Re-coen-sidering: O Brother, Where Art Thou?

This is the second in a bi-monthly 2018 series in which I'm reexamining my feelings toward six movies made by Joel and Ethan Coen, five of which I did not care for the first time.

If I'm considering the matter as broadly as possible, I'd say that Joel and Ethan Coen have two tones they work in, both of which start with the letter M: madcap and melancholy. And that while both tones are present at some point or another in most of their work, I vastly prefer the films where melancholy predominates.

Of course, as soon as I said that I would immediately provide a staggering contradiction to that preference. My favorite Coen brothers movie, which is also my favorite movie of all time, is Raising Arizona, and most people would consider the madcap to far outweigh the melancholy in that movie. But then all you need to do is look at my next three favorite Coen movies to right the ship on my perspective. Fargo, Inside Llewyn Davis and Miller's Crossing contain almost no madcap. (Though one of their movies with zero madcap, No Country for Old Men, falls in the bottom half of my Coen movies, so the system is nothing if not unpredictable.)

O Brother, Where Art Thou? is a movie where the madcap fairly suffocates the melancholy. The movie makes gestures toward melancholy, to be sure, but they always fall flat, in part because the madcap has done such a powerful job preventing us from really being introduced to our three main characters.

I don't know that I would have been able to put my finger on this as a contributing factor to my middling response to the movie the first time, but when I watched it a second time on Friday night, 18 years later, it was easy to identify. We are meant to take an immediate liking to Ulysses Everett McGill (George Clooney), Pete Hogwallop (John Turturro) and Delmar O'Donnell (Tim Blake Nelson) -- all great names by the way -- but the manner of their introduction really keeps me at arm's length. In short, they never are really introduced. Their first handful of scenes are very set piece heavy, and their reactions are often the reactions of three staring faces operating as one, leaving us little opportunity to differentiate between them. Broadly you'd be able to say "Oh, Ulysses is the handsome one and the other two are the hicks," but that, you will agree, is not really characterization. Belatedly we are given an idea what drives them in a scene by a campfire where they talk about their hopes for how to use the money, but this does not actually reveal as much about their characters as the movie thinks it does, plus it's too little too late.

The movie doesn't really have time to develop these characters because it's too fixated on producing the next madcap scene. And these scenes are madcap all right, full of the kind of mugging expressions that always made me feel this movie was more condescending toward its characters than it was loving toward them. (Whereas I feel like a movie like Raising Arizona stays on the other side of that divide.) It was Clooney's performance in particular that made me feel that, though the others bug out their eyes plenty as well. Nelson is the most credible, I suppose because he is the closest to the type of character he's actually portraying. Clooney and Turturro are hopelessly northern by comparison, which is not to say they can't do reasonable southern accents or inhabit their characters in other ways. It's just that they seem to be mocking these characters more than is good for the movie.

If I liked the set pieces a little more, I probably wouldn't have as much of a problem with it. But each set piece is anywhere from ten to 30 percent less satisfying than I feel like it should be. As just one example that illustrates multiple points I've made so far, I don't get the appeal of the scene where John Goodman beats up Nelson and Clooney with a branch he pulls off a tree. It's not that I don't get why he attacks them -- he's trying to rob them -- but I don't get why Clooney entirely fails to take evasive action. In the Coens' interest in cooking up some good slapstick, they've robbed all credibility from the characters by having Clooney sit there, without defending himself, after Goodman has already gone upside Delmar O'Donnell's head about three times. He's still sitting there saying he doesn't understand -- in that oh-so funny, linguistically aspirational, southern hick way -- when Goodman finally gets to him and goes all Babe Ruth on him as well (get it, Goodman played Babe Ruth). Goodman's also at fault here by having taken his time getting to Clooney without any worries that Clooney would defend himself. When you have unbelievable reactions by two different characters in the same scene, you have an unbelievable scene -- even in a movie where most of the scenes are supposed to be heightened and unbelievable in some way.

Speaking of unbelievable, I just don't buy that these guys would just waltz into a recording studio and record the year's (decade's?) biggest hit as a lark. These don't strike me as guys who could perform a song like this off the cuff, and only two days later I can't remember if the movie actually provides an explanation for their golden pipes. I should say, I was a man of constant distractions while watching this movie, as I was going down some internet rabbit holes while watching it. Don't worry, I did give it a fair shake -- I was mostly pausing it when I'd do this -- but I could tell early on that my impression of the movie was not likely to improve significantly, so I considered some level of distraction acceptable.

The recording studio scene does give the movie one of its two big ties to one of my favorite Coen movies, Inside Llewyn Davis. Probably the most obvious comparison between the movies is that they both make use of the structure of Homer's The Odyssey, this one explicitly (it credits Homer in the opening credits), the other a little less explicitly (the cat Llewyn loses is named Ulysses). But the more specific -- like, bizarrely specific -- thing they have in common is that both movies feature a musician or musicians recording a major radio hit, without having the foresight to profit from its success. Llewyn actually rejects the chance for long-term profit on "Please Mr. Kennedy" because he needs the quick influx of cash from doing a one-off job, and doesn't believe a song this vapid could have any legs. (Hence, engaging in his fatal flaw as he does repeatedly throughout the movie.) In another sign of the contrast in quality between the two movies, the Soggy Bottom Boys never even think to consider anything other than the $10 they get paid to record "A Man of Constant Sorrow" -- improbably record it, as I mentioned earlier. Although I suppose it's also part of their fatal flaws of being exaggerated, idiotic hicks.

I don't want to suggest to you there's nothing I like about O Brother, Where Art Thou? In fact, I had retroactively given in three stars on Letterboxd and would probably stick with that rating, or at least, bust it down no further than 2.5 stars. The things I enjoy most about it are its look -- the sepia tones were one of the earliest examples of digital color correction, and the Dapper Dan hair gel containers makes a great example of the production design -- and some of its small-scale visual gags. Like, I love the scene where Delmar looks over at Ulysses' body lying on the ground after their run-in with the sirens, and then looks over where we'd expect to see Pete's body, and there's just an empty shirt and pants. I like the way this establishes our expectations and then inverts them. The idea that Pete might have been turned into the toad is one of the ways I'll go along with their exaggerated hick-itude, even. Alas, the movie just doesn't have enough moments like this.

So now that I have re-coen-sidered O Brother, Where Art Thou?, I'd say that not only does my initial impression still hold, but I probably like it even a little bit less than I did then. It's still obviously the work of masters, and they're surely in command of the type of film they wanted to make. But that type of film is just not for me, in this case.

Next up in June: The Ladykillers.

Audient Auteurs: Robert Bresson

This is the third in my 2018 monthly series devoted to watching two films a month by revered directors whose work is not known to me.

If you’re a cinephile and also a reasonably intelligent person, it can be hard to admit that you just don’t “get” something. But I think I may indeed not “get” Robert Bresson. In this month’s Audient Auteurs, I hope to unpack why and explore what to do about that.

I have a bit more of a history with the French filmmaker than some of the other subjects I’ve chosen for this series, even though, like those others, I had yet to see any of his films. The reason is that they’d done a marathon of Bresson films a couple years back on Filmspotting, and though I was only “listening loosely” during those segments – a habit I’ve developed when listening to a discussion of a film I haven’t seen – the fact remains that I did expose myself to a discussion of about six of his films, including both films I watched in April. So I kind of knew what to expect: artsy miserabilism.  

And I guess I don’t think all that much of artsy miserabilism, perhaps especially artsy miserabilism from France. (Is there any other kind? Ha ha.) Although Bresson is often thought of more as a precursor to the French New Wave, he’s really contemporaneous with it, and both of the films I watched came out long after the movement was underway. Those films have put me a bit in mind of Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, whose 1959 release came seven years before either of these films. The 400 Blows is a film for which I have a massive amount of respect, and no love. I suppose not having seen it since I was a late teenager could have something to do with that, but given my general feeling toward artsy miserabilism, I wouldn’t think my 2018 perspective would be all that different.

