Audient Bridesmaids: A new periodic series

A few years ago -- seven, actually, now that I look at it -- I did a series called Audient Auscars, in which I watched the remaining best picture winners I hadn't yet seen. There were 15 at the time, so the series actually ran into the following year.

Now, just a few days after watching the final of 2021's ten best picture nominees, I'm announcing another way to systematically gobble through some of the best movies of all time -- according to the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, anyway.

That's right, watching Nightmare Alley caused me to contemplate how rarely I ever let even a best picture nominee go unseen -- to say nothing, obviously, of the winners. So now I'm going to go back and clean up all the ones I haven't seen yet. 

Starting with the most recent best picture nominee I haven't seen -- that would be Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close in 2011 (which is funny because I've actually read the book) -- I'm going to go back through history and watch all the others that slipped through the cracks, either because I didn't make time for them (a comparatively small number) or because I wasn't alive yet (a lot more).

And since this is a large number, there is going to be no set pattern of reoccurrence for these viewings. I'll just have a targeted list and work through it from now until I finish or until my death, whichever comes first.

Just how large a number?

I think I'll show you rather than tell you.

Here's that list in reverse chronological order:

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2011)
Ray (2004)
The Prince of Tides (1991)
My Left Foot (1989)
Hope and Glory (1987)
A Room With a View (1986)
Prizzi's Honor (1985)
A Soldier's Story (1984)
Places in the Heart (1984)
A Passage to India (1984)
Tender Mercies (1983)
The Right Stuff (1983)
The Dresser (1983)
Reds (1981)
Coal Miner's Daughter (1980)
Norma Rae (1979)
An Unmarried Woman (1978)
Coming Home (1978)
The Turning Point (1977)
Julia (1977)
Bound for Glory (1976)
Lenny (1974)
A Touch of Class (1973)
Sounder (1972)
The Emigrants (1972)
Nicholas and Alexandra (1971)
Fiddler on the Roof (1971)
Love Story (1970)
Hello Dolly! (1969)
Anne of the Thousand Days (1969)
Romeo and Juliet (1968)
Funny Girl (1968)
Rachel, Rachel (1968)
The Lion in Winter (1968)
Doctor Dolittle (1967)
The Sand Pebbles (1966)
The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming (1966)
A Thousand Clowns (1965)
Ship of Fools (1965)
Darling (1965)
Becket (1964)
How the West Was Won (1963)
America America (1963)
The Longest Day (1962)
Judgment at Nuremberg (1961)
The Hustler (1961)
The Guns of Navarone (1961)
Fanny (1961)
The Sundowners (1960)
Elmer Gantry (1960)
Sons and Lovers (1960)
The Alamo (1960)
Room at the Top (1959)
The Nun's Story (1959)
The Diary of Anne Frank (1959)
Anatomy of a Murder (1959)
Separate Tables (1958)
The Defiant Ones (1958)
Sayonara (1957)
Peyton Place (1957)
The Ten Commandments (1956)
The King and I (1956)
Giant (1956)
Friendly Persuasion (1956)
The Rose Tattoo (1955)
Picnic (1955)
Mister Roberts (1955)
Love is a Many-Splendored Thing (1955)
Three Coins in the Fountain (1954)
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954)
The Country Girl (1954)
The Caine Mutiny (1954)

(At about this point I'm reconsidering the wisdom of typing these all out, but I'm already committed -- the fallacy of sunk costs I guess.)

The Robe (1953)
Julius Caesar (1953)
The Quiet Man (1952)
Moulin Rouge (1952)
Ivanhoe (1952)
Quo Vadis (1951)
A Place in the Sun (1951)
Decision Before Dawn (1951)
King Solomon's Mines (1950)
Father of the Bride (1950)
Born Yesterday (1950)
Twelve O'Clock High (1949)
A Letter to Three Wives (1949)
The Heiress (1949)
Battleground (1949)
The Snake Pit (1948)
Johnny Belinda (1948)
Great Expectations (1947)
Crossfire (1947)
The Bishop's Wife (1947)
The Yearling (1946)
The Razor's Edge (1946)
Spellbound (1945)
Mildred Pierce (1945)
The Bells of St. Mary's (1945)
Anchors Aweigh (1945)
Wilson (1944)
Since You Went Away (1944)

(And here, a hundred titles in, we expand the field to ten nominees per year. Oy.)

Watch on the Rhine (1943)
The Song of Bernadette (1943)
The More the Merrier (1943)
Madame Curie (1943)
In Which We Serve (1943)
The Human Comedy (1943)
Heaven Can Wait (1943)
For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943)
Wake Island (1942)
The Talk of the Town (1942)
Random Harvest (1942)
The Pied Piper (1942)
Kings Row (1942)
49th Parallel (1942)
Blossoms in the Dust (1941)
Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941)
Hold Back the Dawn (1941)
The Little Foxes (1941)
One Foot in Heaven (1941)
Sergeant York (1941)
All This, and Heaven Too (1940)
Foreign Correspondent (1940)
Kitty Foyle (1940)
The Letter (1940)
The Long Voyage Home (1940)
Our Town (1940)
Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939)
Love Affair (1939)
Of Mice and Men (1939)
Alexander's Rag Time Band (1938)
Boys Town (1938)
The Citadel (1938)
Four Daughters (1938)
Pygmalion (1938)
Test Pilot (1938)

(Only about ten years left to go ... I'm dying at this point)

The Awful Truth (1937)
Captain Courageous (1937)
Dead End (1937)
The Good Earth (1937)
In Old Chicago (1937)
Lost Horizon (1937)
One Hundred Men and a Girl (1937)
Stage Door (1936)
Anthony Adverse (1936)
Dodsworth (1936)
Libeled Lady (1936)
Romeo and Juliet (1936)
San Francisco (1936)
The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936)
A Tale of Two Cities (1936)
Three Smart Girls (1936)
Alice Adams (1935)
Broadway Melody of 1936 (1935)
Captain Blood (1935)
David Copperfield (1935)
The Informer (1935)
The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935)
A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935)
Les Miserables (1935)
Naughty Marietta (1935)
Ruggles of Red Gap (1935)
Top Hat (1935)
The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1934)
Cleopatra (1934)
Flirtation Walk (1934)
The Gay Divorcee (1934)
Here Comes the Navy (1934)
The House of Rothschild (1934)
Imitation of Life (1934)
One Night of Love (1934)
Viva Villa! (1934)
The White Parade (1934)
42nd Street (1933)
Lady for a Day (1933)
Little Women (1933)
The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933)
She Done Him Wrong (1933)
State Fair (1933)
A Farewell to Arms (1932)
I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932)
Smilin' Through (1932)
One Hour With You (1932)
Shanghai Express (1932)

(Go away, I'm dead)

Arrowsmith (1931)
Bad Girl (1931)
The Champ (1931)
Five-Star Final (1931)
The Smiling Lieutenant (1931)
East Lynne (1931)
Skippy (1931)
Trader Horn (1931)
The Big House (1930)
The Divorcee (1930)
Disraeli (1929)
The Love Parade (1929)
Alibi (1929)
Hollywood Revue (1929)
The Patriot (1928)
In Old Arizona (1928)
The Racket (1928)
7th Heaven (1927)

That's 201 goddamn movies. (At the very least, I shouldn't have bothered to go back through and italicize them.)

So yeah I'm not close. 

I can't tell you what percentage of these films I had literally never heard of before, but it might have been as high as half of them. Then there are others I know pretty well by reputation, but had absolutely no idea they were thought of well enough to have been nominated for best picture. 

Obviously there's a big difference between the time I was alive and a cinephile and the years before I was born. I've only missed two 21st century nominees, and you have to go back to 1984, when I was 11 (at the time the Oscars were announced anyway), to find a year where there's more than one nominee I haven't subsequently seen. Only 16 years earlier in 1968, though, 80 percent of the nominees have eluded me to this point.

Now, it's possible I will get to some of these for other reasons before I get to them as part of this series. That's okay. I'm thinking of doing a monthly series on classic musicals, maybe even as soon as next year, and if I do that, I will almost certainly watch some of these. Plus I've already said I should watch The Hustler before I watch The Color of Money for my Scorsese series. And to be honest, it's just as well, because I actually would like to finish this project before I die.

Quite a few of these, I bet, are so obscure that I won't even be able to figure out how to watch them. I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.

I can't tell you how soon I'll get to Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and to be honest, writing out this whole list, and reckoning with its gargantuan size, has dampened my enthusiasm for the whole thing. But since I generally like to strike while the iron's hot, I'll probably get started pretty soon. It's better when you announce something and then don't just let it die on the vine.

Unlike other series, I don't actually know if I'll write about each one of these, though I will probably try. I guess it depends on how much else I have going on on the blog at the time, and how tedious it all starts to feel. 

Taking early bets on when I will finish this series ... the over/under is currently the year 2046. 

