Disconnect movies

I watched two movies this past weekend, and they can both be described as "disconnect movies."

What do I mean by a "disconnect movie"?

It's a movie where any two storytelling elements -- whether that's genre, tone, time period, sets, props, etc. -- create a notable contradiction with how you've seen these elements used separately on previous occasions. They create a disconnect in your mind. 

When you've seen more than 7,200 films -- that's a milestone I passed last week -- you've seen every storytelling element at some point in isolation, on the spectrum from the most anodyne children's movie to the most hardcore fusing of sex and violence you can imagine in a mainstream movie. 

It's when things from very different parts of the spectrum get mashed up into the same movie that you take notice and sort of remember it. 

So the movie I saw on Friday night was The Bluff, a new Amazon movie directed by someone with the "can't be real" name of Frank E. Flowers. I've been trying not to watch most of the junk Amazon has pushed at me early on in 2026, but this now makes two straight 2026 viewings on Amazon Prime (after Relationship Goals on Wednesday night), so I guess my resolve is cracking. 

The reason The Bluff qualifies as a disconnect movie? It's a pirate movie, but it also has the violence of a Quentin Tarantino movie. 

You never see that, do you? 

Almost every pirate movie you've ever seen was designed to be consumed by viewers younger than 15. Sure people may die, but they die bloodlessly. The reason for this is that the production costs of a typical pirate movie mean it's going to the movie theaters and it's supposed to be seen by as many people as possible, to make back as much of both the production costs and the marketing costs as possible. 

No one dies bloodlessly in The Bluff. There's a man who gets his head smashed in by a seashell. There are arms and legs coming off. There's a man being blown apart by a cannon, although at least this one is from far away. 

The reason I suspect The Bluff gets away with this is that it has only about one scene at sea, with the rest taking place in a village in the Cayman Islands. So you can probably more than halve the production cost right there, and you aren't relying on the under 15 set buying tickets. 

I liked The Bluff more than I probably should have, awarding it three stars when it's likely no better than 2.5, simply because I found it interesting to watch a pirate movie with believable gore. You just don't see it, and after more than 7,200 movies, there's nothing I like more than something I've never seen. 

Then Saturday morning, I got in a cheeky 10:30 a.m. viewing of The Testament of Ann Lee. That makes two 2025 movies, after Sirat, that I have seen in theaters despite no longer being able to rank them, which I think is a commentary both on my anticipation for those movies and on the theatrical alternatives early in 2026.

The reason The Testament of Ann Lee qualifies as a disconnect movie? It's a period piece, set in the 18th century, and yet it is also a musical. I haven't seen one of those before either, and unless they make the movie version of Hamilton, I probably won't any time soon.

(If you want more of my thoughts on either of these two movies, I expect to have reviews up of both within a few days.)

Instead of just capping this post at "here are two examples of a term I just coined," I thought I would give you ten more examples -- five good, five bad. 

Before I do, as usual, I have to set out some rules. Actually, only one this time:

1) I am excluding from my list what you would call "mashup movies." That's not to say that there won't be two different sorts of movies mashed together among my choices -- that's kind of what I'm getting at here with the term "disconnect movies" -- it's just that I don't want to spend a lot of time on the movies that exist purely to mash two unlike things together. So you won't see me talking about Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, or Pride & Prejudice & Zombies, or Cowboys & Aliens. In short, I want these movies to come by their status as disconnect movies incidentally, as part of the more laudable goal of just making entertaining movies. 

I guess there is a quick other rule, or more of a disclaimer:

2) I'm not saying these are the five best or the five worst disconnect movies. There may be better or worse examples out there. I'm just saying these are the first five good examples I thought of and the first five bad examples. I don't have unlimited time to write these posts you know. Nor, I should say, are these listed in the order that I like them or dislike them. 

Five good disconnect movies:

1) The End (2024, Joshua Oppeheimer) 
Qualifiers as a disconnect: A movie set in a post-apocalyptic bunker that is also a musical.
Thoughts: Yes, there would be a cheeky, mashup-movie style mentality in Oppenheimer's film, but it isn't really possible to consider Oppenheimer's work in the same vein as mashup artist extraordinaire Seth Graham-Smith. After all, this is the man previously known for the deadly serious documentaries The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence. When he makes a musical set in a post-apocalyptic bunker, he means it. 

2) Winnie the Pooh: Blood & Honey (2023, Rhys Frake-Waterfield)
Qualifiers as a disconnect: Beloved childhood character Winnie the Pooh, murdering people.
Thoughts: Good? Didn't I put this one in the wrong category? No; you may recall from this post that Blood & Honey haunted me in the right way, even though it has among the tawdriest and most depressing explanations for its existence: that the copyright on this material had fallen into the public domain. It earned from me a marginally positive three-star rating on Letterboxd. 

3) The People's Joker (2022, Vera Drew)
Qualifiers as a disconnect: Well-known DC characters and transgender themes. 
Thoughts: Clearly the best of the movies discussed so far, Joker could only exist as a violation of copyright laws, not a result of them lapsing. But I'm glad it does exist because this is very moving in addition to being very funny, and more than besmirching the names of these DC characters, which DC and Warner Brothers would have been worried about, it just shows the reach and impact on them on all sorts of people in overcoming their lives' challenges. 

4) Prey (2022, Dan Trachtenberg)
Qualifiers as a disconnect: Murderous aliens and comanches of the 18th century. 
Thoughts: Although this is not altogether dissimilar from the central dynamic of a movie I already excluded from discussion, Cowboys & Aliens, you can't see Trachtenberg sitting in a room and pitching it as a mashup, can you? His intentions were purer than that, and they gives us a movie without an ounce of cheek but plenty of excitement, the best in the Predator franchise to date.

5) Hamlet (2000, Michael Almereyda)
Qualifiers as a disconnect: To be or not to be, and a Blockbuster video store.
Thoughts: This may be a little bit of a cheat, or rather, a catch-all for a particular sort of trend when adapting Shakespeare: to set it in modern times with purposefully anachronistic elements. But it's still usually good, so it qualifies here. Usually; Tim Blake Nelson's O, the 2001 Othello adaptation, could go in the other list. 

Five bad disconnect movies:

1) Wild Wild West (1999, Barry Sonnenfeld)
Qualifiers as a disconnect: The old west and steampunk.
Thoughts: I have to admit, I had a harder time thinking up the bad ones, and I'm not sure how much this qualifies, because steampunk is, by definition, a sort of futuristic form of technology in a time where the steam engine was new. And in truth, the steampunk aesthetic may have been the only thing that actually worked about the movie. 

2) Colossal (2017, Nacho Vigalondo)
Qualifiers as a disconnect: Kaiju and toxicity brought on by alcoholism.
Thoughts: Rarely have I struggled with competing tones as much as I did in Colossal, in which characters can make a kaiju appear halfway across the world by standing in a particular location in their town, and also display the sort of hostility toward one another that belongs in a Cassavetes film. 

 3) Nasty Baby (2015, Sebastian Silva)
Qualfiers as a disconnect: A gay couple struggling to conceive through a surrogate, and the murder of a homeless man.
Thoughts: I suppose what I just told you qualifies as a spoiler, but Nasty Baby a) is more than ten years old, and b) does not deserve to have its bizarre plot twist hidden. 

4) The Book of Henry (2017, Colin Trevorrow)
Qualfiers as a disconnect: A brilliant young terminally ill kid plotting to murder the abusive father of his neighbor.
Thoughts: Maybe you didn't know this was the reason you were supposed to stay clear of The Book of Henry, but there it is. 

