Audient One-Timers: Sunset Boulevard

This is the penultimate in my 2026 monthly series watching the 12 highest ranked films on my Flickchart that I had seen only once.

If I had watched Sunset Boulevard for the first time in my Art of the Film days -- that was the class I took my senior year in high school, my launching pad for becoming a cinephile -- I would have already seen it multiple times.

Instead, my first viewing was in September of 2012. So the second one is only just coming along now.

I can't say exactly why I didn't prioritize my #89 on Flickchart before then, though I have some ideas. And those ideas were not disabused by this second viewing.

Simply put, from the images I'd seen of Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond, I just thought she was too much. 

It may never have been a thought I'd consciously articulated to myself, but the classic expression you think of Swanson giving as Desmond -- you know the one -- just struck me as outsized. This unarticulated thought led to a mild aversion about seeing the movie, an unspoken assumption that the movie was overrated. Even for a woman who had gone over the edge, and at this point was guilty of murder (er, spoiler alert), Swanson wasn't modulating her reactions correctly, I didn't think. 

Now, an argument could be made -- and probably has been made, given the history of scholarly attention to Billy Wilder's film -- that Desmond the woman has been subsumed by her silent film screen persona, and that persona was heavily dependent on big reactions. Subtlety was not a thing that played well in the silent era. 

But I was never sure how emotionally true it struck me that when this woman is reacting to challenges and sadnesses in her own real life, she's playing them to the back row. I'd have preferred to see a distinction between the two modes. 

To be clear, I don't think Swanson gives a bad performance here. I think a lot of the time it works, especially since what Wilder is going for is a bit heightened, a bit consciously like a noir. After all, the movie is narrated by a dead man, which from the very start means we are meant to take what we're seeing with a grain of salt. 

Still, as I watch Swanson, it is all too easy to imagine the parody version of her that Kristen Wiig either would do or has actually done. And I still felt that way on this viewing.

Why, then, did the movie still manage to get five stars from me and end up in my top 100 on Flickchart?

It's a banger, for sure. But I probably awarded it extra points when I first saw it to recognize the disparity in quality between what I was worried it might be and what it actually was. I felt this disparity even with the mild reservations about Swanson's performance that I have now spent the last eight paragraphs discussing. Better get off that topic or else "mild" will start seeming like "major."

The next thing that surprised me about my second Sunset Boulevard viewing was how much of the plot I'd forgotten. If you'd asked me what happens between the first time we see Joe Gillis (William Holden) floating in Norma's pool and the next time, I probably would have said "Buster Keaton and some other old Hollywood greats play cards. Norma becomes increasingly unhinged." Would I have even been able to tell you that Joe is getting into a romantic entanglement with his friend's fiancee, who is also an aspiring screenwriter? Would I have been able to tell you that this made Norma jealous, because her interest in Joe had developed, or maybe always had, a romantic dimension? Would I have been able to tell you that Joe is actually living with her for most of the movie? I don't think I would have.

In fact it struck me as interesting that the last movie I rewatched, for my Remembering Rob Reiner series, was Misery. The dynamic between Norma Desmond and Joe Gillis is not unlike the dynamic between Annie Wilkes and Paul Sheldon. Both of the crazy women are holding these writers they admire hostage, though in the case of Norma and Joe, the captivity is more something he opts into and then doesn't feel he can escape. He comes and goes as he pleases -- which becomes a point of contention when he starts doing it secretly at night -- but he has to return, either because he's come to rely on Norma's creature comforts, or because he's worried she'll try to harm herself again, or just because he's hiding out from creditors. 

I was just as engaged in the action this time around, especially because it had the feel of something I was watching for the first time. To be sure, nothing that truly surprised me happens in the film, the kind of thing that led me to wonder if I'd slept through a significant portion back in 2012. It had an air of familiarity. But otherwise I was encountering it anew and appreciating the developing complications between characters, and the satire of the needs of Hollywood types that was just as true back in the relative infancy of Hollywood as it is now. 

And generally I was really appreciating the compositions of the shots. Wilder has some really good shots that make use of the foregrounds and backgrounds, and their interplay within the mise en scene. In fact there were a couple shots where I was wondering if they were a split diopter shot, and that technique does date all the way back to 1936, 14 years before Sunset Boulevard. Google tells me these memorable shots were achieved in camera through the true deep focus used by DP John F. Seitz. 

I wish I had more to give you in terms of true analysis of the film's themes, other interesting takeaways, etc. I did want to say that this confirmed for me my affection for William Holden, and I really enjoyed, and had forgotten, director Erich von Stroheim in the role of Norma's butler/manservant, whose actual relationship to her goes much deeper than that -- and reflects a true sort of derangement by both him and her. 

Like most movies that make it this high in my Flickchart rankings on a single viewing, Sunset Boulevard could probably stand to drop a bit on my chart -- out of the top 100 for sure. But it's still so much better than I initially assumed it would be from that demented look in Gloria Swanson's eyes as she descends the staircase in her home and does that slithering thing with her hands, like some kind of enchantress. 

I'll wrap up this series in December with the Romanian abortion drama 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, my #78 on Flickchart, a true one-timer in the sense of its subject matter. That's assuming I can find it, something I have never consciously tried to do since it was my #2 movie of 2008. 

The world's funniest Transformers ad

I've gotten some good grist for this blog just by zoning out on the couch after something I'd finished watching, and letting the Netflix screen saver rotate through a bunch of potential viewing options on the endless loop it does before the TV eventually goes to sleep.

But nothing I've seen on Netflix made me laugh as hard as what I saw on Disney+ on Friday night.

It was the same scenario, lounging after the completion of a program, which in this case was a viewing with my wife of Only Murders in the Building. Murders plays on Disney+ here in Australia through its relationship with Hulu.

I noticed an ad for Transformers come on -- I mean, not really an ad, but 45 seconds worth of footage that was meant to entice you and possibly get you to push play. At first I was kind of looking through it -- I mean, who needs to watch an ad for a movie you've already seen that's 19 years old and was never very good to begin with? But in the 23% of my attention I was giving to it, I got the sense that it was really anodyne, especially for what it was advertising.

As I said, I wasn't fully engaged with what I was watching the first time. So I waited for it to come around a second time, and below is what I saw. It's only 45 seconds long, so you can afford to watch it yourself.

Now I didn't have the sound on. That might have changed my impression of how funny this ad was. Maybe the dialogue was really rich with intrigue in a way the images so clearly aren't.

But if you are going only off the images -- and images are king when it comes to the movies -- then this ad for Transformers shows exactly two things, each more boring than the next:

1) Shia LaBeouf having a conversation with Peter Jacobson in a classroom;

2) Shia LaBeouf getting into a car with Kevin Dunn.

And not even a transforming car.

Simply put:

HOW the HELL do you have an ad for Transformers that does not feature ANY TRANSFORMERS?

And if you are going to make the curious decision not to show any Transformers in your Transformers ad, how the hell do you at least not try to entice people with a shot of Megan Fox? 

Flabbergasting, and hilarious. 

