The question of how many times I've seen Caligula

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

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

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

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

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

Hello, unsimulated sex.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What's that you say?

And:

Um, how is that possible?

How indeed. 

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

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

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

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

How? How? How?

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

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

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

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

2) Helen Mirren gets naked.

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

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

So let's just focus on the thresher scene.

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

Memorable, right?

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

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

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

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

The whole thing just seems highly implausible.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Believable psychological portraits, or lack thereof

I have to think that one of the most challenging things to depict on screen is a person with some brand of abnormal psychology. The term "abnormal" is problematic here, especially considering the kid gloves we use to describe mental health issues these days. But you know what I'm going for. 

Generally, I'm speaking of people whose view of the world is in some way skewed by factors that do not totally reflect their reality. Like, many people have real reasons to be depressed: their mother's dead, their father's in jail, they bounce between homes and they don't get enough food. But I'm talking here about people whose reality is pretty okay and yet their wiring is still screwy.

Like the protagonist of Michael Haneke's The Piano Teacher, played by Isabelle Huppert. 

I have always heard The Piano Teacher discussed in hushed tones, like it was this really confrontational, difficult-to-watch film. I think that's probably accurate, but I also thought that meant it was acclaimed. And perhaps it is. But to quote Leslie Nielsen, "that's not important right now." (But while we're on the topic: It won the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2001, and the two leads won best actor and best actress.)

The reason it's supposed to be difficult to watch is that Huppert's character, an exacting virtuoso pianist and piano teacher by day, is into sleazy sex shops by night, and wants to be dominated sexually as well as watch other people have sex. 

This isn't the part I have trouble with. Sex addiction is an addiction like any other addiction, if it is appropriate to describe the predilections of Huppert's Erika Kohut as sex addiction.

No, it's how she behaves independently of the sex addiction that I found irreconcilably odd. I won't go into all the details of her moment-to-moment interactions with the others in her life, but I do want to give one example that I think might stand in for the whole broken psychology. 

Erika lives with her mother, and in a symbol of her stunted emotional state, they sleep in the same bedroom in twin beds that are next to one another. In case it's not obvious how strange this is, Huppert was either 47 or 48 when she filmed The Piano Teacher, so obviously that's about the age the character is. 

At one point in the film's final third, at a moment of particularly damaged affect, she rolls over onto her mother's bed, mounts her, and frantically kisses her on the mouth, saying over and over again "I love you! I love you! I love you!" It is basically a sexual assault of her own mother.

Sorry, I just can't relate to this.

I don't mean I can't relate because I've never sexually assaulted my mother, though to be clear, I have not. I mean because it just doesn't make sense as a psychological portrait, even if she were a lesbian, which she isn't. But that still would only go a very small, superficial and irresponsibly reductive way toward explaining such an act. 

Untangling the influences of a toxic parent is also a tricky exercise on screen, though I guess we could say that being damaged during your upbringing could explain almost anything that sprouts in your psychological profile later in life. But not this, right? 

Plus, although the mother is clearly a nag and disapproves of what she knows, or at least suspects, her daughter is doing after hours, she isn't portrayed as specifically toxic in a way that goes beyond the ordinary concerns of a parent who might also be aging into dementia. 

What I'm getting at is, this feels like a provocation by Haneke, one without the justification of having a basis in psychological reality.

And it would not be the first time Haneke had made a provocation just for the sake of it. That's what I feel about his movie Funny Games, though I've only seen the English language remake, not the original. I like to be discomfited in movies, quite a bit in fact, but Funny Games discomfited me in the wrong way, enough that I have no interest in going back to watch the original. And that's a bit how I feel about The Piano Teacher, though just to a lesser degree. (And the fact that Haneke remade Funny Games means that not only did he find it a concept worth exploring, he doubled down on it by exploring it twice.)

For a moment I considered writing about this film via a blog post I would have called "Kissing cousins," because I think Haneke is kissing cousins with Lars von Trier. They both show a sadism about women that I sometimes feel exists only to be confrontational. To be clear, both are capable of excellent work -- I love Haneke's Amour, and I love several von Trier films, including Dancer in the Dark and Melancholia -- but both have baser instincts they indulge more often than is warranted, which verge on the misogynistic. (I didn't write that post because I thought it required me to list other examples of kissing cousins directors, and honestly, I felt too lazy to undertake that, even though it's a good project.)

