This year's release date asterisk

It Ends was a movie I looked for last year, when it was recommended to me by a friend who saw it and ranked it as part of his own year-end rankings. (Which means it could only be one friend. There's only one other person who would be willing to go on this crazy mission with me each year.)

So why will it be a part of my own 2026 rankings?

I have fairly hard-and-fast rules about release years and when I count a movie toward the current year. And it usually has to do with the film's U.S. release date. Even though I've lived in Australia for 13 years now, Australian release dates are sometimes way out of whack and I just don't consider them to be a reliable gauge of the current film year, not when I'm comparing my own list to those from people who live in other parts of the world. 

If a film has a release in the U.S. in a particular year, it's part of that year for ranking purposes. That allows foreign films, which were often released in their home country in the previous year, to qualify for ranking in that second year.

But if you go to IMDB for Alexander Ullom's head-trippy road movie -- in that it is literally about a road that seems to go on forever -- you'll see the following under the U.S. release:

"United States - December 10, 2025 (internet)"

And then on the very next line:

"United States - August 21, 2026"

Huh? 

A film may get only an internet release, or it may get an internet release after a theatrical release. In fact, I believe this second describes every movie that's been made in the internet era -- though to be fair, IMDB does not usually note the date a movie becomes available for streaming.

But an internet release and then a theatrical release? You don't usually see that.

What happened was that Letterboxd, for a limited time, had exclusive access to the movie as part of its Unreleased Gems series. I noticed in a recent email from Letterboxd that they're doing it again this year. 

In fact, the time was so limited that when I went to look for it a month later, in order to make It Ends one of my final half-dozen viewings of 2025, it was no longer available. I wrote it off as never rankable on one of my year-end rankings, a fate that befalls a large number of releases each year.

But most of those other movies burn their eligibility in that first year. Because of its unusual release schedule, I've now decided It Ends did not. 

It took another eight months to finally get a proper release, but It Ends came out in the U.S. last month, and washed up on our shows last week. I watched it Sunday night as a second movie after the family went to see Terminator 2, as discussed previously. 

I liked but did not love it. Not top 20 like my friend ranked it last year. To each his own. But that isn't really the point of writing this post.

No, the point is to talk about a sort of stretching of the rules that actually sort of pains me a little bit.

I know these are my rules and I can do whatever I want with them, but I also feel like it's good to be consistent. And the way it works out, only foreign films, not English language films like this one, usually get that "second chance" -- which is really just a first chance, since I literally could not have seen those movies in the year of their proper release, unless I'd flown to the country where they were released, or maybe caught them at a festival. 

If I had been a bit faster, I could have seen It Ends last year.

But then again I might not have even noticed it was a Letterboxd exclusive, might not have even had it recommended to me by my friend. And then it would have been like any other film that has a different release year on IMDB than the year of its actual release, a result of debuting at a film festival one year and getting a theatrical release the next. That's especially likely if the festival debut was a later festival, like TIFF. You can't expect all those films to get distribution in that first year, so you rank them in the second year.

And so I am treating the Letterboxd exclusive window on It Ends kind of like an online film festival. 

Hey, it works for me, and these are my rules anyway. Which doesn't mean I am always flexible enough to bend them. 

Watching along with Hitchcock/Truffaut

I'm dutifully continuing the endeavor I began almost a year ago, in which I vowed to alternate the books I'm reading between books that are related to film, and all other sorts of books. I've kept it up over the year, though there have been some big asterisks on some of the movie-related books. Turns out, I don't really want to read a book that is specifically about film every other book, even if it's good for me in terms of deepening my intellectual appreciation of my favorite medium.

For now I'm continuing to do it, and the latest I'm making my way through -- slower than I might like -- is Hitchcock/Truffaut, which was given to me as a gift at some point over the last ten years. 

If you aren't familiar with it, you probably should be, at least by reputation. It's a conversation between Alfred Hitchcock and Francois Truffaut conducted over a week in 1962, in which Truffaut is wearing his journalist's hat in discussing literally every movie Hitchcock had made to that point. (They could not, of course, discuss movies he hadn't yet made -- or could they? More on that in a moment.) 

It's delivered to us in a coffee table-sized book, in other words, the size of book you would find on a coffee table, not a book as big as a coffee table. There are a lot of stills from Hitchcock's films, sometimes covering whole two-page spreads, and the conversation is recorded as an exchange of dialogue, like you'd find in a script, with each man's initials and a colon before what he's saying. (I'm a little unclear on the logistics, because I don't think Truffaut spoke perfect English, and many of the thoughts he expresses are quite complex.)

I must admit I am a little confused on the timing though. Wikipedia says the book was not released until 1966 but that the conversation took place in 1962, and yet there are references to The Birds in the conversation, which was not released until 1963. Well, fortunately we live in the age of AI, which just explained to me that principal photography had already been completed on The Birds at the time the conversation took place, meaning it was front of mind for Hitchcock -- though obviously Truffaut would not have seen it yet, or at least not more than some isolated dailies. 

There are a couple reasons it's taking me a long time to get through this:

1) It turns out that reading a dialogue between two people doesn't feel the same as reading a book. It's more like listening to an audio transcript. When I'm reading a book, I'm looking for crafted sentences and other signs of compelling writing. I'm not interested just in what two men said, even if the content of what they said is inherently interesting. And that leads me to point 2:

2) The content is not all inherently interesting. A number of the movies they're talking about are movies I haven't seen, and others are movies I've seen, but not for ages. So a lot of it is a bit abstract in terms of resonating with me, even if some of Hitchcock's war stories have a certain appeal unto themselves. 

The first I can't do much about, if I do want to ultimately finish Hitchcock/Truffaut. And I'm a completist, especially when it comes to books I start, so not finishing it is out of the question. 

The second? I do have some options there.

And so I've started watching movies alongside the chronological discussion, projecting 20 to 30 pages down the road so I can have one of these movies fresh in my mind when it comes up. It's kind of like what I did last year with Quentin Tarantino's Cinema Speculation. Last night, I watched my third such previously unseen Hitchcock. At the very least, this project could get me closer to having only a dozen Hitchcocks remaining, meaning at some point in the future I can spend an annual viewing project on finishing off his filmography. 

The first was Sabotage (1936), which was among Hitchcock's final handful of films he made before coming to Hollywood. It concerns a terrorist planning a series of attacks in London while hiding in plain sight of owning and operating a small movie theater. 

The second was Foreign Correspondent (1940), one of only four Hitchcock movies nominated for an Academy Award for best picture, meaning my viewing knocks out one of my future viewings on my perennially in progress Audient Bridesmaids series. This one deals with the classic Hitchcock character of an innocent thrust into espionage and intrigue, the titular character sent to Europe to cover World War II but getting involved in an intricate spy plot instead.

Those first two were quite recognizably Hitchcock pictures. Last night's was not. The third was Lifeboat (1944), a classic frame story in which about eight characters are trapped on the titular vessel after their ship is sunk in the Atlantic during World War II, one of whom is a German. This one is more about human nature than deception and mystery. 

If I'm keeping with the four-year intervals, Hitchcock made Rope in 1948, though I've already seen (and loved) that one, and am due for a rewatch. So I guess it would probably be either 1947's The Paradine Case or 1949's Under Capricorn, both of which are unfamiliar to me.

What do these movies have in common, other than coming out at four-year intervals, which isn't really an actual attribute?

Well none of them blew my mind, and I guess I can't expect lesser Hitchcocks to measure up to the classics. I've seen almost all of the real household names in his filmography, so it was inevitable that some of the ones I'm watching now couldn't hold a candle to those.

But I was particularly surprised at how little Foreign Correspondent did for me, especially when you consider the Academy consider it one of the best ten films of that year. (One of his other nominees for best picture actually won it in the very same year: Rebecca, a stone-cold classic.) Although there's some good stuff in this movie, some stuff you would note as "Hitchcockian" -- the assassin escaping under the umbrellas, the titular character getting his overcoat caught in the windmill gears -- my overall impression of the film was disappointment. 

Sabotage was the winner of the bunch for me, even though Hitchcock's and Truffaut's dialogue about it is mostly negative -- the leader actor being wrong for the role, a key decision that I won't spoil being morally dubious from him as a filmmaker. 

Lifeboat? I was hoping the restricted locale would inspire some of the director's greatest cleverness, and that it might give me Rope vibes. Instead, this felt like one of the pictures Hitchcock made as a favor to somebody, not delving into his usual proclivities like I thought it might have. (I haven't gotten to that one yet in the book, so let's see what they say about it.)