A deep dive into the depravity

Any time you watch two movies in a row, and they are both about child sexual predators, it warrants an explanation. 

On Monday, the day between the weekend and the public holiday for Melbourne Cup Day (a holiday based around a horse race), I left work a few minutes early so I could catch a 4:40 showing of Lance Oppenheim's Primetime, about To Catch a Predator host Chris Hansen (Robert Pattinson) and his show. 

And I liked it. I really liked it. If you want to see how much, my review is here. (I actually could have gone one higher on my rating. I can't tell what stops me from doing that on certain occasions. Maybe I'm still feeling that I went one too high on The Social Reckoning and this is my way of evening things out.)

I went into Primetime knowing it wasn't the first movie about Hansen and To Catch a Predator. In fact, it wasn't even the first one within the past year. 

The first movie was last year's documentary Predators, directed by David Osit, which I did not fit into my 2025 rankings for a number of reasons, not the least of which was that I was already ranking two other movies with the word "predator" in the title -- both from the actual Predator series -- and I didn't want things to get any more confusing than they already were. (Predators is also the name of a movie in the actual Predator series, but it didn't come out in 2025.) 

The other reason? Yeah, who wants to watch a movie about pedophiles, even if they get what's coming to them? In fact, maybe especially if they get what's coming to them, but more on that in a minute.

But now that I had seen and wanted to write a comprehensive review of Primetime, I thought I simply had to have the complete perspective on the truth vs. the fiction of this story by watching its nonfiction counterpart. And because of the holiday on Tuesday, I wouldn't be posting my review until Wednesday, so I had time to do it. (I don't post reviews on weekends or holidays for reasons of general wisdom related to user traffic and the like.) 

The thing is, I didn't really want to watch it that night. It was still a bummer of a topic and figured to be even more so when we saw the real people on screen, rather than actors playing those people. Besides, the night before a holiday is like a weekend night. You're supposed to watch something fun. You're supposed to shut your brain off. 

But when I got home and told my wife what I'd watched, she regretted that I hadn't included her in the viewing. Not in the way she sometimes does, where she assumes I should have known and gives me a little bit of a guilt trip, but just in that way of a missed opportunity. 

So I asked if she wanted to watch Predators.

She did.

I asked if she wanted to watch it that night.

She did.

So we did.

And Predators was even better than Primetime. Like, a whole star rating better. And I gave Primetime an already very good four stars. 

Better, and sadder. 

See, these two movies do two things primarily:

1) Reveal Hansen as a bit of a creep. A creep who thinks he means well, I'm sure. A creep who thinks he's doing God's work. I mean, that's what the MAGA people also think when they shriek extra loudly about releasing the Epstein Files. And though Pattinson's performance is possibly to an extreme -- I described him in my review as a man collapsing from within from his own depravity -- the main reason that's not the Hansen we get in Predators is because he always knows he's in front of the camera. 

2) Reveal these sexual predators as sad, broken human beings. "Hurt people hurt people," as they say. 

I was prepared for the first. I was not so prepared for the second. 

The first scene in Primetime involves a child molester, or at least a prospective child molester, played by Tony Revolori, one of two former child actors (with Jonathan Lipnicki) who play the grown predators in this movie. (Of course there are others, but these were the only two I recognized as former child actors.) When he arrives, we know he's not the sort of monster we imagine in this scenario -- he's nervous and uncertain. And when Hansen descends the stairs to confront him, he stammers and pleads, just a ruined man who doesn't want his life to be blown up. But he knows it already is.

And how do we really know this? The line that struck me most in this -- and I think it might have been a creation of this script -- is when Hansen asks him what he thinks he deserves, or what he thinks will happen to him. He answers "The electric chair? Am I going to get the electric chair?" 

This is a man who hasn't, as far as we know, even done anything yet. He's just pedo-curious. And yet he thinks what he's done is enough for the government to end his life. 

Not everyone we see here is as pitiful as this. Some merely go into fight or flight, protecting their identities belatedly by pulling down baseball caps or pulling shirts up over their faces. I guess they don't realize how cameras work and that the damage has already been done.

But Oppenheim purposefully portrays most of the others we see as scared, confused, alarmed that they've actually found themselves on the precipice of committing this ultimate taboo, the sort of taboo that no part of society thinks is okay. One man is even physically handicapped, bringing a literal dimension to his mental deficiency, and making him seem all the sadder.

But that's nothing compared to Predators. 

We get the real men in Predators, and we also get men caught in copycat stings. These internet vigilante justice versions of Hansen have the same impact on the men they catch in terms of reducing them to puddles of crying shame, so much so that one particular host of one of these shows even seems to regret his own choices. He needs to call the authorities not to arrest this man, but because he fears this wretched soul needs to go on suicide watch.

And the thing is, if you are unveiled to the whole world as a pedophile, wouldn't you want to commit suicide?

Perhaps the most painful part of Predators involves an 18-year-old man who had to register as a sex offender for having a relationship with a 15-year-old girl -- an age gap that is legal in some states, just not his state. The scene of them interviewing his mother is interrupted by what I feel was a totally unpremeditated bout of this young man weeping uncontrollably in a neighboring room. I'm not even sure if he knew the documentary crew was there, though he probably did. He just couldn't control how sorrowful he was over what had become of his life, from a thing that isn't even illegal everywhere.

Did I say that was the most painful? No, the most painful part is when the director, David Osit, answers a question put to him by one of his interview subjects -- a credentialed expert, not a sex offender -- about why he wanted to make this movie. And Osit reveals, again I think without premeditation, that he was the victim of sexual abuse by an adult when he was younger.

And you know what? Even knowing what we know about this man, and that his final interview subject -- Chris Hansen himself -- was fighting for people like him, Osit still has a hard time containing his feelings of sorrow over how To Catch a Predator got down into the muck and ruined the lives of real, sad humans, who themselves may have been victims as children. He even essentially asks Hansen to answer for himself, which Hansen does -- mostly still with a certainty that he was in the right, but clearly somewhat chastened as well.

I realized that the title Predators is a lot like the title Bicycle Thieves, which, while not the title I prefer for that particular masterpiece, does do something profound: It reminds us that not only is the hero of that movie seeking out the thief of his bicycle, but he himself becomes a bicycle thief before the story is over. 

Predators? It's not only the men who tried to molest young boys and girls. It's the man who tried to catch them. 

The reflected glow of Robyn

I came into Voicemails for Isabelle on a high note, and left on a similar note -- though dimmed slightly from the knowledge that all the parts in the middle were pretty mediocre. 

So what, you ask, allowed me to start and finish at a peak position of the movie's overall quality?

A little song called "Dancing On My Own" by Robyn.

If you don't know "Dancing On My Own," well -- I actually can't even entertain that as a possibility.

Few songs released in the last 20 years have ascended to unanimous banger status like "Dancing On My Own." When I discovered the song and put it on my annual mix in 2012, just two years after it was released, I was ahead of the curve, part of a small community of people who knew there was nothing better than this at getting your body moving. But it also had that secret ingredient that helps a song become great, which is that the lyrics were perfect to sing along with, as loud as you could manage without attracting attention, because they were poignant as fuck. Everyone can imagine themselves on a dance floor while watching someone they love kissing someone else across that floor. It's even happened to many of us, including me. 

