A lot of Moana for a ten-year period

If you really like something, there's no such thing as too much of it.

Well, I only sort of like Moana. So a third Moana movie in ten years seems like a lot, especially when Disney has other franchises you would expect them to nurture.

The original Moana came out in 2016. Hard to believe but that is ten years ago now. I liked this movie but did not love it. 3.5 stars. 

Possibly because Disney was nurturing its other franchises, it took until 2024 for Moana 2 to come out. I thought this movie was meh as hell. I barely remember what happens in it. I think there might have been coconuts and a chicken. 

Now only two years later, we're getting the de rigeur live action Moana. It's too soon, I think.

Now I should say, the ordinary "sequel every two years" rhythm of many popular franchises could give you way more than three movies within a ten-year span. In fact, depending on how popular it was, you could get as many as five. In fact, there are some series where they basically make one movie a year until the box office no longer supports that pace. I'm looking at you, Saw. 

For animated movies, though, the timeframe gets distended. Even if you determine the first movie was a hit and you want to make a second, you're starting all the way over at the beginning again, even if you've already gotten some of the technology assets lined up to easily create these characters again. We probably would have seen Moana 2 a lot earlier than eight years after Moana if you could churn out animated movies any more quickly. 

So I really think it's the close proximity of Moana 2 and the live-action Moana that seems like testing our Moana-related good will. I'm so not ready for another Moana, this soon, that I might not even see this one.

I think it seems particularly strange when you look at Disney's other franchises, particularly its most popular one.

There isn't even a live-action Frozen in the works yet. I find that odd. Granted, they're making an animated Frozen III that will be coming out next year. But that'll be eight years since Frozen II, which seems like a long time without giving us anything from this franchise. (Though it does mirror the previous gaps in this and other franchises, and is exactly the same gap as the one just discussed between Moana and Moana II.)

They are, however, making a live-action Tangled, news that I greet with both excitement and trepidation. As possibly my favorite non-Pixar Disney movie of all time, at least that's what my Flickchart says, Tangled is both the sort of thing I really want to see in live-action form, to see how they handle it, and don't want to see in live-action form, for fear of how they'll ruin it. However, it does have the benefit of being directed by Michael Gracey, who made sort of wondrous things happen in Better Man a few years ago, so maybe there's some chance for the gravity-defying elements of Tangled to really make it onto the screen here. 

But that movie doesn't even have a release year yet on IMDB. Which means it might be almost 20 years since the 2010 release of the original that they've nurtured that "franchise," if you can even call it a franchise without there ever having been an animated sequel. 

Compared to these two, indeed, three Moanas in ten years feels like a lot.

And I can feel it in my own sluggish response to the possibility of seeing the film. Even the prospect of seeing Dwayne Johnson actually play Maui, rather than just voicing him, doesn't really move the needle for me. 

I should say that almost none of the Disney live-action remakes have really done it for me. If you forced me to try to figure out which one was the most successful, I don't even know that I'd have a ready answer. Maybe Maleficent? Almost all have been various levels of disappointing. 

But at least in the case of the others, I hadn't just had my fill of them with a decade of regular exposure. 

Spoiler subtitles

I had an experience watching a movie on Sunday afternoon that I don't believe I've ever had before. That's right, after nearly 7,300 films, I'm still having new experiences.

The subtitles were not in sync with the dialogue.

That's right, they were coming about six seconds before the actual spoken words they were translating, though strangely, this gap narrowed as the movie was going until it was almost imperceptible. 

The movie was Louis Malle's Murmur of the Heart from 1971. And why was I watching Louis Malle's Murmur of the Heart from 1971, you may ask?

It was June's assignment in Flickchart Friends Favorites Fiesta, a Facebook group of Flickchart users, in which each month we are assigned the highest ranked movie from another person's chart that we haven't yet seen. Murmur of the Heart was someone's #2, which I find a strange choice, but then his #1 is also pretty strange: The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey, which I also had occasion to watch in this group maybe a year ago, and which I did like a fair bit. 

You'd think this guy and I might not be very well suited for one another, but his top ten is a strange mix of movies I've never heard of and movies that are in my own top ten. Examples of the former? Twist and Shout (1984), Young Hearts (2024) and Friends (1971, and what is it with this guy and the year 1971?). Examples of the latter? Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Princess Bride, though Bride is technically just outside my top ten at #11.

In any case, the comparative obscurity of half of his top ten meant I might have had to skip all the way down to his #5, Young Hearts, as a possible viewing for June. If you can't get your hands on the movie you're actually assigned, you just go to the next one that you can find. 

But when I posted in the group that I'd been unable to track down Murmur, he posted a link to a Russian streaming site where I could watch it. 

That sounds extremely dodgy, but I have actually used this site once before, also in this group. It feels like this would be piracy, or at least expose me to malware, but I trust the guidance of others in this group, most of whom are younger than I am, and in any case, the last time it didn't cause me any problems, that I am aware of. (No identity theft since then, at least.)

The Russian stream of Murmur of the Heart did cause me one problem, though, and by now you know it's the subtitle delay -- or rather, the subtitle head start. 

It took me a minute to figure out what was going on. At first I thought there were no subtitles at all, because there were characters speaking words that were receiving no translation. But then I had already seen subtitles, so that was obviously not it. 

I suppose even if I didn't speak a decent amount of French, I would have soon figured out that the subtitles were coming early, but my knowledge of French landed me on that conclusion a lot sooner. I timed it and found it to be about a six-second delay between the two.

At this point I had to decide whether I was going to abandon the movie. I had already determined I could rent Young Hearts on Apple. 

But then I decided, how much chaos could this actually cause? I might as well just keep watching.

