Damsels snubbing distress since 1997

I've become hyper aware of the ways modern movies try to address the persona non grata cinematic trope of the damsel in distress, who has been basically scrubbed from movies released today. In fact, most movies will try to have a woman save a man, just to be sure to they are on the right side of this issue. The only movie I could imagine having a woman in danger saved by a man would be something funded by conservatives who were trying to thumb their noses at the "liberal snowflakes."

But this isn't really the recent corrective we sometimes think it is. Yesterday I re-watched Disney's Hercules as a movie night with my kids, and I noted that they were already engaging in the meta satirical activity of teasing the trope way back in 1997.

When Hercules first comes across Megara trying to fight off the river guardian -- a blue centaur about six times as big as she is -- she lets out a definite effeminate squeal that sets us up to think she's in need of Hercules and his muscles. And as he closes in to help, receiving her somewhat indifferent welcome, he tries to clarify that she is, indeed, a damsel in distress ... isn't she?

"I'm a damsel, I'm in distress, I got this," Megara says to Hercules, dripping with snark and sarcasm. "Move along, junior."

We later find out that she was actually negotiating with the river guardian on behalf of Hades, so yeah, I think she can take care of herself. (But he did make her "an offer she had to refuse" ... presumably sexual in nature.)

Near the end, Megara does actually save Hercules, pushing him out of the way of a falling column that lands on her instead.

It makes me wonder why we've gotten so worried in the past five years about whether female characters can save themselves, when in fact Disney was trying to be on the right side of this issue more than two decades ago ... and you would never consider them at the forefront of gender progressiveness. I think maybe Megara was one of Disney's first reactions to the criticism of its under-empowered princesses.

Yet the idea of the damsel in distress, and that it is a hallmark of Disney filmmaking, has lingered on to such a powerful extent that the company had to specifically address it and try to exorcise it in last year's Ralph Breaks the Internet, with a scene devoted to a coterie of Disney princesses enumerating the stereotypes related to them. (A fairly tedious scene, I might add.)

It's not that I don't think we still have far to go; we do. It's that Hercules made me realize we've already been on this road for a long time ... and that the perception is still that we're not doing enough.

I'd say that's sad, but it's nothing compared to the perspective of a bunch of African Americans who thought we might have reasonably "solved" racism decades ago. Some things, unfortunately, take time ... more time than most of us have to breathe in this lifetime, probably.

Not your Alien

I can’t see why Harmony Korine wanted to make The Beach Bum, but it’s easy to understand what attracted Matthew McConaughey to the project.

He saw Spring Breakers, marvelled at James Franco’s gonzo performance and thought “I’d like to do that.”

But this is not your Alien, McConaughey. Nor is it your The Dude, which is also in there.

It’s easy to tell that The Beach Bum is from the same director as Spring Breakers. Both films are set in sun-dappled Florida. Both films use a montage approach to the narrative. Both films feature kind of a “pimp lifestyle,” one of which seems appropriate to the subject matter and one of which seems vaguely absurd. Both feature a setting with an outdoor piano, as well as other excesses of the rich. There’s a similar kaleidoscopic color scheme and both films were shot by Benoit Debie. Both films even include a High School Musical alum (Vanessa Hudgens there, Zac Efron here).

Oh, and both feature an over-the-top performance by a character with an outlandish nickname.

In the superior Spring Breakers – which a friend of mine has recently dubbed “Korine’s Citizen Kane” – that character is Alien, played by Franco.

In The Beach Bum, it’s, er, Moondog.

Moondog is played by McConaughey, channeling Franco.

It’s not that Moondog is anything like Alien, in the overt sense. Alien is a drug dealer with corn rows and gold teeth, while Moondog is a stoned space cadet hippie poet. But McConaughey is channeling, or trying to channel, the go-for-broke commitment to a particular character that Franco delivered for Korine in Spring Breakers, imagining that he might carve out his own spot in the cinematic cult character hall of fame.

Nice try, but no.

Moondog is one of the most face-punch-worthy characters I have met in recent memory. He spends all his time in a stupor – sometimes drunk, sometimes stoned – which, miraculously, the other characters consider endearing. He floats around the greater Miami/Florida Keys playing bongo drums amidst semi clad women, constantly smoking joints. He crashes the vows of his own daughter’s wedding – massively underdressed, mind you – in order to grope the groom’s balls in order to prove he’s not man enough, or something. The guests love it. “That crazy Moondog.”

Also, his poetry is shit.

I suppose that’s why some critics have called The Beach Bum an “epic goof.” Then again, some people also thought Korine was punking his audience with Spring Breakers. I pity those people, but they were out there.

Is how I felt watching The Beach Bum how other people felt watching Spring Breakers?

I hope not, because I really wanted to punch this movie in the face, along with its main character.

Of course, I could have wanted to do that with Alien, as Franco’s performance is as stylized and filled with tics in its own way. Except in that case, all the specific wardrobe and hairstyle choices, and curated mannerisms, work. Here, none of them do.

I suppose at this point you might want to take a better look at Moondog. Here he is:

You can probably see why the choices remind me of Alien, in a way. He’s festooned with eccentricities. Probably the most laborious of these is the sunglasses, which are flipped up here. When down, they look more like those sunglasses old people wear, which I guess is meant to provide additional blockage of rays, or possibly help with their glaucoma. When up, he also sometimes wears reading glasses in order to better read his terrible poetry to an adoring audience.

Who knows, maybe he actually has glaucoma, and that’s why he smokes that much weed.

We’re supposed to believe that Moondog was a renowned poet who once made something genuinely great, although old VHS video of him also makes it look like he was once a motivational speaker of some kind, only a tad less wacko than he is now. That’s how he attracted the attention of his wife, a bit of a trainwreck herself but also quite the catch in many respects, played by Isla Fisher. What she would want to do with him, the film never tries to argue. We’re supposed to just believe his blend of carefree free-loving goofiness is an aphrodisiac to everyone he meets. He's kind of like the words used to describe Cosmo Kramer -- "do nothing, fall ass backwards into money, mooch off your neighbors and have sex without dating" -- only without the charisma, and completely insufferable.

The Beach Bum wastes all this time with Moondog without us ever learning what really drives him or why we should care about him. In the end, it has utterly no meaning. People said that about Spring Breakers, but you can see the difference between having no specific viewpoint – i.e., not celebrating or criticizing the behavior you present – and just having no meaning at all.

Un-lee-shed: Mo' Better Blues

This is the third in my bi-monthly 2019 series watching (most) of the Spike Lee films I haven’t yet seen.

