Delivering on advances and hitting sales milestones

I really enjoyed a little indie comedy-drama that opened last week in Australia called Best Sellers, starring Michael Caine and Aubrey Plaza. 

It's worth writing about here for a number of small reasons. When taken in combination, they justify my time to write it and your time to read it. 

1) It's the type of movie you rarely see anymore, a small independent movie about book publishing starring two compelling actors and a good supporting cast. Or if they do make it, it's not for distribution in cinemas, where it has debuted in Australia -- both in smaller arthouse theaters and in multiplexes.

2) Michael Caine is 88 years old. It crept up on us but now it's here. Ninety is just around the corner. We should enjoy him now while we can. 

3) It occurred to me that in watching this movie and writing about it, I'm doing something similar to what Caine's character is supposed to be doing in the movie: delivering on an advance. Caine's Harris Shaw was given $25,000 to write a book three decades earlier, and when her publishing house is in desperate financial straits, Plaza's Lucy Stanbridge comes to guilt Shaw into fulfilling his end of the contract. My situation is pretty different, but it also involves living up to my end of a deal. I saw this as an advanced screener provided by one of the publicists, and in writing the review, I'm complying with the conditions of the advance provided to me in the currency of free movies.

4) Best Sellers is also a personal milestone. It's the 400th movie I've reviewed for ReelGood, a list I have been painstakingly keeping on this post written in June of 2017. That was when I crossed 100 and I've just been continuing to update it since then, as a one-stop shop for links to all my reviews, should someone ask me for that.

Anyway, if you want my full thoughts, here is the review. 

Drafting a team of ten movies to watch forever

It's been a while since I've done a "project post" on this blog. Lo and behold, I thought of one right at the time that I'm preparing to move in just three weeks. Seems unlikely, or a bad use of my available time, but I need distractions right now I guess -- perhaps more than ever.

I'm not overly missing the end of my fantasy baseball season, which is now two months in the past, but I'm continuing to listen to baseball podcasts, so I guess the related issues are sticking in my head. On the most recent episode of Circling the Bases from NBC SportsEdge, they did a snake draft of Thanksgiving foods. 

For those of you not familiar with what this might mean, it means that the two podcasters selected available Thanksgiving foods in rounds to comprise a "team" of foods, similar to how you compile a team of fantasy baseball players each year in March. As in the first guy made his selection in the first round, then it was the other guy's turn, not only to make his selection in the first round, but to make his selection in the second round back to back. Then it was the other guy's turn for two selections, his second round pick and his third round pick. And so forth. 

A "snake draft" is a draft that snakes around, not returning to the first picker when the second round begins, but proceeding in reverse order. That means, theoretically, that no one picker gets a significant advantage over anyone else. Let's say there are ten teams, as that makes it more clear than just two. The tenth picker has only the 10th best choice of whatever is available -- usually, that would be major league baseball players, not food -- but then that person also gets the 11th best pick, so he/she has an advantage going into the second round. Then the ninth team gets the 12th pick. It's supposed to all even out over the course of the draft. 

And like in a draft with major league baseball players, their Thanksgiving draft required them to fill certain "positions" -- an entree, three side dishes and a dessert. Just how you can't pick all outfielders when you are drafting a fantasy baseball team, but rather, must draft someone at every position on the field, these Thanksgiving drafters had to not overload themselves on desserts, for example.

I don't know if I got the idea directly as a result of this podcast episode, but I decided to apply the draft logic to movies -- specifically, my favorite movies of all time.

Now, I would not be making any decisions in this draft. I would simply be assigning my movies to "teams" based on their position on my current Flickchart. The idea would not be to make selections among my favorite movies for a perfect team for myself, but rather, to draft up teams involving all my favorites and deciding which of these teams was my favorite.

The stakes would be high. I would draft up 16 teams of ten movies apiece, covering my top 160 movies on Flickchart. Then I would choose one team of ten movies that would be the only movies I could watch for the rest of time. It's kind of like the death match rules on the Filmspotting podcast, where they pit two movies against each other, and then the movie that loses is thrown into the incinerator, meaning no one can ever watch it again.

Why 16? Well, my real fantasy baseball league has 16 teams. And the more options, the harder to ultimately reach a conclusion, making it tougher on myself.

Just so I'm sure you understand how this works, I'll clarify the draft logic. Let's do the first two rounds so you understand which ranked movie on Flickchart gets assigned to which team. So in round one, here's what the teams get:

Team 1 - pick #1 and pick #32
Team 2 - pick #2 and pick #31
Team 3 - pick #3 and pick #30
Team 4 - pick #4 and pick #29

And so forth. And then when round 3 begins, Team 1 gets pick #33 and it goes snaking onward from there.

The following 16 teams were produced. I'm not going to go to the trouble of showing the ranking # next to each film, nor, for space reasons, a director and year for each film. If you really wanted to figure out how the films are ranked on my Flickchart, you could plug them into this snake draft formula. 

One other point of clarification: A person's Flickchart is never perfect. There are always movies that are ranked too high or ranked too low, depending on what duels they've had, how you were feeling on a particular day, etc. But these 160 movies are battle-tested, and if they deviate from my "real" feelings about the films, it's not by a huge amount. However, I would not be surprised if the end results of this little experiment included taking advantage of some movies I loved that were ranked too low on my chart -- in real fantasy baseball terms, those would be players I was able to draft later than expected, making them a "steal."

Also I have to pedantically note: Because I am writing these as a comma-separated list, I am excising commas from the titles. I know, the horror. 

Okay I suspect I have already lost most of you so let's just get into it:

Team 1 - Raising Arizona, Big, WarGames, The Passion of Joan of Arc, Return of the Jedi, Goonies, Apollo 13, Sideways, Boogie Nights, Harakiri

Team 2 - Back to the Future, Ghost, Vanilla Sky, Like Father Like Son, Seven Samurai, A Separation, The Player, Misery, My Cousin Vinny, Happiness

Team 3 - Pulp Fiction, Time Bandits, Lost in Translation, Synecdoche New York, Election, Rear Window, Silence of the Lambs, Where the Wild Things Are, Memento, Toy Story 2

Team 4 - Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Shawshank Redemption, The Exorcist, Galaxy Quest, Ghostbusters, Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, Jacob's Ladder, Under the Skin, Total Recall, Chicago

Team 5 - Citizen Kane, A Fish Called Wanda, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, Adaptation, My Neighbor Totoro, Glory, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, The Blackcoat's Daughter, Parasite, I'm Thinking of Ending Things

Team 6 - Star Wars, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Four Weddings and a Funeral, The Wizard of Oz, Airplane!, Strange Days, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, The Great Dictator, The Sixth Sense

Team 7 - Fargo, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Dumb and Dumber, Bonnie & Clyde, Greed, 4 Months 3 Weeks 2 Days, The Matrix, Major League, Kissing Jessica Stein, Ruby Sparks

Team 8 - Toy Story, Defending Your Life, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, Spring Breakers, Jaws, Stand by Me, Finding Nemo, My Life as a Dog, A Ghost Story

Team 9 - This is Spinal Tap, When Harry Met Sally ..., The Empire Strikes Back, Parenthood, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Philadelphia, Superman II, Inside Llewyn Davis, Rabbit Hole, Mother

Team 10 - The Iron Giant, Unforgiven, Elf, There Will Be Blood, A Christmas Story, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, Twelve Monkeys, Tanna, Rain Man, United 93

Team 11 - The Princess Bride, Donnie Darko, Almost Famous, Dangerous Liaisons, Once, Animal House, Miller's Crossing, Dances With Wolves, Coco, Trainspotting

Team 12 - 2001: A Space Odyssey, Run Lola Run, Die Hard, Titanic, The Social Network, Poltergeist, Step Brothers, The Last Temptation of Christ, Ordet, E.T. The Extra Terrestrial

Team 13 - Goodfellas, Do the Right Thing, Glengarry Glen Ross, Ace in the Hole, The Bicycle Thief, Blade Runner, The Bridge on the River Kwai, Das Boot, The Untouchables, The Crow

Team 14 - Tangled, Bound, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, The Cell, Network, Dave, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Three Kings, Smoke Signals, Truly Madly Deeply

Team 15 - The Cable Guy, Say Anything, Flirting With Disaster, All About Eve, North by Northwest, Moon, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Sherlock Jr., Kicking and Screaming (1995), Night of the Hunter

Team 16 - Jesus Christ Superstar, Children of Men, Starship Troopers, Schindler's List, Malcolm X, Sunset Blvd., Let the Right One In, Cinema Paradiso, Hamlet (2000), The Wages of Fear

Before I go any further, now is the time to make any predictions you may have, as well as choose a team for yourself. (That's such a data dump that I don't know if either of these things is possible, but more power to you if you want to do it.)

Boy was this hard. These are all my babies.

I decided I would do rounds, eliminating half the teams in each round until I narrowed it down to just one. That made it much easier actually.

As with assembling a fantasy baseball team, the guiding principle is to have an even mix of talents and positions. An even mix of positions is a requirement in that format. There are no requirements here, but if I'm going to be watching only these ten films for eternity, I need a variety of genres, tones and time periods.

And I need COMEDY. I'm going to have to have regular occasions to laugh if I'm going to be watching only these ten films. That helped eliminate some teams right off the bat. For example, neither Team 13 nor Team 16 had a single comedy in them. Easy peasy. Gone, even if that meant killing films I dearly love. That's the nature of this business. Some other teams that had a decent comedy representation were also eliminated due to other deficiencies in their variety, or doubling up on other resources. For example, Team 8 had two Pixar films, which was too much for this format.