The truth is, it did not cause very much chaos. The way a scene proceeded was still largely unaffected by this problem. You'd get a "spoiler" of sorts if there was dialogue in a new scene that hadn't come on the screen yet, but this is not the kind of movie where big things are happening where you don't want even a five-second preview. (There's a big thing that happens at the end, which I won't spoil, but by then this problem had been largely mitigated, which I will explain in a moment.)

The most challenging aspect to it, I suppose, is that you'd get dialogue without actually knowing which character was speaking it, because they hadn't actually opened their mouth yet. By the time they were actually speaking it, there might have been three or four more lines that appeared, and it was difficult to go back and determine who had said what. However, I also found that this did not really matter, and a lot of it could be sorted out in the context of what was being said. I mean, there are certain things that would only be said by a mother and certain things that would only be said by a son. 

I should tell you a bit about what this movie is about. It's a coming-of-age story set in 1954, about the sexual awakening of a 15-year-old (or so) boy, who has an overprotective mother. She was the only actor I was really familiar with, as she's played by Lea Massari, an Italian beauty who was also one of the stars of L'Avventura. (She only just died last year at age 91.)

I should also tell you why the dialogue eventually caught up with the subtitles. 

One of the things that struck me as dodgy about this Russian streaming site was that it would have these little "blips" in the movie. When the first one came, it had all the hallmarks of the movie stopping for a brief ad. Except no ad came. Instead, after about a second, the movie resumed. 

Although I didn't realize it at first, each of these blips was slightly bridging the gap between the subtitles and the dialogue. There might have been one about every ten minutes, and maybe they were actually less than a second each, because it took until nearly the end that the dialogue and subtitles were essentially in sync, with only a mildly perceptible delay of the dialogue after the subtitles. I wondered if the movie had gone on another 30 minutes, whether the subtitles would have actually fallen behind.

After watching the movie, I still think it's a weird choice as someone's #2. I suppose a coming-of-age movie can have quite an impact on a person, depending on when they see it. But I reckon that either you have to be at that age when you see it -- which is why movies like Stand by Me and My Life as a Dog had such an impact on me -- or the movie has to be set during the time period when you were that age. (So, as an example not from the movies, maybe something like Stranger Things, when I was the same age as those characters in the mid-1980s.)

Perhaps one of those two things describes this guy, who I otherwise don't know. The rest of his top ten includes other older coming-of-age stories I've seen but which did not connect with me the way they did with him (like Au Revoir Les Enfants), though then also one from 2024 in Young Hearts. So who knows, really.

One thing I can tell you is that something very shocking, that does not involve violence, happens near the end of the movie, which I can only recall seeing in one other movie -- and which also would make a person have questions about any viewer who ranks this movie as high as this guy does. Then again, the other movie where I've seen this is my #682, meaning it's in the top ten percent of my Flickchart, so maybe I should be cautious about any untoward implications. 

Audient One-Timers: Das Boot

This is the sixth month (but seventh movie) in my 2026 series Audient One-Timers, in which I'm watching the 12 (it turned out to be 13) highest ranked movies on my Flickchart that I'd seen only once. 

Of the six previous movies I'd watched in this series, each was the same version of the movie I'd seen previously.

That streak was broken with Das Boot, my #124 on Flickchart. (Or The Boat, as it was called on Amazon, where I ended up renting it. Way to make a movie sound less interesting than it actually is.)

When I first saw Wolfgang Petersen's 1981 film in April of 2019, I was worried about its notorious length. And then I found that the notorious length was only the director's cut of the movie. The regular cut was only a reasonable two hours and 30 minutes. And given its ranking, obviously I loved it. 

The director's cut adds another hour to that, and the director's cut was the only version I could find today when I wanted to watch it again. 

I don't mean literally today, I mean "today" in the general sense. I actually watched it across Friday and Saturday.

I thought I had started early enough to watch the whole thing on Friday. It was the last day of school before winter holidays, and considering that my job involves communicating with schools, there wasn't a huge amount to do after about 2. Everyone at the schools is just trying to get the hell out of there for two weeks.

So I threw on the movie about 3:30, figuring I could remain at my post for the last hour of my workday and watch the first hour of the movie, even with its subtitles, while keeping one eye on my emails. Then I'd have enough time before dinner to finish watching. 

Well, it didn't quite work out that way. My older son had his first school formal on Friday night, and I needed to deliver him there by 6. That kind of threw me off the pace, and then it was dinner, and then I watched Stranger Things and Pizza Movie as I told you about in a blog post a few days ago. 

I finally finished Das Boot on Saturday afternoon between 4 and 5 o'clock.

The piecemeal way I watched it didn't help, but the real thing that made me like Das Boot less this time -- not a huge amount less, but definitely less -- was the extra hour of material. Which I probably could have predicted, considering that I rarely prefer a director's cut of a movie I already love, and in most cases try not to watch them at all. 

Das Boot's director's cut is particularly problematic, though, in terms of separating it from the original. And to illustrate this, I'll use the example of another director's cut that I actually haven't seen.

The thing I've heard about the director's cut of Apocalypse Now -- one of them, since I guess there are two -- is that there's this long sequence on a plantation. It's 20 minutes of footage that otherwise does not exist in the version we're most familiar with. As such, it's easy to note when you've come across that footage and assess whether it strengthens or weakens the rest of the movie. Perhaps more importantly, it's easier to pull that section out entirely and sort of ignore it in making an assessment about the film on the whole. 

There was no way for me, me personally, to tell what made up the extra hour of footage in Das Boot. The whole movie takes place on a submarine, save three shorter sections, one each at the start, middle and end. And I feel quite certain those three sections are all in the version I saw in 2019. So that meant that the hour's worth of extra material just blended into a general indistinct stew of claustrophobic sub scenes.

Was it extra content in set pieces that were already in the shorter version? Was it new set pieces? Having seen the movie only once, I didn't know, but there being no obvious lines of demarcation, like the plantation scene in Apocalypse Now, made it impossible to tell. 

