A Madea homecoming

I thought I'd slide this one in under the wire for Black History Month, though I don't know if the conclusions I reach will feel particularly empowering.

You might look at this post and say "You're slipping, Vance. Just using the name of a new movie as the subject matter of your post, in its entirety? You can do better than that."

The more observant of you will notice, though, that this is not what I'm doing. If I were putting a title in the subject of my post, the words would all be capitalized, and there would be italics. 

In this case, the homecoming to Madea in my Sunday night viewing of A Madea Homecoming is a personal one. And I don't even need to italicize the word "Madea" because it is the name of a franchise. I don't italicize casual references to "Batman" and "Star Wars," unless I am talking about 1989's Batman or 1977's Star Wars. With a whopping dozen titles in its extended universe over 17 years, there are now more Madea movies than there are either Batman or Star Wars movies (only just). 

It's a homecoming for me because I used to watch most of these movies. I saw five of the first seven, starting with Diary of a Mad Black Woman in 2005. I saw Madea's Family Reunion and Meet the Browns before missing my first, which was Madea Goes to Jail. I also missed I Can Do Bad All By Myself before I was back on board for the next two, Madea's Big Happy Family and Madea's Witness Protection. Tyler Perry has been a busy man, as there have been a number of films he's directed since 2005 that are only Madea adjacent, some of which I have also seen (The Family That Preys, Temptation: Confessions of a Marriage Counselor and A Fall From Grace, while I've missed such films as Daddy's Little Girls, Why Did I Get Married? and its dubiously titled sequel, Why Did I Get Married Too?). 

I suppose calling them "Madea adjacent" is not fully accurate, since if there were an explicit connection to Perry's drag matriarch, they would be part of the extended universe on Wikipedia. I think of them as Madea adjacent, I suppose, simply because they involve Perry. That's how prominent this character has been for him. 

But I haven't seen any of the Madea movies -- A Madea Christmas, Boo! A Madea Halloween, Boo 2! A Madea Halloween and A Madea Family Funeral -- since I moved to Australia, which is probably not a coincidence. Before these movies started debuting on Netflix -- A Madea Homecoming is the second to do so -- you had to either see them in the theater (something I still don't think I've ever done) or rent them. Suffice it to say that movies that specifically examine the experience of Black people in America, that aren't also critically acclaimed, have only belatedly become available in Australia in any real way. If the latest Madea movie had a theatrical debut, I doubt it would actually play in Australian theaters, even today. For the distributor, I imagine it is a simple cost-benefit analysis, and they've determined that the cost to advertise and distribute Madea movies in Australia is not justified by the historically paltry benefit of expected ticket sales.

But I always wanted to watch these movies, not because I thought a) I'm the target audience for them, or b) I had any real chance to enjoy them as much as Perry hoped I would. In truth, I have enjoyed a number of them, and if I hadn't started out impressed by Diary of a Mad Black Woman -- impressed with reservations, I should note -- then maybe I never would have continued. It's sort of a miracle I did, considering how much I hated Madea's Family Reunion. 

No, I wanted to watch them for the film critic idealism of giving every widely released film an equal opportunity (loaded phrase there) to be reviewed. And also for the attempt to use Roger Ebert's empathy machine -- that's what he called cinema -- to put myself in the perspective of the people who were its target audience. Even if Madea's hijinks are a tad to broad for me personally, I thought I could figure out how to judge them on their own terms, and decide what worked and what didn't work within that specific context. Plus there was also a melodramatic story in each of these that was running parallel to the Madea hijinks, with Diary of a Mad Black Woman in particular establishing that template. Just because I'm calling it melodrama -- even Perry would probably call it melodrama -- doesn't mean I'm undercutting it, as some of that material is quite effective.

I did review a handful of these for AllMovie, where I was writing back in the 2000s, including each of the first three -- though probably none after that, given how I wound down writing for that site in 2011. Mission accomplished I suppose.

Now in 2022, on the last day of Black History Month, I am trying to decide whether I will review A Madea Homecoming.

For one thing there is the whole Australian audience thing I alluded to earlier. I'm pretty sure that my largely hipster audience on ReelGood is not going to care that much, if at all, about the latest Madea movie. It's what the distributors decided ages ago when they decided against an incursion into Australia. It's not these hipsters' fault; they just weren't raised on it. And they rightly identify a lowest common denominator aspect to it that keeps them away, even if they are trying to be more woke. They might read a Madea review as a way to gawk at it and see what I'd say about it, but not because of any actual interest in seeing the movie.

Or maybe they identify the thing that I've identified over the years that make me hesitant to even watch these movies: 

How negative can I be about them before it starts to seem like I'm engaged in a sort of race-based cruelty, or at the very least, like I'm tone deaf and uncharitable?

Aye, there's the rub. Because Perry's Madea movies are made specifically with the least discerning potential audience members in mind -- audience members who are drawn to the broadness and ability to laugh at themselves unselfconsciously -- they rarely make for truly accomplished cinema. Perry randomly throws in a few attempts at creative scene transitions, but they stick out for how indiscriminately they are used, calling attention to the attempt to be something that these movies clearly aren't. 

When you are accustomed to judging something according to relatively high standards for use of the tools of cinema, it's hard to engage with a film that doesn't care about that at all -- especially when it's made by someone demographically different than yourself. 

It's an issue I keep returning to on this blog: how to engage with art made by creators of other genders, races, sexual orientations or gender identities, and say you dislike the work without it seeming like a function of your constitutional inability to relate to it.

If I do review the movie -- and I really need the content this week, which is why I chose to watch it on Sunday -- I know there is no chance I will give it any more than two stars, which translates to 4/10 on ReelGood's rating system. I'll give you a couple reasons why, after a SPOILER warning.

The film opens with one of the broadest sequences I have seen in any of these movies. The recurring character played by David Mann, Mr. Brown, is preparing a BBQ for his son's visit, in celebration of his son being named valedictorian of his class. Madea and her perpetually incorrect brother, Joe (also Perry), are watching these preparations with bemusement. Brown is overwhelming the BBQ with lighter fluid, finishing up one bottle and going on to the next. He goes through about three normal sized lighter fluid bottles this way, then moves on to the sort of gas can you keep in the back of your car if you run out of gas and have to walk to a gas station, complete with the long nozzle. He continues this activity despite Joe finally coming out to tell him he's put on too much. 

Of course he's put on too much. An infant would know he'd put on too much. But he keeps going. For like five minutes.

When he finally lights the match, he immediately goes up in flames and runs around the yard. For like five minutes. Okay maybe one minute. As if discounting the possibility that he could burn to death, neither Madea nor Joe does much to help. Madea "hilariously" fills up a tea cup of water to try to douse him. When that has little effect, she tries the hose, only to find its stream to be piddly. Finally she gets Joe to trip Brown so his own body contact with the ground will douse the flames, something Brown might have figured out himself if he weren't in an (understandable) state of total panic. Of course, neither would this probably really work. 

As you might guess, Brown only has a few burnt piece of clothing, notably the ass missing from his pants. Otherwise he's fine. 

I have no idea if a Black audience finds this funny. I did not find it funny. The whole scene is ill-conceived and makes everyone in it look bad. 

Fortunately, there's nothing else quite this broad in the movie.

For me, Madea movies have always been saved, if they were saved, by the plot that does not directly involve Madea. There are some movies in the Madea cinematic universe -- like Meet the Browns -- that only feature her tangentially, like one broad comic scene, usually involving her toting a gun, that is at odds with the rest of the movie, but is shoehorned in for audiences who just came to see Madea. Madea is best used like a spice, in small rather than overwhelming quantities.

This implies that most of these movies are up to something different and often socially progressive, which is the real saving grace of the Madea series. These movies have tackled domestic abuse and other serious topics over the years.

A Madea Homecoming gets off on the right foot in this regard. After the broad opening, we meet Brown's son Tim (Brandon Black) and his "friend" Davi (Isha Blaaker). (I don't actually know if we "meet" Tim or if he was in other movies that I haven't seen.) You'll see why I use those quotation marks on "friend" in a moment. They're driving home and talking about how Tim really wants to come out to his family, and how Davi is encouraging him but is reluctant to do the same himself. It is heavily implied that these two are lovers, and some physical contact they make further invites that interpretation.

This is very promising. The Black community has struggled with its acceptance of homosexuality, which would be a politically prudent venture as Blacks and gays both have a friend in the Democratic party. Perry wants to tackle this and confront the audiences who may love Madea but not love gays.

Except then he backs off. Rather incredibly, it is revealed that Davi is not lovers with Tim, but rather, has been carrying on an affair with Tim's mother, Laura (Gabrielle Dennis). See, I told you it was melodramatic. At first we think Tim is so shocked at this revelation because Davi has been simultaneously carrying on an affair with him and his own mother, which would raise a lot of questions indeed. I mean, we're sure, based on what the film has told us, that Tim and Davi are dating. As it turns out, he's just mad because Davi didn't tell him, and because it's weird for Tim's best friend to be dating his own mother, meaning Davi could potentially become Tim's stepfather. 

