The eternal life of the superhero

WARNING!

WARNING!

WARNING!

The following post contains the majorest possible spoilers about Avengers: Endgame!

(Though if you would like to read my spoiler-free review, click here.)

Two nights after my viewing of Avengers: Endgame, I was playing a game of Marvel Trouble with my five-year-old. You have to take those two words separately to understand what they mean in conjunction. "Trouble" is that old game that has the bubble in the middle of the board, which you press to roll a pair of dice (a handy way not to lose said dice). And "Marvel" means it's a version of Trouble -- a game that's a lot like Sorry, it turns out -- featuring the beloved characters of Marvel comics.

There are four different characters you can play, each of whom has four little identical game pieces. There's Iron Man, whose pieces are colored yellow. There's Thor, whose pieces are colored red. Those color assignments are not particularly obvious so I sometimes confuse those pieces for one another. The color assignments get more obvious from there as Hulk is green and Black Widow is black.

As we were setting up the board, I thought the following:

"Wow, half of these characters are now dead."

It was a sobering thought. It occurred to me how unusual it was that you could think of epic, timeless characters, who have graced the comics for many decades, as deceased. Most people have not yet seen Avengers: Endgame and my five-year-old probably won't see it for five years. But soon, most people -- probably including my five-year-old even before he sees the movie -- will know that Iron Man and Black Widow are no longer alive.

Of course, various comic threads over the years have killed off most if not all of these characters. I'm not sure how many times the world's two most famous superheroes, Batman and Superman, have been dead. There's even a whole series of comic books called The Death of Superman.

Yet not until it is done in a movie do we really think of these characters as actually dead. And even then we have to really believe it. Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice "killed" Superman, but we believed that one even less than we believed that Spider-Man and Black Panther might permanently be dust.

Even in last year's Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, where the actual Peter Parker is supposed to have actually died, we don't tend to think of that as canon. How can we, when another Spider-Man movie is coming out this year?

Yet the MCU has a definitive finality to it. It is the canon of all canons. And once something happens in an MCU movie, it has an authority that exceeds all of the multiplicity of possible rabbit holes comic books can go down. It is the final It.

And so when my son played Iron Man -- his favorite character -- in Trouble, he was playing with a ghost.

Me, I was feeling less morbid and played the Hulk. I love what they did with the Hulk in Endgame (and with Thor, for that matter).

I usually play Black Widow. It's in part to teach my children, by example, that female superheroes are just as cool as male ones. But this time, I just couldn't bring myself to grab those pieces. I figured at least one of us should be playing someone who isn't a ghost. (Plus, the board was more conveniently oriented for me to play Hulk without having to reach across the board.)

I expected the death of Tony Stark in this movie, because nothing has been better publicized than how Robert Downey Jr. wanted to be done making Marvel movies. Well, maybe that Chris Evans wanted to be done making Marvel movies. Captain America's not dead, but let's just say that the only adventures he'll still be going on are getting a second jello at the old folks home. (And lest you wonder where Captain America is in this version of Trouble, he's a special piece you can get on your team if you role the one side of the second die that has a shield on it. When he's on your team, none of your players can be sent back to the start.)

But I did not expect the death of Natasha Romanoff. That's in part because there is a Black Widow movie in the works, which I now understand must be a prequel. But at the time she gave her life for the soul stone, I figured it was not a permanent loss. And at the end, when Steve Rogers makes his improbable trip back to return all the stones (how does he know how to fly a space ship??), I predicted that instead of seeing him re-materialize five seconds later, we'd see her. Somehow when Steve went to return the soul stone, he'd have made an exchange of his life for hers. When I saw what they actually chose to do, that should have been a more obvious prediction. But my prediction revolved around Black Widow because I just couldn't reconcile that she was actually dead.

My feelings of loss over Black Widow probably have more to do with my feelings of affection for Scarlett Johansson than for the character. Black Widow has never been a greatly written character, in part because she has never truly been able to assert her individuality. She does, however, have a great scene in the first hour of Endgame, in which Johansson almost does some indie movie style acting in expressing her ragged, no-sleep-for-five-years frustration over her helplessness to undo what's been done. That was one of the film's most singular moments ... and now I understand why they made sure they got it in. It would be our last chance to really connect with Natasha Romanoff.

What has since occurred to me, though, is that Iron Man and Black Widow are not really dead.

Oh, they're dead within the MCU. Sure. They're not going to make surprise appearances in Black Panther 2.

But what I mean is, superheroes never really die. The Black Widow movie is confirmation of that. Not only will we see Black Widow again soon, we'll see Scarlett Johansson as Black Widow. She didn't even die because Johansson wanted to stop making movies. She just died because that's what the narrative dictated.

And not only will she live again in the Black Widow movie, she'll live again in an Avengers reboot 15 years from now. And 15 years after that. And 15 years after that.

What makes epic characters epic characters is that we will continue to tell their stories. Maybe we'll pick up earlier in their lives. Maybe we'll pick up in an alternate timeline. Or maybe we'll just scrap what has come before and tell it all again.

So just because a character has died in a movie doesn't mean we're likely to think of them as dead. Kids can still engage in Star Wars-related play acting without having it cross their mind that the characters they're playing -- Han Solo and Luke Skywalker -- are no longer among the living. Heck, Han Solo was most recently experienced by them as alive, in last year's Solo: A Star Wars Story.

If we're being honest, they were never among the living anyway. On some level kids know these are characters, characters who have been explored multiple times in multiple incarnations. That gives them a kind of eternal vigor we can never dampen.

Long live Black Widow and Iron Man.

First to the finish line

I’m going to a critics screening of Avengers: Endgame tonight. On the world’s third largest IMAX screen, or so it claims.

Jealous?

It’s a measure of how far the MCU has come with me in recent years that I am anticipating this with nearly the same fervor as I would a new Star Wars movie. I don’t think I would have gone to a midnight screening – especially not when the movie is three hours long – but it feels as momentous an occasion in many ways.

For one, the previous film left off with one of the great cliffhangers in modern movie history, even if the stakes were made to seem greater then we knew them to actually be. Even if you know that much of the loss from the previous film will be reversed, you don’t know how, and you don’t know what new loss may replace it.

And that’s really the key thing here. You could accuse Marvel of takesies-backsies when it inevitably revives Spider-Man, Black Panther et al from the dead, but it absolutely will replace some of those dead with heroes who can’t be revived. At least one of arguably the two most central figures in the MCU will croak in this film, and they ain’t coming back, so the film carries with it the same kind of foreboding as if you went into a Star Wars movie knowing for sure that either Luke Skywalker or Han Solo would die.

Now, Captain America is not Luke Skywalker and Iron Man is not Han Solo (though that would certainly be the correct way to align the characters according to their personalities and traits). Let’s not get carried away here. But I do find the most recent chapter in Steve and Tony’s very long saga to be more satisfying than the most recent chapter of Han and Luke’s very long saga, preferring Avengers: Infinity War to Star Wars: The Last Jedi. For which Han Solo wasn’t around anyway, which may be one of the reasons it was not as good as its predecessor.

So tonight is a pretty big night, and not just because the screen is big and the running time is big. It’s genuinely a big moment in the history of modern film mythology. You could argue whether superheroes should lay claim to such a moment, but the fact is, they do. Kevin Feige and company have spent well over a decade ensuring there would be full audience investment in this moment, and they’ve earned their moment in the sun.

Will it be a satisfying ending to this phase of the MCU?

I’ll be among the first to know … but I’ll heed #Don’tSpoilTheEndgame and keep my mouth shut until sometime next week.

A list-making dad's dream come true

I didn't start making my list of all the movies I've ever seen -- which is just five away from reaching 5,300 -- until I was about to graduate high school.

I got my hands on a video guide released by the local video chain, which seemed exhaustive at the time, and which helped me build the bones of my list. Today, I feel the list is probably accurate to within ten titles, and those that aren't on there are likely ones I saw so young that I don't remember their titles, or even seeing them.

