Baseball and Star Wars

Today is May the 4th. No I will not say "May the 4th be with you." (Dammit. I just did.)

I wasn't reminded of the "holiday" by anything on social media. I mean, it's not even that day in the U.S. yet, so the social media barrage will probably not come until tomorrow.

No, I was reminded of it just by watching a weekend's worth of baseball.

I can't give you specific examples because I watch a lot of different games, and I can't remember what I saw where. (You may recall I play fantasy baseball, so I don't watch any one specific team. In fact, I don't have anyone on my fantasy baseball team from my own major league team, the Red Sox, so I might watch them just about the same amount as I watch any other team where I have no players on my team. The Red Sox have won four World Series in the past 22 years and that's good enough for me, so now I'm basically all fantasy baseball, all the time.)

But the point is, I don't need to try to remember where because pretty much every baseball park seems to have some sort of May the 4th tie-in.

In fact, they have it even if their team isn't going to be home on May the 4th. The ones I saw this weekend were probably for teams who were home over the weekend, but are going on the road for the actual May the 4th with the series that begins on Monday. Either that or they just think a promotion night works better if you also do it on a Saturday.

I just think it's kind of funny. What do Star Wars and baseball intrinsically have in common?

I guess they are both extremely popular, but maybe less so for both. Baseball used to be America's sport, but it has been surpassed by basketball and football for several decades now, as those sports seem to speak to a wider demographic. Star Wars used to be American's favorite franchise, and it might still be, but The Mandalorian and Grogu will break a seven-year drought between films as the TV shows are also getting fewer eyeballs, even when they are of high quality (like Andor). 

In theory, athletes and space fantasy geeks don't overlap very much in the Venn diagram. You are probably more likely to find baseball fans who like Star Wars than Star Wars fans who like baseball, because a sport is probably always going to be a bit more selective in its appeal than a cultural phenomenon that speaks to people the world over. As just the most obvious example, American football may be the biggest sport in the U.S., but people generally don't care about it in other parts of the world. 

So each year I scratch my head a bit when I see them going to great lengths at baseball stadiums around the country to bring Darth Vader on the field to throw out the first pitch, or give away bobblehead figures where one of the players on the team is dressed up like a Jedi.

Look, don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of both. They can intermingle however they want. But I just find it strange.

The real answer?

Baseball teams play 81 home games a year. That's a lot of games. They need to do something to jazz up an average Tuesday night game (or in this case Monday night, or maybe even the Saturday before). Which is also why you might see them celebrating Christmas in July, or Flag Day, or -- well there aren't any holidays in August. But you better bet the big other holidays during the baseball season -- Easter, Mother's Day, Father's Day, Independence Day, Labor Day -- get plenty of play at the stadium. Baseball players even use pink bats on Mother's Day. 

But I think the reason I also get "annoyed" about it -- "annoyed" enough to write a blog post like this, anyway -- is that I've never really embraced May the 4th. It was clever that one guy 20 years ago (or whenever it started) realized that May the 4th sounded like "May the Force," and it could have ended there. Instead each year people are given a reason to post memes or put on a flowing robe or go to some other great lengths to show you that they are more of a Star Wars fan than you are.

Maybe there's a part of me that feels like the real Star Wars nerds -- those of us who saw the first movie in the theater when we were three years old, and played with the action figures for ten years after that -- need to be distinguished from these johnny-come-latelys who haven't really earned it. And when I hear 65-year-old baseball broadcasters talking about "Chewbacky" as they are forced to incorporate into their telecast that night's Star Wars mania at the ballpark, it just reminds me that there can sometimes be too much of a good thing.

Zukerman and Novak go back-to-back

I see a lot more Ashley Zukerman movies than most people because I live in Australia, and because Ashley Zukerman is Australian. But Americans would have/should have seen him as well, given that he appears in such places as Succession, Silo and the Fear Street movies. 

Potentially the most notable thing about Zukerman is that when you see him, you have to ask yourself if he's B.J. Novak. 

I'll include a picture of them side by side later on. Right now, I don't have room to do it while still including the posters for the two movies I'm talking about today.

Novak is best known for his role as Ryan Howard on The Office, though he of course also appears/ appeared in other things. He even directed a movie a few years ago, Vengeance, and is responsible for a truly unique children's storybook that we got given to us as a present, The Book With No Pictures. 

As I was watching the Australian movie In Vitro on Wednesday night -- the second Zukerman movie I've seen in the past four months after One More Shot on New Year's Eve -- I thought again to myself "Yeah, here's B.J. Novak's doppelganger again." Of course, I didn't really have to think of it in those terms because the phenomenon of him looking like B.J. Novak prompted me to learn his name a while ago. As a film critic working in Australia, it's also just generally a good idea for me to know these things.

Imagine my surprise, then, when the very next night, I saw Zukerman's doppelganger in another movie.

Although we are a little less likely to see Novak around than we were a few years ago, he does in fact turn up in The Devil Wears Prada 2, playing the douchebag son of the owner of the media company that publishes Miranda Priestly's magazine. (The character isn't reprehensible, but his big recurring character trait is that he can't stop saying "you guys" and always has to correct himself to say "people" instead. As a big "you guys" guy myself, I didn't think this was so bad.)

So yeah, nothing more profound really to say today except that I saw the lookalikes in two consecutive movies. Sometimes that's all you get.

And now that I've written enough other words to exceed the height of the two movies posters, you get your pic of them next to each other:

So I guess there was one more thing you "get" today. 

Movies that have our favorite movies in them

I watched a lovely little indie film shot in Sri Lanka last night, called Ben and Suzanne, a Reunion in 4 Parts. 

Why this movie? It showed up in a list of new additions on Kanopy, and I liked what both this poster and the title itself promised about its content. So for the first time in a very long time, I watched a movie I knew nothing about, that wasn't a new release on one of the streamers. (Plus, as I've written previously, the end of the month is the perfect time to use up your Kanopy credits because you can't take them with you.)

So glad I did. What a good movie.

