A Tour I wish I'd never taken

When I rented Trolls World Tour for the princely sum of $19.99 three weekends ago, I merely thought I was providing something my six-year-old wanted during times of pandemic deprivation. I didn't realize I was also casting a vote on the future of film distribution.

But that appears to be what happened, as I contributed to the $95 million Universal has made by releasing the movie on VOD instead of theaters, which is obviously not an option right now. Instead of waiting until it is an option, like most studios are doing with most of their films, Universal decided to roll the dice on a rental release with a premium price associated with it.

And in doing so, seriously angered one of America's biggest theater chains.

AMC initially did not raise a fuss over the decision, which is similar to decisions being made by Disney in its release of Artemis Fowl and Warner Brothers in its release of Scoob!, given their recognition of the unprecedented situation and the creative solutions it is engendering. But it was the crowing over the success of Trolls World Tour, and Universal's announcement that it would consider both theatrical and VOD release platforms in the future regardless of the presence or absence of a pandemic, that spurred AMC into action.

Now, AMC has written a letter to Universal, advising them that AMC will no longer host any Universal film releases in any of its theaters.

AMC specifically cited Universal's lack of any "good faith negotiations" in terms of how the company might go forward to explore its greatest avenues to profitability. Citing the companies' years of partnership, AMC CEO Adam Aron says they were left out in the cold on Universal's decision to pursue the strategy it announced this week. The suggestion is that Universal should have given AMC the chance to counterpropose, but instead, they were treated like a red-headed stepchild, irrelevant to the company's fortunes.

Okay, so now they will show just how relevant they are to the success of Universal.

Or maybe they won't, which is the biggest gamble in this whole thing.

On the one hand, I am heartened that AMC feels confident enough in its standing that it can issue threats to one of the world's largest film companies. Maybe that means they are less likely to file for bankruptcy than has recently been rumored.

Or, maybe it means they are closer to bankruptcy, more desperate, and more rash. And maybe that's a bad thing for movie theaters on the whole.

See, this may just be the first salvo in a war that could eventually be won by studios. If audiences -- myself included, unfortunately -- tell the studios with their hard-earned dollars that they are just as happy to watch Trolls World Tour on the increasingly larger screens in their living rooms, it will embolden the studios to continue leaving theaters out of the loop. Those theaters are already running on fumes, and this could be the end of them.

And I could have played a small but meaningful role -- just as small but just as meaningful as the role played by any other single audient.

I hope I can sleep tonight.

The optimist in me never could have imagined that we might be near the beginning of the end. Sure, that optimist had seen the increasingly smaller numbers of people going to the movies. That optimist had noticed that being the only person in the audience was once an anomaly worth writing about, but had now become more commonplace. That optimist had heard that this year's box office was worse than the one before, which was worse than the one before that, which was worse than the one before that.

But that optimist also felt that going to the movies was such a bedrock part of our culture, of our very psyches, that it would never truly go away altogether. And that is, on some level, probably true.

But it's now clear that we are getting to the point where a moviehouse could become more of a novelty, the way the grand old single-screen theaters are a novelty to us now. A multiplex could be that kind of novelty, rather than one of the tentpole businesses in your local shopping mall.

And Trolls World Tour could have started it all.

Oh, if only my six-year-old son hadn't seen it being advertised on the screen while iTunes was up on my laptop, maybe none of this would have ever happened.

Steadily progressing through my library rentals

The Melbourne Public Library system is the most generous I have ever patronized. Whereas Los Angeles allowed you a maximum of three movies for a maximum of two days -- at least when I lived there seven years ago -- Melbourne is a comparative embarrassment of riches. You can total up to 50 items that can be taken out for three weeks at a time -- and then renewed, and then renewed one more time. Unless there's a reservation for one of them, in which case you have to return it at the end of your current rental period. A near perfect system.

And in the past, I've come close to those 50 items. With a combination of books, CDs and DVDs for myself and my kids, I've probably flown well past 30 items, maybe even up to 40. I've never been cut off, but that kind of makes me happy, because that sort of profligate behavior would seem to be taking advantage of the library's good will.

Unfortunately, when the libraries shut down back in March, I had nowhere near 50 books, movies and CDs out. In fact, I had ten. Four of which were books for my older son.

They're the same ten books and movies I still have out. Every time I check, their due date has been pushed forward, in recognition of the uncertainty of when the library will open again. The last time I checked before writing this post, they were not due back until May 17th. Comically, checking again just now, I see that that due date has been moved forward by exactly one day. However, we would all agree that at the moment, the due date doesn't mean much.

Now under ordinary circumstances, I pick up whatever movie catches my fancy, as I am unconcerned whether I watch it or not. That's both new-to-me movies and those I want to revisit. I like having the choices around. Under ordinary circumstances, I return more than half of them unwatched, not because I run out of time per se, but because I face the reality that the situation to watch them just never arose. As there was no cost to borrowing them, there's no consequence to not watching them.

All Quiet on the Western Front, which I believe is the first best picture winner I ever saw when I watched it during history class back in high school, would ordinarily have been one of those that got returned unwatched. But during the pandemic, it's been easy enough to decide I will, indeed, watch 100% of those I borrowed.

I just wish that number were higher than five.

The three I've watched previously are:

Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (for the second time)
Fahrenheit 451 (the new one directed by Ramin Bahrani, which was not good)
Careful, He Might Hear You (an Australian movie from the 1980s, which was also not good)

Which leaves only my second viewing of Life is Beautiful -- intended as a recontextualization of the movie in its recent comparisons to Jojo Rabbit. I have until May 18th, or in reality, probably a lot later.

My tenth item, if you are doing the math, is the graphic novel Watchmen, which I finished about a month ago.

Now, I think I did have more movies out prior to this, but returned some of them that I'd watched, and possibly some I had determined I would not watch. It's starting to feel like ancient history now so I can't really remember. But if I'd known the libraries were about to close their doors -- something I probably could have figured if everything hadn't been so strange at that time -- I would have gone in and started indiscriminately sweeping armloads of DVDs off the shelves.

So as not to squander all of your attention span, let's switch now to discussing All Quiet on the Western Front in particular.

Boredom. That was my memory of watching this film. I remember wondering when this movie would ever end, a reaction that was probably exacerbated by the fact that it likely took nearly a week's worth of high school history classes to watch it all. (It's only 128 minutes, but I doubt we would have watched more than 35 minutes per day.)

My impression of it was that it was some sort of square John Wayne war movie -- well before John Wayne of course, but lacking in grit and realism. I say this without ever actually having seen a John Wayne war movie. But the point is, I remember it being a long slog in which men exchanged thoughts while holed up in a bunker or in the trenches. The 15- or 16-year-old me would have been thinking "Give me some action! I want some action!"

Well, AQOTWF is not at all like I remembered. If it's boring -- and my attention did wander from time to time -- it's not because nothing happens. In fact, quite the contrary. This is a very mobile movie, frequently changing locales and scenarios, such that it becomes a succession of wartime set pieces, each of which is kind of doing something different. Those different things are all a variation on the same thing, which is the theme that there's nothing glamorous about war and that it is not, as the poet Wilfred Owen once wrote (and as quoted here in this movie), dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. ("It is sweet and honorable to die for one's country.")

In fact, the movie was so different from my memory of it that it makes me wonder if I actually sat through the whole thing, or whether I was absent for part of the week and just watched one disconnected 35-minute segment of it. Or maybe the movie was on but I was doodling and making paper airplanes in the back of the room.

One thing I had clearly not remembered was that the characters we follow in this movie are German. I would have bet my bottom dollar that they were American, or maybe British, and I can see why the younger me would have remembered that, given that all the German characters speak with the actors' native American accents. (Not Native American accents -- important distinction.) Films intended for American audiences preferred accessibility to realism at that time. The poster above plays no small role in deemphasizing their problematic German identities, as the helmet you see this soldier wearing is not the very easily identifiable World War I helmets worn by German soldiers, called Stahlhelm ("steel helmet"). The characters in the movie wear that helmet, but the character on this poster does not.

In fact, I wonder if All Quiet would have been one of the movies that prompted a move toward greater realism in depictions of characters from other countries. Although the movie was obviously highly acclaimed, I can't help but feel like it makes the characters seem far less German, and far more hokey, that they speak in American accents. You could argue that the point is to make audiences better identify with the characters -- you know, all soldiers are human beings and the like -- but my guess is that the concession to realism was largely commercially inspired.

