Movies named like infinity stones, movies named like hurricanes

Unless something changes, Time will have been the last movie I watched in 2020. (I watched it last night, and thought the title itself was rather appropriate for the transition between years.)

Unless something changes, Soul will be the first movie I watch in 2021. (We're planning to watch it the night of January 1st for my son's birthday.)

Realizing this, I wondered, what other 2020 movies were named after the stones in Thanos' infinity gauntlet?

None as perfectly as that. However, there were films called Project Power and Color out of Space, so I think that's pretty good. Most years would probably not have films that had either of those bolded words in their titles. You probably almost never get a movie with the word "Reality" in its title, so that was never going to happen. "Mind" would have a chance, but there are only eight in the list of all the movies I've seen, so not a great one. (There's only one "Reality," that being Reality Bites of course.)

So I figure, the year after Thanos was finally dissolved from existence, his infinity stones were up for grabs?

While we're at it, I thought this was a good time to jam in another observation about 2020 films.

Have you noticed how many films released this year have had a woman's name as their title? Like, just the first name?

In other words, have you noticed how many films have been named like hurricanes?

I was planning to write this post when I finally see Shirley, which will be sometime before January 12th, but since my infinity stone observation was so brief, I decided just to piggyback on it with this one.

In addition to Shirley, we have the following this year, which either actually did come out, were scheduled to come out but were pushed back, or which (in one case) I saw at a (virtual) film festival.

In alphabetical order:

Annette
Becky
Clementine
Ema
Emma
Mulan
Rebecca
Wendy
Zola

And then there are two movies named after nicknames for female characters:

Babyteeth
Beanpole

And if you want to get into near misses -- or "missies," as the case may be -- you can consider also the following, which either consist of a woman's full name, or have a woman's name somewhere in the title:

Black Widow
Enola Holmes
The Glorias
Gretel & Hansel
Judy & Punch
Saint Frances
Selah and the Spades
Vitalina Varela
Wonder Woman 1984
The Wrong Missy

Incidentally, "Gloria" was the name of an actual powerful hurricane I experienced as a child. Hurricane Gloria whipped through New England in late September of 1985, according to Wikipedia, which also tells me it was the first significant tropical cyclone to hit the northeast of the United States since Hurricane Agnes in 1972. We all prepared for the worst and I can clearly remember the way it rained and the way the trees were blowing. We didn't evacuate and the only property damage we sustained was that a tree fell in our backyard, knocking down our "space trolley," which was kind of like the kiddie version of a zipline.

I guess I'd have to look at surrounding years to figure out if this is actually a significant number of movies named after female characters, but I can tell you that at one point, I looked down my Letterboxd Watchlist, and every other movie was one of these. 

Circumstantial evidence for the increased focus on women at the movies, maybe?

The year I didn't need any more movies

I've been writing posts whose titles start with "The year ..." for about five years now, posting them sometime between Christmas and New Year's as a way of looking back on the year gone by. They have a different purpose than my spate of year-end list-oriented posts that come along about two weeks after that, more an opportunity to look at overarching trends in the calendar year just completed.

No year I've been alive has probably been easier to summarize, as distinct from the years around it, than 2020. There is only one way people will remember this year when they look back on it in the future, which is COVID-19. That's the dominant headline, and most of us will probably also remember that there was a crazy presidential election and terrible racial strife throughout the world. Twenty twenty had it all, and none of it good.

In fact, the only way it could possibly be confused with another year is if 2021 somehow ends up being just as bad or worse, even with the start of the Biden presidency, even with a vaccine expected to make its way around the world in the first few months of the year, even with little violence in the streets greeting Biden's win. Even still, 2020 will hold a special place in our hearts -- or more likely, the pits of our stomachs -- for having been the year when the virus first took hold, and at the same time, we realized something close to half the U.S. population believes that slavery should still be legal. (Sorry, that's a slight exaggeration. Maybe only a third.)

So why, then, am I not just entitling this post "The year of COVID"?

Well I've been writing about COVID all year. Every fourth or fifth post, the whole year, has been a consideration of some change wrought by the pandemic. And frankly, I'm tired of it. On the level of opinion pieces, which blog posts essentially are, it's gotten too obvious by half.

So instead, I'm looking at a more personal change that was also, sort of, a result of COVID, but which I haven't talked about yet. It's a change that was already underway as a result of industry changes, and COVID just multiplied it by ten.

Every year in the northern hemisphere autumn -- which is the southern hemisphere spring -- I start to really focus on collecting up the movies from that release year that I haven't seen yet. It's not just gathering together specific must-see titles, but boosting the sheer quantity of movies I see in a given year, to bring my total into the 140s or 150s by mid-January, when I close off my list and post my year-end rankings. 

In the past, it's a time that has been characterized by "good gets." Like "Ooh, this movie I heard about back in March is now available on Netflix." Or, "Ooh, the library has a current year title in stock." Or, "Ooh, let me grasp as large an armful of new releases as I can while this plane is still in the air."

That never happened this year. 

October came, November came, December came, and I never once felt that slight thrill tinged with panic, when I suddenly became aware of how little time was left and how many more movies I still needed to see. In short, nothing felt like a "good get" because I didn't care about "getting" anything this year.

As suggested earlier, this can be explained by a number of factors:

1) The pandemic. Obviously. With, I don't know, 50? 60? movies that were scheduled for 2020 not even getting released this year, there were a lot fewer movies that had a "theatrical stamp of approval" that I felt I needed to check off my list as the year was winding down. Getting a theatrical release or not has always been a line of demarcation between must-see movies and those that were barely above straight-to-video level, and I'm talking about the kind of straight-to-video movies that star John Travolta, Bruce Willis and Nicolas Cage. I saw what was released on VOD, more or less when it was released, and I didn't have a bunch of titles collected up that I'd missed while they were in theaters, due to having to prioritize what I could see in any given week and what I couldn't. 

2) Changes in the way things are being done, even without the pandemic. As more and more Important Movies -- like Mank, I'm Thinking of Ending Things or The Trial of the Chicago 7 -- are planned from the start to debut on Netflix or the other streamers, that's considerably more movies each year that you don't have to choose to see or not see in the theater. I mean, you actually can see some of these in the theater, and I recently bemoaned that I had never yet availed myself of that option. But when you see as many movies as I do, you have to have a system that allows you to maximize your opportunities. And that means streaming when the option exists.

3) Screeners. The other big that happened this year, which had nothing to do with the pandemic, was that I started running ReelGood, the website I had previously only been writing for. As my editor stepped away from those responsibilities, he also stopped writing reviews, which might have happened anyway, but the pandemic made it certain. (He has actually written three reviews for me, but only within the past two months.) Coincidentally, our handover of responsibilities occurred in March, right when everything started shutting down. So I started getting all the emails for screeners from publicists and the like that he used to get, and I saw 15 to 20 movies that way. (Most of them not great, unfortunately.)

4) Priorities. It's hard to obsess about what movies you have or have not seen when people are dying of COVID all over the world, including some people I know. (Including my own mother, but she was already doing very poorly and might have died this year anyway.) I could still throw myself into my usual pastimes -- baseball and movies most passionately -- during the pandemic. But I couldn't get bogged down on which of an increasingly oddball selection of 2020 releases I had not yet seen when there was just so much going on of such greater import. This is the perfect time for that hashtag #firstworldproblems.

So even though I figure to see about my usual number of current year releases -- I won't challenge my record of 151, but will almost certainly be in the 140s -- it was largely out of professional obligation and habit, rather than the intense burning passion that can only come from eccentric obsessiveness. 

That does not mean I look back on 2020 as a bad year, film-wise. I think my top ten is going to look just about as credible as it usually does. Or it could just be that I'm subconsciously grading things on a curve and not consciously aware that the overall quality level has gone down. Then again, the various Black Widows and Dunes and Fast and Furious 17s that got postponed aren't usually contenders for my top ten anyway. 

What remains to be seen is how much of this will carry over into the new year -- and how much that year will feel like its own year, or just the stinky remnants of this one. As far as I understand it, most if not all of the delayed movies are indeed set to debut in 2021. But we'll have to see, as we get closer to their expected release dates, just how many studios stick to their guns on having theatrical releases, or whether they start going the way of Warner Brothers and selling them off to streamers that they may or may not already own. Plus there's the fact that 2020 is, in a sense, still going on until late February, when the last of the movies eligible for this year's Oscars will be released.