The problem with this whole companion viewing I'm doing is that sometimes they don't say much about a particular movie at all. That hasn't been a problem with either Sabotage or Foreign Correspondent, but there are certain films that got little more than a cursory mention. If I had chosen to watch those, I would have felt like it was a wasted effort indeed. 

It is nice, though, to have some good counterprogramming as I start to ramp up on current year releases, which will become more and more of a preoccupation for me the closer I get to my ranking deadline in January.

And yeah, it'll get me a lot closer to the ultimate goal, which seems pretty hard to attain at the moment: making my way through all of Hitchcock's films.

At a glance, it looks like I have only about 35 more to go ... 

T2 spoiled, but not ruined

It occurs to me that I should probably include a SPOILER ALERT about Terminator 2: Judgment Day before writing this post. I might assume that if you are reading this post, you've seen Terminator 2: Judgment Day. But if I were to do that, I'd be making the same outrageous gaffe made by the distributors of the movie's 35th anniversary re-release.

But first, some background. 

If you read yesterday's post, you know that we watched The Terminator on Saturday night as a family movie in order to prepare for yesterday's Australian Father's Day viewing of Terminator 2: Judgment Day. The first was a mild success, which I celebrated with a relieved exhale.

See, we'd already bought the T2 tickets. If the first had been a huge fail, the second would have been tainted from the start.

Which it almost was anyway.

When the pre-show ads finished at the Sun in Yarraville, an image of a robotic foot crushing a human skull came on the screen so quickly that it shocked me. Does Terminator 2 really have such an abrupt beginning? Isn't there at least a production company logo or something?

And a part of me knew this was wrong. For some reason I always remember that the first shot of Terminator 2 is of traffic on the 405 freeway.

This wasn't the movie. This was some little short film accompanying it.

And soon it was confirmed that this was some sort of short documentary, an abbreviated version of the kind of thing that once appeared as a DVD extra. Edward Furlong, Robert Patrick, James Cameron and producer Gale Anne Hurd were all being interviewed in short snippets.

What's worse, though, is that there were little snippets of the movie. 

Little snippets of all parts of the movie.

The beginning. The middle. The end. All the coolest liquid metal shots. All the most moving emotional beats. Everything.

The audience started howling. My wife and I started panicking.

See, one of the reasons we watched The Terminator was because we wanted to create the same preconceived notions in our children that audiences had coming into T2 in 1991, having only seen the original, and having only seen the trailers for this movie. (I don't know how spoilery the trailers were. Probably pretty spoilery.) 

We wanted our kids, like the movie hopes, to think, for at least a little bit, that Arnold Schwarzenegger might be coming back for his second chance to kill John Connor, and Robert Patrick might be filling the Kyle Reese role of John and Sarah's less physically imposing protector. 

Well, this little short film started to spoil that right away, not to mention almost everything else in the movie -- even though any individual snippet of the film was only one or two seconds long. 

Yes, this short film included the actual shot of the good terminator descending into the molten steel and giving a thumbs up as his final gesture. 

I repeat: THE DEATH OF ONE OF THE MAIN CHARACTERS WAS REVEALED IN THIS ACCOMPANYING SHORT.

Fortunately, my younger son didn't see it. Realizing pretty early on what was happening, he closed his eyes and put his hands over his ears. I can't remember if his mother told him to do that or if he just did it on his own. If it was his own instinct, he certainly takes after me, as I will sometimes do this when a trailer comes on for a movie I don't want spoiled.

My older son? He was too cool for that sort of evasive action. And he pretty much saw everything in this short film. Even if it was out of context, it was spoilerific as hell.

I made a lame attempt to put my arm in the path of his eyes when the Arnie thumbs up came on screen, but the damage was already done.

I have to imagine that 80 to 85 percent of our audience had already seen the movie. But surely there were at least 15 to 20 percent, which would have been maybe 20 to 25 people, who just never got around to it, or were too young and this was their first time. The audience was alive with people laughing in disbelief at what was happening.

I was beside myself. I even yelled "You're ruining the whole movie!" which got quite a big laugh. 

"I can't believe that just happened," I said to my wife. Neither could she.

Mercifully, this finally ended and we were able to watch the movie.

I guess I don't blame the Sun for this. The Sun is, by far, my favorite cinema, and they would never co-sign something like this if it weren't attached to the film itself. And I actually don't know if they even knew it was on there. I think this may have been the first (only?) showing of T2 at this theater. 

And even if they did know, and if they did consider it to be as sacrilegious as I did, what would be their capacity to start the movie late to skip this? And would that be communicated to the projectionist? 

In any case, if you do want to include this short video -- which also shows all these people looking very old and broken down by the world, particularly the 49-year-old Edward Furlong -- couldn't you put it at the end? And if you're worried people will leave before it shows, just include a message at the start "Stay tuned after the film for a short documentary about the making of Terminator 2: Judgment Day."

The movie is so good that I relaxed into the viewing pretty quickly and put it behind me. At least one of my children had largely avoided spoilers. I guess the other would just have to deal. 

To make myself feel a little better, I did watch the movie specifically from the angle of inspecting how closely it guards the secret of which terminator is which. And I decided it gives up that ruse pretty quickly. Even when Arnie goes through the biker bar to get clothes and a motorcycle, the scene is played for comedy -- violent comedy, but comedy nonetheless. There are no fatalities, and it ends with George Thorogood's "Bad to the Bone" playing. Way too light if this is your villain. And though we can't be sure that the naked T-100 actually kills the cop he knifes in the stomach -- in fact, we don't even know it was a knifing until we deduce it retroactively from his later behavior -- we can see that this cop is lying on the ground without moving. Seems like a fatality to me. 

I should mention one other concern I had about this movie, which was a concern I had (to a lesser extent) with the original, which was the gory deaths. The metal finger through the eye of the mental hospital security guard. The metal sword-arm through the head of Todd, John's foster father. But even more than that, the traumatizing (to me at least, in 1991) footage of the nuclear explosion that skeletonizes Sarah Connor and blows apart the kids in the playground "like leaves," to quote Sarah herself. I looked over at the younger son on each of these, and he didn't look as horrified as I was worried he'd look. I guess my 2026 12-year-old is probably more blase about violence and scary imagery than I was as a 17-year-old in 1991.  

Well, I don't know that their viewing of the movie was significantly impacted by anything that was spoiled for them. However, neither did they fall in love with the movie like I hoped they would.

They seemed to indicate the two Terminator movies they'd seen in the last 24 hours were of a piece. That in itself would have been a bit of a disappointment to me, but that's only because of personal preference. I know there are people out there who think that The Terminator is the "real" Terminator movie and that T2 is effectively a cash grab. They're wrong, but they're entitled to that opinion.

We went to Father's Day dinner at a neighboring burger place, and my wife and I filled the space that is typically left by my children in any dinner conversation with more praise of the film and prompts for discussion about the details of the film. We actually talked a fair bit about Schwarzenegger, whom they don't otherwise really know. 

And as for her? Well, she said she really enjoyed it -- she specifically commented on how different it was that all those stunts were done practically back then -- but she also said she thought it was "a little long." Yes T2 is a half-hour longer than The Terminator, but for my money, every second is exactly as it should be. Again, though, I can't quibble with other people's opinions. 

The kids did get involved in a couple of the discussions, my younger son more than my older one, but the things that engaged them were not the things I would have thought were their big takeaways. Because we had about 30 minutes to fill at dinner, I even got into a few of my nitpicks about the movie -- Sarah Connor is only 29 years old?? -- and one of these was actually something they took issue with. 

I said I thought it was funny that Robert Patrick came through looking like Robert Patrick, when he could have just come through as a metal blob, and that it was funny that when he sampled that first police officer, he incorporated only the uniform into his own shape while keeping the default Robert Patrick appearance. Shouldn't he actually look like the cop?

The kids decided -- my younger one, backed up by the older one -- that the T-1000 had actually taken the cop's clothes and was wearing them over his metal. Which of course doesn't make sense. Where does the fabric go when he takes another shape? They didn't seem to have an answer for this but were unwilling to move from their position.

All in all, it was a close approximation of the Father's Day experience I was hoping for. I mean, obviously I hoped they would love T2 as much as I do, would be as impressed by the visual effects as I was in 1991. But they've seen 35 years' worth of more advanced digital effects, and basically, anything they can imagine conjured in a movie. A liquid metal villain is inevitably not going to gobsmack them the way it gobsmacked me 35 years ago.