French cinema has a distinct identity on the whole, and Bresson is considered central to it. Godard once wrote of him, “Robert Bresson is French cinema, as Dostoyevsky is the Russian novel and Mozart is German music." That’s high praise, but also prepares a viewer for a particular type of experience while watching Bresson’s films. While ennui and a tragic ending are almost a given, Bresson’s films in general do not seem to be the cinematic equivalent of a beret. In fact, both I watched are set in the country, or at least in a pastoral setting.

Initially a photographer and having been a prisoner of war, Bresson made his first short in 1934, and in fact made only 13 features in a 50-year career. He was also a Catholic, a spiritual association that makes it into many of his films. He was known for using something called the “actor-model technique,” which required repeated takes from actors until their tendency to over-emote was scrubbed out of their performances. This flatter affect was designed to allow audiences to internalize the intended emotions rather than having the actors or director feed them on a platter. You can definitely see this in both films I watched.

And those were …

1. Au Hasard Balthazar (1966)

 

This film wasn’t on my radar prior to the Filmspotting marathon, but it clearly should have been. The film must be considered Bresson’s masterpiece, because only a short while after that marathon, Au Hasard Balthazar ranked an impossibly lofty 16^th on the 2012 Sight & Sound critics poll of the greatest films of all time. In fact, I initially didn’t even have any idea how the film’s title was spelled, as Filmspotting co-host Josh Larsen seemed to say it as “O Hazar Bath Hazar.” Which is not that far off from its actual pronunciation, perhaps maybe with an Arabic flavor to it. But if you don’t know what words he’s saying, you kind think of the title as having the same second and fourth words, even if they only sound similar. (Most of Bresson's other titles get full translations into English, with the exception of my second film for reasons you will see, but I almost never hear anyone referring to this one by its English title, which is just Balthazar.)

If I'm beating around the bush with a lengthy introduction of this film, it's because I watched it three weeks ago. A lot has happened in those three weeks (including an international trip and a crisis I've had to deal with), so my talking points are already rusty to non-existent.

To give you a bit of the plot, it essentially follows the life of the titular donkey through various owners over the course of some 20 years or longer. The girl in the poster above loves him, but unfortunately, the twists and turns his life takes means that her ownership and influence over him is only fleeting. Far more often he's owned by someone who is whipping him and lighting his tail on fire for sport.

As a film that's not made by Disney cannot really be "about" a donkey, this is of course more a look at the humans who handle Balthazar and their capacity for kindness and cruelty. There are relationship dynamics between them, and the girl (named Marie, and played by Anne Wiazemsky) is loved and humiliated in equal measure by various men, the same men who victimize Balthazar. There's a clear and poignant parallel drawn between woman and animal, and let's just say nothing really goes well for either of them.

I was hoping to have more of the actual plot to latch onto, to refresh my memory, but the Wikipedia plot summary speaks in generalities that constitute only four sentences in total. That's not really the point of Au Hasard Balthazar anyway. The incredible eye Bresson has for image making and for setting a scene is the dominant takeaway of this movie, and that makes it a real art film in the best possible sense. Just as Bresson scrubbed the exaggerated emotion from his actors, you might imagine that he pre-scrubbed anything high concept from this film at the writing stage. His films are slices of life in which both the beauty and the pain are in the mundane. Though I suppose there is something you could describe as "high concept" about following a donkey for 90 minutes, and the use of coincidence breaks some of this film's reliance on the mundane, the plot is the least important element in a film that examines the way people hurt each other without providing any easy answers, or even any explanations why they do what they do. Consistent with his personal beliefs, Bresson turns Balthazar into a bit of a Christ figure, which is all well and good.

Overall I found this movie sufficiently profound to be clearly in the "pro" camp, but maybe concluded that it's not, like, among the top 20 movies ever made.

2. Mouchette (1967)

In a career that spanned 50 years, I managed to watch two movies that were made in consecutive years. If I'd had my druthers I would have made my second Bresson (or first, if we're going chronologically) either Diary of a Country Priest or Pickpocket, but my choices were made for me by Kanopy, as these were the only two Bresson films available. Don't think I'm complaining. I was overjoyed to have these movies available at all, since I don't pay a dime for Kanopy yet have already used it in the past month to watch both of the movies for this series and to rewatch my favorite movie of 2017 (A Ghost Story).

It's clear that the themes that preoccupied Bresson in Balthazar are still with him only a year later, as Mouchette has a similar pastoral setting and a title character who is abused, both physically and emotionally, by the men in her life. Although I watched this only a few days ago, I'm actually relying a bit on the (longer) Wikipedia plot synopsis for this one as well. I'm finding a strange phenomenon with Bresson where the very minimalism of his films makes me wonder if I wasn't paying attention for a moment and missed some key element of the story.

Mouchette (Nadine Nortier) is an odd duck teenage girl who lives with a dying mother, alcoholic father and baby brother, and is treated as an outcast at her school (though interestingly, she seems to initiate as many run-ins with the school's "bullies" as they do, sometimes hiding and throwing clumps of dirt at them unprovoked). She follows the movements of animal poachers near her house and becomes involved in an incident where she appears to witness one of them strangling another to death. She then develops a weird sexual relationship -- possibly consensual, possibly not -- with the one who appears to have committed the murder.

This film might be even harder on Mouchette than the other is on Balthazar. At one point her teacher humiliates her for singing off key by forcing her ear down into the piano keyboard. Her family members are verbally abusive to her/dismissive of her in various ways, and even townspeople with whom she has not previously interacted in the film call her a slut and degrade her in other ways, apparently without provocation. This is the type of miserabilism I'm talking about, and that I generally do not like. Why is the world so cruel to Mouchette? Because that's what the world is like.

There's one central scene at a carnival where Mouchette appears to have the chance to have kind of a normal relationship with someone, a boy her age who appears to like her. They are on the bumper cars together, bumping in that way that seems sort of startling and aggressive in the moment but is really just part and parcel to that activity. They both have big grins on their faces, though the sound of the cars bumping into each other are like gunshots on the soundtrack, in what I thought was a very compelling choice. The fact that this episode is isolated, and she doesn't interact with the boy again (that I recall), tells you something about Bresson's perspective on the chances someone like Mouchette has in this world.

The overall thrust of Mouchette feels episodic and quite random, but individual scenes were quite compelling to me, such as the one described above. I also noticed some really interesting choices by Bresson about how to set up the camera in a way that defies our usual expectations, but conveys the same visual information in perhaps a more immediate way. As one example, and the details of what was actually going on were fuzzy, there's a scene where some bootleggers appear to be transporting some kind of alcohol under a sheet on the back of a truck. As they are unloading it, an authority figure comes within range, and they quickly cover the alcohol with the sheet. As they wait for the threat to pass, the camera is not on their waiting faces, looking nervously in the direction of the threat. Rather, it shows only their hands on the top of the sheet covering the alcohol, as we may be left to imagine the expression on their faces. I can't explain why I found this so profound, but it's one of a number of examples of Bresson's mastery of camera setups and their psychological impact on us.

My two Bresson viewings leave me a bit unresolved about the man. I described myself as "not getting" him and still believe that's true in some essential sense, but even in the course of writing this I've identified very distinct and memorable moments in his work that struck me in a way that felt fresh and original. As with any great artist, I'd like to continue making my way through his work and reckoning with it.

I'm a bit undecided on my subject for May, though Kanopy does leave me some options. I'll need to start digging deeper soon, possibly considering different candidates who were not on my initial list ... or (ahem) alternate methods for sourcing the movies I can't find.

The gravity of the situation

Note: Spoilers for Gravity. 

My experience of watching Gravity has been one, perhaps inevitably, of watching it on increasingly smaller screens ... and becoming increasingly less impressed with it.

It would have been hard to top my first viewing back in October of 2013, when I saw it on what bills itself as the world's third-largest IMAX screen, at the Melbourne Museum. Socks = knocked off.

A month later I saw it again on a "regular" movie screen, not in 3D, but still larger than ... well, if not larger than life, then at least larger than my TV screen. Socks = less knocked off.

When I finally did watch it a third time, last night, it was of course on my TV screen. Socks = dangling from my toes.

I guess at this rate, to keep things going, I'll need to watch it on a smartphone next, at which point the backs of my heels might not get cold.

