Monday, February 17, 2025

Not tempted enough by Babygirl

Yesterday I had almost the perfect scenario for grabbing a movie on the fly without it impacting anyone in my family, and I did something I almost never do:

I passed.

I was taking my 11-year-old to an 11 a.m. birthday party for his friend, more likely turning 12 but possibly also turning 11. It was at a place called TimeZone which has bowling, video games and laser tag. It's a fairly standard location for the birthday party of an 11-year-old, or even a 12-year-old. 

The location was the Pacific Shopping Centre in Werribee, about 20 minutes from my house, and the precise physical location of Time Zone within that shopping center (I'll use the American spelling when referring to it casually) was directly next to the Hoyts theater. Before I left the house, I'd done the reconnaissance work to figure out what movie was starting right around that time, and on a Sunday morning, there were a number of options, but only one where I hadn't seen it, I remotely wanted to see it, and it would end by the time I needed to collect my son.

Although I had decided against going to that one movie that perfectly fit my needs, I still walked up to the Kiosk at 10:57, when at least ten more minutes of trailers could still be expected for the 10:50 start, and flirted with the idea once more. I went so far as to see how much it would cost, and I guess the $23 was enough to turn me away.

Yes, I'm just not that interested in Babygirl.

I haven't heard anything really negative about it. In fact, one podcaster I listened to recently -- a woman in her 20s, so take the age (not the gender) with a grain of salt -- raved inarticulately about how much she loved it. And "love" is not too strong of a word for how I felt about Halina Reijn's last film, Bodies Bodies Bodies.

But I couldn't pull the trigger, and it wasn't only because I was interested in having a breakfast sandwich and a coffee, and writing this post. (In fact, that it is the exact thing I am currently doing.) No, there were plenty of other factors that made this particular movie a non-starter for me.

1) The $23. It's much less than I paid per ticket when I took my kids to see Captain America: Brave New World on Thursday night, as Hoyts charges an outrageous $33 per adult for what they call their X-treme Screen, which is barely any bigger than a normal screen. (Fortunately, I got them both tickets at reduced kids prices.) But it's much more than the $0 I usually pay at participating cinema chains that take my critics card. Besides, Captain America was a unique set of circumstances where I could really kill multiple birds with one stone, as it was also an excursion to buy birthday presents for my wife, and I could review that movie and rank it for the current year. Perhaps still smarting from the nearly $200 I spent on dinner, the movie tickets and movie snacks, I wasn't so eager to shell out another $23 for a movie I didn't really want to see, and one that I couldn't rank for the current year -- or really review, since it's already been out a couple weeks now in Australia, having debuted in the U.S. in 2024.

2) I'm a little over Nicole Kidman in these roles. Babygirl is Kidman's second 2024 movie (along with A Family Affair) in which she has an affair with a much younger man, a definite way of flattering the 57-year-old who has done everything within her power to create the illusion that she is still in her 40s or even her 30s. I didn't particularly care for the other one, so I didn't think this one would be much better ... and even though I have never considered myself a plastic surgery shamer, I must admit I am finding it harder and harder to look at this treasure of an actress and not be distracted by the mistakes she's made in her quest for the fountain of youth. 

3) I'm a little over this recent trend of trying to reinvigorate the erotic thriller. I haven't really cared for any of the more prominent examples that immediately jump to mind (Deep Water, Fair Play), and I kind of feel like these movies should have stayed in the 1990s. 

4) I have been inundated with ads for Babygirl when I'm playing Lexulous on my phone. They tend to show about a ten-second montage of images and dialogue from the movie and then play it over and over again until you are finally allowed to click out of the ad and get back to the game. So even if I were game for the subject matter, the repetition of the same footage and dialogue might have already irked me terminally.

5) Then there's the fact that I am not a big Harris Dickinson fan. I think he might have a bit of a bully look to him. So it makes it more problematic that one of the ads focuses on him dancing shirtless to George Michael's "Father Figure," a focal scene that has already come up multiple times in the limited discussions I've heard of this movie, and makes me roll my eyes because of the way it's talked about as some moment of great inspiration, when it really seems more like the stuff of basic bitch thirst traps.  

Well, sometimes it's nice not to indulge every movie-related life hack that comes your way. It's what separates us from the animals.

And now that I've almost finished my coffee and have finished this post -- which I won't publish until tomorrow because I've already published today -- I have more than 90 minutes of window shopping, reading, and other aimless meandering to look forward to.

Sunday, February 16, 2025

Giving it away to just anybody

Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross have officially become score sluts.

The Gorge, which debuted on AppleTV+ Friday and which I watched last night, marks their third score for a major motion picture in the past calendar year. 

I haven't landed yet on how much I like The Gorge, but let's just say the star ratings I'm deciding between are 2.5 and 3. And I'm starting to question how "major" the major potion pictures to which they're giving away their talents really are these days.

Of course they are not actually "giving them away." Writing a score for a movie is a gig that pays you money. Like anyone else, Trent and Atticus like to get paid for doing the thing they are good at doing. 

But it may just be my love for Nine Inch Nails, whom I have considered my favorite band for more than 30 years, that makes me think it's also nice if the movies they score have a certain artistic validity to them beyond that paycheck. The same way you would call out Christopher Nolan if he directed, I don't know, Sonic the Hedgehog 4

This hasn't been a problem for Ross and Reznor before now. In fact, let's use this moment in time to give a quick overview of this period when the two have been working regularly on movie scores, given that it is almost the 15th anniversary of their first and what remains their best score: The Social Network

Next came two more collaborations with David Fincher, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and Gone Girl, both of which continued the "event movie" status of their work. Two of their next three are documentaries I haven't seen, Before the Flood and The Vietnam War, which, if not "event movies," certainly carry with them a seriousness of purpose. Sandwiched in between those was maybe our first sign of them branching out into less significant subject matter, though I suppose a movie about a bomb set off at the Boston Marathon (Patriots Day) still meets the description of a "serious" movie.

In 2018 we see them starting to shift down into a bit more of a minor key, scoring Jonah Hill's Mid-90s and their first Netflix collaboration, Bird Box. So as long as seven years ago, you could say they're already making movies just for money, though I loved the novel on which Bird Box was based and I probably liked the movie just a smidge better than some people. I'd argue that at this point, we don't yet feel inundated by their work.

Their first TV work came in 2019 for Watchmen, which I have not seen (no HBO), before scoring an excellent movie for director Trey Edward Shults, Waves. This is a prelude to what I might call their breakout years as household names among casual cinephiles, when in 2020 they scored the best picture nominee Mank and the best animated feature nominee Soul, their first work in a movie designed to be viewed by people of all ages. If we are indeed saying they became household names that year, it could be because they were nominated for Oscars for both scores, the first time since they won for The Social Network, and won for Soul.

Perhaps exhausted by all the accolades, they did not produce a movie score in 2021. However, their foot has been on the pedal ever since. Strangely 2022 brought two more movies I have yet to see, Bones and All and Empire of Light, the latter of which seems particularly out of step with what I would have once thought of as a prototypical Ross/Reznor score. And while no artist wants to be thought of as making prototypical versions of themselves, I'd argue you could also say it's an indication that they're willing to work for anyone who approaches them.

In 2023 it was back to working with Fincher for The Killer, and their second animated movie, Teenage Mutant Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, which I loved. Then last year it was Challengers and Queer, the latter of which I also have yet to see, both of which are collaborations with Luca Guadagnino, with whom they worked on Bones and All. Which also describes the next project Wikipedia has listed for them, Guadagnino's After the Hunt, which is due in theaters in October. (Incidentally, Wikipedia failed to list The Gorge, so it's possible there is another project in there that I didn't get.)

So why this moment in time to slut shame them?

I don't know. I suppose on some level it's not warranted. Even though Challengers, Queer and The Gorge have all been released in one 12-month period, if you go back to looking at the release years only, they're averaging two per year. They had two in 2024 and now it looks like they will have two in 2025, just as they had two in 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2022 and 2023 -- every year except 2021, when they had zero. (I'd have liked to think that meant they made a new Nine Inch Nails album that year, but they didn't, and haven't made one since 2018. Maybe now we're getting at the source of my frustration, since I don't want them to pack away Nine Inch Nails for good, especially as Reznor turns 60 this year.)

Perhaps two scores per year is what they've determined is the maximum they can make while still giving their full attention to each score. And I have no doubt that's exactly what they're doing. As I had the stirrings in my mind about the idea for this post even from hearing they were associated with the movie, I gave a special ear to the Gorge score as I was watching, and found it to contain thought and purpose -- maybe more so than some of the past efforts I've listened to. (I bought every score up to Gone Girl, but then stopped buying them, in part because I stopped buying much music in general.)

