Remembering Chuck Norris via his memes

Chuck Norris isn't the type of person I usually memorialize on my blog.

Although he was certainly an action movie icon in the 1980s, the difference between him and guys like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone and Bruce Willis was that I didn't see almost any of his movies. Or rather, I probably saw lots of individual bits of them on cable in my friend's basement, but they were so interchangeable, with such forgettable plots, that I never bothered to make note of the names of the movies we were watching. 

In fact, the only movie I'm sure I watched from that period was Missing in Action, and this one sticks with me because of one particular scene. Norris' character is held captive by the Viet Cong, and at one point they hang him upside down and put an angry/hungry/rabid rat in a burlap bag that's just bigger than his head, then put it around his head and draw the strings tight. We hear lots of sounds of struggle and angry conflict and we can only imagine what this angry/hungry/rabid rat is doing to poor Chuck's face. But then the big reveal is that he managed to grab the rat in his teeth and crush it to death in his jaws.

That is sort of the perfect Chuck Norris moment, even though it does not involve any roundhouse kicks, and it leads perfectly into what I want to talk about today.

Although I did enjoy watching snippets of forbidden Norris on cable, I'd say the moment I dug Norris the most came some 15 years after that. (Missing in Action came out in 1985.) And in this case it doesn't have anything to do with any actual accomplishment by the actor, but only hypothetical, hyperbolic accomplishments that made him one of my very first experiences with the concept of the meme.

Sometime around 2002 or 2003 -- I remember it was around then because I remember the office I worked in at the time -- I became aware of a list of things Chuck Norris has supposedly done, which are so epic that they have to do with punching God in the fact and everything you can possible imagine at about that same level of impossible. You are probably also aware of this list, depending on what age person you are.

I really wish I could find the original list that was going around at the time. I can find a lot of the same jokes on the internet as part of other lists, but my list, the one I got in an email on my old AOL or Hotmail account, was definitely the best list. (I should pause to say that I can't be 100% sure that this was when I first encountered this list, or whether it might have been when the list came back on my radar for some reason. In any case, it was a good quarter century ago and possibly longer.)

Somewhere along the way it was decided that Chuck Norris was so badass that he could defy the laws of physics, travel through time, be recognized as himself during his own birth, punch God in the face, what have you.

So instead of trying to describe what these "Chuck Norris facts" were like, I've gone through what I can find online and included a dozen of my favorites from that time -- ones that I specifically remember as being part of my original list. Some of the other ones are good, but they aren't my Chuck Norris jokes. 

I think the old man, who died this weekend at age 86, would appreciate them:

1) Chuck Norris' tears cure cancer. Too bad he has never cried. 

2) Time waits for no man. Unless that man is Chuck Norris.

3) Chuck Norris once roundhouse kicked somebody so hard that his foot broke the speed of light. 

4) Since 1940, the year Chuck Norris was born, roundhouse kick related deaths have increased 13,000 percent.

5) Chuck Norris does not sleep. He waits. 

6) There is no chin behind Chuck Norris' beard. There is only another fist. 

7) Chuck Norris has never blinked in his entire life. Never. 

8) Chuck Norris counted to infinity ... twice.

9) Chuck Norris once punched a man in the soul. 

10) When Chuck Norris goes swimming, he doesn't get wet -- the water gets Chuck Norris.

11) Chuck Norris can divide by zero. 

12) There is no such thing as evolution, only a list of species Chuck Norris has allowed to live. 

There was another one I can't find though I can sort of remember, so hopefully I'll do it justice. It's sort of my favorite because of the notion that Chuck Norris was famous before he was even born:

"When Chuck Norris was born, the nurse said 'Holy shit, that's Chuck Norris!' And then he had sex with her."

Wikipedia suggests that Norris was bemused by these "Chuck Norris facts" but had weirdly earnest responses to some of them. Like apparently the one about evolution caused him to clarify that he's a creationist.

Norris was not simpatico to me politically, and he was not much of an actor. But we need our larger than life icons, and the phrase "larger than life" is the very sort of phrase that was designed for someone like Chuck Norris, that prompted him to be lovingly memed. You might say "Life is big, but Chuck Norris is even bigger."

Was. Rest in peace. 