One of my favorite things about Ben and Suzanne was its specificity. The title characters are an American couple in a long-distance relationship, because she has taken a job in Sri Lanka and they don't want to break up. She works for an NGO that gives small loans to female-run businesses, which is usually a fulfilling calling, except when she has to go try to collect on the loans, which is what she's doing now. In fact, she did not expect to be doing it because she thought the ten days over Christmas and New Year's were going to be a proper vacation for her and her partner, who is visiting from parts unspecified in the U.S., only her boss had other ideas. He's Indian by heritage and can understand a little Tamal, which might help in collecting the debts, which he reluctantly agrees to do even though this was supposed to be a holiday. As is usually the case with long-distance relationships, each new time together is a mini referendum on the relationship, because things have changed in the intervening time and you have to suss each other out to see if the other one is still committed. And of course there are awkwardnesses over physical intimacy and differing needs, plus the usual logistical nightmares involved in any trip through a third world country. Ben and Suzanne are played excellently by Sathya Sridharan and Anastasia Olowin.

But you know my favorite specific thing about this movie?

There is a running plot point about Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers, my #55 on Flickchart.

How unexpected was that?

Ben and Suzanne spoilers to follow. 

Early in the film, Ben asks Suzanne what the insect threat is like here, and whether we're talking Starship Trooper level. Just that single name drop would have been fun enough, but not worthy of a blog post. 

But Suzanne says she hasn't seen it, and Ben responds with incredulity -- especially since he thought they watched it together that time in that hotel in Maine. (Another great bit of specificity in the script.) That's one of the other things that happens during these "reunions," where it becomes clear that something has gone out of synch and that the two don't remember the same things about the relationship, almost as though one is gaslighting the other -- and it's usually a portent of worse things to come, which it is here.

So Ben goes on a quest to find Starship Troopers in rural Sri Lanka, and he actually succeeds on the first attempt, which they both find to be a bit of a miracle. They don't actually have a DVD player, though I don't think this is mentioned at the time.

Lo and behold, a few days later it's Christmas, and Suzanne has acquired a DVD player as a gift to Ben. He's chuffed, to use the Australian term. They're finally going to get to watch Starship Troopers.

Only there's a region mismatch. The DVD is region 1 while the DVD player would be (checks internet) region 5. They both luxuriate in exquisite but funny disappointment.

You'd think that would be it for Starship Troopers in the story, but of course you wouldn't actually, because if you are familiar with even the basic elements of screenwriting -- especially romcom screenwriting, which this broadly is -- you know the final callback is still coming.

So a few days and an apparent breakup later, the two are staying in separate rooms at their final destination on the trip, and Ben notices that Starship Troopers is playing on TV that night. Perhaps unusual New Year's Eve programming, but not the craziest you've ever seen. He goes over to her hotel room to tell her, but she's not there. Back in his own room, he faints.

Later when the movie is actually starting, she's had the TV on in the background, and hears it announced. Even though she's mad at Ben, that resolve is already crumbling and of course she gets a delighted look on her face -- and it helps that she's broken a choice to go dry, having gotten silly on wine. (Don't worry, she's not an alcoholic, she was just going dry for unspecified reasons.) She's interested enough to leave the movie on but not to contact Ben about it. 

When it ends and she's loved it, she goes to find Ben, only to learn he had to be taken to the hospital. (He had terrible food poisoning a few days earlier, and this might be part of that.) That's when she (drunkenly) rushes to the hospital, kind of the equivalent of the rushing through the airport scene at the end of most romcoms. (This movie will have its airport scene, but it has a decidedly different flavor, which is just one of this film's strengths.)

When they're reunited and Ben is, in fact, okay -- which we the viewers didn't know until this point either -- Suzanne gushes that she saw and loved the movie, and they go through about a minute's worth of rapid-fire sharing of the movie's best parts, not to mention a sophisticated overall take by Suzanne on the larger movie and what it's doing. And when I say a minute, I mean a minute -- not the 15 seconds that would have been enough. They get it -- Starship Troopers is awesome both on the macro level of its themes and the micro level of its gore and action scenes. They've finally reconnected, even if it might be for the last time. 

I'm just sitting here watching this with a big dopey grin on my face.

You might have thought from the title of this post that I was going to come up with a sort of listicle of other times movies I've loved have factored into the plots of other movies I might like or even love, but the truth is, I really just wanted to talk about this movie. I hope you'll see it, even though I've spoiled it. 

When critics are the filmmakers' co-conspirators

Reviewing films while not revealing spoilers, but while still discussing what fundamentally makes a film good (or not so good), is one of the trickiest tasks a critic faces. In fact, a really good critic tries to speak only in a sort of dog whistle code about whether a film even contains spoilers, because the knowledge that the film might contain spoilers can be a spoiler in itself.

So I've already failed in that regard for Apex. But then again, issuing a SPOILER WARNING about Apex would have created that failure, if I had not already created it. (In case you missed it, this is an actual SPOILER WARNING for Apex, so heed it accordingly.)

I just wrote my review of Apex. It'll be last night by the time I post this, but as I write this, I just finished writing it.

And in this review, I was so careful to protect the spoilers that I essentially lied to my readers. 

It's not quite how it sounds. Let me explain.

Apex, Baltasar Kormakur's new movie on Netflix that stars Charlize Theron and Taron Egerton, has a setup that should be quite familiar to most moviegoers. It's such a familiar setup that I needn't cite another recent example, but the movie Fall from a couple years ago, about the two women who get themselves stranded at the top of an impossibly tall radio tower they've climbed to seek thrills, is a good example. It's the sort of film where the main character has an opening tragedy in which they lose a loved one in some disaster related to extreme sports -- climbing is usually the culprit, as it is in both these films -- before having to address the main, second nightmare scenario, also involving some sort of extreme sports. Cliffhanger was this movie also, and I believe there have been 782 others in the history of cinema.

Apex has a second template for the sort of movie it is, though, and that template is one I name-checked in the review. It profiles as the sort of exploitation movie where a character (usually a woman) is wronged, and then goes about systematically killing all the people who wronged her. And that movie I name-checked was I Spit On Your Grave.

The thing is, Apex only wants you to think it is a version of I Spit On Your Grave. It isn't. 