So I'm not saying Reznor and Ross have started phoning it in. I think they put as much into their scores as they ever have. Although I did not always love how Guadagnino employed their score in Challengers -- one of my complaints was how he would bring it up and down in the same scene without any apparent motivation for this, when it would have seemed to make more sense just to let it play through -- I did think it was a good score, and maybe was as surprised as anyone else when they didn't get their fourth Oscar nomination for it. (That's right, even making as many scores as they do, they have only been nominated those three times.)

Really I think it's that I would hope they would look at the script of each movie they're scoring, when they're approached to score it, and make some qualitative analysis before they accept the gig. I'm not saying The Gorge looks like a failure on paper, or that it even was a failure, though I might think it's a mild failure. I'm saying that the basic narrative components don't seem quite Reznor-Ross-worthy. That no matter how good Scott Derrickson made it -- and it's at least fine in that regard -- it might never have been Reznor-Ross-worthy.

And that's another thing about their standards seeming to lower imperceptibly. They don't even have the argument of working with a visionary director here. Although Derrickson has made some pretty good films (The Black Phone, Doctor Strange, Sinister), for some reason I always think of him as the man behind the Day the Earth Stood Still remake, which I thought was pretty terrible.

Maybe again I just wonder: Are we going to get any more Nine Inch Nails? Probably not at this pace of making movie scores, especially as they continue to hike up their skirts for unworthy suitors. (The slut shaming metaphor lost a little of its usefulness just now.)

Then again, the last period of NIN fertility saw the guys release Not the Actual Events, Add Violence and Bad Witch in consecutive years from 2016 to 2018. And though I don't love any of those albums (some of them are EPs), they were legitimate, vocals-based Nine Inch Nails albums, unlike the two instrumental Ghosts albums released in 2020. During those same years, they also scored five films.

So it is possible for Trent and Atticus to have it all, even if they accept gigs to write music for films that might be beneath them. They just have to decide they want it all. And though I think they will never get too old to score movies, the days of them composing new angst-ridden industrial-edged popular music, and simulating the related emotions as they play it on stage, are limited. Give me a little more Nine Inch Nails now, because you can always score Sonic the Hedgehog 4 later. 

Saturday, February 15, 2025

Taking the Pepsi Challenge with my streamers

I said in Thursday's post that I should not have chosen Stan as my streamer to watch Eat Pray Love. How right I was*, and how many other choices I didn't realize I actually had.

(*read on, there's more to this story)

Suspecting but never definitively proving that the video quality on Stan was worse than on my other streamers, I decided to do a little test. And the results of that test were definitive indeed (*but maybe not in the way I originally thought).

I'm calling it the "Pepsi Challenge," a bit of a misnomer but I'll explain my thinking.

In the actual Pepsi Challenge from the 1980s -- and was it this that prompted Coke to roll out the ill-fated "New Coke"? -- people tasted unidentified colas to determine which one they liked the best. There may have been more than two, or it may have just been Coke and Pepsi. Allegedly, a lot of people decided they liked Pepsi better. And, speaking of things that stayed in the zeitgeist, as I was when talking about Eat Pray Love, so did the Pepsi Challenge, as seen in such places as Pulp Fiction: "I'll take the Pepsi Challenge with that Amsterdam shit."

My Pepsi Challenge does not have the same blind element in that I already knew which streamer was which, and I already had a bias going in. However, it does involve comparing like things to see which is the best. Plus, there would be less inherent subjectivity to it. While it's a personal assessment what flavor of soda you like the best, the crispness of an image, in most cases, is not a matter of preference. 

So first I checked to see if Eat Pray Love was available on one of my other streamers. It was. Amazon.

Then I decided to watch the first few minutes of the movie, just to get an idea of how much better I thought it looked. 

Then I decided I would actually take a picture of the same scene from both movies, one on Amazon and one on Stan, to make a side-by-side comparison all the easier. 

There was no comparison.

Before I show you the pictures, I'll tell you I selected this particular scene because it was a party Julia Roberts' character attends early on -- in theory, where she starts to get the idea she's not happy. An indoor scene, making the lighting all the more important to get right. This was the where I noticed how dark the movie looked. I particularly wanted a shot featuring Viola Davis, because her complexion makes the phenomenon all the more pronounced, as when the image is as dark as I perceived it to be during my viewing, you basically lose the ability to distinguish the features on her face. 

So I paused the movie at the 4:26 mark on Amazon and here's what I got:

I believed this was much brighter than my experience had been with Eat Pray Love. You can see the details of Davis' face just fine. However, I need to go back into Stan to be sure.

Oh no.

Never mind that I didn't get the depth of the shot just right. By comparison, the image on Stan is, frankly, awful looking. The right side of Davis' face is completely indiscernible. I've heard that due to their complexions, it is especially important to light Black actors correctly, otherwise this is what happens. 

On a lark, I decided to see if Eat Pray Love was also available on Netflix. It was.

If we were looking for infinitesimal differences between two like products, as Pepsi was in its comparisons with Coke, the only contest here would be between Amazon and Netflix. These two images look slightly different, but the preference on which one is better could reasonably be in the eye of the beholder.

Whereas Stan would finish a distant, distant third -- or perhaps fourth, behind the option of not watching the movie at all.

There is one other thing I haven't even told you about this. When I started watching Eat Pray Love the other night, I did try to fix the image within the movie, after I'd been watching it for maybe 20 minutes. I determined that Stan allows you to adjust the video quality between the settings of Low, Medium, High and Auto, to optimize your experience based on the speed of your internet. Ours was set to Auto by default, so I changed it to High. I noticed a slight uptick in the quality, but not to Netflix or Amazon levels.

Perversely, I also watched a few seconds of this movie in both Low and Medium. Lordy.

I am now asking myself:

Can I even watch movies on Stan anymore? Should we even still be subscribing to it?

There is no doubt that I like having this extra streamer available as an option for when I'm looking for a movie I can't otherwise find, and that Stan has come through for me in the past. Just earlier this week, I learned that my #1 of 2024, The Substance, will begin streaming on Stan starting ... well, starting today in fact. I thought this was my occasion to finally show the movie to my wife.

But can I even do that if it's going to look like this?

Here's the biggest problem: As a critic, I rely on having no details that are beyond the control of the filmmakers impacting my ability to assess the film. You can already see how this has failed me with regards to Eat Pray Love. In my post Thursday, I mentioned the lighting problems multiple times. Fortunately, I did also mention my suspicion that Stan could be part of the problem, as I already had reason to suspect this. More on that in a minute.

As it turns out, those lighting problems had nothing to do with how Ryan Murphy shot the movie. They only had to do with how Stan projected it. 

Stan does not show a huge number of original films, though I did use it last year to watch and rank the Nicolas Cage film Arcadian, which I did not happen to review. But let's say I had reviewed Arcadian. I might have spent some valuable real estate in the review dinging the movie for a thing that was not its fault. I don't think Arcadian would have been a good movie no matter where it was projected, but being projected on Stan certainly did it no favors. 

Similarly, I don't think I would have liked Eat Pray Love much better no matter where I'd seen it. But I can't be sure. With movies, a first impression often sticks with you. And my first impression of Eat Pray Love was of a dark movie that looked bad. 

This is a worry that has come up for me before related to sound. I remember specifically discussing it (on this blog, I think) in relation to Clint Eastwood's Gran Turino, which had an unfortunate mix between its music and its dialogue such that you had to turn up the volume to hear the dialogue and then rush to turn it down again any time the music came on. At the time, I wondered if there was any way to know whether this was the movie's fault or if it had something to do with my TV or other aspect of my individual viewing experience. Fortunately, another person independently confirmed they'd had the same experience with this movie.

But as a critic, I don't want to be constantly confirming my impressions of movies with other people. I want to know I've got a high-quality streamer presenting it, like Netflix or Amazon. 

But I also don't like to give up on products that I have subscribed to and in many ways like. I am actually involved in a similar problem with my tennis club right now, poor service and considering not renewing my membership, but vastly preferring the option to renew. 

So I decided to dig deeper on this. 

I looked back into our viewing history on Stan. At first I actually did this to see how much we were really using the service, but then that morphed into something else.

And this discovered for me that in the past year, I have watched exactly seven other movies on Stan: Throw Momma from the Train a few weeks ago, the aforementioned Arcadian, three Halloween movies when I was watching those during October, a revisit of The Crow in preparation for watching the new version, and a random revisit of The Truman Show

Seven movies in a year is not a lot for paying a monthly subscription fee. Of course, I am not the only one who uses Stan. My younger son randomly binged the entire Henry Danger series last year, most of which he had already seen, and my wife has watched a half-dozen series in that year, most notably Hacks. There's value in that. 

