An awful week, a great week

When I heard a week ago that another gunman had opened fire on an elementary school in America, almost as if intentionally marking nearly ten years since Sandy Hook, I was at a total loss.

It shook me to the core. And yet unlike when Sandy Hook occurred, it wasn't unprecedented. It was like "This ... again?"

And I didn't write about it on my blog. Until now of course.

The murder of children and teachers at Robb Elementary School doesn't have anything to do with movies, just as Sandy Hook didn't have anything to do with movies. But like Sandy Hook, it begs the question about how we can just go on with our normal activities like nothing happened. 

The first post I wrote after it happened was about loss, but the loss of just a single person: Ray Liotta. Then I wrote about Avengers: Infinity War, and The Final Girls, and an awesome Bollywood movie called RRR. 

It was only when listening to a podcast I'm caught up on, which had released an episode since the shooting, that I was reminded of the fact that I owe it to you, my readers, to say that this unthinkable action -- sadly, all too thinkable these days -- has been close to my mind and heart all week.

So why did I go on, posting frivolous material, as if nothing had happened?

Jesus Christ, what choice do we have. If politicians in America -- almost half, more than half, but way too close too half in either case -- choose to pass no legislation on gun reform, me screaming into the void on my blog isn't going to change that.

But as a blogger I need to at least have the decency to acknowledge that the world has once again been torn asunder by preventable gun violence. I'm sorry I didn't do it before now. 

One of the most visible stands taken on the events of last Tuesday was by the coach of the Golden State Warriors, Steve Kerr, who hovered near tears as he screamed into the void in a far more productive way than I ever could -- in front of TV cameras, at a press conference that was supposed to be about his team's upcoming game against the Dallas Mavericks. Which they lost, by the way. I'm sure Steve Kerr didn't give two shits that his team lost. They won the next one and are now going on to the NBA Finals, which start on Thursday.

Against my Boston Celtics.

The Celtics were my first favorite sports team. For a good half decade before I even gave two shits about baseball, I loved and watched the Celtics as they won championships throughout the 1980s. I feel like I was only dimly aware of their championships in 1981 and 1984, but by the time they won it all in 1986, when I was 12, I was fully invested. Little did I know I'd have to wait 22 more years before I would see them hoist another banner.

This past Sunday night, they hung on in Game 7 against the Miami Heat, on the road, and punched their ticket to their first NBA Finals since 2010. 

This is why it's also been a great week.

I think that's what I'm struggling with most. On Facebook, I posted my impotent outrage in the hours after I'd heard what happened. I didn't post anything else for five days after that. 

The next thing I posted, though, was a picture of me smiling, wearing my Celtics #0 Jayson Tatum t-shirt, with the single word "Finals."

I'm sure there are some people who questioned the tastefulness of that, in the wake of what happened. I questioned it myself.

But 45 people liked or loved the post, which is, I guess, them forgiving me for being distracted by something else, something that brought me joy, in the shadow of such pain. Which is them needing the joy in their lives as well.

I don't know what I want to say here. I know it doesn't have anything to do with movies.

Even the things that stop us dead in our tracks cannot stop us dead in our tracks. I balled my fists in rage over the fact that gutless politicians trying to keep up their perfect rating with the NRA continued to allow deranged young people, young people who never should have been anywhere near military grade firearms, to shoot up another school. To kill more than 20 people, 19 of them students. But because life is presenting us both bad things and good things all the time, and these things are time sensitive, and because there's nothing, in this case, I can do about either the good or the bad, I posted that picture of me smiling wearing my Celtics t-shirt.

I don't regret it. I had to grasp that moment of joy when it was with me. I might get another one in the next two weeks, if the Celtics can beat the Warriors, but I might not.

Like I said, I don't really know what I want to say here. But I did want to let the people know, the people who care enough to come here and read what I write, that I didn't just shrug and move on. 

I hope this time, finally, maybe, the politicians won't shrug and move on either. 

Audient Bollywood: RRR

This is the fifth in my 2022 monthly series introducing myself to Bollywood movies. 

I mentioned a few months back that I became aware of my March movie, Dhoom, by seeing a large billboard for its sequel hanging in downtown Melbourne. This city is very hospitable to Indian cinema in a way I can't imagine most major American cities being, or not very prominently anyway -- maybe only in heavily Indian areas. (Do any American cities have the Indian equivalent of a Chinatown? An Indiatown, maybe? Little Delhi?)

I tell you this because May seemed like a perfect time to catch a current release -- in the cinema.

The idea might not have occurred to me on my own, but it occurred to my wife. I had showed her a great dance number from Bajirao Mastani, my April film, and that was the occasion for her to show me a trailer for a new movie she had seen advertised called RRR, which she was dying to see.

I can see why. It's a historical epic with great visual effects and action scenes, and an insane sensibility that I would later compare to the films of Timur Bekmambetov. But I'm getting ahead of myself. 

We talked about making this happen, actually going to a Melbourne Hoyts (that's where Bollywood films mostly seem to play locally) to see RRR. But my wife and I might see one movie a year in the theater together, and I don't think we've seen any together since before the pandemic -- not just the two of us. (She's been along to movies like Spider-Man: No Way Home and Ghostbusters: Afterlife.) The 185-minute running time, had we been aware of it, likely would have further put the kibosh on the idea.

But I left it really late to watch my Audient Bollywood movie for May, and then a few days ago, I happened to see RRR -- on Netflix. It may be that's always where it was supposed to debut for us here in Australia, or it may be that with the Netflix debut pending, its local theatrical window was very short. In any case, a three-hour running time is far more digestible of an idea when you can watch it at home and spread it over two nights.

Which is exactly what we did on Saturday and Sunday.

And this movie is entertaining as fuck. Excuse my language. But it is. 

The two guys you see in the poster -- well, before I tell you who they are, let me explain to you what's going on in that scene, to give you some idea about the tone of this movie. The guy on the bottom has just broken the guy on the top out of prison, where he was scheduled to be hanged, and because the guy on top had his legs broken, he can't walk on his own. So instead of the bottom guy just cradling him or slinging him over one shoulder, they come up with this daunting blend, where the guy on the bottom can be the guy on the top's legs, while the guy on the top fires rifles and punches people out from a height of about ten feet in the air. And you can just imagine the stunts they do jointly, flipping gymnastically around various structures while knocking out various combatants, all the while never becoming disentangled.