June brought my first audible in Un-lee-shed. I had to call it when I couldn’t find the movie I was intending to watch, Get on the Bus, available on any streaming service I subscribe to, at the library, or on iTunes. In fact, most of these services returned a strange message when I searched for the title, which was (and I’m paraphrasing here) “I haven’t even heard of this movie. Go get stuffed.”

So I did, and watched Mo’ Better Blues instead.

Which was fine, as I actually thought of Blues as the more “significant” Lee movie I hadn’t seen than Get on the Bus, and iTunes obviously agrees. The main reason I preferred Get on the Bus for this series was that I wanted to do a bit of a jump forward in time, rather than watching a third movie within a span of five years on the calendar after She’s Gotta Have It and School Daze. When paired with Four Little Girls, which I intend to watch in August (assuming availability), the summer months could make a good “middle section” to Lee’s career.

But instead it was the best fashions 1990 had to offer in Mo’ Better Blues.

I was indeed a bit distracted by the fashion in the movie, which of course I remember only too well from the time, but which now seems hopelessly specific and dated. And since the 1990s have not yet been fully reclaimed as an era for us to nostalgically revisit at the movies, I felt only the mild repulsion to that fashion, rather than the sentimentality.

But this movie is not about fashion. It’s about jazz. Or blues, I guess, though to me it seemed a lot like jazz.

It stars Denzel Washington as Bleek Gilliam (great name), a trumpeter who leads his own band (featuring the likes of Lee, Bill Nunn, Giancarlo Esposito and Wesley Snipes, all regular Lee collaborators, though this was the first for both Washington and Snipes). Bleek is two-timing two women with each other, though they kind of know it. One of these is Lee’s sister, Joie, who was in almost every Lee movie to that point and still appears in them today, most recently Da Sweet Blood of Jesus. (She’s also on the She’s Gotta Have It TV show, which Lee produces.) The other is an actress I knew I recognized, Cynda Williams, ultimately identifying her (with the help of the internet) as the star of One False Move. That’s a really good movie I need to see again.

Story? What story? It’s pretty much a slice of life of these characters over a number of years as Lee’s character gambles himself to within an inch of being beaten to death, Bleek tries to juggle the women without losing either one, Esposito bristles over the band’s treatment of his white (and French) girlfriend, and Snipes wants to break out on his own. There are a lot of musical numbers incorporated in, to good effect. And a lot of “Lee-isms” are being played with here, like cameras that swoop in to close-ups, dolly shots, a forlorn jazz score, and Brooklyn street life.

But I felt toward Mo’ Better Blues as I did the two previous films in the series, though I guess I gave 3.5 stars to She’s Gotta Have It and three to School Daze. I’m at three stars again here. All three of these films provide useful insight to Lee’s growth as a filmmaker, but I guess I’m not shocked that I missed them. They aren’t essential, and this is probably the least essential of them.

As I was watching this, I wondered how well the movie he released next, Jungle Fever, would hold up today. It didn’t hold up well for some people at the time it came out, but for me it seemed nearly as urgent in its own way as Do the Right Thing, though obviously for different reasons. The Samuel L. Jackson performance in that movie was the real standout, as I remember. If I watched it today – either for the first time or as a revisit – I’d probably be just as distracted by the fashions, but hopefully still engaged by the themes.

As I said, Four Little Girls is on tap for August, if the gods of availability see it fit to oblige me. Otherwise ... Girl 6? Clockers? We'll see. 

High tea with the High T

Before I get started, I just want to tell you that Men in Black: International is not a good enough movie to warrant the type of whimsical subject line I’ve chosen for this post, which implies affection. In fact, I’m not even sure if it’s good enough to watch on an airplane.

But I have a reason for choosing the subject, which I’ll get to presently.

We’re going to America in a couple months, and I’m trying to lose a little bit of weight. Ever since I dislocated my shoulder (nearly five weeks ago), my fitness level has dropped considerably. Not only am I not playing baseball, the culprit behind my dislocation and also a source of some exercise, and not jogging, though my injury doesn't specifically prevent it, but I’m also not riding my bike to work. And though walking to and from the tram stop also gives me some exercise, it’s clearly not as much as riding.

This has exacerbated the effects of an already bad habit I have of scarfing down whatever snacks you have in the vicinity. That’s a bit of an exaggeration, but for some months now I have been eating whatever I like, whenever I like, which we all know is a recipe for bad things.

A particular habit I have that contributes to the problem is that I like to take sugary things with me when I go to the movies. This is based on the largely false assumption that a hit of chocolate will help wake me up if I start fading. And even if the assumption is false, it doesn’t change the fact that if I’m not going to have chocolate with me, I need to have something that can have a similar effect, even if it’s a placebo on some level.

How about tea?

Tea does not have as much caffeine as coffee, of course, but it also does not stimulate my bowels the way coffee does. Having a coffee during a movie is a good idea in theory, but in reality, there’s nothing that sends me to the toilet faster. And watching a movie is exactly when I don’t need to be sent to the toilet.

Tea has never had that effect on me. If I needed to wake up emergently, it probably wouldn’t have the necessary effect on me either. But if I just need a little something, maybe even a repetitive motion that would keep me awake and would contain considerably fewer calories than repeatedly eating M&M’s, tea might fill that roll perfectly.

I tried it out for the first time last night for Men in Black: International.

I got a large thermos and filled it with hot water, then dunked in two tea bags, screwing in the string with the cap when I closed it, so I wouldn’t have to fish the bags out of the brew later on. I favor teas with a little licorice in them, and this was one of those. I then slipped this thermos in my backpack, where I ordinarily smuggle large bags of gummy worms, and brought it with me to the theater.

The first thing I noticed is how damn well the thermos works. Even halfway through the movie, the tea was almost still hot enough to burn my lips. That’s because I kept screwing the cap back on between sips, but still. I needed to make sure I was sitting sufficiently upright not to pour it down my neck for that very reason. I suppose sitting upright, rather than slumped over as I am accustomed to, also prevents you from falling asleep.

My next takeaway was how far the tea went. Even sipping from it regularly, I didn’t come close to exhausting it – I’m sure in part because it did remain so hot, so a sip could never become a gulp. In fact, I found myself continuing to drink it on the way home, not wanting to waste it (as if wasting tea is a thing people think much about), and even then had to dump out a third of it when I got home.

Then I noticed that you know what? It actually worked.

Now, it’s difficult to get a true test of its efficacy because I don’t know if I would have fallen asleep without it. You’re sleepier at some movies than you are at others. Even though I didn’t like Men in Black: International, maybe it was diverting enough not to put me to sleep. Of course, the quality of the movie itself is usually less a factor in my drowsiness than whether I slept well the night before. In any case, I can’t know for sure.

