Audient One-Timers: Ordet

In 2026 I am rewatching my 12 favorite films on Flickchart that I've seen only once, and writing about them each month.

Carl Theodor Dreyer's Ordet, my #121 on Flickchart, could have, maybe should have, been the first film in this series I could not get my hands on, therefore forcing me to go and rewatch my 13th highest ranked film, which was my stated back-up plan at the start of this series. In fact, due to an error I made along the way that required one double-up, it would have been my 14th.

But I did finally source a copy of the movie that was watchable -- only just.

The usual suspects were all out as places to possibly find Ordet, which I first watched back in April of 2012, when I was still in America. (It was actually for a series on this blog, getting to know Dreyer.) My best bet was Kanopy, but it was not there. I thought YouTube might have a version, but it did not. It actually had the original Swedish film from 1943, of which Dreyer's version is a Danish remake, and though that might be interesting to watch at some point, it's not part of the exercise at hand.

But as you'll know if you read my post on Murmur of the Heart, there are some slightly sketchy places a person can go, which aren't pirating but sure feel like it, to find movies that are otherwise inaccessible. And indeed the Russian streaming site I used in that post did have it, but it only had it with subtitles in Arabic, which was obviously of no use to me.

But the Internet Archive -- which I've used maybe a dozen times before and certainly feels safer than this Russian site -- did have it. Two versions, actually.

One version was out. No subtitles at all.

The second version had a little CC icon for closed captioning, and indeed, I could turn on English subtitles here. But there was a problem with these English subtitles: they were very poorly synched to the Danish. The thing that was also a problem with Murmur of the Heart, where the subtitles preceded the dialogue by about seven seconds, was even more of a problem here. The subtitles were out in front by more than twice that length. In the first ten minutes I watched this way, I did eventually time it, and the delay was 45 seconds, though it didn't feel that long when I first started watching. In any case, this was the point where I decided I had to give up on this viewing method.

I started to look deeper into possible YouTube copies, totally without good reason, before going back to the Internet Archive copy and noticing that there was a second version of the closed caption titles. I had tried "En," but there was also "Eng."

And "Eng" saved the viewing, but not without a cost. 

Here the subtitles were behind the dialogue, rather than ahead of it, but only by a couple seconds. Very manageable. I should say that this started to get worse as the movie was going, and by the end, there was about an eight-second delay between the dialogue and the subtitles. Even more distracting, the dialogue was not in sync with the mouths either, though I think it did start that way. So there were, in effect, three different moments of the dialogue being spoken: when the mouths moved, when the words were heard, and when the words were translated.

It's no way to watch a movie. But is it better than not watching it at all? That's hard to say.

And making the whole thing more problematic is the fact that I did, demonstrably, like Ordet worse than when I first saw it. I don't know if that was the circumstances of the viewing or whether I just overrated it the first time.

I've come this far without giving you a plot synopsis at all. And that's not hard to do because this is a movie where not a lot happens, and it takes more than two hours to not happen. I'm not sure how acquainted I was with the concept of slow cinema when I first saw this back in 2012, but if I didn't recognize this as an example of slow cinema back then, I surely do now.

Which, to be clear, is not a problem for me. My #1 movie of 2018, First Reformed, is considered slow cinema. Slow cinema has a big place in film in general, and in my heart specifically. But it can also try a person if they aren't quite in the mood for it. 

In any case, this is the story of a Danish farm family in 1925, the Borgens, who have three generations living in the same house. The oldest generation features the patriarch Morten, who is in the last years of his life. His three sons are Mikkel, an atheist who is happily married to Inger; Anders, who longs for the hand in marriage of a girl on a neighboring farmstead; and Johannes, who might be touched in the head, who is going around talking about how he is the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The youngest generation is the two daughters of Mikkel and Inger, who will soon be joined by a third sibling, whom Inger believes to be a boy, and who is due any day.

The core of the story is their attempt to figure out what to do with this son, Johannes, and their attempt to get the other son, Anders, the approval of the father of his love interest, Anne. Anne's father rejects Anders' petition because the two families believe in two different denominations of Christianity. I won't really talk about the role the resurrected Christ character plays in the outcome of the story, because it isn't necessary to spoil it, even though the movie is 71 years old. But let's just say there is something quite significant that occurs at the end of the story that falls into the category of a miracle.

The first time I watched Ordet, I was haunted by it, given the awesome spiritual themes and the uncanny way the son Johannes seems to be in a trance. For most of the movie, there is no other soundtrack than the whistling wind, and indeed, this feels like a lonely and desolate world, a world that could almost be removed from a literal existence and just represent a spiritual one.

Those feelings about Ordet were still there. But I started to nitpick the reverence I felt for it, pun sort of intended, in relation to another master of slow cinema who Dreyer undoubtedly influenced, which is Ingmar Bergman. 

When I first saw Ordet, it reminded me of a Bergman film, maybe specifically something like Winter Light. (Oops, that's not possible; I didn't see Winter Light until two years later.) And though I know I like Ordet better than Winter Light, I found myself wondering if it's correct that I should rank Ordet above all the Bergman films I've seen. I've seen 11 Bergman films, and the highest ranked of them, Wild Strawberries, is only #268 on my chart. There are two Dreyer films that beat this highest ranked Bergman film, the other being The Passion of Joan of Arc, which is in my top 100. And before I get to my second Bergman film, The Seventh Seal at #343, you get to one other Dreyer film, which is Vampyr at #330. 

Is it right that there should be three Dreyer films that beat all but my highest ranked Bergman film? In fact that's three of the four Dreyer films I've seen in total, the other being Day of Wrath down at #2761. 

And then I wondered, and am still wondering: What is the point of comparing the entire body of their works? Does loving three Dreyer films mean my love for Bergman is in any less?

But I can't deny that these thoughts were in my head as I was watching -- and still appreciating, mind you -- Ordet. 

