Shades of Gray

When I absolutely loved The Lost City of Z, I thought I was finally over my yo-yo relationship with director James Gray.

Then came Ad Astra.

The Lost City of Z had redeemed Gray after the last film of his I didn't care for, The Immigrant. Which I was expecting to like because I liked his previous film, Two Lovers, so much.

I guess Gray is destined to be an on-again, off-again filmmaker with me.

I haven't seen his film 1994 feature debut Little Odessa or his 2007 film We Own the Night, but I started off in a lukewarm place with Gray with 2000's The Yards. But then came Two Lovers, redeeming that film, and kicking off an every-other-film pattern that goes to this day.

For many viewers, it seems that Ad Astra was two in a row for Gray, assuming they liked The Lost City of Z, which not everyone did. Who knows, maybe there are others who are on an every-other-film pattern with Gray that's opposite mine. Astra actually explores similar thematic territory to Z, examining man's thirst for exploration and willingness to sacrifice everything (like a relationship with family) to embark on adventures that could cost them a minimum of several years, and a maximum of their lives. Astra has an 80 on Metacritic, giving some indication of the breadth of its support among critics.

But Astra is more akin to The Immigrant in terms of its sheer narrative clumsiness. Although I don't remember The Immigrant that well, I do remember there's this scene where Joaquin Phoenix is trying to stab Jeremy Renner and he's trying to defend himself with a pillow. If not exactly that, something similarly absurd, and the staging is laughable. There are a couple laughable moments like that in Ad Astra, scenes where Gray failed to comprehend the tone that was inadvertently undermining his earnestly intended direction. I won't go into too much detail because I imagine most of you haven't seen it yet, but the "car chase on the moon" scene certainly qualifies.

Especially in retrospect, these scenes are conspicuous by their absence in The Lost City of Z. Every scene plays out with the exact vibe Gray intended, and as a result he successfully wrestles with the restless spirit of, and personal costs to, the explorer. The subtlety on screen in Z is so different from the thematic hammer strikes in Ad Astra (as exemplified in the cringeworthy voiceover) that the films simply don't seem to be made by the same person.

It's the voiceover that really undercuts Gray. He's proven himself capable of communicating his themes through visuals and dialogue, so why belabor all that with voiceover? It's tempting to reward Ad Astra for its striking visuals, yet Gray saps them of their power by redundantly explicating them through the voiceover. He should have known better.

If we're examining the validity of the "shades of Gray" metaphor -- which is not just a clever play on words in this case -- you can attain the color gray as a filmmaker by making a lot of wishy washy films that linger in kind of a murky middle ground. It seems a little less common to alternate between two extremities of color, of quality, that average out to the color gray. I really don't have any idea why James Gray sees things so clearly sometimes, and then sometimes, can't seem to see anything at all.

However, the pattern I've been on does mean I should look forward to his next film, I Am Pilgrim (if that title sticks), which IMDB lists in pre-production. Maybe I'll have occasion to give thanks for that one.

Killers who don't kill you

I saw my first trailer for Terminator: Dark Fate last night, and I was reminded what makes a terminator such a scary killing machine.

When it gets in range of its target, it absolutely, positively kills that target.

Or whiffs while trying its damnedest, anyway.

It'd be quite a different story if the terminator had its target pinned in a corner, transformed the end of one of its arms into a very long knife, and then, inches from the face of its target, withdrew, saying "Not today, John Connor."

That's the biggest problem with Pennywise in the It movies. It's almost never "today."

I'd have to go back and count, but between the two movies, there can be no fewer than two dozen moments when Pennywise is within inches of one of the members of the Losers Club, but that loser escapes with his (or her) life. And it's not because the ceiling collapsed, or because one of them closed a door just before one of his appendages could slither through it.

No, it's because at the last minute, Pennywise said "Not today, Bill Denbrough."

Yes, Pennywise does kill Georgie Denbrough, or that poor girl under the bleachers, at his first opportunity to do so -- after toying with their fragile psychologies for a few minutes first, of course. He's certainly capable of converting a kill. But I don't buy the argument that his interactions with our main characters are just sadistic amuse bouches for himself before he plans to go in for the kill. Really, he just doesn't plan to go in for the kill -- not today, not tomorrow, and not next Thursday either.