The top guy, Rama Raju (Ram Charan), is the guy we meet first. He's a policeman serving his British rulers, and he's a badass. Not only does he believe absolutely in his duty and in fulfilling his role to the best of his abilities, but the best of his abilities involves insane, suicidal acts of bravery. The way we meet him is a perfect illustration of this. During a crowd scene where protestors are trying to knock over a fence as they protest the British ruling regime, a man in the crowd hurtles something over the fence and injures an important person. Determined to arrest this man, Raju runs at full sprint, up an incline, and into a teeming mass of people, all of whom want to do him harm. He literally fights hundreds of people who are closing in on him and crushing him, repeatedly emerging from impossible circumstances to continue pushing this crowd aside as he proves his quarry. And you better bet he gets it, bloodied and bashed though he may be at the end.

The bottom guy, Bheem (N.T. Rama Rao Jr.), is one of the people on the other side of the fence. Not literally, but he's part of a native group in opposition to the ruling class, who casually tread on the value of Indian life, and steal a young girl from his community because they like the way she sings -- and brutally kill her mother on the way out of the village. He's a protector of the village and vows to get this girl back -- who is either literally or figuratively his sister, I couldn't quite be sure. He's a badass too, again as exemplified in the scene where we first meet him. As part of a plan that we don't see materialize until later in the movie, he uses himself as human bait to try to catch vicious predator -- at first they think it's going to be a wolf, but the plans change and it's a tiger instead. (I won't spoil how they use the tiger in case you are inspired to go check out RRR on Netflix yourself.) His scene first escaping, then snaring in a trap that keeps on failing in unexpected ways, then finally subduing the tiger is one for the ages. 

It's clear that director S.S. Rajamouli knows what the hell he's doing when it comes to grand set pieces. He's directed 11 other features, though without looking into it more than I care to do right now, I have no idea if any of them are in this same vein. But let's just say that the more I see of especially recent Bollywood -- you may remember that Bajirao Mastani was from 2015 -- the more convinced I am that the scope, the scale and the visual effects are only a slight step down from the best of what Hollywood is capable, if they are a step down at all. I know that tiger was digital, just as I know that some of the humans themselves had to have digital enhancements to pull of these sorts of stunts. And there are a few times when, for example, a person being blown off their feet by an explosion, or an animal tumbling head over foot, maybe did not tumble or fall in the way that gravity would truly dictate. But it's crazy fun and entertaining, and both my wife and I let out whoops of surprise and joy on regular occasions.

Plot? I can't tell you how closely this sticks to any of the real events in India of the 1920s -- that's when this occurs, if I didn't mention it -- and there's a disclaimer about historical accuracy, or lack thereof, at the beginning of the movie. (Bajirao Mastani had this too.) But the two main characters were real people, famed Indian revolutionaries. All you really need to know is that the British characters are all awful fascists and major assholes (with the one exception of Bheem's British love interest), and that although Raju is initially on their side, it won't/can't last. A revolution is coming to India, and these guys are going to lead it, in spite of dozens of twists and turns and absurd set pieces along the way.

I'm dying to tell you what they do with the tiger(s). But I won't.

However I do want to communicate to you just how gloriously over-the-top this all is. There's an amazing sequence where the pair -- who are working together while the policeman is undercover -- save a child from burning oil slick in the water. It involves riding a horse and a motorcycle over alternate sides of a bridge, each holding a rope as they swing down to grasp the child while also swinging past each other and exchanging a flag, which the second guy will use to protect himself from the flames as he swings back through them. As with many of the set pieces in this movie, a description in words cannot do it justice. You just have to watch it.

And I think, I am concluding right now as I write this sentence, that I may actually watch this movie again. All three hours and five minutes of it. I know there are wonderfully brazen, totally outrageous scenes that I'm forgetting that I would love to watch again. There are parts involving a flaming motorcycle and a bunch of TNT that would be well worth the second watch.

The one thing RRR doesn't have a lot of? Bollywood dancing. There are about two numbers, and then a number that plays over the closing credits as well -- far shy of the ten to 12 numbers in the films I'd watched previously. The one I remember best, though, is the two leads involved in a dance with insanely hard moves. They cheated a little bit by speeding up the film, but I don't care -- the end result is what matters, and the end result of all of RRR is glorious.

One last thing: RRR stands for Rise Roar Revolt. 

Okay, each of my last three movies in this series have been from the 21st century, so it's time to delve back into the past again a bit. In June I am likely to watch Anand, a 1971 film with the merciful running time of only two hours and two minutes.

The final time I watch The Final Girls

This never happens to me. 

On Saturday night, I watched a movie I had already watched, thinking I hadn't watched it.

However, the same thing happened with a TV show about a week ago. Is this the first sign of Alzheimer's setting in? (It runs in my family, unfortunately.)

The movie was The Final Girls, which I chose as my Saturday night viewing. Parts of it felt familiar, but I thought that was because I had watched a YouTuber talk about it, since I remember someone analyzing its story beats. 

The question should have been "Why would I watch a YouTuber discuss a movie I had never seen?", which would have been a good question indeed. But hey, I was tired. 

In fact it was the second half of my Saturday night viewing, started at 10:20 and chosen for its 91-minute running time. For the first part of the evening, my wife and I had watched the first half of my Audient Bollywood movie for May, which I will tell you about in the next few days. It's 185 minutes long, hence splitting it in half over two nights.

By rights I should have just watched an episode of The Walking Dead, the only TV show I am watching without her at the moment, as I am steadily slogging my way through about four seasons ago. But I guess I had that "cinematic craving." You know what I mean.

I also paused to nap a couple times. I can imagine the first time I watched the movie -- which turns out to have been October 12, 2018 -- was under similar sleepy circumstances, where the movie went in one ear and out the other. I wouldn't be surprised if I watch it a third time down the road given my only partial retention of what happened while I was nodding off. 

I can't remember the last time this has happened to me with a movie, if it ever has. Surely it would have happened before, but I don't remember the experience. (Maybe that's part of the problem, heh heh.)