But there may not be continuing value for me. Even when I watched The Crow, I remember thinking it did not look very good, though I think I put that on my memory of the movie. The weird skipping forward and doubling back by a second or two, which happened a number of times throughout the movie? Well of course that was on Stan. 

I thought I might do the Pepsi Challenge on The Truman Show, but of course, this one was not available on either Amazon or Netflix. Thereby clarifying the conundrum I am in about the service Stan provides me.

But I did decide to click into it to see if the "Stan effect" was visible here. Indeed, it did not look great, though obviously I had not noticed it at the time I watched it last year. That assessment could have been complicated by the fact that I was watching it on my projector, so it was reasonable to imagine there would be differences in the projection. 

The experience of watching movies has to do in large measure with the quality of how they look. That may be an obvious statement, but I'm making it anyway. A good script can drag a movie past its visual components, but it needn't. Movies are first and foremost a visual medium.

So, in light of the definite value I get from a movie like The Truman Show -- not to mention the three Halloween movies that were not available to me any other way, and now The Substance -- I took this whole thing one step further and contacted Stan customer support, including the three stills of Eat Pray Love you see above.

Their first response was to tell me my email address was not associated with a Stan account and to provide further information to prove I was a customer. I was a little annoyed by this, but I get it. They don't want to invest time in a customer unless they know it's really a customer. I intentionally did not provide the additional information about myself because it would still not match up to anything in their system, only telling them the account was associated with my wife's email address, and providing them that address. I did this in part to see if they would come back to me again to prove I was associated with the account holder, as at this point, Stan's customer service, or lack thereof, might be a factor in whether we keep it or not.

They then sent another response asking me to cc in my wife, so yeah, I guess that was sort of the thing I didn't want them to do. But I guess I have to admit I still get it, and sure, this approach is more secure for us. When I responded and cc'd her in, they then responded again (different person this time) confirming what the first person said about needing to verify. Getting more annoyed. Also, when that second person replied, they forgot to cc my wife so I had to reply again, ccing her again. The guy replied apologizing for not ccing her, but then also did not cc her on that response. I guess the net result is a state of annoyance remaining constant.

My wife replied and things were finally allowed to go forward.

Finally they said they could not duplicate this in their analytics and asked what our TV model number is. I replied. 

A third person (they work in shifts, and I do appreciate someone keeping the thread live while the others are off) got back to me and asked if the same issue were happening on any other devices.

Duh. I'm an IT guy and I didn't even think to check this. 

So then I did watch a little bit of Eat Pray Love on Stan on my laptop, and this time, it looked fine. I mean, it looked equivalent to how the other services looked. The way Ryan Murphy filmed it. Which also explains why my wife, who tends to watch Stan through her devices, does not notice the things I've noticed. 

Okay, so this is some sort of interaction effect between Stan and my TV. Maybe we can blame the intermediary, which would be Fetch, the conduit through which we access a lot of other TV-related things on our HDMI2 port. I suppose it's like an AppleTV. 

We actually do also have AppleTV, but unfortunately, it's through my U.S. iTunes (which I need to keep in order to access movies that have not been released here yet) and therefore I can't get the Stan app in the app store.

Well at least now I know what I'm working with. And I know that Stan is not just some purveyor of shoddy streams. 

Stan support responded again (they're right on it, really) asking me to go to a URL on my TV to run a speed test. I tried and tried but I can't figure out how to type in a URL on my TV. So I did the native speed test on Fetch, which came back fine. I told them this.

And then a lightbulb went off, and I finally started to really think like an IT guy -- on my own this time, without the prompting of anyone else.

I thought, if Fetch is the problem, I'll see this problem also when I go on Netflix through Fetch, rather than through the native Netflix app on my TV. I can't get Stan through AppleTV, which I had hoped to do to put it on a level playing field with Amazon Prime. But I can go the other way around, signing into Netflix on Fetch. 

And you know what? Eat Pray Love looked like shit on Netflix through the Fetch box, too. 

So now, ultimately, Stan is completely exonerated in this. Fetch is the shoddy service, or maybe it's just something about the settings. I've already gone through and tried to tweak a lot of settings that I think could relate, to no avail. But at least now I know for sure where the problem lies.

The scientific method involves changing only one variable at a time, but also, knowing all the variables you can and should change to get your answers. I do this without even thinking about it in IT, and now I've finally done it at home too.

The Pepsi Challenge is a useful starting point, but you have to know what it is that you're actually comparing. I thought I was comparing streamers, when I was actually comparing ... digital media players, is I guess the right way to refer to AppleTV and Fetch, as I just discovered from the internet. 

You may be able to tell this post was written partially in real time, as I got the first part of it out without knowing what the problem was, before coming around to the right answer in the end. If I'd done all of this before I started writing, I surely would have structured this post differently. But I can't be bothered to toss all the writing I've already done and start anew. 

However, I think there's something useful about having gone through this the way I did, in terms of where I ended up. Maybe if I hadn't been writing about it, and feeling like I demanded a definitive answer for you, my reader, I wouldn't have gone the extra steps that helped me put my finger on the true problem here. 

And Stan -- poor, innocent Stan -- might have gone bye bye.

Now, if I can just figure out how to get a good Stan stream through Fetch in order to watch The Substance ... 

Friday, February 14, 2025

Love Story

The last movie I watched twice in the same day was The Story of Us.

Then I didn't watch it again for nearly 15 years.

It was August 22, 2010, just three days before the birth of my first son -- though we didn't know he was going to be a son at the time, and we didn't know he would be the first of an eventual two. I can't remember why I chose to watch it that Sunday afternoon, but the emotional pregnancy of our actual pregnancy made me perfectly primed to receive all its wisdom about marriage and parenting. In fact, so primed that when I came to the end of it, and my wife walked into the room, I told her how much it had affected me, and we started watching it again.

It was not my first time seeing the movie. I'd watched it once and reviewed it (positively) when it first came out. Actually, it was one of the retroactive reviews I did for AllMovie, since I wasn't yet reviewing for them on its actual release date. But there were a lot of gaps to fill in their database when I started writing for them in 2000, a year after The Story of Us came out, and I did a lot of gap filling.

It hadn't impacted me as much the first time, perhaps because I was yet another ten years earlier in my life and I wasn't even dating anyone seriously, let alone contemplating marriage or children as an immediate prospect. It walloped me, though, in 2010.

If I didn't watch it again in the 15 years since, it isn't because I doubted my impression of the movie formed on that day. Maybe it was for the same reason I chose these movies for watching when my wife was out of town, as she was last night when I watched The Story of Us for the first time since. If you don't want your wife to think you're unhappy in your marriage, you best not randomly rewatch a movie about marital troubles when she's walking through the living room and forming her own thoughts about why you may have chosen this time to watch this movie.

But watching this movie on Valentine's Day eve was appropriate because this is, first and foremost, a love story, and a terrifically moving one at that. And you can imagine how now having been married for 17 years, and a father for nearly 15 of those, gives me so much fuller an appreciate of this love story, as well as the pain and difficulty that threatens to unravel it. 

And if possible, I loved this movie even more this time, and am now contemplating intentionally dueling it on Flickchart -- as in, selecting the title for a purposeful re-ranking -- so it lands in my top 100 movies of all time.

That's a funny thing to admit about a movie that basically no one thinks was very good. I'm not sure why The Story of Us was coldly received and remains a sort of forgotten movie in Rob Reiner's filmography, which is as impressive as anyone's for a ten-year-stretch from the mid-80s to the mid-90s. And I might actually like The Story of Us more than all but a few of those films.

Since you are undoubtedly in the "I don't agree with what you're saying or I didn't see the movie" crowd, I'm not sure this post is for you, or if you'll appreciate most of the things I'm about to say about this movie, some of which I said in a post that went up on the actual day my son was born (which you you can find here). Maybe it's only for me, but then again, most blogging has to only be for yourself because no one else is going to care about this stuff as much as you do.

I again noticed the details of this movie as I was watching it last night, and just started to jot down notes on my phone. Instead of organizing my thoughts into a coherent piece, I think I will just list a bunch of things I love about this movie. But first, let me just give you the basic story. And instead of rewriting, I think I'll just copy what I wrote back in 2010:

The movie was referred to sarcastically at the time as When Harry Broke Up With Sally. It stars Bruce Willis and Michelle Pfeiffer as a couple married for 15 years, who are taking advantage of having their son and daughter away at camp for the summer, to try out a separation that may ultimately lead to divorce. The movie begins a few days before the kids leave for camp, and ends when they return. In between, Ben and Katie Jordan do their best to live their lives apart, with the inevitable moments together -- some of which are positive, some of which remind them why they're no longer suited to be together. The movie progresses along during their present tense of that summer, but it also flashes back to the memories they're cataloguing of 15 years of marriage. These memories are triggered by conversations they have with their friends (a well-cast group of Reiner, Rita Wilson, Paul Reiser and Julie Hagerty), as well as mundane things that happen in everyday life.