But I do think you have an unenviable task when you are trying to make a movie about someone who's fucked up. Surely the writer, in this case Haneke, has someone in their own life in mind when they write such a character, and is not just making up these details on the fly. 

But I think of it a bit like a sports movie, which sounds like a strange comparison, but hear me out. The reason I don't love most sports movies is that I feel like I don't believe some screenwriter's crazy idea of a crazy finish to a game. I believe crazy things that happen in real sports because they actually happened. If a screenwriter just made it up, it doesn't wow me the way they obviously want it to because it just feels like a complete and utter fiction. 

If I had seen a 48-year-old woman, in real life, pin down her mother and furiously kiss on her on the mouth, maybe I would believe it.

As something a screenwriter appears to have just made up, not so much. 

A Wikipedia article is not a Wikipedia article

I was too tired to watch Jean-Luc Godard's A Woman is a Woman on Monday night. There's no two ways about it. On nights like that you watch 84-minute films, which is what I was trying to do with A Woman is a Woman, but even the brief length and the lightness of tone was not enough to overcome my extreme exhaustion. I slept a couple times during it (always pausing when I did so) and was foggy at best during others.

To be honest, this is probably not a terrible way to watch Godard. You are dealing with a man who was always experimenting with cinema, especially with this, only the second film he ever released. (There was another film completed first whose release was delayed by censors.) Even when you're at full stamina and attention level, there's going to be something elliptical about its storytelling/editing/just about everything else.

And so I gave it the milquetoast star rating I give many films I feel like I didn't fully get but generally appreciated: three stars.

The next day I went to check out the Wikipedia page to find out more about it. I wanted to find out more about its themes. I wanted to take in some other critical appreciations, gathered together in one place. I wanted to find out some of the unique details of its production schedule, which there must have been, given what we've learned about the making of Godard's first film, Breathless, via last year's Richard Linklater film Nouvelle Vague.

Nope there was none of that.

You see, this Wikipedia page is just a stub.

What is a stub, in Wikipedia terms? I will let AI enlighten us:

"A Wikipedia 'stub' is an article containing only basic information that is too short or incomplete to provide in-depth encyclopedic coverage. Generally, these are very short, often only a few sentences, serving as a placeholder for future expansion by editors."

That doesn't jive with my understanding of both Wikipedia, and my perception of the high esteem in which A Woman is a Woman was likely held.

Opening paragraph? Check. Plot synopsis? Check. Cast list? Check. Awards section? Just a link to the 11th annual Berlin Film Festival and a couple bullet points with winners and nominees from the film.

And that's it. 

I don't know how many movie Wikipedia pages you've been to, but they are on average about three to four times this length. There are almost always paragraphs discussing the production, the themes, the critical consensus, even the circumstances of the release. Any of these sections might have multiple paragraphs, and the plot synopsis, even for a short film, might be considerably longer than the 164 words we get here.

I mean they're not lying. They say right at the bottom that it's a stub and they are waiting for more contributions. Which no one has provided yet.

Oh well. The movie's only 65 years old, someone is probably still planning to get to it.

I just think it's strange, because my overwhelming experience of Wikipedia is that everything I read there is remarkably expansive. Like, a news story will occur one day, and the next day there are already 3,000 words on it, neatly divided into sections, and written in that style that so perfectly parrots the style of every other Wikipedia article that you'd swear they were all written by the same person. It's miraculous.

But I had to know there were gaps out there in the database, and on Tuesday I stepped right into one of them. 

It makes me wonder if, indeed, A Woman is a Woman is in fact held in such high regard, or if most people found it mildly perplexing, as I did. And I don't mean "perplexing" like it was too hard for me to understand. This is a cheeky movie, riffing on the traditions of Hollywood musicals and also being very self-referential, such as a moment when Jean-Paul Belmondo's character talks about wanting to see Breathless -- a movie he starred in two years earlier. (Jules and Jim and at least one other French New Wave movie are also referenced. Though this last I find very strange as that movie didn't come out until a year later. Among his many other accomplishments, was Godard also a time traveller?)

It also makes me wonder if this pattern holds for other Godard films on Wikipedia. I could randomly check out a number of them -- there are like 60 -- but, nah. I mean, plenty of them I do expect to be that way, because they'd be significantly more obscure than A Woman is a Woman. But I bet many of even those obscure ones are more fleshed out than this. 

