Movies out of sync with songs of the same name

In September, my assignment in the Facebook group Flickchart Friends Favorites Fiesta was Andrei Tarkovsky's The Sacrifice, a typically ponderous slice of his trademark slow cinema. I've told you about this group before, but as a reminder, it pairs you up with another member of the group each month, and you watch that member's highest ranked film on Flickchart that you haven't seen. In September, I'd seen my partner's top 44 films. This was his #45.

I'll include below what I wrote about it when I posted in the group. But for now, I want to talk about the fact that every time I saw it among my rented items on iTunes, or considered that I needed to watch it before the calendar flipped over to October (I got it in just under the wire on Wednesday night), I had the following song going through my head:

It's not a favorite Elton John song of mine or anything, and in fact, I'm willing to bet it had been 20 years since I'd heard it. I rectified that just now while writing this post.

So it's funny to consider how these little bits of cultural ephemera sit in your head and pop up at the strangest of times. "Sacrifice" is not a particularly uncommon word, and in fact, I'm sure I've heard a handful of other songs with the same title. But the one that came up whenever I considered Tarkovsky's film was the one sung by Elton John and released in 1989. (Which, granted, was only three years after Tarkovsky released his film.) I mean, I needn't have though of any song at all when considering the film.

If you've seen The Sacrifice, you know what an odd match it makes with John. And if you haven't seen it, you may wish to avert your eyes -- consider this your SPOILER ALERT.

While John's song is a tender love ballad with the modest ambition of appealing to a very mainstream audience, The Sacrifice is an abstract example of slow cinema that deals with a man who burns down his house as part of a bargain with God to prevent a nuclear holocaust. Mainstream audiences should stay far, far away. (In fact, I could have included a poster that shows this burning house, which doesn't burn until the long-awaited final ten minutes of the movie, which couldn't have arrived sooner for me. But I decided not to spoil the movie for you right up front, despite this other poster's desire to do so.)

I did think it was interesting to note something that this poster reveals, which is that it expects you to have a very difficult time with this film. The poster pleads "Hang on to the very end and you may find yourself moved as you have never been moved before." It's essentially an admission that this is an arduous viewing experience, but has its rewards if you just stick with it. Well, it's debatable. 

If I had the energy I used to have, I'd now give you five other example of movies that are very hilariously different from songs that share their name. Instead, I'll just give you my write-up on The Sacrifice as promised. I've removed the guy's name just because it's irrelevant and I'd like to preserve his privacy. Though he has nothing to be ashamed of in his love for The Sacrifice. The problem clearly lies with me.

Here it is:

Andrei Tarkovsky's films are endurance tests under the best of circumstances. For me, the best of circumstances was Solaris, which was long but incredibly fulfilling, becoming a favorite of mine. But I lost the battle with Stalker, feeling every passing minute of that movie without enough reward to justify the commitment. I do, in that case, recognize a desire to revisit it again one day, knowing there is thematic material that I might appreciate more on a second viewing.

I don't know that I'll ever be going back to xxx's #45, The Sacrifice (1986). This is not to say that I hated it. I got what it was going for, with a little help from Wikipedia along the way. But it's one of those films where as it is progressing, things are happening that you can't really incorporate into your understanding of what the film has set up for you so far. As an example, I very belatedly got that this is a movie about an imminent nuclear holocaust and one man's attempt to bargain with God to prevent it from happening. (That's partially because this stuff doesn't start happening until the 45 minute mark or so.) Once I understood that, though, it confounded me that one of the man's friends urges him to go sleep with his maid, an act of adultery, because she is "the best kind" of witch. Witches now? So I had to go back to Wikipedia again to figure out what I may have missed.

The answer is, I didn't miss anything, but this is Tarkovsky. His films are meant to be appreciated on very abstract levels, or not at all. I'm not going to say The Sacrifice was an instance of "not at all," but it worked significantly less well for me than Stalker and that was already borderline incomprehensible for me. Those that love Tarkovsky worship him, and I know I have the potential given my feelings toward Solaris. So I guess we'll see how I go with my fourth film of his, after another rest of a couple years to regather myself.

I did very much appreciate the apocalyptic tone that hangs over the film. The man has sort of visions to a future post-nuclear landscape covered with snow and ash, as the camera crawls along the detritus on the ground -- a scene that reminded me of similar camera movements along the refuse-strewn ground in Stalker. I was also reminded of Bergman while watching this, and not just because the film was in Swedish, but because of its religious themes as well. It turns out this is no coincidence as Bergman's son worked on the film, as well as Bergman's personal DP, Sven Nykvist, plus I think a couple Bergman collaborators in the cast as well. I love Bergman so this should be a good thing, but the Bergman film it reminds me of most is my least favorite, Cries and Whispers, which also takes place largely inside one palatial house. As it turns out, Nykvist also shot this, though the two films couldn't look more different in terms of their color. While the reds are downright garish in Cries and Whispers, I learned (also from Wikipedia) that Tarkovsky drained at least 60 percent of the color from The Sacrifice in post-production.

Let's see how it enters my chart:

The Sacrifice < The Hate U Give

The Sacrifice > I Shot Andy Warhol

The Sacrifice < Burning Cane

The Sacrifice > Meet the Browns

The Sacrifice < Somewhere

The Sacrifice < Auntie Mame

The Sacrifice > Premonition

The Sacrifice > John Carter

The Sacrifice < Sleepers

The Sacrifice < Chuck Norris vs. Communism

The Sacrifice < The Man from London

The Sacrifice > Finding Dory

3777/5593 (32%)

This session of dueling was particularly interesting, as the movie came up against two other examples of slow cinema that I found really challenging, Sofia Coppola's Somewhere and Bela Tarr's The Man from London. I really had to sit and think about both choices, and the challenger won in both cases, though I'm not sure that's right. If it had beaten Somewhere, The Sacrifice would have landed much higher than 32%, but that's Flickchart for you. However, there's clearly something wrong with my list as I like this film MUCH better than Finding Dory.

Thanks xxxx. Whether he works for me all the time or not, Tarkovsky is a master and this was an important benchmark in working my way through his films.

I'm Thinking of Kaufman Things: Synecdoche, New York

This is my penultimate edition of a 2021 bi-monthly series revisiting the films of Charlie Kaufman.

In the previous four instances of this series, I spent a lot of time talking about the ways the movie(s) I watched that month related to other movies written or directed by Charlie Kaufman.

This month, when taking notes, I found myself just writing down a lot of snippets of rich and meaningful dialogue. That's certainly an equally valid way of "thinking" about Kaufman.