It was maybe about five years ago that I started noticing it everywhere. The moment I felt it really crossed over was when Boston Red Sox players began singing it at the top of their lungs during their 2021 playoff run, which made it three series deep though short of the World Series. I mean, that was my own moment, though it surely wasn't that moment for people who weren't following the Red Sox. But others were having similar moments around that time, related to whatever thing they cared about. I never suspected that this song I loved, more likely to be a gay anthem than one chanted by macho athletes, would arrive like this. It was now not only among my favorites, but among everyone else's too.

Five years later, Voicemails for Isabelle has adopted it -- late to the party, but still seeking some of the reflected glow.

And you know what? Because the song is so great, it works.

In the world of this movie, it's the anthem the main character, Jill (Zoey Deutch), shares with her cancer-stricken sister, the titular Isabelle (Ciara Bravo). It factors heavily into a pre-credits montage of them at younger ages, when different actors play them, before no actor plays Isabelle at all, since she passes from the disease. (Not a spoiler, it's in any synopsis of the movie.)

I tell you, I was primed for something great at this point, something a lot more than a guilty pleasure. Thanks, song.

Screenwriting 101 requires a good callback, so of course, "Dancing On My Own" gets a place of prominence at the end as well. Don't need to spoil the circumstances of that one, because the movie is worth seeing, only just.

The reason it's only just worth seeing rather than just not worth seeing?

You guessed it: "Dancing On My Own" by Robyn.

It's a pretty cheap, and possibly desperate, trick to hang the feels of your movie on a great song. Though to be fair, that requires a sequence of events around this movie that probably doesn't exist. I'm sure the good people at Netflix did not look at Voicemails for Isabelle and say "It's not going to make it on its own, but write 'Dancing On My Own' into it and you've got a hit." But whoever did decide to include it, they knew how much work it would be doing, whether the movie needed it or not. 

Some people look down their noses at needle drops, feeling like they tell us how to feel too much. Me, I love them, if they're used well -- which, granted, is a big if. 

This isn't exactly a needle drop, as it's diegetic music -- music that actually exists for the characters in their real world -- rather than music in the soundtrack that just tells you how to feel. However, "Dancing On My Own" is certainly doing the same kind of work. 

So is this a cheat?

It's a good question. I sometimes ask myself why a movie gets to choose to associate itself with some undeniably great thing from another medium. Like, how did someone decide that Julie Taymor's 2007 film Across the Universe would get to be a jukebox musical comprised of Beatles songs? Wouldn't anyone who had the chance to do that want to make a movie with that sort of reflected glow?

On the other hand, what are you supposed to do, put bad songs in your movie? That's not a great idea. If you have the cash to pay for the rights, there's a certain skill in finding a song that will not only be just perfect for the mood you're going for, but also something that's already beloved in the culture.

But the trick is, not too beloved, right? If your usage of this song just makes us roll our eyes, you've lost. Great songs do wear out from overuse. If anyone ever makes another Vietnam War movie, they just can't use Buffalo Springfield's "For What It's Worth." They just can't. It's still a great song, but it's worn out now. 

How in danger of happening is this for "Dancing On My Own"?

No danger yet, but it has the potential to get there. When I googled what movies this appears in, AI gave five movies, all since 2018, including Voicemails for Isabelle. There are two others I'm aware of, Babygirl and Spoiler Alert, that I haven't seen yet, and one I have seen, Long Shot. The last is a movie I've never heard of, Teen Spirit. But then AI, in an italicized message below the results, tells me that other discussion communities have mentioned it appearing in the films Rosaline and Deep Water, both from 2022, the latter of which I also saw. Apparently these results are unverifiable, hence the parenthetical mention, or maybe just incorrect altogether, but AI is too polite to say so. 

The funny thing this is that I am actually aware of another movie that AI isn't. The first time I remember seeing it was in one of two movies I saw in 2021 called Swan Song, in which Udo Kier's character dances to it in a club with a lampshade on his head -- an image that sounds funny, but again, because of the song itself and because of what's going on in the narrative, it's poignant as hell. That was a movie I already really liked, and Robyn may have pushed it up to where it finished the year: #20 out of all the movies I saw that year. Incidentally, this is one of the two documented uses -- or at least, documented by me -- where it functions in the gay anthem capacity I mentioned earlier, the other being, I assume, Spoiler Alert, in which the characters are gay. 

Robyn's song is so great that I don't know if it will ever wear out, for me. I'll always want to get up to dance and shout lyrics that remind me of the time some girl on the dance floor was kissing another guy and broke my heart. 

But if it starts showing up in every other movie, then indeed, we will have lost something, collectively. 

So Voicemails from Isabelle got in there while the getting was still good, and more power to it, I guess. Unfortunately, it's pretty unexceptional outside of this exceptional song. 

Sex and death at Camp Crystal La -- er, Camp Miasma

I somehow managed to watch and write about 11 Friday the 13th movies in the month of October without once acknowledging that there was also a 2026 TV series using this IP: Crystal Lake, starring Linda Cardellini. Needless to say, I had too many of the movies to watch to try to catch this as well.

But Friday the 13th was definitely in the air this year, and on Halloween night, my wife and I watched the other piece of 2026 popular culture that was most in conversation with the series: Jane Schoenbrun's Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma.

You may recall -- though you'd have to have a stupid amount of memory reserved for me and my blog -- that I tried to watch this in the cinema during MIFF. It was going to be the first half of a double feature with my regularly scheduled MIFF movie, Rose of Nevada, but I arrived at the theater to find it unexpectedly sold out. So I pivoted to another MIFF movie that was about to start, Joybubbles, which was way better than Rose of Nevada. 

I'm glad it worked out that way, not only because I wouldn't have seen Joybubbles otherwise, but because that allowed me to save Camp Miasma for Halloween, when it was the perfect capper to a month of watching movies that play with the tropes of horny teenagers having sex and getting slaughtered in and around a camp. 

The only problem? I'm not sure how much this is actually a horror movie. But more on that in a minute.

First, let's establish just how much Schoenbrun thinks of their Camp Miasma as a direct stand in for Camp Crystal Lake, the setting for most of the Friday the 13th movies. It goes way beyond both being camps.

1) The killer in this movie, seen in the poster above, was drowned by other campers in a bullying incident, just like Jason Voorhees. Though this time it was an intentional drowning, not just bullying leading to neglect and accidental drowning. 

2) Characters keep talking about how the killer, nicknamed Little Death, is "still there at the bottom of the lake" -- just like Jason Voorhees. 

3) This is a movie about rebooting a famous horror series, so we get a lot about the actual series, including newspaper clippings about many movies with similar titles -- including one in which Little Death "takes Manhattan."

That's probably enough for you to know that yeah, Friday the 13th was not only an inspiration for Schoenbrun, but it was the direct target of a very explicit sort of parody.