So 2021 figures to have its own unique issues and questions to address about the future of cinema. What I hope is that, a year from now, I'm not reflecting on 2021 as the year we watched most of the cinemas close their doors for good, either due to lingering concerns of contagion from the pandemic, or because even vaccinated audiences have moved on. 

Steve McQueen cannot direct five movies in one year

There are currently 73 titles in my Letterboxd watchlist, which tracks the current year film titles I still hope to catch before I close off my rankings the second week of January. 

That may seem like a lot, but it's about typical for this time of year. There are always plenty of movies I can't get to, either because they're on a service I don't subscribe to, or I missed them in the theater and they have not yet become available for rental, or simply because they were once forecast to come out this year but never did. That last is obviously happening a lot in 2020, as titles like Dune and Black Widow are still in my watchlist, mostly because at the end of each year, I roll over the leftovers, as long as their release dates are still in the future.

A series of 2020 (films? TV shows? let's talk about it) I do have access to is challenging whether that list should really be 77 titles long, or maybe only 72.

And this seemingly trivial decision could end up being a landmark moment in the erosion of what we call cinema. 

A while back I added to my watchlist Lovers Rock, a new Steve McQueen movie I'd heard good buzz about. At the time I added it, I noticed the poster also made reference to something called Small Axe, but I didn't know what that meant until later. I just knew McQueen was a filmmaker who demanded my attention, as I've never disliked one of his films and they always engender plenty of discussion.

Small Axe, as it turns out, is a series of five "films" McQueen has directed for Amazon Prime. That service is certainly promoting them as films, as that continues to be the more prestigious moniker, at least for the time being. However, they are not all what we would consider to be feature length. 

As my true awareness of Small Axe has only dawned on me in the past couple weeks, it has presented me with quite a dilemma. When you're already focusing down your choices at the end of the year, and even starting to informally slot your remaining movies into available viewing slots, it throws quite a spanner in the works, to use the Australian phrase, to suddenly be presented with five new movies you hadn't been planning for. 

Of course, part of this dilemma involves actually deciding whether these are movies.

The easiest way to decide is just to go with how they are being marketed, which is as films. If Small Axe had come out earlier in the year, I likely would have just gone with that categorization, and sprinkled my viewing of them throughout the year, as I did with the Amazon-only Jason Blum series Welcome to the Blumhouse, which featured four films of its own. 

But facing the end of the year -- and the prospect of not being able to include these for consideration in my year-end rankings -- I'm forcing myself into the position of really examining their bonafides as genuine pieces of cinema, and not just an anthology TV show, like we get so many of these days.

For one, right at the start of the Wikipedia description, it refers to the series as "an anthology film series." That description contains conflicting terminology, if we are to think of an anthology as primarily a television term. But the weekly release dates of these "films," starting on November 20th and finishing on December 18th, lend more credence to the notion that it is a limited television series with regularly recurring drop dates. 

Then you've got the running times. The first release, Mangrove, is 128 minutes, leaving no doubt as to its appropriate designation as a film. But from there things get more dicey. Lovers Rock, the one I first heard about and the second release in the series, is barely half that length at 68 minutes. Then you've got Red, White and Blue (80 minutes), Alex Wheatle (66 minutes) and Education (63 minutes). 

Only two of those "films" meet the standard definition of a feature film, and at 80 minutes, Red, White and Blue is only barely squeaking in. (I draw an imaginary line of demarcation around 75 minutes.)

Maybe this would seem more clear cut in favor of labeling these as films if we didn't have so many examples of streaming television shows that have very long individual episodes. Many series that are clearly defined as television shows have no trouble issuing single episodes that exceed feature length, or at least my stated 75-minute lower end of that range. Some of those shows are even anthology shows, in that the episodes don't share any characters or plots in common. The most obvious example is something like Black Mirror, which has isolated long episodes among mostly ones that are under an hour.

I'm not sure why McQueen gets a classification exemption. And if Mangrove weren't as long as it is, maybe he would not. If you are promoting five different units of filmed entertainment that are all between 65 and 75 minutes long, are you still calling them films?

Given that many of my arguments are rationalizations enabling me to avoid watching all five of these different units of filmed entertainment by January 12th -- because I feel like I need to watch all of them or none of them -- there's one final argument that truly convinces me, which I have already alluded to in the title for this post. 

I can't think of another example in history where the same director has made five films in one single year. Two, for sure; probably three or maybe even four back in the golden age of Hollywood, when films were made in like ten days and the director's role was limited to the period he was actually on set yelling "Action!" or "Cut!" But five? No director can direct five films in one year, especially in this day and age.

You know what one person can direct five of in a single year? A TV show.

It may seem like a meaningless distinction, but at this time of year, I'm trying to find meaning in meaningless distinctions.

It's generally easier for a director to direct multiple episodes of a TV show, even if some of those episodes reach feature length, because they tend to rely on the same sets and the same assemblage of talent. Maybe the best example here is something like True Detective, whose first season was directed entirely by Cary Joji Fukunaga. And those were certainly cinematic episodes, sprawling in nature and ambitious in technique. It may have been harder for Fukunaga to direct eight episodes of True Detective even than for another director to direct two films in one calendar year. But there is still no doubt that this is a TV show, not a series of related movies.

I suppose there's a degree of difficulty introduced to McQueen's feat in that he changed casts between each project, as well as, presumably, locations, though I have not seen these so I can't state that for sure. I also reckon Small Axe is probably not as technically ambitious as True Detective, though again, I am only speculating.

However I arrive at my conclusion, and even if making decisions according to precedent is a faulty process, it's a conclusion I can rest easy with for now. Then, sometime in 2021, I can watch Small Axe at my own pace, and take in their undeniable pleasures without it feeling like a cram session.

The question I'll have to tackle then, though, will be whether I add them to my various film lists or leave them off. And that's the part of this that gives me long-term categorization fears. There are so many signs of the way movies are ceasing to be considered a vital entity, or collapsing into the mechanics of television if not yet their label as a distinct art form. If something like Small Axe further blurs and starts to erase the line between movies and television, well, at the very least it will throw cinematic loyalists and list-makers like myself into a tizzy.

A question for another day ... 

Finish What You Started: Sanctum and Withnail & I

Today I am not only finishing a movie I started -- two movies, actually -- but also a series I started.

As you are surely aware, it is the end of the year, which means it is also the end of Finish What You Started, my 2020 bi-monthly series that involved completing movies that I once had to abandon unfinished.

I ended up with two movies in the final month. I'll tell you how that happened in just a minute. But at one point, I wasn't sure if I'd have any.

When I first forecast what I expected to watch in this series, I could think of only five titles. I needed six. 

October saved me from that predicament, as I remembered that I'd once started Akira Kurosawa's Dreams, a film I happened to have assigned to me in October for a different viewing project altogether. That meant I didn't have to find any more movies for Finish What You Started, and that the final film in the series, Bruce Robinson's Withnail & I (1987), could be my December movie.

Only I combed the various streaming services and iTunes, and I could not find this film. I had never thought of it as particularly hard to come by -- we came by it eight years ago, which is approximately when I started watching it with my wife the first time. But it was nowhere to be found this time.

So then I remembered one more movie I'd started but not finished. (There are certainly others, but the trick is remembering them.) That was Alister Grierson's Sanctum (2011), which I immediately rented from iTunes. 

Done and dusted, right?

Not so fast.

Within hours of renting Sanctum I realized there was one more source for Withnail & I that I had not yet consulted. The public libraries have been closed for the majority of the year, it probably goes without saying, but they were even significantly slower to get back up to regular functioning than other local entities, probably because they are not designed to turn a profit or support people's livelihoods. In fact even now, when we are going on two months without a single new case of COVID in the state of Victoria, you are still given the third degree when you enter the library, and the librarians help you with tasks you previously were free to do yourself.

So I hadn't reserved anything from the library all year, but yes, reserving movies is now a thing again. And of course, Withnail & I was available for reserve. Even though I'd already sorted things out with Sanctum, Withnail had been on my original list and I decided just to watch it also. The librarian had to go to the reserve shelf to get it for me rather than letting me walk the ten feet into the library to do it myself, but indeed, I had now sourced Withnail as well.

So you get a bonus movie for this series. Or, I should say, I get a bonus movie, because if I'm being perfectly honest, this series probably has pretty much zero value for you to begin with.