That got me down to the following eight teams:

Team 1 - Raising Arizona, Big, WarGames, The Passion of Joan of Arc, Return of the Jedi, Goonies, Apollo 13, Sideways, Boogie Nights, Harakiri

Team 4 - Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Shawshank Redemption, The Exorcist, Galaxy Quest, Ghostbusters, Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, Jacob's Ladder, Under the Skin, Total Recall, Chicago

Team 5 - Citizen Kane, A Fish Called Wanda, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, Adaptation, My Neighbor Totoro, Glory, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, The Blackcoat's Daughter, Parasite, I'm Thinking of Ending Things

Team 6 - Star Wars, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Four Weddings and a Funeral, The Wizard of Oz, Airplane!, Strange Days, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, The Great Dictator, The Sixth Sense

Team 7 - Fargo, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Dumb and Dumber, Bonnie & Clyde, Greed, 4 Months 3 Weeks 2 Days, The Matrix, Major League, Kissing Jessica Stein, Ruby Sparks

Team 9 - This is Spinal Tap, When Harry Met Sally ..., The Empire Strikes Back, Parenthood, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Philadelphia, Superman II, Inside Llewyn Davis, Rabbit Hole, Mother

Team 10 - The Iron Giant, Unforgiven, Elf, There Will Be Blood, A Christmas Story, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, Twelve Monkeys, Tanna, Rain Man, United 93

Team 15 - The Cable Guy, Say Anything, Flirting With Disaster, All About Eve, North by Northwest, Moon, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Sherlock Jr., Kicking and Screaming (1995), Night of the Hunter

This was the time to start eliminating other teams where there were double ups. Team 5 had two films written by Charlie Kaufman, for example, and though he's one of my all-time favorite writing talents, that was too much using the current parameters. Then Team 10 had two Christmas movies -- the only two Christmas movies out of the whole 160, actually. By itself, one of those movies would have been a boon to the team it was on, but together they were overkill.

Team 15 was an interesting case of a really good mix of movies that didn't represent me as a cinephile in all the ways that it should. Nearly half the movies are comedies while nearly the other half are from before 1960. There were some great repeat viewing candidates in there but the team ultimately was not diverse enough.

I also noticed at this stage that I was going to be eliminating any team that had an animated film in it. Tragic.

That left the following four teams standing:

Team 1 - Raising Arizona, Big, WarGames, The Passion of Joan of Arc, Return of the Jedi, Goonies, Apollo 13, Sideways, Boogie Nights, Harakiri

Team 4 - Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Shawshank Redemption, The Exorcist, Galaxy Quest, Ghostbusters, Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, Jacob's Ladder, Under the Skin, Total Recall, Chicago

Team 6 - Star Wars, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Four Weddings and a Funeral, The Wizard of Oz, Airplane!, Strange Days, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, The Great Dictator, The Sixth Sense

Team 7 - Fargo, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Dumb and Dumber, Bonnie & Clyde, Greed, 4 Months 3 Weeks 2 Days, The Matrix, Major League, Kissing Jessica Stein, Ruby Sparks

At this point I think I can start talking about their individual strengths and weaknesses.

Team 1 has my favorite movie of all time, plus a number of other sentimental favorites from my childhood (Big, WarGames, Return of the Jedi, Goonies). Extra points for having a Star Wars movie. But is that loading up too much on nostalgia? Although I respect the hell out of The Passion of Joan of Arc, I'm not sure if that's a movie I want to be watching all the time (I've still only seen it once). Harakiri is a new favorite that I've also seen only once, but is it too slow to watch repeatedly? Boogie Nights gives me what I called an "auteur epic" as I was making notes on these films. Apollo 13 is a strong selling point to this group.

Team 4 has a number of teams doing double duty, which is really useful in this type scenario. Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home fell earlier on in the process, but Galaxy Quest has the same flexibility by serving as both comedy and sci-fi. Raiders and Shawshank are a very strong 1-2 punch, and this group has a lot of something lacking in the other lists: horror. Between The Exorcist, Jacob's Ladder and Under the Skin, I'll be plenty creeped out, and Ghostbusters (another double duty) even has the "There is no Dana only Zool" scene. Quest, Ghostbusters and Dr. Strangelove also provided different intellectual levels of comedy. Bonus points for having a musical (Chicago). However, Strangelove is the only film from before 1973. 

Team 6 also has four different distinct sorts of comedy from different eras, those being The Great Dictator, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Airplane! and Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Star Wars, T2 and Strange Days fill out sci-fi admirably. Wizard of Oz joins The Great Dictator in giving us some bonafide classics, plus Oz is also a musical. I'll be light on horror with only The Sixth Sense, but The Sixth Sense also has a scene that makes me cry, so it can join with The Diving Bell and the Butterfly whenever I need sentiment. Butterfly also allows me to get on a foreign language film. 

Team 7 contains a Coen movie in Fargo, which is a big bonus as the Coens made two of my top ten films of all time (along with #1 Raising Arizona). Dumb and Dumber and Major League both give me comedy, and Major League is my only chance on the whole list to ever watch a sports movie again. Greed gives me a classic silent film, and having one film that runs four hours could be useful in this scenario. The Matrix and Star Trek II give me sci-fi, and Jessica Stein and Ruby Sparks give me romantic comedies, the latter with a built-in head trip element. Bonnie & Clyde provides a taste of classic New Hollywood.

After a struggle, Team 1 and Team 7 were eliminated. Bye bye Coen brothers.

Leaving only these two finalists:

Team 4 - Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Shawshank Redemption, The Exorcist, Galaxy Quest, Ghostbusters, Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, Jacob's Ladder, Under the Skin, Total Recall, Chicago

Team 6 - Star Wars, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Four Weddings and a Funeral, The Wizard of Oz, Airplane!, Strange Days, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, The Great Dictator, The Sixth Sense

And since I've already outlined the selling points for these teams above, I'll just give you the winner:

Team 6 - Star Wars, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Four Weddings and a Funeral, The Wizard of Oz, Airplane!, Strange Days, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, The Great Dictator, The Sixth Sense

The variety of types of comedy present here was a big deciding factor here. Four Weddings will remind me of my formative Monty Python period after I had to eliminate Holy Grail in an earlier round, and it's charming as hell. Star Wars and The Wizard of Oz are all-time classic family films, making up somewhat for not getting any animation on my final team. I may not have quite as much head trip content on this list as some other lists, but Strange Days and The Sixth Sense both qualify. And Airplane! is there when I just want to be goofy.

Overall it's just a very solid list with a lot of versatility. Which is what you want when you will be watching these movies for the rest of time.

I realized after the fact that I doubled up on James Cameron, as Cameron also had a hand in Strange Days as writer and producer. Oh well, no list is perfect. 

And for the 150 movies I will never see again ... you will carry on in my heart. 

Okay, thanks for sticking this out, assuming you did. 

Hugh Jackman likes Rebecca Ferguson's singing

Hugh Jackman and Rebecca Ferguson have worked together exactly twice, and both films have involved Jackman watching Ferguson sing with almost a comical look of rapture on his face.

The first instance was The Greatest Showman in 2017. Ferguson's singing comes in a scene that contains both the film's best and most risible moments. I love the song "Never Enough" that her Jenny Lind sings, so much so that I am willing to call it my favorite thing about the movie, though I've only seen it one and a third times so that may be a premature judgment. (How did I see only a third on the second viewing? We started watching it with the family at an overnight music festival where we were camping out, as part of a sleeping bag movie projected on the big screen, but it wasn't holding the kids' attention enough.) Suffice it to say I've watched this scene by itself about five other times on YouTube. 

However this scene also contains reactions from Jackman that are evidence I offer up whenever I'm criticizing the movie in conversation with another movie fan. Jackman, playing the married P.T. Barnum, is supposed to be so taken by the beauty and talent of Lind that he considers straying from his family for her. To depict how smitten he's become, Jackman has chosen to provide an array of goofy expressions that are so extreme as to become laughable. 

Here, just check out the clip, as you get both the great song and the goofy grins:

Unfortunately for their subsequent collaboration, Reminiscence, which I watched on Friday night, The Greatest Showman is a masterpiece by comparison. I won't get into my criticisms of the movie at length today, but they are several. Let's just say that this film also has plenty of laughable moments as it tries to ape the exceptional movies that came before it, most notably Strange Days. And I could have done without Jackman's thudding noir-style voiceover, a prime example of the film's overall bad writing. 

The aping of The Greatest Showman is probably accidental, but sure enough, this movie has a scene that echoes that scene between Barnum and Lind in the 2017 film.

Nick Bannister (Jackman) is using the film's core technology, which allows you to peer in on a customer's memories and guide them through them so they may experience them again, while in a state of hypnosis in a sensory deprivation tank. He's come across a memory for his current customer, Mae (Ferguson), that's tangential to the memory she came to him to extract, and in the first of many voyeuristic moments in the film, he keeps her under long enough to watch her singing of Rodgers and Hart's "Where or When" as a lounge act on stage. 

He's similarly smitten in an almost identical dynamic to The Greatest Showman, though as a sort of corrective, you can sense Jackman pulling back here, laying it on far less thickly. Don't worry, there's plenty of silly over-emoting from him later on. 

The film is too new for this clip to be available on YouTube, and maybe it never will be. So while I still have 38 hours remaining of my iTunes rental, I've videoed the scene myself, just to provide a parallel structure for the evidence presented in this post:

Now don't get me wrong, Hugh Jackman is one of my favorite movie stars. He seems so likeable at his core that I feel a connection to him even when he's playing someone rotten, which is not all that often given his charismatic leading man traits. He's Australian too, so there's that. I'm not having a laugh at his expense.

Though I do have to admit that Jackman is probably never going to be recognized as a talented actor. Out of the 48 feature films that appear on the Wikipedia page dedicated to his filmography, he has only the one Oscar nomination for his lead performance in Les Miserables -- a pretty dubious distinction considering that this is also a terrible film. 

