Winning the final battle

Look I can't complain about One Battle After Another winning best picture.

It was technically only my third highest ranked best picture nominee at #18 for the year, behind Sinners and Train Dreams. But you also know that I struggled with not having it ranked higher, even watching it a second time to see if I could push it up further. I couldn't, but what are the chances, ten years from now, that I'll think those other two films are better?

I won't know for ten years. For now, though, I know that I've just seen one of the really good Oscars in the past few years, where most of the humor landed, most of the speeches were good, and some really good films won some big awards. 

I only started watching around 9, so I need to go to bed, but let me just include my live thoughts as I jotted them down, as I always do on this blog, sometimes with context, some without:

- The opening Weapons bit was funny. Truly inspired, and who doesn't love a good use of the Beastie Boys' "Sabotage?"

- Beautiful stage!

- Ryan Coogler said "Damn."

- The best achievement song was the perfect length, unlike last year's "I Won't Waste Time."

- Amy Madigan's narrative arc is pretty miraculous. She basically went from having essentially no career for the past couple decades to winning an Oscar. Not half bad. Also, I had no idea she was married to Ed Harris. Since 1983!

- Conan is merciless on Trump. Merciless! 

- Great use of Jane Lynch! 

- Surprised about K-Pop Demon Hunters. I'm officially 0-2 on my guesses. (I had Teyana Taylor winning best supporting actress.) Nice to see the one filmmaker encourage her collaborator not to be bullied by the play-off music.

- Great recreation of the best scene in Sinners, just for a nominated song performance! Loved the appearance of Jack O'Connell and the other two actors as well. Miles Caton! 

- Did I mention how great the stage looks?

- The Ventura Crossroads bit, making movies smaller and taller, made me LOL.

- The Frankenstein costume win leaves me 0-4. (I guessed Sinners.) Haven't even gotten to bust out my highlighter yet.

- And the same movie's makeup win makes me 0-5. 

- I was already a bit suss on the casting Oscar. The amount of time they're spending on it makes me more so. But at least I've finally picked a winner correctly. 

- Kumail Nanjiani's bit about turning famous movies into their abbreviated titles is something I wish I'd written. (Remember, I'm the guy who does the movie portmanteaus every year.)

- I'm with you, The Singers winner. I didn't know a tie was a thing either. (And to continue my terrible predictions, I didn't guess either winner.)

- So Sean Penn is a three-time Oscar winner. He's managed to piss me off each time. The first was when he beat out Bill Murray for Lost in Translation. The second was when he beat out Mickey Rourke for The Wrestler. And now it's for not showing up. 

- Oh and just as a reminder, I've only gotten one guess correct so far. 

- It's ironic that Robert Downey Jr. and Chris Evans gave out the best screenwriting awards because their banter was not well written. (But at least I got both of those right.)

- GOAT Oscar host Billy Crystal shows up to remember Rob Reiner. Pretty great. I was just thinking what a terrible 2025 it was for Crystal. At the start of the year, the house he'd been living in for some 45 years in Pacific Palisades burned to the ground. At the end of the year, his best friend was murdered. Yet he's still here. Brings a tear to your eye. 

- Diane Keaton gets a special segment from Rachel McAdams too. 

- And then finishing with Redford. Duvall probably would have had a good claim too. 

- Speaking of past Oscars hosts ... here's Jimmy Kimmel! 

- As a sign of the increasing obscurity of the documentary feature in the cinematic landscape, I had only even heard of one of the nominees, which I also saw (The Perfect Neighbor). Well, I did guess the one that won, even though I didn't see it. 

- Happy to see the Bridesmaids crew. They are in good form. 

- So glad that her loss for The Substance last year didn't mean Demi Moore's last appearance at the Oscars.

- Autumn Arkapaw's win is a landmark one, but it does make me wonder about Rachel Morrison, who she name-checked and who shot Creed and Black Panther. Wither Rachel? Wait a minute -- she only shot Black Panther. Maryse Alberti shot Creed. What is it with Coogler and the female DPs? Good on him. 

- Lionel Richie looks great for 76.

- Boo on playing off the poor Korean guy who won best song. 

- Okay the PTA win sets up OBAA for best picture. 

