What Kevin James did instead of Hotel Transylvania 4

Kevin James is either in or not in both of the new 2022 movies I've watched. 

That statement would be true for any two movies I watched to start 2022, as long as James was in one of them. But he's specifically not in one of them, as you will see.

Along with his buddy Adam Sandler, James elected not to come back for the fourth installment of the Hotel Transylvania franchise, Transformania, which kicked off my 2022 movie year last weekend and also became the first 2022 movie I reviewed. I guess he and Sandler were tired of that shit and thought they could do better.

Well, the early returns suggest otherwise.

James is the star of the new Netflix movie Home Team, which is now the second 2022 movie I've reviewed. It's a Happy Madison production, so I guess if James was specifically "not in" one of my first two movies in 2022, Sandler was "not in" both of them. (I could have also told you that the titles of both of my first two 2022 movies started with "Ho." Oh wait, I just did.)

The film makes the extremely bizarre decision to take the real-life story of former New Orleans Saints coach Sean Payton, who was suspended for a year for participating in a program where players on his team were paid for making hits that injured opposing players, and turn it into a feel-good inspirational sports movie. 

It's not ineptly made, but it is very ineptly conceived, which is why I gave it only 3/10 on ReelGood rather than the 4/10 it might deserve.

Very likely because of the cooperation of the NFL and of Payton himself -- who has a really groan-inducing cameo near the end of the movie -- the film basically doesn't address the issue of his role in so-called Bountygate. It has to mention it -- we need to know why Payton was suspended -- but it's much more interested in Payton's apparent growth as a person by coaching his 12-year-old's football team, reconnecting with his son, and learning that bad players need to get into the game even in the championship game. (Oops, spoiler alert.)

As you will see if you read that review, there's a single scene where his son asks him about the allegations against him, and Payton's response is "It's complicated."

Really? That's it?

The embarrassing extent to which the film shirks its responsibility is a real detractor from any of the things it might do well. The receiving of concussions by football players at all levels has been a topic of discussion particularly in the last decade -- Will Smith even made a movie about it (Concussion). That a coach would preside over a locker room in which players were paid bounties for intentionally trying to injure -- and potentially concuss or paralyze -- opposing players is the type of thing that severely complicates any attempt to allow him redemption as a movie character. The makers of Home Team seemed to know this, which is why they were so loath to get into it in any detail.

The detail, according to a recap on Wikipedia, is that Payton may not have known about the bounty program at the time it was happening -- it was orchestrated by the team's defensive coordinator -- but he certainly did try to cover it up after the fact. It seems very unlikely that he would not have known about it, and if he didn't, it delivers a different sort of indictment of his being out of touch with his own team. The most we get out of the character in the film is an admission that the buck stops with him and that he needs to take responsibility. "Then why are you appealing your suspension?" his son asks. "Another good question," Payton responds.

Whatever the truth of the situation, the reality is that Home Team handles it lamely and lets Payton off the hook morally. Oh, his character needs to grow like any movie character, but his area of supposed growth is the considerably less fraught lesson that it's more important to play all the players on your team than to win at all costs. Yawn.

So this is the apparent "good work" James wanted to do instead of making another pretty entertaining installment of a durable children's movie franchise.

(By the way, that "good work" includes typical Happy Madison shenanigans like the whole team getting food poisoning and vomiting on their opponents during the final drive of an important game. The food poisoning is a result of these homemade energy bars given the team by the new agey dipstick played by Sandler crony Rob Schneider, who plays the new husband of Payton's ex-wife -- another Sandler crony, his own wife, Jackie Sandler. There are like three other Sandlers in this movie. You get the idea.)

Hotel Transylvania: Transformania is no classic, but it's definitely good enough to have been worth making -- and the actors hired to voice the roles previously voiced by Sandler and James are good enough that we don't miss them at all. 

According to my 6/10 rating on ReelGood, it's twice as good as Home Team, in any case. 

Denis Villeneuve's remake of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, and other original Dune thoughts

What the hell am I talking about with that subject?

Well I'll get to that in a moment, but first, a little prologue. 

And also:

Dune spoilers to follow.

So I figured the perfect way to wrap up my Dune experience of the past three months -- which started with my October viewing of Jodorowsky's Dune, followed by the concurrent reading of Frank Herbert's novel and viewing of the Denis Villeneuve adaptation -- was to go back and watch the David Lynch film that I thought was so hilariously awful when I watched it 15 years ago. Almost exactly 15 years ago, in fact. My records surprised me by showing that I watched the 1984 Dune on January 26, 2007. 

On January 28, 2022, I watched it a second time, and you'll be glad to know I got more out of it having read the book. That still doesn't excuse the poor storytelling choices, which I think would be completely lost on someone who wasn't familiar with the material (which described me in 2007), but it's not the inept mess I once made it out to be. It just has some really funny individual choices that stand out and fatally undercut it.

But first, what the hell am I talking about with that subject?

As I was watching Dune I determined Denis Villeneuve must have had a crush on Sean Young when he was growing up. I noticed that Young plays Chani, the role assumed by Zendaya in the Villeneuve remake.  

What else do we know about Young? Well, her most memorable role was probably as the android Racheal in Blade Runner -- a film Villeneuve has also rebooted.

Now 54, Villeneuve would have been about 15 when Blade Runner came out and about 17 when Dune came out. Good ages to still be working out your crushes, methinks. 

My natural conclusion is that Villeneuve is working on a remake of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective -- where Young plays Lois Einhorn/Ray Finkle -- right about now. (If you have a different choice for the third most prominent role in Young's career, don't tell me.)

Some other thoughts:

I didn't know who Sting was

Even after finishing the book and getting to this character's big scene, I didn't actually know who Sting was supposed to have played in the movie until watching it on Friday night. 

Now obviously, the portrayal of the other Harkonnens, in both the book and Villeneuve's film, makes them out to be corpulent and repugnant, even potentially unable to walk on their own without the use of suspensor suits. That would not describe the image of Sting in this movie, which shows every inch of the physical discipline that makes him excel at tantric sex, as his body is lean and finely chiseled -- a fact we can't help but notice as he is pictured wearing only the interstellar version of a speedo.

But maybe it's an indication of the weird role Feyd Rautha Harkonnen plays in the book that made me unable to initially make the connection. His role is very backloaded, so much so that Villeneuve did not even feel the need to introduce him as a character in his adaptation of the novel's first half. Even Herbert's book would have no use for him until its final 20 pages if it had not introduced him in a random scene just after the halfway point, a scene that seems there only to lay groundwork so his role in the novel's climax does not feel so out of left field.

Maybe the film's peculiar usage of Sting -- which was actually straight out of Herbert's text -- was one of the things that prompted me to judge the film so harshly. I was like "You've got Sting, and then you barely use him?" I should have directed that question to Herbert probably.

The whispered voiceover still sucks

One of the byproducts of needing to fit so much novel into only 137 minutes of movie was that Lynch had to take shortcuts in his exposition, the most famous of which was to have the characters' thoughts appear in voiceover. More often than not, these are whispers -- an apparent attempt to remind us they are only thoughts, though I don't know how that could escape us given that the characters' mouths aren't moving.

More than any other questionable decision Lynch made, this was the one that really undermined my ability to appreciate the film, and in fact turned any instinct to appreciate it into derisive laughter. It just doesn't work, and 15 years later, it still doesn't work.

I guess the main difference now, though, is that I understand this was not just a bad creative choice. It was an attempt to solve the unsolvable problem of how much information needed to be communicated in such a short amount of time. Villeneuve solved that problem by turning the story into (an expected) two movies, each of which will be longer than Lynch's film. Lynch wouldn't have had that option in 1984.

I think the funny thing about it is that so many different characters' thoughts are heard this way. If it were limited to the main character, Paul, that probably would have been more defensible. But even random side characters we've only just met reveal their thoughts to us. There just had to be another way.

And it seemed like once Lynch had committed to this being necessary, it prevented any instinct to show rather than tell. A number of these thoughts can be deduced from characters' expressions and needn't have been explicated. Like when Kyle MacLachlan gets a stunned look on his face upon first seeing Young's Chani, we don't need to hear via his thoughts that he thinks she's beautiful. Duh. Do you think we've never seen a movie before, David?

I remembered "Remember the tooth!" as funnier

The biggest howler from my first viewing was the scene where Dr. Yueh (Dean Stockwell) implants the poison tooth in Leto Atreides (Jurgen Prochnow) and tells him to "Remember the tooth!" when he crosses paths with Baron Harkonnen (Kenneth McMillan). Of course, I didn't know who any of those people were or what the hell they were talking about in 2007 -- I was already out by this point.