I can't say that I was bored during Ordet -- sleepy, due to the circumstances of my day and watching it in my bed when I should have been having an afternoon nap, but not bored. But I do kind of marvel at how long it takes for so little to happen. And that also means that there is quite a lot of dialogue that spells out what each character is thinking, in a way that almost made me think of the modern Netflix mandate to repeat the core issues of the story in dialogue every five minutes in order to make sure that people doom scrolling on their phones won't miss anything. 

Now that I've used the phrase "doom scrolling" sort of arbitrarily in the last paragraph, let me use it to a purpose here. There's something about Ordet that is sort of like a long, drawn-out doom scroll, but I mean that as a compliment. There is something ominous and frightening about the existential issues at play here, as they point ever more inexorably toward some real dour turns of events in the plot. And I do, ultimately, think that the time Dreyer takes for this "doom scroll" does increase the way that it chills us and discomfits us. 

But Ordet does not end on such a note, and I won't spoil what does happen at the end, or the events leading up to it, because that's the part that transcends and turns this into a real wonder. One other word for "slow cinema" is "transcendental style," and indeed there is something transcendent about Ordet.

It's still possible I am ranking it too high. One of the reasons for this year-long exercise is to make those sorts of determinations, though not necessarily to re-rank any such movie down to a more appropriate position in my chart. 

And some of the position it has attained is the result of randomness. Because I keep track of such things, I can tell you that Ordet would be a bit lower if it hadn't won a duel against Planes, Trains & Automobiles, which jumped it from #351 to #156, and then later a duel against The Great Dictator, which jumped it to its peak position of #106. It has since fallen 15 spots to its current position. However, when I did first rank it into my chart, it was only in the mid-300s -- and in fact behind the current position of the other two Dreyer films and the two Bregman films I've mentioned in this post.

In any case, still quite a good film, and maybe next time I see it, everything will be properly synched.

My August viewing will finally jump us into my top 100 movies, when I make time for Malcolm X, my current #97. It'll be a busy month with MIFF, but I'll have to fit in those three hours and 22 minutes because the series demands it. (And there's still a movie ahead that's even longer than that.)

Closing credits, greatest hits

I was going to call this post "Madonna is not a terrible actress," as a callback to last weekend's post on fellow singer Britney Spears, but then I decided most people will grant Madonna a certain minimum competence at her craft without me having to push it on them. She also tried harder at it and longer than Spears. Madonna may not have won or even been nominated for the Oscar she so coveted for Evita, but at least it did earn her a Golden Globe. For whatever that's worth.

So instead, I'm choosing to discuss the closing credits of her 1987 movie Who's That Girl?, the movie that gave us both the title song and "Causing a Commotion," and Madonna her fourth acting credit.

And I don't have some great observation about these closing credits, only this: There was an era when the closing credits of a movie were conceived as a review of that movie's greatest hits. 

Yes, Who's That Girl? is one of those movies where we see a bunch of stills from the movie we've just watched, images that the movie would like to present as "iconic" -- at least within the context of its own world, if not generally in the larger cinematic landscape. And they proceed in story order, making it a bit of a Cliff's Notes recap of the movie we've just seen, one single frame at a time. 

Certainly, James Foley's film is a good candidate for this sort of thing. I don't think Madonna has a lot of costume changes in this movie, but her character is consciously designed as a style icon, though not in the glamorous sense that would appeal to Madonna later in her career. This character is an ex-con and petty thief, and her fashion is sort of in the same punky mid-80s aesthetic as her character in her film debut, Desperately Seeking Susan. 

So yeah, we get a lot of good Madonna poses in the closing credits, but also plenty of Griffin Dunne, who is pretty funny as the put-upon lawyer and groom-to-be who is only trying to get Madonna's Nikki Finn on the damn bus to Philadelphia.

If you can't tell, I quite enjoyed this movie. For about the first five minutes, I wasn't sure what its tone would be, and there were certain moments you could interpret as a tonal miss if you didn't know what the film was going for. But pretty quickly you learn it's a screwball comedy, and a successful one at that. In fact, before too much longer -- when a large cougar is introduced into the story -- you realize that this is a loose re-interpretation of one of the great screwball comedies of all time, Bringing Up Baby. 

The credits, both opening and closing, made me aware of a number of other noteworthy things about this movie. For instance:

1) As mentioned, this is directed by James Foley. Foley would also direct Glengarry Glen Ross, a personal favorite. And while GGR is more of a writer's movie (David Mamet) than a director's movie, it still reserves a special spot in my cinematic hall of fame for Foley, who also directed the guilty pleasure Fear, and just passed last year.

2) You know who the DP is on this film? Jan de Bont! That's right, the director of Speed and Twister. Given that he was known for filming action, it's funny to see him before that proclivity was established. 

3) I was reminded of some familiar faces from films of this era who didn't go on to do much else, and who I haven't thought of in years, but were somewhat important to me back at that time. Such as Haviland Morris, known for her role in Sixteen Candles, where she gets drunk and gets her hair stuck in the door, meaning her friends have to cut her out. Anthony Michael Hall's character's debate about whether to take advantage of her in her compromised state reminds us of an era when potential sexual assault was played for laughs. 

4) I didn't notice it during the film itself, but again, the closing credits came through. You know who plays "Second Dock Worker" in this movie? Stanley Tucci! It's his fourth credit on IMDB overall and second film credit. Unfortunately, Google does not have an image of him from the film, and I'm not going to go back and find one.

But I could see myself watching Who's That Girl? again some day. It's a fun movie, and that's in no small part due to what Madonna brings to it. 

5,000 good movies

Milestone alert!

Olivier Assayas' The Wizard of the Kremlin -- which I saw on Wednesday via a screener for its Thursday release in Australia, in order to review it (see here) -- is the 5,000th film that I've ever liked.

To put that in a better context, it's the 7,311th film that I've seen at least once, according to my carefully manicured list, meaning there are 2,311 movies that I don't like. Or, that I don't like enough to give them a thumbs up in my spreadsheet, which is usually equivalent to three stars. Of course, only half or so were movies I saw when I was even giving out star ratings. 