I've considered, over the years, that the only way to get a truly accurate list would have been to start when I was a kid, something that was never likely to happen. Neither of my parents are into lists or movies, particularly -- actually, my mom has gotten into movies in a big way, but it's been more of a later life obsession. In any case, they wouldn't have made up a list of movies their child had seen because that just wasn't something someone was likely to do in the late 1970s or early 1980s, at least not without their child asking them to do so. (Not that it's particularly common in the 2010s.) And at that point I didn't yet know I was going to be this obsessed with lists.

But now that I'm a parent with my own child ...

I'm not going to lie, I have thought about this a number of times. I figured the 45-year-old version of my older son -- either son, but he was the one I thought of first -- would thank me for it. He wasn't going to have the tools nor the wherewithal to create this list, but I could. After all, I'd know about most of the movies he saw because I'd see them with him, and been keeping track of them for my own purposes.

Every time I considered it, though, I ultimately waved it off. There are many things you may want your children to inherit from you, but obsessive list-keeping skills is not necessarily one of them. I don't think it's a bad thing to pass on, per se, but I'd feel weird being proactive about it. It's something they have to come by on their own, or not at all.

And sometimes, they do just that.

A propos of nothing except the fact that he's got my genes, my son has started asking me recently about my favorite movies. He knows I'm a critic, and he also knows I have my films ranked on Flickchart. This has all become more relevant for him in the wake of seeing Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, which he considers his favorite movie of all the time. More often than I would think reasonable, he asks me where this movie ranks on my list, expecting me to say it's in my top ten or something. When I'm honest and say that it's probably in my top 400 (out of that aforementioned 5,300) he's always disappointed.

It had never been more than your typical kid-questioning until this past weekend, when he said he wanted to rank his top 100 movies. And I said I had the means at my disposal to help him compile a list of all the movies he'd ever seen.

He not only jumped on board, he wanted to do it right then.

Instead we did it over the next few days, adding films as we came across them by going in reverse chronological order through my list of first-time watches and repeat viewings on Letterboxd. We added some films I knew he'd watched without me, such as in his after-school program or at his aunt's house. And though this doesn't really feel definitive either, and we expect to add movies over time as we remember them, we currently have a list of 106 films he's seen.

It's funny how at age eight, he's already grappling with some of the same things I am grappling with in my series Audient Audit -- movies I think I've seen, but can't be sure. I told him he'd watched Bambi and Dumbo, neither of which he actually remembered seeing, and likely would never have included himself on a future such list. Then there were two movies he started but didn't finish at his aunt's house -- that's a pretty common thing there, apparently, since normal people don't lose sleep over partial watches. He wasn't willing to include them. That's a standard I apply to my own lists as well.

Ranking them? Next weekend, probably, if he hasn't already moved on to something else, which is a distinct possibility.

But now that I have this list, I may try to maintain it for him. We watched E.T. on Easter night, after compiling the list, and I've added that. With the one other I just remembered, now it's 108.

A long way from 5,300, but you have to start somewhere.

Don't cry over spilled money

The following post contains spoilers for Triple Frontier.

I don't think of myself as a materialistic person. I can let go of money pretty easily, and don't tend to buy anything that qualifies as a trophy or an object of its own inherent worth. I haven't made a single decision in my career that has been focused on the acquisition of any more money than I already have. Why do you think I tried to make it for a while as a paid film critic?

All that said, few things upset me more in a movie than the loss, destruction or wanton dispersal of money.

I suppose I'm exaggerating with my language here. Plenty of things upset me more, like disease, mass death or the death of a child. Of course those things.

But few inconsequential things bother me more than when a box full of millions of dollars explodes and the tattered bills flutter down into the ocean.

That's an actual example from Lethal Weapon 2, which was the first time I noticed this bothering me. I haven't seen that movie in ages, but I clearly remember that a ton of cash is scattered to the winds and water in the finale. It made me ill. I mean, not really, but it made me shake my head slowly in sorrow.

Among the plenty of other examples, another comes to mind. That's The Dark Knight, where to prove how much he is governed by the insane principles of anarchy, the Joker stacks what seems like a billion dollars and sets it aflame. Just because.

In Triple Frontier, which I watched last night, it happens like nine different times. And here's where the spoilers begin.

The first instance is the burning of the drug lord's safe house, where the team of retired special ops soldiers has found hundreds of millions of dollars in the walls, a la the dead bodies in Sicario only more valuable. Because of their short window of opportunity, they can only take what they have the time to dig out, leaving untold millions going up in smoke.

Then there's their escape through the Andes by helicopter. Because of the extra cash they gathered, the helicopter can't support the full weight of their booty and also reach the necessary altitudes to clear the mountains. They therefore have to toss a number of duffel bags down from the interior of the chopper into the jungle to reduce the strain on the aircraft.

This isn't enough, though, and a gearbox explodes, leaving the helicopter in a position to crash land. In order to allow for the landing, they have to drop the net bag carrying the vast majority of their ill-gotten gains. This is largely recovered, but in the moment it was another head-shaking loss of funds.

As they are traversing a very thin ledge through the mountains, one of the mules carrying several bags containing probably tens of millions loses its footing and goes down the side of the mountain. This is the shot that most closely resembles the shot in Lethal Weapon 2, as the bills billow out and fall to the distant ground like so much confetti. To show what good guys they are (the film really waffles on this one), they take a moment to mourn the loss of the mule as well.

As it's extremely cold and the guys have no other reasonable kindling, they also burn some of the money. This struck me as the least believable case of loss/destruction in the whole film, given that greed has motivated almost everything they have done to this point. (Another area where the film waffles.)

Lastly, when they are facing huge odds as vengeful locals wait for them with machine guns, they must reduce their burden to only what they can carry in their backpacks, throwing the rest of the money down into the bottom of a ravine.

By the end of this I was almost numb.

I'm overstating this a bit, and besides, some of the money that's "lost" is not destroyed or unrecoverable -- it'll just be recovered by South American locals who surely deserve it more.

Still, I was triggered.

Good thing I myself have never lost more than $20 here and there. I don't know how I'd handle it.

If you don't know her name ... you don't speak Spanish

In my email this morning I saw a fairly provocative message subject from Mission Tiki Drive-In, whose emails I still get (and look at) even though I don't live in Los Angeles anymore, and haven't for nearly six years.

The subject was "If You Don't Know Her Name ... You Will."

I did a quick mental review of recent releases and couldn't figure out what movie this subject would be referring to. A click into the message revealed that it was The Curse of La Llorona.

And I thought "That's not the primary reason most people don't know her name."

It's a heartening development that a movie can be released in the U.S. with a title that figures to challenge most Americans' ability to say it. The producers of the Conjuring movies (of which this is one of many universe spinoffs) believe that Spanish has nestled itself enough in the American mainstream that the majority of Americans can or should be able to say this word, but I have to wonder if that's correct. As I lived in Los Angeles and like to think of myself as a general scholar on how to pronounce words in foreign languages (whether I know what they mean or not), I know that this is pronounced "La Yarona," with the L's being said more or less as a Y. But in the numerous pockets of the country where ignorance or a willful distrust of foreign things prevail, there will be many attempts to say the title with an L sound, to the extent that they deign to say it at all. And I can't really blame them, at least those who are attempting to say it, because the more pioneering of them at least know that the word "Lloyd" begins with a pair of L's and is said with an L sound.

Of course, La Llorona is a reasonably famous product of Mexican folklore, increasing the likelihood that the studio would want to use the name in the title in order to create a brand awareness among those who know about it. Again, though, I doubt this brand awareness extends much outside the parts of the country where immigrants are plentiful and (I dare say) welcome.

