The last evil Black pimp

The 1987 film Street Smart is kind of a cinematic landmark. 

It might seem like sort of a random film to single out this way, and trust me, the reason it is a landmark film is not a good one. But it had good consequences.

Simply put, this may be the last big mainstream release in which most of the white characters were good and most of the Black characters were bad.

It's the movie I automatically think of when I consider the idea of why we no longer see African-American characters that are just plain evil. And I hadn't even seen it until Friday night.

Street Smart spoilers to follow. 

If you have no familiarity with this film, it's the one where Christopher Reeve plays a New York City magazine journalist who has run out of interesting ideas, and his editor looks like he's giving up on him. So he gets the idea to profile a pimp, a day-in-the-life kind of thing, and his editor gives him enough rope to hang himself, as well as a strict deadline for submitting the piece. When the journalist (Jonathan Fisher by name) strikes out on getting in touch with any actual pimps, he fabricates the story and turns it in, at which point both it and he become a sensation. 

Meanwhile, a pimp played by Morgan Freeman -- Leo Smalls Jr., who goes by the name Fast Black -- has been accused of murder. In reality, he roughed up a john in a not-very-extreme fashion -- just a kick in the balls and a kick in the face -- but the john (who was more than deserving) goes and has a heart attack. Even though the pimp in Fisher's profile goes by the name Tyrone, people who know Fast Black assume the piece is really about him, as Fisher happens to have stumbled on some details that are similar between his fictitious pimp and Fast Black. Both attorneys in Fast Black's trial believe that Fisher's notes will prove vital to the case, only, of course, there aren't any.

The reason I knew about this movie long before I saw it was that I remember the review of it they did on Siskel & Ebert, way back in 1987. Or thought I remembered it, anyway, but more on that in a minute.

In the review, they discussed how uncharitable it was that the film features no positively portrayed Black characters, and that the characterization of Freeman as Fast Black was particularly problematic. By "uncharitable" I suppose you could say "racist." The other Black characters are a driver/sidekick (Erik King), a business partner/wife? (I couldn't be sure) (Anna Maria Horsford) and one prostitute who factors into a couple scenes (Shari Hilton). None of them have a heart, though I suppose the prostitute comes closest. 

The white characters get off comparatively easily. Some are a bit buffoonish, like Fisher's editor (played by Andre Gregory), but Fisher's wife (Mimi Rogers) and the white prostitute (Kathy Baker) are more good than bad. The lawyers are white but are not portrayed as negatively as the Black characters.

The real problem, though, is Reeve's Fisher. He's the protagonist so he is supposed to be the hero of the piece, but his decisions make him difficult to root for. For one there is the fabrication of his story, a core violation of journalistic ethics that will end his career if he's discovered. Although the film shows him staring blankly at his computer screen (one of those great old computers where the screen is just green writing against a black backdrop), we don't really see him agonize over the decision to make up a story. 

He is similarly blithe when he decides to randomly cheat on his loving wife with Punchy, the prostitute played by Baker, who met Fisher in an earlier scene when he was trying to find a pimp to interview. As I was watching their second scene together and could tell where it was going, I was almost shocked to see it actually go there. Fisher has had no fight with his wife that would "justify" this betrayal -- explain it, maybe -- and instead, he just descends into sex with the prostitute with a crooked grin on his face, like it means nothing to him emotionally. (This is also only a few minutes in the narrative after a scene where he puts his wife in harm's way at a club, when she is roughed up by a thug and he does nothing to intervene.) Simply put, if our protagonist is going to cheat on his wife and retain our sympathies, we need to at least see him wrestling with the choice, like it's a fatal flaw overwhelming him. It can't mean nothing to him.

What may be even worse about this is the aftermath. After the story actually connects him up with Fast Black, Fisher takes him and Punchy to a fancy party thrown by his editor, where the film makes a little comic hay out of the interactions between New York socialites and the pimp world -- comic hay, I should say, that is wildly inconsistent with the tone of other parts of the movie. At this party, Fisher's wife is also present, and she sees him recklessly flirting with Punchy, standing too close and both eating the same shrimp from either end until their mouths are touching -- wearing that same crooked grin as just before he slept with her, a grin that damns the consequences. The fact that he feels no guilt over having slept with her, and is also so shameless as to parade this in front of his loving and supporting wife, who has done nothing wrong, is basically disqualifying from the standpoint of our sympathies.

The reason I'm telling you all this is that the movie does not punish Fisher. He does not lose his job. He does not lose his wife. In fact, the very final scene is him continuing to do the job of TV reporter that he got after his artificial pimp piece went the 1987 equivalent of viral. He's soberly reporting on the consequences of the pimp life and the resulting street justice, in a scene where Fast Black has just been gunned down by his driver, the former dead and the latter led away to jail, while Fisher gets off scot free. (And Fisher was the one artificially orchestrated the conflict that put the two at odds with each other.) 

Fast Black, meanwhile, is consistently violent, sometimes murderously so. The film starts out with the right approach to his character, showing him completing his duties as a pimp by protecting his prostitute and roughing up the john. He does it almost reluctantly, and when the john succumbs to his heart attack, he actually seems concerned in a way beyond his own culpability. He tries to wake the john up and only flees the scene when it's hopeless, knowing he won't be able to explain what has happened. 

This is the last time Fast Black shows a reasonable amount of compassion or restraint. He roughs up a fellow basketball player simply for playing defense on him. He slaps around Punchy and other prostitutes. He flies off the handle at the smallest provocation. He ultimately kills Punchy when he believes (correctly) that she's betrayed him to the prosecuting attorney. The only "positive" aspects to his portrayal are that he can be jovial when he wants to be, and that sometimes he walks himself back after his temper gets the better of him. But this is clearly not a character with an underlying good nature who is fighting his darker instincts. He's a murderer and a bad seed. 

This would be okay if there were another Black character who offset his portrayal, but there isn't.

It's funny, because my wife and I were just talking about this before I watched Street Smart. We had just finished the fifth episode of the first season of The Boys, which we are loving -- those five episodes have all come within the past week, one per night with only one night off. We were talking about the tricky portrayal of A-Train (Jesse T. Usher), the African-American "supe," who is a real scumbag but is not primarily a violent scumbag. We talked about how a portrayal underlying the character's violent nature might be problematic from a racial standpoint, but also that they could afford to make A-Train a bad character because there was a good Black character off-setting him, Mother's Milk (Laz Alonso). 

Street Smart is the reason screenwriters are aware of the need to give a balanced portrayal to minority characters. You can't have all the white characters be good, comparatively speaking, and all the Black characters be bad. It just leaves a bad taste in your mouth. It's icky.

The reason I watched Street Smart on Friday night was to see this last relic of our previous era of racial tone deafness. It wasn't inspired by our viewing of The Boys, as I stumbled across it on Stan and only went with it after going through all 300 of the "recently added" titles first. I wanted to see for myself what it was that Siskel and Ebert had so objected to, just how badly the filmmakers had messed this one up, just how instructive it was to future generations of screenwriters. 

The verdict, I should say, is "pretty badly." However, maybe not as badly as I thought, and that's probably due to the skill of Freeman. As problematically as he is written, he's actually giving a great performance, which the Academy recognized via an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor. You put a lesser actor in that role, though, and I think the movie's core racial problems are even more underlined.

Here's the final funny thing about this, though. Roger Ebert actually liked this movie, and he says nothing in his review about problematic portrayals of Black people. 

Here's the review if you want to read it. He actually gives it three stars, and I believe that's out of four, making it an even stronger assessment than today's more common three stars out of five would be. 

Memory is a funny thing. Maybe Siskel was the one who hated it, though I can't find anything about that on the web. I swear I remember seeing the footage from the movie on their show (it's the scene where Fast Black beats Fisher and holds a gun to his face), and them talking about the racist undertones of the movie.

But maybe I didn't. Maybe I heard somebody else discuss the problematic racial aspects of this film, and conflated that with my memory of Siskel and Ebert reviewing it. I suppose that is most likely, as Siskel and Ebert would have been part of the cloud that hung over all of us back then, when we did not so easily recognize problematic racial politics that are clear as day today. 

In any case, my false memory does not change the problematic nature of this movie. It's maybe not as awful in that regard as I thought it would be. But it also has poor execution, extreme believability issues and wildly inconsistent tones that still make it a very sub-par cinematic experience.

And I do think that 1987 represented about the last time movies could, with impunity, depict Black characters so negatively. Of course, this increased sensitivity to the portrayals of minority characters has sometimes gone too far in the other direction, as it's been responsible for a different type of hurtful stereotype: the "magical Negro," a character so good and saintly that in some cases he or she actually has supernatural powers. (The prime example of this seems to be Michael Clark Duncan's character in The Green Mile.)

But it's definitely a good thing that we no longer get movies with evil Black pimps as the primary antagonist. There could be, and certainly have been, Black pimps in movies that have come out since then -- maybe even evil Black pimps. But if there are, you can be sure that there is also one, if not two, really good Black characters as cops, or as lesser criminal figures who have a change of heart that reveals their underlying moral compass. Though really, I don't think you would see a Black pimp in a movie at all nowadays, and it's probably been that way for at least 20 years. 

And by contrast, a white protagonist with as many flaws as Jonathan Fisher would never be able to emerge relatively unscathed from a movie made today, unless the whole point were a satirical one, about how his white privilege allows him to escape the consequences of his poor moral choices. If I believed Street Smart were trying to do that, rather than just having its head in the sand, I might find it a whole lot smarter. 

Animated colors that nauseate me

After all the to-ing and fro-ing about no one in my family wanting to see The Croods: A New Age (including me, I should say, but I would have gone in order to visit the little town theater in Mansfield, where we stayed between Christmas and New Year's), my wife ended up taking both my kids on Monday, the hottest day of the year so far and one of the last before they return to school tomorrow.

They liked it, of course. I'd say perhaps my wife especially, except that the younger one declared it one of the best movies he'd ever seen. The older one, the one more prone to movie-related hyberole (declaring a half-dozen movies the best he'd ever seen in the past year alone), said it was "okay" but then immediately upgraded that to "pretty good," as you could see him thinking he had been uncharitable, and trying to reconcile his disinterest in seeing it with the fact he'd actually liked it.

It got me thinking about my own negative preconceived notions about the movie that prevented me from wanting to see it, and it's put me on to a larger theory of why I do or do not anticipate certain animated movies. It's a phenomenon common to second-banana animated studios like Dreamworks and Sony, and has to do with the color palettes.

