Belated MIFF, cut short

I always knew I'd have the chance to participate in the 70th edition of the Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) online after my return from three and a half weeks in the U.S. The theatrical screenings for this year's MIFF ended last weekend, but MIFFPlay, the online version with only a fraction of the available titles, ran another week to August 28th. I'd say it was the first time I missed the theatrical portion of the festival, except that there hasn't been one since 2019, so missing it this year was just a repeat of what happened in 2020 and 2021. 

After an exhausting and very successful trip abroad, however, I felt ready to just give the whole thing a miss, to use the Australian phrasing. It felt like a lot to wrap my head around. And for the first time in five years or so, I had applied for no press credentials for the festival, meaning I'd need to pay the full $15 ticket price for each film -- not a particularly appetizing prospect after having dropped so much money on that trip. 

But then it happened ... I got my usual MIFF itch. 

And having only a fraction of the titles to choose from made the whole thing feel a lot more manageable. 

So on the second night back last Sunday, when I was really too jet-lagged to be focusing on any movie that required more than my minimal intellectual engagement, I watched the first of an eventual five movies in this year's MIFF.

It was supposed to be six, but I'll get to that in a moment.

For now, a recap of what I did watch, and some of my thoughts.

Hit the Road (2021, Panah Panahi)
Watched: Sunday, August 21st

This was one of my "must sees" in this year's festival. I love Iranian cinema, and was interested to see what the son of one of today's most celebrated Iranian directors could do. It had already gotten some buzz on Filmspotting, and I thought it made a good first viewing because, indeed, its road trip setting convinced me it wasn't going to be too heady or difficult to grasp in a sleep-deprived state.

As it turned out, I probably shouldn't have watched it, and wouldn't have if I'd only gotten caught up on my ReelGood email a little earlier. The movie opened in Australian cinemas on Thursday, meaning it violated my usual MIFF guiding principle of trying to see only movies I wouldn't soon be able to see elsewhere. Plus my email contained an invite for a free screener of the movie in order to review it, which I did actually ask for in case I needed to brush up on it before I wrote that review (which posted last Thursday). As it turned out I wrote the review from memory -- you can read it here -- which is just as well because I didn't like it so much that I really wanted to watch it again only a few days later.

But as you can see, I did quite like it, especially the ways it broke from the cherished realism/naturalism of the Iranian New Wave. As I say in that review, Iranian cinema is known for blending truth and fiction, though usually that represents itself as straddling the line between documentary and narrative film. Panahi straddles that line with his occasional use of magical realism, or at least devices that put one in a magical realist head space. That touch really stood out to me in a nice film about a family on a road trip to smuggle their older son out of the country, unbeknownst to the younger son.

Plan 75 (2022, Chie Hayawaka)
Watched: Wednesday, August 24th

After taking two nights off from MIFF -- one to watch my movie for Settling the Scorsese, one to catch up on a backlog of emails and other life admin -- I returned with this high-concept but ultimately slow-moving story of a near-future Japan where euthanasia is not only legalized, but even incentivized, for citizens over 75 years old. 

I think I was expecting it to hit the sci-fi elements of the story a bit harder, and maybe play its hand a little more strongly on the themes of what it means to end your life at a time of your own choosing. (And is it really your choosing? Discuss.) Instead it's more of a slow burn featuring a few key storylines, each infused with melancholy more than with tight plot mechanics. And maybe this was even the right approach to the material, but even on my fourth full day back from the trip, I was a bit too tired to appreciate this one as much as I might have. That's especially the case given that there's a grab-your-attention cold open that reeks of studio notes -- not that a Hollywood studio had anything to do with this -- that, if memory serves, never actually pays off in the story.

My Sunny Maad (2021, Michaela Pavlatova) 
Watched: Thursday, August 25th

On my older son's birthday -- he's 12 now -- it was time to fill my annual slot reserved for an "outsider animation" film. (After returning from the arcade, where I had a cocktail.) This slot has been filled in some capacity each of the past six or seven years, and My Sunny Maad stood out like this year's obvious choice. It's the story of a Czech woman who marries an Afghan man and then moves to post-Taliban Kabul, where she's surprised? I guess? to be forced to cover herself and to have no rights. Although it was nominated for a Golden Globe last year, it didn't surface anywhere that I was aware of and I'm happily ranking it with my 2022 films.

I hoped this would scale the heights of a personal favorite of mine from last decade, Cartoon Saloon's The Breadwinner, which covers a similar part of the world and similar themes. It didn't get there, but it got into four-star range, both for the look at the world in question and the provocative use of its relatively simple animation. I couldn't help but being a bit frustrated with the protagonist, who doesn't seem to have properly considered what lay ahead of her, and then takes only some guarded measures to try to improve her situation -- guarded, I suppose, because anything more strident than that could quite literally result in her own death. Still, we expect our protagonists to have a bit more agency, even when their lack of agency is part of the problem. (Don't worry, she does get there in the end.)

I also wasn't quite sure what I thought of the note it ends on, but I won't go into any further detail on that in case you want to seek it out -- which you should.

The Integrity of Joseph Chambers (2022, Robert Machoian)
Watched: Friday, August 26th

My only afternoon-slotted movie -- which I watched after work in my garage on Friday -- is from a name you might recognize. Or you might not. But if you read this blog around the end of 2020, you might.

Robert Machoian directed my #3 movie of 2020, The Killing of Two Lovers, which didn't make it to most places until last year. But I saw it at MIFF in 2020, and one of my favorite goals at each new MIFF is to catch up with the latest from directors I may have discovered at a previous MIFF. The Integrity of Joseph Chambers has the same star as well, Clayne Crawford, who was so memorable in Lovers. He plays the title character, a man who, perhaps under the influence of conservative media, believes that "the end is coming" and needs to learn how to provide for himself in his family. In this particular instance, that means going to a friend's private forest land and shooting himself a deer -- even though he's not particularly experienced with guns or with outdoor survival of any kind. If he'd only wait for his friend who owns the land, who will be available next week ... but Joseph Chambers has got places to be and deer to shoot.

What follows is a sparsely cast "what would you do?" type consideration of a moral dilemma resulting from a mishap. The concept is explored interestingly and I didn't want the film to be "more," as such -- I just wanted it to be as good as The Killing of Two Lovers. It was never going to be that. However, it's a nice next step after a movie that was certainly difficult to follow, in my estimation, and I liked seeing that Machoian has attracted some higher profile on-screen collaborators, as this film features appearances by Jordana Brewster and Jeffrey Dean Morgan.

Neptune Frost (2022, Anisia Uzeyman & Saul Williams)
Watched: Saturday, August 27th

This was the talk of the festival, if the MIFF emails I glanced at over the past few weeks are to be believed. It won an audience award, or some other award, and it attracted my attention by virtue of being from director Saul Williams, known previously to me as a poet and a musician, who has actually collaborated with my favorite musician, Trent Reznor. Then the description was the sort of potentially insane oddity that drew me further in: "Afrofuturist musical." When I mentioned it to my wife -- whose last name is Frost -- she had also heard the buzz, having evidently read the same emails I read. She was eager to watch it with me as her only MIFF film in 2022. As such, we planned it for Saturday, as kind of a "closing night" film -- even if it would be both opening and closing night for her.