The thing is, the parts that were supposed to impress me still impressed me. It just became harder to ignore the schmaltzy parts, of which there are many.

One of the most consistent complaints about Alfonso Cuaron's movie is the way the astronauts foolishly fritter away their small reserves of oxygen on chit chat. I think the scene that's most cited is when George Clooney and Sandra Bullock are floating over toward the International Space Station, relying on infrequent bursts from his thrusters and a hope that they are on the right trajectory. Her oxygen is at like 1%, yet he insists on peppering her with questions about what she'd be doing if she were home right now, and if there's a "Mr. Stone." The most ridiculous thing about that is not, perhaps, that he'd be wasting the oxygen, as you could argue that he's trying to keep her alert so she doesn't pass out. What's most ridiculous is that he wouldn't know the answer to his questions about her family already. If an astronaut were going to space and had lost a child to a freak playground accident, it would be in some kind of dossier he would have read at the very least, and more likely, it would have been the subject of a hundred newspaper feature pieces.

That one I noticed on both my first and second viewing. What I may not have noted those times, but definitely did this time, is the conversation he has with her after becoming untethered from her with no hope of survival. Now sure, he may just be indulging in the last minutes of chitter chatter he'll ever have. But before she has reached safety, when she's still trying to fumble with the lid of some hatch to get in to the ISS, he's peppering her with questions about whether she found him attractive or not. I suppose you could say that he's also becoming untethered from his own rational thoughts, except in the same breath he's also giving her instructions about what she needs to look for and what she needs to do when she gets there.

All this failure to understand the gravity of the situation, as it were, is clearly intended to spoon feed the audience what it needs to relate to these characters. But it's laid on a bit thick. On this viewing I noticed how awkward it was when, right before strapping on a pair and deciding to face her destiny with an open mind and a vigilant heart, Ryan Stone gives the deceased Clooney in her mind orders to go talk to her daughter in heaven and tell her that her mother loves her. It's a nice sentiment but her little speech goes on for like 90 seconds. That's 90 seconds that would be used much better on logistics related to your situation and the goal of arriving back home to terra firma.

One thing I couldn't help be distracted by is some of the film's retrograde gender politics. I wouldn't have noticed them at the time, but in the last few year's of increased sensitivity to these matters, I couldn't help but be aware of them. Although on the surface, Ryan Stone is a very strong female character, she has to be saved -- multiple times -- by Matt Kowalski. Her failure to disengage early enough from the arm to which she is attached means that she goes waaaaay off further into space than she otherwise would have. And while this sets up one of the film's best and most awe-inspiring shots, it also requires Matt to use most of his available thrusters to come out and pick her up, a rescue mission with an extremely low probability of success to begin with. He then later sacrifices himself for her by letting go of the tether so he won't drag her off, thus foiling her attempt to return the favor and save him. She also doesn't stop her repair task outside the shuttle until he tells her about the third time, leading to a slower response to the debris storm, though the film makes certain to absolve her of any guilt related to that. It's Matt, of course, who has to do the absolving, giving him yet another paternal aspect related to her child-like character. Now of course, there is a major disparity in their outer space experience, as he's trying to set a spacewalk record while she is on her first trip, but that doesn't do much to reduce the sense of a gender imbalance in the script.

I'd thought this viewing would be useful in helping determine if Gravity might be an outside contender for my top 25 of the 2010s, a list I will be forming a little more than 18 months from now. It was only my ninth ranked film of 2013, though that did come along with a five-star rating from the original socks-knocking incident. A third viewing might tell me which was more accurate, the five-star rating (which would certainly make it a contender for my top 25) or the ranking of ninth from the year (which, extrapolated outward, might make it only ranked somewhere in the 80s for the decade).

And yeah, technical brilliance and all, the writing in this movie is just too distracting to reward it with those kind of accolades. I still like the movie quite a bit, and felt the tension and stress of that debris field as much as I ever had. But that star rating is more appropriately 4.5 or even (gasp) four than it truly is five.

Thank goodness that technical brilliance is a very important factor for me, because Gravity is a movie I'm glad to support. I may just wait for a future incarnation in which it's available on a big screen, rather than my smartphone, for my eventual fourth viewing.

It's a long, long, long, long movie

You'd expect to see an intermission in a 1960s historical epic like Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago or The Sound of Music.

But you know it was a decade of cinematic bloat when even the all-star ensemble comedy, the Cannonball Run of its day, has a prelude, intermission and postlude, and runs an enormous 154 minutes.

When I put on It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World yesterday, as afternoon viewing for my earache, I thought it was an hour and 54 minutes, not 154 minutes. You can tell I was running at some percentage of my usual capacity to make a mistake like that. But I had plenty of time to finish it ... and it took plenty of time. With naps and other interruptions, I was probably watching it for the better part of five hours.

Even with upwards of 70 of the day's most famous comedic performers (or so it felt), there's no reason this movie should have run two hours and 30 minutes. No reason. And it steadily wore away at my good will until I finally gave it only 3 out of 5 stars, when I'd been having a 3.5-star or even 4-star experience for parts of the film.

On the one hand it was really fun to identify all the cameos, some of which were previewed in the (extremely bloated) opening credits, and some of which were not. As I am not necessarily an aficionado of the films of that era, I wasn't immediately able to supply names for everyone. There were a lot of "that guys" and a lot of time spent consulting IMDB. For instance, I even had to look up Sid Caesar, a "Hollywood old guy" from when I was first coming of age as a kid -- in part because I didn't know if I'd actually seen him in anything outside of Bob Hope specials, and he was 20 years younger than that here. It was also great to see Ethel Merman in something, as I knew her only from that very brief cameo in Airplane!

But my goodness, in the end, a little of Mad Mad goes a long way. I took a basic silly joy in all the various planes, trains, bicycles and automobiles they used to try to make it to the treasure spot in the fictitious Santa Rosita. But each episode could have been 40 percent shorter and achieved the same effect, while bringing the thing in under two hours -- and without an intermission.

The final scene is like a ridiculous slapstick culmination of everything we've seen before then, with a firetruck ladder swaying back and forth (is that a thing that happens?) of its own volition, tossing Caesar, Milton Berle, Mickey Rooney, Buddy Hackett, Peter Falk and Spencer Tracey this way and that. They all end up in traction in a hospital, contemplating their miserable fate and their likelihood of long prison sentences, and then Merman comes in and slips on a banana, ending the movie in gales of laughter from all.

It's hard to watch a movie like this today as an audience of the time would have watched it, as it's probably a bit racist and definitely a bit sexist, plus everything is ludicrous in a way that feels out of scale with what we would attempt today.

But I did have fun. I just wish I'd had less than five hours of fun.

Days of translating poorly

Remember that great meme, one of the original memes, All Your Base Are Belong to Us? It was the humorously poor English translation of video game dialogue written originally in another language, and if you've never seen it, well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fvTxv46ano

I was getting AYBABTU flashbacks while watching Wong Kar-wai's Days of Being Wild last night.

When the film was released in 1990 in Hong Kong (and elsewhere around the world the next year), it was not yet the work of an internationally celebrated director. Wong had made only one previous film, 1988's As Tears Go By, and Chungking Express, In the Mood for Love and The Grandmaster all still lay on the horizon.

So it should be no surprise that the subtitles seem like they were written by someone who was trying to do a racist impression of a Chinese person.

Of course, it's much more innocent than that. Likely the person who did these subtitles was trying their best, perhaps literally translating when he or she should have translated colloquially. But few of the subtitles are actually grammatically correct in English, and in many other instances where they are grammatically correct, they're just not phrased the way a western person would phrase them.

That's not the only example of shoddy subtitle work, though. The length of time the subtitles stay on the screen is often highly problematic as well, as sentences containing six to ten words sometimes stay up for less than two seconds. This is necessary when the dialogue is coming out in a rapid stream, but the words were disappearing even in situations where a thoughtful pause came before the next spoken words.

Examples are probably beside the point, but after a while, I couldn't stop jotting them down. Here are some:

"You want a revenge."

"Please don't dessert me."

"May I have a look of your house."

"He gets my phone number."