The reason I didn't immediately recognize this movie at all is because in Australia, it is called The Curse of the Weeping Woman. Which I actually think is a pretty good title, with the two W's creating a kind of poetic sense of alliteration. Australian distributors knew the locals would have no chance of pronouncing "La Llorona."

When/if I do see it -- as I have missed many of these Conjuring spinoffs -- I will be likely to use the original title in my various lists, especially since I feel like I'm comparing my year-end lists primarily to those of a pool of American critics.

Plus, I'm really excited about what this normalization of Spanish could mean for the 2020 presidential election, as hopefully most of the people who understand how to say La Llorona will help vote El Cabron out of the White House.

Audient Audit: Speed 2: Cruise Control

This is the fourth in my 2019 monthly series revisiting, or possibly visiting for the first time, movies I think I've seen but may not have.

The fourth movie in Audient Audit is not only a case of setting the record straight, it's a case of righting an injustice.

Speed 2: Cruise Control is the first movie in this series that I know, with 100% certainty, that I did not properly watch. Yet it made it onto my lists anyway.

What's more, I ranked it as the worst movie I saw in 1997 -- when by any reasonable standard I did not actually see it. And that's the injustice I'm trying to correct this month.

The circumstance is that I was on a plane with my family. Given the timing I suspect it was my cousin's wedding, since I'd already graduated from college and would not have otherwise regularly been traveling with them at that age. These were well before the days when you had your own seatback entertainment, so everyone was forced to watch, or not watch as the case may be, the same movie.

The choice on this particular flight was Speed 2: Cruise Control, a bit of an odd choice for the plane given that it involves a passenger vessel in jeopardy, and even finishes with a plane crash of sorts.

I landed somewhere between watching it and not watching it.

You had to pay for headphones, and I didn't. But I still watched most, if not all, of the movie. I just didn't hear any of the dialogue or the explosions.

Clearly I thought I devoted enough of my attention to the movie to say that I saw it, and film is, after all, designed as primarily a visual medium. It would be a successful realization of a film's mission statement if you could watch it with the sound off and still say you had seen and understood everything that happened.

But the reality is, you haven't really seen a movie if you haven't heard it. Things that seem vaguely ridiculous out of the context of their spoken dialogue -- which was most of Speed 2 for me -- may come across as much more reasonable when watched as they were designed to be watched. "Show don't tell" is a great guiding principle for making movies, but if you don't expect to be able to tell something, you make different choices about how you are going to show it. Speed 2 was not designed to be watched silently, and for this it cannot be blamed.

Besides, this movie is damn near two hours long. Is it really possible that I watched the whole thing?

What's likely is that I took in 60% of the images and 0% of the dialogue, which, in a flawed bit of math, computes to a movie that was 30% watched. But I must have been really desperate to get credit for it, and I felt I could assess its terribleness just from the images. So indeed, I ranked it that year, and I ranked it 39th out of the 39 movies I saw in time for my ranking deadline.

Once those year-end lists are finalized I don't ever touch them again, so I'm not going to go back and remove Speed 2 from the Microsoft Word file "1997 film rankings." But a second viewing might improve Speed 2's ultimate standing in my Flickchart, where its value is being periodically reassessed through random duels against other movies. It is currently ranked 4,557th out of 4,883, and it was time to determine if that was really fair or not.

For starters, I'd like to say that Speed 2 deserves points for cheekiness alone. The title Cruise Control is a bit of punning genius. Not only does it describe the plot of the movie in about as few words as you can imagine, but it riffs on a familiar setting in most cars that governs the vehicle's speed. The filmmakers had to have been laughing when they came up with it, and I appreciate that a lot more now than I did in 1997. It's even possible that they came up with the title before they came up with the script itself, though I'm not going to look that up for confirmation.

Secondly, I might have almost put Speed 2 in a position to not get a proper second watch. I chose to start it around 9:30 after getting home from another movie, Shazam!, which I watched with my eight-year-old on the Thursday night before our four-day Easter weekend. Suffice it to say that with naps factored in, I did not finish the movie until after 1 a.m. However, I did pause the movie every time I took one of those naps.

As I've spent so much time on preamble, and this is, in the end, a pretty undemanding and straightforward action movie, I won't give you a lot of detail about what works and what doesn't in Speed 2. I will say, however, that it's really no worse than a mediocre action movie, something I probably would have given two stars if rating it for the first time today. Indeed, when you just look up every once in a while and see things exploding without any context, you aren't really making an honest assessment of what the filmmakers have done. Which goes without saying.

I will say that the movie doesn't properly use Sandra Bullock, which may have been inevitable. Bullock broke out as one of Hollywood's most charismatic actresses almost entirely on the basis of her extremely winning performance in the original Speed. And sure, Keanu Reeves was doing all the heavy lifting in terms of the physical action, just as Jason Patric does here. But Bullock's role in driving a bus above 50 miles per hour at all times was absolutely indispensable to that movie. She was the stationary ying to Reeves' mobile yang, and one could not have existed without the other.

Here she's kind of left at loose ends, more making John McClane-style wisecracks about having been through all this before than playing a central role in the current scenario. Oh, she does some heroic stuff, like using a chainsaw (why is there a chainsaw on a cruise liner?) to open a locked door and free a bunch of trapped passengers from imminent death. She's also good at keeping a level head and corralling people where they need to go. But you don't get the sense she's the difference between the life and death of these passengers, as she was in Speed.

It might have been too obvious an approach to give her the same exact role, where her presence at the boat's controls made the crucial difference. But sequels often reproduce dynamics from the original wholesale without us taking them to task. When Speed 2 does decide to repeat a scenario from the first movie, it's by having the villain take her captive in the final 20 minutes, a choice that feels even less useful in our current age, where men saving women from peril is frowned upon to say the least. Sure, Bullock's Annie does show agency once she's in the clutches of Willem Dafoe's villain, but the ending of the original Speed is by far its weakest passage, and that's no less true here.

Let's talk about Dafoe's villain for a moment. Sure, Dennis Hopper rigged a lot of things to explode in the first movie, but Dafoe's control over every opening and closing door on the ship -- which he can manipulate through punching a few seemingly random keys on a control panel he wears on his wrist -- really stretches credibility. You might argue that credibility is not the strong suit of this series in general, but it's thrown out the window entirely in the second movie.

I did appreciate the climax for the most part, though, first the attempt to avoid ramming the oil tanker, then the collision with the Saint Martin port. There was a lot of production bravado, and I dare say money, in that finale, and there can't help but be something comical in the way the cruise ship plows through all the boaters and other pleasure seekers on the shore. I think this movie has its tongue in its cheek more than I thought it did.

I can't go back and rewrite history, but I did think it would be charitable to list the movies that came out in 1997 that I would rank lower than Speed 2 if I were ranking them today. I won't limit it to movies I saw at the time, as that will increase the number of movies Speed 2 is better than. Here they are:

Absolute Power
Addicted to Love
Air Bud
An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn
B.A.P.S.
Batman & Robin
Booty Call
Event Horizon
Fools Rush In
I Know What You Did Last Summer
Julian Po
Jungle 2 Jungle
Playing God
She's So Lovely
Trial and Error
Volcano

Congratulations, Speed 2, you're not nearly as terrible as I thought you were.

One final thought on my 1997 film rankings. I must have noticed this sometime before now, but if I have, I've forgotten. Both my favorite movie of the year (Titanic) and my least favorite movie of the year (Speed 2) are about oceanliners in peril. This exercise has proven the flaws in that initial assessment, but as I said, the record stands as it did in January of 1998.

Okay, on to a more typical "did I or didn't I?" choice in May.

The album approach to diversity in film

I’m of two minds about representation at the movies.

On the one hand, I’m a liberal and I absolutely believe that racial, sexual and gender minorities should be fully represented both in front of and behind the camera. It would be a great finger in the eye of Trump and his cronies if the new cinematic norm were that these minorities were present in plentiful numbers.