I was surprised at how intense this movie actually gets. It makes use of a highly sophisticated grasp of editing, especially at that time, to give us chaotic war scenes and scenes of panic among the soldiers. One particular sequence involving rows of attacking soldiers getting mowed down by a machine gun stuck out to me for being simultaneously expressionistic and realistic, a profound combo. You also get a lot of people with amputated limbs, one soldier who is blinded by shrapnel or some other warfare byproduct, and others who go stir crazy inside the bunker. As a matter of fact, it's kind of the opposite of the John Wayne stoicism I attributed to this movie. It gets under your skin.

I still found it distended at times, and with a few exceptions, it wasn't all that easy to always know who was who, even though director Lewis Milestone et al make an effort to differentiate them in the classroom scene that starts the movie, when they are eating up the propaganda fed to them by a military recruiter/teacher. As a few of the characters die off, though, the cast gets winnowed down and the narrative moves toward an affecting finish.

So now I can really say, with absolute certainty, that I have seen all the best picture winners.

Stay tuned for a post about Life is Beautiful, probably next week.

The impossibility of playing it cool

Two college friends of mine, who did not know each other very well, helped me out with a task back at school, and ended up riding back to campus together in the same car. (I don't remember where I was, but I was not with them.)

On that ride, the driver played the passenger a band he really liked, but whom the passenger had not heard. As the passenger tells it, while the first song was playing, the driver continually turned his head to the right to try to catch that ineffable moment when the passenger fell in love with the song/band. He checked in on the passenger an unnatural number of times, or at least enough that the passenger thought it was funny enough to mention to me.

Whether or not he actually gauged the other's reaction in words, a private joke between the passenger and me grew out of it, which is basically that the driver said "Do you like it? Do you like it? Do you like it?" When performing the joke, you say it quickly, like "Ja like it ja like it ja like it?"

It has lingered as a joke not because the driver's behavior was so unusual. In fact, it's probably because it identified a very real phenomenon:

It's so hard to be cool when trying to share something you love.

Since I am rarely introducing bands to people -- my current School of Rock lessons to my kids notwithstanding (see full discussion here) -- the corollary in my own life is movies. As a cinephile, it's understood that you are always recommending movies to people. It's what we do.

The more enlightened of us make the recommendation and leave it at that.

The more masochistic? We watch the film with them.

Using the "ja like it" story as a cautionary tale, I have learned over the years to try not to place so much pressure on a joint viewing, which is usually undertaken with my wife, as she is my most regular movie-watching companion. In fact, I clearly recall a few scenarios where I had her watch a recommendation without me present in the room, even though I was present in the house. My #3 movie of last decade, John Cameron Mitchell's Rabbit Hole, was one such example. And a good one, as my wife ended up loving the movie just as much as I did -- perhaps in part due to the fact that I was not there hovering over her and gauging her reaction.

More often than not, though, the occasion for me showing a movie to my wife is that I am dying to see it a second (or third, or fourth) time, and I don't want to waste the opportunity by leaving her out of the viewing. Such was the case with our Saturday night viewing of Portrait of a Lady on Fire.

If it is not clear that I love this film, well, it should be. Even though I saw it for the first time only two weeks before finalizing that best of the decade list referenced above, Portrait made it on to the list. Because of the ridiculously short turnaround, I installed it at #25, the last ranked spot before the honorable mentions, though it was clear to me that it should have been higher. I guess I thought #25 was a good compromise between its actual quality and the deleterious effects of recency bias. It may have been similar thinking that caused me to place it at #2 for 2019, behind only Parasite. Given another couple weeks to sit with it, I might have vaulted it over Parasite as well.

If you're looking for further evidence of my love -- as if telling you were not enough -- just look at my new banner at the top of this page, which I put up a couple weeks ago. If you haven't seen the movie, you might not recognize it, but this is indeed a shot from Portrait, with Adele Haenel as Heloise being an "audient." That scene is one of the best of last year -- of the last five years maybe.

Okay so you get it. I like this movie.

But ... I'm old enough and wise enough to show restraint during a viewing. I don't constantly turn my head to see how my wife is liking it. I've matured, as I'm sure my 22-year-old friend introducing that band to my other 22-year-old friend has also matured.

That said, my behavior still forced my wife to quip "Stop monitoring me!" at one point during the movie.

I'll explain.

When I rented Portrait of a Lady on Fire from iTunes, I knew my intention was to show it to my wife. But I err on the side of caution when putting forward movies for her consideration these days. Especially during quarantine, when we spend the week effectively home-schooling our kids in addition to working, everyone needs their free time to unwind. There's no better way to spoil a potential viewing than to make it seem like an obligation.

But I looked up on Friday and noticed that my rental window was down to just 13 days. It was time to at least mention it, so my wife had nearly two full weeks to put it on our schedule. As it turned out, she was pretty excited to see it, so she programmed it for the very next night. Okay, initial hurdle cleared.

But there was a second hurdle -- and third, and fourth -- still awaiting us. Because my kids had a Netflix movie party with their aunt, which didn't end until about 8:40, we got a late start on everything. Plus, we were all tired from having gotten out and exercised for a couple hours during the day. Plus, my wife found out at about 8 that her friend's son had broken his arm and was in "hospital" (you drop the definite article in Australia).

I should have probably called an audible on the viewing. I didn't.

So when we started the 122-minute movie at just after 9, my wife was not in her best shape to consume it. I shouldn't have been either, as I was already on my second glass of wine, but see many previous discussions of how being engaged in something you love keeps you plenty awake.

My wife did not yet love it, so she did not yet have the advantage I did. And the way it was going, she never would.

So yes, I was monitoring her -- not to make sure she loved the movie, but to make sure she was paying enough attention to it and not falling asleep. Which was, of course, for the purpose of giving  her the chance to love the movie, so maybe it amounts to the same thing.

Like a good friend should, she continued to participate in a message thread about the kid who'd had the bike accident. I get it. And it's possible this did not prevent her from missing anything, as she speaks French so did not need to read all the subtitles.

But I just couldn't prevent myself from looking over, from silently judging her failure to watch the movie. She finds it no end of a distraction if I am on a device during a joint viewing, and I felt it was my right to feel the same thing, even with her mitigating circumstances.

I think the problem is that I was not always silently judging. At one point I asked, "Are you following all this?" I think it was my way of confirming that she wasn't rusty enough on her French to catch all the dialogue, but as you might guess, it came out wrong.

Once she was conscious of the attention I was paying to how she was watching the movie, it became its own thing, even when that's not what I was doing. For example, once I looked over to gauge how much wine she had left in her glass, which would tell me how much of the remaining bottle I could pour in mine. I think that's actually when the "Stop monitoring me!" comment came. (Oh yeah, and having wine was probably the thing that pushed the three other hurdles -- the late start, the exhaustion, the broken arm -- over the edge into full impracticality.)

In the end, she never fell asleep (that she would admit to), though she did say "I've been struggling to stay awake for the past two hours," which means the entirety of the movie, and which is no way to watch any movie, let alone something subtle and sophisticated. She did say that she thought it was "really good," though as you can probably imagine, that was not the reaction I was really looking for. She also didn't want to discuss any details of the movie, even when I was going to tell her a simple thing like the fact that Haenel was also in Deerskin, the Quentin Dupieux movie we watched together last year at MIFF.

See, that's the problem with people who love things, and who lose their ability to play it cool when it comes to them. We aren't happy with something being "really good" and with a person not falling asleep while watching it. We want it to redefine this other person's existence, and it's just never likely to do that -- even with a movie as universally beloved as Portrait of a Lady on Fire.

My wife has a more "live and let live" approach to these things -- a more cool approach, to use the parlance of my current argument. Whether I like something she shows me or not, so what? It doesn't affect her love for that thing. I mean, she's not so enlightened that she doesn't recognize when it was a bad time to do a particular thing we were both invested in, and have her regrets about it. But when that thing is in progress, she's not likely to "monitor" me for my reaction.

What can I say? When it comes to my love of movies, I am not cool. 