Which is kind of the trouble with watching this movie on Halloween night, if you are trying to gin up some scares for yourself. Being scary might be like fourth or fifth on the list of the things Schoenbrun is trying to do with this movie.

Their talent for a really unsettling image, as seen in We're All Going to the World's Fair and I Saw the TV Glow, is still present. And I did get a chill a couple times during this movie. 

But the things Schoenbrun is doing ahead of being scary? Yes I've got a list for that too, but I'm not listing these things in order because they are all mixed up together. 

1) Being romantic. This is ends up being a quite earnest portrayal of a connection that occurs between the two main characters. Despite the bleak tone of their previous two films, you might even think Schoenbrun had an optimistic view of life and love. 

2) Being funny. There are a lot of laugh-out-loud moments here. Schoenbrun's previous two films contained ... let me pause to count ... zero of those. 

3) Being queer. I thought the main character, played by Hannah Einbender, was supposed to be trans, and that the actor was trans. Looking it up, I see Einbender is a bisexual woman, and the character says she/they go by "she/they pronouns" but has the biology of a woman. But yes, trans themes run aplenty here, as you might expect, including the fact that the drowned camper who became Little Death was known to campers as a "gender switcher," literally swapping genders on different days of the week. This is what caused them to kill the camper, and is also the bit of transphobia the studio is trying to correct in the IP's history by hiring a queer person to direct the reboot. 

4) Being a satire. That is not necessarily the same thing as being funny, so I will list it separately.

Then they get to being scary.

So I wouldn't say it's a disconnect with Halloween, since it engages with one of the longest-running horror franchises of all time, that helped establish the tropes for a million other horror movies. (Even though, as I concluded, most of the movies in that long-running series are pretty bad.)

But I was hoping my skin would crawl a few more times than it actually did.

Still, this might be, narrowly, my favorite Schoenbrun movie, from beginning to end. I think the highs of I Saw the TV Glow might be higher, but I was pretty put off by the way that movie ends in a weird sort of whimper. World's Fair has some spooky images as well but is fairly low energy and unsurprisingly basic for a first effort. 

Camp Miasma has things like a comically brutal slaughter, only half seen because the camera is always facing Little Death from directly in front of them, that is scored to the sentimental ballad "A Long December" by the Counting Crows. Believe me, it works.

Oh, and because I appear to be on the lookout for these now, or they are becoming more common, there are two split dopter shots in this movie, which was pretty cool. 

It just doesn't scare me, and that's okay. 

The actual Final Friday

Well, the actual Final Friday in terms of the movies I'm watching this month, I should say.

The Friday the 13th series teased having its last movie in the series so many times that I've lost count. Most recently, in terms of my viewings, it was Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday. But that was still two movies ago in the chronology. 

Now, I've finally seen the last movie in what you would call the original chronology, before they rebooted it in 2009 with the film that I watched a year ago so am not watching again this year. 

Unfortunately, it feels like a pretty disappointing end to this 11-movie viewing series for Halloween, not just because of the quality of Freddy vs. Jason, but because of how it feels as a capper to a series of movies about Jason Voorhees. 

Simply put, this is much more Jason Voorhees in a Nightmare on Elm Street movie than it is Freddie Kreuger in a Friday the 13th movie. 

And to be fair, I was never promised otherwise. Freddy's name comes first in the title. 

But the very fabric of reality is quite different in these two series. As many flights of fancy as there may be in the Friday the 13th series, never is there any question about whether it's taking place in the real world, at least as this version of the real world defines and presents itself. 

Nightmare on Elm Street? People are always jumping in and out of dreams, changing shapes, causing things to materialize that do not exist, and so forth.

And that's kind of a hard change to make after you've watched ten movies about a lumbering adult in a hockey mask who is basic, who doesn't talk, and who likes to stick sharp objects through people.

Even the recap at the start is a recap of events in the Nightmare on Elm Street movies, of which there had been seven before this. Only two of which I've seen, so this might also be a future Halloween-themed viewing project for me. If I end up doing that, I might have been better off saving Freddy vs. Jason as a capper for that series.

To be fair, though, it does meet up with the chronology of the Friday the 13th series. Freddy vs. Jason was teased in the final shot of Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday, but then the chronology got a bit scrambled, because Jason X was made next, set in the 25th century, and in any case, it took them ten years to make this mashup movie that they teased with the idea that it might be only two years off.

But Jason does end up in hell at the end of that movie, and that's where Freddy tells us he found Jason in order to bring him in Freddy's own timeline and reality.  

What happens from there? Well it's a bit of a blur. 

I should probably set the stage about the week I've had. Work was semi busy, not crazy, at least my boss is back on board after being off the previous two weeks, so I wasn't doing her job anymore. Another co-worker has gone on leave instead, so the workload is still high. But on Wednesday, I worked in the city, always a tiring day, and then went to the Wild Horse Nine screening I told you about a couple posts ago. I'd normally tack on a second movie, but I didn't, in expectation of the busy Thursday I'd have and not wanting to get home too late. On Thursday I worked in the city again, and then met my wife to see Lily Allen perform her album West End Girl at Rod Laver Arena. Which was a profound experience and which I'd love to write about here if I could figure out an actual movie connection, other than her ex-husband David Harbour, the inspiration for the album. That got us home after 11. On Friday, I worked from home, went for a long walk, made jack-o-lanterns with my son, and then drank too much of our lovely old-fashioned pre-mix while preparing everyone's dinner. This left me in no shape to start a movie at 10:50 p.m.

So what happens in Freddy vs. Jason? Couldn't tell you.

But this isn't because I didn't watch most of the movie. I couldn't have missed more than ten percent of it. It was because I think all the conditions combined to sort of check me out. Yes, Jason Voorhees guest stars in this Nightmare on Elm Street movie, but he's clearly the +1. This feels like the resolution of a journey I haven't gone on with Freddy Kreuger. And though Freddy might be the more dynamic villain, capable of holding my attention better than Jason, that's not what I've spent the last 31 days doing. I've been watching Jason kill people -- quite often in disappointing fashion. But I still wanted a pure resolution to that experience, not one clouded by the wisecracks of a shape-shifting former abductor of children who was burnt to a crisp by angry parents.

I have a dim memory of one or two interesting kills, many of them initiated by Jason. There's one time a guy gets folded away into a fold-away couch. That was pretty cool. 

But any time someone is getting sliced up in their dream by Freddy, and you see the marks of his claws across their real body while they're sleeping, I just felt like I was in a universe I didn't want to be in right now.

I was looking forward to the scenes where Freddy and Jason actually clash, but these felt pretty weightless to me, and not fun in the way I'd hoped. These are both characters who seem impervious to what you would think were fatal blows, so it's a bit like two superheroes fighting in that nothing of consequence is actually going to happen to them. And the whole thing didn't feel comedic in the way I hoped. 