But the circumstantial evidence of, you know, not falling asleep – or more importantly, not struggling against falling asleep – was pretty good.

I’m lying a bit as I did nod off once, just for a second. But that was a weird kind of anomaly, as I didn’t feel particularly tired either beforehand or afterward. The real struggle is the struggle against sleep, and that I didn’t experience at all.

I should note, however, that it didn’t function as a full replacement for food. About two-thirds of the way through I surprised myself by foraging through my bag for something to eat, found a granola bar, and ate it.

Simple solution: Don’t have any food in your bag.

So I guess this is something I’m going to go forward with. At least until I lose some of those pounds and return from the U.S. in early September.

Oh, about that subject. There’s a character in Men in Black: International named High T, played by Liam Neeson. Considering that most Men in Black agents are called Agent _, where the _ equals a particular letter of the alphabet, it seemed especially funny to me that there was an agent with the anomalous name of High T on the night I drank tea watching the movie. And that “high tea” is a social event in Britain and countries of British extraction, like Australia.

I suppose for it to be a true “high tea” I could have smoked a doobie before the movie.

Maybe next time.

Oh, and if you want more on what I did (very little) and didn't (most of it) like about the movie, my review is linked to the right, or will be soon. 

June 17th is Pixar Sequel Day

I knew there had to be a reason I have a Microsoft Word document in which I record a running list of what movies I've seen on each day of the calendar year.

I don't mean just a list of movies watched. I mean a list that starts with January 1, and has next to it the movies I've seen on January 1, dating back to 2002, with the year I saw them in parenthesis afterward. And then goes on from there throughout the rest of the year.

Without that, I would have never noticed that I've seen a Pixar movie on June 17th, three years running. And not just a Pixar movie. A Pixar sequel.

In 2017, it was Cars 3. In 2018, it was Incredibles 2. Now 2019 has rolled along and I am among the first to have seen Toy Story 4.

What makes this especially strange is that you usually only go to the movies on particular days of the week, especially when you go with your kids, which I did for each of these. So if you've seen a kids movie, any kids movie, three years running, one of those days has to be either a Friday or a Monday. Unless you've got a leap year factored in, in which case a Tuesday or a Thursday is also a possibility.

No leap years here. I watched these movies on a Saturday, a Sunday and a Monday, all June 17th in consecutive years.

A lot of things had to go just right for that to happen.

The first year, they had to schedule the Cars 3 preview screening for a Saturday, instead of the usual Sunday. My family and I went to that for free so I could review it. The movie opened that Thursday, June 22nd.

Incredibles 2 opened a week earlier than that in 2018, on June 14th, but for this to work out I had to not get invited to a critics screening of that. I can't remember why I didn't. My editor might have flubbed something. I had to instead take my kids that Sunday, on what was a really rainy day if I remember correctly.

But the strangest turn of events had to be this year, when for some reason the advanced screening of Toy Story 4 was not on a weekend at all. When I saw it was scheduled for a Monday, I thought I couldn't go, since some of these screenings are planned for weekday mornings or afternoons. But then I noticed it was set to start at 6, and realized that not only could I go, but the rest of the family could as well. We all went even though it was a school night, because the alternative was to shell out more than $50 for their three non-free tickets this weekend.

The streak of Pixar sequels on June 17th will die here, as the next Pixar movie, Onward, a) is not a sequel, and b) comes out next March. I suppose I could end up watching it with my kids on video in June, but that seems unlikely.

Given that the original Toy Story is in my top ten films of all time, and the sequel was my #2 movie of 1999 (I didn't yet keep rankings when the original came out, but it would have been my #1), I probably should be writing a Toy Story 4 post that doesn't exist just to point out a coincidence. Maybe in the coming days I will. But my review will also post in a day or two, or may have already by the time you read this (check for the link to your right).

I'll save my soapboxing about why the series did not stop at three (but that I liked the movie anyway) for that forum.

This woman is CGI

I haven't finished watching The Meg yet. I started this nearly two-hour movie last night around 10:45, which is always a recipe for disaster, but I guess Friday night is the night you think you are invincible to sleep and could stay up until 4:30 a.m. if you so chose. Well, I so chose to sleep through much of the first half -- pausing each time, mind you, but I still don't remember most of what happened.

I did remember, though, that I wanted to write a post about Ruby Rose, who I did not realize was RUBY ROSE when I saw her on screen.

So obviously I've heard Ruby Rose discussed more than I've seen her on screen, because I didn't recognize her on sight, and in fact think that John Wick: Chapter 2 is the only movie or TV show I've seen in which she appeared (though I've forgotten a lot of that movie). I've heard her discussed in terms of her gender fluidity, which I've read up on a bit more now. The Australian model turned actress apparently grew up wanting to be a boy, but then eventually decided that her identity was most accurately described as a lesbian who embraces the ideas of gender fluidity that have been allowed to enter the public discourse in recent years. She uses female pronouns but also says if forced to choose a gender she would choose male. I guess that's the very definition of fluidity.

But that's not what I want to talk about today.

I want to talk about how I don't think I've ever seen an actor or actress who looks more like they walked out of a cut scene from a video game. (Wikipedia says "cutscene," but for some reason that word looks vaguely obscene to me.)

I had this weird experience of watching The Meg and saying "I know I'm watching a movie with live actors, so how did they get that CGI character in there?"

The combination of Rose's eyes, physique and hair style in this movie make her the embodiment of female badassery that video games having been trying to capture for years now, probably ever since the inception of Lara Croft.

And since that iconic image is supposed to be inherently feminine, as it is undoubtedly meant to appeal to heterosexual male gamers (some of them incels), it's all the more interesting that Rose has toyed with androgyny in her various public manifestations and modeling campaigns.

I looked her up in John Wick 2 and I get sort of the same impression of her there, but her hair is quite different, so maybe it's really the "female renegade hitwoman" hair style she has here that's making me think of video games. Although to say she looks "real" in Wick doesn't exactly capture her either:

I suppose when you come right down to it, Jason Statham's bald head, square jaw and superhuman fighting skills make him no less of a video game icon than Rose. But since I know The Meg's male lead from countless other films and contexts, he doesn't strike me as the creation of a keyboard and a bunch of code the way she does.

Anyway, The Meg wasn't nominated for any visual effects Oscars last year, so I guess I must conclude that Ruby Rose is flesh and blood.

Real love and spoiling what can't be spoiled

If you started reading this for a substantive analysis of the themes or filmmaking techniques of Olivia Wilde’s Booksmart, I’m sorry to disappoint you. I haven’t seen it yet. It doesn’t come out for another couple weeks in Australia.