So instead of confronting audiences with two gay men in love on screen, Perry gives us only one gay man who is not seen in a sexual context whatsoever. Baby steps, I guess. But this is a rather shocking form of purposeless misdirection, and I'm almost tempted to watch it again just to determine how bogus it really is, how heavily the film implied, if not outright stated, that Tim and Davi are in a relationship.

So how can I write a review of A Madea Homecoming without saying that the film bungles both the broad Madea scenes and the positive social messaging?

How indeed. And I'm still trying to decide whether I will.

I can't artificially inflate the grade. I could talk myself into a 4/10, but this film is really more of a 3/10 at best. I didn't really laugh -- again, not the target demographic -- and I didn't get the feels from anything the film was trying to do politically. 

So what value does it serve for me to review this film for a bunch of Australian hipsters who wouldn't watch it anyway, for whom my low rating is basically a confirmation of the bias they already bring into it? 

It's like when someone is behaving like a jackass on the road, and when you finally pass them, you can't resist the urge to look over and see who it was. This is almost always a fraught activity. You are effectively trying to figure out if the driving confirms some sort of pre-existing bias in yourself. The only time it wouldn't confirm that is if the person in the other car looked exactly like you.

I don't watch Madea movies to confirm biases, either my own or anyone else's. But I'm not in the habit of censoring myself either.

Stay tuned to see if this pops up in my reviews to the right. This could be a thorny one. 

Audient Bollywood: Pyaasa

This is the second in a year full of getting acquainted with Bollywood, one movie per month.

Having started this series in January on really solid ground with 1998's Dil Se, I was ready in February to go back and do something that I kind of felt the instinct to start out with: see a really formative Bollywood film.

Unfortunately, iTunes was no help whatsoever.

The first five or so movies I checked from my Bollywood watchlist that were pre-1980, iTunes had none of them. Then I started checking some other titles I'd had earmarked as likely choices for this series for one reason or another, and it didn't have many of them either.

Just when I started to panic -- and was very close to renting something from the past five years that featured a gay relationship, which I thought would be interesting -- I found a goldmine of Bollywood on Amazon Prime. Including the first "formative" film I'd checked for on iTunes, 1957's Pyaasa. Amazon will be a likely source for most of the rest of the films I watch in this series, given its generous quantity of such films. (Netflix has a number as well, but you won't be surprised to learn they are more recent titles.)

Now, Pyaasa is pretty old -- 16 years older than I am, which makes it pretty old -- but it is not the oldest Indian language film I have ever seen. That honor goes to Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali, which came out two years earlier but cannot rightly be considered a Bollywood film because it did not emerge from the studio system that comprises Bollywood. (I believe I'm correct in phrasing the basic parameters of Bollywood in that way; I'm just starting out, so you will have to forgive any minor inaccuracies as I discuss these movies.) I googled it to be sure, and Pather Panchali was produced by the government of West Bengal, which definitely sounds outside the commercial sphere of Bollywood.

And Pather Panchali made me a little concerned about Pyaasa. Because there are aspects of its production that are very rough -- much rougher than what a commercially funded film could produce just two years later -- Pather Panchali threw up a little bit of a barrier with me that I never got past. I should clarify that a movie looking rough is not, in itself, reason for me to reject it, but I'm just trying to convey the experience I had with this particular film. The roughness of the filmmaking (sorry Ray, I'm sure you are brilliant) kept me from full engaging at the start, and the story never really brought me in. I am surely wrong about Pather Panchali and someday I would like to revisit it, plus see the other movies in the Apu trilogy, to learn how wrong I really am. (There's a longer discussion of my thoughts on Pather Panchali here if you are interested.)

Despite some worrisome moments in the first ten minutes, Pyaasa is not Pather Panchali.

I should discuss the significance of those first ten minutes before we get on to the film proper. Like Pather Panchali before it, I couldn't get through Pyaasa on my first attempt. While in that case, sleep overtook me, here it was something entirely external to the experience of watching the movie. I first tried to watch Pyaasa on the night the Oscar nominations were announced -- I say "night" because here in Australia, those announcements occur at about 12:20 a.m. I had budgeted exactly the amount of time I'd need to watch the two hour and 20 minute movie, with a few short breaks, before tuning in live to see who'd be competing this year for best picture. But at about the ten-minute mark of Pyaasa, my wife came into the living room to talk to me about something -- don't remember what -- and that conversation took maybe 15 minutes. By that point, the window for Pyaasa had been lost, and I watched Andrew Bujalski's far shorter Funny Ha Ha instead.

I wasn't able to get back to Pyaasa for two weeks, frittering away most of February in the process. There were a couple times I considered putting it on, but it was too late or I was too tired. Simply put, Pyaasa was starting to assume the epic scale of a real chore in my head. It's short by Bollywood standards, but it's long by the standards of most films, and I was really worried about another Pather Panchali experience, plus maybe with singing. The first ten minutes of Pyaasa might have been more polished than Pather Panchali, but not significantly, and I didn't feel myself immediately engaged by the characters. (In case you didn't know, Pyaasa is also black and white, which again is something that factors into the way we prejudge a movie and its possible resources.)

The singing part was the part I was not sure about. As I try to come to a definition of what Bollywood is -- even though it is many things -- I've been asking myself whether singing and dancing is a quintessential part of it. Obviously Bollywood is a behemoth producing hundreds of movies a year, and they cannot all feature singing and dancing. But more to the point, are the movies on my Bollywood watchlist primarily going to have been "recommended" to me because they contain singing and dancing? Is a person making lists of essential Bollywood films going to consider that in the lists they make? Were singing and dancing there from the start, or did they only come later?

I soon learned that yes, singing and dancing were there from the start -- but only if you consider the musical era in Hollywood to be "the start." Bollywood has the same lengthy history that Hollywood has, with films dating back to the turn of the 20th century, so obviously, not much singing then.

I've been yammering at you for quite a while and I haven't really even gotten into the movie yet.

Pyaasa is considered a classic example of the form and is directed by Guru Dutt, who is also its star. As I was watching the film, I did some quick math and decided that Dutt could possibly still be alive today, so I looked it up. Nope, and nope by a lot. He died only seven years later at age 39, from what was either an accidental or intentional mixing of alcohol and sleeping pills. He had already tried to kill himself twice, so it was probably the latter. But he was a huge star before then and I'm thinking I might encounter him again, depending on how many older films I watch in this series.

Dutt plays a poet named Vijay, whose poetry cannot gain any traction with publishers because it deals with social issues rather than romance. His brothers hate him but he has the love of his loyal mother, who is not in great health. He quits his menial blue collar job after his foreman throws out his poetry, knowing what it was but not caring, and soon after there's an episode where the same poems (salvaged from the trash) are sold as scrap paper by his malicious brothers, which he must track down. I love the notion that in India of the late 1950s, scrap paper was something that was sold -- though not for very much money, which becomes a metaphor for how Vijay thinks the world sees him.

He must track down this scrap paper, which leads him to a street walker named Gulabo (Waheeda Rehman), who bought the scrap paper. (What a prostitute needs with scrap paper, I'm not sure.) Speaking of engaging with social issues ... I think I imagined that a Bollywood movie might try to steer clear of tackling issues like prostitution, but maybe Dutt had plenty in common with Vijay, refusing the lures of commercialism and trying to succeed with topics he really cares about. By all accounts that worked with Pyaasa.

His encounter with Gulabo confirmed the thing I hadn't been sure of, and couldn't be sure of despite some melancholy singing in the film's opening minutes -- the movie does indeed follow (create?) the template for future Bollywood films, which is to break from the story for (sometimes lengthy) songs. Now, to say there is dancing in the way there is in a film like Dil Se would not be correct. Given what we know of Dutt, he would likely shun the big commercial dance number, and indeed, what dance we see here is minimal and never involves more than two people. In the one case where there are two people dancing, they are waltzing, not performing Bollywood dance.

It was really useful to see this sort of origin of future Bollywood, because it suggests that there was something common in the DNA of these films, even when the subject matter was not frivolous. A movie with this story would never be a musical in Hollywood, but Dutt's usage of songs, sprinkled regularly throughout, suggests something deeper within the culture that expects this sort of expression on film. 

To be fair, the songs have a textual purpose as well. Vijay's poetry is something that is meant to be sung, in the style of classical Indian music, and it's possible that all the songs in the film are "realistic," in that they involve material really being sung by the characters to each other in that moment, not the metaphorical expression of their thoughts and feelings that comprise a Hollywood musical. Like, in a Hollywood musical a character would probably never say to another "Remember that song you sung to me earlier?", because the song would exist in this nebulous space between a thing that really happened and a thing that didn't really happen. I think all the songs in Pyaasa really happened, but they are spaced out the way they would be in a Hollywood musical, so the effect is similar on the overall thrust of the film.

I quite liked the songs, but as the movie went on, I really liked the story. It picks up incredibly in its second half, after drifting a little too much for my tastes in the first half. It gets really complicated and interesting, also following Vijay's previous love, Meena (Mala Sinha), who didn't marry him because he was poor, as well as the person she did marry, Ghosh (played by an actor who goes by the single moniker Rehman), who also happens to be a literary publisher. Ghosh rejects Vijay's initial attempt to publish, though there later comes a reason he wants to publish the poems, which allows for a really fascinating look at such topics as greed, betrayal and artistic integrity.