Oh yes, it introduces us to a bunch of malevolent toxic males who would be Theron's tormentors in a movie like that. They're Australian outback hunters who pay too much attention to her and whose threats toward her person are palpable. 

The thing is, these hunters are red herrings, and they disappear from the narrative after the first 15 minutes. This film's apex predator is actually Taron Egerton, who is introduced to us as the only nice guy in the outback who might have Charlize's back if the hunters overstep. Only he's the psycho killer who psychs himself up for hunting Theron down by listening to the Chemical Brothers' song "Go," in what was a terrific scene.

Baltasar Kormakur and company don't want me to reveal this in my review. So of course I didn't. 

But that means I had to set up those poor, unrefined and definitely misogynistic hunters, who are all bark and no bite, as the straw men villains for my entire review.

Witness lines like this:

"It may be that Ben [Egerton's character] is the only one who will help stand in the way of the predators who are hunting her."

And this:

"This means that we want her to emerge victorious on her own terms, not due to her adversaries flubbing some kind of advantage they had. Yet flub they do, such that there are a number of times when she would have been dead if their only goal were to kill her, thereby ending the equal threat she poses to them. That she gets to live through these moments of her tormentors’ advantage is not quite the same as villain grandstanding and speechifying, but it’s close enough to leave a sour taste in your mouth. Our ideal Sasha emerges from this because she outsmarted adversaries who were doing their damnedest to kill her at their earliest opportunity."

Theron has only one adversary in this film, but if I told my readers that, they wouldn't be surprised when "nice guy Taron Egerton" turns out to be a cannibalistic psychopath. (Sorry, probably didn't need to reveal the cannibalism part, but I'm assuming you've only read this far if you've seen the movie or if you don't care if I spoil it.) 

Oh, and while we're at it, here was my one "dog whistle" that suggested the possible spoilers:

"The fundamental setup of Apex is too obvious by half, but without getting into too many details, let’s just say it doesn’t stay that way."

The full review will be linked to the right if you check back later, or possibly now, depending on when you are reading this.

My whole approach in this review is, in a way, an abdication of the unspoken pact I have with my readers. I theory, a critic is on the side of the readers, cutting through the ways the filmmaker is trying to manipulate you into having a certain experience, if we think that experience isn't worthy or if there is a sort of deception in what they are trying to accomplish. 

But we also want to help a filmmaker succeed when they are manipulating the viewer in a positive way, in other words, in a way that will deepen your overall experience, possibly/probably by surprising you. And that's what Kormkaur and company are doing here. 

I did believe, as they wanted me to, that Egerton would be the guy who helped Theron survive the lethal ambitions of the scuzzy outback hunters, and even when he was revealed to be a creep, I thought he'd at least be in league with those hunters. As it turns out, the scuzzy hunters are just a bunch of blowhards who don't like having a woman throw their attentions back in their faces. But they aren't going to do anything about it, and in fact, they disappear from the narrative entirely. (I did think it might have been a smart move if, at the end, when Theron inevitably needs a ride back to civilization, she gets one from one of these hunters, thereby proving that you can't always judge a book by its cover. Instead she gets picked up by a couple of nice young women, which is definitely safer, both in terms of her personal safety and the message of the movie, but probably less interesting overall.)

In any case, I was happy to keep Apex's secrets, even if it meant I had to write my review in such a way as to conspire with the filmmakers on their red herring. When they've earned it, I want to be there to help. 

They didn't earn it big time in the case of Apex. I'm still only giving the movie three out of five stars, or 6/10 on the ReelGood scale. But it definitely got my pulse pounding on occasion, and was a worthy genre exercise. 

The thing is, even if Apex didn't earn a marginally positive review from me, I still think I'd do my best not to blow up the filmmakers' attempt to fool us with a red herring.

I just wouldn't be as willing of a conspirator. 

Language vs. content vs. absorption

I've been hearing about the video game Exit 8 for a while. Are you supposed to italicize video game titles?

My wife and my younger son are the gamers in the family, and they've told me about it, though my wife couldn't really play it because the game action made her nauseous. My older son is a gamer too, but he games independently, while my wife and younger son usually game together. And my older son is at an age where he wouldn't really tell me about any games, or much of anything else.

In any case, as this poster succinctly encapsulates, the game involves a commuter stuck in an endless loop in a subway station, where bizarre things occur and there is no escape. That's about as much as I knew about it, except also that it was Japanese. 

This poster is, of course, for a movie, not a video game. I don't generally write about video games, in and of themselves, on my movie blog, especially since I almost never play them.

I'd known about the movie almost as long as I'd known about the game. Sometime about a year ago my wife said "Here's this crazy game, and they are also making a movie." The movie played MIFF last August, and for a half a second my wife and I talked about trying to see it there, but we ultimately did not.

The movie, directed by Genki Kawamura, finally hit Australian theaters on Thursday, and I got the idea to watch it with my wife this weekend for a date night. (Plus I'm going to review it. Two birds.)

My wife liked that idea but came back with a different one: What if we take the kids?

On the surface, it seemed like a strange suggestion for a movie with the following genre categorizations on IMDB: Body Horror, Folk Horror, Monster Horror, Psychological Horror, Psychological Thriller, Action, Adventure, and just plain Horror. (Is that the most genre categorizations on IMDB? Probably not, but close.)

I did have some content concerns, though it was actually a ninth genre categorization that I thought might be the most salient: Japanese. (Is Japanese a genre? Discuss.)

To my knowledge, my kids have never seen a movie with subtitles. The closest they've come is small portions of movies that require subtitles. Like let's say there's some alien species in a Marvel movie that's speaking its own language. That might contain about a minute's worth of subtitles on screen. 

A whole movie? That seemed like a bridge too far, even if the younger one and definitely the older one would have no problem with the content. 

Even still we decided to put it to them, or really, to put it to the younger one, because we needn't create expectations of possibly seeing a movie in the older one if the younger one's response was going to put the kibosh on the whole idea.

Which it did. I wasn't present for it, but when my wife asked him, apparently he hemmed and hawed for a moment and decided that seemed like a lot of work for a whole movie. Fair enough.

