Easily avoiding "strong nudity, strong sex scenes"

I saw a very compelling movie last night about a dangerous loner in the age of social influencers and Russian bots, called The Hater. It's Polish. It just debuted on Netflix on Wednesday, and I'll be reviewing it. In fact, I may have already by the time you read this.

As it started, though, the 13-year-old kid in me got a little excited when I saw Netflix warn us that the movie contained "strong nudity, strong sex scenes."

When I saw what it was, I had to laugh -- and write this post.

Oh, it was strong nudity and strong sex alright. But it could have been lifted right out and probably made the film far less problematic -- at least if it were playing in regular theaters, rather than Netflix.

So I should say that of course I'm not opposed to "strong nudity, strong sex scenes" in a film, if it really needs it. Maybe even sometimes if it doesn't really need it. But when it really doesn't need it, it's just silly.

So at one point during the movie, the main character is breaking into a location -- it isn't necessary to explain what location, since this post isn't about the plot. The security guard has unexpectedly returned to his post, and the interloper has gotten stuck in the very same room with him. The interloper recedes into the shadows to see what will happen.

What will happen is the security guard starts watching porn. As you do.

And it's realistic porn. In other words, for about three seconds, you see a penis being inserted into a vagina, in the doggy style position if you must know. It's not the main image on screen, as you see it over the guard's shoulder as the character would, but it's clearly visible and there's no mistaking what's going on.

Did you really need that much verisimilitude, director Jan Komasa?

Movies have been showing characters watching porn for decades, but they don't have to actually, you know, show porn. You can play some sounds of characters in the throes of ecstasy and then just show their upper bodies. That communicates what's going on well enough. You can even get away with it in a PG movie by not showing any nudity, and the audience is still well aware what is happening.

But no, Jan Komasa thought that a throwaway scene in his movie would be made that much more, I don't know, realistic if you saw that penis going into that vagina.

It seems likely to be the first time a penis has ever gone into a vagina on Netflix. There may have been another instance, but I'm hard-pressed to imagine what it might have been. Did In the Realm of the Senses ever play on Netflix?

I almost wonder if Komasa did it as a gag, on a dare from his friends to see if he could get away with it. "Okay, Jan, you've got the power. You're going to put porn on Netflix."

Because if I were a 13-year-old boy, I'd be all over the "back ten seconds" button on that one.

Abandoning the normal

One of the things I've liked so much about the four Hirokazu Kore-eda movies I've seen is that they focus on normal people, dealing with a heightened sense of normal life.

As the Japanese master has made his first non-Japanese language film, he's made a change in his subject matter as well, and not a welcome one.

Instead of normal people dealing with heightened reality, it's famous people ruminating on the banal. 

The Truth is in French with a little bit of English -- they don't make Ethan Hawke work too hard, so his scenes are mostly English. That itself is not the problem with the movie, as other great international directors, such as Bong Joon-ho and Asghar Farhadi, have made movies outside their native tongue with impeccable results. There's no reason to think Kore-eda shouldn't be capable of the same. 

No, it's that by making the characters celebrities -- Catherine Deneuve a multi-Cesar winning actress, Hawke a TV actor -- Kore-eda has decided he no longer cares about the travails of ordinary people.

In the past, I've been likely to dub Kore-eda the modern-day successor to Yasujiro Ozu, as his films are replete with the dynamics and sometimes heartbreaking betrayals of unremarkable Japanese families. Sometimes there would be a high-concept plot -- like the infants switched at birth story of Like Father, Like Son -- but it was always normal people that these high-concept plots happened to. Another example of this would be the non-biological "family" of grifters in Shoplifters.

The basic humility of the characters was something I cherished. The other two films of his I've seen -- After the Storm and Our Little Sister -- deal especially in these characters' core modesty. They have hopes and dreams like everyone, but they aren't attention seekers.

Deneuve's character is like the embodiment of the polar opposite of everything Kore-eda has previously stood for. She's vain, self-centered, jealous of the attention received by others. She lives her life on the stage.

Hawke has more of that modesty going for him, but there's something so insubstantial about his character, who really is just a hanger-on at the periphery of this story, that one wonders why he's even really in it. He's the husband of Juliette Binoche's character, who is Deneuve's daughter and the only unfamous one of the three. But he's so free and easy and a goofy dad that it's almost like he's in the movie as a light parody of Americans.

Deneuve, meanwhile, does that thing that everyone does in movies about fading greats, where she looks out of the corner of her eyes at people who represent threats to her, when she's not looking down her nose at them..

I'm just not that interested in yet another story about an actress (or actor, it doesn't have to be an actress but it usually is) who is nearing the end of her career and is ungracefully accepting her faded glory. There's something fatally solipsistic about it. I suppose all movies about aging are solipsistic in a way, but when it relates to a person who seems to have been self-centered even when she was a young woman, it feels even more self-indulgent.

I guess I just don't understand why this subject interested Kore-eda. I can see why he wanted to work with these actors, all of whom are or have been brilliant, but I don't see why this particular story needed to be told. And if you've got one famous person in it, it feels like you're just doubling down by making another of the main characters famous as well. It start to seem more like an exercise in glamorous, movie industry navel-gazing than a story of something true and real that we might all encounter in our everyday lives

In the end I liked enough about The Truth to give it a marginal recommendation if anyone were to ask me -- three stars out of five. But you can see how this is a disappointment by Kore-eda's standards, as he's previously received five stars (Like Father, Like Son), four-and-a-half stars (Shoplifters), four stars (After the Storm) and three-and-a-half stars (Our Little Sister) from me. If he's going to keep up this pattern of having each film earn a different star rating from me, I don't like where things are going to go from here.

But he shouldn't, as Kore-eda is a good filmmaker -- a great one, even. But even great filmmakers sometimes abandon their core artistic preoccupations at their peril, and I just don't want to see it happen for this guy. 

Best poster of the year

I have no idea what this movie is about or even if it is any good. In fact, I've only just learned of its existence within the last 15 minutes. (I do know The Rental was directed by Dave Franco, which is interesting if not inherently promising in and of itself.)

But I just had to race to The Audient to show you this awesome poster.

My guess is that this is more of an abstract interpretation of the movie and its themes than something that might actually happen in it. The house is probably not upside down and probably no one falls out of its upside down window.

But man, I can't take my eyes off this imagine.

Anyway, I just thought I would let you know.

A Field of Dreams fall from grace

My "get psyched for the baseball season" movie came just a wee bit later than usual this year.

That's right, after a delay of nearly four months from COVID-19, baseball players across the land are going to start hitting balls into empty stands just a little more than 24 hours from now. We'll see how long they keep doing that, but I'm remaining optimistic for now.

And so it was that my long-delayed rewatch of Field of Dreams could finally commence on Tuesday night.

Long-delayed within 2020, but also long-delayed within the scope of my life. My records don't go back far enough to be sure about this, but I'd say it has been at least 25 years, and possibly closer to 30, since I've seen this movie. I'd say I probably saw it three times within the first five years it existed (that would be 1989 to 1994), but since then, nada.

The reason that's so strange is that I think so highly of it. It is currently ranked 51st out of more than 5,000 films on my Flickchart. Scanning the titles that are ahead of it, I can say with certainty that I've seen all of them more recently than Field of Dreams, and some of them as many as six or seven times in that span. You have to go all the way down to Malcolm X at 76 to find a film I haven't seen since the last time I saw Field of Dreams, and the only reason for that is that I rarely feel like I have a three-hour viewing of Malcolm X in me -- so rarely, in fact, that I have still only seen it that one time. (Had a pretty powerful effect on me, though, to make my top 100.)

I have no fear of excessive running times to explain my Dreams drought, nor any real concern that I would like it any less well this time than I had on my previous viewings.

Well, maybe I should have been fearing that second possibility after all.

Shock of shocks, horror of horrors, I didn't really like Field of Dreams on this viewing.

How could that be? Isn't this The Greatest Baseball Movie of All Time?

Well, others would surely dispute you on that. You'd hear other candidates like Eight Men Out (which I love) and The Natural (WHICH I STILL HAVEN'T SEEN!!) in that discussion. But most people would have Field of Dreams at least in their top three, wouldn't they?