5) Hancock (2008, Peter Berg)
Qualifiers as a disconnect: A superhero comedy and ... a very weird sort of serious superhero movie about eternal beings.
Thoughts: If you saw Hancock, you know what I'm talking about here.

Well I think you can tell I pretty much ran out of steam. I started this three days ago, so I better publish it and move on with my life. 

Together didn't have the votes

I've just discovered exactly how far out on a limb I may be with my #1 movie of 2025.

The Australian Film Critics Association, of which I am a member, did not even consider it one of the six best Australian films of 2025.

You may recall that in this post, in which I took a deep dive into my first Australian #1, I said the following:

"Usually when I get the email that contains the nominees for this year's Australian Film Critics Association awards, which mostly focus on films with a strong Australian connection (they do have one "international" category so they can include something like One Battle After Another), it's a bunch of fringe nominees indeed. Yes an Elvis sometimes sneaks its way in there, but this list is usually comprised of films made by, but also only seen by, Australians. I've heard of these movies because I live in Australia, but most outside Australia won't know them from a hole in the ground.

That email has not yet come out this year, but it when it does, I suspect it will include my #1 movie of the year."

Yeah, no.

In fact, I tried to stack the deck in favor of this happening by finally voting on the nominees myself. I've never done it before, though the emails we get remind us of the fact that it is an obligation of membership to do so.

I ranked Together as high in every category -- you give preferential rankings to an existing list of eligible options -- as I possibly could, and yet it did not score a single nomination. Not in any category.

Instead, the six best picture nominees are:

Bring Her Back
The Correspondent
A Grand Mockery
Inside
Lesbian Space Princess
The Surfer

A grand mockery, indeed.

I've only seen half of those films, and I've only heard of five of the six. A Grand Mockery was completely unknown to me. 

Bring Her Back, which was in my top 20 overall (exactly #20), was my second nominee in all those categories, and I like Inside and The Surfer as well. But my third nominee, Spit, also got shut out, while my fourth nominee, Dangerous Animals, only got a lead acting nomination for Jai Courtney.

I guess the pickings weren't as slim as I blithely assumed them to be.

I have two theories on the zero love for my beloved:

1) It may have been a film made in Australia by an Australian crew and director, but in most respects it is not an "Australian film." In other words, while the location is never named, all the characters have American accents, so at best it's set somewhere in Canada. I can imagine, at this moment in our geopolitical history, that a bunch of Australian critics are not interested in rewarding an Australian film that is basically passing itself off as an American film.

2) There's a controversy regarding Together that I haven't touched on previously, because my love for the movie has prevented me from digging too deep into it. I've just read the Wikipedia summary to refresh my memory, and the creative team behind the 2023 film Better Half sued the creative team behind Together because the idea for Better Half was supposedly pitched to Dave Franco and Alison Brie in 2020, but they rejected the offer because they wanted to produce it themselves and bring in their own writer. Considering that movie was ultimately made with stars I've never heard of, I'm skeptical that it would have ever been the correct size of project for Brie and Franco, though now I feel like I should eventually see this film just to assess the similarities for myself. In any case, if the AFCA critics were already biased against Together for passing itself off as American, they certainly wouldn't have appreciated claims that it might have been plagiarized. 

Although I understand the logic behind both of those factors above, I'm still peeved enough that I might not actually vote to crown a winner.

Watch Bluff because you watched The Bluff

So I guess you should judge movies by their titles?

This one is pretty self-explanatory, but come on Amazon. I'm not going to watch a movie just because it has (almost) the same title as another movie I watched.

The Bluff is a 2026 pirate movie, and a pretty bloody one at that.

Bluff is a 2022 movie about an undercover cop trying to bust up a heroin ring.

There is no intrinsic reason why watching one should make me want to watch the other. (Or maybe they just know that my goal is to eventually see every movie ever made. Then again, if that were the case, they could have recommended me The Spongebob Movie: Search for Squarepants or A Serbian Film and it would have been no less arbitrary.

The Three Musketeers rec? That's spot on. Both the movie I saw and the movie they're pushing on me involve swashbuckling.

Miami Vice? The TV show, not the movie? We're getting a little strained there, but at least The Bluff was set in the Cayman Islands, and I'm sure Crockett and Tubbs went there at some point?

Bull? Okay now we are seeing some of the same algorithm shortcomings. Bull could have been a mispelling of The Bluff if someone was really drunk. The movie is also set in London (like The Bluff) and also involves dalliances in the criminal underworld.

I just hope that Amazon is not recommending that anyone who watched Disney's Frozen should also watch Frozen, the movie about trapped skiers on the lift threatened by bloodthirsty wolves, because those are two very different movies. 

Amazon Prime, doing a service to drunk movie searchers since 2011.

A longevity record for original sequel numbering

There aren't many good excuses, IMO, for a Scream 7, but here's one:

I think Scream may now have set a longevity record for any series still using numbers to denote sequels and still using the original numbering.

I mean, it may have already set that with Scream 6, but if so, it's just broken its own record.

How many other series can you think of that have been going on for 30 years and are still numbering the movies according to a plan set out at the beginning?

Granted, Scream has not stuck to the numbering at every step of the way. The movie that is technically Scream 5 was just called Scream. Also with the sixth Scream, they technically switched to Roman numerals for one movie. It's technically Scream VI. 

But yeah, a few small asterisks aside, this is still the original numbering system, 30 years later. 

If you think of other series with a ridiculous number of sequels, they either haven't been doing it as long, stopped using numbered sequels a long time ago, or never used numbers in the first place. Some examples of some of these would include James Bond, Saw, Friday the 13th, Star Wars and Star Trek. And some of those are examples of more than one phenomenon at once.

But I've thought about it, and I can't think of another series that's done what Scream has done -- which, granted, it was only able to do by missing 11 years in there from 2011 to 2022, in which there were no Scream movies. Maybe if they'd had a Scream movie every three years during that period, they'd already be at ten and would have decided to go with Scream: Ghostface Returns for one of the ensuing titles. (As if that could ever be a specific enough title within the series. Ghostface returns in every movie. It's kind of the point.)

I have to state that it doesn't really count if you have only one sequel. For example, The Odd Couple II (1998) came out 30 years after The Odd Couple (1968). It doesn't count or a lot of reasons, but primarily, they wouldn't have even established a numbering system until there was a second movie, so you can hardly say that they have maintained a sequel numbering system for that long or longer. (Bambi II is a particularly hilarious version of that, coming out 64 years after the original.)

Even before Melissa Barrera made her controversial Gaza comments -- which, it seems, effectively cancelled her, and not just from the Scream series -- I was not a fan at all of Scream VI. So I think I'm sitting Scream 7 out. Though it's coming out so early in the year that I'll obviously have many opportunities to watch it before my ranking deadline, and that could easily happen almost accidentally.

Okay I found one other contender, but for now, Scream still holds the record. Just for a few more months though. And this one benefits from fewer movies and more lengthy gaps, but it still definitely qualifies.

Toy Story 5 is coming out in June. I'm not any happier about it than you are. I don't know, maybe you're happy about it.

Toy Story came out November 22, 1995, which was just about 13 months before the original Scream. (The original Scream was released on the last release date before Christmas. Who knew?) 

I suppose if the world ended tomorrow, Scream would finish by holding this record, because none of us would ever seen Toy Story 5. But Scream will have to pass the baton in just a few more months. At least until Scream 8. 