In truth, I think everyone approaches their first foreign language movie with a little trepidation. They think reading subtitles is going to be a chore. They can't properly envision how quickly you can incorporate the reading of the subtitles into your unconscious process of watching the movie, with the result being that you miss nothing either visually or in terms of language. For sure you can't be on your phone, and it helps not to be eating something that requires your attention. But the actual viewing experience is only minimally impacted by the reading, which you and I know but which a first-time viewer might not.

Then again, for some people, this trepidation never goes away. I know a lot of adults who don't want to watch foreign language films because they think it feels too much like work. 

So instead of going to the 2:10 showing of Exit 8, we went to the 8 p.m. showing -- the date night I originally envisioned, which was preceded by a yummy Thai dinner across the street from the cinema in Yarraville.

It turns out that neither the content nor the language would have been worries for our kids in Exit 8. There are a few "scary" images, but none of them involve gore. A few moments of people looking creepy and speaking in voices that are not their own, and even a cameo appearance from that mouse that had a human ear grafted to its body. But nothing they couldn't have handled.

The dialogue is fairly minimal, and fairly repetitive in nature. And some of the words are even the same. Did you know that the Japanese word for "door" is "door"? (Or something very close to that.)

But what probably would have gotten them was the boredom.

Look I'm not going to say Exit 8 isn't good. I liked it. I gave it 3.5 stars out of 5. 

But the game itself is based on repetition, and even with small changes throughout, it started to try my patience after a while. I started being really critical of whether they were doing enough with the concept and providing interesting enough variations on the core narrative template. And I have to say the dark and stormy, a rum-based drink I had with dinner, was exacerbating the sleepiness I was already feeling from a busy day.

My younger son, a veteran of the game, might have given it his approval, though I suspect it might have been grudging. My older son, who had really disliked the last horror we saw with him in the theater (Steven Soderbergh's Presence, discussed here), might have been less forgiving.

So we made the right call, but not for the reasons we would have thought.

And got a great date night out of it to boot. 

Jim Carrey existed ten years before I thought he did

Jim Carrey didn't come into existence with Ace Ventura: Pet Detective in 1994. Of course he didn't.

Everyone knows he was Fire Marshall Bill and other characters on In Living Color. In fact, he starred in all five seasons of the show, from 1990 until 1994. In fact, it kind of seems like In Living Color ceased to exist the moment Jim Carrey no longer needed it, though I'm not going to look into that now to see if there was any actual correlation. 

But he definitely didn't exist before 1990. Right?

Wrong. Jim Carrey was the star of a "major motion picture" five years before that. And it wasn't even his first.

If you want to drill down into his IMDB, Carrey technically first appeared in a TV movie called Introducing ... Janet in 1981. That must have been pretty bad because it's got only a 3.5 on IMDB (out of 10). That range is usually reserved only for when someone is trying to sink a movie because they think it was made by libtards or something. But it doesn't get much better from there, because his next two were the hypothetically theatrical feature All in Good Taste (2.8) and the TV movie Copper Mountain (2.2). (Seriously? How terrible does a TV movie have to be get to get 2.2 out of 10 on IMDB?)

Skip ahead four more projects I've never heard of and finally you get to the first one I had, which is also the movie I watched Thursday night: Once Bitten (1985). 

I didn't like it very much and I suspected its prospects were not very good before I even started. But as a big Jim Carrey fan -- he has three movies in my top 100 -- I had to watch it, just to see "where it all began."

I think the reason I didn't imagine Jim Carrey had done anything before In Living Color is because that's usually how it is with sketch comedians. You get hired to appear on a show like Saturday Night Live -- of which In Living Color is basically an "urban" (Black) version -- and usually you've made people laugh in The Groundlings, but Joe Public has not heard of you yet. Your charms get unleashed on the world in this variety show format, and only then do you go on to have a great (or in many cases mediocre) film career.

I guess Carrey was more of a Kenan Thompson. Why Kenan? He had a whole career with things like Kenan & Kel and Good Burger before appearing on 37 consecutive season of SNL. Carrey was only in five seasons of ILC, but it was the whole run. 

So yeah, Carrey went on In Living Color despite having an entire 14 credits in the 1980s, including two other movies I've seen: Peggy Sue Got Married and Earth Girls Are Easy. (I sort of remember him being in EGAE, because I only saw it 13 years ago. I haven't seen Peggy Sue since it first came out, when I definitely did not know who Jim Carrey was.) 

Anyway, the point of this post was not to drill down into the minutia of Jim Carrey's career. I'll save that for when he dies. (Hopefully not soon.)

No, I really just wanted to see this movie to see how many of the "Carreyisms" we know and love (some people don't love them) were already in place back in 1985, when he was only 23.

It's not a very broad performance, though it is a pretty broad movie. Carrey is sought after by a vampire (Lauren Hutton) with a flaming familiar (Cleavon Little) because he's a virgin, a conundrum that is dramatized in a funny drive-in movie scene, where Carrey tries to get busy with his prudish girlfriend (Karen Kopins). When she rebuffs him, he's confronted by all sorts of images of other drive-in patrons in flagrante delicto, including one guy in a convertible whose naked ass you can just see humping up and down. 

I wish the movie were consistently that funny. I have to be honest and say that I was very sleepy on Thursday night and I might have missed some (or very large chunks) of Once Bitten, but I did get the gist. There's nothing "big" about Carrey's performance here, but I saw certain facial expressions and other moments that reminded me of what's to come -- most of which I love.

Incidentally, I do remember the song from this movie that I thought had the same title as the movie and might have been sung by Tina Turner. 

In fact, it is indeed called "Once Bitten" but is sung by a band called 3-Speed. Who?

You can't judge a movie by its title

You're probably thinking this post is going to be about good movies with bad titles. 

It's actually a lot dorkier than that. Get comfortable, because this is another one of my project posts.

I keep a list of all the movies I've seen more than once, and that list is currently 960 titles long. I've got something big planned for #1,000. It won't likely be this year, but it should be next year. 

As I was adding Invasion of the Body Snatchers to that list (see Monday's post), I had an idea. It's an idea nobody but me would get. It's an idea definitely nobody but me would write about.

