Tusk man the Barbarian

A week ago, I saw Barbarian, a horror film starring Justin Long that has a lot of different tones and things going on. 

Yesterday, my son and I carved our jack o' lanterns for this year, and although he was trying to make a vampire, he said it looked more like a walrus.

These two events in combination could lead me to only one conclusion:

It was time to watch Tusk again.

I'd actually tried to watch Tusk again earlier this month, before I knew Justin Long was in Barbarian and before I knew my son would carve a pumpkin that he thought would look like a large flippered marine mammal. (Not its whole body, just its tusks.) But it wasn't streaming anywhere I could find, not without paying to rent it -- which shouldn't be such a surprise, as I don't think the movie was anything more than a morbid curiosity to most people. 

Me, I love morbid curiosities, and toward the end of this month, I'm not conserving money the way I thought I needed to earlier in the month. (We accepted an offer on our house in Los Angeles, a topic that probably deserves its own post some other time. We're still in escrow but the end now feels in sight.) So when the universe was telling me to rent Tusk from Amazon on Saturday to watch it on my projector that night, I complied.

The first time I wrote about Tusk on this blog, it was in this post, in which I bemoaned that the main thing about Tusk was being spoiled by people saying "Without getting into spoiler territory ..." and then basically just saying the thing. Eight years later, I don't feel the need to still preserve this sort of secrecy about the movie, though I'll still talk around it if possible -- before totally spoiling it with a photo at the end of the post. So this is your SPOILER WARNING for Tusk, even though the poster above, which obviously existed at the time, does a pretty good job previewing the morbid curiosity you are about to witness. (I can talk around Barbarian more easily but there could be mild spoilers for this too.)

So just some context about why I appreciated Tusk as much as I did the first time, which I think was out of sync with people's general thoughts on the film. Kevin Smith's most recent film before this had been Red State, which was my second favorite film of 2011. Especially on the heels of that unexpected pivot toward serious filmmaking, Tusk confirmed for me that Smith might be entering into a whole new period of cinematic exploration.

Alas, it was short lived. His next film, the Tusk spinoff Yoga Hosers, was one of the worst movies I have ever seen, and he's followed it with a Jay and Silent Bob movie and a Clerks movie, neither of which I've seen, which could not be more a case of staying in his lane. Given that Smith has always been a fan of distributing by independent channels, one wonders why he couldn't also explore the new weird streak he established in his consecutive collaborations with actor Michael Parks. But it looks like that new Smith has well and truly vanished.

Barbarian, though, put Tusk back in my head. It was in my head more than it might have otherwise been because I edited and posted a review written by other writers later in the week. There are more similarities than you might imagine:

1) Both star Long in a screwed up horror that leaves you no idea where it's going, assuming you have not been exposed to spoilers.

2) In both movies Long plays an entitled douchebag. In fact it could almost be the same character if the character in Tusk made an unlikely comeback from what happens to him.

3) Both characters are going to get what's coming to them. 

4) Both movies are going to take us around in time a bit, and splice together things that would not necessarily seem related to one another. 

5) Both movies have multiple "oh no that's not right" moments that rely on something gruesome happening that you don't want to watch. (You could probably say this about many horror movies but maybe it particularly applies here. Part of the advertising campaign for Barbarian has shown stills of people recoiling from what they're seeing on screen.)

Anyway.

For me, Barbarian was a little overhyped. I definitely enjoyed it, but there are so many thematic issues going on that I felt like I failed to see the big picture, and I had questions about some loose threads that left me wanting more of an explanation -- not because they didn't provide answers that we deserved, but because certain occurrences in the plot, like the mix-up that informs the movie's first third, seemed to have little to no ultimate function in the narrative. But yes, the scene that's grossing out that audience in the ad is good, as are all this movie's disparate elements taken individually.

Tusk also has some really disparate elements. Last night reminded me of that strange, tonally jarring scene where Genesis Rodriguez gives a teary direct address to the camera about her boyfriend cheating on her. Where did this come from? I have no idea, but it renewed my sense of how alive Smith's cinematic engagement feels in this film.

And then there's just everything related to what happens to poor Mr. Long. I've talked around it but you certainly know by now.