But even without having seen it, I can tell you that it doesn’t seem like the type of movie that would be discussed on something referred to as a “spoiler special.”

That would be The Slate Spoiler Special, a recurring Slate podcast in which a roundtable of hosts (often featuring film critic Dana Stevens) goes through a recent film or TV show without worrying about keeping its secrets. I hate-listen to this podcast. Every once in a while it yields something I find genuinely useful, but more often than not, it inspires snark in me.

I won’t dredge all that up now because I’ve written about it before, but I often think the show is more appropriately referred to as Slate Plot Synopsis. That’s because the roundtable usually passes around the conch in a kind of tag team recitation of the plot, blow by blow, rarely providing what I would consider to be true analysis.

But the thing that’s annoying me in this case is that rarely does it actually involve spoilers. Oh, they tell you what happens in the plot, but more often than not, the plot is not particularly “spoilery.”

As in, it would seem, Booksmart. Now I understand that they have chosen to call the show this and they aren’t going to adjust the name of the show based on what movie they’re talking about, but I might suggest that it’s not that interesting to talk about a film on this show if it does NOT contain what we would traditionally think of as spoilers. As in, it would seem, Booksmart.

It just makes me laugh when they have this dramatic intro with lines of dialogue from the spoileriffic films The Sixth Sense, Soylent Green, Chinatown, Citizen Kane and Seven, then someone straightforwardly tells you that they’re going to be spoiling a teen romantic comedy that I understand has queer elements to it. (Maybe that’s the spoiler?)

If you’re wondering about the second half of my subject line, well, I’ll get to that now.

I didn’t listen to the Spoiler Special episode on Booksmart because I of course have not seen it yet. I did, however, listen to the segment they did on it on The Slate Culture Gabfest, on which Dana Stevens also serves as a co-host. And in a true case of the two shows cannibalizing each other, making the choice to cover it on Spoiler Special all the more ridiculous, Dana started by saying she thought she was all talked out on the movie after talking about it on the other show.

Dana did say she “really loved” the movie … which is not the same as loving it. (She went on to admit multiple problems with it.)

It made me realize that “really loving” something is kind of a ridiculous phrase.

When you say you “really love” a movie, that should be an instance of amplifying the degree to which you love it. But in reality, it’s a kind of backpedalling. If you really “really love” a movie, you just say you love it.

Which of these statements is stronger?

“I love Booksmart.”

“I really love Booksmart.”

Well, I guess the tone of voice factors in as well. And in Dana’s tone of voice, you could tell that “really loving” it meant being defensive about your affection for it and simultaneously acknowledging the reasons you might need to be defensive.

Love is love, someone wise once said.

Audient Audit: Modern Times

This is the latest in my monthly series Audient Audit, where I question my own records about movies I say I’ve seen.

Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times may bear the most embarrassing reason for why I thought I saw it. There are two, actually.

      1)      “I’ve seen that scene of Charlie Chaplin running through the gears of that machine, therefore I must have seen the movie.” (It was likely in some kind of Oscar clip montage.)

      2)      “I must have seen Modern Times just because it’s a classic and I must have seen it.”

Not great reasons, you will agree.

The second one is particularly faulty reasoning, as I have never been the kind of cinephile to devour silent films. I know there are many of us who eat up every example of the origins of cinema, but I am not one of them. So the idea that I “must have seen it” is silly, because I’ve seen only 30-40 silent films in my entire life, and nearly half of those were in the past few years, when I devoted one of these annual viewing series to the topic in 2016.

I think I figured I saw it around the same time I saw City Lights, a film I think of in the same breath as Modern Times, if you will allow that phrasing. I remember that viewing, which took place in my old apartment in New York City sometime between 1998 and 2001 (as those were the years I lived there), because I decided to smoke a cigar as accompaniment to it. And I remember that because I don’t like cigars, and that was one of fewer than ten of those I’ve ever smoked.

Modern Times is indeed a silent movie, but by rights it shouldn’t be. It came out in 1936, which is nearly a decade after sound was introduced to the movies. Chaplin was resistant to cutting over, of course, because he had thrived as a silent actor and was worried he could not make the transition to talkies. (Though 1940’s The Great Dictator, a talkie, might be my favorite of his films.) In fact the film functions as something of a metaphor for this sea change, which put a lot of actors (though not Chaplin) out of work. Chaplin’s character and his love interest/female friend, referred to as “The Gamin” (Paulette Godard), spend most of the movie looking for work. Although automation is the thing in the film that’s preventing them from landing a steady job, in the world it was this change in the way films were made that Chaplin perceived as his primary obstacle.

I should clarify that it’s not a silent film the way The Gold Rush (1925) is a silent film. It actually does have spoken dialogue, but that dialogue comes only from the boss in Chaplin’s factory, which is consistent with Chaplin’s complaint about The Man making his style of filmmaking outmoded. It also has Chaplin singing in his final number. There are sound effects and other diagetic sounds interspersed throughout. But there’s also silent film’s typical reliance on pantomiming and physical comedy, as well as title cards, though Chaplin doesn’t rely heavily on them, consistent with his show-don’t-tell approach. The fact that he used the title cards, but also included bits of dialogue that proved he didn’t have to, gives further heft to Chaplin’s perspective.

Modern Times has some great, laugh-out-loud set pieces. I think my favorite, mostly because I laughed out loud the most, was when he’s being fed by the automated feeding machine, which pushes food (and sometimes machine parts) into his mouth, and which goes haywire rotating a corn cob dangerously close to his mouth. Chaplin’s reactions are priceless, particularly his eyes, as his mouth is largely obscured by the corn cob. I also really enjoyed the blind roller skating right next to the department store dropoff. I'm not sure how he did it so convincingly without, you know, dying. 

The film doesn’t amount to more than the sum of its set pieces, though. Other Chaplin films I’ve fallen in love with in recent years have a fair amount of heart – I’m thinking primarily of The Kid, but even The Great Dictator has a huge amount of passion and heart in its final political speech. Modern Times doesn’t have this same feel to it and often feels like a loosely connected succession of bits. The bits really work, but the whole is less than the sum of its parts.

That of course still equates to a four-star (out of five) rating, as this is a substantial achievement and a fun watch. It’s just near the bottom of the Chaplin features I’ve seen, in part because the others are so superlative.

And to be clear, I definitely had not seen it prior to this week.

On to July. I don’t have my movie picked out yet.

Reasons not to take Netflix for granted

I’m not talking about Netflix the streaming giant, the original studio, the industry disruptor, the

content fire hose, the Spielberg annoyer, the millennial way of life or, way back when, the DVD-through-the-mail service.

No, today I want to talk to you about Netflix, the technological platform.