- I knew the odds had shifted for Michael B. Jordan, having paid enough attention to hear that buzz in the last few days. Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy. Richly deserved for my second favorite film of the year, which has probably just gotten its last Oscar. (Also, though I am only vaguely aware of Timothee Chalamet's relentless Oscars campaign, I'm glad whatever the try-hard things he was up to did not get rewarded.)

- Happy for Jessie Buckley, even though I did not like Hamnet. 

- A little Ewan and Nicole for a 25th anniversary for Moulin Rouge! And even better news, Nicole Kidman looks normal. 

- And it was right at this time that the 7+ app on my TV said I had been idle too long and I had to exit the app and re-enter. Fortunately, it let me do that while still being able to resume in the exact spot I left off. But what bad timing! 

- As expected, One Battler After Another -- the consensus film of the year, despite Sinners' record 16 nominations -- wins the top prize. And yes I did guess that one right. I didn't really know PTA's persona before now, and I thought he came off great. 

- And one last bit with Conan! All his choices worked. 

Really good show! 

On to the next one. 

Tuning back in to the Oscars frequency

My wife had to remind me that the Oscars were on today.

This from the person who basically hasn't watched them since we moved to Australia 13 years ago.

So yeah, it's been pretty far from my mind. I have not been keeping up with the horse race at all. I had my fantasy baseball draft yesterday. That's the sort of thing that occupies my thoughts these days in the first half of March and before. 

Of course, I do actually plan to watch them for the, I don't know, 40th year in a row. It'll just be on a delay. The last couple years, the Oscars had the decency to align with our Labour Day here in Australia, but that was last Monday. So I'll have to do the normal social media ban that I always do during my workday, which should be fine as there will be enough baseball news to consume. 

It is probably just about 40 years now. Earlier this month I mentioned that Rain Man was the first best picture winner I'd already seen at the time it was named best picture, but I was following the Oscars a few years before that. I have a distinct memory of being on my paper route the morning after the Oscars and reading in the paper about the victory of The Last Emperor, which I probably would not have known about it because I would have gone to sleep before the ceremony finished. (And what time was the Boston Globe's final deadline of the night, anyway?) I think I remember the wins of Platoon and Out of Africa as well, as things I cared about at the time they happened. I even think there was some awareness all the way back to 1981, when I would have been only seven, about Chariots of Fire, but this is becoming a bit more speculative, and I certainly wouldn't have been watching the ceremony at that point. 

As you know, in the past ten years if not a little bit more than that, I've shifted my interest to which films get nominated, not which films win. While others are deciding whether the Screen Actors Guild awards and things like that are a bellweather for a film's Oscar chances, I am barely registering that these things occurred.

But today I do plan to print out a nominations list (better do that right after I post this), make my choices, and go through with either a highlighter or a red pen to mark the ones I got right or wrong as I watch the ceremony sometime after 9 p.m. local time, after my son's basketball game and our dinner. And then hopefully post my usual reactions post at some point not too late in the early morning.

The Oscars will always remain in my blood, but sometimes I do have to force myself to tune back in. 

Hoping to jump start my movie year

It's been a bit of a slog out of the gates in 2026.

It's March 12th and I haven't yet seen my tenth movie of the new year. And my highest ranked movie is only a 3.5 star movie. All the others are three or lower. (In fact, there are none lower than two, so that just makes the whole thing seem even more middling.)

I saw a great movie earlier this week called The Plague, which would easily be my favorite of 2026 so far. It's about boys bullying each other at a water polo camp in 2003. A review will be up imminently on ReelGood, linked to the right, because it's just coming out in Australia today.

Thing is, in scrutinizing the release dates on IMDB, I'm seeing that it had a limited U.S. release at the very end of December before going wide on January 2nd. For my purposes, that rules it out as a 2026 movie.

Project Hail Mary to the rescue?

I'm hoping so. 

Undoubtedly the highest profile release of 2026 so far comes out in Australia next Thursday, but I'm a critic so I get to see an advanced screening of it tonight -- in IMAX no less.

Although Ryan Gosling can do no wrong as far as I'm concerned, and I do have high hopes for it, I do also have a few ... hesitations, shall we say. Although the high end for this subject matter is something like The Martian, of even better, the low end is something like Danny Boyle's disappointing Sunshine and that terrible Adam Sandler movie Spaceman from a couple years ago, which also featured a friendly alien. 