"Don't stand on my way."

"It's bored to stay in one place for a long time."

"I owe you this meal. I'll be the banker next time."

I think that last one is my favorite. It's the most Base Belongingest.

Listing any more examples would start to blur the line between someone criticizing a racist impression of a Chinese person, and actually making such an impression, if it has not already. But you get the picture.

If Days of Being Wild were just some one-off from a director who never made anything again, I might expect the subtitles to be in any form, just as likely to be worthy of wisecracks from the Mystery Science Theater 3000 crew as to read coherently. But Wong is a major director, and the reason I chose this movie on a night I was sick with an earache is because I'd heard it discussed in glowing terms. (And because it was only 90 minutes, though in retrospect I would have chosen something that qualified as comfort food, and was in English.)

The answer, of course -- though I had to post in my Flickcharters group on Facebook in order to find it -- is that this is one of several versions of Days of Being Wild in existence. It doesn't yet have a Criterion release, despite several convincing fan mock-ups of Criterion posters, but commenters on my post said they'd seen translations of the Chinese that were unremarkable at worst. The streaming service on which I watched the movie, Stan, just doesn't have access to these other versions, or perhaps doesn't realize that it plucked an inferior version from its available resources. (It would probably be useful if I understood a bit better the logistics involved in streaming licensing, but I won't pretend to.)

The interesting thing is that this version of Days actually does do something quite well in its translation, something I wish other films did more. It translates the money. When money is spoken of in the movie, it's not listed in Yuan, but rather, in USD, so you know the total that's actually at stake. Sure, that's good for me as an American, but the U.S. dollar is the most internationally known currency as well, so if you're going to select just one currency, might as well be the dollar. It even mentions it in a rather shrewd way, as "USD" appears in the subtitles after the first mention of money, then doesn't for a while, then does again, just to remind us in case we've forgotten, kind of like the chyron appearing under the picture of a documentary subject at some point later in the movie, just so we don't forget who we've been interviewing.

I suppose it's a reality that at least two sets of English subtitles might exist for any given movie, to say nothing of the sets of subtitles for the world's other 20 most prominent languages. But I kind of feel like once a set of subtitles that's considered the definitive version comes into existence, it should suppress all other available subtitles -- something that's a lot easier said than done, of course. I mean, if someone were really concerned about it, they could remove this inferior copy of Days of Being Wild from the rotation, though perhaps that was the reason Stan was able to license it in the first place, because it costs less than the version where the translator actually understood how people speak English.

And I suppose there's also value to viewing something as an artifact of its time. If I got only the corrected version of this movie, I might not have the appreciation of how English-speaking audiences originally experienced it. Apparently, they were not as thrown by it as I was, as they surely helped elevate the movie to its place of respect in the Wong canon. Or, they were more accustomed to films being translated poorly than I am, as I cannot think of another instance of watching a movie that had worse than very minor spelling and grammatical errors.

The problem is that I have difficulty knowing how much I really like this movie because of the circumstances of my viewing. Evidently it did become a distraction for me, else I wouldn't have written this whole post.

I do think that it was a bit of a poor bet for me in the first place, as I'm not a fan of the third movie in the informal thematic trilogy that began with this movie, 2046, and I highly respect but still don't probably love In the Mood for Love, the trilogy's middle film. I don't tend to love films where men and women torment each other while lying around in tank tops around smoke-filled flophouses, which is a not totally inaccurate description of much of the first half of this film, and is why for a long time I bristled at the early films of Jim Jarmusch. So Days of Being Wild may never have been totally my thing, but the subtitles certainly didn't help.

Of course, any time you watch a film while suffering from a painful earache, you should not expect it to become your favorite.

Knowing the given names of stray animals

I’ll tell you why I don’t like Ferdinand.

Actually, there are a number of reasons, but only one of them is distinctive enough to be worth writing about.

Okay, so the story starts on a bunch of young bulls growing up on a Spanish ranch where they’re bred and trained to become bullfighting bulls. We see the expected spectrum of personality types among the kids, and the way those types have been established by their fathers – no bulls are born bad but they learn by modelling their parents’ behavior, yada yada yada. You get the drift.

One of these bulls is named Ferdinand, and as you might expect from the fish-out-of-water narratives that suffocate today’s animation landscape, he’s a lover not a fighter. He spends his time trying to cultivate flowers, presumably in the hope of becoming either a florist or a gardener, rather than dying in the ring like his father. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. First, the father has a pep talk with Ferdinand, who doesn’t want to follow his proscribed path, and says to his son, “You know, Ferd, I wish we lived in that type of world.” Those are, of course, his last words to young Ferd.

Because of Ferdinand’s, or Ferd’s, non-violent disposition, one day he sees an opportunity and he bolts from the ranch. Lost and alone, through rainstorms and the like (yes, this movie is as cliché as it sounds), he is discovered by a young girl, who takes him home to her bucolic farm to become her pet.

And she calls him Ferdinand. Or, more to the point, she knows that his name is Ferdinand.

Now, this is not some movie where animals and humans talk to each other. That almost never happens in animated movies that fancy themselves as being tethered to some version of reality. They’ll have a bunch of animals team up to drive a car – yes, that happens here, just as it did in Finding Dory and The Secret Lives of Pets – but they’ll almost never cross that sacred line of having the animals and humans communicate using a common spoken language. You might say that would actually be more realistic than animals who drive cars. But it’s a line most movies won’t cross.

Then how did she know his name is Ferdinand?

It didn’t occur to me at first, and I had to rewind on the seatback entertainment (watched this on the way back from Bali yesterday) to be sure it was not explained away somehow. But no indeed, there’s no explanation for how she knows his name. She just knows his name is Ferdinand. Or perhaps he just looks so much like a Ferdinand that the only name she can think to give him is Ferdinand.

I can certainly understand why they just avoided the whole problem of his name. If he’s called one thing on the ranch with the other young bulls, and another thing when the girl finds him, that would be too confusing for the little kids at whom this is aimed. But they could have figured out some way to incorporate it into the narrative, like that the young bulls wear dog collars with their names on them. (Of course, that would have its own problems – then Ferdinand is no longer a stray bull, but a bull with an actual name and contact information, leading to a moral responsibility by the girl and her father to return the bull to its rightful owner.)

But Ferdinand is clumsy enough overall that I think it just didn’t occur to the writers that the girl would not know this bull’s name. I mean, the movie is called Ferdinand, and this is Ferdinand. Plain as day, right?

Forehead slap.

Thor: Ragna-broke

I thought I was going to blog every day in Indonesia. Fortunately, that hasn't been the case. You don't really want to blog every day on your vacation, do you?

There's been some stuff to blog about, though.

I could have told you about watching Star Wars: The Last Jedi for a second time on the plane, and liking it much better this time. That probably deserves more consideration at some point.

I could have told you about deciding not to go see a movie while I'm here. I could have told you about checking the local listings and seeing that A Quiet Place and Rampage both seemed to be some of the only movies playing in the two accessible locations, and deciding that A Quiet Place would be dub-proof, if it were dubbed rather than subtitled, because almost the whole movie is silent (or so I'm told), though it probably wouldn't have been as most people speak English here anyway (tourism). I could have then told you about learning that the theater was not actually very accessible, requiring either a 30-minute drive or a 90-minute walk, and being easily dissuaded out of doing it by my wife, which I agreed was the best course of action.

I could have told you about my movie-per-day pace nonetheless, and the movies I watched for the first time (Game Over, Man!, Murder on the Orient Express, I, Tonya and Colonia) or the movies I revisited (Grimsby and Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets).

Instead I'll tell you about the movie we have not watched, despite considerable efforts to do so.

But first I need to give you some background.

I've been up to some shenanigans with my iTunes. It isn't something I've wanted to do. I've been happy being a loyal customer of the American iTunes store with the American account I've had for years. It gets new releases faster, much faster, and the rentals are generally less expensive (though the exchange rate is not 1-to-1).

But in the past six months I've received not one, but two iTunes gift cards, purchased in Australia and valid only in the Australian iTunes store. When I first got one of these years ago, sent by Australian relatives when I did not yet live in Australian, Apple had a different policy toward them. With some effort, I was able to convert them to be valid in American iTunes. Well, no more. They've decided to become isolationist. No more international cooperation between various branches of the same company.