Well, not me. Not anymore.

I don't think it's possible to accurately convey to you how surprised I am about this, but Field of Dreams dropped hard in my estimation when I watched it this time. I'm scared to re-rank it on Flickchart because I don't dare ask myself how far it might fall.

I think part of the problem is that this is a crazy story full of crazy people.

No, I'm not talking about the type of "crazy person" who drinks too much and jumps from a roof into a swimming pool at a party. I'm talking about actually, clinically insane people.

You know it's worrisome when you watch Field of Dreams and you side with a snivelling Timothy Busfield.

Busfield plays the brother-in-law of Kevin Costner's Ray Kinsella, and the movie is beyond eager for you to boo him. He's always shaking his head in frustration and disbelieving the gall of Ray and his family. If he had a moustache he'd twirl it.

But you know what? Busfield is right.

Because Ray Kinsella shouldn't mow down a patch of his best crop to build a baseball field, not to mention one with hundred-foot tall, stadium-quality lights. He shouldn't risk the financial future of his family on an eccentric whim, even if it looks awfully nice next to that cornfield.

Especially if it's because a disembodied voice told him to.

The phrase "If you build it, he will come" has been parodied in a number of settings over the years, but always lovingly so. We seemed to be unified in our love for Field of Dreams when it first came out and was nominated for best picture. If a voice told Kevin Costner to build a baseball field, we thought that was surely something he should listen to. Screw that stupid Timothy Busfield and his, you know, tendency to disbelieve in the supernatural.

But I don't think the building the field part was even really what turned me so much against this movie.

I started to get a bit tetchy when Shoeless Joe Jackson (Ray Liotta) just appears in the field one day. It isn't a life-defining moment for them, though. It's like they were expecting him to materialize and would have been surprised if he hadn't. "He came to life. Good for him." The three family members just give each other these knowing looks, which seem to say, "See? If you believe in ghosts, they will just show up. Good for us for believing in ghosts. We're the good guys here."

So next in the plot, after a random PTA meeting in which Amy Madigan shouts down Lee Garlington for her wicked witchy desire to burn books, Ray decides he needs to help a 60s radical and Pulitzer Prize winning author with a baseball bucket list he didn't know he had. So again, acting on something between eccentricity and insanity, he decides he has to drive to Boston to take Terrence Mann (James Earl Jones) to a baseball game between the Boston Red Sox and the Oakland A's. This particular game, you would assume, though how Ray knows that is anybody's guess. One wonders if Lee Garlington had been talking about burning the books of Charles Dickens instead, whether Ray would have decided he had to go back in time to take Dickens to a baseball game instead of Terrence Mann. Don't laugh, because time travel will be proven possible in just a few scenes.

So they go to this baseball game, where I was immediately bothered by some stupid details that might only bother a person who really knows baseball. As Ray and Terrence sit in the stands, watching the game, a clock at Fenway Park shows that it is 10:32 p.m. Given that most baseball games start at 7, this would have to be the very end of the game, if not extra innings. Yet when the voice speaks to Ray again -- "Go the distance" this time -- he writes the phrase on his scorebook, in the empty space where innings upon innings of a box score should have been kept. What, did Ray just write the players' names in and then decide not to keep score?

Okay, so they also get the message flashing up on the scoreboard about the lifetime stats of Archibald "Moonlight" Graham, who played in only a single game and didn't even get an at-bat. One would assume they needed to come to this particular game, because this message was only going to flash on the scoreboard once, so they better be there to see it. Why it would come up during a random game between two teams who are not even division rivals, and who do not factor in to Ray's or Terrence's personal history with baseball, is, again, anybody's guess.

So despite giving no outward reaction whatsoever, Terrence later admits he also saw the message and heard the voice, and switches from being annoyed and perplexed by Ray to deciding that they need to go to Moonlight Graham's home town in Minnesota together. Although I can't be certain about this, the movie makes it appear that they just start driving directly from the game, without even Terrence having time to go home to pack a suitcase.

When they get to Minnesota, they find out that shit, Graham has been dead for 16 years. Life sucked before the internet. But this is not going to stop Ray. And suddenly he walks into a time warp back to 1972, a time period that is laboriously established through would-be blow-your-mind moments. Seeing that The Godfather is playing on the local theater marquee is not enough. Ray has to go dust some dirt off a license plate to see that it expires in 1972.

And look! There's Archibald Graham!

Okay so then they decide they finally need to return to Iowa. Mann is coming. I guess he believed Ray's whole "I travelled back to 1972 and talked to an old Archibald Graham" story.

As they are approaching the house, they pick up a hitchhiker. Why this hitchhiker? Does Ray often pick up hitchhikers? Good thing they did because this is also Archibald Graham, only younger. Again, knowing glances between Terrence and Ray, like this is exactly what they were expecting to happen, even though they were not following any particular series of rules established by this world, because there are no rules established by this world.

The young Graham gets his own bucket list dream of playing with Jackson and a bunch of other players from the teens and 20s. Until the moment when Mean Old Busfield shows up again and somehow manages to knock Ray's daughter off the bleachers, where she appears to be dead.

Good thing there's a doctor on hand! Only, Graham isn't a doctor yet, and he has to step off the field and become an old man in order to help her. His sage medical advice? That the girl is choking on a hot dog and someone needs to whack her back. How he determined that is unclear, as she's just lying there like some corpse. See how mean Mean Old Busfield is?

Of course, now Mean Old Busfield becomes Good Old Busfield as he's just seen a 70-year-old doctor materialize from a baseball field where he had previously not see any baseball players, because he did not "believe" I guess. But now he can see the baseball players. But how did a doctor emerge from the baseball players? Ray just grins. He will explain later.

But now because he's become an old ghost, Young Ghost Graham can no longer play ghost baseball and he has to disappear into the never never forever.

So it's time for all the other players to leave for the night, and also for Terrence to leave, because they have invited him into the corn. Is Terrence worried he's going to die? Apparently not. I mean, he can now, because he went to that game between the Red Sox and A's that he left early in a grumpy mood -- even though 10:32 is not early, as previously discussed. His bucket list is now complete.

But then Ray recognizes that the catcher is his father. Did his father play baseball? I didn't think so. I thought he was just a baseball fan. Anyway.

So now it's the big emotional moment that always killed me when I was younger. Ray gets to have one last throw with his dad. Who wouldn't get choked up by that?

Except on this viewing I realized we have no idea why this is so important to Ray. In the opening narration, Ray mentions that his father was old when he had him and that they were a bit distant, but I guess baseball was something they had in common. But we don't really learn why they were distant or what the nature of the distance was. In fact, I was struck with the realization that we don't really know anything about these characters beyond the basic outline of the things that happen in this story. AND MOST OF THOSE THINGS ARE CRAZY.

As they are playing catch, like literally a thousand cars drive up to Ray's baseball field. I guess these poor hypnotized people are supposed to fork over money to Ray so his family won't go bankrupt. But isn't that kind of weird? Hypnotizing people into paying you money? And now, as a friend I was discussing this with today pointed out, now these thousands of people all know that ghosts exist? Isn't there a bit of a problem with this?

I was shocked by just how incredibly hokey and just plain ridiculous this whole thing is. And though I feel like a part of my childhood has been killed, I think it's important to know these things, to see the truth in what a movie is really doing and what it really has to offer. Absurd profundities that don't follow rules and have only a flimsy connection to each other, underscored by plaintive piano any time some new absurd profundity occurs, does not a movie make.

I suppose it's in keeping with 2020 that I watched a movie to get me excited for the baseball season, and it ended up making me seriously dislike a movie I thought I loved.

However, it did help me in one way. More than once, when it was the end of March and pitchers were about to throw their first pitches of the new season, I watched another baseball movie from 1989, Major League, to whet my appetite even further for the coming season. If you had asked me to compare Major League and Field of Dreams, I would have said I love Major League, but it couldn't hold a candle to Field of Dreams.

Now I know I got that backward. And that I don't love one of these movies at all.

Was I under some kind of hypnosis back then, like the people summoned to that field in Iowa? Or was the amount that Amy Madigan reminded me of a girl I had a crush on at the time a stronger factor in my feelings about this movie than I thought?