Without any evidence to back it up, one of my ReelGood writers is already predicting this will be a flop -- not necessarily because it will be bad, but because audiences will shun it for whatever reason. Clearly he doesn't understand the power and box office draw of The Gos. (Does anyone call him "The Gos"?)

For me, I'm just looking for something with the sort of scale that tells me I'm in a new movie year, and not just another marginal movie on a streamer. 

If movie reviews were like Uber reviews

I was just listening to a fantasy baseball podcast, as many fantasy baseball draft is this Sunday. The fact that it is this Sunday brings me no end of delight; the countdown clock on our fantasy website is something I am following incredibly closely as soon as I set our draft date. (I'm the league's commissioner.)

Anyway, they were answering fantasy baseball questions posed by listeners who had left them five-star reviews on Apple podcasts. You couldn't leave a lesser review and still expect to have your question read on air. They acknowledged it was an "I scratch your back, you scratch mine" situation.

One of the two, the analyst I like best, was pushing back a little bit about it, especially when they were talking about some people who had submitted questions but had only left three-star reviews. He thought that three stars should be the starting point, and as we all know from movie reviews, three out of five means you definitely like the movie more than you dislike it. But in the cutthroat world where total podcast rating determines your visibility among other podcasts, three stars doesn't cut it. (There was a great Black Mirror episode about this phenomenon also.)

He went on to say that when they'd recently had renovations done on their home, he had to review the company who had done the renovations, on a scale of 1 to 10. They told him that anything less than a 10 they would treat like a 1. So he gave them 10 on everything.

I've used Uber as an example in the subject of this post, mostly because it's easily translatable and resonant with anyone who's ever used an Uber. You know that if you give an Uber driver anything less than five stars, it's like you've stabbed him (or her) in the heart and potentially taken food out of his (or her) kids' mouths. Which is how you get ridiculous statistics like an Uber driver with 5,286 rides and a average rating of 4.94. (And curses to those who cut into the perfect 5.)

Are movie reviews the last bastion of pure honesty in our society?

I suppose a pass/fail grade -- which is effectively what a five stars/any other rating system is -- has been in place with movies for years, if you consider Siskel & Ebert's thumbs up/thumbs down system. But Siskel & Ebert provided the nuance with the way they spoke about a film on their show, and of course when Roger wrote in print, he used star ratings. Rating an Uber driver lacks that kind of nuance, and if you ever encountered a system of rating movies that gave either a yes or no without any explanation for that judgment, you would reject it outright. (Rotten Tomatoes is effectively a composite of that, but you can drill down if you want to find the nuance, and the total percentage effectively comes out to a star rating anyway.)

When we are giving star ratings for movies, we aren't beholden to anyone whose children need feeding. In fact, almost without exception, the people we're grading are very well off. That's not to say they might not have gotten themselves into some debt from living beyond their means, but they started from a place of at least some money, all but the most poor independent filmmakers out there. And really, in most cases, we wouldn't even know.

It's a lot easier to imagine yourself ruining the life of an Uber driver. Plus, there are no larger consequences to giving out the highest grade. There's no equivalent of directing someone to a mediocre movie by giving it five stars. If you thought you were putting someone in the backseat of an unsafe driver, well, you might be inclined to withhold your highest rating for that driver anyway. We had one situation like that, which my wife and I still talk about, though I think the likeliest thing was that we did give him five stars.

Plus with a movie review you don't have the immediacy of looking the person you're rating in the eye -- or at least in the back of the head. 

But let's say we did think that, as critics. Let's say we did give five stars to almost every movie. The entire industry would be lost. We'd be gone from our jobs within two weeks. And no one would have any reason to choose any movie over any other movie except whether they liked the subject matter or the stars.

Wait a minute ... is that how it is now anyway?

Useful swag

The days of taking my 12-year-old to advance screenings of animated movies may be numbered -- he already seemed a bit suss about the prospect of the new Pixar movie Hoppers -- but they haven't come to a close just yet.

