981, and then begin with every year from 1983 to 1996. Sorry 1982 to 1986, your range got left out in the cold. 

These were expected results. In 1981 I turned eight and in 1996 I turned 23, and that last range would have covered films until the year I turned 27. All parts of my formative years becoming a cinephile. There may be plenty of cinephiles who are in love with periods of cinema long before their birth, but my cinephilia has always had a healthy dose of nostalgia, and I don't apologize for that. 

But how am I going to choose between these? I'll give you each of the options and then tell you what I settled on, with comments on each. I'll list them in order of how quickly they satisfied the five-film requirement on my chart, but I will list the films chronologically within each grouping. 

1. 1992 to 1996 or 1993 to 1997 or 1994 to 1998 - Pulp Fiction (1994) (#3), Toy Story (1995) (#7), Fargo (1996) (#8), The Cable Guy (1996) (#16), Bound (1996) (#19)

Comment: So I can get five movies from three different five-year spans, all within my top 19 films on Flickchart. Obviously I could be happy with this group, but it's a little light on comedy -- though I suppose both Pulp Fiction and Fargo have their lighter moments. Plus the fact that it takes care of three different time spans could potentially give this an edge as a tiebreaker. 

1. 1995 to 1999 - Toy Story (1995) (#7), Fargo (1996) (#8), The Cable Guy (1996) (#16), Bound (1996) (#19), The Iron Giant (1999) (#10)

Comment: You'll see I've listed this as #1 again because Bound at #19 also completes this five-year span, which is just shifted one up from the previous group. So we lose Pulp Fiction but we gain The Iron Giant. Not sure if I need two animated movies though.

3. 1985 to 1989 - Back to the Future (1985) (#2), Raising Arizona (1987) (#1), The Princess Bride (1987) (#11), Say Anything (1989) (#18), Do the Right Thing (1989) (#20)

Comment: This group is hard to resist because it contains my top two movies of all time. We'll see how much a factor that ends up being in the final analysis.  

3. 1986 to 1990 or 1987 to 1991 - Raising Arizona (1987) (#1), The Princess Bride (1987) (#11), Say Anything (1989) (#18) , Do the Right Thing (1989) (#20), Goodfellas (1990) (#13)

Comment: This is a similar thing as my first two, where we're shifting forward one year. In this case the movie we're losing is my #2, Back to the Future, which is not great. But gaining Goodfellas adds a dose of real cinephile credibility and otherwise gives additional variety to the portfolio. 

5. 1996 to 2000 - Fargo (1996) (#8), The Cable Guy (1996) (#16), Bound (1996) (#19), Run Lola Run (1998) (#21), The Iron Giant (1999) (#10)

Comment: Same as 1995 to 1999 except we gain Run Lola Run in the middle of the range and lose Toy Story. I like the addition of the first foreign language film and don't mind losing one of the two animated movies from that group. 

6. 1983 to 1987 or 1984 to 1988 - WarGames (1983) (#22), This Is Spinal Tap (1984) (#9), Back to the Future (1985) (#2), Raising Arizona (1987) (#1), The Princess Bride (1987) (#11)

Comment: New additions are WarGames and This Is Spinal Tap, the latter being my #9 but not having fit into one of these ranges yet. Strong on comedy, and I think the addition of WarGames could quicken my pulse, but maybe I don't need to contemplate the end of the world too much when I'm already on a desert island and have lost 99.99999% of the films ever made. 

7. 1988 to 1992 or 1989 to 1993 - Do the Right Thing (1989) (#20), When Harry Met Sally (1989) (#26), Say Anything (1989) (#18), Goodfellas (1990) (#11), Unforgiven (1992) (#25)

Comment: Welcome to the show, When Harry Met Sally and Unforgiven. A much-needed influx of comedy for this range, offset by Unforgiven being particularly humorless. I might need more comfort and smiles than this group can give me. 

8. 1981 to 1985 - Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) (#4), Time Bandits (1981) (#27), Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982) (#23), This is Spinal Tap (1984) (#10), Back to the Future (1985) (#2)

Comment: Our earliest range of five years gets in a whole host of new titles, plus This Is Spinal Tap and Back to the Future. I love the diversity some of the new titles bring, but this group may be a little laugh deficient as well.

