Who's ready for Halloween?

It occurred to me very belatedly that it's almost October -- which, in a typical year, is when I try to watch five to ten scary movies to quench my thirst for horror leading up to Halloween.

But in a year as scary as this, when the whole year has been one big horror movie, such a horror binge really feels besides the point. 

Add to that a real uncertainty about whether there will be a Halloween this year, and the idea of my usual October horror marathon feels particularly purposeless. 

Halloween has become a bigger and bigger thing here in Australia. In the seven Halloweens I've been here -- well, six, since I was in the U.S. for Halloween in 2018 -- I've been able to watch it grow with my own eyes. From the early days, when flustered candy givers could be seen giving out sleeves of cookies as a desperate cover for their lack of resources, to last year, when hundreds of kids gathered in a neighborhood courtyard after collecting their bounty, it's really become beloved, especially in my neighborhood. 

But we're only just coming out of Stage 4 restrictions here in Victoria, the worst-hit part of Australia. Only three days ago did we drop the 9 p.m. curfew, which had been 8 p.m. until just a week before that. The playgrounds are open, but non-essential stores are not. Who knows when movie theaters will open again. It may not be until 2021. 

So yeah, if I want a local taste of Halloween in 2020, I may be limited to carving my own jack o'lantern and letting it burn on the 31st, as a silent vigil to what we've lost.

As for movies, I guess I need to make a decision more quickly about that. Tomorow is the 1st. And while I don't usually start on the 1st, you can bet your bottom dollar that I've watched at least one horror movie by the 5th. 

I guess I'll just see how I feel.

In 2020, is there anything else you can do?

I think you've got the wrong movie

One of my favorite movies of 2019 was a delicious little slice of nastiness called The Perfection, about cello prodigies and the terrible things done to them to make them that way. In fact, I liked it so much that I watched it again on Friday night, only 15 months after my first viewing. 

As this was a polarizing one -- some people hate it -- I thought it might not hold up. It did. 

I was on its Metacritic page after the fact, to see what others were as wickedly tickled by its perversities as I was, and found that it has a very respectable score of 60 -- which is a good score for a movie some people hate. That means most of the people who don't hate it like it quite a bit.

I also noticed a very funny ad on the site, one that couldn't have been more confused in its messaging to prospective customers of both the movie and the streaming service it was advertising:

Yes, you read that correctly -- it is an attempt to sell Disney+ to people who watched The Perfection.

I don't want to give you too much of an idea why that's so crazy if you haven't seen The Perfection. So if you haven't, please go do so -- if you have a stomach for darker and more explicit content -- and consider this your SPOILER WARNING for the rest of this post.

The Perfection is a movie that features the following, in approximately this order:

1) The vacant eyes of a recently deceased elderly woman, lying in the bed where she died. 

2) Two women talking about getting wet as they watch two other people carrying on an affair in view of their spouses.

3) Those same two women having an erotic evening at a dance club and then sex back at the hotel. 

4) Fears of contagion in the form of multiple people vomiting yellow vomit.

5) A woman seeing maggots in her own yellow vomit. 

6) A woman accidentally shitting herself as she fails to get off a bus in time.

7) A woman seeing spiders in her yellow vomit and then unidentified bugs breaking through the skin of her right arm and then swarming that arm and hand.

8) A woman chopping off her own right hand with a meat cleaver in order to rid herself of the bugs.

9) A naked man approaching a teenage girl whom he intends to rape for failing to play her cello perfectly, flanked by two other men who will either do the same or act as an accessory.

10) A woman tasing, repeatedly kicking, and then kidnapping another woman in the trunk of her car. 

11) The aforementioned accessories being fatally poisoned, and a female accessory fatally stabbed in the back.

12) A woman threatening to and actually beginning to penetrate another woman with the stump where her hand used to be.

13) A man stabbing through a woman's forearm and running the knife up and down through the wound.

14) A man beaten repeatedly with an iron fire poker.

15) A man with his arms and legs cut off being kept alive by medical equipment as he is forced to watch an unusual cello duet where each woman provides one functional arm to playing a single cello.

So, just your average Disney+ film, am I right?

Of course, I know this is just a template, and whatever title you happen to look up on Metacritic gets inserted into the ad, the same way your own name gets inserted into an email from Joe Biden or Nancy Pelosi. I checked another movie on Metacritic just to be sure.

But as I had never seen this ad before, it certainly made for a funny first introduction.

Last days as an MCU denier

It seems funny now that I ever would have disliked Doctor Strange. Yet it was only four years ago.

Back then, it's fair to say I had not yet bought in to the MCU. It was still possible to greet new movies with a shake of the head and an upturn of the nose. It was still possible to say "Yet another movie made from a comic book? When is this going to end?"

Now that I know where it was destined to end, I am on board retroactively. 

It's kind of similar to my feelings about Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, which I didn't like when I first saw it. The next two movies won me over big time and now I have a strong sense of affection for the original.

The occasion for this reckoning with Doctor Strange was watching it again on Friday night with my ten-year-old son. His younger brother was spending the night over at their aunt's house, so my wife got the idea to order burgers to be delivered (since the younger one doesn't eat them) and watch a movie that might be a tad too old for the six-year-old. We're still basking in the newness of our Disney+ so were obviously drawn there. I suggested the original X-Men from 2000, as my older son is obsessed with Wolverine due to his recent insertion in Fortnite, but my wife preferred something she hadn't already seen. So we landed on Doctor Strange, which would make my son's second MCU movie after Captain Marvel on his birthday a month ago. (Exactly a month ago, as it happens.)

They both really liked it. In fact, it is now my son's favorite movie -- supplanting Captain Marvel. Ah, to be at an age when all your favorite movies are still ahead of you.

I liked it a lot better, too. More than that, though, I find it hard to really remember why I disliked it to the extent that I did. I gave it only two stars on Letterboxd. I spoke quite negatively about it on a podcast devoted to it. I could go back and listen to that podcast to hear the opinions of a version of me that is not yet four years old, but to be honest, I don't want to spend the time.

Doctor Strange -- the character, not the movie -- has been to a lot of really good places since then, which could explain why I suddenly feel so much better about him. And that brings me to the second occasion for my reckoning with this right now.

As you may or may not know, I've been playing catch-up for some time in adding all the movies I've seen to Flickchart, the movie-ranking site where you duel movies against each other and steadily build a list of favorites over time. A few years back I decided it would be better to wait a month after seeing a movie before I ranked it, to let the recency bias wear off before I decided where it belonged on the list. Well, that created the conditions for me to neglect adding my movies entirely, and suddenly, I was two years -- which is about 500 movies -- behind. It's now been three or four years since I've actually been caught up.

But the pandemic has helped me get closer, and now I am "only" about 14 months behind. If I keep at it, I should catch up soon. 

The key to that 14-month time period is that I have now added the most recent movie released in the MCU, Spider-Man: Far From Home. (We'd have Black Widow by now, and I wouldn't have added it to Flickchart yet, but the release has been pushed back to next May.) That means that Flickchart can tell me my rankings of all 23 MCU films, from first to 23rd. And that I can now tell you them. Such a momentous thing might warrant its own post, yet I now have my qualms about some of the films I so easily dismissed when I was still an MCU denier.

So I will just quickly list them ... as "quickly" as you can list 23 films I guess:

1. Avengers: Infinity War (2018) - 457/5319 (91%)
2. Thor: Ragnarok (2017) - 586/5319 (89%)
3. Avengers: Endgame (2019) - 665/5319 (87%)
4. Captin America: The Winter Soldier (2014) - 759/5319 (86%)
5. Captain America: Civil War (2016) - 1018/5319 (81%)
6. Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018) - 1323/5319 (75%)
7. Iron Man (2008) - 1498/5319 (72%)
8. Captain America: The First Avenger (2011) - 1611/5319 (70%) 
9. The Avengers (2012) - 1712/5319 (68%)
10. Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017) - 2024/5319 (62%)
11. Black Panther (2018) - 2037/5319 (62%)
12. Captain Marvel (2019) - 2251/5319 (58%)
13. Iron Man 3 (2013) - 2764/5319 (48%)
14. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017) - 2919/5319 (45%)
15. Thor: The Dark World (2013) - 3018/5319 (43%)
16. Ant-Man (2015) - 3375/5319 (37%)
17. The Incredible Hulk (2008) - 3403/5319 (36%)
18. Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019) - 3498/5319 (34%)
19. Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) - 3661/5319 (31%)
20. Iron Man 2 (2010) - 4075/5319 (23%)
21. Thor (2011) - 4222/5319 (21%)
22. Doctor Strange (2016) - 4374/5319 (18%)
23. Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015) - 4409/5319 (17%)

Digesting this list for the first time, I can see plenty of placement errors -- small ones (I definitely don't like Iron Man better than Captain America: The First Avenger) and what are probably major ones (the original Thor surely will no longer feel like my third worst MCU movie now that I've loved Ragnarok so much). That's the nature of something like Flickchart, where a movie can only jump up on the list if it gets the right duels, unless you purposely re-rank it. And I may indeed have some purposeful re-ranking in my future.