By the end, the story actually takes on some aspects of the story of Jesus Christ, which I found really interesting from a movie with these origins. It's possible it also resembles a story in Hinduism or Islam, so I might just be being narrow-minded in my interpretation, but as a western viewer I only have my own reference points.

Long story short -- it may be too late for that at this point -- by the end I was really overwhelmed with how much I liked the movie. In its second half it moved from somewhere around three stars, all the way up to 4.5. And whether my reaction was really more appropriately a four-star reaction, I felt happy to honor Pyaasa in this way -- maybe sort of a makeup call for the paltry 2.5 stars I had given Pather Panchali.

I don't have my movie picked out for March yet, but thanks to Amazon, I have plenty of choices. There are three or four movies on my watchlist that I had heard of prior to starting this series, so it may be time to take down one of those, so I can intersperse the others throughout the rest of the year. 

Why don't we know Franklyn Farnum?

I was thinking idly about actors appearing in best picture winners the other day. I decided to find out which actor has appeared in the most best picture winners, and of course, that's just the kind of information Wikipedia is eager to offer me.

The vast majority of actors on Wikipedia's "List of actors appearing in multiple Best Picture winners" have appeared in two or three films, but there are a few who went beyond that. Wallis Clark was fortunate enough to appear in five, all of them in the 1930s, while Bess Flowers equaled that total, split between the 1930s and 1950s. (I guess she spent the 1940s recovering from a terrible heroin addiction, leading her to a period of heroine withdrawal. Get it? Heroine?)

Head and shoulders above the others was an actor who appeared in a whopping seven best picture winners: The Life of Emile Zola (1937), Going My Way (1944), The Lost Weekend (1945), Gentleman's Agreement (1947), All About Eve (1950), The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) and Around the World in 80 Days (1956).

But perhaps the more remarkable thing about Franklyn Farnum is that he is listed as having 1,100 film credits overall. That's a lot.

The even more remarkable thing is that I've never heard of him.

I'm no expert on classic Hollywood -- I don't know Wallis Clark or Bess Flowers either -- but if someone had appeared in 1,100 movies and seven best picture winners, I feel like I should know about him, if not from his actual body of work, then at least as the answer to a trivia question.

But nope, totally in the dark on Farnum, and the picture of him doesn't even help me say "Oh yeah, that guy."

I guess back in those days, especially if you were under contract from a studio, it was more like a 9 to 5 job than the project-based acting of today. If they needed someone to walk through the background of a movie and maybe say one line, there was Franklyn Farnum, having a cigarette outside of a sound stage and waiting for his next assignment. Maybe the more remarkable thing is that someone actually noticed he was in all these movies and committed his feat to permanence via Wikipedia.

I looked through Farnum's 1,100 credits on IMDB and it turns out I've only seen ... nah, I didn't do that. Even I am not that crazy. I know I've seen seven of his films, anyway, since I've seen every best picture winner. I'm sure you can add a dozen others.

I wonder if Farnum was even appreciated in his time, recognized as a familiar face by the average moviegoer. His best picture accomplishment -- something he himself was certainly aware of -- would probably not have been general knowledge until the internet age, relying as it does on resources like IMDB.

Today, it seems hard to imagine any actor with this ability to spread himself over multiple quality projects, which means his record is likely never to fall. As some indication of that, among actors still living, no one has more than three, though there are about ten of those. There are the names you might expect in that group, like Meryl Streep, Morgan Freeman and Dustin Hoffman; names you'd expect if you thought about it for a second, like Talia Shire; and names you would not expect, like Beth Grant. 

If this post can contribute in some small way to the world knowing about Franklyn Farnum -- Frank to his friends -- then I'm glad to oblige.

My funeral film festival

NOTE: I do not have a terminal illness, am not contemplating my own death, and do not expect to die in the near future. The following is a thought experiment only.

Dana Stevens doesn't like lists, except when she does.

The Slate film critic and co-host of the Slate Culture Gabfest tells us that she doesn't like ranking her top ten films of each year. She will reluctantly produce a list of her ten favorites, but she will not order them. She won't fit herself into that mold even when she's a guest on the Filmspotting year-end podcast, in which the ranking of films from ten to one provides a crucial part of the episode's structure. While the other three hosts ranked their 2021 top tens from favorite to least favorite, she boldly stuck with her own convictions and just offered ten titles without further assessment of their respective worth.

But I stand by my argument -- maybe never explicitly stated as such -- that a person doesn't go into film criticism without having some sort of mental framework for expressing their appreciation of film. I suspect there are few critics out there who are in it only for the purity of the written word, without being driven on some level by a tendency to rank, to assign star ratings, to produce letter grades or to make lists. 

Well I've just discovered how that manifests itself in Dana, how she demonstrates that little bit of obsessiveness that lets me relate to her just a bit more than I already did.

On their recent year-end "call-in" show of the Gabfest -- which I caught up with only very belatedly, and which features emails and voicemails from their listening audience, not actual live interaction -- Dana and her co-hosts (Stephen Metcalf and Julia Turner) answered the following listener question: "What one song would you want played at your funeral?" Naturally this led to a bit of riffing, with each providing more than one song and Dana even taking the opportunity to talk about movies, though without mentioning specific titles. 

It was revealed that Dana has a Spotify playlist of songs to play at her funeral, a comment that took her co-hosts aback. I assume it shocked them because they thought it flew in the face of Dana's free-spirited ways -- both in her stated dislike of lists, and in terms of the optimism she unfailingly projects. Dana clarified that she is not specifically planning out her funeral or anything so morbid as that, but more than anything, these are songs she wants to be forever associated with her, to the extent that they might live on after her on the internet. She also explained that she frequently adds songs to this list, so at this point it obviously far exceeds the number that could be played at a funeral, and complicates the task of anyone trying to interpret the list as practical posthumous funeral-planning advice from the departed.

It was also revealed that Dana has a wild fantasy about an entire weekend devoted to remembering her, though not in a somber way of course -- just a hope that she could live the sort of life that would encourage family and friends to devote extra time to honoring her, in the form of a three-day party that would be a direct benefit to them, not just a tribute to her. Part of that, she revealed, was that it might take place all at one house and there would be a room devoted to showing a funeral film festival.

She has that list of titles as well, but "that's a topic for another podcast."

I see you, Dana. You like lists. 

(I know, I know. It was never lists she didn't like, it was ranked lists.)

Funeral film festival. Huh. 

It obviously got me thinking: What would I curate for my own funeral film festival?

I was originally going to call this post "Your funeral film festival" rather than "My funeral film festival," because a) I didn't want to give anyone a heart attack who thinks I'm announcing some sort of fatal illness, b) I didn't want to give the impression I am depressed or gloomily contemplating the end of my own life, and c) the idea of planning my own funeral gives me the heebee jeebees. But the reality is, the rest of this post is what I'd consider showing at my own funeral film festival, were such a thing to occur, and were I in a position to help plan it beforehand. (And hey, if you're reading this at some point in the future after I have already died, but before I've already been buried, see if this sort of thing might be practical! I might not be kidding! Or it can be months later as a memorial! I don't care! I'll be dead anyway!)

One thing I should say is that whatever I write about here is bound to change between now and whenever I die. I'd say I hope it changes a lot because I hope that is 40 years from now, but then again, it might not change a lot even if it is 40 years from now. There's a good argument to be made that when you are nearing 50, you have already seen the movies that are going to seem the most important to you on your deathbed.

I figure ten titles is a good number to consider. You show two on Friday night after everyone arrives, five scattered throughout the day on Saturday and another three on Sunday, letting everyone leave to get back to their lives by mid-afternoon. 

The key, though, is that this is not just another variation on "What are your ten favorite films of all time?" Pulp Fiction is currently my #3 on Flickchart, but no way is that making an appearance at a film festival in celebration of my life. 

So the following ten titles I've chosen are also titles that deal in some way with the bittersweetness of life, that have the heart and earnestness to be about something bigger while also, usually, not taking themselves too seriously. I want my mourners to enjoy these movies, not be hit over the head with how final and irrevocable death is.

For the purposes of maximum possible enjoyment for the widest range of people, I'm also considering only titles that aren't known for being divisive. For example, I think a movie like Vanilla Sky is excellent at contemplating themes of the fragility of what we have, but I know some people loathe that movie (even if they are wrong). I don't need a movie that some people hate -- plus a polarizing figure like Tom Cruise -- ruining the celebration of my life. 

Finally I thought it was wise to limit my pool of candidates to my top 500 films on Flickchart, as I want these to be films I really cherish. I want at least the people who know me well to think of me when they think of these films. It turned out I didn't get even that far, as the shortlist of 18 candidates included no movies ranked lower than #394 on my chart. 

So without any further preamble, here are the ten films I've chosen in the year 2022 for this festival. In honor of Dana, I'm not ranking them, though that wouldn't make sense anyway. It makes more sense to provide approximate time slots for them, so that is what I have done.