I watched Sanctum first, on the night of December 20th. 

It was the completion of a viewing that began almost six years ago, when we were away for the weekend renting a house for my wife's birthday. It was a surprise gathering involving three other families, which wasn't revealed to her until they started showing up. (My wife wondered why we had such a big place just for the four of us.) As we were the first to arrive on Friday night, I started watching Sanctum from the house's DVD collection on its exceptionally large TV. There was a chance the first other family would not arrive until the next day, but when they showed up about 20 minutes into the movie, I had to abandon the viewing. There wasn't a reasonable chance to pick it up again for the rest of the weekend, and I've never gotten back to it.

Although I'd heard not great things about this James Cameron-produced disaster movie, I ended up quite enjoying it. I'm a pretty big fan of disaster movies to begin with, and this was a setting I hadn't really seen before. The characters are spelunking and mapping out a tremendous underground cave with its multiplicity of previously unexplored passageways, most of which require diving gear to properly explore. So as the characters start dying as the result of a surface-level monsoon, the deaths took on a variety of forms related to climbing mishaps and diving mishaps, with headwounds and drownings aplenty. I think the idea behind a disaster movie is to put you in the shoes of the characters and what they're dealing with, and this one does that quite well. I'd heard the acting derided, but I found that for the most part, the actors portrayed their fear and (occasionally) their courage with total credibility.

Probably neither of these viewings -- the one that started in 2015, or the complete viewing now -- were under the ideal conditions to watch Sanctum. Those conditions would have been on an IMAX screen in 3D back in 2011, as Cameron's involvement meant all sorts of technological spectacle that's invariably diminished when you watch it on the small screen. Given that I found it effective even in that forum, I suspect I would have really enjoyed it in a format that accentuates the film's visual strengths.

Unfortunately, Withnail & I -- which I watched last night on Boxing Day -- was a different story.

And this I might have expected given the circumstances of my original failure to finish the movie. That's right, this is the only movie in this series I stopped watching simply because I didn't want to watch it anymore. Saving the worst for last, I guess. 

It was sometime late in 2012 or early in 2013, as the second half of that first year and the first half of the second were the only times we lived in the house we bought in Los Angeles just before moving to Australia. (And still own, but have been renting out.) My wife was either the driving force behind the viewing or she co-signed it once she saw I'd acquired it from Netflix, discs through the mail back then. In any case, it had been a favorite of hers that she wanted to show me.

But I just didn't like it. 

Considering only the two movies discussed in this post, there could not be a bigger contrast between the visuals of Sanctum and the visuals of Withnail & I. This is a scuzzy looking movie -- by design, I'm sure -- full of scuzzy characters, both scuzzy looking and scuzzy acting. It is no doubt an outgrowth of the kitchen sink movement in British filmmaking of the 1960s, populated by angry young men, albeit in a would-be comedy. And yes, Richard E. Grant and Paul McGann have anger to spare in the title roles.

If I can be really reductive, here is a quick and easy way to describe the two halves of Withnail & I:

The first half is a portrait of Withnail trying to drink himself to death, a peak he reaches very early on in the narrative when he drinks paint thinner and then asks for his compatriot's toolbox to see if there's an additional supply he's holding back. I suppose the people at the time thought this was funny, but my face did not even crack a smile.

The second half is an extended episode of gay panic. That's right, "I" spends literally the entire second half of this film trying to escape the pursuits of Withnail's randy uncle, who is almost rapey in his enthusiasm. Except instead of being played as comedy -- even this film's dark version of comedy -- the idea of possibly being buggered is treated as a source of serious drama for "I," one the film feels it can keep hitting over and over again without seeming exceedingly homophobic. Of course, 1987 was a different time, and you could get plenty of comedic mileage out of gay panic. If this film were just doing that, it would be okay, but the look on McGann's face is not one of comedic worry -- it's like deep existential dread. 

As I said, 1987 was a different time, and it's possible -- though quite unlikely -- that I would have been more favorably disposed toward the movie if I'd seen it then. It has things in common with movies I like, most notably something like Mike Leigh's Naked, which I only just saw for the first time a few years ago. But in 2020, this movie was as much a slog for me as it was in 2012 or 2013. Only this time I could not turn it off.

I did take breaks every half-hour on the half-hour, a task made easier by the fact that I could easily see the readout on our DVD player. And to be fair, it did pick up for me a little in the middle before spiralling downward again. But it's good to know that I wasn't just too tired, or not in the mood, or whatever temporary affliction I thought I might have felt the first time I tried to watch Withnail & I. It's quite clear now that I will never be in the mood for it.

One final note on this film. I have chosen to write the title as Withnail & I rather than Withnail and I, even though it is far more often represented in print with the "and" than the ampersand. I usually go with how the title is actually presented on screen in the movie, but I don't remember that in this case, and I'm not going to put the damn thing back in my DVD player to find out. I do remember, however, that in the credits, Grant is listed as "Withnail" and McGann is listed as "& I," so that's what I'm going with. In fact, that may be the funniest joke in the whole movie. 

That's it! That's the series. 

I'd offer some kind of recap, but really, these were just six (actually seven) movies that I started once and didn't finish: Sisters, That Sugar Film, The Man Who Fell to Earth, Paddington, Dreams, Sanctum and Withnail & I. They didn't have anything else in common with each other, except that they shared a wrong I have now righted.

In 2021, it appears I'm going to be doing something I haven't done before: I'm going to do two bi-monthly series, intertwined with each other. That's in addition to the regular monthly series I will also do. Whereas I usually had January, March, May, July, September and November off from my bi-monthly series, now I'll be watching the second (or is it first?) of the two bi-monthly series those months.

What will they be? You'll have to stay tuned to see.

Extending Christmas past 11:45 a.m. on December 25th

When talking about the various family-appropriate holiday movies we might watch and when, I quipped that anything had to get watched by Christmas Eve, because for me, Christmas was over at 11:45 Christmas morning.

There's a nugget of truth in any joke.

This is a satirical presentation of a view I really hold. I'm taking the piss out of myself by suggesting that once the frenzy of present opening is over -- say, 11:45 -- then Christmas is over. Oh, you still get to lounge around the rest of the day in your pajamas, reading new books and exploring whatever new contraptions you opened. But that's just relaxation time. The thing I know as Christmas is effectively over.

(Of course, that's some version of a Christmas I had when I was growing up. Here in Australia, we go over to my wife's father's for Christmas lunch, which extended to 4:15 this year. So, not so much on the pajamas.)

What I mean to say, by way of making fun of myself, is that for me, Christmas is all about the anticipation of Christmas. All the rituals that precede Christmas are the things that represent Christmas to me, reaching their peak with that special magic of Christmas Eve. It's all downhill from there.

It's not that I'm no longer in a good mood or feeling happy for the rest of Christmas day. I've been lucky in my life to say that I've felt happy on most Christmases, even this one, when so much is wrong with the world. But even the feeling of satisfaction of a job well done -- my kids said this was the best Christmas ever -- doesn't measure up to the sweet anticipation.

Christmas movies are perhaps the prime example of this. Watching Christmas movies is designed to increase my holiday spirit. Sometimes they do (Jingle Jangle) and sometimes they don't (Fatman). But after Christmas Eve, they no longer even have the potential to serve that function of sweetening the hype that leads up to the day.

Well you'll be glad to know I'm not too old to change.

We had discussed watching The Christmas Chronicles either on Christmas Eve or Christmas night, even though that last was breaking my 11:45 rule. Now that's the original Christmas Chronicles, the one that we missed two years ago when it was new, not the sequel that has come out this year. But when we learned that my older son had already watched it, and he swore his little brother had too, we switched it up to Jingle Jangle on Christmas Eve. And if you read yesterday's post, you know how well that turned out. (Not to be vague: It turned out very well.)

So Christmas Chronicles was to get watched on Christmas, as Christmas Eve was acknowledged by the others to be the prime viewing slot, even if the others may not labor under my arbitrary viewing rules.

But with us not getting home from my father-in-law's until almost 5, we all needed some downtime, naps for the adults and video games for the kids. By the time we were getting our act together it was well past 7 and I made this unusual, and I think very enlightened, proposal to my wife:

"How about we watch Christmas Chronicles tomorrow afternoon?"

As in, Boxing Day. As in, really well and truly after Christmas is over, by anyone's definition. (Okay, not by North Americans' definition, as they were still in the tail end of it at that point.)

