Into the Cosmo(s)

When I saw Cosmo Jarvis in the first movie of my last two flights on the trip to America -- there was a leg to Auckland, a leg to Los Angeles and a leg to Atlanta, and this was the first one leaving Auckland -- I thought for sure he was a real brain-damaged man being given a chance to act in the Australian prison drama Inside, directed by Charles Williams and starring Guy Pearce.

Little did I know that not only had I already seen him elsewhere, in such places as Lady Macbeth and Persuasion, but I'd see him again on this very succession of flights, bookending my final two of those three legs in the Barry Levinson film Alto Knights on the trip from Los Angeles to Atlanta.

And, the guy is not even Australian, making him the only one in Inside who isn't. 

I might have just found my newest Vincent D'Onofrio, an honor I bestow to a chameleons who can slip into any role.

And it was a good way to spend my time (not quite) in the cosmos, but close enough. 

Chameleon? In both of the movies on these flights, he played criminals, but very different sorts of criminals -- a modern-day man accused of raping and murdering a girl when he was 13, and a would-be assassin who fails in the attempt to shoot one of the two characters played by Robert De Niro in 1950s New York. But in the two movies where I'd seen him previously, he played 19th century men, albeit of very different social classes.

Any time I think a regularly abled actor might actually be brain-damaged, that gives additional layers to his range. 

See, in Inside, Jarvis speaks with a slur, the presumed result of multiple vicious beatings inside prison walls. See, prisoners hate rapists, though I suppose not as much as they hate pedophiles. And though the girl Jarvis' Mark Shepard killed was 13, so was he, at the time. 

The slurring, maybe more of a lisp, is accompanied by the slouching of one side of his face. You can kind of get the idea of how it looks from the poster above, where he's over the left shoulder of the kid who's front and center. You probably would know he's not over the right shoulder, because if you don't recognize Guy Pearce by now, where have you been the last 30 years? But you do probably need to know he's over one of the shoulders and not the kid in the center.

It's a pretty incendiary performance, and the fact that I thought it might have been from a non-professional actor only makes it more so. That may not be clearly the case, because with a non-professional, you excuse the flaws in the craft due to the authenticity they bring. Jarvis' performance does not have those sorts of flaws, but I thought it was a performance that could only be given by a man who had been hit on the head too many times. That's pretty high praise. 

In fact, the actual non-professional, or should I say the one without very much experience -- Vincent Miller, who is in the middle of that poster and has only two credits on IMDB, including this one -- is the one who held Inside back from being better than the 3.5 stars I gave it. Both Jarvis and Pearce are great, but Williams maybe could have looked a little longer for his lead actor, who is pretty blank. 

Jarvis does not have nearly as significant a role in The Alto Knights. He's one of the first actors we see, as he tries to shoot one of De Niro's two characters in the movie's cold open -- does shoot him, but the bullet curves around the head and exits the other side without doing anything more than superficial damage, a thing I always heard about when I was younger but which never seemed like a real thing. Then we see him berated by the other De Niro, who hired a hit on this De Niro, for not going in for a couple more shots to make sure the job was done.

Because the actor only pops up a few more times and its only in the lighter context of him being a semi-competent henchmen, I can't say that I reserve the same high praise for this role, but only because there's so little exposure to it. However, it does round out my ideas of what this actor is capable of.

The thing that deserves higher praise than I expected to give it is the movie itself. I must admit I watched The Alto Knights because I thought it was supposed to be one of those trainwrecks we had to see to believe. Having watched it, I now think the reason The Alto Knights had a bit of a moment in the zeitgeist was because it was incredibly expensive and is oddly out of sync with today's cinematic environment, where we just aren't looking for the next Goodfellas anymore. The performance De Niro gives here is -- or should I say, performances are -- very much in the manner of Goodfellas, though probably more if he were playing Joe Pesci's shorter tempered character in the more sinister of these two roles. Anyway, I'm not sure if I thought I'd see De Niro working in this register again, and Levinson has mounted a very credible version of one of these movies that had their heyday 30 years ago, though is ultimately hampered by feeling anachronistic.

Maybe the highest praise I can give Alto Knights is that I was very entertained by it, never bored, which was crucial for the last stretch of a crushing three-leg journey that took effectively 24 hours, at which point I should have been ready to gouge my eyes out. Because of Alto Knights, I wasn't. 

We're not actually done with Jarvis in 2025, either. Some people would have already seen him in three movies this year, as the Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza co-scripted and co-directed film Warfare counts Jarvis among its soldiers. 

I'll be watching that one when I'm on terra firma, as it's now streaming on Amazon. 

Audient Bridesmaids: I'm Still Here

This is the latest in a periodic series in which I watch best picture nominees I haven't seen, working backwards from the newest to the oldest.

Yes this is the latest in a series getting its first new entry since I watched My Left Foot in late February, meaning this is an unusually short amount of time between entries in Audient Bridesmaids.

But the real headline here is that this is the first blog post I have ever written, and will likely also publish, while on a plane.

I'm currently en route from Auckland to Los Angeles, where I'll spend about four hours before flying to Atlanta, where I'll spend about two days before meeting relatives for a reunion at a lake house that's about a three-hour drive from there.

It was while I was en route from Melbourne to Auckland that I watched I'm Still Here, the only 2024 best picture nominee I had yet to see, which usurped the spot of John Boorman's Hope and Glory (1987) as next up in this series by failing to beat Anora for 2024 honors. It was a good reminder that I need to pick up the pace a bit here, unless I want every movie I watch in this series to be a usurper.

But what a good usurper it was.

Before we get to the film proper, let me tie off this "blogging on a plane" topic.

This isn't the first flight I've ever had that had WiFi open to the internet at large -- you may recall how I enjoyed watching baseball on a plane in this post -- but it's definitely the first time I've blogged on a plane. This flight is 11+ hours and that one was only 5+, so you can appreciate that I'm craving the variety, even though I'm less than half the way in and have only watched one movie so far. So here I am. Because I'm typing with just one thumb on my phone, I might keep it short.

I'm Still Here, the Walter Salles film not the Casey Affleck film, immediately inserted itself right into the mix in a year where I had six best picture nominees in my top ten. It might have only been seventh, but then again Conclave, which my wife watched and loved while I was watching this, might have beaten it as well. Anyway it would have definitely beaten Anora and A Complete Unknown, likely top 15 material and definitely top 20.

Because it's a recent film and is only just coming off the period where it was being widely feted, I won't subject you or my thumbs to a plot synopsis or a full analysis of its merits.

I will say that the first half of this film absolutely floored me, from setting the mood of the joy this family was experiencing in their lives of 1970 Rio, without overplaying that, to overturning it with both parents spending time as disappeared, temporarily or otherwise, while being questioned, imprisoned and tortured. You can describe the performance of an actor, in this case Fernanda Torres, as strong in all her scenes, but I think the good acting you remember is in little moments. The one I noted most with Torres was something she's doing with her mouth when she's s being questioned, a kind of tremor, which marks the moment she goes from being perturbed and unnerved to truly frightened. Maybe you saw that moment too.

I think it was the movie's two time jumps in its final 30 minutes that prevented it from truly sticking the landing and being able to bypass some of those higher ranked nominees on my list. (On this flight, my wife continued running through the nominees with Emilia Perez, my #4 of last year. I lost track of how far into it she was and thought she'd had to quit it early, but to my relief she watched the whole thing and liked it.) 

Sorry for the tangent. Although I appreciated seeing what became of the family in the long run -- and seeing the elderly Eunice Paiva played by Torres' mother, Fernanda Montenegro, herself an Oscar nominee -- I found myself taken out of the intensity of the story and those characters at that age, just a bit.

Okay, rest time for my thumb. I hope to get to Hope and Glory before next Oscars.

Note: I didn't actually end up being able to post in flight. Although the WiFi allowed me to download the I'm Still Here poster, Blogger wouldn't let me upload it to the post. *shrug*

Orlando Bloom's still working, just not in Jurassic World

When I saw the character Martin Krebs appear on screen in Jurassic World: Rebirth (review here), I thought "Boy is it nice to see Orlando Bloom on screen again!"

I was never a huge Bloom fan, but I always thought it was strange, and a little unwarranted, that he was unceremoniously ushered out of the spotlight during what should have been the prime of his career. I don't even remember the reason for it. Was he cancelled? Not that I recall. Did he stop being good? Not that I recall there either. 