In my memory, the phrase "Remember the tooth!" gets repeated about five times. In reality, it's only said once. But the part that probably really made me laugh at the time -- and did again on this viewing -- was that after Yueh utters the full line, Lynch goes in to a close-up of Stockwell's mouth as he repeats "The tooth! The tooth!"

Still, I had hoped to get more satisfaction from the "Remember the tooth!" moment when a paralyzed Leto does come across Baron Harkonnen. But the word "tooth" doesn't even get uttered again, unfortunately. Leto's thoughts include something like "What did Yueh say?", which is also funny -- if you had just had a poison tooth implanted in your mouth, you would not soon forget it. But it wasn't the awesome sticking of the landing on that bit that I hoped it would be. 

Predating Jean-Luc Picard by three years

Patrick Stewart has had a long career, so I could not say for certain that this was his first trip to outer space. But a quick scanning of his credits indicates that indeed, Dune appears to be his sci-fi debut, just three years before he would be chosen as Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Did one have anything to do with the other? Hard to say. The internet would probably tell me. I can't be bothered.

The thing I find really funny, though, is that Stewart was cast to play a man of action, a fighter, in Gurney Halleck. Even when he was cast as Picard, it was not because he was seen as deft in hand-to-hand combat. No, his brains and regal quality were what made him right for Picard, not his skills with his fists. Ditto for his work as Professor X. 

Fists aren't totally required in this role either, but from the book I know Halleck is considered to be a great fighter, and indeed he does have a sparring scene with Paul in which they are protected by shields. 

This might have been one of the funniest scenes, though, as the 1984 visual effects for a personal body shield were so clunky that the bodies of the combatants are almost completely obscured. Maybe that was a blessing in disguise as it hid the fact that this is just not Stewart's forte. 

The worm stuff is good

I expected the worms to look like crap. They did not look like crap.

In fact, their breaching of the sand and the flower-like opening of their mouths were accomplished with exceptional technical skill for 1984.

Alas, some of the rest of what's depicted doesn't nearly measure up to it. The visuals involving outer space or green screens are extremely variable in quality. 

Overall, a reasonable effort

It was tempting at the time to think that Lynch's famously eccentric sensibilities caused him to wildly misstep in his conception of Dune. The reality is that this is a pretty straightforward attempt to adapt the material, and its greatest sin might be that it's boring.

Indeed, while I definitely thought that a revisit of Dune would be "fun," I found it pretty tedious.

Oh I liked it better for sure. When you know who the characters are and what's at stake, you don't just think this is a hopelessly impenetrable text filled with goofy people saying silly made-up words. That's definitely the impression the uninitiated would get, and did get in 1984.

But I was hoping I would like it a lot better, and that's just not the case. It actually probably needed to be more of a Lynch film rather than less of one to really resonate. 

David Lynch himself would tell you that. 

                                                            ***********

One final thought about my three-month Dune experience takes us right back to where we started.

I read all of Herbert's novel certain I was aware of one big spoiler that would not be revealed in Villeneuve's film:

Paul Atreides dies.

It's something that Alejandro Jodorowsky, cheeky bastard that he is, reveals in his conception for what would obviously be one of the film's final scenes. I thought at the time "It's too bad I found that out, but then again, I was the one who chose to watch this movie before I had read the book, and with only a vague recollection of the Lynch film."

If I'd thought to consult those vague recollections of that film, I would have realized I have no memory of Kyle MacLachlan's character dying because you know what? He doesn't. 

I obviously got it wrong. He must have been talking about the death of Leto Atreides, a scene with lots of possibilities of how to stage it.

But it's funny in retrospect to have been thinking the whole time how Paul was going to die and how enough stuff needed to happen in the story for the legend of MuadD'ib to have reached sufficiently legendary status before this happened. And when his fight with Feyd Rautha starts near the end of the book, I knew this had to be where he died but also that I didn't think his legend had really grown enough to warrant it in a narrative sense, given all the little chapter-starting histories of Muad'Dib written by the Princess Irulan. 

But no, he just sticks a blade in the underside of Feyd Rautha's chin.

So I really have no idea how many of the Dune sequels Herbert wrote Paul will appear in. I may not find out until Villeneuve adapts them, if he does.  

Although I ultimately enjoyed the experience of reading Dune -- I thought the appendices were an especially illuminating look into the depths of Herbert's mind and his bottomless capacity for "silly made-up words" -- it was, in the end, a slog to finally finish it so I could move on to my next book.

But whether I get to Dune Messiah or Children of Dune or whatever all the others are called, I feel like I now have a really good understanding of this world, its characters, its unique terminology, and a whole conception of how to give birth to a distinctly considered science fiction franchise.

I'll be back for any and all movies even if I'm not back for any more books, and then I'll at least go into those movies without knowing any spoilers. 

Audient Bollywood: Dil Se

This is the opening film in my 2022 monthly series catching up with a dozen notable Bollywood films from history.

I discovered two things upon coming up with an initial list of candidates for my Bollywood series:

1) I really want to watch films that feature Bollywood dancing prominently;

2) Bollywood movies are f***ing long.

Three different lists I found on the internet produced a list of 61 titles to work from, only one-fifth of which I will actually watch for this series. Do you want to know how many of them run less than two hours?

Three.

Most of the rest don't just barely eclipse the two-hour mark. They shatter it.

Because my appetite for extremely long movies is low, especially after watching more than 40 movies longer than two hours in 2021, I will indeed use the running time as some factor in paring down this list. I've actually included the running time as a note in my Letterboxd list to help guide my choices as I go. I'll be able to watch some longer ones as time permits, but this way I'll be able to tell at a glance which ones run between 120 and 130 minutes, for most of the months when I'm just not up for it.

However, the other guiding principle will be the third list, which was someone's breakdown of the ten best Bollywood dancing scenes of all time. 

Whether this person has any authority, and whether I should have consulted ten other similar lists, I'm not sure. In fact, I don't even remember where I got the list (though I believe it was a legitimate publication). But since I already had five times as many movies as I needed, I decided just to trust the one.

The movie that caught my attention from that list was Dil Se, a 1998 film directed by Mani Ratnam. The title is actually written as Dil Se.. on Letterboxd, with a confusing two-thirds of an ellipses after the title, but that doesn't compute in my English brain so I'm just excluding it. The title translates as "From the heart."

The reason it caught my attention was that the list maker trumpeted it as the movie where Indian star Shah Rukh Khan dances on top of a train. Now that I wanted to see.

It was two hours and 45 minutes, but I decided it was better to get myself off on the right foot with this series in terms of content than to prioritize brevity right from the start.

The other thing that appealed to me about Dil Se was that it wasn't from the last ten years. A surprisingly large number of the films that came up on lists of top Bollywood films were really recent films, either because Bollywood is having a peak period or just because internet list writers tend to be younger people weaned on more recent movies. While I had no interest in going in chronological order in this series, I thought it was at least good to start with something that legitimately stakes a claim to being a classic by being nearly a quarter of a century old. 

Well, all my decisions were right.

In addition to being a huge amount of fun on its own, Dil Se also held some good crossover appeal for me. I noted in the credits that A.R. Rahman, who has worked several times with Danny Boyle, does the music for this film, and also that it was produced by Shekhar Kapur, in the same year that he directed Elizabeth. 

The opening scene features Khan's character, radio journalist Amar Varma, at the very start of a very aggressive campaign of stalking a woman he meets on a rainy night in a country train station. The movie characterizes his actions as romantic, of course, but she should be filing restraining orders left and right against this guy, given the way she turns him down in no uncertain terms. She's Meghna and is played by Manisha Koirala. They part ways, without her giving more than the most minimal encouragement to him, but he's determined and manages to find her multiple more times on the streets of Delhi -- something I imagine is pretty difficult, but hey, these are the movies.

Although the first scene is not badly shot or anything, and it does accentuate Khan's charms as an actor, it didn't leave me particularly hopeful about the next two hours and 35 minutes.

But then the train dance scene kicked in.

My first Bollywood dancing scene confirmed what I hoped and assumed would be the case in these movies, that the dance scenes pop in pretty randomly, like musical numbers in American musicals. They don't proceed organically from the action but essentially are like music videos inserted into the action. And boy did this one deliver.

It's not just Khan, but a whole troupe of dancers, who do about an eight-minute number on top of the train cars of this train traveling through the countryside. The train is going slowly and the danger does not seem to be particularly high, but it's not the possible danger that makes this scene so enchanting. It's the marriage of Bollywood traditions with a sort of technical derring do that characterizes the most ambitious films. 

And it's joyous as hell, with one of Rahman's most infectious songs, "Chaiyya Chaiyya." I thought I knew this song from before the film, and Wikipedia says it was used in the opening and closing credits of Inside Man, so that must be it. 