And then I decided to go from ten to 14. 

Here's what I figured. No one is going to watch all of the films. It takes someone insane -- like me -- to watch 14 movies over three days, something I've done on several occasions. But I'm already dead in this scenario. I expect an average mourner to watch three, maybe four films in total, either ones they haven't seen before or special favorites. Hopefully there will be enough mourners that each screening will seem suitably well attended. 

There will be movies that some people just don't like, despite my trying to avoid that as stated above. Depending on where it's held, maybe they want to go play an hour of tennis as a little change of pace, assuming I don't die in winter. Maybe they've booked themselves into the spa. Maybe they want to join the bongo circle, where my more musically inclined friends are banging out a tribute to me on the drums. Maybe they want to participate in the cooking class and learn to make authentic Mediterranean cuisine in my honor. Hey, I don't know what new interests I'll have by then.

So it seems that I can schedule this thing chockablock, with only short breaks between each movie (though you will see I've allocated meal breaks on Saturday and Sunday). Since it's my special weekend -- even though I won't be there to appreciate it -- might as well pack in the goodness as tightly as I can.

The only time restrictions I insisted on obeying were to start the movies late enough on Friday that people didn't have to leave work too early, depending on how far they had to travel, and to get them out of there by late afternoon/early evening on Sunday, so they have some chill out time when they get home before they have to go to bed. One last chance to reflect on me and my greatness.

Oh, and no movies during the hours when people are typically sleeping. I can see a marathon like that working and I know people will have some long, dark nights of the soul contemplating how empty the world will feel after my death, but I want them to be fresh for the next day's slate of films. 

So -- now without any further preamble -- here's the schedule for the weekend. Get there early if you can. 

Friday

Arrival/check-in from 3 p.m.

6 p.m. - Defending Your Life
(1991, dir. Albert Brooks) 111 minutes
Flickchart: #25

(Program note: Dinner to be consumed during film, available at buffet in adjoining room)

Why this film? I want to kick off the weekend on a lighter note, and this film's opener lets us know right away what we're in for, as Brooks' Daniel Miller is killed in a head-on car collision listening to Barbra Streisand in his brand new Porsche convertible, distracted from the road while trying to pick up some compact discs that have spilled into the passenger side footwell. He is then immediately pushed in a wheelchair through the hospital-like corridors of the afterlife, freshly deceased and none too pleased about it, though he's very tired so he can only muster a hangdog half-frown. Before long Meryl Streep shows up to add a total splash of delight to Daniel's trip through the afterlife, where he'll defend in a court of law a dozen key life decisions to determine if he gets to move on to the next plane of existence, or is instead forced to return to earth to give it another shot. In among the hilarity there's some real profundity in Brooks' best film, and I think this gets the audience laughing while never losing sight of the core questions of how we try to move past the fears in life that hold us back.

8:15 p.m. - Cinema Paradiso 
(1988, dir. Giuseppe Tornatore) 155 minutes
Flickchart: #116

Why this film? The main course of night 1, as it were, is also the longest film that will play, and one of the least to do directly with death. As you would know if you've seen it, this is really a love letter to the movies and to people whose childhoods had a love of cinema as wallpaper. As it follows the main character from that young age to adulthood, when he has left his hometown in the distant rearview mirror, it does contemplate life and loss and the things that live on only in our memories. And of course when (spoiler alert!) the loveable old projectionist Alfredo (Philippe Noiret), who is earlier blinded in a fire at the cinema, does die, it's the occasion for our main character, Salvatore (played by different actors at different ages), to reminisce on his formative years, and finally return home. The climactic piece of film he views -- this I won't spoil if you haven't seen it -- creates just the sort of emotional release my mourners may be needing. 

11 p.m. - Wild Strawberries
(1957, dir. Ingmar Bergman) 91 minutes
Flickchart: #394

Why this film? As the lowest ranked film on my Flickchart that will play, it might also not surprise you that this is among the least familiar to me of the movies I've chosen. I've seen it twice, but the most recent viewing was more than ten years ago now. I'm choosing it, though, for a couple reasons. One is that the themes of looking back on life near its end stick with me, even if the specifics of the story don't. Another is that it would sort of honor my (still living, but probably not at this point) dad, whose favorite film is Bergman's The Seventh Seal -- and even though the chess with death bit is certainly the kind of thing you might gladly feature in a funeral film festival, that film didn't connect with me to the extent it did my dad. But the biggest reason that I've chosen it for this late-night slot is that it has an ethereal, existential quality that befits late-night contemplation, though I'm sorry I'm making you read subtitles after midnight on what has already been an emotionally draining day.

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

Saturday

8 a.m. - Breakfast - Pastries, bagels and some hot foods available

9 a.m. - The Iron Giant
(1999, dir. Brad Bird) 87 minutes
Flickchart: #10

Why this film? So what does my first animated film of the festival, a lovely little story about a boy and his robot, have to do with ... oh wait a minute. Death is all over this thing, as one of the most miraculous feats The Iron Giant pulls off is to make young viewers consider the preciousness of life without it totally bumming them out. The giant's first contemplation of mortality, when he gently nudges the lifeless body of the deer, is a tonal masterstroke, enhanced exponentially by Vin Diesel's childlike line readings of the giant's curiosity about death. Then near the end -- again spoiler if you haven't seen the movie -- everyone must contemplate the near certainty of their own impending death when a nuclear missile is headed directly for their small Maine town, with only a heroic metal martyr standing in its way. (Plus the setting is a nice way to honor my New England upbringing, and my dad actually lives in Maine.) The Iron Giant still makes me cry after like seven viewings, so yeah, this one is making the cut.

11 a.m. - A Matter of Life and Death
(1946, dir. Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger) 104 minutes
Flickchart: #327

Why this film? This is the only film in the festival that I've seen only once -- I saw it only a year ago for the first time -- but hopefully that will change before I shuffle off this mortal coil. It'll keep the mostly light vibe going during the daytime hours (yes, Iron Giant is mostly light despite the threat of nuclear holocaust). The story is about a World War II British fighter pilot (David Niven) who is going down over the English Channel, and in his last moments before certain death, he falls in love with the American radio operator (Kim Hunter) whom he sends a distress signal. Except he doesn't die, rather, awakening on the banks of the water within range of this woman and his fellow British soldiers. This may all be a state of limbo, though, as he can't explain his failure to die, and starts seeing visions of envoys from the afterlife, who will eventually have him in a trial that's sort of similar to what happens in Defending Your Life. This movie's delightful spirit, ahead-of-its-time philosophizing (especially for a mainstream film) and yes, even special effects, simply knocked my socks off. This is joyous in its ruminations on that thin membrane between life and death that we all find ourselves in on a daily basis. And maybe it will convince some of my mourners that I'm not actually dead.

1 p.m. - Lunch - Sandwiches

2 p.m. - Four Weddings and a Funeral
(1994, dir. Mike Newell) 117 minutes
Flickchart: #39

Why this film? If A Matter of Life and Death didn't keep the light afternoon vibe going, then this fellow British film definitely will, as only one-fifth of it is dour, if you are going by the math in the title. This is the movie whose inclusion I am most justifying on the basis of "I just love it," with the excuse of the title explicitly referencing a funeral to further strengthen my choice. I do think the portion related to Gareth's death is handled quite well, especially as it does, indeed, change the tone of the film for about 15 minutes. If someone read a poem at my funeral that was as beautiful as W.H. Auden's "Funeral Blues," it'd probably bring a tear to my own eye as I'm lying in the casket listening to it. And then the rest of this film is just such a delight to be in the presence of for two hours. The traveling party of friends, going from one wedding to the next (with a funeral inserted in there for good measure), is the sort of feeling I'd like my mourners to have, dropping absurd witticisms and catty remarks if the mood strikes them. Hey, it's a funeral but it doesn't have to be depressing. 

4:15 p.m. - Truly, Madly, Deeply
(1990, dir. Anthony Minghella) 106 minutes
Flickchart: #150

Why this film? British much? I didn't realize until typing this out that this makes my third straight film from Jolly Old. You'd think I were an Anglophile or something. And I realized I lied earlier -- I've only seen this film once as well, probably due more to its scarcity than anything else. (I think I looked for it a while back and determined you basically can't get it, but I'll kick the can down the road on that problem and leave it for whoever's curating this festival.) There's some real lovely melancholy in this film, as a woman (Juliet Stevenson) is visited by her recently deceased boyfriend (Alan Rickman), who basically takes up residence in their house and even brings some of his deceased musician buddies with him on occasion. (This would go well with the aforementioned bongo circle.) This is definitely a comedy of sorts in that Nina ultimately gets a bit irritated by Jamie, a necessary part in the healing process that allows her to move on. And if I remember correctly, we ultimately realize that was all part of Jamie's plan -- to allow her to say goodbye and to appreciate her loved one a last time, but then to pave the path for a happy rest of her life. 