However, Hugh, I do have to hand it to you. I think I would also be pretty gob-smacked watching Rebecca Ferguson sing. 

And in Reminiscence, it's actually her doing the singing, unlike The Greatest Showman. 

James Gunn 1, Vance 0

Well, I loved The Suicide Squad.

Even in all my complaining about James Gunn's Twitter on this blog -- and there has been a lot, more than any one person deserves -- I have never wavered from the basic belief that he is a good filmmaker. And The Suicide Squad may be his most enjoyable film yet.

So I'll devote a full post's worth of observations about the film as a sort of mea culpa. That may not be the correct term, because I never said he wasn't a good filmmaker and I still believe he's too proud of himself on Twitter. But after this movie, he definitely deserves some good press from me.

Bringing the fun back to ultraviolence

I've been numbed by the John Wick movies. I really enjoyed the first, but I found the next two a slog, an unceasing succession of soulless murders that made me grimace more and more as the movies went on. I call them "murders" not to suggest that Wick isn't acting in self-defense most of the time, but that their sheer joylessness makes them criminal. Half the time, they are initiated by him as revenge for killing his dog, which yeah, seems sort of murdery.

The Suicide Squad is a different story. It includes all sort of fatal mayhem, but it's the kind that demonstrates a sort of creative joy that helps remind us they exist in a comic book world, and that kind of thing is okay because there is never any doubt this is pure escapism. 

Sure, it sill involves heads being sliced in half, faces being blown off, and a man's body ripped in half -- lengthwise, mind you -- by a walking shark. And you can say that any sort of violence breeds potential copycats, though I dare you to try ripping someone in half lengthwise with your bare hands.

But the walking shark is what's important here. This is clearly a fantasy world, a place where none of this stuff could clearly ever happen. Might as well have fun with it.

It was a bit of the vibe I got from a recent big budget favorite, Kong: Skull Island. That film gave me such joy that it ended up in my top ten for the year. The Suicide Squad may not be destined to land that high, but the fact that it's even a contender says something about how successfully it pulls off its tone.

How to do CGI characters

While we're on the topic of that shark, this film contains two of my favorite recent CGI characters. I guess that's no surprise from the director who brought us Rocket Raccoon. I think I like the ones in this movie even better than him.

So there's Nanaue/King Shark, a perfect Suicide Squad candidate in that he's got a loveable voice and general temperament but he is also caught in the act of trying to eat one of his fellow team members. I didn't realize Sylvester Stallone was doing the voice until the end credits, and that just made me enjoy him more, retroactively. I never knew I would want to watching a walking shark for two hours as much as I did.

But even more fun, though with considerably less screen time, is Weasel, a giant weasel who can't speak English and communicates in kind of braying yelps. He's also got crazy eyes. However, he mostly behaves himself, sitting there quietly with the rest of his crew in a kind of unassuming fashion that makes him even funnier. All the bits related to him -- including a scene where he's licking a door and examining a future teammate out of the corner of one bulged-out eye -- are just hilarious. I won't spoil what happens with him, but it is perfectly in keeping with this world, where Gunn knows instinctively never too give us too much of a good thing.

A lethal Harley Quinn

We got a decidedly softer Harley Quinn in Birds of Prey a few years ago, one that would prefer to shoot people with bean bags than snap their necks, though she was still the same crass girl we came to love, even in inferior projects. That was definitely right for that movie, which I enjoyed.

She kills people here, and it's right for this movie. 

There are a couple lethal moves she uses to get herself out of jams, when it's kill or be killed, but she's also a straight-up assassin at one point. It's an interesting commentary on the reality that exists under the fun. This is not a world where you can subdue people with beanbags. And that's okay.

Also, her role in the finale against the [won't give it away] is just awesome.

A real-life Bad Guys

My kids love this series of Australian comic books/graphic novels called Bad Guys, which feature a team of historically bad animals who try to make themselves over as the good guys. They include a wolf, a snake, a spider, a piranha, and yes, a shark.

It's really cute and clever and gives even its adult readers a laugh. But as I was watching The Suicide Squad I thought of how many similarities to this project there really are.

Of course there is the same basic setup, as an historically feared and dangerous band of associates try to slough off the prejudices against them and fight for their version of justice. 

Then there's the fact that both teams feature a shark who speaks sort of monosyllabically, in a deep voice, or at least that's how I always voiced Mr. Shark when reading the books to my kids.

But I'll go one step further: In both properties the shark tries to disguise himself. In these graphic novels, if that's what you want to call them, Mr. Shark's main attribute he contributes to the team is his ability to disguise himself. He does a hilariously small amount to change his appearance, yet everyone in the story has a genuine inability -- no nudging or winking -- to identify him as his former self when he's in disguise. It's patently ridiculous since this is a large sea creature with rows of razor sharp teeth, which is what makes it so funny.

That's not Nanaue's main characteristic in this movie -- he eats people and tears them in half lengthwise -- but in one scene when they need to go undercover, he does suggest wearing a fake moustache to mask his appearance. The team doesn't go for it though, and he has to wait in the car.

Bridging the DCEU and the MCU

We know Gunn was a defector to the DCEU from the MCU, though we also know it was not by choice. He got fired from Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (before ultimately being rehired) due to past tweets that were meant as jokes but came back to haunt him. So now he has a definite foothold in both, which is apparently not a problem. 

You'd assume these rivals would be loath to share talent, but Gunn is not the only example of this in this movie. In fact, I counted four in total, which seems to me a very high amount. They're mostly in smaller roles, in one universe or the other, so maybe that's part of the explanation.

The first character we meet is Savant, an inmate who bounces a rubber ball around his cell, and is so deadly accurate with it that he can use it to kill a bird in the corner on something like the fifth rebound off one of the walls. He's played by Michael Rooker, who of course played Yondu in the Guardians movies. He's already dead in the MCU and he's not long for this one, so maybe that's not much of a conflict. 

Then there's David Dastmalchian as Polka-Dot Man. He's still ongoing in the Ant-Man movies as Kurt, one of Scott's buddies who run the security firm, and he's the kind of character who will never die because he's there for comic relief, and the Ant-Man movies aren't those kinds of movies.

Finally we get a very small role from Taika Waititi, seen only in flashbacks, playing the father of Ratcatcher 2, played very memorably by Daniela Melchior. He's already dead from the start of the movie, so we won't expect him in any future Suicide Squad movies, but he's probably the person most currently in Marvel's good graces (as director of the last and next Thor movie), and he really only would have participated with Marvel's blessing. 

Maybe in this crazy world of bitter feuds between comic book mega giants, there's hope that we really all can get along.

                                                            *************

I think I had more to say originally after watching this movie, but that was Saturday night and now it's Wednesday morning, and I can no longer remember it. It's been a busy few days.

But I'll just close by saying that The Suicide Squad is awesome, and Gunn has definitely bought himself a reprieve from my future scorn.

Metacritic has fallen on hard times

Ever since I first became aware of Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes, which I think was about the same time, I have been steadfastly a Metacritic supporter. That's even though Rotten Tomatoes is by far the better known and more culturally referenced method of compiling critic and user reviews to reach a single score that represents the value of a cultural item.

It wasn't a methodology thing. In the past I have looked into how Metacritic does things and how RT does things, and if anything, Metacritic utilizes the more mysterious, inscrutable means of producing its scores. I believe they have even come under fire for being less strictly data driven or less accountable to explaining their procedures.

Really, it came down to what it comes down to in a lot of these situations for me: Presentation.

I always liked how Metacritic looked -- its fonts, its layout, its whole gestalt. Meanwhile, I thought Rotten Tomatoes looked like it had been made by a child who had mastered web design -- a very competent child, but nonetheless, one who liked childish things. Like I have never gotten into the tomato splats. They just look like something you'd see on Nickelodeon's official website.

I'm not saying I feel any more favorably toward Rotten Tomatoes than I once did. I almost never visit the site.

But neither do I almost ever visit Metacritic, which has become a shadow of its former self.

The first problem I noticed a couple years ago was that the site was absolutely crippled by ads. On any page you tried to reach, there would be at least one video and usually a couple other Java-powered ads scrambling around to get your attention. Sometimes you'd have to close ads just to get to your content, but the ads themselves would contain false icons that made you think you were closing the ad when really you were clicking to learn more information about the product. Or there would be multiple ads for the same item with the content sandwiched in the middle, in a reading area that was truncated from its previous real estate.

I can be frustrated when a thing like this happens, but I also understand it. The reality is, it takes revenue to run a website. If you don't have other streams of income, you have to rely on advertising more and more. And the advertisers knew what they were doing, making their ads increasingly pernicious and increasingly debilitating to the usability of the site. (According to me, they did not know what they were doing, because any ad you perceive as pernicious should not be effectively selling the product. But it must have worked with some people because you still see these sorts of ads.)

I don't notice Metacritic being destroyed by ads these days as much as I once did. Maybe the advertisers wised up, or maybe Metacritic wised up. Now, it's an issue of functionality that has nothing to do with the effect of the ads. 

When I liked No Time to Die but was curious to see whether I liked it more or less than other critics, I went to Metacritic to get a sampling of their opinions. And this is what I found when I tried to search for it:

One of the biggest movies of 2021 cannot be found on a site dedicated to reviews of culture, through a normal search of its title.

Now, I know No Time to Die has a page on Metacritic because I googled it. That took me to the page and allowed me to see that the movie has a 68 score, which is almost exactly aligned with my own 7/10 (3.5 star) rating I gave it on ReelGood. In fact, I hesitated a little between 6 and 7, never seriously considering 6, but knowing I had enough qualms that a 7/10 was not a slam dunk. That uncertainty on my part computes to a 68 Metascore almost exactly.