I kind of wish I had gone another 25 years before I saw Field of Dreams again.

The good news?

Baseball will, indeed, soon start in 2020, however delayed, however long it lasts. And that does make me believe.

Play ball.

Movies I have a stake in

People with careers in the film industry, or even tangential to it, often find themselves in the position of awaiting the release of movies they had some involvement in. My wife is one such person, as she has approved funding for movies, script-edited movies, even produced one feature.

As a film critic, though, I rarely feel like I can claim direct involvement with an upcoming release, or even indirect involvement. I'm looking at things after they're completed, not before they're started.

There have been a few possible exceptions, and one of them I watched on Friday night.

The new Australian horror Relic -- available on IFC Midnight in the U.S., and debuting here on the streaming service Stan -- is directed by first-time feature director Natalie Erika James. She's been an upcoming talent we've been buzzing about for a couple years here in Australia.

As many debut horror movies are, Relic is a feature-length expansion of a short film James directed, called Creswick. Creswick is what made me bubble up with excitement about what James has to offer the film world.

I may not have talked about this on the site before, but ReelGood, the website I write for and now run, has a very successful annual film festival associated with it. I can call it "very successful" without sounding immodest because I have almost nothing to do with it. It was the brainchild of the site's creator, my former editor who handed me the reins to the site earlier this year. He'll return to writing at some point, but is done, at least for now, with both running the site and running the festival.

The festival runs on a Saturday in March each year, and it showcases the best in Australian short films. About 30 films play over the course of the day, a couple times a day, in packages of three or four per hour time slot. At first I wasn't sure what I thought about this format. Although I like any opportunity to see young filmmakers strut their stuff, I don't watch as many short films as I should, which is partly due to a fundamental lack of interest in short-form filmmaking. And besides, when I was new to the site and didn't know anybody, the festival left me sometimes half an hour or more between the end of one screening session and the start of the next -- way too long to shuffle about awkwardly and try to figure out who to talk to while we all congregated in the social spaces of the venue. Pretending to be lost in my phone helped.

Anyway, after a year or two I joined the panel of judges who voted on the festival winners, a position I held for, I think, two years. They didn't eject me from the position, it's just that they had a number of guys who were much more directly involved with the running of the festival who eventually assumed those responsibilities. (Though I do wonder if the fact that I gave top honors to a film no one else liked, in my last year on the panel, had anything to do with it.)

The first year, James' film Creswick was one of the films we considered for the top prize. It's a nine-minute horror short that looks gorgeous and is incredibly creepy. If you want to see how good it is, it's available on YouTube. Check it out here.

The film won top honors at the festival that year, thanks in part to my voting it #1. I wasn't the only one to cast a #1 vote, but without any one of us giving it our top honors, another film might have claimed those honors instead.

Winning the ReelGood Film Festival's top prize certainly was not the thing that vaulted Natalie Erika James into international prominence, brought her funding for Relic, and allowed it to play at this year's Sundance Film Festival. But I like to think it played some small, unquantifiable role.

So when I realized very belatedly, only about a week ago, that Relic was set to debut on Stan, a service to which we already subscribed, I got very excited. Sooner than I imagined, I'd get to see what the young filmmaker I'd championed could do at feature length. I was prepared to be blown away.

Oops.

I didn't like the movie! So sad.

It pains me to no end to write this, but it's true. I'm really glad I suggested that our horror critic review the movie instead of me, because now that I've seen it, I just couldn't bring myself to trash this movie after being so hopeful about it from the short. Besides, it feels especially cruel to have to take down homegrown talent on the site. (I don't worry about it so much here, as I don't have nearly as big of an audience.) We wouldn't compromise our impartiality for the sake of Australian filmmakers, and I never consciously boost my rating or evaluation of a movie based on such considerations. But let's just say it feels much more positive all around when we like the movies made by Australians and get to champion them.

Fortunately, that will be the case here. Our horror critic appears to have loved the movie. Although he has not submitted me his review yet, he did say it was "really great" and "quite a watch."

I'll be curious to see what he thought were its strengths, because to me, it was derivative, half-baked prestige horror without character development or a point. That one sentence is as cruel as I care to be, in the off chance that my "protege" (ha), Natalie, does in fact read this. However, I also realize that if you have not seen Creswick, you have different expectations coming in.

I will say that Relic, which seems like it's being well received in general (a whopping 91% on Rotten Tomatoes), does nothing to tarnish my optimism about James' career. This is still the person who utterly wowed me with Creswick.

I just think that maybe Creswick was not well suited to being expanded to feature length, though I should say that the characters are different, and it's not clear until later in the movie that it is definitely an expanded version of that film. The key to Creswick is its mood and a sense of mystery that is perfect at nine minutes. You need more at 90 minutes, and Relic just doesn't have it.

I suspect that making a longer version of your own short film can be constraining, even if we think it creates the ultimate opportunity to "write what you know." Suddenly you are trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. Better, maybe, if you just start fresh with a story that was always meant to be feature length.

Anyway, my stake in Natalie Erika James has, unfortunately, left me disappointed for the moment. But since it seems to be pleasing other people, James will get to make more movies, and I can't wait to see what she does next.

And if she blossoms into the visionary horror director I know she can be, I can still say -- if I want to delude myself just a little bit -- that I played some small role in it.

Forcing interest that isn't there

I keep looking at this poster and I keep not wanting to see this movie.

Am I wrong about this? Please tell me I'm wrong.

It's directed by Judd Apatow, so wanting to see it should not even be a question. I mean, I don't love everything Apatow has done. I only feel truly affectionately toward less than half of the five movies he's directed. Funny People and Trainwreck were pretty much misses for me, and while I like This is 40 more than most people, it's not what you would call great. Really, I'm hanging on to The 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up, 13 years after the latter was released.

But considering the size of his footprint on comedies made in the last 20 years, when you factor in his writing and producing, I am all about being a Judd Apatow completist. Which means watching this movie.

But I just can't get past this poster.

I know I'm not supposed to "like" the character played by Pete Davidson, as he seems to be the flawed protagonist who has fronted every Apatow movie to date. I figured, though, that I should at least be willing to spend two hours and 30 minutes with him, which is pretty much the standard length of an Apatow comedy. (This one clocks in at "only" 136 minutes.)

Honestly, I can't see that happening. I mean, look at that guy.

It doesn't help that I'm fresh off a screening of one of Davidson's other movies from 2020, The Jesus Rolls, which was actually shot in 2016 but is only just this year slithering its way into our living rooms. It was my worst movie of 2020 so far until it was surpassed only two days later by Fatal Affair, which I wrote about yesterday. And though Davidson's role was pretty small in it, it did not help the movie.

I'd be able to kick the can down the road on this one if it weren't for the fact that I find myself needing to make a decision on it right now.

See, the Australian theatrical release of The King of Staten Island was on Thursday. That doesn't mean squat here in Victoria, where theaters are closed as we endure another lockdown. But there are five other states in Australia, none of which have had the same recent spike in coronavirus numbers, and all of which have their theaters still open.

Although it's staffed in Victoria, the website I write for and now run is not specifically billed as a Victorian website. It's not even specifically billed as an Australian website, though it does have a ".au" at the end, which is a dead giveaway. And homegrown talent has been interviewed on this site in the past, as well as local film festivals hyped.

If I wait until the movie is available in Victoria for my Victorian readers, it would be an acknowledgement that I really am here to serve Victorians at the expense of other Australians. I needn't do that, even if practicalities about where myself and my writers are located do dictate certain things we cover.

Now, it wouldn't be an issue if I simply had no access to this movie. That would just be that. I sometimes get advanced screeners, but not in this case. I'd have to wait until it was available in Victorian cinemas if I wanted to review it at all.

But my U.S. iTunes account does give me access to it. If I so choose, I can pony up for a rental and review it from that.

And when I say "pony up," I mean "pony up." This movie is priced at the premium rental price, a price I have only previously paid for Trolls World Tour -- and obviously you can understand why that would be the exception. (Ha, it was for my kids, and see here for my tale of buyer's remorse.)