So I reluctantly, with great angst and concern, connected to the iTunes store with an email address my wife uses in the Australian store. I was worried that I'd flag myself with Apple as someone who was trying to circumvent their rules, and it might do anything from disabling one of my accounts to deleting my whole iTunes library, music and all. But I had $80 to spend at the Australian iTunes store, and dammit, I wanted to spend it.

At first there were no issues. I could go back and forth between the two stores just fine. All I had to do was log in with a different email address. It would tell me that this account was only valid in a particular country's iTunes store, and it would just switch me to that store. No deleting of iTunes libraries to be seen. I purchased songs and rented movies with no apparent consequences. All seemed right.

But as I was loading up on rentals for this trip, something broke.

I'd rented Mom and Dad (which I actually ended up watching before the trip), I, Tonya and Murder on the Orient Express from the American store, because none of them was yet available for rent in Australia. Thor: Ragnarok was available, so I decided to deplete some of my gift card balance rather than shelling out more U.S. dollars on it. That's when the trouble began.

It processed the rental fine, reducing my balance by the $5.99 rental fee, but then it told me that this computer was already registered to a different iTunes account, and that if I wanted to switch authorizations, I could not switch back for 90 days. This froze me dead in my tracks.

Suddenly the movies I'd rented seemed vulnerable to deletion, and who knew what else. I also had a 99 cent rental of The Florida Project from the U.S. store, not particularly for the trip, but just because the movie was in my top ten of last year, I wanted to see it again, and it's only 99 cents for one week, so I had to act.

The poster for Thor never filled in on my rented movies on iTunes, leaving just a blank square with the title underneath, but I decided I'd deal with that later. We'd go on the trip, watch the other movies first, and then I would commit myself to 90 days exclusively in the Australian store. During which I would eat up all my remaining balance and not worry about that account again. If they needed to delete the movies I'd rented from the U.S., that wouldn't matter because we'd have already watched them.

But then funny things started to happen.

I watched Mom and Dad fine, but noticed some curious behavior with it. When I paused and tried to play again, it crashed iTunes. In fact, I had to restart my whole computer on that one, which is no short commitment as my computer seems to labor on startup, running through a variety of startup tasks. I could probably disable them -- I'm an IT professional, after all -- but with my own devices, sometimes I act more like a user than an IT guy.

I finished that movie without any more pauses, but then noticed another funny thing. The clock never started ticking. It told me that I'd have 48 hours to watch it once I started watching it, but when I finished, I noticed that it still said I had 27 days remaining to watch it, or whatever the actual day count was at the time.

This wasn't bothersome, of course, as it was only a benefit to me. I liked the movie enough that I might actually watch it again before the month was up, if I had such an easy opportunity to do so. We might even watch it on the trip. It did mean that I might have to actively delete it if I were running out of space -- I'm operating within a few gigs of my total allotment at any given time -- but that was a minor issue.

But it did concern me as an indication of something being wrong. And that continued in Indonesia.

Pauses during Orient Express and Tonya both also required restarting iTunes, though not restarting the computer at least. And when it was time to finally watch Thor, which was to have happened on Saturday night, and which was by far the movie my wife was most interested in, it wasn't possible to do so.

iTunes showed it was downloading Thor, but it said only that it was downloading it, not an estimated time remaining or a total bytes downloaded.

Well, downloading isn't the only option for viewing content on iTunes these days. You can also stream it. And when I was logged into the Australian account, it did show a poster for Thor. Concerning, however, was that it also showed the blank poster. So there were two Thors appearing in my rented movies, both at various stages of availability.

And neither of them actually available. When I clicked the play button on one to stream it, it showed only a black screen, one that never progressed forward. I could see the total time bar at the bottom, with 0:00 to 2:10 on either side, but it wouldn't move from 0:00 to 0:01 and onward. No errors, just not moving.

When I clicked the other one, without a poster, it showed only a time bar at the top of iTunes, like it was one very long song. Which also would not start.

I fidgeted with it for an hour, switching stores and trying whatever I could think of. If I at least got that message advising to switch stores for 90 days, that would be something. But that would not come. I thought about downloading it again from the American store, which would give me three Thors, and also about contacting customer support. But I decided either approach would draw undue attention to my situation, which might only make it worse.

So I watched Colonia that night and my wife watched a couple episodes of Jessica Jones.

It's too bad because Thor would have made the perfect "vacation movie." We tried to scratch that itch with Valerian, and it was partially scratched, as my wife commented that it made for a good "vacation movie." At the end, though, she also commented that she'd "liked parts of it," which is a fair assessment of Valerian.

Who knows what I have to look forward to in terms of future iTunes shenanigans. My next attempt to purchase something will give me some indication.

I don't think Apple wants to freeze me out as a customer. If I do need to contact customer support, I'll just plead ignorance and they'll help me right the ship. Their customer support has always been great in the past.

I just wish they'd drop all these restrictions on what can be used where, and by whom. The thing all the stores have in common is that they are getting my hard-earned dollar, or at least the hard-earned dollar of one of my relatives. That should be all that matters to them.

Blogging in Bali

I’m writing to notify you that I’m going on vacation again, but NOT necessarily to expect a break in my blogging. In fact, I might even write more than usual.

That’s because for the first time since we got married, and possibly ever for me, my wife and I are taking a trip where we’re just going to sit on our asses and enjoy ourselves.

Enjoying myself happens to include writing, if I feel like it.

We’re going to Bali, Indonesia -- one of the nearest foreign country playlands for Australians. As far as I can tell, they use it the way Americans use Mexico.

It’ll be my first time setting foot on Asian soil, and what do I plan to do?

Sit on my ass and enjoy myself.

That’s because we’re parents, goddammit, and parents get tired. And because it’s our tenth wedding anniversary.

Oh, did I mention that the kids aren’t coming with us?

My lovely mother-in-law and sister-in-law are staying with our two boys for the seven days we’ll be gone. I’ll actually be gone nine days, as I’m staying two extra nights to visit with a friend of mine who lives in Jakarta. I was actually going to go to Jakarta, but he told me Jakarta is not great for visits. So he’s visiting me in Bali, and we will do a little more exploring, and a little less sitting on our asses, for those two days.

My wife and I have had our relaxing holidays before, before we had kids, but even our honeymoon had some harrowing, exhausting adventures, the kind we don't plan to undertake this time. So this will probably be our relaxingest joint vacation ever, and as I said, for me, maybe my relaxingest ever, overall. 

In the place where we’re staying, we have our own private pool, among other amenities that will make it easy for us never to leave the place. We’ll leave, but maybe not that much. I don’t know a single word of Indonesian (that’s what the plane ride is for) so I’m not planning to do all that much leaving. Then again, the Bali locals cater to Australians for all of their tourism needs, so I imagine most of them will speak English anyway.

The resort where we’re staying also figures to have WiFi, so I may spend plenty of time online. And that means blogging, among other things. Probably.

But if I do allow myself to disconnect and just read three books (my other big ambition), then maybe you won’t get another post from me for a week to ten days. And if so, you’ll know why.

But there’s a good chance I’ll have plenty of new material, as I’m bringing like 25 movies with me (a combo of digital and physical), to say nothing of any options that may exist there. And speaking of options that exist there, I’d love to see a movie in the theater while I’m there, just for the novelty of it. There seem to be at least three options for that, and you better bet if it happens, I’m going to tell you about it.

So stay tuned. The next post from me may be on Indonesian time.

An odd pitch to girls

Hollywood is slowly (quickly) becoming aware of the need to cater more to their female viewers, as data has shown that women are more likely to dictate the financial expenditures of families, and therefore have a greater say in what movies get watched.

I saw one of the oddest examples of that at the toy store the other day.

We were picking up a present for a birthday party my younger son is attending next weekend. I asked him to select a Hot Wheels car to go along with the main present, which I didn't deem quite expensive enough. He did a pretty poor job of that, preferring to run the aisles instead, which left me lingering around the Hot Wheels section for longer than I expected to.