I went on to write a lot of other things that I could probably repeat in some form here, but I've already linked to the post, so you can read it if you want. But just let me get to the notes I jotted down, reasons I love The Story of Us and reasons you should see it if you haven't -- even on Valentine's Day.

- In a story that contains a number of very short flashbacks to when these two were much younger and not yet married, there's one scene that plays out in full that I love for how it establishes these characters. Katie is an intern typing away on an old typewriter in the office where Ben works as a TV writer, and he's trying to get her attention by throwing small office supplies at her -- nothing that will hurt her, of course, like paper clips and the like. She pretends she does not notice. Finally you would think she can't help but acknowledge what's going on when he tosses a shower of maybe a dozen paper clips. She does respond to this, but she does it by going to the other room and coming back wearing a pith helmet with a rotating police siren on top of it. She returns to her typing as if nothing had happened ... only a few moments later finally making eye contact with Ben and smiling broadly. What a playful way to establish the basic parameters of their dynamic ... as well as establishing some of the ways she has changed and he has not, potentially both to their detriment.

- I said in my previous post that I love the details of this movie, the details it does not need to spend the time to get right but does anyway. One I noticed last night is when Ben and Katie, not having told their kids their situation, visit them at camp on parents' weekend and are staying in their usual cabin, with Ben planning to sleep on the couch. Ben is wearing a Camp Pinewood t-shirt, which you would think he might have just bought that day as a showing of additional financial support for the camp. However, if you look closer, you can see that there is a hole in the collar, indicating that not only was this bought some other year, maybe even three or four years ago, but that Ben is the type of guy who wears the camp t-shirt to the camp he's visiting. These details seem accidental but someone actually had to think about them, which is one of the things that gives The Story of Us its feeling of bracing authenticity.

- And speaking of this cabin, Willis has a great line delivery when his daughter asks if they are staying in the "acorn cabin," because an emotional Ben has just started crying when he saw them and is now trying desperately to cover that up. The rest of his family is walking toward the dining hall and he shouts after them "Yes! We got the acorn cabin!" It's hilarious, even though I am not conveying it very well. 

- I love Paul Reiser's rant about why Ben can't write a book about his grandmother. Reiser plays Ben's agent, and the first thing he asks Ben is if his grandmother fucked a president. When Ben doesn't seem to understand that his grandmother is too insignificant of a figure for a book that has any hope of selling copies, Reiser takes him to the window of his office building to look out at the people below, and goes into a long diatribe about how all the people below will some day die. He discusses all the things they spend their time doing, working his way up over the course of a minute of ranting to the idea that none of them wants to read a book about his fucking grandmother. It's great writing and really funny. 

- In one of the longer flashbacks to just, I believe it was, the previous year, Ben and Katie take a trip to Italy to try to jumpstart their marriage. Which works, until they return home ... and all the familiar problems immediately resurface. But in Italy, they meet an annoying other couple of Americans, and Ben instinctively recognizes that he wants to give them a false name because he doesn't want anything to do with them -- even though the others will probably immediately see that it is a false name. He says "We're the Mansons," and without a pause she chimes in with "From Spahn Ranch." Now, you could say this is just screenwriters being too clever. I prefer to think of it as them being on the same wavelength to such an extent that they immediately grok what the other is doing and have a witty retort at the ready -- which makes sense because they are both great linguists, he a writer and she a designer of crossword puzzles. This is borne out in the next scene when they are playing a game of hangman in plain sight under the table while sitting with this annoying couple.

- The boy their daughter has a crush on at camp is named twice, and the second time I was sure I caught it correctly: Austin Butler. I just think that's funny because we now have an Austin Butler of our own.

- Reiner is great with scenes shot in public locations, specifically restaurants. We all know about his famous scene in When Harry Met Sally ("I'll have what she's having"), but there's a good one here too -- not because I think the rant Ben gives here is the strongest part of the movie by any stretch. In fact, it might be the only part of the movie that made me cringe a bit. What I really love is the reactions of the other diners to his rant, which is that they start looking over and theorizing among themselves about what's going on. A good director is aware of what's going on in the scene, even with the extras, and there's no doubt that Reiner is a good director.

- There's one concept in this movie that I have the occasion to think about regularly in my life. If I said I thought about it once a month, that might not be an exaggeration. It's the idea, put forth by the character played by Reiner, that the ass is an illusion. Really, there is no ass; what we call the ass is just the fatty tops of the legs. Not only is this an interesting metaphor for the illusions that are part of every marriage -- the ones we bring in, and the ones that change over time -- but it's also just a damn funny idea. What's more, it has a great callback in Ben's otherwise a bit over-the-top restaurant rant. 

- Eric Clapton wrote the song "Get Lost" for this movie, and little bits of it play throughout in a wonderful way of setting the tone and tying it all together. It's not that I know this song particularly well from my daily life, but it's used so effectively and feels so -- preexisting? -- that I had trouble believing it was actually written for the film.

- And oh yeah, it packs all this into only 95 minutes. 

That's all I wrote down, but I could go on. I won't, of course. Like the people in Paul Reiser's rant, you too will someday die and maybe today you don't want to read much more about The Story of Us

I will, however, leave you with three concluding thoughts, as I wait for my wife to return for Valentine's Day tonight, with a slightly fuller understanding of how I could be a better husband and partner from having watched this movie. 

1) I was reduced to tears at the end of this movie. Again. The final speech by Michelle Pfeiffer is just so great that I might have to write a separate post about it at some point. It's actually one of two moments in the last ten minutes that get to me this way, both of which got me again. In fact, just in preparing for these moments, I felt myself starting to get choked up at other, smaller moments. 

2) Part of the fuller sense of emotion I felt while watching this movie likely had to do with the reminder of what Bruce Willis was once capable of. I'm sorry that he will never be able to give this sort of performance again.

3) The title of this post is obviously a play on the title of the movie and as a real encapsulation of what this movie ultimately is, which is why again, I encourage you to watch it as a sort of counterintuitive Valentine's Day movie. But it has another meaning as well. If you add in the words "I" and "The" and "of Us" to my title, you'd get "I love The Story of Us," which is also true. And I won't hide this love just because others have not yet discovered it.

Thursday, February 13, 2025

Audient Zeitgeist: Eat Pray Love

This is the first in my 2025 bi-monthly series watching previously unseen movies who have some significant role in the zeitgeist.

Now I can tell you about the actual inspiration for my new bi-monthly series, which was not The Bucket List, that being my example of the phenomenon I'm considering when I first announced Audient Zeitgeist.

The actual inspiration was Eat Pray Love, which I seem to have encountered a lot in culture, even 15 years after it came out -- in fact, especially lately.

I can't count the number of times -- okay, it's probably only two or three -- that I've seen a character in some movie or TV show talk about an upcoming trip of self-discovery and say "I'm going to Eat Pray Love that shit." In fact, it's a line of dialogue I can imagine someone like Jonah Hill saying, because that's the kind of thing a Hill character would say -- at least back at the time that Eat Pray Love actually came out, if not the current version of Hill.

The idea being that while on this trip the character is discussing, they're going to eat a lot, pray a lot (or at least a little), and, if all goes well, love. 

Which means that like The Bucket List, Eat Pray Love has risen up in our culture beyond its potentially modest roots as an adaptation of self-help chic lit starring Julia Roberts, to become a thing everybody knows about and can easily understand the meaning of what you're talking about just from a reference to the title.

Of course, the really qualifying aspect of the movie for this series is that I had never seen it.

I corrected that on Tuesday night, perhaps choosing an inopportune night to do it since I'd played tennis that night and the movie is 2 hours and 20 minutes long. Of course, any opportunity may have been inopportune, because I didn't like it very much.

I don't think you need me to recap the plot, but I will anyway. Roberts plays a woman, Liz, who discovers sort of abruptly (at least as the film presents it) that she is not very happy in her marriage to a character played by Billy Crudup, and one day, after anachronistically praying to God (Liz is not religious), through tears she tells Crudup she doesn't want to be married anymore. She hasn't yet discovered what she does want, and has a fling with an actor played by James Franco. Because of the poor sense of pacing of Ryan Murphy's film, the passage of time in this fling is hard to chart, such that in no screen time at all, she also wants to escape Franco and it seems like they've had some sort of soulful relationship that she mourns in equal measure to her marriage.