If you want to go by percentages, it means I like 68.39% of the movies I've ever seen. It's been hovering at just over 68% for some time now, and this is about the highest it's ever gotten. Considering that I am probably a little easier, if anything, on movies the older I get, this number will probably continue to go up slowly, but likely will never get over 69%. (Never say never. Maybe the movie industry will just become unfathomably brilliant in the coming years.)

I'm not sure what to make of the milestone, and I should say that The Wizard of Kremlin only just barely qualified. I started out liking it at about a 7/10, 3.5 star level, before eventually tiring of it and landing it at only 6/10 and 3 stars. Although there is at least one Assayas movie I love (Personal Shopper), I find myself disappointed by his movies a lot more than I am ... um, appointed by them. And perhaps unsurprisingly, Personal Shopper might be the movie he's made that's most unlike him. 

I know it's hard to tell from the poster, but that's Paul Dano next to Jude Law's Vladimir Putin -- an uncanny casting choice if ever there was one. (Law, not Dano.) Even being the star of two of my former #1 movies of the year, Dano could not elevate this one above middling. 

For the sake of fairness, I should say I am not uniquely qualified to discuss what is or isn't like Assayas. This is his 20th feature over 40 years, and I've seen only six of them, and all but one of those since 2012. So it may be that there are hidden Assayas gems that would be exactly what I wanted from him. Among those I've seen, I like Kremlin better than The Wasp Network, Something in the Air and Clouds of Sils Maria, in any case. One of his most famous works is probably Carlos, a TV mini-series that I also haven't seen, but which I suspect to be very similar in structure to this newest one. 

But back to the milestone. I suppose it's more of a milestone of total movies seen, though I wouldn't be celebrating #7,311 on its own. It just so happens that I once decided to mark every movie I'd seen as either good or bad and then keep a running percentage as I went. 

It did take a little while to finally arrive. I noticed when I got to 4,999 thumbs up (it was The Odyssey, which would have been thematically perfect for the milestone), and then the next three movies were all close but no cigar, coming in at 2.5 stars each. I might have even been a little harder on them than I would have ordinarily been -- I said I was close to giving Crossroads three stars in a post earlier this week -- except I wanted #5,000 to be, I don't know, distinctive. But I finally gave in and decided that The Wizard of the Kremlin was slightly more good than bad, rather than slightly more bad than good. 

And so I release you. Nothing more to see here today. 

A seemingly unnecessary defense of The Odyssey

Neither of the first two people I spoke to about The Odyssey actually liked it.

One of those impressions was more middling. I know on Letterboxd he gave it three stars, but the words he wrote in his Letterboxd review were more indicative of his true dissatisfaction with the film.

The other guy? He quoted me two stars, but his words, in our Facebook chat, read more like a one. 

So does this make them the only two who didn't like it?

Surely not, but the overwhelming general consensus on The Odyssey is that it's great. Still, having those be the first two opinions I encountered personally tended to shake my own feelings of love for the film. 

I've since spoken personally to one other guy who loved it, though maybe not as much as I did. Many of the others with whom I regularly discuss film haven't yet seen it for one reason or another. 

A Christopher Nolan film is usually a safe film to like. The last one won best picture, the one from 2017 was praised through the roof, the one from 2014 is considered a modern sci-fi classic in some groups, and before that you get to Inception and the Batman movies. Only the one from 2020 (Tenet) is a bit of a head scratcher and enjoys less general appreciation among critics and fans alike. 

So why do I feel as though liking The Odyssey makes me a less discerning cinephile? Maybe even a bit of a bimbo?

It's because the way I like it reminds me of another film that I and a lot of people cherish, but that true film snobs trashed from the start: Titanic.

I think if you told Nolan he'd made a film that operates on a person in a similar way to Titanic, he'd respond by saying "Fuck you." But I think it's true, and I mean it as a compliment. Titanic was, after all, my #1 movie of 1997, and it remains in my top 100 on Flickchart. 

But I don't think Nolan would want to have his work compared to anything made by James Cameron, just because I imagine Nolan was one of those snobs who didn't like Titanic either. (And if you, dear reader, are also one of those "snobs," please don't take my phrasing personally. My own wife does not like Titanic and I obviously think quite highly of her.)

But wait, maybe I shouldn't be so quick to assume I know what Nolan thinks of Titanic. Here is what AI tells me about Nolan's thoughts on the movie:

Christopher Nolan deeply respects Titanic and frequently praises director James Cameron's ability to pull audiences into a different world, even when the audience's foreknowledge of the ending (the ship sinking) is absolute. [1, 2, 3, 4]

Nolan has pointed to Titanic as a masterclass in how a film can build emotional suspense and create a powerful sense of wonder within its own narrative text, contrasting it with his own approach to historical suspense in movies like Dunkirk. [1]

If I am to believe this -- and we know AI is never wrong -- then maybe he did set out to make The Odyssey have a similar emotional impact on a viewer as Titanic. 

It occurs to me that I haven't even told you yet why The Odyssey gives me Titanic vibes.

Aside from them both being high-budget epic period pieces, I actually think the drawing of characters as good or evil has a sort of epic quality on the level of myth. And that may be a strange thing to say about a lead character (Odysseus) who demonstrates numerous flawed moments and moments of poor judgment. But I think where we land with Odysseus is to feel great investment in his journey home and to love him, warts and all. That's especially the case when contrasted with Penelope's suitors, who are so nasty that you might even say the portrayal approaches camp. 

And I think that might be where I get my most notable similarity to Titanic. Robert Pattinson's lead suitor is such a hissable villain, such a poor match for our leading lady, that it put me in mind of the campy but great performance of Billy Zane in Titanic. 

The people who don't like The Odyssey seem to focus on nitpicks about the story (the sacking of Troy is barely mentioned in the poem, and yet it's a primary focus here!) or the accuracy of the costumes (those uniforms are from the wrong century!). They seem to want a purely intellectual Odyssey, the kind designed as a History Channel series rather than a rousing cinematic epic.