Simply put, when was the last time you saw these colors in a Disney or Pixar movie?

Answer: Never, because Disney and Pixar intuitively realize there's something unpleasant about those pinks and purples, especially when mashed up next to each other.

Oh, Pixar used pinks and purples in Soul, but please note the difference in shade:

Those are lighter, friendlier, more digestible pinks and purples. They don't slap you in the face like those colors used in Dreamworks' The Croods: A New Age or Sony's Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2, the two images selected above.

I think it was the latter movie, which I really despised after loving the original, that first planted the seed of these pinks and purples nauseating me. My memory of Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2 is that every scene is a gross mishmash of these colors, assaulting my corneas and turning my stomach in a metaphorical if not literal way. 

Sure, it's easy to find these pinks and purples in one shot of The Croods. But is that all you got, Vance?

Nope.

I better stop posting these images or I just might vomit.

Yes, I do find these colors displeasing, but this is not just me hating on pink and purple. You can do pink and purple right. It's the aggressive pink and purple, almost neon in its intensity, that makes me feel assaulted. 

It's a whole aesthetic approach to this and a number of other of what I would consider lesser animated films. These colors are prevalent in the Trolls movies as well, for example. And the thing that really sticks out about them is the extent to which they don't exist in nature. Yes, there are pinks and purples in nature, but not these pinks and purples.

See that sloth in the picture above? That sloth is pink. Have you ever seen a pink sloth in nature?

Now, the evidence of The Croods: A New Age -- as least as far as my family's opinons constitute evidence -- demonstrates that this color scheme is not fatal to the effectiveness of the movie. And my wife usually hates pink, like with a passion. She wasn't bothered by it here, which just goes to show you how caught up she was in the story. She really appreciated the female empowerment message of it.

But it's going to keep people like me away, unable to experience that storytelling for ourselves. And it's not because I'm a boy and I don't like pink. It's because something about that mashup of pink and purple has the effect on me that a strobe light has on an epileptic. 

You're stealing everything else from Disney -- or trying to, anyway -- so take a lesson from them and figure out how to employ a more muted color palette. 

I'm Thinking of Kaufman Things: Being John Malkovich

This is the first in my 2021 bi-monthly series revisiting the works of Charlie Kaufman.

I sometimes forget that Being John Malkovich is Charlie Kaufman's first produced screenplay. It's not like every introduction of a brazen new talent has to feel like a rough draft, something that gives a hint of the person's potential but has more flaws than home runs. But rarely do we see a first feature script come in as fully formed as this one.

In fact, for most of the time I've known about Kaufman, I thought his first film was Human Nature. We'll discuss that when I rewatch it in March, but that seems more like a typical first script, the one that comes in promising but misshapen. At the time I saw it, in 2003, it felt like that first work by an artist you go back and consume after he or she has broken out. The fact that I entirely missed it when it was released in theaters in 2001 gives a sense of its low profile relative to Malkovich, and explains why I persisted to think of it as his first until recently.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. We're here to talk about Kaufman's actual first, which in many careers might still be his best, except that Kaufman keeps on getting better.

The fact that it was also Spike Jonze's first feature is further astonishing. As much as this is a writer's movie at its core, it benefits immeasurably from Jonze's eye behind the camera.

This was at least my third time watching Being John Malkovich, which includes the first time in the theater and a revisit in November of 2012. I suspect there could have been a second viewing between 1999 and 2006, but I didn't keep track of rewatches until 2006 so that's only speculation based on the likelihood that it wouldn't have taken me 13 years to return to this fascinating and confounding work. Especially since it was my #6 movie of 1999, a cinematic year I continue to think of as one of the best of my lifetime.

In this series I said I wanted to discuss how each film relates in some way to I'm Thinking of Ending Things, but if I keep my focus that narrow, it may be a bit limiting -- especially since I've given my #1 of 2020 a lot of love on this site recently, if not actual in-depth discussions. What I really meant that I'd be doing is having a general discussion of the themes Kaufman has continued to revisit, which have culminated in his most recent masterwork. We'll find our way there and I think it should be interesting.

If you go nine years without seeing a movie, its details have a chance to get a bit fuzzy, so there were a number of surprises to me on this rewatch. One was how much there is about transgender issues, which -- in one of a few signs of the era in which it was created -- Cameron Diaz' Lotte refer to as being a "transsexual." I can't remember when that word went out of date, but we haven't been using it for some time now. Also retired: Characters who label other characters "fags." One of the abrasive elements of Catherine Keener's great Maxine is that she asks John Cusack's Craig if he is a "fag" because he does not treat her as a sexual object. Though of course as with anything with her, it's mostly done for trolling purposes. (We wouldn't have known what a troll was back then either.)

But back to the transgender stuff. It reminded me how Kaufman once wanted to make a movie called Frank or Francis, whose plot details were not really known, but it was highly suspected to relate to issues of gender identity, as the title might suggest. Er, wait a minute -- I just realized that I always read that title as Frank or Frances, which would suggest a person with gender uncertainty issues, while Frank or Francis would just be two different variations of the same male name. I guess I will leave this paragraph in even though it now makes no sense. Anyway, I always had it in my head that Kaufman was interested in gender non-conformity and I always thought Frank or Francis [sic] might be his modern version of Ed Wood's Glen or Glenda. I better move on.

Still, I think Kaufman explores in other films the gender divide that Lotte wants to cross here. It's of course present in I'm Thinking of Ending Things, where it is highly assumed by the end that a man (the elderly janitor) has assumed the subjectivity of a woman (the character played by Jessie Buckley), even though the truer version of himself also appears in that car (the character played by Jesse Plemons). It's all over the place in Malkovich, as Lotte talks about the portal into Malkovich's brain being kind of like his vagina. There's also of course the "Malkovich Malkovich?" scene with all the female Malkoviches, including the first one with the very ample bosom. 

One constant in Kaufman films is the actual surrogate for himself, a depressed schlub who has no self esteem and nothing to offer anybody, or so he thinks. I found it interesting to note that even in its very first on-screen incarnation, this character is viewed by Kaufman as despicable and incapable of redemption. Cusack's Craig is really difficult for the audience to cheer on, only approaching that on a couple occasions by sheer dint of his timidity. But Craig is more monstrous than pitiable -- he labels himself a monster at one point, and tries for that redemption by saying he doesn't want to be a monster. But in this very moment, he proves his own monstrosity but locking Lotte back in the cage and duct-taping her mouth when he reverts to his jealousy over her connection to Maxine.

Craig's puppetry is the first appearance of Kaufman's career-long interest in metaphors for filmmaking, which have their more literal incarnations (Adaptation) as well as more abstract incarnations (Synecdoche, New York). I was disappointed in a line of dialogue that put too fine a point on a connection we were surely making for ourselves, the connection between Craig's career dreams and what he's actually doing in Malkovich's body. Near the mid-point he tells Lotte "It's just a matter of time before Malkovich is just another puppet hanging next to my workbench." Over time Kaufman would come to trust us to make these associations ourselves. 

The other big connection I wanted to make to Kaufman's other films was the first appearance of characters traveling through an environment that exists only mentally, when we see Lotte chase Maxine through Malkovich's subconscious. It's essentially this same set piece that occurs throughout Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind as Joel and Clementine wade through Joel's memories. And this could really be the entirety of I'm Thinking of Ending Things.

There's probably a lot more I could write about this movie when comparing it to other Kaufman works, but it occurs to me that I don't want to steal the thunder of those discussions when they happen later on. So I'll just end with some individual moments I loved and wanted to call attention to.

- The bit where Malkovich emerges from the portal next to the New Jersey Turnpike, and moments later someone throws a crumpled up soda can that hits him in the back of the head, saying "Hey, Malkovich, think fast!" I love the idea that a motorist driving by at a high speed in the dark a) can identify that this as Malkovich, b) thinks nothing of the fact that he's walking by the side of the highway, and b) decides quickly enough that he's got some beef with the actor that warrants throwing an object at him.

- Moments later, when Malkovich tells Craig he'll see him in court. As if this situation might be properly adjudicated in a court of law or has anything to do with normal jurisprudence.

- The Mary Kay Place speech impediment bit, and how Orson Bean persists in the notion that it's his own problem rather than hers. Incidentally, this is the third time I've seen Place in a movie in the past month, after she appeared in both Music and The Prom.

- Anything related to Charlie Sheen.

- The film's commentary on how dumb men are when it comes to romance and sex. Lotte and Maxine make plans to meet in Malkovich because Maxine basically knows without any question that she can find him and lure him into the bedroom based on nothing more than her own will to do it. 

- The scene of the monkey flashing back to his own capture. Perfectly random and wonderful.

- The puppetry stuff is amazing and beautiful. I found myself wondering if this is actual puppetry that a real puppeteer could manage by orchestrating a precise order of string movements, or whether it is intentionally outside the bounds of reality, and if so, what commentary Kaufman might be making with that.

- Octavia Spencer is in this! She is credited as Octavia L. Spencer.

- I love the backstory of why there was a half-story built into the Mertin-Flemmer building. In the hilarious and grainy video recreation of the story, the old sea captain (I can't remember whether it's Mertin or Flemmer) says, as he's falling in love with the little person woman who inspired this unique bit of architecture, he wants to create a place "for you and all your accursed kind." I laughed out loud, I think just because of the disconnect between loving someone and referring to their kind as "accursed."

- The number of times I laughed out loud during the movie, in general. Every movie Kaufman has written is loosely described as a "comedy," but in my mind I don't think of his movies as being funny in that way -- though I did laugh a number of times in I'm Thinking of Ending Things as well, one of his most consciously dire films.

- As I was watching I noted a similarity between this and Get Out in terms of its idea of one soul hijacking another and fighting for control of the body. I'm not the first one to make that comparison. I found out afterward that a whole fan theory has been put forward that suggests that Get Out is a spiritual sequel to Being John Malkovich, especially since Catherine Keener appears in both films -- the idea is that her character in Jordan Peele's film could actually be Maxine after learning to control this process of body swapping. Peele has given his endorsement to the theory -- after the fact, not claiming it was in his mind when he made Get Out, though he is on record as being a huge fan of Jonze and Kaufman's film. 

Okay that's probably enough for now. Back in March with Human Nature. 

A sensible laughs-to-stars ratio

I've gone and done it again. I've gone and liked a movie that everyone else seems to hate. 

