What will this flight have in store for me?

As you know if you've been catching the hints I've been dropping here and there -- well, more than a hint in yesterday's post -- I'm leaving to fly to America tomorrow night. This will likely be my last post before I leave, and I'm not coming back until August 20th.

How much I post while I'm gone will depend on how busy I am and how much my experiences inspire me to write. It might end up seeming like a relatively normal flow of content -- like one every three days on average -- or I might write nothing at all. I think I'll post at least once because I have one post almost in the can, and I plan to put it up at some point after the calendar flips to August. (No need for secrecy here: It's my monthly post on my old film rankings, this time for the year 2000.)

The last time I made the 14-hour flight to the United States was three years ago. Twice, actually -- once in August and then again in November. 

It was a different world then. Streaming was already a formidable player, but not nearly what it has become since 2019. Perhaps more significantly, the whole release strategy for movies has since been reconsidered in light of the pandemic.

Now I'm wondering: What movies are actually going to be available to watch on this flight?

The Qantas catalogue has always been a good one, always containing more new releases than I can fit in, even when I'm working overtime to squeeze them in. Then there are older movies I've already seen, which I have watched on occasion, though typically only for a specific reason. Like, in 2019 I was rewatching movies to consider them for my best of the 2010s, and my fourth viewing of Creed came in this setting.

It seems like the older movies are likely to play a bigger role this time around. 

Given how much of a person's annual viewing has shifted to movies released exclusively on Netflix or Amazon or AppleTV+, I'm wondering if I will detect a noticeable deficit in the offerings. Fewer movies have snuck by me at the cinemas as a result of this big shift to day-and-date availability on a streaming service, and most of the big streaming movies don't sneak by me either because I subscribe to those services. 

However, I also don't think the total numbers of movies are decreasing. I just don't know if Netflix or Amazon or AppleTV+ would have a deal with the airlines to show their content. I don't remember noticing that Netflix movies were available on the plane, in any case -- and it may just be that my mind skipped over them because I'd already watched them.

Usually when I get on a plane for the next 14 hours, I'm licking my lips at what the options will be, already having some idea of the movies I'd missed that year and surmising that this would be a great opportunity to catch up with them. 

But this time? Few titles are leaping to mind. 

I didn't see the Scream remake, and it will probably be available, but will it be a sanitized version to avoid the collateral damage of children walking down the aisle and seeing what I'm watching? I tend to avoid R-rated movies on the plane because I want to get the "real" version of them.

Alex Garland's Men would be a prime choice, since I did miss that one as well, due to two other reviewers on my site doing a joint review of it. But I've heard the ending is really gross, which also suggests it also is probably NSFP (not suitable for plane).

Weirdly those are the only two that jump to mind.

Obviously there are other movies I missed this year. Clearly there were. I'm not on some sort of heroic or historic movie-watching pace in 2022. In fact, if anything, I may be a little behind where I've been in previous years.

But as we've pointed out, the world is no longer like what it was in previous years. 

I guess I will just wait and see -- and maybe be happily surprised, though who knows. Maybe it will be worth a post after the fact to let you know how things have changed ... in case you are also contemplating your first international trip since the pandemic began.

And if I don't have the time to write that post ... well, I'll be sure to pop in and say hello sometime else before August 20th, in any case.

"... and MIFF ... goes on ... without me."

When the program for the 2022 70th edition of the Melbourne International Film Festival released earlier this month, perusing it was, alas, a purely academic exercise for me.

For the first time since 2013 -- when I would not move here until right at the end of the festival -- I am going to miss MIFF.

Two previous years of pandemic couldn't do it. They just shifted the festival online, where I watched about my usual dozen or so films.

No, the thing that's KO'ing this year's festival is a trip to the U.S., our first in three years, whose dates align almost exactly with the festival.

We're actually leaving before it starts, this Tuesday night. It's another week+ after that until the festival starts on August 4th. And technically speaking, we'll be back on August 20th, when there's still a day and a half worth of films left to play. But I can guarantee you that won't be my priority while recovering from crippling jet lag.

Now, I thought I was going to miss MIFF entirely. But looking at the poster above, it appears as though I'll have a week more to watch films online. So I'll probably do some modified version of the last two years' pandemic MIFFs. But I won't be asking for press credentials to see about five movies for free, and I won't be reviewing them on my site, as I have done every year now for something like seven years.

I really did want to get back to that experience of standing in line outside the theaters on a cold winter night, hands thrust into pockets, dodging raindrops. I haven't had that experience since 2019. But it will need to wait one more year.

Now, I could choose just to skip MIFF entirely, watching nothing online when I get back, and therefore, rank no movies this year a year earlier than most other critics consider them for year-end lists. Almost every year I've had a MIFF movie in my top ten for the year, and sometimes as high as #1 (Toni Erdmann, First Reformed). 

I'll leave that decision for the version of me that isn't purely concentrating on preparing to leave on this trip (and writing this post, apparently).

However, so this post isn't just me bemoaning the poor timing of my trip, I did want to give you a quick rundown of the movies I had focused on as potential candidates for 2022 when I reviewed the program, knowing I would not be here but powerless to resist torturing myself. This would be a fun exercise because I'm not beholden to logistics at all, such as tickets selling out, two movies I want to see playing at the same time, or my wife's schedule conflicting with mine. 

I say I did want to give you that rundown. But as it turns out, I can't figure out where I jotted down the titles. It apparently wasn't in an email, and it apparently wasn't in my notebook. If it was on some random piece of paper, then I have no idea where that random piece of paper is. 

Oh well. Maybe I will watch some of them online when I get back and tell you about them then. 

6000 movies on Flickchart: How consistent have I been?

I have what you might call an obsession with documentation. You may have noticed.

One way this expresses itself is by keeping track of my movements on Flickchart, partly so that if their server ever dies, I'll still have my rankings in an Excel file. But partly also for analyses like the one I am about to do.

I've just reached the milestone of 6,000 movies added to Flickchart, which is still 187 shy of my actual number of viewings. I've gotten behind on what was once a real-time ranking of new movies seen, but right now I'm as close to being caught up as I have been in some time, only about six months behind.

And having just crossed that milestone, I decided it was time to analyze my own Flickcharting to see how consistent I've been. But first I need to explain how it was even possible I could do that.

I'll start by explaining my method of tracking my Flickcharting offline. I have an Excel spreadsheet which gives a real-time snapshot of where my movies are on Flickchart. When a new movie gets added, I go to the appropriate row on that sheet and insert it, moving all the other movies down by one, in keeping with what actually occurs on the site. When a movie wins a duel against another and moves up that way, I'll cut it and paste it from its lower rung on the spreadsheet to its new position of prominence. In this way, I will always have an exact backup of my Flickchart in Excel.

But then I also have a sheet in the same workbook where I keep track of the movements as they occur. I tend to alternate adding new movies with dueling random movies, so you will get a pair of line items on the sheet that look like this, my most recent two "transactions" completed:

A quick explanation of this.

The top line shows that The Golden Compass beat Copland in a random duel, which moves it from 929th on my chart to 884th, pushing Copland down to 885th. I recently rewatched Copland and was not enthralled with it, so I expect more duels with outcomes like this.

The second line shows my addition of C'mon C'mon, a film I was not a big fan of. There are only about a thousand films I've ranked so far that I liked less. As you can see, it landed at 4923 on its initial entry into the chart, losing to Skyscraper but besting The Last Unicorn. (Seeing as how I have not seen The Last Unicorn since the early 1980s, it's dubious how accurate this is anyway.)

If my screenshot had been extended just a little to the left, you'd see that this was row 4243 in the spreadsheet, which gives you an approximate idea how long I've been keeping track of these movements.

So what to do with all this data? Well I'll tell you.

One would be to track a particular film's movements over time. Did I mention that I also take snapshots of the main page every 10,000 rankings, saving them as their own sheet, so I can look back in time to see where I once was? Well I do that too. However, that's on as-needed basis when I'm curious about a particular title, and so far, the need has not arisen.

Instead, I decided to use this milestone to see how consistent my dueling decisions have been over the years. By searching titles -- assuming I spelled them correctly in my haste to record them -- I can see how many movies beat another movie at one point in time, then lost to the same movie at a different point in time. Theoretically, the implicit goal of working toward a perfect Flickchart means that all your decisions are sacrosanct and internally consistent with one another -- an impossible standard, but one all we Flickcharters secretly like to believe is hypothetically attainable.

This little trawl of my data would show me just how consistent I've been.

Now, if I wanted to spend all my time analyzing this data, I'm sure there's a lot I could find out. But I'd really need an algorithm to help with something like that. I'm not some Howard Hughes who has all the time I want to parse my Flickcharting decisions while wearing boxes of Kleenex on my feet.

So I decided to just go from the top of the list and see how many inconsistencies I could find in my top, say, 100. Due to the way I duel -- which I won't explain right now, just trust me -- those top 100 movies duel more than any other on my chart, so they are the easiest to track if I want the most number of results.