The effect, though, was quite clear. The whole thing felt like reduced stakes to me. There were any number of scenes where the boat is getting shaken around by depth charges that break lightbulbs, such that the significance of any scene individually was totally lost. It made me wonder why they'd even bothered to shoot different scenes where essentially the same thing happens.

However, watching a director's cut does have a clear benefit: It makes you appreciate the original movie, and particularly that movie's editing, even more. 

Now that I know that these superfluous scenes existed, and that someone deemed them unnecessary to the film most people saw at the time, I have a renewed respect for those decisions made. And sometimes, a renewed skepticism about the director, though that's a minor complaint. 

Indeed, the idea of a director's cut suggests that the director felt hard done by the original cut, and wanted to show his "true vision." That makes sense in a situation like the Apocalypse Now plantation sequence, which is a truly different element in the film. It doesn't make sense with yet another scene of the sub emerging intact after taking another fusillade of depth charges. Rather, it kind of makes you wonder if those people delivering the depth charges on the surface were just really bad at their jobs.

I've spent most of this post throwing mild shade at Das Boot. It's not really deserved. These are still great underlying materials, and I will still look forward to my next viewing of the abbreviated, theatrical version. I just don't need to see this version again. 

And the set pieces that do distinguish themselves -- the opening debauchery at the nightclub that leads to everyone getting sick, the initial tense testing of the submarine's dive capabilities, the middle sequence where they go ashore and are reluctantly feted by other German military, the bailing of the boat and desperate hope to get it surfaced after it gets grounded on the ocean floor, and finally, the gut punch ending -- are all just as good as they ever were. 

Next up in July? Carl Theodor Dreyer's Ordet from 1955. 

My Supergirl dilemma

Supergirl opens this weekend.

Meh.

I have a big dilemma about this movie.

On the one hand, I want -- with every fiber of my being -- to support movies focused on female superheroes. We don't need that corrective as much as we once did, but we still need it. As many female superheroes as there are, it's still comparatively rare that they are front and center in their own movie.

On the other hand, I hated James Gunn's Superman. And even though this movie is not directed by Gunn, it comes from the same universe that Gunn imagined, and it has the same stupid super dog that I hated so much in Superman. 

And how is this conflict going to be resolved?

I don't know yet.

It would be very unlike me to let one of the more prominent releases of the summer season go completely unwatched. I might skip it in theaters, but by the end of the year, I'd want to have seen it in order to rank it with my other movies from the year -- even if I expected not to like it.

But I've become a bit more selective with my viewings in recent years. That's not to say I avoid watching garbage. In fact, I kind of like watching garbage. Instead, I'm more likely to want to deliver a message to a movie by not watching it, even if no one hears that message but me. The most prominent examples are movies that involve potentially positive portrayals of Trump, from The Apprentice (which I still haven't watched) to Melania (which I may watch before the end of the year). 

The question is, is Supergirl, just by association with Superman, worthy of such a message?

I don't know yet. 

One issue I have with it? Milly Alcock, though it's nothing about her personally. (Though I do think the scowl seems a bit exaggerated.) 

No, it's that I feel like they cast a promising actress as Supergirl, Sasha Calle, only three years ago, and they've already chucked her in the bin and replaced her with someone else. I guess I liked 2023's The Flash a lot more than most people, because that was the final gasp of that iteration of the DC Cinematic Universe. Now under Gunn's new regime, it's Alcock, and Alcock comes with an advanced bias from me because I didn't like the way this world was introduced in Superman.

It's not like I didn't have a dilemma regarding Superman as well. That one I also wanted to support for political reasons, because of the flap involving Gunn's likening of Superman to an immigrant. But I just disliked the actual movie too much to actually go there. 

I haven't actually heard anything yet about how this movie has been received, in part because I rarely seek out that sort of information. It usually trickles down to me, but it hasn't yet in this case.

I suppose I want the movie to be good. I mean, I want every movie to be good. If the new DC Universe were salvageable for me, that would be the best possible outcome. There are going to be a lot more of these movies. 

But just from the few images I've seen, there's a lot of Gunn in this movie. A lot of off-earth stuff that just doesn't really work for me, even though I generally like the Guardians of the Galaxy movies. And the funny thing is, I really like one Gunn movie for DC, that being The Suicide Squad. 

So why not Superman? It's too much to get into now. There are too many reasons. It's just bad.

But I may have to give Craig Gillespie the chance to right this ship. Just maybe not in the cinemas, and not on opening weekend, in any case. 

A Gaten Matarazzo sort of evening

We finally started the final season of Stranger Things last night. I know, a long time coming. 

Once we didn't prioritize it as soon as it came out, then we talked about watching it with our younger son, who had belatedly plowed through all the seasons leading up to it. We thought he might demand a more immediate viewing, in case he wanted to talk about it with his friends or something, but my 12-year-old is a pretty patient kid. A lot more patient than I am, anyway. 

But there were various reasons we couldn't start right away, one of which was, it was a mood thing. We had some family stuff earlier this year that sort of killed the mood for something dark involving a lot of death. I guess we're past that enough now that Stranger Things made it onto the docket again.

A reason we didn't prioritize it straight away, though, is that my wife and I are a bit over it. I don't think this is a unique sentiment, at least among people in our age group. The first and the third seasons, in my opinion, were really great. Everything else showed diminishing returns, not to mention far, far longer episodes. It was the latter consideration that really made it seem like such a chore to start. When you're watching a Friday night TV show with your dinner, you don't really want it to go on for 170 minutes. (I don't think there were any ST episodes that were actually that long, but I'm only exaggerating a little bit.)

And yes, I felt a sense of "when is this going to be over" tedium from the first 71-minute episode. The content was still fine, though "Vecna" is starting to feel like a sillier antagonist the longer I live with him. It's just I'm ready for this whole thing to be over, and I still have at least ten hours of content to wade through before that can happen. 