I'll still do a little talking about how this film fits into Kaufman's body of work, but I may not concentrate on a bunch of superficial (yet still interesting) similarities between Synecdoche, New York and other Kaufman films. You could easily argue that Kaufman reveals himself most in the superficial details, but you could just as easily argue that nothing in a Kaufman movie is accurately described as "superficial," since he has clearly done so much thinking about every minute piece of the puzzle. 

The film it reminds me of most is, it probably goes without saying, Adaptation. Kaufman was literally a character in that film, and Caden Cotard, the main character in this film (played by the late great Philip Seymour Hoffman), is the character most clearly a direct analogue for Kaufman among his rich collection of characters. But the similarity presents itself most in a phenomenon I described in the opening sentence of my review of Adaptation for AllMovie nearly 20 years ago:

"Critics charged with the divine headache of describing Adaptation, in all its twisted magnificence, should find it appropriate that the story concentrates on the paralysis of writer's block, brought on by the impossible urge to say everything."

Synecdoche, New York is chock full of that impossible urge, and it is a divine headache indeed. If a 300-word review of Adaptation was insufficient to tackle its many complexities -- that was the word length I was writing back then, for the princely sum of $20 a pop -- then I have no idea what I would have done with a similar length allotment for Synecdoche. Fortunately, I didn't see that movie until after I stopped writing for AllMovie.

In fact, it was only just after I stopped writing -- like, one week later. That wasn't in 2008 when Synecdoche came out though. To give you some indication how different my movie viewing was back then, I didn't see this movie until Thanksgiving of 2011, November 21st to be exact. Only one week earlier, I had watched Sorry, Thanks, the last movie I ever reviewed for AllMovie. (I didn't stop out of choice; they changed their financial model to stop using freelancers.) 

The timing of my first viewing of Synecdoche, New York is interesting for a couple reasons. For one, it is absolutely unimaginable to me that I could have let three years elapse before getting around to watching it. Not with Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind both having claimed my #1 spot for their respective years. I lose that much trust in Kaufman just one film later, just because I don't really like how the trailer looks and some people say they didn't get it? What a fool I was.

But then there was the timing of what was going on in my life, and this is something that is only just occurring to me now. When I wrote that review of Sorry, Thanks, that was my last paying review gig -- to date. Six weeks from now, that will be ten years ago. Sure, I say I get paid, in a manner of speaking, for the reviews I currently write because I have a critics card that gets me into screenings for free ... when there isn't a pandemic on, anyway. But actually receiving direct compensation for the work that I consider my passion? Hasn't happened in ten years.

And I'm pretty sure I had that existential pit in my stomach when I watched Synecdoche just a week after filing my last review for AllMovie. I surely knew that the film criticism industry was changing, and that the chances of me getting paying work as a critic again were slim to none. So a movie that does a deep dive into the idea of your life passing you by, of measuring your accomplishments and the accomplishments you are still likely to make in the future, would have resonated with me quite a bit at the time. Even if I didn't consciously realize it until now.

But Synedoche, New York is about so much more than that. It might take me 10,000 words to talk about the things it's about. But hopefully you've already seen it, so you already know. 

So instead of doing the rigorous comparisons between movies to isolate similar themes -- you know, what's been the bread and butter of this series -- I'm just going to finish with the string of quotes/exchanges that I jotted down from Synecdoche, which in and of themselves reminded me of Kaufman's entire body of work. Even those that might require explanation, I will just leave to you to sort through. 

Forthwith:

"It's been a year."
"It's been a week!"

"The murky, cowardly depths of my fucked up being."

"It's about everything. Dating, birth, death, life, family. All of that."

"I'm fun."
"Oh sweetie no you're not."

"You wish you were a girl?"
"I think I would have been better at it."
"It's a drag in a lot of ways."

"I'm aching for it to be over. The end is built into the beginning."

"There are a million little strings attached to every choice you make. You destroy your life every time you choose. But you may not know it for 20 years. And you may not ever trace it to its source. And you only get once chance to play it out."

"No one wants to hear about my misery, because they have their own."

"Everyone is disappointing, the more you know someone."

"This is everyone's experience, the details hardly matter. You are everyone."

"As you learn there is no one watching, and there never was."

"I know how to do the play now."

That's pretty much the last thing Caden says in the movie, though it's at least the third time he's said it. He's got his head on the shoulder of the actress who plays the mother in the dream of Ellen the cleaning woman, who as far as I can tell is a character Caden never even met. He either heard of her or just made her up. That's how deep the rabbit hole goes. 

After that, Dianne Wiest, the director in his earpiece, gives him a final stage direction that I only properly understood on this third viewing:

"Die."

Caden complies.

This series will die, so to speak, after one more installment in November, when I watch Anomalisa for only the second time.

Mike Lookinland's second career, and remembering an old cup

If you're like me, you'll look at the long crawl of credits at the end of a movie without really looking at it. Your eyes are pointed at the screen and information is hitting your cerebral cortex, but you're not really processing it. If you're like me, you'll read the acting credits, but words like "second unit director" then cause your eyes to glaze over. You keep watching, but you shift into the dutiful position of a person bearing witness. You're not actually taking anything in, not actually broadening the personal database of key grips and dolly grips you're aware of.

Every once in a while, though, you might find yourself a little nugget of something choice.

As I was bearing witness to the credits at the end of the 2000 film The Way of the Gun on Friday night, I saw a familiar name buried long past the point where I'm continuing to take in useful information. That name was Mike Lookinland, and if you're like me, a Boston area child of the 1980s weaned on the afternoon programming of WLVI, Channel 56, you know immediately who that is:

That's right, that's Bobby Brady, younger brother of Peter and Greg, son of Mike, stepson of Carol, stepbrother of Marcia, Jan and Cindy. 

But surely if the erstwhile Bobby Brady worked on The Way of the Gun, it should be as an actor, right?

This is what interested me: This Mike Lookinland was credited as "First Assistant Camera."

Must be a different Mike Lookinland, then? Surely, there might be as many as two people in the world named Mike Lookinland?

No, it's the same one. Apparently, he shifted from in front of the camera to behind it. In fact, Lookinland has 20 camera-related credits on IMDB from 1987 to 2007, at which point, it seems like he gave that up -- though he does still appear in front of the camera from time to time, even now at age 60, as a TV movie called Blending Christmas is listed as in post-production. It should be noted, though, that this is his first acting role since 2003, when he played himself in Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star.

I'm sure taking up in another part of the entertainment industry is not uncommon for former child stars, or any other actors who aren't really making it in front of the camera. What's probably not as likely is for you -- and by you I mean me -- to notice their names among a flow of hundreds in a typical end credits crawl. 