I wondered: 

What's the highest percentage of titles that start with any one letter that I've rewatched?

You're like "Um, what?"

I'll explain.

In my big spreadsheet in which I keep track of all the movies I've ever seen, I have a running total at the bottom for how many movies I've seen whose titles start with each letter of the alphabet. For example, right now I've seen 736 movies that start with letter S, or 10.17% of my total movies watched. There is no reason to keep track of this. I do it anyway. 

So I thought I would go through the smaller rewatch list, count up the titles rewatched that begin with each letter, and see what percentage of all the titles I've seen with that letter that I have also rewatched.

Still don't get it? I don't know if I can explain it in another way. 

When I first started, this was just a bit of a curiosity. I was writing the information down, but I didn't expect to do anything with it. 

Then after the letter B, I noticed something interesting: Both the A totals and the B totals were exactly, or could be rounded to, 15%. 

I started to get more curious.

Like any statistical exercise, there should be a fair amount of random noise. There should be one letter where I happen to have rewatched a way higher amount of movies than another letter. But there really wasn't. 

Oh they aren't all 15%. But they are all between 10 and 15%, which seemed strange enough to write about. 

Here's the total list:

A - 56/381 (15%)
B - 85/564 (15%)
C - 64/454 (14%)
D - 48/375 (13%)
E - 28/206 (14%)
F - 51/355 (14%)
G - 38/302 (13%)
H - 51/381 (13%)
I - 33/246 (13%)

I'll stop here to note that to this point, it's even more consistent than that five percentage point range. It's a range of only three percentage points. Which is not a lot of random noise at all. But after that the range widens a bit:

J - 13/132 (10%)
K - 14/135 (10%)
L - 35/360 (10%)
M - 58/528 (11%)
N - 26/195 (13%)
O - 17/178 (10%)
P - 48/363 (13%)
Q - 2/21 (10%)
R - 43/285 (15%)
S - 108/736 (15%)
T - 59/458 (13%)
U - 12/82 (15%)
V - 11/72 (15%)
W - 52/339 (15%)

And here it falls down, only because the sample size is so small:

X - 0/11 (0%)

When you've only seen 11 movies that start with the letter X, there isn't actually any number of movies you can rewatch that fall into 10 to 15% of that number. If you rewatch only one of the 11, it rounds to 9%. If you rewatch two, it rounds to 18%. So I was not going to hit on this regardless. As it so happens, I rewatched none of the 11, which means I have never rewatched an X-Men movie. I didn't consciously realize that until right now. Hence the poster for this post. 

Y - 4/51 (8%)

This is the only deviation. If I'd rewatched just one more Y movie, that would have been 10%. 

Z - 4/30 (13%)

It's kind of astonishing, isn't it?

But all it really means -- if it means anything -- is that a film's title has nothing to do with whether I want to rewatch it or not. Which you would have surely known without even reading this post. 

I do think it's kind of strange that there is not more randomness. But the range bears out even to the grand total, which is 960/7240, or 13%. Which I guess is not such a surprise, since it would be the average of all these other figures. 

Does this mean anything?

Hardly.

Was this worth writing a post about?

I don't know, but I sure did it.

The default four-star documentary

I've fallen into a pattern with documentaries, which is that if they are competently made with even a hint of outside-the-box thinking, I am automatically going to give them four stars on Letterboxd.

Even if I found getting through them somewhat tedious, as I did with the 115-minute Paul McCartney documentary Man on the Run. 

Star ratings, it should be said, have two primary functions, in my view:

1) To indicate how much you personally liked a film;

2) To indicate how good this film is relative to its own goals/potential limitations. 

When it comes to documentaries, I often default to the second, more objective usage of the star rating, disregarding the more subjective usage. 

With documentaries, it is a given that you will not be equally interested in the subject matter across the whole genre. There are going to be films about things that speak to you personally, and films about things that don't. However, if you are a critic, you feel like your personal interest should be removed from the equation in assessing how well the film does what it sets out to do. In a way, this is true with any genre, since any individual critic is going to gravitate toward some and not toward others, and the star rating shouldn't suffer from that personal preference. But with documentaries I think it's even more clearly delineated.

So whether I am fully interested in the film the whole time may be more a function of whether I am fully interested in the subject matter, though I think you would also agree that a truly great film makes converts out of even people who are disinclined toward its topic. And that's why I do tend to give a well-made documentary four stars out of five, but no more than that, even if I find that its length or other parts of its execution try my patience. I think I assume that the length would try my patience less if I were more interested in the subject matter, though that's not a given, and unfortunately you can't really test it. 

The thing is, with Man on the Run, I am actually plenty interested in the subject matter. Although I am not nearly as familiar with Paul McCartney's solo career, I love the Beatles and have done so for a good 30 years now. And what McCartney did in the ten years following the Beatles' breakup is actually something I would like to know more about.

But ... 115 minutes of this was quite a lot. 

And here's the issue: it was largely undifferentiated. There are no talking head interviews in this doco, only archival footage. I should clarify that. Subjects are interviewed, but you don't see their talking heads. You see the archival footage and you hear their answers to questions -- but not the questions by documentarian Morgan Neville themselves -- over that footage. 

Even when the archival footage is as priceless as that included here, and even when it is strung together by interesting techniques in which images are played with on screen and bleed into one another, it's still too samey without the talking heads. And that leads it to feel quite repetitive, even as the narrative is moving forward through the approximately ten years that are covered here. 

Of course, there's a bit of a fallacy in saying that I missed the talking heads. Talking heads are generally the least interesting part of a documentary. So am I really saying Man on the Run would be better if I were looking at images of Paul McCartney sitting against a bland background in his early 80s?

I'm not saying that. I think all I'm really saying is that a movie does not deserve four stars if you are frequently checking to see how much time it has left, and if you don't feel specifically inspired or moved or uniquely informed by it. And that's kind of how I feel about Man on the Run.

So I didn't do it. I didn't give it the four stars. I gave it only 3.5.

And this is when I remind you, and myself, that 3.5 stars is a perfectly acceptable rating, and among some fellow critics who are harder on movies than I am, it's a great one. 