So now it's time to include that photo of my son's walrus jack o' lantern, which was getting its trial run in our garage last night next to the one I made, along with the "real" walrus in the film:

Opening night optimism for Bros, unfulfilled

I wanted to make sure I was in the opening night audience for Bros. It gave me the best chance of ensuring I'd have a review ready for Monday. Friday was already out since I had a delayed review for Barbarian going up from a pair of my other writers, and I don't post on ReelGood on weekends. 

Of course, the primary reason was that I wanted to support this movie. Desperately.

I didn't know, but likely assumed, that the movie has not done well in the U.S. Of course it hasn't. People are going out to the movies a lot less these days, and there's one particular sort of movie they consistently support in droves: a movie like Top Gun: Maverick. Bros does not stand much of a chance in this environment, even if it were a straight romantic comedy.

I suppose the thinking there might be more like "especially if it were a straight romantic comedy." Those have not been viable in years, and have basically been relegated to streaming. Being about two men, and all their super gay friends (really, this movie does not scrimp on the gay), might only help by at least giving it a novelty factor.

But then of course there is also the homophobia factor. And it's strong.

If my real-time googling of U.S. box office is actually yielding accurate results, the movies has made $11.6 million in the U.S. That's not terrible, probably, in this day and age, though at this time I am not going to compare it to all the other films that resemble it in some way that might bear itself out in the box office. But it's far less than the $22 million budget so I assume there is no way to view it as anything other than a flop. Which means a studio like Universal is far less likely to take a gamble on a project like this in the future.

Fortunately, I did not know all this when I walked into the Sun Theatre in Yarraville on Thursday night, Australian opening night, for the 9:20 showing. I went in on a cushion of optimism, buoyed by knowing that a friend of mine had liked it, though he had not yet gone into specifics. 

My optimism further increased when I saw that it had been put in the Grand, which, true to its name, is the largest of the screening rooms at the Sun. Given that no movie plays on more than one screen at the Sun, the fact that they had reserved their largest for the opening of the first gay romantic comedy from a major studio was a positive sign indeed.

And then I got into the actual theater.

I wasn't the only one there. No, there were about ten others, seated in groups of five around the back of the theater.

A theater which holds at least 150 people.

Is this just the era we live in? Is this homophobia? Is it just that opening night is not a real indicator of a movie's prospects, considering the people are more likely to go out on a Friday or Saturday night than a Thursday?

One thing I can tell you, though, is that my own personal optimism for the quality of the movie was fulfilled, and then some.

I've already written the review so I won't go into details here. If I remember I will link back to it once I post it on Monday. Or you can just go find the review itself, since it'll appear in my most recently reviewed movies on the right. Just know that I laughed a lot, and that I was impressed with Billy Eichner as a dramatic actor, in the relatively few scenes that required that of him. I already knew his talents as a comic, but this surprised me, as did his ability to sing. 

Also, it's super gay! I mean probably by some people's standards, they wouldn't think it was gay enough -- this is one of the film's thematic texts, what is gay enough and what is too gay. But for a mainstream movie, there were plenty of sex scenes, which were never graphic but certainly would have tested the limitations of what an audience weaned on heterosexual sex scenes thought they were ready for. And good on Universal for not telling them to keep things more chaste.

Really, though, I mean there were gay characters and trans characters and bi characters, and you didn't get the impression that any of them were tweaked in such a way as to fit better into the audience's perceived comfort zone. And by "the audience" I am of course talking about the straight audience, though it's difficult to tell how many of them actually came.

An $11.6 million box office could, in fact, be every single gay person near a major American city buying a ticket to Bros, with some of them seeing it twice. I hope at least a couple million of that can be attributed to straight ticket buyers.

It's probably not enough, though, which makes one wonder: How much longer will it be before a major Hollywood studio releases the second gay romantic comedy?

The fickle finger of fate

I shouldn't place too much stock in the phrasing of questions asked on Quora, which come to me via email notifications due to a search I did a couple years ago. The questions are interesting enough that I keep reading them, which is probably why I keep getting the notifications. Sometimes I learn something. Sometimes I just laugh.

Today is the second scenario.

The reason I say I shouldn't place too much stock in the questions, or in the answers, is that for many of these people, English is not their first language. For many others, logic is not something they are really acquainted with.