But maybe, hopefully, there won't be any more movies in either of these franchises, and Toy Story -- the much better franchise by any measure -- will get to retire in victory. 

It's perhaps a more deserving champion as well, having stuck this whole time purely to numbers, without even involving the Romans or reboot titles at any point. 

Eyes heard, loud and ... cleard

It had been nearly 14 years since I'd last seen my #31 on Flickchart, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, a movie I've seen more than a dozen times overall. And when I saw it on Thursday night, it was like no time I'd ever seen it before.

Hear My Eyes is a periodic Melbourne series where a local musician creates an all new score to accompany a classic film, and it gets showed a small number of times with live musical accompaniment. I've attended the series exactly once before, when it appeared during MIFF of 2017 and allowed me a new experience of a new favorite, 1972's Fantastic Planet, which I saw for the first time in 2008 but have now seen five times in total. That was a trippy experience, and so was this one. 

The musicians in this case were all electronic, led by lead composer and performer Peter van Hoesen, with a cohort called MESS Snythesiser Ensemble on stage with him, and a laser light show orchestrated by Robin Fox. More on the laser light show in a minute.

You pay $89 for the experience, but trust me, it was well worth it. 

Here are a couple ideas of what Hamer Hall in Melbourne looked like prior to Thursday's show, the middle of three. I had to take these photos a bit surreptitiously as there were already several people walking around holding up an iPad which showed a camera with a red Ghostsbusters-style cross through it. I know that was meant for once the performance started only, but I didn't want to unnecessarily anger anyone with what seemed like a blatant violation of the thing they were requesting of me. 

Under the screen you can see a DJ station that was eventually occupied by about eight people. I should say that I don't totally understand live DJing in most contexts. I get that many DJ sets are not totally pre-planned, or if they are pre-planned, then they do the transitions live anyway. I mean, I don't think they're just up there pantomiming. 

But for something like a score, where the music is timed out exactly to what is happening in the movie, there would be no reason I could see why they couldn't just press play on a pre-recorded sequence of music when the movie starts. I guess because then it wouldn't that cool. I do wonder if there is the freedom to interpret in the moment -- I mean, I can't imagine all the eight people up there were just pressing a button when it came time to press a button. But obviously there were certain moments within the movie that had to be respected, without any chance that a freestyle musical interpretation would step on them, such as when the music goes down in time for Arnie to say "Trust me" before he's about to not kill anyone with his gatling gun. 

I wondered, as I was watching, how they managed to squelch the original score, which I have subsequently learned is by a composer named Brad Fiedel. (I had always assumed the score was by one of the household name industry giants, like a Hans Zimmer.) And this gets us to the elephant in that very big room, which is that Terminator 2 is a particularly difficult film score to replace because of how iconic it is. The "dum dum dum da-dum" that we all think of when we think of T2 is so inseparable from the movie itself, would we miss it? But I'm getting sidetracked and I will come back to that in a moment. 

What I mean about this question of squelching the score is that I would have thought there'd be times that the score would be playing over key sound effects or dialogue in the movie. How would they erase the score without erasing the sound of smashing metal or human beings crying out in pain? 

I did wonder if it was similar to how you can reduce a song to individual tracks. There's a podcast I listen to once in a great while called One Song where they do just that, playing only individual parts of a song to analyze those parts unto themselves, in the course of considering that single song over a 45-minute period. Maybe Van Hoesen et al are doing that here. In any case, it was seamless.

The score itself? Pretty great. The word "cyberpunk" came to mind as I was listening to it, but "industrial" would have worked -- a lot of metallic scratching sounds, deep bellows, that sort of thing. The word "atmospheric" also came to mind, because there are moments in the film where I believe there probably was no score originally -- though I am eager now for a comparison viewing -- and they were accentuated here by a background humming, a howling of wind, or a sinister sonic wallpaper that added to the overall sense of dystopia. If I were a music critic rather than a film critic, I might be describing this better.

I did wonder, if just to throw us a bone, whether it might have been nice to acknowledge the "dum dum dum da-dum" of Fiedel's original, especially in the opening credits. I don't think anyone would have accused them of being too influenced by Fiedel if they'd just done the equivalent of a shout-out to that. But no, the music over the opening and closing credits was a bit more like what I would call "technical malfunction music," the sonic equivalent of a robot going on the fritz, with scraping and springing sounds reminding us of a future gone haywire.

Okay now it's time to talk about the lasers.

I don't think they ever got any better than the opening. As you recall, we start on a future battle between the human resistance and the machines, and there are literal blue lasers being shot in the movie. These same blue lasers strobed through the theater, prompting oohs and ahhs from all of us. The use of lasers continued to be interesting throughout, though none as effective as our first experience of them. There were lasers to accompany the lightning as the terminators arrived from the future, for example. There were lasers, thinner in their thickness and more diffuse in their spray patterns, during the film's big explosions. There were single lasers that held, for things like a sudden knife thrust through somebody's skull, though I didn't think these were the best use of the gimmick. When Sarah has her gun sight set on the back of Miles Dyson's head, a single laser pointer from the back of the theater mimicked this, which we all loved. There were also lasers creating patterns on the screen any time we saw something through the eyes of the terminator, which as you remember are through that computer readout.

The whole thing was just generally enthralling, as an alternative to our normal T2 viewings though certainly not a replacement for it. I reckon Peter van Hoesen conceived of this project not because he thought "I can do better than Brad Fiedel's score" but rather, because he loved it so much that he wanted to add his own interpretation to a movie he loved dearly. All the rest of the times I watch that movie, I will get Fiedel's score, so I'm glad I got van Hoesen's once.

And the cumulative impact of this experience was having a strange emotional impact on me. I don't usually get emotional during T2, and if I ever did, it would probably be what we think of as "spectacle tears," where the sheer size and scope of something moves us. In this case, I found myself getting a bit choked up at the film's actual emotion moments, something I don't think I'd ever experienced with this movie. 

Before I let you go for the day, I did want to include a smattering of first-time observations about the movie itself. Or if not first time, then things I was reminded of that I wanted to mention to you now.

1) There's something inconsistent about Sarah's behavior when she's in the mental institution. Clearly she's been working on a campaign to be released, or at least get a visitation from her son, which has involved six months of good behavior. Good behavior that her doctor acknowledges. Why, then, has she also recently stabbed the doctor in the knee with his pen? Surely she would realize this sort of thing would be disqualifying for her release?

2) I think we're supposed to believe that the T-1000 finally getting into a close quarters fight with Sarah at the end is significant, because he's finally sampled her physically and can finally mimic her. When in reality, he already touched her way back at the institution, when his metal sword arm slashed down through the elevator roof and cut a groove into her shoulder. I know they never subsequently shared any spatial dynamics where mimicking her would have been a benefit, but he could have mimicked her at any point from the mental institution onward.

3) There's one single moment I find kind of cringe that I started thinking of as "the most Michael Bay moment in Terminator 2." It's the moment where Sarah, John and the T-101 pause to watch two kids at a service station pointing toy guns at each other and screaming at each other, that leads them to conclude that human beings are doomed. It's not that James Cameron is above hitting you on the head with a message, but the subsequent slow-mo image of the two kids wrestling with their guns, silhouetted just a little by the sun, made me think of that as right out of the Michael Bay playbook. I mean, when you come down to it, Bay is basically just a very shitty version of Cameron, right? 