One interesting thing is that, as with other mashups like Godzilla vs. Kong and Alien vs. Predator, the characters cannot have equal rooting interests for the audience. While it was obvious that Kong would be the hero of Godzilla vs. Kong, and a little less obvious that the predator would hold our sympathies in Aliens vs. Predator, making Jason the hero of Freddy vs. Jason seems like the most desperate yet of any of these arbitrary assignments of comparative good. After all, we learned in Jason Goes to Hell that Jason is responsible for the deaths of 83 people -- and that was only at the start of that movie. 

But maybe it shouldn't surprise us, especially compared to Freddy. There was never anything sympathetic about Freddy Kreuger, a creep who kidnapped and killed children (and hopefully nothing worse than that). But Jason Voorhees started as an innocent boy bullied by other campers and ignored by the counsellors charged with watching out for his safety. He got vengeance for his drowning death and then some, but this movie leans into the sympathy inherent to his origins, including flashback footage of him as a child. In fact, I think for the first time there is the suggestion that his drowning was the direct result of a bullying incident. There's no similar plea for the guiltlessness of Freddy Kreuger. 

At least this movie has some interesting people in the cast. We get a very young Jason Ritter here, John's son, as well as Kelly Rowland from Destiny's Child. Christopher Marquette would appear the following year in a personal favorite, The Girl Next Door, and Lochlyn Munro is a comedic character actor you would know from Scary Movie and others (295 credits on IMDB!). Then Katharine Isabelle and Monica Keena were both actors I recognized even if I couldn't immediately produce any of their credits. So I guess you have to come over to the Nightmare on Elm Street series if you want actors with credibility -- though it may just be that they went on to good things from here, not that they had already done them when they were cast. 

Okay, this has been fun. Even though I only had actual positive feelings about two movies out of 11 -- and that doesn't include the original, which I thought was pretty lame on rewatch -- the overall feeling of watching these movies was one of fun and of anticipation. And that's what you're going for when you do something like this. 

Happy Halloween, all.

R.I.P. to two Star Trek legends

When Walter Koenig died earlier this week, I thought about whether I would memorialize him on this blog. 

On the one hand, Star Trek was a big part of my childhood. Not as big as Star Wars, and when Star Trek: The Motion Picture came out, it did nothing for me. But from The Wrath of Khan onward, I was on board, and have never stopped being on board.

On the other hand, Koenig's Pavel Chekov was probably my least essential crew member of the Starship Enterprise. Sometimes, when people die, you have to let it pass without comment. (I took the same approach to the recent passing of Tom Skerritt.)

But when I woke up this morning to learn that Patrick Stewart had also died, well, there was no denying Patrick Stewart, and now Koenig gets his due as well.

Yes it has been a very hard week for Star Trek fans, though not entirely unexpected. Koenig was 90 when he passed, and Stewart was 86. Probably the truly expected death would be William Shatner, who is closer to his 96th birthday than his 95th. But he's in such good shape that I could imagine him out there somewhere doing one-handed pushups.

Of course, Stewart did not come into my life as early as Koenig, but it was still within the initial bloom of my Star Trek fandom. If I really became a fan of all things Star Trek in 1982, when Wrath of Khan came out, it was only five years later that Star Trek: The Next Generation first premiered on television. And I watched that first episode, as well as many of the others for at least a few seasons. In fact, I've seen way more episodes of this series than the original series, since my Trek fandom was based on the movies. 

If Chekov was not essential to the bridge on the Enterprise, then Captain Jean-Luc Picard certainly was. Stewart immediately became Picard as if Picard had always existed, and came up with a number of catchphrases that Trekkies would use forever, and still do, such as "Make it so." He felt like a distinct, unique creation, not just another generic good-looking man. (Though they did have Jonathan Frakes' Riker in that role just to hedge their bets.)

Of course, Picard was not where Stewart began, though I hadn't seen him in any of his previous roles. His career was already nearly 25 years in by 1987, and though Picard will always be his most famous role, he had some other big ones still to come. Most notably Charles Xavier, a performance I just revisited when my son and I watched the original X-Men movie a few weeks back as a sort of preparation for Avengers: Doomsday. He played that role a number of times, including as recently as Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness five years ago. He also played Ebenezer Scrooge as well as some of the sort of classic roles you would expect from a Shakespearean like him with his training and diction. Just this year, he provided a sheep voice in The Sheep Detectives. So I guess succumbing to complications from Alzheimer's and Lewy Body Disease must have come on pretty quickly. 

Koenig? He was "just" Chekov. That is not 100% true of course, but when I scan his 79 credits on IMDB, I've only ever seen him in Star Trek-related projects. I mean, it's not like Nichelle Nichols, James Doohan, George Takei or even DeForest Kelley had thriving careers outside Star Trek. So no shade on Koenig.

But Chekov provided us some great memories. Koenig had a sly comic timing in that role, as you could see in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, which featured the two-word phrase we would all reproduce related to the character: "nuclear wessels." Then again, he was also a key to some classic scenes from the films that had a very different tone. One scene I always think of first from Wrath of Khan is when Chekov and Paul Winfield's Terrell are detained by Khan and his goons, and get those horrid parasites inserted into their ears. Koenig is great in that scene.

As I try to finish this post before I start my workday, I feel like I have given both men a short shrift in terms of memorializing them. But that's what always happens when we lose screen actors who meant a lot to us and were in our lives for so long.

One thing I can say for both?

They lived long, and they prospered. 

Wild Horse Nine and a thousand posters

When I arrived at Cinema Nova for the advanced screening of Wild Horse Nine on Wednesday night, I encountered something unusual at the entrance.

It wasn't the popcorn and soda they usually provide. There was none of that this time.

It wasn't the alcoholic drinks they sometimes provide. They did provide those, but they were in the lobby, not right at the auditorium entrance. 

No, it was posters. Lots and lots and lots of posters.

How many?

Well, I've almost filibustered long enough for my text to surpass the original poster at the top of this piece, so I can include my next picture:

Posters, and also postcards.

Now, I don't know if you can tell how tall those stacks are, but they're pretty tall. Like, at least 30 posters per stack. So that would mean just on this table there would be 180 posters. Some pretty quick math there.

Oh but this was not the only place you could get posters. When I got inside the auditorium, this is what I encountered:

Yes that's six more stacks of character posters. And six more stacks of character postcards. 

Assuming 30 each in these as well, that's ... carry the one ... another 180 posters, for a total of 360.

So not a thousand, but a lot closer to a thousand than it should have been.

Oh, and when we got to our seats:

In case we missed the previous two opportunities to acquire two-dimensional Wild Horse Nine swag. 

As much as I loved a good movie poster back in the day, there isn't much use for them these days. Even teenagers and college kids don't hang movie posters on their walls anymore, or at least I would assume. (My 16-year-old's walls are bare, and I try to tell myself this is not a lack of imagination on his part.) I certainly have no place to hang a movie poster in my house, save maybe my office, but there's already enough stuff on my office walls. 

And then there's the practicality of the matter. We're all out and about, and these posters are, while not full size, large enough that you can't put them in any bag you have without destroying the edges. And the stock was too thick to roll them up, but rolling isn't a surefire method of protecting them either. You're just as likely to unroll something that's a bunch of mashed flat sides later on. 

But you know what?