The guy is only just now 48 years old. It's not like he hasn't been working, it's just that the projects have been almost exclusively what we would have once called "straight to video."

I mean, this was a guy who appeared in two of the iconic trilogies of the early 21st century, those being Lord of the Rings and Pirates of the Caribbean. At one point, he was among the highest grossing actors of all time in terms of the money made by his movies. Both of those trilogies had other future installments, and Bloom appeared in some of those too.

Then sometime around the end of the Hobbit trilogy, which is now 11 years ago, he just stopped appearing in high-profile movies, with only his appearance in 2017's Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales as a reprieve from that. But I don't even think that was a lead role, if memory serves. I believe it was a cameo.

The only problem with all these fond recollections of Orlando Bloom's career is that Jurassic World's Martin Krebs is not actually played by Orlando Bloom. He's played by Rupert Friend, which I didn't realize until the closing credits of Jurassic World: Rebirth. 

Easy mistake to make. I knew the internet would have a good picture of them side by side, so here it is:

Imagine my surprise, then, when the very next movie I would watch would actually feature Orlando Bloom.

That's Deep Cover, a new Amazon Prime movie I first clocked a few weeks back when it was being advertised as coming soon. I noticed Bryce Dallas Howard in it (more on her in a moment) but I didn't pay enough attention to identify her co-stars at the time.

But when Wednesday night rolled around, after I'd seen Jurassic World on Tuesday, that was the logical next movie up for me, and there was Orlando Bloom in the flesh. 

And killing it, to be honest, making me wonder again where he's been all our lives.

The movie has a pretty delightful premise, even if that premise comes to strain credibility a bit. What is the biggest problem faced by undercover cops who are trying to infiltrate a criminal organization? It's being able to stay in character the whole time, adapt to any changes, and supply credible information about their character at a moment's notice, in the highest stakes situations where a misstep could get them killed. There was a whole speech about it in Reservoir Dogs. 

Who best to do this sort of thing, then? How about improv comedians?

Bloom's character is actually coming in to improv as a desperate attempt to keep his career afloat. He envisions himself more as a serious actor, just a serious actor who has been failing to get any work outside of commercials. This leads to much hilarity, especially the way Bloom plays him: deep into the method and forever blind to his own practical limitations as a person who is not actually a gangster.

The whole movie works well overall, with an enjoyable third lead performance by Nick Mohammed of Ted Lasso fame, as the unconfident, stammering member of the trio most likely to lose face and get them killed. 

But let's get to that second lead: Bryce Dallas Howard. Who has also been on my mind this past week.

You may recall that I mentioned Howard also in connection with Jurassic World: Rebirth, when I was contrasting her with Scarlett Johansson in this post, since Johansson was effectively inheriting the lead female role from Howard in the Jurassic movies. I said I liked both actresses but that I respected Johansson while I did not particularly respect Howard. 

Well, lo and behold, Howard reminded me in Deep Cover that I respect her pretty well, too, and she's a lot more than just Ron's daughter. Perhaps I always knew that, but my goal in that post was to boost Johansson, so I had to have a straw man against whom to compare her. 

It's funny that Johansson and Friend would have scenes of pairing up with each other in Jurassic World and Howard and Bloom would have scenes of pairing up with each other in Deep Cover, kind of like alternate universe doppelgangers. 

Oh but we're not done with the actors in Deep Cover in terms of funny proximal viewings.

Two movies before I saw Deep Cover, I saw Heads of State. These are both genre movies, effectively both action comedies, released on Amazon Prime, and they both feature Paddy Considine in a villainous role. That may be the actor's specialty these days, but two in the same week underscored just how much that's the case. 

But wait there's one more, and this is entirely within Deep Cover, and it was surely intentional by the filmmakers. 

I mentioned Bloom's history in the Lord of the Rings movies. You know who else was also in those movies, at least the first one?

Sean Bean, who appears in Deep Cover as their liaison within the police force. 

If I don't use the word "coincidences," does this still count as another post about coincidences? (Oops, I just did.) 

Understanding Editing: How the West Was Won

This is the seventh in my 2025 monthly viewing series Understanding Editing, in which I alternate between best editing Oscar winners that I've seen and that I haven't seen, going forward chronologically, to get a better sense of what other editors think is a superlative version of the craft.

If I had seen this poster prior to watching the opening credits of How the West Was Won, my jaw might not have dropped so much in seeing the names listed.

Now, I'm not as versed in classic cinema as I wish I was -- more than the average person, less than the average cinephile -- but even I knew almost every name in these opening credits, for a movie released 63 years ago. And with each new name, my anticipation for what lay ahead increased. 

(Incidentally, they don't make movies like this anymore, where the very studding of the stars is kind of the point. I'm thinking of something like It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, which came out one year later in 1963.)

In fact, so studded is it with stars that the movie needed three directors: John Ford, Henry Hathaway and George Marshall, though I must admit I was not previously familiar with the last two. (I see Hathaway directed the original True Grit, which I haven't seen.) 

And I can't help wondering if part of the reason Harold F. Kress won the Oscar for How the West Was Won was because he was working with the material of three different directors who each directed multiple individual sequences, and yet he wove it all together to feel like a cohesive whole. While we're on the topic of Kress, let's get his bonafides out of the way now: He also won the best editing Oscar 12 years later for The Towering Inferno -- another movie studded with stars -- and received four other nominations. 

To be sure, there are sequences in How the West Was Won that required top-notch editing skills, similar to the ones I've been pointing out in the first six months of this series, involving fast-paced action and the threading together of multiple camera angles on that action to great a fluid sense of momentum. These include a big fight scene at a trading post, a harrowing sequence on white water rapids, a horse chase right out of something like Stagecoach, a cattle stampede, and a train robbery sequence, where the uncoupling of trains is captured with high intensity.

But I'm rattling those off in one paragraph, rather than devoting special time to each, because I'm not sure if any of them rises to an inarguable level of impressiveness, and I also think there is something more insiderish going on in the awarding of this award. 

I don't mean that in a bad way, but I do expect that there was a lot of respect accorded Kress for his work with the multiple directors. You might expect each director to have his own editor, someone he was comfortable working with over the years. And in many films where multiple directors contributed, each director would submit his (or her) own work as a completed unit with its own complete production team, whereas Kress was taking submitted footage and finding a way of making it all work as one.

What's more, Kress had only worked with one of these directors, and only once before, if the handy dandy listing of his filmography, with directors listed next to each, on Wikipedia is to be believed. He editing Marshall's Imitation General four years earlier, but had never worked with either Ford or Hathaway. (Interestingly, though, he does not appear to have worked with any of them again afterward, so maybe it wasn't a perfect experience for everyone, despite the accolades.)

When I set out to do this series, I expected to be learning only about the craft as it appears in the final product, which seems rather obvious. But How the West Was Won reveals something a bit more ineffable about the craft of editing, an ability to take disparate material and present it as a grand unifying whole, in ways you can't necessarily point to or pick out. 

If the cinematographer had been doing the same thing, that might be even more impressive -- but there are four credited cinematographers on this movie, such that I suppose you couldn't refer to any of them as a "director of photography." Each director had his own DP, it seems, or in some cases, even more than one. But one guy did all the editing, and he surely helped make this movie proceed forward as briskly as it does, making the 2.5 hour running time pass quickly.

I haven't said much about the story, but indeed it is a decades-spanning epic, in which several generations of one family do play a central role, appearing in a succession of approximately 35-minute sequences exemplifying various old west paradigms. The parts of this film, though never listed on screen, are described in the credits with such titles as "the rivers," "the plains," "the Civil War" and "the outlaws." It's like a taste of everything you could want in a movie about American expansion westward, replete with the biggest stars of the day. And all narrated by Spencer Tracy, a final unifying detail that brings it all together. 

One last comment about the film has to do with its look. This was shot in a widescreen format called Cinerama, and it's still astonishing to look at, even on the small screen. At the time it was first screened, it played on screens so wide that they curved at the edges, and you can sometimes see this curvature in the shots. Kind of reminded me of watching some of the first IMAX films in the giant Omnimax Theater at the Boston Museum of Science, way back in the day.

And you wonder why this got craft-related awards? (It also won for its sound, and was nominated in all the other major technical categories.)

Time for my next rewatch of a previously seen movie in August, and that will be William Friedkin's 1971 film The French Connection. 

I think it's fair to say Mikey Madison's Oscar was unexpected

I had been considering an invite to review an upcoming VOD release called All Souls, from a publicist who usually sends me emails about similarly low-profile movies, all of which I think I may have ignored. Undaunted, he still has us on his mailing list. 