Now, it should be no surprise that the top ten did not contain many movements. I've not had a lot of changes in my top ten during this time. In fact, since Raising Arizona has been my #1 the whole time, it doesn't appear at all on this page of the workbook -- having never lost a duel nor needed to win a duel to move up.

But as we get closer to the bottom of that top ten, some interesting results are revealed.

For example, I discovered that my #7, Fargo, has both beaten and lost to my #8, Toy Story. Since they are only separated by one on my chart, one might assume something like this would be the case. A rewatch of either one or the other could easily be responsible for such a shift, though in this case, I doubt that's a factor -- I happen to have not rewatched Fargo since 2012 and Toy Story since 2013. I haven't been keeping this spreadsheet for that long. (In fact, Excel says I created it on May 28, 2014.)

So while we said this result is not a surprise, it may be a surprise just how frequently this has occurred after these two.

The Iron Giant, my current #10, has both beaten and lost to Wargames, my current #21. I think this movement probably occurred not long after my most recent Iron Giant viewing in late 2018, when it ultimately moved into a spot in the top ten that it has not yet relinquished.  

Tangled, my current #14, has both beaten and lost to Jesus Christ Superstar, my current #15. But then Jesus Christ Superstar has also beaten and lost to Schindler's List, which is now down at #43. JCS used to "slum it" with Schindler's List down in the 40s but has since gotten a big boost. 

As we continue, more movies have switched places with more than one other movie. Do the Right Thing (#20) has had trouble deciding whether it's better or worse than both Run Lola Run (#22) and Unforgiven (#24). Wargames not only traded places with Iron Giant, as listed above, but also with Big (#33). The same can be said for Run Lola Run, which adds Donnie Darko (#23) to its list of dance partners in addition to Do the Right Thing, and then there's Shawshank Redemption (#26) being fickle with both A Fish Called Wanda (#30) and Time Bandits (#31).

I abandoned this exercise at this point, as it was becoming pretty clear that these sort of results would continue to bear themselves out down the chart.

I suppose what I would really need is to see if two movies that are far apart from each other on the chart have actually mutually beaten each other, but a) that's much harder to track, because I would have to have my suspicions of which titles these might be in advance, and b) Flickchart doesn't really work that way, except for over a long period of time with a lot of intervening movements. Once one film beats another, they are next to each other on the chart, at least for the immediate future -- so it's not so easy for them to be at a great distance from one another again, unless you purposefully re-rank a movie because it seems out of place.

I did find one interesting result from within this top 26, which was that Bound (#19) actually beat Big (#33) at two different times. How is it possible for one film to leap over another film twice? Shouldn't it be ahead of that film after the first win? Yes it is, but then the second film can leap frog the first by beating a film that's ahead of both of them. It's nice to know that both times that Bound and Big dueled with Big in the lead, I saw it fit to reverse their respective positions. That's the sort of consistency I'm looking for. Of course, I don't and can't keep track of how many times one of the films might have beaten the other without their positions changing -- and in fact, Big might have won a duel against Bound in this scenario when it was in the higher slot.

There's one other takeaway I want to discuss before I let you go.

I noted that Shawshank had beaten A Fish Called Wanda and vice versa, but what I didn't say is that A Fish Called Wanda has actually leaped past Shawshank two different times, with Shawshank getting the win in the middle duel. 

Now I don't keep track of the dates these duels occurred on this spreadsheet, but I can tell you that on line 1888 -- which means after I'd added 944 new movies and had 944 lower movies win a duel over a higher movie -- Wanda defeated Shawshank to move from 30th to 21st. Five hundred twelve "transactions" later, on line 2400, it was Shawshank upending Wanda to go from 24th to 23rd. Then a mere 142 lines later, which was probably only a couple months depending on how frequently I was charting at the time, Wanda claimed its revenge on Shawshank by moving from 25th to 24th. It seems unlikely that I watched either movie during that time, though I have seen both movies in the past ten years.

But that's not nearly the shortest time period to change my mind. Sticking with Shawshank, on line 2602, Time Bandits bested Shawshank to move from 26th to 25th. Only 64 transactions later -- in other words, only 32 new movies added and only 32 movies repositioned by the outcome of a duel -- Shawshank took the position back by jumping from 27th to 25th. And yes, that two-slot difference suggested there was an intervening transaction related to Shawshank, which was the aforementioned Big insinuating itself between the two of them. 

The only real conclusion to draw from this is what Flickcharters have acknowledged from time immemorial, time immemorial being the 13+ years Flickchart has been available to the public: that human beings, perhaps especially cinephiles, are fickle, and they might select differently between two movies depending on what day of the week it was and what mood they were in.

And when you have a chart with more than 6,000 movies on it, these relative positions are anything but absolute -- even when your thoughts don't change as the result of new information, like a repeat viewing. These are fine differences indeed, imperceptible levels of preference and variations in quality. 

So yeah, I've written all this to conclude something you likely would have surmised before you even started reading.

Hey but at least I used my data. 

The end of a year of documentary alternate Tuesdays

At the beginning of August last year, I set out to reverse my personal trend of watching fewer and fewer documentaries. I vowed to watch one every other Tuesday, in perpetuity.

A year later, the end of that perpetuity has arrived.

It's not that I haven't kept it up. I have. In fact, I've never missed a turn in the two-week rotation. Some weeks it worked out that I needed to watch it on Monday, and other weeks on Wednesday, but never in that year have I missed by more than one day on either side. And if you watch it on a Monday, a day before you were supposed to, it can hardly be described as "missing," now can it?

My upcoming trip to America, which starts six days from now, would create my first real scenario where it would be hard to continue. (Which means it times out pretty well for the end of this year-long project. If I did one more two weeks from now, it would overlap with the date of the first one a year ago, which is one more than necessary.)

The two bi-weekly Tuesdays on that trip would be once when I'm in Maine visiting my father and his wife, and once when I'm in California sorting through the stuff in our garage, preparing to finally sell the house we bought ten years ago (and lived in for exactly one year before moving here). Oh, I could fit in viewings -- I'm pretty determined when I have arbitrary schedules to keep -- but I suspect I'll have better things to do, and it'll be nice not to think I have to, even if you, dear reader, are the only person I'm answering to here, and you are very forgiving.

But I think the trip to America is really just an excuse to do something I've wanted to do for a while. I think the goal of this mission has been accomplished, with an asterisk. Yeah sure I watched 26 documentaries in the past year, which is great -- but I watched only those 26. That's a pretty high number for a year and I wouldn't likely watch more than that anyway, but the point is, I watched them only because I felt obligated to, not organically. The real goal is to watch a documentary whenever I feel like it, not because I should or because I said I would.

If I dwindle back down to the single digits per year in documentaries, this past year will ultimately have been sort of a failure. But I don't think I will. It'll just be nice to watch them when the mood strikes me, not when a predetermined schedule tells me it's time.

The Errol Morris documentary Gates of Heaven, about pet cemeteries, seemed like a perfect way to finish, dealing as it does in issues surrounding the end of life. Plus Morris is one of our most vital documentarians, whose previously unseen work is the sort of thing this "series" was designed to push me toward. (Plus it was short, only 82 minutes, which is always great.)

Far too often, these weren't the kinds of movies I watched in this series. Many of the slots were filled with documentaries from the current year that I thought I should see because there was a little buzz around them and I wanted to rank them. That seems like a bit of a cheat because I might have watched those films anyway. Then there were weeks where I had no idea what to watch so I just threw my hands up in the air and picked some random thing that ended up disappointing me, by documentary standards. (I say "by documentary standards" because most documentaries are pretty good.)

So instead of holding my own feet to the fire every two weeks, my intention now is to keep referring back to my Letterboxd list of documentaries I haven't seen, which I created just for this series, and continue to tick off documentaries I actually want to see, because I have a free night and because it will contribute to my overall edification as a cinephile.

Free nights were actually one of the issues. Because of my commitment to two of these movies a month, as well as two viewings per month among my previous #1s since the start of this year, as well as other movies I need to watch because I'm reviewing them, as well as other movies I need to watch as part of three different series (two on this blog and one elsewhere), I was finding relatively few free nights on my calendar, nights when I really could just watch anything I wanted. I want that back.

But I do want to send off this series with a quick recap of what I saw, when, and a few thoughts on the experience. So here goes:

1. Gunda (2020, Viktor Kossakovsky)
Watched: Tuesday, August 3, 2021
If you read this post, you'll recall that this was the inaugural film -- and that it was so meditative (a documentary about pigs that has no voiceover or other spoken language) that it put me into sort of a trance. The right kind of trance, though. An art film trance, and so what if I needed to take a couple naps in the middle, pausing as I did? A promising start.

2. We Are The Thousand (2020, Anita Rivaroli)
Watched: Tuesday, August 17, 2021
My second movie fell right in the midst of MIFF, and since MIFF was online last year, it was easy to arrange this documentary of Italian origin to line up with my schedule. The movie looks at the viral event that occurred when organizers got musicians from across Italy to come together and simultaneously play the Foo Fighters' "Learn to Fly" in one thousand-piece orchestra of singers and instrumentalists, as a way of wooing the Foos to come play in that small town. The viral event was pretty awesome. The 30 minutes of tacked on material to approach feature length was not.