I loved the movie, so left with one each of the character posters anyway -- and two of actress Alin Salis, just by accident.

A helpful defense against stupidity

There have been a disappointing number of my Friday the 13th movies available through my streaming services. In fact, I believe I've paid to rent every single one since Friday the 13th Part III. I rented one or two through my American AppleTV, but then got wise to the fact that renting through Amazon with Australian dollars was slightly cheaper.

And on the last two, I noticed what you see to the right. Look specifically to the bottom of that image, since I didn't do any thing to highlight it. 

Even though you have to click once to start the rental process, and then a second time to confirm you want to do it, the nice people at Amazon -- I mean, I assume the ones who aren't Jeff Bezos are nice -- have given you yet a third strike before you're out. 

And I'm not sure how long you have to do a change-of-mind cancel, but I can tell you that the window was still there when I went to take this screenshot of my Jason X rental, the morning after I'd watched the movie. Probably that's just the screen not refreshing, because I have to imagine they're at least smart enough to prevent you from returning a bottle of soda you've already drunk. 

It's good customer service that they could probably get away without offering.

The change-of-mind cancel is something I first noticed on Snapfish a few years ago. After submitting one of your photo books, they give you an hour to go in and change it -- though maybe not cancel it, I don't know, I've never tried. That's really nice, because it's very easy to imagine, with a complex order like that relying on so many individual decisions, that you could easily forget that you meant to change out one photo, or move a two-page spread to later in the book.

The Amazon rental cancellation is a bit more for the thick-headed, who somehow misclicked two different times to actually process such an order. 

Then again, maybe they figured they don't have to use it very much, but at least they get the positive press from people like me, taking notice of it and writing about in on their blogs. 

Future Jason

Ho hum. These Friday the 13th movies are so predictable. Jason awakens from cryogenic freeze in the 25th century and fights an android on a spaceship. When are they going to start coming up with something actually new?

Ha.

Right up until just before I rented Jason X on Sunday night, I was under the impression this tenth entry in the series, which came nine years after the last entry, was just another standard reboot, that put Jason Voorhees in just another series of standard Jason Voorhees situations.

Lo and behold, this is a Jason that has been dormant for 450 years, meaning that everyone who was originally charged with dispatching him did, finally, successfully end the Jason Voorhees threat, at least in their lifetime. And then in the lifetimes of about 20 other generations. So, for all practical purposes, forever.

In fact, Earth itself died before this Jason came back to life. We learn fairly early on in Jason X that the planet is no more, at least as a practical home for human beings, having become unable to sustain life. The ship our characters are aboard is en route to Earth 2, though not for the first time, I don't think. These may be the last humans remaining, but I don't think the movie ever says that, and if so, they are certainly not a collection of Earth's best and brightest. Then again, once again I started watching too late at night, and would not be able to verify every little detail of what happens in this movie.

Before we get too far in, I want to make a random observation about this series in terms of its cast.

I've enjoyed pointing out, every once in a while, when a "real" actor makes an appearance -- in other words, someone who has gone on to do something else after this. Those sorts of actors were plentiful in the Halloween movies; Paul Rudd is in one of the worst of those movies, if you recall. Such actors are very much the exception in this series, such that in some movies, there aren't any to be found. There is one in this movie, and it's a funny one: David Cronenberg in an acting role. He exits during the cold open. 

But by the late date of 2002, I thought for sure they'd try to get someone with some name recognition in the movie -- beyond a guy known more for his directing than his acting -- even if they had a mandate to keep the budget low. I thought 2002 was close enough to our current era, when they would absolutely include someone recognizable. Nope.

And the names of non-famous actors just sound made up, don't they? Like names you'd only see in a straight-to-video movie. Consider some of the names that appear in the opening credits of this movie:

Lexa Doig
Dov Tiefenbach
Melyssa Ade
Peter Mensah
Barna Moricz

Who are these people?

Even the director, James Isaac, sounds made up. But my favorite made-up name in the credits is the director of photography: Derick V. Underschultz. Underschultz? That's a thing? He doesn't even spell my first name in one of the two most preferred ways. 

While we're talking credits, for some reason at the very end I noticed the name of a person in a role called "fact checker," which is a simply hilarious concept in any film, let alone this one. We all know that films have creative license and are not bound by facts, especially when they include all those disclaimers about coincidence resemblances to persons living and dead. But that's especially true in a film set in 2455. Anyway, man with this title is called Morris L'Explicateur.

And yes it's a joke. Apparently, there is an old industry trope of a character known as Morris the Explainer, whose only role is to advance the plot through exposition. I'm not sure why someone decided to assign him to the role of "fact checker" in Jason X, though it does appear to be unique to this movie, at least according to Google's AI. 

So how the hell did Jason get into cryogenic freeze? 

It's certainly not as a result of anything that happened in Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday, which I watched on Saturday night and wrote about yesterday. You may recall, if only from reading my post about it, that Jason gets dragged down by the hands of Hell at the end of that one, though given the supernatural element of that, maybe that's a less definitive rather than more definitive final resting place for him.

Most of these movies have at least connected the dots between where Jason ended up at the end of the last movie and where we find him at the beginning of this movie, but not Jason X. And part of that might be a rights issue. I'm mentioning my viewings to my team of writers in an ongoing messenger chat, and one of them told me that the words Friday the 13th don't appear in the title of Jason Goes to Hell because they didn't have the rights to use them. That's also true here. So if you're just trying to make a buck on IP, maybe you don't care if the internal logic of your mythology -- such as it is -- is sound. 

But yes, they've got a neutralized, though very much alive, version of Jason at the start of this movie. He's suspended in air and chained up in a secret laboratory, but we do see an eye flickering around behind the mask as proof of life. This is only the near future, not the distant future, and in this secret research facility, they are experimenting with cryogenics. Why they want to use the world's most notorious serial killer as a test subject is beyond me. I'm sure they did explain it and I nodded off for a second.

Anyway, just before he's put into freeze, he escapes and kills a bunch of people, including David Cronenberg, but then he and another woman are both frozen, to awaken in the 25th century. Because why not?

It's funny to watch this just on the heels of watching Idiocracy on my birthday earlier this week. I didn't mention this on the blog, because I didn't have anything really new to say about Idiocracy on my fifth viewing. But yes, my wife surprised me with a birthday viewing, also a first-time viewing for our kids, at least the older of whom seemed to like it. Anyway, a cryogenic freezing from the early 20th century to the 25th century is, indeed, what happens in Idiocracy also, though I hardly think Mike Judge took inspiration from Jason X. 

So yes, entirely new setting, entirely new technologies (including those that can keep reviving Jason as he gets blown up and torn apart again), and yes, androids! An actress named Lisa Ryder -- still not someone I've heard of, but maybe not with such a made-up-sounding name -- plays this android, and she might have been one of my favorite parts of the movie. She's a good android, in the mold of someone like Bishop from Aliens ... and I wouldn't be surprised if these filmmakers did take inspiration from Aliens. Anyway, there's some decent humor related to this character, like the time she is trying on artificial nipples for her shipboard boyfriend as a way of being more human. (Otherwise she's smooth like a Barbie doll.) Her perky good humor keeps things lively enough.