I was tapping my toe and barely containing an instinct to get up and start dancing myself. Even though I was alone in my living room, that would have been pretty silly.

None of the remaining five or six dance numbers worked as well as this one, but each got my toe tapping and kind of brought me back into it if my interest was flagging a bit, or if I was starting to succumb to exhaustion. Loss of interest wasn't really a problem, though, as the story does move forward decently and I found all the actors appealing. If you remove the dance numbers it's just a regularly paced two-hour movie, so I suppose that in itself is the explanation for these films' long running times.

I knew coming in that I didn't care what the story would be, and I had almost hoped for less of a story if it allowed more dance numbers. As it turns out, the two are not mutually exclusive. Dil Se shows us you can have a movie about a man who doggedly pursues his love interest without realizing she is part of a terrorist group planning to bomb a parade in celebration of 50 years of Indian independence from the British empire (!!!!) without that a) being ridiculous, or b) detracting at all from the film's tendency to express itself via song and dance. It was a really hopeful thing to learn about Bollywood films. 

Another good discovery was that these are films first and foremost, utilizing clever techniques to tell stories. A half-dozen times I was tickled by a particular storytelling choice. One example was when Amar is telling the story of his meeting of the woman at the country train station to his radio listeners, getting into it and providing sound effects. As he's simulating the sound of the wind, the camera takes him out of focus as he rears his head back from the microphone, then brings it back into focus as he cups his hands and dives back in to make his blowing sound. I might not be describing it well.

I could probably continue to describe things the movie does well, and offer you other little strands of the plot, but you're probably not going to rush out and rent Dil Se anyway -- and if you do, maybe you'd prefer these surprises be kept. (I already blew the surprise that she's a terrorist, which doesn't get revealed until halfway through.)

Okay, this first viewing really gives me encouragement for February. I may keep the vibe going with another movie from the top ten Bollywood dance list, or go back into history to examine early Bollywood, or go with one of the countless more recent films now that I've started with something from last century, or maybe even watch a film actually directed by Shekhar Kapur.

The possibilities are endless, and that's a good feeling to have when you first start a new viewing series. 

That's not how batting cages work

A younger friend here in Australia recommended I watch Big Time Adolescence, explaining that it was a point-by-point retelling of our friendship. This was a joke of course. We have a bigger age difference than the characters in the movie, who are only seven years apart, but those being the crucial seven years of age 16 to age 23. I think I'm more like 13 years older than this guy, but wet met as adults when I was 41 and he was probably 28, though I must say I don't know his exact age.

The bad influence could be said to go both ways. He gets me to stay out later than I should and I get him involved in useless movie projects.

I don't have a big takeaway about Big Time Adolescence -- it was very enjoyable until a somewhat flat ending -- but I do have a small thing about it I want to nitpick.

The characters in this movie go to the batting cages, but they don't work like any batting cages I've ever seen.

Anyone who has gone to the batting cages knows that you put in your money, step up to the plate, and get something like 30 pitches, either until the balls run out or the timer runs out. The place I go here in Victoria, with a different friend who plays on my baseball team, has a system where you pay for a full block of time, and press a start or stop button when you want a break, to switch batters or to replenish the balls.

When the machine is pitching, it pitches you another ball maybe every five seconds. Which gives you long enough to recover from your previous swing and reload for your next, but not so long that you start to get bored between pitches.

I don't know what the director of Big Time Adolescence was thinking, but the batting cages in this movie worked nothing like that.

So one of the recurring jokes in this movie is that the 16-year-old played by Griffin Gluck is really terrible at baseball, and his older friend (Pete Davidson), who is his older sister's ex-boyfriend, tries to give him pointers on how to fix his swing. They're bad pointers because one of the points of this movie is how all of Zeke's advice to Mo is bad. (Incidentally, I'll throw this in here -- this makes two 2020 movies, with The King of Staten Island, that involve Davidson's character's relationship to baseball and his giving or receiving of tattoos.)

When the two are at the batting cages with a couple other of Zeke's friends, though, the pitching machine pitches a single pitch, then maybe another a minute later, or none at all -- though the hitters keep standing at the plate in their crouch, expecting the next pitch to come.

Maybe director Jason Orley couldn't figure out how to stage or properly direct a scene in which there were also baseballs entering the shot every five seconds. Maybe he should have watched When Harry Met Sally.

Although a trip to the batting cages has been featured in numerous films -- like the squash court, it's a trope that has allowed male characters to have intimate conversations -- the one I always think of is the trip to the cages taken by Harry (Billy Crystal) and Jess (Bruno Kirby) in When Harry Met Sally. You remember the one. It ends with a dumbfounded Kirby asking Crystal, "You made a woman meow?"

The thing I always remember about this, for some reason, is that the balls keep coming in behind both characters even though they have stopped swinging to speak to each other. Because of course. Because THAT'S HOW PITCHING MACHINES WORK.

The fact that Orley didn't notice or didn't care that his pitching machines weren't working that way gets at one of the reasons I can't recommend this movie more highly. It has some smart observations and Davidson has some really hilarious line deliveries -- like when the guy who is tattooing him asks how his name is spelled, and Zeke says it doesn't matter -- but there's a certain disconnect that prevents it from more fully resonating, accentuated by that flat ending. I still give it a positive rating overall, but three stars out of five is a good measure of my hesitation.

I was sure it would be a bigger hit with me, so to speak, especially since the other 2020 movie featuring Davidson as a stunted manchild was my #2 of that year.

If I convert the three out of five to a batting average, though, it's still .600, just not the 1.000 that The King of Staten Island was.

Maybe realistic batting cages would have gotten it that much closer to perfection.

A very Australian Australia Day - or was it?

Australia Day, which occurs every January 26th, is kind of a cross between Independence Day and Columbus Day. In timing, it's a middle of the summer thing, like Independence Day, and it purportedly celebrates Australian pride, like Independence Day celebrates American pride. But like Columbus Day, it symbolizes the future downfall of the country's native population due to the arrival of Europeans. The day honors the 1791 arrival of the First Fleet, which brought the first European settlers to Australia.

Among indigenous Australians it is often referred to as Invasion Day, and as such, progressive-thinking Australians cannot celebrate it unproblematically. Suffice it to say that while flying Australian flags on January 26th may have once been commonplace among Australians of all political stripes, nowadays it definitely indicates your right-wing tendencies. The most progressive may attend protests on the 26th of January; a couple years back, we attended a concert of Aboriginal musicians, which we considered to be progressive enough while also involving two young children. (The repeated use of f-bombs by the final artist, rapper Briggs, did make us laugh about the actual appropriateness of this as an activity for children. When at one point he said to put those little motherfuckers up on our shoulders -- meaning he was certainly aware there were children in the audience -- one of my kids asked why he would refer to children that way. It was funny.)

Still, regardless of what you think of it, it's a day off from work, so there can't help but be a bit of a festive air to it.

We had a pretty stereotypical Australia Day in a number of ways yesterday. Namely:

1) We went to the beach. The water was gorgeous. It was almost hot in some places.

2) We made cheeseburgers on the BBQ for dinner. Shrimp might have been more Australian, at least in terms of how the stereotypes go, but my wife doesn't like shrimp.

3) We watched a couple sets of the Australian Open. My older son surely would have watched more but I made him go to bed in the middle of the third set at just after 10 o'clock.

But I wouldn't be talking about it on a movie blog if not for

4) I watched the Australian movie I was most ashamed I have yet to see.

Now that I'm reading about it on Wikipedia, I can see that Nicolas Roeg's 1971 film Walkabout actually prompted an argument among critics at the time about whether it should be considered Australian. That it takes place in Australia is obvious, but the director and the two white stars are British -- the boy even being the director's son, Luc. The girl, Jenny Agutter, would go on to appear in Logan's Run and other films.

Whether the film deserves its place among the canon of "Australia's greatest films of all time" -- as in, films made primarily by Australians -- it certainly does make for an appropriate sort of Australia Day viewing, if you are looking askance at that holiday.

The story involves two Sydney children who get lost in the outback after their father commits suicide and burns their car, after first trying to kill them. What a way into the story. Led by the 17-year-old girl (the boy seems to be about eight), they try to walk home, without any real idea where they're going. After finding an oasis that sustains them for about a day before the water dries up, they are rescued by an indigenous boy, who continues their "walkabout" of the title -- killing the animals they require to survive and keeping them alive, without being able to communicate with them verbally.

One of the other things that drew me to watching Walkabout on Australia Day was it being the first role for indigenous actor David Gulpilil, who died last year. I also watched a documentary on his life last year. I was actually thinking I'd watch his final starring role, Charlie's Country from 2015, rather than his first, but I couldn't find it available on my streaming services (after borrowing it from the library in December and having to return it unwatched, due to the holidays and moving). When that wasn't available I found Walkabout on the second service (Amazon) I tried.