But I suspect a lot of these movies need to be seen again and appreciated for where they stand in the thrust toward Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame. Age of Ultron may require that in the extreme. 

For the purposes of our discussion of Doctor Strange, though, I noticed something interesting which I will phrase in the form of a question:

"What do the top three movies on this list -- Avengers: Infinity War, Thor: Ragnarok and Avengers: Endgame -- all have in common?"

There are actually a number of correct answers to this question: Thor, the Hulk, Valkyrie, Loki, Korg ... the list probably goes on. But the relevant answer today is that they all feature Doctor Strange.

So my guess is, as Doctor Strange became increasingly central to the fates of the Avengers, he came to seem less like the star of a side project that arrived at a time when I didn't want to meet any new Marvel characters. Watching Doctor Strange today, I can see it as the origin story of the guy who figured out how to see all possible futures and find the one way of beating Thanos.

Now, shedding my status as an MCU denier does not mean that I automatically embrace anything new that comes out of the MCU. I was lower on both Black Panther and Captain Marvel than some people, and the latest Spider-Man is correctly ranked as at only 34% on my total chart. In fact, it probably should be lower on the Marvel list, as some of those movies -- Doctor Strange in particular -- should be higher. But as my most recently seen and my most recently ranked film, Spider-Man: Far From Home clearly shows that it takes more than just the Marvel Studios logo at the beginning of the movie to win praise from me. 

What has clearly changed, and what has been changing since the second Captain America movie, is my ability to dismiss these movies as "just some comic book movie." In fact, the directon the MCU has gone has so thoroughly convinced me of its validity that it seems hard to believe I was ever snobbishly waving them off. It's hard to remember there was a time when we couldn't see the grand design, and thought that each new movie was made just to make money. Of course, they were made just to make money ... but you can't have such narrative cohesiveness and intricacy without a genuine love for the material as well.

I wouldn't say that I love Doctor Strange now myself, but I do think it deserves one of those purpose-driven re-ranks, which I will now give it post-haste.

Okay, back from that. It is now 2394/5319 (55%), which would jump it from 22nd all the way up to 13th on my MCU list. 

You could indict recency bias for this new placement and call it an over-correction, if you want to use my own logic against me. But an incorrectly placed movie on Flickchart really does need to be dealt with sooner rather than later. When placing a film for the first time, you need to rely on the placement of every movie it comes up against if you want to be sure this new movie will land in the right spot. A film should not be dueling against the likes of Christmas With the Kranks and Live Free or Die Hard -- Strange's former neighbors on my chart -- only to then get stomped by the superior sorcerer who can conjure circular portals that can take him anywhere in the multiverse.

Thirteenth may be too high for it among the MCU movies ... but that just tells me I've probably got more re-ranking to do.

And with Disney+, and a couple of children eager to dive further into the MCU, something tells me I'll have the opportunity, too.

In fact, we've already got our next candidate. That's Ant-Man, which has been deemed suitable for the younger one, and which might have been watched as soon as this weekend if we hadn't just watched Doctor Strange. Given how much I love Ant-Man and the Wasp, I suspect this will be a riser, too. 

My younger one has already said he wants to see a movie with Groot in it, so it looks like a long path is being laid out before us. Which is fine by me, because my days as an MCU denier are ancient history.

Fixing the main problem with Snowpiercer

Bong Joon-ho's 2013 film Snowpiercer is not the type of movie designed to withstand scrutiny. If you are going to go with it, you just have to stifle the many nitpicky inquiries that come to mind. Any question that starts with "How would they ...?" or "How could they ...?" is probably not going to have a satisfactory answer.

However, after watching one episode of the TV adaptation of this movie, I am satisfied that they've at least addressed my biggest qualm.

I don't see any mention in the Wikipedia plot description of the number of train cars in Bong's film, but if my memory of the movie serves me correctly, there were shots where you could see the entire train. That meant a vehicle with maybe 50 cars, a hundred cars max. 

If you break that down, it just doesn't work. Given that the "tail" has at least five cars, and that there's a large buffer zone between the "tailies" and the upper class twits who eat sushi and go to the spa, that could leave only 30 or so cars for those upper crust types. Given the sheer number of individual cars we see that aren't sleeping quarters -- dining cars, aquariums, arboretums, spas, dance clubs -- you are left with only a small number of cars where these people could actually get some privacy. And the supposition is that private quarters would probably hold a lot more value for these people than the ability to go to the spa.

Snowpiercer the TV show takes care of that from the start. In the opening monologue by star Daveed Diggs, he describes the train as having 1,001 cars.

That's more like it. 

When you are dealing with a behemoth of that size, you aren't going to spend much time worrying about what goes where. I don't yet know the total population of this show's train -- I assume it will come up in ensuing episodes -- but even if there are as many as 400 fancy rich people on board, they could each get their own car and still leave hundreds of cars left over that could be devoted to the excesses of the 1%. And I guess because of how trains work, the excessive length of the vehicle has little to do with how nimbly it can travel through mountain passes and over long bridges over water. 

While this is a satisfying correction to the source material, I am still left with at least two big questions, and will wait to see how the show deals with them.

1) At the speed this train is evidently traveling, how can it only circumnavigate the globe once in a year's time? My feeling is that it would take at most a month to make the trip.

2) After 16 years inside this train, how is everyone wearing what still looks to be new clothing? Do they really have the resources to switch out everyone's wardrobe enough for everything to seem very new and in vogue?

Of course, if I wanted to, I could keep listing nitpicky questions that would number more than 20 before I knew it.

Let's just see if the show is good enough to make me stifle them. 

Taking AppleTV+ for a spin

It's been a time of many new services lo this past month, dating back to my son's birthday on August 25th, as Disney+ and AppleTV were both brand new to us, and we've enjoyed exploring both.

One thing we hadn't explored until last night was AppleTV+, which comes free for a year as part of buying an AppleTV. We would have purchased it anyway.

I was planning on watching Boys State, available exclusively on AppleTV+, but we actually made the evening a two-fer by starting with The Morning Show, which is of course a TV show, not a movie. Here in Australia, it's called Morning Wars, because there is an actual morning show called The Morning Show. Fortunately, I've got a U.S.-based AppleTV, so I was able to see the original title. 

I really liked both.

The Morning Show was nearly feature length anyway, consisting of a 66-minute first episode, which is longer than I prefer for a TV show. Even with that hour time block I still prefer something closer to the 42-minute running time of old network hour-long dramas. But I was invested the whole time and am looking forward to seeing where this is going. The cast is packed with actors I like, particularly Jennifer Aniston, for whom I continue to hold a soft spot all these years later. It's a bit Sorkin-y, but the less indulgent versions of Sorkin are still something I'm excited to watch.

Since this is a movie blog, Boys State is really what I'm here to talk about. It came in quite pre-hyped, and mostly lived up to my expectations. I couldn't help having a little bit of itchy skin over watching so many acne-pocked teenage Texans talking about guns and the moment when life begins, but the film has a sneaky liberal undercurrent that even the other fellow future government-builders may not have been aware of. They elevate two of the week's most progressive thinkers to candidacy for its highest offices, and they don't even have to shroud their true feelings very much. That gives me a sense of hope, even at a time when a supreme court vacancy is threatening to give conservative thinkers a leg up for a generation.

As we begin to stumble into all the major subscriptions, expect a post like this related to Amazon Prime in the coming weeks. 

Remembering Ruth

I had wanted to post an homage to Ruth Bader Ginbsurg, who died on Friday, on this blog before now. She was not a cinematic luminary, but she was a life luminary, if you will. I particularly hated to post something frivolous like yesterday's seatbelts post before I got to solemnly recognize that luminous life.

In 2018 there were two movies made about Ginsburg, the documentary, RGB, and the narrative feature, On the Basis of Sex. The reason I waited was in order to see the one of those two I hadn't seen, On the Basis of Sex, on Monday night, allowing me to write this post today.

I probably should have watched RGB again, because that would have given me a better sense of the Ruth Bader Ginbsurg I knew -- which is to say, the one I have followed with greater and lesser periods of intensity since she was appointed to the Supreme Court by Bill Clinton back in 1993. I can't claim to be an expert on her life, but I loved what I learned about her in RGB, which only bolstered the impressions I'd garnered from the decisions she'd written and the stances she'd taken. 

Alas, On the Basis of Sex is not really worthy of her. 

There's nothing wrong with it, really -- well, a few things that I might get into in a moment -- but it's just a very vanilla movie largely lacking in surprises. It's pretty much one of those by-the-numbers biopics that a mediocre director (which maybe Mimi Leder is, Deep Impact notwithstanding) could make in his or her sleep. Neither Felicity Jones' lead performance nor the script does much of a job revealing what made Ginsburg exceptional.