9. 1990 to 1994 - Goodfellas (1990) (#13), Defending Your Life (1991) (#30), Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) (#31), Unforgiven (1992) (#25), Pulp Fiction (1994) (#3)

Comment: A few new titles here doing good work, but again this group won't be getting a lot of guffaws from me, and I'm going to need them. (I think we have to assume a neutral emotional state, even though I mentioned earlier the idea of despairing about the end of the world.)

9. 1991 to 1995 - Defending Your Life (1991) (#30), Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) (#31), Unforgiven (1992) (#25), Pulp Fiction (1994) (#3) Toy Story (1995) (#7)

Comment: And here's the same as the previous group, only it gains Toy Story and loses Goodfellas.

I might be able to keep going down and eventually come across a perfectly diverse group of five. And I'd be interested to see what my first date range from the 21st century would look like. But I can't sit here and do this all day.

So ... what to choose here? And how to choose it?

I'm tempted to tell you why I'm ruling each one out, but instead I'll just tell you what I decided to rule in and why:

If I had been a guest host on this episode of Filmspotting, I would have chosen 1983 to 1987 or 1984 to 1988.

Although I've said throughout this exercise that humor would be important to me, I've decided that lightness of tone might be even more important, and this span has five movies with light tones: Back to the Future, Raising Arizona, This Is Spinal Tap and The Princess Bride. (Yep, I am down with the comedic sensibilities of 1980s Rob Reiner.) All of those movies will make me laugh, but more importantly, they'll also make me feel good. And then WarGames can jangle my nerves a bit whenever I need a little bit of that.

Plus the fact that this time bracket also includes my #1 and my #2, which is hard to compete with. 

The cherry on top was when I added up their Flickchart rankings -- remember we're going golf scores here, where the lower the score, the better -- and you get a 45 for these two year ranges. The next closest is 52, which is the next group up, 1985 to 1989.

These two groups have three movies in common: Back to the Future, Raising Arizona and The Princess Bride. The group I've gone with gives me WarGames and This Is Spinal Tap on one side, while the group I didn't choose gives me Say Anything and Do the Right Thing on the other. I'm essentially choosing the first two over the second two.

When Adam on Filmspotting was talking about how he chose his date range -- a much harder task when you don't have a Flickchart -- he started out by reviewing their previous episode in which they presented their ten choices for the Sight and Sound list, to see if there was chronological consolidation among his choices. A good way to start the process, and it ended up being the way his co-host, Josh, settled on a range. 

Adam said he ruled out one particular range because the movie he loved so much that might have helped anchor him to that range -- Grave of the Fireflies -- is not a movie he wants to watch over and over on repeat. It's too glum. If you've seen it, you know what he's talking about. 

And that's my problem with Do the Right Thing, I guess. Even though the range I've chosen gives me no real credibility with cinephiles as they are classically defined -- where the selection of Lee's movie would have -- I have to be honest with myself that I don't want to watch on repeat a movie where people spew hatred for an entire movie until it boils over into chaos and death. This probably explains why I've only seen Do the Right Thing once in the past 25 years, whereas all the movies in the group I've chosen have gotten multiple viewings during that period, some as many as four or five. 

Arbitrary? Perhaps. Defensible? Absolutely.

For the record, Adam chose 1979 to 1983, and he selected one film from each year: All That Jazz (1979), The Empire Strikes Back (1980), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), The World According to Garp (1982) and The Right Stuff (1983). I can get behind this list because three of these films are also in my top 150 and I really like the other two. When I get around to ranking The Right Stuff, which I only just watched in August, it'll do very well on my chart. Adam clearly went for the comfort of nostalgia picks, though he won't be laughing a lot. (The most humor might be in The Right Stuff, actually, which I characterized as a comedy when I wrote about it on The Audient.)

Josh? He went arthouse, or rather, cinephile, as the period he chose reached its completion two decades before he was born. His range of 1951 to 1955 allowed him Ikiru (1952), Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), Rear Window (1954), Ordet (1954) and Pather Panchali (1955). Rear Window and Ordet are both top 150 movies for me, but I found Gentlemen significantly inferior to the similar Some Like It Hot and I couldn't crack Pather Pachali. I haven't even seen Ikiru, but I've seen its remake, Living. I think he will be starved for films with more entertainment value after a couple watch throughs of these films. 

Anyway, this was a fun exercise, and I hope it was at least sort of fun for you to read. 