6:15 p.m. - Rabbit Hole
(2010, dir. John Cameron Mitchell) 91 minutes
Flickchart: #121

Why this film? I haven't wanted so far to put people in direct touch with their anguish, but if anyone wants to just have it out with their emotions, this is the film for them. I don't suppose a movie about the death of a child is ever going to be light in any respect. But the film that was my #3 for the last decade (meaning its Flickchart ranking should increase once it gets the right duels) is just such a powerhouse emotional experience that I couldn't leave it on the sidelines. It doesn't only deal with the emotions, but rather, how they eat away at your relationships and steadily drive you to disassociate with your own life. If that were where it ended, though, it would be a big downer, and not worthy of inclusion here. Nicole Kidman's and Aaron Eckhart's grieving parents reach a place where they can go forward, with that rock in their pocket -- that's how Dianne Wiest's character describes it -- still there, but maybe a little lighter every day. This is another film that leaves me as an absolute wreck every time, but it's not the child's getting hit by a car -- which occurs before the start of the narrative -- that does it. It's the way family and friends surround them at the end, in a showing of love I'd like this particular weekend gathering to emulate.

8 p.m. - Dinner - Selection of surf and turf

9 p.m. - Harold and Maude
(1971, dir. Hal Ashby) 91 minutes
Flickchart: #203

Why this film? If Wild Strawberries honored my father, who is still living, then Harold and Maude honors my mother, who is no longer with us. This was her favorite film and it quickly became a favorite of mine as well, especially after watching it again the night she died in 2020. I love the mixture of tones in this film, as Harold puts on increasingly elaborate fake suicide attempts, which get a blase reaction from his own mother and are clearly played for comedy, and Ruth Gordon's dialogue is almost exclusively naughty and devil may care, as her paradoxical joie de vivre comes shining through. Of course, this movie ends in a very sad place for Harold, who might actually be suicidal -- though what he chooses to do with those instincts speaks volumes of hope. If everything else the film does right were not enough, I'm loving the idea of hearing some Cat Sevens at my funeral film festival -- even if I won't actually be "hearing" it. (But who knows, don't rule out me manifesting as a ghost and watching from the back row.)

11 p.m. - A Ghost Story
(2017, dir. David Lowery) 92 minutes
Flickchart: #157

Why this film? Now that we're closing in on the witching hour, I want to get back into that existential, midnight movie headspace I tried to create on the first night with Wild Strawberries. This one flirts more with the actual horror genre, as there are things in this film that feel very unnerving -- even though we're seeing everything that's happening with a recently deceased man who walks around draped in a bedsheet with two eerily sightless eye holes, so there are no jump scares or the like. (That's Casey Affleck, and let's hope the world has forgiven him a bit more before I die.) (And wait, there is one jump scare, involving a piece of construction equipment of all things.) There are parts of this movie that go purposefully slowly, and there are parts that speed past us before we even notice -- which I think must be sort of how eternity actually feels. This film doesn't only travel forward in time, it travels backward, never ceasing to be completely and utterly profound at any moment. But I mightn't include it if it didn't end up someplace hopeful, or at least someplace immensely emotionally satisfying. I still remember sobbing in the theater after the last shot, though your mileage may vary.  

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

Sunday

8 a.m. - Breakfast - Eggs benedict, huevos rancheros, raspberry waffles with mascarpone cheese, four-egg omelette with truffle drizzle, Belgian crepes with a glazed apricot reduction, Wheaties

9 a.m. - My Neighbor Totoro
(1988, dir. Hayao Miyazaki) 87 minutes
Flickchart: #70

Why this film? You've had a hard past two days, with ten films that have put you through the ringer, in toto if not individually. Nothing to freshen you on Sunday morning like a little palette cleanser like this. If you think "Hey Vance, what the hell does My Neighbor Totoro have to do with death?" I would respond first and foremost "Shut up, it's my funeral film festival, I do what I want!" in my best Cartman voice. In reality, though, this wondrous little life-affirming miracle with incredibly low stakes does indeed have death lurking in the background. There's something ever so slightly melancholy to the adventures of young Satsuki and Mei, which is that their mother is in the hospital, and because they are children rarely told the unvarnished truth, they have no idea how bad it is. Is their mother possibly on the verge of dying? I mean, they actually moved house to be closer to her, which doesn't sound promising. Because Miyazaki would rather teach children about life while keeping their innocence firmly intact, it all resolves well for Mrs. Kusakabe, you'll be glad to hear -- with no small help from a cat bus, a Totoro, a couple Totoro helpers and a whole attic full of dust bunnies. And maybe, nearing this end of the weekend, you'll be glad to know it will all resolve well for you, even if I'm not still around to help you with that. 

11 a.m. - Tanna
(2016, dir. Bentley Dean & Martin Butler) 87 minutes
Flickchart: #98

Why this film? Tanna wasn't actually on my original shortlist, but I kept coming back to it in my head, and when I expanded the field to 14, it was easy to find a spot for it. We go from one lush Pacific Ocean setting to another, as the film is a sort of Romeo & Juliet story among the indigenous people of the title island, located in Vanuatu. Because I'm name-checking Shakespeare's most famous depiction of star-crossed lovers, you know that there's got to be death involved here somewhere -- hate to give that spoiler since I know a lot of you reading this right now won't have seen my #5 of the last decade. But I might be including this as much for the idyllic paradise in which it takes place -- as close to a vision of heaven as a religious skeptic like me can get -- as for what ultimately transpires between the central lovers. The way one child in this film expresses her grief, like no non-professional actor of that age I've ever seen, and the way the film ends with a sort of communal celebration, are both things I want to bring to you as you near the end of this epic journey in my honor.

1 p.m. - Lunch - Taco bar

2 p.m. - Away From Her
(2006, dir. Sarah Polley) 110 minutes
Flickchart: #346

Why this film? Depending on how I die, this could be the most topical film in the festival. It's the only film dealing with the thing that could very well be my own cause of death: dementia, or the complications that arise from it. That's what got my mother and her mother before that, as well as my grandfather on my father's side. (The jury is still out on my own father, who is as mentally sharp as ever at age 82.) I'm not including the film so much for its subject matter, though I can't deny that's a factor. (A film like The Father might actually be more powerful to me, but it's a bit too intense.) No, the film impresses as much as it does because of Sarah Polley's grace in depicting the illness that affects Julie Christie's character, while her long-time husband, Gordon Pinsent, can only look on helplessly. No way at age 27 Polley should have been this astute about the frailty of the mental faculties of the older set, and from having watched her documentary about her own family (Stories We Tell), I don't even think it was from her own personal experience. What I find so lovely about this film is not Christie's performance, which is very good, but she's playing a character who basically no longer has any agency over her choices. Rather, it's the man who can choose, her husband, who grows to implicitly understand all the best things for her, even when she turns her attention to another man in the home where she now lives. That's an act of the purest love on his part, and I only hope my wife could give me the same "gift" under those circumstances. As a little change of pace, the character does not actually die in the end -- fancy that. 

4 p.m. - Raising Arizona
(1987, dir. Joel Coen) 94 minutes
Flickchart: #1

Why this film? And we save the best for last. Breathe a sigh of relief, people -- you got there. And your reward is my #1 movie of all time, plus a chance to really relax and have a good time. Aside from it being my #1, and that seeming like a good choice to send me off in its own right, there are indeed other reasons I've chosen to include this in my funeral film festival. (Don't make me pull out my Cartman voice again.) Although it is not always in the text, mortality hangs over this film. It's there in Ed's desire to produce a child and extend herself onward past her own finite lifespan. It's there in HI's dreams of a man in black on a motorcycle coming to kill him. It's there in Gale and Evelle's attempts to liberate themselves from prison, and their panicked screams when they think they might have killed the baby while driving off with his car seat on top of their car. But -- you'll be surprised to learn, or maybe you won't because it's my favorite movie -- this movie makes me emotional too. It's all about HI's new dream that ends the movie, where he imagines himself off into the future, with real kids that really belong to him, and the moment when he's sitting at a large dinner table full of hypothetical future family members, his back to the camera, and a hypothetical grown daughter smiles and touches him on the cheek, and says one word:

"Dad."

(Plus I love the idea of the last thing in the festival, to send people off, being Carter Burwell's incredible score over the closing credits, and all the joyous ululating it entails.)

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

I think I've got a good representation of tones, genres, time periods and parts of the world. There may be something I haven't covered but hey, even in death, I'm not perfect.

There were a few films I considered that involved suicide, but in a poignant way, like Abbas Kiarostami's Taste of Cherry. And though I'd love to include an Iranian film, I can't have any mixed messaging out there if the cause of my death is the slightest bit ambiguous. (Besides, Harold and Maude covers suicide pretty well without seeming like a cinematic suicide note.) 

Other honorable mentions from my top 500:

Ghost (1990, Jerry Zucker)
Flickchart: #31
Obviously I love it, but it's too earnest and cheesy for some people, plus maybe it's more about love than death.

Coco (2017, Lee Unkrich)
Flickchart: #139
Appropriate themes and light tone with a powerhouse ending, but I didn't need a third animated film.

Henry Poole is Here (2009, Mark Pellington)
Flickchart: #168
Thematically it works and I obviously really like it, but I think most people don't like it and it's a bit too religious for what I want to convey in this context.  