The cinematic equivalent of having a Black friend

For my March monthly viewing in Flickcharters Friends Favorites Fiesta, I was assigned Dan O'Bannon's 1985 The Return of the Living Dead, which I did not particularly love. When I wrote up my little blurb in our Facebook group, I felt like I needed to prove that I liked other campy gore effects movies, dropping the names of both Killer Klowns from Outer Space and Dead Alive. To be honest, I don't really remember how gory KKFOS may or may not be.

After the fact, I pondered why I felt like I had to list my bonafides, in order to prove that I wasn't just opposed to this sort of movie.

Surely no one cares whether I do or don't like campy zombie movies. The stakes of this opinion are not very high. Even if there's someone out there who thinks I "didn't get" that it was deliberately bad in some respects, well, so what. I can't usually control what other people think, especially in a group where I've met none of these people in real life.

However, I did continue to have to sort of defend myself by saying things like "it was lacking a certain something" and "it didn't hit my sweet spot." Making sure they knew that I had a sweet spot, and that under the right circumstances this sweet spot could be satisfied by campy zombie movies. 

It made me think a little bit better of people who protest they aren't racist, and to prove it they mention that they have a Black friend. 

Of course, if they are actually racist, well, I don't think better of them on that score. But I do think better of the instinct to prove you like something by talking about a similar kind of thing you like.

Maybe it would be easier to talk about this in terms of movies, while still keeping the racial component. 

Sinners has been an interesting movie to have in the zeitgeist. Because it is so clearly defined as a Black movie, liking it or not liking it could appear to speak volumes about the rest of your preferences, and indeed, about you as a person who either prejudges or does not prejudge people. 

You can be in one of two camps:

1) Liking Sinners, which proves you might like other Black movies and are, in theory, not a racist;

2) Not liking Sinners, which means someone could think you don't like Black people.

I'm in the former category, as you would know from the fact that I ranked Sinners as my #2 movie of 2025. And I do, on some level, feel like that opinion relieves me of the need to defend some of my other choices. My lowest ranked movie of the year, the Ice Cube version of War of the Worlds, obviously stars a Black guy, as well as some of the rest of his Black family members, though the rest of the cast is multi-racial. I thought the director, Rich Lee, was also Black, but I just looked it up and discovered that he is not. In any case, I didn't have to defend myself against hypothetical accusations of racism for hating War of the Worlds because Sinners was propping me up, at least this year.

I've got some other friends here in Australia who are in the other camp, who have lots of things they nitpick about the movie -- which I do acknowledge has some pretty significant pacing problems in its second half. They seem to feel less guilty about potentially being thought of as racist, or rather more secure in their own progressive core, because these guys don't worry too much about talking about all the other Black movies they love. However, I have an American friend who sends out his rankings to a group of people in an email, and this year he said, regarding his middling ranking of Sinners:

"And in 2025 the biggest question that I will get is “What is your goddamn beef with Sinners?  Are you a goddamn racist?”  I assure you that I am not a racist.  I just don’t really like it when actors play more than one role in a film…specifically, I REALLY don’t like it when the same actor play twins (except for The Krays and Dead Ringers)."

In starting off with a discussion of a 40-year-old zombie movie, I've worked myself around to something a bit more interesting here. Why do we worry so much about being misconstrued here? Do we worry that it's actually true?

No I don't think that's it. But it's more like a couple lines of dialogue I always think of from Glengarry Glen Ross, where Ed Harris and Alan Arkin are discussing the fact that Arkin's character, who proclaims his innocence, gets nervous talking to the police. Harris assures him it's not because he's guilty of anything or has anything to hide, in fact, just the opposite: "You know who doesn't get nervous talking to the police?" Harris' Dave Moss asks. "Criminals."

So an actual racist would never talk about his possibly fictitious Black friend, and an actual person who doesn't like campy zombie movies would never pretended he liked them. (Though, I suppose, if the Black friend were actually fictitious, that might say something ... usually in this situation, the person is just exaggerating the closeness of their relationship with some Black guy they know.)

Okay that's about enough of that. 

MCU refresher course

Whenever I think about rewatching entire series of movies than run longer than just a trilogy, I think of things like Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter ... and yes, the MCU, though that would now be more of an undertaking than rewatching all of the James Bond movies.