It's really difficult to fear something that fritters away all its best opportunities, because you don't know when you should actually be scared. It's easy to draw the contrasts, as my colleague John Roebuck of ReelGood did in his It Chapter 2 review. The terminator is one, but so is this:

"Pennywise is successful in his murderous enthusiasm in some instances, when in others he is not, with few discernible differences between each scenario. When the capacity of a primary antagonist is uncertain, there's isn't a substantial foundation for fear of it. Think about the alien in Ridley Scott's Alien. The only reason a crew member aboard the Nostromo survived an encounter with it was through luck or ingenuity, not because the alien simply didn't kill them or because they ran to the next room."

That's actually John quoting his own review of the original It in his It 2 review, if we're trying to be as accurate as possible.

So this observation doesn't originate with me, nor does it probably originate with John. But it is a significant detriment to the effectiveness of not only this film, but other modern horror films as well, so I thought it was worth giving it my own particular spin.

The same issue exists in The Curse of La Llorona, which is just one recent case that exemplifies an entire trend in modern ghost story movies. La Llorona presents herself to our main characters a number of times, because you can't have an entire movie about a boogeyman (or boogeywoman) and only show her once or twice. (Not in the post-Jaws era, anyway.) But she of course doesn't kill those characters -- not on the first time, and not on any subsequent times either (spoiler alert). She does kill some other characters earlier on -- you have to establish her capabilities, of course -- but because The Curse of La Llorona opts for a low body count, it necessitates a number of set pieces that peter out inexplicably into non-fatal episodes.

Having said all this, I actually like the two It movies. I gave the first one four stars out of five, and was heading that way on the second after the first hour, ending up at the slightly lower 3.5. That might say more about my own generously skewed star rating system than the actual qualities of these movies, but that's a discussion for another time.

The thing I appreciate about these movies is the way Andy Muschietti stages Pennywise as a concept, not as an actual killer. Although I don't think this is what they were going for, I appreciate It and It Chapter 2 on the level of abstract art, on different ways to visualize an insane clown who might be capable of anything ... setting aside my concern that he's actual capable of nothing.

Some spoilers ahead for the set pieces in It 2.

When I think back to the very long experience of the second It movie, I think of isolated inspired ways to visualize Bill Sarsgaard's expertly conceived embodiment of evil. They're more like snapshots of possible terror than a memory of that terror converted into something tangible. I think of his glowing eyes on the banks of that river as he takes a bite out of the gay bashing victim. I think about the wall-eyed glee of the image above, which presages a further unfocusing of the eyes accompanied by a demented drool. I think of the way his expression goes blank as he starts to bash his head against the wall of glass that separates him from a potential victim. I think of that scene where he's talking to [I don't remember who] and says "Don't you want to play with the clown?" As he turns to look after the fleeing child or adult, his face starts to stretch and skew, as M.C. Escher might have painted him.

These things work for me, though I understand they don't work for everybody. The Filmspotting guys specifically mentioned how they were not taken with two of the more obviously digital scares in It 2, the scene where the fortune cookies turn into creepy crawlies and the scene where the nine-foot-tall naked old woman harasses Bev. I was, in fact, taken with these. I give credit to the vision of a visual stylist who can give me something just a little different from the things I've seen before, and do it with a certain panache, and I consider both of these to be examples of that. Some people don't, and that's fine.

But if you don't, I can see how It Chapter 2 really doesn't leave you much to savor at all.

In a way, watching Pennywise not kill people is a problem lessened if you've read the book. It's been 30 years since I've done that so I'd have to ask a more recent reader to be sure, but I believe Stephen King actually created the template Muschietti followed for the clown's sprees of not killing. King's book is also a book of set pieces, and since it's told largely from the perspective of our main characters, those episodes almost invariably have to be non-fatal in nature.

Knowing who's going to die and who isn't going to die is a contributing factor to a certain lack of fear as well. I remembered that one of the Losers Club was going to die, and approximately when it was going to happen in the story, so any close call before then was going to result in survival, unless Muschietti decided to deviate from the book (which I figured he wouldn't). This is not a problem unique to It, of course. Anyone who's read any book knows which characters are going to die when, and does not fear their deaths prior to that moment while watching the film adaptation. And as anyone who's read the book or seen It 2 knows (and again, spoilers), one of the Losers Club dies by his own hand in a non-Pennywise-related incident, further limiting the number of potential Pennywise-caused deaths.