Dreams (1990, Akira Kurosawa)
Some beautiful themes and possible landscapes of the afterlife, but I decided to let My Neighbor Totoro be my sole representative for the cinema of Japan. 

I'm sure there are great choices for the theme beyond my top 500. Maybe I'll save them for if I come back to life and die a second time.

It occurs to me that this might make more sense as a lineup -- or might make more sense as a film festival at all -- if I'm taken before my time. Nobody's going to film festivals honoring 93-year-old senior citizens, because most of the people who would go would also be 93, if they're even still alive. The existence of the festival implies a sort of melancholy and wistfulness over how much the person still had to give. At 93, you ain't giving much if you're giving anything at all. 

However, if I have died young and you remember this post, tell my wife, because it might not be too late for her to start planning! 

I might be kidding! But I might not be!

Star rating dispersal

I've started something this year that I hope will make my end of year tasks a little easier.

When I post the breakdown of my movies in my year-end wrap-up -- last year, it was 170 -- by how many got each of the ten available star ratings, it has historically required me to go through Letterboxd making little hash marks for each rating. The numbers look pretty similar each year, with 3.5 stars always having the most, followed by four and three. 

The trouble with this approach, though, is that a) it's tedious, and b) it's easy to miss one movie, and realize the numbers don't add up when you get to the end. If that happens, either you count again, which is even more tedious, or you just fudge it by adding one to one of the categories, usually the one with the most, since statistically, that's the one you were most likely to have missed. I believe I have done both things in the past.

This year, I decided to just keep track of it as I go, and save myself an hour of work next January.

So I've got my spreadsheet in which I can add the movies as I go, in a column devoted to their star rating. If I do forget and miss one, it is hypothetically easier to figure out which one I missed if I copy all the existing titles, sort them alphabetically and paste them side-by-side with my rankings, also sorted alphabetically.

The only thing I worry about is that by having a knowledge of how many I've given out in each star rating, I could be biasing myself toward stacking the deck in favor of a particular outcome. If I'm only counting at the end of the year, I have no way of knowing and the end result is sort of a surprise. But if, let's say, four stars has a chance to overtake 3.5 stars for the most in the year -- which I can glean easily enough by a glance at the list -- maybe I'm ten percent more likely to go four stars for my final viewing of the year, when I'm on the fence between that and 3.5. Do I think this is a concern in reality? No, but it did occur to me.

Anyway, I'm telling you all this because it has led to a funny realization with my first seven movies of 2022: They have been given seven different star ratings. And I can tell you for sure that this was not on purpose as an early incarnation of the thing I was worried about in the previous paragraph. 

No, I can genuinely say that my first seven films of 2022 break down as follows:

Bigbug (4 stars)
Death on the Nile (3.5 stars)
Hotel Transylvania: Transformania (3 stars)
Gold (2.5 stars)
Uncharted (2 stars)
Home Team (1.5 stars)
The Sky is Everywhere (.5 stars)

Spoiler alert for the relative placement of these films in my year-end list. 

Now, if my next three viewings are a 4.5 star, a five-star and a one-star, you'll know there are shenanigans for sure.

This obviously can't continue much longer -- three more viewings at most. And at the moment I'm not sure what my next 2022 viewing will be, so I don't know if it has any realistic shot at 4.5 stars, though I give that out with some regularity (15 times in 2021). Five and one are considerably less likely. 

But while it's continuing I'm enjoying it. I might actually be getting the most joy from having given out a .5 star rating, as discussed earlier this week in this post, since it's something I didn't do in all of 2021.

And will I miss the thing where I take a stroll down memory lane at the end of the year, making hash marks on a piece of paper (always a satisfying exercise) as I remember the movies that made up my 2022?

Could be. And hey, if that's the case, I can always ditch this new practice in 2023. 

As for Bigbug, the most recent addition to my 2022 list ... Jean-Pierre Jeunet is back! In his first feature since 2013 and the first I've seen since 2009, he crushes it. Well, four stars' worth of crushing it, anyway. Check out my review here.

Problematic punctuation that could have been avoided

I was doing some Flickcharting the other day, and Julius Onah's Luce from 2019 landed in between Bridget Jones's Diary and Wild Things after the approximately dozen duels that help determine a movie's initial placement in my chart. 

Because I make note of things like this in a spreadsheet -- because of course I do -- I had to record the names of the two movies it landed between as part of my process. 

I initially spelled Bridget Jones's Diary wrong, momentarily confusing it for the spelling I would choose if I weren't aware there was a movie and had to put these three words together in a vacuum. I'd go with Bridget Jones' Diary and be done with it.

The spelling that was actually chosen was a good way to emphasize how they wanted the title to be pronounced, which is Bridget Joan-Zez Diary. So at least there's that.

The thing is, this whole situation could have been avoided entirely.

Bridget Jones is not a real person, is she? 

Then why the hell couldn't she have just been Bridget Smith?

Or Bridget Johnson?

Or Bridget Brown? With this one you even get the alliteration. 

You might say "Well Bridget Smith's Diary just doesn't sound iconic," but what do you know from iconic? You only think the actual title sounds iconic because you've heard it so many times. Take yourself back to a time when you hadn't heard it, which you obviously cannot do, and one would sound the same as the other.

I guess I just don't get why people make these things harder on themselves than they need to be. A friend of mine posted on Facebook the other day that she was getting confused between characters on Battlestar Galactica named Jack and Jackson. YOU HAVE ALL THE NAMES IN THE KNOWN UNIVERSE, PLUS MADE-UP NAMES THAT NO ONE'S EVER HEARD OF. JUST CHOOSE A NAME FOR THE SECOND CHARACTER THAT DOESN'T MAKE HIM INDISTINGUISHABLE FROM THE FIRST.

Surely it's worse to force people to confront their mislearned grammar from the third grade, when our minds were first blown by how to write possessives when the word ended in S. No solution was good. No second S? Sucks. Second S? Sucks. The apostrophe looks like it's in the wrong place no matter what option you choose, the two S's look stupid next to each other (he says as he writes "two S's"), and without the S it violates what we thought we just learned about how to do possessives.

This alone would be reason enough for me not to name a child Thomas or Charles.

But no, Bridget Jones is the character name Helen Fielding chose for her 1996 novel, and in the process, she fucked us. 

Well, I hope you laughed your way all the way to the bank, Helen. And that you stopped fielding questions about this choice 25 years ago. (See, two can play at the game of causing name-related headaches for other people.)

The anti-Our Friend

Two actors appearing together in the same movies over a short period of time is usually a coincidence. I mean, there are circumstances that might change that, like them being friends, lovers, or part of the same franchise, in which case, yeah, it's more likely.

If they're just Jason Segel and Cherry Jones, who don't appear to have any relationship with one another outside of the two recent movies they've both been in, then I guess it's just random.

What their appearance in my #1 of 2021, Our Friend, and their appearance in what has the potential to be the worst film I see in 2022, The Sky is Everywhere, does, is that it allows me to compare the two films in other ways, and there's some pretty good meat there. Enough to write a blog post, anyway.

In Our Friend, Segel plays the friend of the title, Dane, who drops everything in his life when his friend, Nicole (Dakota Johnson), and his other friend, Matt (Casey Affleck), have to keep their lives together following Nicole's terminal cancer diagnosis. He becomes effectively an uncle to Nicole and Matt's two daughters. Jones doesn't turn up until the last ten minutes or so, when she plays an in-home hospice nurse who helps a basically unconscious Nicole through her final couple days. Her role may be small but her impact is large, as her presence creates exactly the sense of calm one would hope to feel during a period of terrible inevitability. One of the lines of dialogue that really gets me is when she talks about the impending end to Nicole's struggles, and says "And won't that be a blessing." Yes, when you are as sick as Nicole, the blessing is not to survive another day -- the blessing is not surviving that day.

In The Sky is Everywhere, Segel and Jones also play characters with a proximity to death and grieving, but this time, they're biologically related. Jones plays Segel's mother, and Segel is an actual uncle to the main character, Lennie (Grace Kaufman), who is dealing with the comparatively recent death of her older sister. Segel is probably the one who tries to do the comforting here, a natural fit for his stoner tendencies, while Jones is more the giver of tough love, the one who surreptitiously boxes up Lennie's sister's belonging that Lennie had intentionally left strewn about her bedroom, to Lennie's great anger and frustration. (Though to be honest, Segel shrugs off the responsibility more often than not.)

Despite these films having many similar themes, and the obvious similarity of both featuring Segel and Jones, they couldn't be more different from one another. Both in terms of their approach and in terms of my diametrically opposed feelings toward them.

If you want to add one further point of similarity, both films are directed by women, but Gabriela Cowperthwaite has Josephine Decker beat by a mile.