3. Step Into Liquid (2003, Dana Brown)
Watched: Tuesday, August 31, 2021
The first time I wondered whether this experiment was a great idea was only three installments in. This surfing documentary, which I threw on with a shrug after striking out elsewhere on streaming, was pretty slipshod and all over the place, even if the director is the son of the guy who directed The Endless Summer. 

4. Never Surrender: A Galaxy Quest Documentary (2019, Jack Bennett)
Watched: Tuesday, September 14, 2021
Although this was a second straight movie I sort of grabbed out of my ass when it came to be Tuesday night, it ended up being a huge pleasure because of how much I love Galaxy Quest.

5. Tim's Vermeer (2013, Teller)
Watched: Tuesday, September 28, 2021
This brought the series back on track in terms of giving me an excuse to watch documentaries I'd been meaning to watch for years ... this actually being the first example of that. This is a fascinating story of a non-painter who used scientific techniques and refracting lenses to paint a Vermeer that was indistinguishable from the real McCoy.

6. Jodorowsky's Dune (2013, Frank Pavich)
Watched: Tuesday, October 12, 2021
It was logical for me to follow up Tim's Vermeer with Jodorowsky's Dune, because I wrote about both of these films back in 2013 when I could not get my hands on them in time to rank them before the end of the year. Loved this one and it single-handedly prompted me to buy and read Frank Herbert's novel before Denis Villeneuve's version of the film came out.

7. Val (2021, Ting Poo & Leo Scott)
Watched: Tuesday, October 26, 2021
This is the first "watch it to rank it for the current year" movie I watched. I was pretty touched by his portrait of Val Kilmer's career from the perspective of his own struggle with throat cancer, requiring him to use an electrolarynx or "throat back" in order to speak.

8. Bob Ross: Happy Accidents, Betrayal & Greed (2021, Joshua Rofe)
Watched: Tuesday, November 9, 2021
As we're getting into November and into the end of the year, expect these late-season list contenders to keep coming. Despite feeling primed to really appreciate this due to the subject matter, I was underwhelmed.

9. The Truffle Hunters (2020, Michael Dweck & Gregory Kershaw)
Watched: Tuesday, November 23, 2021
It's listed as 2020 here, but this fulfilled my requirements for a movie I could rank in 2021. This was the first time where life threw me a curveball that might prevent the viewing, as I was on the second of two nights away with my wife. But after we played a lot of pool and went our separate ways for televised entertainment to end the night, I determined I could still fit in this film's brief 84 minutes, which went down pretty well.

10. My Name is Gulpilil (2021, Molly Reynolds)
Watched: Tuesday, December 7, 2021
I'm a big fan of the recently deceased indigenous actor David Gulpilil, who has been in all sorts of classic Australian films, so it counting for the current year was sort of a secondary interest, since he'd just died within the past few weeks. The movie was not great from a filmmaking perspective but I loved learning more about him. 

11. Summer of Soul (... or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) (2021, Questlove)
Watched: Tuesday, December 21, 2021
Even being in the new house for just over 24 hours did not prevent me from fitting in my documentary alternate Tuesday. I'm a dedicated man. This was one of the most acclaimed films of last year and I was obviously going to fit it in before ranking. It ended up in my top 20 for the year.

12. The Rescue (2021, Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi & Jimmy Chin)
Watched: Monday, January 3, 2022
My first Monday, but not my last. Cannot remember why I needed to watch it on Monday night instead of Tuesday. On that Tuesday I watched The Lost Daughter. It seems like I could have just as easily flipped those two. Really liked this, just outside my top 20 for the year. These filmmakers excel in movies about climbing, and it appears, also in movies about rescuing people from flooded caves.

13. The Velvet Underground (2021, Todd Haynes)
Watched: Monday, January 17, 2022
After I'd broken the seal the previous time, kept the Monday night viewings going with my last movie before I closed off my 2021 rankings. It ended up somewhere in the 60 to 65% range in those rankings, as the these final viewings usually do, when I've lost all my critical faculties and just want to be done with the whole thing. It's an impressive film but not being a huge VU fan probably limited my appreciation. 

14. Looking for Richard (1996, Al Pacino)
Watched: Tuesday, February 1, 2022
I got back to Tuesdays but I got a little cheeky with this one nonetheless. Hey I never said they all had to be documentaries I hadn't seen before, did I? By this point I had already decided I was going to revisit all my former #1s in order to rank them at the end of 2022, and this is the only documentary I have ever crowned as my favorite of the year.

15. In & Of Itself (2020, Frank Oz)
Watched: Monday, February 14, 2022
This indescribable self-help/magic special fits my description of a documentary enough to qualify. Unlike some people -- my wife included, who was watching it on the couch next to me -- I didn't know what to make of this film and am still not sure if I really liked it. Maybe it's just the frustration of not knowing how Derek DelGaudio does what he did. The weirdest thing is probably that we chose this as our Valentine's Day viewing.

16. Flee (2021, Jonas Poher Rasmussen)
Watched: Tuesday, March 1, 2022
This 2021 critical darling -- which was somehow Oscar-nominated for best documentary, best foreign language film and best animated feature, even though two of those three would seem to contradict each other -- was right up my alley as a big fan of Ari Folman's Waltz With Bashir. 

17. The Tinder Swindler (2022, Felicity Morris)
Watched: Tuesday, March 15, 2022
New year, new documentaries to rank in the current year. This movie had its moment in the zeitgeist but I didn't find it particularly interesting.

18. Nobody Speak: Trials of the Free Press (2017, Brian Knappenberger)
Watched: Tuesday, March 29, 2022
I think this was another result of a streaming deep dive -- I remember going through a lot of pages here -- but the results were better than the previous time I did this (Step Into Liquid). Was really interested in the Hulk Hogan portion of this, not so much in the other portions -- and in fact, can no longer remember what they were about.

19. The Imposter (2012, Bart Layton)
Watched: Wednesday, April 13, 2022
My first Wednesday, but there was no way I was watching a documentary that Tuesday, which was my 14th wedding anniversary. (Valentine's Day was bad enough.) I had remembered wanting to watch this documentary when it first came out and was glad to come across it, though it's another milquetoast 3.5 star rating where I don't remember all that much about it.

20. Do I Sound Gay? (2014, David Thorpe)
Watched: Tuesday, April 26, 2022
This might not have been the best documentary I watched in the last year, but it hits an absolute sweet spot by being about an interesting topic (the phenomenon of gay men speaking effeminately) with some (but not overwhelming) social importance, managing to be fun and funny while also uncovering a real sense of sadness and self-loathing. A great way to pass an evening in COVID quarantine, and it was only 77 minutes to boot.

21. Miss Representation (2011, Jennifer Siebel Newsom)
Watched: Tuesday, May 10, 2022
I ended up liking this pretty well after a deep dive into Kanopy to see what I could find, but I wouldn't say that it really says anything new about women's attempts to be viewed equally, and not as sex objects, in popular culture and entertainment. Perhaps the most interesting thing about it in my mind is that the director, a former actress, is married to the governor of California, and therefore, a possible future first lady? Maybe?

22. Can We Take a Joke? (2015, Ted Balaker)
Watched: Monday, May 23, 2022
It wasn't a great sign for the longevity of this project that I took a deep dive into Kanopy for the second installment in a row, and didn't come up with something I felt very excited about for the second time in a row, opting for this primarily because it would be over in 74 minutes. It's basically about whether our culture has become too sensitive to jokes, though it doesn't have quite the right-wing perspective you might assume from that premise.

23. Beastie Boys Story (2020, Spike Jonze)
Watched: Wednesday, June 8, 2022
Clearly feeling a bit desperate to get back on track here, I was glad to remember I had wanted to watch this documentary that was among the first bits of original content I was aware of to be released by AppleTV+. Even though my viewing was divided between work, a long bus ride home from baseball practice and home, I really, really liked this -- glad to see the two remaining Beasties with such a fun perspective on their careers, delivered in a manner that suggested they no longer worry about being perceived as cool.

24. Burden of Dreams (1982, Les Blank)
Watched: Wednesday, June 22, 2022
This was a pivot from the movie I had planned to watch as my documentary the night before, which, I realized after starting it, turned out not to be a documentary: Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom. But what a pivot. This was pretty easily my favorite documentary from the whole year, something I had long wanted to see, about Werner Herzog's fateful experiences shooting Fitzcarraldo. It lived up to everything I hoped from what I'd heard going in, especially his famous speech about animals murdering each other in nature and birds screaming.

25. Our Father (2022, Lucie Jourdan)
Watched: Tuesday, July 5, 2022
Yes I got to tick off a 2022 documentary I needed to see, but more than that got a really fascinating story about a fertility doctor who used his own samples dozens, and dozens, and dozens of times, potentially screwing up the whole gene pool in a major metropolitan area. This is one of the few times I remember really liking staged recreations in a documentary.