So this year, sort of by accident, I'm just rewatching some of them. 

You'd say it was in preparation for Avengers: Doomsday later this year, and perhaps it is -- but not because I feel I need to rewatch the MCU to prepare for it. No, this is all about my 12-year-old son.

He's long been a fan of Spider-Man, having watched the last of those movies at the time it came out (and getting excited about the new one in a couple months). But he was previously prevented by his parents from seeing most of the MCU, since much of it was considered just a tad too intense for younger viewers. I believe we watched Captain Marvel and Ant-Man & the Wasp with him, but we stayed away from the slightly more bruising entries. You may recall from this post and this post that I consider Avengers: Infinity War to be one of those. (It's all about the strangulation of that one character, no need to spoil it in case you haven't seen it.)

But my son is 12 now. He's in high school, which starts in year 7 here in Australia. Even if he doesn't personally have one yet, most of his friends have phones. (He's making do with a watch he can text from.) Any previous restrictions on MCU content have now been lifted.  

And so, sort of informally, we agreed earlier this year to run through a number of these movies he hadn't seen -- as many as he wanted, really. 

And he's wanted to run through a lot of them.

Since the start of the year we've watched Captain America: The First Avenger, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Captain America: Civil War, Avengers: Age of Ultron, and just this past weekend, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. And just for good measure, one movie that features Spider-Man but is not part of the MCU, Sam Raimi's original 2002 Spider-Man for Sony. 

Clearly our syllabus has been informed mostly by trying to get to the Spider-Man movies he hasn't seen, though Tom Holland's character has only been in one of those movies. I encouraged him he should watch the first two Captain Americas before getting to Spider-Man in Civil War, and he seems to have been happy enough with that decision. 

So to clarify, these aren't the first MCU movies he's seen other than the two I mentioned earlier. On his own he had seen the original Iron Man and the original Avengers, plus all the Spider-Man movies. As the instructor of this course, so to speak, I told him he could skip the last two Iron Man movies, the first two Thor movies, The Incredible Hulk, and anything else I might be forgetting about now. (I think he did see the original Ant-Man also, and oh yeah, he definitely saw the third Ant-Man and last year's most recent Captain America movie.) 

Anyway, I've encouraged him to go more or less in chronological order, especially after we realized we didn't have the full context for some of the things discussed in Civil War because we hadn't watched Age of Ultron yet. (Well I did, back in 2016.) This means we're about to get to the really good ones: Thor: Ragnarok, Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame. These were the films that turned me from an occasional appreciator of the MCU, and a fan of all the Captain America movies, to fully on board with the entire MCU. (Though of course the returns have diminished since then.)

I'm not here to present you some grand unifying theory of the middle MCU, though I did think it was worth giving you one short impression I gleaned from each of my viewings. I'll stick to the MCU, though, and leave the original Spider-Man out of it. 

Captain America: The First Avenger
Watched: January 23, 2026
New thoughts: This is actually my third viewing of this film, the only of these five films that I'd already rewatched. And it has probably dropped just a little in my estimation with each watch, though I clearly retain the memory of how surprised I was by this back in 2011. It occurred to me, as I was watching, how it might be tough to make this film like this today, given how it's set in the distant past -- distant, at least, by the standards of today's young people. I think it's the only MCU film in which the vast majority of the film cannot be thought of as taking place in "present day." (Most of Captain Marvel takes place in the 1990s, but that movie at least has aliens.) It's a bit like the MCU's Wonder Woman, though of course this came first. I could tell my son was liking it well enough and was being polite in his appreciation, but he also made little comments clarifying that the next Captain America movies were set in modern times. While I think older viewers can appreciate the design details that went into recreating the 1940s -- and I think that was one of the main reasons I liked it so much initially -- a younger viewer is more eager to get to the modern-day team-ups with other superheroes. 

Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Watched: February 6, 2026
New thoughts: This one I also saw through my son's eyes, and though it gets Cap to "present day," I was really noticing how much talking there is in this movie. It's the Marvel movie that is most like a spy thriller, so that shouldn't be a surprise, but I sensed some impatience on his part to get through this one as well. I can't remember if it was this movie or the next, because both of them feature Scarlett Johannson's Black Widow, but I thought it was funny how my son failed to identify the character from one scene to the next. He frequently confused her with Emily Van Camp's character, which I guess just goes to show you that not everyone is as mesmerized by ScarJo as everyone else. (I was especially mesmerized by her in this movie.) When the action does come, I was reminded that it's pretty top notch. 