This character kills himself due to the fear of Pennywise, which is a pretty powerful idea in the book. It just makes it a little harder for us, the viewers, when that fear is based on a number of interactions in which a clown went "Boogedy-boo!" and then left the room without further incident.

I refuse to call Kursk "The Command"

Entering some movies into some lists today, I discovered that Kursk is not the title of Thomas Vinterberg’s latest film in all markets.

I shouldn’t be surprised, really. Although it’s short enough and easy enough to remember, the title Kursk has a blunt Russian-ness (for want of a better word) that might not really sell it everywhere. Even if that is the name of the submarine that sunk to the bottom of the Barents Sea in 2000, though some of the details of the movie deviate from those events.

But The Command? Is that really the best we can do, American distributor?

It isn’t just the title change that’s dispiriting. It’s the marked difference in the posters.

You’ve seen the one for Kursk above. It’s a poster I like enough to have put it above the fold, to use the old newspaper phrase, on this post, so you see it right away when you come to my blog. I may keep rambling on for a few more sentences so as to force the poster for The Command “below the fold” so you don’t have to see it right away. Then again, I can’t really be sure what device you are going to read this on, so I might as well spare you the dilly-dallying and just show it to you:

Doesn’t that poster suck? The reds hurt my poor eyes.

Fair enough if you want to advertise Colin Firth as the big star of the movie. I get it. Matthias Schoenaerts is not exactly a household name, speaking of words of foreign derivation that may not easily roll off the tongue.

But Firth isn’t really a huge part of this movie, or at least not the interesting parts anyway.

It’s hardly the first poster change to disappoint me in this way, and it probably doesn’t warrant a new post when I covered the subject and the psychology behind it pretty thoroughly in this post. (Then again, that was more than ten years ago.) In fact, it occurs to me that the original posters for The Matador and Kursk even share a sense of enviable minimalism that gets blown up, quite literally, with the flames and overexposed reds of their inferior versions meant to sell the movies to the lowest common denominator.

The reason I am writing about it, though, is that I’m faced with a bit of a dilemma.

I’ve lived in Australia for more than six years, but as a film critic I still think of myself as coming from an American perspective that I’m not eager to shed. That means usually using the American titles for the films I see when I write about them here or include them on year-end lists. In keeping with this, I should adopt The Command, even grudgingly.

But the fact of the matter is, I first learned of this movie from my wife, who saw it at MIFF and called it Kursk. I then watched it on our plane ride home from the U.S. earlier this month, on Qantas, where it was also called Kursk. I had too many instances of knowing this movie as Kursk to change horses mid-stream, especially when the other horse is so bland, generic, and shitty.

If Kursk is too blunt and The Command too forgettable, maybe UK distributors got it right. There the movie is called Kursk: The Last Mission, which could be the best of both worlds. It provides a context for an otherwise unfamiliar Russian word, while also getting in some marketing friendly words that help establish the life-or-death stakes of the movie.

But I can’t adopt a title that wasn’t used in either my current country or my home country, but only in a country in which I haven’t set foot in 33 years.

Kursk it is.

Fuck you, The Command.

The mystery of the unknown birthdate

We live at a time when it's possible to know everything about a famous person. A quick trip to Wikipedia gives you a host of factual details about that person, the amount of which is largely dependent on how famous they are, and gossip sites take care of the rest. In fact, you can easily find ten people someone is alleged to be dating, even if they are not actually dating any of them.

So it always surprises me when a person has attained a certain level of success, and a piece of information as foundational as a birthdate is not officially available.

You can debate whether Molly Gordon has attained that level of success yet. I've only seen Gordon in two things, but she made enough of an impression on me that I was able to remember what the first thing was when I saw the second thing. The first thing was the Melissa McCarthy vehicle Life of the Party from last year, and the second thing was Good Boys, which I saw on Friday night. (Actually, she was also in Booksmart, though I apparently didn't make the connection to Life of the Party when I saw that, or even remember that she was in it.)

Gordon has also been in a couple other things that plenty of people have seen but I haven't. She's a regular on the TV adaptation of the David Michod movie Animal Kingdom, plus she's appeared in Ramy (two episodes) and Orange is the New Black (one episode). Those are just the titles that seem worth mentioning. 

Yet despite her firmly entrenching herself on the landscape of young working actresses, we don't actually know how old Molly Gordon is.