And if I didn't see Mike Lookinland's name in the end credits for The Way of the Gun, I might not ever have seen it. Of the 19 other projects he worked on as a first assistant or second assistant cameraperson, only two others were things I even recognized. One was a TV show, Everwood, that I never watched and probably never will watch. The other is Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Mayers. I have three other Halloween movies that I've never seen and probably never will see before I'd get to that.

IMDB thinks his work on The Way of the Gun was pretty significant, too. On the brief synopsis of his career on his IMDB page, it says "He is known for his work in The Brady Bunch (1969), The Brady Bunch Variety Hour (1976) and The Way of the Gun (2000)." The idea that a person would be known for performing the function of first assistant camera is, I think, hilarious.

I have two more things to tell you about The Way of the Gun.

One of them is this:

Do you remember this cup?

I hadn't thought of it in ages, but you used to always get your soda in these cups from random snack bars back in the day. In fact, I'm pretty sure we used them in the snack bar I worked in for a summer back in 1992. 

White top, light gray bottom, with a sort of flame icon in red ink. What did that flame mean? Who even knew?

They are kind of like that generic white and blue coffee cup with Greek lettering and the columns of antiquity on the side, the kind you were particularly likely to see if you lived in New York.

Last thing.

The reason I watched The Way of the Gun on Friday night was because I once caught a few minutes of it on cable 20 years ago, and those few minutes stuck with me. I'm not sure why they stuck with me, except that they contained a moment of sudden violence that seemed very shocking in the context of not having watched the rest of the movie.

Spoiler alert, if you care about spoilers for The Way of the Gun.

The moment involved the death of Taye Diggs' character. I had no idea when it actually occurred in the movie, and when I finally watched it, I learned that it wasn't until the final 15 minutes. But the scene involved a tense standoff in a small room, and Diggs suddenly being shot out of the blue by one of the other people in the room. Shot in the chin, I realize now that I've watched it, but not instantly fatal -- he has a moment to kind of gape in surprise as he slumps against the wall and fruitlessly tries to apply pressure to the wound.

For some reason, this isolated moment had always sat in the back of my mind, leading me to think The Way of the Gun was some kind of profound comment on the suddenness and brutality of violence. 

Finally watching the film, I know that this is not an accurate descriptor of this film. It's just another post-Tarantino crime movie, even if director Christopher McQuarrie has subsequently distinguished himself through several Mission: Impossible movies (with at least one more to come) as well as Jack Reacher. (In fact, this guy seems to work almost exclusively with Tom Cruise -- he was also writer for Valkyrie, Edge of Tomorrow, The Mummy and Top Gun: Maverick.)

It's not bad, and in its opening moments it even has a fair amount of promise. But then it degenerates into a bunch of really unbelievable shootouts and a series of strained character motivations.

Of course, what it's really known for is the camerawork of Mike Lookinland. 

Knowing Noir: The Postman Always Rings Twice

This is the latest in my 2021 monthly series watching classic film noirs.

I've been watching film noirs for nine months now, and I think I may have just encountered my first homme fatale.

You know, a male version of a femme fatale. I assumed the term existed, because I couldn't be the first person to think it up, though it's obviously far less common than a femme fatale. The first result in google is not a description of the term, but a 2019 Korean film of the same name. (Whereas the 2002 movie Femme Fatale is all the way down at the second result when you google that term.)

I'm not sure if The Postman Always Rings Twice considers John Garfield's Frank Chambers to be an homme fatale -- which is one of the reasons the film is not as successful as it might have been -- but all the evidence is there. 

Sure, the film introduces Lana Turner's Cora Smith like she might be the standard femme fatale, as Frank's first glimpse of her is her bare legs. She's a beauty and she does tempt Frank to go on a wayward path, which would fit the normal description of a femme fatale. But I'd argue that Frank's impact on her is far worse than hers on him.

Despite her not really flirting with him at all, Frank takes it upon himself, very early in this residency at a roadside restaurant where he's assisting the husband and wife who own it, to kiss her -- the wife of the man who's been nothing but kind to him and taken him into his employ. She doesn't return the kiss, and in fact, according to Frank's narration, she spends the next week or so steering clear of him and not making eye contact with him. So who's at fault in tempting whom, exactly?

Frank's own description of himself reminded me of descriptions of other femme fatales so far in this series. He always tells people his "feet are itching to go places," which suggests the same sort of lack of dependability implied in the comment "You're like a leaf floating from one gutter to another." That was Jeff Bailey's description of Kathie Moffat in last month's Out of the Past, and you might say the same thing about Frank Chambers. He's reckless and he's brazen and he doesn't care if he gets caught or who he hurts. He can always just move on to the next town.

If the movie had seen through the notion that he's ruining Cora's life, rather than vice versa, it might have felt like a profound inverse of the normal noir tropes. But not particularly far into the noir period (1946, though James Cain's novel was written in 1934), it doesn't seem like director Tay Garnett or screenwriters Harry Ruskin and Niven Busch are interested in exploring anything very radical. When they do inevitably fall for each other and they do decide to kill Cora's husband -- a task it takes them two separate schemes to accomplish -- the movie wants us to believe it's Cora's idea. But it's Frank who first utters the idea -- though he later swears he was not serious -- and besides, it's Frank who throws himself at her with such shameless gusto. (Gusto that's all the more reprehensible given that Nick Smith's greatest sin is that he's a bit of a drunk and that he might be just a tad domineering of his younger wife, but really, in sort of an amiable way, if such a thing is possible.)

Another thing that set me against Frank is that I didn't find John Garfield very compelling in his role. I though this was my first experience with the actor, and since he died at only age 39, that wouldn't have been such a surprise. As it turns out, he was also in Gentleman's Agreement, but I don't remember him from that. I just felt he was pretty low on charisma, and certainly out of the league of someone like Lana Turner. (I can see from Wikipedia that he was blacklisted as a possible communist, which makes me feel bad for him -- though it doesn't make him any more charismatic.)

Turner is another one of those actresses like Rita Hayworth, who I know by reputation more than from seeing her films. In fact, I know Turner primarily from the fact that she's a character in L.A. Confidential, only very briefly. Despite her appearing in more than 70 films, the only other one I'd seen was The Imitation of Life, which finds her seeming much older even though it's only 13 years after Postman. Here she is in her ingenue prime at about age 26, though I can't for the life of me figure out why they wanted to put her in some sort of white headdress for most of the movie, when her hair looks so much nicer out. 