I had planned to spend $19.99 on other things, but had not yet pulled the trigger. Scoob didn't seem like my best next opportunity, I gotta be honest.

And I don't think The King of Staten Island does either. I mean, look at that guy.

But if I do want to review it on my site, now is the time, and in fact, this weekend is the time, so I can get the review up next week, after less than a week has passed since it opened. Too much longer and it starts to go stale.

And I do like having a strong natural "in" on a potential review, that being Judd Apatow behind the camera. It can be a big help to have someone like Apatow involved with a movie, as it gives you a jumping off point for your review, even if nothing else is coming to mind.

Truth be told, I should probably give "that guy" another chance. Just because Pete Davidson appears to be playing a total douche here -- I'm not judging the tattoos, I'm judging the shirtlessness and outstretched "are you not entertained?" arms -- it doesn't mean that he is a douche, or that it's not a good performance. It might be nice to be a bit delicate with him, anyway, as he made headlines in late 2018 for an Instagram post about contemplating suicide that prompted the NYC police to do a wellness check on him. Maybe if he's a success, some of those thoughts will subside.

I guess you'll be able to tell from my Most Recently Watched section to the right what I decided.

Tonight's probably the night, if any.

Movie titles I can't believe they still use

Okay, most movie titles only actually get used once, or at most, a half dozen times.

But titles like the movie I saw last night should have been played out 25 years ago.

That was Fatal Affair, and it's only the third movie I have given a 1/10 since I started reviewing movies for ReelGood back at the end of 2014. (The other two were Yoga Hosers and Transformers: The Last Knight.) You can read all the bile I spewed at it here.

It reminds me of the actual parody movie made by the late great Carl Reiner, which was called Fatal Instinct, and was an obvious hybrid of Fatal Attraction and Basic Instinct. That parody was made in 1993, which gives you some idea how long ago these types of titles were already considered ridiculous. Unfortunately, Fatal Affair is not a parody. It's just about as earnest as they come.

(R.I.P. Mr. Reiner. I'm sorry you are not getting your own "in memoriam" post from me. You certainly deserve one.)

If Fatal Affair were a one-off, I could see it just being a mistake somebody made. But it seems like movies with these titles might be making a comeback, or at least, somebody thinks they could be, enough to greenlight similar titles into the marketplace.

Earlier this year I considered reviewing another Netflix movie called Dangerous Lies. Here's the poster for that:

I would have actually reviewed it except that Netflix or other sources were releasing other movies I was reviewing around the same time, and since I typically don't exceed more than three per week (and no longer think a movie is "fresh enough" to review if I don't get to it within the first week to ten days), it slipped through the cracks.

I don't know whether it also would have warranted a 1/10, but the title certainly does. How on earth would you expect to remember what this movie was about three weeks after seeing it, let alone three years?

But we're still not done.

In researching my review of Fatal Affair, I determined that its director, Peter Sullivan, directed a similar erotic thriller that came to Netflix just last year. Here is the poster for that one:

Secret Obsession? Are you kidding me?

If the erotic thriller itself were not enough of an anachronism in 2020, you'd think that titles as generic and forgettable as this would be.

I really hope it's not ushering in a full-on 90's nostalgia wave. I'm sure 90's nostalgia is already here in some respects, though I haven't fully noticed it yet. But maybe I'm starting to.

It's not like I don't want to remember the 90's -- I really liked that decade. I was in college. Clinton was president for most of it.

But if this is what the 90's have to offer to us in terms of nostalgia ... well, I'll take the 80's any day instead.

The most visible Invisible

Not a lot of people have seen a lot of movies in 2020.

Me, I'm the exception. I'm already at almost 50 movies released this year. But I'm sure not everyone is scraping up every single new piece of garbage released by Netflix like I am. (Actually, Netflix is having a pretty good year, when you come right down to it.)

Still, I don't know how there can be anybody who hasn't yet seen The Invisible Man.

Okay, my wife is one. But she doesn't get out to the movies very much these days.

She had been planning to, until we went into lockdown here again in Melbourne, and cinemas, at least in the city, have closed again for at least the next month. When they first opened back on June 22nd, though, she was scheduled to go within the next few days, but it never quite happened.

But she doesn't need to go to the theater to see The Invisible Man. It's available on iTunes. It's available OnDemand. I even saw the BluRay available in the store.

You might say that The Invisible Man is the movie of 2020 so far. It's ubiquitous, despite being Invisible. 

Something tells me that when the movies open again here, cinema proprietors will again try The Invisible Man, for all the people who skipped all its releases on other platforms.

I guess when I started writing this post, I thought I had more of a point than I ultimately had. But I guess my point really is that this movie is emblematic of what we're going through this year. Almost never these days do you see a movie available for rental/streaming/DVD before it leaves theaters, but because the theater owners are trying to find every conceivable way of wooing patrons without the benefit of new movies to offer them, The Invisible Man is still available months after it became available in your own living room.

The same may be true for Bloodshot, but, well, no one really cares about that movie.

But it's also a candidate for movie of the year, if you consider how bloodshot our eyes are from all this quarantine screen time.

A grudge against period-appropriate set design

I bet I know what Nicolas Pesce, who wrote and directed the latest Grudge remake, thought when he set out to make it:

"I saw The Conjuring, and everything had this very old-fashioned look. That was really scary. Let's do that!"

Well, that made sense for The Conjuring, as it was set in 1971.

The Grudge, on the other hand, is set in the years 2004, 2005 and 2006. (And continues to jump between them in ways that are really distracting, which is just one of the faults of this really terrible movie.)

It makes no sense to have every third car you see look like this:

Or this:

Or this:

Yes, those are three actual cars driven in this movie, by three different main characters. Wha?

And they were only the ones I could find quickly by going back through the movie. There was also an old school station wagon in there, as well as a number of others parked on the street in the background of various shots.

Now, if it were a conscious decision to make all the cars date from the 1960s or 1970s, that would be one thing, but there are a smattering of new cars in there as well, including the one driven by Jacki Weaver's assisted suicide compassionate carer.

But it wasn't just the cars. If I could be bothered to continue scrolling through this movie, I could also show you countless phones with those old curly cords coming out of them, countless cassette tapes, a TV set into its own side paneling with big chunky push buttons on the front to change channel and turn up the volume, and any amount of retro furniture, wallpaper and lamps. The characters even smoke cigarettes in coffee shops.

I get it. I know cell phones are not as artistically pleasing as rotary phones. (The film does have exactly one cell phone, and that itself seems to be a period appropriate flip phone.)

But when you lacquer your film with so much retro art direction that is so clearly out of sync with the time period, people like me take notice. Might as well just set the movie in the 1970s and make it an American prequel to the originating events in Japan. (Foolishly, the movie insists on picking up shortly after the events of the original, with a different character returning from Tokyo to bring this grudge back to the U.S.)

In fact, you either set the movie in the 1970s or you set it today. Two thousand four through two thousand six? You are just asking us to nitpick, especially if most of your stylings are from 30 years earlier.

To be honest, though, it probably helped me get through this hapless succession of jump scares to have something other than the horror to focus on.

My first viewing of Mark Poppins

No, that is not a typo.

Not by me, at least.

It's not a typo that I've never seen Mary Poppins, nor is it a typo that I wrote Mark Poppins.

But there was a typo that made the subject of this post possible.

We're still in the little coastal town of Lakes Entrance until tomorrow -- we extended our stay through the weekend, to avoid lockdown back in Melbourne -- and so we've now made our second trip to the little cinema here.

And with the absence of new movies getting released, the little theater here has been mixing in "classics" -- both genuine and, er, recent -- with movies that got released earlier in 2020 (like what we saw on Monday, Sonic the Hedgehog). These have included the likes of Moulin Rouge, Bohemian Rhapsody and Death at a Funeral.

As well as, yes, Mark Poppins.

Bless their hearts, like many small businesses, they do not get all the details right, nor know how to proofread.

When we first decided to stay an extra four night, I immediately tried to figure out if we could go to the cinema again, and checked their website for what lay ahead. That was four days ago. They still have not fixed the typo, which reads, yes, Mark Poppins.