This post is not about Stranger Things. It's about one of Stranger Things' stars, Gaten Matarazzo. 

Who was also in the second thing I watched on Friday night, Pizza Movie.

Just how Stranger Things is now clearly directed at an audience younger than I am -- I mean, it always was, just now it's more clear to me than ever -- I worried that Pizza Movie, which I had heard mildly positive things about, would be intended for young people, who got all the jokes about brain rot that I didn't get.

Nope. Funny is funny. And Pizza Movie is funny as hell.

If you aren't familiar with the premise, it's about two college roommates who are desperate for a pizza that they've ordered. But in order to get it -- only on the ground floor of their dormitory -- they have to survive all six? seven? stages of a drug they consumed that fell out of their ceiling panels in a little mint tin. 

One of them is Matarazzo, of course, but the other is a new discovery for me, a 27-year-old actor by the name of Sean Giambrone. IMDB tells me most people would know him from The Goldbergs (haven't seen it) but also that he's done a lot of voiceover work in animated films, which I can see. There's a joke about how he "sounds like an old man," which is actually true in a way. Anyway, this is the funniest debut I've seen for an actor in some time -- and I don't mean that he's actually new to the movies. But he's debuting for me. He's got terrific comic timing and line deliveries.

There are a lot of great set pieces demonstrating the stages of the drug, and each fully commits. I don't want to give too much away, but there's a part about exploding heads that just goes on and on and becomes funnier as it goes. Add in terrific supporting performances, especially by Jack Wilson as a sadistic RA who leads a gestapo that's cracking down on drugs, and you've really got the complete package in terms of comedy. 

This movie left me on such a giddy high from moment to moment that I was considering giving it the hallowed 4.5 stars on Letterboxd. Cooler heads prevailed and I went with a 4, but the fact that it's rubbing elbows with 4.5-star movies means I'm recommending it in the highest possible terms. 

There were some funny similarities between this and Stranger Things. Because it's Matarazzo, of course there are some similarities between the characters, though season 5 of ST finds his Dustin Henderson in a lot angrier place than the character in Pizza Movie. 

No, the thing I'm really talking about it is that in both, his character has to fend off bullies who have a bone to pick with him for something he's done. 

In ST, it's something having to do with the Hellfire Club and the damage wrought on Hawkins that is blamed on the club -- forgive me if I'm forgetting some of the details, as it's been at least two years since I watched those previous episodes, and even a lengthy recap didn't fully bring it all back. 

In Pizza Movie, it's a poor judgment call that led to some unspecified disaster involving the college football team, though again I'll leave you to watch the movie to have that revealed, because it's pretty funny. As is the whole movie, if I haven't made that sufficiently clear by now. 

Die Hard on a bus ... Fall on a shark

We all know how Speed was originally pitched as "Die Hard on a bus," right?

Whether that moment was real or apocryphal, we know it as a prime example of how movies are pitched to someone who has the chance to greenlight them. This hypothetical pitch hypothetically occurs on an elevator up to the office of the person who's making that decision, so they don't have very much time to receive it before they have to turn their attention to indisputably more important things. So it has to be quick, like 20 seconds or less -- or in some cases, just five words.

The other common way of pitching something, other than "such-and-such popular movie in a different setting," is "such-and-such movie meets such-and-such movie," like "Terms of Endearment meets Mad Mux Fury Road." But we only care about the first one today.

The movie I saw last night? Yeah, it's "Fall on a shark."

If you're having trouble remembering Fall, well that's too bad for its producers, who are relying on your memory of it in order to release Fall 2: Deadpoint in September.

But in case you are, here's its poster:

Which really tells you everything you need to know about this particular movie in one image. Making it like a good elevator pitch in that way. 

What do these two posters have in common?

Well, you can hardly see her in the Fall poster, but you can see her better in Killer Whale. That's Virginia Gardner, the blonde, who is the star of both movies. 

I can tell you the other reasons that Killer Whale is "Fall on a shark," but first I'll have to give a big fat SPOILER WARNING for both films, but perhaps more importantly -- and first, to give you time to avert your eyes -- I'll have to tell you why I'm talking about sharks when the movie is clearly about a whale.

No the movie is not literally about a shark. But it's about the sort of threat traditionally posed by a shark, and in that case, this whale is a "shark," especially in the quick and dirty terms that are required to give this studio executive instant clarity on the project he's about to greenlight and how much money it will make him. (Or her, but usually him.) Besides, you can't use the same word in the title as you use in the pitch. Saying this movie is "Fall on a killer whale" and then calling it Killer Whale is kind of like saying it's "Die Hard on a bus" and then calling it Speed Bus.

Okay so the similarities.

In both movies, two young women in their late 20s/early 30s -- Gardner is currently 31 -- set out on an adventure of sorts that leaves them stranded in a place where they have no food/water, no means of communicating with anyone, and no realistic path to safety. In Fall, they are marooned at the top of a comms tower that looks like it's about two miles off the ground, when some of the rusty infrastructure they used to get there breaks off the tower and falls to the earth. In Killer Whale, they've travelled by jet ski to a remote Thai cove with some little clumps of what could generously be called islands, one of which becomes their home when a killer whale comes through and tries to start mauling them. 

In both movies, they come up with a variety of strategies to try to get off this island, each increasingly more desperate, each doomed to failure in the short run.

In both movies, one of the women is trying to forget a recent tragedy in which their boyfriend was killed. For the character in Fall, it's an opening rock climbing death, which makes it very similar in structure to both the recent Apex and the long-ago Sylvester Stallone vehicle Cliffhanger -- oops, spoilers for Apex and Cliffhanger, but you can see it coming from a mile away. For the character in Killer Whale, it's a robbery attempt that led to her boyfriend being hit by a car going full speed -- yes, another bad trope. (So yes, he survives a struggle with a gunman only to be hit by a car. It's a bit much.)