She had the charisma that Garfield lacked, and she elevates him on screen enough to give them a good, steamy chemistry. However, I found the story itself to be quite protracted, with the characters alternating wildly between loving and hating each other as they get in and out of legal trouble. The scenes depicting their attempts to kill Cora's husband are probably the best, if only because they represent bursts of action in what is otherwise a story weighed down by a lot of talking.

I started out taking notes for other noir elements -- you know, shadows and the like -- but I didn't keep it going very long, in part because I was so tired Monday night when I watched it. And because I am also tired now as I write this, I'll leave off here. 

But I can't go without mentioning one face in this movie that was really familiar to me: Hume Cronyn. I had always known Cronyn from his appearance in Cocoon, and had never seen him as a younger man. Never mind the fact that I spent the first half of the movie thinking he was one character before realizing he was another.

Three months left of this series, with plenty of choices left -- though fewer now that I have been unable to source a second movie I wanted to watch, Otto Preminger's Laura. You may remember I was frustrated in a previous attempt to get my hands on Kiss Me Deadly. Still, there's obviously quite a lot left that I haven't seen, and actually not too many slots left if I plan to close with another Bogart film in December. 

R.I.P. to a "dirty" comedian and an unexpected comedian

Last night, on my documentary alternate Tuesday, I watched Never Surrender: A Galaxy Quest Documentary. I wasn't sure if it was the right choice for this ongoing series (they've felt a bit forced each of the past two times), but as soon as I started watching I was grinning from ear to ear.

Near the end of the movie they pay tribute to Alan Rickman, perhaps the only of the film's major stars they couldn't interview for this 2019 feature. They talked about his generosity, his dry wit, his kindness, and yes, his sense of superiority over fools he couldn't suffer or sub-par material -- some of which was exaggerated for the comic effect of playing up his own persona. It got me all sentimental about Rickman again.

This morning, as I was putting away the dishes and still thinking about it, I wondered why I had never written an In Memoriam post for Rickman on my blog. This was early 2016, and maybe my memorial posts were more sporadic back then. My mind then naturally travelled to wondering what other big stars I had failed to memorialize, and who would be the next.

Two minutes later, I pulled up to my computer and discovered that Norm MacDonald had died. He had been privately fighting cancer, and passed on at age 61.

MacDonald was not of Rickman's stature, and his influences were more in the television arena than the movie arena. But I couldn't ignore the confluence of events, and had to start writing this post right away ... maybe to honor both of them.

In checking my blog, where I had never even tagged Rickman in a post, I found the same was not true for MacDonald. Ten years ago, when we returned from a Mexican vacation to celebrate our third wedding anniversary, I wrote this post, which not only discussed the viewing of Dirty Work -- one of MacDonald's most significant contributions to the movie world -- but also specifically considered what makes his comic delivery so great. I won't repeat that stuff here, but I will invite you to click on that link if you want to read the thoughts I wrote back then.

It was all about the delivery with MacDonald, which is why he was so great at short jokes either on stage or on the Weekend Update desk on Saturday Night Live. 

Here is one of my all-time favorite MacDonald jokes on Weekend Update, one that probably wouldn't be uttered today. I'm not going to google it in order to quote the wording exactly, but I think I can mostly get it from memory, and I will bold the part that he hit specifically for emphasis:

"So Michael Jackson and Lisa Marie Presley have broken up ... turns out she was more of a stay-at-home type, and he was more of a homosexual pedophile."

MacDonald knew how to land a punchline with the best of them, especially those that underscored the absurdity of something. It got him in trouble from time to time. He was fired from SNL for his relentless jokes about O.J. Simpson, which surely walked the line of good taste, but wouldn't have been a problem if he weren't pissing off an NBC higher-up who was friends with Simpson. 

MacDonald wouldn't sanitize his comedy for anyone, even if it meant getting fired. He knew what was funny and he would continue to put it out there, regardless of the consequences. That doesn't totally work in today's world, but in the world of MacDonald's prime, it was exactly what we wanted.

And though the essence of his work was dirty, there was something about the cadences of MacDonald's line readings that made him right for any project where the idea was to make people laugh. I was delighted, a couple years ago, to hear his unmistakeable voice pop up in the vocal cast for the kids TV show Skylanders Academy as my kids were watching it in the other room.

I feel like I've watched Dirty Work fairly recently -- if you consider ten years ago to be recent -- but maybe it's time for my first Billy Madison viewing in ages, to honor him. His role of lying by the side of Billy's pool, drunk or stoned or whatever, occasionally looking up to figure out what the hell was going on, was perfect MacDonald. He did funny lead work in Dirty Work, but his essence may have been as an MVP supporting player for former SNL buddies like Adam Sandler. And if the tributes going out to him today are any indication, his contributions to the comedy world made him more of a giant in that arena than a supporting player.

Rest in peace to two greats, who may not have been as different from one another as it may seem. Never Surrender also discusses how the pairing of Rickman and Tim Allen never should have worked, but that Rickman's own previously untapped knack for comedy, as well as his personal generosity, led them to become a great on-screen pair, with an off-screen mutual respect that was real.

Maybe Rickman and MacDonald even could have made a movie together. I would have watched that.

Twenty years from united

If Pig made for a bad "Friday night film," then United 93 certainly made for a bad "Saturday night film."

Of course, in the case of Pig, I imagined it to be an exploitation film, the kind of thing Nicolas Cage has been making lately (Mandy, Willy's Wonderland). It's not that at all.

With United 93, I knew what I was getting in to.

But this was no ordinary Saturday night. It was the 20th anniversary of 9/11.

I hadn't been planning to do anything to observe the anniversary, cinematically or otherwise. But when I posted yesterday's post about Pig -- or more precisely, about the long odds of Nicolas Cage's busy career allowing him to grow a beard -- I noticed the date stamp on the post: September 11th, 2021. It seemed like a pretty frivolous way to mark the anniversary or something that had an impact on me that was less than it was for some, but more than it was for many.

Quickly, a plan formed in my mind to watch the best film ever made about 9/11 -- Paul Greengrass' astonishing 2006 docudrama -- even though it was a Saturday night, the traditional night to let your mind relax on something funny or gory. 

(Side note: Something that fit both descriptions, in a weird way, was the warm-up, as my wife suggested we watch the 1990 Australian Sam Neill-starring film Death in Brunswick to start the evening.)

I don't put forward with any conviction my claim for the personal impact 9/11 had on me, but it's not nothing. There was actually a very real chance I could have been near the World Trade Center that day, if my life had gone just a little differently.

See, I worked on Wall Street in late 1999 and early 2000. Don't get excited; it was nothing glamorous. In fact, it was the opposite of glamorous, except for the part where you could get a company car to drive you home from work if you stayed late, not to mention a free dinner.