Captain America: Civil War
Watched: February 7, 2026
New thoughts: Before these rewatches, if you'd asked me to rate the Captain America movies, I would have told you they were all 4/5 star movies, but I would have put The Winter Soldier at the top. Well I guess I'm more of a new school MCU fan than I thought, because this is easily the most entertaining in the series, whether or not it's the best. You just can't beat the team-up of all these superheroes, which was maybe the biggest MCU team-up to date since we hadn't had Avengers: Infinity War yet. And while it feels sort of shallow to prize that entertainment value over a movie that is sort of constructed as a 70s paranoia film, the fact of the matter remains: I had a much better time watching Civil War than I did The Winter Soldier (or The First Avenger, for that matter, which is an implausibly low third out of the three movies). Maybe part of it was knowing that, on the other side of the couch, my son was enjoying this much more, finally getting his Tom Holland fix, and enjoying the presence of the others as well. He also enjoyed seeing some of the Scarlet Witch and Vision, knowing them from having watched Wandavision a few years back. (He also watched the Loki series, I should say, since I'm trying to cover all the bases here.) 

Avengers: Age of Ultron
Watched: February 21, 2026
New thoughts: So I said earlier that I was not fully on board with the MCU during its early stages, even after the Captain America movies had brought me further on board. Avengers: Age of Ultron was Exhibit A of that phenomenon. Not only did I not like this movie when I saw it in January of 2016, having missed it in the theater, but I felt superior to it, and scoffed at it. Watching it now, I really have no idea what offended me so much about it. It is probably the least good of the Avengers movies, but it's still a good movie. The only real problem I have with it is the motivations of the villain, Ultron, who goes from coming into existence, to deciding the world needs to be cleansed of human beings, in basically no time flat, for no reason that I can find sensibly articulated in the dialogue. But if the worst problem a superhero movie has is that the villain doesn't make sense, then that's certainly not something unique to that particular superhero movie. I think what Ragnarok and the most recent two Avengers movies did for me is that they made me realize that yes, there's a reason why watching a bunch of superheroes teaming up is fun: you get a little sampling of all the personality types, instead of being stuck for a whole movie with one you might not like that much. Age of Ultron is a pretty good version of this, and I appreciated it a lot more once I realized that's something I wanted from these movies. 

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
Watched: March 15, 2026
New thoughts: I knew at the time I watched this, also on video rather than in the theater, that I liked it more than the original Guardians of the Galaxy, which I was famously not a fan of. What I didn't remember, until this viewing, was just how goddamn funny it is. I tend to think of all the stuff that makes me laugh about Dave Bautista's Drax the Destroyer is in Infinity War or possibly Endgame, but he's frikking hilarious in this movie. Both my son and I were laughing quite a bit, and there's no guarantee we would both find the same things funny. We're still quoting Drax lines to each other a few days later. Although this is not the best movie featuring Guardians of the Galaxy characters, it's the best Guardians movie and I don't think it's particularly close. Only in the climax do I think it loses a little steam, but before that it's great, it's colorful, it's staged well, and it makes me LOL like a dozen times. And again, complaining about the overblown climax of a superhero movie is just about as fruitless as complaining about the confused motivations of a superhero movie villain.

I may have more to say about the movies we're getting next, which will probably also include Black Panther, since I think it makes sense to watch everything forward now until the end of Phase 3. (That's Endgame, if you don't have your Marvel phases memorized.) I guess that would also mean a viewing of Doctor Strange, although did we already watch that? (I keep remembering other MCU movies my son has seen, which include Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.) In terms of their essential role in the Infinity Saga, as well as my personal opinions of them, I could let both Black Panther and Doctor Strange pass, and I've already seen both of them twice so I don't really need a third viewing of either.

But given the way I am overall enjoying this reacquaintance with these movies, I'm happy to let my son take it in whatever direction he wants. I just might have to think twice about continuing this for the movies that have come since 2020. 

Winning the final battle

Look I can't complain about One Battle After Another winning best picture.