Dune not actually close to the record

When I witnessed Dune winning six Oscars but not best picture -- which I never thought it had any chance of winning -- I wondered if that was the most Oscars ever won by a movie that didn't win best picture.

Nope, and it's not actually as close to the record as you might think.

In 1972, Cabaret won eight Oscars without winning best picture, though it was nominated. The only Oscars it was nominated for but didn't win were best picture and best adapted screenplay -- both of which went to The Godfather. The only other Oscar that went to The Godfather was the best actor trophy for Marlon Brando, which he famously declined.

Ha, that's exactly 50 years ago, though of course that Oscars ceremony won't celebrate its 50th anniversary until next year. 

The weirdest thing about this story might not be that Cabaret won all those Oscars without nabbing the big one, but that The Godfather was not more of a sweeping awards phenomenon, given the cinematic reputation it has gone on to enjoy. To be sure, it was nominated for 11 Oscars, but kept coming up as the loser in the early part of the show -- which must have seemed like a bellwether for its chances of taking home the big prize. 

Looking at this now on Wikipedia, I see that the 11th nomination was actually revoked for the film's score. I have to read up on that. 

It appears that part of the film's love theme was already used in the 1958 film Fortunatella, so they had to replace it with the score for Sleuth. 

I guess they did not have a "best adapted score" Oscar back then. 

The night Will Smith won an Oscar and lost his shit

CODA wins best picture!

That wasn't the biggest headline of the night, but it deserves at least the opening of this piece and its own picture. 

Since I didn't see it in time to rank it, I can only estimate where it would have landed among the best picture nominees for me, but I'm thinking fourth, behind Drive My Car, Dune and The Power of the Dog. Hey, when a movie in my personal top half of the best picture nominees wins, I consider it a win for me, considering some of the disappointing choices in recent years. Plus, I think it may actually be the only BP nominee that made me cry, so there's that.

If not for, well, the other thing, my headline for this piece would have been "A fitting coda for CODA," but probably a bunch of other people have written that anyway, so whatevs. 

I will say it's really nice to honor a movie that celebrated love and compassion, as it was one of the few films nominated to actually do that in a genuine way. We needed it now.

The other thing ... well we'll get to that.

First I want to say that I decided to write this post as I was going, to cut down on some writing time after I finished watching (on delay) after dinner Monday night in Australia. So I sort of live-tweeted it, and will just leave my thoughts as is.

I also wanted to say that my 11-year-old watched approximately the first 45 minutes of it with me, which was a first. Hey, I'll encourage movie love wherever I can.

I also drank most of a bottle of wine. 

Okay let's get on with it:

- Good opening number, but maybe not great that it was pre-recorded. Or was it?

- Welcome back, Dolby Theater.

- Long opening credits ruined all the surprises of who's going to appear!

- My son doesn't get Amy Schumer's roasting. I can't really explain it. 

- Playing "Africa" as H.E.R. and Daniel Kaluuya come on stage? Not sure about that.

- Jessica Chastain is looking a lot like Julia Roberts.

- It's skit heavy to this point. I think that's a good thing.

- Dune wins sound. No time for a walk-up. A bit jarring. 

- Queen of Basketball. Yes it's definitely jarring having no walk-up.

- Oh, right, these were the awards that were given out beforehand. Never mind. Go back to what you were doing. 

- I can't hear any of the acceptance speeches because my son keeps asking me questions. While it's mildly annoying, I also feel the urge to indoctrinate. 

- However, his mother, who knows spoilers, comes and forces him to go to bed because there's something on the telecast she doesn't want him to see. I'm intrigued. We tell him he can watch the performance of "We Don't Talk About Bruno" tomorrow. 

- Encanto wins best animated feature, and I've picked five of the six announced awards correctly, missing only on the documentary short. 

- Very random cheer-worthy moments. The Matrix, three superhero movies, and ... Dreamgirls?

- Kotsur's interaction with Youn Yu-Jung was touching for its meeting of two people for whom English is not their first language.

- Drive My Car wins best international feature. I should have entered my friend Jon's Oscar pool, because the ballot I filled out in five minutes is doing quite well. 

- How is Reba McEntire not 100? (Actual age: 67.)

- My recording has no ads and this is moving along well.

- I probably wouldn't actually be doing well in that pool because I haven't guessed right on any of the rando awards. You need to get at least one of those to have a chance I think. 

- I should have picked Cruella. The costumes in that were awesome.

- I've time-stamped "We Don't Talk About Bruno" for my son: 1:25:20. I wonder who greenlit the playing of a song that wasn't nominated? While this song is playing, allow me to sidebar for a bit. I get why "Let it Go" was the hit it was, as it's a soaring number with a dramatic presentation on screen. But why did "Bruno" break through the way it has? I may never understand this. 

- Sykes dressed up as Richard Williams. Funny!

- Elliot Page is really short.

- When Kenneth Branagh says "island of Ireland," it sounds like he's saying the same word twice.

- CODA wins for its script, which I don't really think is outstanding. This is a sign of things to come. (Also one of the first big awards I've gotten wrong.)

- I missed what top five this was supposed to be, but any top five featuring Minimata and Army of the Dead is suss, as the kids say.

- Will Smith. Wow. I can see why my wife didn't want my son to see that. 

- So weirdly my telecast blacked out after what shall forever afterward be known as The Incident, during Questlove's acceptance speech, and rejoined with P. Diddy introducing the Godfather anniversary bit, mentioning The Incident in his speech by saying we were moving on with love. I hope so. We'll see how it goes if/when Smith wins best actor.

- I didn't know Sally Kellerman died.

- "Spirit in the Sky" might be a bit too rousing here.

- Finneas saying he loved his parents as "real people" was a nice touch.

- As Kevin Costner is reading off the best director nominees, I realize I somehow missed the award for makeup and hairstyling.

- Campion wins! Will make up for not winning best picture.

- What, Frances McDormand couldn't show up to present best actor?

- That timely 28-year anniversary of Pulp Fiction ... 

- Chris Rock must be fucking pissed, wherever he's sitting. Smith wins. At least he gives a really emotional speech. "At your highest moment, that's when the devil comes for you." And now he's apologizing. Okay. We can work with this. 

- John Travolta is like "First Adele Dazeem, now this?"

- Oh I guess I didn't miss hair and makeup after all.

- Schumer, welcome back! "Did I miss anything? There's like a different vibe in here."

- Jesse Plemons decided not to punch Schumer for disrespecting his wife.

- So I guess the narrative now is that Chris Rock was the bad guy?

- Keeping my laptop from running out of battery life is becoming a problem.

- We couldn't get a shot of Kristen Stewart in the audience before now?

- This was not my favorite Jessica Chastain performance but I love Jessica Chastain. So yay. 

- And CODA wins. Which you already knew if you had been reading from the start of this piece. Or, for any number of other reasons.

- I really like how they planned to have a translater signing both toward the audience, so the deaf viewers at home could comprehend, and toward the winners, so the deaf cast and crew on stage could comprehend. Thoughtful and sensitive. 

- I picked 15 of the awards correctly. That could be a personal high. 

Okay. Does Will Smith still have a future in Hollywood? Probably. Will Chris Rock press charges? Probably not. 

On to the next one.

Minimum Oscars prep

As has been my custom for about ten years, I kind of tuned out on the Oscars once I learned the nominees six weeks ago. I used to be obsessed over these awards when I was younger, but when I see a friend of mine repeatedly post on Facebook about joining his Oscar pool, I kind of just scoff. Part of it is that I don't really care, but another part is that I feel like you can just take your predictions from a number of reliable sources online and you'll get 75% of them right, with only a few surprises eluding you. What fun is a pool where half the entrants have basically the same picks?

But I do feel a bit of an obligation, which is actually coupled with genuine desire, to do a little Oscars prep, so this weekend, I watched the only remaining best picture nominee I hadn't seen, and my second-favorite of the nominees. (My favorite, Drive My Car, may have been available, but I can't just casually throw on a three-hour movie.)

Friday night it was Nightmare Alley, which I had planned to watch on the projector in our garage, until I realized, moments beforehand, that I had that problem last year trying to play iTunes rentals through our projector. It's incompatible for some reason. So I just watched that one in the living room.

On Saturday night I got my technical specs worked out correctly and remembered to rent Dune through Amazon instead, where I could play it through the Amazon Prime website rather than my iTunes software, hence allowing a projector setup in my garage. (There may have been a way to do this with an Apple equivalent streaming site, but I didn't bother to figure it out.) 

I liked Nightmare Alley a lot better at the start, before Cate Blanchett's character came into it. No offense to Blanchett, but the direction the story took after this point just didn't do it for me, nor particularly did her performance if I'm being honest. (Okay, so, some offense.) I was set to give it 3.5 stars on Letterboxd by the end, but ultimately caved and went with four just because of how great the first hour is and how much I liked the production design, the camerawork, and the overall effort that went into creating this 1930s circus. I think I am a sucker for old circuses (aren't we all). Also, I remain an old softie when it comes to star ratings. I just can't help myself.