For about eight months I was an assistant to investment bankers at Goldman Sachs, a temp job after I finished up at Columbia Journalism School with no idea of what my first foray into that career field would be. I did all the things you would expect an assistant to do -- gathered receipts for expense reports, maintained calendars, did photocopying, answered phones. It was never going to be my long-term career, but it did make me familiar with that area, and I would frequently shop in the underground mall that was at the base of the World Trade Center. I remember it well, remember specific Christmas presents I bought there in 1999.

The path that led me away there started in the summer of 2000, when I got a job as an editor on a technical theater magazine. Logically, this should have at least kept me in New York through 9/11/2001, but the job was not a perfect fit for me -- it wasn't me, it was them. They were happy with my work, but I was not happy doing it, and a variety of factors prompted a relocation to Los Angeles, where I would live until 2013, in the spring of 2001.

So when the planes hit the buildings on that fateful Tuesday in September, I was not yet six months gone from Manhattan, and only 18 months gone from actually working on Wall Street. That wasn't the main factor in my staring at the television for the rest of that day and most of the next day -- we all did that -- but it definitely added an underlying poignancy.

During my third viewing of this astonishing movie, which actually reminded me of my recent viewing of WarGames in some respects (planes mysteriously disappearing from old school monitors, control room conversations about whether this was a drill or not), I thought about how the actions of the passengers on board the titular flight is something scarcely possible in today's trying times.

I don't mean it's not possible because they wouldn't summon that courage today. The impossible part is the way we jointly perceived them as heroes.

I happened to be talking to someone yesterday, irrespective of 9/11 entirely, how there is no such thing as a non-politicized event in our modern era. There is no modern issue that both political liberals and political conservatives can agree on. They'll argue whether the sky is blue or not, if only because to agree to a point the other side has made first is to lose an infinitesimal amount of political power and influence.

If 9/11 happened today, we wouldn't have been able to agree in an uncomplicated way with what Dick Cheney is said to have uttered when he heard about United flight 93, which was "I think an act of heroism just took place on that plane." For the purposes of my current argument, I'm not saying those words would be uttered by a Republican (like Cheney) and that the Democrats would be in the absurd position of trying to contradict them. I'm just saying that for any event that can seemingly only be perceived one way, the other side would be trying to find a way to poke holes in it.

I'll share another personal story about the events following 9/11.

The first time I went back to the movie theater was that Saturday. I'm sure that wasn't a particularly long layoff at that time -- from Tuesday, I probably would not have gone to the movies until Saturday anyway. But it seemed a significant enough occurrence -- a purposeful way of distracting myself from the events of the world -- that I clearly remember what movie I went to see, even though this was about six months before I started keeping my chronological list of viewings.

The movie was Hedwig and the Angry Inch, about as much of a subject matter divergence from 9/11 as a person could hope to find. My friend accompanied me, since he obviously needed the distraction too.

We both liked the movie, but the notable experience came when we exited the theater in Hollywood, near the base of the Hollywood Hills.

On the corner outside the theater, a group of people had gathered with American flags and candles for a vigil. My friend and I were drawn to it like iron filings to a magnet. 

This was not something that would have normally attracted either of us. We were the ultimate skeptics of anything too earnest. I mean, I'm an earnest guy in that I love movies with emotion, and I like to provide genuine warmth to friends and loved ones. But earnest displays of patriotism would have drawn eye rolls from me.

Not this day. Not anymore.

We might have stayed at that vigil for two hours. And it quickly became something a lot more rowdy than your average candlelight vigil. We were waving American flags in the streets as cars passed and honked. We chanted pro-America slogans, though I should be careful to clarify that they were not anti-Islamic slogans. 

If you saw something like that today, you'd immediately be wary of its potential for violence. The people who had gathered would be trying to start a fight with someone. They'd have the sort of potential energy that led to lynchings and mobs with torches and pitchforks.

Twenty years ago, though, this was just an honest outpouring of the emotions we all felt -- we ALL felt.

Not one side. Not the other. Both sides. Everyone.

I don't know what would be the equivalent of that today. You would have thought COVID would be it, possibly. But COVID was decidedly not it. It immediately became politicized and has become the sort of crisis that might define the different sides of the political spectrum for years, if not decades, to come.

There was the hope that 9/11 might define a different sort of unity between the parties, the sort of united front that the heroic passengers on that plane formed as they revolted against the terrorists and prevented them from reaching their target. 

It didn't last. And I don't know if we'll ever get it back again.

The unlikelihood of a Nicolas Cage beard

If it seems like I'm writing a lot of posts about Nicolas Cage in the past few months, that could be because every film of his I watch (or rewatch) provides new grist for the mill.

Last night it was Pig, and lo and behold, like clockwork, here comes the post.

Cage has a different appearance in Pig, one you can get an idea of from the poster here. He's got shoulder length hair and a grizzled beard that involves several months' worth of growth, not to mention about six decades' worth of grayish white.

When I say "different," I mean we haven't seen it much before -- and there's a reason for that.

When you make seven movies a year, you don't have time to grow your hair or a beard.

Not unless all seven of those roles require that look. 

Logically, this should be a fake beard and fake hair. If it is, it's an incredible makeup job. Cage gets knocked around in a couple scenes in a way that suggests the makeup wouldn't hold up, though that's obviously not a real obstacle for a professional makeup team. The thing that really gives lie to that idea is that Michael Sarnoski's film doesn't seem like the type to do anything artificially. They'd have Cage grow the beard because he should want to, because it's the type of film that deserves it. (Which doesn't mean I didn't find it confounding on some level. But this is not a proper Pig review.)

One thought that occurred to me is that this could have been the first movie Cage made after COVID, which would have allowed him to grow his hair long. In fact, if you are Nic Cage, you should grow your hair long out of sheer speculation, as someone could want that exact look for the film they are making. If the first job you get doesn't require that look, no problem -- you just shave.

But in checking Wikipedia, I can see that principal photography for Pig occurred in September of 2019, when COVID was just a toxic twinkle in our collective eye. 

Now, what would really be useful would be if there were a way to quickly cross-check production schedules for various movies, like an IMDB for pre-production only, with timelines showing the proximities of one production schedule to another for various actors. Wouldn't be a great business model for a website, but it would be useful in this case.

I suppose I could sort of manually do it. In 2021 Cage has also had Willy's Wonderland, and Wikipedia tells me that principal photography was in February 2020. So no conflict there.