Perfect pauses: Code 8

Perfect Pauses is probably not only my most infrequent recurring "series" on this blog, but also the most inconsequential.

And yet I'm back, undaunted, with my fourth in about four-and-a-half years, and my first in just over two.

Technically speaking I did my first back in 2011, when I wasn't anticipating a series and called the post "Great pauses in movie history." It took until 2016 to start recognizing it as "a thing."

Anyway, the idea is that if I'm pausing whatever I watch and the pause happens to time out just about perfectly, I'll write about it here. Deep, right?

So the latest was Code 8, a movie that got a blink-and-you'll-miss-it release last year in the U.S. before becoming a hit on Netflix upon its recent release there. I'm quite attuned to what's new on Netflix these days, as I'm reviewing whatever I can on what I can now call my sister site, Reelgood.com.au. (I'm running it now, hence the "sister" designation.) Code 8 had already piqued my interest when I realized it was not technically a "new" release (though it's probably new to Australia). So I watched it Friday night even though I don't expect to review it.

I'll get to a little bit of my thoughts on it in a minute, but first, the pause:

Given that the fire out of the muzzle of a gun is visible for only a split second, I thought it was pretty cool that I happened to catch this one in its brief moment of ephemeral existence.

Of course, I considered the fact that this is not the natural action of the gun and it could have been enhanced by special effects, but that doesn't really make it any less cool, as it's still on screen for only a split second.

And that's really just about all I have to say about the pause.

As for the movie, I thought it was a pretty good little low budget sci-fi action flick, with a nice premise. (I say "low budget" more because it has inexpensive stars than because it looks anything less than first rate.) The premise is that in a near future world, some statistically significant percentage of the population is discovered to have been born with super powers. Not all-powerful super powers like Superman, but one specific type of power per gifted person -- some can read minds, some can control electricity, some have telekinesis, some can heal. In no case does it make them immortal, so they can be taken down through ordinary gunfire or anything else that would usually kill a person. Their powers are heavily regulated by the government -- you have to have a permit to use them, and they're only intended to be used for work. (Which makes them good day laborers, as you can build a building faster if you can toss cinder blocks to each other like it was nothing.)

The world is approaching a total lockdown of these powers, as there are numerous incidents where a "power enabled" person has been guilty of a crime/caused a disaster/etc. There are Robocop-type police who can identify the power-enabled via facial recognition and fly around in the type of transports you see in the poster above. In any case, one particular construction worker (played by Robbie Amell) is trying to save his sick mom and falls in with a gang of criminals.

It's pretty entertaining stuff. It joins a small fraternity of recent lower-budget sci fi movies that I liked more than I was expecting to, which also includes Kin. I don't remember it particularly well the morning after, but it was a nice little diversion in the moment, and well made.

I did have a funny moment during the end credits as I had turned my attention to something else while they were rolling. I looked back up a minute or two later and thought "These credits are still on? What the hell?" Then of course I realized that minute upon minute of credit time was being devoted to the names of the people who had helped crowd source the film. (That's 30,810 contributors, according to Wikipedia.) And at first I'd thought it was just a really big visual effects department.

Back sometime in late 2021 with another perfect pause.

Finish What You Started: That Sugar Film

This is my second in a 2020 bi-monthly series of finishing movies I had to abort watching on my first attempt. (I still like the original usage of the word "abort," but this particular instance is, er, not ideal.)

There are discontinued viewings that you stop by choice, and then there are those that are just out of your hands.

My attempt to watch That Sugar Film in December of 2015, as discussed here, was the latter.

By waiting all the way until the end of my 30-day rental period on iTunes before starting to watch it, I had no time to recover when the viewing started glitching and buffering, and then just wouldn't play at all. It was a prelude to the end of my previous laptop -- actually, two laptops ago now -- which succumbed to a faulty hard drive (and was too old to be worth replacing), but I didn't know it at the time I wrote the post linked above.

The circumstances were rather unusual. I was watching the movie in a Starbucks prior to my midnight screening of The Force Awakens. That doesn't happen to be all that relevant to the story, I just thought it was worth sharing.

When my laptop did ultimately die, I was still able to get back the other rentals I had downloaded but not yet watched by just setting up iTunes on my new computer and downloading them again. Obviously there was no such option with That Sugar Film, as I had already kicked off my (then 24-hour) viewing window. It's not Apple's fault my laptop gave up the ghost.

I had only been liking the movie at a mid-range level before then, so I have not prioritized getting back to it before now. I should probably explain a little bit what this is, if you don't know. It's basically Australia's answer to Supersize Me, with director-star Damon Gameau in the Morgan Spurlock role. Instead of 30 days of only McDonald's, though, the experiment is 60 days on a high sugar diet, the kind Gameau had previously forsaken. That "high sugar" diet being, of course, a fairly average diet for most people in the world. Gameau made the experiment one step more difficult -- he would only eat foods that are considered to be "healthy," like non-sugar cereals, yogurt, fruit and smoothies. He quickly discovered he would have no difficulty getting to 40 teaspoons of sugar a day -- the average intake for an adult in the western (?) world -- even without a single bit of what's considered "junk food," and in fact might even have to "diet" for a part of each day not to exceed those 40 teaspoons. It's all in the interest of preparing for the arrival of his new daughter, who is in the belly of his pregnant girlfriend for the entirety of the narrative. (That last detail feels very Spurlock-ian.)

Interesting experiment. At the time I thought "The world already has one Morgan Spurlock -- does it need another?" Since then, though, I've softened on Gameau, who also released a documentary last year called 2040, which looks at where the environment will be 20 years from now if we do nothing about it, and what we can do. Again, not all that original, but it gives him a little more credibility than if he were trying to be "just another Morgan Spurlock."

The good news is, Gameau comes across positively, as Spurlock did in is early efforts, and not kind of self-indulgently, like later career Spurlock. I was fully with That Sugar Film this time around. It has a really lively presentation. There's a lot of use of fun and reasonably sophisticated graphics, like Gameau riding around on a fat cell travelling through the body. My favorite recurring technique that felt distinct was the way Gameau handles normal talking head interviews. Instead of just appearing in whatever environment in which they were interviewed, they appear on the side of a cereal box or in the ingredients section of a bag of candy, with their faces often color-adjusted to match the packaging. It's a small detail, but small details in a form as frequently tired as the documentary can make a big difference.

There is, of course, quite a lot of eye-opening information here, if it is all to be taken at face value. We know that there is some disagreement among experts whether sugar or fat is more harmful to humans, though maybe less so than there once was. But Gameau is quite clearly on the side of sugar = bad, and a lot of the information he provides compellingly makes that case. (Among them -- the one expert he talks to who seems to disagree with these findings is someone who openly admits receiving funding from Coca Cola.)

The one hesitation I had with the film, because I just did not believe it, despite the physical evidence presented, was the transformation to Gameau's body over the course of the 60 days. He gained something like 20 pounds, his bloodwork was terrible and the doctors were telling him he was on the way to getting a fatty liver. As this is a healthy early 30s guy, it just didn't really ring true, even with before and after video/pictures of how he looked. There just seemed something too far-fetched about the radical changes given only a change to drinking more juices, while maintaining the same level of exercise.

Then the fact that there's a lot that just seems like a self-fulfilling prophecy. He'd say he felt a lot less energy and had wild mood swings, then there's footage of him just being sacked out on the couch in a half-coma of exhaustion. I'm not saying Gameau would fake this to sell his case more convincingly, I'm just saying he could.

Overall, though, it's a really compelling and alarming documentary, while remaining very fun. Probably the best of all worlds when it comes to the aims of the types of documentary I tend to enjoy the most.

Full disclosure: I ate the remnants of a bag of chocolate chips while watching. Ha.

Okay, I'm whittling down my choices. I'll probably watch the original Paddington in June -- or finish watching it, I should say.

Audient Authentic: Why We Fight: Prelude to War

This is the fourth in my 2020 monthly series watching "classic" documentaries I have never seen.

When I watched Eugene Jarecki's 2005 documentary Why We Fight, I knew its name was a conscious reference to a series of documentaries dating back to World War II. I never had occasion to seek them out, though, until this series.