As it turns out, Neptune Frost may have been more of a Tuesday night film. Or a Tuesday afternoon film after a morning where you've had a good night's sleep and have a relatively clear head. Simply put, this was a challenge. The first challenge was not one that we shouldn't have been able to overcome, but does play into your expectations for a Saturday night film -- it wasn't in English. I guess I'd made the assumption of English based on the co-director being American. 

Then this film is -- how should I put this -- highly experimental. It doesn't really allow you to get your bearings, and I don't even know that I could really explain what happens in it, except that it involves a non-binary character who is involved in some sort of cyberpunk collective that has aims at overthrowing parts of the Rwandan labor infrastructure. Most of the dialogue is more poetic than practical in terms of communicating what's going on in the narrative. I'd love to be able to give you a better description of this film, but I'm ashamed to admit that I was enduring it more than engaging with it for most of the time -- a sentiment shared by my wife. That said, I respect the movie immensely -- I've never seen anything like it -- and it has a particularly great sound design. Even if only out of guilt, I couldn't give it any less than three stars on Letterboxd. 

Domingo and the Mist (2022, Ariel Escalante)
Watched: Didn't watch

Serves me right for trying to sneak in one more movie before the 11:59 Sunday night viewing deadline. We'd already had our sort of "closing night" with Neptune Frost, but since that was sort of unsatisfying, I was even more determined to see a sixth MIFF film -- which would still keep me under $100 in total expenditures for the festival. I had a shortlist of 15 films and had at one point thought I might watch at least half of them -- when I had planned to watch more than one on certain days, and not take a two-night break. So at least this sixth seemed like it should be doable.

Well, it would have been if the movie had had subtitles. 

Unlike the previous four foreign language films I'd watched, there were no subtitles in the streaming copy of Domingo and the Mist, a film about an elderly man who won't leave his property in rural Costa Rica because the land is still being haunted by his dead wife in the form of a mist. There were comparisons made to the work of Apichitpong Weerasethakul, and though he can be sort of hit and miss with me, I thought it would be a worthwhile final Sunday night film -- short on dialogue and long on atmosphere. Well, short on dialogue is one thing, having no dialogue you can understand quite another. I tried to watch it without the subtitles, but I just decided there was too much meaning to infer to continue on this way. 

I did try to turn on the subtitles, but I couldn't find a way to do this, and besides, it hadn't been necessary in Hit the Road, Plan 75, My Sunny Maad or Neptune Frost. I decided it was just broken, and I had to abandon the viewing and ask for my money back. This morning, a guy from MIFF wrote back to me to say he would do it, but to let me know that I did, indeed, need to turn on the subtitles. I wrote back saying I couldn't figure out how to do that, and he didn't respond, so what I should have done differently will likely remain a mystery.

It was already 10 o'clock by the time I gave up on being able to watch Domingo and the Mist. I could have still fired up one more film, assuming it was short enough, but there seemed to be a decent chance the streaming would be cut off entirely at 11:59, as per the many published listings of that time. So instead of watching one final MIFF film, I watched the new Predator movie Prey, which was just plain awesome.

For the first time since 2019, I hope to have a "normal" MIFF in 2023. Hopefully COVID will just be a distant memory, and the theater in which these films play will know to turn on the subtitles for me. 

My ten favorite movies that are moods

I usually like a tight and clever plot -- except when I don't.

The extreme example of not liking a tight and clever plot is any movie with spies. I don't really care who is double-crossing whom and why. I suppose spy thrillers often violate the rules of tightness in order to achieve the heights of "cleverness," but some people really go for that. I don't.

I do generally like it when something happens in the plot late in the movie to give me a little frisson of excitement, not necessarily a "twist," but something I wasn't expecting -- perhaps emotionally. But a lot of time, an emotional "twist" is more likely to be found in a movie where mood is what they're going for more than plot.

This is a roundabout way of telling you that I love a movie that is all about its mood -- but only when it's done well. A movie all about its mood that isn't done well is just an exercise in masturbation. But one that's done well ... *chef's kiss.*

What prompted the writing of this post was resuming my viewing of my previous #1s after a 39-day break to allow for my trip to America. My trip wasn't nearly that long, but I paused this project about a week before I left and it took a week after returning to unpause. I knew I wasn't going to watch any of these while I was gone, but interestingly, I could have. As it turned out, my dad and his wife suggested a viewing of Inside Out as one of our evening activities while we were in Maine with the kids -- and I watched it again even though I'd only just watched it for this project three weeks earlier. If only I'd known, I would have saved it. 

It's not often you watch the same movie twice in a month, especially when it's your fifth or sixth time seeing the movie, but surprisingly, I was hit a tad harder by it this time than on the previous viewing. Maybe it was the company, with some people in the room -- including my sister -- seeing it for the first time. (Or it could have been the fact that my older son was in the room, and he's the same age as Riley, and he also just moved house in the past year, creating many of the emotions Riley experiences. I almost wrote a post about this very thing when I watched it back in early July.)

I contemplated watching a second movie for this project, one I hadn't just watched, on the plane, since Lost in Translation was among the Qantas offerings on our flight. But I was already watching one older movie for Audient Bollywood, so I just couldn't justify yielding a second spot to a movie that hadn't come out in 2022. (Though it would have been a great scenario to watch it, given that jet lag is a big theme of the movie.)

For a time last night, I wish I had, as I was unable to scare up Lost in Translation on any of my streaming services, despite my certainty it would be there. I was going to give up and shift to something else, and may have if I'd been able to find Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind on any of them either. Instead of searching up a third title, I asked myself "How lazy are you?" and just got out my old laptop to hook up to my TV via HDMI, so I could play my Region 1 DVD of Lost in Translation. It really only took about three minutes. I'm glad to know I'm not that lazy. 

I still mightn't have written this post if I hadn't come across another movie I love that's all about its mood while doing some Flickcharting this morning. So here I am.

I decided not to come up with an entirely organic list -- that's a bit too much work for me this morning -- but rather to go down through that aforementioned Flickchart to identify the ten films I've ranked most highly that are about mood at the expense of plot. This is not to say they don't have any plot, just that the plot is there to support the mood -- at least as I experience the film.

Unsurprisingly, the mood for most of these films is "melancholy." That's really what you mean when you say "mood" without any other words to modify it. 

Perhaps also unsurprisingly, these films tend to be supported by a very "moody" score or soundtrack, one that puts you in the contemplative space to appreciate what's going on with these characters. 

Without any further ado, in the order they appear on my Flickchart ...

36. Lost in Translation (2003, Sofia Coppola) - It's a testament to Coppola's excellent musical taste that all the songs on this soundtrack strike an identical tone. As I was listening, and as an owner of the soundtrack, I kept saying "Oh yeah, this song. Wait I thought this song had already played." While that might sound like a backhanded compliment, it's actually a perfect realization of her attempt to establish a tone of melancholy and displacement, one that the movie plays out expertly. There's a disappointment while watching Lost in Translation that the "relationship" between Bob and Charlotte does not have a traditionally satisfying emotional arc, as it hits a bump in the road and ends in a place of minor disjuncture. But that's like actual life, in which connections rarely land solidly. Of course, the actual conclusion to their non-consummated romance hits it out of the park in terms of emotional satisfaction, and wouldn't you know it, there's the Jesus and Mary Chain's "Just Like Honey" to allow us to marinate in that moment.