And so on Saturday we went to an advanced screening of GOAT, a title which I believe is properly capitalized due to the play on words (it's both an acronym and a reference to the protagonist's species). Yes the movie is out in other parts of the world already, but we Australians can be a bit slow on the uptake.

Because he's at that age where he's changing, or has already changed, tastes -- we've made our way through five movies featuring either Spider-man or Captain America in 2026 alone, a topic I will probably write about at length another time -- there was a lot riding on this advance screening having something good. Fortunately, it did.

But first let me discuss my realization, come to gradually over the past couple years, that an advanced screening doesn't really mean diddlysquat for most children. 

For one, kids don't really have a good idea of when a movie is coming out. Not my kids, anyway. And because movies are less a part of a culture than they used to be, there's no playground bragging rights to be had from getting to see a movie before your friends can see it. My son probably wouldn't know if GOAT is coming out in March or July -- though he has consumed some content related to it on YouTube, so that certainly helps in elevating the prestige.

And getting a ticket for free? That obviously doesn't mean shit to a kid. All of their movie tickets are free. 

Getting free food is cool, and my kids do appreciate it. (I'll include the older one here as well, even though he hasn't gone to one of these screenings with me in a while.) But that's another case where it isn't usually money out of their pocket anyway. I think they do get a sense of thrill that even their dad isn't spending any money on it, because in theory your parent could actually deny you something you wanted from the snack bar. There's something about going to a table and picking up a drink and a box of popcorn feels special, and in this case they were also handing out ChocTops, which are ice cream cones covered in a hard shell of chocolate topping. (Though it's possible he actually lost out in this deal; he asked if he could get a bag of Maltesers, chocolates that are probably most similar to Whoppers, before he knew about the ChocTops, and I denied him on the basis of us already getting something sweet for free.) 

So the only real thing I can offer as an incentive is the fanciness of the advanced screening itself, where there's usually a big poster up you can pose in front of, and there are often other special details tailored to the specific movie. In this case, there was a little basketball court in the part of the Hoyts Melbourne Central lobby that was set up for it, and about three kids were shooting baskets. Even though my son is a soccer guy, he loves playing HORSE with me in the pool, so I thought he might be in on that activity, but he wasn't.

In fact it was almost a disastrous idea to go into the city on Saturday for this. We took a series of trains to get there, and my wife joined us, even though she didn't have (and wouldn't have wanted to have) a ticket to the movie. There are five new train stations that have opened in Melbourne since the end of last year, and we thought this would be a good opportunity to ride through four of them and actually get out in two of them -- even though our regular route into the city would have been faster without this detour. Hey, when there's new infrastructure, you have to experience it, just because. We'd get in early enough that we could have lunch before the movie, and my wife would occupy herself in the city in other ways while the movie was going on. 

Well you know what else is no big deal to a 12-year-old? New train stations.

Actually he did get into the spirit of looking at them, when we finally got there, but the trip to get to the new stations involved a lot of heel dragging and complaints of being tired. I may not always want him to grow up, but I won't mind if he does grow out of this particular phase.

In any case, by the time we were actually in the city and eating lunch -- he said the pizza at Brunetti's was the best he'd ever had -- he was, indeed, on board with the whole thing. In fact, he even preferred to chatter about things he was seeing on the big slide for GOAT that was up before the movie started, than to play Connections, which is another habit of ours.

But the one truly tangible thing about the GOAT screening -- which set it apart from a normal screening, at least as far as my son was concerned -- was the thing I teased in the subject of this post and am finally getting to: the GOAT athletic towels they gave out beforehand. Here's what those looked like:

And why am I labelling this as useful?

Well I play tennis on Wednesday nights, and each week I have to remember to bring a towel to de-sweatify myself. This past week, I forgot it, so I used the sleeve of my jumper as my very ineffectual towel. Even in the weeks I do remember it, which is most of them, I'm bringing with me a washcloth, which does the trick but is still not really designed for this purpose.

Well, the GOAT athletic towel, inscribed with the name of the team from the movie, is by all means designed for this purpose, and I've just now gone and put it in my tennis bag, so there's no chance of me forgetting it.

My son? Well, he wouldn't be 12 years old if something hadn't gone amiss somewhere.