Why We Fight: Prelude to War is the first of seven such movies available on Kanopy. If it being the first weren't reason enough to select it as the next in this chronological series that has already made it through the 1920s and 1930s, then it being directed by Frank Capra certainly would have been. (It also won an Oscar for best documentary.)

I still haven't gotten up to the true feature length I'm seeking -- this is only 52 minutes long -- but I suspect I'll be there by the 1950s next month. At which point I will likely slow down and see a lot more movies from 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s.

Propaganda films come in all shapes and forms. We tend to think of them as negative, such as those made for the Third Reich by Leni Reifenstahl, but they can serve a positive function as well, and that's the case with this (and, I assume, the other six in the series, which I might watch if it weren't such a drain on my Kanopy credits, and if I didn't get a sense of what all of them are probably doing from this one). The U.S. had already made the decision to enter World War II, and these government-sponsored films wanted to retroactively make the case for it, as well as convince an American populace with non-interventionalist tendencies.

Noting Capra's involvement, I had assumed that the government had just gone to Hollywood and conscripted the most successful director at the time. In fact, Capra seems to have been a far more willing participant, as he took up the mantle of specifically answering the function of Reifenstahl's Triumph of the Will, which probably would have made a good selection for this series had I not already seen it. (Actually, I may have only seen select scenes from it, so it could have also been a good candidate for last year's Audient Audit.) According to Wikipedia, Capra was "daunted, yet impressed and challenged" by Reifentstahl's work.

As it turns out, Capra actually directed most of the films in the series, so I could have selected any of them if that had been my primary interest. It made sense to go chronologically, though, and this one -- released near the beginning of American involvement in the war -- gives the background for how the Axis dictators came into power. It intersperses actual footage and newspaper headlines with recreations of events where cameras could not have been present, but just as quick snippets of footage to provide context to the narration, nothing requiring any acting or potentially fictitious interpretations of events. We see/hear about political rivals assassinated and armies amassed. We see Hitler and Mussolini and the Japanese generals firing up brainwashed crowds.

As a cinephile, I was, of course, looking to see if I could detect "the Capra touch" -- something that would remind me of the director of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, two of the hits Capra had already made at that time. Of course the film shares an earnestness and seriousness of political purpose with the former, and one could argue, the latter as well. And indeed, the underdog current to Capra's previous work helps with the thrust of these films, as America is characterized as an underdog under the oppressive heel of these European and Asian tyrants.

I suppose it wasn't likely that I'd find the kind of "escapist humanism" -- is that a good way to describe it? -- that I attribute to Capra's work on the whole. That's fundamentally inconsistent with this type of project. Though it does have Capra's plucky spirit, it does not necessarily seem like something Capra himself was uniquely qualified to bring to the film/these films. It's such a different type of project from Capra's feel-good Hollywood films that I don't feel like I really would detect hallmarks of the same director, and yet another director probably would have made them a lot less hopeful and more cynical, or simply never gravitated to the project in the first place.

As for the actual content of the film, it gives a showcase of some absolutely priceless historical footage -- not necessarily rare, but something that I don't generally see, or am less likely to find accumulated all in one place. Like footage of the bombings of various European cities and Pearl Harbor, the latter being the actual "inciting incident" (to use the screenwriting term) that got American into World War II. The footage of the marching armies of other countries shows quite well the type of determination the Allies were up against. I was also educated on parts of the lead-up to war that I didn't know about, or forgot. (The report I did on World War II in the sixth grade, or whenever it was, has mostly left me.) Also the film lays out the plans for world domination put forth by each of the Axis powers, the routes they planned to use on the map to invade adjacent and far-flung territories and turn them all an insidious color of black, meant to indicate their occupation. Chilling.

There was one particularly shocking image from the film that I'd never seen before, and it was about the idea of other countries breeding young brainwashed soldier from birth. The shot -- which could not have been recreated for fear of violating all sorts of morality standards -- shows a big "pile of babies" who appear to be accumulated together to receive some kind of innoculation or brain-washing agent. You can literally see like 40 babies stuck in the same ten foot by ten foot space, not actually smothering each other, but coming as close as you can, and all crying like the dickens for obvious reasons.

I tried to find an image online but ultimately failed. So I found the spot again in the movie and took this picture. Crazy, right?

I guess I didn't find Prelude to War "groundbreaking" in the form or anything like that, but it is certainly a vitally important historical document and I'm really glad I saw it. I reckon it played a significant role in turning public sentiment toward the war.

On to May and on to the 1950s, unless I find another thing in the 40s that screams out to be watched.

A statistical anomaly among movie theaters

I'm not sure what percentage of the world's movie theaters are closed right now, but it's something approaching 100. If not because the actual local restrictions demand it, then because there aren't any new releases flowing out of Hollywood right now. (Almost any, as we will see in a moment.)

Not every movie theater in the world relies on Hollywood releases, of course -- in a country like India, most theaters probably wouldn't -- but I have to assume most other countries are following the rest of the world in terms of isolating their people, and, consequently, holding back their new movies for times when they can actually make some money on them.

There's at least one exception, though, and that is the Mission Tiki drive-in in Montclair, California.

This used to be our drive-in when we lived in Los Angeles, though it was a 30-minute drive or so from where we lived -- that's 30 minutes without traffic, I should say. In LA it might have taken you 30 minutes just to make it from the 10 to the 101. Before these End Times, anyway.

And because it used to be our drive-in, I still get the emails telling me what's playing. And, despite this pandemic, those emails are still coming.

Only in this latest have I noticed them having to try to get creative, programming Raiders of the Lost Ark and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade on one of their four screens. (And what a fun double feature that would be.) (Two quick takeaways about that: 1) They skipped Temple of Doom, which I think was a good choice; 2) They spelled it Raiders of the Lost Arc, which is funny.)

So yes, this was also, presumably, one of the only ways for anyone, anywhere to see Trolls World Tour on the big screen, as the vast majority of us who have seen it (yes, that includes me) did so through digital rental.

The drive-in, of course, represents a perfect scenario for keeping open a movie theater in a pandemic. The isolation of its viewers in their own hermetically sealed environments is part and parcel to the experience. People have to rub elbows in the bathroom or at the snack bar, assuming it's still open, which it would not need to be as you can bring in any food you want. But a little common sense social distancing -- the type that isn't possible when you are seated in a movie theater -- could override some of those concerns as well.

Still, I can't imagine many drive-ins are remaining open, because of those chances of incidental mutual exposure, and because of the paucity of new releases to keep crowds coming. I know the ones here in Melbourne are not, because I checked -- believe me, I checked. If the goal really is to keep people apart by all reasonable means, the responsible solution is, indeed, to close any place that promotes social gathering, even one with the built-in advantages of this one.

That said, you still can't really stay away from everybody in the normal course of the things you have to do. I note that every time I go to the grocery store, it's like diving into and swimming around in a germ pool. Theoretically, anyway -- we've flattened the curve and had so relatively few cases here in Australia in the first place, that you don't tend to feel like coronavirus is out there in any actual way. But if it were, I feel like you'd get it on any trip to the grocery store. People are not very effectively social distancing, even when the store has put measures in place -- such as stickers on the floor that tell you were to stand, and plastic shields to separate clerk from customer -- to help enable it.

I feel like movie theaters could be entrusted to be the social distancing equivalent of a grocery store. Throw a plastic bag over every other seat, the way you do when the seat is broken, and you've got your 1.5 meters or six feet or however you want to measure it. Heck, throw the plastic bag over two out of every three seats and you still aren't cutting in to the necessary capacity for most theatrical releases these days, based on how many people are actually buying tickets to them.

But that would have only been possible if the film industry hadn't made a coordinated effort to prevent all new movies from getting released. What we needed was a coordinated effort a month ago to figure out how they could still be released, just by changing some seating plans.

But I don't want to sound like one of those people suggesting everything should be opened up. Eff those people. Their concern for our economy is commendable. Their lack of concern for our elderly, though, is decidedly not.

Still, when I hear that AMC is probably going to have to declare for bankruptcy, and shudder to think of the impact on smaller theaters who haven't specifically made the headlines, I wonder if it all couldn't have been done differently somehow.

The "new normal," when it does arrive, will take many shapes and forms. I just hope movie theaters will still be a part of them.