76. My Neighbor Totoro (1988, Hayao Miyazaki) - I didn't say all my choices had to be melancholy. However, there's melancholy to be had indeed in this film, undercutting the wonder experienced by the children as they discover their new country home and all the various sprites and other magical creatures who lurk in its nooks and crannies, or in the forest just beyond. Let us not forget that weighing down these children's otherwise uncomplicated excitement and playfulness is the knowledge that their mother is sick, and they don't know for sure whether she will recover. My Neighbor Totoro never gets anywhere close to a story and I wouldn't have it any other way.

79. Spring Breakers (2013, Harmony Korine) - Many of my explanations about why I love Spring Breakers, given to incredulous listeners over the years, have never been able to fully encapsulate the special trance this movie places on me. First it captures FOMO perfectly. Then it captures the delirium of the best time of your life perfectly. Then it perfectly captures that feeling of when you've stayed at the party too long and things have started to go south -- also something depicted in Lost in Translation. But again it's the way this movie wraps you in its soundtrack -- particularly the ultimate in melancholy, "Ride Home" by Skrillex -- that leaves me staring off into the middle distance in reverie. 

87. Once (2007, John Carney) - I wasn't at first sure if Once qualified, but it's certainly got the lack of plot. I mean, the characters don't even have names. This probably most closely approximates the missed but made connections between Bob and Charlotte in Translation, as a potential romance is considered but rebuffed, and we sense the profound effect these two have had on each other even though they may never see each other again. It's obvious that Glen Hansard's passionate, melancholy -- there's that word again -- music is the key to fueling this emotional journey, though we can't discount the contribution of Market Irglova, both as a singer and as Hansard's muse in its creation. 

108. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007, Julian Schnabel) - Two thousand seven was a good year for making us feel more than think, though of course this got ranked with my 2008 films in the first year it was available outside France. Few things are more melancholy -- I'm going to stop calling attention to my use of this word -- than the concept of being trapped inside your brain with only a blinking eye to communicate with the world. Okay, maybe some people would call that terrifying more than melancholy. But there's something about how Schnabel depicts this condition for Jean-Dominique that effortlessly communicates his desire to grasp the beauty of life now that he is intimately acquainted with its fragility. And let's not forget the role music plays here, as there's an unforgettable sequence using U2's "Ultraviolet (Light My Way)" that might not sound memorable on the surface, but wallops you in context.

110. Ordet (1955, Carl Theodor Dreyer) - This might be a stretch and it might look like I'm desperate to prove to you that I like movies made before the year 2000, but there's no doubt that the spell cast on you by Ordet has little to do with its plot. This story of three sons of a devout Danish family, and their struggles with their faith, is the sort of thing that inspired a whole career of contemplation from the likes of Ingmar Bergman, some of whose films could end up appearing on this list. But I think it's really the quiet of their homestead, the rustling of its grass, that places you in this meditative space that carries through the whole picture, and prepares you for the high concept ending that it's best not to spoil.

134. Under the Skin (2013, Jonathan Glazer) - Scarlett Johansson makes her second appearance on this list with a film that basically has no plot at all. Well, it starts to develop something like a plot in its second half, but that's only in contrast to the first half, in which Johansson's alien cruises the streets of Glasgnow for new victims to lure into her black goo. If not for the eerie mood created by this film, it wouldn't have gotten under my skin (so to speak) and become my tenth favorite film of the last decade. But yes, there's melancholy here too -- just look at the expression on Johansson's face at the end and you will understand precisely what has been lost. (A nod to Micah Levy's score to put us in exactly the head space we need to be.)

160. A Ghost Story (2017, David Lowery) - Oh the melancholy! A ghost looks on quietly, helplessly, as the woman mourning him tries to recover from his loss ... and then looks in on the next 300 years or more of the occupants of this building, just for good measure. Daniel Hart's score and Dark Rooms' "I Get Overwhelmed" do tremendous work holding us there once Lowery's images, his square aspect ratio and the performances have brought us to this place. The existential ennui climaxes in a hugely satisfying final emotional payoff.

214. The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou (2004, Wes Anderson) - I debated whether to include Bill Murray's appropriate second appearance on this list, since I think Anderson is always about mood over plot. But in the end, the thing that connects with me so much about possibly my favorite Anderson film is this blue space it finds and remains in. The decline of Zissou's life is embodied perfectly by the abandoned, overgrown hotel on that island in the middle of the film. And Seu Jorge's covers of David Bowie songs are an essential component to the narrative and character work Anderson is doing.

296. Code 46 (2003, Michael Winterbottom) - And finally at spot #10, we get to the film I came across while Flickcharting this morning that prompted me to write this post. There are some high concepts at the center of a love story between two characters in a sun-bleached Shanghai of the future, when only rich, connected people can live "inside" and everyone else is forging documents to try to escape the harsh conditions. Winterbottom draws a very specific portrait of a future where characters slip in and out of multiple languages while they speak. But it's a Lost in Translation sort of relationship that develops between the characters played by Tim Robbins and Samantha Morton, plot taking a backseat to moments infused with significance and scored by memorable songs like Freakpower's "Song No. 6" and Coldplay's "Warning Sign."

Some I bypassed in this top 300 that didn't quite fit my concept of this post, but could have if I'd squinted a bit:

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968, Stanley Kubrick) - 12th
Solaris (1972, Andrei Tarkovsky) - 146th

I also bypassed all my choices that I consider to be straight horror films, because the best horror films are all about creating a mood and that's a sort of different category of cinematic achievement. 

Now that I've become more officially acquainted with this proclivity of mine by having written this post, I'll have to see if I'm more aware of movies presenting themselves to me as moods -- kind of like I immediately notice when a "wax stamp movie" presents itself to me. (Unfamiliar with that concept? See this post.) 

Settling the Scorsese: New York Stories

This is the fourth in my 2022 bi-monthly series finishing off the feature-length directorial efforts of Martin Scorsese.

I'm not sure what it says about Martin Scorsese that my favorite movie so far in this series is the one that was only one-third directed by him. At least his third was my favorite of the three thirds.

New York Stories was his 1989 collaboration with Francis Ford Coppola and Woody Allen, in which they each made a 35- to 40-minute film about the city they love. I had hoped to make a little game of figuring out which one was Scorsese's without any further cues, not that it ultimately would have been much of a mystery, given that Allen and Mia Farrow appear in one of the films and Talia Shire appears in the other. The exercise was ultimately rendered moot by the fact that each film has its own opening credits sequence, but before that played, I'd pegged the first film, which I would learn is called Life Lessons, as Scorsese's just from the instant reliance on Procol Harum's "A Whiter Shade of Pale." That's a Scorsese choice through and through.

It features Nick Nolte as a talented abstract artist in the vein of Jackson Pollock (who get name-checked here). He's obsessed with the lesser, probably not actually talented artist who is his tenant in the giant loft space he owns and splatters with paint, which is presumably in the meat packing district. She's played by Rosanna Arquette during Arquette's peak fetching period. (That's not meant to be a lewd comment about Arquette, just that she's really adorable here, her slightly buck teeth peeking through her full lips in this way that's full of piss and vinegar and challenging anyone in her path.) They've had a bit of a relationship but she has dropped him for a performance artist played by Steve Buscemi, who has subsequently dropped her on a trip out of town, leaving them both miserable.