At least I'm getting up to speed on Godard. Just this year I've added both this and Alphaville, having watched Contempt last year. Including the couple others I'd seen before that, I guess that means I only have about 55 more to go. 

The giving of last names to movie characters

When screenwriters are writing a character, or when actors are portraying a character, they're told to have a whole backstory in mind for that character, the sort of thing they can call on to explain a character's motivation in any particular scene -- even when that backstory is otherwise nowhere on the page. It's all a part of rounding out that character and lending greater verisimilitude to a fictitious creation. Now of course you can go too far and imagine a backstory that's actually contradictory to, and distracting from, what the other characters are doing on screen -- we're talking actors now -- but usually if you do that, you're not long for the project. 

Part of fleshing out the character, you could argue, is going to the trouble of giving them last names. But I just think it's a bit weird. 

Remarkably Bright Creatures is hardly the only, or anywhere near the best, example of this, but it's the movie I happened to be looking at on IMDB -- having watched it Sunday night and reviewed it yesterday -- when this idea struck me.

As much as you do want characters to be full inhabitants of the world in which they exist, there are little details that seem too particular by half. And last names might be one of those.

Oh there's never any doubt that a character needs a first name, if only so the actor reading the script can figure out when it's their turn to talk. Some films would not even have this, of course, but they need to be going for something fairly particular if they don't name the characters, and it's certainly not a common approach. 

But a last name? Does it even matter?

I feel fairly certain that no last name of any character is spoken in Remarkably Bright Creatures, with the possible exception of the lead, played by Sally Field, whose character's name is Tova Sullivan. 

With the others, the screenwriter just has to decide, based on essentially nothing, what the character's last name is. (The first names are also based on nothing, but because they are essential, there's no getting around it.) 

I'll give some examples, but first I should mention that Remarkably Bright Creatures might be a particularly poor case study, in that it is based on a novel. In a novel, you are a bit more likely to give a character a last name because it's all there on the page. It doesn't need to fit awkwardly into the dialogue in moments when it's not relevant. So it seems quite possible that the screenwriters here -- director Olivia Newman and her co-writer, John Whittington -- are entirely guiltless, and they are just transferring what's already on the page. 

But because Remarkably Bright Creatures was, indeed, the movie that gave me the idea, let's just look at this one.

The second lead, played by Lewis Pullman, is Cameron Casserone. Good alliteration. I suppose alliteration is as good a way to choose someone's last name as any. Just ask Donnie Darko.

Tova's love interest, played by Colm Meaney, is Ethan Mack. He's just the local shopkeeper. He does not need a last name. However, a love interest is a reasonably significant character, so I'll allow it.

It's when we get to Tova's friends, who are not major characters, that the silliness of giving all the characters complete names becomes clear.

Joan Chen plays Janice Kim. Now, Kim is in fact a Chinese surname -- I just checked to be sure -- but it is far more commonly known as a Korean surname. So it's possible Chen is playing Korean. It's not the first time, I'm sure, that she's been asked to play a character from a different part of Asia than she's from. She might be playing a person of Chinese descent, but the common Korean surname begs the question, where no surname would not have.

Kathy Baker plays Mary Ann Minetti. More alliteration. And I guess she's Italian? All appearances to the contrary? Or maybe she just married an Italian. We never meet her husband. 

Beth Grant plays Barb Vanderhoof. Now we're just getting really creative. Barb has a Dutch background, or her husband -- whom we also do not meet -- does. But this is the first of the surnames that just seems way outside of the path of least resistance. You're not going with something that's either alliteration or that points to a character's obvious ethnic origins. (And while we're at it, couldn't Janice have married someone who wasn't Asian? Don't put limits on Janice.)

There are other characters listed on IMDB who also have surnames even though I could not identify how they appeared in the story, just from my memory of it. I've already mentioned all the important characters. So they're giving last names even to characters who have one or zero lines. 

I should say, I've already mentioned almost all the important characters. 

As the second lead, Pullman's Cameron Casserone also gets a love interest, played by the actress Sofia Black-D'Elia (speaking of complicated last names). And what's her name?

Avery.

Just Avery.

I guess they didn't want to go with Avery McManus-Martinez. 

The My Dearest franchise is not something you need to be aware of

This is a snapshot from the Wikipedia page devoted to Netflix original films. 