Okay, this is interesting. Cage's other 2021 film is Prisoners of the Ghostland, which appears to have been shot immediately after Pig in November of 2019. In this film Cage appears to have a more closely cropped beard, indicating that indeed, he could have grown it out for Pig and cleaned it up for Ghostland.

His movie before Ghostland was The Croods: A New Age, in which I don't remember him having a beard. (I'll let that sink in a moment.)

Okay now it's all coming together. In 2020 he released Jiu Jitsu, in which he has a beard. That was shot in June of 2019. So the beard is definitely real. 

I guess the big surprise about this is not the beard itself, but the fact that Nicolas Cage was willing to make fewer than seven movies a year the past few years. 

Seven is only a slight exaggeration. In 2018 and 2019 he had six films in each year, but he slowed down his pace after that, apparently excising most of the straight-to-video releases he would shit out after a week of work on each. COVID could certainly have played a role in only two 2020 releases and only three in 2021 -- in fact, it almost had to have. But so could greater selectivity.

He may have spent most of what he's earned throughout his career, which is the reason he has to keep working at this furious pace. But the last couple years -- and specifically, the growing of the beard -- suggest that at last, Cage may have reached a point in his emotional growth and his personal finances where he can just say "I've got a beard, take me as I am." And my guess is there are plenty of people willing to do that.

I do expect that the beard period is over. The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent is listed for 2022 and is currently in post-production, and in that movie, Cage plays himself. 

If you cast Cage to play himself, you most likely want the clean-shaven version so it is more iconic Cage. But who knows, maybe "himself" will have a beard from now on, and if that's the case, maybe it's a good thing for all of us.

Everyone you would want in a comedy

Warning: I am about to ruin many of the good jokes in Wanderlust.

This is the third and final post about my Father's Day mini-marathon -- it was Father's Day in Australia on Sunday -- which means that I don't have any new discoveries from my latest viewing of This is Spinal Tap.

There's a recurring joke in David Wain's Wanderlust in which Alan Alda's hippie burnout Carvin Waggie must list all nine people with whom he originally bought the commune -- sorry, "intentional community" -- known as Elysium, every time he mentions the purchase. "Jerry Beaver, Stephanie Davis, Ronnie Shamus, Danielle Meltzer, Janie Brody, Billy Marcus, Glen Stover, Tony Piloski, and Janice Woo."

"Thanks, acid," another character sarcastically retorts on about his third time doing it, in a rare display of cynicism by a community member toward one of their own.

In that spirit, I am going to list the frankly staggering number of amazing comic actors who make this film such a consistent delight, who are also responsible for making Wanderlust one of my favorite comedies of the 21st century.

Because just a list does not make very engaging material for a blog post, I'll also include a favorite moment involving that actor/character from the film. 

Let's start with:

Alan Alda - Aging hasn't caused Alda to lose any of his comic spark. Sure, the listing of names is a great bit, but my favorite moment might be when he has a brief argument with Paul Rudd's George Gergenblatt over his contention that "money literally buys you nothing." "I think you mean metaphorically," says George. Carvin repeats his point until he is left staring at Rudd and Rudd just has to concede the point.  

Paul Rudd - Rudd has always been a comedy MVP but he's really pushing his range here. The scene where he practices dirty talk in front of the mirror, prior to an expected session of free-love lovemaking sanctioned by his wife, is the hardest I laugh in this film. Just watch the faces he makes as he says "I'm gonna get up in your vadge with my dee-yuk!"

Jennifer Aniston - Aniston is usually a straight woman but she has fun with this one, especially in a scene where she's "tripping her balls off" (to quote Rudd) on ayahuasca tea.

Malin Akerman - I think this is when I really started to like Akerman, though she lowered my defenses in Watchmen. Her micro-reactions to George's nervous dirty talk, which take her from enthusiastic to horrified within 30 seconds, are perfect.

Joe Lo Truglio - Yep, before there was Brooklyn Nine Nine there was Joe Lo Truglio as a nudist would-be novelist who wears a "dangle bag" over his testicles in order not to drop pubic hair into the grapes he's crushing to make wine.

Kathryn Hahn - In the nine years since Wanderlust I have come to recognize Hahn as one of this generation's most brilliant comic actresses, but she was comparatively new to me here. She doesn't have many standout moments here, but when she offers to substitute herself in the free love for a grossed-out Akerman, it turns out she's perfectly suited to George, since her dirty talk involves the discussion of her "vadge" as well.

Jordan Peele - I'm pretty sure I had not yet discovered Key & Peele when this came out. Peele has a couple shining moments, first when he won't leave the door-less bathroom while George is trying to take a shit, then when he parks George's car in the middle of a lake and can say only "It's crazy. I mean, can you believe that? Can. You. Believe. It?"

Keegan Michael Key - His role is much smaller but of course I have to mention him next. He's the HBO yes man who agrees with everything his boss says about why they don't want to buy Linder Gergenblatt's documentary about penguins with testicular cancer -- even when that viewpoint is a direct contradiction to something he just said.

We're only like halfway there.

Justin Theroux - By size of role Theroux should have already been mentioned. He's the commune's guru, and his list of modern devices that are too modern for him is hilarious. "You know, you can really get caught in that web of beepers, and Zenith televisions, and walkmans, and discmans, and floppy disks, and zip drives! Laser discs, and answering machines, and Nintendo power glove." (Aniston's deadpan response is perfect: "Wow, you know so much about technology.") 

Lauren Ambrose - Who knew Claire on Six Feet Under was funny? I do now. She's ridiculously pregnant with Jordan Peele's baby -- "he's African American," she points out helpfully -- and her spontaneous birth scene is comedy gold.

Oh but don't forget there's a whole part of this movie that doesn't take place on the commune -- sorry, "intentional community."

Ken Marino - No one plays a douchebag successful brother better. Living in Atlanta where he runs a successful port-o-john company, George's brother is the ultimate inappropriate non-PC asshole with too much money. Vulgarity is rarely better. Typical line of dialogue, when looking at Linda: "Your body is redonculous!" as he pantomimes grabbing her breasts.

Michael Watkins - Marino's long-suffering wife driven to morning margaritas. I've soured a bit on Watkins in recent years -- the volume has been turned up way too loud on her last five years' worth of performances -- but here she's excellent as she blurts out a series of semi-drunken complaints that ends with "I have mixed feelings about being a parent."

Linda Lavin - The Broadway vet has what basically amounts to a cameo as the real estate agent who sells George and Linda their Manhattan "micro loft" -- which she only starts acknowledging as a studio apartment once they try to sell it. Her description of her blind husband's sexual gifts -- some left up to the imagination, some not -- is a funny surprise. 