My wife's face lit up at the suggestion -- as much, I would guess, out of a genuine pleasure at my gesture of abandoning my own rigidness, as relief at not having to try to watch a movie that night.

Although I was perfectly happy to watch it, I did almost get out of it. We were again slow to assemble after today's afternoon quiet time and it was again after 7 p.m. Tonight I said to my wife: "I think the ship has sailed on Christmas Chronicles."

"No," she said. "We promised [the younger one]."

So watch it we did. I should say, start it we did. My older son watched the first half-hour, while we were eating dinner, then returned to his games; the younger one lasted an hour before succumbing to general exhaustion. 

And you know what? Not only was I really enjoying it -- fun movie -- but I felt Christmasy enough while watching it as well.

So it doesn't matter that we'll watch the final 45 minutes on -- gasp! -- December 27th. 

It's okay. Maybe Christmas is a state of mind, not just a date on a calendar. 

And yet more color and song in our Christmas

Netflix keeps nailing it with these Christmas movies.

Last year we loved Klaus, and earlier this Christmas season I was really taken with a little LGBTQ+ Christmas movie called A New York Christmas Wedding. Knowing Netflix, those two films probably represent about ten percent of the Christmas-related content they've released in the past two Christmases. I know there are a couple Christmas Chronicles movies out there that we still haven't watched, one of which might get watched on Christmas night.

But our Christmas Eve viewing took the cake.

I swear I'm not picking these out to keep up with this week's musical theme. In fact, I didn't pick out Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey at all. It was my wife's suggestion. Unlike most new releases on Netflix, I wasn't even aware it was coming out, which could be because the opening of cinemas has given me actual theatrical releases as an option to review again, so I haven't been desperately combing Netflix.

So this movie gave us color, as it has beautiful sets, costumes and visual effects, and color, as in, people of color. The cast is almost entirely Black -- African-Americans and African-British alike -- with just a few token whites thrown in. It's a role reversal we have direly needed, especially in a period Christmas story like this one, which appears to take place in Dickensian England, though the setting is never named.

And yes, of course, it was a musical. 

That makes it the third straight musical I've watched this week, and the songs were really good -- even if I only remember one or two now that the viewing has finished. But in a wonderful sign of what Netflix can bring to the cinematic landscape, this is a big budget (or looks big budget anyway) Christmas movie with top notch visual effects (toys that come to life) and a cast that almost exclusively has dark skin. This would never have happened in the Before Times, and though I usually use that phrase to refer to times before the pandemic, in this case, it is times before streaming. Society and streaming have been in lock step with making progress and documenting that progress on film, and the result is Jingle Jangle. (Never mind the two steps back we sometimes seem to get with that one step forward on the progress -- it's Christmas, so we can afford not to think about that for one day.)

I could conventionally praise this film for some time -- Forest Whitaker is great, Keegan-Michael Key makes a moustache-twirling villain, and newcomer child actress Madelen Mills has charisma coming out the wazoo -- is it appropriate to talk about a young girl's wazoo? -- but I don't really want to give you a blow by blow of what's great about Jingle Jangle. What I really want is for you to see it yourself, since some of you may read this before all your Christmas viewings are done and dusted for 2020.

If you need more evidence, I can tell you that my ten-year-old son wanted us to pause the credits so he could tell us this: "That was, by a mile, by far, the greatest and bestest movie I have ever seen." (Some grammatical inaccuracies inserted by me for effect.) Now, he has made this claim about ten different times in 2020, so take it with a grain of salt. But if there was ever any doubt that young white children could be swept up in the magic of a holiday tale told by and starring Black creators, I submit this as Exhibit A providing evidence to the contrary. 

I had a second movie in store on Christmas Eve, as I wrapped a last few presents and actually crossed the barrier into Christmas proper. That was The Muppet Christmas Carol, which I had never seen, despite it existing on this earth for 28 years. It wasn't in my head at all, but then someone mentioned it on Facebook, and I remembered that the Muppets were one of the collections they have on Disney+. Sure enough, The Muppet Christmas Carol was there on the service, waiting for me.

This too is -- can you guess what I'm going to say by now? -- a musical.

I suppose most muppet movies have some singing and dancing in them, but that honestly did not occur to me when I selected it to accompany my last present wrapping of the season. And I'll spend a bit less time on this, since most of you would have already discovered it, but this is fun as heck as well. The songs are really good -- "One More Sleep Until Christmas" will certainly stick with me -- and all the usual muppet mayhem is typically delightful. Michael Caine gives a real performance as Scrooge, a character it would appear he was born to play. I also loved Gonzo as Dickens and his sidekick Rizzo, and was there ever a more natural Bob Cratchit than Kermit the Frog?

Just as one quick thought: I had an idea for a funny variation on A Christmas Carol as I was watching. In the scene where Scrooge and the Ghost of Christmas Past go back to look at him at school in his childhood, she (creepy creation here!) tells him that these are only shadows of his past, and they can neither seen nor hear him. Well, what if there were a version of this story where one of the kids looks over and says "What? I can see and hear you just fine." And then "Ahhh! Travellers from the future!" And the whole rest of the story would be about the time travel conundrum that the eight-year-old Scrooge sees the 60-year-old version of himself, and how that turns him into a crazy person, and suddenly the 60-year-old is wearing a straight jacket as he has been in a mental institution for his whole life.

But that's a story for another day.

Today is Christmas, and I wish you a merry one, fully of color, song, and joy. 

A musical Technicolor Christmas

Sometimes you choose the movies you watch. Sometimes they are chosen for you. And sometimes the combination of the two results in something felicitous, like I had this week in the lead-up to Christmas.

The Young Girls of Rochefort, Jacques Demy's 1967 musical and a follow-up to his more famous 1964 film The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, was assigned to me this month in Flickchart Friends' Favorites Fiesta (yes, that's a lot of F's), my monthly group where you are randomly matched up with another person and watch their favorite movie that you haven't yet seen. I thought Young Girls made a great choice for December, as its undoubtedly festive atmosphere would be a perfect accompaniment to the Christmas season.

On my own I had selected to watch White Christmas, the 1954 Bing Crosby-Danny Kaye holiday classic directed by Michael Curtiz, which I knew about only as a holiday classic I had not yet seen. I noticed a while back it's streaming on Stan. I did not know it involved singing and dancing, though with these stars, that should have been a safe assumption.

I watched them on consecutive nights, Tuesday the 22nd and Wednesday the 23rd, the latter while wrapping presents. Not only did they both increase my holiday joy tenfold, but they also both popped off my screen in beautiful Technicolor, the kind we don't get anymore, the kind that took my breath away.

Technicolor, as you know, was the predominant mid-century method for coloring film, at least certain films, the biggest spectacles out there. I'm not going to get into a technical explanation of what it was, because there's a Wikipedia article for that. But you know it when you see it. The reds are redder, the greens are greener, and the purples -- oh, the purples!

I don't know how to describe the effect of watching Technicolor in 2020, but you've probably done it yourself, so maybe you don't need me to. And if you have, you are always struck by a moment when you ask yourself: "How come colors don't look like that anymore?"

If you haven't, here are some examples from these movies:

Again, not trying to impress you with any technical knowledge I don't have, which should be perfectly clear by the following comment: I have no idea why colors don't look like that anymore. I mean, aren't colors colors? Shouldn't you be able to reproduce any color you want on screen?

Yes and no. Yes you should. No you can't. These colors pop more than popcorn. Does it have to do with their respective lines of demarcation? Do today's colors bleed into one another more?

Let's take a filmmaker who is likely to use a lot of different colors in his films. Say, Tim Burton. Why can't Tim Burton make a film whose colors look like Technicolor? Shouldn't we have the technology?

And yet we don't, and he can't. Which makes this era of filmmaking even more special. 

I considered at one point subjecting my kids to White Christmas, and I'm ultimately glad I didn't. For one, I needed to wrap their presents. But there's also a lot of non-Christmas material to wade through in order to get to the Christmas material. Besides, I'm not sure they yet associate Christmas with classic, nostalgic cultural objects like this. They've barely seen any movies made before 1960 -- The Wizard of Oz and The Day the Earth Stood Still are the only two I'm sure of -- and it's hard to be nostalgic for something that has no connection to anything you've ever done.