As for Dune, I did not expect my enjoyment of it to diminish on a second viewing, and indeed it did not. I said above I could not casually throw on a three-hour movie, but I guess a 2:35 movie wasn't as much of a hurdle for me. But Dune moves more quickly for me than a movie that length usually does, and besides, I had already decided I was going to allow myself a certain luxury when watching it: Namely, if I started to fall asleep, so be it. The tricky thing about watching on my projector is that I don't have a way to remotely stop the movie from playing, so I have to get up out of my bean bag and press stop if I want to close my eyes for a minute. In a movie I've already seen, though, I decided I could just let sleep overtake me for a few minutes, knowing a loud sound would snap me back to attention periodically (especially with Hans Zimmer doing the score). And if I missed a few minutes, it would be stuff I already knew was going to happen anyway. Besides, the first half of the movie, where I was less likely to fall asleep, is the best part anyway. It was pretty freeing to make this decision, and indeed, I probably did miss a combined ten minutes of the film's final half-hour.

I've got one more night, Sunday night, before the ceremony airs on Monday my time, so am I going to watch the best costume nominees I haven't seen and jam in as many of the live action shorts as possible?

Nope. Talk to 2002 me if you want to see that sort of thing.

I will, however, be avoiding spoilers during the day on Monday, and will gladly watch the ceremony, as I always do, on Monday night once the kids are squared away for the evening.

I haven't missed an Oscars since the mid-1980s, and none since I started watching them regularly. Some things will never change.

Chinese mothers should talk to their daughters, and other Everything Everywhere All at Once thoughts

I couldn't help noticing, when I watched an advanced screening of the 4.5 star Everything Everywhere All at Once on Thursday, that it bore a remarkable similarity to the most recent 2022 4.5 star movie I saw the weekend before. That would be Turning Red, Pixar's latest.

Both movies deal, using a huge amount of metaphorical and fantastic imagery, with the communication breakdown between immigrant Chinese mothers living in North America, and their more westernized daughters. 

The age of the daughters differ. Red's Meilin is supposed to be 13, while the actress playing Everything's Joy, Stephanie Hsu, is 31 years old, though Joy's age is never mentioned. 

The conflicts, though, are very similar. In both cases, the more traditional mother cannot accept her daughter's desire to step outside of the limited range of what's expected of her -- in one case a heightened interest in a boy band, in the other, because she's a lesbian. And both inherited their own strictness from the generation before, a mother in one case and a father in the other.

It's just funny to see such a similar theme explored in the same week in two very different sorts of movies that immediately became my favorite and second-favorite movies of 2022, though which is which may be something I can't truly decide for a while yet. (Plus, both could well be eclipsed by other movies as we go along.)

Here are some other thoughts from my first advanced screening since early December:

Security on patrol

As I was walking into the screening, a large bald man in a suit with a big smile said something to me, which was surely related to the confidentiality requirements during the screening -- no use of your phone, etc. I didn't hear exactly what he said but was happy enough to nod along to it, knowing it would be conditions I could agree to, much as I sign various user agreements without reading all the fine print. (Most recently on our agreement with the person who will market our home in Los Angeles. Yeesh.)

Despite his big smile and friendly demeanor, that man took the security very seriously in this movie.

Now, I'm not really sure what he was trying to prevent. Is it really a thing anymore where people try to record a movie on their phone so they can sell a bootleg copy of it later on? His militant desire not to see any phone screens light up during the movie was certainly not just to protect the undisturbed enjoyment of the other patrons. 

How militant? He walked the aisles at least a half-dozen times during the movie, a sort of hulking deterrent who didn't mind if he were providing the same sort of viewer distraction that would be provided by the peripheral sight of a mobile phone screen in use. And when one phone did go on during the movie, he walked right over to that person and snuffed it out.

Needless to say, my own phone was conspiring to run me afoul of him. 

I tend to forget during Thursday night viewings that I have an alarm that's set to go off at 6:45 to tell me to take out the garbage cans. It used to be on Sunday night at my old house, and caused the same sort of problem then.

Namely, the supremacy of the alarm is considered to be such that it powers on the phone just to let you know it's going off. There is likely a setting I could adjust so it wouldn't do this, but I haven't adjusted that setting yet, and besides, there might be situations where I'd want to preserve the battery, but I'd want the phone to power on at a designated time.

That designated time is not 30 minutes into a movie, when not only does the alarm go off and power on the phone, but while you're trying to shut the phone down again, all the other audible notifications that have been waiting while the phone was off have to chirp out to you. At least the sound of the alarm itself is a peaceful one.

As I tried in vain to power the phone back off again, I noticed the security guard eyeing me. Given how quickly he later squelched the other phone user, I was surprised my frustrated wrestling with my phone didn't draw him over. But because I didn't want to draw him over, I eventually lost the wrestling match, and instead of getting the phone to shut off again, which requires holding down a button for longer than you should need to, I hastily stuffed it in my backpack, where I hoped at least the lining of the bag would smother future noisy emissions.

So annoyed was I by this that it kind of ruined my next five minutes of the film, and for a minute I worried I wouldn't recover my equanimity. Fortunately, this movie is good enough -- and it's one of those movies that gets better, rather than worse, the longer it goes -- that my mental order was soon restored.

Ke Huy Quan returns

I can't remember, if I ever knew, why the erstwhile Short Round from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Data from The Goonies gave up acting, but presumably it had something to do with him no longer being a cute young kid, and the movies no longer welcoming him after a certain point. In any case, he has no credits whatsoever between 2002 and 2021. 

Well welcome back, Ke Huy Quan.

It was lovely to see the boyish charm still present in this 50-year-old man. He's still got the same voice we remember from those movies, he's still got a ton of energy, and he still makes you smile. 

He's also sort of this film's secret weapon. Michelle Yeoh is its main weapon, and awesome secondary weapons include the aforementioned Hsu, James Hong, and Jamie Lee Curtis as we've never seen her before. But I don't think this would be the delight it is without Quan.

Is it too late for him to cameo in the next Indiana Jones movie?

The easiest way to get me

This is not giving anything away about the movie, not anything you probably couldn't guess yourself, but I'll be vague about it anyway.

If you really want to bring me to the edge of waterworks, all you have to do is get a character to renounce their previous prejudices.

I suppose this is true in multiple spheres, but I notice it most often when a character gets over their intolerance of homosexuality, as happens in this movie.

You'd think I were gay or something, with the way I'm always pushed to and beyond the threshold between not crying and crying when a character embraces the LQBTQI person in their life. Except that I don't have to be, because cinema is that empathy machine that Roger Ebert described, where you can put yourself in the shoes of others, and vicariously experience the powerful emotion they would be feeling in that moment.

One of the most powerful instances I can think of this happening is in Kissing Jessica Stein -- which, if we're being honest, is really a heterosexual movie masquerading as a gay movie. That doesn't change the power of a moment where Tovah Feldshuh's character is comforting her daughter, played by star Jennifer Westfeldt, and her voice hitches for a moment as it becomes clear she understands something we didn't know she knew: her daughter has been seeing a woman. "I think she seems like a very nice girl," she says. 

I'm getting verklempt. Please, go talk amongst yourselves.

I don't think the moment or moments in Everything Everywhere All at Once are as profound or as smartly executed, but that just shows you what an easy target I am.

Daniels are back

This film is directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, who directed a previous top ten movie for me, 2016's Swiss Army Man. I obviously loved that at the time for how far it went outside the box of our expectations, and still feel fondly toward it even though it couldn't maintain that high level for me on the second viewing.

Everything Everywhere All at Once has the same sort of rule-shattering craziness in it, and though the core questions are perhaps a bit more traditional than those in Swiss Army Man, the execution is equally joyous, colorful, surprising and hilarious. 

I realized while watching it that these guys made a movie in between, The Death of Dick Long in 2019, and I never really heard anything about it, nor noticed it playing in a theater near me. It apparently wasn't a dud, either, as Wikipedia shows the movie having a 74% critical approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. 

Guess I better seek that out, as any chance to luxuriate in their distinct cinematic vision is a good one. 

Never get two popcorns

I attended my first advanced screening in some time on Thursday night, first since before omicron anyway. I saw Everything Everywhere All at Once, and as is my custom, I followed it up with a second movie, which was Ti West's X. I intend to write more about at least the first of these two movies on another day, but first I want to write about popcorn.

The first screening had complimentary popcorn and a drink, as is also the custom at these events. Because I thought I was running late for the 6 p.m. start -- the movie didn't start for another 20 minutes after I took my seat -- I missed that they were also serving gin in the lobby as part of a promotion. I would have certainly had some, but given that there was a second movie on the docket and I hadn't been home since I left my house at 7:30 that morning, it's probably better that I didn't.