Long enough to notice a very odd way to get girls into Hot Wheels, though not inconsistent with the trend we're seeing in the movies.

The first I noticed was the one pictured above: a van with She-Hulk on the side. Now I'm not familiar with every corner of the Marvel comic book universe, but at least in the movies, She-Hulk has yet to make her appearance. Yet Marvel and Hot Wheels think that a She-Hulk van might sell like hot cakes. Well, there were a lot of them still there, I can tell you that.

Then next I saw:

Again now. They've only just introduced Spider-Man into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and Spider-Woman has yet to be heard from, though I'm sure she's been in the comics for years. But as with She-Hulk, I doubt they are trying to sell a Spider-Woman van off the backs of any comic books. It's just a pandering "here's a Hot Wheels girls will like" move. (Though I guess I should be happy they aren't just trying to pedal Hot Wheels that are colored pink. This is definitely a step up from that.)

The third one is at least someone I recognize:

Elizabeth Olson plays Scarlet Witch in the MCU, though I don't remember her skin being pink, and I don't remember an outfit anything like that either. And what is that, a bakery truck? The flames are cool. The pink skin, not so much.

Now we're getting somewhere more along the lines of what I would expect:

Black Widow is probably Marvel's best and most famous offering among a relatively limited number of female characters. Though damn, they might have tried to make her look more like Scarlett Johansson. And what's with that giant stack of red hair? And is that one of those trucks that takes large quantities of money to and from the bank?

Lastly we have:

At least they're on brand with this one, with a picture that is clearly Zoe Saldana and the familiar font that has appeared on movie posters for Guardians of the Galaxy 2. Plus, it's a car, which wins. Why do girls have to play with boxy trucks?

I mightn't have found the whole thing so odd if there were equivalents for Marvel's male superheroes. But there wasn't a one. The options among Hot Wheels were either female Marvel superheroes, or all other cars, dressed normally as cars.

If it is pandering, as I am kind of suggesting it is, at least it's better pandering than if they put forth a bunch of pink cars with petunias on them. At least let these girls aspire to be badass.

But more than anything I think it calls attention to the dearth of female comic book heroes, rather than celebrating the ones that exist, as it surely intends to. You can go about 40 deep with male Marvel stars. The fact that you can't even go five deep here, without hauling out two "girl version of" heroes that no one has heard of outside of imagining that they must exist because obviously they do, is just sort of sad.

In a year or two you'll be able to add Captain Marvel to this list, I suppose.

But do you bump out She-Hulk or Spider-Woman?

Perfect Pauses: Mom and Dad

I haven't done a "Perfect Pauses" post in a while, not since Alien 3 in June of last year. Then again,
this is actually the shortest interim between two of these posts since I've been doing them, as the previous one was in January of 2016, and before that I hadn't even considered the idea since a 2011 post called "Great pauses in movie history."

Anyway, I'll get on with it.

My previous two had been on rewatches, but last night it was a first-time viewing of Mom and Dad, the new(ish) Nicolas Cage vehicle from Brian Taylor -- half of Neveldine and Taylor, the duo responsible for the Crank movies.

And boy did I love this movie. As it's still early in the year, I don't mind telling you that it instantly leap-frogged the other dozen 2018 movies I've seen, becoming my new #1 of the year. Which means it'll probably ultimately land in the 15-20 range, though I could see this one sticking in the top ten. I like it that much.

If you want some of what you got in Crank and the other Neveldine/Taylor movies -- outlandish, jittery visuals with a penchant for the sleazy -- then Mom and Dad will be right up your alley. However, it's also got a brain in its head, saving some of its sizable quantity of energy for subtle social commentary that'll make every parent in the audience say "Yep, uh huh."

If you don't want to know the setup for the film, which is known to most people but perhaps not to you, you may not want to read the next paragraph. However, I think most people learn about this film as a result of knowing what it's about, so I'm not spoiling anything beyond that. Besides, it's necessary for contextualizing the pause I've chosen.

Mom and Dad concerns a mysterious, never-explained phenomenon that causes all the world's parents to want to murder their children. Not any children, not all children -- just their own. It's a great premise, and you can imagine the ways Nicolas Cage delivers on it. (Giving a performance that can be described as good in a more traditional sense: Selma Blair, pictured, as his wife.)

This pause happened to come right at the moment when Blair's murderous intent locks in. She's been driving home in a state of confusion, and as she reaches her house -- which contains her two kids inside -- this is the look she gets in her eyes.

Of course, the premise behind "Perfect Pauses" is not that I find a great image in the film and pause on it. It's that I genuinely need to pause the movie -- to go to the bathroom, to deal with a child who needs something -- and this is what comes up. I think it was the bathroom in this case, as I think my kids were asleep by this point. I hope they were, anyway.

Oh, and if you need any more enticement to watch this movie, I'll give you three words, or really, five: Nicolas Cage. Pool table. Sledgehammer.

The streaming service I did nothing to deserve

We live in an era of ever more available streaming services, but they all have one thing in common: You have to pay for them.

Well, they did all have that in common, but not anymore.

The Melbourne Public Library Service, of which I am a proud and regular member, recently signed on to participate in Kanopy, the streaming service you get for free through your library membership. I'm sure a lot of Americans are already familiar with this, since I first learned of its existence at least six months ago on Filmspotting: Streaming Video Unit. Then I kind of forgot about it, until it materialized here.

Lord knows what the profit model is for this service, but it exists, and last night I partook in it for the first time.

And I'm one grateful bastard for its existence.

I haven't explored half of its offerings yet, but it has already given me a clear benefit over some of my other available sourcing options. The auteur whose films I'm watching in April for my Audient Auteurs series, Robert Bresson, has two films on Kanopy, neither of which I could find conveniently available elsewhere -- not even on iTunes, if memory serves, though I won't swear to that. I watched Au Hasard Balthazar last night, and will follow up with a viewing of Mouchette upon my return from an upcoming trip to Bali to celebrate my 10th anniversary.

You might expect a free service to be glitchy, difficult to navigate or in some other way deficient, but nothing could be further from the truth. It streamed perfectly, which is really saying something, given that my internet sucks and we probably need to consider replacing our router. And I had no trouble finding anything or interfacing with it in any way.

I had been in a hurry to watch Au Hasard before our trip, which starts on Tuesday, on the irrational fear that Kanopy was too good to be true and they would take it away from me. But it looks like it's here to stay.

And in looking only at the featured movies on the front page, there are other things I want to watch, including my #1 of 2016, Toni Erdmann, which I need to (and also want to) watch again before deciding on my favorite films of the decade just over 18 months from now.

What did I do to deserve Kanopy?

Not a damn thing.

And that's what makes it so miraculous. When monetizing and profiting are the key motivators to any internet venture, even the free ones, it's hard to know exactly what Kanopy is getting from me, except possibly the data of what I've chosen to watch. There are no ads in the middle of the movies or anything like that. It's just free, and it's glorious.

Which is a good complement to our library. Libraries everywhere are great, but the Melbourne ones are particularly first-rate in terms of their wealth of free offerings. Not only do you have a massive collection of movies, books and music to choose from, but you can keep those things for three weeks, and renew them multiple times. (You used to be stopped at two renewals, but recently I accidentally renewed something a third time and the system let me do it.) Then there are the in-building amenities, like all the video games you can (and my kids do) play, which include VR games -- my first-ever VR game experience was at a library. Oh, and did I mention that they have a 3D printer, and you can print things for free as long as you are willing to wait for them?

I may not deserve Kanopy, although maybe we all deserve something for free in this day and age when the world sucks us dry of our time, money and clicks.

And until the other shoe drops and they take this marvelous thing away from me, I'll be enjoying the hell out of it.

My top 64 of the 1990s

Eight years ago I was super excited about my top 25 of the 2000s, posted on this blog about four weeks after the decade ended. (Read here if you're interested.)

I was excited enough that I wanted to go back and retroactively post my top 25 of the 1990s. But just scanning the list of my favorite titles of the decade gave me a headache. How would I ever narrow it down to just 25? The impossibility of the task put my ambitions more or less permanently on ice.