But if I had shown the kids these movies, once they got past the fact that one of them was entirely in French, I think even they would be wowed by these colors. And hopefully, the singing and dancing too.

So fate stepped in and gave me an absolutely brilliant lead-up to The Big Day this year. Whatever else I watch from here on out, I can't imagine it would put me in a better mood. 

Not a place I expected to be at the end of 2020, but that's the power of movies I guess. 

My Christmas miracle

So even though this is a movie blog, I meant to write about The Mandalorian long before now.

We finally got access to the show when we got AppleTV and Disney+ in August, and my wife and I quickly watched the first four episodes. Then we watched them again, due to a command decision on her part that may have helped save Star Wars in our house.

Without going into too much background -- I've written about it before -- my kids had been skeptical about Star Wars at best. My older son had simply not taken to the first two movies in the saga, even at the ripe old age of ten when we watched Empire in October, and the six-year-old had spent a lot of time running up and down our hallway pretending to shoot blasters while the movie was on. While that's marginally a positive reaction on his part, it doesn't represent real engagement when you aren't even watching the screen.

Instead of plowing ahead undaunted to Return of the Jedi, which had been my plan, my wife suggested we see if we can hook them on something more recent.

The Mandalorian has been a total hit with them, almost from the very first moments. I'll say "almost." The pilot episode has a character that gets bissected by a closing cantina door, you may remember, and the older one almost wigged out at that scene. Strangely, there has been nothing quite that visceral in the time since then -- Baby Yoda eating frog eggs doesn't count -- so the rest of it has been smooth sailing. 

We still have one episode to go in the second season, so if you are inclined to comment on this post, please, no spoilers. 

Now the ten-year-old has been known to say things like "The Mandalorian is the awesomest thing ever." The younger one is still distractable and doesn't always fully watch what's going on, but he absolutely loves Baby Yoda -- Grogu, we now know him to be -- and even asked for a Baby Yoda for Christmas on his letter to Santa. "The one with the necklace," he wrote.

And that's where my Christmas miracle comes in.

This is "the one with the necklace":

Just as cute as anything related to Baby Yoda, you will agree. 

I should stop to say that I, personally, love Baby Yoda. I know, big revelation there. I'm sure I'm the only one who loves Baby Yoda.

But I literally had no choice but to giggle every time he was on screen, even if he was not doing anything. His default facial expression made me giggle. If he moved a little to the left? I was done for. That reached its culmination in season 2, when we learned his name. Mando would say "Grogu" and BY (as I call him) would immediately turn and say "Huh?" That did me in every time.

If anything should be this year's version of a Furbee or what have you, it should be this Baby Yoda with a necklace, who also makes noises and other small animatronic movements.

But when I started at Target last Thursday night, there wasn't a single Baby Yoda in sight. Like, I mean, his face was not on anything. Not on a board game. Not on a book. Not even on a greeting card.

I knew my mandate was to get "the one with the necklace," but at this point, I would have been happy to get a pair of socks with Baby Yoda on them.

This story would be a lot better if it had taken five or ten other toy stores before I got lucky. If they ever make the movie, I'm sure that's a detail they'll change. But I have to be honest with you and tell you that Big W, the rival to Target, was my salvation, and it was the next place I stopped.

I was disconcerted enough by striking out at Target, and feeling a hopeless certainty of failure sink in, that I was kind of listlessly wandering through the toy aisles at Big W. 

And then there it was: the Baby Yoda with the necklace.

It was just sitting there by itself. I'm not even sure if it was in its right place. In any case, there was no price tag on the shelf, indicating its proper storage spot. There were other Star Wars toys in the vicinity, but this guy was just on his own, no others of his kind around. 

I grabbed him, almost as if he might disappear if I blinked.

And he might have. Not five seconds after I laid claim, two teenage girls next to me said "Ohhhhh, Baby Yoda!" I had no indication they were in the market for him, but it was another reminder of how universally beloved this character, and consequently this toy, have become. 

I figured he might have been returned by a customer -- for some reason -- and only just "restocked" (haphazardly though it may have been) ten minutes before. And he likely wouldn't have lasted another ten. 

I made such a quick beeline for the checkout area, perhaps fearing another desperate parent might grab him out of my arms, that I didn't even have time to consider what this thing might cost. If I had been asked to guess, I would have said $50.

Turns out, it was twice that.

So what. What's $100 when an animatronic Baby Yoda will make your youngest son's Christmas?

It wasn't until I got home that I remembered even to test out the toy's capabilities. And this is where my Christmas miracle got even more amazing. When you touch its head, its eyes open and close, its ears wiggle a little bit, and a kind of humming chorus of Jedi angels emits from it. 

Score.

Merry Christmas all, and may you find your Baby Yoda with the necklace this year, whatever it may be. 

The practical snowman

While prepping my massive list of films I might watch while using my projector at the hotel last month, I noticed that Jack Frost was playing on Amazon. I'd always meant to see it, finding the concept of Michael Keaton reincarnated as a snowman odd to say the least. But I didn't watch it at the hotel because I figured it would be better to wait until it was, you know, actually Christmas season.

Saturday was the night, but when I rocked up to Amazon, I realized the Jack Frost on there was the horror Jack Frost from a year earlier. At the time I didn't realize, I suppose, that there were actually two different movies, though I have certainly seen their different posters at different times in my life. Anyway, if you asked me, I definitely would not have told you that I thought Michael Keaton starred in this movie, whose poster would have been the one I saw on Amazon:

So no Michael Keaton Jack Frost for me.

Except then I realized: "I'm an adult. I don't have to only watch movies I can stream for free. If I need to pay a couple bucks to watch the Michael Keaton Jack Frost, I will."

And sure enough, it was available for rental on iTunes for $2.99.

So the movie, which I marginally liked, was a disappointment in the following way: It wasn't worse. I really expected the idea of a magic harmonica that breathed life into a snowman, when it was wearing the clothes of a boy's deceased father, and that father was the one who started inhabiting the body of this snowman, to be a lot more ridiculous. Within the parameters of what sounds like a pretty absurd setup, it's a pretty conventionally heartwarming story.

I didn't actually know about the magical harmonica beforehand, and that might point to the only sort of absurd part of the movie. Before he dies in a car accident during a blizzard -- spoiler alert -- Keaton's title character is the leader of a kind of honky tonk band, where they wear unironic bowler hats. It's the kind of music Bruce Willis was into for a while there. And apparently it did not seem as ridiculous in 1998 as it undoubtedly was. (That music has its roots in something good, but transformed into a very poor facsimile thereof.)

It's because he's so focused on his music career that Keaton can't be there for things like his son's big hockey game. You get the idea.

In fact, on its own terms, the movie is probably not sufficiently good to earn my slight recommendation, but I'll tell you why I'm giving it:

I really enjoyed the look and feel of the snowman.

"Look and feel" is a term we often use in my regular line of work for the usibility of a piece of software -- its "look" and its "feel." When a new version of something is released, someone might say "The look and feel won't be changing."

But it's appropriate in this case as well because with the practical effects used here, something really does have a "feel."

At first I thought the snowman might be digital. Jack Frost was a year after Starship Troopers, which I continue to hold up as the shining example of a film that defies its time period in terms of visual effects. Twenty-three years later, those arachnids still look good. Titanic was 1997 also.

A digital snowman would be a piece of cake compared to those two movies. But Jack Frost also didn't have the budget of those two movies, so it hardly seems like they'd be at the front of the queue for the best in digital animation. 

I went so far as to google it, which of course revealed that the snowman was a creation of Jim Henson Creature Shop.

I love this for a couple reasons.

The first is that it really does excuse the mild affection I have for this movie, which is pretty out of sync with the film's 19% Rotten Tomatoes score. If you've got Jim Henson puppets in your movie, it means you are part of a smallish fraternity of films that share the DNA of Henson's more obviously wonderful creations. (Never mind that the execrable The Happytime Murders is also in that fraternity.)

The second is that it reminded me of something where I shouldn't have needed any reminding, especially since I rewatched Labyrinth during the aforementioned hotel trip with the projector. It reminded me that puppets can be capable of great expressiveness. 