On the other hand, I have a steadfast belief that there is a time and a place for every type of movie you could make, that any type of person might want to see. I don’t want to enter into an era where certain movies just don’t get made because they happen to be about subjects or people that we’ve decided are historically overrepresented.

If only movies could be like albums.

“Photo albums, Vance?”

No, not photo albums, you nitwit. Musical albums. The kind made by musicians, usually containing 10-15 songs.

Most albums, the good ones anyway, feature a multiplicity of moods, speeds and tones. You start off with something hot to bring the crowd in, which builds to its peak moment of excitement. You keep it going in tracks two and three. But by track four it’s time to slow it down a bit and become contemplative for a track or two. Then a couple whimsical songs, another banger or two, and then close with a couple sorrowful or ethereal contemplations on existence and its impermanence.

The point is not how the album flows and is constructed, but that the same artist has made a dozen different songs potentially appealing to a dozen different audiences, appropriate for a dozen different moods. Or if they’re really good, appealing to everybody, because that’s just how masterfully the album has been composed. But definitely taking different approaches to the making of music in each song, and comprising them of dissimilar elements.

If only a filmmaker could make ten movies at once that were meant to be received by us as a set. If they could, it would relieve each movie of having to be everything to everyone.

You could have one film where a woman is the hero, and another where she has to get saved by a man. You could have one film where all the races play together nicely, and others where they’re each doing their own things that pertain just to them. You could have one movie full of sassy gay best friends and one that didn’t have any.

But films cannot be interpreted as part of a collection, at least not in the moment of their inception. Each one must stand on its own. Each one must try to pass the Bechdel Test. Each one must have minorities present in a fashion where they aren’t pernicious examples of tokenism. Each one must try to engage in race-blind casting even if it’s not historically accurate. Each one must be sure that the villain is not a member of some group that has been too historically vilified.

I realize a suggestion like this is dangerously close to the “separate but equal” logic that informed the segregationists. But I hope you know I don’t mean it that way. I mean it to allow movies like Glengarry Glen Ross to have a future.

Glengarry Glen Ross is among my top 30 films of all time. It could never be made in 2019. It is a movie made by and starring white guys. The cast is comprised exclusively of white men, it’s written by a white man and it’s directed by a white man. If Glengarry Glen Ross were made today, there would be a movement on Twitter to cancel it.

But if Glengarry Glen Ross were part of an “album of films” released at the same time, it would not prompt outrage. Its white male cast would be balanced out by movie #7, whose cast was comprised of Lebanese lesbians. I’m exaggerating a bit but I think you take my meaning. I think it’s a legitimate cinematic pursuit to want to make a movie where six white guys stab each other in the back in order to win a prize for selling the most real estate and to prevent the loss of their jobs. To that particular filmmaker, it may represent the exact mood, the exact tone, the exact historic or demographic moment they want to explore.

Oddly and perhaps counterintuitively, the end result of this movement toward heterogeneity in each film is a kind of homogeneity – not within each movie itself, but taken in comparison to one another. If all movies have a perfect balance of races, genders and sexual orientations involved in whatever mission the plot takes them on, with predictable results about who is allowed to have a dark side and who is not, the movies will begin losing the element that distinguishes them from one another. They’ll have a utopian quality that reflects the society I want to live in, but they may also stop seeming as true as they could be if they were more thorny, eccentric and specific. What is art if not thorny, eccentric and specific?

Me, I want a world with both Glengarry Glen Ross and the Lebanese lesbians, and without one having to answer to the other if they don’t want to.

No better than Cobra or the Silver Surfer

Star Wars titles have never been a paragon of cleverness, but sometimes they have at least been distinctive (The Phantom Menace) or poetic (The Last Jedi).

Rarely are they derivative of trends that have been so beaten into the ground, I wrote a blog post parodying the trend a whole five years ago.

That was this post, in which I bemoaned the lame over-usage of the word "rise" in movie titles. Now, a Star Wars movie has succumbed to that deader than dead trend.

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is the title of the last movie in the Skywalker saga, the implications of that title notwithstanding. It's not a great title (and does have me asking a lot of questions), but I don't object to the Skywalker name drop. It's the use of "rise" that gives me pause.

You may recall (if you haven't clicked on the link above) that the impetus for my complaints over "rise" was The Amazing Spider-Man 2: Rise of Electro, though it turned out that was only a title used in Australia and some other non-U.S. territories. But other titles with some variation on that naming convention, that were used domestically in the U.S., were Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer and G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra.

Any time a Star Wars movie is taking leads from Fantastic Four and G.I. Joe, it's time to be worried.

Of course, I don't for a moment believe that a title previews the potential quality of the film itself, so I'm not really worried. However, questionable decisions are questionable decisions, and it's hard to know for sure to what extent they permeate the project.

Unlike millions of people I have not watched the teaser trailer, and I think I will continue with what has been my standard practice for a good five years now, which is to take whatever measures I can to avoid trailers of movies I'm excited about seeing. But I have seen a couple stills from the trailer (accidentally, while googling for the image above), and I must say it's exciting to be within eight months of another full-on, non-spinoff Star Wars movie.

I just hope it's not the last one I ever care about. I'd like Star Wars to keep rising, even as the Skywalker saga falls.

A frank acknowledgement of how adults spend their time

In the otherwise unremarkable kids movie Wonder Park, which I decided was a better option than Shazam for my five-year-old and eight-year-old on Thursday night, there was a moment that made me laugh for how true it was.

The mother of the heroine, named June, is tucking her in to bed, and winding down the fantasy play they've just been involved in. June's dad comes to collect her mother, and gives the following as the playful reason she must come away:

"Come on, you've got a DVR that's near capacity and it's not going to watch itself." Or words to that effect.

It was an honest and refreshing acknowledgement of what parents actually do when they put their children to bed: They watch TV.

Movies tend to present an idealized version of their good characters. The bad characters may engage in activities that have no merit, but the heroes never do. In most movies, this dad might be scooping up this mom so they could go to their poetry reading or their cooking class.

Nope. They just have a DVR choked with unwatched episodes of peak TV, and if they don't start taming it they'll have to start deleting things unwatched.

Now that's a dilemma I can relate to.

If anything it's a little quaint. The full DVR was maybe the big dilemma of five years ago. Now, most peak TV you care to watch is available on a streaming service, where size limits are not relevant considerations.

But I just appreciate the fact that the movie isn't trying to make this mom and dad out to be Super Mom and Super Dad. After they've fulfilled their obligations to their child for the night, it's time to bunker in for a television show or three.

A little later in the narrative, June is going off to math camp as her mother is sick in the hospital. She has this waking nightmare of what will happen to her dad if she's not there to look after him. In this vision, she sees him slumped in his easy chair in perpetuity as the empty pizza boxes pile up around him and he watches TV. When he finally summons the necessary energy in his legs to go to the refrigerator, it's full of crows rather than food.

I'd say that was similar to what I did when the family was away last weekend, with one significant difference: The fridge was a place of abundance, freshly stocked with things I was ashamed to eat when the family was present, rather than a barren wasteland.

When she actually catches her dad in the act of something he shouldn't be doing, it's scooping and eating ice cream directly from the tub. He immediately hides it behind his back.

Hey, just because we do these things doesn't mean we don't feel guilty about them.

A second chance for Dumont

Bruno Dumont’s Twentynine Palms is my least favorite movie of all time.

Most people wouldn’t know what movie they hated the most, but I do, because a little website called Flickchart has forced me to make that decision. Once a decision like that is made – that a movie will lose a hypothetical duel to every other movie on your chart – it tends to ossify. So now I know this is my least favorite film like I know that Raising Arizona is my favorite, and it would take a really, really exceptional example to unseat either one.

I won’t go into why I hate it so much. I did that already in this post.