Me? I want the rousing epic. Always have. Always will.

And it's not that I don't want good verisimilitude, or moral complexity, or knotty storytelling that doesn't easily resolve itself. I do want those things, sometimes. 

But if a filmmaker sets out to make a movie that will leave me quivering with adrenaline in the finale, and near tears on several occasions -- maybe even more than near -- then that is more valuable to me than a perfectly historically accurate Odyssey as a professor of antiquity would have commissioned it. 

We go to movies to feel, I say. And people who lose their love of movies over time often do so because the movies cease to accomplish that for them. 

Because it is increasingly unusual to really feel scared in a horror movie, or really laugh at a comedy, we really remember and appreciate new movies that makes us do those things.

And so it is with sitting in a movie theater, watching a giant epic play out on the biggest screen possible, and feeling your fists unconsciously ball with rage, your heart unconsciously increase to a fever pitch in time with the score, and your eyes start to press tears through the ducts that usually keep them dammed up in reserve. 

That kind of movie is worth celebrating. 

And if your mileage varies on The Odyssey, well, maybe you didn't like Titanic either. 

You snob. 

Mixed reviews on verifying yesterday's post

After writing about the Netflix screen saver mode yesterday, I naturally found myself on the couch in front of a series of loops of this screen saver that very night. 

So naturally, I thought I should test the things I said in yesterday's post with actual numbers. 

I was pretty spot on with the timings and quantity. Here is what I said yesterday about the duration each slide spends on screen:

"It puts single images from other Netflix shows and movies on the screen for about 15 seconds before switching to the next one."

Actual time? A little more than 14 seconds. I tested it consistently and the only differences were natural margins of error in how long it took me to press stop on the stopwatch app on my phone. Why 14 and not 15? I don't know, seems like they would just round up. 

And here is what I said about how long it takes for the title to come up, giving my son and me the chance to guess the title before it comes up:

"The image appears about two seconds before the title."

Actual time? Two seconds! I'm glad I opted for two, because I originally considered writing "one or two seconds," before realizing that one was too quick.

And here is what I said about the quantity of slides in the loop before it starts over again:

"They go in a loop of maybe 40 titles before repeating."

Actual quantity? Forty-five titles. That might be the one I'm most impressed with, given that I have never counted and only ever estimated. Forty-five still seems like a bit of a random number, just like the 14 seconds rather than 15 seconds. I probably would have either rounded down to 40 or up to 50, but that's why they're doing that job and I'm not.

So that was all pretty good. I am pretty good with numbers. I have a weird ability with them that I sometimes think verges on freakish. 

But the actual premise of the post? A bit flimsy.

I said it was weird for Netflix to be advertising a random old movie, even if it was new to their service, rather than concentrating on newer movies or TV shows, the kind you'd think they'd be more invested in if trying to figure out how to spend their money on future original programming.

Well, do you want to know some other movies that were featured among these 45 titles, in addition to the subject of yesterday's post, Cleaner?

Lost in Translation
Crazy Stupid Love
The Truman Show
American Psycho
Fight Club
Take Shelter
Wieners
Zoolander
The Devil's Advocate
Go
The 40 Year Old Virgin

If you include Cleaner, that's 12 of the 45 titles expended on advertising old movies, at least in this incarnation of the screen saver, which I believe only lasts a couple days before changing. So that's 27 percent. 

Now, I would argue that only one of those besides Cleaner is truly "random," that being the movie Wieners, which I had to look up. It's from 2008 and it stars Kenan Thompson and Zachary Levi. Unlike Cleaner, I don't think I need to watch this one. 

The rest, at least, are considered classics from between the mid-90s and the early-10s. 

I do think it's funny how much this content changed since I last watched the screen saver and was inspired to watch Cleaner and then write about it. I may be wrong, but I don't think any of those titles were in the loop the last time I watched, other than Cleaner. It's almost like they changed the content in response to what I wrote yesterday, doubling down just to prove me wrong. 

I also wanted to mention that in two instances, the movie was being advertised because it was leaving the streamer soon. I believe those two titles were Lost in Translation and Zoolander. 

I won't talk about all 45 titles in the loop, but I do have a couple other observations:

1) There were only two new Netflix movies in the loop, only one of which has actually come out already, that being Voicemails for Isabelle. The other is the Kevin Hart vehicle 72 Hours, which I believe is due out in the next week to ten days. Given that I've probably already seen a dozen movies that debuted on Netflix in 2026, if I were them, I would include more of those. Especially something like Enola Holmes 3. 

2) The tendency to advertise old content is not limited to movies. Also in this loop were the TV shows The Office (American version), Community, The Mentalist and Dr. House. Yes, you read that correctly. The show known as House was listed as Dr. House here. I don't know, maybe it's an Australian thing. 

3) There were a number of movies that are not "new" but are not "old" either. These were primarily horror movies: Tarot, Final Destination: Bloodlines and Heretic. Final Destination is actually coming to the service at the start of August (which will give me the chance to revisit it, especially the brilliant opening). Companion isn't a horror, but it can generally be thought of in the same category of "high-concept genre film." Interestingly, both Heretic and Companion feature actress Sophie Thatcher. (And Heretic also features actress Chloe East, star of one of those 2026 Netflix original films I've seen, Roommates.)

Okay it's time for you stop reading this and for me to go do something else.

New to Netflix, ancient history to everyone else

If you're like me and you have Netflix available as an app on your TV, I'm sure you sometimes let it go into screen saver mode, where it puts single images from other Netflix shows and movies on the screen for about 15 seconds before switching to the next one. 

If this mode is on while we're sitting in the living room doing other things, my younger son and I will play a game where we see who can be first to guess the title of the new image, since the image appears about two seconds before the title. We get so we know these titles just from this screen saver mode, and since they go in a loop of maybe 40 titles before repeating, sometimes you develop a sense of what's going to come next because you remember it from last time. I'm glad I have one person in my family who enjoys playing this game, because the older son and his mother certainly do not.