And there was a little something else in the movie that made it appropriate for that day. I really got the feels any time the movie either implicitly or explicitly evoked the father-son relationship between the good terminator and John Connor. The part where John stops Sarah from killing Miles Dyson -- or at least arrives to do so after she's already made that choice for herself -- is still the film's most emotionally resonant moment for me, but given that I'm a dad celebrating Father's Day, this other material worked on me more than usual as well. 

Risking The Terminator on my kids

If you can believe it, I only just watch the original Terminator for the second time.

How is this possible, you ask? Especially when I've seen T2 at least eight times, and wouldn't be surprised if it were double digits?

Well I never saw The Terminator in the years between when it was released in 1984 and when Terminator 2: Judgment Day was released in 1991. My first exposure to the Terminator universe was in T2, at which point my mind was blown and I was on board for however many decades of later releases were yet to come. (Most of which have been disappointing, but with intermittent pleasures along the way.) I might have caught five minutes of the original on cable at a friend's house, but that was it. 

The actual date of my single previous Terminator viewing is lost to time. I didn't start keeping track of the dates I watched movies until 2002, so it was sometime between 1991 and 2002. I know I didn't rush out right away after T2 to watch it. It might have taken at least a few more years and happened somewhat organically.

The fact that I haven't seen the original The Terminator more than once until now seems even more absurd when you consider that I rewatched two demonstrably lesser Terminator movies, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines and Terminator: Dark Fate, before I got to a rewatch of the original. That's very strange on the face of it, though at least those two are my next two favorites in the series. (Leaving Terminator: Salvation and Terminator: Genisys on the outside looking in. Like, way on the outside, barely able to see the inside from their vantage point.)

There's a reason I haven't watched The Terminator again since the 1990s. It's not that I think it's bad. In fact, I think it's quite good. It's just that it pales in comparison to T2, feeling like a fossil by comparison, certainly technology wise, and possibly even narratively. 

We may generally prize practical effects over digital effects, but the liquid metal Terminator in T2 came along at a time when we weren't already ruined for digital, and it still looks good today. It's kind of like the digital effects in Starship Troopers. (In fact I've probably made that comparison before.) 

That's in stark contrast to the practical effects of The Terminator, which probably already looked quaint even by 1991. We may feel warm fuzzies about the Schwarzenegger mask and the Ray Harryhausen-style movements of the skinless terminator endoskeleton, but that's only because it reminds us of a lost, simpler time -- not because it actually looks good. 

The liquid metal, combined with some dynamite storytelling and action set pieces, levelled up the whole series, leaving that film's predecessor feeling antiquated and small by comparison. So when I'm looking to scratch a Terminator itch, I never think of being able to do that in the original Terminator. (You could also make the argument that I prefer my Arnie as a protagonist, which he is every other time he appears throughout the saga.)

And this was my thinking behind being uncertain about whether to show The Terminator to my kids, now ages 12 and 16.

Why is this even coming up, you ask? Well I'll tell you.

Sunday (today) is Father's Day in Australia. I'm not huge on days in my honor, and I treat it a bit like my birthday -- I'll take a few token gestures on my behalf, and I don't want to do anything I don't want to do, but other than that, I don't want a big fuss made over it. Especially this year, when my wife is overwhelmed with work-related things. 

She asked if there were any good movies to see, but this is a bad time of year for that. Although the theatrical release schedule is not as black and white as it once was, late August/early September is still not a great time for new movie releases. Especially new movie releases that might feel "special" in some way.

But I can tell you what does feel special: Terminator 2: Judgment Day. 

Which I've already seen once in the theater this year, back when I saw the altered musical score (plus added laser effects) for the Hear My Eyes series, as discussed here. But that wasn't going to stop me from making this our Father's Day activity.

It's playing today at 3:45 at my favorite theater, The Sun in Yarraville, for its 35th anniversary. And I guess I need to stop pooh-poohing random anniversary years (see this post), because this will now be the second time I'm celebrating the 35th anniversary of the release of T2. 

My last viewing brought home with me a resolve that we needed to show this to our kids, which I shared with my wife at the time, back in February. What a golden opportunity to do so, on the big screen no less.

The thing is, doesn't T2 have more impact if you've already seen The Terminator? My own personal experience notwithstanding?

I stand as living proof that you can love Terminator 2: Judgment Day on its own merits, not having consumed anything about this world previously, and not having your mind blown that there was a reversal from the first movie, where Arnold Schwarzenegger went from villain to good guy. I already knew that anyway, because of course it was in the culture back in the '80s.

But The Terminator isn't in the culture to the same extent, in that my kids don't appear to have grown up with its mythology. They've heard of the movie, but didn't even know the central tenets of the series, which is built on the need to kill John Connor before he ascends to command the rebellion against the machines, potentially even before he's born. In fact, they didn't even know who John Connor or Sarah Connor were.

So they were in a position indeed to be faked out by the start of T2, when you just think Arnie is back to try again to kill the young John Connor ... but only if they saw the original movie.

My wife could go either way on it. She left it up to me. I think she was excited to see the original again -- she's seen T2 few enough times that she actually thinks the original might be superior -- but she was willing to yield to my concerns, it being Father's Day and all. 

And I definitely had reason for worry. The things that blew our minds when we were young are, in some cases, just too old-fashioned for today's young people. I knew this wasn't possible with T2, given how modern it still feels, but its predecessor lacks those bells and whistles. And if you think I'm overreacting and that I should give my kids more credit, I still remember well the time my older son started to watch Jaws on the plane, but then abandoned the viewing after less than 15 minutes because it was just "too old."

The danger was, we'd already bought the tickets to T2. If they both hated The Terminator, it would put quite the damper on our Father's Day activity.

Well I decided we should do it. I set up the projector in the garage -- my first projector movie in ages -- and popped up some popcorn. We'd order dinner during the movie, to arrive for its second half.

And I think it was pretty much a success.

Neither kid was effusive in their praise. My older son said it was "cool," but that could have been diplomacy, knowing that there was a lot riding on this viewing and not wanting to poison the well in advance of T2. My wife and I quickly took over with our own effusive praise, so I can't recall my younger son's reaction. But later he showed his engagement with the viewing when he talked about being faked out by Kyle Reese, thinking he was another terminator -- at which point my decision to watch the movie, in order to support a similar sort of fake-out in T2, was totally vindicated. 

"Exactly!" I enthused. "You're supposed to not know and that's supposed to increase the tension!"

(That's not exactly what I said, but it was what I wished I'd said.)

I'm not going to include a lot of Terminator takeaways in this post, but one of them was just how little exposition there is in the first 25 minutes or so of this movie. In fact there's very little dialogue, and what's there is largely limited to Sarah Connor, her roommate and her roommate's boyfriend. Eventually the detectives played by Paul Winfield and Lance Henriksen get a fair amount of chatter too.

But exposition actually related to the time travellers? There's almost none. And indeed, that's designed to fake us out, but we're also just trying to get oriented in this world. There's some on-screen text at the start about the war with the robots being waged in present day, but after that, we don't really know who these guys are who materialized in a Tesla coil's worth of lightning. I noted specifically that we don't even see Schwarzenegger's POV computer readouts until it's firmly established that he's the villain, and definitely an android.

Once Reese gets talking it becomes a veritable exposition dump, making up for all the previous paucity of details. But we need it to fully acquaint ourselves with the stakes of Sarah Connor escaping her own assassination. 

The action scenes are pretty good. The visual effects are, I try to tell myself, quite sophisticated for 1984. And the relationship between Reese and Sarah is touching enough. 

But I know this is never going to stand a chance for me against T2, and a second viewing didn't change that. I need to remind myself that the concepts themselves -- among them the paradox of a person sent back in time to become the father of the very person who sent him back -- were part of what made the original Terminator so great. It's easy to take that for granted when you've lived with these ideas for 42 years. 

But even if this movie hadn't worked for my kids, I knew I had the ace up my sleeve that the sequel was the best in the series, which I had told them. In fact, I had told them that the first one was a little old-fashioned but the second one was not. And whether she actually believed it or not, my wife now co-signed, at least verbally to the kids, that the second one was the best in the series. I didn't know if she was able to decide that based on this viewing and a retroactive memory of T2, but she enthused to me privately that this had been really fun, so I suspect The Terminator didn't suffer for her on her most recent viewing. 

And so it's all down hill from here, in other words, now we can coast to Terminator 2, in about five hours. I'll let you know tomorrow how it goes. 