It would be easy to forget just how dang well this thing works … unless you have something subpar to compare it to.

We don’t subscribe to any of Netflix’s US competitors, in part because they weren’t available when we first got to Australia, and in part because Netflix is enough for us. I know we miss out on original content on Amazon, Hulu, all that, but there’s so much original content in general that it hardly seems worth crying over missing any particular subsection of it.

We do, however, subscribe to Stan, an Australian streaming service that has worked out a number of great content deals. Stan is carrying Disney/Marvel/Star Wars in Australia, as well as, I believe, every single Bond movie. (No time like the present to pick up where I left off six years ago, when my chronological viewing of the Connery movies stopped at Goldfinger.) Stan also gives us access to random American peak TV shows that we love, like Better Call Saul.

But as a streaming technology, Stan sucks.

At first we thought the poor resolution and the buffering were a function of our internet, and in truth, that’s somewhat to blame. Despite living just outside the city in North Melbourne, an eminently cosmopolitan area, we do not yet have the Nationwide Broadband Network, known to everyone as the NBN. Areas farther away and even some areas in the boonies have it, but we don’t yet. When this does one day happen, it should help improve our shit internet.

But that same internet does not contain a single performance issue when watching something on Netflix. Not a blip. Not a drop. Not a single delay.

It got so bad this past week that I had to stop my rewatch of Exit Through the Gift Shop on Wednesday night because it wouldn’t play more than five seconds without pausing for more than five seconds. In fact, the only way to finish it was to shift the viewing to my phone, which uses the same internet, but is apparently more sophisticated than my TV set up in terms of delivering the actual content. It was still bad, but it was enough improved that it was reasonable to persevere, and the remaining 40 minutes of the movie probably took only about 45 minutes to watch. As opposed to, I don’t know, a million.

I’d hoped that was just a single bad evening, but then my wife’s and my joint viewing of Book Week on Saturday night was similarly disrupted. In this case we were able to get better results by restarting our Fetch box, the device through which we stream Stan.

But even at its best, when it does not buffer, Stan delivers a sub-optimal viewing experience, looking grainy and a bit unfocused. Taking advantage of the Disney/Marvel deal, I watched both Iron Man 3 and Inside Out through Stan within the past few months, and neither popped the way it should have. Tellingly, during that time I also rewatched Avengers: Infinity War, but I watched it on a DVD borrowed from the library even though it was available through Stan. It looked a million times better.

If you’re opting to borrow something from the library because you know the version you have available at a touch of your fingertips is not going to be good enough, it kind of defeats the whole purpose.

And yet we don’t really want to unsubscribe from Stan because of the access to Better Call Saul and the like. Plus our kids have just discovered some shows on there they really like. Strangely, these shows do not have an issue streaming for them, but that could be because they watch them in the morning. So maybe competing during the peak nighttime viewing hours with other subscribers is also factoring in. Which it really should not.

All this is not to go on at length about Stan and its deficiencies. Stan will improve over time, I’m sure, to the extent that its budget and the talent it hires will allow it.

Instead, it’s just to be reminded that when you are paying that very small amount per month for that very large amount of content, Netflix is also giving you a viewing experience that is as good as DVD.

And when you’ve seen the alternative, it’s something to appreciate indeed.

The completely unanticipatable Annabelle (Wallis) double feature

I like to tell you about coincidences in my arbitrarily chosen viewing schedule. In fact, the most recent post on this blog is that kind of post. In fact, if I weren't writing about this particular coincidence, I actually had a different coincidence I could have written about instead today. (Seeing two movies this weekend in which parents do drugs with their own children.) It probably gets tiresome for you.

But I'm not sure if I ever remember watching a movie, specifically noting an actress and learning her name from that movie, then completing the double feature with another movie chosen completely randomly in which this actress also appears.

An actor maybe, but never an actress. (Kidding.)

The actress is Annabelle Wallis. I'll show you a picture of her, but not yet; if I inserted it in the body of the text at this point, it would interfere with the formatting of the two posters to your right. Yep, this is how the sausage gets made.

Wallis plays the Wall Street Journal reporter in Tag, the 2018 comedy based on a true story of adult friends who had been playing the same game of tag since they were kids. In real life, the reporter was a man, but you can forgive the casting directors if they thought someone who looks like Wallis was a better way to go with the role.

I'd already seen (and quite enjoyed) Tag, but my wife had not, and we needed something that wasn't the Ted Bundy Netflix movie to watch on Sunday night of our three-day weekend. We both want to see the Ted Bundy movie -- Extremely Wicked Shockingly Evil and Vile, which is why we're calling it "the Ted Bundy movie" -- and in fact, I started watching it by myself the other weekend before she stopped me. But we both agreed it isn't the kind of fun holiday weekend movie we were looking for. A weeknight movie for sure.

Tag was what we found when we went "spelunking" in Netflix.

One of the only people who's not famous in this cast -- famous to me, anyway -- is Wallis, who I'd actually seen once or twice before, it turns out, but never specifically noted. Here, now I have room to include a picture of her:

I liked her performance, but not enough to make a point of looking her up afterward. I did, however, do something I often do, which is try to match unknown names to known faces by guessing based on their position in the end credits. As Wallis was the only person I didn't already know, it was pretty easy in this case.

My wife peeled off to do her own thing, and I went spelunking again.

I decided to dig down into horror, and I opted for Annabelle over The Exorcist (one of my favorites, haven't seen it in nearly 20 years) and He Never Died (I like Henry Rollins). Exorcist would have won if it weren't nearly 10:45 and if the movie weren't two hours long, so Annabelle was the runner up. I figured, the Conjuring Extended Horror Universe is a pretty respectable horror franchise and I'd only seen the original Conjuring. No time like the present to correct that.

Wallis is the star of Annabelle, but you know what? I didn't recognize that for the entire length of the running time. That's because in Annabelle, Wallis looks like this:

Kind of different, right?

In fact, as I was watching I noted that Alfre Woodard and (to a far lesser extent) Tony Amendola were the only "names" in the cast, while pretty much everyone else was an unknown. A strange observation to make about a woman I had just seen in another movie.

It's a compliment of course. Wallis may be one of those rare chameleons who looks different in every role, kind of like Vincent D'Onofrio or Rebecca Ferguson. And one of these was a horror while the other was a comedy, furthering the impressiveness of it.

I only finally realized when I saw her name in the credits for the second time in the same evening.

Probably the weirdest thing about this double feature is that the lead actress's first name is the same as the title of one of the movies. I really don't have any idea, in these situations, if there's some actual causality or if it's really just a coincidence. I have to think they didn't decide to name this movie Annabelle because they had already cast a woman named Annabelle. It's Gemma Arterton starring in Gemma Bovery all over again.