The complimentary popcorn was a small popcorn, as is also the custom. I went through it ravenously, as apparently the two chicken skewers I'd purchased while walking up to the cinema were not dinner enough. The Coke didn't last super long either.

When the movie I ended, I had to rush to get out (more on that in a moment) in order to be sure I wouldn't miss any of the 8:30 X. Again, a miscalculation as there was another ten minutes of ads and trailers after I got in. But I also wanted some further food to sustain me for the second movie, so while I was getting my ticket at the candy bar, I opted for ... another popcorn. This time a large.

Bad decision.

I ate this one in a constant flow as well, but since it was much bigger, it took me much longer. I got down to the bottom level of it when I was struck with an overwhelming desire to stop eating it. Part of it was that I didn't have enough left of my second Coke to counter its saltiness, but part of it was realizing that I just ... couldn't ... eat ... another ... bite.

I felt okay for the rest of the movie, but once my feet got moving again when it finished just after 10:30, that was when the belching set in.

And I had to keep belching for about ten minutes to relieve the discomfort while I waited for the tram, the first of four conveyances to take me home. (Followed by a second tram, a train, and finally, my bike home from the train station.)

Even after this period of initial uncomfortable belching was done, I had smaller belches just to continue to try to settle things down there, pretty much for the rest of the hour-long trip home.

I won't be doing that again any time soon.

Sure, the first one left me wanting more. But a second one left me wanting a lot less. 

It was a costly trip to the cinema for reasons other than my guts. Because of the hurried departure from Everything Everywhere All at Once, I failed to properly check my seating area to make sure I had everything. I later determined that my AirPods had been in the breast pocket of my shirt when I'd taken it off at the start of the movie. I suppose it was possible I left them in X -- I walked out before the end of the credits there too -- but EEAaO seems the more likely culprit.

I would have noticed it in time to go back in and get them had I partaken in my usual routine, which is to start listening to something pretty much as soon as I leave the theater. But because I had now been out of the house for more than 15 hours, it was all I could do to hurry over to the tram stop to make sure I didn't narrowly miss the first of those four conveyances and have to wait another 20 minutes for the next one. Even though I had a good six minutes to wait once I got there, I was still in that thousand-yard-stare mode that left me too limp to kick off a podcast. 

I only discovered it at the train station, and then I was miles away from the theater.

I've sent them a message through the website so hopefully they will find them.

The funny thing is, just earlier that day, as I was getting on the train in the morning, I thought to myself how smart I was to always look back at where I had been sitting to make sure I hadn't left anything. I even considered trying to make a funny Facebook post about it until I decided it was just too pedestrian an observation to be worth sharing.

Lessons learned: Don't get cocky about your own genius life hacks, and definitely don't order the second popcorn. 

Audient Bollywood: Dhoom

This is the third in my 2022 monthly series catching up on prominent Bollywood films.

The first two entries in this series included a film that promised to have outstanding dance numbers (1998's Dil Se) and a genuine classic from the origins of Bollywood (1957's Pyaasa). Now in March we get to a film I had actually heard of before this series began.

It may not actually have been Dhoom (2004), per se, that I had heard of, but rather its sequels. I probably wouldn't have heard of Dhoom 2 (2006) either, as South Asian content was not very prominently advertised in Los Angeles, where I lived in both 2004 and 2006. Rather, it was 2013's Dhoom 3 that I remember seeing on a massive poster that took up a whole building wall here in Melbourne, that piqued my curiosity about this franchise nearly nine years ago. But I couldn't rightly start in on the third film of the series, so Dhoom was my choice for March -- and given the goals for this series, to expose myself to a multiplicity of examples of Bollywood, the sequels will likely have to wait until another year, as simply enjoyment-based rather than assignment-based viewing. Read on if you want to see whether my enjoyment rose to the level of seeking them out.

In watching Dhoom, I consciously wanted to see what a Bollywood franchise looked like, especially one I could tell from the poster was an action franchise. And I discovered that it looks ... pretty much like an American franchise.

In fact, Sanjay Gadhvi's film wears its influences on its sleeve. It is essentially a combination of The Fast and the Furious and Ocean's Eleven ... which also describes the Fast and Furious movies in and of themselves as that franchise moved onward. But in 2004 only two movies in each of those series had been released, and probably only one by the time they started making Dhoom. Of course, other Hollywood influences abound, as the central buddy partnership of a cop and a criminal recalls 48 Hrs. and countless other movies on which the genre of the buddy action comedy was based. 

Is resembling these movies a demerit for Dhoom? Hardly. The informal name of India's film industry is a loving homage to Hollywood, so it makes sense that many Bollywood films would be an attempt to bring the conventions of Hollywood to a South Asian audience. Not that those South Asians could not watch the originals, but everyone likes movies that star people who look like them, don't they?

And it's a credible version of Hollywood filmmaking. The action set pieces are good, the comic rapport between the stars is enjoyable, and there's even a use of split screen, which was popularized around that time in the films of Steven Soderbergh in particular. 

I'll give you a quick plot synopsis just so you know what we're talking about. Mumbai is being beset by robberies conducted by a gang who ride motorcycles -- I'd call it a biker gang, but then you might be thinking of Harley Davidsons rather than the bikes you see in the poster, which give the film its Fast and Furious flavor. (Hotrodders are hotrodders, whether their vehicle of choice is a bike or a muscle car.) The leader of the gang is Kabir (John Abraham), and in hot pursuit is detective Jai Dixit (Abhishek Bachchan). Kabir is always one step ahead, of course, so Dixit enlists a low-level hustler, Ali (Uday Chopra), using various blackmails to convince him to cooperate and try to infiltrate the gang. The gang increases the complexity of their heists while Kabir taunts Dixit, including one time bumping into him on the street, pretending to be a blind man -- his "proof" that Dixit couldn't catch him even if he were right under his nose.

That should all sound pretty familiar to anyone who was watching Hollywood action movies around 2004. What wouldn't be familiar is that this, too, has dance scenes. I wasn't 100% sure whether Dhoom would participate in the traditional Bollywood usage of song and dance -- some films made in Bollywood surely must not -- but after the cold open heist, a traditional Bollywood number is the first thing we get. It's between Dixit and his wife (Rimi Sen), and it's just the first of about four or five such numbers throughout the film.

Without fail, such numbers always boost the value of the movie for me. Without them, Dhoom is probably a three-star effort. The dance numbers kick it up to 3.5, and even though I'm trying to avoid giving movies that extra half star for no good reason, these dance numbers are a good enough reason. Their syncopation, their joyousness, and their total lack of necessity to the story always puts a goofy grin on my face.

And as mentioned earlier, the set pieces are pretty inventive. There's something about close-combat fighting in the movies I've seen that seems a bit off, but the stunts are pretty fun. For every bad absurd stunt you have -- like this one part where Dixit and Ali, on a motorcycle, simply jump over a group of approaching assailants, without there appearing to be any sort of incline that enabled the jump -- you have a good absurd stunt. The best of these entails jumping a speed boat over a road, across the path of an approaching truck, so someone on the boat could fire shots at someone in the truck. Fun stuff.

What's also fun is the charisma of these stars. Despite assuming central position in this poster, Bachchan is probably outdone in this regard by the smoldering Abraham and the funny Chopra. Then when one of these people appears in a challenging dance number, you think "Oh yeah, not only are they charming, but they can also dance and possibly sing." The film is, probably unsurprisingly, not great on gender equality, but the female member of the gang, the only woman who appears with any consistency, also has real star power. She's played by Esha Deol, and she has magnetism to spare. (Plus, er, sex appeal. That's all I will say.)

I might go into more detail about Dhoom, but I have to say, I chose some pretty unfavorable circumstances to watch it. It was the second movie I watched after the family and I watched Turning Red. It was nearly 10 on a Saturday night when I got started on it, after an insanely busy week that started in Sydney and also included our upstairs carpets being replaced, our car breaking down, a tour for a possible high school for my son, me conducting interviews for an open position at my job (a career first for me), and more Uber trips than I can count. So yeah, I was too tired to watch Dhoom, probably, but I couldn't resist the projector already being set up in our garage for Turning Red. I fell asleep a couple times, but I think they were all pretty short, and I don't think they affected my ability to follow what was happening or enjoy it. Dhoom isn't the type of movie that asks too much of you, and that was a thing I needed on Saturday night. Fortunately it was also short by Bollywood standards, only 129 minutes. 

On to April, where it may be time to get back to one of the movies that has been singled out for containing a top ten Bollywood dance sequence. Since I really enjoy even the ones with supposedly "mediocre" dance sequences, that could be a real treat. 

The first 2022 movie I'm not reviewing

You get a sense of how much my reviewing at ReelGood has become a one-man operation by the fact that I'd seen 11 2022 movies and reviewed all of them, most recently The Batman nine days ago. That's also the last thing that has been posted to ReelGood, which makes for an unusually long drought, a drought I'm usually hustling to prevent. That's why I'm sure to watch the new streamer releases when I can't get out to the theater, and why so few slip through that I didn't review.