Strangely, it happens to my wife with some frequency, with her favorite artistic medium: novels. More than once she has read her way well into a book before realizing she had already read it, and in fact, we joke about owning two copies of this one random, inscrutable, stream-of-consciousness Scottish book called How Late It Was, How Late because she bought it twice -- not only having forgotten she read it, but having forgotten how much she disliked it. 

This undoubtedly seems worse than watching the same 90-minute movie twice, except my wife's brain is not wired the same way mine is. I have that collector's mentality, that list-maker's mentality. Each movie I add to my movie collection lodges its way into a compartment in my brain that is specifically designed to keep track of such things. My wife has no such compartment and therefore I expect less retention than I expect of myself. (Of course, I don't "expect" anything from my wife at all on this front -- it's her business.)

The weird thing is that I was actually inclined to go a full star higher on The Final Girls in 2022 than I was in 2018. Just before I went to add the movie in Letterboxd, I was hit by a suspicion that I was going to see a star rating appear when I called up the movie, meaning I had previously ranked it. Indeed this happened, and my judgment in 2018 had been 2.5 stars. I was going to give it 3.5 stars this time, though I can't really tell you why -- I guess maybe its self-referential nature just worked a little bit better for me this time. The reality is probably smack dab in the middle at three stars.

The really weird thing is that this just happened with a TV show also.

My wife and I went to start watching the final season of Better Call Saul, however, she accidentally picked the first episode from last season rather than the first episode from this new one. Although some parts of the episode seemed familiar, it wasn't until we got to the end, and it dropped us back into the episode menu, that we realized that a full season's worth of episodes had already been released, and the titles of those episodes were all titles I recognized. So somehow we watched the whole episode without realizing that a season's worth of events were not accounted for in the plot.

Hey, I suppose when I really do get Alzheimer's, they can just show me Raising Arizona on repeat, and I'll keep discovering it as though it were the very first time. 

The last post about my kids and Avengers: Infinity War

Looking back on my posts on this blog, I've actually only tagged Avengers: Infinity War three times, and only once within the past two years. Nevertheless, I feel like I've been going on and on about how I didn't want my kids to see it because I believe it contains one of the most mature incidents of violence in any MCU movie, and I wasn't ready to throw open the doors of the whole MCU to them. (That's the opening bit where ______ gets strangled to death.)

Well, doors officially thrown open.

Last night my older son (age 11) had a friend sleep over, and I didn't actually expect they'd be watching an MCU movie. My son has a bit of MCU fatigue, as we all do, though I took him to Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness a few weeks ago and he really enjoyed that. Still, this was the friend who had previously recommended Monty Python and the Holy Grail to him, as written about here, so I imagined things wouldn't be so predictable. They've watched MCU before -- Thor: Ragnarok comes to mind -- but I figured we'd go off in some other unexpected direction this time, as we did last time.

But it's hard to get children to spontaneously conjure the titles of movies they want to see, and when we started to go through Disney+ to jog their memories, it turned out this friend also had not seen Infinity War -- even though he had seen Endgame. In my own mind I had come around to my son possibly seeing Infinity War, and it might have even been me who suggested it last night in order to get us out of a state of decision paralysis that could have theoretically lasted forever. (A luxury we especially could not afford with a movie that runs two hours and 34 minutes.)

Eleven still feels a bit young to me to be taking in some of these images, but he's taken in worse. In fact, a few weeks ago, he saw my favorite comic book movie since these final two Avengers movies, The Suicide Squad, with the other kids who were waiting for a gathering of my wife's friends to wrap up a leisurely dinner. That's a full-on R, with people getting ripped in half and their heads exploding, if I remember it correctly. If he could handle that with a shrug, he'd be fine on Infinity War.

And he was. In fact, when he emerged at about the halfway point to say that my laptop battery was about to die -- I'd forgotten to bring in my power cable when I set up the projector for them in the garage -- he said "This is a good movie." The emphasis was on the proper word, as in "This is a good movie" rather than "This is a good movie," which is a bit more circumspect. Hey, I agree.

In fact, if he even remembered that the strangulation of ________ was the thing that worried me -- though I don't remember if I'd ever hinted at why I didn't want him to watch the movie -- he probably blew right past it without thinking. Especially when he'd only recently seen a human-shark hybrid tear a man apart with his bear hands.

The other reason I dropped my opposition was that I realized it was futile. And now we're talking about my younger son.

We give both kids a lot of latitude when it comes to what they watch on YouTube, within reason. At least while my eight-year-old is watching things in the living room, we walk by regularly and can police anything he's watching that he shouldn't be watching. They're good kids and they don't usually push the boundaries of what they know we expect from them in terms of their behavior. 

Once we started showing them Marvel movies, Marvel-related content on YouTube seemed fair game. I mean, it's only logical, right? When we're casually monitoring the content of what they're watching, we're looking for the YouTubers to be dropping profanity -- which the ones they watch do not -- not concerning ourselves overly with the exact content of the discussion about superhero movies.

The other day, though, I realized that the eight-year-old was watching a YouTuber doing a deep dive into the climax of Avengers: Endgame. This didn't necessarily offend me on a content level, but on a spoilers level. Though to be fair, as they've watched Spider-Man: Far From Home, they've already had the biggest secrets of Endgame spoiled for them -- as discussed here. 

If my son was watching an analysis of exactly what happened at the end of the Avengers saga when I happened to be walking through the room, I can only imagine that he saw ________ being strangled to death sometime when I wasn't.

Whatever. If they want to ruin movies for themselves, they can. Not everyone has the same standards on that as I do, and as we all know, the events of these movies become playground lore pretty quickly.

And if they can handle images that I have determined to be too shocking for them, well, then that's great too.

I guess I'm out of reservations.

Swing open, door, to the cinematic content of the adult world. 

Why did you do that, Ray?

Ray Liotta was the rare actor who peaked early and also peaked late.

The Goodfellas era Liotta was of course a treasure for people in my age bracket, who were just barely old enough to watch a movie like Goodfellas in 1990. That's the first time I was aware of him, though it was his fifth film and he'd had a television career dating back ten years before that. (If we're going for maximum accuracy here, I would have seen him the year before that in Field of Dreams, but since that was a small role that only came in at the end of the movie, it wouldn't have yet been enough to register him in my consciousness as a name I should know.)