If you want to tell me the choice of which second movie to watch really wasn't so random, because I had the name "Annabelle" on the brain after just seeing her name in the credits of Tag, well, you'll just have to trust me. I wouldn't try to pull a fast one on you.

Cinema's youthful parents

I've watched two new-to-me movies this weekend (so far; it's a three-day weekend to celebrate the queen's birthday, which is actually in April). Both have been from this part of the world (one from New Zealand, one from Australia). Both came out in 2018. Both are comedies. Both have titles that start with B.

And both, coincidentally, have an actor who is way too young playing the parent of the main character.

The biggest difference? One is good, one is not good.

The good one, which I saw first on Friday night, is The Breaker Upperers from New Zealand. It's a lively, colorful comedy starring its writer-directors, Jackie van Beek and Madeleine Sami, and it's got a funny and original premise: The leads are in business helping people break up with their significant others, often by concocting elaborate ruses that involve costumes, faked deaths, staged cheating, etc. I knew I'd like it from the first minute of the film.

In this film, the woman on the right (New Zealand treasure Rima Ti Wiata) plays the mother to the woman on the left (van Beek). These are more or less current photos.

Van Beek is 42-43 and Ti Wiata is 55-56 (I could only find their birth years online), a different of as few as 12 years or as many as 14. Van Beek may actually look a little older than her age and Ti Wiata may look a little younger, making the problem more noticeable. I did notice it, obviously, but since it's a comedy with a bit of a zany tone, it didn't bother me. In part because both actresses are great in the movie.

The bad one, which I saw second on Saturday night, is Book Week from Australia. It's directed by Heath Davis. It's basically a cheap knockoff of Wonder Boys, only the struggling novelist with substance/alcohol dependencies who is teaching to make ends meet and impregnates one of his age-appropriate co-workers while younger women fawn over him during a literary festival where his agent is present is completely unlikable in this movie, while in the other movie he's Michael Douglas.

In this film, the man on the right (Australian treasure Nicholas Hope) plays the father to the man on the left (Alan Dukes). These are more or less current photos, and the photo of Dukes is actually from the movie.

Dukes is 52 (or was when the film was released, so may now be 53) and Hope is ... 60. He's the only one of these four actors whose exact birthday (December 25, 1958) I can get. That is possibly as few as seven years difference in age between a man and his father. Given the way this film constantly flatters the lead and suggests his desirability despite ample evidence of his repugnance, in a way that reminds me of pre-#MeToo myopia, I wouldn't be surprised if the director thought the 52-year-old could play 42. But Hope really still seems like a young man, so Dukes would need to play 32 for it not to stick out.

Given my feelings on the two films, I'd much rather offer you the poster for The Breaker Upperers than the poster for Book Week. But two things prevented me.

One is that this post comes from a place of criticism, even if I'm not bothered by the small age difference in The Breaker Upperers. If looking for a poster child (so to speak) of that criticism, the lesser movie seems more appropriate.

The other is that the poster is the best part of Book Week, and better than the Breaker Upperers poster, which actually doesn't sell the movie very well.

You shouldn't look at the rest of Book Week, but looking at the poster is an enjoyable enough experience.

Juliette Binoche is way more beautiful than she used to be

It’s not usually my thing to write about the appearances of actors or actresses, especially in the age of #MeToo. I’m probably more likely to write about the appearance of an actor, since it’s a lot less skeevy to talk about the looks of men than the looks of women when you’re a heterosexual male.

But as I was watching Claire Denis’ High Life last night, I couldn’t help but notice that Juliette Binoche is a more beautiful woman now than she was 30 years ago.

And I’m mentioning it because that is not part of the conventional wisdom when considering actresses, or women in general, sad to say.

I first became acquainted with Binoche in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which was made in 1998 but which I saw in 1992. This was before I recorded the dates of my viewings, but I remember watching it in college as part of the class where we also read the novel. It’s cliché to say it but this is one of those instances where the novel is so much better than the movie. But one of the reasons the movie disappointed me was Binoche.

I’m sure her acting wasn’t bad, because she has impeccable instincts, although 30+ years of practice since then has undoubtedly made her better. No, it was something about her appearance. She was too pale, and her face seemed slack and featureless. Almost like her features were blown out in an overexposed photograph. This is the best I can describe an indescribable impression I had 27 years ago.

How somebody looks should not, ideally, affect your impression of them. In reality, it does, especially when you are a not-yet-fully-enlightened 18-year-old.

I remember still not really liking her a few years later in The English Patient, and here she was suffering in contrast to Kristin Scott Thomas. Interestingly, Thomas was also someone whose appeal was not yet clear to me when I first saw her two years earlier in my beloved Four Weddings and a Funeral. Something about her features had sharpened by Patient, and her glamor increased tenfold. Binoche came off worse by comparison.

I’d guess I was coming around on Binoche by what seems to be my third time seeing her in Chocolat in 2000. That’s not a great movie, of course; it’s one of the shining examples of the safe kind of movie that gets Oscar nominations because of a nice production designed and being inoffensive. But I remember thinking Binoche was now someone I liked. I’ve basically liked her ever since, which does not mean I’ve liked every movie she’s appeared in (hello, Clouds of Sils Maria). But Binoche is definitely a plus rather than a minus, and it’s not even close. In fact I’ve pretty much come to think of her as a treasure, the way others do.

Juliette Binoche was 24 when she made The Unbearable Lightness of Being. She was 54 when she made High Life. Yet the 54-year-old version of her puts the 24-year-old version to shame.

Here’s a side-by-side comparison so you can see if you agree or not:

I’m not 100% sure why, but I will try to describe some more indescribables. I said before that her face felt featureless and slack. Now it’s got some angles, which accentuate the bedrock beauty that she needed to have to get recognized in the first place. She may have had facelifts and the like, and if so that’s not really how I hoped to be reaching this conclusion (but kudos to her surgeon). But since the improvement started in her early 30s I suspect that’s not the only or the defining difference.

It’s not that it’s impossible for a woman to “grow into her looks,” it’s just that that’s an unusual thing to be expecting for actresses or other famous women in particular. In the most extreme version of the truth, Hollywood only values certain women while they are still in their 20s. Hit 30 and you have to be a star or a true thespian to keep getting work. Binoche may be both on some level, but ironically she also started getting better looking after 30.

Or it could just be that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and the older and more sophisticated version of Binoche speaks to me personally the way the younger version did not.

Either way, damn, she’s a 54-year-old hottie. Fifty-five now, but 54 when High Life was shot.