Nolte's Lionel Dobie is still devoted to her because he (rightly) believes that acting maturely is the only way he has a chance to get back together with her, though it's clear he hasn't got much of a chance. But there's a lot of passive aggressive playing of loud music -- when he paints, which seems to be all the time, he's always blaring some sort of classic rock -- and he's able to more or less see into her room, or at least see shapes of what's going on in there. It's not a healthy situation. 

However, it does showcase a filmmaker at his healthiest. There have certainly been bits of technique by Scorsese that I admired in the three previous films in this series -- Who's That Knocking at My Door, New York New York and The Color of Money -- but never have I found him in bracing command of the tools of cinema as in this little film, which most people would probably consider a trifle. I should remind you, of course, that Scorsese was making splashy displays of his ability in the films around this period -- The Last Temptation of Christ is right before and Goodfellas is right after -- but I have obviously seen those films. For the purposes of this argument, I am comparing Life Lessons to the other films in this series, which left me less than impressed.

Thelma Schoonmaker's editing is certainly part of it. There are masterfully constructed sequences of Nolte slathering acrylic on canvas, somehow building toward a masterpiece that you believe might actually be a masterpiece. That's one thing I liked about Life Lessons, was the belief that the art was actually legitimate art and not some terrible facsimile that is supposed to be amazing if only the production designers cared enough about getting a good artist to do it. That goes for Buscemi's performance art as well. (And while we're on Buscemi for a moment here, it struck me as funny that he is described by Nolte as handsome, and not in a sarcastic way -- which is probably the last time anyone has ever used that word in connection with Buscemi.)

But back to that editing. It has that real Schoonmakerian (that's not a word) confidence that marries well with Marty's moving camera, which he uses to great effect here. The loft feels like a completely alive creative space anyway, what with Nolte slathering paint like a madman, but the camera and editing give it a further kinetic quality that makes it a joy to watch.

Technique aside, I just enjoyed this little slice of a story. We've all been in a situation where the thing we love and want is right outside our grasp, but keeps us hoping by never departing completely. It can result in a high degree of melancholy (making "A Whiter Shade of Pale" the perfect soundtrack) that we only hope does not bubble over into something darker (which does happen here, though only in a minor, low-stakes way). I really liked both of the lead performances. Nolte is always in command of his craft, especially when he's playing someone a bit eccentric, and I really believed Arquette as a woman drawn to the celebrity and obvious greatness of this mentor, but not to him physically or romantically, who also doesn't know what she's doing and has serious doubts about her own skills as an artist.

Those themes about art and artists also shine through, and they don't have to take a back seat to Marty's usual Catholic distractions. In fact, only in the space where Buscemi performs -- which appears to be an abandoned subway track -- was there any Christian iconography I could detect, in the form of a statue of some sort of angel. Scorsese wants to remind us his preoccupations are still there, but he can do other things as well.

It's really telling that I felt the urge to write a lot more, thematically, about the 35 minutes of this film than about the two hours, or sometimes two-plus hours, of the other three films I've watched. 

While I'm here I suppose I should reserve a comment or two about the films by Coppola and Allen. Coppola's, the second, was easily the film's weak link. Called Life Without Zoe, it's a sort of flight of fancy co-written with Sofia, which deals with a young rich girl who favors dressing up in costumes as she prances her ways through balls and other elements of fantasy high privilege in New York. At my most charitable, I would call it cute -- knowing that Coppola the elder probably made it as a favor to this daughter, and that Coppola the younger would explore these notions much more convincingly in her future work, perhaps most notably Marie Antoinette.

Allen's Oedipus Wrecks was a hoot. It's very typical Allen material, dealing with a man (played by him) who feels bedeviled by his own nattering Jewish mother, who disapproves of his relationship with a shiksa (Farrow). When the three are attending a magician show, his mother is chosen to participate in an illusion where she climbs into a box that the magician pierces with multiple swords. When the magician opens the box, she's actually disappeared -- and she later turns up in the sky over New York City, like some sort of nattering God, who passes all her judgments and neuroses down to Allen except that everyone else in New York can also see, and more importantly here, her. It has a funny resolution and I was pleased to see Larry David appear in a cameo. (Though I'm not sure "cameo" would have applied at the time, since he wasn't famous -- I'm thinking of it that way largely in retrospect.)

Speaking of cameos, character actor Paul Herman has a small part in each of the three films. Nice touch.

So yeah, New York Stories left me feeling happy all around, and I think things will get better from here to finish the series, with The Age of Innocence due in October and Kundun due in December.

Audient Bollywood: Eeb Allay Ooo!

This is the eighth in my 2022 monthly series Audient Bollywood, in which I'm watching a Bollywood movie I haven't seen (which is most of them).

My logic behind watching a movie for Audient Bollywood on my plane ride back from America was twofold:

1) It would give me a discrete set of choices, however many were offered on the flight, which would allow me for once to have an artificial limit placed on my theoretically thousands of choices for this series;

2) It would give me 14 hours worth of flying time, and therefore, time enough to watch the longest movie Bollywood could possibly think of throwing at me.

But here's a funny little secret about the 14-hour flight between Melbourne and Los Angeles, which can fluctuate as high as 15 hours depending on winds and the like: It's actually not enough time.

How can you say that, Vance? you ask. Many people consider the biggest obstacle to visiting Australia not to be vacation time or the cost of the trip, but rather, the very length of the flight.

Once you've done this flight a bunch, though, you start to think of it less as a very long time to be trapped in an airplane, and more as a very short time to watch all the things you want to watch.

So when you factor in the fact that I ended up watching three other movies, as well as two episodes of the TV show The Flight Attendant -- and that I would involuntarily succumb to as much sleep as I could manage -- I ended up opting for the shortest movie I've watched so far in this whole series.

Eeb Allay Ooo! (2019) caught my attention for a couple reasons, only one of which was its skimpy 98-minute running time. Another was that it was supposed to be the feature debut from an acclaimed documentary director, which is the sort of perspective that has been absent so far in this series. However, now that I'm back on terra firma I'm wondering if I may have misremembered this as the movie from the acclaimed documentary director, given that director Prateek Vats has never before directed a film, full stop. It might have been one of the other dozen or so choices.

But this certainly feels like the sort of film made by a person accustomed to making documentaries. It is easily the most realistic and naturalistic film I've watched in this series, and in fact the first not to feature musical numbers or Bollywood dancing of any kind. Being realistic should not mean there's no absurdity to it. There's plenty of absurdity, though the comedy, such as it is, is very straight-faced.

I should start with the title. "Eeb allay ooo!" represents the noises made by professional monkey repellers in Delhi. That's right, there are people -- at least in this movie, though I suspect in real life as well -- who are paid to shoo monkeys from government buildings, so they are less of a hassle to innocent passersby. The most effective means of doing this is through these sounds, which, I suppose, approximate the cries made by these monkeys' natural predators -- larger monkeys and other alphas. However, the sounds must be made very precisely or they will be totally ineffectual.

That last is the experience of Anjani (Shardul Bharadwaj), a down-on-his-luck man who has come to the big city to beg for work. A benevolent relative has vouched for him and gotten him this monkey-repelling job, which he hates and is not good at. He's bullied by the other workers and by the monkeys themselves, who thumb their nose at him while his co-workers seem to do their jobs with a fairly high degree of success. While he's at first on the verge of flaming out, his sad circumstances of trying to shape up -- as every other person in this movie tells him he must do -- eventually force him to become more serious and in fact to become obsessed with trying to be good at this job, ultimately resorting to forbidden tactics like posting pictures of alpha monkeys and even dressing up as one. While this actually worsens his prospects at the job, it leads to meaningful self-discoveries and even a possible transformation that will help him find his place in this world.