I will say that thus far, this had been a death sentence for its French director. I had so written Dumont off that I had never watched another one of his movies, though I was peripherally aware of a few titles. I didn’t want to give the man one more minute than I’d already sacrificed on his hateful previous film.

But I also believe in second chances.

So nearly nine years after Twentynine Palms etched itself permanently in my cinematic record, I dipped my toe in the Dumont waters again.

The movie Ma Loute, whose English title is Slack Bay, didn’t strike me as anything like Twentynine Palms. As you can probably tell from the poster above, it looks more like something fanciful fellow countryman Jean-Pierre Jeunet would make than the tedious realism of what I described in the above-linked post as “the worst Vincent Gallo movie you can possibly imagine.”

Though obviously going in with my hackles up, I was intrigued. When I saw it on the shelf at the library recently, I snatched it up. Sunday afternoon, I watched it.

Although formally quite different from Twentynine Palms, Slack Bay shares that film’s sense of misanthropy. Bruno Dumont does not think all that much of his fellow human. That attitude is a bit more tolerable, though, when it comes in the form of satire, which is what Slack Bay really is. The costumes and production design might remind someone of Jeunet, but this is really more like Bunuel in its desire to poke fun at the bourgeoisie and engage in class warfare. As I am a big Bunuel fan, that’s a compliment.

The movie deals with a coastal region in France where city folks like to go on holiday. The tides render some of the lower-lying areas impassable, so a family of locals are among those who help the tourists navigate the area by boat, or in one of the film’s more fanciful constructs, even by physically carrying them through knee-deep water. That’s probably one of the film’s most obvious visual metaphors, but that doesn't mean it doesn’t work. The tourists are oblivious in general, but especially in regards to how they treat these working class locals. They’re also foppish fools, flopping about in their fancy outfits and overreacting about everything. Juliet Binoche is the personification of this, in a performance that might have annoyed me if I didn’t ultimately get on the same page as Dumont.

One of the reasons this film is far, far, far more tolerable than Twentynine Palms is that the misanthropy is leavened by a little optimism. There’s actually a sweet romantic undercurrent in this movie as relates to the teenage son of the local family and a teenage daughter of the main family of tourists we follow. There are complications along the way, I can say that without spoiling anything, but Dumont portrays this pair with an earnestness that feels hopeful.

Slack Bay has its disappointments, its moments of tedium. But the truest sign of its ultimate success is that I don’t want to spoil any of the plot, because I do recommend you see it. It’s a mild recommendation, and the movie falls well short of anything Bunuel has done, but it’s a recommendation nonetheless. In fact, in synopsizing the movie a couple paragraphs ago, I was inclined to let you in on a secret about this local family that the film actually reveals early enough on that it might justifiably be included in a synopsis. But Dumont has done enough right with this movie to earn back the courtesy I did not extend to him in that previous post, when I gave away the whole plot of Twentynine Palms just to indicate the depth of my disdain for it.

I’m in no hurry to rush out and see his other films, but no longer do I view him as the personification of cinematic evil, either.

That's a win for a guy who surely doesn't care about earning it. 

Life in a day, Linklater style

When you have the house to yourself for a couple days, and you're a cinephile, you don't only watch movies. You do movie projects.

Hence this past weekend, when I watched the entire Before trilogy and Boyhood in one day.

I love the trilogy – with an asterisk that I’ll get to in a minute – but Before Sunrise was the only one of the three films I’d seen more than once, even though Before Midnight was my #2 movie of 2013. Seeing the characters age 18 years in one day was the main impetus behind my Linklater Day, but I wanted a fourth movie, and Boyhood was an obvious candidate to keep the theme going – making it, suppose, a Linklater/Hawke Day. I’d already seen Boyhood twice, but it’s a movie whose pleasures grow with each viewing, and it had been about four years since that second viewing.

But it was also my last full day at home before the family returns, so I couldn’t just watch movies. There were piles of undifferentiated crap I needed to clean up before they got home, to disguise the fact that I’d let their home become a hovel while they were gone.

So I created, and stuck to, the following schedule:

8 a.m. – Before Sunrise

12 p.m. – Before Sunset

4 p.m. – Before Midnight

8 p.m. – Boyhood

I suppose if it hadn’t been for Boyhood I could have tried to actually match the movies to their times of day, maybe watching Sunrise at some ridiculously early hour, Sunset in the late afternoon and Midnight at night. And though I’d been sleeping poorly with the family gone (always happens, not sure why) and I actually could have watched Sunrise at an ungodly hour, knowing I could take a nap later on, I liked the neatness of starting one of these movies every four and hours, and washing dishes/doing laundry in between.

I considered taking notes, to make sure I didn’t forget any little observations I might make about something Jesse said in the third movie that contradicted something he said in the first, that kind of thing. And I did notice a few such things that I’ll try to reproduce here. But I didn’t end up taking those notes, because I didn’t watch these movies to geek out on their minutiae or pick apart their internal consistency. I watched them to have the experience of life, of lives, wash over me, two lives in three movies and four lives in the fourth.

As such, I suppose my thoughts on the day will be a bit stream-of-consciousness. Which is appropriate for four movies that dwell on the vagaries of time and memory.

Since I need some place to start, I thought I’d share a couple technical challenges that impacted my viewings of two of the four movies.

I had Sunrise, Sunset and Boyhood as DVDs borrowed from the library, but my library reservation of Before Midnight didn’t come through in time. So I rented and streamed that off iTunes, which presented me with a few technical difficulties – though not, as it turned out, as significant a difficulty as one of the DVDs.

I got through Sunrise and Sunset with nary an issue, but the streaming of Before Midnight was imperfect. I have any number of possible candidates to blame, from the fact that I haven’t updated iTunes for a while, to the general slowness of my rapidly aging computer, to the crap internet we have. The good news, though, was that the way the viewing was sometimes compromised amplified the film’s themes. I’ll explain.

Though it didn’t happen throughout, the way the streaming issue manifested itself was in terms of the image lagging, and then going in fast forward for however long it took to catch up. The key to this not being that annoying was that the audio was totally unaffected. There wasn’t a single hiccup in Linklater’s dialogue (also written by Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy), which is really what you come to a Linklater movie to experience. So while the mouths were sometimes out of sync and occasionally it played like a sped up movie from the early 20^th century, there was no interruption to the audio flow. I allowed this to function as an extension of Linklater’s familiar concerns regarding our inability to grasp moments and hold onto them. Time is always speeding away out of our control. Or sometimes it does seem to stand still. But either way, it is not something we can control.

The problem with Boyhood was more annoying, but I did also manage to fit in with Linklater’s themes. Although I could not see much in the way of scratches on the disc’s surface, the Boyhood DVD did have glitches that in this case affected both the sound and the image. I wiped it clean with a tissue, to no avail. There were a couple times when I worried I’d have to abandon the viewing, and looked to see if it was available on any of my streaming services (it wasn’t). I could have rented it from iTunes, but fortunately, it never got annoying enough to resort to that measure. The worst that happened is that I missed a couple short chunks of the movie, four minutes on one occasion and eight minutes on another, which wasn’t fatal as I’d already seen the movie twice. All the other continuity blips were ten seconds or less. It was infrequent enough that I was able to persevere.

When I thought about the moments I’d missed – including, quite poignantly, the end of Patricia Arquette’s final speech about the next event on her schedule being her funeral – at first I regretted missing them. But then I thought “How perfectly Linklater.” Boyhood is a movie that, by design, lurches forward, missing moments in life that we might think should be a part of any highlight reel. But that’s kind of the point, isn’t it? Again it feels like life is speeding away from us, and we look up one day and our child is graduating high school. Missing little bits of Boyhood only made the loss the movie is exploring all the more profound.

But back to the main impetus for this viewing day. What would I think of the growth, or lack thereof, of Jesse and Celine over the course of 18 years of their lives, consumed by me within the space of ten hours?