Take this one:

"What Hollywood actor/actress lost a career-making role due to the fickle finger of fate?"

(I added the hyphen in "career making," since that would have been a bridge too far for this person.)

I think "the fickle finger of fate" is hilarious phrasing, but I think the answer is even more hilarious.

This poster gave the example of Meg Tilly, who had to drop out of Amadeus because she tore a ligament while playing soccer just before shooting was set to begin. The doctor said it would take five weeks before she could start shooting, so obviously they had to replace her.

It's true, Meg Tilly did not go on to have a particularly illustrious career. She's often considered the lesser Tilly, as her sister Jennifer was the better known name -- though even Jennifer's career has not been a major one.

What I find funny about this answer, though, is that the role did not go to Julia Roberts, or Sandra Bullock, or Nicole Kidman, or Meryl Streep -- in short, it did not go to an actress who took the role and ran with it, and is now considered a screen legend. 

No, the role went to Elizabeth Berridge:

Who?

Exactly.

After Amadeus, Elizabeth Berridge appeared in a couple movies I've never heard of, and held down some recurring roles on TV shows that lacked any distinction, the most prominent of which was probably The John Larroquette Show. She guested on Touched by an Angel, but that was only one episode. 

She does still work. She appeared in a short just this year. But she only has four total credits since 2005, though granted, two of those are films I saw and liked: Please Give and Results.

However, by no definition of the word was Elizabeth Berridge's career "made" by appearing in Amadeus. So why does this person assume that the role would have changed Tilly's career?

And really, Tilly was one of the main cast of The Big Chill the year before Amadeus. The roles she got for the rest of the 20th century -- some of them quite prominent -- were probably as much due to appearing in that movie as anything that Amadeus could have done for her.

Like I said, I should not place too much stock in what I read on Quora. 

Reviewing a purchase or reviewing a movie?

For a number of reasons, including slight differences in their offerings, I have started to rent more movies through Amazon than through my old standby, iTunes. One big issue with iTunes is that movies I rent there won't play through my projector, assuming I am using the iTunes software itself to view them, for some technical reason that I still don't understand. I watch a relatively small percentage of the movies I see through my projector, but it's definitely become a factor in my vendor preferences. I'm sure there's a way to watch them through the Apple TV website that circumvents this, but let's just say it's felt like a bridge too far.

In the case of The Kid Detective, the movie I watched in October for Flickchart Friends Favorites Fiesta, it was a difference in what was available that was the deciding factor. These are pretty rare. While iTunes only has this movie available for $12.99 purchase, it was rentable via Amazon. Typically the availability is determined at a higher level and not customized on a vendor level, or so I have always assumed, but this was the exception.

I liked the movie. I'll include my FFFF review below. But what I'm writing about today is the follow-up emails Amazon has been sending me, asking me to rate my purchase. 

I find this strange, because I think Amazon wants me to tell them how much I liked the movie. But in most other cases, Amazon wants me to tell them whether I got the thing I bought in a timely manner, whether it came in the same condition they said it would come in, all that stuff. If I'd hated The Kid Detective and rated it one star, wouldn't that look the same as if I told them that a pair of headphones came damaged, or a book arrived two months late?

Books are probably the valid point of comparison here. I feel like when you receive a book from Amazon, you are clearly meant to tell them whether it was physically undamaged when it arrived. You aren't meant to read the whole book and then subject it to a rating of its quality from one to five stars. Especially since in this case, they ask you to rate the purchase only a few days later, and you can't have been expected to finish the book and assess its quality by that point. You might not even have started it.

With a digitally rented movie, there is no chance for it to come damaged, at least not physically. If for some reason you couldn't play the movie, you would contact customer support and they would either issue you a refund or get you to a link that actually worked. There would be no shipping involved in returning the faulty item. In fact, I don't think you'd necessarily even feel inclined to negatively rate the experience, unless customer service just totally dropped the ball. You'd always know it would be resolved easily enough.

So even though Amazon has asked me twice now to rate The Kid Detective, I have not complied. When it comes to other purchases I make online, I do usually do stuff like this and do not want to make them beg. I know that reviews are a big part of increasing consumer confidence in the thing in question.