And it's a world I felt like I could slightly relate to. From a trip to Bali in 2018, I know a little bit about the menacing quality of these monkeys, how they beg and jump around in public areas and pose a certain threat to passing innocents. We went to a monkey forest in Bali and one of these things jumped on my back for a couple moments before dismounting. The scratch he left on my arm while scaling my body led to jokes about the start of some new international pandemic. It was funny, but it also left me feeling like I'd been in a situation that could have ended badly. (When I watched Eeb Allay Ooo!, I had also just watched Nope a few days earlier, in which a much larger monkey proves capable of lethal force.)

So I sympathized with Anjani in his initial ineffectual attempts to repel the monkeys. Not only was it truly a Sisyphean task -- repel one monkey, five others come back -- but the fear involved in constantly interfacing with these wild animals seemed perfectly legitimate to me, even if it reduced him in the eyes of his mocking co-workers. Anjani is one of those characters that can do no right, not because he's actually incompetent or lazy or anything like that, but because his best intentions backfire and can never be seen clearly by anyone in his life. We've all felt like that from time to time.

But there's also a very dry humor to this whole situation. There's a certain absurdity to trying to shoo monkeys from public spaces, since the monkeys clearly will do whatever they want, and if you lack any real resources that might more permanently resolve the situation -- say, weapons -- then you are operating at a real deficit. In fact, in an odd way, it is meant that the very mastery of how you say "eeb allay ooo!" is the key to doing your job effectively -- though why this should be the case is anyone's guess.

I really liked this movie, though I have to admit that watching it feels like a bit of a dream. See, the second movie on this 14-hour flight -- which this was -- is usually the time when you start succumbing to involuntary sleep, the kind that comes in fits and starts, even when you lack the resources -- speaking of lacking resources -- to have the sort of couple-hour sustained sleep you really need. So the 98 minutes of Eeb Allay Ooo! probably took about five hours to watch, as if it were one of the Bollywood behemoths I've watched this year, or plan to still watch in the future. It's a shame I didn't choose a different time slot for it, since this was easily my favorite of the four movies I watched on the plane (Ambulance, Asking For It and Firestarter being the others -- none of which crossed the three-star threshold on Letterboxd).

I was really hoping that Qantas would have Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India, the one movie I knew I planned to watch even before starting the series, which is three hours and 44 minutes long. Since it didn't, I may see if I can tackle that one in September. 

Did I really need to keep all the ticket stubs?

As we spent five days going through the belongings in our garage covered with nine years' worth of rat poop, there was not as much sifting through papers as you might expect. Oh, it's not that I didn't have the papers -- I am a notorious pack rat. It's that we determined that it was worth more to us to ship them and pay a little extra for their weight than reduce their number a likely meaningless amount. In the end, I probably could have taken more as the pod goes only on volume, not weight, and we had leftover volume.

There were a few times during the process, however, when I got rather granular, including when I went through one of those old corporate popcorn tins -- you know, the ones divided into three distinct flavors --  full of receipts and ticket stubs.

On a particular morning back at the house where we stayed in the Hollywood Hills, I plunged my arms elbow deep into this tin and resembled a bit of a sorting machine as I separated into a "keeping" pile and a "trashing" pile. Knowing how ridiculous this was in the first place, I went really fast -- which is what probably gave it the quality of a machine to an outside viewer. (And probably also made me look a bit insane to that viewer, as piles of curled ATM receipts and the like started to billow around my feet.)

As I was sifting and sorting, I ended up keeping all of my movie ticket stubs -- the ones I could identify while going at this rate of speed, in any case.

Why?

It's a good question. But there's no doubt we cinephiles like ticket stubs. We like evidence of having gone to the movies. We're reminded of the circumstances of those visits, and because we love movies so much we tend to have a natural collecting sort of mentality -- especially the list-makers among us.

And these stubs, unlike the ones back at my house in Australia, seem to have preserved all the details, like the one you see above. They've been out of the sunlight for nine years, and also, I think these tickets probably used longer enduring ink back then than they do now.

Am I ever going to do anything with these stubs? 

If I were a bit more of a scrap booker -- as in, if I could ever find the time to commit to that sort of thing -- I could see myself putting them in that sort of album. But the completist in me doesn't really love that idea, because it would suggest to the casual reader that these were all the ticket stubs I had ever gotten, when we all know that at least 20 percent of them have been lost to the sands of time.

So in the meantime, I just squirrel them away wherever, waiting for some future theoretical project that will never arrive. And now I have maybe hundreds more to add to the existing quantity.

I did think the experience of cleaning this house out would be one of making tough decisions, of proving what an adult I am, capable of walking away from sentimental pieces of my history. And of course I did do that. I parted with a number of beloved objects, beloved not because they are actually emotionally valuable to me in any way, but just because I spent whole periods of my life where I saw them on a shelf on a daily basis. You can be sure I took pictures of those things before donating them or throwing them on the trash heap.

But the ticket stubs -- a perfect way to prove what an adult I am -- had the virtue of being very small and easy to ship/store. So the sorting machine kept as many of them as it could.

So if I want to look at them again, I'll have them to look at ... the day after tomorrow and beyond. 

The disproval of my Lightyear theory

Warning: Lightyear spoilers ahead.

I haven't written anything about Lightyear on this blog. I think I was too disappointed. That sounds like a strange statement, because disappointment is one of the easiest things to write about if you are reviewing movies, even if it does tend to fall back on familiar themes and engage in flawed metrics about expectations vs. reality. But because of how much I wanted Lightyear to be good, my disappointment left me feeling sorrowful rather than energized to rant. I left my ranting, such as it was, for my review, which you can read here.

If I were to summarize my two biggest problems with Lightyear, they are as follows:

1) I wanted it to have a fun, retro-futurist color palette, as befits the original conception of the character, as well as the kind of lunk-headed sense of fun that came in Tim Allen's original voicework for the character. I needed it to feel simpler and more optimistic, not the major bummer I found it to be at almost every turn.

2) It is about the furthest thing from a movie made in 1995 that would engender a major toy line and all sorts of aspirational excitement among young kids. If anything, this is an eighth or ninth Buzz Lightyear movie, not the first one. (Don't even get me started on the reveal related to the Evil Emperor Zurg, one which entirely undercuts his necessary status as a villain young kids can hiss without their noodle frying.) 

But you know what? My younger son loves it.

He said so at the time, despite some reservations that confirmed for me that he'd also found the movie a bit off. But that feeling didn't linger. When he watched the first half of it again on Saturday -- some friends were looking after him while we cleared the stuff out of our garage -- it started a new cycle of appreciation for the movie and the character at its center.

Yesterday at Disneyland, he desperately wanted a Buzz as his souvenir toy -- it was finding the right one that was the issue. We went on the Buzz Lightyear ride (disappointing) and he asked me a lot of questions like "Who do you like better, Buzz or Socks?" (Socks being pictured in the poster above.) He even talked about how there were parts of the hands-down best ride at Disneyland -- Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance, which I may write about at another time -- that reminded him of things that had happened in Lightyear.