And there's a part or two that actually works against what I would think a Ginsburg movie should be doing. I think it's good that On the Basis of Sex doesn't depict her as a saint, but it seems to have an inordinate number of characters who find her disagreeable -- most notably, her own daughter, at least at the start. And yes, this is a period of Ginsburg's life (most of it occurs in the year 1970, exactly 50 years ago) when she was still coming into herself, the person she would become.

But about that. The key case that started to make her career was when she challenged a tax law that prevented a caregiver from getting a tax benefit for providing care to a parent. He would have qualified as a woman, but did not as a man. So while her interests were to attack laws that discriminated against women on the basis of sex (there's the title), she keenly did so by attacking a law that discriminated against a man, thereby proving that the reverse form of discrimination was also unconstitutional. She took into consideration the existing biases of the male judges to convince them of the validity of her argument.

The thing is, and this may be true to history, Ginsburg didn't come across the case herself. At least as depicted in On the Basis of Sex, her husband Marty (Armie Hammer) brought it to her. And she didn't even immediately realize, without additional prodding from him, the potential breadth of the significance of the case. As she was a professor at the time, she just wanted to go back to preparing for her next day's law school lecture.

Even if it was true, I didn't love the decision to have a man essentially making her career for her, even a man as undoubtedly terrific as Marty Ginsburg is supposed to have been. It made me wonder whether she would have had a quiet little career as a law professor if it hadn't been for him ... which is not what I wanted to wonder while watching a movie about Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Still, I was glad to be in her company on Monday night as I still mourned her loss. And that's literally the case in one of the film's final images, when we see a modern-day, real-life Ginsburg walking some stairs into the halls of justice. (It's a famous building that I just didn't identify right away.) 

She lived a good long life, succumbing to cancer at age 87, though just two months longer might have secured her legacy on the court. By dying just before the presidential election, she left the door open to Trump and McConnell pushing through a vote on her replacement in the next six weeks -- a scandalously shameless act of hypocrisy that should come as little surprise to anybody anymore.

But I don't want to focus on the political fallout of her passing. Today we should, and I do, remember how Ruth Bader Ginsburg spent her career as a champion of the underrepresented, a dogged fighter who refused to cave to bullies like Trump. Some say she should have retired when Obama was president so he could have named a like-minded replacement, but Ginsburg got a late start on her career, and didn't feel like she had finished her duty after just 20 years on the court. As On the Basis of Sex reminds us, she was still "just" a law professor at age 37, and was already 60 years old when appointed by Clinton. She wanted to serve until she was 90, a 30-year court tenture, but she came up three years short.

Ginbsurg's appointment reminds us of a simpler time, when the main calculation in a potential appointment was not how young the appointee was, and therefore, how long this person would have to exert his or her will on the court. I'm sure Trump is out looking for the most conservative and nominally accomplished 38-year-old he can find. Clinton didn't worry about that; in Ginsburg he saw the best qualified candidate, and he rewarded her years of dignified service on the bench, championing causes they both believed in, that they both knew were best for the country.

And I'm sure she made him proud until the day she died. 

How to put on a seatbelt

I had a very active weekend in terms of my recently expressed theory that movie characters never wear seatbelts, containing both an extreme proof of that theory and a disproof of it. An extreme disproof, I suppose, in that it was an absolute disproof.

First came the extreme proof. On Saturday night my wife and I rewatched the ridiculous but super enjoyable 1996 action movie The Long Kiss Goodnight, starring Geena Davis and directed by her husband, Renny Harlin. I was all but certain this was before Cutthroat Island knocked them off the map as a creative power team, but that actually came out a year earlier. Somehow they still made this, and we should be grateful they did.

Remember how I mused what would happen if one of these non-seatbelt-wearing characters got into a car accident, thereby drawing attention to the non-plot-based decision to leave them unprotected? Well that actually happens in The Long Kiss Goodnight. The traumatic head injury that starts to bring Davis' Samantha Caine's memory back results from her being thrown through the windshield after hitting a deer on snowy winter night. Obviously if you're wearing that seatbelt you stay in the car. (Which I suppose is a good thing for her, as the car immediately starts to burn.)

The thing is, we see her later riding in a car and she's still not wearing a seatbelt. No lessons learned? Certainly the lesson couldn't be "Good thing I wasn't wearing a seatbelt, otherwise I would have burned to death in my previous accident." That's some pretty Trumpian mask-denying logic right there. 

I had just about given up on the possibility of movie characters ever wearing seatbelts when I watched How to Build a Girl on Sunday night. This Beanie Feldstein vehicle, a clear homage to Almost Famous (and I don't just say that because The Next Picture Show podcast paired the two in their "classic film influences a new film" format), features one scene where Feldstein's character and her dad (Paddy Considine) ride in a car. I checked their shoulder area and yep! Seatbelts for both! I rubbed my eyes like a cartoon character who can't believe what he sees, then looked again, and they were still there.

If How to Build a Girl, set in the 1990s, really wanted to be an accurate representation of the era, the filmmakers certainly didn't watch The Long Kiss Goodnight to get a gauge on how people behaved back then. 

Keyword: Ramona

The Netflix algorithm is a funny thing sometimes.

At some point this week, without any particular inspiration that I remember, I decided it was time to watch Scott Pilgrim vs. the World for the second time. I had really liked the film when I first saw it -- it just closed out my top ten of that year -- but I'd remembered feeling sort of exhausted by its repetitive seven-act structure. When I saw it at #418 (92%) on my Flickchart -- oh yes, that was the inspiration -- I decided to revisit it to see whether that ranking is a tad too generous.

I checked Netflix to see if it was streaming there, and was glad to see that it was. 

Then I scanned to see the other results that come up as similar films when you search for Scott Pilgrim. I couldn't help notice a movie called Oh, Romana!, whose poster looks like this:

The reason this is funny is that the movie almost certainly has nothing to do with Scott Pilgirm. Except this: Both have a character named Ramona.

I certainly wouldn't have caught it except that Ramona Flowers, the character in Scott Pilgrim who has the seven evil exes Scott must fight, has become a bit of a breakout cultural icon. I've heard people mention loving her in a number of different contexts. It's probably the ever-changing hair color. Or actress Mary Elizabeth Winstead. Or the fact that she goes her own way. 

Oh, Ramona! has nothing to do with her. It's a 2019 romantic comedy from Romania. So does that make it a romantic Romanian Ramona? Here is its premise as written on Wikipedia:

"Oh, Ramona! follows the main character Andrei from his point of view while he steps into adulthood and dealing with romance. Andrei has a crush on the "hottest girl in school", Ramona. Later on another girl Andrei meets on a vacation, Anemona, is charmed by his sincerity and dorkiness and he ends up being torn between the two girls he loves. To be able to choose, Andrei has to introspect his life."

Written by a Romanian with English as his/her second language, I'd say. No judgment. 

From the poster it looks like it's trying to evoke something like American Pie, a very different type of coming of age movie from Scott Pilgrim, if we can even call that coming of age. At 22, Scott should have already come of age ... though he does start the movie dating a high schooler. 

So the only reason the movie seems to have come up is that they both have a character named Ramona.

Now, I can understand if it were the other way around. The point of a search term is to be able to help someone find something whose title they can't exactly remember. If a prospective viewer were searching for Scott Pilgrim and couldn't remember the exact title -- maybe they thought it was Ramona Flowers vs. the World? -- you'd want Scott Pilgrim to come up in a search by the word "Ramona."

But when the searcher already knows the name of the movie, producing Oh, Ramona! as a search result is basically just deception. It's basically saying "We are blatantly looking for any reason for you to click on something, and hope that you are in love not only with Ramona Flowers, but with her actual first name."

Then again, I suppose you could make the argument that Cristina Jacob, the writer-director of Oh, Ramona!, specifically chose that name for her character as an allusion/homage to Scott Pilgrim, which may well have been a cinematic touchstone for her. Or, more cynically, perhaps she thought her viewers would make the same mistake Netflix imagined they might make, clicking on this movie for its apparent similarity to something they already love.

I'd watch to see if the homage extended further than the title -- thereby actually sort of justifying the "similar films" designation by Netflix -- except that that's exactly what they want me to do. 

As for my actual second viewing of Scott Pilgrim on Friday night, I liked it about the same amount as I remember liking it previously, and felt similarly exhausted by the structure. Then again, I was sort of just exhausted anyway. It was Friday night and I'd run nearly six miles earlier in the day. So it was inevitable that I took a number of short "naps" as I finished the film's final 30 minutes. 

One thing I will say, though, is that although I enjoy Ramona Flowers as much as the next guy -- or girl -- the young star I was most delighted to see here was Anna Kendrick. (There are quite a lot, you remember, including Brie Larson, Aubrey Plaza, Chris Evans and Mae Whitman). Not because I thought she looked so much younger, but because she's responsible for my single favorite line delivery in the whole movie.