And in both movies, the friend who isn't going to make it -- because come on, they can't both make it -- is guilty of some sort of transgression against the friend who is going to survive. In Fall, it's having slept with/had a relationship with the boyfriend who died. In Killer Whale, it's having set up the robbery attempt, when they thought no one was supposed to be there. Anyway, they pay for it by becoming whale food or gravity food.

Biggest difference? Gardner plays the bad friend in Fall and the good friend in Killer Whale. What range! I guess she didn't want to be typecast?

Next biggest difference? One movie is pretty good and the other movie is terrible! 

Yes, I was not a Killer Whale fan, but I suspect not many people are -- which doesn't mean it won't be a hit on Netflix, or hasn't already been. I mean, if a sophisticated cinephile like myself prioritizes seeing Killer Whale, just think about all the people with less discerning tastes and how quickly they'll go for it. 

But truly, this is one of the year's worst, and if you want other tropes this movie uses and abuses in terms of its credibility, it's the scene where a character holds her breath underwater for, oh, eight or nine minutes. And when she returns to the surface, it really just takes one big gulp of air to regain her equilibrium. (It might have helped if she was supposed to be some sort of underwater pro, but the things we know about her is that she used to be a concert cellist but that she required hearing aids after the shotgun blast in the robbery attempt.)

I thought Gardner was quite good in Fall, but she's terrible here, which just goes to show you the importance of a good director. I don't know either Fall director Scott Mann nor Killer Whale director Jo-Anne Brechin from a hole in the ground, but from the evidence, it would appear Mann is good at his job and Brechin is not good at hers. 

Last catty comment: The set involving the little island clump the characters are stranded on is more of a set than any set I have ever seen in a movie, ever, even the ones back in the 1920s and 1930s where you knew it was impossible that it was anything other than a set. 

But you know, maybe see Killer Whale if you want a few laughs throughout. Shamu playing the role of a killer is never not funny. (I said the previous one was going to be my last catty comment. Oops.)

Babe: Pigs who are shitty, or words that are pretty?

Why is it that every single movie I see, that's set within the correct time period for this to make sense, includes romantic partners who call each other "Babe?"

"What do you think, Babe?" "It's time to go to dinner, Babe." "Do you know where I left my keys, Babe?"

There are all types of people in the world. I would guess that only a relatively small number of them call each other "Babe."

But it's become so common in modern film that it's almost like screenwriters have universally agreed that they are going to use this crutch and that we shouldn't analyze it too closely. 

On the surface, you'd think it would be a class signifier to some degree. If boyfriends and girlfriends, husbands and wives -- or please, especially within Pride Month, any other combination of gender types within that -- call each other "Babe," it's usually meant to indicate that they are a bit less sophisticated. Of course, this also means that the movie itself usually loves them. Only a person who isn't a genius sounds genuine when professing their love to another character. Nothing saps the romance out of a romantic movie than watching an egghead tell another egghead how they feel about them. 

But lately I've noticed that "Babe" has progressed beyond the guys in wifebeaters and the women in hotpants. It might be that even eggheads are trying it on for size.

And I should pause on that word "wifebeater" there for a moment, which you would likely know refers to a sleeveless white undershirt. A tank top.

There is the idea of domestic violence built into people who wear shirts like that -- probably unfairly -- and I do think there is a mild misogyny when a man calls a woman "Babe." It isn't actually sexist, but it is sort of infantalizing, like it's lengthier form "Baby." Although the term "Baby" goes back to the start of modern courtship and pop music, I have always found there to be something a bit problematic about it.

Of course, you can't be a sexist pig calling someone "Babe" if that person is calling you "Babe" right back, which is what you see most often in movies today. In fact, just to make sure it's not a problem, usually both characters will refer to the other using this term within the very same scene, just so we know it's an even playing field. 

But I rankle at it a bit for two reasons:

1) I myself don't like or use the term. I think if I called my wife "Babe," she'd have reason to be annoyed at me. Of course, it would be a break in my normal pattern, which would raise her eyebrows, but I also think she'd be mildly offended.

2) Not everyone in the world can possibly use this word, but the movies make it seem like they do.

If I'm analyzing why this trend is happening, and why "Babe" has become such a placeholder for any other form of familiarity used in a couple, it's precisely that: it communicates immediately what is intended while essentially disappearing into the woodwork. It is freed from the burdens of specificity.

If you wanted to put on screen as accurate a depiction of a couple as possible, you'd probably go for a word that more uniquely fits the little dualistic vocabulary that exists between these two people.

For example, in my marriage that would be the word "P." My wife and I call each other "P" as a shortening of "Person," though we sometimes use the longer version as well. As in, "You're my person." And then "P" for short.

It's a bit cute and schmaltzy. All these things are. It's probably less revolting than "Shnookums" but more revolting than some other options. 

The thing it isn't? Immediately clear what is meant by it. 

If you made a movie in which two characters called each other "P" in a scene, we'd have questions. We'd be like "What are they saying? P? Did I hear that right?" And then even if we could confirm it, we'd be like "And what does that mean in this context?"

Everyone knows what "Babe" means. It means two characters are in a pretty happy relationship and they have pet names for each other. But if we introduced actual pet names, the kind people really use, you'd be too confused and we'd have to stop and explain it.

So "Babe" it is.

Am I really upset about this?

Of course not, not really. It's fine. There are lots of shortcuts in screenwriting that are more unrealistic and more worth getting upset about, but that we accept because they keep the story moving. Screenwriting is all about efficiency, remember.

And look, there are a lot worse words it could be. "Babe" and "Baby" both show up throughout history in popular music. "Baby" was huge in the 1950s, and by the time Sony and Cher came around, "Babe" had gotten more popular as a potential replacement. 

I'll just have to accept that the percentage of people who actually say it is something less than what the movies and TV tell me it is. 