4) This is something I always say about T2, so it's not new, but I continued to be annoyed by the fact that John and the T-101 just watch for five minutes as small puddles of the T-1000 reassemble themselves after being heated up following the liquid nitrogen freeze. They could have been miles away by the time he fully reformed, yet instead they're barely 50 paces ahead of him. 

5) And speaking of John, I really appreciated how good Edward Furlong is in this movie. I think there might be some people out there who find his at-times squeaky performance to be cringe in the same way Jake Lloyd's performance as Anakin Skywalker is cringe, but I feel just the opposite about Furlong. I feel like this is one of the great child acting performances out there, to be honest. I was noticing little details of his performance, like the moment when he's looking at his mother as she tries to bury him under bulletproof jackets in the fleeing police truck. In this one prolonged expression you see three things: 1) sorrow that he never took his mother seriously all these years, 2) a sense of pride that his mother is so strong and capable, and 3) a desire to take in every part of her face, because it may be the last time he ever lays eyes on her. All in one expression. 

I feel like there is a cohort out there -- maybe even the majority of people -- who think of The Terminator as the masterpiece in this series, and T2 as just a capable follow-up. Maybe even a great movie, but nowhere near in the league of the original Terminator in terms of creativity, world building, that sort of thing.

I just don't see it. I've seen the original Terminator only one time all the way through. Maybe twice, but no more than that. There's just nothing in that movie that makes me want to come back to it the way this one does. This is the masterpiece. 

I said earlier that I might want to do a comparison viewing, especially while my Hear My Eyes experience is fresh. Well, I might get that chance. When the movie came up over dinner this week, in the context of discussing where Daddy would be on Thursday night, we thought it might be okay now to show these movies to our kids, even the 12-year-old, despite the violence. I think they could have more trouble with the nuclear annihilation scene -- that's the one that gave me trouble when I was 17 -- but I think the 12-year-old could probably handle all of it, and the 15-year-old certainly could. So that may be in the offing sometime soon.

If you happen to be in Melbourne and you happen to be reading this shortly after it's posted, there's one more performance tonight. 

Audient Bridesmaids: A Room with a View

This is the latest in a periodic series in which I'm watching all the best picture nominees I haven't seen, in reverse chronological order.

When I first envisioned the Audient Bridesmaids series, I imagined myself building up a head of steam on the project and occasionally rattling off a couple in a row. I did expect there also to be droughts, which is why this is periodic series rather than committed to some regular time interval. But I figured I'd still make steady progress on it.

Well, before now, the closest two posts in the series were the four months between viewings of My Left Foot and I'm Still Here -- an old bridesmaid and a new bridesmaid -- last year between March and July. There was a similar gap in late 2022 and early 2023. If you take those two out, these have never come any closer than seven months apart.

I guess I must be getting serious now, because I just posted one of these 11 days ago when I saw Hope and Glory. And now I'm back with the unseen best picture nominee before that, James Ivory's A Room with a View, which I'll call from 1986 because it was nominated alongside the other 1986 nominees, even though many sites list its release year as 1985. 

Watching A Room with a View also enabled me to confront a childhood fear, which sounds like a strange thing to say about a movie that in almost every respect is a very light period romantic comedy. Considering this childhood fear, that certainly isn't how I would have pegged the movie.

The phrase "childhood fear" is a little misleading. It's not like I was afraid of A Room with a View the way some children are afraid of the dark or of a monster under the bed. But I did have a traumatic experience of sorts with the movie, one that has stuck with me all these years later.

It occurred on an airplane. I'm guessing it was the summer of 1987, because that's consistent with when this movie might have appeared on an airplane. My family would have been going on a trip to the Rocky Mountains. However, it's possible it was a year earlier than that, when my family did our summer trip to the UK -- which would make a bit more sense because a) the movie is set in the UK, and b) that trip would have been only about three months after the film's theatrical release. Whichever year it was, it was almost 40 years ago.

I hadn't paid to get headphones for this movie -- which I don't think my parents would have done even with a movie that was tailored to a 12- or 13-year-old -- but that didn't mean I was immune to seeing its images. And I clearly remember getting up from my seat to go to the bathroom and seeing this:

I think I might have literally stumbled backward.

Seeing the context that led up to this -- a brief fight in a Florence square that otherwise has nothing to do with the story, with minimal impact on the characters -- might have made it less shocking. But it was first laying my eyes on the screen and seeing this soon-to-be-dead man covered in blood, and eyes wild with the fear of approaching death, or maybe already dead -- well, it was a lot for preteen me to handle.

I don't think I had nightmares about it or anything, but it did always surround A Room with a View with a certain fascination on my part. 

As I said, this ends up being a complete anomaly within what amounts to one of the most whimsical Merchant-Ivory movies of this period -- or any period. And I enjoyed all of it quite a bit.

There isn't a huge amount to the plot. It's basically a chamber piece set across two settings, Florence and England, in which Helena Bonham Carter's character tries to forget her brief infatuation with Julian Sands' character, while entertaining a more practical engagement with Daniel Day-Lewis' character, in the first decade of the 20th century. Incidentally, this is the youngest I would have ever seen Day-Lewis on screen. This performance wasn't enough to get him Oscar nominated -- the nominations in this movie went to Denholm Elliott and Maggie Smith -- but he does play quite the clueless prig. And he'd win his first Oscar only three years later, in the aforementioned My Left Foot. 

Although I enjoyed the story, which went by for me on a cushion of delight, it was perhaps the performers that I enjoyed most here. I didn't anticipate how many names I might know in this film. There were the character actors from my personal favorites, like Elliott (Raiders of the Lost Ark) and Simon Callow (Four Weddings and a Funeral). There were the dames, one of whom we've lost (Smith) and one of whom is still with us (Judi Dench). There was poor Julian Sands, lost on that hiking trip. There's of course Bonham-Carter in the earliest of the two types of film for which she would become known (Merchant-Ivory films and Tim Burton films). And then any film with Day-Lewis is worth a watch.

I must admit, I didn't know Merchant and Ivory had such senses of humor, though of course credit there should probably go to their frequent collaborator, screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. It's a really funny film and the actors are on board for it. She also earned an Oscar nomination for this script. 

I also didn't realize how few quintessential Merchant-Ivory films there actually are. This one is probably the most quintessential. They were such a known pairing at the time that it was almost as if they were a genre unto themselves. But really the only other significant M-I films from around this same time were The Bostonians (1984), Mr. & Mrs. Bridge (1990), Howards End (1992) and Remains of the Day (1993). Could there have been so few? Their producer-director collaboration featured a lot more movies than just these, of course, but then you get into a bunch of pretty obscure titles both before and after, films that were not responsible for whatever time they had in our zeitgeist. I guess they had a strong imperial period but then left the center of the culture. 

Fun fact: James Ivory is still alive! He's 97. Merchant, though, has been gone for 20 years now.

Don't expect another post like this in another 11 days, but when I do get to the next movie in this series, it will be Prizzi's Honor, the John Huston film from 1985. 

The limits of hype

I came across this on my phone this morning. You only get the first line before you click to reveal more, so all I saw was:

"The end starts here. Are you ready for the final"

The final what? THE FINAL WHAT?

Oh yeah. Mission: Impossible. 

Which came out last May. 

I know you still have to hype a movie on its streaming debut -- or even if it's not the streaming debut, its streaming debut on your streamer -- or even if it's not the streaming debut on your streamer, you just have to hype your streamer anyway. 

But the language of that hype feels a little inflated when it's a movie we've all had easy access to for nearly a year. 