I love this movie's balance between presenting the fantastical and capturing a genuine reaction to it. People's minds aren't exactly blown by the fact that characters seem to appear from nowhere and can fly through the sky as they fight, but certain eccentric things stretch their capacity for comprehension. Take the moment when Matthew Patel arrives at the battle of the bands as Ramona's first evil ex. It's not the moment he arrives that prompts the great Kendrick reaction, but it's when he extends his villain taunt of Scott to a kind of Bollywood dance that Kendrick drops the following:

"What?"

Or maybe it should be:

"Wut?"

It's so brilliant not only because of Kendrick's delivery, but because of what it implies. Like, "I've accepted everything that's happened thus far, but this particular weird thing is so weird that it leaves only a single word of gobsmacked disbelief at my disposal."

That single word alone is worth my watching seven distended evil ex battles. 

Strange places to find James Tolkan

If you are an actor, I don't suppose there is really any "strange" place to find you. It's a point of pride for you to be able to play any role at any time -- younger than you are, older than you are, a different gender than you are, a different species than you are.

Still, I found it a little strange to find where James Tolkan kept turning up in my viewings over the past few days. 

To catch you up, if you don't recognize this photo, James Tolkan played the principal, Mr. Strickland, in one of my all-time favorites, Back to the Future, as well as its two sequels. He worked quite a bit back then, also appearing in such films as The Amityville Horror, WarGames, Turk 182!, Top Gun and Dick Tracy. At first I thought I hadn't seen him in a film in ages, but I only saw Amityville Horror for the first time a few Halloweens ago, and the great Prince of the City only a few years before that. Those are older movies, but he was also in Bone Tomahawk, though he would have been about 85 and I'm almost certain I didn't recognize him.

It was a joy to see him in Masters of the Universe on Friday night, probably one of the only real joys in that movie. I watched that for some forehead-smacking cheezeball filmmaking, but outside of the astonishingly wooden and lifeless performance of Dolph Lundgren, it wasn't really "so bad it's good." It was mostly just lame and forgettable.

But James Tolkan was there to inject some life, and some humor, into the proceedings. He plays a detective, which is not a far cry from his gruff Mr. Strickland persona. I still found it strange to see him because I was not expecting it, though as I said, I was quite delighted by it. He's a bit of comic relief, always muttering disbelievingly as he finds himself involved in scenarios involving laser guns, muscly men with swords, and dimension hopping. Then again, I don't really know who I was expecting to see in this movie -- certainly not Courteney Cox.

But I wouldn't be writing this post if he hadn't shown up for the second time in four nights as I watched the Woody Allen film Love and Death on Monday night. No, I'm not suddenly re-appraising this #metoo pariah of my own accord. Rather, this film came up as my monthly selection in Flickchart Friends Favorites Fiesta, and I haven't missed a randomly assigned, er, assignment in that series yet. And hey, I did laugh quite a bit. 

And there, about two thirds of the way through, was James Tolkan again, playing a decidedly less expected role than he did in the He-Man movie. Would Tolkan be your choice to portray Napoleon? Me neither. But he was Woody Allen's choice, and when you put the famous Napoleonic bicorne hat on him, he does look a lot like the man: 

That also makes it the second film I've seen in the last three months where someone plays Napoleon, as I watched Time Bandits (for the tenth time or so) in the wake of Ian Holm's death back in June. 

Oh, and Tolkan is pretty funny in this too.

One other quick thought on Love and Death. If you haven't seen it, the film is kind of halfway between a parody of Russian novels and the films of Ingmar Bergman, and if they didn't come out in the same year, it would also seem like a bit of a Barry Lyndon parody. But it felt especially timely to watch it now, as my wife and I are just finishing off the (so far) only existing season of The Great, the mischievous comedy about Catherine the Great. Both properties are comedies set in late 18th century/early 19th century Russia, and both feature the possible coup of a leader. 

So, as usual, timely coincidences all over the place in my viewings.

Audient Authentic: Gimme Shelter

This is the ninth in my 2020 series Audient Authentic, in which I watch classic (pre-1990) documentaries that I have not yet seen. 

I have a bit of a funny reason for being interested in Gimme Shelter, the 1970 documentary from Albert Maysles, David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin. Yep, we're into the 1970s now. This is the first of two 70s movies before finishing the series with two in the 80s.

The legit reason -- and a genuine reason -- the film is on my radar is because "Maysles" is one of the first names in documentary filmmaking. I've already seen Grey Gardens (1975), the brothers' best known film.

The funny reason is that the film gets alluded to in one of my favorite comedies of all time, The Cable Guy.

When Chip Douglas (Jim Carrey) takes the mic at the karaoke jam he set up at the house of Steven Kovacs (Matthew Broderick) -- with $10,000 worth of equipment he got into the house without a key -- he selects Jefferson Airplane's Somebody to Love as his song. Only it's not the album version. He engages in a bit of an intro about Jefferson Airplane performing at the Rolling Stones-fronted free concert at the Altamont Speedway on December 6, 1969, the show where the Hell's Angels famously functioned as security, and several people died. Carrey does a couple riffs that I now realize are based on the actual movie Gimme Shelter. Pretending to be Grace Slick, he calls out "We just had a baby born on the left side of the party ladies and gentlemen. We need an ambulance over by the scaff-ol-ding." (Yes, he draws out and emphasizes the three syllables of that word.)

So yeah, these are references that swim around in my head on a daily basis. I am who I am!  

Considering that I had been a little underwhelmed by my first music documentary of this series, last month's Dont Look Back, I wasn't sure if this would grab me either. And the version I had to grab off YouTube (not finding it anywhere else) both was poor quality and featured Portuguese subtitles. 

I thought these would have a distancing effect, but instead, they combined with the "grubby" aesthetic of the footage to make the film a kind of raw and visceral experience for me. (Also, I think I'm more interested by the music of the Rolling Stones than of Bob Dylan.)

There was something sort of entrancing about the cinematography of this movie, both its actual look, and the placement of the camera. First, the look. As I was wondering how I would describe it in this blog post, I came up with the idea that the images had a "smudged" quality to them, like they had been drawn with cray-pas. You know, those wax- and oil-based crayons you used to use back in school. What was likely a budgetary limitation for the filmmakers has the appearance of a deliberate artistic choice with the passage of 50 years. (Happy 50th Gimme Shelter, by the way.)

The brothers themselves were the cinematographers -- Zwerin was on the editing, which more on that in a moment -- and the way they frame the images is hypnotizing. Way too close to their subjects turns out to be an incredible decision in this case, as half the time, the thing the camera is looking at is only half or even a quarter visible in the frame. I think of this one particular shot of the Stones in a studio environment listening to their song "Wild Horses," where one of the band members (I can't tell the three non-Keith and Mick guys from each other) appears with only half of his face in the frame, as you focus on his wandering eye that sometimes makes contact with the camera before looking away. The whole movie is like this -- the camera wandering, fixing on seemingly unimportant details that speak volumes, indifferent about how much we can see of what we're looking at.

The movie finishes on Altamont -- I suspect the last two-thirds are spent on it -- but before that, it captures the last few tour stops for the Stones. In one of these, a young Tina Turner performs a blistering set as well. I really felt transported back to that time.

The Maysles also do wonderful things with intercutting concert footage with images of them examining the Altamont footage after the fact, with radio DJs giving us a little bit of context and exposition, and even with phone calls between the Stones' management and potential venue hosts as the concert has to quickly be moved from Golden Gate Park in San Francisco just a few days before it's supposed to happen. While these are mostly moving chronologically, they don't all, and again, you've got an entrancing effect here. 

You can't use the word "intercutting" without talking about the editing, which was Zwerin's department (with Ellen Hovde). The look of the film is so scruffy that you would instinctively deny that it is strongly accomplished on the technical side, but I noticed at least a couple edits that blew my mind. There's one shot where Mick is approaching the stage from a side door, disappears into the crowd, and seemingly without an edit at all, the camera goes to him on stage, emerging from the shadows. There's stuff like that throughout the movie.

Back to the cray-pas comment, there's an amazing use of color in this movie. There are scenes of volunteers erecting the scaffolding and other staging needed to move the show at the last minute to Altamont, and it's against this amazing orange and purple sky that is almost something out of a fantasy movie. Hypnotic.

I think I could keep gushing but let's wrap up with the Altamont footage itself. In today's litigious times I doubt you could get away with including footage of so many stoned and drunk concert attendees without their permission, but back in 1969, it made for an illuminating portrait of modern youth. I could probably watch a whole movie of just the faces of the people in the crowd. (And if I didn't want to get further into the 1970s with my next pick in this series, I just realized I could watch the actual Woodstock documentary, which I haven't seen, which also came out in 1970, and which presumably includes lots of similar footage.)