In fact, to crush this particular drought I'm planning to watch Netflix's The Adam Project tonight with the hope of getting up a review by Friday morning, so I don't go the whole work week without posting something. It should have been Turning Red, which my son wanted to watch while we were in Sydney last weekend, but we didn't bring an HDMI cable with us, and surprisingly, the TV in the hotel room didn't use one. I made the call that we couldn't just watch a new Pixar movie on my laptop screen. 

There has been one other review of a 2022 movie on the site, Moonfall, but it was reviewed by a pair of my reviewers doing a bit of a Siskel & Ebert routine, and I haven't yet watched it myself. Sadly, these are busy guys (one of them is in France the last I checked) so they haven't been able to contribute any solo reviews so far this year.  

Well, that streak of 11 straight 2022 movies that I both watched and reviewed is finally over. 

Even though it was the topic of a little zeitgeist buzz earlier this year, I wasn't really anticipating the documentary The Tindler Swindler -- in fact, when I saw it advertised on Netflix, I thought it was yet another TV series. 

Watching it Tuesday night, six weeks after it debuted, for another documentary alternate Tuesday, I am obviously not going to review it. I say "obviously" though I should probably explain that I have a guiding philosophy that a review must post on my site within two weeks of the film's release, preferably one week, preferably only a couple days -- though the Thursday (theatrical) and Friday (streaming) release dates make that tricky, given that I don't post on ReelGood on the weekends. 

That's all I really wanted to say today -- not much, but after writing so much on this blog during the first 75 days of the year, the current three-day drought seemed epic. 

Though I should give you a word or two of my thoughts on The Tinder Swindler, and why I'm glad I didn't review it.

I gave the movie 3.5 stars, or 7/10 according to the ReelGood rating scale, but it's just the kind of movie I've given a 3.5-star rating by default in the past, which really might deserve more of a three. (And I said I was not going to do that anymore, for the umpteenth time, earlier this year.) It's well made and the subject matter was interesting, but I guess I didn't end up feeling particularly surprised by what I saw. I mean, one of the great truisms of the world is that scammers know how to scam. This one might have had a slightly higher degree of difficulty, but it didn't represent an unusually high level of commitment before the scamming proper began.

I'm also glad I didn't review it because I don't really want there to be a 1:1 relationship between movies I've seen and movies I've reviewed in a given year. It never ends up that way by the end, of course, because you miss movies in the theater or streaming and catch up with them later (The Tinder Swindler being the first example of that in 2022). But this particular streak of 11 straight was reminding me that I need to do a better job finding other people, reliable people, who can write for ReelGood, so the whole site doesn't rest precariously on my ability to watch this week's handful of new streamers. 

R.I.P. to the first adult actor I knew

It probably goes without saying that I've been watching movies starring adults since I started watching movies back in the 1970s. But no actor personified an adult like William Hurt, who died of natural causes at age 71 on Sunday.

How does one "personify" an adult? 

I suppose what I really mean is that Hurt kind of ushered me into the concept of adult movies, those that were not intended for me but whose merits I could begin to understand.

There were a number of these "gateway movies" that I saw all or part of in the mid- to late-1980s, when I was just beginning my teenage years. And Hurt seemed to be in all of them.

The one I think of most is Broadcast News, one of the earliest movies I saw that I knew was not for me, but I loved anyway. It's a title I've been meaning to watch again for ages, and now that Hurt has died, it should finally find its way onto the schedule. I think part of my affection for this was the crush I had on Holly Hunter, but I remember specifically being taken with Hurt's performance.

The Accidental Tourist was another, though unfortunately, my rewatch of that one didn't go so well when I saw it again back in 2010. 

Then there were films I saw parts of, if not all of, like The Big Chill, Children of a Lesser God and Kiss of the Spider Woman, though I did eventually properly watch all of them. 

So unlike most actors who only appear in adult-oriented films -- I don't think Hurt ever appeared in something primarily intended for children -- I've been watching his movies for going on 35 years now. 

You could argue that Hurt's recent run in the MCU -- a run that was expected to continue, I imagine -- could be described as that sort of shift. But Hurt didn't get involved until other Oscar-winning actors (Hurt won his Oscar for Kiss of the Spider Woman*) had already been guinea pigs. (I will leave this paragraph even though I was subsequently reminded that his MCU character, Thaddeus Ross, first appeared in The Incredible Hulk -- in other words, the second MCU movie.)

I think the thing that drew me to Hurt was his dignity. He was like a British actor in American skin. He had a kind of proper quality to him that some might call stiff, but Hurt was never stiff. He was prim and proper and almost always played an intelligent character, but he had that mischievous little smile that belied inner dimensions to which he also treated us.

It certainly came as a surprise to learn that he had passed. He never struck me as someone in his 70s, though he was indeed a week short of his 72nd birthday. I also contested the idea that "natural causes" could take someone as young as 71. 

But having watched Hurt on screen for half of his own life, I suppose he was, in the end, an old man, if you define 70 as that line of demarcation. An old man who gave us many wonderful moments on screen over those 35 years since I first discovered this beguiling adult who was not Mark Hamill or Harrison Ford or Christopher Reeve or Roger Moore or Michael J. Fox.

I'll miss him. 

Correction: I wrote that he had won his Oscar for Children of a Lesser God when I originally posted this, due to a mental error caused by the similar title structures. 

Matthew Goode rarely is

This post contains spoilers for The King's Man, and possibly other films that will be determined as we go.

I don't believe the spoilers would be detrimental to your enjoyment of the film, and the premise of this post basically argues that they shouldn't really be spoilers anyway. Still, read on at your own peril.

I wonder if it was weird for Matthew Goode to possess movie star good looks and his fair share of acting ability, only to end up in Hollywood and always -- and I mean always -- get cast as villains.

They go to a lot of trouble in The King's Man, which I watched on Thursday night, to hide the fact that he's a villain. His character is seen about a half-dozen times -- always from behind (and once with a fencing mask on) to preserve the surprise of who this man is with the outrageous Scottish accent, pulling all the strings in World War I from behind the scenes. (Yes, this movie tackles World War I head on with the delight of an enthusiastic alternate historian, though I was surprised to learn afterward how much of it hypothetically could have been real.)

But who are we kidding? Once Goode was introduced as a minor innocuous character at the beginning, and then nothing was really done with him, it should have been obvious to anyone half paying attention that he was going to end up being the Big Bad. 

Because that's what Goode always -- and I mean always -- does.

As I am typing these words, I have only a general sense of how correct or how absolute this notion is. But I'm going to go through the films he's appeared in that I've seen, just to see how much his filmography bears this out. (I won't bother with the films I haven't seen, as this could subject me to spoilers -- though I should probably say there could be other spoilers ahead, so tread carefully. If you see a particular title come up, and you haven't seen the movie, you can just move past that one before you determine whether I decided he was, indeed, a villain in that film.)

Let's go chronologically. As it turns out I've been watching Goode at the movies for exactly 20 years, which gives this a nice little additional bit of relevance:

Chasing Liberty (2002) - Here is the sort of role Goode might have imagined he'd play his whole career, a handsome and charming love interest for the president's daughter, who is on the lam at a European music festival. It wasn't long after this before he went sinister, though.
Verdict: Not a villain

Match Point (2005) - Had to re-read the plot synopsis on this one. I thought Goode might have been sinister here but he appears to be more of a cuckold. Just being a priggish Brit doesn't mean you're a villain. 
Verdict: Not a villain

The Lookout (2007) - And Goode takes villainy by the teeth. In a pretty scenery-chewing performance if I remember correctly, Goode plays the smarmy leader of a team of would-be bank robbers who conscript the bank's janitor, a former hockey star with brain damage that affects his short-term memory (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), to help rob the bank.
Verdict: Villain

Watchmen (2009) - Similar to in A King's Man, Goode's status as a villain is a late-film reveal, as for most of the time we just think he's one of the good (if underutilized) Watchmen. Nope. He wants to bring the world to its knees, just like the guy in A King's Man.
Verdict: Villain

A Single Man (2009) - Had to go to the plot synopsis on this one too. Turns out Goode plays the deceased lover of the main character, played by Colin Firth. He's remembered fondly but painfully by Firth's character following his death eight months earlier in a car accident.  
Verdict: Not a villain

Stoker (2013) - Hit up this plot synopsis as well despite remembering Goode's villainous ways in this one. Both a pervert (he tries to hit on his teenage niece) and a murderer in this one. 
Verdict: Villain

Belle (2013) - I'm just going to stop mentioning my visits to the Wikipedia plot synopses. Looks like Goode only has a small role in this one, the father of the main character, who gives her into the care of his uncle near the beginning of the film. Not for villainous reasons, though -- maybe for cowardly ones, but I don't really remember.
Verdict: Not a villain