Now why couldn't I have just found this by searching the site?

I suspect it has something to do with the lack of distinctiveness of the four words in the title. Those four words would appear in countless other titles, and it's possible that they just don't bring up the film when taken in combination with each other. A major malfunctioning of the site's core search architecture, to be sure, but one that at least has some sort of explanation.

But let's conduct the search from the very page itself, something that does not change the way the search performs, but just looks funny in context.

Sorry, that's a bit small, but maybe you can zoom in, or just wait for me to explain what we're seeing in the next paragraph. 

In this particular instance it does give some results, as it is searching all of Metacritic, rather than the focused movie search I did previously. The titles it does produce are not only significantly more obscure than the movie I'm searching, but they also feature common words that would appear in multiple titles. If my previous explanation for the failed search holds water, then why is the 2014 iOS game "No one dies" able to be found? Those words are certainly no more common in frequency in the database than "No time to die."

My goal today is not to roast and lambast Metacritic. It's actually far more solemn than that. It's to mourn the solid product I used to love and to visit on a weekly basis. Nowadays, I might go months between trying to use this as a resource to gauge critical consensus on a movie, and the latest James Bond movie is a reminder why.

The sad thing is that I'm not going to RT either. I'm just not looking up these critical consensuses, something I used to dearly enjoy and consider a key aspect of my engagement with the movies. 

Our relationship with any form of culture evolves over time, but when that change is forced by an external failure like this one, rather than something essential about our own changing perspectives, it's disappointing indeed.

Knowing Noir: Detour

This is the penultimate month of my series watching classic film noir that I haven't yet seen.

Just in time for the end of Knowing Noir, my November viewing has brought me a combination of traits that has been elusive so far in this series. It's been difficult for me to find a movie that both really worked for me, and also clearly demonstrated what I think of as the core characteristics of noir. But Detour has answered the call.

Also one of the shortest movies in this series at only 67 minutes, Edmund G. Ulmer's 1945 film is a simple, straightforward movie that has noir tropes galore. "Simple and straightforward" are adjectives someone would rarely ascribe to film noir, but I've determined they are things my simple little brain desperately needs.

It's the story of a man named Al Roberts (Tom Neal), a New York piano player who is hitchhiking his way across the country to be with his girlfriend, Sue (Claudia Drake), who left New York to pursue Hollywood stardom. Al is picked up by a man going the same direction and with the same destination, but Charles Haskell Jr. (Edmund MacDonald) dies mysteriously while Al is taking his turn driving, after popping a number of pills. (So I guess maybe it's not that mysterious.) Al panics when he realizes he will be blamed for murdering Haskell if he notifies the police, so he hides the body and assumes the man's identity in case someone should pull him over and ask why he's driving the car. He hopes to ditch the whole ruse when he reaches California and picks up with Sue again.

His fatal flaw is that he's got the desire to pay forward all the favors others did him when they picked him up to give him a ride. He picks up hitchhiker Vera (Ann Savage) at one of his next stops, and as luck would have it, she recognizes he's not Haskell because she rode part of the way with Haskell as part of her own cross country excursion. Trouble ensues.

I can't/won't discuss too much more of the plot because there isn't all that much more without getting into spoilers. If I had been tasked with summarizing other films in this series, I'd probably need at least two more paragraphs just to lay the groundwork of what was going on. Its (I'll use the word again) simplicity is Detour's most deceptively brilliant aspect.

The next would have to be Ann Savage. She's a whip-smart femme fatale who has a withering comment coming out of the side of her mouth at any given moment. She reminded me a bit of what I know of Mae West, which is not all that much -- I know her famous line of dialogue is "Come up and see me sometime." (A little googling shows me that also become her signature song.) Assuming we think of West as a sort of tart and tough woman who can take care of herself, while also having a gift for linguistics, just check out a couple of the key quips from Savage in Detour:

"What did you do, kiss him with a wrench?"

And then later, referring to the same deceased Charles Haskell, after Al protests his innocence:

"Sure, sure, he died of old age."

And later, while drunk:

"Am I tight? As a primadonna's corset."

Savage's performance may be one of the most enjoyable in the whole series. While most of the leads and almost as many of the femme fatales have blended into the woodwork as this series has gone on, Savage will always be easy for me to remember in Detour.

Tom Neal's Al Roberts was better than the average protagonist in this series as well, with a couple of his own good, hard-boiled noir comments, such as:

"She looked as though she'd just been thrown off the crummiest freight train in the world."

And:

"My goose was cooked."

And a good description of money and its meaning in the lives of the people who seek it out:

"Little green things with George Washington's picture, that men slave for, commit crimes for, die for."

The physical environment of a noir film is also well established here. Before he and Sue leave New York, they walk through an environment that is so suffused with fog that you could easily mistake it for London. The film also relies on silhouettes several times, notably the backup musicians as Sue sings, and there are even venetian blinds in the hotel room where Al and Vera stay, through which he furtively looks for anyone following them. 

One of my favorite intentional uses of noir techniques was a moment when Al is in a Nevada cafe, pondering the events that have come before (but which we have yet to see). Ulmer darkens everything around his protagonist and lights only his eyes, a sort of beacon of last hope that we know will also soon be snuffed. 

I could continue to sing the film's praises but it's a Saturday morning and I have a busy day today. Just know that this is exactly the type of noir I hoped to find when I first envisioned this series.

But I've still got one more month to go, and that means a date with the man who also provided inspiration for this series: Humphrey Bogart. As of right now, I've got something interesting planned to close the series, but I won't reveal it now in case it doesn't work out. 

One movie for every year since God created Adam

If I thought the 163 minutes of No Time to Die on Wednesday night were long, it was just a warmup to my Thursday night viewing of The Bible: In the Beginning ...

(Those ellipses are in the title. It's not my way of being mysterious.)

Why was I watching this movie on a Thursday night, the informal first night of the weekend, when I'm generally trying to unwind with something lighter? Something shorter than 174 minutes?

Or more to the point, why am I even watching this 1966 epic from director-star John Huston in the first place?

Well it's milestone time again here on The Audient. And in this case, I didn't even write my usual preview post a few weeks ago to let you know it was coming.

The Bible: In the Beginning ... was the 6,000th movie I've ever seen. (Pause for a moment to acknowledge the usual potential inaccuracies in my list, but as far as I know, I've seen 6,000 movies.)

Once I'd hit 5,999, I had to watch this movie next, whenever that opportunity arose, and regardless of what other apple carts it may have upset in terms of my normal viewing patterns. I was able to control it to the extent that I made sure the moment arrived before the beginning of the proper weekend.

It comes just 1,379 days since I watched my 5,000th movie, The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T, on February 8, 2018. So using some quick math, that means I've been averaging a new movie every 1.379 days since then. I can't swear that's a record but it seems likely. (Might as well check ... nope, the previous thousand took only 1,271 days. Kind of a relief to know I'm slowing down rather than speeding up.)

As you would guess from the previous title (and from Mr. 3000 back in 2010, before I deviated for a classic for #4,000 with Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans in 2014), I'm all about the theme for these milestones. 

If you haven't figured out the theme for watching a biblical epic, it's that according to the Bible, the earth is approximately 6,000 years old. While I personally think that's a bunch of malarkey -- just ask the dinosaur bones -- it does make it easy to choose one of the biblically themed movies I haven't seen, and not eventually settle on something lame like The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T.

My first thought was to watch Cecille B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments, all three hours and 40 minutes of it. I can watch a 220-minute film every thousand movies. 

But then I thought, although that covers the Bible angle of the theme, it tends not to emphasize the supposed age of the earth that I am celebrating with this milestone. So I googled further and found this movie, which was not even on my radar, but which ticks many of the same boxes as DeMille's epic, while also being 45 minutes shorter.

The Bible covers the first 22 chapters of the Book of Genesis, dramatizing some Bible stories I knew pretty well but had never actually seen on screen before. For the first half before the intermission, I found myself comparing this material to what I saw less than ten years ago in Darren Aronofsky's Noah. The Noah story -- with Huston himself as Noah -- takes up a good 45 minutes, leaving slightly less than that for the creation, Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel. It covers these stories at a long, languid and sometimes trying pace, though my familiarity with them -- and the comparative earliness of the hour -- kept me engaged.

The second half was a different story. By this point it was the wrong side of 10:30 and we were entering narrative territory that was far less known to me. After a very short bit about the Tower of Babel, so short that I wondered at the decision to erect a set for it given the amount of screen time it gets, the second half focuses exclusively on stories that are an offshoot of the character of Abraham (George C. Scott). For some reason I have failed to learn much about this portion of Genesis -- I suppose, that reason being that I am not religious and only remember what I do know from Sunday school. But that made it far less easy to follow and far less easy to care.

Suffice it to say, I finished at about 1:20 a.m. after a number of short to mid-range naps.

My overall impression of the film is solidly favorable, even though it feels like something out of a time capsule. Huston uses a couple clever techniques to help visualize his themes while not rendering them absurd due to the technical inability to stage some of the grander moments. I was a bit disappointed that there was no way to get Noah's ark on anything that looked vaguely like an ocean -- it's a lot more clearly a flooded sound stage. But much of the animal wrangling seems genuine, and it was fun to watch Huston's slightly loopy take on Noah as he interacts with those beasts of all size and shape.

The opening creation sequence reminded me of something out a Disney nature documentary of the time. Somehow more than ten minutes of this film passes before we even meet Adam. The introduction of Adam is a bit paltry, as he appears by degrees out of hills of sand that steadily take the shape of a man. This itself would not have been such a deficient way of doing it, but it is regrettably accompanied by a crescendo in the score that should be saved for a big reveal. In this instance, for another two minutes after the crescendo, we still can't tell that this is becoming the shape of a man, except that God, our narrator (also Huston), just told us.