I also use this mode to identify movies that may be new to Netflix that I need to see. I try to keep up on release dates for new Netflix movies, but sometimes I get behind and use this as a nice refresher.

However, not all the movies (or TV shows) that appear here are actually new. Though I can't figure out a rhyme nor reason to why they're promoting certain old ones. 

Take Cleaner, for example. When I saw a single image of Samuel L. Jackson from Renny Harlin's 2007 film, for half a second I thought "Oh, what's this new Samuel L. Jackson movie?" In the remaining half of that second, I realized that this is not at all what Samuel L. Jackson looks like in 2026. So concluded it was an old movie.

Now I'd say it's obvious that this is new to Netflix. At least that much must be true. In fact, Google via its AI confirms that it started streaming on the platform in late May. 

But surely Netflix is adding old movies all the time, isn't it? Why was this random 19-year-old movie, which I don't remember from the time even though it also stars such big names as Eva Mendes, Ed Harris and Luis Guzman, given place of prominence within those 40 titles on the screen saver, which also include a bunch of genuinely new Netflix movies and TV shows?

I guess I don't know why Netflix is trying to "make Cleaner happen." Is there an incentive for them that this title in particular does well? And if so, what is that incentive?

Even AI is a bit confused about the logical sequence of events here. When I googled "when did cleaner start playing on Netflix," the answer was "The 2007 crime thriller Cleaner (starring Samuel L. Jackson and Eva Mendes) saw a major resurgence on the platform, and was notably added to the platform in the United States in late May 2026."

That almost makes it sound like being added to the platform was a response to its resurgence on the platform, which doesn't make a lick of sense.

Well, it worked. I watched it last night. 

And found it to be utterly middling. 2.5 stars. The kind of borderline competent but otherwise completely forgettable movie that I wouldn't have remembered the first time around because no one did very much to promote it even back then. 

And that would change 19 years later why, exactly?

If you figure it out, let me know. 

Britney Spears is not a terrible actress

Over the years I've conflated the critical response to the Britney Spears vehicle Crossroads with the critical response to the Kelly Clarkson-Justin Guarini vehicle From Justin to Kelly. 

I think there are four reasons for this:

1) Both movies star a singer or singers who are trying their hand at acting;

2) Spears famously dated a different guy named Justin;

3) Both movies are (sort of) road trip movies; 

4) Neither movie propelled the stars on to other acting roles. 

And so I assumed both were bad, and that the stars were a big reason why they were bad.

That's definitely true of From Justin to Kelly. This movie's reputation was so bad that I saved it for a special February 29th viewing back in 2024. If you don't know, I try to watch the worst movie I can find every February 29th, though sometimes it backfires, as I actually sort of liked the movie I saw on February 29, 2020 (Christian Mingle).

It didn't backfire with From Justin to Kelly. It wouldn't be exaggerating very much to say that this is one of the worst movies I've ever seen, though there are currently 22 movies ranked lower than it on my Flickchart. I guess that's still "one of the worst." And the poor craft of Clarkson and Guarini was certainly part of the problem, but by no means the biggest part. 

Crossroads is different. I wouldn't say this is a "good" movie, but it flirted with goodness enough for me to consider going with a three-star rating on Letterboxd, the minimum star rating for a movie to have been judged as "good." I opted for 2.5 stars instead. And though I don't do this myself, I know some people indicate the kind of "close but no cigar" feeling I have toward Crossroads by giving it 2.5 stars but also a heart. Me, I don't use the heart feature on Letterboxd.

And Spears? She ranges from perfectly adequate to actually quite touching. I was specifically watching her microexpressions to see how she was reacting to new information and other dialogue in the scene, and I really found them quite acceptable. Then there's a part where she has a big emotional breakdown that I thought was credible too. 

Of course, the caliber of the supporting cast has something to do with why this film is better than it might otherwise be. While From Justin and Kelly had essentially no known actors propping it up, Crossroads has future Oscar winner Zoe Saldana, as well as Taryn Manning, Justin Long, Kim Cattrall and Dan Aykroyd. But I also found the writing to be pretty decent and the direction to be, again, perfectly adequate.

While Spears never starred in a movie again after Crossroads -- she actually did appear in one earlier film, Longshot, as "flight attendant" -- she did have a couple appearances on TV shows, playing someone other than herself. But more often than not when she did appear again, she was playing Britney Spears, the role she was born to play.

I hope critics weren't too hard on her at the time, because a) we know she had a bit of a mental break in the long run, and that wouldn't have helped, and b) it wasn't deserved. She could have been a more than competent actress for a couple years if things had worked out differently. As is, I'm glad there's a little showcase for what could have been in Crossroads. 

Alluding to two titles from the 1970s (or close enough)

On Friday night, Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice became the first 2026 film I've seen twice. It's a lot easier when a new movie you like is on a streamer, which this is -- Hulu to be exact, but we get it through Disney+ in Australia. You just throw it on whenever you like. Feels a bit luxurious.

Three months seems to be about how long you should wait within the current year, at a minimum, before rewatching a movie. Another favorite of the year so far crossed that threshold a few weeks ago, was also available on a streamer, and seemed like the perfect thing to watch that Friday or Saturday night, whichever one it was. But my wife got wind of the fact that I was going to watch it, got a little synopsis of the movie from me, and said "Well what if I want to watch that?" Meaning not tonight but some other time. So it might be another three months or more before I get to that one for the second time.

It's too early in the year to begin confirming movies that are placed highly on your in-progress ranked list, because even if something is currently well within your top ten, there's a good chance that ten or more movies will displace it before you get to January. Which means a confirmation rewatch isn't really necessary because by that point the movie will be your #17 of the year, and any movie can be your #17 of the year. You don't have to confirm it to be sure. 