For now, residents of Los Angeles still have the Mission Tiki, to watch a handful of "new" releases that you figure everyone in the vicinity has already seen if they ever intended to, plus some genuine classics that I'm sure will win some eyeballs this weekend. And as they are the only shop in town, I wonder if that giant parking lot, with its various small slopes in the grade to maximize viewing angles, has been filled to the brim every night. It was a pretty popular activity even when there wasn't a pandemic on.

But pretty soon, all four of those screens will have to have Raiders of the Lost Ark or the equivalent if they want to get any eyeballs at all. And pretty soon, that last bastion of seeing movies on a big screen could close, to reopen lord knows when.

Our very own School of Rock

We're not the only parents out there who've had to get creative.

There are x number of hours in a child's weekday that need to be filled, and if your experience is anything like mine, the school is not cutting the mustard. Oh, I believe they're trying -- but this is a new experience for all of us, and even three weeks of planning (most of which were the school holiday period between term 1 and term 2) have not resulted in a finely honed remote learning curriculum.

But the problem really doesn't have that much to do with what the schools are doing or not doing. Even during school holidays, we had to find ways for the kids to pass the day that didn't just involve us surrendering to the temptation to give them whatever device they wanted from sunup to sundown.

Well, every little bit helps.

Which is why, for the past two weeks, I have become a professor from 4 to 4:30 most weekday afternoons, giving them rock lessons.

Not lessons on how to play, mind you. I have no clue about that. But history lessons, talking about the best bands in rock history and playing about four to five of their songs, finishing with a live performance on YouTube.

We call it School of Rock, and that's no coincidence, as it was two Saturdays ago that we watched the Richard Linklater film. That's how I got the idea.

It had actually been my wife's idea to show them School of Rock, and it had been percolating for some time. We were going to watch it on a weekend out of town back in February, but it took until quarantine for the DVD to actually make it into the player. (Actually, it was on Netflix.)

Me, I was never a huge fan of the film. I remember seeing it in the theater in 2003 and thinking it was good, but maybe ten to 20 percent less good than I thought it would be. To be fair, my expectations were pretty high. I was on a Jack Black high and I also had a great fondness for Linklater.

My kids are also on a Jack Black high, which was what made it such a natural fit for them. He's probably the actor they have encountered most in their cinematic travels so far, maybe saving only Dwayne Johnson. Both are in the two new Jumanji movies, both of which they've seen, but Black is also in the two Goosebumps movies, favorites around our house, and at least one other thing I know they've seen. Gulliver's Travels maybe? If so, they saw that one without me.

Anyway, they like Black, my wife likes the movie, so it was an easy choice for a Saturday afternoon quarantine viewing.

As it turned out, I liked the movie a lot better coming in with slightly lower expectations. It really is quite good. It's no surprise it's been an enduring modern classic in our culture, culminating in the recent stage musical with book by Andrew Lloyd Weber of all people. (Then again, you don't have to be a classic to find your way to stage these days.)

It was such a success with both me and the kids -- my wife got to sit back and say "Told you so," though she didn't -- that I decided to launch my own School of Rock for the boys, weekdays at 4 p.m. Why 4 o'clock? Well, it's late enough in the workday that I thought I could shift my attention elsewhere for a half-hour and no one would notice. Hopefully that's been true.

The marker erase board you see above gives you an idea of what we've been up to, but I'll go band by band to tell you how it's worked out.

We started with Tenacious D, probably for obvious reasons. If it's not obvious, well, Jack Black is actually in this band. Nothing like starting out with a dose of obvious relevance to get them to buy in to the new idea.

Tenacious D is a duo of Jack and character actor Kyle Gass, and they rock. They have genuine musical ability but are also predictably strong about keeping humor at the forefront of their lyrics and the handful of sketches that punctuate the album I own. I had to really be careful with the songs I selected to play them, as there's an f-bomb in at least half the songs (plus songs actually titled "Hard Fucking" and "Fuck Her Gently"), but fortunately that still allowed me to play the song "Tribute" to them, which is kind of their own version of "Devil Went Down to Georgia." (It has a "motherfucker" in it but it's sung very quickly and is hard to hear.) I also played them a skit that involves Jack ordering way too much at a drive thru which is hilarious, though I did have to edit out one f-bomb, which I did successfully.

Anyway, this has been the biggest hit of the school so far, entirely due to "Tribute." I played them the video for this (preferring it to a live show) to close out the class, and particularly my younger son loved it, as it features Jack and Kyle encountering a horned demon on a lonely highway and having a jam battle against him. (The whole video is pretty funny; the premise is that they're recording the song in one of those mall karaoke booths where you're supposed to shovel in quarters to sing "My Sharona.") They've actually made me play the video again at the end of other classes, when I'd hoped to be blowing their minds with the band du jour. Oh well, I'll take what I can get.

To immediately give them a flavor of the variability that's baked into rock 'n roll, I focused on Elton John on day two. My older son looked over my shoulder at the iTunes playlist and noted, quite pedantically (he takes after his old man), that the genre for John's songs was listed as pop, not rock. I tried to explain that the lines were blurry between these things, but then I also had "Crocodile Rock" come along to save me, when "Rocket Man" and "I Guess That's Why They Call it the Blues" did not. But they weren't really convinced until an energetic live performance in Central Park of "Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting," which made them Elton believers. As visual accompaniment to the music -- the need for which I was rapidly realizing -- we looked at a slide show of great John outfits from over the years.

They had a conflict on Wednesday of week 1 (a conflict! during coronavirus!) so we didn't get back to the syllabus until Thursday, at which point, I felt it was time for an unquestioned, traditional rock 'n roll giant. The Rolling Stones are not a personal favorite -- I have only a single album that I copied when I borrowed it from the library -- but I of course love any number of their famous songs. I played them "Sympathy for the Devil" and "Paint it Black," without making much of a connection, before leading up to what I thought was a surefire hit, "You Can't Always Get What You Want." But they didn't have patience for a 7:29 song, predictably. They did show some interest in looking at pictures of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, as well as a raucous live performance of "Satisfaction" with a massive quantity of balloons filling the arena. I also showed them the famous clip of "Let's Spend the Night Together (Some Time Together)" on Ed Sullivan. Still, in all, the Stones were a miss for them.

Week 2 (not doing the class on Fridays) began on Tuesday after a long holiday weekend. Here it was time to introduce them to one of my top five bands of all time, Pink Floyd. The visual accompaniment this time was their album covers. I had lots to choose from when it came to Floyd -- 12 albums and 104 songs, according to iTunes -- but I started with "Another Brick in the Wall Part 2" because it's used in the theme song to a dystopian kids show the older one watched for a bit. He also likes the dance version of it I put on an electronica mix for him. It didn't seem to make a huge impression this time, nor did "Time" and the little bit of "Money" I played them. I had others lined up, but in scanning through their albums, the older one noticed the 23-minute song that kicks off Atom Heart Mother and wanted to listen to that -- presumably just for the novelty of its length. This he said he liked, even though it doesn't resemble a traditional song in any shape or form. I couldn't really pause to appreciate that because the younger one was getting cranky, plus I had to close with a live YouTube version of "Wish You Were Here" from the last time the band played together (including Roger Waters) some six or seven years ago. Ultimately I'd say Floyd also went over their heads, but maybe that's not a huge surprise for a six- and nine-year-old.

We got back into the hit column Wednesday with Queen. I needed to steer things back in a more populist direction and did. They knew Queen as the artist of "We Will Rock You/We Are the Champions" and wanted to get to those right away. Instead I started out with "Under Pressure," as I'd recently played them "Ice Ice Baby" back-to-back with this song and they thought it was funny. "Bohemian Rhapsody" was queued up next, and that allowed me to also show them the clip from Wayne's World. I had "You're My Best Friend" set next, but I skipped over that to "Bicycle" as I thought they would find it funny. It was all a prelude to the YouTube video of WWRY/WATC at Live-Aid, which we all sung along with -- even my wife, who had wandered down to the kitchen classroom space to make a coffee. They were interested in Freddy Mercury and asked a lot of questions about his death.