I found myself going down some internet rabbit holes as I was watching. I became obsessed with the question of how Cain, after being cast out following the murder of his brother, ended up finding a wife and creating the lineage of awful people who all eventually die in the flood. If Cain and Abel were the first two (and as far as we see, only) children of the first two human beings, how was there anyone other than his own mother for Cain to procreate with? 

This one site I found explained that Cain and Abel are not the only two, and perhaps not even the first two, of Adam and Eve's children. In fact, the Bible says nothing about how old they are when Cain kills Abel, so they could already be in their fifties or something, and their parents could have already had a litter of other children. (People lived hundreds of years in the Bible and remained capable of reproducing for most of that time.) I had to laugh a bit when this site said it was possible there were as many as 32,000 people on earth when Cain killed Abel and went in search of a wife, all just from the multiplying handiwork of Adam and Eve and their offspring. (The site also explains away possible genetic disorders from incest by talking about the perfect genes the first two humans were born -- that is, created -- with. Apparently brothers could sleep with sisters because the genetic disorders multiplied down through the generations would not yet be present.)

I also celebrated the appearance of Seth, the other child of Adam and Eve who is named in the Bible, though he is only mentioned in narration, not actually appearing on screen. The reason for my celebration is that I temporarily had the nickname Seth on my college ultimate frisbee team, which was due entirely to the fact that I mentioned the third son of Adam and Eve and no one else on the team had even heard of him. A very small amount of research obviously proved me correct, but this small bit of doubt lives on in me, so I always appreciate the external validation.

I won't get into more details because that's not really the type of post this is.

It felt like a useful movie to have seen and a good movie to mark this milestone. But after two straight nights of movies that ran longer than two-and-a-half hours, I'm really going to need something of a more snackable length as I do finally unwind on Friday night.

I have no idea what will make a good theme for my 7,000th viewing, but fortunately, I've got what I hope is more than 1,379 more days to figure that out.

No time to run out of gummy snakes

You'll see shortly why I chose a No Time to Die poster featuring Ben Whishaw's Q.

Although I had expected to see the latest James Bond movie on Sunday night, as per my last post, it took until Wednesday due to the ever-popular "abundance of caution" related to COVID. My younger son is actually quarantining for two weeks because someone in his class got COVID, and one or two others have subsequently tested positive. Although I never rant about COVID protocols, because I am a strong supporter of the progressive-minded caution that gives birth to them, I do think it's weird that we quarantine kids for two weeks after we've basically given up trying to contain the virus. Isn't it likely that a kid in every class out there has COVID and we just have to deal with that?

But by Tuesday our whole family had already gotten two negative COVID tests back since Friday, so it was time for me to venture out for only my third movie in the theater since theaters opened again three weeks ago. For some people, one movie a week might be a lot -- for me, it means I'm falling terribly far behind at the wrong time of year to do so.

I had been dreading this one a bit. The two hour and 43-minute running time figured to be quite the challenge for me, as I have been falling asleep at home during movies less than half that length. Despite really liking the latest movie in my noir series, 1945's Detour (post to come), I actually fell asleep during its 67-minute running time. (I always have the presence of mind to pause in this scenario to avoid missing anything.)

So I came equipped with two cans of Pepsi Max and an extra-large bag of gummy snakes. 

(I can't just throw out the Pepsi Max reference and leave it without comment. I am historically a Coke man. For some reason I decided I liked the taste of Pepsi Max better than the taste of No Sugar Coke. I'm still wrestling with it.)

In past 163-minute movies, that bag of gummy snakes would have been just the starting point. I'd throw some chocolate in there too as a different sort of sweet that might give me a little jolt when I needed it most. But I'm also trying to lose some weight right now. I could fall off the wagon a bag of gummy snakes' worth in order to not let No Time to Die beat me, but I wasn't willing to fritter away any recent dieting gains more than that.

But how to make an open bag of gummy snakes last?

I'm one of those people who will eat and eat a movie snack until it is gone. I can't set aside some for later. I can make a drink last, but not food. It's just not how I'm programmed.

Well I decided I needed to change my programming for this one. So I had to come up with a method.

The first part of that method was to hold off on starting them as long as possible. But after a very long pre-credits sequence that effectively involves two cold opens, I found myself tearing the bag. So time for strategy #2.

And I thought, let's make a drinking game out of this.

I would allow myself five gummy snakes at a time, each to be eaten in segments, but I would wait for another particular milestone in the movie to pass before I got my next five. Just as how someone might watch Austin Powers and drink every time he says "Yeah baby!", I decided to eat every time ... well, not every time the same thing happened, but every time the next new thing I'd chosen happened.

The opening sequence had involved only two actors I knew, Daniel Craig and Lea Seydoux -- and also Rami Malek behind a mask, though it was only my knowledge that it was Malek that helped me determine that. So my first milestone was to wait until an actor I could name appeared on screen. 

Not too long after the credits Naomie Harris became that person. Five more snakes.

The next one took a little longer. I decided I would wait for a gun to appear on screen. Shouldn't take that long in a Bond movie, but in this case, it was about 15 minutes. Ana de Armas was the one to draw a gun in the scene in Cuba. And while on the one hand I was desperate for my next portion of snakes, on the other hand I was pleased that this was working.

The next one also took a little while. I decided I was going to wait until a character we had been introduced to dies. I won't tell you who came through for me on that to avoid spoilers, but the risk paid off as I again waited about 15 minutes.

I thought I'd chosen too hard of a choice for my next one. I decided to wait until Seydoux's character appeared again. But then I panicked and thought "What if she doesn't reappear until the third act as a twist?" So I switched to the next time "007" was uttered. But I had to cheat a little here, because right on queue Seydoux did appear. I allowed that to count and took five more snakes.

Other milestones included the next time I saw fire on screen (I ended up allowing the burst of flame from a gun barrel to count), the next time I saw a "Bond gadget" (Q gave Bond his special watch only a few minutes later), and the next time I saw a flying object (bird or plane would have sufficed, but I went with an airborne car, which came only moments before a helicopter). There may have been one other in there. 

The last one -- the next time there were subtitles on screen, as two characters are French -- never arrived. But by then it was nearly the end of the movie and I had only one gummy snake left. At this point it made no sense to deny myself the last snake, so I ate it.

As for the Pepsi Max, I drank one and a quarter cans.

If you came to this post to figure out what I thought about the movie, well, I'm sorry to make you wait so long. I enjoyed it. Maybe because of my little game, or maybe just because of the successful pacing of the movie, this did not feel as long as I knew it was. That's a good thing of course. Means I was enjoying myself.

I kind of want to talk spoilers but I'm not going to do that today. Maybe in a couple days, with sufficient warnings, if I'm still thinking about it.

Oh, why did I choose Ben Whishaw's Q? 

Well, you may not have noticed this when you were watching, but I certainly did. Q actually eats gummy snakes/worms in this movie! As he is trying to crack some code on his computer, he picks from a modest bowl of gummies that contains about seven of the sugary reptiles. 

Presumably the task he was involved in carried no risk of putting him to sleep. 

Movies that last an eternity

As you know I've been on catch-up duty since the movie theaters reopened 16 days ago, though I haven't been fulfilling that duty with very much alacrity. Of course there are other things going on in my life right now, like the purchase of a new house, but even still, seeing only two movies in those 16 days is a pretty paltry pace -- especially when I'm trying to make up for lost viewings.

So I'm trying to go tonight, though I haven't mentioned it to my wife yet. But the options available, the ones I most need to watch to stay current on the film conversation, aren't very enticing, especially for a 9 o'clock viewing.

It's not their content, though I have to admit that the latest James Bond is feeling more like a duty than a pleasure to me right now. It's their length.

I've chosen Eternals for the artwork of this post as it perfectly exemplifies the phenomenon I'm talking about today (and goes well with my title for the post), though it's not a serious candidate for tonight's viewing, since I know it's coming to Disney+ before Christmas, and can pick it off then. 

I'm a bit Marveled out at the moment, but the really onerous thing about Eternals is its length: 157 minutes. If Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, my first return to the cinema, wore me out with 25 minutes' less girth, just imagine what the poorly reviewed Eternals will do to me with an extra half-hour of run time tacked on. 

Two other must-haves are better options, given that if I don't get them in the theater I may not get them at all before my deadline for closing off my 2021 list: the aforementioned No Time to Die, and Ridley Scott's latest, starring Adam Driver and Matt Damon, The Last Duel. (Side note: Isn't every duel somebody's "last duel"?)

When would those movies movies get me back out of my seat again, you ask?

No Time to Die: 163 minutes later.

The Last Duel: 153 minutes later.

Oy.

James Bond will probably win out, if only for reasons of practicality. I have a website to think about, and my ReelGood readers -- diminished in number though they may be -- will probably be most interested in a Bond review. It's something we have to do if we are going to be a "website of record" (kind of like The New York Times is a "paper of record"). Besides, the clicks help in whatever nebulous goal I'm trying to achieve.

But damn, that's the longest of the three movies I've mentioned so far, just 17 minutes shy of three hours. I can't even imagine what sort of artificial stimulants I might need to keep me awake for the whole movie, especially since I already know how early I've gotten up this morning (7:30, which is actually late for me), not to mention how poorly I've been napping in the afternoons.

The other options aren't significantly better. Jane Campion's first proper feature since 2009, The Power of the Dog, is a good contender, and has a regional interest to our audience as the director hails from New Zealand. That film's 126 minutes are downright modest compared to the others, but the film still keeps you in your seat for more than two hours. I've already decided to wait until video for a second Adam Driver movie in theaters, Annette, but that one is 139 minutes as well.