As a side note, I think it's funny that the still they chose to advertise this movie is not Tom Cruise, but Angela Bassett, whose role (as far as I remember) is comparatively small in that movie. She isn't even one of Ethan Hunt's spy gang, which has collected some new names over the years but still has some of the originals as well. Isn't she just some sort of bureaucratic functionary?

Of course, if they had used Tom Cruise, there would have been no mystery about "the final what" and I probably wouldn't be writing this post at all. 

Audient One-Timers: Solaris

This is the second in my 2026 monthly series in which I'm rewatching my 12 favorite films, according to Flickchart, that I've seen only once.

The second movie in this series, Andrei Tarkovksy's Solaris, a lot more closely conforms to what you'd think I mean by the term "one-timer" than the first movie, Chris Eyre's Smoke Signals. Both films do have in common the fact that I saw them for the first time in 2013 -- and that comparative recency probably explains more than any other factor why I haven't yet seen them again.

Solaris, as you would know if you've seen it or if you know Tarkovsky, is long, ponderous and slow-paced, the sort of film you would definitely only watch once if you didn't care for it, and might take a while to get back to even if you did. In fact, given that the other two Tarkovsky films I've seen in the years since then -- Stalker and The Sacrifice -- have not worked for me as well as the #172 ranked Solaris obviously did, I was definitely concerned about the possibility of this just going over my head and seeming as ponderous as the other two, on a second viewing. 

But I don't think "ponderous" always has to be a negative appraisal of something. Tarkovsky's film is ponderous, and I think that's the best thing about it. (And it made me want to revisit Stalker, which I didn't dislike but which definitely tried my patience more with fewer rewards, while actually bearing a lot of similarities to Solaris otherwise. Before I do that, it would probably be best to see the three Tarkovsky features I haven't seen: Ivan's Childhood, Andrei Rublev and Mirror, the latter of which also has a good copy on YouTube, which is where I saw Solaris. Not even any ad breaks!)

My affection for Solaris was especially noteworthy given the baggage I brought in, which was seeing Steven Soderbergh's remake ten years earlier and not caring for it. I suppose that might have made me more receptive to a good version of Solaris, but it could have also made me wary about the possibility of any good version existing. Now that I've seen the original two times, and confirmed my affection for it with a rewatch, I'm wondering if I might be more open to what Soderbergh was doing, or just more critical of it. That's another rewatch to consider some day.

My first viewing of Solaris was around the same time that I decided I really loved Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, to which Solaris owes a few very small debts. My two twenty teens viewings of 2001 were what elevated it all the way up to #12 on my Flickchart, the first of which was only two weeks after I watched Solaris (and no doubt inspired by the fact that I'd just seen Solaris). 

Tarkovksy's film does capture the eerie and unnerving qualities of unexplained occurrences in outer space that Kubrick gave us in such a memorable way four years earlier, but it doesn't really use space the way you imagine it would. Although the sense of being on a space station is clear, especially with our views of the ocean planet below, we get almost none of the traditional space backgrounds you'd think you'd get in a movie like this, with stars twinkling against a sea of infinite blackness. I recall exactly one, and it serves more as a transition between the scenes set on Earth (which run longer than a half-hour to start the film) and those set in space. Once the characters are in space, Tarkovsky is not that interested in continually reminding us of that fact through shots of space or footage of anyone doing a space walk. Everything we see can be, and obviously was, shot on Tarkovksy's very earthbound sets in Russia. (2001 was not shot in space, of course, but when I was younger, I believed it was.)

So it's a credit to Tarkovsky's movie magic that we never doubt our location. The sets themselves look like we imagine a space station would look, or rather, a space station that was inhabited entirely by Alzheimer's patients, as it's been left in disarray with various objects strewn about and loose wiring letting off sparks. Then the images of the swirling surface of the ocean planet, whose swirls ebb and flow and change according to the mysteries that are unfolding for the characters, are chilling in their otherworldliness.

Though I think if there's one single key to why Solaris gets under our skin, it may be the sound design. Every sound is chosen for its maximum pscyhological impact on us, as it mirrors the mental dissolution the characters are experiencing as they walk this space station and see the physical embodiment of some person from their past, inexplicably walking the corridors next to them. I don't find the moment-to-moment experiences with these characters, one in particular (the dead wife of Chris Kelvin), always chilling, though individual moments are quite so. The scene where she's banging on the door to get out of it -- and then bursts through the metal as though it were wet cardboard, leaving jagged edges -- is quite effective in that regard.

Because of its length (2:42) and the practical necessities of my Sunday schedule, I split Solaris in half the way the movie itself splits itself in half after about 1:19. Although you'd think you'd be under the movie's spell more as it reaches its climax, I found myself more gripped during the first half, which include those establishing scenes on Earth and all the shots of nature around Chris Kelvin's home. This film definitely relies on anticipation of what's to come in creating its mood.

I really get a lot out of the portion of the film that you wouldn't think would really be eerie, which is the character Burton explaining his experiences while on a previous rescue mission to the surface of the planet to try to find two lost crewmen. We see an older version of Burton, alongside Kelvin and a few others, watching a hearing of a younger version in which Burton explains what he saw. A hearing does not seem like the sort of place we'd become entranced by the film introducing its concepts to us.

But here is where Burton talks about seeing a massive infant four meters long on the surface of the planet's oceans, and later reveals that the infant had the appearance of the orphaned son of one of the lost crew members, something Burton only realized later when he met that son. Even twice removed from the actual events -- a character watching his own verbal account of this experience -- it sets our imaginations alive. 

And here I think is part of the film's very small debt to 2001, only because the ending of 2001 also involves the image of an infant, the Star Child. It's such a small debt that I hesitate to even mention it, because Tarkovsky is clearly doing his own thing here and not ripping off Kubrick in any way. Maybe both of them realized that seeing images of small children in outer space, where they certainly should not be, is pretty eerie.

Okay I've used enough synonyms for "eerie" and "unnerving" and "chilling" for one day. 

Remembering Rob Reiner: The Princess Bride

This is the first installment of the second of two bi-monthly 2026 series that have the same name. Every other month starting with January, I'm watching the six Rob Reiner films I haven't seen yet. Every other month starting with February, I'm watching my six favorite Reiner films other than This Is Spinal Tap, which I watched before the series started. I know, it's a little bit complicated.

My intention with this version of my 2026 intertwining bi-monthly series, the one where I watch six Rob Reiner favorites, was to go chronologically. I had a special viewing of This is Spinal Tap (1984), my favorite Reiner film, before we even started, watching it as a double feature with Spinal Tap II: The End Continues last month. Next up would have been The Sure Thing (1985), technically my seventh favorite Reiner film, but we're excluding my favorite for the purposes of this series since I already just watched it. And I was really looking forward to this one, because my records say I have not watched The Sure Thing at any point since I started keeping track of my rewatches, nearly 20 years ago. 

But you know what? I can't find The Sure Thing anywhere.

This surprised me, especially in the wake of the loss of Reiner. I know that the passing of a beloved personality does not necessarily change the availability of his or her films, because that has to do with contracts and rights and all that stuff. But you do sometimes see films surface because there is a hunger for watching them at a particular time.

Not The Sure Thing. Not where I've looked, anyway. 

I won't get into where I looked and whether I missed somewhere obvious. I don't think I did, because Google AI tells me:

As of early 2026, The Sure Thing (1985) is generally not available on major subscription streaming services, but it is available to rent or purchase. It can be found on digital platforms such as Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV, and sometimes YouTube.