She's either 23 or 24, according to Wikipedia, because she was born in either 1995 or 1996. Of course, that could also make her 22, since not everyone who was born in 1996 has turned 23 yet. Just to make sure it was not an omission on a website with crowd-sourced information, IMDB confirms the lack of specificity on a birthdate.

What a strange thing that this definitely ascendant performer, who could soon start to find herself the subject of magazine profiles or the modern equivalent thereof, could be anywhere from 22 to 24 years old.

It also makes me wonder how we even know that much about her. Did she coquettishly once tell someone she was born in 1995 or 1996 and leave it at that? Or was it just an estimate somebody ventured based on circumstantial evidence and second-hand information?

It's a bit of an old-fashioned scenario that hearkens back to a time when it was impolite to ask a woman her age. I remember somewhat regularly seeing women on IMDB whose exact birthdates were not known. For an actress in particular, not revealing your exact age might be a strategic move to continue getting cast in roles they might have otherwise considered you to have aged out of. Whether you can play 40 or not should be a function of how you look, if it must be a function of something, but knowing that you're actually 51 is going to be a dealbreaker for some casting agents.

This is also an old-fashioned topic for this blog, I think, as I remember addressing this issue once before, though I can't remember how long ago, or regarding whom. It definitely wasn't someone as young as Molly Gordon. Actresses who came up pre-internet may have successfully hidden their exact ages and the internet may have never caught up with them. But Gordon was born at least a year and as many as two after I got my first email address. The internet should have been on her from the start.

I'm going to see if I can remember to check on this periodically. At some point, Molly Gordon or a person who represents her will come forward with this information, and Wikipedia will update accordingly. And it will interest me to try to tie it back to some particular moment when her seemingly inevitable stardom (she's both talented and pretty) breaks through a particular ceiling of her previously enjoyed obscurity. You can't really be a big star and not have your birthday be a matter of public record, and it will happen for her at some point. 

In the meantime, casting agents will continue to have no definitive evidence that she can't be cast to play a senior in high school. 

A first!

I wrote back in April about the exquisite tease of working in the same building as a movie theater, but never being able to align my schedule properly so I could actually see a movie in conjunction with any part of my workday.

Well, the stars have finally aligned and that monkey is off my back, to shove together two unrelated metaphors.

Yesterday was the last day of the school term, which means all the school staff I usually work with for my job vacate school grounds by about 1:30, and no later than 3. It also happened to be a night I was not going home after work, as I had an awards ceremony for my baseball team starting at 7.

That made a 4:30 showing of Good Boys my best yet chance to accomplish this elusive feat.

So I cut out of there 30 minutes early -- when all my co-workers had long since stopped working and were standing at each others' desks or throwing things around the room -- and made it happen.

To give you an idea of just how close this cinema really is, I left my desk at 4:30 and still had time to see at least ten minutes of trailers before the movie started, including a Zombieland 2 trailer I would have preferred not to see so as not to ruin its jokes.

And yup, I watched the movie, no other interesting details really to share. I had enough time before the baseball ceremony to get a bite to eat and everything. But I can share the sense of joy I experienced at finally doing this thing I had wanted for so long to do.

I can also share the joy of Good Boys. I think my expectations might have been a bit low. I knew the kids in this movie were young, but I expected them to be snarky and act like adults in kids' bodies, especially since it's from Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg.

One of the sublime pleasures of Good Boys, though, is how much they act like 12-year-olds. It's not only the organic (rather than forced) misuse of words, or failure to understand concepts about sex and drugs that they'd easily get in a couple more years. It's how they proudly embrace their own childishness. Particularly in the case of the character played by Keith L. Williams, who I want to see in everything, they repeatedly profess pride at their own desire to squelch their impending teenagerdom, as when they try to make a citizen's arrest regarding a drug transaction, or unfailingly confess their own misdeeds to adult authority figures, or reject the basic premise of a kissing party. Not only were these the truest parts, they also made me laugh the most. I was charmed as hell by this movie and I even got a bit emotional at the end. No actual tears, mind you, but they weren't far off.

Good job, Good Boys. You helped me see my work adjacent movie, and you were also more than worth the time.

Leaving Lieberher

I’ve now seen two movies featuring Jaeden Lieberher in the past six weeks. You know him, of course, as he’s only 16 but has already appeared in 11 feature films, most of which had wide releases. He’s of course best known as the young Bill Denbrough in the It movies, the second of which I saw last night. James McAvoy plays the character now, but there are also new scenes of him as a kid, when he was played by Lieberher. Lieberher was also in The Lodge, the Riley Keough horror I saw at MIFF, which hasn’t had its wide release yet -- and won't until February, I'm now learning. 