Horror remakes: The Toxic Avenger

It was only 20 months ago that I saw Lloyd Kaufman's The Toxic Avenger (1984) for the first time. I'd been on a little bit of a Troma jaunt, in which I also saw Frankenhooker and Tromeo & Juliet. I'm going to leave that sentence as is, even though I just checked and Troma actually had nothing to do with Frankenhooker. In any case, I had only recently seen both those films and was feeling very receptive to the sort of thing Troma had to offer.

It's a bit of a shame, then, that Kaufman's film spoke to me little enough that I can't even really tell if Macon Blair's new Toxic Avenger -- which actually first saw the light of day in 2023, before finally getting a proper release in August -- is a remake of that film or not.

Certainly, it doesn't exist in a world in which the Toxic Avenger, and by that I mean the person not the movie, exists and is part of the characters' lore, which distinguishes it from other not-quite-remakes I've seen this month like I Know What You Did Last Summer and Friday the 13th. However, it's not quite a remake in the sense that the title character is an adult looking after his stepson after the stepson's mother died, whereas I'm pretty sure the original Toxic Avenger was a high school kid. 

Actually, I just looked it up, and Mitch Cohen, who played that character, was 32 at the time the film was released -- he just looked like a gawky teenager. That's pretty different, though, from the guy who plays the character here, our treasured Peter Dinklage, who is 56. 

Hey, did I expect every movie I watched this month to be a shot-by-shot remake like Psycho?

There's another thing I should tell you about Toxic Avenger -- or Toxic Avenger Unrated, as it is sometimes billed -- or actually two things:

1) I paid $14.99 AUD to rent it. That's about $9.77 USD. 

2) I watched it as the second movie of a horror double feature, and I was really, really tired.

The first is pertinent because I had said, earlier on this month, that I didn't want to pay the full $19.99 rental price just so I could watch it in this month of horror remakes. And that was a $19.99 USD rental price, which would have been closer to $30 AUD. And so indeed, I did not. I paid half that, which is not really what I wanted to do either, but as I mentioned a few days ago, this theme is starting to run dry for me and I still have another four days until it's Halloween.

The second is pertinent because it explains why, two days later, I can barely remember Blair's new movie. 

I know I generally liked it, and I do have some general thoughts on it.

One is that I was really glad they cast Dinklage in this role, where it does not seem his size is a relevant part of the story. Or rather, it's not relevant at all when he's just a janitor looking after his stepson, one with an aggressive brain cancer who is likely to die in a year's time. (Humorously, every time the doctor gives him bad news, he engages in an excessive amount of small talk before getting to the news, which drives Dinklage's understandably nervous character crazy.) No one comments on his size and we are not meant to question why the boy's full-height mother went for him. Dinklage has done a good job making his height an unimportant aspect of the movies in which he's cast, and this was another example of that. (I do find it a little disappointing that Dinklage did not actually get made up in the Toxic Avenger practical effects suit. Wikipedia says it was actress Luisa Guerrero, so I guess not even a man, who did that work.)

However, I do think that Blair found there to be something that was right about Dinklage that made him worth casting in this movie, perhaps some sort of match with the toxic sludge superhero we see in the second half. And indeed, some characters do refer to him as a "little guy" in that form -- though at that point, they don't recognize him as the janitor, thought to be dead, who is revived by the rejuvenative effects of the sludge on his person. I'm not sure if this was the intention, but it has the impact of suggesting people are polite enough not to talk about height with a human little person, but it's still something they'd mention if they thought they were dealing with an actual monster.

The other thing is that I was surprised how little this film deserved what I would consider the very prominently listed notion that it is unrated. The first film in the evening's double feature, which I watched with my wife and my older son, was Osgood Perkins' The Monkey, a second viewing for me. The Monkey's gore seemed more worthy of being unrated than the gore in this movie. Maybe sometime I'll try to figure out what gore offends the censors too much and what gore does not.

Another interesting tie-in with The Monkey that I would never have anticipated? Both movies feature Elijah Wood. So I'm sure if I weren't already writing a post about a horror remake, I'd be writing about a post about an Elijah Wood double feature. 

This does have the spirit of Troma all over it. Blair is a big Troma fan, and Troma is the actual production company here. So we get a lot of big, intentionally absurd moments, and you get geographical locations described thus: "Depressing Outskirts," rather than an actual name. There's good glee in this movie, always a hallmark of Troma.

Lastly I'll just mention that Kevin Bacon is the antagonist in this movie, and he has a lot of fun. 

I wish this piece about The Toxic Avenger were more substantive, but they can't all be masterpieces -- the movies, or my essays about them.