Interestingly, he was credited as David Gumpilil here. I'm not sure if that was an error on the part of the filmmakers or has to do with indigenous naming customs, which have to do with honoring the dead but which I don't understand fully. (After Gulpilil died, for example, his family asked that he be referred to as David Dalaithngu, but only for the first three days after his death.)

Without completely detailing what happens in this story -- such as it is -- I will say there are a lot of images of a spoiled Eden and intimations about the ways white settlers destroyed a more pure version of Australia. Because this is Roeg and he has always let his imagery rather than his words do the talking, this doesn't hit you over the head, though it's also impossible to watch the film without getting the point. There are a number of scenes of animals being killed, for example, and though it is Gulpilil's character who kills most of them, he does so humanely, with his spear, for food. The white hunters we briefly see shoot them for sport. Big difference.

Indeed the film is incredible to look at, hallucinogenic in parts, and it manages to be a film both recommended for viewings by children (it makes lists of films children should see before they turn 14) and one with intense imagery and subject matter (a father trying to shoot his own children before killing himself? Jenny Agutter appearing nude multiple times at age 17?). Although I did really like it, something about its conclusion left me a little hollow, though it's certainly compatible with the themes of the loss of innocence experienced by a people and a country.

I suppose it has a small amount of additional resonance to me as Roeg was, like me, not an Australian but trying passionately to interpret Australia as an outsider. If I one day could produce the writing equivalent of Walkabout, that would be cool, but I'll probably just continue watching an intelligently made and critical film about Australia each January 26th. This was only the second time I've watched a film set in Australia on January 26th after Phar Lap in 2014 -- a far more traditional Australian-made film about white people -- but I'll hope to keep the new tradition going from here, with an eye toward films that consider and properly honor the true owners of this land.

Dune vs. The Book of Boba Fett

Yesterday I finally got caught up on two "books," making it the perfect time to write a comparison of them.

The first was an actual book, Dune, which I had started reading back in October in the hope of completing it before seeing the film, which didn't release here until early December. It was always an ambitious project, especially given that I was moving, but I learned that the early December deadline also didn't matter because the movie was only going to be the first half of the novel. I reached the point I needed to reach before seeing the movie, but then I slackened my pace and only finally finished yesterday.

The second book is The Book of Boba Fett, whose most recent episode we watched last night, leading us to be fully caught up on the show for the first time.

Mild spoilers to follow. 

It was a couple episodes ago when I noticed the similarities between Dune and The Book of Boba Fett -- the latter taking inspiration from the former of course -- and they've only become more comical since then. Note: Yes, I am aware that I am probably the eleventy hundredth person to notice these similarities and write about them on the internet, but I haven't read any of those other comparisons so maybe you haven't either.

Let's go:

Both take place on a desert planet.

Both feature a hero left for dead and presumed dead among the harshest elements of that planet.

Both heroes are directly threatened by a large desert creature whose gaping mouth full of endless sharp teeth is its primary defining feature.

Both heroes originated off world. 

Both heroes are saved by a band of natives who wear robes or other coverings that almost completely obscure them while protecting them from the harsh desert atmosphere.

Both heroes are initially the prisoners of these natives before proving their ability to bring value to the tribe.

Both heroes blend fully into the cultural customs and fighting ways of the local tribe.

Both heroes assist the natives in fighting the threat of far-worse off-world invaders than themselves. 

Both heroes must ultimately return to some version of their previous station and to become local leaders on the planet.

In both, there is spice.

I think it was the last that really made me laugh. Could Jon Favreau and Robert Rodriguez really introduce the discussion of spice into The Book of Boba Fett without making their theft of Frank Herbert's original material completely clear?

Given that this series is all about paying homage to earlier Star Wars anyway, maybe they didn't care -- maybe they even wanted it to be obvious. The Book of Boba Fett is the ultimate example of the way the same ideas cascade down through the years and are in knowing conversation with one another. 

This show is full of Easter Eggs for the original Star Wars and Return of the Jedi in particular, and we've already gotten some Attack of the Clones as well. But it's now clear to me after consuming three versions of Dune -- the first of which, David Lynch's version, I intend to watch again now that I understand the story better -- that George Lucas had to have had Dune in his head when he originally conceived of Tatooine, the planet where Luke Skywalker was raised, and where an inordinate amount of the Disney TV shows have taken place. (With more to come, of course, as there is an Obi-Wan Kenobi show coming up.)

But you know what? Frank Herbert didn't start this either.

In listening to a pair of podcasts on The Next Picture Show that were released at the same time Denis Villeneuve's film was released, I learned that Herbert had a film in his own head -- Lawrence of Arabia -- when he was writing Dune. So ultimately, all of these stories go back to real historical events involving real British officer T.E. Lawrence, who presumably did not base his own life experiences on anything else.

It's just that when two such similar entertainment properties come on our radar within two months of each other -- and even less time here in Australia -- you can't help noticing their similarities and commenting on them.

Does this diminish either of them, though?

Nah, just good fun in both cases, and satisfying viewing. And I'm a bit surprised to find The Book of Boba Fett so satisfying. From the little preview of it that closed the last season of The Mandalorian, I thought the show looked like it would be humorless and a bit of a slog. Not that Mando has a huge amount of charisma, but I figured Boba Fett would have significantly less, and also be significantly less redeemable.

As it turns out, Temuera Morrison is really easy to like, the show has been conscious of needing to be fun and even sometimes needing to be silly, and overall, I find it in the same vicinity of enjoyment as The Mandalorian. 

I guess Disney's stewardship of Star Wars really can do no wrong, especially when it takes inspiration from one of the most classic tales in sci-fi history.

Encant-whoa

I thought of Encanto as a perfect Christmas Day viewing. It had only become available on Disney+ a few days before that, and it fits that "know it when you see it" type film that's a holiday film without being about the holidays. It's big and warm and something the whole family can watch together.

Well, that didn't work out. The kids saw it with their aunt in the theater the weekend before Christmas, when my wife and I needed that Saturday to do serious packing at our old house. Although the younger one made it clear he was eager to watch it again, the older one has lately been proclaiming that he doesn't like to watch movies more than once. 

The bigger issue, though, was that my wife saw it as an even more special viewing than I did, not to be watched merely at home on Disney+. She wanted to go to the theater with my younger one to see it -- a trip I knew would never happen, given how the movie became scarce in cinemas the moment it debuted on Disney+.

By the time we actually did see it, two Fridays ago, I felt like I'd missed the boat. I don't know if I'd have liked Encanto better either in the cinema or watching it on Christmas, but on Friday night, January 14th, it really went in one ear and out the other. A pleasant viewing experience to be sure, but something I didn't feel inclined to think about again the moment it was over.

Until I came to grips with just what a phenomenon this movie actually is.

The first thing that caught me by surprise was when my son had his best friend to visit us in our new house. After the end of the playdate I took them both back on the 30-minute drive to our old neighborhood to drop him off. In the car, they were both singing the lyrics to the song "We Don't Talk About Bruno," as though they'd bought the soundtrack and listened to it on repeat. I mean, that's how we would have learned a song from a movie in the old days. They must have learned it watching the song on YouTube, or possibly multiple viewings of the movie, though I could only vouch for my son's two.

My son didn't know all the lyrics, as he actually couldn't get a lot further than this one particular part about the wedding day. But I was measuring its effect on him not by his success learning the lyrics but by the strength of his enthusiasm. That the knowledge and enthusiasm were mirrored by his friend -- whom he hadn't seen once since his first viewing of Encanto -- suggested to me that this Encanto phenomenon was a thing that was "sweeping the nation," as the saying used to be.

Don't get me wrong, I'm really glad these two white kids are gravitating toward a movie about brown people. That's really good.

But me personally, I don't get it. I thought Encanto was animated well, has some genuine magic, and certainly has some catchy songs -- I have to admit "We Don't Talk About Bruno" is a bit of an ear worm. But some kind of new classic? Hardly. 

I can't decide what it is that prevents me from connecting with the movie. Maybe it's that it doesn't go outside of this one small town where the action takes place. Maybe I don't find the characters very interesting. Maybe I've seen one too many movies lately with a character named "Abuela."

Everyone else? They seem to think of this movie the way I think of Tangled.

As one example: "We Don't Talk About Bruno" is near the top of the pop charts. That's unusual for a song from a movie, especially a song that's sung by the cast as a kind of diegetic music, not the non-diegetic songs that have been breakouts after their inclusion in other movies (see: "My Heart Will Go On" from Titanic, "Secret Garden" from Jerry Maguire). 