Actually it says "Mark Poppins (the original)", not to be confused with Mark Poppins Returns from two years ago. I'd say that the B-movie ripoff of Mary Poppins, about Mary's ne'er do well brother, would be quite original indeed.

Okay, I will now leave off teasing this sweet little theater with its very nice staff, and its squash courts.

The fact that Mary Poppins was playing was fortuitous for a number of reasons. First off, as coincidences in my viewing schedule continue to abound, I have been assigned this movie as my monthly selection in Flickchart Friends Favorites Fiesta, in which I am matched up with another person in the group, and watch their highest ranked movie on Flickchart that I have never seen. Informally, I consider Mary Poppins just about the most prominent movie I have never seen -- running neck and neck with the original King Kong -- so I was overjoyed to get this person's chart randomly assigned to me this month. Especially since I've already seen the sequel to Mary Poppins, my chronic oversight seriously needed to be corrected. Never did I dream I'd have the chance to watch it on the big screen.

Then there's the fact that my kids had already seen (and liked) the sequel, so I had some built-in name recognition I could use to convince them to be excited about the viewing. My older son sometimes turns his nose up at movies that he thinks are old -- "from the 1980s or something" -- so I worried there was a chance he'd rebel once he saw the movie start. But my goal was to get them in the door and worry about that part later. Besides, when we were staying in a hotel after Christmas before boarding the ferry to return to Melbourne from Tasmania, we started watching a bit of The Sound of Music, knowing we'd have no chance to watch the whole thing. He was really interested, so I had reason to believe Mary Poppins might work for him as well.

Finally, the 1:15 Friday showtime was perfectly timed to our needs. Because we had decided to stay, my wife had some work commitments that she had otherwise expected to be home to handle. One of these was an all-day meeting on Friday, which she didn't expect to last all day, but which did end up running until after 2. So I had a plan to take my kids to a nearby adventure park -- where we did archery, go karts, laser tag and batting cages -- before rocking up to the little cinema/squash court in time for the movie. Which we only just did, as the credits started rolling as we were taking our seats.

I had been bracing all week for the plan not to work. But every time I mentioned going to the movie, wincing a little bit for an expected negative reaction, I got only tempered enthusiasm. The fact that treats would be part of the deal certainly helped. I love the fact that my kids are not too jaded yet to appreciate something like Mary Poppins, or to at least believe they will appreciate it.

And appreciate it they did, as did I.

The two hour and 20 minute running time was another one of my big fears -- either the kids would get too restless, or have to go to the toilet. The latter never happened. The former sort of did, but it didn't matter. You know why? Because we had the whole cinema to ourselves, and could stretch our legs whenever we wanted.

At first we confined ourselves to the seats we had selected, around the middle on the left. But about 20 or 30 minutes in, my six-year-old, who was on the aisle, wandered down to the front area, in front of the seats. My first instinct was to follow him down there and wrangle him. But before I even had the chance to rise from my seat, I thought, "Who cares? If it keeps him interested, and as long as he doesn't actually exit the theater, more power to him."

We all ended up shifting seats multiple times. In fact, we all ended up in the aisle at one point. I had my head resting against the cushion of a seat, and my body sprawled as comfortably as I could on the stairs. My younger one nestled into me at times and spent other times roving. My older one spent a lot of time in the very back row, and even sometimes behind it.

As we watched the magic unfold on the screen above, I'd hear little laughs and comments spasm out of them, such as when Mary pulls a whole coat rack out of her hand bag, or the characters float to the ceiling for their laughter-propelled tea party.

At one point my older son did ask how long I thought was left, but immediately made it clear it was not because he wanted it to be over. Having been able to leave my phone on due to the lack of other patrons, I knew it was more than an hour, but I told him 45 minutes. So even if he was rebelling a little against it, he wanted me not to think he was, which is great.

At the end, the older one was singing "Let's Go Fly a Kite" and running up and down the aisles, and the younger one was still dancing along to some of the earlier dance numbers.

Whew! What a good experience.

Although I myself prefer a bit of a more determined pace than Mary Poppins gives us, it is, of course, a lovely film, and Julie Andrews charms the socks off me.

Having seen the sequel, it definitely interested me to see how much was taken directly from the original. One of the things I thought was weirdest about Mary Poppins Returns was their naval commander neighbor (played by David Warner) who shoots a cannon off his roof every hour of the day. Watching this I of course discovered that that bit was taken directly from the original.

When I got home later, I read my review of Mary Poppins Returns to see how foolish I'd sounded when talking about it, given that I hadn't seen the original. Fortunately, I was shrewd enough to write around the direct comparisons to the original -- I never mentioned the oddity of the neighbor, for example -- so I came off okay.

Afterwards, when I dared to share some of the fears I'd had about taking them to the movie (its length, the year it was made) to see how much they'd been affected by them, I was glad to hear my nine-year-old admit that yes, it was "old school." But that was alright, because it was a "classic."

Good on him for an increasingly mature understanding of the history of this thing called cinema.

And good on me for finally crossing this undoubted classic off my unseen list.

Now, to look into funding for that story of Mary's ne'er do well brother ...

What Cop Land can tell us about the police

First off, I had to include this screen shot from the landing page (Cop Landing page?) on our streaming service Stan, rather than a poster for Cop Land, because of how funny I thought it was. For one, I don't think it's an actual still from the movie, or if it is, I don't remember it. It seems more like the actors laughing after a flubbed line. But whether it is or isn't, it gives the impression of a nice, harmonious movie about badge-wearing chums, when in fact, all three of these guys are set up in opposition to each other at one point or another during the narrative, and corruption runs deep. In other words, the mood of Cop Land is not captured in the slightest by this picture.

Secondly I want to tell you that I did not decide to cue up James Mangold's 1997 film on a random Thursday night on holiday to grapple with its portrayal of police, to help me better understand what's going on in the world in 2020. In fact, it had more to do with someone recently using a scene from Cop Land, punctuated by Robert De Niro telling Sylvester Stallone "You blew it!," to comment on a typically befuddling piece of news on Facebook. (I think it was related to John Bolton not doing anything sooner to counteract Trump, but at this point I can't remember -- there's just so many people reacting to so many befuddling actions taken by Trump.)

Thirdly, spoilers for Cop Land to follow.

As I started watching, I realized that Cop Land may have been ahead of its time in one sense, while being very behind it in others:

It posits that all cops are basically bad.

That's not actually how I feel about the police, but it's how a lot of people feel, and justifiably so. The "few bad apples" metaphor is no longer placating people. They've realized that most of them are bad, if not by their own actions then by covering up the misdeeds of others. And even if I feel that "most" is a strong word, I support this perspective because I'd like to see the whole system torn down and rebuilt from the ground up. (And just being the police reporter for a weekly newspaper in Rhode Island nearly 25 years ago is probably not reason enough for me to run to the defense of the good officers I knew back then.)

It was certainly interesting to watch Cop Land in 2020, as it starts out with our actual hero committing multiple crimes. That's the sheriff of the small (fictional) town of Garrison, New Jersey, which looks right over the Hudson at New York. He's played by Sylvester Stallone, and we first meet him extremely drunk at the local cop bar. "Cop bar" is probably redundant, since most of the residents of this town seem to be New York City police officers, who depend on Sheriff Freddy Heflin to look the other way when they speed, drive drunk and commit a hundred other minor or major felonies in town. But who is Freddy to talk? We first meet him opening the parking meter outside the bar so he can get more quarters to play the video game inside. He's then packed into his car by a couple of these corrupt NYC cops, even though he's had about five too many drinks to be driving. Predictably, he swerves to miss a deer and crashes into a tree.

As I said before, this is our protagonist, the guy whose behavior we are supposed to see as a model. After this unfortunate introduction, he does steadily turn into that guy.

But the rest of the police portrayals in this movie are problematic at the very least. Let's start out with the least problematic of these police.

We meet the two other cops in Garrison, the veteran (played by Noah Emmerich) and the newcomer (played by Janeane Garofalo). They are both basically good cops, and she is 100% good, doing everything by the book. But Deputy Cindy Betts up and quits when things get too hot in Garrison, returning to her old job in upstate New York. It's not cowardice that causes her to quit, but rather, a desire to return to police work that is not compromised by giving corrupt cops a break on all their infractions. It should be said, though, that she only comes to this decision when it actually starts seeming dangerous to do this job, which is not a good look for one of only two female officers we meet. (The other is played by Edie Falco, who works for the NYC bomb squad, and gives Ray Liotta's character the supplies he needs to torch his house for the insurance money.)