Except in neither of these films did I actually see Jaeden Lieberher. I saw Jaeden Martell.

The actor once known as Lieberher has changed his name to Martell. You might think this is just a cool-sounding stage name that reminds a person vaguely of Game of Thrones, but it’s actually his mother’s last name. He’d gone by his father’s last name previously, and though there could be something to the name change that relates to his dad and the kind of guy he is, I’m going with the simpler explanation that it’s shorter, snappier, easier to remember and easier to spell. You know, all the reasons people normally choose a stage name, just with a basis in his actual reality.

Even if he had just made it up, it would be legitimate to change the name for any number of reasons. Arnold Schwarzenegger is the exception, rather than the rule. (You may remember he was temporarily known as “Arnold Strong,” which was maybe too on the nose.)

The thing that struck me as noteworthy about this one is that it came after he had already firmly established himself, which seems a bit unusual.

I don’t have statistics on this, but I venture most people arrive at a stage name before they are cast in multi-million dollar Hollywood films. In fact, you often change the name specifically to help you get cast in such a movie. Clearly, “Lieberher” wasn’t holding Jaeden back.

If you want proof, well, how is Aloha, Midnight Special, The Book of Henry and It for proof? I mean, I’m a guy who can identify and name actors that others can’t, so I may not be the best example. But I usually only bother when I’ve seen them a couple times and I consider them significant enough to note the name. In the case of Jaeden Lieberher, I think I remembered his name specifically because the last name was a bit of a mouthful … kind of like “Schwarzenegger.”

Which is why I immediately noticed the change when I was watching The Lodge. I identified pretty early on that this was, indeed, the star of It and Midnight Special, but I thought there was at least a 20% chance I was confusing him with someone else, so I waited for the credits to confirm my guess. But there was no Jaeden Lieberher in the credits, only Jaeden Martell.

And though “Martell” is undoubtedly a cool name, it feels a ton less distinctive than Lieberher.

Even IMDB is a bit confused by the change. As is the standard practice when an actor changes how he or she is credited – you know, when a Richard E. Jenkins becomes Richard Jenkins, or when a Larry Fishburne becomes Laurence Fishburne – IMDB lists his older role with the following designation: “(as Jaeden Lieberher).” But they’re actually confused about exactly when the change occurred. For The Lodge they have “(as Jaeden Lieberher)”, even though this is where I actually noticed the name change.

The thing that makes it even a bit stranger is that the change occurred in the midst of an ongoing movie franchise. Sometimes you have to switch out an actor between movies, like when a Terrence Howard decides he no longer wants anything to do with the MCU. They kept the actor between It and It: Chapter Two, but switched out the name. Which could also confuse some people, though probably only nerds like me who care about such semantics. 

This post is as long as it is just to hear myself talk, or maybe to hear myself type, or maybe because it’s the end of the day on the last day my boss is in the office for ten days, after she’s already left. This issue does not actually warrant this many words.

Especially if Jaeden’s dad is a dickhead and he just didn’t want anything more to do with him.

Either way, his It director probably sympathizes. Back when he made Mama, Argentine director Andy Muschietti was called Andres. At least he kept the ethnicity of one of his two names, though you could argue that "Muschietti" was the harder name to spell/remember than "Andres."

Anyway, I guess Martell is working for Jaeden, as he’s also going to be in Knives Out, Rian Johnson’s new movie. Then again, who knows if Johnson cast him before or after he left Lieberher.

When I first posted this, I noticed that I used the label "jaeden lieberher," not "jaeden martell." I've since changed it, as I suspect I'll be writing about this talented actor again in the future, when everyone but me will have forgotten his original name. 

Lies we tell the terminally ill

If that subject sounds like some kind of poor taste joke, it’s not. It’s actually one of the main themes of the last two movies I’ve seen, one for the first time, one a film I loved from three years ago that I watched again.