In fact, I can't find a single movie playing right now that meets either a reviewing need or a year-end list need that is under two hours.

Does it get any better from here? Not really. Dune, which releases December 2nd, and West Side Story are both 156 minutes. Guillermo del Toro's Nightmare Alley is 139 minutes. Licorice Pizza, Paul Thomas Anderson's latest, clocks in at a typically Andersonian 133 minutes. Even Ghostbusters: Afterlife is over two hours at 125 minutes. And though Spider-Man: No Way Home and The Matrix Resurrections don't have listed running times yet, 140 minutes would figure to be on the modest side for those two.

The only "big movie" still coming out this year that is reasonable in length is Venom: Let There Be Carnage, which has already opened in the U.S. but opens here in a few weeks. Somehow they brought this one in at only 97 minutes. Hallelujah. Too bad I didn't like the first one and may give this one a miss, to use the Australian phrasing.

Just so you aren't confused by why I'm writing this post today, this does not qualify as some sort of shocking revelation. I know movies are long these days. Studios once told directors to cut 20 minutes from a movie because they were worried that audiences would be scared off by the length. Now, following the "more is more" logic used by Netflix on their TV series (for example), studios are happy with that 20 minutes and might even prefer an additional 20 if you've got 'em lying around.

It's just that it feels like all the movies are long. There's no way to find something shorter unless you are going for a genre that has traditionally run shorter, such as comedy or horror, but even those movies run longer than they once did.

The consequence of this is that I have watched a bunch of movies lately where I needed to re-read the plot synopsis afterward to be sure I didn't miss anything. The last movie I saw in the theater, The Many Saints of Newark, was right on two hours exactly, but I started it at 9:15 after a long day, and that meant there were moments I missed as I nodded off. Given that it tackles more than a dozen characters and is trying to scratch an itch that has been building up in fans since The Sopranos ended in 2007, that's probably one that could reasonably have been even longer.

It's continued this weekend even with home viewings. The past two evenings I struggled through viewings of Titane (108 minutes) and Red Notice (117 minutes). Neither of those movies is too long in and of themselves, but life's cumulative exhaustion has left me less equipped to tackle them. And the longer movies I've watched have contributed to that. Even the ones I haven't watched yet are contributing to it in advance out of sheer anticipation.

Solutions? Stop watching movies I guess?

I just have to plow through. But complaining about it here helps, I guess. 

I'm Thinking of Kaufman Things: Anomalisa

This is the final installment of a bi-monthly 2021 series rewatching the films of Charlie Kaufman.

I didn't take as many notes during my viewing of Anomalisa as I did during the other six films I watched over five months for this series. While I had been scurrying to identify sometimes minor similarities between the films in the hope of excavating the full thematic breadth of Kaufman's work -- I'm saying that like it's a bad thing -- here I kind of let the totality of the film wash over me on this, my second viewing.

And I landed in about the same spot on the film as I did the first time, finding that I admired it and what it was trying to do without feeling like it totally works.

The first thing it has going for it is, of course, its form. Stop-motion animation has traditionally been used in the service of really outlandish or fantastical stories, so it's fun to absorb the banal imagery captured by the style here, such as a naked middle aged man toweling himself off after a shower, or picked up a large vibrating dildo that he accidentally knocks off the counter at a sex shop that he accidentally visits on the recommendation of a clueless cab driver. While expending much of its energies on the absolutely quotidian aspects of life, and therefore feeling very realistic in that sense, it also calls attention to its own artificiality, revealing the juncture points in the designs of the puppets, and how they threaten to (and sometimes do) fly apart into mechanical malfunction at any moment.

Then also as a positive you have the Kaufman themes: A sense of alienation from one's own life. A constant feeling of disappointment in the alternatives available, romantic or otherwise. The awkwardness of physical and emotional intimacy. A preoccupation with the minor faults of other human beings, which leads to an overall sense of ennui and minor misanthropy. The notion that everywhere you look, there's an inescapable drabness and sameness that will be with you until the day you die. But ultimately a sense of the inability to escape from one's own self.

These things are all good, so why is Anomalisa not a slam dunk for me like Kaufman's other films are?

Well for one, they aren't all slam dunks. I still get more out of this than I get out of Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, and its impact on me is probably comparable to that of Human Nature.

It can't be the overwhelming sense of melancholy the film instills in us, because that's present in other Kaufman films, some of which reach equally bleak conclusions.

I'm not sure I'm going to be able to answer this question. Sometimes different delivery methods of the same themes just don't work equally as well as one another. And in certain of Kaufman's films, particularly Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the director is adding a creative element that expands on what Kaufman is giving us with his writing.

That last should not logically be a problem for Anomalisa, where it should be said that Kaufman is actually the co-director. He collaborates here with Duke Johnson, a specialist in stop motion animation, who oversaw the stop motion in the Community episode done in that style, among others. Though I don't think I've seen any of Johnson's other work -- I can't actually remember if I saw the Community or not -- it appears as though Johnson's contributions here are only technical, while directors like Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry also have their own creative energy and vision that adds a layer to what Kaufman is already bringing to the project. (Now I'm pretty much parroting a good friend's standard talking points on Kaufman and Jonze, which is that they need each other to bring out the best in the other.)

But I don't want to diminish the importance of stop motion to this film, and that will lead me to the first of my real comparison points with other Kaufman films. There's no doubt that Johnson brings an immeasurable amount to the project in that he can actually execute Kaufman's vision, which does require this form to be really achievable. The "gimmick," if you will, that Kaufman employs here is that everyone except the title character has the same face for our protagonist, Michael Stone -- essentially a revisiting of the most memorable scene in Being John Malkovich. While they obviously achieved that outcome in that movie by superimposing Malkovich's head on two dozen other bodies, that was just one scene that was played for broad comedy. I don't think you can execute that in live action over a whole movie without severely undermining the film's overall solemn tone. You can with stop motion though.

One particular use of this "gimmick" put me in mind of Human Nature, actually. During the overnight in which Lisa and Michael are sleeping in his Cincinnati hotel room, the camera looks out the window at the world outside as the sky goes from night to morning. We see on the right a billboard for the Cincinnati Zoo, which has a humorous slogan that calls back to Michael's conversation with the cab driver on the drive from the airport: "It's zoo-sized!" The picture is of a monkey with the same face as that worn by all the other people Michael sees, excluding Lisa but eventually starting to include her as well. Of course, Human Nature deals with what is essentially a monkey with the face of a man as its main character, and there are other times throughout his filmography Kaufman has returned to his preoccupation with animals.

I'll close by comparing the film to the one that would come next for him, which inspired this series but which I won't watch again to close it out for lack of remaining time slots on the calendar. Probably the most interesting scene for me is his breakfast with Lisa after their night together, moments after he has impulsively proposed running off with her to start a new life. He can't enjoy even a minute of exultation and confidence in this choice, as he is immediately drawn to the way Lisa clanks her teeth with the fork while she eats, and that bits of scrambled egg fall out of her mouth because she's talking while she's eating. The very next moment he accuses her of being controlling, so in the space of about 90 seconds she's acquired three significant demerits that he hadn't seen until that exact moment in time. It's just a reminder of Kaufman's essential world view that it is impossible for a person, specifically him, to trust even a fleeting sense of happiness, as it is always complicated by the realities and imperfections of life. Plus, a tendency to nitpick others' faults and use those as justification to end a relationship lays the groundwork for I'm Thinking of Ending Things, at the point where we are consuming the film on only its most literal level. In a way the outlook of Anomalisa is even more depressing, as Michael is seeing and being derailed by these things not at the end of a relationship, but at its very beginning -- which then also becomes its end.

I guess I won't close just yet because I shouldn't leave any discussion of Anomalisa without commenting on two more things.

One is the vocal work. David Thewlis makes a great perturbed Kaufman protagonist, aware of his need to function as a social being in society, as in the agonizing small talk with the cab driver, his involuntary participation hanging by a thread of strained politeness. Deep down the man loathes others as much as he loathes himself. Then you have Jennifer Jason Leigh so perfectly capturing the hesitations and insecurities of Lisa, a woman with crippling self-esteem issues who can only comprehend Michael's interests in her as a joke he's playing on her. Michael successfully breaking down that wall is really liberating for her, as it's a joy to watch this goofy yet cautious personality enjoy the simple pleasures of singing and pushing elevator buttons while beginning to trust the enthusiasm Michael shows for her. The most demanding role, though, belongs to Tom Noonan, who creates a handful of different personalities for the remaining characters in the movie he plays, all of them engaging, as this actor naturally always is. (Don't forget he's a returning cast member from Synecdoche, New York, the last of the Kaufman films I had yet to name check in this post.) Kaufman doesn't ask him to alter his voice significantly from role to role, which is part of the point -- he doesn't, for example, change the pitch of his voice when he plays female characters. But that doesn't mean there isn't nuance in the different roles he voices, and it's really impressive to see. 

I also wanted to touch on the hilarious dream sequence where Michael visits the basement of the hotel to speak to the manager on a "delicate matter." I love the little injection of absurdity in an otherwise straightforward movie, where Michael has to drive a golf cart to the other end of the basement in order to reach the man's desk, but also has to avoid a large pit in the middle of the floor, which he does not manage to do on his return. This scene also sort of reminds us of the "Malkovich Malkovich Malkovich" scene, as there is a pool of what appear to be secretaries who all tell Michael they love him, after the manager has started out by making this same declaration. This also culminates in Michael losing the part of his puppet's face that contains the nose and mouth, a sort of body horror that might be similar to Malkovich seeing his own head on all the other bodies.