I sort of loved it actually. But we'll get to that in a moment.

I don't know if it was just a coincidence that I laughed the hardest I've laughed in years on the first night in Australia after Joe Biden was inaugurated. I didn't consciously feel the sense of relief I imagined I'd feel. Given that his inauguration had recently become a fait accompli, I had an underwhelming actual response to it, even with waking up at 4 a.m. to watch it -- and realizing only then I probably needed to wake up about 15 minutes earlier, as he was already mid-speech.

But Thursday night our time was indeed a cause for celebration. The kids pushed for a special dinner, so we went up to Errol Street and got fish and chips, and beers for the adults. Later when we came home, I told my wife I was going to watch something really silly. I didn't know what, but I wanted a cinematic balm for my celebratory mind.

That thing ended up being Vacation, the fifth movie in the series that started out as a National Lampoon property before shedding that affiliation (at least as far as the titles were concerned) with Vegas Vacation in 1997. I had before now considered it safe to avoid this movie, as Ed Helms already felt like a dud at the movies way back in 2015, and the only previous movies in this series I actually like are the original and the aforementioned Vegas Vacation. That's right, I don't like the Christmas one. 

In fact, if I'd felt for the whole movie like I did in its first 15 minutes, I'd have written a post on The Audient with this title: "I like Ed Helms, I just don't like Ed Helms movies." I was already planning what I'd write about The Clapper when this happened:

I started laughing.

And laughing. And laughing.

And just never stopped laughing throughout the rest of the movie.

That might be a slight exaggeration. But three or four hysterically funny scenes put me in this film's good graces, and I never saw any reason to leave them. And most of the remaining scenes were solid doubles if not actual homers.

It all started with the introduction of the Albanian minivan that the grown Rusty Griswold (Helms) rents for his family to make another ill-fated trip to Wally World. The vehicle is this incredibly odd shade of blue and has kind of a bubble butt at the back, for no good reason. It has multiple gas tanks and multiple charging cables flopping out of it like spaghetti, which have connector prongs that don't go to any outlet you've ever seen, complete with protruding springs and other doohickeys. The remote for the car has about 17 buttons, most of which have completely unclear meanings, including one with a swastika on it. 

Here, have a look:

Anything related to this vehicle had me in stitches, including its GPS and the steady reveal of what the various buttons do, but they weren't the only moments that made me laugh out loud during Vacation. In fact, in one moment involving a highway chase, I was so doubled over with hysterical laughter that my wife had to come check on me to make sure I was okay. (Actually, that did involve the minivan.)

As unpredictable as all this was, it led to something highly predictable: I went to Metacritic and saw that Vacation has a 34 metascore. That's an improvement on its 27 on Rotten Tomatoes. I'd remembered it hadn't been well received, but in those few minutes between when I finished the movie and when I checked on these scores, I convinced myself I'd remembered it wrong. After all, how could I find those scenes so much funnier than anyone else did? But nope. I read the review of the guy who liked it the most on Metacritic -- Vulture critic Bilge Ebiri -- who also admitted to "laughing [his] ass off." But he spent about every other sentence of the review apologizing for his reaction.

Why do we need to apologize for laughing?

It occurred to me after watching Vacation that if something is funny, it's funny. If it's racist or sexist or homophobic and you find it funny, that's a you problem. But Vacation is none of those things (very much) so I don't know why I can't feel pure about the laughter it inspired in me.

And it's not like this movie has no bonafides. We may not have known who they were then, but Vacation was written and directed by Jonathan M. Goldstein and John Francis Daley, who may not be household names, but sure got a lot of kudos when they made Game Night a couple years later. I laughed a lot harder at this than I laughed at Game Night.

If I put myself in my wife's shoes, seeing me on Thursday night -- or rather, hearing my guffaws from the other room and coming in after they'd ended -- would only be comparable to the time she saw me lose my shit at the drive-in while watching Step Brothers for the first time. I was like a crazy person to her with how much I was laughing at that movie. Have I laughed that hard another time since then? Surely, but the fact that Step Brothers was what immediately came to mind as a point of comparison is a good indication how hard I laughed during that one particular scene in Vacation. That's got to be worth something, right?

It's worth four stars, I decided.

Yep. I snubbed that 34 metascore and 27 RT score and logged a four-star (out of five) entry on Letterboxd.

I did feel a little funny about it -- who's going to see that rating on Letterboxd and think less of me for it? -- but not as funny as Vacation was. 

Is this as good as other movies I typically give four stars? Surely not. But I am going to remember that laughter for a long time. Maybe someday I will see another really funny movie and compare it to those times I saw Step Brothers and Vacation.

There's probably no reliable way to translate laughs into stars. And surely, one funny scene in a movie is not going to be enough to push it even into positive three-star territory. I've seen movies that were total duds outside of one brilliantly conceived comedy bit.

But again, that wasn't the only time I emitted guffaws during Vacation. The sheer quantity of laughter forced me to realize that star-ratings are a measure of a subjective experience of watching a movie. Opinions cannot be "right" or "wrong," though of course, the more opinions someone gets "wrong," the less likely you are to believe them when they recommend a movie to you.

Well, I hope you'll still believe me when I tell you that Vacation might bring you the same laughs it brought me.

If we are grading only the laughter, and grading it on a curve, and grading it subjectively, it may have even been worth five stars.

Knowing Noir: In a Lonely Place

This is the first in my 2021 monthly series watching film noir that I haven't yet seen.

Well, it looks like there's no easy cure for my negative feelings toward Humphrey Bogart.

Not that any one movie would ever represent a last, best hope to fall for an actor, if you still have other of their movies yet to see. But In a Lonely Place was definitely the most prominent Bogart role I had yet to see, and it didn't change my thoughts on him one iota.

I guess In a Lonely Place was a particularly bad place to hang my hopes. It's dark and it accentuates Bogart's meanness, even his psychopathy, when I think I was actually looking for a kinder and gentler Bogart. Maybe no kinder and gentler Bogart was ever to be had. (I already tried in The African Queen, years ago, but did not like that either.)

You may recall that In a Lonely Place was kind of the inspiration for this series, in that it was the most-discussed noir (in my circles, anyway) that I had not yet seen, and also gave me a chance to interrogate my feelings about Bogart. I figured the widespread critical acclaim for the film would win me over on some level.

Nope.

I'm going to spoil some things about In a Lonely Place, so read on only at your peril.

The film is maybe an imperfect place to start for this series as it does not feature the biggest noir tropes, namely, that the lead character is a detective of some kind -- either private or public. But it's certainly classified as a noir, though the femme fatale in this case more needs to look out for the main character killing her than vice versa.

Bogart plays a screenwriter, Dixon Steele (I could never get used to the nickname "Dix"), who is angry. Why is he angry? The film isn't really sure. He went to World War II. That he hasn't had a hit movie since then certainly contributes to his mental state. But the film only mentions that in passing a couple times and does not really stick to it as a psychological explanation for Steele's antisocial behavior. 

Which he displays from the start, and rarely takes a break from. And so he immediately became associated with what I haven't liked about other Humphrey Bogart characters -- a kind of derisive superiority, a sense of being cool and above the fray.

Steele gets accused of murder after the girl he went home with one night -- because he's lazy and wants her to give a summary of a particular book he's adapting, rather than reading it himself -- turns up murdered. Seems like quite the coincidence as Steele really did have nothing to do with it, we find out by the end. But he shows so little concern over the fact that she's been killed -- preferring to mock and tease the police officers who are questioning him -- that his guilt seems almost like a certainty. He doesn't protest his innocence and he doesn't seem very distburbed that a woman he was with (not romantically, but still with) was killed within an hour of her leaving his house.

I thought immediately of a very different type of movie, A Cry in the Dark, the Meryl Streep movie that many people will know of as "The dingo ate my baby!," because that's the famous line from that movie. The reason the chracter Streep plays, Lindy Chamberlain, was suspected of having killed her own child in real life was that she did not seem to be sufficiently shaken by the baby's disappearance in interviews after the fact. People figured she had to be hiding something because no one shows that kind of sociopathic remove from something so awful that has happened to themselves. (I'll alternate the words "sociopath" and "psychopath" in this piece because I can't be bothered to remind myself of the difference between them right now.)

That's how I felt about Dixon Steele. Instead of getting a horrified look in this eyes when he's informed that Mildred Atkinson has been killed, he's mostly like "Yeah, so? What does that got to do with me?" It may not be the response of a guilty person, but at the very least it is the response of a heartless one. And indeed, this does intimately have to do with him, as he is a primary suspect. 

So why is Steele heartless? We don't know. Because he's a jerk? Because he has a violent temperament? And because these things are true, why does his neighbor, Laurel Grey (Gloria Grahame), fall for him? She says she likes his face, but that's just flattery to Bogart, who has a face like an old catcher's mitt. Because we can't actually believe that Laurel loves him -- the film doesn't do the work to convince us of this -- the whole thing just comes off as unbelievable.

In a Lonely Place is staged as a tragedy, in that it thinks it is a tragedy. Near the end, when we finally learn that Steele is innocent, but because things have irreparably fallen apart between Laurel and him, she says "That information would have meant so much to us just 24 hours ago," as sorrowful strings play on the score. (This film's score is far more heavy handed than I would anticipated.) If that is not a line of dialogue from a tragedy, I don't know what is. I'm not sure why Steele was any better of a match for her 24 hours ago. 

But here's the thing about tragedies. A film is considered a tragedy if a character has a flaw that prevents him or her from realizing dreams that are easily within grasp. That's called a "tragic flaw," of course. It afflicts basically good characters that the audience is clearly rooting for, who have just ... one ... thing ... that gets in the way of a happy ending.

This does not describe Dixon Steele. He's all flaw, so there's nothing tragic about it. He's a mean, grumpy SOB who wants to strangle Laurel in every other scene, who is only prevented from bashing in the brains of an innocent motorist with a rock because Laurel stops him just before he does it. I mean, what kind of sociopath, what kind of psychopath, is pushed to the brink of murder because his own crazy driving causes a collision? Not a sociopath or psychopath I can root for, I can assure you of that.

If we want to look at characters with tragic flaws within Bogart's own career, we need go no further than my favorite Bogart film, a film I genuinely love, and also the only time I'm sure I loved what Bogart brought to a film. That's Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Bogart's Fred C. Dobbs is a character we like, a character we want to see make good on his quest for gold. But Dobbs has a tragic flaw in that he becomes paranoid and cannot trust those who have accompanied him on his quest. It leads to his undoing, and that does, indeed, feel like a tragedy.