Emmerich's character is basically just a bit ineffectual. In fact, he chickens out when Freddy sticks his nose too far into affairs that he is repeatedly told don't concern him, and leaves Freddy's side when he starts fearing for his own safety. (He's got a pregnant wife, so we can allow him some latitude.)

Then we've got the IA officers, played by Robert De Niro and Malik Yoba. Yoba is the only vaguely sympathetic black character in the whole movie, but I'll return to that topic later on. As they work for internal affairs, their hands are clean, though I don't suppose that goes without saying. In fact, one character later on (I believe it was Harvey Keitel) explains that the only reason people join IA in the first place is because they get caught on the take, so they are given the choice of joining IA or going to jail. So we are given reason to suspect these two as well -- though of course, anything Keitel's Ray Donlan says should be taken with a grain of salt.

Then we get to the actual corrupt cops, and their degrees of corruption.

Sort of in the middle you have Liotta's Gary Figgis and Michael Rapaport's Murray Babitch. (This is truly an all-star cast, if you haven't figure that out yet.) Liotta only gets to be "in the middle" -- remember, he torched his house for the insurance money, and his girlfriend was unexpectedly caught inside -- because he lost his partner and kind of sidled into corruption that way. He does choose to do the right thing at a certain part of the narrative, but we can't forget his many crimes against humanity. Then there's Murray, who kind of wants to do the right thing and turn himself in after he shoots two young black men after they bump his car and threaten to shoot at him (even though they're only holding a "club," one of those devices we once used to lock our steering wheels). He shoots wildly rather out the window while he's driving, not execution style, so the shootings appear genuinely to be an "accident" (he could argue he was trying to stop the car rather than kill its occupants, I suppose). But his willingness to draw his gun makes him very problematic, as he had already drawn it previously that evening, outside the NYC bar where Robert Patrick's corrupt cop is seen vomiting. He probably thought it was some black guy instead, who could really hurt him. This guy had been ready to shoot someone all night. Even if it wouldn't have been his idea to have his death faked by Keitel pretending he jumped off the George Washington Bridge (which, strangely, had no cars on it other than these two), he's certainly grateful enough for it if it means he won't go to jail.

The really bad cops are played by Patrick, Keitel, John Spencer, Peter Berg and Arthur Nascarella. They are guilty of anything everything: taking bribes, planting evidence, murdering people, drunk driving, speeding. Not necessarily in that order of magnitude. In a more hilarious moment, Patrick tries to plant a machine gun in the car of the two dead black motorists, when the first cops arriving on the scene have already fully investigated the car for the gun Rapaport reported them having. (They're on the up and up, but since we barely get to know them, they aren't really worth mentioning.) It's an absurdly obvious attempt, but then again, Patrick was just vomiting outside that bar a few minutes ago. While most of these guys are "only" guilty of these transgressions, Berg's character is also cheating on his very sweet wife (Annabella Sciorra) with the not-very-sweet wife of Ray Donlan (Cathy Moriarity). (See, I told you everyone was in this.) He's also a violent drunk.

I remember at the time I first saw this, I found it bold and brazen that the film cast such a suspicious eye at such a venerable institution as the police. Don't forget, even with the Rodney King beatings only a few years in the past, people generally supported police officers and the work they did when this movie was released 23 years ago. You were far more likely to get dozens of movies each year in which cops were the uncomplicated heroes, who didn't even open parking meters to steal their quarters. So Cop Land seemed, indeed, quite a risky proposition for a studio to fund.

While it may have been ahead of its time in this regard, it's fallen way behind the times in another, and that was just one of the things that caused me to kind of turn my nose up at it on this viewing.

Simply put, almost all of the black characters in this movie are bad, or at the very least, disagreeable.

Let's start with the two black motorists who bump Rapaport. They are very clearly at fault for this. They bump him either intentionally, because who knows why, or because they are too incapacitated to drive, though it certainly seems more like the former than the latter. When Rapaport catches up to them, they have these exaggerated looks of being criminal punks, with a lot of dreadlocks and a nearly sociopathic indifference to the fact that they are dealing with a guy who is flashing his badge at them. They laugh at him, and this is when they point the club at him to pretend it's a gun. The movie basically gives Murray Babidge every excuse for acting as he did as a response, as he was dealing with people with whom you cannot negotiate.

The next black characters we see are two black motorists who are pulled over in Garrison by Emmerich's character. Freddy Heflin's cruiser is also present. It's not entirely clear what the function of this scene is even supposed to be, though during it, Freddy has a flashback to when he saved Sciorra's character from drowning as a teenager, the heroic feat that made him deaf in one ear. Anyway, the black motorists are very angry at having been given a ticket and they yell at Freddy, breaking him out of his stupor. Their yelling definitely has a haranguing quality to it, like they are "uppity n-words" or something. How could you yell at nice and spacey Sheriff Heflin? the movie seems to ask. (It was also interesting to note the difference between then and now; black motorists would scarcely dare to yell at white police officers in 2020, for fear of being shot on the spot.)

Then you have the character played by Method Man, another criminal who relishes beating up two cops on an NYC rooftop. Like the bump-and-run motorists Rapaport shoots earlier, he is portrayed as Evil with a capital E -- not a scared guy who finds himself in a physical fight with two police officers, but someone who might have sought out that fight so he can taunt and torture them. The extent that he is Dangerous with a capital D is underscored by the fact that he's already subdued Berg's partner, and now is throwing around Berg like a ragdoll, with a big sadistic grin on his face. How can you face an enemy who does not fear for his own life? the movie seems to ask a second time. Although the way Berg's character dies is pinned on Keitel, for delaying his rescue in an attempt to get Berg's character out of the picture, it's Method Man who actually throws Berg over the side of a building, leaving him to hang on an antenna, and fall to his death a minute or so later.

Finally, you have a scene at the end where a random black police officer, no more than an extra, starts mixing it up with someone else for no reason whatsoever, in a scene that otherwise has nothing to do with that. It's like Mangold (who is also the film's writer) specifically chose to put this in just so we could once more be reminded that black people mouth off and are naturally aggressive.

Mangold has become quite a good director, responsible for hits like Logan and Ford v. Ferrari, but back in his second feature, he really had a lot to learn about subtlety. I won't ding him as much as I should for the representation issues, because the climate in that regard was unfortunately a lot different back then -- as evidenced by the fact that I did not even remember this as a racially problematic film. But yeah, this movie is pretty overwrought and simplistic.

However, what no longer seems simplistic -- sadly -- is the film's observations on what percentage of police officers are compromised. This year has taught us that it's not a few bad apples spoiling the bunch, but a bad bunch that came pre-spoiled.

Movies? Squash? Why not both?

I wrote last year about the most unusual vacation movie viewing experience I may have had, which was seeing Aladdin on the top of a mountain while "going to the snow" for the weekend.

I don't know if this one surpasses that, but it definitely challenges it.

We are currently in the town of Lakes Entrance, which is four hours from Melbourne. If you are paying attention to international news, you may have heard that Melbourne is now going under lockdown again for the next six weeks. As we still find ourselves out of town until the weekend -- having just extended our trip in response to the lockdown -- we're going to enjoy a last few days of mobility.

Part of that mobility is, of course, seeing movies, and Lakes Entrance just so happens to have a theater.

A theater that is also a squash court.

It's just about as odd as it sounds. When you open the front door, you can either go upstairs, which takes you to the candy bar, where you also buy your tickets, or you can go to the left, where there are three squash courts, whose height means they take up two floors.

When you're waiting in line for the candy bar, you can actually look down into the squash courts.

No one was playing at the time I went with my younger son on Monday morning to see Sonic the Hedgehog, which he had already seen but I had not. Either the courts aren't open for coronavirus, or no one saw it fit to spend their Monday morning playing squash.