The thing she does want, ultimately, is to travel around the world to three specific locations all starting with I -- could there be any better metaphor for her self-involvement -- which are Italy, India and Indonesia. (Though Indonesia is always referred to in the film as just "Bali," since perhaps that sounds more exotic than "Indonesia.") She couldn't know that this was how it would turn out, of course -- unless the script is lazy enough to posit that she does -- but these three legs of her journey will correspond to the three words in the film's title, in that order. The trip is planned to take a year.

First I want to talk about how shoddy this film looks, especially for a travelogue into which we are meant to dream ourselves away. And I don't think it was just the fact that Stan, my Australian streamer, makes everything look a bit shoddy, especially compared to watching the same movie on any of my other streamers. (I should have checked to see if it was on them. I just saw it was on Stan, because it's the kind of movie Stan would have, and stopped there.)

More specifically in its shoddy appearance, let's talk about the lighting. Which is way too dark, even in the majority outdoor scenes in these three locations, but especially where we start in New York. That may have been an intentional thematic choice by Murphy, but I don't feel inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. But on that topic of lighting, there are entirely too many scenes where Roberts has light shining on the back of her head, which made me think Murphy intended that as a halo effect. Yawn. 

It's hard to think of there being a halo around Liz' head because it's not very easy to like her. For being two and a third hours long, Murphy's script, which he co-wrote with Jennifer Salt and Elizabeth Gilbert, doesn't put in the time for us to understand where Liz' sense of ennui originated. Sure, a person can be unhappy just because they're unhappy, but Liz comes across as a privileged person who doesn't totally appreciate what she has. Even the presentation of Crudup's character is pretty mild as an inciting incident for her divorce, and I wonder if that was to flatter the character by not making her capable of marrying a true narcissist. Without having an obviously toxic male to run away from, though -- and the movie starts to portray him more cartoonishly after the fact as a sort of corrective measure -- we don't really get what's driving this sudden desire to leave. Ultimately the movie is going to posit the fact that she "doesn't love herself so how could she love anyone else," which may be a true phenomenon in the world but doesn't seem any less corny, especially in Murphy's hands. 

The journey gets better as it goes -- at least Murphy gets the momentum going in the right direction -- but I found Liz' experiences in Italy particularly insufferable. This is the section of the movie that bears the brunt of the "Eat" portion of the title -- only once do we even see her eat something again after this -- but it's not very good food porn. And there's the sort of ridiculous notion that Liz and her companion need to buy new jeans because they've gained too much weight while indulging in pizza and pasta. Because these are both professional actresses, one an icon of her generation, of course they did not gain a single pound while shooting the movie, so the notion that they now both have a "muffin top" -- Liz' term for the small roll of flab at her waist -- is totally unsupported by what we see on screen.

Plus this section is replete with cultural stereotypes of Italians and in all other ways unconvincing. There's this one attempted "joke" where a small Italian girl gives them the finger from the fire escape of her apartment building, based on nothing that they've done, only a desire by the screenwriters to add personality into the moment. It falls as flat as any of their other attempts at "jokes." At least, I should note, her handsome language teacher does not become a love interest for her, but rather, for her friend.  

The India portion is weighted down by Liz' interactions with an American named Richard (billed as "Richard from Texas" on IMDB), and he's played by an actual Richard, Richard Jenkins. He gloms onto her so mercilessly that it seems like a failure at both the performance level and the directing level. The failure at the writing level is that he takes to calling her "Groceries," because when she first gets to the ashram where she'll be staying, he sees her eating a particularly large plate of food. Guess the "Eat" portion of the film is taking its time to transition into the "Pray" portion. And poor Liz, I think this is the last time we see food touch her lips in this movie. You shouldn't call someone "Groceries" if they have as big of a "muffin top" as Liz has. (Wait, no, she doesn't have a muffin top at all.)

He's of course got a back story that will reveal itself over time, and in this ashram -- which is, in a bit of irony that is never resolved, missing its guru because she's in New York, effectively trading places with Liz -- Liz has to do menial labor tasks to earn her keep, in addition to her praying. She also has an underdeveloped relationship with an Indian girl who works there (I. Gusti Ayu Puspawati) and who is dreading her arranged marriage. 

I did eventually thaw on this section of the film a little bit, but I was pretty eager to get on to the Bali portion because that's the only of the three places I've actually been. (I was in Italy in college but it was the very far north and for a ski trip, which is very dissimilar to what we see here.)

Here, with the same level of abruptness that characterizes many of the other interactions in this movie, she meets Felipe (Javier Bardem), a Brazilian who I guess retired here (Bardem was only 41 in 2010) after his wife died ten years ealier. This is a homecoming of sorts for Liz because in an opening I didn't totally understand either, she had been there earlier to interview a local who can read your palm and tell your fortune, which is, I suppose, reason enough for her to have taken this trip in the first place, when the man told her she would be in one short marriage and one long one, but she didn't know which she was currently in. 

I say this relationship is abrupt because I have already forgotten how these characters actually meet, but like one scene later they are swimming in beautiful Bali bays and apparently already deliriously in love. I guess they didn't meet cute enough for me to remember that part.

I didn't hate this section of the film either, but the overall effect of the whole experience was pretty disappointing.

I don't know, I guess I thought this might be fun -- kind of in a similar way to another Bali-set movie starring Julia Roberts, Ticket to Paradise with George Clooney, was fun. At least I thought it would be lit better.

But actually, I don't think this movie really wants to be fun. It tries to be fun on a couple occasions, but I think that's more a concession to the fundamental components of filmmaking than it is an actual interest in being fun. I think we need to read more into Roberts' opening tearful speech to God -- which comes out of left field when the movie is barely five minutes old, her crying face seen in awkward profile -- if we want to understand what this movie really thinks its about. 

Now the real question is: Is its enduring spot in our zeitgeist justified?

I guess that's a different question than "do I understand it."

Yes I understand it, especially since few of the cultural references to the movie would be considered respectful. They're far more likely to be taking the piss out of the movie than suggesting a journey like this is actually a clear-eyed means of achieving self-actualization.

For one, such a journey is only available to someone who is pretty wealthy, or has been working all their life to save up for it. Roberts was only 43 in 2010, so she isn't the latter. She'd have to be the former even though, if memory serves, her character is only a journalist. And that's not me insulting journalists. That's me having been a journalist and knowing that the pay isn't great.

Then there's the inexcusable self-absorption of it. We are meant to be our own biggest supporters and all that, but there's a fine line between looking out for yourself and the "me me me" mentality that is only slightly softened here by Roberts' charm.

Plus there's the definite tourist's attitude to the hip trend of trying to know yourself better through eastern religion. I don't think Liz even articulates why it is that she wants to go to this ashram, considering that she doesn't seem to be that into the idea of the spiritual when she tries to pray to God. It's almost like it's shorthand that she's just a shallow rich lady who is susceptible to the ideas presented by the 2010 version of influencers without having any sincere knowledge of why she's doing the things she's doing.

Eat Pray Love is a myopic conceit that purports to be a real formula a real person could use to try to achieve a happier life. The cynical thing about it -- the book before it, I'm sure, and then the movie -- is that the people who are ready to receive this sort of message are rarely the ones who are in a position to enact what it is suggesting. I'm sure there were more than a few midwestern moms with mortgages -- MMMs, we might call them -- who dropped everything and took a plane somewhere in the hopes they would eat Italian food while still looking as good as Julia Roberts, and were quite sure there was a soulful Brazilian widower out there just waiting to fall head over heels for them. Three weeks later, maybe they came back with significantly less money to pay that mortgage.

I'll be back in April to chew over another zeitgeist movie I haven't seen.

Wednesday, February 12, 2025

Self-effacement points for an actress we now like better

At the time of this writing -- which is likely sometime within two weeks of the time of its publishing -- we have made it through all but two episodes of Netflix's 3 Body Problem. (The first season, I should say -- Netflix promises us that another season is coming. In fact, it's official.)

This is not a movie, but the post is about an actress, so I think it works for the format. Plus there's a movie tie-in coming later.

I should say, "at long last" we have made it through all but two episodes of 3 Body Problem. More than a year ago, with the arrival of this show on the horizon, my wife encouraged me to read Cixin Liu's three-book series, which is about as heady science fiction as you are likely to find, while remaining accessible enough to warrant adaptation into a TV show. I'm glad she pressed me to do it, because I doubt I would have bothered to read the books if I had already seen the show, and the books blew my mind. The show is doing a pretty good job of recreating that sensation, though obviously is not as effective, because as we all know, "the book is better."

But I did finish reading them last September, so it's taken quite a while for us to get to this point. 

And, I should say, whatever pleasure we've taken out of watching the show -- me, a lot the whole time; my wife, more and more as it goes -- it's been despite actress Eiza Gonzalez. 