The rest of the plot is probably not worth going into. It's not as ludicrous as I'd hoped it would be, outside of the general premise. I did find there to be one or two interesting bits of sci-fi technology in it. 

And Jason does get a makeover near the end, to a new, more badass version of his character design. Though this comes pretty late and isn't as satisfying a reveal as you would hope.

There's only one more movie I have to watch, which is Freddy vs. Jason, and which came only a year later in 2003. I'd say that this being a mashup movie, it's likely not beholden to the narrative in either series. I'll wrap up this epic project on Friday night, one night before Halloween. 

Hell is other people

You really didn't expect me to get all highfalutin and start quoting Jean-Paul Sartre in the ninth (!) post this month about the Friday the 13th series, now did you?

Well it wouldn't be the first time. In fact, the series already did it once itself. 

In my favorite entry of the series so far, Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives, one of the jokes -- yes, this series had finally started figuring out how to be funny -- was that a young camper, who couldn't be more than ten, falls asleep with Sartre's No Exit open on her chest. That's the actual play where that quotation originates.

But although the series may not be making an explicit nod to Sartre in Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday, the use of the word "hell" in the title gives me an avenue to do so -- and I wonder if they weren't also hip to what they were doing. 

You see, in Jason Goes to Hell, the movie is not really about Jason, or not the visual incarnation of the Jason we usually expect. In Jason Goes to Hell, Jason literally is "other people."

Before I talk about that, let me just say that this is now my second favorite film in the series, though not to the level of Part VI. The second best movie only means it gets an actual recommendation, albeit a marginal one: three stars on Letterboxd. And it's truly different from the other movies, as I sort of expected it to be -- though not at all in the way I expected. 

When I heard that title, and figured by the ninth movie they had given up any semblance of taking themselves seriously, I imagined this movie might literally be a trip through Hell for Jason. He'd be in a typical rocky red environment with pools of lava and random bursts of flame, and he'd be slitting through the throats of all-time jerks in world history, maybe even doing battle with the devil in the final act.

The fact that this movie doesn't literally have anything to do with Hell -- until, perhaps, the final shot or two -- just makes me wonder all the more about the intentionality of the Sartre allusion. 

See, we only get to see Jason with his usual mask for about three minutes in the first ten minutes of this movie, which leads to the most intentionally comical scene in the whole series thus far.

We've got what we think is our typical horny teenager opening, with a woman disrobing for a bath and eventually running through the woods for her life. But this is no hapless, unwitting victim. It turns out she was a plant, to set a trap for the world's most famous aspiring hockey player. And once he does spring, she does a professional gymnastic roll out of the scene, having done her bit. Now it's time for the others to do theirs. And these others are about 20 military men with guns who were all in hiding around this spot where Jason gets baited. How they knew that was exactly where he would appear is pretty unclear, though you won't want to complain about that given the reward of what happens.

And what happens is that they open fire en masse, riddling Jason with bullets, then blowing the ever-loving shit out of him with a grenade. 

It's hilarious. There's no way it was meant to be taken with a straight face. And that pleases me considerably. The movie hasn't succeeded in being funny since Part VI, but now it's done it again. 

The men celebrate. In fact, the world celebrates. And this is the first time, I think, that it is acknowledged a) what Jason's actual body count is, and b) how that translates to worldwide fame.

Even when he went to Manhattan in the last episode, there was no sense of any of the bystanders saying, or even thinking, "Hey, that's Jason Voorhees!" They just look on stupidly and shake their head: "Another Tuesday night in New York."

But when someone is responsible for 83 deaths -- that's the number given by a newscaster in the reporting of the likely actual death of Jason Voorhees -- you better bet the world knows about him. All the serial killers we know by name didn't even get halfway to that count. 

The detonation leads to an autopsy of the strewn body parts that used to be Jason Voorhees, which is also kind of hilarious, because the cause of death should be pretty obvious. But I think the police can't believe they actually have a certified Jason Voorhees corpse, or what's left of it, and in another funny bit, one forensic specialist gets the chance to say what he wants to say to this corpse responsible for so many deaths. The short diatribe of insults is funny, dripping with schadenfreude, but of course, these will be this man's last words.

See, the other coroner performing the autopsy has just been mesmerized by Jason's suddenly beating heart, and taken a bite out of it, at which point, little bits of Jason from around the room have flown into his body, completing with vapor trails of magical lasery light. This man -- known character actor Richard Gant -- is now the reincarnated Jason, only he's still performing the usual Jason mayhem in his own body.

Jason's soul/spirit/whatever get passed around between carriers in this movie, and the way it's transferred is through a long, grotesque worm-like object emanating from each throat, which you would not be blamed for mistaking for a blackened tongue. That's just some of the really quite good makeup and other practical effects, which are also essentially making their debut in the series. See, that's one of the things that's been so shoddy about this series -- it has barely even required anything good in terms of gore effects. Well, that all changes with this movie, where we also gets some good bits like partial beheadings and melting faces. 

Want to know what else is in this movie? A split diopter shot! I know, I was as surprised as you are. That's when two extreme depths of a shot are in focus at the same time due to a trick that's performed on the lens to split it. I thought only really ambitious directors involved in pretty distinct properties would use one of these shots, but apparently, director Adam Marcus (who?) is up to the task. And it looks really good!

I wonder if the passage of four years, from 1989 to 1993, was enough to sort of consider this a reboot of the series, even though such a thing did not really exist back then. (Heck, your average person might not even know what rebooting a computer was in 1993.) Nowadays, series are always trying to inject new life with new creative talents bringing new perspectives to the material, but this series had so rarely done that, it genuinely surprised me when they did with this one.

The story itself is also pretty interesting. Although there's a bit of disappointment from seeing "Jason" not in his classical form, but in the bodies of other actors who aren't wearing masks, that's more than balanced out by this film's conceit. And it's not a great conceit necessarily, but at least it's something, and it reminded me a bit of all the family stuff in the Halloween series. 

We learn that the only way to really kill Jason dead is for him to be killed by a blood relative. Because why not, this is also the only way he can be fully revived. So you can bet there's one of each in this movie, a blood relative who can revive him (Erin Gray, in an early role) and one who can kill him if given the chance. I did enjoy this because it felt like good effort in the right direction, especially since they seemed genuinely interested in wrapping up the series at this point. 

Oh and if there were not enough interesting things going on in this movie, we even get a mercery played with a lot of fun and gusto by Steven Williams. He specializes in tracking down serial killers and has a grand old time interacting with the other characters with a devilish glint in his eye as he circles his prey. There's a great scene in a jail cell where he breaks the main guy's fingers one at a time as a price for getting information about Jason. I don't totally get the function of this scene because this guy is supposed to be a hero, sort of, but he's the sort of hero who's not above breaking the fingers of a good character just for sport. 

Anyway, the whole thing moves along quickly and of course we do get a proper Jason again by the end. 

And I guess I'm spoiling this movie, so if you don't want to know what happens at the very end, you should avert your eyes now.