The tragedy here is that Dixon Steele has been so poorly developed as a character that we have no idea why he is the way he is. "The war" feels like a pat answer, mostly because the screenplay doesn't do the work to support this theory. It may be a darker and more insidious commentary about the male psyche and about Hollywood, but those don't really land with me either -- not because they might not be true, but because the film does not provide the evidence of its perspective. We would have to go to extra-textual information about Hollywood at the time (the red scare, the broken personal lives of some of the cast and crew) to find our meaning in the film, and that meaning does not exist for me in 2021. 

I'm wondering if I should have finished this series with In a Lonely Place rather than starting with it. After all, if I really wanted to change my thoughts on Bogart based on deciding whether I like noir over the course of a 12-month viewing series, wouldn't it be better to watch a bunch of other noirs first? I doubt it would change my opinion of this film, but there's a chance it could have. 

Now that I've done it, though, there's no going back. So the best I can do is bookend this series with Bogart films. Fortunately, I've got a number of other choices for Bogart noirs I haven't seen. I'll watch one of them in December.

In the meantime, it'll be on to a non-Bogart film in February, though what that will be I haven't yet decided. Leaning toward Gun Crazy, if you want to watch along with me, but don't hold me to it. 

Today, it ends. Today, it begins.

Please allow me to take a break in the movie action to celebrate the end of Donald Trump's presidency.

It's really tomorrow for many of you, but I want this post to have January 20th, 2021 as its timestamp on my blog. If I wait until tomorrow to post this, it will have a different timestamp, and it's possible I won't be able to post it with the same sense of optimism, because maybe far-right factions will have already tried to blow up the White House or something. 

But on January 20th in Australia, I am indeed hopeful about the future now that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will officially begin the roles they were elected to perform last November. 

I suppose I could try to link this in to movies somehow. I could quote this movie about presidents or that movie about presidents, or just talk about movies that leave me with a huge sense of optimism. 

But let's not stretch things too much. Let's just bear witness. Let's just look ahead to a brighter future.

Goodbye, you fascist jerk. Hello, tomorrow.

Literally and figuratively.  

I'm thinking of Kaufman and Welles

For about the past five years I've done both a monthly viewing series on this blog and a bi-monthly viewing series, which have both reset at the beginning of each new calendar year.

Twenty twenty-one is an expansion forward in that regard, as I'm not going to get six months out of the year to rest comparatively easily. 

That's right, I could not decide between two different bi-monthly series for 2021, so I decided to do both of them, intertwined. One will consist entirely of repeat viewings, while the other will be my first time seeing the film in question.

The first will start this month and is called I'm Thinking of Kaufman Things, a riff on my #1 movie of last year. Charlie Kaufman's I'm Thinking of Ending Things struck me as a kind of culmination of all the films he'd written or directed before it, though to be fair, you could probably say that about each of his films. Also "culmination" is not the correct term, since he's only 62 and could have another couple decades of films in him.

But given how many themes contained in I'm Thinking of Ending Things have appeared first in other Kaufman works, I thought it would be a good time to go back and revisit those other works, all of which I've seen, in chronological order.

It'd work out great if Kaufman had exactly six films before now, but that's not the case. Between his work as a screenwriter and his work as a director, he's got eight total films to his credit.

So here's how I've decided to handle it. I won't watch I'm Thinking of Ending Things again at the end of 2021, as I saw it twice last year and it's still fresh in my memory, so that cuts out one movie. And the two of his films I'm most familiar with -- which were also my favorite films of their respective years, just like Ending Things -- also happen to have been consecutive works in his filmography, Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. So I'll squeeze those two into the same month at the midpoint, leaving myself with the following schedule:

January - Being John Malkovich (1999)
March - Human Nature (2001)
May - Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (2002)
July - Adaptation (2002)/Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
September - Synecdoche, New York (2008)
November - Anomalisa (2015)

The sticklers among you will note that Confessions of a Dangerous Mind technically came out about three weeks after Adaptation, so I can't really call Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine consecutive releases. But the fact that there were two Kaufman movies in December of 2002, when he has only eight total movies in the past 22 years, is an oddity to begin with, so I think it'll be okay. (In fact, when I first envisioned this series, I had forgotten he even wrote Confessions. It made me grumpy when I realized that as it meant I had to combine the other two movies into one month.)

The symmetry of the series does work out pretty well otherwise, though, as half of the months will be movies I've seen only once (Nature, Confessions and Anomalisa) while the others will be movies I've seen at least twice, and more than four times in the case of my July movies.

In each post I'll try to reflect on how the movies relate to each other, and to I'm Thinking of Ending Things in particular.  

The other half of the year -- the months in which I usually do my bi-monthly series, starting with February -- will relate to another great director who was in our minds last year, and who would have directed a #1 film of the year for me if I'd been around back in 1941. That of course is Orson Welles, whose greatest film was the subject of the movie Mank last year, though Welles himself played only a bit part.

It was actually well before I saw Mank that I was thinking one day about how much I like Welles, if not always every movie he made, then at least the idea of him. And then I got to thinking about how I still had not seen his final, uncompleted movie, The Other Side of the Wind, which was released to Netflix in 2018.

At the time, I decided against seeing it that year in order to resolve the problem of how to rank it, as a "new release" in 2018 or just a relic that had been dug up and finished. I wrote about that dilemma here. I figured I would get to it pretty soon in 2019, but that whole year and the next both passed without me doing so. By the time this occurred to me near the end of 2020, the movie was almost totally off my radar.

So I decided to reverse engineer a series leading up to the watching of The Other Side of the Wind, which would have the added benefit of making me an Orson Welles completist.

Because you know how I like my clever series titles, this one will be called All's Well That Ends Welles. The purpose will be to "end Welles," in other words, to see the remaining films of his I haven't seen.

As with I'm Thinking of Kaufman Things, though, the numbers don't work out perfectly. There are more than six Welles films I have not seen. I tried to whittle down that number with a 2020 viewing of his version of Don Quixote, also an uncompleted patchwork that was finished in 1992. I had already watched The Stranger a month or two before that. But I didn't whittle any further than that, leaving me with the following titles still to watch:

Journey Into Fear (1943)
The Lady From Shanghai (1947)
Macbeth (1948)
Mr. Arkadin (1955)
The Trial (1962)
Chimes at Midnight (1965)
The Immortal Story (1968)
F for Fake (1973)
The Other Side of the Wind (2018)

The series is a bit problematically conceived, because I am actually closer to the beginning of Welles' filmography than I am to the end of it. Plus, it's unclear how many of these things are actually really considered feature films, and how many will even be accessible to me. Then there's also the fact that I kind of want to watch a movie I've already seen, The Magnificent Ambersons, a second time, to get a proper grasp on my feelings toward it.

But if Welles wanted to have a messy career full of fits and starts and incomplete projects, I don't know why a bi-monthly series devoted to him should be any less messy. In six installments spaced about every 60 days, I will reach my own idea of what constitutes "ending Welles" by the time 2021 is done.

Although I didn't plan this, I think Kaufman and Welles actually have a fair bit in common. They are both exceedingly ambitious in the scope and themes of their projects, and are both fascinated with existentialism, insofar as it affects the psyche of men. I would not say their films are made to the exclusion of women, but their perspectives on and relationship to women are things I'm sure I'll grapple with -- things I'll be thinking of, if you will -- as I visit and revisit their work over the coming 12 months. 

So I may have bitten off more than I usually chew, but I think it will make for good chewing. 

Come have a bite with me, if you like.

Tom Hanks wants to sell me a timeshare

Most of the posters for the 2020 Tom Hanks vehicle Greyhound are traditional, earnest images of a heroic sea captain looking heroic. But not this one.

I came across this weirdo promotional pic while checking my old stomping grounds, AllMovie, where I wrote from 2000 to 2011. But this isn't something they cooked up. When I went and googled "Greyhound movie poster," it was also one of the top ten results there.

What the hell is up with this?

I suppose there's something old-fashioned about it, like "Greyhound! Starring beloved star of stage and screen, Tom Hanks!" I could see it hearkening back to an earlier period when studios owned stars, and they wanted to be sure you didn't miss out on a movie just because you'd never before seen the star in question in a naval uniform, and couldn't handle it for some reason. (Though we have seen Tom Hanks in naval garb, in Captain Phillips.)

But even if this were some tactic from the 1940s, it would be executed with a lot less squareness than this.

Let's break it down, shall we?

The image of Hanks is not from the movie, I think that is clear to anyone who looks at this poster. I don't think they're even trying to convince anyone that it is. The neutral vanilla background alone disproves that notion. 

But the way they've chosen to dress him makes it an explicit mismatch. He isn't remotely dressed like a member of the military. I'm not sure how you would describe how he's dressed, but I might go with something like "lecture casual." He's not dressed for a fancy dinner, but the collared shirt and what appears to be a sport jacket means he's not just going for a walk in the park either. Maybe "country club Sunday brunch" is a good way to describe it. 

Then: the pointing. What, is he auditioning for a role as Harrison Ford? What is he pointing at? Sort of at you, the viewer. Sort of at the title. Sort of at his own name. One thing that's for sure is that the pointed finger is supposed to make you feel confident. Like "This is where it's at. You've come to the right place."

Then the facial expression is unusual to say the least. Hanks has not been a big squinter throughout his career. He's never played The Man With No Name. In fact, his name is usually a big part of his films (Forrest Gump, Larry Crowne). Intimidation is just about the last thing he's tried to play. Nor has he played someone losing his vision, that I recall. The squint turns the pointed finger, which plays as confident in a vacuum, into a kind of accusation. At the very least there is something conspiratorial about it. Is Greyhound a big secret between you and me, Tom Hanks?

The final indignity is that terrible typeface, which would make a graphic designer vomit. It isn't remotely memorable, nor is it intended to be. It's like the person who designed this poster literally reached into a hat of the 20 most common fonts on Microsoft Word and this was the one he or she came up with. To snazz it up a little, he or she offset it with a black rectangle.

It might be that this is extracted from some kind of press materials related to Apple TV+ rather than a legitimate image that was meant to go out there and stand on its own, in which case, there are likely similar egregious examples, and it seems unfair to pick on Greyhound specifically. But I like to think it's just one of those bizarre mishaps that managed to escape its way into the world, like an awful TV show with a racist premise, or a kids movie that somehow has characters with exploding heads. 