It was tense and exhilarating, in a way, to watch as the Maysles captured so much footage of the actual clashes between Hell's Angels (who were drunk on the $500 worth of beer they were paid to be security) and concertgoers, without the possibility of knowing that this type of thing would occur. It was like they had a camera wherever they needed it, when they needed it, which is just a sign of their skill as filmmakers. Of course, footage shot for this event was also used to help determine that a particular concertgoer, who pulled a gun, was stabbed to death by an Angel, in what was later (rightly, it seems) ruled by the courts to be self-defense. There were three other accidental deaths and also four births, if you can believe it. We see the Stones trying to calm everybody down and Jefferson Airplane arguing with Hell's Angels because one of the band members was knocked unconscious by them. The Grateful Dead refused to play when they saw how the situation was deteriorating.

In short, the event was a trip, and so was the movie that captured and delivered it to us.

Here's hoping for as much luck with my next pick in this series in October, which is as yet undetermined. 

Why movies hate safety

You wouldn't think my post about the new Charlie Kaufman movie, I'm Thinking of Ending Things, would be about seatbelts.

If I were doing my job properly, I would be spending this time instead singing the praises of another great feather in Kaufman's cap, my favorite thing he's been involved with since Synecdoche, New York. (So, er, better than Anomalisa, I guess that means.) If you want to read those praises, check out my review here. 

Truth is, whenever I review something for ReelGood, it takes the wind out of my sails in terms of writing about it here. Not that I regularly write proper reviews for this blog anyway, but I definitely like to think of myself as coming here to gush if I see something I love. Eloquently gush, I should say.

Unless I find a new angle that I couldn't possibly cover in my review, though, I feel all talked out on the movie once I get to this blog. 

Hence, seatbelts.

In truth, it's actually an excuse to bring out of mothballs a post I had started a few weeks back and never posted. I've recently had plenty of opportunities to return to it, because the phenomenon I'm going to discuss seems to be everpresent in the movies.

Namely: Movie characters never wear seatbelts.

Don't think it's true? Next time you watch a movie where characters are driving in a car, check their shoulder area for seatbelt straps. You won't find any.

I suspect it's all about the appearance, that you want the actors to appear free and unencumbered, and not restricted by a safety harness. Lack of a seatbelt may also help with some movement they have to make during the scene.

But there are very few other things in today's movies that register as so out of sync with reality. In reality, most people gave up on whatever rebellious stance they had toward the wearing of seatbelts. Even with idiots who don't wear bike helmets or -- in 2020 -- masks, they recognize that a seatbelt is a useful life-saving device. They don't think it's some kind of liberal hoax to restrict their freedoms.

But movie characters, whatever their political persuasion, are almost never seen wearing seatbelts. Unless the plot itself strictly calls for a seatbelt, like they're about to stage a crash and the wearing of a seatbelt -- or, I suppose, the lack of wearing one -- is a plot point meant to contribute to why they survied or didn't survive the crash.

In I'm Thinking of Ending Things, it was particularly egregious. The characters played by Jessie Buckley and Jesse Plemons spend a good third of the movie driving back and forth from his parents' farm in a driving snowstorm. It's a good thing Kaufman didn't see it as a necessary part of the plot to have them spin off the road in slippery conditions, because they would have been right through that windshield.

I first drafted this post while watching the MIFF movie The Killing of Two Lovers, which could have been about two lovers killed by seatbelt neglect for all the time spent in cars without minimal safety precautions. I noticed it again in the final movie I saw at MIFF, Ema, in which the title character gets into the back seat of a car with a child, and does not strap either of them in. 

In a way, it's akin to the screenwriting shortcuts William Goldman talked about in his book Which Lie Did I Tell?, where he explains to us why the protagonist can always find a parking spot outside the courthouse, and why a character paying for something always has exact change. The movie does not need to waste time on the logistics that would actually accompany these transactions in the real world, like someone rooting around for change, or circling until an elusive spot appeared. 

In a way, though, it's not. You never have to show characters putting on a seatbelt. This can almost always be done off screen. But not even wearing one? You don't lose any time on this. You only lose some kind of intangible aesthetic, the importance of which eludes me anyway. I guess I'd have to see a version of I'm Thinking of Ending Things with seatbelts, alongside a version without, to really know which one I preferred from an artistic standpoint. 

And it's kind of dangerous because you are modeling behavior here. Viewers of all ages watch movies, and though the three examples I've listed are geared toward adults, I'm not willing to assume that this preference in the blocking of the scene doesn't extend to movies for kids. You may not be doing anything so pronounced as disregarding the importance of seatbelts, but I think you could be sending subliminal messages to people.

It's not just the seatbelts, either. I still see movies made today, with modern characters, where no one wears helmets on bikes. In some cases, this is also true of motorcycles. Of course, in movies like whatever recent Mission: Impossible movie it was where Tom Cruise rode a motorcyle helmetless, the character did not expect to be riding a motorcyle that day. He commandeered a motorcycle as part of a pursuit, if memory serves, so no, he would not have a helmet. But there are plenty of other examples where the character should have a helmet and just doesn't. 

With a motorcycle, I get it -- you've got your star here, and if she or she is wearing a helmet, you can't see his or her big moneymaker during that scene. But what's the excuse for no bicycle helmet? Because they make you look dorky?

I guess everything related to bicycles is a bit dorky, if you are talking about an adult. It's the main reason there has been nary a bicycle in a single season of The Walking Dead, even though that would be one of the most useful forms of transportation to survivors of a zombie apocalypse. I guess I can see why. The climax of the movie The Cure for Wellness involves Dane DeHaan on a bike, and it's absurd.

Okay now I really am getitng sidetracked.

I suppose it is dangerous to put movies in loco parentis, because viewers should know that they cannot do everything they see in a movie. But I do think there has become almost a casual disregard for safety for an infinitesimal gain. If you're reading this and you're about to go into production on a movie, just use the damn seatbelts. I don't want my kid going through the windshield because he saw your movie. 

Music faced, now I want more

I'll tell you the things I expected to feel upon finishing the third night of our Bill & Ted's weekend, which of course featured the just-released Bill & Ted Face the Music:

1. "How embarrassing."

2. "Were they really that desperate for money?"

3. "I've had it with these series reboots three decades later."

Here is what I did not expect to feel, but did actually feel:

1. "How clever! How charming!"

2. "It feels like they did it for the love of the material, not for money."

3. "I want more!"

Who would have guessed it?

Perhaps the seeds of my optimism first came when I saw the two on Colbert a few weeks ago. I knew Keanu would look good, because I've been seeing him regularly throughout his career, but I said to my wife about Alex Winter, "He looks good, why can't he have a career?" They had a lovely rapport -- both with Colbert and with each other -- and I started to feel a mild hunger for some more Bill & Ted.

Before watching it on Sunday night, I'd only heard from one person who had seen it, who offered a guarded recommendation. In fact, even when recommending it, he had this look on his face like he was sort of regretting it as he was even speaking the words. (And if you wonder how I saw someone's face in this day and age, it was over Zoom.)

But it only took a few moments before I was fully on board, and a few moments after that before I was grinning widely. And laughing regularly. And enjoying the hell out of myself.

I'll have a full review up tomorrow -- I've written it but not yet posted it, so be sure to check back if you're curious. But I was just so pleasantly surprised by how they revisited and extended the logic of the first two movies, and there are some killer lines and moments, plus a good combinaton of new and returning comic relief. It's jam-packed full of material for a 91-minute movie, but never feels hurried. (Almost) everyone has something to do, too. Simply put, the thing works.

I'll leave the actual analysis of the film up to the review, but I'll let you know now: I'm serious that I could watch more of these movies. I don't know that that's actually a good idea, and there are parts of this movie that would suggest Reeves and Winter don't intend to play these characters again. (That's not a spoiler.) But I guess it all depends how big of a hit it is. If it's a hit, either Reeves and Winter could return, or they could hand it off -- though I guess it's hard to imagine a Bill & Ted movie without Bill & Ted.

Anyway, I'll just close by saying I am so damn pleased by the existence of this movie, which also has a perfect title.

Thank goodness for well-made cinematic comfort food during a pandemic.

Embrace the bogus

Welcome to night #2 of our Bill & Ted's weekend ... or really, morning #2 after night #2.

And yes, I can say "our" as my wife surprised me by watching most of Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey, even though she had planned not to. At first she said she was just going to watch ten or 15 minutes of it, then she stayed for the whole first hour. Why she didn't just finish the viewing at that point is beyond me. I will never understand the viewing habits of other people.

She did, though, realize very close to the start that she had already seen it. So I guess it's slightly less weird that a person would bail on a second viewing of something they'd already seen than their first viewing ... though my wife would do that too. Maybe I'm the weird one for insisting I watch things to their completion, even repeat viewings. Who knows.