Anyway, Wikipedia says it has the highest peak on the U.S. pop charts (#2) of any Disney song from the 21st century. It's a catchy song but I never would have guessed it would break out like this. I guess Lin-Manuel Miranda tips the scales a bit.

But it's not just the music that seems to have resonated with my son, his friend, and countless others out there. Earlier today my son was watching some YouTube video where the YouTuber was doing a deep dive into the characters and their motivations, like this was some really rich text whose finer points needed to be parsed and analyzed.

Really? Encanto?

I have Disney+, so maybe I need to watch it again when it isn't three days before I'm closing my list from the previous year and I'm not completely film-exhausted. That can't entirely account for it, though -- a movie I saw two days before that (Drive My Car) and one I watched the day after (The Tragedy of Macbeth) both made my top ten. So it wasn't just movie fatigue that caused Encanto to make no impression on me. My top ten was still vulnerable and still changing. 

Maybe I just need to look back to my earlier reference to Tangled to explore this better. Maybe there is only room in our hearts for one new Disney classic. Maybe if you love Tangled -- or Frozen or Moana -- you don't get the hype about Encanto. Me, I don't get the hype about those other films, and Encanto is just the most recent -- making it more of the latest example of a trend, not a strange phenomenon unto itself.

I've gone back to watch Moana and I still don't like it much better. I think I only saw Frozen that one time. I like both films, but it's never going to be more than that.

The difference with Encanto is that I do see the bones for loving it, I just haven't gotten there yet. 

Maybe after my son's current obsession dies down a bit, we can talk about Bruno again a couple months from now and I'll finally see the light. 

My 2007 film rankings (in 2007)

No time like the present to get started on a thing like this, right?

I said in yesterday's post, in which I announced a year-long celebration of the 25th anniversary of deciding to rank my films each year, that I wanted to post my rankings from before this blog came online, as an additional means of keeping them safe from the caprices of fate.

I've got 12 to post, so might as well get going. 

Ha! I just noticed I can do one per month.

I decided to go chronologically backwards rather than chronologically forwards, for no good reason. I was sort of inspired by Filmspotting, the podcast I have listened to the longest, who made it a recurring feature to go back and consider their top five films from the years before they started the podcast, since they discussed all their new favorites of each year on the podcast (as I do here on my blog). They decided to start with the first year before they started and go backwards, so I'm doing the same.

(Technically speaking, these are my 2007 film rankings in early 2008, not 2007, but I thought that made it too confusing for anyone who looked at the title of this post at a glance.)

As a reminder, the idea behind this post will be to post the rankings as they were that year, for posterity and for your consideration, then show the films in the order they are currently ranked on my Flickchart, which is implicitly an accurate representation of what I think of them today. Following that will be a little analysis. 

There's no direct correlation between which lists I'm posting each month and which couple #1 movies I'm watching that month. As I said in yesterday's post, I intend to rewatch those #1s in random order, based on my moods, leading up to the year-end ranking of all 26. These lists will appear in reverse chronological order. Some month, the two will probably accidentally overlap.

And yes, I realize this is a pretty deep trip up my own asshole. Hey, your reading time is yours to do with as you see fit. Who am I to argue if you choose to spend it here?

Here are my 2007 film rankings as determined on the date these rankings were closed: January 22, 2008.

1. There Will Be Blood
2. Once
3. Juno
4. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
5. The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters
6. Sicko
7. Away From Her
8. Into the Wild
9. Alpha Dog
10. I Am Legend
11. Atonement
12. Noise
13. Margot at the Wedding
14. La Vie en Rose
15. Bee Movie
16. Beowulf
17. Knocked Up
18. Surf's Up
19. The Living Wake
20. Charlie Wilson's War
21. The Golden Compass
22. Bug
23. The Host
24. Paprika
25. Ratatouille
26. I'm Not There
27. The Savages
28. Persepolis
29. Zodiac
30. Grace is Gone
31. Stardust
32. Grindhouse
33. Music and Lyrics
34. The Ex
35. Next
36. The Simpsons Movie
37. Balls of Fury
38. Michael Clayton
39. 3:10 to Yuma
40. Hot Fuzz
41. Black Snake Moan
42. Transformers
43. A Mighty Heart
44. Superbad
45. The Jane Austen Book Club
46. 28 Weeks Later
47. Waitress
48. Awake
49. No Country for Old Men
50. Sunshine
51. 300
52. The Namesake
53. The Invisible
54.  Lars and the Real Girl
55.  Live Free or Die Hard
56.  Resident Evil: Extinction
57.  Breach
58. Disturbia
59. Arthur and the Invisibles
60. Arctic Tale
61. Premonition
62. Miss Navajo
63. Ghost Rider
64. The Number 23
65. Meet the Robinsons
66. Happily N’Ever After
67. Smokin’ Aces
68. Day Watch
69. Paris Je T’aime
70. Eagle vs. Shark
71. The Nanny Diaries
72. Southland Tales
73. American Gangster
74. Fracture
75. The Darjeeling Limited
76. 30 Days of Night
77. The Heartbreak Kid
78. Death Sentence
79. Shooter
80. Civic Duty
81. Epic Movie
82. Captivity

Only 82 movies! What a rookie I was back then. It's more than double that now.

And here's the order those movies respectively chart today on my Flickchart, with their overall ranking and percentage in parenthesis, as well as how they have moved up or down within the 82. Numerical ranking is out of 5763 movies on my chart.

1. There Will Be Blood (57, 99%) 0
2. Once (76, 99%) 0
3. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (102, 98%) +1
4. The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters (168, 97%) +1
5. Away From Her (343, 94%) +2
6. Juno (351, 94%) -3
7. Into the Wild (370, 94%) +1  
8. Atonement (371, 94%) +3
9. Beowulf (514, 91%) +7
10. Alpha Dog (646, 89%) -1
11. Sicko (732, 87%) -5
12. The Living Wake (741, 87%) +7
13. I Am Legend (751, 87%) - 3
14. La Vie en Rose (869, 85%) 0
15. Bug (877, 85%) +7
16. Margot at the Wedding (886, 85%) -3
17. The Golden Compass (902, 84%) +4
18. Charlie Wilson's War (972, 83%) +2
19. Surf's Up (1007, 83%) -1
20. Bee Movie (1079, 81%) -5
21. Zodiac (1120, 81%) +8
22. I'm Not There (1132, 80%) +4
23. Ratatouille (1149, 80%) +2
24. Noise (1196, 79%) -12
25. The Simpsons Movie (1310, 77%) +11
26. Grindhouse (1330, 77%) +6
27. Knocked Up (1476, 74%) -10
28. The Host (1675, 71%) -5
29. Black Snake Moan (1703, 70%) +12
30. Balls of Fury (1735, 70%) +7
31. Music and Lyrics (1817, 68%) +2
32. The Savages (2029, 65%) -5
33. Paprika (2031, 65%) -9
34. The Ex (2188, 62%) 0
35. The Jane Austin Book Club (2228, 61%) +10
36. Stardust (2258, 61%) -5
37. Hot Fuzz (2475, 57%) +3
38. Persepolis (2556, 56%) -10
39. Grace is Gone (2705, 53%) -9
40. No Country for Old Men (2776, 52%) +9
41. Michael Clayton (2783, 52%) -3
42. American Gangster (2849, 51%) +31
43. The Invisible (2857, 50%) +10
44. Transformers (2912, 49%) -2
45. A Mighty Heart (3009, 48%) -2
46. Next (3129, 46%) -11
47. Superbad (3329, 42%) -3
48. 300 (3406, 41%) +3
49. Resident Evil: Extinction (3437, 40%) +7
50. 3:10 to Yuma (3464, 40%) -11
51. Sunshine (3808, 34%) -1
52. Waitress (3909, 32%) -5
53. Premonition (3926, 32%) +8
54. Miss Navajo (4023, 30%) +8
55. Awake (4033, 30%) -7
56. Arthur and the Invisibles (4098, 29%) +3
57. 28 Weeks Later (4111, 29%) -11
58. Ghost Rider (4156, 28%) +5
59. Lars and the Real Girl (4222, 27%) -5
60. Meet the Robinsons (4274, 26%) +5
61. Disturbia (4306, 25%) -3
62. Arctic Tale (4419, 23%) -2
63. The Namesake (4494, 22%) -11
64. Day Watch (4623, 20%) +4
65. Paris Je T'aime (4639, 20%) +4
66. Breach (4644, 19%) -9
67. Happily N'Ever After (4650, 19%) -1
68. Smokin' Aces (4696, 19%) -1
69. Live Free or Die Hard (4745, 18%) -14
70. The Number 23 (4772, 17%) -6
71. Eagle vs. Shark (4922, 15%) -1
72. Southland Tales (4964, 14%) 0
73. The Darjeeling Limited (5031, 13%) +2
74. Fracture (5168, 10%) 0
75. Death Sentence (5207, 10%) +3
76. The Heartbreak Kid (5495, 5%) +1
77. The Nanny Diaries (5580, 3%) -6
78. Shooter (5609, 3%) +1
79. 30 Days of Night (5613, 3%) -3
80. Civic Duty (5640, 2%) 0
81. Captivity (5699, 1%) +1
82. Epic Movie (5721, 1%) -1

Now that I've typed all that out, it seems like a lot of work, and I may have to reconsider the utility of it going forward. Then again, the earlier the years get, the fewer titles I'll have -- I believe there were fewer than 40 in that first year. So I guess I'll kick the can down the road on that particular decision.