It was technically only my third highest ranked best picture nominee at #18 for the year, behind Sinners and Train Dreams. But you also know that I struggled with not having it ranked higher, even watching it a second time to see if I could push it up further. I couldn't, but what are the chances, ten years from now, that I'll think those other two films are better?

I won't know for ten years. For now, though, I know that I've just seen one of the really good Oscars in the past few years, where most of the humor landed, most of the speeches were good, and some really good films won some big awards. 

I only started watching around 9, so I need to go to bed, but let me just include my live thoughts as I jotted them down, as I always do on this blog, sometimes with context, some without:

- The opening Weapons bit was funny. Truly inspired, and who doesn't love a good use of the Beastie Boys' "Sabotage?"

- Beautiful stage!

- Ryan Coogler said "Damn."

- The best achievement song was the perfect length, unlike last year's "I Won't Waste Time."

- Amy Madigan's narrative arc is pretty miraculous. She basically went from having essentially no career for the past couple decades to winning an Oscar. Not half bad. Also, I had no idea she was married to Ed Harris. Since 1983!

- Conan is merciless on Trump. Merciless! 

- Great use of Jane Lynch! 

- Surprised about K-Pop Demon Hunters. I'm officially 0-2 on my guesses. (I had Teyana Taylor winning best supporting actress.) Nice to see the one filmmaker encourage her collaborator not to be bullied by the play-off music.

- Great recreation of the best scene in Sinners, just for a nominated song performance! Loved the appearance of Jack O'Connell and the other two actors as well. Miles Caton! 

- Did I mention how great the stage looks?

- The Ventura Crossroads bit, making movies smaller and taller, made me LOL.

- The Frankenstein costume win leaves me 0-4. (I guessed Sinners.) Haven't even gotten to bust out my highlighter yet.

- And the same movie's makeup win makes me 0-5. 

- I was already a bit suss on the casting Oscar. The amount of time they're spending on it makes me more so. But at least I've finally picked a winner correctly. 

- Kumail Nanjiani's bit about turning famous movies into their abbreviated titles is something I wish I'd written. (Remember, I'm the guy who does the movie portmanteaus every year.)

- I'm with you, The Singers winner. I didn't know a tie was a thing either. (And to continue my terrible predictions, I didn't guess either winner.)

- So Sean Penn is a three-time Oscar winner. He's managed to piss me off each time. The first was when he beat out Bill Murray for Lost in Translation. The second was when he beat out Mickey Rourke for The Wrestler. And now it's for not showing up. 

- Oh and just as a reminder, I've only gotten one guess correct so far. 

- It's ironic that Robert Downey Jr. and Chris Evans gave out the best screenwriting awards because their banter was not well written. (But at least I got both of those right.)

- GOAT Oscar host Billy Crystal shows up to remember Rob Reiner. Pretty great. I was just thinking what a terrible 2025 it was for Crystal. At the start of the year, the house he'd been living in for some 45 years in Pacific Palisades burned to the ground. At the end of the year, his best friend was murdered. Yet he's still here. Brings a tear to your eye. 

- Diane Keaton gets a special segment from Rachel McAdams too. 

- And then finishing with Redford. Duvall probably would have had a good claim too. 

- Speaking of past Oscars hosts ... here's Jimmy Kimmel! 

- As a sign of the increasing obscurity of the documentary feature in the cinematic landscape, I had only even heard of one of the nominees, which I also saw (The Perfect Neighbor). Well, I did guess the one that won, even though I didn't see it. 

- Happy to see the Bridesmaids crew. They are in good form. 

- So glad that her loss for The Substance last year didn't mean Demi Moore's last appearance at the Oscars.

- Autumn Arkapaw's win is a landmark one, but it does make me wonder about Rachel Morrison, who she name-checked and who shot Creed and Black Panther. Wither Rachel? Wait a minute -- she only shot Black Panther. Maryse Alberti shot Creed. What is it with Coogler and the female DPs? Good on him. 

- Lionel Richie looks great for 76.

- Boo on playing off the poor Korean guy who won best song. 

- Okay the PTA win sets up OBAA for best picture. 