Pride Month: Stonewall (1996)

I can say with pretty good confidence that this is the first series I've ever done on The Audient, of any length, where two films had the same title. 

What can I say, once I decided I was all in on the Stonewall theme for my four Pride Month viewings in 2026, I was all in.

Nigel Finch's Stonewall from 1996 predates Roland Emmerich's Stonewall from 2015 by 19 years, and that may not be entirely a coincidence, because there are a lot of plot elements in the 2015 version that we first see in the 1996 version. And no, it's not just because they're about the riot outside the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village in June of 1969, which unofficially launched the gay rights movement in the United States, at least in terms of the public conversation. 

For starters, they both feature a central relationship between a new clean-cut kid from the country, just arrived in New York, and a rail-thin young Latino -- or maybe we should say Latina, since both protagonists are drag queens, to the extent that pronouns get discussed. 

Then in both cases, the new kid from the country also has a relationship with a more straight-laced man from the Mattachine Society, where the activism hoped for mainstream acceptance achieved by homosexuals themselves becoming more mainstream -- for example, wearing suits and other sophisticated attire, rather than dressing in drag. 

We know that Finch's film was based on a memoir with the same title by gay activist Martin Duberman. Wikipedia does not attribute any source material to Emmerich's version, so perhaps we can include among the many demerits for that version that it's a light theft of Finch's material. 

The reason I wanted to watch another fictionalized Stonewall story that was underpinned by real events was that I heard this one was supposed to be a musical. I thought that sounded really fun and like a really spirited way to leave off my Pride Month viewings in 2026. 

Well, it turns out that wasn't quite right. There are "musical sequences" in this film, but they mostly involve drag queens lip-synching songs from the 1950s that might have appeared on a jukebox in 1969, sung originally by women. These sequences are entertaining, but they aren't even full numbers, usually about 30 seconds of material apiece. Then there is also a protest song or two sung by folky guitarist Matty Dean (Frederick Weller), the fresh-off-the-bus transplant to Greenwich Village, who differs from his counterpart in Emmerich's version because he's a lot stronger with a lot more agency. 

So no, it wasn't the full musical I was expecting. But was it worth watching? Most definitely yes.

Which would be no guarantee from the chintzy promotional materials you see above. Even for 30 years ago, that poster art is really cheap. And I wouldn't be surprised it would have made no one want to see this movie. 

But would you believe I could actually identify more actors from this movie than from Emmerich's better budgeted version? Weller is someone I know but whose name I didn't know. More easily recongizable to me was the lead, who goes by La Miranda, and who is played by Guillermo Diaz -- who I thought was a regular collaborator of Spike Lee's, until I looked up his filmography and realized he hasn't appeared in a single Lee film. Well, I recognize him anyway. John Doman and Bruce McVattie also appear here, but the most easily identifiable in all the cast, though in a small role that couldn't get predict his future stardom, was Luis Guzman.

The big advantage this version has over Emmerich's is its sense of honesty. The polish someone like Emmerich can bring to a film is clearly a substitute for truth. You just believe these characters more. You believe the things they're saying and the things they're doing. Now, you may remember I was more positively inclined toward Emmerich's movie than most people, though still not positive on it overall, but it's clear to me how much it suffers in terms of the depictions of its characters. This depiction always feels charitable toward them, while the movie that you'd think should be more 20 years more enlightened is considerably more tone deaf overall.

I don't want to make this whole post a comparison of these two movies, but I do want to give one more. Both essentially have to fill a movie's worth of material prior to the riots, because those were a fairly self-contained event, even if they spread out over a few additional nights after the original riot. Finch's version seems to be even a bit more character focused than it's interested in laying the precise historical groundwork for the riots, which would understandably interest Emmerich's version more because of its larger budget and larger sense of historical importance. Finch's Stonewall feels more important overall precisely because it doesn't think of itself as important. It thinks of itself as an eccentric little Stonewall movie with true-to-life characters, some of whom serve as a Greek chorus while lip-synching 50s pop. 

I was disappointed by this version in one small way: Marsha P. Johnson does not make an actual appearance. The titular character in my first film, The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson, showed up almost immediately in Emmerich's version, and I'm quite sure could be seen in the footage of last week's Before Stonewall. Here, I thought for sure one of the characters was her, but the character is then introduced as Princess Ernestine. Oh well.

That concludes another Pride Month on The Audient. And I do want to remind myself as I leave: I don't have to wait for Pride Month to come around to watch these movies and further educate myself on the LGBTQI+ experience. Of course I do come across these films during my ordinary viewing, but usually only for new year releases. I should fit in the older ones whenever I can. 

The Buster Brown horror movie you didn't know you needed

I sometimes call my younger son "Buster Brown," as a synonym for "buddy" or "sport" or "champ." As in "Okay Buster Brown, it's time for bed."

This week he asked me what it means, and I didn't actually know. Though the history is consistent with how I use it. I'll just regurgitate what AI has to say about it:

"Buster Brown is a classic American comic strip character created in 1902 by Richard F. Outcault. Known for his wealthy background, bowl haircut and mischievous antics, the character and his dog Tige famously became the long-running mascot for the Brown Shoe Company."

Given that I didn't know this history, why, you might ask, is it a phrase I use?

AI again:

"'Buster Brown' is a piece of American slang used as a playful nickname or mildly condescending form of address (similar to "Chief" or "Pal")."

Ha, that's two synonyms I didn't include in my opening sentence of this post.

Continuing:

"It is often used casually to get someone's attention, sometimes with a teasing edge."

Okay it all checks out. I inherited it from my own elders I'm sure, because I sure as hell wasn't around in 1902. (Even my grandparents weren't around for a couple years yet in 1902.)

Why am I writing about this on a movie blog?

Well I thought the images of Buster Brown that came up when I googled were really interesting, and in one case, really eerie. 