But on Friday night I didn't know what new movie to watch or what old movie to watch -- as in, what movie from either this year or from any other year -- so I decided to throw on a rewatch, which starts to happen a lot less in the second half of the year as I start ramping up toward finalizing my list. (My line of demarcation between watching a mix of old movies, new movies and rewatches, and watching mostly movies from the current year, comes with the start of MIFF, which is about three weeks off.)

So Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice it was. 

I would say I liked this time travel/comedy/organized crime movie just about as much the second time as the first. I did notice a little bit of wobbly technique here and there -- a couple of the fight scenes have quite bad choreography, and the director, BenDavid Grabinski, uses a dated "partial slowmo" effect here and there that I can't really describe in words -- but this movie sings on the strength of its screenplay and performances, which were just as strong the second time. There's a moment in this film involving Vince Vaughn that I find quite profound, and that's all I'll say about it. Some great needle drops too. 

What I do want to say, today, is that I didn't even really realize it as I was watching it the first time, but this movie -- in title specifically, but even in some of its themes -- is an homage to two movies from the 1970s. 

Here's the first one:

And already I'm breaking the rules because Paul Mazursky's film Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice is from 1969. There's where the "or close enough" in the title of this post comes in.

Having a title consisting only of four names separated by three ampersands would be reason enough to conclude an allusion, but the fact that the final name is Alice in both scenarios pretty much cements it. 

Thematic similarities? This could also be a stretch, because one movie is about people experimenting with affairs and processing the aftermath of those affairs, while the other is about time travel and organized crime. But there's also an affair between Alice and either Mike or Nick (it's not a spoiler -- okay it's Mike) in this movie, so that's enough to grasp onto if you're desperate.

The thematic similarities are perhaps more clear in the second movie:

Elaine May's Mikey & Nicky -- which is not always presented with an ampersand though that certainly helps in this situation -- is more directly appropriate for this exercise, having come out in 1976, and also being in the same general genre as Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice. The fact that the names of the two male characters are the same, albeit with Y's on the end, does not feel like a coincidence, especially when you have all the male names in the world to choose from when writing these characters.

There are quite a few similarities in the plot as well, in that one man is though to be a rat and becomes the target of a contract killer (though only a "cannibal assassin" in M & N & N & A), and the other tries to help him escape. 

This is the best kind of allusion, because it establishes your cinematic bonafides -- I love Mikey & Nicky, have less of a memory of Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice -- while actually not having all that much to do with the story you're currently telling. In other words, BenDavid Grabinski cannot be accused of ripping anyone off, because the meat and potatoes of his story really have nothing to do with the two previous movies. He just wants us to know he likes them, and that's fun. 

And Grabinski's movie, in my humble opinion, is good enough, clever enough and memorable enough that perhaps someday, someone will allude to it too.

The Odyssey in LieMAX

This is the subject I thought of for this post before watching The Odyssey. That is to say, before The Odyssey leapt to the front of the line among my favorite films of 2026, meaning a different sort of subject might be warranted. 

But I'm going to go with it anyway because I love this new term a friend introduced to me yesterday.

"LieMAX" of course refers to a screening auditorium that calls itself IMAX but isn't really. 

I'm by no means an expert on what makes an IMAX screen an IMAX screen, though I do know that the aspect ratio is significantly taller than your normal theater. And I also know that the entire space is usually custom built with a much taller seating area and higher ceiling overall, to accommodate the massive size of the screen.

Which means you should not be able to just convert an auditorium that had previously not been an IMAX auditorium into an IMAX auditorium, even if you do change the dimensions of the screen.

At least I'm assuming the screen dimensions were changed for the new "IMAX" screen at Melbourne Central, which has just become the second option for IMAX movies in the Melbourne central business district. I don't know how recently it's happened, but since I've last been there, anyway. (That's not saying much. They don't take my critics card there so I don't usually go there.) Without changing the screen size well then you really aren't doing anything but changing the name. 

The first and best option remains the Melbourne Museum, which houses what was once the third largest IMAX screen in the world. I was aware of this designation back when I saw Gravity in 2013, so I'm sure that at least three IMAX screens in Dubai alone have since surpassed it. But a different friend of mine told me yesterday that this is the only screen in the southern hemisphere -- could that really be? -- capable of showing the full height of what Christopher Nolan filmed with The Odyssey.

So why didn't I go to that one, if I wanted to see it yesterday in time to get up a review today? 

Well I was naive enough to rock up to their website earlier this week and try to get tickets, only to see all the sessions reading SOLD OUT for Thursday. That's not entirely true. I could have gotten one at 12:01 a.m., but yeah, I'm not going to ruin my next four days with something like that. The movie is 172 minutes long, after all.

When I told the original other friend, an American (the second is Australian), that I was going to see The Odyssey in three hours, I said the good one was sold out so I was going to the one that was probably IMAX in name only.

"Ah ... the LieMAX!" he responded.

Well, it didn't make a goddamn bit of difference.

I was plenty floored by what I saw even on this smaller IMAX screen, and whatever they don't have in size of screen, the Hoyts at Melbourne Central is compensating for in size of sound. That theater shook, rattled and rolled for nearly three hours of the ominous rumbling and up-tempo chaos of Ludwig Goransson's score, and feeling it in my bones was combining with the sense of adrenaline that increases as this movie reaches its fever pitch. This movie builds from a very good film to a great film as it enters its final section, and I don't think I could have loved it any more, even if I'd been seeing it on the best screen for it in the southern hemisphere.

Which I may still do. When I texted my wife how much I loved it, she said she couldn't wait to see it as she had read the original poem more than once. I guess I never had that discussion with her to determine exactly how important it was to her. As usual, my film critic's schedule won out, as I even left work a little early to catch this showing, just so I could write the review last night before I went to bed. (I ended up writing the whole thing on the train ride home and only just tweaking it a bit this morning before posting it. Link here.)

So yeah, when I said I would see it again with her, she suggested bringing my older son as well. Heck I think it would be fine for the younger one too, especially since he loves Tom Holland. 

You don't get a second chance to make a first impression, but my first impression was pretty damn great even on a less than ideal screen, so the second one can only be better.