Oh and then just for good measure:

Ian Michael Black, David Wain and Michael Showalter - These are basically just cameos, but these fellow The State alums join the director for a scene in which they sit around the set of a news program, making increasingly lewd and suggestive comments about their field reporter who just covered a nudist protest, and about how they wouldn't mind if she would participate in such a protest in the future.

And then my two discoveries from this movie:

Kerri Kenney - I'm sure I've seen her in other things but her name is unfamiliar to me. She's the woman who originally meets George and Linda when they arrive for a night at the bed and breakfast. She has a couple good bits, but the one I remember is when she asks George "where John, Paul and Ringo are," and keeps riding the bit through George's awkward silence until she finally says "You know I'm kidding right?"

Jessica St. Clair - The field reporter who is the subject of the lewd comments. This is more subtle work as it involves her just becoming increasingly embarrassed as her male colleagues prove themselves to be monsters. The horror of the objectified slowly dawns on her face.

I've just listed 18 really funny people -- twice the number that joined Carvin Waggie in buying Elysium -- and I think I've probably even missed some.

If you're not all that familiar with Wanderlust, it's time for you to change that.

The 11th hour change of my Father's Day movies

I watched four movies on Sunday, which was Australian Father's Day, but I had planned to watch a different four movies. 

Rather, I had planned to watch three different movies and a fourth that I did ultimately watch, but in a different format than I had planned to watch it.

I was all set to start with the 1999 adaptation of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, which would seem like a totally random selection for this mini Father's Day marathon except that I'd finished reading the book just the day before. In fact, I had planned to write here about my expected Benedict Cumberbatch double feature, as I was also going to watch this year's The Courier. No, Cumberbatch is not in Mansfield Park, though at 23 years old in 1999 he would have been the appropriate age to play one of the Bertram children. Actually, what happened was that when I was reading Mansfield Park, I pictured Cumberbatch in my mind for the character of Edmund Bertram. (The character is actually played by Johnny Lee Miller.)

I was also going to do this month's edition of my blog series I'm Thinking of Kaufman Things, that being Synecdoche, New York. 

The fourth movie was always going to be WarGames, and it still was -- actually the second movie, chronologically. This gets me into aforementioned format in which I had planned to watch it, which is really what I want to talk about today.

It turns out you can't watch iTunes movies through your projector. Not my projector, anyway.

I'm sure you are as surprised as I was. 

I kind of figured that as long as you had the projector hooked up to your computer, the projector would display whatever was on the computer screen. This is not the case. 

When I started Mansfield Park and could not see anything on screen, at first I attributed this to a very dim opening credits sequence. It was about 1:30 in the afternoon and the light was only imperfectly being blocked from getting in to our garage. Once the credits were over and the movie got into its unending succession of daytime scenes, I'd be fine. Or so I figured.

But I thought it was really curious that I could see absolutely nothing on screen, and when there was some daylight a minute later, the condition persisted.

Befuddled and more than a little bit annoyed, I googled it, and it appears that iTunes movies will not play on certain digital projectors. This flummoxed me. Certain older digital projectors, the article said. Mine is less than a year old but it is also not the most expensive version on the market (not by a long shot). Neither is it it the cheapest (not by a long shot). As hard as it was to believe that I had spent as much money on this projector as I had, in order for this to be one of its practical limitations, this was the only explanation that made any sense about why I couldn't see what I was expecting to see.

I can't even remember what the technical explanation for this was, and can't be bothered to google it again.

There was some lingering uncertainty about whether it might be just this one particular file having the issue, so just to be sure, I risked starting another. I say "risked" because once you start your rental, you are committing yourself to watching it within the next 48 hours if you don't want to let it expire. And since you paid for it, usually you don't. Through the Mansfield misstep, I'd already added a Monday night movie to my viewing schedule and I didn't want to add a second.

WarGames made the perfect sacrificial lamb.

My iTunes rental of WarGames represented what I believe is a personal first: Paying money to rent a movie that I already owned. Why would I do such a thing? Well I'll explain.

I had planned to have only my computer hooked up to the projector throughout the day, which also included five hours of baseball in the morning. Just seemed easier. I own WarGames on DVD, but it's an American DVD, meaning it requires a multi-regional DVD/BluRay player. Which we have, but it's the kind that's part of your home entertainment setup, not the kind that connects to a laptop. I do have such a USB DVD/BluRay player, but of course it is not region free. 

So even though we own WarGames, which I had already decided was my choice for a Father's Day family movie, I paid the $3.99 rental for the convenience of having it on iTunes. 

This of course also made it a good tester movie. Even if I started the 48-hour rental window, it didn't matter, because we own the movie anyway. 

Well, it didn't make a difference. The problem still existed.

Okay, time to call an audible. I did what I had previously considered such an inconvenience to do: brought my multi-regional DVD player out to the garage. Really, it was quite easy. Should have done it in the first place.

So three movies from my collection -- Wanderlust, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home and This is Spinal Tap -- took the place of Mansfield Park, The Courier and Synecdoche, New York. It's just as well, as I had a half viewing of Star Trek IV about six years ago and it's nice to have made it all the way through this one. Plus I was surprised to note it had been more than eight years since my last Tap viewing -- quite a long time for a film in my top ten on Flickchart. Back then I watched it twice in two years, so I guess I still had a lingering impression that I'd seen it recently. (It had been only five years since my second viewing of Wanderlust. This was my third.)

Mansfield Park? It did get watched on Monday night. 

Disappointing. The book was much better. (Gee, what a surprise.) Having finished reading so recently, I was in a unique position to assess the changes they'd made in this adaptation, many of which had to do with tightening up a 470-page book. I get that you need to do that, but some of the choices really sacrificed the character depth, while certain characters that I thought were important had been excised entirely. Plus there were too many instances of taking something that might have been deep, deep subtext in Austen's book and turning it into text. I'd go into detail if I thought there were any chance you had read Mansfield Park, recently or ever.

Regarding the projector, it's really annoying to learn of these limitations, but I guess it's better to find out now than in a situation where it really matters: one of my Friday-to-Sunday marathons at a hotel, where I can't just pop over and get substitute DVDs from my collection. Last time I streamed most of the movies I watched, but what if the hotel WiFi is in the crapper? iTunes would have been my backup, and in that case, it would have been a poor backup indeed.

My last one of those was last November, and I usually do about one per year. I'd be due for another but the current lockdown is making that considerably less likely. 

So movies in my garage on Father's Day will have to do ... for now. 

An artificial intelligence echo

I watched four movies on a projector in my garage yesterday for Australian Father's Day, and I may be able to get two posts out of it. Actually three now that I think of it. Which is good, because I've been in a bit of a creative slump lately when it comes to this blog.