Five best 2007 movies I've seen since closing the list (alphabetical): The Lookout, My Kid Could Paint That, Shotgun Stories, Timecrimes, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story
Five worst 2007 movies I've seen since closing the list (alphabetical): Dan in Real Life, Rocket Science, Run Fat Boy Run, Smiley Face, Stephen King's The Mist
Biggest risers: American Gangster (+31), Black Snake Moan (+12), The Simpsons Movie (+11)
Biggest fallers: Live Free or Die Hard (-14), Noise (-12), The Namesake/Next/3:10 to Yuma/28 Weeks Later (-11)
Average percentage on Flickchart: 51.09% (1 of 1 so far)

I actually have this blog to thank for the big rise in American Ganster's position. It was a 2010 rewatch of the movie for my series Second Chance Vance (discussed at length here) that allowed me to reevaluate the film and go from thumbs down to thumbs up. (Incidentally, it's as funny to look back on those early days of the blog as it is to look at these early movie lists.)

Among fallers, I believe I would still love Matthew Saville's Noise. However, I do know him -- saw his film at Sundance on a trip planned specifically to see it -- so it may just be that my initial ranking was a little inflated because I was too close to it, and it has settled from #13 to a more realistic #24 over the years. 

I am curious to figure out what I found and apparently continue to find so disagreeable about The Nanny Diairies, not a great film if I remember correctly (obviously), but surely innocuous enough, and an early Scarlett Johannson vehicle. It's not like we didn't know what she was capable of back then, as this was four years after Lost in Translation (another #1 of mine). I don't think I'm curious enough to actually watch it again, though. Maybe it just needs to come up in some more favorable duels on Flickchart.

Okay, one rankings committed to the permanence of the internet, 11 to go. 

My 25th anniversary ranking of #1s

This is not a post about 2021 movies. I promise.

It occurred to me that this January marks the 25th anniversary of the first time I ever ranked my movies from first to worst. Because of the way these things work, I just named my 26th #1 film, since I chose a #1 in January of 1997 and in January of 2022, bookending that 25-year period. (It might have even been February back then because the Oscar nominations dropped a little later in those days.) But it's 25 years, and I didn't think to mark the 25th #1 last year, so I'll have to acknowledge the anniversary rather than the milestone. Besides, I didn't decide at the start of 1996 to rank my movies that year -- I decided at the end of it. So the whole thing really did start 25, rather than 26, years ago. 

I still remember quite clearly my apartment in Providence, Rhode Island, working on that first list, which I may have actually written down on a piece of paper before ultimately committing it to permanence via Microsoft Word. I obviously didn't have my current methodology on that first time through, where I steadily add movies as I go and assign them a comparative worth, so I am building the list all year rather than right at the end. No, that first one was a matter of sitting down with a list of movies and choosing their order right then and there. I think my current system allows for better accuracy, but there was something thrilling about that initial approach.

I've moved eight times since I lived in that Providence apartment, but the lists have always come with me, safe and sound on Word documents I have regularly saved and backed up and never lost in some sort of calamity. And of course the desire to keep making the lists has also traveled with me, as intact as it was that first year -- or should I say, even more intact, as the obsession has only grown over a quarter century.

So let's honor that obsession with something obsessive.

Last night I watched my #1 of 2017, A Ghost Story, which I had mentioned in a post two days ago as an example of something I was discussing. Invoking its name got the movie in my head, as did noting Casey Affleck's entry into the two-timers club of people who have been in two of my #1 movies, a feat he accomplished this year with Our Friend. The reasons A Ghost Story came up twice in three days on my blog had nothing to do with each other, except that both times it was because it had topped one of my year-end lists. So now that I'm no longer watching 2021 movies and am free to watch whatever I like, I had to scratch that itch.

As I was going to bed afterward, I thought, "What if I rewatch all 26 of my #1s in 2022?"

At first I laughed at myself for such a suggestion. I recently got done telling you that I was only doing one bi-monthly series this year, instead of the intertwining ones I did last year, so that I had six fewer viewing commitments over the course of the whole year. So now I want to add another 25?

It's 24 actually, because I already started a couple weeks ago without realizing it. I watched Our Friend for a second time on January 10th to confirm it should be my #1 of 2021. That counts I think.

And there's something really good about that number of 26 as it relates to a calendar year. To watch 26 movies in 52 weeks just means you have to watch one every two weeks. I'm already 1/13th of the way there.

I won't commit myself to watching them at those intervals, though I'll try. If I get behind it will be easy enough to catch up later.

What will this lead up to, you ask?

At the end of the year, I will rank these 26th movies from first to "worst," like I do with the movies I watch each year, and post the results here. Think of it like that season of Survivor comprised entirely of past winners, where they competed to see who was the winnerest among them.

Rewatching some of these movies might feel a bit like overkill. Since they are among my favorites from the last 25 years, I do watch them with some regularity anyway. In 2021 alone I watched three of them, those being the two Charlie Kaufman had written (Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) plus a random rewatch of my best of 2018, First Reformed. (Kaufman wrote a third #1, I'm Thinking of Ending Things, but I didn't watch it in 2021 because I had just watched it a second time at the end of 2020, and there weren't enough available viewing slots in my I'm Thinking of Kaufman Things series.) I still think I need to watch those films again to be completist on this project, but I'll push them back closer to the end of the year. 

It's been longer for most of the others -- a lot longer in some cases, as you will see in a minute -- but I rewatched all my #1s from 2010 to 2019 in the year 2019 so as to consider them for the best of the decade. So those are comparatively fresh too. Still, I think it makes sense to rewatch all of those again as well, to make my impression fresher. Three years is plenty long between viewings of favorite films that it should not seem like a chore to watch them again, even if they are long like Toni Erdmann. 

This also gives me an excuse to finally do something I should have done ages ago: Rewatch the first #1 I ever selected, which is also my only #1 movie I have seen only once.

That's right, given that it was the movie that kicked off this whole thing, you'd think I'd have been eager to go back and reconfirm the greatness of Al Pacino's Looking for Richard, my #1 of 1996. I can probably thank my enthusiasm for this movie for starting the list project in the first place, and yet I've never gone back to see if my 23-year-old brain was making good cinematic choices. This despite the fact that I've owned the movie on DVD for most of the past decade after buying it from a video rental place that was going out of business.

That will likely be one of the first I rectify, but chronological order is obviously not important to me, as I've already ticked 2021 and 2017 off my list. That might have been an interesting way to go about it and it certainly speaks to the organizational part of my brain. But if I'm going to add 24 more viewings to my 2022, the least I can do is catch them as catch can. Watching them in random order seems to be a good way to randomize their impact on me as well, and even the playing field when they do all duke it out for top honors in December.

I'll probably use the same system I used to determine my best of the last decade, which is that I'll put all 26 movies in a special Flickchart account and keep dueling them until I'm satisfied with the order. Based on my current Flickchart, which includes some of these movies in my top 20, I have a suspicion about how things will go, but it's also possible that new viewings will help me reconsider my assumptions about their relative worth. I hope so or else it's really not worth doing.

One last thing, and it has to do with the backing up of these lists that has been successful so far, but is always potentially fallible despite my best efforts.

Although I won't write about these new viewings on this blog unless something else about the viewing inspires me to write -- you better bet there will be a specific Looking for Richard post when I get to it -- I do think this might create an opportunity for some blog material, and it has everything to do with committing my lists to permanence.

You can find my rankings from #1 to #whatever dating all the way back to the first list I published after beginning this blog in January of 2009. That one saw The Wrestler claim top honors. But my lists before then? They are still only saved in these Microsoft Word documents.

As having material to write about has proven something of a challenge in recent years, setting aside these prolific times at the end of the year/start of the year, I think I will periodically post the other lists on this blog, starting with the best of 2007 and going backwards. In this case I think chronological order is warranted. I'll post the list exactly as it was on the day I closed it, and then of course do some analysis, maybe even showing the order in which those movies rank for me today on Flickchart, to see how much has changed.