At first I was shaking my head at Bogus Journey, getting a painful reminder of what I found so disappointing about this film, but partway through I had a bit of a revelation. When I started likening this movie to the sequel to The Wizard of Oz, it gave me a whole new perspective on it.

The original Wizard of Oz is, of course, a mostly bright and sunny movie -- I'm talking about its tone here, though most of the scenes do take place during the day. Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure has the same feel to it.

But I felt an immediate sense of revulsion back in the 1980s when I first saw a trailer for Return to Oz, the sequel (of sorts) released some 45 years after the original. The movie may not have had a significantly higher percentage of scenes set at night -- not that the trailer could really show me this anyway -- but the sunny demeanor of the original seemed to be entirely absent from this movie. It felt garish and twisted, as if entirely missing the point of what an Oz movie was supposed to be.

I finally saw Return to Oz about five years ago and by this point, I could fully enjoy its garishness and its twistedness. Yes, there's some nightmare imagery in that movie, but instead of being repulsed by it, I found it a brave and surprising departure from The Wizard of Oz.

Such is now my impression of Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey. It's never going to surpass Excellent Adventure in terms of my affections, but it's a lot closer to the original than I ever would have guessed.

Yeah this movie is garish and darker, but that's okay. You get that sense right from the start, in that grotesque scene where the robot Bill and Ted peel away their faces to reveal their robot underparts to a horrified room full of future hostages to the villain, played by Joss Ackland. (And when I saw him, I immediately thought of his role in Lethal Weapon 2 -- "Diplomatic immunity!" "It's been revoked.")

That spirit continues, of course, when Bill and Ted are killed -- pushed off a cliff by their evil doppelgangers -- and make a trip through all sorts of existential afterlifes. Or should that be afterlives? There is plenty of garish imagery to accompany this, with both objective and subjective visions of hell. The first comes complete with an image of the literal hell, including a horned incarnation of the devil. But then you also have a personal hell for each lead, as Bill relives a nightmare moment where he was being kissed by his ancient and physically unpleasant grandmother (also played by Alex Winter) and Ted is chased by a malevolent Easter Bunny.

In addition to being bothered by the darker tone, when I first saw this movie, I considered this a decidedly different way of forcing us to suspend disbelief than the original. See if you go with me on this. While you can argue that time travel is "realistic," in that many films have put forward the single belief-suspending notion that time travel is possible and then followed some fairly clearly delineated rules from there, all this afterlife stuff is patently "unrealistic" and breaks the rules originally established by the series.

This time, though, I just went with it. Ultimately, what happens in a Bill & Ted movie is just a way of seeing how these two Southern California slackers will react to different stimuli. It's all just a way for us to enjoy their clearly delineated personalities -- the only rules that really matter.

I think the Return to Oz comparison was ultimately inspired by the eventual use of practical creature effects in the form of the character Station. This was one part of the movie I decidedly did not remember, and if you didn't remember Station either, here he/she/it/they are:

I think I ultimately don't consider Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey the type of movie that should feature characters like this, but like I said, this time I just went with it.

Making that easier is the fact that I was laughing a lot more than I expected to. As just one example, Winter has a couple hilarious line readings in a row when the afterlife version of the military school drill sergeant, played by Chelcie Ross, is tormenting them. First he's trying to figure out how to salute the character, and he says "Sir! Dude! Yes! Sir! Sir! Dude!" Then after being given their punishment, he says to Ted "Dude, I don't think there's any way I can do infinity push ups."

In fact, one of my more interesting takeaways of watching this movie was a reminder that Alex Winter was always the more interesting of these two performers for me. Given the career Keanu Reeves has had, it was easy to forget the kind of promise Winter showed. In fact, even now, I appreciate him in these movies a lot more than I appreciate Reeves. His charisma shines through more, while Reeves gets a bit lost in the fact that his hair is covering his eyes most of the time -- kind of like a dog whose eyes you can't see. You can't really connect with someone's charisma if you can't see their eyes.

I have to wonder how much time Winter spends wondering why he didn't have a career like Reeves did. It could easily embitter a person, and probably has, though seeing them on Stephen Colbert the other night, it seems that they retain a very strong personal fondness for one another, even going out for meals together and such (during non-pandemic times of course). It probably benefits him to remain friendly with Reeves, and maybe Reeves doesn't give a person a choice by just being a good guy you couldn't resent. But if I were Winter, I'd probably be resentful as hell.

It's interesting to me that I'm going on at much greater length about the movie I don't like as much than I did about the original, but clearly this has been the greater "discovery" of the two for me this time. But I can't leave off my discussion without referencing the scene I remembered best from the first time around, when William Sadler's Death -- just as great as I remembered -- plays a variety of games against Bill and Ted.

The sequence is played perfectly. It starts with the ridiculousness of playing Battleship, as the sides exchange shots and Sadler either delights in a hit on his opponent's ship or curdles as his battleship is sunk. Then, once he extracts a "best of three" scenario upon losing, it's on to the equally absurd botched finale of a game of Clue, in which Death guesses the wrong murder suspect when he accuses Colonel Mustard. "Plum, I said Plum!" he says, rattled, and then changes the terms to best three out of five. We only see the final losing moments of a game of electronic football, and then it's on to the coup de grace -- a game of Twister between Bill and Death. The tension builds as we see Death contorting to place his foot on a color far out of his range, and as he falls, it's a great release of comedic energy.

Having had two really fun viewing nights in a row, I am primed and ready for Bill & Ted Face the Music.

A most excellent weekend

I don't know for sure if it will be "excellent," but it will definitely be "Excellent!" (cue guitar sound).

Continuing a "tradition" my wife and I have only done twice before, if memory serves -- with the Godfather movies and the Girl With the Dragon Tattoo movies -- we have just begun a weekend of movies in the same trilogy, one per night. And from the poster I've included and the unmistakeable allusion in my title and opening sentence, I think you know what that is.

We've watched Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure on Friday night, and will follow that tonight with Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey before wrapping up the weekend with the brand new Bill and Ted Face the Music on Sunday night -- which is also Father's Day here in Australia.

A few differences from previous instances of these trilogy weekends, though I should say, those weekends were not the same as each other, either. In the case of the Godfather weekend, we had both already seen the first movie but not the second and third. For the Dragon weekend, we had seen none of the original Swedish versions of the films (and it was a few months before David Fincher's Hollywood version came out). In this case, we had both seen the first movie, I'd seen the second but my wife couldn't remember if she'd seen it, and of course, the third is new to us both.

Also, there will be no themed food this time, though the travel through time and throughout the world certainly would have created the opportunity had we considered it. (In the previous two instances we ate Italian food and Swedish food.)

One other difference: My wife won't actually be watching Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey with me.

She's rarely up for movies on three consecutive nights these days, and me saying the sequel was not all that was enough for her to opt out. She's happy to have me fill her in on what she missed before we both watch the new movie tomorrow night.

I hadn't seen the original Bill & Ted's since within about two years of its release, when I watched it for probably the second and final time. However, I think it was also one of those movies I probably caught parts of throughout the first half of the 1990s. Would likely have been on in the background while I was in college.

Still, having caught enough of it back then, and continuing to quote it for some years afterward, I assumed that it would mostly seem familiar to me. That was decidedly not the case when the movie started, as the entire opening credits play over what looks like a futuristic rotating diamond. Having forgotten what percentage of the film is set in the future, and that it begins with opening words by George Carlin as Rufus, I felt totally at sea during this opening -- like, did I even see this at all?

Of course, as soon as Carlin started talking, it was "Oh yeah, right." And things felt much more familiar from there. (At least to me; my wife continued to remember very little of it.)

We enjoyed watching it, laughing out loud a number of times each. One of the most consistently funny parts was the bit about Bill's new stepmother, Missy, who is only three years older than he is. "Missy ... I mean, Mom." It never got old, nor did Ted's comments like "Remember when she was a senior and we were freshmen?" and "Remember when I asked her to prom?"

Also really enjoyed the performance of Terry Callimeri as Napoleon. I remembered him being funny, but he really steals the show. In fact, all the historical figures are great, and we especially got a kick out of the bromance between So-crates and Billy the Kid.

One not so great takeaway was a moment of homophobia, but was glad to see it was only a moment, and very much in keeping with the prevailing norms of the time. Bill and Ted hug each other at one point -- I think it's when Ted is proven not to be dead because he "fell out of his armor when he hit the ground" -- and they realize what they've done and say "Fag!" to each other. Fortunately, the film moves on quickly and nothing like that happens again.

The last thing I wanted to mention was that we commented on how silly it was that the film climaxed with Bill and Ted's history presentation in front of what appeared to be the entire student body of the school. While the show they put on undoubtedly warrants that kind of audience -- and where did they get all their props and sets, by the way? -- the idea of an assembly attended by all the students to watch a history class assignment is just laughable. Given that there seemed to be at least 500 people in the audience, does that mean the whole school sat there for the entire day through 250 different presentations, assuming the two students per presentation standard set by Bill and Ted? I think not.