If you saw a little more of the snapshot, you'd see that the first is Spanish and the second is Thai. So, no relation.

I do think it's funny that Netflix should have randomly acquired, and decided to release, two such similarly titled films in such close succession. It does, however, appear just to be random.

But I wouldn't put it past Netflix to imply a relationship, maybe even a recommendation. "If you liked My Dearest Senorita, you're sure to like My Dearest Assassin."

Maybe I'll watch both of them just to find out.

Remembering Rob Reiner: LBJ

This is the third in my 2026 bi-monthly series Remembering Rob Reiner, in which I'm watching the six movies of the director's I haven't seen. Not to be confused with the other bi-monthly 2026 series, also called Remembering Rob Reiner, which runs in the other bi-monthly months and involves revisiting six Reiner favorites.

The thing that made Rob Reiner so interesting as a dominant force in Hollywood, at least for a good 15 to 20 years there, was that you couldn't really pin him down to one kind of movie. Even when you thought his thing was comedies, he'd make complicated comedies, or comedies that crossed over with other genres. But then sometimes he wouldn't make comedies at all. Sometimes he would make horrors, or thrillers, or love stories.

So there was not really a pattern, but there were sometimes familiar interests revisited. His 2016 film LBJ is kind of like the revisitation of two movies he made back-to-back in the mid-1990s, which otherwise will not appear in either of my bi-monthly series, and it reflects an interest on Reiner's part in both presidential politics and civil rights. 

The first of those films is 1995's The American President, the fully fictitious story of a widower president (Michael Douglas) who begins dating an environmental lobbyist (Annette Bening). I think of it in the same category as Ivan Reitman's Dave, a film I can very easily see Reiner having directed, though I hold that film in higher esteem. 

The second came the very next year in 1996, Ghosts of Mississippi, which was sort of the beginning of the end of Reiner's charmed existence as a director. (North in 1994 ended his run of great films, but he got back on track for at least one more with The American President. Though I personally love 1999's The Story of Us, some people think Reiner never made a really good film again after The American President.) Sorry for the tangent. Anyway, this is the true story of the trial of a white supremacist accused of assassinating civil rights activist Medgar Evers. James Woods plays the white supremacist, and at the time we probably had no idea how good of a fit that was for the right-wing Woods. 

In LBJ you kind of get both things coming together. You get a peek behind the closed doors of the highest corridors of power in the U.S., and you also get the civil rights struggle in the form of the 1964 bill that new president Lyndon Baines Johnson reluctantly championed after John F. Kennedy was assassinated. (So I guess you also get an assassination in this film, another connection with Mississippi.)

And you know what? I thought it was really good.

I was almost tempted to go all the way up to four stars on LBJ, but cooler heads prevailed and I settled on a 3.5. But it was a generous 3.5, the kind that makes me remind you: this too is a good star rating. 

I did end up paying for the movie on AppleTV -- just a rental, not a purchase -- when I forgot I'd written this post, which talked about its availability on Kanopy. Lo and behold, eight years later, it was still available on Kanopy, if only I'd done the usual search of all my streamers before renting it. Fortunately, I'm glad to say that I don't mind having spent my hard-earned cash on LBJ, because I liked it.

The first thing that relieved me was to see a presidential biopic come in at only 98 minutes. Make all the jokes you want about what that says about Johnson and his presidency, but I think it just reflects a different time when the flab was cut from a movie rather than left in. Now granted, this man was president for three years longer than Johnson, but the Ronald Reagan biopic from a couple years ago, which I haven't seen yet, was 141 minutes. At this rate, I can't imagine how long the eventual biopic of Donald Trump will be. 

The second thing was that Woody Harrelson did not, in fact, seem ridiculous in all his LBJ makeup. I can see now, having discovered the previous post linked above, that I thought this makeup was quite bad and that it would make the whole movie laughable. Maybe I'm more grown up now than I was eight years ago, because I didn't balk at the makeup at all. (I did wonder if it was necessary to give Jennifer Jason Leigh's Ladybird Johnson a bigger nose, but she's not in it all that much anyway.)

No, this is just a tight little movie that intercuts the day of John F. Kennedy's assassination with events that came before and after it in the life of Johnson, focusing mostly on the civil rights act Kennedy wanted to push through before he was killed, but also dealing with issues like Johnson's own political ambitions, and his desire to create a legacy that was not tarnished by his previous opposition to civil rights measures in his capacity as a congressman and senator. 