Why this one? 

Well, it stars recently minted Oscar winner Mikey Madison, so it's got to be at least half decent, right?

Reading the synopsis, I'm not so sure. 

"Young single mother River (Mikey Madison) is coerced against her will to become an informant for the police against Silas (G-Eazy), an infamous drug lord and father of her child.  After an undercover operation goes wrong, River soon finds herself fighting for her life and on the run to protect her daughter."

I mean, it could be good, but probably not.

But this synopsis gets at the larger issue with this movie, the one the other half of the above banner reveals:

Look, I'm not into judging books by their covers, but there's a reason this exists as an aphorism. We all do it, and when the cover shows me "Gerald 'G-Eazy' Gillum" as a co-star, I go straight into judging mode.

This is not a universal indictment of rappers as actors, either. Some rappers are great actors, have even become beloved icons specifically for their acting. But, not "Gerald 'G-Eazy' Gillum."

The thing I really want to tell you about was how buried this movie was until Madison won her Oscar.

Checking it out on IMDB, I noticed it's not even a 2024 release -- it's a 2023 release. That's right, it hit the internet in Canada and the U.S. on December 8, 2023. At which point it earned a 4.9 from the collective raters on IMDB, who often tend to be generous with their ratings unless they are ganging up to troll a movie whose subject matter they find too progressive. (A rant for another time.)

The movie trickled out with a theatrical release in the United Arab Emirates (!) on March 27, 2024, and a random Swedish internet release date of April 28th of this year. (It's possible there were other releases along the way, though IMDB did not capture them.)

Now finally it's seeing the light of day in August in the Australia/New Zealand market.

And I will not, in fact, be reviewing it.

It isn't a bad idea to try to capitalize on Madison's sudden marketability. I mean, my own curiosity was piqued, almost to the point of emailing the guy that I would do it, before cooler heads prevailed. 

But it does indicate to us how recently Madison was making movies like All Souls, and how, if not for Anora, she might have been back to that sort of movie again right away.

Speaking of judging, though, I should say that everyone has to start out somewhere. It's the very rare case of an actor who starts appearing in prestige projects right from the beginning. If your first role is as an adult, it's pretty unlikely, as only child actors graduate to prestige movies when they come of age, and only if they were successful child actors. At which point they are known names anyway, and part of the film's marketing campaign.

Actually, this does describe Madison to some degree. Her first credit was in 2013, when she was only 14. She appeared in a couple shorts, then a couple features, then a TV show, and then a Quentin Tarantino movie (Once Upon a Time in Hollywood) and a horror reboot (Scream). So she was already on her way, but she still hadn't broken out, so she thought All Souls seemed like a good idea. (Maybe it was. I haven't seen it.)

However, I also have to wonder if the marketing of the movie has been shifted to make it seem more about her than it really is. The only real evidence I have of this is that in the cast listing on IMDB, Madison's is the 11th listed name. That could be random -- I've seen situations where the well-known star of a movie has their name buried in the IMDB credit, which I know are sometimes entered as they appear in the movie, which could be in order of their appearance on screen. G-Eazy is only fifth listed, so maybe it isn't actually that much about him either. But it could also be a total bait and switch, where Madison isn't really in the movie that much but her name value now gives the movie a second life it never expected to have.

I'm almost curious enough to see it.

But, nah. 

The spiders will never again be real

On Saturday night, in the second installment of our unofficial "spider movie series" -- the first of which I mentioned in Friday's post -- my wife and I watched a 1990s favorite of mine that I hadn't seen since the 1990s, Frank Marshall's Arachnophobia.

As a side note before we get to the crux of this post, my friends and I used to joke that Arachnophobia was a good "action movie." This is because I first saw it with two of them on a triple date, where I ended up making out with my date there in the theater, and then my second viewing was with a different girl I was dating, and we also paused the viewing (which was at her house) to pash a bit. So in both cases I "got action," to use parlance we would have been more likely to use back at that time. 

I can't remember if there was a third viewing at any point, or if Saturday night's viewing was the third, but suffice it to say that after 17 years of marriage, stopping a movie to kiss is not something my wife and I do much anymore. 

I did have some qualms about how well this movie related to the script she's actually writing, which involves giant spiders. (That's why we're watching spider movies right now.) The arachnids in Arachnophobia get their creepy qualities from their quantity, not their unusual size. 

Which is most assuredly a good thing, as we will discuss.

I decided Arachnophobia would be a good movie to watch because it was a good movie. If it also got her "spider juices flowing" -- yes that was a phrase she objected to -- then all the better. 

But I realized there was a more fundamental way than size of the spiders that Arachnophobia differs from the spider movies made today, and from the movie that will get made from the script she's writing:

The spiders in Arachnophobia were real.

Or if not real, they were practical animatronic spiders that looked good enough to be real. 

This is something we will never see again.

I don't constantly write to you on this blog about how digital effects have ruined the movies. The truth of the matter is, digital effects done well, or done for the first time, have given me some incredibly memorable viewing experiences, responsible for movies I cherish. I don't know how they would have tried to do Starship Troopers without digital arachnids, for example. (It isn't really a giant spider movie as such, but it sort of is, especially since they do call them arachnids.)

Even if I don't write about the diminishing returns of digital effects a lot, I do think about them a lot. (Especially when I watch a movie like Snow White, which I watched the night before Arachnophobia.) If I don't say it more, that's probably because saying that digital effects have ruined the magic of movies feels like a boring take, as well as a little bit old man-ish. They have their time and their place, but those places are getting fewer and those times are getting farther between.

And Arachnophobia is not so squirmingly delightful if it uses digital creepy crawlies. It only works as well as it does because some dedicated and skilled professional spider wrangler got together a bunch of spiders and created the necessary conditions for them to crawl out all over the walls and ceilings, on queue, while the camera was rolling. If the camera didn't get it, they'd have to wrangle all those spiders and get them back on their marks to do it all over again.

We will never see this again, and in fact, "spider wrangler" may no longer exist as a job.

Even if wrangling spiders is not expensive, though I have to imagine there's a considerable cost to it, it's expensive in terms of logistics and time taken on set. I don't know how many shots it took to get some of what they had here, but if even one of them had be reshot, I wouldn't be surprised if it required a full hour to be ready to yell "Action!" again. Not worth it when you can just make a fully compliant spider, which always hits its mark, on the computer, right?

In horror films, which Arachnophobia nominally is (it's really more akin to something like Gremlins), there's been a movement to return to practical horror effects, at least as an element that distinguishes you from the other horror movies around you. We get a couple each year, and fans of the horror of yesteryear will flock to them. 

You don't see the same hearkening back to the bug wrangling of yesteryear. If a bunch of spiders needed to come out of a sink drain in a movie made today, as they do in Arachnophobia, I guarantee you those spiders are just a bunch of ones and zeroes.

But it's not just that today's version of Arachnophobia is digital. It's that today's version of Arachnophobia is non-existent.

When was the last time you saw a movie in which escaping small, deadly creatures was even supportable as the primary threat of the movie?

That's why all spiders at the movies are now big spiders, and all big spiders have to be digital. 

Because if using real spiders is too quaint and too expensive by half for today's movies, just imagine how quaint it would be to try to used forced perspective to make a small spider look big. 

I think what makes our skin crawl when watching Arachnophobia is knowing that the spiders are real. That even if the actors were in no danger because the spiders were harmless, the actors were indeed in that space with those spiders. Their reactions to the spiders are, in some ways, real, which makes their reactions contagious to us in the audience.

With digital spiders, all you get is a contagious case of ennui. 

Ten mid movies I've somehow seen twice

As you likely know, I recently passed the milestone of 7,000 movies seen in my life -- that's 7,000 different movies, mind you, and doesn't count rewatches. If you add rewatches into my total viewings, I'm well over 8,000, maybe closer to 9,000. 

But there's a milestone related to that as well on the horizon: 1,000 different movies that I've seen more than once.

Well, it's not that close on the horizon.

Kiah Roache-Turner's movie Sting on Saturday was my 921st movie I've seen more than once. This list doesn't concern itself with the number of times that I've seen each of these movies, it's just a flat list of movies I've seen at least twice.

At the rate I'm going, I probably won't get to 1,000 for at least a few more years. I tend to rewatch let's say an average of 50 movies a year -- some years more, some years less, that's the exact definition of "average" -- and of those, at least half are movies that are already on my list because I'd already seen them at least twice. So it could take more three years even if you're saying that I add 25 titles to this list every year, which may be aggressive.