And that's no Lie. 

The production code title that sounds like it inspired the production code

Certainly when W. Somerset Maugham wrote Of Human Bondage in 1915, he wasn't thinking about whips and ball gags and dominatrixes. (Dominatrices?) Still, that title is enough to make a person blush in 2026.

Given that the film version of Maughram's novel, directed by John Cromwell, came out in 1934, and that's also when the production code (otherwise known as the Hays Code) came into use in Hollywood to police the morality of images in movies, there might be every reason to assume that Of Human Bondage was one of the films that inspired this code. 

In fact, Cromwell's film is exactly the 53rd -- of an eventual 52,000 -- film to receive a Certificate of Approval number from the Production Code Administration (PCA) during the 34 years the code was in place. I know this because I noted its number when the movie started. The internet tells me John Ford's The World Moves On was the first. The code was finally retired in 1968, leading directly to the New Hollywood movement. 

The bondage in question is actually the relationship that exists between people with power disparities in the amounts they love one another, which create life-long obligations borne of this unresolved obsession. The obsession doesn't seem to resolve itself even if the obsessor arrives at a new condition of comparative happiness.

Pretty heady subject matter for a movie made in 1934, but then again, heady subject matter was what caused them to institute the production code in the first place.

In fact this film seems very much to have been conceived with pre-Code standards in mind. The character played by Bette Davis in this movie is downright awful -- though it was a star-making performance for Davis -- and it is even implied that she becomes a prostitute as her story nears its grim end. (Sorry, I guess I didn't think it was necessary to issue a spoiler alert for a 92-year-old movie.)

But I was most fascinated by how it gets inside the head of people who just can't quit other people, and how almost every character in this movie gives too much love to someone who is unworthy of them, and too little to a worthier person. 

If you are a human being living in the world, this should be something familiar to you. Assuming you aren't at either end of the spectrum -- the most beautiful, most amazing person who has ever lived or a repugnant cretin -- you have likely performed both of these roles at some point in your life. You've given too much of yourself to a person who either ignores, or worse, teases your affections for their own entertainment, ultimately discarding you and rejecting you in cruel ways, or you have been the person to do that to someone else, even if you didn't mean to, or didn't think that's what you were doing at the time. 

Although this applies to a number of characters in the story, the center of it all is Leslie Howard's Philip Carey, a failed artist and distracted medical student who also has a clubbed foot, but is handsome enough and kind enough to have attracted the attentions of several appropriate matches over the course of the narrative. But he can't be happy with any of them, because he still pines for Davis' Mildred Rogers, who encouraged his affections only to gleefully squash them, but then keeps throwing herself in his path and preventing him from achieving happiness with these other suitors.

Anyway, I found the whole thing pretty astute, and at only 83 minutes, perfectly brief for a Wednesday night movie starting after 10 p.m.

I also thought I should comment on Davis, whose eyes I always notice (thanks, Kim Carnes) any time I see her in a movie. Seeing this one Wednesday night made an interesting complement to having watched Goldie Hawn in Cactus Flower on Tuesday night, because both actresses were in their mid-20s when they made these movies, both had only debuted a few years earlier, and both broke out big time after these performances. The deviation occurs with their Academy Awards fates. Though we know from yesterday's post that Hawn actually won for Cactus Flower, in the supporting category, it was felt at the time that Davis would have been an Oscar frontrunner for Bondage, in the lead actress category, but she didn't even end up getting nominated. 

Goldie Hawn's surprising paucity of credits

I watched the latest in my Flickchart Favorites Friends Fiesta series last night, which was Gene Saks' 1969 romantic comedy Cactus Flower.

And let me tell you, it was super fun to see Goldie Hawn in one of her earliest roles, when she was only 23 or 24, depending on when the filming occurred relative to her birthday. I didn't know it at the time, but found out later that she won an Academy Award for this role. Charming as Hawn is -- she was a favorite of mine in the 80s and 90s -- I had no idea she had won an Oscar, and would not have thought her capable of giving a performance that would be received that way. I guess that was that era's equivalent of Marisa Tomei in My Cousin Vinny.

Before I focus exclusively on Hawn for the rest of this piece, I want to make the aside that I thought this was a very strange mode in which to find Ingrid Bergman. This icon of sophistication, playing an assistant to a dentist in a goofy comedy? It was quite the disconnect. 

I went on IMDB to see if Cactus Flower was Hawn's debut -- it wasn't, she had appeared in two TV shows and two other movies -- but that didn't end up being my big takeaway about her IMDB page. No, that was saved for her total number of credits.

How many credits would you assume Goldie Hawn had? 75? 100? Even more than that?

Nope. She had 37.

Huh?

Now granted, she did effectively stop working in the early 2000s, around the age of 55. (She's 80 now.) After The Banger Sisters in 2002, she didn't appear in another movie for 15 more years, when she co-starred in the Amy Schumer vehicle Snatched. That same year she was the narrator in a movie I've never heard of called SPF-18, which has only a 3.2 on IMDB so it must be terrible. Other than that, just The Christmas Chronicles and its 2020 sequel. (There was also a random episode of Phineas & Ferb in there.)

Hawn seemed ubiquitous in the 1980s and 1990s. Starting with her iconic role in 1980's Private Benjamin, she had a succession of really popular films, such as Overboard, Bird on a Wire, Housesitter and The First Wives Club. You know, when I started out that sentence, I thought I'd really be offering up more genuine bangers, if you will. Because by then she already starts to wind down, with Everyone Says I Love You, The Out-of-Towners and Town & Country before that period of presumably self-imposed exile.

Could I have missed so badly in my memory of Goldie Hawn and what she meant to those of us growing up in the 1980s?

Maybe it's just that she was a celebrity more than she was an actress. She might have been "around" more than she consistently showed up on our screens. And her relationship with Kurt Russell was always very cute. And she had an enduring legacy in terms of her daughter, Kate Hudson, herself an Oscar nominee just this past year. 