You'd say this could be interpreted as a love of the character from the original four Toy Story movies, but that wouldn't be right. My eight-year-old has only seen about half of those, and none of them recently. He never specifically talked about Buzz from watching those movies, only from seeing Lightyear.

So am I wrong to suggest that Lightyear is too complicated and sad of a movie to create aspirational space ranger love in a generation of young children?

I suppose it could be a matter of when that generation of children came of age. I can pretty much guarantee that children born around 1987 -- which would make them eight, like my son, when this movie supposedly came out in 1995, launching the Buzz Lightyear phenomenon -- would not dig a movie about a space ranger who repeatedly fails in his mission to return his crew home, losing four years at a time and steadily watching the people he cares about die off. Essentially, a whole lifetime of failure that has led to him becoming bitter and grouchy, and causing an older and more bitter version of himself to become the Evil Emperor Zurg.

But maybe 2022 kids can handle this.

The movies they've grown up on have prepared them for concepts that demand more of them. I mean, these are kids who saw Inside Out, who know that sadness is in some way intrinsically related to happiness. Pixar itself has challenged them more often than it has let them off the hook and just given them a sweet and uncomplicated ride. And of course others have tried to imitate the Pixar formula, meaning that even your less challenging types of films -- your Minionses, your Penguins of Madagascar -- have probably had 10% more of a brain than they would have had 25 years ago.

The other factor is that they may not get that Buzz Lightyear is a spoof of astronaut heroes of the 1950s and even earlier, who may have even begun their lives on radio. They don't expect a Buzz Lightyear movie to be light and bouncy and in the overblown style of those early radio serials, so when he's "dark and gritty" -- at least by their standards -- it's only normal.

Still, I think there's something to be said for the thing my son couldn't put his finger on, that didn't quite sit right with him, when we saw Lightyear back in June. He knew instinctively that the tone was off in this movie. That little funny feeling he got in parts of the movie was with me the entire time, and just got worse as it went.

But there's no denying that he has emerged with a feeling of aspirational love and affection for Buzz Lightyear that he didn't have before. So either it's not as dark as I think it is, or that simply doesn't matter to him and others like him.

I'm tempted to watch it again to find out for myself, but I just don't want to. I'm comfortable with it having been a miss for me ... but love that it was a hit for my son. 

America loves Step Brothers

The vast majority of the time I wear this shirt is, of course, in Australia. Where it goes uncommented on for months and months of semi-regular wearing.

I have, unsurprisingly, worn it more regularly on this trip to America, since you tend to wear the small number of t-shirts you brought with you, especially on a trip that takes place during summer, about once every five days. Assuming you also regularly encounter the means to launder them. 

When I wear this shirt, two hours never pass without a comment from someone who loves this movie. 

If I thought it was just an Indiana or a New England thing, yesterday's wearing during our second day cleaning out our house disabused me of that notion. Our first stop of the day was 7-11, where, as I was buying my fourth cucumber lime Gatorade in the previous two days, the woman behind the counter told me how much she loved the movie.

America on the whole appears to love Step Brothers.

The movie is of course a personal favorite. My wife and I talk about how when we first saw it together at the drive-in in 2008, it was the hardest she had ever seen me laugh in the three-and-a-half years she had known me. She wondered if I might have been losing grip on my sanity. I have since seen it five more times and it's currently #119 on my Flickchart, which places it within my top 20 or possibly even top ten comedies of all time. 

But I guess I still think of it as sort of "my" movie, and am surprised when I discover that other people share my affection. Maybe part of this phenomenon is that comedies have, on the whole, become significantly less funny since 2008, so much so that I have a hard time believing that anything as recent as that can rise to the level of a widely embraced classic. It's not just because you have to work a lot harder to make good comedy these days, due to the minefield of political sensitivities out there. Please don't interpret this as me saying "wokeness means you can no longer be funny," because I hate that opinion. But I don't think it's entirely a coincidence that I haven't laughed hysterically at a lot of comedies in recent years.

Step Brothers, though, is indeed viewed as a comedy classic -- at least by Americans. Especially on the day I wore it in Maine, I had no fewer than a half-dozen passers by and others I encountered comment on it. This is significant especially since I was not already having an interaction with those people. They just blurted out their affection for it to me, or in some cases, mentioned it only to whoever they were walking with, smiling and laughing appreciatively, though of course I could hear what they were saying.

I don't think it's that Australians don't like Step Brothers. I have certainly gotten comments on it in the past. But I do think Australians are less likely to give you their unsolicited opinion on something, good or bad. Just as they're less likely to randomly say hello to a stranger they are walking past. Australians are no less friendly than Americans -- and are certainly more friendly on average, since there tend to be fewer assholes -- but they save their friendliness until you are already engaged in some sort of interface with them.

Having had this experience of overwhelming support for the movie on this trip, I'm sure to pay a lot more attention to the sorts of reactions this t-shirt gets, or does not get, when I return to Australia. We'll be starting to head into warmer weather when I get back. 

Only then will I have a better idea of whether there is something distinctly American about the appeal of Adam McKay's film, and even then, it'll be based only on circumstantial evidence. 

Nope to Nope

I was supposed to finally see my first movie in the theater on this trip last night. As the trip has already been going on 17 days, in the past it would be about my third. I would have insisted on seeing something in Massachusetts, or Maine, or both. Heck, I might have even driven out from the state park in which we were staying in Indiana for the family reunion way back on that first weekend. (There was a nearby town with a movie theater but I think it was only playing The Rise of Gru. And you know my thoughts on minions.)

Well, it will be at least 18 days.

I had to say "nope" to last night's 9:40 viewing of Nope for the following reasons:

1) I woke up at 4:30 a.m. That would have been 7:30 a.m. on the east coast, where I had awoken the previous morning, which is the time I normally get up, if not a half-hour before that. So while this didn't alarm me and get me worried about another round of jet lag (did I tell you I didn't sleep at all that first night in Indiana?), it did mean I was going to expire a lot sooner that night. Especially because ...

2) We spent all day working in 90 degree heat at our house in the valley. Yep, there was a lot of usable stuff to haul out the curb and unusable stuff to haul out to the junk pile, which we paid someone to come pick up. I went threw three large bottles of sugar free lime cucumber Gatorade. (Oh the things you can't get in Australia.) By about 4:30 I was just done. Especially because ...

3) I drank two large margaritas with dinner. After washing off as much of the grime and dust as we could manage in the sinks and water fountains at a local park -- the water is off at our house -- we reported to Casa Vega in Sherman Oaks, where we were amazed to find a table waiting for us even though we had no reservation. (It's a pretty popular spot.) We rewarded a day of labor with yummy Mexican and washed it down with tequila.

I did manage to say "yep" to Dave Made a Maze on Amazon, but it was only 81 minutes, as opposed to the two and a quarter hours of Nope. And there was napping. Pausing and napping, so I didn't miss anything, but napping nonetheless.

You can't nap at the theater, and besides, I want to be at peak awakeness for Jordan Peele's latest attempt to blow my mind. I still know nothing about it. 

That won't happen tonight -- plans -- but could happen one of the next two nights after that. 

The physical labor at our house should be less, and I shifted my awakening this morning to 6:30 -- a good start, both metaphorically and literally. 