If your "misogynist troll incel" warning bells are going off, don't worry. This story has a happy ending. It does not have a particularly happy beginning, but that charge was not led by me, but rather, by my wife. Who is, as you might have guessed, a woman. 

I didn't have particular feelings about Gonzalez one way or another when we first started. She fulfilled a particular type you get in a lot of movies or TV shows, which is "woman who is objectively attractive but does nothing for me personally."

By no later than the second episode, though, my wife was starting to talk about her as having a "stupid face."

Now I have to explain that for a moment. It doesn't mean she thinks the person looks like they are stupid. She means that the face itself is stupid, like it's galling in some way. I've written about this before, but I won't link to that post because that post did attract some trolls in the comments section, as well as some commenters who though I was as troll, and for that I feel shame.

And this term is never used on people who are unattractive. In fact, it is more likely to be used on a person who is attractive, but who has something about their face that exudes unpleasantness or meanness or, in its most benign form, just a certain boring blankness that belies the fact that they are supposed to be beautiful.

Like Eiza Gonzalez.

At this point I suppose it is time for me to give you a look at poor Ms. Gonzalez -- a closer look, I should say, since she's also front and center in the poster above:

Is this the perfect shot from this show to illustrate the thing I'm talking about? Probably not. But I see it in her every expression, because once my wife mentioned it, I couldn't not see it. If you saw the show, maybe you know what I'm talking about. Or maybe I just sound mean, but remember -- happy ending.

My wife got to the point where at least once an episode, she would make a "tsk tsk" sound of exasperation when she would see the actress on screen, especially since they made the poor choice of dressing her like an underwear model even though she's supposed to be a genius physicist. Emboldened by her distaste for Eiza Gonzalez, I joined in with my own, because indeed, I do find something objectionable about her. 

Or, did. Found. Past tense. 

Because right when we'd worked ourselves up to a particular lather in episode 6, one of the other characters called out the very thing we were talking about.

It's the character played by Jovan Adepo -- I won't bother explaining who these characters are or the context of their interactions -- and there's a moment when Gonzalez' character invites Adepo's character to say something negative about her, because she called him "professorial." So he does.

Here's how he starts:

"You're beautiful."

My eyes rolled a bit. On this we agree with Mr. Adepo, though he seems to be missing the whole point of why we don't like her.

Then he continues:

"In a boring way."

What? We're on to something here. She laughs

"You're like a movie star, but in really bad movies. Like you'd be the bad girl in Speed 3."

OMG. 

Nailed it.

The character takes offense to this. Obviously, the actress did not.

How else to explain something so spot on, but so otherwise unrelated to anything this show is about?

This is a TV show about -- well, I don't want to spoil what it's about. Let's just say it contemplates the vastness of the universe and scientific advancements beyond our imagination. The fact that there is a reference to the fictitious but very plausible Speed 3 is out of left field, indeed.

Which means it only could have gotten in there if the actress okayed it and if she recognized some essential truth about the observation.

And I think that's a pretty cool way to take the piss out of yourself.

Eiza Gonzalez must have heard this about herself before. Or it must be some expression of her inner self-loathing. Like, she wishes she were beautiful in a distinctive way, not just the generic way that would get her cast in Speed 3. Like, an actual successor to Sandra Bullock, not some cheap ripoff with no charisma.

But it's one thing to accept a joke at your expense. It's another thing to insert a random bit in a TV script that really does not have anything to do with the moments that come before and after it -- and therefore, according to ordinary script logic, means it should probably be excised -- that cuts to the core of a phenomenon that some not insignificant percentage of the people watching are actually thinking about you.

Because didn't she kind of have to be the impetus for this joke? What person writing a script is going to say "Let me see what you think of this ... I want to write a mean joke about one of our lead actresses that has nothing to do with the story and therefore is possibly inexcusable on a basic narrative level. That okay with everyone?"

No screenwriter who wants to keep writing scripts would say that, so Eiza Gonzalez had to be the one who did.

Big ups, Eiza. Really big ups. 

Your face is not so stupid anymore.

Tuesday, February 11, 2025

The average length of movies is 106.91 minutes

As you would know if you've been keeping up with The Audient, I recently started going back and filling in all the movies I had not yet added to my big movie spreadsheet, which I stopped updating in 2022 while continuing to update its Microsoft Word counterpart. Keeping up that one is much easier as it is just a giant list of titles. I won't go into again why I stopped or why I started again, but if you want to catch up on that discussion you can find it here

What I do want to get into is that this project has seemed to help me find a potential universal average length for movies. Not just the movies I've seen, but all movies.

One of the pieces of data I keep about each movie is its running time. I did this primarily for a silly project that I posted about here, when I wanted to choose my favorite movie at each length. Now I just do it out of habit and because it's easy enough to keep doing, though it does mean I have to go to IMDB for each movie I add, which is just the sort of thing that might make this catch-up project seem daunting enough to discontinue it. In many cases I can remember the release year and the director of the movie, and of course whether I liked it or not, but rarely if ever will I actually remember its exact length. Fortunately, so far it has not seemed like a disqualifying hardship to do this, and I'm down to less than 600 movies I still need to add (starting at more than 800). 

Because I was keeping track of the length anyway, I also created a calculation that would add up all the minutes and divide it by the total number of values, so I could see a running average of the length of the movies I watch.

And this average length is always, or immediately comes back to if it strays from it temporarily, 106.91 minutes.

In fact, so often have I added another movie and seen this as the total running average that I have several times checked to make sure that the calculation hadn't stopped calculating for some reason.

When you get to a certain number of samples in any group -- and at this writing I am at 6315, with 587 still to go -- the statistics you can derive from it are long past the point of significant. So the fact that new titles cannot move this number much one way or another means that this is a true representation of the average length of movies I see.

And really, that would also make it a true representation of the average length of movies everybody sees.

We can put some asterisks on this. There are some people who watch largely romantic comedies and don't have the stomach or the attention span for big epics that run more than three hours. They undoubtedly have a lower average running time. Then there are those people who only like the latter and don't like the former, which means they are seeing much longer movies on average.

But we aren't trying to find out this number for viewers who profile one way or another. We're trying to find it for a hypothetical viewer who watches anything, regardless of length or subject matter, with no preference for movies in any particular genre.

Such as a critic. Such as myself.

The fact that it keeps coming back to this 91/100ths of this minute -- not 89, not 93 -- means that there seems to be a sort of granular accuracy to this, almost one we can take to the bank. I'll be curious to see how close we are to it after I add the other 587 titles I still have to add, which are also drawn from a random period of time in my life in which I did not consciously err toward one type of movie over another (which describes every large sample size from my viewing life, larger than a few months anyway). But I suspect we'll be right on it or fairly close.

This project has one other average that I can sort of take to the bank, though I think this one I may have mentioned at some point before. (I don't want to go digging for it, but it's long enough ago that you likely won't blame me if I repeat myself.)

Namely, I seem to like exactly 68.12 percent of the movies I see.

I am also keeping a running list of the total liked vs. the total disliked, which at this writing is 4302 pro and 2013 con. (Yes, it seemed like a landmark moment when I passed 2000 movies I didn't like, but since I was adding my movies in reverse chronological order, it was not possible to know which was my 2000th disliked movie.) 

Every time I add a new movie, I notice whether this percentage goes up or down. But in the time I've been adding these titles over the past week or so, it is have never gotten above 68.17% or below 68.05%. And as soon as it heads toward one of those extremes it immediately reverts back to the norm.

I actually kind of want it to go down below 68% because the lower it gets, the more it means I am holding movies to a higher standard and not just giving them a pass with a milquetoast thumbs up. Then again, the more movies I watch that I like, the more it means I am making positive use of my one wild and precious life, so I am happy to just let the numbers go where they will.

So I guess the real takeaway is, for you in the reading audience, if you are watching a movie that is 105 minutes or shorter, think of it as a win, because you're watching a shorter than average movie. 

And let's not delve too deeply into the reality that we love movies but that we rejoice when we discover they will take up less of our time. 

Monday, February 10, 2025

2024 creature feature regrets weekend

Three weeks is about the amount of clearance I need from the previous year before I start watching movies from that year again, and sure enough, it was exactly three weeks between watching the last 2024 movie I ranked for 2024, A Complete Unknown, and the first 2024 movie I watched during the post-2024 era, which will last from now until the end of time.

And then the next day, I watched my second 2024 film of the post-2024 era.

Both of these were films I had been meaning to see in time to rank them, but missed them for one reason or another. And both feature human beings who might not be quite human.

The first was Marielle Heller's Nightbitch, and there's one of these every year. Well, maybe not every year -- the last one I remember for sure was CODA in 2021. And by "one of these" I mean a movie I wanted to see before my ranking deadline but did not realize was actually easily accessible to me until it was too late.