The Imitation Game (2014) - "Great!" I thought. "Goode is almost certainly one of Alan Turing's professional rivals, or someone who wanted to out him!" Nope, just a cryptography colleague, it appears, whose name isn't mentioned very often in the synopsis.
Verdict: Not a villain

Self/less (2015) - So it appears Goode plays the scientist who pioneers the fundamentally unethical body-swapping procedure at the film's core, which just sounds like a villain thing to do, though to be honest, I barely remember this film. Also it's a bit complicated by the fact that part of the time he plays a vessel, which means it's someone else's personality piloting the body. But still ...
Verdict: Villain

Allied (2016) - Appears to be a smaller role of a man who was blinded in the war. A blind person can't be a villain unless it's Don't Breathe, or possibly Don't Breathe 2. 
Verdict: Not a villain

Downton Abbey (2019) - This is probably a good time to cover both of Goode's prominent TV roles on British period pieces -- that I've seen, anyway -- which are his role as Mary's race car driver love interest in Downton Abbey, and his role as Tony Armstrong-Jones on The Crown, where he really mistreats the queen's sister, Princess Margaret. He's lovely in the former and a definite villain in the latter. But in the case of the Downton Abbey movie the answer is ...
Verdict: Not a villain

The King's Man (2021) - As discussed.
Verdict: Villain

Overall verdict: Matthew Goode is not always -- always -- a villain.

However, being a villain in five of the dozen films in which I've seen him at least makes him pretty likely to be cast that way. It would be a higher percentage than most people. And therefore, I can justify the time I've just spent on this.

I suppose this is actually a compliment to Goode, in that when he's a villain, I really remember it. 

In the subject of this post, I used a little play on words, saying "Matthew Goode rarely is," implying the word "good" there. And in that use of "good," meaning it as a synonym for "kind" or "just" or "pious," and an antonym for "evil."

But Goode is definitely "good" in terms of his talent, in terms of what he brings to the screen. And that can be a chilling coldness that has its best times to shine when he's cast as an evil bastard eager to deceive, kill or maybe even molest you.

If Goode weren't so good in the times he's been cast as a villain, I probably wouldn't think there had been so many of them. 

Residual enthusiasm and productivity

Note: I wrote this post more than five weeks ago, expecting it would post within a week. The reason it didn't is more proof of what I'm writing about. So I will leave the original text intact and add parenthetical responses written today, March 10th, in bold.

It's funny how cyclical blog writing can be.

A little over a year ago (more than 14 months ago now) I wrote a post in which I marvelled about the productive year 2020 just completed, in which I wrote more posts than all but one other year in the history of this blog. Then later in 2021, my updates got so infrequent that I wondered why I was even still doing this -- resulting in fewer posts than all other years but one since 2013, and third lowest overall. 

Well, as the cycle I alluded to in the opening sentence of this post would indicate, I'm back again. (Boy am I ever.)

There have only been 69 days so far in 2022, and I've posted on 65 of them. 

Posts are always in heavy supply at the start of the year, since that's when movies are most front-and-center in my life -- even more than usual -- as I look back on the year just completed. That's no guarantee, though, that I'll keep writing at such a furious pace after I officially move on to the new year. (Such a furious pace.)

But this year there has been residual enthusiasm and productivity -- even if those posts are just a case of writing about that very enthusiasm and productivity, like this one.

As I write this, it can go up no sooner than two days from now, as I already have a post in the can for tomorrow. (Remember, I never post more than once per day.) (Which is why I kept saving this one until I didn't have something else written that I needed to post first.) It might be longer, though (more than a month longer), as who knows what tonight's viewing might inspire me to post -- not tomorrow, but the day after that. I've also got another post in the can that just needs to go up sometime in February. (Note: This parenthetical comment is being added about a week later, when I have six -- yes, six -- posts currently in the can.) (I was already adding parenthetical future comments back then.) 

I assume I will be posting the post I'm currently writing in February, but at this point, who knows. (Nope. March 10th.)

And to give you an indication of that uncertainty, I've written the earlier sentence in this post as "There have only been xx days so far in 2022, and I've posted on xx of them." I hope I remember to update that before I post this. (Yup. Remembered.)

I suppose calling it residual enthusiasm from the end of the year would be correct on some level, but 2022 has excited me in a whole bunch of new ways. Not only do I have my recurring series, Audient Bollywood and Settling the Scorsese, but I've also determined to post all my previous film rankings from before I started this blog, as a way of backing them up permanently, so a hard drive crash (and a failure of my primary backup) don't leave them lost out there in the ether.

Those posts require some additional analysis and computing of numbers, so they give me something to work on even when I'm not aiming to post them the next day. Then there's also the accompanying project, which is rewatching all my previous #1s in 2022 in order to rank them at the end of the year.

So never fear, Audient readers. I'm not closing up shop anytime soon.

And I need to remember this post the next time I have one of my inevitable droughts. Because movies always come back around again, don't they?

Lifelong passions are not easy to squelch, and a writer writes -- in my case more than most. (Understatement of the year.) I'm at the point now where I feel like if I don't write at least a thousand words a day, I'm not fully satisfying the deep urge to write that most writers feel. They feel it even if they are not always in a position to write, or even if they sort of hate writing on some level. (Hating writing obviously doesn't apply to me.) Writing is a complicated passion. 

Film is a more uncomplicated passion, and it is a resource that gives forever. There's no getting to the end of watching movies. 

So until blogs are just such a ridiculously archaic form that only the most self-absorbed TV characters still pursue, and that's the TV writers' idea of a joke, there will still be posts on The Audient. (Though possibly not tomorrow, as the well has run dry at the moment. And though I'm never more than an idea away from my next post, I'm going to Sydney this weekend, so it could be a few days off you get from The Audient -- finally.)

My 2005 film rankings (in 2005)

This is the third in a 2022 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. 

The shortcomings of my random rewatching of #1s, combined with a non-random reverse order listing of my year-end rankings from 2007 back to 1996, are being revealed to me this month, as I just watched and posted about Hustle & Flow a few weeks ago. Then again, I'm not really here to talk about Hustle & Flow today. I'm here to record my 2005 film rankings to the permanence of the internet.

Before we get to that, though, I'll just say that this list felt like a bit more of a stroll down memory lane than the two I've posted previously. Two thousand five was the first year I dated my now-wife (we met just before Christmas in 2004), so I remember a lot of these titles being things I saw with her pretty soon after we started dating. And since that dating experience obviously had a very happy ending, it makes me very fond of those movies, even the ones I didn't like very much. 

Here is the best-to-worst list I released in January of 2006, for 2005 movies:

1. Hustle & Flow
2. Good Night, and Good Luck.
3. The 40-Year-Old Virgin
4. Kung Fu Hustle
5. Munich
6. Proof
7. The Squid and the Whale
8. Batman Begins
9. The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants
10. The Matador
11. Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance
12. Brokeback Mountain
13. Match Point
14. Bride & Prejudice
15. Everything Is Illuminated
16. The Family Stone
17. Paradise Now
18. King Kong
19. The Constant Gardener
20. Melinda and Melinda
21. Broken Flowers
22. Guess Who
23. Walk the Line
24. Ellie Parker
25. Aeon Flux
26. Grizzly Man
27. Cache
28. Diary of a Mad Black Woman
29. March of the Penguins
30. War of the Worlds
31. My Date With Drew
32. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
33. Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith
34. Millions
35. Syriana
36. Thumbsucker
37. Beauty Shop
38. The Ringer
39. The Aristocrats
40. Shopgirl
41. Crash
42. Layer Cake
43. Constantine
44. Son of the Mask
45. High Tension
46. Thirtyfive Something
47. Junebug
48. Wedding Crashers
49. The Ballad of Jack & Rose
50. The Jacket
51. Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous
52. Dark Water
53. D.E.B.S.
54. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
55. Coach Carter
56. Lords of Dogtown
57. Robots
58. Sin City
59. Are We There Yet?
60. Fun With Dick and Jane
61. White Noise
62. Racing Stripes
63. It's All Gone Pete Tong
64. 2046
65. Hide and Seek
66. Herbie Fully Loaded
67. The Dukes of Hazzard
68. A History of Violence
69. The Pacifier
70. Smile
71. Fever Pitch
72. The Upside of Anger
73. Saw II

Just glancing at this top ten, it doesn't have a lot of huge favorites that I watch over and over again. Only four of the movies in my top ten have I seen more than once, and strangely, Batman Begins is not one of them. Yep, even though I rank this as the highest of the Nolan Batman movies, I haven't seen it again after that first time in Paris (!). So I guess I've never seen Batman Begins without French subtitles on the screen. (I saw the English language version, not the dubbed version, thank God. That wouldn't have worked because there certainly would not have been English subtitles.)