Liotta worked steadily after that, making about one film a year, but Goodfellas is a hard place to start out if you are trying to top yourself, as every actor should. But Liotta wasn't really a leading man, even though he is certainly the lead in Goodfellas. He was a character actor sought out largely for sinister roles, even though he is arguably the least sinister character in Goodfellas. His role in Something Wild -- which preceded Goodfellas by four years but which I didn't see until about ten years ago -- is a better measure of how he was seen by casting directors.

But just when Liotta had entered "Remember Ray Liotta?" territory, he started doing some of the best work of his career. The last ten years featured memorable performances like Killing Them Softly, The Place Beyond the Pines, Marriage Story and The Many Saints of Newark. Granted, those films were still playing on the Liotta persona we knew, but they had a lot more depth and nuance than some of the roles he was saddled with right after he became famous. In fact, this post is not the first time I'm tagging Ray Liotta on my blog. I was inspired by his performance in Marriage Story to write this post, which says a lot of things about Liotta that I would want to say today -- so maybe I will let it do some of the work I would otherwise do here. And that performance was not like the typical Liotta performance, as he played a divorce lawyer rather than a mobster.

Liotta died in his sleep while filming a movie in the Dominican Republic. He was 67. He had a lot more to give, seeing as how he had three movies filming and two in post-production. One of those last two was Elizabeth Banks' Cocaine Bear, which is about how it sounds -- it's based on that story of the bear who ate the cocaine. That also gives you an idea how Liotta liked to play off of that persona for comedic purposes, as he did in films like Muppets Most Wanted, Wanderlust, Date Night and a film I probably shouldn't like but do: Wild Hogs. (And I also wrote about him in relation to Wild Hogs, making this actually the third time I've tagged him on my blog.)

He will certainly live on in our minds and in our memes. "Why did you do that, Karen?" is a line I still say quite a bit, alluding to that moment in Goodfellas after his wife, played by Lorraine Bracco, hastily dumps all their cocaine (speaking of cocaine) down the toilet upon baseless fears of discovery. "They would have never found it!"

Why did you do that, Ray? Why did you go and die on us when you still had more peaks yet to come?

Rest in peace. 

Gerard Butler looks like somebody's scared grandfather

It's now been two weeks since I've been out to the movies, and since I haven't found much of interest on the streamers either, it's been eight days since I posted a review to ReelGood. That'll probably change in the next few days as I try to make it out to see Top Gun: Maverick.

As I was checking showtimes, I found this action craptacular playing in local cinemas. (Sorry, I should not make snap judgments ... ha.)

Is it just me, or does Gerard Butler look like ... well, you've read the title of this post.

Butler is only 52, which is plenty old to be a grandfather, but a lot younger than some other actors who still make credible appearances in action movies. He's not even married, so if he is a grandfather, it would be of the illegitimate persuasion.

This, then, must just be a really unflattering photo.

The sunken eyes, the gaunt and elderly cheek bones and jaw ... he looks more like someone who is making a break from the nursing home, his pockets filled with individually wrapped biscuits, than a man who will "stop at nothing to get her back" -- which describes just about every action movie ever made where somebody's wife or daughter is kidnapped. 

I was hoping to get a quick peek to see if that's the plot of this particular movie, but Last Seen Alive does not even have its own Wikipedia page yet. The film is listed on Butler's filmography, but it has no link. It's rather a miracle, I'd think, that it is even playing in cinemas, seeing as how a straight-to-Redbox fate seems far more likely.

Go after her, Grandpa. And let's hope, in your frail and haunted condition, this is not the last time we see you alive. 

My 2003 film rankings (in 2003)

This is the fifth 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. 

It surprised me to see that I've only written about Lost in Translation one time on this blog, and that was when I was talking about travel-related sleep deprivation, not the movie itself. It's still nestled in my top 50 on Flickchart nearly 20 years after I first saw it, and though I've revisited it comparatively few times -- only once since I started keeping track of rewatches in 2006 -- each revisit confirms my feelings toward it. (I'll have another revisit in the near future as part of my 2022 project of rewatching all my #1s.)

Two thousand three was a bit of a tumultuous year, as it involved a breakup with the woman I'd been dating for more than 18 months, though that wasn't until November. It had not yet occurred when I saw Lost in Translation, but I was already in a pretty melancholy state, I suppose, as I expected that relationship to end soon. (It had been my decision to end it, but it was a decision I ended up regretting for most of 2004 as I tried to get back together with this person.) I suppose I call it tumultuous because we had a 24-hour breakup in the summer, but as you know, the first breakup never takes. Other than that, though, pretty stable, as it was the first year since moving to California in 2001 that I had the same job the whole year, and by this point I was really entrenched in my social scene out there.

Now that I've given you my personal 2003 biography, here was how I ranked my films in early 2004 when I closed off my list:

1. Lost in Translation
2. Finding Nemo
3. Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World
4. House of Sand and Fog
5. Kill Bill Vol. 1
6. Seabiscuit
7. Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
8. Elf
9. Big Fish
10. Whale Rider
11. The Guru
12. Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl
13. American Splendor
14. The Triplets of Belleville
15. Monster
16. 28 Days Later
17. The Matrix Reloaded
18. School of Rock
19. Camp
20. Capturing the Friedmans
21. 21 Grams
22. View from the Top
23. In America
24. X-Men 2: United
25. Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines
26. Shanghai Knights
27. Mystic River
28. The Station Agent
29. Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle
30. Bad Santa
31. A Mighty Wind
32. Better Luck Tomorrow
33. Final Destination 2
34. Thirteen
35. Daredevil
36. Down With Love
37. Anger Management
38. Bruce Almighty
39. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
40. Old School
41. Bend It Like Beckham
42. Love Actually
43. Cold Mountain
44. Identity
45. How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days
46. Hulk
47. The Core
48. Phone Booth
49. Gothika
50. Confidence
51. The Matrix Revolutions
52. Bad Boys II
53. S.W.A.T.
54. Northfork
55. Dumb and Dumberer: When Harry Met Lloyd
56. The Real Cancun
57. Paycheck
58. Dreamcatcher

And no, I don't think I was just being cheeky by ranking 21 Grams 21st of the year. I mean, I didn't ranked Thirteen 13th, did I? I like to think my process has more integrity than that ... though maybe it didn't 20 years ago. 