Yeah, well, I looked in all three of those areas, and no go.

I'm not giving up on watching The Sure Thing. I'll find it somewhere this year even if I have to buy it online as a DVD and have it shipped to me from America. But I will have to give up on ordering this bi-monthly series chronologically, so instead I'll use the order these films are ranked on my Flickchart. (And I can't build toward a climax by going in reverse order, in case you were wondering, because reverse order would also dictate that The Sure Thing was up next.)

That means that after #9 This is Spinal Tap, up next is #11 The Princess Bride (1987), which is actually skipping over two movies in the chronology after Tap. 

It had been almost eight years since my last Bride viewing, which was when I showed it to my kids one time when my wife wasn't there -- a decision that I regretted when she told me how much she would have liked to be present for their first Princess Bride viewing. There has not been one since, and though my younger son might still be into it, the 15-year-old definitely would not be. Like the boat boarded by Vizzini, Inigo, Fezzik and Buttercup, that ship has sailed.

The 2018 viewing, my first since before 2006 (as far back as my rewatch records go), also reminded me how much I cherish the movie. The next time it came up in a Flickchart duel, it jumped from 29th to 11th (yes, I keep a record of these things as well), which is where it has stayed to this day. 

Although this series is designed to sing the praises of Reiner, we also know that Reiner was not a director with a signature style. He had signature touches and collaborators -- watching this reminded me that he re-teamed with Christopher Guest after Tap, and would use Billy Crystal again in When Harry Met Sally -- but otherwise none of these three films is directly comparable to one another. Reiner presided over them, but as I was watching The Princess Bride this time, it made me realize that the person I probably really wanted to praise in this post is William Goldman, who wrote the screenplay based on his own book. We lost Goldman in 2018, only a few months after my last Bride viewing.

This is not to say there will be no Reiner in this post. But as I was watching, I decided to start jotting down quotes, and those quotes can be attributed to Goldman, not Reiner.

You see, when I got to the Princess Bride portion of my in memoriam post to Reiner in December, I wrote "You can quote 30 lines from this movie and there would still be 30 more honorable mentions."

Impulsively, I decided to see whether that was hyperbole or really true. 

So the following is a list of quotes I wrote down, mostly as they occurred, but a few out of order because I only realized I wanted to do this about ten minutes into the movie. So I went back and added a few I knew I had missed. I'll write them here in the order I wrote them down. 

Did I stack the deck in favor of getting as close to 60 as I could, to prove my previous casual hypothesis correct? You can be the judge of that. I had a hard time drawing distinctions between lines that I thought might actually be repeated by people -- repurposed for use in their daily lives, as we do with the movie lines we love the most -- and just good lines of dialogue that I remembered because I've seen the movie a half-dozen times. It may not have been perfect, but I will tell you that there were some where I decided they definitnely did not belong as quotable lines -- so I was not always erring in my own favor.

Also, although most of them are jokes or funny lines, a few aren't. 

Okay, presented mostly without context, because quotable lines should allow you to bring up the context in your head automatically:

1) "Unemployed! In Greenland!"

2) "As you wish."

3) "No more rhymes, and I mean it! Anybody want a peanut?"

4) "The Cliffs of Insanity!"

5) "Is this a kissing book?" (Incidentally, the only quote from the Fred Savage-Peter Falk portion of the film.)

6) "Inconceivable!"

7) "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

8) "Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die."

9) "I am not left-handed."

10) "No one of consequence."

11) "Plato? Aristotle? Socrates? Morons."

12) "And find out who is right, and who is dead."

13) "You'd like to think that wouldn't you!"

14) "Never get involved in a land war in Asia!"

15) "Never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line!"

16) "I am no one to be trifled with."

17) "I spent the last few years building up an immunity to Iocane."

18) "Life is pain highness. Anyone who says different is selling something."

19) "I died that day!"

20) "Death cannot stop true love."

21) "Good night Westley. Good work. Sleep well. I'll most likely kill you in the morning."

22) "Rodents of Unusual Size? I don't think they exist."

23) "The Pit of Despair. Don't even -- (clears throat) -- Don't even think of trying to escape."

24) "Boo! Boo!"

25) " ... my wife to murder, and Guilder to frame for it. I'm swamped."

26) "If you haven't got your health, you haven't got anything."

27) "There will be blood tonight!"

28) "I would not say such things if I were you!"

29) "You are the brute squad."

30) "I've seen worse."

31) "Your friend here is only mostly dead."

32) "I'm not a witch, I'm your wife! But after what you just said, I'm not even sure I want to be that anymore!"

33) "Have fun storming the castle!"

34) "Mawage. Mawage is what brings us together today."

35) "Wuv. Twoo wuv."

36) "Oh you mean this gate key."

37) "I think that's the worst thing I've ever heard."

38) "Stop saying that!"

39) "I want my father back you son of a bitch."

40) "I killed you too quickly last time."

41) "Hello lady!"

42) "Don't worry, I won't let it go to my head."

A few stretches there maybe, but I got to 30 pretty easily even if you take out a dozen stretches. And the stretches and the ones I didn't write down can certainly qualify as the "30 honorable mentions."

So yeah, this script is amazing -- incredibly paced in addition to the priceless writing of dialogue. Goldman was a true master, except when he wasn't. (Did you see Year of the Comet? Yeah, don't.)

But without the actors, scripts are just words on a page. And that's where Reiner comes in. Without the line deliveries of these actors -- for which I think we can credit them and him equally -- Goldman's great lines don't stand a chance of committing themselves to permanence. 

Just think of the performance of Wallace Shawn, instantly iconic, but who before this was primarily known for stuff like My Dinner With Andre. Not the same sort of material at all, but Reiner found the comedic genius within him and brought it out.

Or -- speaking of Andre -- there was Andre the Giant, who was not an actor at all. Even with his heavily accented English, the wrestler is responsible for -- *stops to count* -- well, only three of those lines. But he is also responsible for inserting himself forever into our hearts, such that on this viewing, when he'd already been gone for more than 32 years, I got a little choked up on his line "Hello lady!"

To say nothing of how this made stars of Cary Elwes and Robin Wright, though Wright famously turned down a half-dozen ensuing rules that would have made her a lot more famous than she ever became. 

The script is great, but Reiner's touch with actors and with material -- whether we can fully quantify it or not -- makes The Princess Bride what it is. Which is my 11th favorite movie of all time.

I could probably dig for a number of other things I got out of this viewing, but The Princess Bride is not exactly new territory in terms of movies about which to rhapsodize. So I won't even bother.

But I did want to ask one thing: What's with all the weird Christmas stuff in the grandson's bedroom? (I only just now realized Savage's character doesn't have a name.)

What weird Christmas stuff, you ask? You never noticed it either?

Well I'll show you.

How about this crazy, angry homemade Santa?

Or the snowman over his shoulder here?

Or the long-bearded, European-style Santa whose long beard and red coat you can see in the middle of the picture here?

There's absolutely zero indication that this movie is supposed to be set at Christmas. Nor was it released at Christmas, having come out in September of 1987.

I'm not looking on the internet. I know the internet will have an explanation. I don't want it. I'd rather just speculate. 

More than anything I like how it gives this kid's bedroom a real, lived in quality. No, you might not actually decorate your own room with Christmas stuff, but I like that there is nothing remotely choreographed about the items in his bedroom. (I keep wanting to call him Kevin after his Wonder Years character.) Our bedrooms -- I would have been 13 when this came out, so maybe a little older than this kid -- defied a set dresser's perfect idea of what a bedroom should look like, and whoever dressed this set honored that truth and then some.