You may remember I was trying to work our TV at our Air BnB in Los Angeles so that I could get into Hulu and watch this. You may also remember that I was unsuccessful in that endeavor. 

Even more unsuccessfully, I failed to realize that a lot of Hulu content is actually available to us on Disney+ here, due to some agreement I don't properly understand and needn't bother to properly understand. Anyway, I could have watched it before my deadline, but only noticed this a few days later when it was too late.

The first thing I want to tell you about Nightbitch is that it does not star Sandra Bullock. "Why would I think it starred Sandra Bullock, Vance?" I just think the picture in that poster above looks a lot more like Sandra Bullock than it looks like Amy Adams, which is funny because I have never for a moment thought they resembled each other.

Actually, this isn't at all what Adams looks like in the movie. I think that's quite a beautiful picture above, but Adams never looks as beautiful as she actually is in this movie, which was a choice by both Heller and Adams to underscore how much she has been physically reduced by being a stay-at-home mother to a two-year-old. When Adams was younger I thought of her as an actress who would always take roles in which she was clearly very pretty, but the last ten years of her career have changed that impression significantly. She's really in touch with her feral side here, even beyond what is required by the story itself. (Which, if you did not know, is either a real story about some part of her that is turning canine, or just a metaphor for the transformation she wants to undergo to get her old self back.)

I really liked Heller's approach to this script, which consistently breaks out of the ordinary scenes involving Adams' Mother (I only just realized, looking at IMDB, that the character doesn't have a name) in her communications with friends, former classmates and her husband, delivering some sort of soliloquy about her true thoughts -- scenes that really allow Adams to go the extra mile in finding the miserable center of a woman whose life has become only taking care of other people. Heller also intentionally blurs the line between "Is this real?" or "Is this in her head?" as there are some moments where no disinterested observer can confirm what's happening, and some where what's happening does poke its head out into other people's reality. (Though, I suppose, their reactions could still be in her head.)

Obviously in its thematic preoccupations, but also in a certain lacerating quality, the movie reminded me a lot of Jason Reitman's Tully, written by Diablo Cody and starring Charlize Theron. The way Theron eschewed all vanity in that movie to give us a specimen of exhausted motherhood (one who was also currently pregnant in that case) was very reminiscent of how Adams does the same thing here. And in both movies, a well-meaning but lazy husband/father gets called out for the way he passively shirks duties he knows his wife will do if he just shows himself to be even marginally disinclined toward them. Here it's Scoot McNairy, and I have to say, I could see in him a lot of my own failings to do more than 30% of the household tasks in our house -- though Scoot (also nameless, only "Husband" on IMDB) is probably closer to 10%. I'm not as bad as he is ... right? (Or in any case, my kids are now 14 and 11 so it's all long since been forgiven.) I especially liked clever observations in Heller's script such as when she reminds him that she's going into the city that night so he has to be the parent present, and he says "I know, I know, I'm babysitting." And she shoots back "It's not babysitting if it's your own child." Too right.

I might like Tully a smidge better, but I like them both a lot and I think this would have made my top 40 of last year if I'd seen it in time.

I didn't know anything but the title of Zelda Williams' Lisa Frankenstein. In fact, that means I did not know it was written by Diablo Cody, making my referencing of her in relation to Tully quite the coincidence. (Yes, I wrote the Nightbitch half of this post before I watched Lisa Frankenstein, already knowing that was my plan for Saturday night so also knowing in advance the concept for this post.)

If you had asked me to guess what it was about, I would have told you that Lisa was the daughter of either the mad scientist himself, or of Frankenstein's monster, depending on how this particular film wanted to interpret the identity of "Frankenstein." But just from having seen the poster, I could have told you it was not set in the 18th century. 

Making assumptions about this film was the reason it didn't quite make it off my Letterboxd watchlist during the 2024 ranking season, even though I had (paid) access to it for most of the year. It was seeing it pop up on Netflix -- which also may or may not have happened while I was still ranking -- that allowed me to belatedly catch up with it this past weekend. 

It turns out the movie was not what I thought it was about, textually, but was similar to what I thought it was about in spirit, and also a little better than I would have thought it might be. Lisa here is actually Lisa Swallows (the charming and very capable Kathryn Newton), it's just the movie thinks of her as "Lisa Frankenstein" because she ends up inadvertently raising a man from the dead by visiting an old graveyard in her town and dreaming herself away into the statue of him next to where he's buried. Yes, the statue looks a bit dreamy, but Lisa's wish was actually to be dead like him, not to have him alive again with her. See, her mother was killed by an axe murderer the year before, protecting Lisa from said axe murderer at that, and though I called Newton the actress charming, Lisa the character is more mopey and goth adjacent, as you might expect from someone whose mother recently died and whose ineffectual father (Joe Chrest) has since taken up with the town bitch (Carla Gugino) and her kind but vacuous cheerleader daughter (Liza Soberano). Oh yeah, it's also 1989.

Lisa Frankenstein humorously reminded me, in its inciting incident, of a movie I did see and rank in 2024, which was Hot Frosty. In that holiday romance for the Hallmark crowd, Lacey Chabert wishes a handsome snowman (Dustin Milligan) into existence in a similar fashion, and indeed does begin her own romance with that snowman, just as Lisa becomes involved with Cole Sprouse's initially wordless exhumed corpse, who steadily regains his complexion as he regains missing body parts through means not entirely savory. This is surely a better movie than Hot Frosty, though I did like that one too, in spite of my better critical instincts.  

As a leftover from Juno, we still think of Cody as a bit of a try-hard as a screenwriter (she probably rolls her eyes every time someone confronts her with the phrase "home skillet"). However, I have not found that to be Cody's dominant mode of writing in most of her movies since then (including Tully) and I continued to find her work more positive than negative here. I didn't embrace it as much as Nightbitch but it still gets a solid 3.5 stars from me.

And now back onward to non-2024 movies ... again. 

Sunday, February 9, 2025

The stages of my interpretation of Presence

In a post written earlier this month, I briefly touched on my feelings about Steven Soderbergh's Presence, but that hasn't ended my thinking about the movie, especially as I've listened to it discussed on podcasts and edited my own writer's review.

Before I go any further, let me get this out of the way:

Spoilers for Presence to follow.

Before I'd had any of these experiences with others engaging with the movie, though, I had this pressing question:

Just why, oh why, was a dead girl's ghost haunting a house her friend did not yet live in?

You shouldn't have read this far if you haven't seen the movie, so I also shouldn't need to refresh you on the plot, but let's just say you've already forgotten Presence. (I might argue that it is not as memorable as it should be.) 

The film opens with a camera flitting through an empty house -- up stairs, down stairs, around corners, through vacant rooms. Before any actors appear on screen, we get the idea that this is the POV of a ghost, moving quietly through the space as if walking on ballet slippers. And, I'm sorry to say, this was as scared as the film ever made me, just putting myself in the shoes -- or whatever footwear it was -- of this ghost. 

Soon afterward, we see a real estate agent arrive to show the house to -- and this part I really do forget -- either just a couple of adults, played by Lucy Liu and Chris Sullivan, or also to their teenage children, played by Callina Liang and Eddy Maday. Whether or not the teenagers are present for this showing (no pun intended), we meet them soon enough, because the family does buy the house and move in. And all the while we continue to see the ghost watching them at the middle distance of about ten feet away, sometimes closer, sometimes running quickly to another part of the house entirely. 

As the story goes on, we learn that not only can the teenage girl detect some sort of presence in the house, but that this presence is actually the ghost of her friend who died recently, supposedly of an overdose, but, we learn later on, actually because she was murdered. How she knows this ghost is her friend is not important, because we suspend disbelief in a movie like this -- on some things. We know, from the beginnings of the traditions of oral storytelling down through the ages to the moving image, that there are certain people who have a sort of spiritual communion with the dead, and they just "know things."

The next thing, I would argue, is the thing we cannot accept.

If we are to accept that the girl, Chloe by name, believes this spirit is that of her dead friend, we also have to accept that Chloe is correct, even though we never get any proof that it's actually her friend.

So again, I ask:  

Just why, oh why, was a dead girl's ghost haunting a house her friend did not yet live in?

For someone whose scripts are as tight as those of Steven Soderbergh, who rarely asks questions he does not answer, this seems like quite the oversight indeed.

I thought for a moment this house was empty because it was where Chloe's friend had lived, so when she died, the distraught family had to move elsewhere to start again. Too many bad memories.

But if that were the case, then surely Chloe would know that her friend used to live there, and it would have been commented on. (And, of course, way too weird to actually go through with the purchase.)

Plus, it seems rather unlikely, though not impossible, that a family would move into a house in the town where they already lived; presumably they'd have to live close by if the two teenage girls had been friends. And then of course, if they lived in the same town, there would be no way not to know this was the house where a girl had just died of a drug overdose (or so they think at the time).