And then I will have versions of these lists that are safe from every calamity short of the calamity of The Audient itself going offline. 

I don't think you need or could possibly want any more on this topic for today. Just know that I'm off and running on yet another movie project, one that is assured of having a lot of quality viewing in store for me.

Do I hate The Matrix Resurrections as much as J.K. Rowling hates it?

Yesterday I devoted a post to my best film of the year, though that was really a way in to discussing a larger phenomenon.

Today it's the worst, and it also gets into a larger phenomenon. 

When I reviewed The Matrix Resurrections, giving it tied for the lowest rating I gave any film in 2021, I was not thinking of it as a film with trans themes directed by a trans person. This was a precursor to rating it my worst film of 2021 earlier this week. 

Before I had a chance to do that officially, about a week after my review went up, a friend told me he didn't like it either and said "It was just a film entirely about transitioning."

Uh oh, I thought.

His argument was that the shift of power from Neo to Trinity was a mirroring of the director's own decision to transition from man to woman. 

I don't think this friend is a transphobe. He didn't really elaborate on why that specific thing was a detriment to his enjoyment of the film, but if I had to read between the lines, I'd say he thought it was a film about transitioning at the expense of all the other things a Matrix film should be about. In his view, it could have been about transitioning as long as that didn't prevent its director from devoting the energies and resources that make a good Matrix movie a good Matrix movie. 

Which is worse, that he saw and was somehow bothered by a trans theme, or that I didn't see the trans theme at all?

Did my sisgender privilege give me the "luxury" of not seeing a trans theme in The Matrix Resurrections?

There's a sentence I wouldn't have written ten years ago. I wouldn't have even known what "sisgender" meant. But I'm glad I do now because trans rights are human rights, and I'm wiser than I was then.

Still, it's possible someone doesn't see a trans theme in a movie because they are not trained to see -- or because they are trained not to see -- such a theme. They passively dismiss the possibility that something is trans because it's too foreign to them. The possibility of a trans theme never even enters their consciousness in the first place. 

More to the point: Would I have judged the movie less harshly if I did perceive the trans theme?

Either because it would have contributed in some useful way to what the film was doing, or just to come off looking better myself as a critic and human being?

And that gets into this tricky gray area in film criticism where you have to try to control the way you're perceived by your readers. If you're like me, you live in fear of being thought of as racist/sexist/homophobic/transphobic. You know you aren't, but the fear that some careless wording might cause you to be perceived that way is strong -- even as you are taking great pains to avoid such carelessness. It's another situation where a line I love in Glengarry Glen Ross feels really pertinent. Ed Harris' character tells Alan Arkin's character "You know who doesn't get nervous around the police? Criminals." It's the people who are least guilty of something who are the most worried that they might be found guilty -- might actually be guilty.

I'm probably not the least guilty person out there in any sphere, but I sure do worry about this sort of thing. "If I don't rate this movie directed by this person of this race or gender high enough, what will my readers think about me?"

The thing is, The Matrix Resurrections really is shit. Lana Wachowski made a movie in which she takes pleasure in trolling her fans, though I suspect she thinks the object of her trolling is really Warner Brothers. I say, we're all trolled. Equal opportunity trolling.

But first there was my friend who agreed with me about the film, and whose comment was possible to interpret as transphobia, and then, making it worse, I heard the movie discussed on The Slate Spoiler Special, where host Dana Stevens had a trans critic on to discuss it with her. I'm not going to find that critic's name right now, because it's not relevant and I probably don't want to add to the list of terms someone could search to find this post -- if there's any chance they might misinterpret what I'm writing here. (See, there I go again.)

But it was a trans woman, which I could tell from the pairing of the name with a voice she had not made any specific attempt to modify, if her goal had been to better align it with our preconceived notions of her gender identity. Plus she revealed that identity near the end of the podcast, in what she jokingly characterized as a completely unsurprising disclosure of information. 

Anyway, this woman admitted the movie was flawed, but loved it. 

It's that more than anything that makes me wonder if I was too poorly equipped to see the themes in The Matrix Resurrections that she saw.

I think Dana was caught in between a rock and a hard place too. She clearly didn't like the movie very much, but I could tell she was selecting her language in such a way that she made it sound like a "her problem," and tried to over-praise the things she could legitimately say she liked about it.

What I don't know is, does this trans critic love the movie because it's about transitioning, because she thinks it's important to support trans artists in anything they do, or just because she thought it was a good movie?

To her credit, I could not tell from her analysis. She didn't go on excessively about issues of transitioning, and in fact, they might have only gotten a quick mention in passing. So there was no way, from the text of her words, to ascribe to her the same motivations in liking the film that my friend ascribed to Lana Wachowski in making it.

But it might be worse if just being a trans person allows you to appreciate certain trans dog whistles, if you will, that I didn't see/hear, because I was not capable of seeing/hearing them.

Why is this worse? Well I'll try to articulate that.

For starters, there is the goal I try -- fruitlessly, I'm sure -- to achieve in my criticism, which is to suppress the self as much as I can. That is to say, I try to remove my particular subjectivity as a white, heterosexual, 48-year-old American man living in Australia, so I can try, if at all possible, to view the art before me objectively.

Well a) that's the luxury of some white sis hetero privilege right there, but b) it's probably impossible anyway, so I shouldn't blame myself. Trying to pretend that I can see a movie made by Black people through Black eyes is a self-delusion meant to make me feel more comfortable about my place in the sociopolitical landscape. (Bo Burnham is well aware of this essential truth.) I can no more see a Black movie through Black eyes than I can see a trans movie through trans eyes.

The problem, then, is how much do I allow my constitutional deficiency to adjust how I either praise or scorn a movie for a reading audience of indeterminate demographic makeup? If I hate a movie, as I did The Matrix Resurrections, is it my duty to hate it ten percent less because [fill in the blank] person made it, as some kind of offset to compensate for my constitutional deficiency? Does some part of me have to write the review keeping in mind the comparatively small percentage of my reading audience -- and even smaller in the case of potential trans readers -- who might get things from the film that I don't?

The philosophical purists would tell me not to do that, and would applaud me for going with my gut and naming The Matrix Resurrections the worst film of the year despite my reservations about how it could make me look. But then you have neurotics like me who continue to wonder.

Because part of choosing any film as your worst of the year is a statement, right? The movie you say you hated most may not actually be the worst, but something about the manner it disappoints you makes it "worse" than a piece of technical garbage that was made poorly. If we were going for the actual worst film that I saw in 2021 -- like most poorly made -- I might have to choose the low budget film Royal Jelly, a body horror movie in which a woman starts taking on the traits of a bee. 

And yet there are always mitigating factors. Things like this can never be absolute. I actually ranked 16 films lower than Royal Jelly because I was considering those mitigating factors, like the low budget, like a cast with limited professional experience, like the fact that there were some cool ideas, some of which were executed interestingly, even as the vast majority of the film was executed poorly.

Naming a film your worst of the year is really a measure of how much it disappointed you based on your expectations. And I was super disappointed by The Matrix Resurrections. When you add in a sort of bad faith by Wachowski in the cheeky manner in which she skewered The Matrix and the whole idea of reboots -- in addition to how ugly the film looked, how poorly the fight scenes were executed, how uneven the performances were, and how totally lacking it was in mind-blowing concepts -- you've got what was a fairly slam dunk choice for worst of the year. I was never even tempted to drop #169, Sweet Girl, below it.

But the fact remains that someone, somewhere, would/will read my rankings, without reading this post that provides context for them, and will assume my hatred of the movie is a result of my retrograde ignorance about gender identity -- my desire to downvote trans themes or trans artists the way people downvote movies on IMDB whose subject matter and/or creator offends them. 

To make matters worse, I've cheekily chosen a specifically provocative title for this post. J.K. Rowling is perhaps the world's most famous transphobe -- at least among people from whom we would expect better -- but I hope even in her weakened moral state she would not judge The Matrix Resurrections on the grounds of it being trans wish fulfillment. 

In particular because I don't think it is. To say that those themes aren't present on some level would be incorrect, but to say that Lana Wachowski only cares about issues of transitioning is to do her a massive disservice. The best artists are the ones who care about a lot of different elements to and perspectives on the human condition, and stuff all of them into their films. And Wachowski has been a great artist for a long time, dating not only back to The Matrix and the several smaller successes she's had since then, but to Bound, which is currently ranked as my 20th favorite movie all time on Flickchart.

She just needs to make a better movie next time.

The resonance of present day

This is not an official 2021 wrap-up post. Really. I'm moving on.

But I did notice something about my latest #1 that I thought was worth exploring in a blog post, so gosh darn it, I'm going to do it.