He most certainly left the auditorium with his GOAT athletic towel, but he lost it somewhere in the few minutes afterward. I know he had it when we left because I've become religious about checking places we've been sitting to make sure we haven't left anything. But he most likely lost it in the bathroom, though it's funny he should have even gone in with it, because he offloaded his sweatshirt to me before he went in. We realized it was missing soon enough later that we could have actually gone back into the bathroom to look for it. But maybe the specific location of the loss was unappealing enough to stop us in our tracks. If it had fallen on the bathroom floor, well, we wouldn't have wanted to carry around the things it would have been absorbing.

If you were keen to hear what I thought of GOAT, well, I'm sorry to disappoint you, but if you read this blog with any regularity you're accustomed to that sort of disappointment. Though I will of course be reviewing it, and that review should be linked on the right by Wednesday. 

Audient One-Timers: Rain Man

My 2026 monthly series involves rewatching my 12 highest ranked movies on Flickchart that I've seen only once, in reverse order of their ranking.

Barry Levinson's Rain Man, currently #157 on my Flickchart, occupies a very curious place in my personal viewing history. Forthwith:

1) It is almost definitely the first best picture winner I ever saw. My big movie spreadsheet says that I saw this movie in the theater -- which I think is correct -- so that means I would have been 15 when I saw it. I don't think I'd seen any of the other best picture winners when I was 15, with two possible exceptions: Chariots of Fire, though I would not have guessed I'd have actually sat down for a full viewing (I may have seen some of it on cable), and The Sound of Music, which I am pretty sure I was taken to see when I was young, but all I remember is that I found it incredibly long and I think I might not have watched the whole thing. It definitely would have been the first I made an intentional decision to see. 

2) I'd say it's certainly the first best picture winner I saw before it was named best picture, though there is some small chance that I went to see it as a result of learning that it had won best picture. That's not really a thing anymore, or at least not to the same extent, but back then, a best picture win would get a movie an extended theatrical run after the ceremony, because it was sure to make a buck at the box office with so few other ways for people to see it. 

3) It is definitely, beyond a shadow of a doubt, the one of these dozen movies I'm watching as part of Audient One-Timers whose single viewing was the longest ago. Whether I saw it in 1988 or 1989, it's clearly a longer ago single viewing than the rest of these movies. There are a couple I may not have seen since college, but college started for me in 1991.

4) Even though I've seen it all the way through only one time, I feel like I know Rain Man pretty well just because I've seen snippets of it on cable, because it was thoroughly entrenched in the zeitgeist of the time, and because it has a lot of single images that feel iconic, most of Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman in some unusual pairing, like walking that long road outside of Wallbrook, the institution where Raymond Babbitt lived, or coming down the Vegas escalator in their matching gray suits. This movie was fully central to the culture for a while, and I know a lot of us liked to quote lines like "Definitely time for Wapner," even though that is probably a blend of two lines, and even though today, doing an imitation of a character with autism might be pretty cringey. 

5) And speaking of winning Oscars, it's also the only of these 12 movies in Audient One-Timers that won the top statue, though there are some other nominees in there.

What I wanted to interrogate on this viewing was, how the heck did Rain Man make its way into the stratosphere of my Flickchart rankings, presumably continuing to win duels against films you might think I'd like better?

Let's dispense with the word "presumably." I have same data that might be useful here, that I've been keeping for no good reason, and can finally put to use. If I'd thought about it, I would have started using it when this series started, but better late than never.

I maintain my Flickchart rankings in a spreadsheet, as kind of an online backup to the website in case the website should ever go offline for any reason. And as I add new films and insert them in the correct spot in the list, I also record when a lower film beats a higher one. I've been keeping this for probably close to ten years, so I can tell you exactly when Rain Man has won or lost a duel in which one of the films switched places.

To be honest, I thought the results would be a bit more telling. It originally jumped inside the top 200 (from #204) when it beat The Untouchables and momentarily went as high as #125 in my rankings. Within only a month or two after that, it was beaten by Rabbit Hole, which went to #128 on its way up to its current lofty position of #55. (Yes I do love that movie, which was my #3 of last decade, while I have lost some of my original love for The Untouchables.)