Really, this is just an intro to a different thing I want to talk about today, the proximity to 1,000 just being my excuse, with Sting serving as my news peg, to use the newspaper term.

Sting is not ordinarily the type of movie I would rewatch, and I don't mean I don't rewatch horror movies or I don't rewatch movies about giant spiders. I mean that I don't generally rewatch movies that I found mid the first time -- forgettable, without any prospect of really gleaning anything further from them on a second viewing. 

Why did I rewatch Sting, you ask, especially when I only just watched and ranked it last year? (In fact, and here is a coincidence about which I would have written an entire post if I weren't already writing this one: I watched it for the first time on June 28, 2024, and I happened to rewatch it exactly a year later on June 28, 2025.)

My wife is writing a script about a giant spider, and I suggested we watch some of the available giant spider movies to get the juices flowing, or more practically, to acquaint her with things that have already been done in movies about giant spiders, so she's at least aware of those things if she's going to be writing similar things in her script. Sting was one of the movies I suggested, and it's especially important she be familiar with this one, given that it was made by an Australian director, as will her film be.

Anyway, it got me thinking about the films we rewatch and why we rewatch them. Generally speaking, I was able to break down the films that any person would rewatch into five broad categories:

1) Films that are personal favorites, which might be movies from your childhood or more recent eccentric choices that you happen to love more than most people do.

2) Films that are considered all-time classics. 

3) Films that have a certain cultural prominence or significance.

4) Films you didn't like so much, but other people liked, so you think you must have missed something. (Series on this blog where I revisit movies where I felt like I was out of sync with the general consensus, and there have been several such series, are covered here.)

5) Films that were so bad that you have to watch them again just to experience the shock and disbelief all over again.

When cable television was more of a thing, you might have had a sixth category:

6) Films that are on cable all the time so you watch them passively in the background. 

And for parents:

7) Films your kids demand you watch with them multiple times. 

Sting does not fall into any of those categories. It does some things pretty well, and I think I might have liked it better on the second viewing than the first, just a little bit. Generally speaking, though, it is a mid film that I never imagined I would really think about again, let alone see again.

So, because you know my mind wanders toward projects, I thought today I would go through the 921 titles I've rewatched and give you ten that are like Sting, that stand out on this list for the fact that I would never have imagined watching them a second time. I'll also give you a bit of the context for the second viewing.

So you'll note this does not include movies I ended up finding mediocre on a revisit, but was originally rewatching for one of those five core reasons. These have to be movies like Sting, which were rewatched for none of those reasons. 

I guess I could just get nine more because I've already given you Sting, but I'll get ten more. So it will be 11 total.

I should also tell you that I will exclude any films watched purely for my Random Rewatch series on The Audient, a periodic series I do with sometimes large gaps of several years between entries, where I use a random number generator to watch films that land in the corresponding spot on my Flickchart. These have included Who Killed the Electric Car? (serviceable documentary), High Heels and Low Lifes (which I liked but not enough to rewatch), Hollywoodland (which was mediocre to bad) and Sucker Punch (about the same as Hollywoodland). The series has been on pause for a while since I can't bring myself to program the deficient children's movie Doogal. 

Anyway, instead of ranking them I will just go alphabetically. 

The Big Red One (1980, Samuel Fuller) - This fairly unremarkable war movie had a special edition come out in 2005 called The Big Red One: The Reconstruction. I was assigned to review it for AllMovie, but I thought I couldn't properly comment on the edition with the different footage if I didn't have the original as a point of reference. So I watched both of them within a space of a couple weeks, knowing from the first viewing that I did not specifically desire a second. Mark Hamill is in it. I don't remember a lot of the other bits, just that there was a lot of stuff that seemed like a B+ version of things I'd seen in better war movies.

Dopamine (2003, Mark Decena) - When I watched Dopamine on October 9, 2004, it was during a brief period of about two years when I wasn't working as a critic, after AllMovie temporarily eliminated the use of freelancers. When the regime changed in 2005, they gave me a whole bunch of new, and by that I mean old, titles to work on. The ones I'd seen, I didn't rewatch any of them before writing my review, except one: Dopamine. Why Dopamine, a sort of sci-fi indie love story, and not the others? No idea. By the way, it's not bad. 

Event Horizon (1997, Paul W.S. Anderson) - I hesitated to include this mediocre science fiction horror in this ten, because there was something definitive that prompted my rewatch. Namely, it was that something "really scary" happened in this movie, and not just the scare quotes in this sentence. I don't remember what I thought I'd heard was so scary, but I thought when I rewatched the movie, my mind might be blown at that point and I would just know. Well, I never noticed when that thing I thought was supposed to be so scary happened, and the things that did happen weren't all that scary. I think I needed to do more research. 

The Final Girls (2015, Todd Strauss-Schulson) - For some who rewatch, there'd be a bonus entry on the types of movies they rewatched: "films you forgot you watched the first time." I suppose that also works for Alzheimer's patients. (I'm not making light. With my family history, I expect to be such a patient one day.) My destiny may contain a faulty memory, but today, I never forget watching a movie -- except The Final Girls. Although there were less than four years between my October 12, 2018 first viewing and my May 28, 2022 second viewing, I genuinely did not realize I'd watched the movie before. And it took me until like an hour in to be sure. If you can't remember that you even saw a movie until an hour in, that's a great definition of "mid." (Of course, I then finished the viewing. Naturally.)

Housesitter (1992, Frank Oz) - I said Dopamine was the only movie I was assigned to review for AllMovie that I felt the need to watch again before reviewing ... well, maybe there was one other. I can't remember for sure, but I can think of no other reason I would have rewatched one of Steve Martin's more forgettable star vehicles from this period, which is not significantly improved even by the presence of comic genius Goldie Hawn. I know I did review it so this must have been the reason. However, I think this might have been in my first go-around of reviewing movies for AllMovie, which started in 2000, because Housesitter is not among the list of movies I've rewatched since 2006, when I started keeping track of my rewatches. Then again, it could have snuck in between 2005, when I restarted with AllMovie, and my 2006 start date for recording rewatches. 

National Lampoon's Loaded Weapon 1 (1993, Gene Quintano) - And this makes three? A rewatch to review this is the only explanation for why I would have put Loaded Weapon 1 in front of my eyes a second time. I wouldn't say it's terrible, but it is by no means among the most memorable of the bounty of spoof movies from this period ... though it also might be terrible. Likely the presence of Samuel L. Jackson and the underrated comedic abilities of Emilio Estevez gave this movie some funny moments ... but you can bet I am not going to watch it a third time in order to find out. 

Pootie Tang (2001, Louis C.K.) - There was a clear reasoning behind my second viewing of Pootie Tang, but that doesn't change the fact that I knew it was mid and I knew it would be mid on the second viewing. When I saw this movie the first time, in 2004, I didn't really know who Louis C.K. was. The second viewing, in February of 2013, was conducted specifically to see if I would see some of the Louis C.K.-ness of it on the second viewing, now that I had seen and loved two different Louis C.K. shows. I did not see the Louis C.K.-ness. And now we're in a third Louis C.K. era, one where he's been rightly cancelled and has come back with a right-wing bent to his comedy -- and would surely not make a movie like Pootie Tang. As mediocre of a miss as it is, it's still better than anything he's got going on right now. 

Presence (2025, Steven Soderbergh) - Just this year. You may recall the circumstances because I wrote a special post about them. I watched this movie on a screener, even though it was another of my ReelGood writers who was actually writing the review. Then my wife bemoaned that there was nothing for us to see with my older son while my younger son was away at school camp, so I agreed to see it again. I don't dislike Presence to be sure -- in fact, it's in the upper half of my rankings this year -- but I don't think it ultimately works the way Soderbergh hopes that it works, there are some loose plot threads that never get revisited (so I don't know why they were included at all), and I certainly didn't need to see it twice inside two weeks. 

Trainwreck (2015, Judd Apatow) - This is probably the only film on this list where I have no idea why I watched it again. It wasn't to review it, because my then-editor at ReelGood reviewed it. It wasn't to discuss it on the ReelGood Podcast, which we also did, but did at the time of its release when my viewing was still fresh. No, this was watched about 14 months after I first saw it -- after I first saw it and found it among Apatow's poorer efforts, I should add. It could have been because my wife wanted to see it, but that doesn't sound right. Speaking of Alzheimer's, I guess it's fine that I don't remember the reason behind all my rewatches. Human beings are not perfect recall machines, and I'm probably closer to perfect than most people. I guess maybe I thought it was Apatow so I had to give it another chance, liking most of his other films? But I've never given Funny People another chance. 