Enjoyable night of viewing though.

I'm not looking forward to tonight as much, but I know some people do have a fondness for Bogus Journey, and I remember at the very least that William Sadler as Death was a scene stealer.

Ranking Christopher Nolan

Tenet is open in parts of my country right now. Not parts anywhere near me, as the state of Victoria is still under Stage 4 lockdown, and will be for another 12 days. After that, who knows really.

But some people in the world, even elsewhere in Australia, have seen this movie. It even has scores on Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic. I really never thought the day would come.

In the past, the relase of a new movie from a major director like Christopher Nolan would have been the occasion for me to consider the director's whole career. The distant past, increasingly. According to my records, the last time I ranked a director's whole filmography on this blog was in October of 2014, when I put the films of David Fincher under the lens, tied to the release of Gone Girl. (Which remains Fincher's last feature to date, though Mank will finally end that drought later this year.)

I could have waited until I saw Tenet -- it will happen, eventually -- before writing the post you are currently reading. But there's a couple reasons I didn't do that, as follows:

1) Before Tenet, Nolan directed exactly ten feature films. I love round numbers, something I suspect I have in common with most listmakers. Really, I should have done this when Dunkirk came out in 2017.

2) The Filmspotting podcast has just recently finished their so-called "ouvre-view" of Nolan's films, the end of which was supposed to coincide with the release of Tenet. It did not, but they still continued on as planned, and recently revealed their own rankings of Nolan's ten films to date, having watched them all again. (It was a month ago, but I'm a bit behind.)

So I thought this made a good opportunity for me to do the same.

However, I will take a little bit of a different approach than on my previous times doing this exercise, as when I ranked all the extant films of Pixar, Wes Anderson, Joel and Ethan Coen, Danny Boyle, Star Trek, and the aforementioned Mr. Fincher. (I'm asking myself now how Tarantino has escaped me so far.)

In those instances, I organically chose which movies should occupy which spots on the list, without any input from outside sources. This time, it will be all outside sources.

See, I can tell, at any given time, exactly how I rank the films of any director I choose, simply by doing a filtered search on my Flickchart. But I find that takes all the fun out of it. What fun is making a list if someone else makes it for you?

This time, though, I thought I would consider a different goal. I thought it was time to figure out if I am more of an Adam or more of a Josh.

If you don't know, Adam Kempenaar and Josh Larsen are the hosts of Filmspotting. Adam has been the host since the begining in 2005, and Josh is his third co-host, having started his own tenure at the beginning of 2012. While previous co-hosts couldn't hang on for more than three years, Josh ain't giving up this gig any time soon.

I've had my suspicions over the years which host was more aligned with my personal tastes, based on individual opinions I wholeheartedly agreed or disagreed with. But there are just so many movies out there that all three of us have seen, and so many exceptions to so many rules, that it's hard to say for certain whether I've more regularly agreed with one than the other. There really has been no perfect litmus test to figure this out.

Until now.

Christopher Nolan has made enough of a variety of different films, in enough genres and tackling enough varieties of the human experience, that he certainly seems to function in the way we want him to for the current experiment. Given how he's risen to be among the most successful working directors today, someone embraced by Hollywood but with a consummately iconoclastic approach to making movies, he's also the greatest common ground for the modern cinephile. In short, he's probably the director whose films you can be most certain the people you discuss movies with will also see. Some people don't like Tarantino's violence, or Apatow's juvenile humor, or Anderson's arthouse pretensions -- either Anderson, really. But most everyone is okay with seeing the new Christopher Nolan movie.

But the key is, if I'm going to find out whether I'm really an Adam or really a Josh, I can't let my own unconscious biases enter into it. After all, I've listened to that episode of Filmspotting and I know what they've picked. Armed with this knowledge, I could skew my own list one way or another if I picked it organically.

Enter Flickchart.

Using the aformentioned Flickchart filter, I can immediately see how I have judged Nolan's ten films relative to each other -- which best, which worst, and everywhere in between. And while a person's Flickchart may not feel 100% accurate at any given time -- changing its course can feel like turning the Titanic -- it's going to be pretty close when you're considering only the relative positions of ten films out of the 5,000+ on my chart. And because Nolan hasn't made a film since Dunkirk in 2017 -- not one that I can currently see, anyway -- I don't have to worry about the fact that I'm way behind in adding the movies I've seen to my Flickchart. (I'm still stuck somewhere in early 2019.)

So ... before I lose you on endless preamble, I'll tell you what I'm going to do. I will reveal my Nolan rankings according to Flickchart, and then I will figure out whether I have a greater absolute difference in my rankings from Adam's chart or from Josh's chart. So that means if, say, I rank Dunkirk #6 and Josh ranks it #3, that's an absolute difference of three. Of course, if he ranks it #9 that's also an absolute difference of three. The least absolute difference is the one who has more similar tastes to mine ... at least, using only this flawed Nolan litmus test.

Shall we begin?

Here's how Josh ranks the films:

10. The Dark Knight Rises
9. Insomnia
8. Following
7. Interstellar
6. Batman Begins
5. The Prestige
4. The Dark Knight
3. Memento
2. Inception
1. Dunkirk

And here are Adam's rankings:

10. Following
9. Batman Begins
8. Insomnia
7. Inception
6. The Dark Knight
5. The Dark Knight Rises
4. Dunkirk
3. The Prestige
2. Memento
1. Interstellar

And here's a bit more, but not too much, on my rankings and their order.

I should say, before I start, that even though I have not very recently rewatched any of these movies -- I saw Memento back when they started the ouvre-review in April, for probably the fourth time -- I've seen six of these movies more than once. That means that percentage-wise, I might have a greater familiarity with this filmography than with any of the others I've considered in this forum previously. Which just means this post has been longer overdue, and my thoughts are, for the most part, still fresh.

According to my Flickchart:

10. Dunkirk (2017). 3613/5249 (31%). Adam #4, Josh #1. The harshness of my response to Dunkirk is a residual of that first viewing, when my former editor said I was crazy to see it after a couple glasses of wine. I talked about that here. But my second viewing last year or the year before did not significantly improve my impression of this movie. It still feels like a frequently confusing experiment with a bombastic score and too little payoff, plus too little character development. The latter was the point, I guess, but not everyone wants the same from Nolan as I do.

9. Interstellar (2014). 2335/5249 (56%). Adam #1, Josh #7. Every time I tell myself I should like Interstellar a little more than I actually do, I remind myself that Matthew McConaughey spends the last 25 minutes of this movie yelling "Murph!! MURPH!!" Or at least it feels that way. However, there are also some totally blow-your-mind moments in this film, like when they lose all that time down on the wave planet. Damn, space-time can be a bitch.

8. The Dark Knight Rises (2012). 2251/5249 (57%). Adam #5, Josh #10. I like The Dark Knight Rises pretty well, but I don't take it very seriously -- certainly not as seriously as Nolan wants me to take it. The thing I like best about it, for example, is how fun it is to do an impersonation of Tom Hardy's ridiculous Grandfather Bane voice with its absurdly comical high pitch combined with muffled incoherence. But it's a decent conclusion to the trilogy. Anne Hathaway is the best part about it.

7. Insomnia (2002). 2209/5249 (58%). Adam #8, Josh #9. The first time the Flickchart rankings are letting me down a little bit. If I were making this list organically, I probably would have put Insomnia at #9, but what are you going to do -- these three movies are all within two percentage points of each other on the chart, so it's not that far off. Yeah nobody really loves Insomnia but it has its moments. I prefer villain Robin Williams in One Hour Photo from the same year.

6. Following (1998). 1582/5249 (70%). Adam #10, Josh #8. That this is this high up on my Flickchart tells me two things: 1) I've been pretty generous in this movie's duels over the years, and 2) I am by no means a diehard Nolan fan. This basically means that a full half of Nolan's films are a bit shrug-worthy to me. I do like Following and I remember thinking it demonstrated some real cleverness on Nolan's part, cleverness that would fully bloom over his coming films, but I have little interest in seeing it again.

5. Inception (2010). 1001/5249 (81%). Adam #7, Josh #2. And here's where we start getting to films I really like. I actually didn't love Inception on the first viewing, but the second and third have increased my appreciation significantly. I always thought it was a narrative mistake to have the movie introduce us to the world on an atypical and ultimately botched version of the core premise -- don't you know you have to demonstrate a successful incarnation before starting to throw curveballs? Of course, this complaint ultimately pales in comparison to Nolan's many ambitious concepts and their execution. It's really good.

4. The Dark Knight (2008). 725/5249 (86%). Adam #6, Josh #4. Taken in comparison to Batman Begins -- which you'll note you haven't yet seen on this list -- I found The Dark Knight to be a mild disappointment. By any other standards, it's a remarkable accomplishment with a truly frightening villain performance at its center and a genuinely dangerous tone of anarchy for such a mainstream film. It's probably telling that this is the only of the three Batman movies I've seen more than once. It gets under your skin.