Mid movies by distinctive talents

I'm trying to not needlessly fatten up my 2026 rankings with a lot of streaming crap. When a movie gives off a whiff of being a quickie algorithm pleaser, instead of letting it flesh out the lower part of my rankings with just another in a sea interchangeable movies, I'm leaving it on the sidelines. As my post the other day about the two movies called Runner/The Runner will attest. 

But you can't entirely disregard genre movies on streaming, so you're looking for certain key elements that would make you choose one over another. Netflix's new The Whisper Man ticks a lot of these boxes.

One of these is the cast. Adam Scott? Tick. Michelle Monaghan? Personal favorite. Robert DeNiro? I'm not as instinctively opposed to what latter-day DeNiro can offer us as I might have been a few years ago. Sprinkle in an unexpected Michael Keaton and Hamish Linklater? You're speaking my language.

But the real clincher for The Whisper Man was its director, James Ashcroft. 

Ashcroft is a Kiwi who made one of the more dour and hopeless horror movies I've ever seen, Coming Home in the Dark, in 2021. I won't get into what makes it so depressing. But let's just say it's in the Funny Games category of bleakness. It involves a family put in peril on a camping trip by a pair of violent scumbags. 

Then last year he followed it up with The Rule of Jenny Pen. This was a truly weird, in the best possible way, psychological horror? I guess? in which a menace played by John Lithgow tortures, figuratively and sometimes literally, a character played by Geoffrey Rush in the retirement home where they both live. It involves a hand puppet called Jenny Pen.

Neither of these movies are personal favorites, though Pen performed quite admirably in last year's rankings, coming in at #68 out of 184. I'm a bit more mixed on Dark, though in a weird way I think it might showcase the "real" Ashcroft a bit better and give us a better idea of the sorts of non-commercial films of which he is capable.

And then he goes and makes some true interchangeable Netflix schlock that has a good cast but not a lot else. 

There are plenty of dour moments in The Whisper Man, to be sure. It might, in fact, push the envelop on this sort of movie more than some other films would, and there were a few memorable images. Overall, though, it's quite mid, and will soon be forgotten by me and everyone else who sees it.

Devoting a whole post to the notion of a director who "sells out" to make a more accessible film suggests that there is something particularly unusual about it. I won't say everyone wants to become more famous and make more money, but probably most people do. 

I think the thing that caught my attention about this film is that Ashcroft's previous two features indicated the sort of person who wouldn't do that. One was incredibly depressing. The other was incredibly weird. This one? To the extent that it's incredibly anything, it's incredibly mid. 

And it's not like Ashcroft had to take this project because he was desperate after the flop of his last film. I don't know if The Rule of Jenny Pen flopped or not, but he's releasing this one only in the very next calendar year, so obviously one project came right on the heels of the other. It wasn't "I'll take anything I can get at this point." (Technically speaking, Pen shows a 2024 release date on IMDB, but that was due to festival debuts.)

That sort of desperation does apply to another distinct talent who also made, in my estimation, a very mid film that I've seen recently. That's David Robert Mitchell, whose The End of Oak Street came only after he'd been fishing about for eight years following the box office failure of Under the Silver Lake. 

Mitchell also gave us something that really showcased his unique vision in the form of It Follows, a big hit in 2014. He used that hit to follow up Follows with a sprawling noir that ran two hours and 20 minutes, and because even then his financiers were probably suspicious of its box office potential, it took another four years to get that one released. Predictably, it flopped, and a potential wunderkind -- someone I was thinking in the same category as Ari Aster and Robert Eggers, who also had prestige horror hits around that time -- went into the wilderness for the better part of a decade.

It was more clear that The End of Oak Street was a compromise in his vision, even if it has some surprises that are the kind of thing that might have intrigued someone like Mitchell. He actually wrote it, so there's no suggestion this was a director-for-hire project. But clearly he said "I have to make something that is not a sprawling 140-minute noir," and what came of that was a dinosaur movie involving music by Michael Giacchino. 

I know some people like this more than I do, so your mileage may vary. But whatever you think about it, there's no doubt you never thought of this as the logical next movie from the guy who made It Follows and Under the Silver Lake. 

And then also this week I saw a movie by a man who had the same eight-year layoff between features as Mitchell, but he went a different path.

Boots Riley got critical acclaim, but probably not much box office either, for his 2018 film Sorry to Bother You. He was not entirely in the wilderness for the years in between, because he made a TV show called I Am a Virgo, but I have to assume he would have been able to make a follow-up feature sooner if Bother had been just a bit more successful and a bit less idiosyncratic in its vision.

So what did Riley do for his follow-up? 

He made I Love Boosters, which I saw and quite liked on Sunday, and which is, if anything, even a bit weirder than Sorry to Bother You. 

I wouldn't say I love either of Riley's films, though I highly respect both of them and they naturally excite me for anything he might make next. The question is, though, whether it'll be another eight years or longer until the next Riley feature, given the lack of money Boosters surely made. (I could be consulting actual box office figures here, but my point works even in the abstract.) 

It seems that Riley prefers his artistic vision to the ability to make movies on the regular. That's a brave decision, and if it's going to be his fate, I hope the hossanas for his previous features are enough to nourish him, artistically, while he waits for his next opportunity.

And if I see his name attached to The Whisper Man 2, well, I will be disappointed. 

A couple hiccups in Remembering Rob Reiner

If you've been following my bi-monthly Remembering Rob Reiner series -- yes there are two of them in alternating months, one concentrating on favorites and one on unseen movies -- you'll know that I've continued to shuffle the order of the favorites version due to things like availability, recency of viewings and themes like the month of Halloween. Thus far, the unseen Reiner movies have proceeded exactly as I expected them to.

Well that all ends now.

September is when Albert Brooks: Defending My Life was due up. This is the finally Reiner movie I hadn't seen that's already been released. 

A documentary about a guy I love, made by a guy I love, the two being lifelong friends? I can't believe I didn't watch it in the year of its release, 2023. 

I felt sure it was available on one of my streamers, because I remember seeing it advertised at the time. Or at least thought I did. But I checked AppleTV -- nope. I checked Amazon Prime -- nope. I checked Disney+ -- nope. And I knew it wasn't Netflix or Stan. 

As you'll note from the poster above, it turns out it was an HBO original, which means it would have streamed on Binge here. My wife actually has a subscription to Binge, but it only works on her computer, it doesn't work through our TV. I won't get into trying to explain why.

But that hardly matters anyway because the internet tells me it is not currently streaming on Binge here either. In fact, AI tells me the following:

"While it briefly appeared on Australian subscription services around its late 2023 release, current streaming aggregators like Flicks Australia show that there are no active streaming providers offering the documentary in the country."

Darn. 

Not only was I not going to watch it last night, as I had envisioned doing, I might not be able to watch it at all. 

If I want to keep this series from going off the rails, there may be a hail Mary option. It's possible it is available on DVD or BluRay, and although we don't have an active DVD or BluRay player going on our TV, I do have an external drive that I can attach to my computer. They'd be selling it for some outrageous price like $29.99 because that, it seems, is what they have decided the market will pay for DVDs these days. But I just don't know if I can do it.

Besides, this series might be irrevocably off the rails anyway.

The sixth and final entry in this series in November is supposed to be a movie that has yet to be released: Spinal Tap at Stonehenge: The Final Finale.

When I was first scouting for this series back in late December/early January, and determined I would have exactly the right number of unseen Reiner movies for a bi-monthly series, that determination relied on the availability of this now definitively final Spinal Tap project. It was envisioned as the final Tap project even before Reiner died, and his loss as a creative spark has certainly scuttled any notion of blowing past that resolve to do other final Final FINAL Tap movies. 

At that time, it seemed as though the project had already been completed and was just waiting for someone to fix on a release date. Well, that release date has not been announced yet. IMDB still lists it as completed and expected in 2026. But 2026 has less than four months remaining, and if they haven't chosen a release date by now, it raises the question of whether this movie will materialize at all. It's possible it is not actually completed, or it's possible everyone just thought it was too sad after Reiner died. (Reiner is not actually listed as an actor in this film, so maybe that makes it less sad and gives it a little bit more of a chance of eventually debuting.)

If this movie might not come out at all, is it even worth trying to track down some version of the Albert Brooks movie? Just a reminder that I am opposed to piracy in all but the most desperate and unavoidable circumstances, and really, there's no viewing of any movie that is that direly needed. 

I guess I'll have to think about this one. And I'll certainly check my local JB HiFi to see if they even have the movie as a DVD, whether it's even a possibility.