But I could imagine how odd it must be to have people engaged in a hearty match while you're waiting for your popcorn. Or, how odd for them to have spectators to their huffing and puffing below.

Given the mixed usage of the space, I half expected it to be a dinky little theater that was more like a glorified home theater. But no, there are 120 seats in there -- only 20 of which could be used, of course. More than 20 were left unblocked, but the blocked off ones at least ensured that the 20 of us could socially isolate ourselves.

In the end, there were only seven of us. That included my son and me, one kid sitting by himself (who actually left halfway through the movie, inexplicably) and a mother with three children. I hope the 11 a.m. screening time had something to do with that, but then again, no open movie theaters are doing any sort of business right now. I made sure to purchase multiple items from the candy bar just to help out.

As for the movie itself, I really enjoyed it. I had heard good things, and I could tell within the first few minutes they would be confirmed. Sonic as a character is very much like that X-Man who moves so quickly, as well as the Flash, and they do some similar stuff here as in the "Time in a Bottle" sequence in X-Men: Days of Future Past. I always enjoy James Marsden, and as the villain, Jim Carrey was back in his scenery-chewing heyday. The great dialogue they give him, which he savors so fully, only help his gloriously over-the-top performance.

As we've extended our trip, it seems likely that we'll be back to this theater before Sunday, especially as the movies turn over on Thursday. It'll definitely be my last chance to go to the movies for a while. When I said Hearts and Bones two weeks ago might be my only cinema screening before another lockdown, I was not quite right, as I also got to The Personal History of David Copperfield last Thursday (see review here). Hopefully I can make it four total before I content myself with Netflix and iTunes again for a while.

And who knows, maybe next time there will be actual squash players.

A posthumous date with Ennio Morricone

I don't mean that to be too whimsical a subject for a memorial post. Because I was not really even familiar with Sergio Leone westerns, let alone any other spaghetti westerns, until recently, my appreciation of the work of Ennio Morricone is a comparatively new part of my cinematic journey. So this will not be a proper "in memoriam" that reflects on the length and breadth of his career.

Besides, as my former film teacher said of Morricone's passing on Facebook, "In light of all those whose lives are being cut short for one reason or another, living until the age of 91 seems a lucky feat." Indeed. 

So, I won't apologize for my apparent whimsy in describing yet another interesting coincidence in my viewing schedule that relates to Morricone's passing.

It's school holidays here in Australia, and though it remains to be seen if these school holidays will end -- we could be facing another lockdown that might again include home schooling -- for now we are taking advantage of the break in the schedule to be out of town. It's our first time leaving the area since this all began, and though some of the things we'd be doing on our holiday in this coastal town of Lakes Entrance are shut down, at least it's nice to look at some different walls and skylines for six days and five nights.

Of course, soon after we arrived, I checked out the supply of available DVDs in our "holiday house," which numbered only ten -- quite modest compared to our last time out of town. 

Only three of those were movies I hadn't yet seen: The kids movie Matilda; the crappy-looking Anthony Hopkins horror movie The Rite, whose interest to me I summed up nearly ten years ago in this brief and dismissive post; and the spaghetti western My Name is Nobody. I thought the latter was directed by Leone, but as it turns out, it was only based on an idea by him, which is enough to get his named splashed all over the front of the DVD case. (The actual director was Tonino Valerii.)

None of these commanded my attention, but as I do like an opportunistic viewing that results from a smaller subset of choices (rather than all the movies available for streaming or digital rental at any given time), I vowed early on in the trip to watch My Name is Nobody. By Sunday night, I had fixed Monday as the night to watch it.

Monday during the day, I heard that Morricone had died. And indeed, as I expected might be the case, when I checked on IMDB, I saw that Morricone had written the music for My Name is Nobody.

Needless to say, I kept my date with Morricone, especially now that he had died. The film is from 1973, the year of my birth, making it somehow all the more appropriate. 

I could tell from the music playing over the DVD menu that this was not the Morricone I thought I knew. Then again, given the imposing quantity of his credits, I shouldn't have really thought I knew him at all. He made one of the most recognizable and repurposed ten-second snippets of film score of all time in his The Good, the Bad and the Ugly theme -- you know, the part with the whistling, which has scored countless showdowns from Looney Tunes and everywhere else you can think. But there was a lot of Morricone I didn't know, and still don't.

This score features flutes. Yes, flutes! I wouldn't have guessed it, but maybe it's only one of 20 flute-based Morricone scores. I really don't know.

But that song playing over the DVD menu -- very 70s, and almost hippie dippy -- is the theme song for one of two main characters, the Nobody of the title, played by Terence Hill. I wouldn't know Hill if I hadn't watched They Call Me Trinity last year during a friend's weekend-long spaghetti western marathon, where he also plays the title character. He's actually an Italian born as Mario Girotti, though I never would have guessed as he doesn't strike me as having what I consider to be traditional Italian features. I guess if 2020 has taught me anything, it's that I should not be making assumptions about anyone based on their appearance.

Anyway, here he is:

From two movies now of this guy, I can see that he carved out a career playing a bit of a goofball, by western standards, who spends most of his time sleeping and smiling. He doesn't pose the least threat to anybody until they see how quickly he draws his pistol. Even then, he'd still rather subdue someone by humiliating him through repeated slapping or some other type of non-lethal force, then walk away without checking to see if that guy's going to grab a gun and shoot him in the back.

Because the character he always plays seems to be a bit of a dopey innocent, we meet him in My Name is Nobody -- catching a fish with his bare hands and a goofy grin on his face -- through the musical equivalent thereof from Morricone. And though this song, with all its flutes, at first made me laugh when I thought of it as the representative of the composer's career I was going to spend my evening with, I'd be lying if I didn't admit how catchy it was. In fact, I can easily recall it this morning, and it may stay in my head for a while. That may be as much of a compliment to Morricone as I need pay. While some composers make music that may be suitable to the moment, but falls out of your head immediately afterward, Morricone's work really sticks with you.

But just to make sure I got what I'd come for, Morricone also supplies what I thought of as more typical Morricone fare later in the movie, in the climactic scene where 150 men on horseback approach the other hero, Jack Beauregard, played by a 68-year-old Henry Fonda. Here we get the more typical propulsive and epic contours of a Morricone score, including some of the "wah wahs" -- I don't know how to describe them better -- of his TGTBATU theme.

Overall it was a very satisfying two hours spent with Morricone, covering both ends of the spectrum of an immensely talented career. 

The movie itself failed to satisfy me in some regards. Although I enjoyed the many whimsical asides -- like when Hill messes with some pursuing baddies in funhouse mirrors, or beats up an opponent by using a spinning cowboy dummy with outstretched arms -- I thought this movie was pretty slack on story. And in fact, for some reason, there was a major discrepancy between the running time listed on the box (96 minutes) and the actual running time (116 minutes). That meant my mind was expecting a story with a more determined pace, so the whole time I felt impatient to get where we were going, assuming for a significant portion that we were going nowhere.

Still, director Tonino Valerii obviously learned a fair amount from his presumed mentor, Leone. (He started out as assistant director on A Fistful of Dollars.) The opening scene creates a similar kind of mood to the opening of Once Upon a Time in the West, where there's almost no dialogue, and noises breaking the silence punctuate the tension. Here, the primary noise is the impossibly loud sound of a razor shaving Fonda's neck, as Fonda has a gun pointed at the barber's crotch to ensure he isn't up to any funny business. The razor is cross cut with footage of a horse being brushed outside by Fonda's would-be assassin. 

So yeah, I did end up liking My Name is Nobody in the end, especially after reading the plot synopsis on Wikipedia gave me a better appreciation of the story's actual merits, and some of its nuances I may have missed after several glasses of wine. The movie really sticks the ending as well.

Morricone stuck the ending of his career, as it were, composing Quentin Tarantino's The Hateful Eight among others. He was actually working right up until the end, in fact, as there's a film on IMDB that he was scoring (The Canterville Ghost) that is still listed as in pre-production. Who knows how long into his 90s he would have continued working if he hadn't sustained injuries in a fall, which ultimately ended his life.

I'm just thankful I still have so much Ennio Moriccone left to discover -- the more flutes, the better.