And just to disprove that these misbegotten press materials from Apple might be a thing, I did similar google searches and came up with nothing. Not for On the Rocks. Not for Wolfwalkers. Not for Boys State. Not for The Banker.

I suppose it's appropriate for what ended up being one of my biggest disappointments of 2020. I'm not saying Greyhound was one of the worst films I saw last year, but checking in at #110 out of 149, it certainly missed the cutoff for a positive review from me. And it was certainly less than I expected from the usually reliable Tom Hanks -- who, it must be said, is one of my favorite famous people, period, let alone favorite movie stars -- and who also served as writer on Greyhound.

Don't point your finger at me, Tom Hanks. I point my finger at you. 

I could never get romantically involved with Robert De Niro

Kicking off the repeat viewing section of the "watch whatever you want" portion of my year, I casually threw on Heat on Friday night. I'm not sure how you "casually" throw on a 164-minute movie, but to the extent that you can, I did.

I started perusing the options on Amazon without knowing what I wanted to watch, only that I wanted to watch something I'd liked but seen exactly one time before. Heat fit the bill. Because it's so long, I didn't finish until after 1 a.m., but finish I did. 

Heat spoilers to follow. 

I could probably make a number of observations about a movie I had not seen since the fall of 1995, but today I am focused on Robert De Niro's incompatibility as a romantic partner.

Incompatibility with whom? Well, anybody, I suppose.

You probably remember (since everyone I know has seen Heat more than I have) that De Niro's love interest in this movie is Amy Brenneman, an actress I had kind of forgotten about until she popped up here. As a side note, it's a shame that people like Brenneman get basically 20 years in the spotlight, while De Niro gets 50. I'm not saying these are equivalent actors, only that Hollywood puts women like Amy Brenneman out to pasture, so we have the ability to forget about them. The same is not true of men. 

Anyway, De Niro and Brenneman (I'll go with the actor names rather than the character names) meet in a bar when she starts chatting him up despite all evidence that he has no interest whatsoever in such a conversation. When he says "Lady, why are you so interested in what I read or what I do?", that would be enough to send me running for the exits, even when he subsequently apologizes and moves one seat closer to her. The moving one seat closer would also be a "Check please!" moment for me. (Another side note: It occurs to me that Brenneman has a real southern twang in this scene, one that sort of disappears for the rest of the movie. Maybe that's another reason why she got 20 while De Niro got 50.) 

Of course, Brenneman is charmed by all this and doesn't say "Shit, that's Robert De Niro, a psychopath who might murder me at the drop of a hat!"

At his most chilling, De Niro conveys a kind of non-negotiable menace that suggests that one wrong step will get you killed, and it doesn't even have to be how you would define a wrong step. His definition of a wrong step meets a much lower threshold than yours.

Of course, Robert De Niro plays a different character in every movie, and the one in Heat is particularly averse to murder. That's not to say he doesn't kill several people in this movie, in addition to wantonly shooting a machine gun on an open street in a way that could easily kill somebody whether it actually does or not. (The movie takes pains to show that most of the shootings originate with other more hair-trigger members of his crew.) In fact, the last-minute errand that ends up being his undoing is to kill Waingro (Kevin Gage), a man he wants to kill specifically because he killed some armored truck officers -- a predecessor to other betrayals. That's more because Waingro's actions exposed him and his crew to far worse jailable offenses than robbery, but you get the idea De Niro really doesn't like the actual killing either.

But even in this comparatively sympathetic role, there's something in De Niro's eyes that would suggest to me -- if I were a woman -- to stay away. Not to mention in the way he asks questions, the way he makes small talk. It's weird. It's a bit aggressive. You don't know what he's thinking, or what he might do. 

I think it's why he played such a perfectly deranged potential romantic partner in Taxi Driver. Cybill Shepherd reluctantly agrees to go on a date with him despite his evident weirdness, but then he takes her to watch a porn movie, at which point, he confirms her gut instinct about him. 

I'm being a bit facetious about some of these things, but I think it's true (and probably an obvious statement) that an actor's body of work has an effect on how we perceive each new performance they give. De Niro has made over 100 movies -- I imagine, though I haven't counted -- so I can't make the following statement with any certainty. But there's a reason he has not been cast as a typical romantic lead at almost any point in his career. It's not that it was beneath him, though it probably was (and though nothing is beneath him at the current stage of his career). It's that casting directors just do not see "romantic lead" when they look at Robert De Niro. They see "psychopath."

And because of all this, there's a bit less credibility in Heat when Brenneman's character stares deep into his eyes and feels like she's met the man of her dreams. 

The man of her nightmares, maybe.

Piloting into 2021

I'm done with all the year-end posts, so time to get back to pointing out coincidences, right?

This is a pretty good one: The first two movies I've seen since closing my year-end rankings were about World War II fighter pilots.

You could say I planned it, but you'd be wrong.

A Matter of Life and Death, the most prominent Michael Powell/Emeric Pressburger movie I had yet to see, jumped to the front of my queue by virtue of it being discussed on the podcast The Next Picture Show, where they match a classic film with a new release to discuss the former's influence on the latter over a pair of consecutive episodes. I had already seen the latter, Soul, and figured I might as well whack out a viewing of the former so I could get something out of both episodes of the podcast. The film is not widely available, but it's on YouTube so I got to work.

Simply put, I loved this. Just a few days after the post in which I mentioned ten great films I saw in 2020 that weren't released in 2020, I'm pretty sure I've already got one of my entries for the corresponding post I'll write a year from now. 

The 1946 film is about a British fighter pilot (David Niven) who has a distress call with a female American dispatcher (Kim Huner) as his plane is engulfed in flames over the English Channel. Before he jumps, without a parachute, to his certain death, the two kind of fall for each other in the intensity of the moment. However, something goes wrong with the afterlife bureaucracy -- something about the heavy fog over Britain -- and he washes up on shore, unharmed, in spitting distance of where the dispatcher is stationed. As the two finally meet each other and forge a genuine connection that might be love, Niven is visited by representatives from that afterlife (which is pictured in black and white to the technicolor of the earthly settings), who try to correct the mistake. But Niven now figures he's got a case to be made about why he should stay on earth.

Connections to Soul pretty obvious, no?

I was flabbergasted not only by the film's great script, but by the techniques it uses, unusual in a film from that era, to create supernatural settings and images of other worlds. The film opens on an image of the universe before panning down to Niven's doomed plane, and the afterlife is replete with imagery of an otherworldly waystation involving fantastical architecture. The Archers (the nickname for this pair of directors) employ other fascinating techniques like freeze frame that were not regularly used at the time. The shot seen from behind the closing eyelid of a person going into surgery, which would have required the construction of a large papier mache eyeball, just furthers this film's sense of delightful creativity.

I could go on and on about A Matter of Life and Death, but we have a second film to get to. Which is also worth going on about.

The first trailer I saw for a 2021 movie was Shadow in the Cloud, and it struck me right away as the first film I might see for my newly launched list. It seemed the perfect example of the type of film that gets released early in the year to try to capture an audience, a wild genre mashup that might be too eccentric to compete with the big summer releases but could certainly carve out a niche early in the year. Of course, that's using conventional release logic, which certainly doesn't apply during a pandemic. Though it's starting out as an old-fashioned conventional year in Australia, considering that this movie did get released in January and I did see it in the cinema.

Shadow in the Cloud is a New Zealand production from a director I had never heard of, Roseanne Liang, a Kiwi of Chinese descent. It stars Chloe Grace Moretz -- whom I loved when she was a kid, but have not really liked for the past five years -- as a woman boarding a plane from New Zealand to Samoa during World War II. She's an officer with flying experience but of course she is derided and degraded by the sexist all-male crew who don't understand why there's a woman on board their plane. They have orders for her to be there and she's escorting a high-value package, so they reluctantly accept her on board but make her sit in the lower turret for takeoff. Where she gets stuck when a literal gremlin starts dismantling the plane mid-flight.

This movie is an absolute gas. It's set in World War II but has a driving early 80s synth score. It's got a CGI gremlin and also a lot of thrilling air battle sequences. But there are also parts of it that could be a stage play, in the best possible sense. Simply put, it's a jolt of adrenaline to start us off right on the new year.

I may step away from movies about World War II pilots for my third new-to-me movie in 2021, but you never know with these things.

The early bird gets the worm

(I considered an image from I'm Thinking of Ending Things to accompany this post, but decided that four straight posts with artwork related to this movie would be a bridge too far for those of you who don't, you know, like the movie.)

The reason film critics jam in so much December viewing before publishing their year-end lists is that even if they've kept up with most of what's been released, an increasingly difficult prospect with the sheer quantity of things available these days, they won't have a definitive grasp on the year until the late awards season movies get released by various studios angling for Oscars.

I myself used to look forward with glee to the last two weeks of December, when I imagined that my whole top ten might be upended.

The reality is that December movies have had increasingly less impact on my year-end rankings in recent years, and I'm wondering if this is an industry change or a me change.

I'm Thinking of Ending Things marks just the latest favorite film of the year that I saw way before December. I had a second viewing of it in December, but my first viewing was September 9th.

This pattern has been continuing for long enough that I thought it was finally time to write a piece about it. 

Here, let's go back ten years. This is when I saw my favorite films, dating back to 2011:

2020 - I'm Thinking of Ending Things - September 9, 2020
2019 - Parasite - June 27, 2019
2018 - First Reformed - August 15, 2018
2017 - A Ghost Story - August 5, 2017
2016 - Toni Erdmann - August 3, 2016
2015 - Inside Out - June 7, 2015
2014 - Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) - November 17, 2014
2013 - Beyond the Hills - September 3, 2013
2012 - Ruby Sparks - December 26, 2012
2011 - A Separation - January 5, 2012

The last six years are particularly notable in this regard, as my September 9th viewing of I'm Thinking of Ending Things represented the latest in the year I watched any of those #1s. Before 2015 things lean a bit more traditionally, but even my December 26th viewing of Ruby Sparks was not a late-year release. It was when I happened to catch this movie on DVD following its July 25th theatrical release. The Birdman viewing was pre-Thanksgiving, though I remember that the movie got released in Australia the day before my list closed -- so if I hadn't seen it on a trip to America, I might have really had my list shaken up right at the end, or more likely, not been able to recognize it as my #1. (In other words, the early Birdman was able to get the worm.)