Well, maybe less permanently.

I've now got my excuse -- and also an excuse to go more than just 25 deep.

The first podcast I started listening to back in 2011, Filmspotting, is in the final four of their annual Filmspotting Madness tournament, which pits various films or film personalities in a March Madness-style tournament of 64, whittling it down to just one winner over a period of six weeks. Listeners choose a winner in all the duels by voting in polls on their website. Previous installations have focused on actors and actresses (2015), directors (2016) and last year, the films in the Filmspotting pantheon (films that have been deemed ineligible for their weekly top five lists because they're just too great and have been talked about too much).

This year is the first year in a three-year plan. In 2018 they're trying to determine the best movies of the 1990s, and they will follow that in 2019 with the best movies of the 2000s. That'll time out perfectly to be discussing the best movies of the 2010s when everyone else is talking about that in the early part of 2020.

What more excuse did I need?

Now, when I selected my top 25 films of the 2000s back in 2010, I did it completely organically. I narrowed my selections down to maybe 40 candidates, rewatched a good ten films in that January alone, and then produced the top 25 only from my own conclusions about their quality and my affection for them.

"What other way would there be to do it, Vance?"

Well I'm glad you asked. The easiest way to do it would be to just look at my Flickchart. The chart can and would tell me what my top 25 movies of the 2000s were based on the decisions I've made in various duels over time, which have led to an exact ranking for every film I've charted. If I believed it to be 100% accurate, it would arguably be the best way to go.

But I didn't necessarily believe it would be 100% accurate. Plus, making a list is a creative process. Even if my Flickhart list would be evidence of my own thought process on the topic, as recorded over a long period of time, there are enough variables in the decisions I've made that I didn't feel comfortable just having the website spit out my answers for me. I wanted to generate them on my own, if only for the aesthetic value of the exercise, of consciously considering and selecting them with only this context in mind.

And that's what I'll do in two years when it's time to choose my best of the 2010s. But the 1990s? Remember that headache I told you about that they gave me?

So I decided this time, I would just let Flickchart do its job. It'll be a lot easier on me, especially in a post I want to just crank out in a timely manner. Besides, it's a bit more honest, isn't it? I won't be selecting movies I think will gain me credibility but I don't really love, though I hope you know me well enough to know I don't do that anyway. These will be my favorites, pure and simple, a result of having selected them over time in a series of individual decisions governed by honest preferences.

I'm inclined to write a blurb about each one, but you don't need to read 64 blurbs. Twenty-five seems about right, as that's what I also did back in 2010. Twenty-five short blurbs, because many of these titles are ones you likely know, love, and know everything great about already.

So, in time for the championship game between Michigan and Villanova in college basketball's actual March Madness tournament, here's what Flickchart tells me are my top 64 films released between 1990 and 1999:

64. Short Cuts (1993)
63. Groundhog Day (1993)
62. Se7en (1995)
61. The Professional (1994)
60. Ulee's Gold (1997)
59. Smoke Signals (1998)
58. Beauty and the Beast (1991)
57. Misery (1990)
56. Trainspotting (1996)
55. Wayne's World (1992)
54. Total Recall (1990)
53. Kicking and Screaming (1995)
52. Toy Story 2 (1999)
51. Awakenings (1990)
50. A Man of No Importance (1994)
49. The Crow (1994)
48. A Simple Plan (1998)
47. Thelma & Louise (1991)
46. Speed (1994)
45. Before Sunrise (1995)
44. The Crucible (1996)
43. Swingers (1996)
42. Contact (1997)
41. Edward Scissorhands (1990)
40. Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992)
39. Apollo 13 (1995)
38. Reservoir Dogs (1992)
37. Jacob's Ladder (1990)
36. Happiness (1998)
35. The Sixth Sense (1999)
34. Three Kings (1999)
33. My Cousin Vinny (1992)
32. Boogie Nights (1997)
31. Dave (1992)
30. Dances With Wolves (1990)
29. Philadelphia (1993)
28. Malcolm X (1992)
27. The Player (1992)
26. Starship Troopers (1997)

25. The Matrix (1999) - The two most influential films of the decade bookend my top 25, with The Matrix clocking in here. This barely made my top 25 of 1999, landing at #22 on my year-end list, but I couldn't have known at that time how it would change cinema and grow in stature. I don't just love The Matrix because of its reputation, though. I love it because it's almost perfectly realized, and is a total whiz bang of a movie.

24. The Silence of the Lambs (1991) - I still remember watching this on a date in 1991 and feeling enthralled by it. And though I haven't revisited it more than twice in the ensuing years, that feeling of being enthralled has never left me. It has one of the most iconic characters/performances of all time, and it set a new standard for serial killer movies that made it almost as influential as my #25 and my #1.

23. Strange Days (1995) - Rarely is technology in a science fiction film used so successfully to find the heart of the story. This is a movie about love, loss and the loss of love in a scuzzy near future that is looking more and more like our own, in the film that showed me Ralph Fiennes could play a hero as well as a monstrous Nazi, and reminded me that Angela Bassett is just awesome.

22. 12 Monkeys (1995) - Another great head trip takes my next spot. Bruce Willis' first comeback (would that be fair to say?) has one of its true highlights in Terry Gilliam's film about a virus and time travel and, well, quite a bit else. It's Gilliam through and through and though that might disappoint us nowadays in light of his recent support of Harvey Weinstein, it was great then, and I won't deduct credit from the movie in retrospect.

21. Galaxy Quest (1999) - A comedy so good I saw it in the theater on consecutive nights. This loving Star Trek lampoon may be in my top ten comedies of all time and gave me a permanent fondness for Tim Allen (who will also appear later on this list). The cast also includes Sigourney Weaver and Sam Rockwell and I could just go on and on in a lovefest about this movie. It's got heart, it's got great production design and it's funny as hell.

20. Titanic (1997) - My heart will go on, and so will my affection for Titanic. I just can't quit it. (Wait, now I'm crossing my movie quotes.) A theatrical viewing of this in 3D a few years ago confirmed that I still love my #1 movie of 1997 and that I'd be happy on almost any occasion to sit down and watch it for three hours and 15 minutes. Some Titanic defenders might swear their appreciation for it is purely technical, but what can I say, I love the love story too.

19. Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) - The movie I would have least expected to appear on this list if you asked me after I first watched the trailer for it. "Who is this Hugh Grant character and why does he think he's so great?" Well, the answer is because he is so great, and this movie is delightful as hell -- even with Andie MacDowell in it. This is like comfort food for me. I own it and come back to it regularly.

18. Dumb and Dumber (1994) - The fact that Dumb and Dumber is only my 18th favorite film of the 1990s shows you how crazy good this decade was for me. I could watch this movie any time of the day or night. I used to say that if this came on TV I would be unable not to watch it until the end, though I'm not sure how many times that actually happened. It makes me shoot milk out of my nose. "Ah lahk it a lot."

17. Flirting With Disaster (1996) - David O. Russell was never better than in the 1990s, and this is his best of three great films from the decade. This is the very definition of the modern screwball comedy and it just flies from one great set piece to the next. I've never liked Ben Stiller, Patricia Arquette, Tea Leoni or Richard Jenkins better -- though Stiller has another reason to be praised in 1996 coming up later on the list.

16. Election (1999) - It's appropriate that Alexander Payne's best film comes right after Russell's, since for a while I thought of them both as personal favorites who couldn't do wrong. For a while. They've both gone comparatively astray for me recently, but Election is prime Payne, when his wicked humor combined perfectly with structural narrative playfulness to produce something utterly rewatchable. Strangely, it's a feel good movie even though most of the characters are bad.

15. Ghost (1990) - As with Titanic, you'll never take the romantic out of me. This was Titanic before Titanic, a film to which I was slavishly devoted on first viewing with its high concept ideas and a romance that made me swoon. But guess what? This one holds up too. I watched it a few years back and I continue to think it has one of the best and tightest scripts of any film I've ever seen. If Ghost told me it loved me, I'd say "Ditto."