The casting is good here, with a pair of good actors doing impersonations of Kennedy brothers (Jeffrey Donovan and Michael Stahl-David) and Bill Pullman and Richard Jenkins playing other senators. 

One of the things I liked about this was that Reiner was committed to showing the complications in Johnson the man. Even though it's clear Reiner greatly respects the man and what he both accomplished and tried to accomplish, he has no illusions about Johnson being an easy man to get along with, or always on the right side of history. A lot of the moments we see here of Johnson are profane, with the man dropping f-bombs and hanging up the phone on people, both before and after he became president. Ultimately, though, Reiner appears to have believed that Johnson became clear-eyed in his support of the civil rights movement, and there are some really good lines of dialogue and speeches reflecting the man's late-arriving sense of empathy. 

It was wise of the film not really to delve into Vietnam, which was Johnson's undoing as president, and the thing that prevented him from running for the presidency a second time in 1968. (You're allowed to complete the term where you started as the vice president and then still run again twice more, as long as you served less than two years as president, I believe. So although he was reelected by a landslide in 1964, he opted out of 1968.) Reiner never really made a war movie, and he wasn't going to start with getting into that part of LBJ's presidency and life. 

Reiner did not of course write LBJ, so some of the credit I'm about to give should go to screenwriter Joey Hartstone. But Reiner at his best didn't need a huge amount of celluloid to tell a story that feels pretty in depth. I learned a lot I didn't know about LBJ in this film, and that's a credit to the sort of filmmaker Reiner was at his best. 

One final comment about the final thing in LBJ, and this was the second straight movie I watched where watching to the end of the credits revealed something funny I wanted to mention here.

At the end of the credits there was something you see regularly in films, but it was not a message I expected to see in this film:

"The persons and events in this motion picture are fictitious. Any similarity to actual persons or events is unintentional."

Really? Fictitious? In a film based on historical events and people?

I assume this is one of those situations where you include such a disclaimer because it costs you nothing to do so and because it protects you from the frivolous litigiousness of any wronged party. No one can say "Lyndon Johnson never said that!" because you can just say "It's not Lyndon Johnson. I already told you that. If you think it is, that was unintentional."

But on the face of it, it seems very silly, and on the most basic level seems to suggest that the history being presented here is a lie. I would probably favor:

"Although the people and events in this film are based on real historical people and events, some dramatic license has been taken with the depiction of these people and events." Though the lawyers probably wouldn't be happy with that one. 

Reiner's last overtly political film, 2017's Shock and Awe, will be on tap for me in July. 

How would Donald Trump interpret me watching Melania?

Melania is just the type of movie I would watch just to shit on it. 

Now, I don't want to sacrifice my cherished objectivity as a film critic. So officially, I would come in to Melania ready to give it a fair shake. And unofficially, I think that if I somehow actually liked the film, I would be willing to tell you that, and give it a corresponding star rating on Letterboxd and position in my in-progress 2026 film rankings. 

But come on. There are certain films that we can't really hold to the same standard as other films. Films made entirely for grift-related reasons, shining the light on people we can all agree are vapid and vacuous -- and yes, I believe that opinion probably extends to actual Trump supporters -- disqualify themselves from the benefit of the doubt you ordinarily give to filmmakers, whose intentions you assume to be earnest, and whose output you believe to be the result of a true belief in the thing they are trying to make.

It would be reasonable to potentially be afraid of watching Melania, for fear that I might actually like it and might not be capable of shitting on it. But I don't fear that. I can't really envision a world where I could give Melania any more than 2.5 stars out of five on Letterboxd, and even that is highly unlikely. 

But the movie is now available on Amazon Prime. It probably was about two weeks after it was in theaters. But I only just noticed it this week, which is why I am writing this post now. So I can watch it any time I want.

No, the only reason I'm worried about watching Melania is that I don't want Donald Trump to take a victory lap over the fact that I watched it. 

Realistically, Trump will never know that I, an American film critic transplanted to Australia, a blogger who calls himself Vance based on his former blog handle and a nickname his friend gave him from a Monty Python skit, watched Melania, unless he reads this blog post. And while I don't put it past Trump to read anything that is in any way about him, there's just too much content out there. He doesn't have the time. 