Okay now I will really close with one exchange that I jotted down that I really liked, with the cab driver:

"Have you been to Cincinnati?"
"Yes, once before."
"Oh, it's changed since then."

Since when? Funny.

It also suggests a presumption that Cincinnati would have been disappointing to Michael on his previous visit, that this cab driver needs to talk up the city in his informal role as ambassador to newly arriving tourists. Little does he know that Michael is disappointed by every city he visits because he is disappointed with his life, and with himself.

It occurs to me that I have written more words for this discussion of Anomalisa than for any other single film in this series. Including these words that I'm typing right now, this piece is 1933 words long, exceeded only by the 2208 words I wrote for the double post including both Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine.

The conclusion, other than that it's appropriate to end the series with the longest piece, is that I actually do get a lot of Anomalisa, and maybe the more I think about it the more I will realize that it really is up there with Kaufman's other masterpieces. Or maybe even that I have grown to appreciate it more even just during the course of writing this post and exploring my thoughts in real time. Maybe it's that the Kaufman movies I love more unproblematically also leave me with a sort of comforting epiphany, even when they are bleak, and that this one doesn't.

That doesn't make it worse, though. It may just make it the most consummately Kaufman movie of all.

The countdown to Dune

For most of you, this countdown is already over. Dune is open in North America and everyone's got an opinion they've expressed online about it, which I am doing my best to avoid.

Dune doesn't open in Australia, though, until December 2nd. It's a deadline that's approaching fast for a reason that would not apply to most people ... although maybe more than I would have thought. 

See, on October 12th I watched Jodorowsky's Dune, the great 2013 documentary that interviews members of what would have been the principle creative team for Alejandro Jodorowsky's adaptation of Frank Herbert's seminal science fiction novel. It would have gone before cameras in the mid-70s, years before David Lynch's disastrous 1984 version -- even before Star Wars. The world was not ready for it at the time -- potential financiers thought Jodorowsky was crazy -- so all that remains is a massive bound bible of storyboards Jodorowsky had made, the memories of the people who would have been involved, and this film.

It was enough to get me to buy Herbert's book on Amazon when I finished my current book a few days later.

If the film were releasing in Australia in October as it has in the U.S., I wouldn't have done it. I would have had to plow through its 575 pages in less than a week, when that length book would normally take me a couple months.

Or, in this case, hopefully six weeks.

I calculated that if I put in a good effort, I should be able to knock out the whole thing by the Australian release date. I don't usually average 100 pages per week on any book I'm reading, but it's certainly within my capabilities, even as a slow reader. 

Making it a bit extra ambitious, though, was the fact that Jodorowsky says in the film that you don't really understand what's going on in Dune for its first 100 pages. I took that as a challenge rather than a warning, even though I've been known to get beaten by books I could not make sufficient sense of. ("Beaten" does not mean I stopped, except in the case of David Foster Wallace's behemoth Infinite Jest. It just means that the book ended up consuming half my year.) 

Fortunately, Dune doesn't make sense in accessible ways. It throws out a lot of terminology without explaining what it means, but the actual language is straightforward and the main characters are introduced in such a way to make it easy to keep track of them. In fact, I felt momentum rather than hesitation at the start of the book, knowing that what I didn't know would make sense as the book went along, or that the parts that didn't make sense might end up more like flavor notes I couldn't really appreciate than narrative essentials to understanding the story.

But then another event came along that I could have sort of anticipated, though there was every chance that it wouldn't occur before December 2nd:

We bought a house.

This is a big topic and it certainly bears more discussion at another time. I don't mean to just drop it in your lap and leave it there. But let's just say the whole thing is freaking me out enough that I haven't even posted about it on Facebook yet, even though it occurred eight days ago. I certainly don't feel ready to delve into it right now. I'll just say that a house hunt that was most likely to stretch into next year ended abruptly when we were the winning bidders at the first ever auction we attended. I think it still hasn't totally sunk in for me. 

The thing that's important for the current discussion is that this will add a lot more complication to my schedule before December 2nd. Which suddenly looks like a far less attainable deadline for finishing the book, especially since I currently find myself only on page 185.

The next question is whether it even matters if I finish the book before then. And there's a lot of reasons it might not.

For one, I already saw the Lynch version from 1984. I don't remember more than a few hilarious details ("remember the tooth!"), but I've been exposed to this entire story and everything that's happened in it once already. Still, I probably wouldn't be reading the book right now if I had seen it recently and it were fresh in my memory.

What I have seen recently, though, is Jodorowsky's Dune, in which Jodorowsky blithely reveals the fate of one of the movie's main characters. So I already knew that before I made the decision to purchase the book. 

The other reason it may not matter if I finish the book is something I just found out yesterday, after I began drafting this post:

Denis Villeneuve's Dune is not the same as either David Lynch's Dune or Alejandro Jodorowsky's Dune would have been, in that it is only half the story.

I'm glad I happened to be discussing the book in a Facebook chat with a friend yesterday, which led me to the discovery that he had also read the book in the lead-up to watching the movie, and that the movie only covers about the novel's first 300 pages. It's Dune Part I, something the rest of you surely already know, but was news to me.

This brought with it a huge sigh of relief. It'll be easy for me to read another hundred-plus pages in the next three weeks, even with my busier schedule. No problem there.

Now the only problem is trying to read the book with my own ideas of what various characters look like, without being totally poisoned by the cast of Villeneuve's movie.

Since I don't remember very much of Lynch's version, the only thing I could say for sure was that Kyle MacLachlan played Paul Atreidis, the protagonist. I have a suspicion Sting played Baron Harkonnen but I'm not going to look it up to confirm it. 

Not that it matters in those cases, because neither of those two actors are competing for my mental images of Paul and Harkonnen. I know Timothee Chalamet plays Paul in this version, as he has been front and center for the advertising I've already consumed (though I have turned my eyes away so as not to see any of the film's trailers). By necessity he is my Paul as I read this. Then I happened to google Baron Harkonnen to see how he had been depicted in illustrations, failing to realize that of course the actor cast to play him in this version, personal favorite Dave Batista, would also be revealed in that search. So Batista is my Harkonnen.

But then a few others I uncovered by accident, specifically, Jason Momoa as Duncan Idaho. Only just now, as I was selecting a poster for this post, did I note Rebecca Ferguson on the poster and realize that she's the perfect casting for the Bene Gesserit, the Lady Jessica. Perhaps only because of her first name, I had been picturing Jessica as Jessica Chastain, and hope I can continue to do that. (And I discarded that poster and went for the one of just Chalamet so as not to worsen this unconscious matching of names to faces.)

There are other actors that I know are in this film, such as Oscar Isaac, but I don't know what role he plays so I can maintain some additional ignorance on that front. (Oops, just blew that. In the interest of fact-checking to make sure Isaac was, in fact, in the movie, I googled "Is Oscar Isaac in Dune?" in the hope that I would get a simple confirmation. Instead it showed me what character he plays. D'oh.)

It may not really matter if you can maintain your own mental image of a character in a book. We read countless books while already knowing who appeared in the most prominent film adaptations of that book. It's a hazard built in to being a person who's aware of popular culture and cannot possibly read all literature before it gets made into a movie.

Besides, my faculties are failing me a bit on this one anyway. For some reason when each new adviser to Leto Atreidis gets introduced in the book, I mentally cast him as looking like Timothy Spall. Timothy Spall is not in Villeneuve's movie so I have no idea where this came from.

One thing that's for certain is that reading Dune before the movie was not an idea that was unique to me. Not only was there the friend who gave me the approximate amount of the novel that appears in this movie, but another friend had previously told me he'd chosen to read the book in the lead-up as well. He's actually an Australian who could not wait for December 2nd and has found a place to watch it illegally online.

Me personally, I'll be waiting. I'm not concerned about the plot or even really the casting being ruined, but I am concerned about the grandeur being ruined by watching it on a TV screen, as this guy and countless HBO Max subscribers around the world have chosen to do. Because when it all comes down to it, movies like Dune may live and die by the spectacle they put up on the screen, not whether they get every detail right from a book that has notoriously been considered unfilmable over the years.

In a few weeks, I'll be able to add my own opinion to the online chorus. 

The extremes of Temple of Doom

I've always thought of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom as a movie of extremes. 

Its violence was so extreme that it prompted the creation of the PG-13 rating. Kate Capshaw's annoyance level was so extreme we all hated it her afterwards. And a third one, because you have to use the rule of three if you want to use this sort of paragraph structure in your persuasive writing.

Well, I've watched Temple of Doom for probably the third time overall, but very likely the first since the 1980s. Funny how well I remembered it for having only seen it twice, so maybe I did see it three times back then, or at least caught portions of it on cable in the background. Or maybe it was just so extreme that the parts that resonated with me really resonated with me. Then there was also the fact that I used to play the Temple of Doom video game, which likely increased my familiarity with the material beyond mere viewings.

So you wouldn't be surprised to learn I have a bunch of new thoughts prompted by my latest viewing, starting with these extreme elements and then going from there.

1) It doesn't feel as violent as I remembered. In 1984 I was ten going on 11, and I'm pretty sure I saw Temple of Doom in the theater -- there would have been no reason not to, since I saw Raiders of the Lost Ark in the theater three years earlier (at least twice, in fact). The violence did not make as much of an impact on me at that time as the room full of bugs, particularly that long creepy crawlie that disappears into Capshaw's neckline. (I'm sure in that one particular shot it was a wig attached to a dummy.) But over the years, I've used my memory of the way a new rating was spawned by the movie to indeed think of it as some sort of brutally graphic film.