This is how they are currently ranked on my Flickchart out of 5916 films, followed by the percentage of the ranking out of 5916 and the number of slots they rose or fell compared to the other movies from that year on my Flickchart. A positive number indicates a comparative rise of that many slots, a negative number a fall.

1. Lost in Translation (35, 99%) 0
2. Elf (46, 99%) 6
3. Finding Nemo (131, 98%) -1
4. The Guru (228, 96%) 7
5. 28 Days Later (387, 93%) 11
6. House of Sand and Fog (427, 93%) -2
7. The Triplets of Belleville (571, 90%) 7
8. Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (616, 90%) -5
9. Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (620, 90%) -2
10. Kill Bill Vol. 1 (653, 89%) -5
11. Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (659, 89%) 1
12. Seabiscuit (701, 88%) -6
13. Big Fish (716, 88%) -4
14. Whale Rider (1014, 83%) -4
15. Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (1144, 81%) 10
16. X-Men 2: United (1156, 80%) 8
17. Capturing the Friedmans (1236, 79%) 3
18. Bad Santa (1296, 78%) 12
19. American Splendor (1738, 71%) -6
20. The Matrix Reloaded (1797, 70%) -3
21. Camp (1864, 68%) -2
22. Old School (2078, 65%) 18
23. Final Destination 2 (2090, 65%) 10
24. Monster (2115, 64%) -9
25. A Mighty Wind (2327, 61%) 6
26. School of Rock (2343, 60%) -8
27. Bruce Almighty (2815, 52%) 11
28. Shanghai Knights (2839, 52%) -2
29. In America (2866, 52%) -6
30. Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle (3024, 49%) -1
31. The Station Agent (3128, 47%) -3
32. View from the Top (3221, 46%) -10
33. 21 Grams (3224, 46%) -12
34. Better Luck Tomorrow (3259, 45%) -2
35. Love Actually (3784, 36%) 7
36. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (3910, 34%) 3
37. Anger Management (3955, 33%) 0
38. The Matrix Revolutions (3957, 33%) 13
39. Thirteen (4023, 32%) -5
40. Daredevil (4058, 31%) -5
41. Bend It Like Beckham (4087, 31%) 0
42. Mystic River (4183, 29%) -15
43. Down With Love (4553, 23%) -7
44. Hulk (4634, 22%) 2
45. Bad Boys II (4785, 19%) 7
46. Cold Mountain (5001, 15%) -3
47. The Core (5039, 15%) 0
48. Confidence (5123, 13%) 2
49. Identity (5192, 12%) -5
50. Phone Booth (5308, 10%) -2
51. Dumb and Dumberer: When Harry Met Lloyd (5442, 8%) 4
52. How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days (5464, 8%) -7
53. Gothika (5500, 7%) -4
54. Northfork (5710, 3%) 0
55. S.W.A.T. (5717, 3%) -2
56. Paycheck (5814, 2%) 1
57. The Real Cancun (5816, 2%) -1
58. Dreamcatcher (5853, 1%) 0

Five best movies I've seen since closing the list (alphabetical): City of God, Code 46, Dirty Pretty Things, Memories of Murder, Shattered Glass
Five worst movies I've seen since closing the list (alphabetical): Alex & Emma, The Brown Bunny, Just Married, The Room, Wrong Turn
Biggest risers: Old School (+18), The Matrix Revolutions (+13), Bad Santa (+12)
Biggest fallers: Mystic River (-15), 21 Grams (-12), View from the Top (-10)
Average percentage on Flickchart: 50.67% (4 of 5)

It may just be a feel I get from this list rather than anything borne out by the stats, but I feel like these movies are seriously shuffled around. Their comparatively small quantity masks it a little bit, but there are movies rising and falling all over the place here -- and if there were twice as many movies, they might rise and fall by twice the amount.

The biggest risers are a bit of a mystery for me, as two of them I don't like significantly more than when I first saw them. I've always been a bit underwhelmed by Old School and continued to feel so when I watched it again a few years ago, but there are a few scenes -- specifically the one where Will Ferrell's character outlines his Saturday plans to the college students ("We might go to Bed Bath & Beyond, but I don't know if we're going to have enough TIME") -- have really become personal favorites, apparently elevating the film on the whole. I certainly don't feel like I have the reason to like the third Matrix movie any more than I did back then, especially since I haven't even seen it again, but clearly I've decided to give the whole trilogy certain credit for seeing its vision all the way through -- even if the vision falters near the end. (And really falters in the fourth, which I ranked as my worst movie of last year.) Bad Santa is the only one whose large rise feels really legitimate, as I definitely unlocked something on my second viewing that I didn't on the first.

In terms of fallers, my big turn against Mystic River has a similar origin to my big turn against Crash two years later -- unjust Oscar love. Bill Murray's richly deserved Oscar was stolen from him by Sean Penn, leading to the way I always talk about this movie when people (rarely) bring it up -- I just launch into a quotation of Penn's most histrionic scene, where he continues to shout at greater volumes "IS THAT MY DAUGHTER IN THERE?" (And with the Boston accent, the last word is "THEY-uh.") Incidentally, 2003 must have been a year of awarding overacting, since that was the year Renee Zellweger got her Oscar for chewing the scenery of Cold Mountain -- which couldn't drop much because I pretty much hated it then too.

21 Grams started to curdle for me pretty quickly after I closed off my list, too -- I think Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu pulled off some structural trick like playing it in reverse order, which I thought was really cool at the time. But even at the time it struck me as the sort of emotionally tormented drama that always turned me off a bit. I genuinely don't know why View from the Top has dropped, since I always thought of that as a bit of a confection, and have consistently given it the win in duels on Flickchart. It must just always come up against movies ranked lower than it so it can never jump up.

The average ranking of 50.67% on Flickchart brings 2003 in at fourth of the five years considered so far.

June will bring us the films of 2002. 

Not talking about Rebel Wilson's new body in my Senior Year review

It's appropriate that the new Netflix comedy Senior Year is about a woman who awakens from a 20-year coma to find a world of very different technologies and social morays. In 2002, when the woman (played by Rebel Wilson) had her cheerleading mishap that led to a coma, it was a totally acceptable -- nay, rewarded -- pursuit to vie for the frequently interrelated titles of cheerleading captain and prom queen. Today, most teenagers desire to become neither, recognizing the shortcomings of both aspirations while being insufferably shallow anyway in their own modern, social media-influenced ways.