But if he did read it, that would be a good thing, because he'd know I watched the movie just to take the piss out of him and his vacuous, vapid wife. 

If he doesn't read it, he'll just see one more viewing added to the view count, and he'll pump his fist in the victory of having contributed something people want to watch to the world of cinema, about his inherently fascinating wife. 

Don't think Trump doesn't know the view count. Streamers don't like to share their streaming data, but that doesn't apply to someone like Trump and a streamer like Amazon, which is purposefully kissing up to the sitting president. Even if Jeff Bezos weren't politically aligned with Trump, he's the kind of shitstain who would work every angle to his advantage with a venal U.S. president, milk whatever favors he could out of him -- especially an even bigger shitstain like Trump, who practically has an "open for business" sign staked into the White House lawn.

So yeah, Bezos is sending Trump the view counts of Melania. Bet on it. 

I don't want that count to tick up by even one just because I deigned to watch this movie.

The thing is, I've heard it's not even a good howler. Probably at most it is boring and silly. I doubt it commits any major gaffes. Brett Ratner is a reasonably competent filmmaker and I'm sure he -- also politically aligned with Trump -- did whatever he could to make sure Melania was beyond reproach, at least in people's ability to pick it apart on the fundamental level of its presentability. 

The other thing is, though, I like to see movies that are in the zeitgeist, and there may be fewer movies in early 2026 more zeitgeisty than this. Hey, movies aren't in the zeitgeist only for positive reasons. 

So I will probably watch it. Probably sooner rather than later. 

And I'll just have to hope Trump, in his heart of hearts, knows that my +1 on the view count is because I despise him and his inner circle and I am eager to subsequently dump steaming piles of shit on him through the platform of my own particular professional expertise. 

Unfortunately, now that I've written this post, I'm probably less likely to do that, lest I commit a different sort of Trump-related sin -- giving him too much attention. 

When no attention is bad attention, you really can't win. 

A significant release year miss

When I started watching the movie F on Thursday night, the "latest" from 47 Meters Down director Johannes Roberts, I thought it had quite a strange look to it. 

There was an out-of-time quality to it that I couldn't place, that I attributed to it looking like TV rather than looking like a movie. This was streaming on Amazon, but it's the same feeling I remember having about a Netflix straight-to-streaming movie I saw a couple years ago, Blood Red Sky. I didn't think either movie was bad -- not by this point of F, anyway -- but I do think there's something uniquely unsavory about a film that looks like a TV show. We all know that we love TV shows that look like movies, but the reverse is not true.

It was only when I got to the very end of the credits, which I watched despite not liking the movie by its very strange ending, that I realized why this 2026 film looked so odd:

It was made in 2010.

Of course, if I'd already seen the poster above -- a poster from the movie's DVD release -- then of course I would have known its vintage. But I had only this to go on:

Huh? In what way, shape or form is this a 2026 film?

Even if Amazon had newly acquired this film, which it seems like they must have, that is not the same as a release year. 

I checked the Wikipedia page to see if it mentioned anything about some new release agreement, some kind of streaming debut, that would, in any conceivable way, qualify this as a movie released in the current year. But I found mention of nothing like that.

You may recall that Amazon has biffed this sort of thing before. I wrote here about watching the movie Corner Office, thinking it was being released in 2024 but then finding out that the actual release year was 2022.

I get that. Release years are slippery things. A festival debut here, a theatrical release there, and then a streaming release, and you could conceivably have a three-year range of ambiguous possible release dates.

There is no way to miss a release year by 16 years. 

So now Amazon is requiring me to do all my homework before watching one of their "new" releases, which takes away some of the spontaneity of just finding it on the streamer and pressing play. 

I guess a movie that looks like a TV show, supposedly released today, is the kind of thing that should give you pause. 

Watching old Netflix films

What exactly is an old Netflix film?

It's a Netflix original that you somehow missed at the time it was released, but you end up watching at a later date. 

I say "somehow" because I have pretty complete coverage of the Netflix original films I ever wanted to see. 

Watching one belatedly almost never happens, but it happened when I watched the 2017 film The Ritual on Wednesday night.

Why does this almost never happen? I should clarify, it almost never happens to me, but it could happen to others. Still, I don't think it happens much to them either.