3. The Prestige (2006). 530/5249 (90%). Adam #3, Josh #5. I've been on the Prestige train since the beginning, as each of the remaining films on this list cracked my top ten of the year they were released. I might even like it better than my #2, but more on that in a moment. This is the most pleasurable type of puzzle box, the one that rewards repeat viewings and isn't afraid to go off the rails a bit in terms of your expectations. Adam and Josh described it in a way as the ultimate Nolan film, and that may still be true nearly 15 years later.

2. Batman Begins (2005). 288/5249 (95%). Adam #9, Josh #6. This ranking may be very problematic as for some reason, I have only seen this film once, the only one in my top five of which this can be said. I guess that first viewing really made an impression on me -- and I don't think it was just the circumstances, seeing it in Paris on a day of rest after a lot of walking. I got on board with Nolan's Batman right from the start and found the ensuing films to be a case of diminishing returns, though not significantly. I'll watch it again sometime to see if it truly deserves to be ahead of The Prestige.

1. Memento (2000). 119/5249 (98%). Adam #2, Josh #3. Nolan has never been better for me than when he first came out of the chute -- and though he actually came out of the chute with Following, I hadn't seen that so it was coming out of the chute for me. Even if Nolan makes another ten films I doubt he will have a chance of eclipsing one of the most ambitiously structured, faithfully adhered to, and philosophically rich narratives I have ever seen. (Just don't ask the premise to stand up to much nitpicking.) This is also the Nolan film I've seen the most, probably four times all the way through.

So I mentioned diminishing returns in terms of the Batman movies. It seems I also have diminishing returns in terms of Nolan on the whole. My top seven films are the first seven films he made, with the last three, chronologically, occupying the eighth, ninth and tenth spots on this list, in that order. I'd blame a reverse recency bias, but I've seen both my #9 and my #10 twice, to give them a chance to move up. They didn't.

Still, I wouldn't say this means I'm down on Nolan. I'm just as eager to see any new movie he makes as when I saw Insomnia after Memento. I know there's the opportunity for my mind to be blown any time out.

Now, the important question -- how do I compare to Adam and Josh?

I won't bore you with a film breakdown, but here were the absolute differences:

Adam = 6 + 8 + 3 + 1 + 4 + 2 + 2 + 0 + 7 + 1 = 34

Josh = 9 + 2 + 2 + 2 + 2 + 3 + 0 + 2 + 4 + 2 = 28

So I am more of a Josh, I guess!

How do I feel about this?

Well, a friend of mine, the friend who introduced me to the podcast, doesn't like Josh very much as a Filmspotting host, in part because he's never really forgiven him for replacing the host he liked best, Matty Ballgame. Plus, Josh is capable of some very eccentric preferences, the kind that sometimes go so far as to undermine his credibility. Adam, on the other hand, tends to hew slightly more to the critical mainstream in his views on films, though his tastes skew a little more independent as well.

Because of my friend, I've thought I'm not supposed to want to be a Josh, but I don't mind it. I have always liked a critic who will go out on a limb and champion something he loves that others don't, and Josh does that. So I'm okay with it.

Interestingly, though, I did have my biggest difference on any Nolan film with Josh. He worships Dunkirk, having it as his #1, while I've got it entirely on the other end of the spectrum. Outside of that, though, we are very much in sync, having no greater than a four-ranking difference on any film. Whereas with Adam, we've got three different films with a ranking difference of six places or more.

If you'd care to do your own Nolan rankings, I'd love to hear them in the comments. Whether they make you an Adam or a Josh is optional.

He doesn't die tomorrow - we don't think

I had an echocardiogram exercise test yesterday.

You know the one. You've seen it in the movies. They're worried about someone's heart, so they have him/her walk/run on a treadmill and stress test his/her ticker.

Why did my ticker require a stress test?

It didn't, probably. But I'm 46 years old, so out of an abundance of caution, I heeded the warning signs during an "incident" last Monday night.

I had been feeling some pain/pressure in my chest during the day, but nothing that worried me too much. I was able to shrug it off for the most part. Then that night, while watching whatever movie I was watching, I was snacking on some vegemite-flavored bagel chips. As though it were an exact reaction to the intake of the chips, I felt a flutter of sharp chest pains -- I described it to the doctor as "like the pitter patter of little feet on my heart, only painful." I pushed away the bagel chips immediately.

The possibilities were numerous. I could be experiencing cholesterol or blood pressure issues. I could have some kind of heartburn or indigestion. Or I might be about to drop dead of a heart attack.

I went to bed and monitored it the next day. There was no incident equivalent to the bagel chip incident, but there were a number of times I felt brief, sharpish pain in my chest. I immediately lowered my exertion level as much as I could and ate as healthily as I could. Complicating matters, it was my son's birthday, so I kept all my fears to myself. Don't want to make a trip to the hospital on my son's tenth birthday unless there's no other option.

Fortunately, one really great thing happened mid-afternoon, and that leads me to tell you about another recent malady I've been having. For the better part of a week, I had had numbness in my left foot and lower back pain, likely the result of the hard metal kitchen chair I've been sitting in all day every day since late March. I self-diagnosed it as sciatica, which I learned should go away on its own within one to three months. But I also needed to get myself some back support to keep it from getting worse.

My proper office chair arrived mid-afternoon that day, and immediately my foot and back showed improvement. It was like a cool sensation rushed to my lower back, like a bunch of nano-bots were being dispatched to the pain region and healing me with their millions of little nano-bot scalpels and other surgical tools.

The heart thing started to improve too, or become less frequent anyway. Whether the two were actually related or not, I have no idea.

The next morning I made an appointment for a telehealth conference with my doctor, which we couldn't do until Saturday. But I was already encouraged enough about my progress that I decided I could wait until then. By Saturday I felt yet better, but my doctor still had me do some blood tests, plus schedule the echocardiogram stress test for yesterday.

And I'm glad to say that I walked on that treadmill at increasingly faster speeds and steeper inclines for the better part of ten minutes, and everything looked fine.

Whew.

Last night I was in a celebratory mood. So how did I celebrate?

I watched She Dies Tomorrow.

I'm a bit of a masochist, aren't I?

I might have seen this a couple weeks ago, as it was an option during MIFF. But we didn't end up streaming that one, leaving it perfectly ready and available for viewing immediately after my own fears of death had been momentarily squashed.

Because that is, legitimately, how I felt. I was having thoughts like "What affairs do I need to get in order?" and "How terrible it would be if I died on my son's tenth birthday?" The answer: Very terrible.

That's what this movie is about. It's about a woman (Kate Lyn Sheil) who becomes entranced by some flashing red and blue lights that enter her house, and is suddenly possessed of a metaphysical certainty that this is her last full day on Earth. She knows she's going to die tomorrow. What's worse, anyone she tells about this gradually starts to believe the same thing about themselves. It's an epidemic of mortal paranoia. (Making it yet another movie released in 2020 that speaks so eloquently to what's going on in the world.)

It wasn't until I started to hear the movie discussed yesterday on Filmspotting that I became sure I wanted to watch it that night. I wanted to watch it to get more out of their discussion, so I stopped the review halfway through. But I was also compelled by how they describe the characters' feeling. These characters are steadily gripped by that feeling you sometimes get late at night, when your mind goes down the rabbit hole of contemplating what it means that you will one day die. I know that feeling. It makes your blood run cold.

Fortunately, because we are adults and rational human beings, we shake off that feeling so that it doesn't paralyze us. This movie is about people who cannot shake that feeling, and know that the day they will die is at hand.

I know the feeling both from my own life -- I still remember my first conversation about the permanence of death with my parents, and how distraught it left me -- and from last Monday and Tuesday. Did I really believe I would die last Monday and Tuesday? It's hard to say. But I also knew that if I ignored the warning signs, it's possible the moment could just arrive without me being prepared to meet it. A little negligence about my own health and it could be over just like that.

Well, today is "tomorrow." If this is the last post that ever goes up on The Audient, you'll know I have heaped some spectacular jinx on myself. Or maybe there really was something to worry about.

As for the movie, I thought some parts were extremely effective, while others were meandering and kind of without a point. I wouldn't expect anything different from Amy Seimetz, the consummate indie actress/filmmaker, who is mumblecore adjacent (and uses many other mumblecore adjacent performers here).

The effective parts will really stick with me, though. There's this line of dialogue by Sheil where she's trying to explain to Jane Adams the non-negotiability of this feeling, and she says "It just ... is." On "is," her eyes flick upward ominously, and a sinister note is stricken in the score.

If there's one thing I definitely don't like about the movie, it's that poster. It makes me queasy to look at it. The way the images overlap each other, it looks like Sheil has a huge open sore on the side of her face.

Then again, if a poster is about trying to recreate the feeling the movie gives you in a single image, well done.