The most recent class to date brought us finally to our home turf with AC/DC -- a conscious parochial choice and not a recognition of the prominence of the band within rock 'n roll history. It allowed me to play both "Thunderstruck" (which I love way out of scope with how good a song it probably is) plus the mashup of "Thunderstruck" and "Shipping Up to Boston" I created for our wedding (each song representing a home city for one of the two of us, you see). I also played "You Shook Me All Night Long" and "Back in Black," plus pictures of the band and the street sign for the street in Melbourne named after them. I think I managed to convince them that Angus Young is a pretty interesting figure. Musically, they may have been least into Accadacca (as they are sometimes called here), but both got into the video I showed at the end, which was a concert performance of "Hell's Bells" from 2009 in which Brian Johnson swings on the ringer of a large bell bearing the band's name. "I gotta admit, that was great," said the older one.

Women and minorities have been highly underrepresented in the first two weeks of the class, as have they in rock 'n roll history unfortunately. I intend to correct that next week, our first full four-day week, in which I may introduce them to the likes of Heart and Prince. Let's just hope my older son doesn't see the "pop" designation next to Prince's name on iTunes.

Hey, if this quarantine goes on long enough, this could turn into School of Pop, School of Rap, School of Reggae, School of Classical, and School of Yodelling before all is said and done.

A with without an and

I know that the order names appear in the credits is not random. In fact, it's a negotiated part of the contract in some cases, maybe all cases. A particular actor -- or, more likely, that actor's agent -- will get it in writing that he or she gets top billing. I suspect the next few spots are also up for grabs, and then comes everyone else who doesn't have an agent, or at least not a top dollar one.

But proximity to the start of the credits is not always the most sought after condition. Sometimes, you negotiate for the "and" credit, which means you are the last listed in the opening credits before the casting director or the costume designer or whoever comes next.

Before I knew how it worked, though -- and I'm still really only going on what people tell me -- I figured the credits were ordered purely by decreasing importance of the actor in question to the cast of the movie, and in many cases, they end up being one in the same. With one caveat -- there's always an actor at the end with the "and" credit, who comes as a surprise and reshapes our preconceived notions of what we expect from the cast of this movie. His or her name makes you say "Aha!," like "I didn't know this person was going to be in this movie!"

For a long time I have always considered Danny DeVito to be the ultimate example of this. I have no idea why. Maybe twice in my history, maybe close in time to each other, I saw movies where at the end of the credits, it said "And Danny DeVito," which made me say "Aha! I didn't know this person was going to be in this movie!" Or maybe it never happened at all, and DeVito just seemed like he would be that kind of person, who puts an ironic spin on the fairly straightfoward listing of cast members that had come before.

But what if there are two such people?

In my understanding of that, the first gets a "with" and the next gets an "and." Or if there are more than one, however many extra all get a "with" before the last person comes in as the ultimate punchline, as it were, with their "and." Everyone who has ever listed something knows that you can only have one "and," after the penultimate item on the list and before the final item.

This is a long setup for a fairly minor point, but stick with me.

It always strikes me as weird, then, when you get a "with" without an "and," which is what happened in The Hitman's Bodyguard, which I watched on Monday night. It's probably actually the umpteenth time I've seen that phenomenon, but the first where I actually decided to write about it on the blog.

The credits finished up with "with Richard E. Grant" -- a perfect with/and candidate, by the way -- and I thought with an internal squeal of glee, "Who is going to be the 'and'?" My personal guess, out of nowhere, was Glenn Close.

But then it just went on to the casting director or costume designer or whoever comes next.

A with without an and? Unheard of!

Okay, heard of at least umpteen times before. But each time I see it, it offends me, as a grammarian if nothing else.

That's all I wanted to explain, really. This post was 90% setup, as it turns out.

Except that halfway through writing it, I realized the "and" had already been expended earlier in the credits. That's right, they observed the "only one and" rule, they just frontloaded it.

The order of the names in the credits was "Ryan Reynolds, Samuel L. Jackson, Gary Oldman, and Salma Hayek." And then all the flotsam and jetsam who made up the rest of the cast before getting to Grant.

Salma Hayek is a good candidate for an "and" credit, given that her role in the film is pretty inessential, and though she appears throughout, she has very little to do. Plus she fits the other description, in that she's a famous name who you wouldn't have necessarily expected to appear in the credits for this movie.

But having her as the fourth name -- negotiated for vanity reasons to be sure, to get her up close to the big boys -- fails in the sense of finishing as a "punchline," as an ironic twist to the succession of no-name actors you've been enduring for the last 30 seconds. In truth, she would have worked better as an "end and" and Grant would have worked better as just a cameo, as he's truly inessential, in just one scene at the start that shows us how Reynolds does his bodyguarding.

Then again, this whole movie is pretty inessential. It's not terrible -- I gave it two stars -- but if I were involved with it, maybe I would have negotiated to have my name removed from it entirely. (Who am I kidding; if I ever made a movie, I'd be thrilled as hell to see my name up there.)

But Hitman's Bodyguard was a huge success, which is why I finally saw it, and which is why there's a sequel due out in August, The Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard, if coronavirus ever ends.

I guess Hayek will be upgraded from an "and" in that one, given that she's in the actual title.

Maybe Morgan Freeman can pick up the "and" credit, as I really wouldn't have expected to see him in this particular movie.

"Anything Day" Movie Marathon

Run out of things to do around your house with your kids/yourself that have any semblance of structure?

Well, have you tried nothing? Or, should I say, anything?

Easter Saturday was a day like that for us.

I wanted to call it Do Whatever You Want Day, but my wife, who came up with the idea, insisted on the branding Anything Day. (To be fair, though, I would have come up with the idea myself had I not thought there was a 100% chance she would reject it.)

And on Anything Day, what you did was this: whatever you want.

That went for both the fortysomething adults and the, um, first-decade-of-their-lives-something kids.

No one could tell you to get off your device. No one could tell you to get out of your pajamas. You could raid the pantry, within reason, especially if no one say you doing it, which they weren't likely to do.

The only rules were that you had to eat meals, brush your teeth at the end of the day and go to bed at close to the time you usually did. And that you could not compel anyone else to do anything they did not want to do (we'll see how well that worked out in a minute). Oh, you could ask someone if they wanted to do something, like play a game. But the other person could just say no.

It was a masterstroke, I think, and now that it's happened once, I daresay it'll be likely to happen again sometime during the indefinite duration of this quarantine.

I, of course, chose a movie marathon.

The way it ended up working out was that we basically each resided primarily in one room. Going from the front of our house back, my wife was mostly in our bedroom, my older son was mostly in the kids' room with his various devices, my younger son was mostly in our living room with our TV, and I was mostly in the garage with my movie marathon, as I will explain in more detail in just a moment. The kitchen/dining room was neutral territory for all intents and purposes.

Now, I had three main guiding principles to my marathon, none of which worked out quite the way I'd hoped.

1) The movies would all be kid-friendly in nature, so people could pop in and not be shocked by a beheading, an outrageous sex act or an ill-timed f-bomb.

2) The kids would be expected to watch something with me at some point, if not through actual compulsion than through suggestion, and because #3 would make it so much fun.

3) The movies would be watched on our projector.

Now, if you remember from my birthday trips to the hotel for my hotel movie marathons, I use this projector to project on the wall at the hotel. But it's a cheap projector. It cost me less than $80 on Gumtree, the Australian equivalent of Craigslist, and I knew it would really only serve the purpose of the unique scenario for which I was buying it, and possibly rarely a scenario like the one that arose yesterday.

The image quality is not particularly good, as I think this projector was designed for stationary content at a meeting, and maybe only a meeting at a company that was just barely scraping buy. In truth, I don't really know who is the market for a cheap projector like this. Me, I guess.

But the mere idea of watching something projected on a wall (or in this case, a sheet affixed by thumbtacks to our garage door) sort of gives the act an air of festivity, and that's what I was hoping to create yesterday.

Again, we'll see how well that worked out, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

And just so this post is not too gargantuan in length, maybe I should get to the actual films in my Anything Day Marathon right now.

How much blackface is too much blackface?

I got everything all set up, including my coffee and toast, by about 8:30, missing my 8 a.m. scheduled start time due to sleeping later than I usually do. (Which, in itself, was a good start to Anything Day.)

First up was something decidedly inoffensive as a start to the day -- or so I thought.