There's a funny footnote to this story.

I wrote this piece yesterday to get a head start on today. Truthfully, I just write the ideas whenever they come, and if that happens to be three in one day, I'll write them in one day (if I have time) and save them for the next available opening.

On my way home from work, after I had already written the rest of what you read above, I was listening to a podcast about pop chart history, and they were talking about one of the later albums by David Bowie -- one that critics recognized as a superlative example of his craft, but which didn't particularly connect with them or endure in their memories. The interviewee referred to critics giving it a "respectable gentleman's four stars." Which seems to suggest this is a struggle in the broader critical community, in situations where we want to show our respect for a piece of art, but also to indicate that something about it doesn't quite do it for us personally.

So maybe by this definition, Man on the Run is a four star-movie that I gave 3.5 stars -- opting, for once, for the subjective. 

The shoddy fonts of low-budget press releases

When you send out press releases to savvy film review sites, you can't really fool anyone that the movie you're advertising is better than what we would have called "straight to video" back in the day. You, dear reader, won't be surprised to learn that I receive a lot of such press releases from PR people, since they want coverage of their movies a lot more than the big distributors seem to want it -- even though we would seem more likely to give those movies bad reviews.

But just because the movie's probably bad, does that mean that the press release also has to look so shit?

As if typefaces themselves cost money, these press releases tend to rely on blocky, unsophisticated fonts, and usually compound the matter by justifying the text, such that the spacing between words is weird and stretches the words so that the final letter on the right side aligns down the page. Which is not a sophisticated look. 

Because it is necessary for me to provide examples, but not necessary for me to crush the spirits of these little movies, nor of the nice people who try to get me to review them, I will block out identifying information from these examples.

This is another one of those that thinks I live in London, as I discussed here. 

How bad does that third line of text look? If you have to go for justified text, there are more sophisticated ways of doing it, such as slightly spacing out the letters in the words so you don't notice it as much. Not leaving giant spaces between the words that are two to three times greater than all the other spaces in the paragraph.

It turns out I've deleted a lot of the offending emails, so I don't have a huge number of other options to choose from. But here's another that doesn't look nice:

Why are you screaming at me? I think you can use all caps if you have to, but then choose a less severe font. 

It just strikes me as odd that there is no one out there who has said "Hey, you have a shit movie? I can dress it up and make it real nice." This is an imperfect comparison, but it's kind of like how there are very few -- I'm not going to say none at all -- scammers who can send out fake emails that don't include typos. You just get one scammer who is semi competent at imitating a real email, and you'll have scads more personal information you can release on the dark web. 

Okay, I'll let these poor PR people off the hook today. 

Never trust the opinions of random punters

When you're a good writer and someone else is not, you feel like a bit of a bully talking about their bad writing. (And my apologies if I seem a bit big-headed calling myself a "good writer." If I've been a film critic for 30 years and I can't call myself a good writer, there's something really broken about my self-esteem.)

But that doesn't mean that other people's bad writing doesn't sometimes bug you.

Actually in this case it's more bad thinking than bad writing. It's the logic behind the conclusions in the thing I'm about to discuss, more than the expression of those conclusions, that I'm interested in today.

(Before I continue, I should define "punter" for you. It's a word I didn't hear before coming to Australia, but I like how it works in conversation. Although the term has its origins in betting, in this context it translates roughly to an average person, customer or member of the public, though in a slightly derisive way.)

I'm not sure if you know much about Quora, but it's a question answering site where someone posts a question and whatever Quora user wants to answer it will write them a response. And usually the asker is soliciting opinions, not facts. AI provides factual answers quite well (most of the time, anyway). 

I got involved with Quora because I once had to ask whether we should be worried about cooking in an oven where there had been rodent poop. The response led me to Quora, I signed up, and maybe as many as ten years later, I still get emails about things people are talking about on Quora, which seem generally to be tailored to my interests. 

And I should state that a lot of the Quora users are not native English speakers, but that's not even a significant part of why I'm writing about this today.

The thing that prompted me to write this piece was an answer to the Quora question "Who is the best actress in the United States?"

Before I get to the answer, I'll say that the question is already problematic. It's not saying the best American actress, and the answer this person gave is proof that they know this is not the question, because the actress given in the answer is not American. Then what does the question mean, exactly? The best actress in Hollywood? The best actress who is currently physically located within the contiguous 48 states, or possibly Alaska or Hawaii?

So the Quora answerer apparently just wanted an opportunity to talk about Ana de Armas, who should not be the answer to this question under almost any circumstances. 

I want to start by saying that Ana de Armas is fine. I've liked her plenty of times. Sometimes she's really good. Sometimes she's not so good. So basically, I think she is a more than competent working actress who is obviously very attractive, so she's gotten plenty of work. She does have one Oscar nomination, so that's in the answerer's favor.

But the only reason to call her the "best" in the craft of acting is if you are basically in love with her and you just want to write about her for a bit. (I actually do have one friend who is in love with her. I myself understand that she is quite beautiful, and yet she has never risen above that level into a personal favorite of mine.)

So here's what the guy says:

"In today’s Hollywood, defining the “best actress” is never simple—but one name is dominating the conversation right now: Ana de Armas."

That made me chortle.

The way he phrases this, it takes it out of the subjective and into the objective. It's not that this guy thinks Ana de Armas is great; anyone can have a personal favorite, and even if I might argue with them about that, I would never write a blog post about it.

No, what this guy is saying is that 

a) there is a constant and strenuous debate about who is the best actress in Hollywood, and 

b) in this hypothetical constant and strenuous debate, Ana de Armas is leaving the other contenders in the dust.

He goes on to argue:

"She isn’t just another star—she’s a rare blend of elegance, intensity, and raw physical commitment."

No problem there, and it's actually rather elegantly written, speaking of elegance.

But then he continues:

"Often described as the female counterpart to John Wick, Ana has carved out a space where performance meets precision."

Huh? 

Let's break down this hilarious sentence:

1) Why is "female counterpart" in italics? Nobody knows.