And I’m not even saying that because she has graphic sex with a machine in the movie.

Though it doesn’t hurt.

Watch out for mild peril

I've written before about the funny phrases used to warn parents about material in movies that is potentially too intense for their children, but I think I've come across a new winner.

We have this channel on our TV that functions as something of a default, because our antenna is broken so we can't get actual TV. There are pay packages we could subscribe to, but since we don't, our TV sits on this channel that gives a succession of trailers for movies available on pay-per-view. Some of them are mainstream, many of them I've never heard of, and most of them seem to be in some way inappropriate for my children, who are usually exposed to a minute or so of this stuff before they bring up Netflix or YouTube.

Each trailer is introduced by a short description of the Australian rating for the movie and the reason for the rating. And here is what it had to say about Mary Poppins Returns:

"Rated G for a scene of very mild peril."

Ha ha.

First of all, if something is rated G, do you really have to give a warning about potential objectionable content at all? Shouldn't it say "Rated G because no one in their right mind could possibly be scared, disgusted or offended by this material"?

But if you are giving the warning, isn't "mild peril" sufficient? "Very" is just calling attention to your own ridiculousness.

And if you are giving the warning, wouldn't this be more appropriate? "Rated G for fairly intense anguish and anger by a parent over the death of his wife/mother of his children"? That would better quantify the reasons why you might not want to bring a young child to Mary Poppins Returns.

The funny thing is I also have trouble narrowing down which one scene they deemed to contain peril. I count at least two. There's the scene where the children are being chased in the carriage while inside the design on the vase, and there's also the scene where the lamplighters are climbing Big Ben in order to turn back the time by a couple minutes to meet a bank deadline. Both scenes could reasonably be considered perilous, mildly or otherwise.

Then of course there's the peril involved with standing in a shop that turns upside down and floating into the sky while holding on to a balloon, but I guess "fantasy peril" doesn't count.

I noticed this just after watching the penultimate episode of Game of Thrones on Saturday night. Something that contained only "very mild peril" seemed like a nice change of pace.

Instead I watched Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters, in which a man gets pulled apart by the roots of a tree.

Pride Week on The Audient

June 1st marked the beginning of international Pride Month, a month devoted to the celebration of our sexual and gender differences.

There are probably a hundred reasons I should have known about this, but if you can believe it, I learned about it because baseball's Oakland A's were having a Pride Day on Saturday in which they were giving out unicorn fanny packs. Yes, you read that correctly -- unicorn fanny packs. When Joe Biden sent me an email about it, I realized it was a month-long recognition of the members of our society we had previously refused to acknowledge, not only but perhaps especially the sports world.

Without consciously being aware of Pride Month, or intentionally curating my viewing schedule in any way, I watched four movies featuring gay relationships in the past week.

Here they are, chronologically, with some thoughts on each.

Freeheld (2015, Peter Sollett)

The only of the four films featuring a lesbian relationship, Freeheld was my choice for another no-borrow, daytime library viewing, as first discussed in this post. At the time I wrote that post, I did not envision myself getting a chance to go watch a movie at the library without borrowing it again, as I expected to be at work this past week. Well, due to stupid paperwork issues that I won't get into now, I missed a second week of work recovering from my dislocated/fractured shoulder. Who am I kidding, I enjoyed it. So I found myself at the library again, a different library, this past Tuesday.

Freeheld documents the real-world case of Laurel Hester (Julianne Moore) and her girlfriend Stacie Andree (Ellen Page), domestic partners who were not allowed to marry in mid-2000s New Jersey. Hester, a police officer, was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, and wanted to give her pension to Andree, a mechanic, so she could hold on to the house they owned together. The local community freeholders interpreted the law differently than Hester and Andree did, leading to a social justice movement to clarify the law and get Andree the benefits she deserved.

I was worried about Freeheld from a filmmaking standpoint, as it is not particularly subtle in its script or dialogue. There are a number of poorly constructed scenes, especially in the first half. Typically strong performances from Moore, Page and Michael Shannon really help things, though, and I didn't even mind the flamboyant work of Steve Carrell as a gay Jewish attorney, though some homosexual viewers might. By the end I was really caught up in it and it "got a little dusty in the room," as the hosts of the Filmspotting podcast are fond of saying.

Love is Strange (2014, Ira Sachs)

It was an unintentional gay double feature on Tuesday, as I'd already planned to rewatch one of my favorite films of 2014, Love is Strange, that night. The Freeheld viewing was the random, opportunistic one.

I wanted to watch this movie again as I am considering which films qualify as my favorite of the decade, a list I will be publishing next January. It tells the story of an aging gay couple in New York (John Lithgow and Alfred Molina), who have been together for nearly 40 years but have only just gotten the right to marry. Unfortunately, just by posting pictures of his honeymoon on social media, Molina gets the axe by the Catholic school that employs him as a music teacher, which feels he has forced their hand on something they had been previously willing to overlook. The loss of his job forces them to sell their apartment, and while looking for a new place to live, the newlyweds must live separately with relatives and friends.

What made this one of my favorite films of that year was its modest scale, its humanism and its lovely heart. Not everyone behaves as the best version of themselves at every point in this movie, as sharing close quarters with overstaying house guests tends to bring out people's worst. But Sachs is a master of the day-to-day indignities and grace notes of life and love, and is constantly enriching us with his perceptiveness. He's gotten wonderful performances up and down the cast as well. It's a political statement about equality and gay marriage delivered in a purposefully small and unassuming package, and it's got poignancy and warmth to spare.

Keep the Lights On (2012, Ira Sachs)

Sachs was responsible for two consecutive viewings in my Pride Week, as I found his fourth film, Keep the Lights On, at the library during Tuesday's visit. Having loved Love is Strange, I had always meant to see this, but never before seen it on the shelves. I watched it Thursday night.

Lights is the story of a Danish documentary filmmaker (Thure Lindhardt) and his relationship with a drug-addicted boyfriend (Zachary Booth) circa the turn of the century, for about a decade. The plot is less about any particular events in their lives and more about the progression of those lives as the former tries to see the latter through his addiction, with breakups, reunions, and other characters mixing in. It's semi-autobiographical about Sachs' own relationship with a literary agent who suffered from addiction (but had made it public previously with his own memoir).

Because this is not a mainstream film per se (despite featuring Julianne Nicholson), and more aptly described as queer cinema, I thought it was Sachs' first film. In fact, he'd made three others, including one I've seen that has nothing to do with homosexuality as far as I remember (2007's Married Life). I guess I figured he'd start with the more niche film, given that his subsequent (and previous) films have had A-list actors, but maybe a film like this is only something you can make once you've built up a little bit of artistic capital. Having thought it was his first film while I was watching it, though, I forgave its grainier look as well as a frequently rough performance from Lindhardt in the lead role.