With Rain Man dropping another 30 spots to its current ranking, that just means that 30 movies have catapulted it in the rankings, some of which are probably original entries from newly watched films. But since it does get a lot of duels, that means it has continued to hold off the films that were ranked lower, the data for which doesn't show in my spreadsheet because I only record the instances of films changing positions, not instances where the status quo is maintained.

Okay let's get back on track after that unscheduled diversion that was not as illuminating as I hoped it would be.

I think the thing about Rain Man is that it was one of the first "adult" movies I watched, around the same time that I saw movies like Broadcast News as well. I mean, it wasn't totally adult in the sense that it starred Tom Cruise, who was obviously appearing in movies that were geared toward me. At around age 26, he wasn't an "adult" in the same way that Broadcast News' William Hurt and Albert Brooks seemed like adults. But the subject matter was clearly adult, and that's the important distinction here.

I remember having a conversation with myself when I watched it, thinking that this was not a movie that I should love, and yet, by the end, I did love it. It was probably also one of the first movies I watched where a self-centered prick made himself over as a caring individual for whom material gains were less important than family, a message that I've had peddled to me a thousand times since -- though rarely as well as in Rain Man.

Watching it this time, there's a part of me that thinks yes, #157 is too high. Not having watched it again since the late 1980s, and not really having had a huge inclination to watch it again either, should tell me something about where this movie sits within my personal pantheon. 

But I did really appreciate what a competent version it is of the thing it's trying to be. The word "competent" is a bit backhanded as a compliment, but I was really noticing Levinson's visual sense here. That's not to say that Levinson was/is a director without a visual sense, but I think of a movie like Diner as first and foremost a movie about dialogue. Dialogue is important in Rain Man too -- Levinson's gifts for people talking over each other, that we would have seen in Diner and that we see in Robert Altman's movies, is fully on display. But the reason there are so many iconic shots in Rain Man is because Levinson conceived them visually. I mentioned the two above, but there are also shots of the characters and their car against various backdrops of the American landscape that really stood out to me. 

Other observations I appreciated as I went along:

1) Bonnie Hunt has a small role as a waitress in a diner, whose phone number Raymond memorized when he was reading the phone book the night before. 

2) Hans Zimmer was the composer here, which I thought was interesting because I was just discussing Zimmer's career recently with friends in the context of having watched Terminator 2, which a couple of us thought he had scored. Another friend clarified that Zimmer didn't really get big until the 2000s, but Rain Man shows that he was clearly working long before then. This score was actually Zimmer's first Oscar nomination, and I found it interesting to ponder how little it sounded like what I would come to think of as a Hans Zimmer score. He was barely 30 and would not yet have developed a signature style, though you can hear little notes of the bombast of a future Zimmer score -- though those future scores would have considerably less pan flute.

3) Speaking of the changes since then, I appreciated the fact that Raymond has a Sony Watchman portable TV set with an antenna that's longer the TV itself, and that Charlie, with the cell phone still a glimmer in our collective eye as a society, is wedded to pay phones for the regular succession of phone calls he must make. (I think Gordon Gekko had a car phone in Wall Street, which came out a year earlier, but Charlie, despite his flashy smile and bro attitude, is about to go out of business in his company leasing exotic cars, so a car phone would have been an unaffordable luxury.)

4) I like that the lower stakes option is consistently chosen in this story. When we see the pit bosses start to talk among themselves about Raymond and Charlie's card counting, which then moves to the security video room, we're preparing for violence to be done to the brothers, or at least a harrowing escape through the streets of Las Vegas accompanied by some sort of rambunctious score. Instead, Charlie's just told he needs to take his winnings and leave, which they do. The story realizes it doesn't need additional set pieces or anything like that. It just wants a way to explain why Charlie doesn't stay in Vegas and use Raymond as a cash cow to become a millionaire, and that's all we need. 

One big thing I of course considered was that they probably couldn't make Rain Man today. Even though autism is not a form of special needs in the same category as someone with Down's Syndrome, for example, there would be a debate about whether it was right to have a mainstream intellectual actor portray someone like Raymond Babbitt. What would probably happen is that the politics of it would seem like too much trouble and they just wouldn't make the movie at all. 

Okay next up on the schedule in April is the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers. That should be fun. 