Going by order on Flickchart, my April viewing will be my #3 Reiner film, at #26 on my Flickchart, When Harry Met Sally. And that one should not be hard to find. 

Lousy with two-time Oscar winners, and just lousy

The original Predator from 1987 famously had two future governors in its cast, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jesse "The Body" Ventura.

Predators from 2010? It had two future two-time Oscar winners, one of whom had already won one of his Oscars.

That's just one of the things I wanted to talk about in a post about the two movies in the larger Predator franchise -- if you don't count the Alien vs. Predator movies -- that I hadn't seen before this weekend.

When the movie-watching year resets and I can watch anything I want again, I've made a habit of completing little projects like this in recent years. Last year in February I watched The Amazing Spider-Man 2 and Spider-Man 3, which were the only two Spider-Man movies I had yet to see -- though maybe it would have been smart to wait for my younger son on that one, considering that he's since become a Spider-Man fanatic. Instead we've started this year watching Marvel movies he hadn't seen from the Captain America and Avengers franchises, which is another example of a project like this, though not in this case watching movies that I hadn't seen myself. (We also watched the original Spider-Man from 2002, since he was raised on Tom Holland as Spider-Man and only saw Toby Maguire in the role in that new Spider-Man movie from a couple years ago.)

I thought there was a similar thing in 2024, but perhaps not because I'm not seeing it. Though in 2023 around this time of year, I did complete the Rocky series with a viewing of Rocky II the night after I watched Creed III. 

Enough historical precedent. The reason to watch Predators (2010) and The Predator (2018) seems obvious enough. I'm clearly a new devotee of this series, having placed both of Dan Trachtenberg's live-action Predator movies in my top ten of their respective years, first Prey in 2022 and then most recently, Predator: Badlands just this past year. Although I may like Prey more, Predator: Badlands was even higher than Prey, #5 vs. #7 -- which says more about the quality of the competition than an absolute value for each film. The animated Predator: Killer of Killers also did very respectably in last year's rankings, but nowhere near the top ten. 

I'm going to finish this project off with a rewatch of Predator: Badlands tonight, since it's just recently arrived on Disney+. I suspect I'll write about it tomorrow, but don't hold me to that.

Another reason it was important to watch these movies is that I have been implicitly damning them every time I write about a new Predator movie I like -- which was not exactly fair, given that I'd never seen them. I don't diss them specifically, of course, but I have assumed it was safe to refer to the entire franchise as a "moribund franchise" that Trachtenberg raised out of the depths of its despair. 

I started with Nimrod Antal's Predators on Thursday night, though I didn't finish it until yesterday afternoon/early evening/later evening. Despite the interruptions, I liked it almost enough to recommend it, though in the end it fell short of that at 2.5 stars. I was sort of glad that it dipped in quality near the end, because that added weight to my previously risky argument that the franchise hadn't been any good before Trachtenberg came along. (At least not since the original.)

Shane Black's The Predator, which leaned heavily into what people think is his strength, an almost Joss Whedon-style, f-bomb laden joking camaraderie between the characters? Well that wasn't good from the start. I didn't get anything out of that one, despite the presence of likable actors like Olivia Munn, Keegan-Michael Key and Sterling K. Brown.

In a piece like this, I might ordinarily go into the plot of the two movies, talk about what worked, talk about what didn't work. To be honest, I'm not really feeling that today. So let's get to the headline bit about the two-time Oscar winners from Predators, and see what energy I might have left over to talk about The Predator.

So you'd know that Adrien Brody was the star of Predators -- at least, I knew it, as he was the only one I definitively remembered from the ads I saw of it 15 years ago. You'd also know that Brody just won his second, and presumably final, Oscar last year for The Brutalist, having first won for The Pianist in 2002. (I didn't realize the structural similarity of those two titles until just now.) It being the probable last was one of the reasons he wouldn't get off the goddamn stage.

But you probably wouldn't know that a then-unknown Mahershala Ali was in, and one of the first killed off in, Predators. This is when he was still credited as Mahershalalhashbaz Ali. Ali didn't become known to most of us until he won his first best supporting actor Oscar for Moonlight six years later, before winning his second for Green Book only two years after that. If memory serves, Ali spent only a reasonable amount of time on stage. 

Winning multiple Academy awards is not completely uncommon -- it's also been done this century by Emma Stone, Daniel Day-Lewis, Frances McDormand, Cate Blanchett, Renee Zellweger, Christophe Waltz and Sean Penn, with Hillary Swank, Denzel Washington and Anthony Hopkins having won a second this century after winning their first last century. But having two in the same movie, especially when it's a Predator movie, still strikes me as pretty unlikely. (What little we knew at the time about the potential of Ali.)

Having the characters dropped unconscious from a craft in the sky into a game preserve on a distant plant, and having to awaken mid-air in order to deploy their parachutes, is a good way to get us into the action and set the scene. I was on board for this and thought I could, potentially, be watching another prestige object in the Predator series. In addition to those already mentioned, the film collects a watchable group that includes Topher Grace, Alice Braga, Danny Trejo, Walton Goggins, and a surprise later appearance from Laurence Fishburne as a guy who has been there a lot longer, and has the crazy to prove it.

But as the movie went on, and as the Predators were revealed more and seemed less interesting, it became more and more mid. The affection for this film by Filmspotting co-host Josh Larsen is not totally unfounded, but I'm glad to say this has nothing on Trachtenberg's movies.

The Predator, which I watched immediately after finishing up Predators last night, felt off to me from the start. This is also a frame story featuring a core cast of about seven characters who get picked off one by one, though in this case most of them are part of a ragtag military group who like to give each other shit, almost excessively so, to the point of affectation in the script. They're led by Boyd Holbrook, who has never been a favorite of mine, though as mentioned before, I do enjoy Munn, Key and Brown. There's a Moonlight connection with this one as well, as Trevante Rhodes is also in the cast, though this movie does show the limits of his charisma and I think explains why he hasn't continued to have much work. (Thomas Jane has never been a favorite, though Alfie Allen is always fun to see, because it always makes me think of his sister and the song she wrote about him.)

This story is a bit more all over the place, taking place on Earth and involving alien tech being passed around between shady military people and these ragtag soldiers, as well as a biologist played by Munn. The story also involves the neurodivergent son of Holbrook's character, played by Room actor Jacob Tremblay, who was such a revelation in that movie and so flat in this one, only a few years later. Anyway, it's jokey and messy and for the most part I just wanted it to be over.

The thing I find very interesting about this series -- when I think back to the original and Predator 2, which was actually the first film in the series that I ever saw -- is that I'm not sure any of the movies has any plot connection to any of the other movies. The first sequel would have been the most likely, but because Schwarzenegger didn't return, replaced by Danny Glover, whatever connective tissue there was would have been pretty thin. And it takes place in an entirely different environment. So I'm going to say there was basically none. 

My thought was that Trachtenberg's movies were supposed to connect to each other, but so far, the three are very different. My understanding was that Killer of Killers was supposed to lay the groundwork for Badlands, but an explicit connection between them was thin if it existed at all. I suppose the most similar two movies are Predators and Killer of Killers because both focus on Predators fighting people who have been chosen specifically for representing a different brand of warrior that can challenge them. Did we mention one of the characters in Predators is a Yakuza hitman who's good with a sword? That itself is very similar to one of the three stories in Killer of Killers, albeit from a very different time period.