It's appropriate because in 2002, a critic -- possibly even me as a critic, because I was one then -- would have written about Wilson's significant weight loss in my review. It wouldn't have seemed possible not to write about it, simply because you have to acknowledge the elephant in the room -- and no, that's not a fat joke.

Today, not so much.

Oh, I thought about it. It seems like a legitimate talking point about the movie. I don't know how much weight Wilson has lost, but enough to make her a candidate to play the role she's playing, when she never would have been one in the past. Googling to find out how much weight she lost is on the wrong side of the line that I'm looking at today, and besides, it may be even more now than it was at the time of filming.

But I knew there was no way to talk about it without it becoming inadvertent body shaming at best, a prurient fixation on the physical attractiveness of actresses at worst. That's the era we live in today, and though a person usually would accompany such words with a critical shake of the head, it is undoubtedly a good thing that we can't get away with this sort of thing anymore. So instead of in my review, I just talk about it on my blog, right?

I do think it's a newsworthy consideration. Actors make their name with one particular sort of appearance, and if they're making a name at all, it means that appearance works for them. Chris Farley wouldn't have been Chris Farley at half the weight, and whether or not she aspired to this, Wilson was sort of in the same boat. Her larger than life personality went with a body that was larger than your typical Hollywood body, and there was never any doubt that there was a physical aspect to what made her funny. Fortunately in Wilson's case we were laughing with her, not at her.

But life in the spotlight is hard, and people on the internet are cruel. Who knows how many times Wilson had to read that she was fat, or pretend to deflect comments from casting directors about what roles she was suited to play, as if they didn't cut her deeply. So she did lose the weight, and though we still remember the way her personality was sort of an accompaniment to the size she was when we first met her, she's pulling it off. 

I think it's newsworthy because a change in the sort of roles a person can play is a not-irrelevant form of engaging with their body of work, which we do in a review. And most critics will know that it can be useful to have a real-world opening paragraph to a film review, to orient the viewer before delving into specifics about the film in question. The temptation was there to at least mention in passing her weight loss.

Instead I talked about the roles Wilson was suited to play in a different context -- those based on a personality so specific and so heavy on shtick that they undermined her candidacy for a lot of realistic roles in realistic films. Fortunately, that doesn't really describe Senior Year, which doesn't mean it's not effective -- which it is, as you'll see if you read my review. 

It's something a woke critic should learn to do if he or she doesn't already. While changes in physical appearance -- which also include things like plastic surgery -- do feel relevant to the assessment of an artistic work, especially if a new artificiality prevents you from relating to the character as a real human being, you're so much better off just letting it go. It's more fair to the performer and you'll feel better about yourself in the morning.

But it does require shutting off those instincts. Especially if we don't know what to write about a movie -- which was not a problem for me with Senior Year -- we tend to lean toward surface-level observations that don't necessarily improve the review, but at least maybe get you going in your writing. We're better off if we resist this though. For example, in 2022, no one wants to hear a critic -- particularly a white male critic -- incorporating the physical attractiveness of an actress into the text of a review, in the same way that people don't need to hear about race from that critic just because a film happens to feature minority characters. 

And so it is with plastic surgery, and especially with weight loss. It may be an interesting thing to observe in your own mind, and you may feel like mentioning it is a way of congratulating the person on something that must have been very hard.

But it probably doesn't have a place in a review. 

If you must acknowledge that elephant in the room, at least save it for your blog. 

My last free ticket at Cinema Nova

There were a lot of ways I felt like a dinosaur on Wednesday night, someone holding on to something that is no longer viable -- and looking pathetic to everyone around him to boot.

I came into the city for a day of work and to go to baseball practice, which is a stone's throw from Cinema Nova in Carlton. Nova is the inner city's premier arthouse cinema -- perhaps the premier arthouse cinema in all of Victoria -- which is notable for the fact that it's an arthouse cinema in the body of a multiplex. The screens are not all huge -- in fact the majority of them are tiny -- but there are like 16 of them, mostly playing independent films, and not all of which play four times a day. So that means if there's something in the arthouse that's out right now, you'll find it among the 20+ films that are playing at Nova at any given moment.

It has also been one of the places that always took my critics card, but that came to a sudden end on Wednesday night -- bizarrely, halfway through the night.

I had originally intended to attend the two+ hour practice and then come to see Kogonada's After Yang at 8:30. But when our normal playing field was off limits to us on Wednesday night due to a conflict from another athletic team, the practice became more about hitting in the batting cages and then using some very small patches of grass to do some limited fielding drills. I got there early, did my hitting and then left in order to sneak in a cheeky 5:45 viewing of Celine Sciamma's Petite Maman, which, like After Yang, has only just opened in Australia, months after it opened elsewhere. The movie is only 73 minutes long, so I felt like I couldn't afford not to take the opportunity to see it, especially if the alternative were jockeying with 70 other baseball players on a patch of grass smaller than a basketball court.

The first thing that made me feel absurd was what I was wearing and what I was dragging behind me. Because I came straight from practice, I had on my Melbourne University practice jersey, my cap, and sweatpants. Not really a proper appearance for a critic attending a screening of a movie he plans to review, but Australians don't judge you on things like that. (And lest you think it's weird that I'm on a baseball team that's associated with a university, it's a giant program that takes people of all ages -- there are probably at least five people older than me across the club's eight men's teams.)

And then there was what I was dragging. I have a bag that's about the shape of a bag for carrying golf clubs, only this one is designed for baseball equipment -- bat, cleats, glove, batting gloves, that sort of thing. It's one of those bags with wheels, so you can drag it, but as soon as you try to go fast, the wheels come out of alignment and it teeters on them, twisting your wrist and requiring you to stop and settle them again. Since I was hurrying to the cinema to get there on time, I had to do this quite a bit.

So I rocked up not only with this bag, but with my backpack, which was carrying my work computer as well. Again not a problem since no one frisks you in Australian cinemas to make sure you aren't carrying in any contraband. (And I wasn't -- not for this movie at least.)