I don't live in England

My list of PR contacts for ReelGood is mostly something I inherited from the previous editor. I might have had to switch to get my name on some new lists, because they would have had his email address and I can't remember how much of that he did on my behalf before he left. But I don't maintain it at all, so it's a bit of a mystery box of emails I get from various sources.

I don't really understand, though, how I became part of a list of London area film review websites.

As you can see from this email, I have been invited to a "stink-o-vision" viewing of a movie called Dead Lover. Considering that I have never once seen a movie that involves smells pumped into the theater, this would be something I would absolutely do.

Of course, it's in London, so never mind.

They may think I'm Irish, I guess. Dead Lover is also coming to Irish cinemas, as you can see.

But I'd kind of think the .au at the end of my email address might be a dead giveaway that I'm not. 

Outside of this one source, usually the worst I have to deal with is that I get invited to a screening that's in Sydney. At least in that case, the .au email address wouldn't cause a disconnect.

I suppose if I got an unmangeable quantity of email, it might be worth it to unsubscribe. But I usually get on the order of 25 to 50 emails a week, only half of which are really relevant. (I probably need to unsubscribe from the list that keeps sending me housing-related news.) 

So in the meantime, I'll continue to receive these, and to think fondly of all the things I might smell if I lived elsewhere. 

Remembering Rob Reiner: Being Charlie

My two 2026 bi-monthly series have the same name but different focuses. On the other alternating months, I'm watching six favorite Rob Reiner films. On these alternating months, I'm watching the six I haven't seen.

Being Charlie is not a good movie. Let's get that out of the way at the start.

But it is a fascinating document of Rob Reiner's relationship with the son who murdered him.

I was anticipating with some trepidation the viewing of the film that Reiner directed in what would seem like a favor to his son, Nick, who co-wrote this screenplay as a reflection on his own struggles in and out of rehab and living on the street. I mean, it's possible Reiner himself wanted to tell Nick's story, but without delving into the details, I'm assuming he thought having a screenwriting credit could help launch Nick in some unspecified way -- which was never going to happen in any other way. Plus perhaps unburdening himself might be therapeutic.

But you can tell this film did not get the A version of Reiner, or of anyone else. Let's start with the cast.

Nick Robinson is a legitimate actor. In the same year Being Charlie came out, he was also in Jurassic World. He's since been in such films as Love, Simon and Damsel. They got a credible lead to play the Nick Reiner character. That's not to say Robinson is great in this role, but he's credible.

The rest of the cast? Common acquits himself best, but Cary Elwes -- undoubtedly doing Reiner a favor from their Princess Bride days, and in need of some juice in his career in 2015 -- never seems any better than uncomfortable in the role of a California gubernatorial candidate who is also Charlie's father. (He's an actor who became famous for a series of pirate movies -- think if Johnny Depp had run for governor but had been a lot more straight-laced than he is -- which is an interesting nod to Elwes' own career, since he was technically a pirate in Princess Bride.)

Everyone else in the cast? A few faces I'd seen here and there, but otherwise, unknowns. No one willing to add any star wattage to the project. Any potential stars probably looked at this and said "Thanks, but no thanks."

On the surface, you'd think the worst this movie could be is generic. The sad reality of addiction is that addiction stories follow a series of very predictable patterns, because the character arc of an addict is very predictable. And Nick Reiner was an especially predictable version of an addict. Still is, other than the killing his father part, though that is just an extreme version of the familiar addict spiral.

You'd figure that with a successful veteran like Reiner at the helm, this movie would at least look professional. It does not. The lighting is shoddy. The editing is questionable. The cinematography is indifferent. Even the credits look like they were made on the machine my friend bought from the store back when we made a short film in 1990, and returned after we were done. (A story for another time.)

Before I get into the interesting part of the film, I'll give you a little bit of the plot.

So Charlie is an aspiring stand-up comedian who has sobriety issues. I mean, major sobriety issues. He's been sent to rehab multiple times (like Nick) and released himself of his own recognisance (like Nick, I'm sure). And he has a contentious relationship with his famous father, like Nick. 

Let me stop here for a minute to talk about the dimensions of Rob Reiner's generosity in making this film. I watched part of an interview with the two Reiner men that occurred around the release of this film. You probably know which one I'm talking about, it was making the rounds.