This snowman was designed in such a way that the individual parts of his face can move independently of each other, and that the puppeteers have to learn how to make these movements. There are four puppeteers credited to this snowman, and since puppeteers don't usually get much credit, let's name them here. Bruce Lanoil and Denise Cheshire are credited as in-suit performers, while Denise Cheshire Pearlman is listed as "head operator" -- which either means she operates Jack's head, or she is the head of all the operators. Interestingly, Denise Cheshire and Denise Cheshire Pearlman appear to be two different people as evidenced by their separate IMDB pages, though surely there is a relationship. Allan Trautman is also credited as "additional puppeteer."

Whatever the combination of techniques and talents, they really make this snowman come alive -- alive in a way that a dead digital creation rarely comes alive, and certainly not in 1998. It's one thing to use a computer to create an arachnid whose face you can't see, who has no personality, and a sinking cruise ship. An actual creature with a soul wouldn't have been up to digital's abilities at the time.

And Jack really is tactile. That's a word that gets thrown around all the time in the debate between practical effects and digital effects, but there's a reason for it, as it perfectly expresses the three-dimensional physicality of a character on screen -- the kind we also see throughout Labyrinth. I suppose there isn't really a "debate" on which would be better, if the possiblity existed to use either technique for the same amount of money, and achieve the same result. Every filmmaker whould use practical effects if he or she could. But practical effects just aren't ... well, practical.

But I'm glad they still have a place in the movies, either because those movies were long enough ago that digital was not yet viable, or because some movies today will repudiate digital in order to create something with a more definitive physical presence.

And the truth is, when that tactile, practial snowman moved its stick eyebrows, its coal eyes or its cork nose, I felt the emotion behind it. 

And so yes, I did believe that a harmonica-playing Bruce Willis wannabe had, for a few magical weeks, returned to this earth in snow form. 

Is it in this land?

I was on about titles yesterday, and now I'm on about titles again today.

(Incidentally, do you like how the way I think is becoming more Australian? Instead of saying "What are you talking about?" Australians say "What are you on about?")

This is one of those superficial posts where I make an observation about four similar contemporaneous movie titles -- which is also kind of like yesterday. But I wouldn't be writing the post at all if it didn't allow me to recount a story from my youth, one of those moments you remember because something you said got everybody laughing.

First the banal observation: There are four movies either out in theaters now, or very soon, whose title structure is "_____land." The titles are Greenland, Nomadland, Dreamland and Summerland.

Now, the story.

I was on a school trip to Canada and we went to this cheap-o amusement park, which Canadians probably thought was great, but which struck us as lame by comparison, as New England had a couple really good amusement parks when I was growing up. They might seem terrible now (I'm not even sure if they still exist), but at the time, they were a hell of a lot of fun. This one was not.

The park was segmented into "lands," and I'm sure these weren't their actual names, but for example, they had "Forestland" or "Arcticland" or "Sandland." In fact, if any of those were the actual names I'd be very surprised, as I don't even remember what the park's overarching theme was. But you get the idea. 

Some friends and I were looking for a bathroom or an ATM or a gift shop or whatever. (Did they have ATMs when I was that age? Did I have any money?) So we went up to one of the people who worked at the park to ask directions to something, which he was not giving us very clearly.

In an effort to cut through his waffling instructions, I asked, "Is it in this land?"

My friends cracked up and even the employee was stifling guffaws. He was someone who seemed to value his professionalism, so it was all the more telling.

After I originally posted this, I realized it may not be clear why everyone thought this was so funny. So at the risk of ruining a joke to explain why it's funny, it was something about the way I said it. It was kind of like "Is it in this LAND?" So I was essentially taking this silly convention they'd established to segment their park -- which everyone knew was silly -- and using their own terminology to cut to the core of what I wanted to ask. Anyway, I was hailed a comedic genius in the moment. 

Was it worth writing this post just so I could tell you this story? You be the judge.

Okay so I'll also at least talk about how excited I am to see Nomadland, Chloe Zhao's new movie, which may have the most critical acclaim of any movie released this year. (And it's actually getting released this year, thank God, not debuting in January or February to take advantage of the extended Oscar deadline. It's opening at Cinema Nova on Christmas, anyway, even if IMDB doesn't have it opening until February in either Australia or the U.S. If any year is a year not to trust the IMDB release dates, it's probably 2020.)

Anyway, I was a huge fan of Zhao's The Rider, which rounded out my top ten of that year. This seems to be getting more hyped than that was, which maybe isn't a big statement, since that film wasn't all that widely seen. (It did earn her a gig as director of a Marvel movie, though.)

I wasn't as big of a fan of Frances McDormand in Three Billboards Outside Yada Yada Yada, and just from appearances this might find her in a similar mode. But I can get past that.

Greenland is a new disaster movie starring Gerard Butler. There are meteors showering from the sky in the poster. 'Nuff said.

I don't know anything about Dreamland or Summerland. Okay, Margot Robbie is in Dreamland, which looks on IMDB like a sort of generic mid-century period piece. Though this is certainly an interesting tagline: "A teenager's adventures as a bounty hunter take an unexpected twist." I would have thought the teenager being a bounty hunter was the unexpected twist. 

Summerland stars the always interesting Gugu Mbatha-Raw and the always uninteresting Gemma Arterton, and that averages out to a semi-interesting period piece -- also mid-century -- synopsized thusly: "During World War II, an Englishwoman opens her heart to an evacuee after initially resolving to be rid of him in this moving journey of womanhood, love and friendship."

I'll be at Nomadland on one of its first nights out, but as for the other three, I might give them a miss. 

Yep, still trying out those Australian phrases.

If you are an actual Australian reading this, you can see Dreamland in cinemas now, Nomadland at Christmas and Summerland on January 7th. 

According to IMDB, Greenland came to Australia on August 13th, but I don't remember that happening, though I must say our cinemas here in Victoria were closed at that time. It might have played in the other states. It just got released in the U.S. on Friday on HBO Max, in any case.

Elegant elegance

I just learned of a movie I'd never heard of as a result of what I thought was just a clever play on words. Turns out, the clever play on words in this scenario is the title itself.

I got my weekly email from the drive-in movie theater in Montclair, California -- the same one I haven't been to in more than seven years, but I'm not unsubscribing from the emails of random restaurants where I once placed an online reservation, so I'm certainly not unsubscribing from a mailing list that tells me about movies.

The email subject is always a little teaser, often a play on words, related to a couple of the movies you might choose at the theater this week. In fact, it's often phrased as an actual choice. This week's was "Monster Hunter or Hunter Hunter?"

I knew Monster Hunter was the new collaboration between Resident Evil director Paul W.S. Anderson and his muse, Milla Jovovich -- in fact, I'd be going to an advanced screening of it on Monday night if my wife didn't have a conflict. (It doesn't open here until New Year's Day.) But I was curious to see which film they were describing as "hunter hunter," surely a play on words based on the title of the first film.

Well, that film is actually called Hunter Hunter.

It's funny that two films with such similar names would be in the cinema at the same time. But my real takeaway was how good that title was. 

There are some films that just repeat a word in their titles, like Runner Runner. I haven't actually seen that film, but from the synopsis on Wikipedia it does not sound like that title is doing anything of actual linguistic interest. 

Hunter Hunter is a whole different story. It appears to be a story about a hunter who hunts hunters. Hence, Hunter Hunter. (I guess Runner Runner could be about a runner who runs other runners, but I'm not willing to give it that credit.)

Now, it appears from a quick synopsis that this hunter is not human. I was thinking of something like Dexter, a serial killer killing other serial killers. I might actually like that idea better.

In this case it's a wolf that's the hunter, but the wolf is indeed hunting hunters. Fur trappers, more precisely.

There was probably some small amount of risk in greenlighting this title, elegant and clever though it may be. Would people get it? Would they just think it was a random word repetition, like Runner Runner?

I haven't conducted a poll or anything so I don't know the answer to that. I do know that some person somewhere who controlled this film's financing or distribution decided it was a good risk to take, and indeed, I think they were right. Because the phrasing "______ hunter" is already common to us -- you know, like The Deer Hunter -- I suspect your average person can reverse engineer the meaning of the title. 

More crucially, I think they probably experience the little frisson of satisfaction that I experienced when they realize what that title is doing. The fact that the word is the same provides an immediate obstacle to comprehending its meaning, but that obstacle is overcome in maybe five to ten seconds ... kind of like your brain processing a joke whose punchline took a moment to set in.