It won’t surprise you to know that one of these movies is Lulu Wang’s The Farewell, where “lies we tell the terminally ill” is basically the film’s premise. Awkwafina plays a Chinese-American woman named Billi, who returns to China to say goodbye to her grandmother, Nai Nai, after the latter has been recently diagnosed with terminal cancer. Only, Nai Nai doesn’t know that. You probably couldn’t hide a medical diagnosis from the person being diagnosed in America, but in China, you can – as this is based on a true story. The family organizes a hasty wedding for Billi’s cousin, who has only been dating his girlfriend for three months, to support the lie. This will give everyone a chance to say goodbye to her, even as she has no idea why everyone looks so sad and cries extra hard when they leave.

It doesn’t really work. I mean, Nai Nai never learns that she’s terminal, so it works in that sense. But celebrating her life doesn’t really work when they are understandably finding it so difficult to put on a happy face, and she doesn’t realize she’s supposed to savor every moment, so she just wonders why everyone looks so tired. Lovely effort, though, in the sense that it’s meant to be an act of humanistic kindness to her and prevent her from dying prematurely of her cancer diagnosis. (The Chinese believe that it’s not the cancer itself that kills a person, or at least not as quickly as the awareness of the diagnosis and the fear of death.) The ideal way to do it, I suppose, would be if only a chosen few members of the family knew about it, and the rest were told to make every effort to come to this wedding for “a reason we can’t tell you about, but it’s very important.” I suppose that wouldn’t really work either.

The other film is Chris Kelly’s Other People, which came out in 2016, and was my #7 movie of that year. This deals with the final year in the life of terminal cancer patient Joanne (Molly Shannon), as seen through the eyes of her son, David (Jesse Plemons), who returns to Sacramento from his life in New York in order to spend her remaining time with her. The cancer is not the thing that’s a mystery to Joanne, as it wouldn’t be for nearly anyone who has regular doctor’s appointments in a western country. The lies David tells her has to do with how he’s doing, not how she’s doing, but for a similar reason. He doesn’t want to upset Joanne any more than she needs to be upset when she’s already facing her mortality, and wants her to die not worrying about him. So he doesn’t tell her he and his long-time boyfriend have broken up, or that his career is facing a dead end after his comedy pilot didn’t get picked up. The setup is based on Kelly’s own mother’s death in 2009.

What I find so moving about the humanism of Other People is the lengths David goes to in order to give this last gift to his mother. Or I should say, the lengths his ex-boyfriend goes to. Joanne and the rest of the family come to New York to see David perform in his improv troupe, and afterwards, they stroll back to the apartment that David shares … well, used to share with Paul, his ex (Zach Woods). To support the lie, Paul is there, smiling and welcoming them in, pretending to know where everything is even though he doesn’t live there anymore. I guess I find it moving that Paul would do this for a guy with whom he had a complicated relationship that has now ended. It’s not for David, but for Joanne. David’s realization near the end that Joanne may not need to have this hidden from her is one of the parts where I really tear up.

I loved both films, though I feel like I need to see The Farewell again, as my own last lingering bits of jet lag, combined with the fact that much of the dialogue is in Chinese, made it difficult for me to stay fully awake for the whole film. I feel like some essential bit of the payoff of The Farewell slipped through my fingers. I was also tired when I started watching Other People on Tuesday night, but maybe that’s the difference between a movie you’ve never seen and a movie you know you love. My eyes only started to close in Other People during that final moving scene, oddly enough, though maybe that’s because Joanne could barely keep her eyes open either. The amazing thing about Kelly’s film is it allows us to experience Joanne’s death from both perspectives, hers and her son’s – the sign of an astute filmmaker, an astute observer of other people, indeed.

Audient Audit: Manon of the Spring

This is the latest in my 2019 monthly series trying to figure out if I’m lying when I say I’ve seen certain films.

You may recall that in August I did a bonus installment of Audient Audit that was inspired by watching Jean de Florette in a different viewing challenge. Having been assigned that movie made me realize I might have a movie that needed to be audited in a different way, in that it didn’t appear on my lists but should have. That was ultimately my conclusion about Claude Berri’s 1986 film.

Berri had another 1986 film called Manon of the Spring, the sequel to Jean de Florette. It came conveniently included in the Florette DVD I borrowed from the library. And like Florette, Manon was also a movie I thought I might have watched in French class a year or two after it came out. In fact, I remember being able to translate the title into French: Manon du Source. Imagine my surprise when it is now translated as Manon des Sources, which refers to multiple springs, somewhat confusingly. Maybe it was always translated that way, but to me, it’s Bicycle Thieves all over again. (Of course, the whole thinking seems to be faulty here, as "source" takes a feminine article, "la," which means it would have been Manon de la Source. "Du" is used when it's a masculine article, as "de le" is not a valid construction in French.)