If this series had to finish two movies shy of its expected completion, I guess that would be appropriate. After all, the loss of Reiner was equally sudden. No he wasn't cut down in the prime of his life, but he probably would have made more films, whether they would have been any good or not. We lost him before we were ready, so maybe a series that finishes prematurely is a fitting way to honor that, however inadvertently. 

Runner runner

Well this is annoying.

Not only are there two movies coming out in 2026 that have essentially the same title -- that would be Runner and The Runner -- but they are both being unleashed on the world in the month of September. 

First up is the Gal Gadot vehicle The Runner, directed by a director of some note, Kevin Macdonald. He directed The Last King of Scotland and Whitney. Fun fact: I still haven't seen The Last King of Scotland, even though it won an Oscar for its lead actor, Forrest Whitaker. The IMDB synopsis describes it thus: "A high powered attorney must race through London to save her abducted son while following cryptic commands from a mysterious caller."

Yawn. 

Then next week it's Runner, which would appear to be a buddy action comedy starring Alan Ritchson and Owen Wilson, directed by somebody I've never heard of: Scott Waugh. Maybe because I have yet to see a film of his I've actually liked and haven't been a watcher of Reacher, I'm very suspicious of the fact that I have to incorporate Ritchson into my awareness of the world. This one is described as follows: "A former soldier and his unlikely partner become the targets of a ruthless cartel while racing to complete a critical medical delivery and save the life of a little girl."

Double yawn.

In fact maybe both of these movies are boring enough that I don't need to work out the difference between them and can just leave them both on the sidelines of my 2026 rankings in progress. 

By the way, if you're wondering where you know the subject of this post, it's from a third Runner movie which might have also put us to sleep:

Audient One-Timers: Malcolm X

Audient One-Timers is a 2026 monthly series in which I'm rewatching my 12 highest ranked films on Flickchart that I had seen only once. 

Malcolm X is the textbook example of a one-timer that falls into that category merely for its daunting length.

Spike Lee's 1992 opus is three hours and 21 minutes long. When, in this busy world of ours, does it ever seem convenient to sit down and watch a 201-minute movie?

Oh, and this isn't a 201-minute movie like Lord of the Rings: Return of the King is a 201-minute movie. That's 201 minutes of magic, battles and apocalyptic madness. This is 201 minutes of racism, by both Blacks and whites.

But it's also 201 minutes of the most glorious filmmaking you will ever see.

But before I get to that, let me tell you how I did, indeed, set aside 201 minutes to watch Malcolm X: I watched it in about five sittings over three days. 

This was not my intention. I intended to watch it all on Wednesday. My wife was in the city for the evening, so when I got home from work, I thought I could watch an hour of it before dinner and two hours and 21 minutes of it after. She'd be home by then, but she'd have already eaten and she wouldn't need to interface with me other than a quick "hello, how was your day."

But the thing that happens when your wife is in the city is that you have to do all the things related to your kids' dinner. Plus clean up some of the place that she didn't get to during the day, because that's only right. 

So even in two sittings, if you want to call it that, before and after dinner, I was barely past the hour mark on the first day.

The second day wasn't much better. We went out for dinner for my sister-in-law's birthday, and she came over and hung out well before that. I might have only watched another 15 minutes all up that day.

Friday was when I knocked out the rest of it. For some reason I awoke at the ungodly hour of 5:45, so I got X down to less than an hour remaining before going to work that day. The last 40 minutes or so, I'm not ashamed to admit, I watched during my last two hours of the workday. It was a bit slow so I didn't feel too guilty about this. (I was working from home.)

And here was where purchasing the movie really came in handy. Having not found it on any of my streamers, I went to Apple to rent it, but the rental price ($5.99) was actually a dollar more than the purchase price. There are worse movies to own than my 97th ranked film on Flickchart, and this way, I didn't have to worry about how long it took me to finish it. I wasn't running up against a 48-hour expiration date for a rental. 

But I was running up against the practical reality that I wouldn't allow myself to start another movie until I finished this one, and not a moment too soon, as I left work a few minutes early to see the movie I wrote about yesterday, I Want Your Sex. (Don't go checking that post if you actually want to learn anything about I Want Your Sex. I only wrote about a near disaster involving a can of Pepsi Max.)

I think one of the reasons I had put off seeing Malcolm X, which I loved when I saw it in the theater in 1992, before now was precisely what I alluded to with my comparison to Lord of the Rings: It wouldn't be "fun." 

But you know what? When a movie is made with a sense of vigor, a sense of exploding cinematic conventions, a sense of letting the camera do whatever it wants to do -- like the senses with which Lee made X -- it is fun. 

I don't really know where to start talking about the things I noted from this second viewing of Malcolm X, but let's at least start macro before going micro. 

Is it possible this is the best biopic ever made?

I guess you'd have to ask what qualifies as a biopic in this discussion. Is Raging Bull a biopic? I guess it is. Personally, I'm not a huge Raging Bull fan, so it's no contest for me. But some biopics are more obviously biopicky than others, and I think among films you consider to be obvious biopics, Malcolm X is king.

That's not actually what my Flickchart says. Flickchart has five biopics ranked higher than this for me, but I would take issue with the categorization of any of these as pure biopics: The Passion of Joan of Arc, Bonnie and Clyde, The Social Network, Schindler's List and Goodfellas. Just because a movie is about a real person, I don't think that necessarily makes it a biopic. Especially if it's about someone who wouldn't otherwise be famous, as is the case in Goodfellas. 

But among movies that are clearly about one particular person, especially by being named after them, and they consider this person from very early in their life until their death? Yeah, Malcolm X kicks any of those movies' asses.

One of the things I think this does so well is chart the changes in this man over time. It starts with the young Malcolm Little wearing zoot suits and swinging his arm in an affected way as he walks, alongside his director, which is one of my most lasting images of the film. During this time, the later proponent of racial segregation has an appetite for white women. It then continues with his life of crime and stint in prison, from which he emerges as a key figurehead in the Nation of Islam, in fact, such a key figure with so much press that he ends up alienating his fellow brothers. And by then it's too late too avoid his own assassination. 

I skipped ahead there. But this is at least three different Malcolms we get in this movie, and Denzel Washington plays each as a distinct part of a recognizable whole. It's a masterful performance that might have won Washington an Oscar if he hadn't already gotten one for Glory (which is still due up in this series) just three years earlier, and if Al Pacino hadn't needed one that year for Scent of a Woman. (As if.) 

But as much as this is Washington's film, and you can't imagine another person playing this role, you really can't imagine another person directing it than Lee. Which was a real possibility as this was originally a project for director Norman Jewison. 

I had thought of this being an immediate successor to Do the Right Thing, my favorite Lee film that's on the outskirts of my top 20 on Flickchart. It isn't. He made both Mo' Better Blues and Jungle Fever in between. (Which I also liked and which I have also seen only once, Fever better than Blues though.)

But whether his last film was the masterful but insular DTRT, or the noble failure JF, in either case Malcolm X was a major step forward in terms of size and scope for its director. "Major" tends to understate the case. Probably no one had any idea if Lee would be capable of overseeing such a sprawling epic, one that had the audacity to shoot on location in Mecca for greater verisimilitude, one that covered several periods in U.S. history that were distinct even though they were only separated by two decades. No one had any idea until Lee did it and until he knocked everyone's socks off. 

His indispensable collaborator in this effort was Ernest Dickerson, his cinematographer for each of his previous five features and then never again after this, I'm sorry to say. For the things I made note of during this viewing, I don't know whether to credit Lee or Dickerson, but I'm sure it was a combination of the two that's responsible for what ends up on screen. 

I'll mention a couple scenes that particularly grabbed me in terms of the camerawork.

The first is also a showcase for Washington. When Malcolm is serving a term in solitary confinement -- or "the hole," in the parlance of The Shawshank Redemption -- there's a shot where a small shaft of light opens at both the bottom and top of the frame. I guess this is the foot of the door and the top of the door, but the room is completely dark so we have no bearings at all. Washington lets out a howl of agony to the very depth of his soul, and then both shafts of light close again. It's abstract in terms of meaning within the actual plot, but perfect as a metaphor.

Dickerson's active camera shines throughout, but one scene in particular I love is a conversation taking place in the street between a handful of Malcolm's followers, who flank him on either side. The camera whips back and forth between the speakers, who, for a higher degree of difficulty, keep replacing each other, meaning Dickerson has to whip to a slightly different spot in real time and land there just as the speaker is starting his or her line of dialogue. Then at the end after about 30 seconds, the shot rests on Malcolm in the middle. (Not the TV show.)