It should be noted that saying the title correctly out loud requires a slight change in your pronunciation of the two words. You have to go up a bit on the first syllable of the first word -- say it out loud to see what I mean -- and then say the second one with more of a flat tone. The title forces your brain into a kind of heteronym, which is when two words are spelled the same but given different means when pronounced differently. The examples the internet gave for a heteronym are "lead" as in to pave the way and "lead" as in the element on the periodic table, and though the two pronunciations of "hunter" in this scenario have more to do with emphasis than the actual sound of the vowels, it creates a similar effect. Interestingly, in this case, both "pronunciations" mean the same thing, but the emphasis creates a perspective and a relationship between the two instances of the word. 

Anyway, the credentials of the people who made this film are not very strong, or unknown at best. The director (Shawn Linden) does not yet have his own Wikipedia page, and the most recognizable names in the cast are two washed up former teen actors (Devon Sawa and Nick Stahl). So I don't know if I'll be prioritzing this one.

That said, all you have to do is skip down a few paragraphs on Wikipedia to note that the film has a 93% on Rotten Tomatoes, and then your interest spikes a bit more. 

No Australian release date is listed on IMDB, so I'll have to "stick a pin" in this one, as they say down here. 

Or, maybe, hunt it out in some other way. 

No Oscar nominations? No problem!

Programming note!

You may remember that I am accustomed to finalizing my rankings of the year's best films on the morning the Oscar nominations are announced, which is usually about January 12th. 

You may have also noted that the Oscar nominations are not actually being revealed that day, or anywhere close to that day, in 2021.

Because of the pandemic -- those are maybe the four most common words to start any sentence this year -- the Academy has extended the release date to qualify for an Oscar to February 28th. So that means all your usual crappy January movies will be in under the deadline! 

I was going to include the dripping-with-sarcasm phrase "In its infinite wisdom" in there somewhere. Indeed, I don't think it was infinitely wise to extend this deadline. I've seen enough really good films this year to have what looks like a legitimate top ten in many other years. Just play the hand you're dealt and go with it.

But no, films will have until February 28th. Which obviously means the January 12th date is out of the question.

The actual date when the nominations will be announced will be March 15th -- two weeks after the show was already supposed to happen.

I ain't waiting until March 15th to announce my favorite movies of a year that will have already been over for 75 days by that point. 

So indeed, I'm just going to do it that same day I usually do, even though my post won't be buoyed by the pomp and circumstance that usually accompanies that day.  

The nominations have lately been going on a Monday morning U.S. time, so indeed, that's what I'm going to do this year. But since early Monday morning in California is Tuesday here, I will post this list on -- you guessed it -- Tuesday, January 12th, probably just after midnight my time like I usually do.

This may be a bit early to tell you about it -- you're probably more focused on last-minute Christmas gifts for your favorite uncle than my favorite movies -- but they, after a streak of like ten straight days with a post, I hadn't written anything in three days. So here you go.

Put it in your calendars.

Of course, I will likely hype the hell out of it and mention it in every other post between now and then anyway. It's my way. 

Who would have guessed Fatman would actually be bad

When you hear an idea as bad as Fatman, it most likely means the movie will actually be good.

Nope.

My opening statement there might seem counterintuitive, but go with me. Movie ideas that strike you as bad, on the surface, are lucky to have made it as far as they did. They usually do because the writer, director and actors managed to make something good out of what sounds like a horrible idea. Like, the idea of a guy who befriends a farting corpse should be so dead in the water, it might not even get financing. Yet the result was Swiss Army Man, which made my top ten of that year.

Fatman had similiar counterintuitive promise. When you're casting Mel Gibson, a pariah in many parts, as Santa Claus, you are already off to a difficult start. However, at least that does prepare you for what to expect from the movie -- not something with a traditional sense of holiday cheer. (Though it should be said, Gibson did appear in the more conventionally uplifting holiday-themed Daddy's Home 2 a few years back.)

Even with avenging angel Gibson on board, though, the idea of a hitman trying to take out Santa Claus is a pretty far bridge to cross for most people. It wouldn't be the first dark Christmas movie, but it's not making any further converts among people who already have a bone to pick with Gibson. Chances are, many of the nice people who don't like Gibson also don't like movies where someone is trying to kill Santa Claus.

Even if this movie is not for them, Fatman had the chance to succeed with the grittier elements of a holiday themed movie intended for an audience with more of a stomach for crime movies and violence. It does not. Becuase directors Eshom and Ian Nelms don't commit to that tone either. This movie has elves, and though they are not four feet tall, they are dressed up like elves, with funny noses and ears. You'll be glad to know that the Nelmses at least had the good sense not to have a lot of cute elves getting caught in the crossfire.

I could go into the many more ways this movie doesn't work -- including Santa coming to issue dire threats to the shitty young boy who hired the hitman -- but really, I don't have the energy. I will say that I have a very strong stomach for anything in a movie, and this did not come close to testing it. But there were any number of moments when I grimaced because I just thought it was unpleasant. 

The final indignity -- or perhaps the first indignity -- of the movie is its title. "Fat" has become an increasingly cruel adjective over the years, as we've realized it makes us all a bit of a playground bully if we use it on another person. Santa Claus is probably one of the only characters you can get away with calling fat, because it's a defining trait, but even classic Christmas material unencumbered by political correctness shies away from the f-word, preferring kinder synonyms.

What's even more problematic about it is that in the film, Gibson is not fat. There's a weird kind of reversal to what they do when an actress gets pregnant on a TV show but they haven't written the pregnancy into her character. Whereas they shoot her from the chest up to hide the fact that her stomach is bulging, they shoot Gibson from the chest up to hide the fact that his isn't. 

I guess they thought the idea of a Santa Claus who shoots beer cans off of fences in his backyard would be even more ridiculous with a big Santa-like belly. But why the Nelms brothers consider that the moment they'll try to adhere to some consistency of tone is anybody's guess. 

So yeah, Fatman was not the ideal movie for me to watch on the night we put up our Christmas tree, to ring in the holiday. Then again, it probably would not have been the ideal movie for me to watch under any circumstances. 

"I don't need Mank in my life right now"

That quote wasn't from me. I liked Mank, after a slow start.

It was from my wife, who didn't make it through the slow start.

To be fair, she wasn't expecting to. I'd been holding her feet to the fire to watch the movie, and she relented Saturday night. I should probably clarify that. I asked on Friday night when she might want to schedule watching it, and when she hadn't come back to me with a definitive answer by Saturday night, I asked again. She doesn't like to be pressured in these situations, but it had been out a whole week and I wanted to get it watched.

She did what's become a somewhat frequent occurrence for her: She said she'd start the movie and then "peel off" (a phrase we use for going our own way for the evening) if she wasn't feeling it. Often this is a good way for her to ultimately watch the whole movie, but with the two-hour-and-12-minute Mank, I knew it would never happen.

What especially doomed this one, other than that she could certainly think of better ways to spend her Saturday night, was not the length, but Mank itself.

Mank is one of a sizeable number of movies released this year that, through no fault of their own, feel out of sync with the moment we live in. While there are quite a number of movies that have felt quite 2020 -- either because of contagion, quarantine or racial inequality -- that's not exactly what I'm talking about here. Those movies can be too on the nose, or for people like my wife, serve as way too much of a reminder of things she wants a distraction from -- especially on a Saturday night.

And this isn't because Mank doesn't speak to this moment. It does, in a number of ways. Central to the story is a California gubernatorial election between Frank Merriam and Upton Sinclair in 1934, in which Sinclair was branded as a socialist, and Merriam ended up winning. This was allegedly the basis for the political themes of Citizen Kane, which Herman J. Mankiewicz would later write. It was interesting to see that studio execs like Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg were unapologetically and outwardly Republican, a position they would probably never take today, even if it was how they really felt. In the course of defeating Sinclair, MGM secures the services of one of the film's few fictitious characters, Shelly Metcalf, to film newsreels of people telling the camera why they intend to vote for Merriam -- even though half of the people are actors. A liberal just looking for his big break as a director, Metcalf kills himself when he sees what his "fake news" has wrought. 

No, the real disassociating element in this movie for my wife was that it dealt with a bunch of old white men squabbling over credit for, and whether to make, a movie taking down another old white man.

Of course, they weren't old at the time. But having the movie set 80 years in the past makes them "old" in another sense, like you'd talk about the concerns of the old world.

I don't want to be reductive when I characterize my wife's perspective on Mank. She believes Citizen Kane is a masterpiece and she could tell right away that this was a handsome and immaculately made film. What's more, she's not the type of person who rejects the canon, literary or cinematic, because it was made largely by white men, either old white men or "old" white men.