You can call it the polish of a man who has spent 40 years in the spotlight if you want to, but Rob Reiner seems sincere as he discusses this project and the struggles their family had had. And what I found really interesting is that the film makes zero attempts to let the father, David Mills, off the hook for prioritizing the wrong things in his relationship with his son -- his career and perceptions in the media rather than what's best for his son. I don't know that Reiner would have been in a similarly vulnerable period of his own career where he thought Nick's troubles would have a measurable impact on him, because Reiner's biggest run of success was before Nick was born. But Reiner's willingness to let the Elwes character look like a shit -- for most of the movie, anyway -- was quite generous.

And then there's the tragedy of Michele Reiner. If you consider the mother character here, played by Susan Misner, to be an accurate stand-in for Nick's mother, then that just makes his decision to kill her all the more heartbreaking. As you might expect from a mother, especially compared to a father, Charlie's mother repeatedly takes the approach that is more directly focused on showing her son love. Charlie's father claims also to love him, but he says it's tough love and he says that was a conscious choice. His mother is more about nurturing love, and if that was Nick's impression of her, one wonders how far gone he must have been to have killed her.

I said I was giving a plot synopsis, but the components of Being Charlie are so standard that I needn't even provide much more on that front. Charlie meets people in rehab. Charlie has a friend who has a negative influence on him. Charlie falls for a girl in rehab who also has a negative influence on him. Charlie has short-term successes and falls off the wagon. There is some sort of tragedy along the way, but I won't tell you what. The film ends on a positive note.

So I think I can now transition into the ways the film is interesting, both in and of itself and as a reflection of a relationship that turned fatal.

In the inevitable reconciliation scene at the end between father and son, it's crucial how Charlie characterizes the nature of that reconciliation. There are three words you might expect Charlie to speak to his father in that scene: "I love you." Instead, this is what Charlie says:

"I don't hate you, Dad. I don't hate you."

That's a really smart way to say "I love you" without being trite, but it also reveals their true dynamic that never got resolved by the time Nick killed Rob ten years later. 

Maybe the most Nick could ever say about his father was that he didn't hate him. But maybe he really did.

Certainly that's what's been alleged, that he hated his father despite what we would think of as olive branches offered by his father, such as Being Charlie. However, you can also imagine a version of this from Nick's perspective in which his dad really is some version of an ogre.

We have a tendency to think generally about how it's hard to grow up in the shadow of a famous person, but Rob Reiner in particular makes a strange version of that narrative. As discussed earlier, his biggest career successes were long before Nick was sentient, and although he was certainly a recognizable public figure, it's not like there were paparazzi snapping pictures of him wherever he went. Yes, Rob's success could have engendered an overdeveloped sense in Nick of needing to measure up, but how much of that was inspired by pressure coming directly from Rob, we don't know.

Still, you can imagine a version where Rob Reiner is that ogre. Where he talks to his son while poking him in the chest with an index finger. "You're doing this movie, you're getting yourself back up on your feet, and I don't want to hear another word about it." After all, we know that at least that character played by Cary Elwes was envisioned as a practitioner of tough love.

There are a lot of interesting insights buried in the generic surface of Being Charlie, insights that would not have been interesting ten years ago -- just another Hollywood rehab story -- but have become a lot more interesting in the past four months. Does that make this a good movie?

Well, no. I said at the start it wasn't. 

But I was thinking about giving it one or 1.5 stars on Letterboxd for most of the time. By the end, I landed on two stars. Which is just shy of what I think of for 2.5 star movies, which is "interesting failure."

And even though this is not any sort of example of the craft of Rob Reiner as a filmmaker, I do remain touched by his decision to make the movie, and of course think about that decision in its best possible light. I don't really believe in the above image of Rob pointing his finger into Nick's sternum and telling him to shape up or ship out, though I'm sure some version of that conversation happened between them on more occasions than they could count. (And also that Rob poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into rehab, which might understandably raise a person's frustration level -- especially when the person in that rehab had all the advantages any child could ever hope for.)

And even if Rob was a bad parent to Nick, didn't manage those responsibilities as well as he could have, was learning on the job like we all are, I do think the olive branch of Being Charlie means something, if only that he continued trying to fix his son in any way he could. 

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.