Let's see where these movies find themselves ranked today according to my Flickchart. The number is its ranking on Flickchart out of 5807 films, followed by the percentage of that ranking out of 5807 films. That's then followed by the number of spots it went up since 2005 (a positive number) or down since 2005 (a negative number):

1. Hustle & Flow (196, 97%) 0
2. The 40-Year-Old Virgin (268, 95%) 1
3. Batman Begins (316, 95%) 5
4. Good Night, and Good Luck (332, 94%) -2
5. War of the Worlds (335, 94%) 25
6. Munich (478, 92%) -1
7. The Squid and the Whale (597, 90%) 0
8. Brokeback Mountain (602, 90%) 4
9. Everything Is Illuminated (638, 89%) 6
10. Proof (649, 89%) -4
11. Kung Fu Hustle (658, 89%) -7
12. The Matador (681, 88%) -2
13. Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (966, 83%) -2
14. Paradise Now (1115, 81%) 3
15. The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (1179, 80%) -6
16. Melinda and Melinda (1552, 73%) 4
17. The Family Stone (1567, 73%) -1
18. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1584, 73%) 14
19. Bride & Prejudice (1585, 73%) -5
20. Grizzly Man (1623, 72%) 6
21. King Kong (1675, 71%) -3
22. Star Wars - Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (1835, 68%) 11
23. Match Point (1873, 68%) -10
24. Walk the Line (1922, 67%) -1
25. Guess Who (1985, 66%) -3
26. The Constant Gardener (1988, 66%) -7
27. Aeon Flux (2026, 65%) -2
28. March of the Penguins (2079, 64%) 1
29. Millions (2237, 61%) 5
30. Ellie Parker (2323, 60%) -6
31. Broken Flowers (2477, 57%) -10
32. Cache (2480, 57%) -5
33. Beauty Shop (2504, 57%) 4
34. My Date With Drew (2505, 57%) -3
35. Diary of a Mad Black Woman (2835, 51%) -7
36. Layer Cake (2941, 49%) 6
37. Constantine (3016, 48%) 6
38. Sin City (3252, 44%) 20
39. Thirtyfive Something (3491, 40%) 7
40. Dark Water (3574, 38%) 12
41. The Aristocrats (3626, 38%) -2
42. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (3662, 37%) 12
43. The Jacket (3735, 36%) 7
44. Son of the Mask (3754, 35%) 0
45. Wedding Crashers (3932, 32%) 3
46. Syriana (3938, 32%) -11
47. Thumbsucker (3954, 32%) -11
48. Robots (3972, 32%) 9
49. Shopgirl (4024, 31%) -9
50. High Tension (4027, 31%) -5
51. Are We There Yet? (4049, 30%) 8
52. The Ballad of Jack and Rose (4127, 29%) -3
53. Miss Congeniality 2: Armed & Fabulous (4211, 27%) -2
54. Fun With Dick and Jane (4308, 26%) 6
55. A History of Violence (4309, 26%) 13
56. Crash (4363, 25%) -15
57. Junebug (4365, 25%) -10
58. Lords of Dogtown (4593, 21%) -2
59. Racing Stripes (4724, 19%) 3
60. Herbie Fully Loaded (4747, 18%) 6
61. D.E.B.S. (4798, 17%) -8
62. The Ringer (4840, 17%) -24
63. White Noise (4841, 17%) -2
64. Coach Carter (4872, 16%) -9
65. It's All Gone Pete Tong (4982, 14%) -2
66. The Dukes of Hazzard (5072, 13%) 1
67. 2046 (5161, 11%) -3
68. Hide and Seek (5237, 10%) -3
69. Smile (5342, 8%) 1
70. Fever Pitch (5447, 6%) 1
71. Saw II (5562, 4%) 2
72. The Pacifier (5612, 3%) -3
73. The Upside of Anger (5641, 3%) -1

Five best 2005 movies I've seen since closing the list (alphabetical): The Baxter, Confetti, Nine Lives, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, Transamerica
Five worst 2005 movies I've seen since closing the list (alphabetical): Alone in the Dark, Asylum, Chaos, The Island, Just Friends
Biggest risers: War of the Worlds (+25), Sin City (+20), Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (+14)
Biggest fallers: The Ringer (-24), Crash (-15), Syriana/Thumbsucker (-11)
Average percentage on Flickchart: 49.10% (3 of 3)

The obvious big mover here is War of the Worlds, which I apparently received somewhat middlingly the first time I saw it. Obviously it has grown in leaps and bounds in my estimation as I have rewatched it several times with my wife (having seen it solo originally). She also loves it so that helps. I just find this film unbelievably tense, and it doesn't lose me even though I know that the final 30 minutes are considerably weaker than the rest.

Among the risers and fallers I have a number or examples where I'm surprised they could rise/fall so much, because I already thought I had felt enthusiastically about them in the direction they have risen or fallen. Take Crash, for example. (Take it, please.) Crash was a very weird example of a movie where, when I walked out of the theater, I reluctantly admitted to my wife (then girlfriend) that it was probably the best film I'd seen that year, though I remember feeling confused about that assessment because I knew something was wrong with the movie. As soon as I thought about it for half a second and read some reviews, those wrong things became crystal clear. The epic backlash against the movie did not really ramp up until it won best picture, after I closed off my list, which helps explain my initially kinder ranking. Let's just say that although the backlash didn't sway me from one way of thinking about the movie to another, it did increase the vehemence of those negative feelings.

The Ringer puzzles me because I don't remember liking this movie even at the time I saw it. Johnny Knoxville and co. never overcame the problem of the movie being about an abled man who pretends he's disabled in order to dominate the Special Olympics, though I guess at the time I must have felt it redeemed itself near the end. I have forgotten that entirely by now, and it dropping 24 spots proves that.

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is the surprise riser for me, since I always thought I felt pretty positively about it and haven't even seen it again to have that assessment confirmed or strengthened, as a comparative rise would imply. Only a second viewing should significantly boost its standing relative to the others, you would think. Meanwhile, it was indeed a second viewing that caused me to decide I had been too harsh on A History of Violence (+13) the first time, though I still don't really like that movie. I don't think I've seen Sin City again, but I think I've just decided over time that it must have been better than I initially gave it credit for, just for the use of its groundbreaking techniques.

This is a very middle-heavy group, nothing in either the top two percent or bottom two percent of my Flickchart. But it leans a little toward the lower half of that middle, which is why the average Flickchart percentile is easily the lowest of the three years I've looked at so far. (I should point out, though, that I'm only consider the percentage of the movies I ranked at that time, not the ones I have seen since. However, 2005 probably doesn't fare very well in that regard either, as I had to leave a bunch of stinkers off my list of the five worst I've seen since the list closed.)

Two thousand four in April. 

My days of bad children's movies are numbered

I don't think I will have to sit through 100% Wolf for very much longer.

Thankfully, I don't have to sit through 100% Wolf itself for any longer, as it mercifully ended 96 minutes after it started on Saturday night, and I never intend to watch it again. But I won't have to sit through movies like 100% Wolf for very much longer either.

It was my eight-year-old's choice for a family movie, but he'll be growing out of making choices like this pretty soon.

It already wasn't his first choice. He wanted to watch The Last Airbender, the 2010 M. Night Shyamalan movie that I didn't hate as much as most people did. Apparently I had more hope for 100% Wolf than to reassess my not-completely-negative take on a Shyamalan dud.

Bad choice.

100% Wolf was not actually my first choice among our remaining choices. My son had watched a trailer for Over the Moon, which reminded me a bit of the surprise delight Wish Dragon that I ranked last year. My son kept the moon theme -- 100% Wolf is about werewolves -- but picked the wrong movie.

Bad choice.

Look, 100% Wolf wasn't awful, and it was an Australian production, so I give it some additional home team points. As you can see from the poster, it's got a decent voice cast, though I'm starting to wonder how much that really means these days -- who would turn down the opportunity to phone in some line readings from their house and collect 20 or 30 grand for a couple days' work?

So it could have been worse. But I'll be happy to be past such movies, probably within the next year.

I'm a film critic, so I theoretically see everything. But there are certain movies that just don't have any hope of seeming relevant to my audience, and therefore, I'm not going to watch them if I don't have a specific reason, like having an eight-year-old son who is just sentimental enough about his own dwindling childhood to continue gathering my wife and me on the couch for movies like this one.

Where was his older brother, you ask?

Well, here's the preview of things to come, the feeling that 100% Wolf hasn't got long left. My 11-year-old had two other 11-year-olds over for a sleepover, and they were set up in our garage with the projector, watching the first Avengers movie. I guess we're getting closer to that day when I finally agree it's okay to show him Infinity War, which features _______ getting choked to death by ______. 

But it's not the MCU that is the preview of things to come. The 11-year-old has probably seen half those movies by now, and his younger brother has seen at least five. No, it's what his friends wanted to watch instead that really opened my eyes.