Like the kind you'd find in a horror movie.

Most are pretty innocuous. In the one I've included above, the dog looks pretty demented, but the kid just looks cheeky. Though I have to say, there's something unnatural about how he has one eye completely open and the other completely closed. The closure of the second eye should cause at least a partial sympathetic reaction from the first eye. But I'm not going to get stuck on that. For the most part this is innocent.

This one is even more innocent:

But then I got to one that has entered my nightmares and never left:

I think you need to see a close-up of the serial killer in this artwork:

How about even bigger?

It's like the Babadook or something, am I right?

I'll go start writing the script. 

I'm not sure if I know what Jack O'Connell looks like

Jack O'Connell has been part of our movies for more than 20 years. Including some prominent ones, such as last year's presumed runner up for best picture.

But do I know what he looks like? Not really.

Don't worry, this is a compliment.

When I've thought of cinematic chameleons in the past, Vincent D'Onofrio was always the name I've come up with most. He quite simply did not look the same in any two films. Now, the longer your career goes on, the more this falls away. I have no trouble identifying D'Onofrio now, even on the rare occasions he does still go outside the more familiar default mode of an actor in his 60s. 

O'Connell? I still have trouble identifying him. And he might really be the new D'Onofrio.

The examples go way back, but let's first look at his two big roles from the past two years.

Here's how he looks in 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, which I watched on Saturday night:

And here's how he looks in Sinners a year before that:

Same guy? I don't know, maybe?

Back to Black the year before that? Same guy? Could be. Might not be.

Now how about Money Monster back in 2016:

Okay the last two look a little more alike. 

I could give you an image of him from Starred Up in 2013, when I first became aware of him, but I'm not sure whether it helps prove my point or starts to detract from it.

I'm not sure, Vance. Three pictures that look pretty much the same and then one where it's the same guy with a blonde wig.

So maybe this chameleon quality is something more intangible. Like I feel like I never know where Jack O'Connell is going to show up. So when he does show up, I'm never sure it's him. Plus he's rarely if ever billed as one of the reasons to see a movie, remaining in the realm of a character actor rather than making the sort of cash-grab romcom his looks could probably get him. 

So maybe it's just a me thing. But one fact is clear: O'Connell is doing interesting things on our screens, and his work in The Bone Temple -- the focus of the movie rather than just a cameo in the previous one -- is further confirmation of that.

The movie overall? I feel like I ended up liking it about the same as the previous one. I think I felt more inclined to nitpick 28 Years Later than I am to nitpick The Bone Temple, but I also think 28 Years Later has higher highs. Whatever the case may be, I definitely felt primed for the final movie in this new trilogy when I reached the end of The Bone Temple, which is not something I would have taken for granted coming in. 

Resonant themes, boring movie

We got our upstairs carpet professionally cleaned last week. This is exactly the sort of thing I would never do. I might live in a house for 25 years, and probably only in the 25th year, when I was trying to sell it, would I order a professional carpet cleaning. But this is why I have a wife, who knows about the appropriateness of doing it more often than that.

The reason I wouldn't have done it is now clear to me. It required moving everything out of my wife's office space, our bedroom and my younger son's bedroom, and down into the basement. It almost felt like we were moving house, that's how big of a production it was. This area also contains bookshelves with more than 500 books, so we went up and down the stairs with armloads of those as well. (The timing was that we were getting a new bed, finally replacing the one we've used ever since we moved here in 2013.)

But it wasn't just for logistical reasons I was wary about the task. It was for sentimental ones. 

A child's bedroom, undisturbed for four-and-a-half years since we moved here, is like a museum to the history of all his former taste in toys. It shows everything he acquired from the ages of 8 to 12, plus quite a lot of stuff he had before that. They're either still actually on display, or squirreled away in cabinets and drawers that are easily accessible at a moment's notice. 

A child's bedroom disturbed by a carpet cleaning? Well, it forces that child to choose what's returning to that bedroom and what's going into storage (scary!) or being given away (even more scary!).  

And my wife had my son make these decisions this week. 

I'm glad to say that he takes after his old man in terms of sentimentality. When separating the wheat from the chaff, the chaff pile included clearly random bits of plastic detritus that had basically no attachment for him. (Or for me, I should note.) The stuff he kept was the stuff I would have kept, which is to say, most of it. 

That's a win. But it doesn't mean my son is actually playing with any of this stuff, not halfway through his 12th year. Nor should he be. I might have still been playing with toys, only just, at age 12, but it surely would have been nearing the end, and that was back in the 1980s.

Today, screens take care of toys a lot earlier than that, and a few days later that that, Saturday, was a reminder of that. Not of toys vs. screens, but of the dominance of screens in general. 

My wife and I went to an afternoon BBQ to celebrate the winter solstice here in Australia. It's held annually at a vineyard about 90 minutes from here that's in the family of one of my wife's friends. Naturally they have a lovely selection of wine, though my wife's friend's brother also distills gin so there was that too. On the food side, they roast a whole goat on the spit -- actually two of them, back to back. It's scrumptious. 

We used to take our kids to this, but none of the other friends' kids come anymore, so this year we didn't. When we got back, it was clear that my younger son had just been on screens all day, and why wouldn't he have been? At least then I transitioned him to watching a movie. We watched Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 2. 

You might be wondering where I'm going with this long preamble, except you've seen the poster I've attached to this post, not to mention the title I've chosen, so you've figured it out. 

Basically I wanted to set the scene for how resonant the themes of Toy Story 5 are with me, particularly at this moment generally, particularly this week specifically. And yet I still thought it was pretty boring and an increasingly redundant entry into this series that has now been going on for 31 years. 