Not the privilege-oblivious white girl you were expecting

On the day I had the occasion to explain the term "Becky" to my older son, I also watched the new film Becky.

The two things were not related. I'd already had the movie rented from iTunes, and was thinking of watching it that night, before the conversation even organically emerged.

It wasn't actually Becky he had asked about originally. It was Charisse.

Cherice? Cherisse? Sharice? The internet can't resolve it for me so I'll go with my original spelling.

We have the BT song "Never Gonna Come Back Down" on a mix of electronic music I made for my nine-year-old. I don't know that that song would make the cut on a mix made in 2020 for an adult, but this is like an electronic music starter pack. And, in fact, it's the second such one I made for him, so I'm going a bit deeper in the catalogue.

As you can't get anything by this one without him asking questions about it, he wanted to know why BT finishes the song talking about "mean English girls named Charisse."

I tried to explain that there was nothing wrong with people named Charisse, but that BT was trying to conjure an image for us of a type of person we might know, and by giving her a specific name it's supposed to help cement the type. Truth be told, I don't get the reference myself because I haven't spent all that much time with English girls, mean or otherwise, named Charisse or otherwise. But I get what BT's going for, only I couldn't really explain it to my son.

To assist, I ended up trying to explain what a Karen was. And that naturally led to trying to explain what a Becky was. I still don't think he got it. But by this point neither of us wanted to keep talking about it anymore and we changed the subject. Though I suspect we could come back to it at some point.

Now, in recent days as Karen has been on the ascent, there has been some question about whether a Karen and a Becky are the same thing. At least, wikipedia states, quoting Merriam-Webster Dictionary in 2019, that Becky is "increasingly functioning as an epithet, and being used especially to refer to a white woman who is ignorant of both her privilege and her prejudice." Then wikipedia goes on to add its own comment to the matter: "The term Karen has a similar connotation."

Similar, maybe. The same, no. First of all, I think Becky is younger than Karen. Becky may become Karen someday, but I don't think Becky's path is set in stone. From the way I've heard it used, Becky is a bit more innocuous than Karen, maybe kind of a hippie dippy type rather than a little Phyllis Schlafly waiting to blossom. Karen has embraced her prejudice and doubled down on it, if not consciously then at least in a really demonstrative way. Becky, on the other hand, is just clueless. She probably doesn't realize she's being insensitive, and more than anything, is just not woke. Karen, on the other hand, is anti-woke.

In any case, this doesn't describe the protagonist of Becky.

Oh the character, played by Lulu Wilson, is the right age, or at least approaching the right age. And she's got the right skin color. But she doesn't just float through life on a blithe wave of her own self-satisfied self-interest. 

In fact, the whole protecting her actual family, which includes her dad, and her surrogate family, which includes her dad's African-American fiancee and her son, from the Neo Nazis who are invading her home, suggests quite the opposite. Protecting them, even though she does resent her dad's fiancee for trying to replace her mother, who died of cancer. At the very least, the enemy of enemy is my friend.

This is a delicious little slice of handsomely-crafted exploitation from directors Jonathan Milott and Cary Murnion (Cooties). A terrifically grungy industrial score and some slick editing tricks are just two of the many tools in their bag. Wilson is another. Amanda Brugel, as that potential stepmother, is yet another. But perhaps most surprising of all is Kevin James -- yes, that Kevin James -- as the leader of the Neo Nazis, with a swastika tattooed right into the back of his head.

I won't say too much more, just that this is a must-watch for anyone who likes how any of the above things sound.

I will ask, though, if Milott and Murnion were conscious of the slang usage of the word Becky when they decided to name their character and name their movie. There could be some kind of commentary going on about how this girl is shaken out of her stupor of indifference by the sudden threat to her family, but really, she's mourning the death of her mother from the start. She's not the type of character on whom you'd slap the "Becky" label. I mean, you've got to be more than just white and blonde to be "Becky," and if you're also mourning your mother, well that's just mean.

Maybe they just thought it would be a badass name to call a teenager with a Neo Nazi's blood splattered on her face.

Audient Authentic: Primary

This is the seventh in my 2020 monthly series watching classic documentaries, going chronologically.

And now, on to the 1960s.

Primary seemed like a good 4th of July viewing. To the extent that I even wanted to celebrate Independence Day this year -- it doesn't feel like a very good time to be an American -- at least it could help me look back to a time when American politics felt a bit more innocent. Then again, society on the whole was probably worse, considering that the racism that is afflicting us today was only bolder and more socially acceptable back then.

Anyway, let's not go down that road.

It makes for a good 2020 viewing as well, as it's an election year, and the 60th anniversary of this 1960 movie.

Primary is a bit of a primer, so to speak, for one of the first dozen or so documentaries I ever saw, 1993's The War Room. That went behind the scenes of the Clinton campaign, and D.A. Pennebaker was one of its co-directors. Pennebaker will get a full spotlight in the movie I watch in August. For Primary, he gets credit as a sound recordist, photographer and sequence editor. (Albert Maysles was also a camerman on the film.)

It's interesting to see how Primary is marketed now, as a document of John F. Kennedy's rise to national prominence. At the time it was made, it was equally an examination of both Kennedy and his Wisconsin primary opponent, Hubert Humphrey, the perennial bridesmaid who would also lose to Richard Nixon in the 1968 presidential campaign. In fact, in a way, this is more Humphrey's movie, as he was willing to let director Robert Drew and his crew into very intimate spaces with him -- even inside a car transporting him between campaign stops in Wisconsin. He's the one willing to let Drew and company really peek behind closed doors, perhaps because he didn't have that much to hide with his glad-handing and folksy aphorisms.

Kennedy is by far the more remote figure here. In trying to provide parallel coverage of the two candidates as the narrative progresses, Drew has to settle for similar access to Kennedy that any other media had -- the candidate pushing through adoring crowds at events open to the press, for example. There's even some footage of Kennedy giving a speech where they just film the TV screen, a prototypical symbol of their lack of any real access.

Until the end, I should say. Drew and company do get behind closed doors with Kennedy when he is waiting out the results on primary night, as the various voting districts of Wisconsin are reporting their vote tallies. You do see some stray, unrehearsed comments here, though nothing that reflects badly on him.

Still, I couldn't help marvel over the similarities between him and Clinton in this respect. Although Clinton's campaign is to be credited for giving Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus such unfettered access in The War Room, the candidate himself did not appear on camera very much. It's almost as though Clinton modeled his own participation on his hero Jack Kennedy's involvement in Primary.

Primary is a useful way to get to know Hubert Humphrey, though. Before this I'd had no experience with him, and in fact, I had to google him to be reminded what his political fortunes were both before and after this. He seems like quite a likeable fellow, which I think may have been the take on him: a bit soft and folksy and unable to ultimately capture anyone's political imagination. (He was awarded the 1968 Democratic nomination for president despite not winning a single primary.)

That last parenthetical comment provides a good bridge to my other major takeaway from the film. Near the beginning, when speaking to a group of voters, Kennedy talks about how Wisconsin is one of the few states in which citizens' preferences are polled in this format. I had always assumed primaries dated back to the start of the union, or close to it anyway. As it turns out, that aforementioned chaotic 1968 election was the impetus for primaries to become more mandatory across all the states, in terms of the process of accruing delegates. By Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign, primaries were still only held in 40 of the 50 states.

The footage of the candidates interacting with voters and radio show hosts was not, in itself, really groundbreaking for me to watch in 2020. Though it certainly would have been 60 years ago, and for that I credit the filmmakers.

If my ultimate takeaway from Primary was to be a little underwhelmed by it, that could be because the result of the film itself is a bit underwhelming. Although Kennedy wins more delegates than Humphrey, it barely seems as though the April 5th Wisconsin primary is even a turning point in the campaign. In fact, someone states -- possibly the narrator -- that all this work and campaigning will basically end up being for naught, as it will leave the candidates in more or less the same respective positions as before they came to Wisconsin.

I did like some of the filmmaking choices that told a different story, though, specifically the camera pulling away from Humphrey's campaign bus as it falls behind into the distance, and his campaign theme song playing out the end of the movie.

In August, I expect to be moving on to Pennebaker's Bob Dylan documentary, Don't Look Back.