If I was taken aback but pleasantly surprised that another friend wanted to watch Monty Python and the Holy Grail on a sleepover -- as discussed here -- I was taken aback and less pleasantly surprised when one of these kids wanted to watch Police Academy.

Now, it's been pretty long since I've seen Police Academy, but I'm pretty sure it has f-bombs and I know it has nudity -- since the kid confirmed it when I humorously confronted him with that fact. 

How does he know it has nudity? Well, he'd already watched it. With his parents' consent.

My wife, usually far more vigilent about these things than I am, said she would have been okay with Police Academy, when I reminded her that it was rated R -- at which point she did a complete about face.

The compromise between Police Academy and a Marvel movie -- in terms of appropriateness if not in terms of subject matter -- was going to be Dumb and Dumber, which is largely lacking in profanity and entirely lacking in nudity. My son was keen to see it. But the other two had already seen Dumb and Dumber more than once each, so they opted against it. And because it was already closing in on 8:30 and they needed to get that damn movie started, we just went with The Avengers, telling my son that my wife and I would watch Dumb and Dumber with him later on -- probably not as fun as with his friends.

So under some set of circumstances, the contrast between what was showing in our living room and what was showing in our garage could have been as extreme as a movie featuring a boy who transforms into a pink-haired poodle rather than the rest of the werewolves in his family, and a movie featuring bouncing boobs among profane police officers. Such a stark discrepancy can't last long, and never again is it going to lean in favor of the first movie rather than the second.

Don't get me wrong, I actually think it's time. In fact, I view it as a positive development that my older son was more interested in the idea of a comedy than another Marvel movie. Even at age 11 he is able to see how much they resemble each other and start to feel like a bit of a slog. He doesn't have a completist mentality, and he doesn't have my luxury of having spaced these movies out over nearly 15 years now, rather than watching a dozen of them within essentially two years. I can understand the exhaustion, and I like it that my son wants to laugh, maybe even that he'd be on the fringes of naughty humor. Maybe if John Cleese and Graham Chapman weren't a hit with him, Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels will be. (He'll have to wait a bit longer to see what he thinks of Steve Gutenberg and Michael Winslow.)

Even these 11-year-olds are weirdly betwixt and between though. For as much as the most mature of them -- in terms of interests if not behavior -- is appearing to show the signs of attraction to the opposite sex, and has to really censor himself not to swear constantly, the guys also weirdly played hide and seek a number of times during the weekend. Granted, they were videoing it with the intention of posting it somewhere, but it was still hide and seek. 

Maybe they're not so different from my eight-year-old, but it's much more likely that he will aspire to be like them going forward than they'll aspire to be like him. Especially in their choice of cinema. 

Will I miss D-grade animated movies like 100% Wolf and last year's Dog Gone Trouble, which was also known as Trouble in some parts?

I won't. But I do know this can never be an absolute stance, and here's why: The aforementioned Wish Dragon, which ended up at #35 on my year-end list, is not a movie I ever would have watched if my son hadn't suggested it. The animation was more than competent -- far better than 100% Wolf, anyway -- but its lack of a theatrical release would have been code for "It ain't worth your time."

Well, Wish Dragon was worth my time. Maybe before he fully grows out of animated movies and wants to watch bouncing boobs instead, my eight-year-old will pick one or two more Wish Dragons along the way. 

Another Hollywood disappearing act

I wrote yesterday that Channing Tatum seems to have returned to the spotlight after four or five years where he basically wasn't heard from at all.

Well we're now going on about that long for Ryan Gosling.

It has occurred to me before that I haven't seen Gosling in anything lately, but it didn't occur to me exactly how long it had been until I looked it up on Friday night.

The occasion to look it up was Murder by Numbers, a 2002 detective movie that was among Gosling's first, which I stumbled across while scrolling through Netflix, on the rare occasion of having no idea what I want to watch on a Friday night. This one jumped out at me not for Gosling, but for Sandra Bullock, who I had mentioned in yesterday's post. (Yes, I wrote yesterday's post on Friday. It's a thing that happens a fair amount.)

It was only Gosling's fourth professional credit, and first since he had his breakout (among independent film fans, at least) the year before in The Believer. He would have been 21 during much of filming, still young enough to play a high school kid. And all the Gosling charm, moves, and gift for some unknowable sort of menace, were present from the start.

We haven't seen any of those things for a while.

Gosling's last credit on IMDB is in Damien Chazelle's First Man (2018), where he plays my uncle Neil Armstrong. (Not really my uncle.) As that was the sort of dedicated performance in which Gosling was surely striving for an Oscar nomination -- fruitlessly, as it turned out -- it seems strange to think that it was his last to date. 

Rather than something arduous about that shoot appearing to have caused his ensuing absence, it seems that the reasoning was somewhat similar to Tatum's: fatherhood. According to what he and partner Eva Mendes -- who also no longer makes movies -- have said, they wanted their daughters to grow up outside the spotlight, and may have actually moved to Canada, Gosling's native land. Gosling has also made cryptic comments about movies being "not his favorite way to work."

Well, like Tatum, it looks like Gosling couldn't stay away either. 

Gosling has about the same number of projects in the works as many other busy stars, which is notable in his case for the total absence of them since 2018. The one that's in post-production means that we're sure to get it, which is The Gray Man, set for release this year. The rest are three projects that are in pre-production and one that's announced. He'll appear in another Wolfman remake (currently titled Wolfman), which is another collaboration with Derek Cianfrance. He's supposed to play Ken opposite Margot Robbie in Greta Gerwig's Barbie movie, which should be a hoot. Then there's also The Actor and Project Hail Mary.

It shouldn't take a hail mary for Gosling to get back in the game. Like Tatum, he was fully entrenched in the A list, but unlike Tatum, Gosling was always thought to have real acting ability, not just the charisma to make certain roles work. Gosling's appeal crossed over -- nay, crosses over -- from discerning cinephiles to your average viewer, both of them appreciating his craft and swooning over the way he furrows his brow.

Tatum and Gosling make for an especially interesting comparison as they are both 1980 babies, both 41, though Tatum turns 42 next month. Gosling has another eight months of being 41. 

I have more hope for Gosling's return to form than Tatum's, but the movies will definitely welcome them both back. Let's just hope that their returns are for good reasons, that they've figured out ways to make their work compatible with the parts of their lives that prompted them to give up Hollywood in the first place. 

I guess Channing Tatum is back

When I was in the cool old cinema in Ballarat (as mentioned yesterday), I noticed the two adjacent posters you see here. Both movies feature Channing Tatum. It's the sort of detail you don't usually see in real life, often because stars' movies tend to be spaced out at greater intervals, each one intending to capitalize on the next fertile release period of the calendar year. But you'd see it plenty in a movie about a movie star, to show just how famous he or she actually is.

One of the reasons I went beyond noticing it to writing about it here was that a few years back, I examined how Tatum was sort of on the verge of losing his fame.

In this post, which is already two-and-a-half years old now, I wrote about Tatum's unexpected disappearance from the scene, which was already in full bloom by then. Both of the two movies I mentioned at the end of that post -- America: The Motion Picture and Free Guy -- finally came out in 2021, but his roles were so small in them, and it's just voice work in the former, that that hardly felt like a reclaiming of the spotlight. In fact, his cameo in Free Guy had such a sort of desperate quality to it, it felt like an attempt by a filmmaker to prop up the sagging career of a guy we used to know who now needed our help. Free Guy suggested to me that Channing Tatum had forgotten how to be a movie star.

I guess he's remembered.

Now, Dog is probably not anyone's idea of a big return to form. In fact, there's something about its "soldier and his dog" story that seems like a logical step further into the ghetto of obscurity, an attempt at a comeback that just proves how marginalized he's become. At a certain point in some people's careers, they become suited for no better than movies that are intended purely for the consumption of American conservatives, who love their soldiers and their dogs. (Side note: I noticed Dog is being advertised at a local cinema with upcoming BYOD -- Bring Your Own Dog -- sessions. That sounds ... messy.)

But then The Lost City stars Sandra Bullock, who isn't in her peak period either, but is still close enough to it to retain her spot on the A list. For now. 

In any case, having two movie posters side by side in a mainstream movie theater is a sure sign of something.

The Lost City hasn't come out either here or America, but the early verdict is in on Dog, which has a 61 on Metacritic. Promising start. Maybe even the coastal elites will want to watch this one.

Tatum, he may yet return to the elite, though it will take a concerted effort over the next few years. As he is now the parent of at least one young child -- the thing that caused him to sort of step away in the first place -- it remains to be seen if he's got the hustle to get back to the top, or prefers a few paychecks here and there to put food on the table for his son.

Me, I hope we see him back filling that niche he filled ten years ago, when he could make both action movies and comedies come to life. Because cinema needs a Channing Tatum, a loveable lunkhead who feels comfortable in his own skin, and not the one who seemed so awkward and out of place in Free Guy.