I did indeed notice those small inconsistencies, which I would not say resulted from a lack of care by the three central filmmakers, but rather, functioned as an intentional point about the way human beings are inconsistent, or how their viewpoints change over time. In Before Sunrise, for example, Jesse asks Celine if she believes in reincarnation as part of his hypothesizing on how a million reincarnated souls from the beginnings of human existence have splintered themselves into the billions of people inhabiting the planet today. She responds, definitively, that she does believe in reincarnation. In one of the later movies – Before Midnight I think – he asks her that question again, and she says she doesn’t.

Jesse regularly says that he “remembers everything” – including the type of condom they used in Vienna – but he doesn’t remember asking her whether she believes in reincarnation, and therefore can’t hold her to her original response. This is just the nature of human experience. It was a relatively insignificant moment in their day, and maybe he didn’t even remember positing his “million souls for a billion lives” theory with her – maybe he used that one on all the girls at that time. But neither is her inconsistency an issue. She may have once believed in reincarnation, but as the practicalities of the world crushed her, she stopped believing in it. Or maybe she never believed in it, but saying she did was part of the self she wanted to present to Jesse when she first met him, when she thought that’s what he wanted her to say. Now that they’re married and there’s no wooing left to be done, she can drop the charade.

One thing I noticed, though, was that watching these movies back-to-back-to-back did not give me some grand unifying theory of Jesse or Celine. I have ideas about each of them, which the actors worked on and consciously toyed with over the course of the three films. But what struck me was just how much these did indeed seem like the same characters, matured in some ways and still stunted in others, over the course of nearly two decades. I’m not sure if Hawke and Delpy made specific choices to achieve this, or it was a function of them playing only small variations on their actual selves, but there’s a remarkable overarching consistency to their characters, which is probably only enhanced by the type of inconsistencies mentioned above.

Rather than talking about Jesse and Celine as such, though, I want to talk a bit about myself. When Linklater is at his best, he gets you interfacing with yourself, examining the way his themes touch on your own life.

And as it happens, these movies line up with my own life pretty significantly. I’m one of those viewers who can say that he’s taken similar steps to Jesse and Celine as they’ve taken them, as both Hawke and Delpy are within four years of me in age. However, they’re playing about two years younger than they actually are, as they were supposed to be 23, 32 and 41 in these movies, when they were actually more like 25, 34 and 43. Anyway, the point is, I was doing some of the things they were doing, when they were doing them, in my real life.

Only I didn’t see Before Sunrise when it first came out. In fact, I didn’t see it until 2001. Who knows how my first viewing might have been different in 1995, a year I was melancholy about graduating from college, but in 2001 I was swept up in the romanticism of it. Which is interesting because that was a bit of a tumultuous year for me. I moved from New York to Los Angeles in May, and had a really difficult transitional summer there, complicated by a relationship that didn’t pan out the way I hoped it would. However, I saw it in November that year, and by then, I’d settled in and had new romantic irons in the fire, though I was not dating anyone just yet. I guess my new sense of optimism was enough for me to dive right into Before Sunrise.

I did see Before Sunset in the theater, and now we get to the asterisk I teased you with earlier. Although this is the favorite movie in the series for a lot of people I know, I was in no condition to appreciate it when I saw it. The summer of 2004 was another time of great tumult for me, except instead of just having emerged from it, as was the case with Before Sunrise, I was still right in the thick of it when I watched Before Sunset. At the time, I was mourning the end of/trying to rekindle a nearly two-year relationship, while also desperately flinging myself at a long distance rebound relationship with the intensity of an addict. The optimistic ending of Before Sunset didn’t land for me as I felt a particular pessimism about my own prospects.

The interesting thing now, in watching Before Sunset for the second time, is to realize how soon things were going to look up for me – and in a way that feels specifically related to this movie. At the end of 2004 I met my wife, and our first big trip together was to go to my friend’s wedding in Spain in June of 2005. We combined that trip with four days in Paris. So only a year after I watched Jesse and Celine walk around Paris, feeling hopeless even as they felt hopeful, I myself was walking around Paris with my future wife. It was something I hadn’t ever considered until I watched this movie again, and it hit me like a ton of bricks. I still think it’s only my third favorite of these movies, but that is now a very strong third favorite. (And I had additional appreciation for it in the context of this marathon, as a result of its sub-80-minute running time.)

My second viewing of Before Midnight also involved the realization of something I could never have known would have been related to me when I first watched the movie. I watched Before Midnight about three months before I moved to Australia, but since that move came together so quickly, it wasn’t even a twinkle in our eye when I saw the movie. (In fact, we’d just bought a house the year before, so moving was probably the furthest thing from our minds.) One of the trepidations about being married to someone from another country is you never know which country you’re going to live in, and whether you may need to move to that other country for the good of your marriage/family, leaving behind the country you know. This is a major point of argument between Celine and Jesse in Before Midnight, as Jesse is feeling the acute loss of not being there as his teenage son grows up. He tries to sell Celine on moving to Chicago. Only a few months after I saw this transpire on screen, I moved to Australia for the good of my wife’s career prospects. Nearly six years later, we still live here.

Some other things about the movie really ring true that I couldn’t have known at the time, either. In 2013 I had only one child, who was not yet three years old. As my second was born on the first of January in 2014, I must have already known he was coming when I saw the movie in May, but only just. So at the time, Celine and Jesse’s argument about who did what in the marriage, vis-à-vis the children, was probably just a bit abstract. Now that I have two, I’m even more conscious of the truth that the man (me) packs only his clothes when the family goes on vacation, while the woman (my wife) packs everything else. I saw in myself some of Jesse’s blithe lack of awareness of just how much Celine does for their family, I’m ashamed to say. However, I’m glad to say I think it’s something both Jesse and I are working on.

As I said, this was a bit stream-of-consciousness and it has probably gone on longer than you care to read, unless you are Nick Prigge and eat up new Before talk in perpetuity.

I’ll close by saying that this was an enthralling day of movie viewing, with built-in breaks where menial tasks allowed me to ponder the significance of what I’d watched. It was a day where memories from my own romantic and family life swam in and out of the front of my mind, reacquainting me with people I hadn’t thought of in years, and how we’d done right by each other, or failed in that regard.

But neither was it a melancholy day. Even when movies are about melancholy things, they invigorate your spirit when they are as good as these four.  

MCU completism

I wasn't always that into the MCU. I used to greet new releases with forehead slaps, sometimes. How many of these movies did we need?

As the Captain America movies kept getting better and better, though, I kept getting more and more interested, and now I'm fully on board. Although I think plenty of the earlier movies are duds, there's only been one movie released in the past four years that I haven't liked, which was 2016's Doctor Strange. Heck, even that one I'd probably like a lot better now that I've drunk the Marvel-flavored Kool Aid, and now that I enjoyed the character in both Thor: Ragnarok and Avengers: Infinity War.

In fact, I'm turning into such an MCU nerd that I watched Infinity War again on Friday night. It's my advanced preparation for the release of Avengers: Endgame at the end of this month. I'm not one of those people who is re-watching all the previous movies, but re-watching this one seemed appropriate.

Besides, you can't "re-watch" all the movies in a series if you haven't watched them all once.

That's right, lo these six years since its release, Iron Man 3 had remained unwatched by me. In looking back at a post I wrote on the day of its release, I noticed I finished with the following comment about it: "I'm not saying I might wait until DVD, but ... I might wait until DVD."

Boy did I ever. Actually, I waited for an Australian streaming service called Stan, which I hadn't even heard of back in 2013. In fact, I was still about three months away from even moving to Australia.

It wasn't unusual for me to "wait for DVD" on an MCU movie back then. I didn't see either of the Marvel 2013 releases in the theater, though I did catch up with Thor: The Dark World in 2017 in preparation for the release of Ragnarok. I was 2-for-2 in 2014 (Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Guardians of the Galaxy), but again I skipped Avengers: Age of Ultron in 2015 until the end of my ranking season, in January the following year.