Word Wars (2004, Eric Chaikin & Julian Petrillo) - Okay make that two movies. You can take your pick among the multiple reasons listed here about why I might have watched Word Wars again. I might have been reviewing it five years after my first viewing, having seen it in 2005 the first time and feeling like I needed to freshen up on it in 2010. But by 2010 I was mostly reviewing only movies I had just seen, having worked through the backlog a long time before that. I might have watched it again because I thought it would be better. (It's not bad but it's pretty forgettable.) But maybe I just watched it again because Scrabble is my favorite board game, and any movie about Scrabble might be worth watching twice. 

When I originally went through my list, I came up with a shortlist of 19. However, those extra nine were easily shaved off as they had other, legitimate explanations, like they were watched for a film festival and then also on opening night of the festival, or that they were too good to be really called mid, even if the decision to rewatch them was sort of random.

With the limited amount of time I have on earth, it's nice to know that I'm mostly rewatching movies for the right reasons. 

What the hell is ScarJo doing in a lame-ass Jurassic World movie?

Take what I'm about to say with a grain of salt.

There have been six movies in the Jurassic franchise -- or, three movies each in two separate Jurassic franchises, if you prefer -- and I have seen each one of them in the theater.

You can't say this for Pixar, as you discovered from my most recent post. You can't say this for James Bond, and of course you can't because I wasn't born when some of them came out, but I'm talking about even the recent ones. You can't say this for Mission: Impossible. You can't say this for a lot of series with a large quantity of movies in them.

And you won't be able to say this for the Jurassic movies anytime soon, because we already have plans to go see Jurassic World: Rebirth next week in the theater with our kids, during their school holidays. (By the way, does anyone have any concerns that there will now be more Jurassic World movies than there were Jurassic Park movies? Do we have to change the way we think about the whole franchise, or the two franchises in comparison to each other?)

But notwithstanding my own demonstrated sense of loyalty, I still think I can say that the Jurassic movies, generally speaking, are lame, and that I am ashamed at myself for continuing to think big-screen dinosaurs are going to knock my socks off like they've only done two times before.

If you want the God's honest truth, the one of these six movies I've enjoyed the most was the original Jurassic World. When I saw Jurassic Park in 1993, yes, I was wowed by the dinosaurs, but I left the movie feeling a little less toward it than I hoped and expected I would. The other four were mediocre to bad.

So I do believe I can say:

What the hell is Scarlett Johansson doing here?

Scarlett Johansson is an actress I respect unconditionally. She will probably never win an Oscar, but she always makes good choices and she always shows up, even in movies that ultimately proved not to be so good. In most cases -- maybe not all, but most -- they were still good choices that happened to turn bad.

Jurassic World: Rebirth is not a good choice.

Could it be a good movie? Sure it could. A lot of people out there seem to like director Gareth Edwards more than I do. He's helmed a Godzilla movie and a Star Wars movie. In many respects, he's the right man for the job.

But it's still a seventh movie in a series in which far more pedestrian actors than Scarlett Johansson had been plying their time.

Before I get the hate mail -- do people still send mail? -- I should rush to say that I don't find the trio from the original film, that being Sam Neill, Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum, to be pedestrian. Maybe none of them are out-and-out stars, but they are all compelling presences, and Jurassic Park would not be what it is without Goldblum inexplicably going around with his shirt off.

But when you move to the second trilogy, then you've got Chris Pratt, and Chris Pratt's charm has long since worn off, if you ask me. 

Maybe I'm letting some of the Hillsong Church stuff rub off on my perception of him on screen, and maybe that's not fair. But by year 15 or so of us knowing Pratt, and year 10 or so of him being a genuine movie star, we've all gotten one too many plucky animated characters and dumb heroes with their vacant charm to really find him fresh anymore.

Pratt's primary co-star in those movies was Bryce Dallas Howard, who I do like, but who I find to be an actress who has gotten a toe in the door through nepotism and then found just enough charm to keep that door open, though not enough to really earn my respect.

I respect the hell out of Scarlett Johansson. I do not respect this choice. No way she should be taking Pratt's and Howard's sloppy seconds.

But you know what else just happened to Scarlett Johansson? And by "just" I mean in November?

She turned 40. And I think, as much as it pains me to say it, that milestone may have pushed her into "career maintenance mode."

Johansson has such a hold on our affections, and still our prurient desires, that it may be hard to believe she's about to see a major change in the types of roles for which she can be/should be cast. But Hollywood rarely makes exceptions. Women over 40 have it tough.

I'm hoping that I'll go to see Jurassic World: Rebirth next week and it'll be incredibly fun, and that it'll seem like another win for ScarJo.

I'm worried, though, that it will not, and that our days of having Scarlett Johansson top our marquees may be dwindling. 

Passing on Pixar

When I saw the trailer for Elio a few weeks ago, I thought "My God, that looks awful."

That hasn't stopped me with Pixar before. I've seen every Pixar movie, eventually. 

With Elio, I know I'll have the chance to see it on Disney+ before my ranking deadline, so that's easy. However, this is a significant moment in my Pixar career, as it is the first time since 2013 that I've passed on an opportunity to see a Pixar movie in the theater.

That was Monsters University, which came out on June 21, 2013, when I did not yet have a child old enough to go watch it with me (my oldest son was only two), and when we had our mind on other things with our impending move to Australia two months hence.

Since then:

- Inside Out, watched at the Jam Factory in South Yarra on June 7th, 2015, at an advanced screening with my now-old-enough son, who showed an incredible comprehension of what was happening for a four-year-old. It ended up being my #1 movie of the year.

- The Good Dinosaur, watched at Village Crown on January 3, 2016, also with my son and maybe not this time with my wife, who probably sniffed out the stink of this movie when I could not.

- Finding Dory, watched at the Sun Theatre in Yarraville on July 6, 2016, by myself at a 9 o'clock show, where I remembered thinking it was strange that I was seeing an animated movie by myself at night, and then ultimately feeling even more foolish because the movie is bad.

- Cars 3, watched again at the Jam Factory in another advanced screening on June 17, 2017, in what was a milestone movie for my younger son, his first movie in the theater at age three-and-a-half. I didn't really like it but I don't think the others had a problem with it.

- Coco, watched again at the Sun with I think just the two boys, on January 6, 2018, on a Saturday afternoon. It wasn't the first time they'd seen their old man cry at a Pixar movie (Inside Out), but it was the first time they both saw their old man cry, though it was dark so maybe they didn't notice.

- Incredibles 2, watched on June 17, 2018, though I am having trouble remembering which cinema it was. I think it was just the three boys again. I thought this movie was pretty good.

- Toy Story 4, watched on June 17, 2019 (Pixar loves this release date range), as the last Pixar movie before COVID. I don't remember who was with me or where we saw this, but it was in the theater, and at least one of my children was there.

- Onward, watched on April 20, 2020, at home. There was no option to watch this in the theater as it was now COVID. My older son was really emotionally affected by this movie and was bawling uncontrollably. It was a little frightening to see. Wonder if it made him think about the possibility of losing me, his dad?

- Soul, watched on January 1, 2021, on our projector at the lodging where we were staying in Mansfield, Victoria, with my sister-in-law and mother-in-law. It was my younger son's seventh birthday and he really remembered this one, as did we all. Still no option to see it in the theater during COVID.

- Luca, watched on June 28, 2021, again on our projector and again at a place we were staying, only this time it was an Air BnB in Nagambie, Victoria, where we got away for a week to change up our circumstances during COVID isolation. Third straight Pixar you could not watch in a cinema.

- Turning Red, watched on March 19, 2022, on our projector for the third straight time, but this time at home in our garage. Fourth straight Pixar it was not possible to watch theatrically. This one made my top five of the year.

- Lightyear, watched on June 19, 2022, at I think Melbourne Central? I can't remember. My older son had aged out by this point but my younger son was with me. I'd say it was a happy return to theatrical viewings of Pixar movies, except this might be my least favorite Pixar movie.

- Elemental, watched on June 21, 2023, back to going solo to the Sun in Yarraville, but at least I believe it was an afternoon showing, unlike Finding Dory. And Pixar is back in the win column after Lightyear. 