26. Gates of Heaven (1978, Errol Morris)
Watched: Tuesday, July 19, 2022
Alas, I didn't love Gates of Heaven. In fact I'm not even sure I really liked it. I'm giving it three stars as an adjustment of my expectations of a documentary made at a very different time than today, but this was a lot of talking heads waffling on and going on whatever tangents they wanted, because Morris' interview style allows for that. I saw the seeds of what Morris would become in the future, but this first effort only brings the pets to life, so to speak, in fleeting moments. I learned all too much about the ins and outs related to the creation of the cemetery without really feeling like it was a vibrant space either. He also gave altogether too much screen time to the film's least appealing character. Maybe I just needed more b-roll than I got. Or maybe I was too tired, which is not a big surprise given that I'm leaving for the U.S. in six days. I'm obviously wrong because Roger Ebert put this on one of his Sight & Sound polls as one of the ten best films of all time. This film's completion and exhibition were also the occasion for Werner Herzog to eat his own shoe, as a result of losing a bet about whether Gates of Heaven would ever see the light of day. 

A few takeaways:

1) I'm still pretty allergic to earnest movies about social and human rights issues, the kind I watched extensively when I was choosing films for that human rights film festival back in 2015 and 2016 (for festivals taking place in 2016 and 2017). Yep, five years later I am still broken from that. 

2) Twenty-three of these 26 movies are from the 21st century, suggesting that documentaries don't have much of a shelf life. Either the older ones are not available, or they're not on my radar because, with a few rare exceptions, people aren't still talking about them 50 years after they were made. (Also, I watched 12 pre-1990 documentaries for my series Audient Authentic back in 2020, so perhaps I thought I scratched that particular itch then.)

3) When I saw a doco that I really liked, it definitely got me feeling enthused about this project all over again. However, instead of soldiering on with the project through good times and bad, I'll just remember that I can be enthusiastic about documentaries even if I am not doing this series -- and maybe that's the next step in bringing them fully back into my good graces.

If the problem before this was that watching documentaries felt like a chore, forcing myself to watch them every two weeks probably didn't help with that. But now that I'm reminded they don't have to feel like a chore, I'll look forward to opting in to them -- on my own schedule this time.

The sneaky three-timer, and other Hamlet rewatch thoughts

I haven't written about many of the previous #1s I'm watching this year as I've actually watched them, but Hamlet, my #1 of 2000, rose to that level for a couple reasons. If you're keeping track at home, it's the 16th of an eventual 26 I am rewatching before I rank them all at the end of the year, and it's probably the last before I leave on my 3.5-week trip to America a week from now. It also happens to be the next one that will get mentioned in my August monthly post reviewing my 2000 film rankings.

As I've been revisiting these movies I have previously crowned with my top yearly honors, I've also been reminded of the full size of the casts, some larger than others. You don't get a lot of other actors in, say, 127 Hours, but Michael Almereyda's adaptation of Hamlet with its all-star cast provides plenty of familiar faces -- and chances to see who might appear in multiple films I've named #1. That's another obsession of mine, each year trying to figure out who I can add to the two-timers list. My longest term obsession is seeing if the same director will score two different #1s, but that hasn't happened yet. 

Hamlet has two actors I already knew of who had appeared in another top film for me, those being Bill Murray, who also appears in Lost in Translation, and Ethan Hawke, who also appears in First Reformed. Last night I added a third, and for him, it's also a third #1 -- even if you can only barely count what he does here as "appearing in" the film.

You probably recognize Casey Affleck from the photo above, "playing" Fortinbras, the Prince of Norway in the original play, who has his sights set on vengeance for the death of his own father, which gives him something in common with the title character. In the play, if memory serves, he only barely appears at the end, never having factored into the drama before then except as an everpresent looming threat.

Well, he doesn't appear on screen at all in Almereyda's film, but he does appear in this photo on this news telecast, the last shot of the film, and possibly one other at the beginning, though I didn't recognize it as Affleck if he did. (By the way, that's Robert MacNeil of The MacNeil-Lehrer Report.) 

The reason this is significant is that just last year Affleck punched his card into this exclusive fraternity with his second #1, as Our Friend added to A Ghost Story to accomplish the rarefied feat. This "appearance" in Hamlet means he's at three, which, if I remember correctly, ties him with only one other person, that being Charlie Kaufman (Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, I'm Thinking of Ending Things).

Is it a bit cheeky to count this? Sure. Affleck probably didn't even need to be on set. He only needed to give them permission to use a photo of him. It seems strange that they even used him, since he was only 24 and not yet widely known -- though his credits before this do include Good Will Hunting, To Die For and 200 Cigarettes among others. Tellingly, though, his role in American Pie the year before was uncredited, and only three years earlier in Chasing Amy he's billed as "Little Kid." Must have been a specific reason they used him, some connection in the cast, but a quick search of the internet did not yield it. (Though that search did remind me that Fortinbras appears in a few other photos, on a magazine cover and in a newspaper article I think -- I must have not been paying attention or thought it looked like him.)

One final note about Fortinbras: It's an avatar I have sometimes used, because it is roughly the Latin version of my own last name, Armstrong. 

Another behind-the-camera two-timer

There are doubtless collaborators who don't appear on the screen -- at all -- who worked on more than one of my #1s. Was the key grip on The Wrestler also the key grip on Moon? Undoubtedly.

The only ones of those in the past I've noticed are for screenwriting (the aforementioned Kaufman) and cinematography (Emmanuel Lubezki, who shot both Children of Men and Birdman, my #1s of 2006 and 2014). These are the sorts of core behind-the-scenes contributors who achieve renown for the way their art transcends the anonymity of most of the names that appear in the credits. They're the kind of people who become known among casual cinephiles, whose work becomes a factor in getting you pumped up for a particular project. 

Well, you can add the music department to that. 

As I was watching the closing credits of Hamlet -- more on them in a moment -- I noticed that Carter Burwell did the music. If you're the sort of casual cinephile who doesn't recognize that name, Burwell has worked on most of the Coens' projects -- most significantly, in my mind, having composed the delightful bluegrass theme "Way Out There" from my beloved Raising Arizona, my favorite movie of all time. You know, the one with the hillbilly yodeling. 

He hasn't made it to my #1 spot working with the Coens -- they've never had a #1, though in retrospect Fargo would be my #1 of 1996, the first year I started doing this, instead of Looking for Richard, another Shakespeare movie. But he did get there through another movie: Adaptation. 

I didn't realize this until I went hunting through IMDB, sure that he would have scored some other #1 of mine but not being sure which one it was. There you go.

Speaking of music ...

The lingering impression of the closing credits music

In 2000, I remember really liking Hamlet as I was watching it ... and then being taken to another place by the music over the closing credits. 

The song is called "Greentone" by Accelera Deck, and because I can, I thought I'd include the song here so you can get a sense of the apocalyptic vibe that had such an impact on me:

The industrial percussive quality of this song makes it so ominous. It's like wandering the corridors of Hell.

I don't really know if I would have chosen another movie as my #1 without "Greentone." Probably not. But the music, such a perfect soundtrack for savoring what I just watched, made it a certainty.

And it's not the only time this has happened with a #1 movie of mine.

There may be others, but the one that jumps to mind is the closing credits of Toni Erdmann. I was already in a state of melancholy contemplation when that movie came to its close after two hours and 40 minutes, but then I heard the opening strains of The Cure's "Plainsong" start to play. Transportation city.

Here's that one:

Yep. I was helpless to consider any other movie my #1.

Does this make a lot of sense? No it doesn't. But there's certainly something to be said for the last audio impression a movie makes on you. I happen to know that the usage of Sia's "Waving Goodbye" over the end of The Neon Demon has a major impact on my thoughts on that film. Just this week, I was taken to another headspace by Birdy's "Quietly Yours" at the end of the brand new Netflix adaptation of Persuasion, which alone prompted me to elevate it a half-star. (Realizing after the fact that this song alone had been responsible for turning a 3.5 into a 4, and that some other critics had complaints about the movie that resonated with me, I demoted it back to 3.5 before publishing my review, which you can find here.)

So, memo to anyone out there who's making a movie: If you want me to slobber all over your work, just stick the audio landing and we'll be good.

Baby Blum

While scouring this film's credits on IMDB for this post, I notice another something really weird. If I thought Casey Affleck was too young to be thrust into the sort of significance his character has in this movie, what about the movie being produced by a zygote Jason Blum?

Blum was actually 31 by the time Hamlet was released, but the sort of industry-dominating career he would forge was just a twinkle in his eye back then. In fact, he's listed as an executive producer, which can be a sort of ceremonious credit, not necessarily someone who did the hard yards. However, it's only the fourth of what is now 217 credits on IMDB. The others are on a short and a feature I've never seen, though his debut is pretty impressive: In 1995 he was listed as an associate producer on Noah Baumbach's Kicking and Screaming, another film I dearly love.

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

Okay, speaking of ceremonious things, this is a pretty good halfway point post for my 2022 #1 rewatches project. It's more than halfway, which gives it something in common with the baseball season, also currently in its break for the all-star game -- a break point that occurs more than halfway through the season. 

This post is not just about Hamlet, as I have name-checked -- let me see -- 14 other former #1s in this post. I'm eager to see how I go with my final ten titles, to be resumed after August 20th, and how I end up ranking these 26 dear favorites. 