The fact that these ten years start with A Separation is significant, because that was the last time my list got a big jolt so late in the year -- in fact, actually in the new calendar year. It was a welcome jolt that year, because without A Separation, my #1 movie would have been Red State. And as much as I love Red State (it made my top 25 of the decade), I just couldn't wrap my head around having a Kevin Smith movie as my #1 of any year. Fortunately, no shenanigans were required -- A Separation really was that good. (And finished about eight slots higher than Red State on my best of the decade, as evidence of its genuine superiority in my eyes.)

So what does this all mean?

I can't discount the effect of my process on how I think about all this. The longer and more involved my year-end wrap-up posts have gotten, the more advanced preparation they require, meaning I may start to cement my thoughts on the year's films earlier than I used to. I've gotten to a point where for about two weeks at the end of my viewing schedule, I'm kind of praying not to see any really great movies because I've already rough-drafted my top ten. That said, I did see three of this year's top ten since December 30th, with Soul reaching as high as #4. 

I think it also helps to sit with a movie for a while to determine how you feel about it. Last year, I saw Portrait of a Lady on Fire on December 31st, and it ended up at #2. Could it have overtaken Parasite if I'd seen it a month earlier? Maybe. However, when I ultimately watched them both again this past April/May, I did confirm that Parasite still had the slight edge.

The biggest challenge in this regard might have come in 2013, when I saw my #3 film of the year, Inside Llewyn Davis, on the last day. At the time I wondered if it should leapfrog Before Midnight (#2) and Beyond the Hills (#1), but it was just too close to the end for me to seriously entertain that idea. Then again, time has proven me correct on that as well, or at least consistent, as Beyond the Hills was my #11 of the decade while Inside Llewyn Davis was only #23.

I also think the "late-year awards contender" is not quite as much of a thing as it has been in the past. We obviously have to disregard the highly unusual year just completed, but even in 2019, 1917 was a film that got released right at the end, while Parasite had been around longer to gather more buzz and word of mouth. Parasite ultimately won best picture. It may no longer seem like a late release gives a film enough of a chance to accumulate the necessary zeitgeist momentum. Whereas once the idea was to have good films fresh in the memories of Academy voters, meaning anything released earlier in the year didn't stand a chance, I reckon that could be changing.

Films debuting on streaming services muddies those waters further, as they don't seem to be as strategically planned for awards consideration, though there are exceptions like Mank. (Of course, such movies aren't eligible for awards at all, in most years, unless they get a theatrical release in addition to their streaming release.)

In terms of practical ways to address this -- assuming it's something that even needs "addressing" -- the first step is to realize that I could be showing a bias against films released too late in the year to earn serious consideration for my #1 spot. That will at least trigger an awareness as I watch movies late in 2021, and help me be certain to give them a fair shake.

Really, though, a #1 movie is a #1 movie. You know it when you see it. The converse was what I knew about Red State in 2011, that it was not really a #1 movie. When it's #1, you just know.

Of course, there's no guarantee that a given year will have a "true" #1 movie for you -- something you feel, beyond a shadow of a doubt, deserves to be honored alongside the other films you've deemed worthy of that honor in the past. I have never had such a year, as every movie I have ever selected as my #1 has had that certain feel to it, and almost every one received five stars from me on first assessment. (The only exception was last year, when I gave Parasite only 4.5 stars on my first viewing -- but that was obviously an overly conservative assessment, as by January it had risen all the way up to #13 for the whole decade.)

So we're off and running on a new year. I've got my first few 2021 movies lined up and ready for watching. 

If my recent tendencies are any indication, they could have a real shot for end of year glory. 

2020 in portmanteaus

It's time again for me to make crazy new films by jamming together the titles of two movies released in 2020. The seventh time, in fact. 

COVID-19 can take some things away from us, but not this.

I'm Thinking of Staten Island - A woman considers breaking up with her boyfriend because his tattoo skills are so poor.

Feels Good Mank - Herman J. Mankiewicz gets embroiled in controversy when he writes Pepe the Frog into Citizen Kane. 

The Invisible Mank - Herman J. Mankiewicz gaslights Orson Welles into believing he's the sole writer of Citizen Kane by turning invisible and whispering withering put-downs.

Fatmank - Despondent over his inability to get full credit for writing Citizen Kane, Herman J. Mankiewicz takes a job trying to kill Santa Claus.

Eurovision Sonic the Hedgehog - A super-speedy alien has to join the world's most popular talent show when it turns out Lars and Sigrit were also on that boat. 

Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of Wonder Woman 1984) - Wonder Woman breaks up with the Joker, freeing herself up to become the first big superhero movie released during the pandemic.

Bill & Tenet Face the Music - The quest to create the world's greatest song becomes even more challenging when the Wyld Stallyns go backward through time in reverse. 

Uncle Frank & Antebellum - A gay white man and a straight African American woman argue which is worse south of the Mason-Dixon line, racism or homophobia? 

Promising Young Wonder Woman - A feature length movie on the Themyscira Olympics. 

The War with Grandpalm Springs - A boy and his grandfather get extra creative and deadly in their pranks when they realize they are re-living the same day. 

Borams - Borat Sagdiyev gets injected with COVID-19 and infects a bunch of Australian sheep.

Ma Rainey's Black Borat - Something highly inappropriate I'm sure. 

Fantabulous Island - Harley Quinn brings ordinary people to an island where they can enact their every revenge fantasy against the Joker. 

Wolfwasp Network - Wolves? Wasps? Wasps? Wolves? Let's call the whole thing off. 

The Wrong Miss Juneteenth - The prize for winning a pageant for African American teenage girls is a trip to Hawaii with David Spade.

Rebeccapone - A new bride arrives at a large estate, where she has to contend with the ghost of its former mistress -- as well as Al Capone shitting himself. 

The Social Dil Emma - The romantic entanglements of a 19th century English village just get more complicated when everyone gets Tinder. 

The Swallowbys - Three eccentric children get left behind in their giant mansion by their wicked parents, and experiment with swallowing household objects in their boredom.

Downhillbilly Elegy - A strung-out Amy Adams invites further shame when she flees from an avalanche, forgetting that the Appalachian Mountains don't have any snow. 

Blow the Man Downhill - A contemplation of the age-old adversarial relationship between avalanches and human beings, from the perspective of the avalanche.

Onward the Rocks - Rashida Jones spies on her husband to see if he's cheating on her, with the help of her father, Bill Murray -- but only his bottom half. 

Things almost ended in 2020

In 2020, Charlie Kaufman was thinking of ending things -- but so were we all.

That's not to say we were suicidal, but then again, that's only one of the many possible things Kaufman's movie might be about. We may not have been thinking of ending things in that sense, but we were definitely thinking of things ending -- most notably, the lives of people we loved.

For some cinephiles, things did end in 2020. Some lost their lives to COVID, but in less extreme examples, there were other kinds of endings. The end of cinemas as we know them -- predicted though not yet confirmed -- was a major loss for many of us in 2020, something we grappled with more than we may have wanted to admit, when there were so many more significant life-and-death worries, freedom-and-oppression worries, worries about whether we'd have enough money to put food on the table for our families.

But there were also new beginnings.

For whatever else went wrong in 2020, one thing went right: Joe Biden was elected president of the United States. If Donald Trump had won four more years, maybe more of us would have thought about ending things for ourselves -- especially the minorities, both racial and gender, who figured to further suffer under his orange thumb.

But we stood up and collectively voted Trump out, and he could take 2020 with him on his way out the door.

Bad years have a way of birthing good ones, or at least, good things, if you look at it right. I'm not sure if 2021 will be a good year, but I am comforted about the possibility when I compare 2020 to another election year, 2004. That may not have been a bad year for you, but it was for me. I never thought of ending things of course, but it was one of a handful of the worst years of my life. I spent a lot of the year struggling to get back together with an ex-girlfriend, and also hoping John Kerry would unseat George W. Bush. 

Neither of those things happened, but you what did happen in 2004, right near the end? My Boston Red Sox won their first World Series since 1918, and I met my future wife about a week before Christmas. Instead of being one of my worst years, maybe 2004 was one of my best.

I hope the good things that happened at the end of 2020 will bring us out of it strong, so we can start to put it behind us. Today, though, I look back -- back on a year that was pretty darn good at the movies, considering all the obstacles to the movies and to the larger world around them.

Performers of the year

If you had a really good year, you get mentioned below. If you had a really bad year, you get mentioned below. If you had a mixed bag or only made one movie, you don't get mentioned. 

Three who had a good year 

Chadwick Boseman - How could this be a good year for Chadwick Boseman, when it was undoubtedly his worst? I mean, isn't the year you die a pretty terrible year no matter how you slice it? Performance-wise, though, Boseman was at his best in 2020; in among all the many sad things about his early passing at age 43 from colon cancer, it's sad he didn't live to see or hear the praise for his work in Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (#17). By some measures this is the best performance he ever gave, as headstrong and ambitious trumpeter Levee Brown, who butts heads with the titular Ma Rainey in search of improving both the quality and appeal of the music they make together. I didn't figure I would give this movie more than grudging respect before I saw it, as movies that are this beholden to their stage roots often don't feel to me like fully realized cinematic entities. But the confined staging of Ma Rainey only enhances its many still-relevant themes, and gives Boseman a hothouse atmosphere to strut his stuff -- both as a very confident character, and an actor with boundless capacity, capable of not one, not two, but three big emotional scenes that explain the character's divisive nature. A posthumous Oscar may be in the offing for Boseman. Spike Lee's Da 5 Bloods (#55) was the last film whose praise Boseman lived to see, and it got a ton of it, though not necessarily for Boseman himself. Back in June, we had the luxury of not yet knowing what Boseman had known himself for some time: that he was at death's door. In retrospect, his work as the young soldier who never made it out of Vietnam -- like the actor himself, taken before his time -- assumes a sort of angelic quality, though one grounded by Boseman's always superlative technique. I'm sorry this is the last time I'll be able to honor Boseman in "three who had a good year"; given his merits as an actor, it could have happened a dozen more times.