The really hard circle for me to square is that I can't figure out what would have even been my iconic Goldie Hawn role back. I know I listed Private Benjamin as iconic just a minute ago, but I remember that I didn't see that until I lived in New York, which was already my mid-20s. Bird on the Wire was similarly a late entry for me, as I only saw that in 2016 -- and really didn't like it very much. And the one that might be my favorite Hawn film, though Cactus Flower is certainly a new contender in that regard? It's probably Overboard, but I only saw that for the first time in 2017. 

Is it possible Hawn was a good vibe more than she was a movie star?

But I felt so fondly toward her that I did, indeed, believe her departure from Hollywood was on her own terms, when she just got sick of it. How else to explain someone going out on top of her game, even if she may have been in her 50s at that point? Which might just as well have been her 80s in Hollywood years.

But I wouldn't even know if she'd started to stink at that point because I haven't even seen The Out-of-Towners, Town & Country or The Banger Sisters, so I can't attest to any period of decline that might have showed her the exit. 

I have seen two of her last three films, and no, I'm not counting SPF-18 in that group. The only one I didn't catch was the sequel to The Christmas Chronicles. I liked the first Christmas Chronicles and don't remember being either glad to see Hawn again or distracted by her diminished capabilities. I do think I felt she wasn't great in Snatched, but then again, that movie wasn't great. 

It's just a funny illustration of the gulf that sometimes exists between our perceptions and reality. To me, Goldie Hawn was a shining beacon of wacky physical comedy and delightful facial expressions. She was just a person who made me smile, wherever she showed up, or even maybe if I only saw her in trailers. Clearly, that wasn't from a boatload of classic movies. 

In any case, it was a real treat to fall in love with her all over again in Cactus Flower. Maybe I need to go back through and sweep up some of the titles I've missed. Their number is sadly manageable. 

The debut of someone who may be no one

I mentioned yesterday that I was on the page "2026 in film" on Wikipedia to look up recent movie industry deaths, and got more than I bargained for by learning that beloved actor Sam Neill had just died within the last couple hours. 

Well, that same page has an interesting section that I wanted to write about today, called "Film debuts."

I only recognized one of the names listed there, and that makes sense. A debut is only really a debut in retrospect, isn't it?

More importantly and more to the point, a debut is only a debut if the person went on to become somebody.

Otherwise, where do you draw the line? Hundreds of people make their film debuts every year. Halfway through the year, the good people who maintain Wikipedia are only interested in 11 of them.

Jaafar Jackson is the name I recognized, and that's because a) he's a relative of Michael Jackson and b) his role in the Michael Jackson biopic has been singled out as significant. 

What do the rest of the people have in common? Well, they're famous for some other reason, most of them, though they don't happen to be people I know about, and in some cases, they aren't likely to be film regulars. 

Take the two men from Disclosure Day. They're both wrestlers. They've been included here because they happen to be the men in the ring during the film's opening sequence, where Josh O'Connor is supposed to be handing over a backpack in a crowded location to avoid any shenanigans. But I don't think we're about to see Lance Archer and Brian Cage appear in a bunch of other movies just because they were used playing versions of themselves in this movie. Then again, wrestlers have a strong recent history of reimagining themselves as movie stars, so perhaps they will.

A couple of the others are musicians, including Amaia, Guitarricadelafuente (that's a mouthful), Ruslana Panchyshyna (that's also a mouthful) and Orville Peck. But most of them are in movies I haven't heard of, which also reduces the newsworthiness of officially declaring this a film debut. (I do know that Bitter Christmas is the new Pedro Almodovar film because I just bypassed the chance to see it at MIFF.) In the case of Street Fighter, the movie isn't even coming out until October.

Markiplier is a YouTuber. I guess YouTubers have earned their own special place in the celebrity landscape.

Then you have two people who, as far as I can tell, are "just" actors. Helen Shen is credited with originating a role on Broadway, so maybe that's somewhat newsworthy. Just because it's a Korean musical doesn't mean some other people haven't heard of it. But I can't tell what the supposed significance is of Carlos Gonzalez. He has some TV experience in Spain. 

The only one besides Jaafar Jackson I can really get behind is Owen Cooper. I didn't know him either, but he was the lead in the breakout show Adolescence, which I haven't seen yet, so certainly a lot of people would know who he was and might be interested in his film debut. He plays the young Heathcliff in "Wuthering Heights," though if I recall that role doesn't have more than about ten minutes of screen time. 

It's folly to try to figure out the whims of, and apply universal standards to, the ordinary human beings who are active on Wikipedia. They are not benefitting from the consistency of a single editorial voice that might include some things and exclude others. Though I do know that Wikipedia cracks down on entries for people who are not considered famous enough, and removes/cleans up content that is not up to the site's standards.

I guess to really see how this section is used, it helps to go back at least one year to "2025 in film." The one name I knew I would see there is Chase Infiniti, who seems to be the correct usage of this sort of section. She was known beforehand and I think we're all quite sure we are going to see her in three movies a year for the next ten years. A few other names stand out as having already had their place on this list confirmed, such as Sinners' Miles Caton, One of Them Days' SZA and Marty Supreme's Tyler, the Creator, the last two of whom also fits the bill of musician-turned-actor.

The other 20 names? A lot of speculation there, at least to this point.

Although I've got my issues with this -- obviously enough to have written about them here -- I wouldn't trade Wikipedia's tendency to err on the side of inclusivity. That's the reason, after all, that I know I can get a comprehensive listing of even minor film industry professionals who have died, since I know about a lot more minor film industry professionals than most people. It's even the reason my own name sometimes appears in Wikipedia, among the critical response section for movies I've reviewed. And yes, seeing that every once in a while -- though it's usually when I'm googling myself -- is as thrilling as it sounds.

I guess we'll follow these people to see where they go. The farther you look back in film history in the equivalent sections of other Wikipedia pages, the more likely you are to find people who really did blow up, whose debut in a certain year is certainly notable.

And then there will be a record of the duds who went nowhere -- whether they deserve that record or not.