Partitioning a movie as a TV show

The latest kid-friendly TV show we've been watching together as a family is Man vs. Bee, the Netflix comedy where the immortal Rowan Atkinson plays his typical bumbling but loveable fool, whose housesitting assignment in a fancy mansion full of futuristic technology and priceless art goes awry thanks to an unkillable bee and his own incompetence. Atkinson remains a gifted physical comic even at age 67, and one of his routines makes us laugh out loud each episode.

But should there even be (bee) episodes? Shouldn't this have been a movie? You know, something on the order of the Nathan Lane movie Mouse Hunt, only better?

There are nine episodes in the show, and because most of the episodes are around 10 minutes, with only the first running a longer 19, the total running time for the show is 108 minutes. That's a tad long for a comedy, but it shortens right up once you realize that about two minutes of each episode is devoted to the end credits. If you subtract 18 minutes of credits, you are right down to 90 minutes.

It's another sure sign of something that seems increasingly clear: Viewers prefer watching TV shows to movies.

I hear Netflix is starting to move away from some of its heavier investments in expensive movies with big stars. I read recently that the upcoming Russo-directed The Gray Man, starring Ryan Gosling and Chris Evans, may be among the last of the high-profile, should-have-gotten-a-theatrical-release movies we will see Netflix putting out for a while. (The Gray Man did actually get a theatrical release on Friday, but will debut on Netflix just a week later.)

Now, an action thriller like that doesn't really work diced up as nine episodes, but a comedy like Man vs. Bee? That's a different story.

And despite my preference for movies over TV, I'm not sure it's the wrong thing to do.

If Man vs. Bee had been a movie, I'm not sure we would have watched it. I probably would have watched it myself -- gotta add it to the list -- but it probably wouldn't have been prioritized as a family viewing. Although the kids seem more or less as eager as ever to watch movies, my wife is definitely not. I tried to get the new Netflix animated movie The Sea Beast on the schedule as a family viewing last weekend to review it, and failed. I'm hoping I might get another shot tonight.

With Man vs. Bee passing only about ten minutes at a time, however -- or eight minutes, really, if you exclude the credits -- it's been a snackable pleasure our family can enjoy together, on weekend nights when we eat in front of the TV instead of at the table. In fact, so short are the episodes that we can, and always do, roll into a second, an indulgence we usually don't opt for when we watch a 30-minute or hour-long show. In fact, our biggest problem is getting through it too quickly -- we want this pleasure to draw out as long as it can.

The creators -- Atkinson and William Davies -- were clearly conscious of the fact that their content was approximately feature length. The Wikipedia entry on the series quotes Atkinson as describing the creative process as producing content roughly the length of a feature and then editing it into ten episodes. (How it decreased to nine, the entry does not stipulate.) They had to go about the task a bit differently than if it were a normal feature, though, as episodes require a cliffhanger at the end of each. Though set pieces in a movie may roughly break down that way, it usually wouldn't work out perfectly at those approximate ten-minute intervals. 

It's customary for a person in my position to wring his hands over further evidence of the decline of movies. Consider my hands wrung.

Until I see a significant number of other examples of this, though, it's probably too early to worry about this being a trend others will follow. I still can't keep on top of the number of movies released on different platforms in any given year, and that's the way I like it. 

Audient Bollywood: Baar Baar Dekho

This is the seventh in my 2022 monthly series Audient Bollywood, in which I educate myself on Bollywood by watching notable examples of it.

As you may recall, I've been using a list of top ten Bollywood dance numbers (published in TimeOut) as guidance in making my dozen choices in this series. I won't get to all of the ten films -- length and availability are relevant factors -- but my July movie marks my third selection from that list so far.

It also marks the first time the list has steered me wrong, in terms of both the quality of the movie and the quality of the dance number. 

Or if this is one of the ten best Bollywood dance numbers of all time, I've got some disappointment ahead of me in the five remaining slots in this series.

The dance sequence selected on this list is the song "Kala Chashma" from the 2016 film Baar Baar Dekho, directed by Nitya Mehra. Oh, it's not a terrible number at all, but it's got a couple things going against it that I consider to be rather serious demerits:

1) It comes during the closing credits rather than being part of the narrative proper. That just seems like cheating. And because so many Hollywood romantic comedies have taken to having their characters dance over the closing credits, it felt hackneyed and obvious, even if Baar Baar Dekho might have slightly preceded that trend.

2) The primary "innovation" in its choreography seems to be people bobbing their heads from side to side. (Is it considered "bobbing" if the heads are going side to side? I wanted to say "wiggling" but that sounded even less right.)

Here, you can judge for yourself whether you think this is a great dance number:

Now, one thing I've discovered during Audient Bollywood is that a Bollywood dance number is a superfluous narrative flourish in the best of times. It almost always interrupts the action at sort of absurd moments, perhaps even to a greater degree than in the western musical because there's almost no attempt made to incorporate it into the narrative proper. It's much more like a stand-alone video than an offshoot of the action, and the lyrics rarely even seem to be elucidating anything in the story -- and I can tell this because I've been seeing them all translated in the subtitles. In fact there's one song in this movie that talks a lot about crispy potatoes. 

But a pure Bollywood dance number -- like I've seen enough Bollywood to make such a judgment -- is indeed part of the movie proper, not just an end credits dance sequence that's essentially designed to show how much all the people in the cast like each other and how much fun they had making the movie. So says I.

Since even if you watched that clip, you probably have no idea what sort of story it's accompanying, I might as well get into the plot now. And on this front the film had significant promise.

It follows the story of Jai (Sidharth Malhotra) and Diya (Katrina Kaif), who have been in each others' lives forever -- we open on them both being born in different hospitals in 1986, and the credits are a montage of their childhood growing up together and becoming romantically inclined toward one another. By the time they are young adults, they're still gaga over each other, but he -- skittish male that he is -- starts to worry about the commitment of marriage she's hinting at. He spouts divorce figures and also secretly harbors an interest in moving to England to take a job at Cambridge University. He knows she'll never go for this because she's very close to her family.

So as their wedding approaches, he starts to flake -- and then he starts to lose time. This was the promising part, since you know I like movies about what I call "the uncontrollable slippage of time." I was at first reminded of the 2021 Australian film Long Story Short, in which a newly married man wakes up each morning one further year into his marriage than he was the day before. In fact, I looked it up to try to see if there was a connection between the two, because Jai first wakes up ten days into his honeymoon, not remembering how he got to that point, and then the next day, two years into his marriage after this wife's water breaks. And you can tell they haven't been two happy years because she's really pissed with him and they're living in Cambridge, those two things probably being related to one another.

I couldn't find a connection between this and Long Story Short, and if there had been, it would have obviously been the other way around, with Long Story Short taking its concept from this. In fact, the connection is with the Adam Sandler movie Click -- one of my classic "uncontrollable slippage of time" movies -- as Wikipedia states that Baar Baar Dekho was inspired by the Sandler flick.

If so, they probably should have just gone with an exact Bollywood remake, magical remote control and all, because the execution of the concept is pretty scattershot. There's only a rudimentary explanation given for how much time Jai is moving forward each day, and why -- he's a gifted mathematician with a Rain Man-like ability to do instantaneous calculations, and in one of those "standing at a white board" scenes he works out some sort of exponential increase in the jumps, though it's essentially waved off as unimportant. The thing about high concept films is that you sort of have to create rules and then obey them, or else it just feels all over the place -- like this film.

And then at one point he goes backward to an earlier point, but then forward again, and it really gives the impression that the screenwriters are just making it up as they go. Maybe they were. 

Which, as I suggested earlier, would probably be okay if it was propped up by some really great dance numbers. There is one dance number I did like, which I thought was going to be the one that made the top ten list. That would have at least been something.

I did enjoy the lead performers for the most part, her more than him. The movie flirts with poignancy from time to time, and I liked what it was trying to do, but it just didn't get there. 

But hey, at least it was only 135 minutes long -- which is puny by Bollywood standards.

In August I hope to catch a movie on the fly on my return trip from the U.S. I'll be flying back on August 20th and I have to assume Qantas has plenty of Bollywood content on it, perhaps even some older stuff that I have identified as a good fit for this series. And a 14-hour plane ride is the perfect opportunity to watch a Bollywood movie, the longest one I can possibly find. 

If they don't have anything, that'll still leave me 11 days after I return to watch my August movie. In fact, I might have tried to catch my July movie in this way, as we're flying over on July 26th, except that a) if they didn't have anything, I'd have only five days left in the month to watch something, a pretty big ask with all my other travel commitments, and b) I'd rather have most of my choices in this series be intentional ones, not just whatever the plane ride has to offer. 

Nasty, brutish and short

My disappointment with The Northman on Friday night made me realize I had a thirst for a movie set a thousand years ago that actually immersed me in its world. 

Okay, the 1386 setting of Ridley Scott's The Last Duel is 636 years ago, not a thousand, but I was still only too quick to put it on Saturday night once I found it was streaming on Disney+ -- casually disregarding the advanced mental preparation one usually makes before embarking on a two hour and 35-minute time commitment. 