- Inside Out 2, watched on July 11, 2024 at the Sun, with my older son returning to the fold for one more movie because he remembered liking the first one. My wife and younger son were also there for our first full family Pixar outing since Cars 3, though I think we were all a little let down by the movie. 

With the number of mildly snide comments I made about the movies there, you can see how a lack of need to see a Pixar movie in the theater is something that has been steadily building in me. Now, with Elio, I'm finally putting it into practice.

Even though Pixar movies are definitely hit and miss with me lately, it seems like a big moment. It ends a streak of 14 straight Pixar movies that I either saw or would have seen in the theater if I'd been able. I am pretty sure that there is no other type of movie with that many examples where it was possible for me to have that sort of streak, and even if there had been, I likely wouldn't have achieved it.

This is not to say I will not see another Pixar movie in the theater. Of course I will. I will probably see the next one there. It's called Hoppers and the description sounds sort of interesting. I could probably even get my younger son to go with me, as he will only just be turned 12 next March and will probably still retain some of his instinct -- especially as the younger one -- to please his old man. If not, maybe I'll just go by myself, as I did twice before during this run of 14.

Then it's -- sigh -- Toy Story 5, which is kind of a given theatrical visit, despite my wariness that this franchise is still going on. (It's actually the sixth movie, not the fifth, if you also include Lightyear.)  

But opting out of Elio does serve as a bit of a nail in the coffin, at least from my perspective, on the idea of a Pixar movie as an event movie, the kind you would not risk missing in the theater. I saw what Elio was offering -- a lot of extreme colors, goofy aliens, and characters who sound like they're being voiced by babies -- and said "No thanks."

Which, really, just puts me back where I was in my thirties, when I missed seeing Cars, Cars 2, Brave and of course Monsters University in the theater, the last three of those being a three-movie streak of their own. 

The numbers don't add up

This is a very small thing to pick on Reality Bites about, but I realized I could pause the movie to see if the numbers being added up on a notepad actually added up correctly.

They didn't anticipate pausing back in 1994. Of course that's entirely not true, as VCRs had been pausing for years. So maybe let's just say they didn't think or possibly care too much about any of it.

The pause you see here is from after Lelaina (Winona Ryder) has been getting gas customers to pay her in cash while she charges it on her father's gas card, a scheme she has to employ because she ran up a $400 phone bill by calling 1900 numbers. (For emotional therapy, not for titillation.) She adds up the wads of cash she gets each time she pulls the scheme, to make sure the numbers add up to the $400 she needs.

The thing is, they don't add up. 

Lelaina has written out $389.84 at the bottom of that list of numbers, but they actually add up to $393.97.

Even if you give the benefit of the doubt that I'm counting something as a six that is actually a zero -- there's about one ambiguous number on there -- it doesn't account for that sort a difference.

Would it have been so hard just to figure out what these numbers actually added up to, and have her write the correct number?

If we wanted to attribute a sort of intentionality to Ben Stiller et al, they might say that it's the character adding the numbers up incorrectly, not the set designer or the continuity person. Lelaina's the dumb one, not us!

But if so, what a way to undercut your main character, who is trying to use her ingenuity, as her father told her to do.

I's not a perfect moment of self-actualization; it's essentially a scam perpetrated on her father by his daughter. So maybe you could get away with her poor math skills being part of her stunted evolution.

But if you are a person who's at least somewhat decent with numbers, you can scan down that last column and add up the digits and know that the last number couldn't be a 4. It obviously has to be a 7. I mean, doesn't Lelaina know basic arithmetic rules and know how to carry the 1?

Wait ... carry the 1! Lelaina doesn't. 

There are none of the extra chicken scratches at the top of this equation to show you're carrying numbers from previous columns. To add that all up in her head without any markings -- it gets harder after the first column -- would make her pretty gifted in math indeed, which does not seem to describe who Lelaina is. (Not very gifted in language, either, as she fumbles when trying to define "irony" on her job intereview.) 

So if Lelaina is not a genius, and there are no chicken scratches, then we must assume that Lelaina is using an off screen calculator and just writing the totals in. Which, in that case, is absurd, because that means the calculator produced the wrong answer. Or more likely, Lelaina typed the numbers into the calculator incorrectly, or transcribed her results incorrectly. 

Whatever the case may be, they really didn't anticipate pausing. 

A very short amount of time vs. a very long amount of time

I had been stalking Christopher Landon's new movie Drop on iTunes, waiting for it to come down in rental price. When it finally hit $5.99 a few days ago, I pounced.

Why was I so interested in Drop?

1) I generally like the work of Landon, or at least hold Freaky in very high esteem. Freaky seems to give me a significant quantity of optimism for his future efforts.

2) I had heard enough about it to know it was some sort of high-concept movie, but I didn't know what the high concept was, and that's very unusual for me. 

Well, it turns out the high concept was a character trying to do a thing that would take a very long time to do, but having a very short amount of time to do it. That happens like a half-dozen times in this movie, and is one of my bugaboos. 

SPOILERS FOR DROP AHEAD.

I think you know the phenomenon I'm talking about, and it often features some sort of cross-cutting. A character needs to do something secretive, often right under the nose of another person without them knowing, but the thing is very complicated and that person's back is turned only for a very short time. 

Drop is, of course, not the only movie that is guilty of this. You're likely going to see it in some form in thrillers, in movies involving spies, or maybe in movies like this one, where a woman's son is being held captive and she must do exactly the things a mysterious person is messaging her, or the son will die.

Most movies that use this trope -- would we call it a trope? -- use it sparingly. Drop relies on it a half-dozen times. I'll give you the most egregious example, and leave the others to your imagination.

The main character, Violet (Meghann Fahy), is being sent around a fancy top-floor restaurant by her mysterious interlocutor, obligated to slip poison in the drink of her date, and she has to make attempts to get help and alert the authorities in ways this interlocutor can't detect. One is writing a message in lipstick on a $20 bill that she gives as a tip to the pianist. I don't want to get sidetracked on this one because it doesn't have to do with the thing I'm talking about, but it does contribute to the script's lack of credibility. Quickly: The possibility of the pianist actually seeing this message relies on a) him looking at the money in his tip jar, something he might not do until the end of the night; b) him deciding to get a drink from the bar (you'd think they might let him drink for free); c) him happening to choose that $20 bill to pay with after pulling a crumpled wad of about a dozen bills from the tip jar; d) him actually looking at the bill before using it to pay. Not bloody likely. 

Anyway, one of her attempts involves waiting for the maitre d', who is already suspicious of her, to be away from her station in order to seat some guests. This allows her first to try to call 911 from the phone that's at the maitre d' station, not once but twice, both of which cannot be completed, for reasons we aren't really clear on. You'd think a restaurant would indeed want to have this capability in case one of their guests had a heart attack or choked on some food. Often in movies like this the bad guy would have taken out the landlines, but there's no indication that's the case here.

When she's exhausted that idea, she moves to the unlocked computer terminal that's at the same station. Here she brings up a website for a domestic abuse hotline and starts a live chat. She's about to report what's happening to her, but somehow her mysterious interlocutor knows exactly what she's doing on this presumably unmonitored computer terminal and texts her something along the lines of "I wouldn't do that if I were you" right before she's about to hit send on the message she's typed. She hems and haws about this for about 15 seconds, then finally decides not to send the message, close the website, and hurry back to her table, where her befuddled blind date (Brandon Sklenar) is probably wondering why he hasn't peaced out of this unpromising evening. (Speaking of a lot of time vs. a little amount of time, all of Violet's strange behaviors and side quests have taken such a long amount of the time she'd normally be spending face to face with her date, that you can't believe he wouldn't have taken a lot shorter amount of time to decide the evening was not salvageable.)

So I suppose this means it took the maitre d' abandoning her station for, I don't know, three minutes? Four minutes? A long time. 

Anyway, there are at least three other things like this that take place in the restaurant.

But let's forward maybe a half-hour to the climax of the film, when we get a different example of a very short amount of time vs. a very long amount of time, also an annoying example of screenwriting sins but not quite the same as the one I've listed above.

Namely, it's the "you have way too little time to effect a meaningful outcome on something that will likely come to a head in the next 15 seconds."

So when Violet finally unmasks who's been sending her these drops, she pulls a fast one on that person and he ultimately ends up going out the window. But not before he issues an order to the person back at Violet's house, who has not only the son captive, but also Violet's unconscious sister: "Kill them."