The Astaire-Rogers musical/dance-fest Swing Time has gotten a lot of love on Filmspotting, most recently on an episode in which they gave us a top five movies of the 1930s as a "starter pack" on watching movies from that decade. I'd been feeling a distinct lack of classic Hollywood on my viewing schedule lately, so when I struck out on a couple other things I looked up first, I landed on Swing Time, rented from iTunes.

It was inoffensive in that it did not include a beheading, an outrageous sex act or an ill-timed f-bomb. But that's to say nothing about the offense caused by an unexpected blackface scene.

I say "unexpected" not because you ever expect a blackface scene, but there are some pretty famous ones, like the one in The Jazz Singer. In that case, I was expecting it. I wasn't here because it hadn't come up at all in the Filmspotting discussion of Swing Time, nor in any other I had casually heard over the years.

But yes indeed, about two-thirds of the way through, there's a dance number called "Bojangles of Harlem" in which Astaire appears in blackface as a "tribute" to dancer Bill Robinson. And because it's a loving "tribute" and there's no racism implied (though that doesn't mean there wasn't any received), I expect it escapes mention in discussions of infamous blackface scenes. And in truth, it did not offend me particularly either. The greater offense probably had to do with its non-existent story function, which is a problem I have with musicals from that era, that they go off on these long performance-related tangents that don't have anything to do with the story, and come late enough in the story that they delay a conclusion you are already beginning to anticipate.

Still, it was weird to see, and I suspect it helped knock this classic down a notch for me.

Even setting aside "Bojangles of Harlem" entirely, I found the movie a bit scattershot. And even as charming and talented as Astaire and Rogers are, and as breathtaking as their moves are, those factors alone did not elevate the movie to classic status for me. I ended up at 3.5 stars on Letterboxd.

I got a preview of the rest of my day when my six-year-old came out to plop down with me for about ten minutes of the movie, eager for his own part in the experience to start. "Could it be more ... clear?" he asked, referring to the image. I could tell then that the projector might not be sustainable.

The movie I actually rented for $19.99

I told you a couple days ago first that I was shocked to see the movie Never Rarely Sometimes Always available for rent for iTunes for $19.99, and then that I was considering the rental as a way of supporting the film industry on the whole.

Never did I imagine that if I did take the $19.99 rental plunge, it would be for the sequel to the Trolls movie, which I didn't even see.

But that's what happened when my six-year-old came across my computer open to the iTunes store on Friday night, where he saw Trolls World Tour listed under the New & Noteworthy category. "Why are you looking up Trolls?" he asked. I wasn't, of course, but he doesn't understand how things like iTunes work.

I thought my denial in that moment had put the subject to rest, but during his ten-minute cameo in Swing Time, my son said "You know, I might actually be interested in Trolls." I saw where this was going.

The reason I wanted to start the marathon at 8 was that it gave me a shot at watching two movies that I wanted to watch before I had to throw my kids a bone. But the way it worked out, at noon, I was only starting my second movie, not my third. That was due in part to an hour-long trip out of the house that included two separate trips to the grocery store. I won't get into it, but that certainly didn't feel very Anything Day to me.

Nor did watching Trolls World Tour, but that's what happened at 12 o'clock for the next 90 minutes.

At least I'll say this for my six-year-old -- he was willing to go with me on the projector idea. He didn't even mention that the image quality was inferior, at least at the start, and made all the right comments and rejoinders that served as de facto proof that there was nothing insufficient about our viewing experience. Good kid. We cuddled together on our beanbags and watched.

About 30 minutes in, though, he ventured that maybe it was time to try our old TV, which I'd brought out to the garage as a back-up.

At first I reacted with a heavy sigh, but I knew he was right. The projector was just not good enough for an animated movie, especially not one we'd paid an arm and a leg to rent.

So without striking the projector setup, we did a kind of 90 degree rotation to the right to watch the TV, and my was the difference significant. I realized I had had only a vague idea what this Trolls world really looked like, and that there were details in the set and the characters that contributed to both the humor and meaning of the movie. Secretly, I was relieved by the death of my projector dream -- a death so definitive, in fact, that I didn't get back to it even when I was solo again.

Trolls World Tour started to improve for me after we made the switch. Before that, I was thinking it might not be much better than the animated sequel I saw last year without first seeing the original, The Angry Birds Movie 2, which ended up near the bottom of my year-end rankings. But once I was able to appreciate more of the nuance -- a funny statement for a Trolls movie -- I was able to enjoy the movie pretty well. Not enough to reach the minimum three stars for a recommendation, but close enough at 2.5.

My first Dance in three decades

At just after 2 I was on my own again, and after a short nap in the beanbag pile, I started on a very different type of movie indeed.

I didn't see Dances With Wolves in the theater, though having just turned 17 when it came out, I might have. But I was suspicious of it for some reason, which means I was annoyed to see it clean up at the Oscars the following March, especially when it was up against contenders I adored, like Goodfellas and Ghost. Then I rented it soon after it was released on video, and found myself completely swept up in its scope and emotion.

That one viewing has been enough for me to consistently keep the movie near my top 100 on Flickchart over the years. (It currently sits at #102.) But its massive 181-minute girth has prevented me from ever confirming that high opinion.

Simply put, I needed an Anything Day to correct that.

So from a little after 2 to a little after 5 I did indeed soak in the beautiful cinematography of the Nebraska prairie without watching it late at night and falling asleep. I considered for a moment switching back to the projector, but that would have diminished that beautiful landscape. Plus there was the little issue of the subtitles, which are notoriously hard to read on this projector.

In short, I was pretty much as engaged as I was the first time, though probably inevitably not as moved. I remembered quite well the moment that really got me the first time, when Wind in His Hair shouts down from an elevated perch to the valley below, where Costner's title character is departing at the end. He proclaims their eternal friendship. As this was the Lakota who had most doubted the befriending of John Dunbar at the beginning, it felt like a moving testament to how much Dunbar had become a member of the Lakota family. And though the tear ducts didn't flood like they had the first time, there were damp eyes this time too.

As I was watching Dances With Wolves, I felt conscious of how its white savior narrative might play 30 years later. Fortunately, watching helped convince me that it may not actually be a white savior narrative. Sure, Costner's film pats Dunbar on the back for being an enlightened humanist who was more eager to befriend the Lakota than slaughter them, and he does indeed provide some valuable services to them. But I think in the end, they probably save him more than he saves them.

My older son provided a bit of a distraction during this movie, as he came out once saying "I want to book my movie!," having had enough Fortnite (if that's possible) by then. He was brushed off pretty easily the first time, but on the second one, I knew I'd have to act. Having given him the task of deciding on a movie he wanted, he came up with Scoob!, the new Scooby Doo reboot that as far as I know hadn't been released yet, and sounded like a (gulp!) second $19.99 rental.

When I found (to my relief) that it has, indeed, had a coronavirus-postponed release, he didn't have any other ideas, and was starting to look more glum. He had initially told me he might want to watch two movies with me, and that was now looking seriously in doubt, especially if he didn't have any idea what even the first one would be. (That said, he did reject participating in Trolls, and that was on him.) Fortunately, I decided it was time to switch away from iTunes rentals and actually landed on something that would work for both the kids.

Subtitles on, subtitles off

The original Karate Kid was a beloved childhood classic for me, and I was only a year older than my nine-year-old is now when it hit theaters in 1984. So seeing the 2010 remake, starring Jackie Chan and Jaden Smith, available on Netflix, it gave me the idea that the new one might work for him like the original did for me -- but would probably not do for him, just because it would seem "old." Plus, I thought the six-year-old -- who had started to stagnate in the living room, the only one still in his pajamas -- could probably watch as well.

I had a couple backups -- Next Gen or a Studio Ghibli movie -- but I was relieved to see that my son accepted The Karate Kid. I was a bit bummed, not to mention surprised, that it was two hours and twenty minutes long, but my wife had agreed to make us a macaroni and cheese dinner to supplement our microwave popcorn, so as long as the movie ended sometime in the vicinity of their bedtime, it would work.

And you know what? This is a pretty charming remake. Three-point-five stars.