You may remember (though why would you) that this was my #4 film of 2021. It was not nearly that sort of slam dunk for others. Critics generally supported it, some passionately, but audiences famously did not go see it, though I'm sure some of them ended up loving it as much as I did when they caught up with it on video. Some of them hated it. 

I'd say The Last Duel took a sort of typical second-viewing drop in my estimations, which is, not very much but enough for me to notice it. I still think it's great, and I was already surmising that it will be in the conversation at the end of this decade when I consider candidates for my top 25 films of the past ten years.

Today I want to focus on the appearance of Matt Damon in this film -- which could be one of those character details, along with Ben Affleck's platinum blonde hair, that turn off viewers who already feel predisposed against a movie, kind of like a character dressed up in a fat suit. 

I was going to call this post "Matt Damon's brutish mullet," but the use of the word "brutish" put me in mind of Thomas Hobbes' famous quote about life. Since all three of those adjectives effectively described Damon's character, I went with that title instead.

A far simpler film, made 20 years ago, would have had the man fighting for his wife's honor (Damon's Jean de Carrouges) unambiguously heroic, and the man who violated her (Adam Driver's Jacque Le Gris) unambiguously loathsome. In fact, both men are loathsome, and because de Carrouges is on the right side of the central conflict, we need to know it through his appearance -- though it's pretty damn evident in his behavior as well.

And what an appearance. I think most people agree that Damon is a good-looking man, but they've really uglied him up here. The scar on his cheek is one obvious way, though in reality, it speaks to his courage in battle, which even Le Gris in his own accounting of events does not attempt to dispute. I noticed in Le Gris' account, which comes second, he does not paint a different picture of de Carrouges saving him in battle, so it must have gone down the way de Carrouges depicts it. A simpler movie also might have showed Le Gris remembering it as him saving de Carrouges instead. But I'm getting sidetracked.

The real thing that makes him gross to look at is the hair. I have no idea if a mullet is authentic to the period of time -- just as I have no idea if Affleck's platinum blonde hair was a thing -- but it certainly speaks volumes about this man. He's a real brute with no sense of style whatsoever, whose hair might have been cut by a butcher. 

He's also a "small" man, hence the Hobbesian "short." Damon's only three inches shorter than Driver -- though those are an important three inches metaphorically -- but he's notably petty, constantly worried about personal slights and threats to his honor. He's concerned about whether Le Gris addresses him as "sir," and he's highly litigious, twice trying to sue Affleck's character for transactions related to real estate. What's more, he takes on the titular duel primarily to defend his own honor -- since, as we learn, rape was actually considered a property crime, perpetrated against the man who owns the property rather than the woman who is his property. With de Carrouges, it's all about property.

Even in de Carrouges' own telling of events, he doesn't come across as very righteous, which I think is one of the best things about this movie -- both he and Le Gris characterize their obvious weaknesses as strengths, which speaks to the blindness of men to their own faults from time immemorial. 

It may have been a radical conception of Damon's appearance by the hair and makeup people -- who are obviously doing the bidding of the director and the writers, one of whom is Damon -- but it's a great way to remind us, just by looking at him, not to get it twisted. This man may be fighting a righteous cause in the sense that he's trying to prevent his wife from getting executed -- a foregone conclusion if Damon loses the duel, thereby "proving" that her claim of rape was false -- but his motivations are all wrong-headed, his perspective all backward. When he says he's risking his life for her, she reminds him that he's really risking her life -- for his vanity.

Vanity? Just looking at him, you wouldn't think he had any. 

How is Natalie Portman only 41?

And she just turned 41 a month ago. Before that she was only (gasp) 40.

It feels more likely that Portman has been appearing in movies for 40 years than that this is her age. That's because she did two things in the 1990s that both made her seem older than she really was.

The first of course was appearing in Leon, a.k.a. The Professional, when she was only 12 going on 13 during filming. That film was released in late 1994. The point is that she's young in that movie, but the things that happen to her are very grown up, and her acting ability belied her young age. She was the original Millie Bobby Brown, or maybe the latter day Jodie Foster. 

Then five years later it was Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace, when she would have been 17 going on 18. Given what we know about moviemaking, it's far more common to get a 22-year-old to play a 17-year-old, not an actual 17-year-old. If this were our first exposure to her, she might have struck us as 17, but since she was the comparative veteran of five features by then, she seemed older than she was.

So when I saw her in Thor: Love and Thunder this past week, I thought, "Wait, wasn't The Phantom Menace 23 years ago? What excellent plastic surgery has Natalie Portman gotten?"

Well, she may have gotten some -- it's pretty common even for comparatively young "over the hill" Hollywood people -- but it's not because she's actually old. 

And it's not the first time I've had to remind myself how young she still is, having made more than 50 films if you include shorts. I feel like I just checked her age like six months ago. I keep saying "Well she must be at least 45 by now."

Portman's always been ahead of the curve I guess, which is unsurprising for an incredibly smart person who attended Harvard. She was done with one of the biggest trilogies in cinema history, which would define most people's whole careers, by the time she was 24. She won an Oscar when she wasn't yet 30. Just after that she appeared in another major trilogy that has now become a quadrilogy, though she's only appeared in three of the four films. Throughout she has also challenged herself with difficult work from acclaimed directors, such as Wes Anderson, Darren Aronofsky, Pablo Larrain and Terrence Malick. Even many of her more genre-oriented choices have represented challenges for her, such as V for Vendetta and Annihilation.

I suppose a lot of these thoughts would be suited for an in memoriam piece, and maybe my mind is still in that place after writing such a piece for James Caan a few days ago. But chances are I will never get to write such a piece for Portman, since she will certainly outlive me. 

And while I'll follow Portman anywhere she goes on screen, I can't say her latest movie, or her in it, really worked for me. If you want to read my negative review of one of my most anticipated movies of 2022, you can find it here. 

The tedium of the protracted revenge plot

If you asked me to name five 2022 releases I was sure I'd see in the theater, Robert Eggers' The Northman undoubtedly would have made that list.

Another writer for my site requested the assignment of reviewing The Northman, though, and his review didn't convince me it had been a worthy follow-up to The Witch and The Lighthouse. So I waited until it became available at the normal rental rate, which has just occurred this week.

There's a chance I would have liked it more up on the big screen, but I doubt it.

While I was chatting with a friend on Facebook messenger during a break from The Northman, he told me if he'd seen it at home he would have walked out after 20 minutes. You can't "walk out" of your home, but the meaning was clear, and though I never intentionally leave a movie unfinished, I certainly get the sentiment.

The story follows Amleth (Alexander Skarsgard), who was Shakespeare's direct inspiration for Hamlet, which means the broad strokes of the story were already known to me before I started watching. Well, imagine a version of Hamlet with all the cleverness, humor and wordplay stripped out of it, leaving only the bloodthirsty revenge, and you've got a good idea what the experience of watching this movie is like. (I mean, you probably already have a good what the experience of watching this movie is like, since you saw it in the theater like a normal cinephile.)

I basically knew all that this movie would be from the very beginning, and never did I feel very impressed with it. Oh, a lot of hard work went into it, but for not much reward.

I think the point of the movie is supposed to be about the futility of revenge. Amleth flees the scene where his father was murdered, chanting "I will avenge you father, I will save you mother, I will kill you Fjolnir," that last being his uncle. But he finds out over the course of this movie that his father was probably awful, his mother cheered her husband's death, and she viewed his uncle as a savior. 

We have to spend so much time watching Amleth engage in an increasingly baroque revenge scheme, though, that the movie can't help but sort of endorse it just by choosing to expose us to so much of it. Implicitly, a movie tells you what it thinks is important by the amount of time it devotes to that topic, and maybe if the idea that revenge is hollow is the point, it needs to be more explicit about that. Perhaps because he has already devoted so much of his life to his single-minded pursuit of vengeance, he's already got the sunk costs and doesn't feel like he can abandon the scheme now. That point is not really explored either. 

When I talk about protracted revenge plots, though, I'm not only talking about the length of time it takes to dramatize them. I'm talking about being protracted within the life of the character.

It's of course an age-old narrative device -- and I mean like back to when there was only an oral storytelling tradition -- that the child of a slain father will devote his life to vengeance. And since the common wisdom is that revenge is a dish best served cold, there really is no statute of limitations on it. If you extrapolate this out to its logical endpoint, the best sort of revenge would be if you came and slit someone's throat on their deathbed -- though I suppose the idea is also to deprive them of some happiness they would have otherwise enjoyed.

For me, though, I feel like a person's life is going to feature any number of tragedies, and if you fixate on one of them you will live a much more empty existence. This perspective likely comes from the privilege of never having someone in my life who I needed to avenge. But if I did, and the opportunity to deliver revenge didn't come straight away, I'd like to think I'd "get over it" and channel my life into something more positive and fulfilling. Again, this is the enlightened perspective of a human being raised in the 20th and 21st centuries with access to modern psychological theories, who never had a righteous cause to seek vengeance, not that of a 10th century Viking. 

But here I think we should bring in a character who would have a little bit more of that modern perspective: Bruce Wayne. And I was bothered by this part of the "protracted" quality of revenge in The Batman.