One funny similarity I did notice? The two movies I watched in the past two days were both exactly 107 minutes, with the one I'm going to watch tonight being only one minute longer than that. The original Predator is 107 minutes and Predator 2 is 108. Trachtenberg's previous two do deviate from that formula just a little, with Prey seven minutes shorter at 100 and the animated movie, perhaps unsurprisingly, running only 85 minutes. 

I'm not quite so interested in getting a holistic view of the entire Predator series that I need to rewatch either the original two movies, rewatch Killer of Killers or Prey, or see the one Alien vs. Predator movie I haven't seen. Besides, there are only so many days in a weekend. But I do look forward to rewatching Badlands tonight, and I'll let you know if any holistic impressions emerge from that viewing. 

R.I.P. Robert Duvall

Robert Duvall was a rock, imperturable. 

You could blow up artillery right next to him and he wouldn't flinch (Apocalypse Now). But watch out if you did perturb him, you might get the wrong end of a baseball bat (The Apostle). 

But not all of Duvall's movies started with the letters "Apo." He was just a constant throughout the movies of the past 50 years, only quitting four years ago when he was 91. 

If mentioning his work in The Apostle seems like a strange way to start a eulogy to the man, who we lost this week at age 95, try telling that to IMDB, who lists him as "Actor, The Apostle (1997)" when you type in his name. 

That film does serve as an exact mid-point between the time that a lot of people might have first become aware of him, in The Godfather (1972), and his last film in 2022, The Pale Blue Eye, which I haven't yet seen.

Of course, The Godfather wasn't nearly the start of Duvall's career. He was on TV starting from 1960, which means he got a relatively late start around age 29 and still had a career that spanned 65 years, if you consider the career to have been effectively ongoing until his death. We wouldn't have really been surprised to see this stalwart still turn up again, even at age 95, would we? His traits played at any age.

And it was iconic performances basically from the start, as he played Boo Radley in To Kill A Mockingbird in 1962. Most of his 1960s stayed on TV, but by the end of the decade, he transferred to film and never looked back, appearing in such films as Bullitt, True Grit, MASH and THX 1138 before Francis Ford Coppola presumably got advice from his good friend George Lucas and cast him as the consigliere Tom Hagen in The Godfather. 

I didn't come to any of this work until I was an adult, and I still haven't see the original version of True Grit. But he was a constant in films I did see when I was younger as well. 

Oddly, the titles from Duvall's career don't read as quite so iconic after the 1970s, which also included films like The Conversation, Network and The Godfather Part II. (He had the wisdom to skip The Godfather Part III, though I can't remember what the story logic was for why he wasn't there.) 

But he was always around, turning up here and there, and always contributing an intensity you didn't soon forget. He also had a way of laughing that made you think it might be a prelude to killing you. 

Duvall may not have been a personal favorite, but there was never any doubt that I needed to write a remembrance of him here, which I have done quickly now as I prepare for work and another busy day. That was the purest indication of his impact on cinema during the entirety of my lifespan. 

Rest in peace. 

Having to choose on Valentine's Day

Most of us don't have to choose on Valentine's Day. You either have a significant other or you don't. 

For those who have multiple families, well, I guess you do choose the one you like best and then you're on a business trip for the other one. But that's not a lot of people.

Of course, it's not actually Valentine's Day in the movie Eternity, it was only Valentine's Day when I watched it. And I had to choose to watch it over the other movie I planned to watch, which wouldn't have had a Valentine's Day theme at all. But when my wife and I finally watched the first episode of Pluribus with our dinner, that brought me on to AppleTV+, where I was reminded that Eternity is an Apple movie and it's only just been released on their streaming platform -- in time for Valentine's Day, of course. Whenever possible, I do enjoy a themed viewing. 

Pluribus was our only joint viewing last night. While my wife and I do sometimes watch a movie together on Valentine's Day, and it even sometimes has a romantic plot, it's not expected or even typical. You see, we don't really celebrate Valentine's Day in our house. Not that we've never celebrated it, but when we did, mostly in our earlier years, it was more for my benefit than for hers. See, her birthday is only five days later, and she is even more opposed to the tacky commercialism around Valentine's Day than I am. Americans are raised with a tolerance for this sort of thing; Australians, at least some Australians, are not.

And this year, there was a reason we weren't doing anything at all to acknowledge the holiday, but it's not something I need to get into right now. I'll just say it doesn't have anything to do with our relationship. It's external to that.

Anyway. Let's discuss the movie. 

David Freyne's film was my biggest accessible regret before my 2025 rankings closed. I could have seen it in the theater before that deadline, but I just couldn't make it work, in part because of the same unnamed thing that's been going on with our family for the past couple months. 

But I generally love movies with high concepts and movies involving the afterlife. One of my favorites, to which this bears more than a passing resemblance, is Albert Brooks' Defending Your Life. I had high hopes for a movie in which an elderly woman dies of cancer, and then in the afterlife has to choose whether to spend eternity with the husband of 65 years who died just a little bit before her while choking on a pretzel, or the husband who died 67 years earlier in the Korean war. She wasn't "unfaithful" to either of them in life because she was single when she met and married both of them, but now she's got a dilemma. 

The husband she lost in the 1950s represented only young love and endless possibility. He was handsome and charming. The husband she had for 65 years after that was a person whose every wart she learned over a lifetime of everything life throws at you. You could see why she might not want to spend a literal eternity with him after spending a figurative eternity with him on Earth. But also, she doesn't really even know the husband she lost 67 years earlier because they only had a couple years together and it was all unrealized promise. 

It's a more interesting dilemma than it is an interesting movie. I'm giving Eternity a marginal thumbs up, but I was more conscious of its missed opportunities than I was of its successful execution of the central dilemma. I was also really conscious of the earthbound nature of the sets. There are a few scenes that give us something with a true afterlife vibe, but I was continually noticing how most of the scenes were likely just shot in a hotel hallway somewhere. Maybe it would have been too much of a distraction, and problematic in a different way, to have the whole thing look like Pixar's Soul -- not to mention costly, which is likely the most relevant factor. But in a movie like this, you want to think more about the heavens than you think about Courtyard by Marriott. 

I think the movie probably did not want to wrestle with its more interesting existential concept, which it introduces as "the void." As lovely as some of the eternities appear to be -- and you can choose from multiple packages like you were choosing a vacation -- they are a single, final choice, so you have to select them carefully. If you try to escape from your eternity to get into another one, well, there's a small chance you'll succeed. But the greater chance is that they'll catch you and send you off to the void: which is just blackness for eternity, the closest thing to hell that exists.

Unless you are inclined to believe in heaven, we mostly think of death as a light being switched off and an end to consciousness. You're no more conscious of the time after death than you were conscious of the time before you were born. This film posits a potential eternal consciousness of nothingness, which indeed would make someone insane pretty quickly. But the film doesn't really go there. It doesn't show us this, only suggests that it exists. 

For reasons that I again won't go into -- but I've hinted enough at them that you might be starting to guess them -- Eternity was actually the most thematically appropriate film I could have watched on Saturday night, having nothing to do with Valentine's Day and having everything to do with early February 2026. Death was on my mind. And even though Eternity didn't grapple with it in as satisfying a fashion as I might have liked, any grappling with death is helpful in terms of coming to grips with it, and getting closure with it, in our own minds. 

On that cheery note, Happy Valentine's Day, for what remains of it in your time zone.