The command "kill them" could have been been executed in one second. If the assailant had some hesitation -- you know, it's not easy to kill a four-year-old boy -- maybe that expands out to five to ten seconds. So let's consider what happens with Violet before the person back at the house has a chance to do this:

1) She gets the cracked glass behind the villain to break by throwing a hockey puck at it, which doesn't initially work and takes an extra hit from something else to finally break. (I can't remember what that second thing was.)

2) Both she and the villain get sucked out the window, him down to his death and her hanging on to a tablecloth that's also got a corner snagged on some sharp edge to prevent her from falling. 

3) Her date, who has already been shot in the side, crawls over to the edge and grabs the tablecloth before she can fall. 

4) Despite this debilitating wound, not to mention a date that has been bizarre at the very best, he finds the strength to pull her all the way up to safety.

5) Using the app on her phone that shows her home security cameras, Violet can see that the man in black with the balaclava is only just now walking upstairs to her son's bedroom with murderous determination. You would say at this point that at least a minute has passed since the man's partner issued his order to kill her family, but more like two minutes and probably three.

6) Violet then asks her date -- his name is Henry -- where his keys are. She wants to get his car, apparently. She also has to ask where the car is in the parking garage, and I guess identify the car as well since she's never seen it. Though I suppose we'll give her the benefit of the doubt that clicking the unlock button will make some car flash and beep and will allow her to find it. 

7) Henry, severely wounded, not only has to agree to this request, even though he only has a vague idea what's actually going on and what the stakes are of this request, and even though his date has been erratic at the very best all night long (though she did kiss him once, and maybe he was blinded by that), but he also has to have immediate perfect recall of where he parked his car.

8) Violet has to get down to the parking garage on the elevator, from however many floors up (it's the top floor of the building, remember), when you'd think the police might already be there, when the restaurant might have already been locked down, or at the very least, when the elevator was disabled due to needing to use the stairs during a building emergency. Remember, guns have been fired, several people have been shot, and a man has already fallen out the window to his death.

9) Violet then has to get the car and begin driving to her house at a breakneck speed, dodging and pushing through traffic. Even if her house happens to be close to the restaurant, the drive itself would take an additional five minutes at best, probably more like ten, and only if she doesn't crash the car in her panicked state, or get pulled over by the police who would surely be on scene by now, and would be very interested in a person leaving the scene of a crime that involved at least one death and danger to quite a lot of other people, driving at high speeds.

10) Now, I should tell you, Violet does have some help. Her unconscious sister has awoken from her conk on the head and is now doing whatever she can to slow the progress of her captor to the son's bedroom. But if we're adding up all the various time periods here, it has now been, what, 20 minutes since this man's partner ordered him to kill their hostages? And no, there's no apparent moral quandary from him in doing so. It takes an incompetence of the highest order to not be able to complete this task by now.

But of course, Violet gets there in time to stop the man and save both her son and her sister.

I get that she would try to do this. The alternative is that both her sister and her son are dead. However, that she would proceed with any likelihood that she would get there on time, and not just collapse in tears in a desperate heap, seems like she knew she would get there. 

Of course she did, she read the script.

I want to end on a last way that this script proves itself deficient. There's a moment in the climax where the henchman appears to have the drop on Violet, finally able to kill not only Violet, but the two others he has utter failed to kill so far. How she gets out of this is ridiculous, but that's not what I'm focusing on.

No, the part I thought was really dumb, from a screenwriting perspective, is that the sadistic henchman -- you have to make sure everyone is as sadistic as possible in order to ensure we don't haver our own moral qualms about their deaths -- decides he must remove his balaclava before finally killing Violet.

The movie considers this some sort of big reveal, focusing in on the man's face as he removes the mask. Who was it, we wonder, who was collaborating with the man in the restaurant? Which character we've already met is going to show up here unexpectedly?

Answer? He's nobody. We've never seen this character before.

Mic Drop.  

Being single bites

When one of my movie podcasts mentioned Cameron Crowe's Singles in my past week of listening, in an episode about favorite movie quotes, it planted the seed that a Singles rewatch was nigh. (The quote: Cliff Poncier's "All this negative energy just makes me stronger.") 

When a second, unrelated podcast also name-checked Singles -- a music podcast this time -- in the context of 1990s alternative music, I knew this was the universe telling me to rewatch this movie now. 

Of course, when I think about Singles, I also think about Ben Stiller's Reality Bites, so I decided to make it a double feature.

Am I the only one from my generation who links these two movies? Definitely not, though I don't know whether it rises to the level of common knowledge that these movies go hand in hand. But let's consider what they have in common:

1) Both are about twentysomethings feeling jaded and unsure about their futures, though more so in Reality Bites than Singles.

2) Both heavily incorporate music, though more so in Singles than Reality Bites, and different types of music.

3) Both feature a rock band with a funny name where one of our main characters is the lead singer, the funny Citizen Dick in Singles and the funnier Hey That's My Bike in Reality Bites. (I especially like that the purported groupies of Hey That's My Bike are called Hey That's My Bikers.)

4) In both movies, that lead singer treated their love interest with contempt or indifference and came to regret this, crawling back for a second chance.

5) Both movies have one central plot and two subplots.

6) Both movies have sort of a Melrose Place thing going on. The apartment complex where most of the characters live in Singles is directly reminiscent of the one in Melrose Place, though obviously at a lower socioeconomic level, and Melrose Place is directly invoked in Reality Bites, where the character waiting for the results of her AIDS test, played by Jeanene Garofalo, says she's like the new character on Melrose Place with AIDS, and concludes by saying that Melrose Place is a really good show.

7) Both movies have a six degrees of Kevin Bacon connection with John Mahoney. Mahoney is actually in Reality Bites, and he was also in the movie Cameron Crowe directed before Singles, Say Anything. 

Because Reality Bites came out two years after Singles, 1994 to 1992, if you want to accuse anyone of theft, it would be Stiller of Crowe. But there's enough of a difference between the two that it would be a baseless accusation. They are more like kissing cousins than a movie that owes a debt to another movie.

Reality Bites is the far more serious movie, as evidenced by the specter of AIDS, not to mention the character played by Steve Zahn being thrown out of his house after coming out to his parents (and no further word on that topic before the conclusion of the movie). Singles is far lighter on its feet, and yes, this does correspond to a preference of one over the other, which I will expand on as this piece continues.

I will say, though, that coming in, I did not know which of these movies would play better for me in 2025. I watched them in chronological order, starting the first in my office in the early evening before finishing it on the couch after 10 o'clock, and starting the second far too late, but finishing it within the same night anyway. They're both less than 100 minutes long, which helps. It was the first time I had seen either movie since I started keeping a list of the movies I rewatched back in 2006. 

After the fact, I checked on Flickchart to see how I actually had them ranked. It's #648 for Singles and #957 for Reality Bites. That is definitely consistent with my preferences, but the gulf should be wider. Not necessarily because Singles should be higher, as I think it's ranked about right. But Reality Bites should not be in my top 1,000 movies. I wouldn't bust it down to 2,000+ or anything, but inside the top 1,000 is too high. 

Okay let's get to my takeaways from each movie, starting with Singles.

1) I was surprised at how flat-out charmed I was by this movie. It's sweet and, as I said a moment ago, very light on its feet. It's not that I didn't remember this being the case about Singles, but I was surprised by the extent of it being the case.

2) I love the fact that the characters randomly talk to the camera. It's not part of some artificial construct like a faux documentary, though I promise that's not intended as a dig at Reality Bites. It's just that sometimes, the characters need to chat with the audience.

3) My affection for Bridget Fonda was fully reignited with this movie. I won't get into the fact that I think she has the perfect mouth, not only great dental work, but those teeth are ideally framed by the shape of her mouth as she does what I call a "frown smile" -- a slightly downturned look that you can tell is a smile anyway. Sharon Horgan also has this. Anyway, I guess I did get into it, but I'm trying not to be too much of a creep here. 

No, the thing I really loved was how kind her reactions are to unrequited romantic intentions. Two different characters make overtures toward her in this movie, one her own doctor basically asking her out, another an ex-boyfriend going in for a kiss at a time of maximum vulnerability for him. She doesn't make either of these characters feel like they crossed a line, she just sweetly lets them down while also boosting them up. It's one of the more generous things I've seen in a movie in some time. That showcases an extraordinary amount of self-possession for this character, which is kind of a big deal given how little of it she has in her initial dealings with her boyfriend Cliff, whom she ultimately dumps. (Leading to him crawling back, as discussed earlier.)