The first one has to do with a coincidence, and it's a lot more interesting of a coincidence than the coincidences I usually waste your time with.

How about a full half of the four movies containing a computer that asks someone how they feel?

The first one might not surprise you: John Badham's 1983 classic WarGames, which is currently #32 on my Flickchart. An obvious all-timer for me.

The second wouldn't have been something I even thought of until the moment in question actually occurred in the movie. That's Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, another top 100 film on Flickchart (#85) that I hadn't seen in way too long.

When David Lightman (Matthew Broderick) first finds the back door password to log into the WOPR, otherwise known as Joshua, the interaction begins with the question "How are you feeling today?"

It surprises Jennifer (Ally Sheedy), who asks how a computer can ask that. "It'll ask you whatever it's programmed to ask you," David offers helpfully.

The echo in Star Trek IV was kind of astounding. You may recall that before he leaves Vulcan following his rapid regrowth on the Genesis planet (events covered in Star Trek III), Spock (Leonard Nimoy) undergoes a computer assessment of his mental acuity. He nails the answers to such rapid-fire questions as "What is the molecular formula of yomium sulfide crystals?" and "What is the electronic configuration of gadolinium?", but this one stops him dead in his tracks:

"How do you feel?"

And then, because he doesn't respond:

"How do you feel? How do you feel?"

His (human) mother comes in to try to contextualize this part of the assessment that Spock cannot compute, and it leads to a discussion of how his crewmates acted in opposition to their own collective interests when they risked so much to retrieve him from Genesis. 

"Humans make illogical decisions," says Spock.

"They do indeed," says his mother.

The reason I include that last part is that it is also an echo of WarGames. When Joshua asks David, who has logged in under the profile of Stephen Falken, to offer an explanation for the reports it received that Falken was dead, David types in:

"People sometimes make mistakes."

Joshua, in his perfectly creepy synthetic voice, responds "Yes they do."

I'm glad to report that the viewings firmly reinforced these films' entrenched position in my top 100 of all time.

The movies shared some more minor things in common, like both involving U.S.-Russian relations regarding nuclear material, both ending on scenes of cheering control rooms, and even both featuring scenes involving spilled garbage cans. But I won't bore you with those today.

More on my Father's Day mini-marathon tomorrow.

Pushing that Netflix new release up the hill each day

As a critic stuck in lockdown with movie theaters not open, I feel like I'm caught in a devil's bargain with Netflix that may last until I die.

I need to keep posting reviews of new movies on ReelGood for a theoretical audience whose level of engagement with the material is questionable at best, but with nothing new coming out in most Australian cinemas (about half the states are in some form of lockdown), I'm stuck with the streamers.

The other streamers do release new movies, and you better believe I flock to new material on Amazon or Disney+ or AppleTV+ with a sort of unseemly enthusiasm. I'll probably be watching and reviewing that new Amazon Cinderella this weekend.

But most of the time, I'm locked in a battle of wills with Netflix.

On the one hand, I am grateful to Netflix for providing me new grist for the mill. Since this pandemic started 18 months ago, I reckon a full half of the movies I've reviewed, if not more, were Netflix movies.

But that's also part of the problem.

Although film criticism is something that never ends -- until you decide you want it to, I suppose -- there's something especially Sisyphean about Netflix. The new releases come with machine-like regularity. Just when I think I'm on top of what's coming out, I see another new movie on Netflix's screen saver that seems worth throwing into the queue. 

And the thing is they all look promising, at least from a critic's perspective. Either because there's something intriguing about the concept, or because it stars someone famous, or because it's directed by someone famous, or just because it seems like it would be easy to write about.

That last describes He's All That, which I watched on Wednesday night and cranked out a review before bed in order to keep feeding this unquenchable beast.

Given that most of the sarcastic critical responses to this movie present themselves before you even start watching the movie, it's an easy enough review to write in the 30 minutes before you go to bed. Assuming that your preconceived notions of the film were proven correct -- and mine were -- the review basically writes itself. (And whether you think that shows is something you can judge by checking here.) 

But even if watching the movie and writing the review consumed only two hours of my life, which is a pretty good return on investment, it doesn't mean it's still not exhausting on some level. And not all of them come that easily. I think you can see my struggles a lot more clearly in the last Netflix movie I reviewed, Beckett, here. 

Although I liked that film a lot more than He's All That, the review was much harder to write. It's a sign of how burned out I'm getting that the review reads like an attempt to meet a certain word count rather than an insightful attempt to grapple with the film's themes and strengths and weaknesses. 

And in a real sign of how burned out I'm getting, I failed in my attempt to do a quick turnaround on Beckett last week. I had planned to do the same thing I did last night, watch it and crank out a review in the same night, last Thursday, when the film was already more than two weeks old. (I don't usually like posting a review of a new film much later than that.) But I only got the review about a third written by midday on Friday, and then it was just lost to the weekend. I didn't even post it until Tuesday of this week.

What's the cure for this obvious loss of inspiration, this obvious capitulation to a drudgery to my work that I usually never feel?

Well for one, maybe some weeks I just won't write two reviews, or God forbid, the three I sometimes squeeze in. My own standards are really the only ones I'm trying to meet. That theoretical reading audience doesn't give a rat's ass whether I write two or one or zero reviews in a given week. When there's one there, they'll read it if they care to, and won't if they don't.

But Netflix isn't my only problem. At this moment I actually have three pending reviews of movies I haven't watched, which I'm sort of compelled to watch because I asked for screeners for them for PR people. It would be only two, but one of my writers flaked on the third, which doesn't lessen our obligation to review the film if we want to keep a positive relationship -- or any relationship at all -- with the PR people. 

So not only are there the Netflix movies I feel like I should review because they will actually get eyeballs, because my readers can actually watch them right now while they are in lockdown, because they're movies people might be talking about anyway (like a remake of She's All That), but I also have to review these movies that I, in my infinite wisdom, have requested to watch, even though they are much less likely to be seen by our audience.

There's some endpoint to this, but I don't know what it is. Maybe staffing up more, so my writers will flock to these weekly or sometimes twice weekly new Netflix releases, while I can review only the ones I really care about. Or maybe it'll be just taking a little break for myself. My website isn't going to shrivel up and die if I go without updating it for two weeks. 

I don't know.

All I know is that right now I feel like Sisyphus. There's always a new movie to roll up that hill. It's just right now, even as I try to dig in my heels, I feel the gravity of that heavy object pushing me backwards down the hill I just ascended. If I'm not careful it could crush me.