Dan Stevens - For a long time I have been giving Dan Stevens a hard time for quitting Downton Abbey to pursue a movie career. I considered him a modern-day David Caruso, leaving behind a sure thing in search of something illusory that never transpired. Well it may have taken him eight years, but "never" has finally arrived. Things paid off for Stevens big time in 2020, with a pair of roles that couldn't have been more different. He showed off some heretofore underappreciated comedic chops (and a funny Russian accent) in Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga (#11), in which he plays a feather-haired singer with an operatic voice, who I might have called macho if he were not hiding the pretty unsecret secret that he's gay. Most scripts would have played up the character's boastfulness and sinister intentions, but Alexander Lemtov is only that guy if you don't look very closely at him. He's actually sort of the secret hero of the piece, bringing out the best in Rachel McAdams' Sigrit while actually not wanting to steal her away from Lars (Will Ferrell), her love interest -- or if so, only to help her out professionally. Then in Dave Franco's The Rental (#27), Stevens shifts gears to play an architect who goes away for the weekend with his wife and another couple, stumbling into dangerous territory when he yields to his attraction to the other woman, who is also his colleague. Her boyfriend is his brother. Yes, it's pretty complicated, which is the most horrifying part of a film that only becomes structured as a traditional horror when it nears its climax. Unlike Lemtov, he does steal somebody's woman, but it's not something he means or wants to do -- he's just beset by human frailties that have the potential to turn an idyllic weekend at a seaside rental property into something truly nightmarish. Stevens may not have become the household name both he and David Caruso wanted, but if he keeps making ensemble turns like these, he'll continue to justify his Downton departure. 

Phylicia Rashad - Phylicia Rashad ends up on this list not because all the movies she made in 2020 were great -- Tyler Perry's A Fall From Grace, which I liked well enough when it was the second 2020 movie I saw, did not hold up in my memory and ended up in triple digits at #107. Rather, it's because she had an unusually busy year -- it's rare to see an actor credited with four features in a single year -- and because each movie was better than the one before it. A Fall From Grace was the first of two villainous roles Rashad played this year, a sign in and of itself of an actor's range, and the second one hit significantly higher on my chart at #71, that being the Jason Blum-produced Black Box. Despite his typical financial constraints, which were certainly on display here, the movie ended up being a tight little mind-bending thriller, one in which she plays an experimental doctor of dubious intent. (The fact that she played both those roles without us initially being aware of the character's sinister nature is a real credit to her.) But her year didn't really take off until the end, albeit in two smaller roles. The first was Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey (#25), in which she plays a woman reading to her grandchildren the story that is unfolding before us. (There may be more to her character than that, but I won't spoil it, even if you wouldn't likely watch this now until next Christmas.) The second was Soul (#4), in which she voices the main character's mother, around whom several of the film's more emotional moments revolve. I've enjoyed Rashad's work since she came back on my radar in Creed, where I will never forget some of the choices she makes for that character, and I'm glad to finally be able to formally acknowledge her strong overall body of work on this blog. 

Honorable mentions: Alison Brie (The Rental, Promising Young Woman, Horse Girl), Bill Burr (The King of Staten Island, The Mandalorian), Sacha Baron Cohen (Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, The Trial of the Chicago 7), Keegan-Michael Key (Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey, The Prom)

Three who had a bad year

Edgar Ramirez - Edgar Ramirez didn't make bad choices this year; he just made bad movies. In other words, I support his interest in Wasp Network (#133), The Last Days of American Crime (#124) and Resistance (#117), they just turned out to be a lot less than they looked on the page. The biggest disappointment, also the lowest in my year-end rankings, has to be Wasp Network, director Olivier Assayas' latest Carlos-style look behind the scenes of illegal operations involving Latin Americans. Assayas should be really experienced with this sort of thing, yet this narrative is all over the place, jumping around in time periods that all have one thing in common: Nothing that would interest anyone is happening in any of them. Ramirez is one of the boring people, a pilot, to which nothing is happening. Again, not a bad idea to bring a graphic novel about the last heist before criminals become physically unable to commit crimes without their brains being zapped, but The Last Days of American Crime comes up short on the execution, with only Michael Pitt making it at all worthwhile. Poor Ramirez, he was only in Resistance for about five minutes at the beginning, but he still gets dinged for a movie that shows us what Marcel Marceau was up to in his days before miming, when he was a resistance fighter in World War II. It's the best of the three but it's terribly bland, which makes it a good match for Ramirez, an actor whose charisma has never grabbed me, maybe because he doesn't have much to begin with. He could have skated by previously, but in 2020, he made three movies that drew our attention to it. (He's a dead ringer for a friend of mine from certain angles, though, and for this he deserves some love.)

Betty Gilpin - Betty Gilpin is actually one of my favorite acting discoveries of the past few years. There's a scene I regularly think about from the first season of GLOW, where she's a mess of tears and mascara at a party, and she cuts through all the bullshit of the way sadness is usually portrayed by actors and actresses. Unfortunately, her 2020 was just sad. It would be hard to believe Coffee & Kareem (#140) didn't represent her low point of the year, at least in terms of her performance if not the quality of the film, but then along came The Grudge (#146), which nestled itself in my bottom five and never dislodged. First the ridiculous performance. In Coffee & Kareem, she plays a hothead detective whose head just gets hotter the longer the movie runs, so much that she's erupting out of the normal performance range well before the climax. This is a scenery-chewing turn where the character shoots a pistol wildly in the air at least once, but really, I think more like four or five times. Gilpin's work is either the best or the worst thing in the movie; conventionally it would be the latter, but at least Gilpin commits to the absurdity of the whole thing. She gives a far more traditionally modulated performance in The Grudge, where she gets a demerit just for being part of the ensemble of what is a truly terrible horror remake, and horror film in general. I'm not even going to get into what makes The Grudge so lame, in part because I've blocked most of it out, but jumping around in time and between storylines is just one of the film's glaring flaws. Wasting an actress like Gilpin is another. I never ended up seeing her third film of the year, The Hunt, but since it's about hunting people, it was at least tone deaf if not actually bad. (As a matter of fact, the tone deafness got it delayed from its potential 2019 release after a number of high-profile shootings.)

Bobby Cannavale - The third choice on this list came down to two different performers (the other lands in my dishonorable mentions), but I had to go with Bobby Cannavale because it gave me the opportunity to pontificate on how much I hated The Jesus Rolls (#147). Now I have to come clean and say I would have been off to a bad start anyway with this movie because I don't really appreciate the film from which it spun off, The Big Lebowski -- at least not like I'm supposed to appreciate it. But this lethargic, pointless attempt to ride the undeniable charisma of John Turturro as Jesus Quintana just sits there for 85 minutes, making us forget Jesus was even charismatic in the original Coen brothers movie. There's barely any bowling, and the plot, such as it is, takes Turturro and Cannavale on a sort of fits and starts road trip around god knows where, I don't even remember. Just a total waste of time, and the otherwise likeable Cannavale signed off on it. But if it were just that lone bad choice he probably could have stayed shrouded in anonymity in 2020, at least in terms of my year-end jeers. Instead he co-starred in Superintelligence (#129), which seems like a total paycheck grab and not the type of movie the actor has been making for the last 20 years of his career. He's actually very pleasant in this Melissa McCarthy vehicle -- likeable, you might say -- but it's such a nothing role, and really, a nothing movie, that his on-screen persona is not enough for it to seem like a positive for him. All you need to do is look at its #129 ranking and you know it was no good. (Because hey, my opinion is the only one that counts here, right?) 

Dishonorable mentions: Joey King (The Lie, The Kissing Booth 2), Kumail Nanjiani (The Lovebirds, Dolittle), Rob Schneider (The Wrong Missy, Hubie Halloween), Jackie Sandler (The Wrong Missy, Hubie Halloween)

Incidentally, this is the second straight year Nanjiani has made my dishonorable mentions. Better step it up in 2021 Kumail.

The year I regularly disappointed a very nice publicist

I mentioned in my "looking back on 2020" post from two weeks ago that I watched a lot of screeners this year -- and that they mostly weren't very good.

The harder part about that was that the publicist who sent me most of them, a woman I will call Deirdre to preserve her privacy, is very good -- and very nice.

Her company seemed to be in charge of Australian distribution -- whether theatrical or VOD -- of every movie that came out this year that starred people I knew, but where I had otherwise never heard of the movie itself.

And, as you might guess, most of them were not so great. 

The funny thing is, most of them were not so bad either. I gave most of them between a four and a six on ReelGood's ten-point ratings scale. Still, a maximum of six on a ten-point scale can't be what Deirdre was looking for.

It looks even worse when you actually check my year-end rankings. The highest film that Deirdre distributed on my chart was Becky at #29, but I didn't actually review that, giving it over to my horror writer to write up his thoughts -- not because I couldn't have reviewed it (I'd watched it about two months earlier through U.S. iTunes), but because I was really busy the week it finally hit Australian theaters. There was a similar situation for The Assistant, a strong #35 for me, which I don't totally count because I did not actually get a screener from her for this -- I already had it rented from U.S. iTunes since it came out much later in the year in Australia. So the eight I gave the film was likely much appreciated, but I would have reviewed the film whether she brought it to my attention or not.

I did give an eight to Les Miserables (#32), which was also from her company. So that was the one time I really came through for her, a movie she steered my way that got a high rating from me. Still, I already knew about that one because it was the film that earned France's spot among the 2019 Oscar nominations instead of Portrait of a Lady on Fire. I likely would have sought that one out on my own as well. 

After that you have to go all the way down to 23 Walks at #85 to find the next movie on my year-end list that I felt positively about, and this was a romance about senior dog lovers -- not something I expected to like at all. You can just keep following the list down from there: Burden (#106), Dreambuilders (#108), Spree (#112), The Secrets We Keep (#115), Dogs Don't Wear Pants (#116), Resistance (#117), On the Rocks (#128), A Christmas Gift from Bob (#135) and Endings, Beginnings (#138). 

Deirdre should at least be relieved that none of her films made my bottom ten.

Not having ever had a "relationship" with a publicist before, I find it interesting how you develop familiarity with them just from an email exchange every couple weeks, and subsequently feel bad about dissing their movies. I mean, they have to know that this is the game, that you can't expect critics to love or even like the movies you send to them. But you, as the receiver of these screeners, also hope things will even out over time, and that you can legitimately like a movie they send rather than just throwing them a bone by giving them a five when the movie might really deserve a four.

Of course, our site actually did hand out an eight to three of the movies she was promoting, so I guess I needn't beat myself up about this any further.

It occurs to me that if you were so inclined, you could piece together who this distributor is based on the titles I've mentioned. Oh well. I can't always protect the innocent on this site. And anyway, I've told you how great I think Deirdre is. She's a feather in this distributor's cap, even if some of the movies it distributed in 2020 were not.