But I digress. Even though this is another installment, a regular installment, of a series devoted to legitimizing movies that were illegitimately on my various lists, I decided to watch Manon in September before it’s due back at the library, and just take care of this month’s entry in Audient Audit. So yeah, that may mean that one movie I had tapped for this series will remain in limbo about whether it belongs on my lists, but watching movies can be a “catch as catch can” proposition, especially when you are returning from a three-week vacation and still vaguely dealing with jet lag.

The reason Manon should definitely have already been on my list – especially when compared to movies like last month’s Breathless, which it was immediately clear I had seen almost none of – was that I remember, back in the late 1980s, finding Manon dull in comparison to Jean de Florette. This certainly seems like proof that I had seen both movies, once I recalled it.

However, having watched Berri’s sequel, I’m now thinking that it was indeed assigned in a French class to get the teacher through a couple afternoons when she had otherwise been too lazy to plan something, but that perhaps I found it so boring that I tuned out. I felt pretty sure that I had seen the first half of the movie, but it was disappointing me enough that maybe I started doodling in my notebook instead of watching. And if you aren’t watching, listening is not enough to say you’ve followed the movie. Sure, we were taking French, but to say that we actually understood a lot of it without subtitles would have been a stretch.

What had disappointed me about Manon of the Spring, assuming this memory I’ve concocted is actually legitimate, was how passive the title character seemed to me. At the end of Jean de Florette, she witnesses Urgolin (Daniel Auteuil) and Papet (Yves Montand) do a little jig as they restore the water source to the land her father once owned. The thing they accomplished fairly easily, as a result of withholding key information from him, was the thing that killed him, as he died while trying to use explosives to identify the water source. (Oops, sorry, spoilers for Jean de Florette.) That she wouldn’t have sworn lifelong vengeance and risen up to kill them made her seem, to me, weak or disinterested. (Or maybe I’m just thinking this now because I was fresh off viewing the Australian historical vengeance movie The Nightingale the night before watching Manon.)

But Manon did indeed have vengeance in mind, heeding the wisdom that it’s a dish best served cold. That I didn’t realize that at the time is further proof that either I did not watch the whole movie, or that I didn’t comprehend what I was watching, which maybe is the same thing.

Manon does find the mysterious source for the water that bubbles up on her father’s land when it’s not blocked. It happens when she chases a stray goat (she’s a goatherd) into a cave. When she find that water, she’s finally ready to give the town a little dose of its own medicine, blocking the source the way Urgolin and Papet once blocked it for her father.

The funny thing is that I didn’t totally realize this was what was happening on this viewing either. I saw her find the source, but we don’t actually see her blocking it. We only see the water dry up for Urgolin and others and them starting to panic. Only by reading the Wikipedia summary afterward did I realize this is what happened.

I’m not slow, but as I mentioned earlier, I am jet-lagged. This means the nearly two-hour movie was a struggle indeed to get through. I could have waited a few days more, but I’d already renewed this and other movies I brought on my trip once, and I was planning to return them all to the library Thursday after work. It was watching Manon of the Spring on Wednesday night, or not at all.

I was again bothered this time by the comparative passivity, the mute passivity, of Manon. I had a bit of trouble believing her character, due in part to the blank performance of Emmanuel Beart, but also to the decision to have her rarely speak, and to float and dance around like some kind of fairy. She just didn’t strike me as a real person, which made her (initial) failure to seek vengeance on those who wronged her father seem more like a character flaw than perhaps just an instance of waiting for the right moment, or maybe just not being a vindictive person in the first place.

While Florette and Manon are both fairly minimalist in terms of story, it bothered me in Manon where it did not in Florette. I felt like a huge amount of time was spent covering a fairly small amount of narrative, making it seem like points were belabored this time that were not belabored in the first film. I also found that Berri’s work with actors was less distinctive, and I don’t think we can only blame the absence of Gerard Depardieu. Auteuil, a very good actor, did not impress me this time out, possibly because he is given a truly predatory attitude toward Manon that kind of skeeved me out. (Who runs after a woman, increasing the magnitude of his proposals the faster she flees? He’s proposing desperate marriage as she disappears over the top of a hill, scared out of her wits.) Montand also interested me less this time around.