- I knew the odds had shifted for Michael B. Jordan, having paid enough attention to hear that buzz in the last few days. Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy. Richly deserved for my second favorite film of the year, which has probably just gotten its last Oscar. (Also, though I am only vaguely aware of Timothee Chalamet's relentless Oscars campaign, I'm glad whatever the try-hard things he was up to did not get rewarded.)

- Happy for Jessie Buckley, even though I did not like Hamnet. 

- A little Ewan and Nicole for a 25th anniversary for Moulin Rouge! And even better news, Nicole Kidman looks normal. 

- And it was right at this time that the 7+ app on my TV said I had been idle too long and I had to exit the app and re-enter. Fortunately, it let me do that while still being able to resume in the exact spot I left off. But what bad timing! 

- As expected, One Battler After Another -- the consensus film of the year, despite Sinners' record 16 nominations -- wins the top prize. And yes I did guess that one right. I didn't really know PTA's persona before now, and I thought he came off great. 

- And one last bit with Conan! All his choices worked. 

Really good show! 

On to the next one. 

Tuning back in to the Oscars frequency

My wife had to remind me that the Oscars were on today.

This from the person who basically hasn't watched them since we moved to Australia 13 years ago.

So yeah, it's been pretty far from my mind. I have not been keeping up with the horse race at all. I had my fantasy baseball draft yesterday. That's the sort of thing that occupies my thoughts these days in the first half of March and before. 

Of course, I do actually plan to watch them for the, I don't know, 40th year in a row. It'll just be on a delay. The last couple years, the Oscars had the decency to align with our Labour Day here in Australia, but that was last Monday. So I'll have to do the normal social media ban that I always do during my workday, which should be fine as there will be enough baseball news to consume. 

It is probably just about 40 years now. Earlier this month I mentioned that Rain Man was the first best picture winner I'd already seen at the time it was named best picture, but I was following the Oscars a few years before that. I have a distinct memory of being on my paper route the morning after the Oscars and reading in the paper about the victory of The Last Emperor, which I probably would not have known about it because I would have gone to sleep before the ceremony finished. (And what time was the Boston Globe's final deadline of the night, anyway?) I think I remember the wins of Platoon and Out of Africa as well, as things I cared about at the time they happened. I even think there was some awareness all the way back to 1981, when I would have been only seven, about Chariots of Fire, but this is becoming a bit more speculative, and I certainly wouldn't have been watching the ceremony at that point. 

As you know, in the past ten years if not a little bit more than that, I've shifted my interest to which films get nominated, not which films win. While others are deciding whether the Screen Actors Guild awards and things like that are a bellweather for a film's Oscar chances, I am barely registering that these things occurred.

But today I do plan to print out a nominations list (better do that right after I post this), make my choices, and go through with either a highlighter or a red pen to mark the ones I got right or wrong as I watch the ceremony sometime after 9 p.m. local time, after my son's basketball game and our dinner. And then hopefully post my usual reactions post at some point not too late in the early morning.

The Oscars will always remain in my blood, but sometimes I do have to force myself to tune back in. 

Hoping to jump start my movie year

It's been a bit of a slog out of the gates in 2026.

It's March 12th and I haven't yet seen my tenth movie of the new year. And my highest ranked movie is only a 3.5 star movie. All the others are three or lower. (In fact, there are none lower than two, so that just makes the whole thing seem even more middling.)

I saw a great movie earlier this week called The Plague, which would easily be my favorite of 2026 so far. It's about boys bullying each other at a water polo camp in 2003. A review will be up imminently on ReelGood, linked to the right, because it's just coming out in Australia today.

Thing is, in scrutinizing the release dates on IMDB, I'm seeing that it had a limited U.S. release at the very end of December before going wide on January 2nd. For my purposes, that rules it out as a 2026 movie.

Project Hail Mary to the rescue?

I'm hoping so. 

Undoubtedly the highest profile release of 2026 so far comes out in Australia next Thursday, but I'm a critic so I get to see an advanced screening of it tonight -- in IMAX no less.

Although Ryan Gosling can do no wrong as far as I'm concerned, and I do have high hopes for it, I do also have a few ... hesitations, shall we say. Although the high end for this subject matter is something like The Martian, of even better, the low end is something like Danny Boyle's disappointing Sunshine and that terrible Adam Sandler movie Spaceman from a couple years ago, which also featured a friendly alien. 