Given that I don't often see films that I would categorize as "queer cinema" (as opposed to mainstream cinema with gay elements), I was concerned that I didn't like it anywhere near as much as the gentler and more mainstream Love is Strange. Love is love, and I can get into a love story featuring anybody, but tell that to the neurotic part of my brain that worries about how these things are perceived. Still, I can genuinely say I came around on the movie and found it moving at times, and that Lindhardt's performance gained confidence as the movie proceeded -- or maybe just as I got accustomed to his limitations.

Rocketman (2019, Dexter Fletcher)

The final film in my Pride Week, the one that made me finally take notice of the theme I'd stumbled across, was the new Elton John biopic, and it was another film I had not expected to be seeing when I saw it Friday afternoon. In fact, I went into the doctor's office for an appointment fully expecting to go into work for the rest of the day once the doctor had officially cleared me to return. But after waiting for two hours to see the doctor, I started thinking it seemed silly to go in to work for just the second half of the day on Friday. Checking my phone, I saw that Rocketman was starting within the hour at a theater near the hospital.

Fletcher's film is of course the story of the rise to fame, and subsequent drug addiction, of one of the greatest performers and songwriters of the second half of the 20th century. It's amusingly similar to the last film Fletcher touched, which was Bohemian Rhapsody, another story of a flamboyant gay musician who came on the scene in the 1970s. Fletcher of course picked up the pieces on that film after Bryan Singer was fired, though Singer retained the directing credit as per DGA rules.

Although the biopic is a form that justifiably leaves a person wary, most recent biopics have attempted to get past the traditional limitations of the form. Rocketman is no exception, as it has numerous flights of fancy and musical numbers that give it a lot in common with a Baz Luhrmann film. You've got magical realism as well as Taron Egerton's John attending an alcoholics anonymous meeting dressed in a red costume with devil horns and angel wings. In short, I really enjoyed it, especially at the beginning. Egerton delivers a really nuanced performance, and gives real depth to John's struggles with his own sexuality and how those around him receive it. 

Now that I know this is Pride Month I suppose I may honor gay filmmaking and movies about gay subject matter in a more conscious way. But I'm not sure I'll be able to top the unconscious week that kicked it off.

... and the Coke was still waiting for me

Given that I can't drive while recovering from a dislocated/fractured shoulder, I can't really get out to the movies at night, unless it's by walking or public transportation, neither of which are necessarily exciting options.

Fortunately, I have also missed two weeks of work, which means I've had my days to myself.

So this past Wednesday I caught a double feature in the theater, which timed out just about perfectly to encompass my kids' entire school day, including transportation to and from the venue. Dropped them off, saw two movies, picked them up.

The second was a movie I wanted to see (Brightburn) while the first was a necessary bridge to get me to the second (John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum). The unnecessarily and indulgently long running time of the first (130 minutes) was why the double feature managed to suck up my whole day.

The way I felt about the movies was consistent with my anticipation of them. I really liked Brightburn (four stars), but John Wick 3 (1.5 stars) continued that series' diminishing returns, as I knew it would. What a trudging, numbing succession of bludgeoning violence.

There are two reasons I'm telling you about this double feature.

The first was that it's been a long time since I've felt this harassed by a theater staff. I'm not going to call out the particular theater because their staff is usually quite nice, but this time I had someone who was taking her job a little too seriously.

As I was checking my phone while the Wick credits rolled, this woman came up to me and asked to see my ticket. After the movie was over. She was asking because there had been more people in the screening than tickets sold, and I guess she wanted to catch me in the act of being the extra person. Even though I didn't pay for my ticket (critics card), it was a legitimate ticket, but she looked at it for about 30 seconds before returning it to me without so much as a gesture of apology. Maybe she spent so much time because I was not sitting in my actual assigned seat, but it was a 10 a.m. screening with seven people in attendance. Who finds their assigned seat?

But I was not done with this woman. Or, I should say, she was not done with me.

During Brightburn, she swept through, I guess for quality control reasons (and probably to check to see if the number of people in this screening matched the number of tickets sold). On her way back up through, she made her way down my aisle to tell me to take my feet off the seat in front of me.

Seriously?

Granted it's not traditionally "polite" to have your feet on the seat, but I thought theaters had long since stopped enforcing whatever policy they may have about this. They know that the seats are too small and that some of their taller/larger patrons may not be able to get comfortable without getting creative. Or they should know, anyway.

It's unclear to me whether she would have done this regardless of who I was, or whether she had some residual axe to grind because she was suspicious of my attendance in the first session, or whether she even recognized I was the same person. But in any case it annoyed me.

I thought of saying something afterward, but who can be bothered.

The second thing I wanted to tell you was something funny, and something that worked in my favor.

Although I didn't notice it at the time, during John Wick I lost the No Sugar Coke I'd carried in in my winter jacket pocket. I didn't open the drink because most of that movie occurred before noon, and I was more likely to need it during the second movie. But it was only by total dumb luck that I, in fact, had it available to me at all.

I figure it fell out of the pocket and under the seat, because that's where I found it, on the ground, when Brightburn started.

How did this happen, you ask?

This is no small theater where I saw these two movies, boasting about ten screens. But for whatever reason, they programmed the 10 a.m. Wick and the 12:50 p.m. Brightburn both on screen 4, just to the left of the concession stand. So after getting about 20 minutes to catch up on my baseball scores, I found myself walking back in to the very same auditorium.

And because my natural instinct about where to sit in a theater is so keen and so consistent, I chose the exact same seat -- at which point I saw the can of soda lying on the ground behind the seat, not yet having even realized I had lost it.

Three very particular and very unlikely things had to happen for this to be possible:

1) The two movies I had randomly selected for my double feature needed to be playing in the same theater.

2) I had to choose the same seat.

3) The theater staff -- maybe that nasty woman -- had to have missed it when they cleaned the theater between screenings.

In any case, I was really glad I had it, as I purchased a large popcorn as my "lunch" to eat during Brightburn. Without that drink, the salt in the popcorn would have left me seriously dehydrated. I was already imagining a replay of my viewing of Kick-Ass, another R-rated superhero movie, nearly a decade earlier, when a salty popcorn sans drink nearly drove me to distraction. (Somehow I managed to really end up liking that movie as well.)

I'd almost suggest the reason the woman shamed me regarding my feet on the seat was because she was annoyed I had smuggled a soda into the movie, but then again, if she'd seen the soda she surely would have cleaned it up.

Sticklers for the rules rarely let anything slide.