2) You do know that John Wick is a movie character, not an actual person, right? When you were talking about Ana de Armas, you were talking about an actual person. 

3) I get why this person is saying this -- de Armas appeared in a movie (Ballerina) where she was the literal female counterpart to John Wick, as that movie is actually set in the JWU (John Wick Universe). But even so, she would not need to be "described" as a female counterpart to Wick -- she would just be one. 

4) What does it mean for performance to meet precision? Isn't precision usually a component of performance? 

The writer then includes a fairly defensible paragraph in which he discusses de Armas' accolades for Blonde, but follows that with:

"Then came her unforgettable turn as Paloma in No Time to Die. In just minutes of screen time, she delivered one of the most electrifying performances in the entire Bond franchise—effortlessly balancing charm, danger, and lethal precision."

Maybe this is where my personal opinion comes into play, but in what universe (not the JWU for sure) is de Armas' work in No Time to Die "unforgettable"? If anything, I thought of it as sort of a footnote in that movie, something that doesn't move the needle at best, and is sort of a waste of the actress' charms at worst. To discuss the prominence of this performance within the history of a film series that has been going on for more than 60 years and features more than 25 movies is just the most irresponsible sort of hyperbole. Oh, and there's that interest in "precision" again.

The next three paragraphs are fairly innocuous discussions of de Armas' preparations for Ballerina and some of the other roles that she is known for, though the writer seems to find the titles themselves to be proof of her star magnitude, when they just aren't. 

But he lands the plane hilariously with the following conclusion:

"Right now, she’s not just part of the industry—
she’s defining it.

Ana de Armas isn’t just among the best. She is the moment."

What did I say about hyperbole?

I don't want to be that bully here. This guy is not as good of a writer as I am. Few people are. (Ha ha, now I'm just fucking with you.)

But come on. I feel like if you are participating in the Quora community, and the readers are expecting that you have some kind of expertise on the thing they've asked about, you should at least try to keep your comments within the realm of our commonly accepted reality. 

Audient One-Timers: Invasion of the Body Snatchers

My 2026 monthly series involves rewatching my 12 highest ranked films on Flickchart that I've seen only once. 

I've always found it to be a bit of a mystery that Don Siegel's original Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) is ranked so prominently on my Flickchart. 

To be sure, it was a movie I knew was great, in addition to being seminal, the moment I saw it, which I would guess was sometime in my early- to mid-20s. But a personal favorite? Its ranking as #151 on my Flickchart certainly seems to suggest it should be. There are a lot of movies I've seen five, six, seven times that are ranked below it.

But one truth about Flickchart is that a movie is only as good as the duels it's had. Sure there was a ground zero when I first added Invasion of the Body Snatchers to my chart, when it beat a lot of stalwarts to land where it landed. I must have been feeling pretty favorably toward it that day, though it was not the day I saw it, since, as I said, that was sometime in the late 1990s (I'm guessing), and Flickchart has only existed since 2009.

It would have held that spot, though, if it never randomly came up against any movies in the next 100 that I might like better. It's conceivable that this movie -- that any movie ranked a little too high on my chart -- might have only had "slam dunk duels." In other words, either it faces a top 100 movie, where it loses but does not lose any ground in the overall rankings, or it faces a movie outside my top 500, and is an obvious winner. I'm guessing that if Invasion of the Body Snatchers ever came up against my #178 -- I just chose that number randomly, but it happens to be Romancing the Stone -- then it might lose, and enough such losses would drive it steadily downward to a more appropriate spot. And yes, I'm pretty sure Romancing the Stone, specifically, would win that particular duel.

One indication that it is not a personal favorite should be that I've never seen it fit to watch it again. Yes for sure I am less likely to rewatch black and white films -- especially nowadays, when there are barely any streamers that carry them -- but this one in particular would have been an easy watch. It's only 80 minutes long, and it contains almost zero fat, meaning it feels more like an hour than an hour 20.

And that's really the first thing I want to talk about here: how frigging efficient this script is. No fuss, no muss. Every single occurrence on screen contributes to the thrust toward the inevitable, with nary a wasted moment. It gives the film an extraordinary momentum. In fact, I was even thinking that this could be a great black and white entry point for my kids, considering that I don't think they've ever seen a full-length black and white film. They saw The Wizard of Oz, but that's only about a third black and white. So maybe my third Invasion of the Body Snatchers viewing will come a lot sooner than the second. 

So yeah, there was no time to get bored, and this flew by in the darkening, daylight savings hours of a Sunday late afternoon. 

We all know the story here. It's a chilling parable about conformity, and specifically about McCarthyism. I don't need to delve into the themes. You've seen this subject matter reinterpreted multiple times, such as the also superlative 1978 version with the famous final shot of Donald Sutherland pointing. These Audient One-Timer posts are not about delving deep into the film itself.

So there are only two other things I want to write about it today:

1) I don't want to spoil an entertainment property you didn't even know I might be talking about today, so I'm going to be vague here. But it struck me, as I was watching, that one of the most popular new TV shows from the last year is essentially a version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I didn't think about that as I was watching that show, but when watching IOTBS, all I could think about was the show. It's funny that I didn't actually hear pod people evoked in any of the discourse around that show. The Borg from Star Trek was a more common reference point. I'm sure those comparisons are out there on the internet if I wanted to search for them. 

2) Although I find the rules to be generally as complete as needed to establish the chilling ideas we see here, there was one nitpick I had on this viewing that isn't sitting right with me. Okay so we know that one of the keys of replacing these people with pod versions of themselves is that an actual physical replacement has to be grown in a seed pod, a process that is faster than you might expect but still takes some time. What happens with Kevin McCarthy's love interest, played by Dana Wynter, is a bit problematic, then. Although we know these replacements occur while the person is sleeping, they do actually involve a physical swap-out of new organic material with the same weight, size and mass. So how is it that Becky Driscoll, unable to fight sleep any longer, dozes off for five seconds, and awakens as a pod person? Where is the seed pod that needs to be next to her body in order to assume her identity? 

The internet likely also has an explanation for this one, but I'm not going to go looking for it.

My May movie will be ... well I've just realized I've made a grievous error. 