Manon of the Spring is still a good movie, It’s just at least a full star lower than its predecessor, and something I definitely won’t watch again now that I’ve officially seen it once.

Only three months left to watch the 15 (!) movies I’ve still got on my list of those I initially identified as candidates for this series. Then again, two-thirds of those are generally unavailable, so it’ll work out just about right.

What every X-Men movie is about

One of the more shocking franchise developments of 2019 is how hard X-Men crashed and burned. The latest installment, Dark Phoenix, which I saw as my final movie on the flight home on Sunday, made a pitiful $65 million at the box office in the U.S., and barely a quarter of a billion dollars worldwide. That’s nothing these days. It makes it only the 28^th biggest domestic money earner of 2019, but that alone probably does not provide useful perspective. More useful is that means it currently lands between Good Boys and Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark in terms of earnings, though both of those are still in theaters and will likely surpass Dark Phoenix. (Good Boys, of course, already has.) By the end of the year it will be no higher than 50th, probably. 

It seems an unthinkable outcome for a series that stars A-listers Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence and James McAvoy, and in this installment boasts A-lister Jessica Chastain, as well as major riser Sophie Turner of Game of Thrones fame. Of course, it’s not even the stars who are specifically supposed to sell a franchise like this, but the brand itself, which has produced nine previous movies – three in the first saga, three so far in this saga, and three Wolverine spinoffs. (Not all of these movies came under the same studio banner, but that hardly matters.)

While watching X-Men: Dark Phoenix, though, I realized why we’ve finally dropped the series: Each movie is about the exact same thing.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think there’s been a single X-Men movie that didn’t involve the uneasy tension between mutants and the world governments that seek to contain them. In each movie, the potential value of a team of superheroes working for good is offset against the potential disaster of their collective destructive force. Each X-Men movie has involved someone proposing to or actually quarantining these X-Men for further research/imprisonment. Each X-Men movie has involved the good X-Men trying to convince the bad X-Men to fight for the greater good rather than their own self-interest and/or survival. And each X-Men movie has dealt with one particularly powerful mutant struggling to control that power while reconciling their anger with their better instincts.

And I think I’ve actually made it sound more interesting than it actually is. Lines of dialogue have become increasingly disposable or interchangeable the more of these movies there have been, as the core conflicts have gotten more and more boring. To give you an idea of the difference between the franchise era we live in now and the one we did 15 years ago, the first X-Men franchise had the good sense, as it were, to end after three movies with X-Men: The Last Stand in 2006, a movie most people did not like. Of course, that ending was humorously short-lived, as the series was rebooted only four years later with X-Men: First Class.

We have now blown past the disliked third movie in this incarnation of the series, 2016’s X-Men: Apocalypse, to deliver a fourth, even less-liked X-Men, Dark Phoenix. The difference is that nowadays you can’t quit when you start to get behind. Maybe they thought focusing on Jean Grey, who had not previously been a part of this saga, would give the series new life, especially as it helped with the modern mandate of replacing the traditionally male protagonists with a clear female protagonist. (Which is one of the reasons Jennifer Lawrence’s Mystique has been so elevated in prominence even though she was a total side character in the original series.) But that thinking ended up being flawed, or at the very least, not enough.

What they should have realized was that if they were going to make a fourth X-Men movie in the current timeline, it had to actually be different in some way. Logan might have been a good example to them. That really deviated from what we knew previously of X-Men with its R rating and with its deaths of two major characters. Perhaps some of Logan did rub off, as Dark Phoenix kills off a major character, though I won’t say who. The fact that this development carries almost no impact shows just how far this series has fallen in the decade since it began with such promise.

X-Men: Dark Phoenix is not an awful movie, but its mediocrity, its reliance on such played out ideas and such familiar tropes, kind of makes it one. Then there are the problems with its execution, like its literal darkness – for some reason they decided to shoot almost all the major set pieces at night. Never a good idea.

I can see how they thought that Dark Phoenix was probably good enough, given its enviable cast and the fact that we’ve been receptive to these ideas in the past. But we will only receive for so long. And now the future for the X-Men franchise seems dark indeed.

Which I’m not mourning. I need a break from X-Men. But if they’d handled it a bit more deftly, maybe I wouldn’t. The best franchises are the ones that you eagerly greet with every new installment, because they are different enough from each other to warrant further exploration. But it feels like there’s really nothing left to explore here, and maybe there never will be.