Netflix movies, more so than most movies that debut on streamers, seem to exist for the exact two-week period after they were released. Sure, they will remain on Netflix likely forever, but watching them ten years after their release seems anachronistic. They were meant to be one-and-done in that first fortnight. After that, they're no longer promoted, and if you didn't catch the exact name when they were being promoted, good luck to you in trying to find them again. 

This may not be uniquely the case for Netflix as opposed to the other streamers, but since Netflix was the first streamer to release a notable quantity of content branded with its name, it kind of created the template for this. 

Why did I miss The Ritual in 2017? I shouldn't have. It's a genre film with plenty of apparent genre goodies. It stars Rafe Spall, an actor I have always liked. And if I needed further incentive, it's only 94 minutes long, the perfect length not to think twice about it and just press play.

I guess I'd have to say it was early enough in the Netflix original films era that maybe I didn't have the same sort of coverage I have today, when I'm running a review website and often reviewing a lot of Netflix movies in that capacity. I didn't get that responsibility until early 2020, in fact just a few weeks before the start of the pandemic. 

Still, even back then you'd think I would have been scouring the streamer for movies to add to my annual rankings. But I guess I'm not appreciating how long ago this really was, and how little I'd established standard practices when it comes to things like this. 

But then I looked in the Wikipedia pages devoted to Netflix original films, which I use surprisingly often. I'm mostly on the page for the current year, because I want to see if there's anything out now, or coming out soon, that I can review. But sometimes I go into the old ones too.

And I couldn't find it.

It appears the movie is not a "Netflix original" the way some other films are. It premiered at TIFF in 2017, where its international rights were purchased by Netflix. I guess because it was released theatrically in England by a company called eOne Films, it didn't qualify -- at that time -- as a "Netflix original." Since then, I think they've relaxed that stance, and take "ownership" over whatever they see fit to claim as their own. 

I'm not sure how useful this post was, and maybe if I had realized earlier that The Ritual wasn't on the Wikipedia pages of Netflix original films, it might have skewered the premise of the post before I even started writing.

Also, the very idea that The Ritual has a short shelf life is sort of belied by the fact that I hadn't heard of it before I went on Netflix to browse Wednesday night, but it was placed before my eyes during a fairly shallow browsing session. If it weren't being promoted at all, well, I just never would have found it. 

But then it also makes me wonder: Why did it pop now? Why do I never remember seeing it any time previously in the more than eight years since it appeared on Netflix in early 2018? 

So it's an old Netflix film for sure, whatever path it took to get there. 

Do I need to see a 3D Billie Eilish concert?

When I went to see Project Hail Mary in IMAX a few months ago, there was a trailer for the new James Cameron-directed Billie Eilish concert movie, which of course was expected to use all the latest tricks in the technology-forward director's arsenal. 

Because I wanted to see what a concert looked like when given the same care as filming a Na'vi, I thought I would probably go.

Strangely, though, it isn't even playing at the IMAX theater where they advertised it, at the Melbourne Museum, which is unusual. When you see something in IMAX, usually they only show trailers for other things that are almost definitely going to play at that theater. IMAX is a different animal, where you don't get any of the filler ads for local restaurants or telecom companies, and you get straight to the movie while only seeing glimpses of other future ways you will be awed in these very seats.

Billie Eilish: Hit Me Hard and Soft is indeed opening today, but is normal 3D, in normal theaters, enough of a draw for me?

Should a slight difference in size really matter that much in determining my interest in this film?

You see, I don't love Billie Eilish. Her music, to me, is a bit like Charli XCX's music, which is that I mean it is exactly adjacent to all sorts of bands that I have, historically, loved, but that this particular brand of what she does -- of what they do -- does not quite work for me. For a person who has been as popular as she's been for going on ten years now, I don't even know that many of her songs, and the one I probably know best, "Bad Guy," is probably my least favorite of the songs I know.

But still, I'm kind of interested in a 3D concert with James Cameron's imprimatur. 

But it's not like this is the first 3D concert I would have ever seen at the movies. Almost exactly 16 years ago, on May 2nd, 2010, I went to see Phish 3D with my friend Gregg, since we are both Phish fans. In fact, I wrote about it here, though you should probably only follow that link if you want to see a blog post with really ghastly formatting. 

The gist of that post was to discuss five total hours of two very long movies (the other being The Baader Meinof Complex) I saw on the same day that really knocked the wind out of me. If I lost my wind even from a band I used to, and possibly still do, consider one of my favorites, what chance do I stand listening to that much music that mildly annoys me, when I've already gotten the 3D concert experience in an inherently more favorable setting? 