The 140 minutes passed faster than I thought they would, and I could not even identify any parts that clearly seemed like fat. The action is updated well while keeping the same core narrative details. For example, instead of "wax on, wax off," young Dre learns defensive movies by repeatedly hanging his jacket on a hook. My kids thought Jackie Chan's Mr. Miyagi -- er, Mr. Han -- was crazy, but the reveal of the method to his madness worked for them just as it did for Dre. (Incidentally, the title Karate Kid is kept for brand awareness reasons only; as the movie is set in China, it's really kung fu that he's learning. I felt it was an acceptable sacrifice, and probably necessary in a cinematic environment that was already turning its eyes toward China a decade ago.)

The 140 minutes didn't prove a challenge for my kids either, who both stuck with it. The younger one threatened to fade at one point, but I think this was more an act of rebellion about having to eat his dinner than any loss of interest in the movie.

One minor annoyance, though, was that the movie didn't have an effective default subtitle setting. There is not a lot of Chinese spoken in this movie, but there's enough that you feel like you're missing something if you don't have the subtitles on. Sometimes the context is enough, but there was a scene about halfway through where Chan and the evil sensei (not really a sensei) have a conversation of a minute or so where you just don't know what they're saying.

So we turned the subtitles on for that, but we quickly realized that with the subtitles on, that meant that everything would be subtitled -- even the English. I thought this could actually help the one of the two of my kids who could read the subtitles, since I don't suspect he understood everything Chan was saying, even when he was speaking English. But he quickly became annoyed by it, so we had to turn them off again, only to turn them back on again twice more during the rest of the movie to understand certain scenes better. So instead of wax on, wax off, it was subtitles on, subtitles off.

He got annoyed when I wanted to read the subtitles to my younger son, so he too would understand what was going on, but we got through it.

By the end, the kids were so pumped up that the nine-year-old was throwing actual punches in our hallway while getting ready for bed. A couple landed on my leg, and one hit my six-year-old in the solar plexus, prompting tears.

No good idea/deed goes unpunished I guess.

Subtitles off

The final movie of the night was supposed to be Timur Bekmambetov's Night Watch, which I bought some four years ago when trying to prevent a local used video store from going out of business. Now that the kids were packed away for the night, I could relax my earlier content standards.

But here we had a subtitle problem again.

I don't know if you've seen Night Watch, or if you did, whether you saw the version of this vampire movie that I did. But in the version I saw -- twice, in fact, within a couple years of its release -- the subtitles themselves were these great pictorial interpretations of the movie's themes. Like, the English words might drip blood or get blown off the screen. I daresay it was a significant factor in my enjoyment of the film.

This DVD did not have that.

In fact, the language settings were all screwed up. First of all the languages themselves. There were two languages, both of which were English, except both of which were actually Russian. There was no dubbing, as I'd feared when the opening narration was in English, but both language options seemed to be exactly the same, with English narration and Russian dialogue.

This would have been fine except for the subtitles. Again, there were two subtitle options, one of which simply contained no subtitles at all, even though it said it was supposed to have them. The other subtitle option? Just plain text written out on the screen. The stylized subtitles have not been preserved on this DVD, and maybe have just vanished into history.

So instead I watched Event Horizon.

This was a random choice from perusing Netflix. I'd remembered really disliking it, but had also questioned that dislike over the years, as I know this movie disturbs some people. So I decided to give it another shot to disturb me.

It did, a little bit, in that it gave me chills a couple times. I do think there are parts of the execution that are just too broad by half, which I think is what I latched onto when I first saw it back in 2007 and gave it, I was surprised to see, only 1.5 stars. (Though I should say this was a retroactive star rating given in 2012 or 2013, when I added all my previous viewings to Letterboxd.)

Although there's some indelible imagery in this movie and some cool ideas, I guess I don't respond that much to space horror in which the images people see are of things from their own past/memory. Though my own thoughts on that are inconsistent, as this is what happens in Tarkovsky's Solaris, which I love.

Anyway, Event Horizon is better than I remembered, and that was good enough to end the night.

Some funny coincidences

Any time I do a marathon I like to note some funny coincidences between the movies, and there were some here too. So, to finish off this post, here they are.

1) The first two movies both feature a character named Penny.

2) Dances With Wolves and The Karate Kid both feature people trying to learn each others' languages.

3) Karate Kid and Trolls World Tour both have characters who do a "pinky swear."

4) Subtitles were a consideration in the way I watched, or whether I watched, three of the candidates for this marathon.

5) Kevin Costner is the director and star of Dances With Wolves. He also appeared in the movie Swing Vote, which is, along with Swing Time, one of only three movies I've seen that start with the word Swing. (Okay, that's pretty flimsy.)

6) Both Event Horizon and Swing Time feature characters who gouge out their own eyes after travelling to another dimension.

Okay, I think that's about enough for today.

Inexplicable things

You've noticed Netflix's new Top 10 feature, haven't you?

Of course you have. Whenever something new happens with Netflix, you notice it, because you're always on Netflix. Especially right now.

When Netflix finally allowed you the ability to keep trailers from playing automatically when you were scrolling through the titles, boy did you notice it. That was annoying as hell. So of course you'd notice when they started telling you the ten most popular things people are watching -- today, this week, whatever it is -- on Netflix. How else would you know that Tiger King is still king?

To be honest, though, I don't usually scan the list. It's mostly TV shows that, in truth, I don't have that much interest in watching. They might be good, or they might just be something new that Netflix is promoting the shit out of. I've got other TV shows I need to catch up on.

Right now, in Australia, there's only one movie on there, Coffee & Kareem. See above note about promoting the shit out of something. Or, it's a sign of just how desperate people are to watch some new movie, any new movie. And this is the newest Netflix has released.

Wait, that's not right. Coffee & Kareem is not the only movie on that list. There's one other movie on there. What's that right at the end of the list?

Is that the 2003 flop Cat in the Hat?

It is. And for this I have no explanation.

I didn't doctor up the above image. I promise. Sometimes I don't have things to talk about on this blog -- not lately, but sometimes. But I would never stoop to doctoring images just to give myself material.

But it's so damn odd to see this movie there that my doctoring the image would be one of the real explanations you'd have to consider.

Now, I should tell you right away that I just happened to watch Cat in the Hat for the first time back in February, when I was away at a holiday house for the weekend and that was one of the movies they had. I should also tell you that I actually enjoyed it. It was so much better than I expected it to be, and it looked great, thanks in part to future great cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, who was probably already great then except I hadn't heard of him yet.

But just because I enjoyed a movie most people thought was a travesty, a movie that would have been destined for the cinematic scrap heap except that people still reference it as an epic flop, doesn't make me any less surprised to see it embraced by any statistically significant population of people as measured on Netflix, especially 17 years after it was released in theaters.

It's possible it's a new release on Netflix, but that wouldn't even begin to account for this phenomenon.

You might say that it's all the parents desperate to find something for their kids, who are unexpectedly trapped inside all the time now. That might explain it if, you know, Cat in the Hat were the only child-centric movie on Netflix. But the Netflix children's area is just as bursting with content as any other part of the site.

If I were forced at gunpoint to produce some flimsy explanation, I guess I would venture this: There was recently that Green Eggs & Ham show on Netflix, and critics were really fond of it, so I assume a fair number of Netflix subscribers watched it. This would, I guess, be an attempt to find similar material, as Cat in the Hat would be one of Dr. Seuss' other most recognizable titles. But it's not like Cat in the Hat is even the only other Dr. Seuss property available out there, not by a long shot. It does, at the moment, appear to be the only other one available on Netflix.

I did a little googling to see if I could find anything in the news that would explain it, but I gave up pretty quickly upon getting no relevant results. Netflix is notoriously tight-lipped about the way it does things. A listing of the top ten was pretty unlike them in the first place; an explanation for that listing, almost certainly a bridge too far.

Then again, Netflix may be just as flummoxed as I am. They are just reporting their actual statistics, one would assume.

I mean, I'd be surprised if Cat in the Hat were even in the top ten of children's entertainment, but this is all of Netflix. Like, Tiger King is on one end of that list, and Cat in the Hat is on the other. People that desperate for more content about big cats after finishing the adventures of Joe Exotic?

Maybe the simplest explanation is the one that's actually true. In all times -- pandemic or otherwise -- people are interested in content that, in some way, relates to what they are going through. Maybe a movie where kids are cooped up in a house, trying to find ways to entertain themselves and squelch their boredom, is really speaking to people right now.

I sure as hell know it's speaking to me.