Without any evidence to back it up, one of my ReelGood writers is already predicting this will be a flop -- not necessarily because it will be bad, but because audiences will shun it for whatever reason. Clearly he doesn't understand the power and box office draw of The Gos. (Does anyone call him "The Gos"?)

For me, I'm just looking for something with the sort of scale that tells me I'm in a new movie year, and not just another marginal movie on a streamer. 

If movie reviews were like Uber reviews

I was just listening to a fantasy baseball podcast, as many fantasy baseball draft is this Sunday. The fact that it is this Sunday brings me no end of delight; the countdown clock on our fantasy website is something I am following incredibly closely as soon as I set our draft date. (I'm the league's commissioner.)

Anyway, they were answering fantasy baseball questions posed by listeners who had left them five-star reviews on Apple podcasts. You couldn't leave a lesser review and still expect to have your question read on air. They acknowledged it was an "I scratch your back, you scratch mine" situation.

One of the two, the analyst I like best, was pushing back a little bit about it, especially when they were talking about some people who had submitted questions but had only left three-star reviews. He thought that three stars should be the starting point, and as we all know from movie reviews, three out of five means you definitely like the movie more than you dislike it. But in the cutthroat world where total podcast rating determines your visibility among other podcasts, three stars doesn't cut it. (There was a great Black Mirror episode about this phenomenon also.)

He went on to say that when they'd recently had renovations done on their home, he had to review the company who had done the renovations, on a scale of 1 to 10. They told him that anything less than a 10 they would treat like a 1. So he gave them 10 on everything.

I've used Uber as an example in the subject of this post, mostly because it's easily translatable and resonant with anyone who's ever used an Uber. You know that if you give an Uber driver anything less than five stars, it's like you've stabbed him (or her) in the heart and potentially taken food out of his (or her) kids' mouths. Which is how you get ridiculous statistics like an Uber driver with 5,286 rides and a average rating of 4.94. (And curses to those who cut into the perfect 5.)

Are movie reviews the last bastion of pure honesty in our society?

I suppose a pass/fail grade -- which is effectively what a five stars/any other rating system is -- has been in place with movies for years, if you consider Siskel & Ebert's thumbs up/thumbs down system. But Siskel & Ebert provided the nuance with the way they spoke about a film on their show, and of course when Roger wrote in print, he used star ratings. Rating an Uber driver lacks that kind of nuance, and if you ever encountered a system of rating movies that gave either a yes or no without any explanation for that judgment, you would reject it outright. (Rotten Tomatoes is effectively a composite of that, but you can drill down if you want to find the nuance, and the total percentage effectively comes out to a star rating anyway.)

When we are giving star ratings for movies, we aren't beholden to anyone whose children need feeding. In fact, almost without exception, the people we're grading are very well off. That's not to say they might not have gotten themselves into some debt from living beyond their means, but they started from a place of at least some money, all but the most poor independent filmmakers out there. And really, in most cases, we wouldn't even know.

It's a lot easier to imagine yourself ruining the life of an Uber driver. Plus, there are no larger consequences to giving out the highest grade. There's no equivalent of directing someone to a mediocre movie by giving it five stars. If you thought you were putting someone in the backseat of an unsafe driver, well, you might be inclined to withhold your highest rating for that driver anyway. We had one situation like that, which my wife and I still talk about, though I think the likeliest thing was that we did give him five stars.

Plus with a movie review you don't have the immediacy of looking the person you're rating in the eye -- or at least in the back of the head. 

But let's say we did think that, as critics. Let's say we did give five stars to almost every movie. The entire industry would be lost. We'd be gone from our jobs within two weeks. And no one would have any reason to choose any movie over any other movie except whether they liked the subject matter or the stars.

Wait a minute ... is that how it is now anyway?

Useful swag

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And why am I labelling this as useful?

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

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

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

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

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

Audient One-Timers: Rain Man

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other observations I appreciated as I went along:

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

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

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

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

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

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

I don't live in England

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Remembering Rob Reiner: Being Charlie

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Disconnect movies

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

What do I mean by a "disconnect movie"?

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

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

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

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

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

You never see that, do you? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Five good disconnect movies:

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

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

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

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

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

Five bad disconnect movies:

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

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

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

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

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

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