Then there is the possibility that the ghost followed Chloe there, but the sequence of events is wrong for this. 

So if you are looking for an explanation beyond something lame like coincidence or randomness, the only thing I could come up with was the idea that the ghost's perception of time is not linear. Either that means the ghost could predict the future, that her friend was going to live there, which seems like an unlikely skill for a ghost, or it was just that the ghost could see all times simultaneously, and placed herself in this house in order to communicate with the girl who would soon live there. If pressed on the question himself, Soderbergh might offer some explanation along these lines.

The thing is, there is no real evidence of this in Presence. All the events we see in the film are portrayed chronologically (maybe more on that in a minute), and only knowing a source of obvious inspiration for this film -- David Lowery's A Ghost Story -- would we even be tempted to offer up such an explanation. 

But if this film is like A Ghost Story, it violates one cardinal rule of that film, also a cardinal rule of real estate: location, location, location. As you know if you saw that film, Casey Affleck's roaming ghost -- really just a sheet with eye holes -- can roam no further than the borders of the property, and roams more metaphorically across the eons, on the same plot of land (a la Robert Zemeckis' Here), in the past, present and future.

The spirit in Presence, on the other hand, seems at least once to have been able to move from one location to another, and that's just too many skills to have if she, like the aliens in Arrival, can also see all times at once. There's no satisfying explanation for why she came here rather than staying in her own house, unless it was, indeed, just to save her friend from the romantic interest who seduced her with the intention of murdering her.

So I don't really like any of these explanations.

But then I got another explanation.

When I got the review from my writer, I finally asked him about this apparent quandary, because I didn't want to ask him before then for fear of biasing his writing. (He loved the film, giving it a 9/10 on our rating scale.)

His response:

"I think the ghost was her brother!"

Well, duh. Forehead slap.

I knew the ghost at the end was her brother, but my apparently really dumb and surface-level reading of what happened was that the first ghost, having accomplished her goal of waking up the brother in time for him to save his sister from getting murder and go out the window with the murderer, had moved on to the next plane of existence. And that she had been replaced by the ghost of the brother, just deceased. Just because we are getting the movie from the perspective of the ghost, it doesn't mean it has to be the same ghost the whole time. 

But that's just what Steven Soderbergh wanted me to think, because I am viewing events chronologically, and because I am naturally inclined to believe the impressions of a person sensitive to paranormal activity, because years of watching movies have told me I should believe them. 

My critic reminded me that the psychic character had told the family that a ghost could even be haunting the house "from the future," a detail I conveniently forgot or possibly waved off at the time, like "Yeah that's one of those things psychics say."

So I guess in this line of thinking, it was the brother all along, trying to alter events in his own past. It also gives a second meaning to the title ("Present(s)"?) and it also explains why the ghost is in a house with which it would not otherwise have a connection. 

I still have questions though.

Now, you can never fully disentangle the cause and effect of time travel, though many films have tried. If the brother is indeed haunting the home from the future after his own death, he would know that he had, indeed, succeeded in going out the window with the murderer. When the spirit urgently runs down the stairs to awaken the previously alive version of himself, so he can carry out saving his sister, it's basically just acting out a preordained series of events, which is not as satisfying as him making the conscious choice. I guess at some point he did make the conscious choice, though you could argue, he only made it because his future dead self forced his undead self to do it. Which is still a choice, but it's only a choice that's possible from the choice already having been made.

Then I thought about how it would really be interesting if, in some iteration of events, the brother had not saved his sister, meaning she was dead and he was alive. Then it could only be her spirit that was in the house, going back and trying to change events so that she lives and he dies. If that's the case, though, it's extremely problematic from the prospective of audience sympathy. Any character who goes about trying to save their own skin and sacrificing someone else, especially a loved one, in the process, is an asshole, and beyond redemption. So even though that's sort of a cool from a "multiple timelines, cause and effect" perspective, it is almost certainly not what was intended. 

Another thing I didn't properly interpret was what the final shot meant, where we see the spirit ascending from the house into the sky, and go to credits. Because I was fixated on the idea that the brother's spirit had only just become the occupant of the house, I didn't think the camera ascending in the sky could be his perspective, because his sacrifice would have to continue by staying in the house if he had just exchanged places with the spirit who had been haunting the house, which I had continued to think was the dead friend. So if anything, it would be the dead friend ascending to the heavens here, though I have to admit this explanation was lost on me as well. I kind of just thought it was a cool way to end the movie. 

So I guess this means the house will no longer be haunted for its next occupant ... but how soon will that be? Now an actual dramatic death has occurred in this house -- out the window of this house -- so the next buyer might be slow to buy it. 

And of course, this cannot be construed as a happy ending for the family, who has now lost their son, and whose daughter -- even if she looks sort of upbeat in the end -- has further trauma piled on top of losing her friend. (Was she friends with both of the murdered girls? I think she only references one of them.) Surely her mental state cannot actually be better after the death of her brother on top of that? Unless she was somehow privy to this time loop conundrum involving how her dead brother's ghost woke up her living brother and prompted him to save her from her prospective killer?

And then this killer's fate doesn't sit well with me, not any better than his mere existence as a plot device, which I actually think is the most troubling aspect of Presence (though I suppose necessary for the story Soderbergh wants to tell). I guess the idea is that Chloe was conscious enough, in the moments after he had drugged her but before he had fallen asleep, to hear his various serial killer rantings and ravings, enough to tell police after the fact that he had confessed to the other murders. But then she's just a single person testifying -- a single, potentially depressed person who is recovering from the death of her own friend and brother and might not be the most trustworthy source. I guess we have to think that some evidence somewhere will back up her claim, as it seems like this teenage killer was getting careless, considering that his plan seems to have been to leave the brother alive, and the brother could just tell everyone that he'd had a drink with the guy just before he inexplicably went to sleep and woke up to find his sister dead. Sloppy, even for a teenager.

Then there's one more wild theory that isn't supported by the text but I did consider for a moment. What if the brother was dead the whole time? That would explain the mother's fixation on him prior to that, effectively her own sort of depressed mental break, talking to him when he isn't there. Maybe this whole thing is somehow her own fantasy, or the fantasy of the father, who always wanted the son to be a better man?

I thought the end result of my journey into the potential interpretations of Presence might result in a retroactive elevation of the three stars out of five I gave the movie on Letterboxd. I don't actually change my initial star rating once I've entered it, but a film can change in my mind, and that change can inform how I rank it in my upcoming year-end list (upcoming in 11 months) or on Flickchart. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was a recent -- well, relatively recent -- example of that, as I initially didn't care for it, awarding in only two stars on Letterboxd, until it became a four-star movie for me on my second viewing. 

But I'm not sure it has done that with Presence. Any new interpretation I get has a disappointing downside to it, once you start to pick away at the rest of what's there. 

I guess it's a subjective thing how much you care about these cause and effect questions, given that if a time travel movie -- you're a lot more likely to encounter them there than in a ghost story -- works for you, you basically disregard them entirely. So in the end, maybe Presence didn't really work for me all that well, even though I absolutely loved and was enthralled by the technique for most of it.

Or maybe it's just that it's always going to pale in comparison -- pun intended -- to my #1 of 2017, A Ghost Story.

It is, ultimately, disappointing to me that only the most literal interpretation of the movie was available to me at the time I saw it, so much so that a week later, once my writer had written his review, I was still pregnant with the burning question I posed twice at the start of this piece about the friend haunting a house where she never lived and where her friend did not yet live. If this theory could so easily have holes poked in it, how could it possibly by the most likely narrative explanation for a filmmaker who has always had a fairly stringent approach to storytelling, which manifests itself in movies that are likelier to run 85 to 95 minutes than 120 to 130?

The good news, though, is that I do regularly have deeper interpretations of other films. I don't always go for the "sucker's explanation," the most obvious interpretation of the text that points you to the most shallow but least satisfying explanation. I think it has to do with how much the movie engages you in the first place, and I think by the end, I had already turned on Presence a bit.

Because there are certain things that ultimately feel like failures of the script, no matter how you interpret the larger story and where it ends up. For example, there's the whole bit where the father is considering leaving the mother because he doesn't want to be an unwitting co-conspirator in whatever financial chicanery she's involved in with her work. We never end up learning what this chicanery is, nor do we see the father take the next step toward leaving the mother. So that thread just never pays off, and it seems like someone like Soderbergh should have recognized that.

Well, Presence has caused me to write nearly 3,000 words about it on my blog, so that's proof of it doing what a movie should do: engage me. And who knows, maybe this is only the beginning of my relationship with the movie, and there's a lot more interpreting still to do.