4) While we're on the topic of the female leads, I was also very charmed by Kyra Sedgwick. It's not that I am anti-Sedgwick, but as her career went on, she did less and less for me. My wife and I have a joke where she yells "Confess! Con-FEY-OO-essss!", emphasizing her southern accent, from when she was on that show The Closer. (I think the bit actually came from a Saturday Night Live sketch.) Here, though, I was reminded how sympathetic she is in the right role, so sympathetic that I wanted to pat her on the head. You can see the vulnerability in her eyes, her awkwardness, her uncertainty that it will all work out.

5) As it has now been 30 years (!) since the height of grunge -- even more, I guess, as grunge was already starting to fade by 30 years ago -- I was surprised at how nostalgic I felt for the bands that play here, like Alice in Chains and Soundgarden. The musicians don't themselves play an essential role in the story, I wouldn't say, though some acting is required of the members of Pearl Jam, who serve as Cliff's backup band in Citizen Dick. (Using their real names, which I thought was even more charming.) That's another similarity with Reality Bites, as the Lemonheads' Evan Dando has a very small role in that movie.

6) It's all about the Campbell Scott-Kyra Sedgwick love story, with the Matt Dillon-Bridget Fonda plot and the dating scene desperation of Sheila Kelley's character clearly serving as B plots. And though the B plots are more lightweight, they aren't inconsequential. They are lightweight in a warm and friendly way. 

The thing I like so much about the Scott-Sedgwick courtship -- Steve and Linda by their character names -- is how everyday it is, how grounded in the real world. They don't meet cute. They don't instantly realize the other person is for them. They are suspiciously lacking in grand romantic gestures, leaving anguished voicemails rather than running through airports, proposing marriage casually while one of them is eating a corn dog, which she does not want to become a "historic corn dog." I'm just thinking how a movie made today would not be allowed to languish so much in the apparently pedestrian, whose very relatability is key to its impact on us. 

7) Speaking of the way this movie is "friendly," I like the bit where Steve and Linda believe they are going their separate ways and they shake hands. "Let's be the first people to say they'll stay friends and truly mean it," says Steve. I don't know if it's an inconsistency in Crowe's writing, but I prefer to think of it as intentional, as Steve not realizing what's right under his nose: Each of these two have examples in their own lives of exes with whom they are "truly" friends. While it's clear that there is something unresolved, romantically, in Linda's relationship with her ex Andy (James Le Gros) and Steve's relationship with his ex Janet (Fonda), since she gets back together with Andy and he tries to kiss Janet (leading to one of her generous light rebuffings), until this point they are actually carrying on well enough as just that: friends. And while we don't see enough of the relationship between Linda and Andy to judge it, we know things seem quite comfortable between Steve and Janet, affection without longing. 

Overall, I like how this film does not feel like it has life or death stakes, even with a lost pregnancy, the losses of jobs, etc. Crowe manages to keep an upbeat tone throughout, which I suppose was a unique gift of his movies, one he didn't really step away from until Vanilla Sky in 2001. And then he went scrambling right back to it, but was never able to make another movie that felt as easy as Say Anything, Singles, Jerry Maguire or Almost Famous.

Okay, on to Reality Bites, which was not so charming.

1) I had forgotten about how many lines of dialogue there are from this movie that I either say or think of. For some reason Garofalo's line "Don't bogart that can ... man" is something I think of a lot, even though I am usually not bogarting anything myself or asking someone else not to bogart something, least of all a can. Then there's Garofalo's line where she calls out Ethan Hawke's and Winona Ryder's characters for the sexual tension of their bickering and squabbling, where she says "Oh why don't you guys just do it already and get it over with."

2) I had also forgotten how much of a prick everyone is in this movie. Even when/if they are ultimately good characters, and that's debatable, they are prone to treating each other monstrously. Having told a friend of mine about the double feature, as I was watching it, I wrote him the following message: "Everyone's really mean to everyone else in Reality Bites." And this is definitely true.

It's particularly difficult to like Hawke's Troy, whose intellectual narcissism -- which Stiller's character has such a hard time defining in one of his tongue-tied rants -- goes beyond the level of toxicity usually required of a character primed to reform himself and factor into a happy ending. Which is why I always found the ending of this movie disappointing. The thing is, I didn't really want Lelaina to end up with Stiller's Michael either, even though I must admit I am probably more of a Michael than I am a Troy. He's also not great. (My friend called him "insufferable.") Hawke has moments here where his philosophizing reminds one of the sort he would go on to do with Richard Linklater, as Before Sunset was set to come out the following year. 

3) Of the two films, Reality Bites appears to have aged significantly less well. Although I liked how much characters smoke cigarettes in this movie -- an accurate depiction of these people specifically and many people in general, even today -- that made it no less shocking to see how much smoking there is, since smoking has almost totally dropped out of the modern movie. (Yes, Hollywood has taken on the informal role of being a role model to young people.) Then there's the use of the "R" word, and I can put both of these things together into one scene, where Lelaina is sitting at the kitchen table, smoking, talking to her mother (Swoosie Kurtz) and her stepfather (Harry O'Reilly), who is also smoking. In this scene, both Lelaina and her mother use the word "retarded," and they don't mean it as "to slow the growth of."

4) A movie called Reality Bites is obviously in conversation with the concept of reality TV, but it feels a bit ahead of its time in that regard. One of the core conflicts is whether Lelaina is going to give up the documentary footage she's shooting of her friends to a TV network called In Your Face TV, where Michael works. (Would have been a stand-in for MTV at the time.) Now granted, it's not as ahead-of-its-time as you might initially guess, since MTV's The Real World had already been around for two years at that point, enough time for Stiller and company to poke fun at it. (Her footage is repurposed into a crass Real World clone, which includes, as one example, images of one rhinoceros mounting another, scored to the song "Let's Talk About Sex.") In introducing a test screening of the show -- called, appropriately, Reality Bites -- Michael refers to it has their foray into "real programming." The internet tells me the term "reality TV" was first used in the early 1990s, but can find no concrete examples of its actual origin. It's possible that it was not really used in 1994, since there were so few examples of reality TV that there would not yet need to be a name for it. I think of the debut of Survivor in 2000 as around the time the term really would have taken off. 

5) This movie was shot by Emmanuel Lubezki! Who would have guessed. Yes, he was just a regular working professional before he became the preferred director of photography for prestige directors making ambitious films. Movies from this period you might also not have guessed he shot: A Walk in the Clouds, The Birdcage and Meet Joe Black. (He was working with Alfonso Cuaron too, but those don't come as a surprise given the Cuaron works later associated with his name, such as Children of Men.)

6) Rodrigo Garcia was one of Lubezki's camera operators! And this I didn't even get in the opening credits, I had to wait and happened to catch it in the closing credits. If that name is not familiar to you, he would go on to direct films like Mother and Child, Albert Nobbs, Last Days in the Desert and Raymond & Ray. (I also see he directed episodes of a TV series I was not aware existed, a reimagining of Party of Five, but about the five children of parents who get deported to Mexico. That show was made in 2020 but it feels very relevant to 2025.)

7) It's interesting how these films reflect the persona of their director. I talked about how cool and easy Singles felt, in matching what we know to be Cameron Crowe's persona. Well, Reality Bites is tightly wound and anxious, matching the mode we most often see from Stiller on screen, as he's often whinging (to use the Australian term) or arguing with someone. Don't get me wrong, I love Ben Stiller -- he directed all-time favorite The Cable Guy as his very next film -- but I don't think he could have made a movie that was relaxed and slower paced like Singles, though it should be said he did not write Reality Bites, only directed and starred in it. 

But let's go with our original premise that Singles was in some way a text for Stiller when making Reality Bites. If so, it's easy to envision how there could be a parallel in the relationships between his character, Michael, and Hawke's character Troy, and Stiller and Crowe extra-textually. In a way, Crowe is like a Troy, only much nicer -- cool, with even the long hair, and with even looking a bit like Ethan Hawke. I can't honestly imagine that Crowe would have truly been a figure of frustration, resentment and of course aspiration for Stiller, since they might not even know each other unless they happened to meet sometime at an industry event. But you can easily see Stiller stammering out some sort of frustration at Crowe about how Stiller doesn't meet the cool threshold necessary to speak to him, just as his character does toward Troy.

Okay that's honestly a lot more than I imagined I would delve into these movies when I launched my double feature Friday on a lark.