(Side note: Looking up the date of my viewing of Phish 3D, which I originally tried to do on Letterboxd before having to opt for my Microsoft Word document, acquainted me with the fact that I never put in a retroactive logging on Letterboxd for this viewing. Since, at that time, I was just going down my movie list from this Word document to add my movies, I have to imagine Phish 3D wasn't available to add to Letterboxd when I first tried to do that. It is now, so I've belatedly rectified that.)

To be fair, Hit Me Hard and Soft comes in under two hours, and I know it's not only concert footage, as Phish 3D was. I know this because my younger son and I had a joke about one of the things in this trailer, which was that the big "dramatic moment" in the trailer was Eilish crying because her brother couldn't be present with her on tour. Not because he was sick or anything had happened to him, just because he wasn't present.

And just writing that last paragraph made me realize: The whole premise of this post is wrong.

It wasn't Project Hail Mary where I saw the Hit Me Hard and Soft trailer, it was Avatar: Fire and Ash. My younger son was with me for that one, not for Project Hail Mary. And we saw that in Hobart, the capital city of Tasmania, not my local IMAX theater. Which, therefore, did not actually create an implicit promise to screen this film that it did not fulfill. 

So yeah I guess I'm not going? I don't know. 

No need for 20 points of differentiation

I was listening to my fantasy baseball podcast this morning – and apologies for making this my second straight post with a baseball tie-in, though it doesn’t stay there – and they were doing a segment called the “believe-o-meter.” The task among the hosts was to submit an answer on a 1 to 10 scale of how much they believed in what a certain previously fringy player was doing this season.

Simple, right?

Except that one guy gave the answer of a 3 ½ out of 10 on one player. And another, I think sort of as a joke and to indicate his own uncertainty, gave a 4 ¾ on another one.

It reminded me how I am sometimes asked by my writers if it would be possible to introduce halves into our rating system.

ReelGood rates movies on a scale of 1/10. For those accustomed to the sort of five-star system Letterboxd uses, it’s the same thing, you just have to multiply the star rating by two. The previous editor somehow introduced a poop emoji when he wanted to go lower than 1/10, but I don’t know how he did that within the current functions available to me, and I’m not eager to repeat it anyway. 1/10 should be the minimum, just as a half-star on Letterboxd is the minimum. If you try to rate a movie 0/5 on Letterboxd, it just looks like you didn’t give it a star rating at all.

In either system that’s ten points of differentiation in quality. And ten should be enough.

We don’t need 20.

In the extremest of olden days, I think there might have only been four-point rating systems for the quality of things. One to four stars, no halves. I agree that that is too limiting to indicate finer points of quality, and so various systems involving five points (a five-star system) or eight points (four stars but with halves) were introduced. Our current ten-point scale is the best iteration anyone's thought of so far.

But the reality is, when you only regularly use a couple different ratings to indicate movies you like but don’t love – from 3 stars to 4, or from 6/10 to 8/10 – you do sometimes feel the need to indicate more nuance.

So that same former editor will sometimes say to me “I might give it a harsh 7,” or “I might give it a generous 8.” That would be talking about the same movie, but in one case you go a tick above, and sometimes you go a tick below. A rating of 7 ½ would solve the problem.

But are we really so wishy washy that we can’t take care of this problem in just ten different points? Our readers require us to be definitive, while understanding that not every film can be distilled down to a number, and that of course it’s just our opinion anyway, and opinions differ.

The real problem – and this is one I continue to come back to time and again on this blog – is that I am not making full use of the full range of ten ratings. Because I’m a bit of a softie, I give a significant number of films somewhere in that 6 to 8 range, in that I can usually find something about it that’s good enough to give it a 6. But sometimes I even feel bad about a 6, like it’s a slap in the face. And that leaves five whole numbers to indicate small gradations in films that are not very good.

I’m not going to change my rating system overnight to the one my former editor already uses, in which he reserves 8s for films he truly loves and almost never gives out 9s and 10s. That’s too far in the other direction, but it does mean he’s using more of the range, or perhaps at least is less reliant on halves. He might be using the same amount of the range, just shifted more negatively.

And I might not use the rating range as I ideally would, but at least I recognize that halves have no place on a ten-point scale.

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.