Since then I've been loyal to Marvel, though I can't really say I've been loyal with my wallet, as all of those movies have been available to me for free through my critics card. Still, a viewer is a viewer, and though I only actually reviewed one of those films (Ant-Man and the Wasp), I reviewed it very favorably, helping spread the Marvel love.

So the night after I watched Infinity War the second time, I decided I'd erase my last MCU blind spot. I'm 21-for-21 at long last, just in time for #22 to come out.

I sort of liked Iron Man 3. Again, this could be a bias based on my newfound appreciation for this cinematic behemoth on the whole, but I thought it was enjoyable. It's definitely an eccentric movie, spending a significant amount of its time in winter in Tennessee, of all places. Add Shane Black to the list of Marvel directors who were, indeed, able to put their own stamp on one of the MCU movies. There's a lot of Black banter in there, and though not all of it works, it does give the movie a bit of distinctiveness.

I also loved the twist with this film's villain, Ben Kingsley's The Mandarin. I won't spoil the twist in case you haven't seen it. I mean, there must be someone out there other than me who hadn't seen it.

And now to go watch Tony Stark's farewell at the end of this month. I'm not the kind of MCU nerd who reads up on rumors, but I think pretty much everyone knows that Robert Downey Jr. is leaving the MCU, along with Chris Evans (and Chris Hemsworth?). Anyway, some of these guys are going to die, and that's going to be a bit sad.

And now I can officially say I was with them every step of the way.

Not the Boot I thought it was

I'd thought all this time that Das Boot would be a chore.

The line I'd heard about it was "The movie is like three hours long, and it's set entirely inside the submarine!"

Well, that's wrong. It isn't three hours, unless you watch the director's cut, which I didn't. I prefer theatrical versions whenever possible. The theatrical version is 2:29. Also, it's not entirely inside a German U-Boat. It starts and ends outside the boat, and also has a middle portion outside the boat.

But what I had always read between those words was that Das Boot was the 1981 version of what we now call "slow cinema." Never mind that its director, Wolfgang Petersen, would go on to direct action movies like Air Force One and genre movies like Outbreak. He wasn't directing those movies in 1981, so I thought this was some kind of meditation on boredom. That he was, indeed, tasking us with the knowledge of what it's like to be trapped inside a submarine without anything to do, like Bela Tarr might do.

Wrong.

My what a thrilling movie. Even knowing how much longer the movie had to go, I was in constant doubt about the crew emerging from any particular scrape unscathed. Petersen's ability to ratchet up the tension obviously made him a candidate to direct those later Hollywood films, but I would never have guessed how masterful that ability is. This guy was truly skilled in the art of cinematic manipulation.

And what camerawork. You'd expect there to be limitations on a camera's movements inside a submarine -- if the movie was not shot on an actual submarine, it was shot on an equally claustrophobic set, which is just a limiting in terms of cinematography. So I really don't know how they did those shots where the camera follows a man running full speed to his station down the length of the boat, through circular openings that a cameraman should not be able to navigate while still holding the shot steady. So clearly some kind of mechanical device was involved, but that only makes it more impressive.

Oh, there's some time devoted to being bored on a submarine. About 15 minutes, I'd say.

I could go on at length about the things I loved about Das Boot, including its perfect ending, but I don't have a lot of time to write right now so I'll just cut it there.

But if you thought you were going to have to save your eventual viewing of Das Boot for a really rainy day where you really had nothing better to do, think again. This one is on Netflix now, at least where I live, and it's exciting enough to be your Saturday night movie.

Pirating = bad, borrowing from the library = perfectly fine

I can't help but notice that almost every time I borrow a movie from the library, it's got some kind of ad beforehand thanking me for not pirating it.

These usually riff in various ways on the theme "By buying this movie, you helped support x number of jobs. Thanks!"

Only I didn't buy it. Somebody did, but now I'm just one of potentially hundreds of people watching it for free.

Which makes it different from pirating how, exactly?

The main objection to piracy, of course, is that you don't pay for it in any way, shape or form. You are contributing nothing to the limited amount of money a movie can make on its video sales. Yeah, it's illegal, and yeah, sometimes it results in movies getting seen even before they've been released to video. But those would be relatively minor considerations for the aggrieved parties if money were exchanging hands.

Money does not exchange hands when I borrow a movie from the library. And nowadays, in the absence of video stores, libraries have far better collections than they ever did. It's getting increasingly rare that I can't find a movie I want through inter-library loan, which basically means not only am I watching this movie for free, but I'm watching pretty much every movie for free.

And that supports x number of jobs how, exactly?

Libraries as institutions cast a sheen of respectability over almost everything, but I can't see how it doesn't annoy studios or distributors to know that more and more people are watching their movies for free through these respectable institutions.

Then again, I don't recall seeing publishing houses getting up in arms about books being available at libraries. What is a library for if not to prevent people from having to purchase books?

Because I don't really feel like taking a deep dive into the internet right now, I'm not going to search for the ways these conflicts were once adjudicated before they were resolved and ultimately relegated to the realm of standard practice. And besides, if you want really aggrieved parties, you need look no further than the music industry, which suffers most in this scenario as it seems always to do. Because most people can easily burn CDs to their computers, borrowing music from the library is basically the equivalent of buying it. Just without money. Which is also called piracy.

Anyway, just something I've been thinking about.

The tease of working above a movie theater

Almost exactly a year ago, my job moved into a shopping plaza that has a movie theater in it. No, I don’t work at a women’s haute couture clothing store. The shopping plaza has twin skyscrapers set into it, and I’m in one of them. (Only third floor, though, so don’t get too jealous of my view.)

The year since then has been a sustained tease.

I’ve got this movie theater within about a minute’s walk from my desk, depending on how quickly the elevator or “lift” arrives. Yet I haven’t once seen a movie there.

Okay, that’s not entirely true. I’d say I have probably seen five to ten movies at Cinema Kino in the past year. But I’ve only seen those movies by going home, and then later that night, in the 9 to 9:30 range, coming all the way back in to work to attend that particular theater.

Most of the blame for this is quite obvious and nothing I can do anything about. When I leave work each day, my time is not my own. I need to go pick up children from school, or if my wife has picked them up, I need to go right home anyway so I can help make dinner. A two-hour sojourn to the movies isn’t usually in the cards.

But you figure it might have happened at least once, on a special occasion. It hasn’t, and it won’t happen later today either, even though I’ve got a very special occasion right in front of me. That special occasion is my wife and my kids going to Tasmania for five days, and leaving me behind in Melbourne, for a rare chance to do what I please, when I please.

If for no other reason than that it had never happened before, I decided I was going to go see a movie after work on Friday. Just for the novelty of it. Just for the convenience of it. Goddammit, I’ve got to use my proximity to the theater as an excuse for seeing a movie at least once.

But I’ll tell you why I can’t, or rather, why I won’t: They don’t program the damn movies for the end of my workday.

I get off at 5. The movies at Cinema Kino don’t have any interest in that. Here’s when they start today:

Shazam – 3:40 p.m., 6:30 p.m.

Dumbo – 6:00 p.m.

Sometimes Always Never – 6:10 p.m.

The Happy Prince – 4:20 p.m., 6:50 p.m.

And then a couple of other movies I’ve already seen that are not conveniently timed even if I hadn’t seen them.

This may represent a difference between Australia and the U.S., but what happened to all those 5:35 time slots you usually get for a movie? I feel like movies in the U.S. play at 1:10, 3:20, 5:35, 7:25 and 9:40. Don’t they?

I thought about figuring out a way to slip out early and see the 3:40 showing of Shazam, but it defeats the purpose of having a theater conveniently located near my work if going to see a movie there requires feats of great inconvenience. If I’m going to leave work 90 minutes early, I could go to any theater anywhere, and besides, I’d want to do it for a reason better than Shazam.