Dumbledore double

We've reached the third third of our trip, arriving in Los Angeles yesterday for the final eight days in the U.S., so I thought it was long past time to check in with you.

Fortunately, my in-flight entertainment from Boston to LAX gave me just the sort of excuse I like to write a quick something: a coincidence.

It was rather unlikely, you will agree, that I would watch two movies in which Albus Dumbledore, the Harry Potter character who has now appeared in more movies than any other, would appear, or at least be referenced.

This would not be unlikely if I had chosen to revisit one of the ten other Harry Potter movies available on my American Airlines flight, to accompany the newest, Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, which I didn't manage to see in the theater. 

The second movie I watched was, indeed, a revisit, but it was a revisit of last year's Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar.

Why Barb and Star? Well, although I really appreciated that movie the first time -- it ended up at #32 out of the 170 films I ranked in 2021 -- my affection for it didn't land in the same vicinity as that of its most ardent fans, so I wondered what I'd missed. In fact, I remember not long after thinking that I could only remember a few jokes that had really worked for me. I remembered marveling at the absurdity of the whole thing, but was it actually hilarious? I didn't know.

I only laughed once or twice on my second viewing. I still appreciate the movie quite a bit -- like I still really enjoy Jamie Dornan's dramatic ode to the seagulls, and I love that both Barb and Star come up with lies about what they were doing that involve turtles. But it isn't the home run for me that it is for others.

However, it does contain a reference to Dumbledore. When Dornan's character says something about a phoenix to Barb (Annie Mumolo), she shouts out "Dumbledore's bird!" And then says "Dumbledore" again more quietly when she gets a perplexed look from Dornan. 

The movie that features a lot more Dumbledore was a minor comeback for the Fantastic Beasts series.

I really liked the original, And Where to Find Them, but The Crimes of Grindelwald was bad. I don't intend to revisit it to find out, but I suspect the difference in my affection for the two movies has something to do with not being burned out by digital wizardry (so to speak) when I saw the first. Of course, sometimes a reboot/prequel/what have you works for you because you realize you longed for a return to that world, and it got a lot of things right. But the freshness of that return is no longer there with the second movie, so it has to stand on its two feet, and proves ill-equipped to do so.

My feelings toward The Secrets of Dumbledore don't approach my feelings for And Where to Find Them, but at least this movie is solidly in the three star range, meaning I would recommend others see it. Grindelwald had been a two-star experience -- competently made, I suppose, but entirely lacking in anything that excited or thrilled me.

Of course, the difference could just come down to them replacing Johnny Depp with Mads Mikkelsen. 

It won't be a Dumbledore triple as we have chosen to go to Disneyland (on Tuesday) rather than Universal Studios, as my wife had hoped, where there would be plenty of Harry's wizarding world. I have to see the new Star Wars rides, and besides, we went to Universal on our last trip in August of 2019. We haven't been to Disney since January of 2017.

Before then, we have to clean out the garage of our house in Van Nuys, which we have been renting for nine years since we moved. We'll be shipping some things, donating others, and throwing a third group in the garbage, in all likelihood. And while that will make for a busy next few days before the shippers come and box up our stuff on Monday -- we can't pack it ourselves so as not to try our hand at international drug smuggling -- it may feel like a breeze compared to two solid weeks of seeing family in Indiana and New England. Which went as well as can be expected, maybe even better than that, but I need a bit of a change of pace that isn't so emotionally demanding and fraught with potential hurt feelings.

So it's really nice to be sitting in the backyard of the house where we're staying in the Hollywood Hills, a bit of a treat to ourselves in expectation of turning a healthy profit on the house we're about to sell. Here, check out my view:

With any luck I'll be checking in with you a bit more regularly before I fly back to Australia next Thursday night. 

My 2000 film rankings (in 2000)

This is the eighth 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. 

Two thousand was a year in which I did temp work for the first half of the year and worked at a technical theater magazine for the second half. I lived in New York. It is starting to feel like a very long time ago.

I still remember with some fondness the movie theaters I frequented when I lived there, though my #1, Hamlet, was seen in some sort of special venue that I don't particularly remember, as part of a screening my friend got through her SAG membership. Or was it some other actors guild? Stage seems more likely. Anyway, yes, it was a long time ago.

In fact so long ago that I am starting to get my employment timelines wrong. I think last month I said that I was working in buildings close to the World Trade Center only six months before 9/11, but it was actually 18 months, since I worked for the theater magazine for almost a year, or maybe even a full year, before moving in March of 2001. Anyway, you did not really come here to learn about my life from 22 years ago, though I should also say that I was involved in my most serious relationship to that point, with a woman from my high school, until about August, at which point she went to grad school in Pittsburgh. She hadn't lived in New York before that, but rather Boston, so it was also a year of a lot of commuting. Somehow we managed to see each other several times a month in the nine months we dated, which just feels like a lot of work now. At the time I had the energy.

Anyway, as we go back in time I'm predictably watching fewer and fewer movies. In 2000 it was only 58. Here is how I ranked them:

1. Hamlet
2. Wonder Boys
3. Traffic
4. Frequency
5. Almost Famous
6. Dancer in the Dark
7. The Contender
8. Erin Brockovich
9. Timecode
10. You Can Count on Me
11. Thirteen Days
12. Disney's The Kid
13. Requiem for a Dream
14. Nurse Betty
15. Return to Me
16. American Psycho
17. The Cell
18. Before Night Falls
19. Shaft
20. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
21. Gladiator
22. Snatch
23. What Women Want
24. X-Men
25. Saving Grace
26. The Tao of Steve
27. Quills
28. Cast Away
29. The Legends of Rita
30. Red Planet
31. Mission to Mars
32. The Perfect Storm
33. Grass
34. Shanghai Noon
35. The Road to El Dorado
36. Boiler Room
37. High Fidelity
38. Unbreakable
39. Chocolat
40. Chicken Run
41. State and Main
42. Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas
43. Scary Movie
44. Best in Show
45. Mission: Impossible 2
46. Pay It Forward
47. The Yards
48. The Patriot
49. Fantasia 2000
50. Joe Gould's Secret
51. Dinosaur
52. Pitch Black
53. Hollow Man
54. Shadow of the Vampire
55. The Whole Nine Yards
56. The Replacements
57. All the Pretty Horses
58. The 6th Day