Our Friend, a film I gave five stars and named my favorite of 2021, is certainly about grief, mostly about the anticipation of future grief. When someone you love has terminal cancer, you are basically pre-grieving until they die. The movie has to be about that, of course, but it doesn't have to be about only that. Yes there are plenty of logistics related to the end of Nicole's life and some of them are quite heavy, but there's a lot of joy and despair and soul-searching that has nothing to do with the actual cancer, but more to do with friendships and career goals and a person's trajectory in life. The fact that the film has a flashback structure, where we're treated to generous helpings of character dynamics from long before Nicole even received her diagnosis, inevitably means that it is focusing on nothing so narrow as this cancer itself. When it does indulge in the traditional emotional payoffs involved with disease movies, they are well earned, and more powerful for their relative scarcity.

The Sky is Everywhere, a film I gave half a star and expect to be right at the bottom of my 2022 rankings given that I didn't see a single 2021 film that I gave such a low star rating, is also about grief. Boy is it about grief. But the film's problem is not that it is this lugubrious affair from start to finish, where a character is just reacting really badly to her sister's death and can't get over it. That would at least be something, as no one would expect a person to get over the death of a sibling in less than a year, and would expect her to display the signs of that grief on a regular basis. No, the problem is that this movie jumps wildly back and forth between a twee sort of mania marked by magical realism and DIY eccentricity, that would make Amelie Poulain and Michel Gondry take turns vomiting over its excesses, and these ridiculous bouts of crying and fresh despair that make you sit up and take notice because they represent such an abrupt tonal shift from what was occurring just a moment before. If you think my reaction is a failure to properly appreciate the multiplicity of ways grief rears its head, I invite you to watch this movie and tell me if you can stand sitting through more than ten minutes of it. On second thought, don't. I really don't want to do that to you.

I appear -- yet again -- to be in the minority in my impression of this film, which I reviewed here if you would like to read a half-dozen other epic takedowns. Its Metacritic score is a solid 67, which features 11 positive reviews, five mixed reviews and only a single negative review. My idol Joe Morgenstern is one of the positive reviews, though it should be noted that the excerpt from his review expresses some of my reservations despite his ultimately positive take on the film. 

But trust me -- they're wrong. They don't get it. You really will want to gouge your eyes out. It's always hyperbole when people say that ... and yes, it's hyperbole this time too. But not by all that much.

So where does this leave me in terms of Segel and Jones, two actors whose work in Our Friend felt like a capper on years of their work that I've loved? But who are now in this oversaturated abomination of weepie teen romance cliches where characters float through the air and write their wishes on leaves?

I guess I won't know until their next collaboration. 

My 2006 film rankings (in 2006)

This is the second in a monthly posting of the 12 year-end rankings I completed prior to starting this blog, on the occasion of my 25th anniversary of ranking movies. I'm posting them as a form of permanent backup, plus to do a little analysis of how my impression of the movies has changed since then. I'm going in reverse order and will end with 1996 in December. 

My 2006 rankings feature an early contender (spoiler alert) for my favorite #1 movie of the era I've been ranking movies, a title I hope to determine by using Flickchart at the end of the year to duel them all against each other. 

Normally I wouldn't like to reveal this sort of spoiler now, but the truth of the matter is, my blog is already sort of spoiling it for me. Children of Men is one of two #1s (I won't name the other) that appear in my current Flickchart top 20 to the right of this post, and though that's a pretty solid bit of evidence in favor of its chances in this year-end project, I still have to rewatch it this year. I haven't watched it since 2016, so there's always the chance of a big shift in my feelings. (Good luck with that, though, as it will be my seventh viewing overall.)

Here's how the whole list from 2006 looks:

1. Children of Men
2. The Departed
3. United 93
4. The Queen
5. Letters from Iwo Jima
6. The Prestige
7. Bubble
8. Pan's Labyrinth
9. The Science of Sleep
10. Half Nelson
11. Apocalypto
12. An Inconvenient Truth
13. Cars
14. The Pursuit of Happyness
15. The Film Is Not Yet Rated
16. Monster House
17. Night Watch
18. Winter Passing
19. The Devil Wears Prada
20. Stranger Than Fiction
21. Quinceanera
22. Hostel
23. Venus
24. Little Miss Sunshine
25. Idiocracy
26. Friends With Money
27. Dave Chappelle's Block Party
28. Game 6
29. Click
30. Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazhakstan
31. Hoodwinked
32. The Proposition
33. Inside Man
34. The Ant Bully
35. Casino Royale
36. World Trade Center
37. Tristram Shandy: A Cock & Bull Story
38. X-Men: The Last Stand
39. A Prairie Home Companion
40. Crank
41. Catch a Fire
42. Wordplay
43. Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World
44. The Break-Up
45. Saw III
46. Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby
47. Mission: Impossible III
48. Night at the Museum
49. Unrest
50. London
51. Little Children
52. The Hills Have Eyes
53. The Da Vinci Code
54. On a Clear Day
55. The Lake House
56. Idlewild
57. Superman Returns
58. Thank You For Smoking
59. Lucky Number Slevin
60. V for Vendetta
61. Renaissance
62. A Scanner Darkly
63. Last Holiday
64. American Dreamz
65. Kinky Boots
66. Eragon
67. Final Destination 3
68. Doogal
69. Silent Hill
70. My Super Ex-Girlfriend
71. An American Haunting
72. The Oh in Ohio
73. Brick
74. For Your Consideration
75. Date Movie
76. Art School Confidential
77. Lady in the Water

Ninety-three fewer films than I watched just 15 years later.

Here's the ranking of these films in 2022, with the number being its ranking on Flickchart out of 5764 films, as well as the percentage of that ranking out of 5764 films. That's followed by the number of spots it went up from 2006 (a positive number) or down from 2006 (a negative number):

1. Children of Men (17, 100%) 0
2. United 93 (154, 97%) 1
3. The Departed (187, 97%) -1
4. Pan's Labyrinth (319, 94%) 4
5. Idiocracy (350, 94%) 20
6. Letters from Iwo Jima (373, 94%) -1
7. Apocalypto (438, 92%) 4
8. The Prestige (534, 91%) -2
9. Night Watch (554, 90%) 8
10. Cars (572, 90%) 3
11. Half Nelson (602, 90%) -1
12. Bubble (655, 89%) -5
13. The Queen (685, 88%) -9
14. The Pursuit of Happyness (757, 87%) 0
15. The Proposition (802, 86%) 17
16. Hostel (832, 86%) 6
17. The Devil Wears Prada (1093, 81%) 2
18. Winter Passing (1144, 80%) 0
19. The Science of Sleep (1184, 79%) -10
20. Game 6 (1249, 78%) 8
21. Inside Man (1285, 78%) 12
22. Crank (1361, 76%) 18
23. Stranger Than Fiction (1366, 76%) -3
24. Monster House (1368, 76%) -8
25. The Break-Up (1470, 74%) 19
26. This Film Is Not Yet Rated (1523, 74%) -11
27. Click (1644, 71%) 2
28. An Inconvenient Truth (1718, 70%) -16
29. Quinceanera (1745, 70%) -8
30. Little Miss Sunshine (1776, 69%) -6
31. Dave Chappelle's Block Party (2092, 64%) -4
32. Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2171, 62%) -2
33. The Ant Bully (2174, 62%) 1
34. Venus (2283, 60%) -11
35. Hoodwinked (2314, 60%) -4
36. Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story (2430, 58%) 1
37. Thank You For Smoking (2759, 52%) 21
38. Mission: Impossible III (2805, 51%) 9
39. Friends With Money (2901, 50%) -13
40. The Lake House (3015, 48%) 15
41. The Da Vinci Code (3056, 47%) 12
42. World Trade Center (3081, 47%) -6
43. Night at the Museum (3120, 46%) 5
44. Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (3146, 45%) 2
45. Catch a Fire (3163, 45%) -4
46. X-Men: The Last Stand (3311, 43%) -8
47. Little Children (3434, 40%) 4
48. London (3581, 38%) 2
49. The Hills Have Eyes (3641, 37%) 3
50. Casino Royale (3645, 37%) -15
51. Wordplay (3844, 33%) -9
52. Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World (3859, 33%) -9
53. On a Clear Day (3891, 32%) 1
54. A Prairie Home Companion (3942, 32%) -15
55. Idlewild (3986, 31%) 1
56. Saw III (4068, 29%) -11
57. Lucky Number Slevin (4206, 27%)
58. Brick (4287, 26%) 15
59. A Scanner Darkly (4288, 26%) 3
60. Kinky Boots (4340, 25%) 5
61. Superman Returns (4457, 23%) -4
62. Unrest (4570, 21%) -13
63. Final Destination 3 (4676, 19%) 4
64. V for Vendetta (4813, 16%) -4
65. Renaissance (4935, 14%) -4
66. Eragon (4962, 14%) 0
67. Last Holiday (4971, 14%) -4
68. American Dreamz (5086, 12%) -4
69. Silent Hill (5280, 8%) 0
70. Doogal (5336, 7%) -2
71. The Oh in Ohio (5493, 5%) 1
72. An American Haunting (5494, 5%) -1
73. My Super Ex-Girlfriend (5534, 4%) -3
74. For Your Consideration (5681, 1%) 0
75. Art School Confidential (5700, 1%) 1
76. Date Movie (5702, 1%) -1
77. Lady in the Water (5726, 1%) 0

Five best 2006 movies I've seen since closing the list (alphabetical): Lemming, The Lives of Others, Marie Antoinette, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, Shortbus
Five worst 2006 movies I've seen since closing the list (alphabetical): The Benchwarmers, The Black Dahlia, Little Man, Sorry Haters, The Wicker Man
Biggest risers: Thank You For Smoking (+21), Idiocracy (+20), The Break-Up (+19)
Biggest fallers: An Inconvenient Truth (-16), A Prairie Home Companion (-15), Casino Royale (-15)
Average percentage on Flickchart: 51.56 (1 of 2)

This is the first time I'm identifying an explicit influence of the Filmspotting podcast on my feelings on films. I didn't start listening to this podcast until 2011, but I've gone back and caught the episodes before I started listening from 2005 onward. (I actually got stalled in 2007, but that means the full year of 2006 was covered.) Positive words on the podcast about The Break-Up and The Lake House -- the latter being one of host Adam Kempenaar's great guilty pleasures -- helped those films be among my biggest risers, 19 and 15 spots respectively. That's not because I consider their opinions sacrosanct, but because they gave me permission to acknowledge I like these movies better than I originally ranked them. I also recently rewatched The Break-Up, as I wrote about here. 