Oh, so I suppose you want me to wait around for a whole hour and see Dumbo? See the previous paragraph. Sure, I could eat something, drink something, wait it out. But by about 5:40 I’d probably be saying “All this for *$%@! Dumbo?” Besides, I want to get this movie out of the way so I can get home and start enjoying my house with no one in it. This weekend, the novelties will abound.

The fantasy I really have about having a theater so close is being able to duck out for a long lunch and see an 11:30 movie or a 1:00 movie. But I’m not an executive, so I don’t have the liberty to do something like that. And that would be a really long lunch, considering that I only get 30 minutes.

It hardly seems sporting that I’m annoyed about Cinema Kino being so near yet so far, considering that when I do see movies there, I see them for free as part of my critic association membership. That should be novelty enough.

But I want it all, dammit.

Or at the very least, one single 5:25 start time of some movie, any movie.

Please?

The last days of Rachel McAdams' ass

I thought I’d missed the boat on Game Night, a 2018 comedy a lot of people celebrated as one of the funniest of the year, which I thought was only pretty good. So I watched it again this past weekend … and again thought it was pretty good. However, I did forget significant portions of the third act, lending some credence to something I’d previously suspected: that the reason I didn’t remember it all that well is I was actually asleep for a portion of it. This almost never happens; if I’m about to fall asleep, I’ll pause a movie pretty much without fail. Then again, my mind is not at its sharpest or most absorbent when I continue finishing a film after one of these naps, so that could have been a factor too.

Anyway, the thing I really noticed this time is how much the film notices Rachel McAdams’ butt.

For one, she spends most of the movie poured into a pair of tight fitting jeans. That’s not so uncommon, and does not represent anything out of the ordinary in terms of prurient interests on the part of the filmmakers. If you have assets – particularly if they are ASSets – then show them off.

But the camera does take special notice of her in the pants. There are a couple shots like this, but I think of one shot in particularly in which the camera follows her from the ground up when she’s about to do her little dance to Third Eye Blind’s “Semi Charmed Life” in the biker bar, while shaking her booty and haphazardly spinning around a gun she doesn’t know is loaded. That shot reminded me of a shot Michael Bay might stage of Megan Fox in a Transformers movie, only not as skeevy.

It’s not as skeevy for a number of reasons, but one of those is that McAdams seems to be in on it. The coup de grace in the movie’s ass-fixation is a line of dialogue I remembered from my previous viewing, which finally came in the last ten minutes of the movie. In trying to get out of a pinch in which a henchman may shoot her, she says “No please, I have children at home.” The henchmen fires back a line of dialogue rather than a bullet: “Not with that ass you don’t.” “Oh, thanks!” she says, and then he gets sucked into an airplane engine.

This exchange functions as a funny confirmation of what we’ve been thinking all along if we’ve made note of how the movie is taking in McAdams. There’s almost a cathartic aspect to it, like “Somebody finally mentioned the elephant in the room!”

What I find extra funny about it, though, is that the actual line of dialogue seems to exist for no other reason than as a compliment to McAdams’ physique. In fact, it’s an especially weird choice because one of the film’s main conflicts involves how she and husband Jason Bateman have had trouble conceiving. You might include a line like this if it were designed to serve as a trigger for her character, but it’s not. It’s just a one-off that sets up a punchline in which the man gets sucked into an airplane engine, which McAdams initially celebrates before saying “Oh no, he died!” Which I actually think might be the film’s funniest line. Ass or not, McAdams is a really talented comedienne with great timing and line deliveries.

So this got me wondering just how much of a compliment it is. She knows she’s gifted in the posterior, and she’s willing to let the movie make mention of it. But what if there was an extra aspect of bragging to it? What if she actually HAS had children, and is just flaunting the fact that her ass still looks like this even AFTER children? And since I knew McAdams was probably about 40, her having children was a distinct possibility, even though I remembered no period of professional inactivity or a weight gain in any of her roles.

So to Wikipedia I went. When I saw the “1” appearing next to “Children” in her bio area, I thought “Aha! So Rachel McAdams is, indeed, an incorrigible narcissist!”

Scrolling down to the Personal Life section of her Wikipedia page told a different story. Indeed she does have a child, but that child was born two months after Game Night was released. Clicking on the Game Night link, I scrolled down and discovered that principal photography for the movie occurred during April of 2017. That’d be about three months before McAdams got pregnant.

Now instead of accusing McAdams of excess self regard, I think maybe she knew that she and her boyfriend were trying, and that maybe, indeed, this would be the last time her butt would look quite this good on film. The last time a line of dialogue about how good her butt looked would even be possible.

Game Night is McAdams’ most recent credit on IMDB, and her only future project is that she is “rumored” to be in 2021’s Sherlock Holmes 3 – a rumor that probably only has any traction because she was in the first two movies. So Game Night might not only have been her last chance to show off her butt, it might have been her last role, period, for quite some time as she concentrates on motherhood.

But here’s hoping, for the sake of mothers everywhere, that McAdams will get that ass back if she wants it.

Maybe in time for Game Night 2. 

Jordan Peele knows what to do

Not long after Get Out became a certified hit, we started hearing rumors that its director, Jordan Peele, was being tapped to helm a remake of the anime classic Akira.

Boy is it good he didn’t do that.

Very soon after that, the Scarlett Johansson version of Ghost in the Shell came out, and tanked, likely putting the brakes on the project anyway. In fact, in IMDB, it’s currently still listed as “in development” and doesn’t have anyone associated with it publicly – though if you are an IMDB Pro subscriber I guess you can see names attached as rumors and the like. My guess is that it’s DOA, but maybe it’ll still go somewhere.

Whether it was made or not, Peele wouldn’t have had anything to do with that shit. There’s no quicker way to extinguish your heat than to take the money to try to turn some soulless studio remake into something better than it otherwise would have been.

And I’m sure Peele would have made Akira better than it otherwise would have been. But it still likely would have been a forgettable sophomore effort that hurt him more than it helped him.

Besides, Peele knows what he should do, and what he can do quite well: make scary, surrealistic horror movies starring black people, with a hint (or more than a hint) of comedy, and a hint (or more than a hint) of social commentary.

Of course, Peele is such an interesting talent that I suspect he will choose to go in a slightly different direction for his next film, just so he does not appear to pigeonhole himself. Whatever that is, though, I’m sure it will be well worth seeing and well worth talking about. And it won’t be an Akira or its equivalent, in any case.

Just about 11 hours after finishing Us, I’m not sure I’m ready to talk about it yet, to add my half-baked theories to the many that are already out there, that I’ve only just started to read about and listen to. But I do know I was in the presence of a filmmaker on top of and in command of his craft, manipulating us in all the right ways, and making us think, even if we don’t always know what it is we’re supposed to be thinking about. I think of Us in a bit the same way I think about Darren Aronofsky’s mother!, in that it throws a bunch of provocative ideas out there for us to consider, but does not really tell us what to make of them. Or it gives us five different possible interpretations, and we can choose the one we like best – even if none of them are completely internally consistent or can stand up to scrutiny.

All I know is I’ve been thinking about it almost non-stop and have the sinister version of “I’ve Got Five On It” running through my head in a constant loop.

Because Jordan Peele knows what to do, I certainly don’t fault him for his controversial statements this week about not seeing himself casting a white guy as the lead in one of his films. I don’t think I would have faulted him anyway, but having seen Us, I fault him even less. It’s clear that he is filling a niche that is otherwise missing in today’s cinema. “I’ve see that movie” is the reason Peele gave for his No White Guys policy. And truly, we had not seen Get Out or Us before we saw them. Whatever Peele’s third joint is, we won’t have seen that one either.

Jordan Peele knows what to do. I can’t wait to watch him continue to do it.