And here is the order in which those movies rank out of 6013 movies currently on my Flickchart. Following the ranking is the percentage of the ranking out of 6013 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. Almost Famous (47, 99%) 4
2. The Cell (54, 99%) 15
3. Hamlet (151, 97%) -2
4. Requiem for a Dream (195, 97%) 9
5. Wonder Boys (204, 97%) -3
6. Dancer in the Dark (232, 96%) 0
7. Frequency (267, 96%) -3
8. American Psycho (382, 94%) 8
9. Erin Brockovich (473, 92%) -1
10. Traffic (490, 92%) -7
11. The Contender (692, 88%) -4
12. Thirteen Days (701, 88%) -1
13. High Fidelity (853, 86%) 24
14. Timecode (1012, 83%) -5
15. Return to Me (1018, 83%) 0
16. You Can Count on Me (1064, 82%) -6
17. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (1111, 82%) 3
18. Saving Grace (1396, 77%) 7
19. Shanghai Noon (1449, 76%) 15
20. The Road to El Dorado (1607, 73%) 15
21. Before Night Falls (1631, 73%) -3
22. Snatch (1711, 72%) 0
23. Cast Away (1872, 69%) 5
24. Nurse Betty (2006, 67%) -10
25. Quills (2024, 66%) 2
26. Gladiator (2046, 66%) -5
27. X-Men (2060, 66%) -3
28. What Women Want (2288, 62%) -5
29. Grass (2483, 59%) 4
30. Disney's The Kid (2591, 57%) -18
31. The Legends of Rita (2685, 55%) -2
32. Unbreakable (3000, 50%) 6
33. Chocolat (3107,, 48%) 6
34. Shaft (3154, 48%) -15
35. Mission to Mars (3351, 44%) -4
36. The Tao of Steve (3507, 42%) -10
37. Pitch Black (3583, 40%) 15
38. The Perfect Storm (3593, 40%) -6
39. Boiler Room (3812, 37%) -3
40. Joe Gould's Secret (3813, 37%) 10
41. Scary Movie (3938, 35%) 2
42. Red Planet (3982, 34%) -12
43. Chicken Run (3992, 34%) -3
44. Fantasia 2000 (4103, 32%) 5
45. Best in Show (4246, 29%) -1
46. The Yards (4302, 28%) 1
47. Mission: Impossible 2 (4492, 25%) -2
48. Dinosaur (4501, 25%) 3
49. Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas (4576, 24%) -7
50. The Patriot (5146, 14%) -2
51. Pay It Forward (5194, 14%) -5
52. Shadow of the Vampire (5342, 11%) 2
53. State and Main (5357, 11%) -12
54. The Replacements (5731, 5%) 2
55. The Whole Nine Yards (5758, 4%) 0
56. All the Pretty Horses (5777, 4%) 1
57. Hollow Man (5856, 3%) -4
58. The 6th Day (5979, 1%) 0

Five best movies I've seen since closing the list (alphabetical): Bamboozled, But I'm a Cheerleader, The Claim, The Emperor's New Groove, The Gleaners & I
Five worst movies I've seen since closing the list (alphabetical): Battlefield Earth, Coyote Ugly, Heavy Metal 2000, Held Up, Trois
Biggest risers: High Fidelty (+24), The Cell/Pitch Black/The Road to El Dorado/Shanghai Noon (+15)
Biggest fallers: Disney's The Kid (-18), Shaft (-15), Red Planet/State and Main (-12)
Stayed the same: Dancer in the Dark (6th), Return to Me (15th), Snatch (22nd), The Whole Nine Yards (55th), The 6th Day (58th)
Average percentage on Flickchart: 55.72% (1 of 8 so far)

I wouldn't have automatically produced 2000 as a great movie year if you had asked me -- I think 1999 was a real classic, but we'll look at that next month. You can't argue with the 55.72% average rating on Flickchart, though, the highest so far by several percentage points. Impressive.

The biggest riser is not a film I have grown to appreciate significantly more than I did at the time. Nick Hornby's novel version of High Fidelity was always a tough act to follow, but the movie version now follows it a lot less closely than it did at the time for me, when I'd read the book within a year before seeing the movie. I think I've started to conflate the value of the two, though I did rewatch the movie and it obviously did not drop in my estimation from that viewing. Among the quartet of movies that rose 15 spots, I really want to highlight The Cell, because of the high level of that 15-spot rise. A movie I enjoyed enough at the time to rate it 17th for the year has now risen all the way to #2, as I continue to watch it about every two to three years. 

Among fallers, the biggest is Disney's The Kid, which I watched on a plane trip to California from New York. I counted the viewing even though the plane landed before the movie ended, but when I rewatched it for a project on this blog about ten years ago, I wasn't charmed by it the way I had been the first time. I guess you should really watch the whole movie before ranking it. It's interesting to note that I rated the two Mars movies, Red Planet and Mission to Mars, about the same as each other, with Red Planet actually having a slight advantage. Both have dropped since then, but I guess I now think Mars is the better film, as it fell only four spots while Planet dropped a dozen. 

Oh and for the second month in a row my #1 from that year did not hold on to its peak position on Flickchart, as Hamlet is only third now, surpassed by new #1 Almost Famous and the aforementioned The Cell.

The great movie year of 1999 is our next up in September. 

Viewing conundrums across the international date line

Whenever we used to fly east across the Pacific Ocean from Australia to the United States, the flight would leave in the morning Melbourne time. Not early morning, but like 11 a.m. This brought you in to Los Angeles at something like 8:30 a.m. on the same day, making for one very loooong day. All the movies I watched on the flight were part of this one day. 

For some reason -- COVID? -- that's changed now. The flight leaves at night. Our flight was at 9 p.m., bringing us in to Los Angeles at 6:30 p.m. Which I thought would be fantastic, since we'd only have to stay up a few more hours before going to sleep -- theoretically getting on the new time zone that much faster.

Well, tell that to the worst jet lag I've ever had. After six nights in the United States, I've still only had full night sleeps with the assistance of a sleep aid, and even those were not always as effective as I expected them to me. There was one night -- the second night -- when I slept nary a wink. In fact, at about 4:30 I gave up trying and watched The Amazing Spider-Man, which I'd never seen, on Netflix. 

But I'm not here today to talk about jet lag.

I did want to tell you about how I saw a movie on July 26th, then a movie on July 27th, then two more movies on July 26th, then two more movies on July 27th.

What, Vance? you say. That's impossible.

Au contraire mon frere. And the later departure time had everything to do with it.

See, when you leave in the late morning, you cross the international dateline in the same day. But not when you leave at night. 

As far as I can tell, though the internet has been anything but helpful on this, you cross the international dateline about six hours after leaving Melbourne. If you leave at 11 a.m., that means you cross at about 5 p.m. Melbourne time, effectively staying in the same date on which you left. 

If you leave at 9 at night, though, that means it's about 3 a.m. the day after you left when you cross, before you jump back into the previous day. Whole different story in terms of assigning dates to my movies on my movie list.

Father Stu, the first film I watched on the flight, quite clearly belonged to Tuesday, July 26th, the day I left terra firma. But the second movie, the new reboot of Scream, was not quite so straightforward. If I didn't watch all of it before those six hours elapsed, I watched enough of it to count it toward whatever day it was for me that day. And since most of the viewing would have come between midnight and 3 a.m. Melbourne time, it was a Wednesday, July 27th viewing for all intents and purposes.

By the time I started Kimi, I had time warped back to Tuesday, which was also the day I watched The Duke. (And this answers my question about whether movies on the streamers would be available. Kimi is part of Steven Soderbergh's ongoing deal with HBO, so without this flight I might not have seen it. It's ended up being my favorite film I've seen since we left.)

Then on our next flight to Indianapolis, which was well and truly on American Wednesday after a night in an LAX hotel, I saw Marry Me and Sundown. 

So this is how it looks in my "movie order" document:

Father Stu (7/26/22)
Scream (2022) (7/27/22)
Kimi (7/26/22)
The Duke (7/26/22)
Marry Me (7/27/22)
Sundown (7/27/22)

So it's in chronological order, even if the dates are not.

Of course, this does not work on Letterboxd, the other place I record the order of my movie viewings. A movie on a later date cannot appear before a movie on an earlier date, for obvious reasons. So Scream comes after The Duke but before Marry Me on there. 

And hey! This "crazy" phenomenon gave me the excuse to write my first post from this trip. There figure to be more.