But I get it. Now may not be the time. Saturday night specifically was not the time for her to watch Mank, but 2020 -- or even the 21st century -- may also not be the time for her to watch it. 

The next thoughts are mine, not hers. In a week in which we have just learned of yet another shooting of a Black man -- who was armed, but with a legal right to carry, and it seems like the only thing he was actually carrying in his hands at the time was a Subway sandwich -- it's just not Mank's time. Even as I was watching and appreciating the film on a technical level, even eventually on a character level, I just couldn't get it out of my head that certain art just feels like a relic this year. 

Mank is literally supposed to feel like a relic. My wife noted, with some annoyance, that they put so-called "cigarette burns" on the film stock (remember Fight Club) to fetishistically remind us of period filmmaking. But there are ways that it is also representative of old thought processes that you just can't reconcile in this moment in time.

It remains to be seen how Mank will do at the Oscars, though it is rather pointedly preparing itself for disappointment by reminding us that Citizen Kane was nominated for nine Oscars and won only one -- the one Herman Mankiewicz and Orson Welles fought over. If you were cynical, you'd say that David Fincher was also suggesting that his film is the best of 2020, which means its Oscar victories will be similarly paltry.

The Oscars do love celebrating their own history, though, which is why Mank is certain to get a lot of technical nominations, plus ones for Gary Oldman, Fincher himself, and maybe even Fincher's deceased father, who wrote the script. (And though the script originated years ago and likely underwent significant changes in the interim, it's no surprise, given the film's themes, that Jack Fincher has the only screenwriting credit.)

However, I do hope that in 2020, the Academy sees its way to finding something that better represents what we've been through in 2020. The movie rooting for the triumph of good over fascism isn't really enough for it to be progressive in the way that a 2020 best picture winner will hopefully be. A 2020 best picture really needs to show us the faces, on screen, of people other than just old white men.

My surprising quantity of thoughts on The War With Grandpa

In a holiday season that has suddenly become pretty crowded with movies I want or need to see, The War With Grandpa would not ordinarily have been one of them.

But that's where having kids comes in.

They weren't actually both my kids. A movie was just one part of the busy schedule of ways we were trying to wow a friend of my ten-year-old son on his first sleepover with us. Because it was also my younger son's birthday party, that's where we started before doing some skateboarding/scootering, and then the movie. My other son would have accompanied us but he actually transitioned from his party to a sleepover at his aunt's -- a response to his stated concern that he would be bullied by his brother and his brother's friend. A risk not worth taking on the day of his birthday party (his actual birthday isn't until January 1st).

The movie actually had a lot of bullying in it, both the ordinary kind, where an older kid at your school dumps your bowl of chili into your backpack, and the kind that's particular to this movie, with a kid to his own grandfather, and vice versa.

That's not one of the things I want to talk about with regard to The War With Grandpa, which seems to be going over like a lead balloon with most critics, but which I really enjoyed. I'll just keep this one to myself, though, as the movie has already been out for a couple weeks here, and I usually try to write reviews of thing for ReelGood sooner after they hit the cinemas than that. Keep it to myself, and to all of you.

There were, however, no fewer than three things it occurred to me to write about as I was watching the movie. Hence the title of this post. And here you go.

The cartoon character face of Rob Riggle

I have appreciated Rob Riggle as a comic presence for some time now. He has a small but comedically essential role in one of my favorite comedies of this century, Step Brothers. ("Pow!") 

It wasn't until this movie that I really realized why I appreciate him so much. Which is: He has a cartoon character face. 

I mean, just look at this guy:

What a happy guy.

But more than that, what a cartoon character! He looks like William Hanna and Joseph Barbera imagined him one day and then brought him to life. 

Or more than maybe a cartoon character, maybe it's that he looks like a caricature. You remember when you used to not be able to walk through any tourist area in the world without there being some guy sitting in a chair, ready and able to pick up a Sharpie and draw a seven-minute portrait of your giant head on a teeny tiny body that was skiing or playing tennis?

Yes, that's what Rob Riggle looks like.

God bless him, he's a joy to watch.

Interestingly, one of the teenage characters in the cast also has a "Riggle face" -- so much so that I actually thought he might be Riggle's son, benefitting from a little bit of nepotism. Turns out, no -- his name is Isaac Kragten and here's what the looks like:

You can't really see it here but trust me, he has a very Riggle quality to him.

And speaking of faces ...

I missed Uma Thurman's Picasso face

It hasn't been that long since I've seen Uma Thurman in a movie -- she made a brief appearance in Lars von Trier's 2018 film The House That Jack Built -- but it felt like ages since I'd seen her in anything properly, where she had a significant role. That's because before that it was the 2015 film Burnt, and before that it was Lars von Trier again with the two Nymphomaniac films, which I didn't even remember her being in. (Not that I remembered her being in Burnt.)

She's only 50. We should not have had that long of an Uma Thurman drought. Oh the lives Harvey Weinstein has ruined.

Anyway, watching this, I realized how much I missed her and her Picasso face.

Now, before anyone starts accusing me of some kind of Weinstein-style body or appearance shaming -- even though I don't know if that's one of the things he did -- I absolutely mean it as a compliment when I say she has a Picasso face. It's not even really that anything is disproportionate, as she could pass for either a conventional beauty or an unconventional one.

But you will agree, there is something eccentric about her face, something that absolutely caused her to become an A-lister where people whose beauty is more uncomplicated did not reach similar levels of success.

Here, this is her nowadays:

She hasn't suddenly turned into an old woman and she's clearly still "got it." 

And by "it" I don't only mean a distinctive appearance. I mean a presence, a charisma, and in the case of The War With Grandpa, a great sense of comic timing.

Early on in the film, the kid and his grandpa agree on the rules of engagement for their turf war over the kid's bedroom, and one of those is that there should be no collateral damage -- no negative consequences to anyone else in the family but them. So much for that. The movie quickly establishes a running bit where their pranks backfire on her character, who is the grandfather's daughter and the boy's mother. Twice these pranks encroach on her drive time, and lead her first to throw the contents of a coffee cop spiked with hot sauce onto a motorcycle cop next to her -- and later, to do the same with a python.

Thurman kills it in these scenes. Sometimes you worry that when someone hasn't been working for a while -- she's appeared some on TV, but that doesn't count ha ha -- then they may lose some of their sharpness. Not so here. And whatever it was about this particular script that prompted her to get back into the game, I'm very glad she did.

The redemption of Grandpa De Niro

Robert De Niro has been in the grandpa phases of his career for long enough that it no longer feels like a recent development. It's been at least ten years, anyway, as 2010's Little Fockers was, technically speaking, my ten-year-old son's first movie in the theater, given that he was a baby sleeping at my feet for one of those "get mom out to the movies" sessions.

But he's only been in two movies where the word "Grandpa" was in the title, and the first one was godawful.

That first was 2016's Dirty Grandpa, a film I hated so much, not only was it my lowest ranked out of the 151 movies I saw that year, but there are currently only 18 movies lower than it on my entire Flickchart. That may be too harsh of a judgment, but it gives you some idea just how much I hate that movie.

That movie's total absence of heart was why it repulsed me so much. Turns out, maybe De Niro just needed to pick a grandpa script that did not make him an asshole.

The War With Grandpa is that script. Every time you think this movie is going to veer off into exaggerated Dennis the Menace meets Home Alone territory, it anchors itself with a really sweet scene -- a really conspicuous demonstration of its heart. And that means, if only by the transitive property, that De Niro himself also has a ton of heart in this film.

As it turns out, it's much more fun to enjoy De Niro in a film than to roll your eyes at what seems like another terrible choice just to earn a few extra bucks.

With the right script, De Niro still has a lot to offer us, and I still want to see him offer it. I've avoided enough of his recent other movies to know how he comes across in those, when he's bringing more adult material to the table, but it's really nice to know that he's capable of doing work that isn't just for the lowest common denominator, be that kids or teenagers looking for some cheap dick jokes (as in Dirty Grandpa).

And The War With Grandpa -- which he likely filmed at age 75 or 76 -- gives good evidence that we could have him around a while longer. He still seems pretty spry. It's nice to know that we might not have to choke down however many more movies he still wants to make, but that there could be some War With Grandpas thrown in there.