I flashed my critics card, got the free ticket to Petite Maman and found three consecutive seats to myself where I could spread out all my baggage -- literal and metaphorical.

Well, the first disappointment of the night was my shrugging reaction to Petite Maman. Given how I adored Sciamma's previous film, 2019's Portrait of a Lady on Fire, I was quite surprised to see how disconnected I felt from this very early on. I figured an "a-ha!" moment would still come along to salvage it, but it never did. You can read my full review here. 

The movie's short length left me plenty of time to eat a nice dinner on Lygon Street, which has a number of good restaurants, many of them Italian, with seating on the sidewalk. I chose one of them and sat outside, despite a very light rain that fell at different points of the meal. The dinner was yummy as hell and I had plenty of time to get to After Yang at 8:30.

This is where the evening took a bit of a nosedive. 

As I was in the queue for tickets, I saw the guy who had given me my first ticket behind the counter, but he wasn't at a register so I seemed likely to avoid him. This is my preference as I kind of feel like I am getting away with something if I get two free tickets in the same night, even though there is nothing about my critics card that would specifically prohibit this. The feeling of prospective shame was exacerbated by my goofy appearance and all the bags I had with me. I mean, there was no chance I would blend in with the other patrons at the cinema. 

When I got to the front, I did avoid him and provided my request to the woman at the register. However, you never know if the person who is taking your order is familiar with the rules for free tickets for critics, and indeed, she had to check with that same guy who had issued me my Petite Maman ticket. He told me that after he'd issued my free ticket earlier, he'd checked with his manager and discovered that Nova no longer issues complimentary tickets for critics, only a $2 industry discount, meaning my $20 ticket would be $18 instead. 

Flustered, I stepped out of line to try to find documentation that proves my eligibility for a free ticket, since I used to carry in my backpack a list issued by my organization of the movie theaters that accept our critics card. This was a new backpack and I hadn't transferred that list over to it. I went into my email on my phone and couldn't find the proof there either. In fact, I found the proof that late in 2020, we'd gotten word from the critics organization that Nova is not honoring the card "until further notice," and that we needed to respect that decision. I vaguely remembered this, but also thought it was a short-term pandemic thing.

Having already taken up this adversarial position toward the Nova staff, I had to come back to the guy to say "I'll take your word for it, since I guess I don't have any other choice." Then we got into a small semantic disagreement in which he acknowledged that they accepted the card "ages ago," to which I countered "Well, like last year." I guess it had probably been early 2020, but I couldn't relinquish my position. 

The guy was unfailingly polite throughout -- I never got to the point of rude either -- but at this point he did feel like it was time to play his trump card, which was "Well, you already got a free ticket earlier so that was good for you." Might not be right on that exact wording. In any case, it was still polite but strident enough to work as a zinger that left me no alternative than to pay my $18 and drag all my bags in to see After Yang.

This was another of the smaller screening rooms, but unlike Petite Maman, this one was going to be close to full -- at least in the row where my seat was. So while I started with my bags spread out, I quickly realized this was not going to be viable -- and when I had to rapidly remove my bag from the seat to make way for a couple women sitting next to me, it revealed my box of orange Hostess cupcakes I'd smuggled in with me. One of the women made a humorous little comment about the contraband -- not judgmental per se, but in my frame of my mind I had no choice but to take it that way. So not only was I this ridiculous person in a baseball outfit with too many bags, and Lord knows how clean I was in her mind, but I had also violated cinema policy by bringing in outside food. Not just any outside food, but a box of cupcakes, which felt extra piggy.

Although I now had a person sitting directly next to me, which I like to avoid if at all possible, I didn't want to move because I didn't want that to seem like me leaving my seat in a huff after she discovered my criminal behavior. Besides, if I moved to another seat, that might also belong to someone else. But when the two seats on the other side of me were also soon filled, and I again had to clear my excessive quantity of bags, it gave me the excuse I needed. I said to the two new arriving guys "I'll move, I've just got too much stuff."

Fortunately, when I went down closer to the screen to a row most viewers don't dare venture, I did get the three seats I needed and watched the movie without incident.

As a capper, I didn't like After Yang as much as I wanted to either. For maybe two-thirds I thought it had a chance to move into my #1 spot for the year, but I thought it lost focus in the final third and started to meander and sort of repeat itself. Still a very good movie, but ending in mild disappointment -- which felt very symbolic for this particular day. 

The accumulation of the evening's events left me very contemplative on the way home. I was wondering how much longer our critics card would be accepted anywhere -- even though one of Nova's competitors, which is a lot closer to me and which shows both arthouse and blockbuster films, still does accept my card without blinking, every time. And that got me thinking about the continued viability of film criticism on the whole, a pursuit that has lost a little bit of its luster for me lately as well. The absurdity of me wearing my baseball uniform and dragging around all these bags only compounded things, as it reminded me how I have isolated myself in my new house, and how things that were once so easy for me are now inevitably far more challenging. Looking at my reflection in the train window, I saw a tired schlub with too much baggage. 

Not dead, just in a rut

When you tell everyone you've finished your COVID film festival and are emerging from the garage, and then don't post anything on your blog for the next six days, people may wonder if you've, you know, died.

I haven't, nor have I been in a relapse. (Though the hacking cough is still strong.)

However, being in a film rut feels like a small death sometimes.

Maybe after watching 22 films in six days, there is nowhere to go but down, but it does definitely feel like I'm suddenly in a state of lethargy when it comes to movies.

I did finally get back out to the theater last night, first time in two and a half weeks, to watch The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, which I enjoyed. Not as much as I wanted to enjoy it, and maybe that's an indication of the problem.

I've only written three reviews in the past month, though you can stretch that to four if you want to include the one I wrote on April 8th -- technically the past month I guess. The prospect of reviewing the Nicolas Cage movie underwhelms me somewhat, in part because it's already been out for more than two weeks so is starting to feel a bit stale.

Is baseball to blame? Maybe. I always get a bit distracted around the start of the season. But as discussed previously, games are played in the morning and early afternoon here, so they don't conflict with the normal hours someone might watch a movie.

I'll get my mojo back I'm sure. Doctor Strange is out now, so I will take the kids to that this weekend probably. Maybe that's what I need to come out of this funk: a Marvel movie. Ha.