Actual Hell finally comes into the movie at the very end, when Jason is finally delivered the fatal -- really, permanently fatal, we swear -- blow by said blood relative, resulting in more shooting lasers from the sky, the kind of thing that tells you something outside the ordinary is really happening. Oh there's also a magic dagger. Why not? To let us know that he's really, truly, we swear, permanently dead, arms emerge from the ground and pull him down to Hell. That's it for Jason. All that's left is the hockey mask left slightly submerged in the dust. 

But of course it can't really be it. They knew it even at the time they made this movie. The last thing we see is Jason's mask pulled under the ground by ... Freddy Krueger's claw!

I thought this was great, but now that I've gone back to the franchise page on Wikipedia, I'm confused. The next movie in the series is not Freddy vs. Jason. It's actually 2002's Jason X, which I plan to watch later on today. But both most have been in the works simultaneously because Freddy vs. Jason -- the final film of this series, which I will watch at some point before Halloween night during what figures to be a busy week with at least two nights out -- came only a year after that, in 2003. 

Remembering Rob Reiner: Misery

Welcome to the only remaining of my two bi-monthly 2026 series appreciating the career of Rob Reiner in the wake of his passing. The other series, devoted to the films of his I haven't seen, was cut short by the lack of availability of one film and the lack of an expected release of the other. This series, which reviews six of my favorite Reiner films, still continues and still has one final entry in December.

The ability to watch Misery, Rob Reiner's only horror movie, during the month of Halloween cause me to scramble a few things about the chronology of this series. Given what happened to the other series, as you just read in my italicized intro, a scrambled chronology is the least of our worries.

Only two things about that:

1) Because it is set in a wintry Colorado, the movie makes me think more about winter than it makes me think about Halloween;

2) I'm not sure it's actually a horror movie, really. 

Because Misery was written by Stephen King, we easily lump it into the category of horror. Horrifying things happen in it, to be sure. But as I was watching it this time, I wasn't getting the horror vibe from it I thought I'd get. In fact, with the wintry setting, the vibe might have been more similar to another wintry classic from the 1990s I watched earlier this month, Fargo, especially with the similar role and similar  folksy vibe of the small-town police officer bringing himself too close to danger. Unlike Marge Gunderson, though, Richard Farnsworth's Buster does not emerge from the experience unscathed.

Of course, whether or not it's a horror -- which it certainly is in the most obvious forms of its categorization -- has nothing to do with the quality of the movie. Which I still found to be quite high, unsurprisingly, in this, my first viewing in almost exactly ten years. 

It's certainly more of a horror movie than the first King adaptation Reiner directed, Stand by Me, which I also watched for this series back in June. Although Mike Flanagan has lately taken huge strides in making himself the preeminent King adapter, at least in terms of quantity -- it might be too much, really -- guys like Reiner and Frank Darabont were who we associated with King for a while there. 

I was reminded that this is also a script by the great William Goldman, which is one of the reasons it's so good.

Another major reason, so obvious it's barely with stating: the yin and yang performances of Kathy Bates and James Caan in the primary roles. Since Bates won an Oscar for this performance, let's take her second and start out with Caan.

How understated is this actor? Caan obviously had some showy roles in his career, such as The Godfather, but let's credit both Caan and Reiner for the way he underplays Paul Sheldon. As we might expect from a writer with a keen intellect, Paul always clocks exactly what he's up against in Annie Wilkes, even before he discovers she was responsible for actual murders in the past. There is, in fact, some amount of trial and error in the way he tries to manipulate her, but none of it involves histrionics of any sort. With certain types of psychos, you know raging at them will be wasted energy, and will worsen your situation significantly. We believe that he is ultimately able to manipulate her to the extent that he is because he hasn't frittered away too much good will on false avenues that were never likely to bear fruit. Paul experiences tremendous loss in this film, and not just the use of his feet when Annie hobbles him. As a person who is obsessed with making backups of my data, I am most impacted by the burning of his sole copy of the book that may be the best he's ever written. But even in this scene, he doesn't resort to naked pleading, and there's only a single line of dialogue in which he tries to appeal to her better nature. He knows this effort is likely to fail, and the harder he tries, the more likely it is to fail. Instead we just see, in small adjustments of his expression, what the stakes are for him, and the new levels of despair to which he's sunk.

What's so incredible about Bates' performance is how far off the reservation she's willing to go. She is the opposite of Paul in that she's constantly going big -- big happy emotion, big angry emotion, big sad emotion. The big sad emotion is perhaps the scariest, even more than the yelling and the brandishing of furniture, because this is one form of bigness that's underplayed, if that makes any sense. We think of it as "big" because it's such a shift from her prior demeanors, but it has a certain suicidal deadness, perhaps the most determined of any emotion she shows in its utter inability to be negotiated. But what I really enjoy about Bates here is how weird she's willing to be, like when she scrambles around the room, oinking like a pig. There's zero vanity in this role, and that's what Academy voters recognized when they honored her with an Oscar. She was giving us a real person -- a scary, incredibly unhinged real person, but a person who struck us as so real because of her complete psychological profile. We believe she would imprison her favorite writer in her house, making it up as she goes along, because despite her ability to see the next move in how to keep him here and avoid discovery, her long game is flawed, incomplete, and likely to end in disaster for the both of them. Just as it would be for most normal people in this situation -- or maybe I should say most "real" people, because Annie Wilkes is not normal.

What makes their final brutal fight, complete with eye-gouging and screaming and the use of any available objects, so cathartic is that we finally get a reversal not only of their power dynamics, but of their personas. Paul finally lets loose in a way he knows there's no coming back from, and Annie has finally left herself open to attack. It's a really satisfying climax for the film.

One thing I wanted to say about Goldman's script, that I find very interesting, is that it contains no family for Paul Sheldon -- not even any whiff of a backstory related to a family. It's one of the things that keeps the script so clean and focused. Today, there would be a daughter or an estranged wife looking for him, and maybe that person would even be imperiled in the climax. Goldman didn't see any need for that. We don't have to have maximum empathy for this man in the form of a family who would suffer from his loss. It should be enough that he's in a terrible situation that he doesn't deserve, even if he's a bit of a prick, and may not be the kind of person who treats people with the right amount of delicacy or deference. And Goldman was right to think this because Misery doesn't need it. 

In terms of Reiner's contributions, Misery is pretty dissimilar to anything he'd made previously or would make again. It may be the best example of how Reiner was, at his core, an extremely competent technician, maybe not possessed of a particular look or filmmaking flourishes, but just an excellent studio director capable of turning out a tight and exciting finished product. Misery is that and then some.

I'm hoping I'll wrap up this series with The Sure Thing in December, but you may recall that this was supposed to be the movie I watched way back in February, when I had hoped to go in chronological order for this particular incarnation of the bi-monthly series. When I couldn't do that, I then started to go in order of the films' rankings on Flickchart, but I ultimately threw that out too. I think I might have a lead on getting a copy of The Sure Thing, but if I can't, there are other options. I won't let this series flicker out like the other one did, anyway.