Then there's the crazy shot where Malcolm, during one of the times that he is being assaulted by incoming harassing phone calls that refuse to stop, is staring straight at the camera, his chin held up by a thumb and forefinger. The camera steadily turns 360 degrees so that he's upside down in the shot and then right side up again. What a way to depict a henpecked mind. 

Two other quick thoughts before I leave off on the specifics about the movie. 

Another thing I don't think a lot of other directors would do is give us the kind of overlapping dialogue that Lee gives us at the end. The scenes where Malcolm is reading aloud the words of the letter he's written Betty, and she is also reading them to a gathered group of friends and associates, contain an unusual amount of dialogue spoken in unison, or almost in unison. In the background are scenes of Mecca. It's profound. 

Lastly, the chaos after Malcolm's assassination reminds me of the intense climax of Do the Right Thing, with bodies on the ground, screaming, and general bedlam, a perfect encapsulation of how it has all gone south. 

This may not have been a cogent, holistic consideration of what makes Malcolm X so great, and why I'm so happy I own it now, so it won't be another 34 years before I watch it again. But I think my enthusiasm is clear. 

I did want to finish with one final thought. 

One fairly brief scene had stayed with me for its succinctness and potency, and especially how it spoke to me personally as a white person.

I'm sure you remember the scene where a young white woman approaches Malcolm and a couple of his cohorts, certain in her progressive bonafides, knowing she doesn't have a racist bone in her body and only wishing to lend some small amount to Malcolm's cause. She says she has nothing to do with the sins of her ancestors and wonders what she, a good white person, can do to help. 

"Nothing," he says, and walks away.

He doesn't try to explain his answer. I'm sure he considers the answer self-explanatory, but perhaps of greater pertinence is that he just doesn't consider this woman worthy of more than a curt brush-off. It's not an impolite brush-off -- even being impolite would suggest more emotional investment in this moment than he wants to give. It's just direct and to the point, and it ends the conversation immediately.

Malcolm X would later repudiate his notion that all whites are devils. In trying to forge a new way separate from the Nation of Islam, which had forsaken him, he revisited his idea of judging a person absolutely by the color of their skin. In the final year or so of his life, he tried to be a bit more like Martin Luther King Jr.

But that scene does and should resonate with white audiences, and it's felt especially apt in the racial discourse that has consumed the country, nay the world, in the ten years since Donald Trump's first presidency began.

Progressive-minded people can and should do whatever they can to make the world better, but it's not the responsibility of Black people to endorse their progressive mindedness. I don't think anyone would say now that "nothing" can and should be done in this fight, but there are altogether too many people out there who want to be congratulated merely for thinking and saying the right things. Do, or do not; there is no try. And whatever you do, don't make it the responsibility of a Black person to guide you through it and tell you you are good at every step of the way.

If I thought Malcolm X was long, in September I have Erich von Stroheim's Greed. I saw the four-hour version the first time, so between now and then I'll have to figure out if I want to watch this version again or if I'll opt for the two hour and 10 minute version available on Kanopy. 

The Pepsi Max that didn't explode

I have a long history of bringing my own snacks into the movies.

I'm not proud of it. But it comes from a time when I had a movie addiction to feed but was relatively poor. Paying for the movie was enough of a hit to my bank account. I couldn't more than double that with a popcorn and a drink.

Today? I'm not scraping together pennies like I once was. Now it's just habit, and a preference for having the exact movie snack I want. So I guess I'm less proud of it than ever. 

I don't always bring in my own snacks. In fact, I only bring them in when I'm going solo, which, granted, is 95% of the time. If I'm with family or friends, I can't bring someone else in as an unwitting co-conspirator on my secret shame, making it a lot less secret.

And the thing is, they never notice. The people running the theater, I mean. Years ago, they heavily frowned on the notion of external snacks, and went so far as to possibly even inspect your bags, though maybe I'm wrong about that. In any case, I did use to worry about it.

Over time, though, a "customer is always right" mantra has come to dominate the showing of movies. No one blinks at bringing in a backpack, which is how I (almost) always get mine in. In fact, if you walked into the movie carrying an entire McDonald's value meal openly in your hands, I doubt anyone would stop you. Too awkward. They don't get paid enough for that sort of confrontation. 

However, last night I almost forced the issue.

I should say "yesterday afternoon," because my showing of Gregg Araki's I Want Your Sex started at 4:40. I thought I left my house early enough to get there, but I was racing in, and made it to my seat with about a minute to spare before the movie proper started. 

I didn't have my backpack with me, in part because I'd brought in no food. I'm a little less worried about succumbing to sleep in a late afternoon movie as I am in a 9:25 start, even though I've long since concluded the hit of sugar doesn't actually do much for me, its effects gone almost as soon as I've stopped actively eating it. 

But I did have a can of Pepsi Max, which was easy enough to smuggle in in the pocket of my winter jacket. We still technically have three more days of winter here in Australia.

The drink was also intended as a "break glass in case of emergency." If I started to nod off, and caffeine was the only way to suppress that, it was there if I needed it.

I didn't start to nod off, so when the brief 90 minutes of I Want Your Sex had passed, I had not yet opened the can. So I stuffed it back in my jacket pocket when leaving the theater.

The problem is, that jacket pocket also contained one of two gloves -- which I don't need anymore, but still have stuffed in there out of habit -- as well as a tin of mints, which were technically also there in case of an emergency that never arose. There wasn't really enough room for a can of Pepsi Max. (If you're wondering why that wasn't a problem on the way in, well, I was carrying in an inner pocket that time. Should have done the same on exiting.)

And so as I was walking through the lobby on my way out, it fell to the floor loudly and obviously.

Fortunately, it did not explode. 

Another couple walking toward me picked it up and handed it back to me with a big grin and told me I was lucky it didn't explode. And they just meant "It would have sucked to have ruined your Pepsi Max in that way." They weren't judging me in the slightest for the Pepsi Max. They were just being good samaritans and they wished me well.

But it's true, I was lucky. Because an exploding can of Pepsi Max in a busy movie theater lobby would not have been good for anyone, particularly me, at my favorite cinema, the Sun in Yarraville.

It didn't occur to me at the time, as I also just felt it was lucky that I hadn't ruined my Pepsi Max. But after leaving, I thought about what a scene that would have been. An illegal external can of soda exploding all over the place, calling incredible attention to itself, leaving sticky residue everywhere and causing a potential slip and fall hazard for the other patrons in the lobby. Because it's sugar free, the residue wouldn't have been quite as sticky, but that would have probably been the least of the concerns. The attention called to it and the slip and fall hazard would have been enough.

See, the people who worked there would have needed to run over and start cleaning it up. They also would have inevitably interfaced with me in some way. Perhaps they still would not have been getting paid enough for a confrontation with me, but it would have been awkward at the very least. A can of soda, which they do not sell at their snack bar, causing havoc that should never happen. Sure, someone might drop a drink they do sell, and I'm sure that happens sometimes. But that at least is within the range of expected outcomes for their establishment.

And I'd have to stay and face the music, wouldn't I? I couldn't just flee. That would make it worse. It might make it less awkward, but my guilt would be compounded tenfold. And knowing me, I'd have to stay there and stammer out an explanation for why I had a can of soda with me, even if no explanation was requested.

The following mitigating factor would probably not have occurred to me:

The can of soda was never actually opened.

You see, if you bring an external drink into a movie, the goal is to drink it, is it not? That's the way you're ripping off the cinema. That's the real crime.

But if you didn't drink it?

Well then I guess there was no crime at all. You brought in a can of soda, and you left with the same can of soda intact. At least, intact until it fell on the tile floor and blew up everywhere. 

I mean, maybe I just did a very small grocery shop before the movie, and had no other place to put my single purchase than the pocket of my jacket.

However, as I said, I wouldn't have thought of that in the moment. I would have just stammered and spluttered and looked guilty as hell. Which, in truth, is what I would have been.

Lesson?

It's probably not to discontinue smuggling in my own food and drink. I'm a creature of habit. I'll probably keep doing it.

No, the lesson is probably not to casually stuff a can of soda into a jacket pocket already occupied by a glove and a tin of mints. 

A time warp to when Tim Curry was still alive

I got a little tired of just using "R.I.P. [name of cinematic luminary who has just died]" as the subject for my in memoriam posts, so I hope this one isn't too cheeky. Then again, I think Tim Curry was a guy who would have appreciated a little cheek in the discussion of his death, if anyone would.