What I said in my Toy Story 5 review, which will post on Monday so check back, was that the reason, beyond financial incentives, for doing a Toy Story 5 was that devices had not yet played their logical role of antagonist to the toys in a Toy Story movie. I thought Toy Story 4 in 2019 might have been a better time to do that, making this one feel late to the party, but obviously, given my firsthand experience with screen use in my own family, I felt it was a topic worth exploring. 

And so I thought it was strange to watch Toy Story 5 and feel mild annoyance at how obvious the choices were and how much everything felt like a rehash from something earlier in the series. Here's another line from my review: "Is it really possible that 31 years later, the most compelling material they can come up with for a new Toy Story movie is the toys worrying, once again, about their kids ditching them?"

The film shifts to Jessie as the protagonist -- a welcome move away from Woody and Buzz, who really do feel shoehorned in -- but in a way that just makes this issue more acute. Toy Story 2, 27 years ago, was already Jessie's big reckoning with her abandonment issues over Emily leaving her at the side of the road in a donation box. This movie goes back into the same territory and even revisits material from that movie. It's kind of how I felt when I watched Creed 2, which still devoted a significant portion of its thematic heft to reckoning over the death of Apollo Creed. I was like "Didn't we already do this in the first one?"

I don't want to rehash all my points from the review. You'll have a chance to read it soon, possibly even now depending on when you're reading this. But I'll just say that I also have positive things to say about Toy Story 5 and that I've given it the marginally positive three-star rating. There's material involving a lost shipping container of Buzz Lightyear toys that I thought was pretty exciting and inventive. 

But it's a problem that I was clearly primed for a movie about toys being sunsetted by technology -- so primed that I've written more than 600 words about it before I even started discussing the movie -- and yet I still found it a bit tedious. It's still an easy call to describe the Toy Story franchise as Pixar's best, especially since there's only one other that even has more than two movies. But they chipped away at the overall effectiveness of the franchise with Toy Story 4, and they've done even more of that here. 

And when I did get to the theater to see it, part of a 1-2 Pixar punch with Hoppers within 24 hours across Thursday and Friday, it was not with my younger son. 

Too bad, maybe he could have benefitted from its conclusions. 

Pixar proxy

I had hoped to see Toy Story 5 last night on its opening night here in Australia. That shouldn't be confused for an excessive amount of enthusiasm for the movie. Really, I just need to see a movie on Thursday night if I want to have any hope of posting a review before the weekend. If I miss that window, I'll post it on Monday or Tuesday, but it's not as good an option.

The vibes were a bit off in my house, though. My older son might be having an issue with gluten and we're all a bit worried about it/him. "Hey, I want to go see a movie!" didn't seem like the right play.

So I scratched the Pixar itch with Hoppers, which is also just available to me in the past few days, having debuted on Disney+. (And I'm not totally sure that's the perfect usage of the word "proxy," but you can't beat the alliteration.)

Hoppers seemed to me to be emblematic of post-Pixar. And by that I'm speaking personally. It's post me caring about Pixar, at least potentially. It's post my kids caring about Pixar, definitely, although my younger son did see this with his aunt earlier this year, though I'm sure he would have skipped it if he weren't trying to do something nice for his aunt. 

The basis for this judgment?

I guess because it involves primarily animals? That had something to do with it. Movies where animals communicate with each other don't seem as sophisticated as I want. I didn't care for The Wild Robot, even though others did, and I'm still processing what this means for my interest in animation on the whole.

Also for a long time I thought Hoppers was an Easter movie. It came out a few weeks before Easter, and the title made me think of what rabbits to, which is hop. (There's also an actual Easter movie called Hop.) Having seen the movie, I couldn't tell you if there is actually a single rabbit in Hoppers, so obviously I got that one wrong. However, even if I had been right, I'm not sure why being an Easter movie would lower Hoppers in my estimation, but it did.

I never saw a trailer for the movie, which I think might have excited me for it and might have gotten me over some of my Wild Robot worries, though it's hard to say. If I were to watch that trailer now, I'd have a whole different impression of what it portended for me, because I've already seen the movie, so the viewing itself was my first impression of the movie and I can't go back and have a different one. 

Well, you might have figured out what I'm leading up to: I kind of loved this movie.

The poster you see above is a pretty mid encapsulation of what this movie has in store. Set against a blank yellow "studio" background, it gives an impression of shenanigans that are very character-based, possibly very silly, which would be the style for movies aimed at an even younger audience -- like a Minions movie. (Yes, there's another one of those coming out soon too.) 

But this is a lush, verdant film with scenes of a glade that are so beautiful you want to eat them. While some animation studios seem to reach a certain level of sophistication and then level out, Pixar continues pushing its capabilities so that each new film feels like a step forward, and Hoppers is one of the best examples of that I've seen. 

What's more, that animation style is a bit weird, and that is most assuredly a compliment. In a way that sometimes reminded me of how Turning Red tried to push the house style in the direction of anime, this too has a kooky perspective in which animals are made to look less "realistic" in certain moments and more expressionistic, like something you might see in an old Road Runner cartoon. 

That decision totally works with the humor, which is also a bit weird. Some of the line deliveries here made me laugh out loud, which is not something I remember doing in a Pixar film for half a decade or longer. These animals, and indeed some human characters as well (the plot is Avatar, even though the movie itself funnily decries that it's not Avatar), have slightly oddball personalities, ones that a screenwriter (or screenwriters) had to specifically conceive in a manner that was outside the path of least resistance. There is thought put into these characters, even ones who have relatively small roles.

One of the best examples of this was the lizard voiced by Tom Law. I don't remember this lizard doing much more than chiming in as a fifth voice in any scene, but every time he did it made me laugh. There's this one scene I will take with me that occurs in a car, where the beavers and other animals are trying to communicate with a human by using emojis on a phone and text-to-type. The lizard says, in a sort of formal and proud voice, "I too have something to say," and then jumps down and starts mashing lizard emojis on the phone.

Maybe you have to see it to get it. And you definitely, definitely should.