A documentary bounty

On the strength of a good year for documentaries last year, I chose to delve into the history of classic documentaries as my monthly viewing series in 2020. Then 2020 was an even better year for documentaries. 

Three documentaries -- Disclosure (#5), Feels Good Man (#6) and Time (#8) -- made my top ten of the year, and the 2020 documentary that may have been the most astonishing achievement, My Octopus Teacher, finished just outside the top ten at #12. If I'd thought about it just a little more after the fact, or if I'd not seen a couple great movies near the end of my viewing year that displaced it, it could have easily been the fourth documentary in my top ten.

I don't know if I've ever had more than one documentary in my top ten before now. A quick stroll through the 25-year history of my year-end lists disproves this, but it's only happened once, when both The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters and Sicko made the cut in 2007. Before now, only 11 documentaries total had made my top ten since 1996, which includes droughts without any from 1997 to 2001 and 2014 to 2018. 

Whether this is a sign of things to come, or just a pandemic blip that was related to the content available this year, remains to be seen. 

Music moment of the year

Of all the things that might have made me cry in 2020, and for all the possible reasons, I never expected a Will Ferrell comedy to be one of them. But that's what happened during the emotional, not to mention chronological, centerpiece of Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga.

At about the halfway point of the movie, there's a break from the story designed for little other reason than to celebrate the contest itself. What it also celebrated was diversity, in a way that just walloped me.

Sigrit (Rachel McAdams) and Lars (Ferrell) are attending a party at the Scottish mansion owned by Lemtov (Dan Stevens), and a buzz starts to ripple through the crowd. It's the start of a "song-along," which we soon realize is a large improvisational group song where anyone present is invited to join in. And join in they do.

As the mash-up morphs from Cher's "Believe" to Madonna's "Ray of Light" to ABBA's "Waterloo" to Celine Dion's "Ne Partez Pas Sans Moi" to Black Eyed Peas' "I Gotta Feeling," former real-life Eurovision contestants, including some winners, come out of the woodwork to join the cast we've already been introduced to. In fact, they do most of the heavy lifting while our cast are supporting players for this one scene.

Not only is this just an exquisite amalgam of joyous popular music, but the people singing it are their own exquisite amalgam. The song is kicked off by a Black contestant, Swede Jon Lundvik, as a promising start. But as things progress, two gender fluid singers, France's Bilal Hassani and the bearded Conchita Wurst from Ukraine, join in. Before all is said and done, they'll hand off to Netta, the Israeli 2018 winner, whose face and body size defy the very norms of pop stardom. 

As the camera swirls around capturing all of this, I'm filled with chills that eventually have no other way to exit my body than through my tear ducts. I was just overwhelmed by the way a popular movie wholeheartedly embraced people of all shapes and sizes and colors and gender identities, reminded in that same moment that it's still such a rarity. Director David Dobkin et al had no way of knowing we would need it so much in late June of 2020, but this was an ode to diversity that many of us clung to for dear life, a symbolic reason to hope in a year full of so much pain.

Now, not for a moment do I believe something like this song-along would actually be possible. As much as I believe musicians are capable of great improvisation, there's no way two dozen performers could sprout up and take each others' leads on a perfect flowing mash-up of great songs, which even features a violinist at one point. It's about as plausible as a sudden song and dance number in an MGM musical.

But I don't watch movies for plausibility. I watch them to be transported into a stratosphere of the possibilities of the human spirit, and that's what the Eurovision Song Contest song-along did for me. 

Ten great non-2020 movies

Every year in this post I like to give a shout out to movies I discovered and loved that weren't released in the year just completed. This is the ten best of those, in alphabetical order:

Dead Man (1995, Jim Jarmusch) - The black and white Jarmusch western that everyone loves and that has evaded me for years has no longer evaded me. And I love it too. 

Dreams (1990, Akira Kurosawa) - I was particularly glad I finished what I started here, as this is as elegiac and meditative and beautiful as it gets. Kurosawa never lost that touch, even in his sixth decade of making movies.

For All Mankind (1989, Al Reinert) - The final movie in Audient Authentic really put the capper on a series that saw three films make this ten best list. The sky was the limit for this compilation of footage from all the Apollo missions that went to the moon.

Gimme Shelter (1970, Albert & David Maysles & Charlotte Zwerin) - I'm not a particular Stones fan, but the way these filmmakers moved in and out of their subject matter, a cross between a snake and a fly on the wall, is music non-fiction filmmaking at its very best.

Jezebel (1938, William Wyler) - I'm not sure why this Bette Davis vehicle stuck with me so much, but its pandemic setting likely put it over the top for me. It's like Gone With the Wind with yellow fever. 

Look Who's Back (2015, David Wnendt) - This satirical German comedy about Hitler waking up in present day and rising to power again knocked my socks off, even though I saw it months before I knew how sadly #2020 its themes would be. 

Man With a Movie Camera (1929, Dziga Vertov) - Some person whose opinion I trust once told me how incredibly boring this was. Yeah, I suppose it is boring if you disregard all the sights, all the movement, all the revolutionary camera setups and all the groundbreaking editing innovations. 

Mary Poppins (1964, Robert Stevenson) - Informally the movie I was most embarrassed about never having seen, Mary Poppins entered my watched list in glorious fashion this past July, when I saw it in actual cinema, just before everything closed for our second wave of the virus. Classic sights and songs. 

Pride & Prejudice (2005, Joe Wright) - I finally read Jane Austen's book just so I could watch this movie for a viewing challenge. Both experiences were exceedingly rich and joyous.

Waves (2019, Trey Edward Schults) - The most recent great Florida film, seen through the eyes of the upwardly mobile Black middle class. Its colors are as searing as its themes and emotions. 

2020 by the numbers

In past "by the numbers" sections, I have broken down movies seen for the first time in theaters vs. movies seen for the first time on DVD/streaming. It's not so simple as that anymore, especially since I didn't watch a single new movie on DVD this year.
Here is the breakdown of what I did watch by source - Netflix (47), iTunes rental (35), theater (21), screener (15), Amazon Prime (12), MIFF (10), Stan (4), Apple TV+ (3), Disney+ (2).
Movies by star rating - 5 stars (2), 4.5 stars (17), 4 stars (26), 3.5 stars (36), 3 stars (29), 2.5 stars (15), 2 stars (9), 1.5 stars (6), 1 star (7), 0.5 stars (2)
Percentage of films given at least three stars, indicating a postive rating - 74%
Total new movies watched in the calendar year - 276
Total rewatches - 81
2020 movies watched more than once - 3 (I'm Thinking of Ending Things, Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga, Antebellum)

Five amazing things in 2020 movies

1) That shot in The Vast of Night. If you saw it, you know the one I'm talking about. It's a steadicam shot that goes from handheld to car to drone to pulley system to helicopter, or so it seems, not necessarily in that order. It's as out of this world as the subject matter of the film.

2) The entirety of My Octopus Teacher. How this guy got so much footage of what is apparently the same octopus as it lives and bonds with him and fights for its life, all while having sufficient breath to keep the camera running, I may never understand. 

3) That shot of the line of police in True History of the Kelly Gang, appearing like a wall of terminator robots shining their lights on the gang below, in the perfect encapsulation of this film's memorable out-of-time aesthetic. 

4) The use of the mask in Possessor. Probably the scariest horror moment of the year, in a film that was otherwise too disjointed and oddly structured to be truly satisfying. 

5) The opening "Themyscira Olympics" sequence in Wonder Woman 1984. The movie may not have been very good, but I'll always have that. 

Another name for ...

Palm Springs is ... Love Wedding Repeat
#Unfit: The Psychology of Donald Trump is ... The Burnt Orange Heresy
Have a Good Trip: Adventures in Psychedelics is ... Horse Girl
Another Round is ... Uncorked
The Trouble With Being Born is ... How to Build a Girl
Capone is ... Fatman
Enola Holmes is ... Promising Young Woman
Blow the Man Down is ... Swallow
Rebecca is ... Becky

And finishing with ...

Quick hits

This section usually has a bunch of stuff related to the Oscar nominations. Obviously we can't do that this year. Let's see how we go.

Highest ranked film I first saw on streaming - I'm Thinking of Ending Things (#1)
Highest ranked film I first saw in the theater - The Furnace (#21)
Director who won me back - Judd Apatow (The King of Staten Island) 
Director who lost me - Sofia Coppola (On the Rocks)
Breakout actress - Jessie Buckley (I'm Thinking of Ending Things)
Breakout actress honorable mention - Maria Bakalova (Borat Subsequent Moviefilm)
Breakout actor - Pete Davidson (The King of Staten Island)
Breakout actor honorable mention - Maciej Musialowski (The Hater) 
Most unexpected performance - Kevin James as a Neo-Nazi (Becky)
Most expected performance - David Spade as a sarcastic dweeb (The Wrong Missy)
Movie I should have loved but didn't - Wolfwalkers (#102)
Movie I shouldn't have loved but did - Bill & Ted Face the Music (#19)
Best Netflix movie - I'm Thinking of Ending Things (#1)
Worst Netflix movie - Hubie Halloween (#149)
Movie that got better the more I thought about it - Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (#17)
Movie that got worse the more I thought about it - Mank (#39)
Most overrated by critics - Nomadland (#82)
Most underrated by critics - Antebellum (#24)
Best sequel - Bill & Ted Face the Music (#19)
Worst sequel - The Kissing Booth 2 (#136)
Dumbest smart movie - Superintelligence (#129)
Smartest dumb movie - Bill & Ted Face the Music (#19)
Best use of Tom Holland - Onward (#9)
Worst use of Tom Holland - The Devil All the Time (#142)
Best colorful movie about music - Eurovision Song Contest (#11)
Worst colorful movie about music - Trolls World Tour (#121)
Most prolific - Jason Blum (Black Box, Evil Eye, The Lie, Nocturne)
Least prolific - Marvel ( ... )
Best practical jokes - Borat Subsequent Moviefilm (#23)
Worst practical jokes - Impractical Jokers: The Movie (#141)
Most #2020 movie - The Platform (#10)
Movie that most should have come out five years ago - The Social Dilemma (#103)
Movie that most should have come out 25 years ago - Hubie Halloween (#149)

Ten thousand words later you can take a rest. 

I'll be back tomorrow with a final 2020 wrap-up post, my annual portmanteaus post, a favorite of yours and mine. (Or at least mine.)