Well, I didn't really find it that way at all. For my money, there's nothing in this film nearly so horrifying as the face melting of the Nazis at the end of Raiders. The body count seems lower than Raiders, and the sheer physicality of the close quarters fighting is far less bone crunching and flesh smacking. If I just think of the blood that flies in Indy's epic Raiders smackdown with the big bald Nazi -- even before the plane propeller shreds him to pieces -- I can't find any equivalent of that here.

I think instead of the pervasive sense of violence throughout the film, as Raiders has, concerned parent groups were specifically reacting to the scene of human sacrifice and Mola Ram removing the heart from his victim prior to it. Interestingly, although that scene was obviously a main talking point on the playground back in the day, it didn't disturb me the way the bugs did. If it had killed the man, it might have been a lot more traumatizing to me. But instead I thought "Okay! You don't need a heart to live!"

2) Kate Capshaw is not as annoying as I remembered. If you had asked me to characterize Capshaw's performance throughout the film, I would have said that she is literally whining and carrying on in her every single moment on screen. That's how extreme the depiction of her as a brat and a wimp and a coward felt to me back in the day. (A coward who can speculatively reach her arm into a hole filled with bugs to save her two companions, but a coward nonetheless.)

There's a fair bit of that, sure. It didn't offend me as much this time. Maybe I saw more of the Capshaw that Steven Spielberg saw in this film, that prompted him to eventually propose to her. They've just celebrated their 30th anniversary.

The thing that did strike me, though, was that this is never a role they would give to a woman today. Although Willie is not helpless -- she stands up to a few thugs, plus she saves them from the room that was going to spike and squish them -- she's a bit too damsel-y, and way too much of an ass. A performance like the one Capshaw gives, which is actually quite deft in terms of physical comedy, would be singled out as misogynist in 2021. If you want a character to be the butt of every joke in a film, it has to be a man today. That's not a criticism, just an observation of how things have changed.

One thing that's for sure is that Willie has absolutely zero back story. She's a lounge singer working in Shanghai. She's originally from Missouri. That is literally all we learn about her in the whole film. And part of that is because ...

3) The whole movie is basically one epic wrong turn. Whereas Raiders of the Lost Ark involves planned voyages to specific parts of the world for very specific reasons, a la a James Bond movie, Temple of Doom feels like one big episode of improv inspired by escaping from various jams. If I'm not mistaken -- certain exposition might have gotten past me while I was drinking margaritas on Friday night -- the only reason they even end up in India is because they have to use a raft to escape from Lao Che's plane, which its pilots had already abandoned. I can't recall what their actual destination was supposed to be after leaving Shanghai. The whole Mola Ram adventure, then, is just sort of picked up on the fly. (Incidentally, wouldn't it have been easier for the pilots just to kill Indy and company while they slept, rather than having to parachute out and destroy the plane?)

Because of this, the movie has a curious feeling of never giving viewers their bearings. We come in on Indy's Shanghai adventure much as we do with the cold open in Raiders, which is one of the best parts of that film -- and which again likens it to a Bond movie. In that case, though, the opening South American adventure is only there to introduce us to the character, and has nothing to do with his eventual quest for the ark of the covenant, either in terms of the two ambitions being related to one another, or in terms of physically getting from point A to point B in the plot. The Lao Che diamond and the Sankara stones don't have anything do with each other either, but by one adventure bleeding directly into the other, geographically, we never have a chance to pause and receive a heaping dose of exposition that orients us within the plot.

Not only is there the impact on Willie, who is basically just a beautiful and whiny cypher, but there's the impact on Short Round (Ke Huy Quan). We don't know anything about why Short Round is Indy's companion or how that came to be. And because he's not properly introduced, he too can strike us as nattering and annoying, like Willie. If The Goonies hadn't come along a year later, in which I thought Quan was very effectively used and became beloved to me (and I've seen that movie about 15 times), I wonder if I would have always thought of him as nothing more than the annoying pipsqueak from Temple of Doom, who does things like try to avoid blame for causing the ceiling to lower on them rather than figuring out how to get out of those jams. 

4) The oddness that this is a prequel. If you happened to be looking away from the screen when the title "Shanghai - 1935" comes up at the beginning, or if you forgot or never knew that Raiders takes place in 1936, you'd watch the whole movie without realizing that this is a prequel to Raiders. It's a curious choice that I never understood, and still don't. (I'm sure I could google it and there would be an answer, but I'm content to leave myself in that state of not knowing.)

A couple odd things result from this choice. One is that you can't really worry about whether Indiana Jones will make it out of any of the scrapes he gets in. A worry for the fate of the protagonist is key to the tension any film tries to create, even if most savvy viewers know that the hero is not going to die, or at least not at this juncture of the movie. Because this is a prequel, we know for sure that Indy is going to survive all the scrapes.

We don't know that about Short Round or Willie, though we probably have our suspicions, knowing that Steven Spielberg tends to be a populist filmmaker. However, it does raise a couple interesting questions about their fates. Presumably Indy got too annoyed by Willie or fell out of love with her, if he ever was in love -- this looks more like a relationship based on intense circumstances, the kind Sandra Bullock talks about in Speed. In any case, she's certainly not around when he connects up again with Marion Ravenwood in Raiders.

That's not too surprising, James Bond goes through women quickly and easily enough. (There, that's the third Bond reference in this piece.) Since relationships are supposed to be monogamous, you have to end them if they aren't going well, unlike with friends where you can just see them less. 

But whither Short Round? Even the most perverse of us would not suspect he was killed between Indy's adventures in 1935 and his adventures in 1936, and for the sake of Indy's health, let's just hope that was a quiet year. But he was jettisoned at some point because he certainly does not accompany Indy on his trip to South America to find the idol.

I suppose the most likely explanation is that Short Round was a China-based companion, who happened to get dislocated to India for their remaining adventures while they were escaping Lao Che's thugs. (This even though the actor is of Vietnamese heritage. Still today we don't properly distinguish Asians from each other in casting.) So when they defeated Mola Ram he just went home again, ready to assist should Indy return to that part of the world. 

5) Flying heart is ool kavort. The gibberish I just wrote is what I always thought Mola Ram was saying in the Temple of Doom video game when he starts throwing flaming hearts at you on one board. It was one of those young person jokes that took on a life of its own, such that I still remember it today.

Why I would have thought it was "flying" and not "flaming" is good question, though the hearts are both airborne and on fire, so I guess either would work. How I came up with the imaginary words "ool" and "kavort" is also a mystery.

Even at the time I remember friends saying the line was really "Soon Mola Ram will rule the world," which certainly makes more sense. In watching the movie last night I realized, when the line is actually spoken by Mola Ram, that it's really "Soon Kali Maa will rule the world," Kali Maa being the large statue that presides over the fiery human sacrifice pit.

6) Dan Aykroyd? I had no idea Dan Aykroyd was in Temple of Doom until I noticed his name in the credits. Naturally then I had to go back to the start of the movie and find his scene, which is about 15 seconds long and occurs when our trio of heroes are boarding Lao Che's plane to escape Shanghai. He's kind of like one of the men Bond (fourth reference) always has planted in exotic locales to help him with logistics, like Q. It's easy to miss Aykroyd because you never get a close-up of his face, though his voice is certainly recognizable once you realize who it is you're actually watching.

Because he helps them get on the plane of a man who means to kill them, it made me wonder if Aykroyd's character is supposed to be betraying them all along, or if he has also been duped by Lao Che. Since his character appears so briefly and is given such little narrative consequence, Spielberg et al may never have even asked that question. The characters might as well have just gotten on the plane without any help.

7) The Obi-Wan Club. Again something I never knew, unless I knew and forgot, was that the name of the club in Shanghai is inspired by Obi-Wan Kenobi from Star Wars. (I laugh at myself for having written "from Star Wars." What other Obi-Wan Kenobi is there?) 

For half a second, when I googled it, I thought this was a real club, and that made me wonder if the inspiration was the other way around, the Star Wars character taking his name from the club. Then later I realized I had landed on an Indiana Jones Wiki page, which discusses parts of the movies as though they are real parts of world history rather than cinematic inventions.

And speaking of that club ...

8) The Busby Berkeley opening. I had forgotten about the cheeky way this opens in Willie's performance of the lead song from the musical Anything Goes, which I actually acted in as a thespian in my younger years. I mean, I certainly remembered that the movie opened in the club, but just how much of the musical number plays out before we see our hero gave me a sense of how delightfully unexpected the choice was. Audiences must have thought they stepped into the wrong movie, as suddenly a Busby Berkeley-esque song and dance has supplanted the expected opening moments of an escapist adventure about a swashbuckling archeologist. The fact that the title for the movie they're supposed to be seeing does appear -- in the same Raiders font, bisected by the blonde lounge singer singing the song -- must have just made the effect all the more weird.

Incidentally, the set piece that follows -- Indy and Willie going after the antidote and diamond, respectively, as fleeing club patrons unwittingly kick them across the floor -- is still a triumph of execution. Temple of Doom may have some things going against it, but its set pieces are not one of them.

9) Speed round. Monkey brains! Indy taking down a whole rope bridge with just a few hacks from a sword! The world's longest and most serpentine mine cart track! Touching someone's skin with a flaming torch as a way for breaking their hypnotic state! There's a lot in this movie.

And how did someone manage to fill an entire room with bugs and get them to stay there, anyway?

I should have a tenth, just how I should have had a third in that paragraph near the start. Nobody's perfect.

I enjoyed my viewing quite a bit, even though I have never totally "liked" this movie, especially when contrasted with the two movies around it. Though it's light years better than Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, so it's got that going for it. 

And I think I'm now going to watch those other two movies -- The Last Crusade and Crystal Skull -- as each are movies I've seen only once. How could I have seen The Last Crusade only once? I'm not sure but it's true. I'll look to correct that in the coming months, as well as reevaluate just how bad Crystal Skull really is.