I might have actually written a post yesterday to memorialise Dolly Parton, but I didn't feel like I had the right. Any Dolly Parton movies I've seen, I haven't seen in 40 years -- that would be 9 to 5 -- and I'd be faking it if I said I had a meaningful relationship to her music. I appreciated her generally the way the whole world does/did, but this is not a blog about great people. It's a movie blog.

And I can say I had a significant relationship with Tim Curry, through the role that will forever be identified with him: Dr. Frank-N-Furter from The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Pictured above.

I first saw Jim Sharman's 1975 cult classic in my later high school years, when I was old enough to be going to Harvard Square in Boston at midnight on a Saturday night. That was where they showed the film complete with all the fixins: people dressed up as the characters, people chanting the accompanying comments at the screen, and before theater owners got tired of the clean-up, people throwing rice and other projectiles that had been curated as part of the interactive experience. I'd say I did this about three times, enough to feel like I really "got it" and was a small part of a particular scene.

Because of the uniqueness of that experience, it was a while before I saw The Rocky Horror Picture Show again. In fact, it was probably decades. The only repeat viewings I can be sure about are when I watched it in June of 2016 and November of 2020. If there was one other viewing between, say, 1991 and when I started keeping track of my rewatches in 2006, I don't know when it would have been or under what circumstances it would have occurred.

But it was amazing how much of that movie became entrenched in my brain from just a handful of times I went in the early 1990s. I think this was a very real part of my maturation as a young progressive, because this subject matter is not the sort of thing with which I would have had much of a relationship before then. Men in lingerie and mascara and lipstick? It would have either been taboo or I just wouldn't have understood it. 

Tim Curry's performance as Frank brought me into a world of better understanding, even as it was the furthest thing from any sort of teaching tool. This movie was a thumb in the eye of good taste, but it was having a ball with itself, and Curry was a central part of that.

He sashayed. He preened. He licked his lips in naked desire. He bugged out his eyes. He huffed and puffed and played the ultimate drama queen. He thrust his hips as part of "Time Warp." 

And this combination of attributes broke through the shell of an 18-year-old kid whose upbringing was fairly sheltered, even though it was always within a family context, and greater community context, of great liberalism. 

And by the end of this movie, this selfish narcissist who kills people and engages in scientific experiments in order to gratify his own sexual desires? He's worked his way into our heart, and his ultimate demise feels tragic.

All within a context of extreme cheekiness, of course.

Curry did other work. I still remembering him running around the Clue mansion with great fondness. He's really good in The Hunt for Red October. IMDB tells me he was also in Congo. I'm not going to do justice to his 245 television and movie credits here.

But even if he had only ever been Frank-N-Furter, his legacy would have been ensured and we would still be mourning him today.

Rest in peace, Frank. 

Remembering Rob Reiner: The American President

This is the fourth in my bi-monthly series Remembering Rob Reiner, where I'm rewatching my six approximate* favorites (see more below) from his career. Not to be confused with Remembering Rob Reiner, my other bi-monthly series that runs in alternate months, where I watch the six remaining films of his I haven't yet seen. 

While the other Remembering Rob Reiner series I'm doing in 2026 has been straightforward in terms of both content and order, I've been playing havoc with the content and order of this version. 

First it was excluding my actual favorite Reiner film, This Is Spinal Tap, from the series, because I watched it a few weeks before the series started in conjunction with Spinal Tap: The End Continues. That left this series to feature favorites two through seven, watched chronologically.

Then it was having to drop the intended chronological approach when I couldn't get my hands on The Sure Thing in February. Still haven't gotten my hands on it. I have until December to figure that one out. So I shifted to the order I rank these favorites on Flickchart, meaning I started with my #2 Reiner film, The Princess Bride.

The last two changes have both come since the most recent iteration of this series in June, when I watched Stand by Me. 

The first of those was deciding to break the sequence of Flickchart ranking by not watching Misery next. I decided Misery was a better fit for the month of October, being Reiner's only horror movie. So I'd watch The Story of Us in August instead.

And finally it was deciding not to watch The Story of Us at all. That's no shade on that movie, which I like more every time I see it. It's that I just watched it in February of 2025, and wrote two different posts about it. In fact I've already tagged that movie six times on my blog, more than The Princess Bride (four) and the same number of times as When Harry Met Sally (which I watched in April). I decided I don't need another viewing and a fresh set of observations about The Story of Us only 18 months later.

That left me what is now my eighth favorite Rob Reiner movie, and one I haven't rewatched in ages, The American President. (I wasn't sure I'd ever rewatched it, but my records show it as a movie I've seen more than once, so I guess I have to go with that.) And in fact it's the last Reiner movie that I would say I have strong positive feelings about, before you get into stuff like A Few Good Men, which I respect but which has only a middling impact on me. 

So just so you understand the schedule:

The American President - now
Misery - October
The Sure Thing - December (if I can find it)

Caught up?

For the record, The American President is my #698 on Flickchart. So clearly a film I like, but not one I would describe as a personal favorite. At the time it came out in 1995, it was a great bounceback for Reiner from the 1994 disaster North, which ended one of the greatest imperial periods (to borrow the pop chart term) for any director in Hollywood history.

Reiner decided he needed to get back on track with something Capra-esque. Not only is the word "Capra-esque" used in the movie to describe Sydney Ellen Wade's first arrival at the White House -- when Wendy Malick's character tells Sydney the security guard won't know what the word means, and he corrects her by instantly name-dropping several Capra films -- but Frank Capra III, who would appear to be the grandson of the original Frank Capra, serves as a first AD on this film. (This is why it's good to pay attention to closing credits.) Though to be fair, Capra III actually worked with Reiner on  each of his nine films from A Few Good Men in 1992 to Flipped in 2010.

It was interesting to watch this film in relation to Dave, an even more Capra-esque film, if we're going only on an outsider's experience in Washington (Mr. Smith Goes to Washington). I think of Dave and The American President as of a piece, knowing of course that I like Dave a lot better (currently #86 on my Flickchart). I watched Dave as a way of celebrating Joe Biden's presidential victory in 2020, confirming how much I loved it. My rewatch of The American President confirms that the gap between the movies is a bit greater than I thought.

I did enjoy my American President viewing, but I was definitely conscious of Reiner's political leanings as I watched it. See the thing that this movie does that Dave doesn't do is it uses the D word and the R word. Michael Douglas' Andrew Shepherd is a president from the Democratic party, and his most vocal critic, and potential challenger in an upcoming election, is the very Republican senator Bob Rumson, played by Richard Dreyfuss. The internet tells me Rumson is meant to be an amalgam of well-known Republican figures, though he looks most like Dick Cheney, which is interesting because Dreyfuss actually played Dick Cheney in Oliver Stone's W. Certainly Rumson is meant to exceed Cheney in his ability to give rousing speeches. 

Of course Shepherd being a good guy and Rumson being a bad guy aligns with my own perspective on the world. Democrats are my heroes, generally speaking, and Republicans are my villains, generally speaking. There are some exceptions. 

But on this viewing I did feel a bit put off by it on behalf of conservatives -- just a bit. Although I do appreciate Reiner wearing his heart on his sleeve and leaving no ambiguity about his political affiliations, I also subscribe to the old-fashioned notion that a movie should be made with enough finesse that any viewer can see themselves in the protagonist. I can imagine that Republicans who might have been inclined to see The American President in 1995 would have been turned off by having their world view aligned with that of the villain, in no uncertain terms.

I think this might have bothered my wife more than it bothered me. When she asked how I'd spent the late afternoon on Saturday, when she was out for drinks with some of her friends, she was surprised to hear the answer, mostly because she doesn't know I've been watching Rob Reiner movies in 2026. (She doesn't need to be briefed on all this, and in fact, it's probably for the better that she isn't.) She then told me that she had actively disliked The American President, and she described its talky earnestness as one of the reasons, though I think she might have also hinted at its political stridency being an issue as well. (She's also coming at this from the perspective of making movies for all audiences. She's even more of a lefty than I am.)

So let's look at that talkiness. This movie is of course written by Aaron Sorkin, and you hear it in every single line of dialogue. This film was a prelude of sorts to Sorkin's The West Wing, which ran from 1999 to 2006 and also featured Martin Sheen -- though this time as the president, not the president's chief of staff. 