Now, The Batman is not strictly a vengeance story, or maybe not even primarily that. (Or if so, it's on the part of the villain, not the hero.) But the same inability to get over a tragedy long in the past informs it. 

I have never quite believed that the killing of Bruce Wayne's parents would be such an everpresent part of his life, even what appears to be 20 years after it happened. That's always been a part of the Batman mythos, but The Batman makes it more explicit than other versions of this story have done. Because Robert Pattinson's Bruce is excessively mopey, even by the long-established standards of the character, we are even more confronted than usual with the notion that he's never gotten over the murder of his parents in an alley when he was a child.

Certainly it is a psychological reality that we can have scarring traumas that affect the trajectory of our whole lives. There can be no doubt about that. But I think film narratives have become increasingly reliant on what ends up being a romantic notion of this revenge plot, that there are people in our lives who are so good, whose absence is so foundation shaking, that their murder would provide the entire direction for a character's life.

I suppose at least in The Batman, we are meant to conclude at the end that Bruce has seen beyond his own protracted sorrow and is ready to step into the role of a more traditional hero, who does things more out of love than hatred -- love for the people who are still around, rather than hatred for the people who killed his parents. And in turn that's a way of loving them as well. 

And yeah, you can certainly hit me with not understanding vengeance until I or someone I love has been wronged. I do understand vengeance, though. I'm still hoping some day to be in a position of advantage, for example, over the two guys who ran my college radio station in my senior year, who denied me a radio show in my last semester, in what I viewed as an act of spite. I don't want to kill them; I just want to be in a position to hire them for a job or something, and not only deny them, but tell them why I'm denying them. Zach and Nate, one day I will have my vengeance. 

But I don't think about the radio station snub every day of my life and try to execute a plan to execute them. 

I suppose that's the difference between not getting to play DJ and watching your father get beheaded by his own brother. 

R.I.P. James Caan

I have always cherished James Caan even though there are relatively few movies of his that I really love. In fact, I've probably seen him on screen fewer times than most others I've memorialized on this blog.

Plus, The Godfather isn't even one of the reasons I've cherished him.

How few James Caan movies have I watched?

Okay not that few. The actual number is 20.

However, probably 15 of those were movies where I had to remind myself after the fact that Caan was in them. Not because Caan was forgettable in them, but because the movies themselves never rose to a particular level of prominence in my own affections.

The two movies I do really love are Elf (#46 on my Flickchart) and Misery (#137 on my Flickchart). The next highest, Bottle Rocket at #277, is one of those where I wouldn't have been able to tell you that Caan was in it. No idea, which obviously means it's been too long since I've seen it. The Godfather does pop up next on my chart at #515 -- sorry, I'm not a huge Godfather lover -- and The Godfather II is one of those I'm counting among the 20, even though he only has a brief uncredited role (and therefore isn't popping up in my filtered list of Caan movies on Flickchart). But after that you have to go all the way outside the top 1,000 to find the next movie -- Middle Men at #1293, which I do like a lot more than its reputation.

I guess it's hard to square, then, why I was so quick to come write this post, only a few hours after hearing about his passing at age 82. 

It would have to come down to Elf and Misery, and I suppose it's the character he plays in both films that spoke to me in a way I'll try now to express. 

Caan plays a character we end up liking in both films, but he isn't easy to like. As the author Paul Sheldon in Misery, he's an eccentric S.O.B. who has his various rituals -- which include making only a single typewritten copy of his manuscripts and a single smoke and Dom Perignon after completing his work, but which don't include any more than the minimal amount of politeness required of him. He can put on an insincere smile to placate a psycho like Annie Wilkes -- he's quick to calculate the necessity of such a facade -- but genuine kindness and tolerance of tedium are foreign to him. We root for Paul not because we love him, but because the conditions of his unjust imprisonment are so expertly established that we quickly and easily root against his captor. Effectively, we empathize with him -- but there would be something about Caan's performance that invites us to do so.

Neither can Walter Hobbs in Elf suffer fools. He's not imprisoned, and by having all the power, he's quick to dismiss anyone who's wasting his time -- particularly some loony dressed up like an elf who claims he's Walter's son. He gets this priceless "What now?" expression in his eyes that we can all relate to. If we were approached by Buddy the elf, our reaction would probably be to roll our eyes and reveal our consternation as well.

Because he starts out so disagreeable, the fulfilment of our journey with Walter Hobbs is all the more satisfying. Whatever else I love about Elf, I may find nothing more gratifying than the steady thawing of Walter from a man for whom business was more important than anything else, to a father capable of showing his love to both of his sons -- not because he has to, but because he wants to.

As a thriller, Misery requires less of an arc for Paul Sheldon, but by the end, we know Paul has learned not to take his fans for granted. Annie's love was too tough to be an effective delivery method for this lesson, but Paul got something out of it anyway.

I'll miss seeing the guy who always felt like he had to grin and bear whatever was coming to him, even if that grin looked a lot more like he had just sucked a lemon, and in the end ultimately emerged a better person for suffering these fools -- a person we might even start to love. 

And oh yeah, he was also Sonny Corleone.

Rest in peace Mr. Caan. 

Perfect pauses: Happening, and protesting America on 4th of July

The timestamp of this post won't show the 4th of July -- it's July 5th in Australia -- but as I type this, Americans are at BBQs scheduled to celebrate the independence of the United States from England. It's a day that has traditionally prompted patriotism even in those naturally inclined not to show it. American flags might not be their thing, but usually they'll throw America a bone one day a year.

Not this year.

As we are all still stinging from the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, I thought I'd put up sort of a protest post today -- in part because it was something I was planning to put up when I wrote about the movie Happening last week, only I forgot. (Plus, posting something French on Independence Day will stick it to a particular subset of the American population, who think France embodies everything they hate about countries that are not America.)

One particular pause during the movie -- what I have periodically identified on this blog as a perfect pause -- yielded me the image you see above.

The main character, Anne, is receiving the prompting from her professor to "continue," as all her classmates look on. It's a particularly fraught moment for her, as we saw her thrive in a similar scenario earlier in the movie. Now, she's been distracted by her attempt to attain a safe abortion and has fallen behind in her studies, leaving her incapable of answering the professor's question and all her classmates fixing her with accusatory stares.

However, in another way, these are stares of anticipation. And the word "continue" is particularly fraught, as it gets right to the core conflict of the movie -- whether to "continue" a pregnancy or not. Everyone in this shot, including the professor, can be seen to be challenging Anne to bring her baby to term -- the perception of a silent pro-life majority, even if the statistics do not bear out that such a silent pro-life majority exists.

Anyway, as an isolated image, it speaks a lot about the film on the whole.

It might be a bit of a flimsy tie-in for 4th of July, except the point is that it's supposed to fly in the face of the holiday. If we're really celebrating freedom and independence, give women freedom and independence regarding their own bodies and what they choose to do with them.

My 2001 film rankings (in 2001)

This is the seventh 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. 

I will forever think of 2001 as "the year I randomly decided not to make Memento my #1." I saw Memento back in March, before leaving New York for Los Angeles the following month -- it's actually usually listed as a 2000 movie due to film festival debuts. Then I didn't see Gosford Park until a week or two before my ranking deadline. Even though I didn't keep track of the dates I saw movies back then (though would start within just a few months), I remember it wasn't until January because Gosford Park was half of a double feature with, of all things, Kung Pow! Enter the Fist, which wasn't released until January 25th of 2002. That's right, the Oscar nominations were released later then too, meaning I usually had all of January to keep collecting titles from the previous year, according to my own arbitrary but clearly defined rules of when to close off my annual list. (Rules that recent pushes back of the nominations have forced me to abandon.) 

Speaking of the Oscars, recency bias has often been listed as a reason why one movie gets a best picture nod and another gets forgotten, and I'm wondering if a similar thing didn't happen here. I was, obviously, really impressed with Gosford Park when I saw it, but it doesn't hold a candle to the creativity, individuality, and long-term cinematic impact of Memento. We'll see in a few minutes just how much lower Gosford Park is now than Memento on my Flickchart. (Again speaking of the Oscars, I'm wondering if this wasn't sort of a career recognition award for Robert Altman, who made two movies that would have been contenders for my favorites of the year if I'd been doing my rankings in the early 1990s: The Player and Short Cuts.)

As mentioned two paragraphs ago, 2001 was a year of great transition for me, as I swapped coasts and did not have a very nice landing when I got to the second one. I sort of followed a girl out there, one I had met while in Los Angeles the previous New Year's Eve, and suffice it to say that things curdled pretty quickly between us once I got there -- and not by my choice. (Fortunately, I also had a ton of friends out there, so she was not the only reason I moved.) It was a pretty rough summer for me, and just when I started to come out of it, September 11th happened -- which made it seem all the more profound that I had lived in New York only six months earlier. (And worked in buildings close to the World Trade Center only a year before that.) Fortunately, by September I was also finally feeling like I'd adjusted to living in L.A., and had a mostly very nice dozen more years living there before coming here.