Or maybe it's just that COVID works on your brain in such a way that you feel sort of like a shadow of yourself for a while afterward. If this is even "afterward." The cough would suggest otherwise.

Back on board with legit content soon, folks. 

Tangled & Cash & cavity searches: Wrapping up my COVID Film Festival

I've watched ten more movies in my garage since I last updated you. I can't talk about them all here. To be honest, I'm as eager to move on from this as you are. Watching 22 movies in six days can exhaust even the most irrepressible of cinephiles, especially if they have COVID.

Besides, I already told you about watching New York, New York on Thursday night. That leaves only nine more to tackle, or at least to touch on. 

To be honest, I might not even be writing the current post if I did not watch both Tangled and Tango & Cash on Saturday, which led to the brilliant title you see above. If I can't share my brilliant titles with you, my readers, it's like they never happened. 

Comedy and rectal probing

I decided to make Friday a string of comedy favorites following when I quit work at about 4:30, and once I got a head of steam going, I hoped I might be able to fit in five of them before I went to bed. I was on a pace to do it, too, but I ended up having a long nap during the fourth, Tropic Thunder, which ruled out any possibility of a fifth. 

And I couldn't help noticing that all four featured the concept of someone being rectally probed. I would have attributed it to being just a 1990s thing, but then the notion reared its head -- or maybe I should say reared its butt -- in Tropic Thunder as well. (I never did fit Team America: World Police into the festival, so I'll have to check that some other time to see whether it delves into cavity searches or fisting or something similar. Given that it's Trey Parker and Matt Stone, I bet it does.)

First it was 1996's Beavis and Butt-Head Do America, where a running theme is that the FBI agent voiced by Robert Stack must subject everyone he questions to cavity searches in trying to locate the "criminal masterminds" Beavis and Butt-Head. We get the telltale shot of someone snapping on a rubber glove on multiple occasions. (And lest you judge me about including this in the festival, Mike Judge is an underappreciated comic mind. Don't forget he was also responsible for Idiocracy.)

Wayne's World (1992) made a natural pairing with Beavis and Butt-Head, but for reasons beyond the obvious of intellectually challenged blond and brunette headbangers hanging out together. (Bill & Ted were yet a third version of this.) Indeed, there's a notable cavity search in this as well, as a police officer helps Wayne and Garth by pulling over Rob Lowe's character and snapping on the glove in the same way as above to waylay him in a most embarrassing and uncomfortable fashion. We see Lowe walking funny when he arrives at Wayne's basement to crash their party at the end.

There was no snapping of the glove in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (1994) -- which I still enjoy despite wincing at its transphobia -- but here Ace makes a wisecrack about his ease of passing through the high security to get into Joe Robbie Stadium before the Super Bowl. He says something along the lines of "The man with the rubber glove was surprisingly gentle."

Tropic Thunder, which didn't come out until 2008, had no actual instance of a rectal probe, implied or otherwise, but Tom Cruise's Les Grossman does deliver this classic threat: "From now on, my fist is going to be so far up your shithole that every time you have a thought, it's going to have to tiptoe past my wedding ring." Steve Coogan's character also mentions crawling up Satan's bottom -- just moments before he steps on the landmine.

Conclusion? I guess this was all part of the gay panic that has been a core component of mainstream comedies until recently. I'll have to keep an eye open to see how often I see it elsewhere, or if I see it in anything more recent.

Finally understanding that Tenacious D song

I didn't watch Tango & Cash -- the last of only six new-to-me movies of the 22 -- just to have a clever tie-in with my planned viewing of Tangled, though it didn't hurt.

Really, I just thought I should greater appreciate a reference in a Tenacious D song I enjoy called "Kyle Quit the Band," sung by Kyle Gass and Tropic Thunder star Jack Black. 

Lyrics in that song go as follows:

"Couldn't split up Kato and Nash
(That's true)
Couldn't split up Tango and Cash
(That's also true!)"

Now when I laugh along with that, I actually know what I'm laughing about.

It's an enjoyable if slight 80's action movie, and I feel like I should have seen it before now. Now I have.

As for Tangled? Given that I've already written about this movie more than a dozen times on this blog, I won't give you any new takeaways, or even tell you if I had any. 

Only my first rewatch of Evil Dead II

How could I watch Army of Darkness twice before I'd seen Evil Dead II twice?

I'm not sure, but somehow, it happened. 

I was sure I'd seen Evil Dead II -- the last of the 22 -- more than twice all the way through. But according to my list of rewatches, whose accuracy must never be questioned, it must have only been once, and then a partial viewing. I have a random memory of watching part of it on one of those car TVs on a work trip to Knott's Berry Farm around Halloween, when they transformed it into Knott's Scary Farm. Which I guess was enough to increase my familiarity with it, but not to count as a complete second viewing.

No wonder I'd forgotten so much of what happened in it.

Also, apparently Ash never says "You're going down, fucker," which I could swear he did. He does say "You're going down" to his evil hand, and then later, "Who's laughing now!" as he maniacally chainsaws it off. Then of course there is the iconic "Groovy" once he lashes the chainsaw to his hand.

Still, I actually think the individual lines make me laugh harder in Army of Darkness, even if the overall thrust of the movie is obviously not as good. 

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

Two movies got no mention at all (sorry Sin City and Next), but I need to finish this off and move on with my life -- now that I've finally emerged from the garage. (Forgot to tell you that! Yeah, it happened this morning.)

But here is the complete list, with the day breaks indicated, starting on Monday and ending on Saturday. I'm not going to say the list is always impressive in terms of quality -- when you're sick, you aren't looking to delve deep into the arthouse movies you haven't seen -- but in terms of quantity it can't be beat.

Titanic 
Can't Buy Me Love
Kin-dza-dza!
Shadow in the Cloud
-------
Avatar
Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy
Tucker and Dale vs. Evil
Do I Sound Gay?
-------
Toni Erdmann
Metal Lords
Mad Max: Fury Road
Carnival of Souls
-------
New York, New York
Sin City 
-------
Beavis and Butt-Head Do America
Wayne's World
Ace Ventura: Pet Detective
Tropic Thunder 
-------
Tango & Cash
Next 
Tangled
Evil Dead II

Now let's never do that again.