There are benefits and drawbacks to the Sorkin approach. I think it works like gangbusters in The Social Network, in part because that film just feels so propulsive, when you take into consideration David Fincher's directing style and the Trent Reznor-Atticus Ross score. It doesn't not work in The American President, which might be considered one of the progenitors of Sorkin's walk-and-talk style. But there was one particular part where I noticed one of these drawbacks.

Annette Bening's Sydney finds herself in a moment of intense emotion when she wants to convey how important the president has become to her, and she asks him not to say anything until she's finished, because she's going to stumble through it. Then she proceeds to make a statement that lasts no longer than 15 seconds and expresses a relatively uncomplicated thought without even a hesitation. 

Simply put, Sorkin is incapable of writing someone stumbling through a line of dialogue. Of course, a director can do what they want with his words, and Reiner could have directed Bening to stumble during that speech. But given the sort of co-auteur status of Sorkin in a typical project, I'm sure Reiner did not want to counter his style in that way, even if this was relatively early in Sorkin's career and level of influence. (I'll just mention that the pair also worked together on A Few Good Men.)

The Sorkin approach suffuses this movie and ultimately starts to erode some of our good will toward it. I think it's more a Sorkin movie than a Reiner movie, which doesn't mean it's bad, it just means it doesn't provide for me what I like most about a Reiner movie: its sense of human-scale warmth. That's at least the case in the three Reiner movies I've rewatched so far this year, but will naturally exit stage left in Misery.

This is starting to run long, but I did want to close out with some clear praise for the movie.

I continue to love the idea of a widower president trying to figure out how to have a romantic life while being in office. There are a lot of really charming occurrences related to this, to match the charm brought to this project by both Douglas and Bening. Presidential logistics take center stage here, and I always enjoyed seeing them in action. 

One thing I found funny, though, was the notion that a president would lose more than 20 points on his approval rating just because he started a relationship with someone. There's a lot of talk about morality in this movie, and it doesn't seem to relate to the fact that the lobbyist is trying to get his buy-in on a bill while also sleeping with him. It relates more to the mere notion that he would be having a sexual relationship out of wedlock, while his 12-year-old daughter sleeps down the hallway. Maybe this was actually cause for scandal in 1995, and don't forget, this was before Monica Lewinsky. But a single president dating an adorable lobbyist, who make a very photogenic couple, causing a scandal that threatens his very reelection? Well that's just laughable in the age of Donald Trump.

As mentioned previously, I'll return to this series in October with Misery. 

MIFF: Bookended by outsider animation, and Joe Swanberg redux

If you want to know what it's like to watch a MIFF movie at 7 p.m. on the final Sunday of the festival, well I'll tell you, there weren't any tumbleweeds blowing through Melbourne Central.

The last day of any activity, be it a film festival or the circus -- yes those are the only two options -- would usually entail a matinee show, then pulling up stakes and getting the hell out of town as quickly as possible. In the case of a circus, that would be literal. 

Not MIFF. Because Melbourne Central is an extremely busy venue anyway, it seemed just as much like it might be the first day of the festival as the last. My screening of the animated film Tangles -- not to be confused with the animated film Tangled -- was essentially full. 

As I've mentioned about four times during my nearly three weeks of covering MIFF, I wasn't supposed to go to Leah Nelson's film originally. At the risk of truly beating this horse to death, I'll remind you that I was supposed to go to Mile End Kicks on Tuesday night, but changed out the showing because I ended up making that movie part of my MIFF preview, and watched it through Apple rentals before the festival even started.

Tangles had made my shortlist -- it was one of probably 50 titles I shortlisted, anyway -- but I wouldn't have normally planned to go to a MIFF showing on Sunday, mostly because of the tumbleweed factor. I thought it would be sad and lonely to attend a showing in the dying hours of the festival, when everyone else is heading for the airport, metaphorically speaking. But this isn't Sundance. The people leaving MIFF are just getting on a train and riding 20 minutes to their houses.

But it did create a very interesting bookend, which is that I started this MIFF watching an outsider animation movie at the Hoyts in Melbourne Central, and that's where I ended it as well. It seems ages ago that I saw the Chinese animated film Light Pillar on Friday the 7th, and on Sunday the 23rd, I brought the festival full circle back to where I started. 

And going to the movie allowed me to have another funny and memorable MIFF experience: a second interaction with Joe Swanberg.

Actually it was the first, considering that I didn't interact with him on Friday night, for the first festival showing of his movie The Sun Never Sets, which he appears to have introduced three different times over the weekend. Only the first was at the Forum, and the last two were both afternoon showings in Melbourne Central, 1 o'clock on Saturday and 4:15 on Sunday.

In heading up the escalators to my 7:00 p.m. showing of Tangles, I was perfectly time to catch him on a landing coming down, which would have been just after his Q&A ended, assuming he had a Q&A for this showing. 

I made eye contact with him and he returned it. "Hey" I said, like we were old friends. He returned the greeting in the same manner before we both continued on our way. 

Likely he just responded in the way he always responds when someone sees him in public and realizes they recognize him. Swanberg is probably the sort of person whose face is not recognizable enough that he's always getting stopped, but when people do recognize him, it earns his respect, because it means they watch his movies. They are not just your average dufus on the street, though just from my few experiences with him this weekend, I sense he has an affection for your average dufus too.

About three seconds after this short interaction, I became emboldened to go give him some well wishes, to tell him I'd really enjoyed his film. I followed him back to the top of the next escalator, but once he'd boarded it and started to descend, I decided there was no value to picking through the people between him and me. The last thing I wanted to do was create a stalker vibe. So I just aborted. 

Okay but enough about Joe. He had his turn on Friday.

I thought I might be really walloped by Tangles, because my mother had Alzheimer's. Oh, didn't I tell you? Tangles is a bit of a personal memoir by its filmmaker, a lesbian living in San Francisco around the turn of the millennium, who begins a period of bicoastal living as she has to make it regularly back to Maine to check in with her family after her mother starts going downhill quickly. It's told in black and white with a graphic novel's sense of boundary pushing, though I suppose I'm just saying that because it's gay and a bit cheeky about it. Wanda Sykes plays the role of her editor at an LGBT magazine (I think that's all the letters they had in 1999), and she's not the only name who lent their talents to this. Julia Louis-Dreyfus voices the mother, and other characters are voiced by Seth Rogen, Bryan Cranston, Pamela Adlon, Beanie Feldstein and Bowen Yang. Abbi Jacobson voices the character based on the director, though it could be Beanie Feldstein -- I can't tell for sure because IMDB doesn't have any of the character names. Both actresses would be about the right age, anyway.

And don't get me wrong, Tangles was great. It does what it does well. I just didn't feel the tears welling up at any point.

And maybe that's because the things that make me cry in movies are not necessarily the things that speak to my own experience the most. In that way, I think I'm sort of the idealized form of the critic, who doesn't have particular triggers that are based on his own life. I hope that means that I'm going only on the filmmaker's abilities to make a moment emotional even though it doesn't speak to me personally. It's either universal, or highly specific in a way that works without pertaining specifically to my own experience.

So yes I loved the way these characters are drawn, both figuratively and literally, and yes, it does have relevance to things I've gone through. But that makes it four stars with no tears, not 4.5 or five with sobbing. 

That's it for MIFF, but I did want to tell you that I had one final piece of business to take care of during this festival, and I took care of it on Sunday night.

As you know because I wrote about it last week, I do like having a double feature that includes one MIFF movie and one non-MIFF movie. I thought I'd missed my shot at that when I couldn't get into Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma on Tuesday before Rose of Nevada, but I realized I just needed to think outside the box. I'd be out of Tangles by 8:45 on Sunday night. If I went home then, I'd just fiddle around for an hour and go to bed. But if I stayed out, I could get to a 9:15 movie and complete the MIFF/non-MIFF double feature.

Because I'd had four beers and three margaritas over the course of the afternoon with friends -- forgot to mention that part -- I thought my stamina would be too shot to attempt this. But by the time Tangles let out, I knew I could do it, and hoofed it down to the Village Cinemas at Crown Casino for the showing of The End of Oak Street.

The best thing I can say about this movie was that at least it was brief, clocking in at only 99 minutes, which is nothing for a movie that features dinosaurs. In fact, that was one of its problems, that its pacing was so off, and that it felt like it should have been 20 minutes longer to flesh out the characters and land in a satisfying place where it felt like we'd watched a whole movie. This was like 64% of a movie and some very strange tonal choices. But hey, it got me home at just after midnight, which was just what the doctor ordered for the end of a festival that exhausts you even when you space your movies out. 

Looking forward to MIFF 2027 already!