14. Schindler's List (1993) - I finally sat down for my second viewing of Schindler's List last year, 24 years after my first -- which confirmed it was not just hanging around the upper end of my Flickchart on reputation alone. This is still an epic accomplishment of almost unbelievable quality and importance, feeling almost like a documentary in spots, yet it's also got a truly cinematic villain that allows it to function, in some respects, like a Spielbergian popular entertainment. The ending still slays me.

13. Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) - I saw T2 before I saw The Terminator, so the latter never stood a chance. James Cameron's best film will always be one of my most mind-blowing exposures to special effects of all time, but it doesn't get by on the T-1000 alone. It was a brilliant decision to reclaim Arnold Schwarzenegger as the hero of this series, and a whole host of iconic imagery follows from that. It's one of my favorite action movies of all time, and that scene of nuclear apocalypse still gives me the willies.

12. Bound (1996) - Bound has spent time in my top 20 overall on Flickchart; that's how much I love it. I simply love spending time in the company of such interesting characters who make such smart decisions within the context of a tight noir gangster thriller, and the hot lesbian sex doesn't hurt either (yuk yuk). The Wachowskis' debut feature is still their best, and it gets remarkable narrative mileage from just the sets of two adjacent apartments. All scripts should be this intelligent.

11. The Iron Giant (1999) - You've cried in movies before, but how many of them still reduce you to tears after a fifth viewing? That's about how many times I've seen Brad Bird's masterpiece all the way through, and I still get that lump in the throat at the end. It's a simple and wondrous snapshot of a particular time in Cold War America with a message of friendship and non-violence that's the perfect antidote to it. Simply put, one of my favorite children's movies of all time.

10. Defending Your Life (1991) - Surely the most obscure film to place so high on my list, Albert Brooks' afterlife romantic comedy nails both the romance and the comedy. He and Meryl Streep have never been so laid back and lovely as they navigate an afterlife processing station where they must convince a judge that they deserve to move on to the next plain of existence, or be sentenced to return to Earth to give it another try. It's high concept and marvelously joyous, with a useful message about confronting fear thrown in for good measure.

9. Glengarry Glen Ross (1992) - The highest ranked 1990s film on my chart to just miss my top 20, though it's been as high as 12th or 13th in the past. David Mamet annoys me more often than he wins me over, but this is the massive exception to that, a foul-mouthed and dialogue-heavy look at four men trying to sell worthless investment properties in order to stay afloat. "Third place is your fired." Alec Baldwin's monologue would probably be enough, but then there's the rest of the movie. A tour de force of writing and acting.

8. The Shawshank Redemption (1994) - Yet another film whose backlash has never been a consideration in my affection for it. Shawshank is a masterpiece, pure and simple. It'll never be my #1 film, but I understand why it's #1 on IMDB, and I would never begrudge someone who called it their own favorite movie. It's a depressing prison movie that sings on the strength of its script, acting, and message of hope in the face of total hopelessness.

7. Unforgiven (1992) - Another exception after Glengarry. I have historically not loved the western, though I've developed an appreciation for it in recent years. Yet I've always loved Unforgiven, Clint Eastwood's best film and one of the most thoughtful examinations of morality, heroism and the consequences of violence that I've ever seen. "It's a hell of a thing, killing a man. You take away all he has, and all he's ever gonna have." "Well I guess they had it coming." "We all got it coming, kid."

6. Goodfellas (1990) - And this is the first of the current Filmspotting final four to make my list, with two more ahead. I guess Filmspotters have good taste. What can a person say about Goodfellas other than that it is an absolute flat-out classic, as confident a display of the mastery of the cinematic medium as exists. We bow before the cinematic god that is Martin Scorsese.

5. Run Lola Run (1998) - I had a sub-par viewing of Run Lola Run a few years ago. And then a few weeks ago I saw it again and remembered why I didn't penalize it on my Flickchart for that sub-par viewing. A symphony of editing, music and cinematic derring do, Tom Tykwer's film is a singular experience that also gets you in and out in only 80 minutes. Its narrative invention is combined with a philosophical, existential approach to fate that is also thought-provoking. Dense and rich.

4. The Cable Guy (1996) - No rational argument will explain why this movie is ranked above some of the other films on this list, but I can tell you that few films that I've ever seen so largely exceeded my expectations for them. The film that made me love Jim Carrey has so much going on that I could never possibly do justice to it in five lines of text. Let's just say that this became a personal cult favorite with friends and has since become a measurable part of my identity as a cinephile. And here's that other Ben Stiller accomplishment I was telling you about. He should get more credit for it.

3. Fargo (1996) - The film up against Goodfellas in Filmspotting's final four. I may not have realized until they made a fantastic TV show version of this movie just how singular of a creation it is, using trademark Coen elements to carve out an absolute distinctive cinematic landscape that ties together comedy, tragedy and melancholy. If it weren't this funny, I probably wouldn't love it as much as I do, but the same is true if it weren't this tragic. Somehow, you aren't depressed as hapless Minnesotans leave a trail of bodies as they just try to make better lives for themselves.

2. Toy Story (1995) - And my #1 children's movie of all time is not one of the classics from Disney's mid-century height, but the first film released by Disney's subsidiary, Pixar. Pixar's first feature arrived fully formed, from the technology used to animate it to the whip-smart dialogue and script. Oh, and the heart -- the tons and tons of heart. Like with Galaxy Quest, I saw this on consecutive days in the theater, and many times since then. Pixar has never bested it.

1. Pulp Fiction (1994) - The other Filmspotting finalist (it goes up against Silence of the Lambs), Pulp Fiction is my #4 film of all time and the highest ranked film that I saw after I became a cinephile. The number four also represents the number of times I saw it in the theater, still a record. A narrative pretzel that simply blew my mind and instantly elevated any number of its scenes to all-time iconic status. This movie showed me what filmmaking could be, could do, and remains one of my most influential viewing experiences of all time. It doesn't take this top spot by accident or by default; it's fully deserved.

To show you just how much I love this decade, all 64 of these films are listed within my top 200 all time on Flickchart. Short Cuts gets in just under the wire at #199, though it's a perfect cut off because my #65 is then #208 overall. That means 32% of my top 200 are films from the 1990s, nearly a third.

Here is a breakdown by years for each:

1990 - 8
1991 - 5
1992 - 9
1993 - 4
1994 - 8
1995 - 7
1996 - 7
1997 - 5
1998 - 4
1999 - 7

I don't consciously think of 1992 as a great year for cinema, but clearly I thought it was. This was also a bit of an important in my maturation as a film fan, as 1992 straddled my freshman and sophomore years in college, when this was all start to mean so much more to me. That was also the year I had my first collegiate film class. Probably no coincidence there.

Oh, and just so they could cheat and add a few more titles, the Filmspotting guys had eight play-in games, allowing them to add eight more titles to the list. In case you're wondering, my next eight are: Truly Madly Deeply, Natural Born Killers, Looking for Richard, Bottle Rocket, Quiz Show, Close-Up, The Blair Witch Project and Carlito's Way. And yeah, I'm sure I could easily make arguments for these over some that came ahead of them. Tough decade.

I should mention that although I had a lot of the big titles in common with the Filmspotting 64, I did diverge from them in a number of other ways. Only 24 of their 64 overlapped on my list. I suppose I'm happy with that, as a cinephile gains his or her personal identity more on the basis of idiosyncratic favorites than the ways he or she conforms to conventional wisdom. Filmspotting themselves even accounted for their own preferences in making this list, as producer Sam van Halgren fought to have The Insider included even though it didn't make any of the major lists they used to figure out the most beloved films of the decade. More power to you, Sam.

I'm a bit alarmed that so few of these films are in a language other than English. As much as I love my 1990s, I know I have big blind spots in that decade, a function of what was available to me at the time I was falling in love with these movies and what I've prioritized going back to see. One of the few films that made the Filmspotting cut that I haven't seen, for example, was Chungking Express, a movie I believe I'd love if I could get my hands on it. I tried to watch it last year for Asian Audient, but could not borrow or rent it from anywhere, and didn't feel it warranted going to the lengths of purchasing it. So I've still got some work cut out for me.

But in early April of 2018, as random a time as any other, this is how I feel about that great decade, and I'm sticking to it.