Specifically, Our Friend marks my 12th straight #1 movie that takes place in the present day -- or at least, recently enough to be functionally indistinguishable from the present day. 

In reality, the events of this movie take place eight years ago, or nine, now that we've crossed into 2022. There are also some flashbacks within the previous ten years before that. But for all intents and purposes, this movie takes place "now."

Just like my previous 11 #1 films:

I'm Thinking of Ending Things (2020)
Parasite (2019)
First Reformed (2018)
A Ghost Story* (2017)
Toni Erdmann (2016)
Inside Out (2015)
Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014)
Beyond the Hills (2013)
Ruby Sparks (2012)
A Separation (2011)
127 Hours** (2010)

* - there are scenes in both the distant past and distant future, but the jumping off point is "present day"
** - technically a portrayal of events seven years before the film's release, but that hardly seems significant and is about the same length of time ago as Our Friend

You have to go back to 2009, when Duncan Jones' Moon was clearly set in the future, to find a #1 that does not, effectively, take place "now." If you want a movie set in the past, you have to skip over The Wrestler in 2008 to get to There Will Be Blood in 2007.

I don't know if this is actually significant or not.

The largest number of films, overall, probably take place in "present day," as there are whole genres of films where there's rarely a function in setting it in a different time period (such as romantic comedies). Movies set in the past probably outpace movies set in the future to comprise the rest. But I'm still thinking that's only 60 to 65 percent of the movies at most. So it being 100% of my #1s over the past 12 years certainly does seem like a bit of an outlier.

Then if it is significant, I have to determine if it's just a coincidence or if there's something to it.

Theoretically, one might conclude there's something about the now that resonates with me. Broadly speaking, people watch movies to grapple with themes they feel are relevant to their current lives. (Or to laugh, or to be scared, or to watch cars fly in outer space, but you get what I mean.) I might extrapolate from my recent results that I am more touched or intellectually provoked by a movie that is set in the here and now, whose application to my life is crystal clear.

But it's easy to find exceptions, movies that were purposefully set in the past but are clearly in conversation with our current moment. This year a good example is The Last Duel, which was set in the 14th century but feels as of-the-moment as any film released in 2021. While Ridley Scott's film probably did not have a realistic shot at my #1 spot -- it was bested by three films set in the present day -- you can't say the same for Celine Sciamma's Portrait of a Lady on Fire in 2019. That enormously affecting film, set in the 18th century, probably only missed out on being my #1 in a coin flip with Parasite. (Though subsequent viewings have confirmed I still give Parasite the slight edge.)

I think one thing that's true is that a movie set in the present day doesn't have to try as hard to seem relevant to the moment. It can sort of stumble into relevance by being both set and made right now. Whereas there are many movies set in the past that don't speak to the current moment because that's not really what attracted the director to the material. Sometimes a person just wants to make a straightforward western. Ditto future films, though I think films set in the future are more likely to grow out of a present-day hope or anxiety.

I guess one other observation is that a film set in the past or in the future is much more likely to be a genre film of some kind. And films with strong genre connections are not usually the type I award my #1 spot. They can get close -- Creed, Wonder Woman, etc. -- but they are usually stopped at #2, like those films were.

Considering all this, I'm conscious of the fact that I'll start watching certain films knowing they have no realistic hope of being my #1. The time period is probably one of the subconscious factors I'm considering in any snap judgment about the likelihood of a film contending for top honors. But not always. For example, I feel like any film with science fiction elements that are integrated into a high concept -- meaning the film could be set in the future -- does have a shot to be my #1 due to the blown mind factor. It's one of the reasons I was so surprised to have only a middling response to Her back in 2013.

As usual these are just a collection of ruminations without any obvious conclusions. I don't think there could be an obvious conclusion, because I have rarely rewarded two movies that I thought were doing exactly the same thing, or even very similar things. Yeah, both Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and A Ghost Story are about memory and loss and the passage of time -- subjects that demonstrably resonate with me -- but they go about exploring those issues in such different ways that I don't think anyone would even begin to compare them.

Now that I've had this realization, I do wonder whether it will affect how I view candidates for my #1 of any given year -- both before and after I've seen them. Will I try to boost a period piece to the top spot in 2022, to prove myself wrong? Unlikely, and none of these decisions get made without oodles of thought. But it could be a subconscious thing.

If we're going to keep looking back further to when I started ranking movies in 1996, I only have one more movie set in the future (Children of Men) and two more movies set in the past (Gosford Park and Titanic). Interestingly, there are also two movies about Shakespeare in there -- Looking for Richard and the 2000 Hamlet adaptation by Michael Almereyda -- but they each only have a foot in the past, as they are both Shakespeare as viewed through a present-day lens. That might be the most interesting discovery of this whole post.

No other discoveries for now. But it's a good something to chew on. 

2021 in portmanteaus

Want some 2021 movie titles mashed together to make a crazy new movie?

I figured you did! 

The Green Knight in Soho - Sir Gawain sees reflections in the mirror of the 60s pimp who is going to cut off his head in one year. 

Judas and the Black Widow - Bill O'Neal sells out Natasha Romanoff to Dreykov, regrets another ten years' worth of air traffic control issues caused by the Red Room. 

Raya and the Black Messiah - Fred Hampton uses his rousing oratorical skills to unite the kingdoms of Fang, Heart, Spine, Talon and Tail.

Ghostbusters: Afterlife of the Party - A party girl conks her head on the toilet, dies, and finds herself sharing space in a containment unit with Muncher.

Tick, Tick ... DUNE! - Time is running out for Jonathan Larsen to write a musical about Frank Herbert's seminal sci-fi novel, tentatively titled Hark! The Harkonnens or Duncan Idaho and his Merry Fremen. 

The Last Dune - Its box office success ensured that it would not be. 

The Power of Clifford the Big Red Dog - An oversized maroon canine gets groomed by Bronco Henry. 

Encantomorrow War - Mirabel Madrigal discovers her gift is traveling to the future to fight aliens alongside people who aren't born yet and people who have already died. 

There's Someone Inside Your House of Gucci - The leadership structure of a fashion empire crumbles when a serial killer begins killing them -- while wearing a laser-printed mask of Jared Leto's face.

Vivoyeurs - A musical kinkajou spies on the retiring singer who broke his master's heart as she takes photos of people and has sex with them.  

Red Licorice Pizza - Simon Rex offers up his lengthy endowment around the San Fernando Valley of the 1970s, calling it "my tasty ten inches of red licorice." 

Bo Burnham: In the Heights - Bo Burnham decides the best way for a white comic to change the world is to gentrify a neighborhood of primarily Latin American immigrants.

The Finch Dispatch - Having survived the apocalypse, Tom Hanks moves to France and starts a newspaper about his experiences eating fussy cuisine through a hazmat suit.

Dear Evan Shang-Chi - An ancient warrior loses all his powers when he can't fit his ten rings around the cast on his broken arm. 

Candymany Saints of Newark - If you say Dickie Moltisanti's name five times in a row, he bludgeons you to death against the nearest steering wheel.

The Matrix Reminiscence - Remember when this franchise had something interesting to offer the world?

The Matrix Remorse - What Lana Wachowski should be feeling right now. 

Chaos Walking Richard - Richard Williams gains a coaching advantage by telepathically projecting his thoughts to his daughters during their tennis matches.

Space Jam: A New Legend of the Ten Rings - Lebron James sets his sights on six more championships to reach double digits, in a Disney/Warner Brothers crossover that features all the intellectual property in the known universe.

Spider-Man: No Time to Die - Sean Connery, George Lazenby, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig team up to cure Dr. Julius No, Colonel Rosa Klebb, Auric Goldfinger, Emilio Largo, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, Mr. Big, Francisco Scaramanga, Karl Stromberg, Hugo Drax, Aristotle Kristatos, Kamal Khan, Max Zorin, General Georgi Koskov, Franz Sanchez, Alec Trevelyan, Elliot Carver, Viktor Zokas, Gustav Graves, Le Chiffre, Dominic Greene, Raoul Silvia and Lyutsifer Safin of their desire to be villains.

Belfast and Furious 9 - Dom Toretto perishes in a fiery crash after he forgets he's supposed to be drag-racing on the other side of the road.

Passing 2 - Not only do animals try to pass themselves off as professional singers a second time, they try to pass themselves off as different animals than they actually are.

Titannette - Impregnated by a car, Marion Cotillard gives birth to a doll that can sing all the songs on the car's preset radio stations. 

Malcolm and Maud - A woman becomes possessed by the devil after her director husband fails to thank her at his film premiere. 

Venom: Let There Be Card Counters - Oscar Isaac gets backed off the blackjack table after he transforms into a toothy monster and starts eating the other players.