Here is how I ranked my 2001 movies at the start of 2002:

1. Gosford Park
2. Memento
3. Amelie
4. Waking Life
5. Vanilla Sky
6. The Anniversary Party
7. Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within
8. Rush Hour 2
9. Rock Star
10. Amores Perros
11. A Beautiful Mind
12. In the Bedroom
13. Shallow Hal
14. Ghost World 
15. Moulin Rouge
16. Ocean's Eleven
17. Together
18. Series 7: The Contenders
19. Startup.com
20. Monsters, Inc.
21. Hedwig and the Angry Inch
22. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
23. Ali
24. Black Hawk Down
25. The Man Who Wasn't There
26. Training Day
27. One Night at McCool's
28. High Heels and Low Lifes
29. Monster's Ball
30. Joy Ride
31. All Over the Guy
32. Spy Kids
33. Not Another Teen Movie
34. Heartbreakers
35. From Hell
36. The Royal Tenenbaums
37. American Pie 2
38. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
39. Scary Movie 2
40. The Princess Diaries
41. Pearl Harbor
42. Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back
43. Blow
44. Baby Boy
45. Bridget Jones's Diary
46. Made
47. Heist
48. The Caveman's Valentine
49. 15 Minutes
50. The Fast and the Furious
51. Mulholland Dr.
52. The Others
53. Shrek
54. Planet of the Apes
55. Evolution
56. Legally Blonde
57. Hannibal
58. Wet Hot American Summer
59. Life is a House
60. Say It Isn't So
61. Lara Croft: Tomb Raider
62. The Pledge
63. Cats & Dogs
64. Kiss of the Dragon
65. The Mummy Returns
66. The Dish
67. The Invisible Circus
68. A.I.: Artificial Intelligence
69. The Glass House
70. Jurassic Park III
71. O
72. Sexy Beast
73. The Musketeer

And here is how I rank those movies today on Flickchart. This is out of 5951 films I have ranked on Flickchart. Following the ranking is the percentage of the ranking out of 5951 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. Vanilla Sky (34, 99%) 4
2. Memento (138, 98%) 0
3. Waking Life (223, 96%) 1
4. Gosford Park (234, 96%) -3
5. Moulin Rouge (293, 95%) 10
6. Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (309, 95%) 1
7. Together (399, 93%) 10
8. Amelie (412, 93%) -5
9. A Beautiful Mind (419, 93%) 2
10. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (648, 89%) 28
11. In the Bedroom (696, 88%) 1
12. Amores Perros (723, 88%) -2
13. Rush Hour 2 (761, 87%) -5
14. The Anniversary Party (767, 87%) -8
15. Monsters, Inc. (884, 85%) 5
16. The Royal Tenenbaums (906, 85%) 20
17. Shallow Hal (936, 84%) -4
18. Rock Star (965, 84%) -9
19. Ocean's Eleven (1127, 81%) -3
20. Training Day (1137, 81%) 6
21. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (1189, 80%) 1
22. One Night at McCool's (1239, 79%) 5
23. Series 7: The Contenders (1342, 77%) -5
24. Mulholland Dr. (1349, 77%) 27
25. Ghost World (1377, 77%) -11
26. Hedwig and the Angry Inch (1486, 75%) -5
27. The Others (1495, 75%) 25
28. Joy Ride (1729, 71%) 2
29. From Hell (1959, 67%) 6
30. Startup.com (1993, 67%) -11
31. The Man Who Wasn't There (2219, 63%) -6
32. Heartbreakers (2270, 62%) 2
33. Black Hawk Down (2565, 57%) -9
34. The Princess Diaries (2772, 53%) 6
35. High Heels and Low Lifes (2816, 53%) -7
36. Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (2835, 52%) 6
37. Not Another Teen Movie (3027, 49%) -4
38. Ali (3076, 48%) -15
39. Shrek (3167, 47%) 14
40. Spy Kids (3452, 42%) -8
41. Monster's Ball (3588, 40%) -12
42. The Pledge (3604, 39%) 20
43. The Fast and the Furious (3695, 38%) 7
44. American Pie 2 (3704, 38%) -7
45. Blow (3794, 36%) -2
46. All Over the Guy (3800, 36%) -15
47. Pearl Harbor (3813, 36%) -6
48. Bridget Jones's Diary (3838, 36%) -3
49. Life as a House (3858, 35%) 10
50. Baby Boy (3903, 34%) -6
51. Evolution (4060, 32%) 4
52. A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (4132, 31%) 16
53. Legally Blonde (4153, 30%) 3
54. Planet of the Apes (4257, 28%) 0
55. The Caveman's Valentine (4394, 26%) -7
56. 15 Minutes (4406, 26%) -7
57. The Invisible Circus (4510, 24%) 10
58. Hannibal (4650, 22%) -1
59. Heist (5026, 16%) -12
60. Wet Hot American Summer (5099, 14%) -2
61. Kiss of the Dragon (5222, 12%)
62. Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (5263, 12%) -1
63. The Dish (5348, 10%) 3
64. Cats & Dogs (5369, 10%) -1
65. Sexy Beast (5371, 10%) 7
66. Say It Isn't So (5392, 9%) -6
67. The Glass House (5425, 9%) 2
68. Jurassic Park III (5576, 6%) 2
69. Made (5624, 5%) -23
70. The Mummy Returns (5687, 4%) -5
71. O (5735, 4%) 0
72. The Musketeer (5834, 2%) 1
73. Scary Movie 2 (5867, 1%) -34

Five best movies I've seen since closing the list (alphabetical): Battle Royale, Donnie Darko, In the Mood for Love, L.I.E., The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra
Five worst movies I've seen since closing the list (alphabetical): Domestic Disturbance, Freddy Got Fingered, Life Without Dick, See Spot Run, Tomcats
Biggest risers: The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (+28), Mulholland Dr. (+27), The Others (+25)
Biggest fallers: Scary Movie 2 (-34), Ali (-15), All Over the Guy (-15)
Stayed the same (*new feature!): Planet of the Apes (54th), O (71st)
Average percentage on Flickchart: 51.81% (2 of 7 so far)

Although Vanilla Sky moved up four spots to #1, making this the second straight year where my #1 of the year is no longer my #1, it isn't actually my favorite movie from 2001 either. My real #1 is a movie I didn't even see in 2001, Donnie Darko, which was subsequently named my favorite of the decade and which currently sits at #23 on my Flickchart after having spent much of its life in my top 20. 

That's only a taste of the wild west we're seeing among the movies I had seen, as it becomes further clear that the longer removed I am from a movie, the less I remember how well I liked it -- a rather obvious statement, but one I wouldn't have expected to be borne out quite to this degree. 

We have to start with the biggest faller, Scary Movie 2, which dropped 34 spots -- hard to do within a list of only 73 movies. That's the most any movie has dropped since I started this project, and it's not the first time I've considered this phenomenon on this blog. Ten years ago, in order to celebrate 15 (rather than 25) years of ranking movies, I made a top ten list of the worst ranking mistakes I'd made over those 15 years -- and Scary Movie 2 was #1. You can read the full post here, but here's what I wrote about Scary Movie 2:

"Did I have a brain embolism when I was making out my 2001 rankings? Or have I just completely forgotten the things about this movie I might have once found funny? The reason this movie is my #1 ranking mistake is because I currently think of it as so loathsome, so puerile, and so inept, that I have it ranked #3289 on my Flickchart -- out of only 3329 films total. That means that according to my current understanding of Scary Movie 2, there are only 40 movies that I've ever seen that I hate more. Yet in the year 2001, I thought it was better than nearly half of the movies I saw -- 34 movies in that year alone. What's the real truth? And could I possibly be so intrigued by this odd disconnect that I would actually watch it again? Eh, probably not."

Well, I did watch it again -- two nights ago, actually, while mid-draft of this post. And yeah, it real bad. The 2001 version of me was the crazy one, not the current one. The only thing I can think of was that I found Anna Faris delightful, as I always do, and that I was sort of amused by the opening Exorcist spoof. But Scary Movie 2 does not deserve a single other word from me so I'm moving on.  

The other biggest fallers (Ali, All Over the Guy) are movies I must have just steadily thought less of over the years, but the biggest risers -- which are also of more than 25 spots -- were all movies I realized I got wrong at the time and consciously reconsidered with subsequent revisits. I really didn't care for The Fellowship of the Ring the first time I saw it, and have only really come to embrace it after loving The Two Towers and The Return of the King so much. When I saw Mulholland Dr. I had no idea it was destined to be considered a classic -- let's just say I didn't get it the first time, and no, I don't think leaving in the middle to have to take a shit (the only time I can ever remember having to do that) made a huge difference one way or the other. And The Others I consciously put under the microscope for a series called Second Chances that I did around ten years -- if you're really curious you can see that post here. Also worth mentioning is The Royal Tenenbaums (+20), which I only reappraised within the past two years -- and I liked it a huge amount better. I reckon it will still go higher when it wins the right duels. 

I wonder if because it was a year of transition for me, 2001 was also a year I was super mixed up when it came to movies?

In August -- a month I will be in the U.S. for most of the month -- I will consider the year 2000.