I created a Letterboxd listing for the top 15 movies I'd seen only once on my Flickchart, since I might have to go beyond 12 if I can't source one of the top 12. I thought I'd put them in that order in the list. But when checking now, I can see that I somehow skipped over the great Hitler movie Downfall, my #171 on Flickchart. It should have come up in March after I'd watched Smoke Signals (#181) and Solars (#176). Instead I went straight ahead to Rain Man (#158). So obviously this means Smoke Signals was my #13 and should never have been included. 

There's no doubt that the eight films I have left in this series are all ranked higher than Downfall, so either I skip Downfall or I extend the series to a 13th month. Or I could just double up one month.

If I do double up, May will include both Downfall and my #141, Judgment at Nuremberg. If not, just the latter. But the felicitous thematic relationship between those two films makes it seem like a double feature would be just about the perfect solution. Who knows, maybe I'll even try to watch them on the same day.

Flickchart Friends Favorites Fiesta: A Woman Under the Influence

When I wrote this post back in September of 2022, I imagined I might regularly share with you the writing I do for Flickchart Friends Favorites Fiesta, a monthly viewing challenge I do on Facebook where we get assigned the highest movie on another person's Flickchart that we haven't seen. You're suppose to report back once you've watched it, and almost everyone does -- or, I should say, they all do, but they don't all get to the movies they were assigned in anything close to a timely manner. Believer in commitments that I am, I always watch my assigned movie in the month in which it was assigned.

In any case, after sharing that review I wrote of Fandango, I haven't shared one since.

But I was proud enough of what I wrote earlier today about John Cassavetes' A Woman Under the Influence, which I watched yesterday, that I decided to break the drought and share it. Without any further ado, here is that piece, with names redacted to protect the innocent:

                                                         ***********

The thing that’s frustrating on some level about watching A Woman Under the Influence (1974), which I got from [REDACTED]’s chart, is the thing that made John Cassavetes such a unique and vital voice in independent cinema. Those of us weaned on traditional movie narratives know that you are almost always going to get the “why” that explains a character’s behavior. In this case that would be the lead character, Mabel Longhetti, played by force of nature Gena Rowlands. A traditional treatment of the subject matter about a housewife cracking up would give a clear antecedent in the narrative about why she no longer has possession of her faculties.

Cassavetes is not interested in that. He gives us this mental breakdown already in full swing, and allows us to live with it for two and a third hours. We can glean, along the way, that perhaps Mabel’s shitty husband, played by Peter Falk, has left her unable to properly cope with her three young children, who are typical examples of the sorts of underdeveloped brains that lead them to run around in circles and remove their clothes. But then again, it’s not like this doesn’t describe half the children out there.

The truth is, we don’t really know why Mabel needs a spell in a mental institution, though there can be no doubting that she does need one. And that is the clean-film-narrative-defying nature of mental illness. There is not always a “reason” that a person is mentally ill, other than that their brain does not work properly, taking their low self-esteem, their past failures, their irrational fears of impending disaster, and elevating them to dangerous levels.

What I’ve written so far may indicate that this movie was a struggle for me at times, and it was. However, I like it infinitely more than what I consider to be the lesser versions of Cassavetes’ craft. One film of his that particularly gives me the shits, to use the Australian phrase, is Faces, which I dismissively refer to as people just yelling at each other for two hours. Though to be clear on the way Cassavetes can work for me, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie is my #249.

A Woman Under the Influence does not rise to that level, but it gets a lot closer to it than you might think based on what I’ve written so far. In truth, all you really need in this movie is Gena Rowlands, who commits to celluloid what is often considered one of the greatest acting performances of all time. The only thing – and I mean the only thing – that makes me hesitate to give the performance that level of praise is what I said earlier, that there is a nagging part of me that wonders WHY she is like this. But the actual technical brilliance of the performance has nothing to do with the screenplay decision not to explicate Mabel’s illness.

How to describe Rowlands’ performance in this movie? I’d say it’s like the famous subway station scene by Isabelle Adjani in Possession stretched out over a whole movie, except that this undersells the moments of quiet in Rowlands’ performance, where you just see her confusion, her alienation, wash over her face in a blank look propped up by an artificial smile that she thinks is a real smile. This almost seems like a method performance of mental illness, and I would not be surprised to learn that Rowlands spent time in an institution to research her role.

As for the script itself, I do find that there is a little something, I don’t know, arbitrary? about the scenes Cassavetes shows us and the scenes he does not show us. For example, I like the strange breakfast scene where Mabel feeds her husband and his 11 (!) coworkers a spaghetti meal after working an all-nighter fixing a burst water main. But I guess I just don’t know why this scene is the scene that’s best designed to dramatize her mental health issues. It’s almost like an inciting incident scene in the narrative, though if anything I think she just has an improperly modulated sense of gregariousness. The fact that this scene is supposed to be the dividing line between what was supposed to be a romantic, child-free evening with her husband, which was cancelled by the water main break, and multiple characters being severely concerned about her mental health, just feels like a scene was missing. But then again, I think this is the nature of Cassavetes’ filmmaking, and if you don’t go for it then maybe you are trying to make Cassavetes something he was not.

Obviously I’m very glad to have seen this film and I’m genuinely curious to see where it will land. And this will be my first film ranked for this series on v. 2, though I think I can still list the duels the way I normally would.

A Woman Under the Influence > The White Crow
A Woman Under the Influence < Magic in the Moonlight
A Woman Under the Influence > The Old Oak
A Woman Under the Influence > Professor Marston and the Wonder Women
A Woman Under the Influence > Easy A
A Woman Under the Influence < Bottoms
A Woman Under the Influence > Hatching
A Woman Under the Influence > The Hangover
A Woman Under the Influence > My Girl
A Woman Under the Influence > The Measure of a Man
A Woman Under the Influence > Willow
A Woman Under the Influence > 12 Years a Slave

1793/6720 (73%)

Thanks [REDACTED]!

                                                        ***********

Okay, back to me. Or, back to the post, I should say, since it's all me. 

Oh, that mention of Flickhart v.2? Stayed tuned, I'm going to write a long piece about that in the near future.