Some big jumps are, as they were in 2007, the end result of my Second Chance Vance series on The Audient, which boosted American Gangster from 2007. I famously hated Brick the first time I saw it, but felt better about it on a rewatch, leading it to jump up 15 spots. The biggest riser is also a result of that viewing series, though I was mystified on second viewing what it was I hadn't liked about Thank You For Smoking the first time. If you are really interested in that discussion, you can find it here. 

An interesting note about the 17-spot rise of the Australian film The Propostion, directed by John Hillcoat and written by Nick Cave: it was given to me as a gift, but I've never actually watched it a second time. I guess my ownership itself has won it some duels on Flickchart?

As for the fallers, I'm noticing something that is an interesting offshoot of my recent post on Looking for Richard, in which I mentioned I don't generally rewatch documentaries. I wonder if that also means they slip in my estimation when I think back on them. The biggest faller was An Inconvenient Truth, and yes, I do now think back less positively on it since it feels like it grew out of a particular moment in time -- a funny thing to say because we haven't, in fact, solved the climate crisis yet, so maybe it's more relevant than ever. But maybe I've taken on some of the criticism that it was a better message than movie, or that Al Gore is a bit of a self-parody. I also think that although the themes of climate change are evergreen -- pun not intended and only noticed in the editing phase -- documentaries more than fiction films can't rise above the particular moment in which they were made. I think their adjacency to the news, which is sort of part and parcel to the form, saps them of some of their rewatch value. 

(Incidentally, another 2006 film that I didn't watch in time to rank it, Who Killed the Electric Car?, is a perfect example of this. We are still interested in electric cars today, but when I rewatched this as part of a series involving randomly chosen rewatches from my Flickchart, it felt like its moment in time had passed.)

But the ratings system documentary This Film Is Not Yet Rated was also a big faller, 11 spots. I think I might have just overpraised it the first time due to my enjoyable experience watching it at the L.A. Film Festival, where its director Kirby Dick was present for a Q&A. 

I'm kind of surprised Casino Royale could fall as much as it did, because I remember not liking it from the start. I still haven't rewatched it though. That is also true of A Prairie Home Companion, which I must have given a little bit of a pass back then just because I listened to the real show growing up with my parents, and I wore out our Garrison Keillor audio tapes of Lake Wobegon stories extracted from the show. 

Special mention needs to go to Idiocracy, which I saw too late in the year to properly go any higher with it than the still very respectable 25th I ranked it in 2006. It's now one of my favorite comedies of the 21st century and is all the way up at #5 for the year. 

Okay, I'll hit you up with my 2005 list in March. 

Counting shits

If you're hoping I'm calling Uncharted "shit," no, it's not quite that bad. It's basically mediocre-minus. The shits in question relate to spoken dialogue, not quality.

I really hemmed and hawed about whether the new Tom Holland movie would be appropriate for my eight-year-old and 11-year-old. That the movie is effectively being marketed to them by starring the erstwhile Spider-Man, who could reasonably be considered the most popular actor for kids under 12 (he's my kids' favorite actor), is helpful, but only in a limited sense. If I used that logic take my kids to The Devil All the Time and Cherry, that would have been a disaster.

I also didn't have any real knowledge of the video game, except that it was in the same realm as Indiana Jones in terms of its swashbuckling and seeking of treasure. I remember everyone always said the cut scenes were really great. Was it one of those game where when the characters died, they died bloody? I didn't know.

I did, however, have a person in my Flickchart Facebook group say "Ehhh probably?" when I asked if it was appropriate for kids that age. (He's an American critic and he saw the film earlier in the week.) He likened the level of violence to that of a Pirates of the Caribbean movie, and indeed, that seemed fine for them.

Because I also wanted to make this my first review on ReelGood next week, I brushed aside any remaining qualms and took them on Friday night.

We ran into a problem at Uncharted, but it didn't have anything to do with the movie itself. It was the same problem we ran into at Spider-Man: No Way Home -- exactly the same, in fact, which I wrote about in this post. The two movies whose trailers horrified my eight-year-old at that viewing -- Morbius and The Batman -- still have not come out, so sure enough, we got those trailers again. The difference this time was that I was the one in charge of helping my son avoid any visual or auditory input from them, where my wife did it last time. (She was not present for our Uncharted viewing.) My heart went out to that poor boy, seeing the intensity with which he closed his eyes and covered his ears, and it was clear he wanted more than his own meager body parts could accomplish. So during the Batman trailer I also sung a little funny song right next to his ear, so that was all he could hear, and not the punches, screams or scraping metal. (He later on told my wife he had "averted his eyes" during these trailers. I had no idea he knew the word "averted.")

To my great delight, the violence level in Uncharted was perfect, probably even better than Spider-Man. There was only one part that wigged out my son a little bit, when a character gets his throat slit. That sounds like a lot to take in, but the way it was staged was comically tame. Yes, this man dies almost immediately from his injuries, but one really wonders why, given that the only sign of his fatal wound is a red line on his neck about the thickness of a Sharpie -- not the freshets of blood that flow from such a wound in reality and lead to death pretty quickly. Pretty sure this guy could have walked away from this one, and maybe even kept his appointments later in the day.

There was, however, one part of the movie that bothered my son ever so slightly, something I only knew because I asked him about it.

The profanity level is pretty tame in this movie too, with maybe one or two "son of a bitch"es and I'm sure some "hell"s and "damn"s scattered in there, though at this point those words pretty much go in one ear and out the other. Seeking to give the film some sort of edge, though, they went to the "shit" well quite a lot. "Shit" is the perfect form of profanity to pay a compliment to the aspirational viewers in the audience without really offending younger viewers.

So I don't know if my younger son was offended, but he certainly did notice.

After about 15 minutes I turned to him and said "Are they using the S-word enough for you?"

"They've said it six times," he retorted, without missing a beat.

I had to contain my hysterical laughter so as not to bother the people around me in the mostly full theater.

I secretly hoped he would keep counting. The movie didn't make that task easy. When I asked him near the end if he had kept track, he said he hadn't, but he suspected it was in the vicinity of 25 times. That sounded right.

Well, the movie was a huge hit with them. It wasn't with me, but I don't care about that. My older son proclaimed it his favorite movie ever -- what a surprise -- and the younger didn't make any such assessment but was eager to talk about how Holland was his favorite actor. When my older son asked me what I thought about, I was honest, though I probably softened it a bit just because I knew how strongly he felt. I tried to explain that he hadn't seen movies like Raiders of the Lost Ark and so had nothing to compare it to. Of course, Raiders is only the movie I name check in this scenario because I hadn't seen the older movies that inspired Raiders, which my dad would have championed with me in this same situation.

In truth, if Uncharted were the first movie of its kind you had seen -- which I suspect it was for these guys -- then it would deliver the goods well enough for you, especially if you didn't have the high standards of a film critic. (As for Raiders, well, that's still a long way off. I might have seen it for the first time around my younger son's age, but the Nazi face-melting definitely requires several more years of maturation.)

I'll close by saying I was really encouraged to see our theater almost full. In fact, by leaving it until the last minute to buy tickets, I actually flirted with losing out on tickets entirely -- completely unheard of in the COVID era. We had to rush over from our dinner at the neighboring pancake restaurant to get there before the trailers started -- trailers my younger son would have been just as happy to avoid -- and the three tickets I purchased in the front row were the only three available that were next to each other. We could have sat scattered, but that doesn't make it very easy to share popcorn and Skittles -- nor to cover your son's eyes and ears when the trailers are too intense.

So yeah, audiences will still go to the movies and in fact, they seem eager to. We've had some COVID restrictions lifted this week, so maybe we're finally getting back to a time when the cinemas won't feel in constant jeopardy of going under.

In the end, the eight-year-old -- who had expressed major concern about being so close to the screen, both for visual reasons and because he thought it would be louder -- said that sitting in the front row turned out just fine. He wasn't bothered by it at all.

Just like he wasn't bothered by the 25 shits, though he certainly did notice them.