But I'm not that interested in contributing to Amazon's dialogue surrounding The Kid Detective and whether someone else should rent it based on its merits as a movie. I don't rate movies I watch on Netflix. That seems like the most similar thing to what Amazon is asking me here.

Okay here's that write-up on FFFF:

I watched [Redacted]'s #50, The Kid Detective (2020), about a week ago, and unfortunately, failed to strike while the iron was hot to write this review. So this may not end up being my usual length, but I will give it the old college try.

I quite enjoyed the movie. The basic setup is that the main character, Abe Applebaum (Adam Brody), is a bit of a prodigy who successfully solved a missing persons case (if memory serves) when he was a kid, and was celebrated by the whole town. Instead of this just being a one-off thing, he continues as an underage detective, and has success solving crimes. Now at 32, though, the life has lost some of its luster and he's not so much celebrated as pitied by the townspeople. His parents still parent him like he's 13.

The story is about his new case, and what I really liked about this movie is that it follows the same structure as your typical noir but in this small-town setting and with largely younger characters, including a teenage femme fatale played by Sophie Nelisse. (She serves that function in the story but is a total innocent, unlike most fatales.) I expected it to be cutesy and sort of a comedy, but it's a lot more contemplative and adult-oriented than you might expect from a film with that title. There is humor in it but it's all deadpan. In fact, I don't think I laughed once, though I was consistently amused by everything that was happening on screen -- without that amusement crossing over into taking the project less seriously. It gets that balance just right.

In fact, it's plenty adult in its approach, with (again if memory serves) profanity in addition to drug use and violence. Abe might not get knocked around to the same extent as other noir heroes but he definitely exposes himself to danger and has the sort of narrative arc through the movie you would expect from a detective beaten down by time.

In a way this film is doing something similar to Rian Johnson's Brick, but I like this film better. I'm not a big fan of Brick because I think the dialogue is annoyingly stylized and Johnson is a bit too cutesy with all his camera tricks and other noise. I enjoyed the straightforward approach of director Evan Morgan and especially Brody's performance as Abe, which gets a really satisfying final moment on screen.

I'm not sure if this was one of the intended themes but the film functions as an interesting analogy for child actors growing into adults, which is sort of a reality for Brody (he got started acting when he was 19, it would appear). Child actors are rarely able to convert the charm of their younger years into becoming appealing adult actors, with a few notable exceptions, and so we see the same is true for Abe as a young detective.

Let's see how it enters my chart:

The Kid Detective > Monty Python: Live at the Hollywood Bowl

The Kid Detective < In the Heat of the Night

The Kid Detective < Dave Made a Maze

The Kid Detective > The Brothers Grimsby

The Kid Detective > Cave of Forgotten Dreams

The Kid Detective < Tommy Boy

The Kid Detective > All the King's Men (1949)

The Kid Detective < Queen of Katwe

The Kid Detective < Incident at Oglala

The Kid Detective < City Island

The Kid Detective > Swing Vote

The Kid Detective > The X-Files: Fight the Future

The Kid Detective > Bronson

2449/6160 (60%)

Thanks [Redacted]!

There will be loathing

There Will Be Blood spoilers to follow.

It's amazing the difference two years can make. Two years ago I watched my favorite film of 2007, There Will Be Blood, for only the third time, and the first time not in a movie theater. I'm not sure if it was the first viewing on the smaller screen that made the difference, but I remember my third viewing feeling like somewhat of an anticlimax after a layoff of a dozen years. 

Last night, I just sat there thoroughly enthralled by the movie. (Only four left until I've rewatched all 26 of my previous #1s.)

There are so many themes to think about in There Will Be Blood -- capitalism, greed, family, religion, even sociopathy -- but last night I was focused on something else: the extreme loathing that exists between Daniel Plainview, played by Daniel Day-Lewis, and Eli Sunday, played by Paul Dano.

These two men have nothing but dislike for each other from their first moments together on screen. Crucially, though, it's not just a negative chemistry between the actors -- Dano is giving us two different characters with Paul, the brother we meet first and only once, and Eli, the brother who is Plainview's most regular antagonist throughout the movie. (And "antagonist" is really the right word here, as these two intentionally antagonize each other at every opportunity they get. Debate as much as you want about which one is worse, but Eli gets the title "antagonist" because this is clearly Plainview's story, making him the protagonist.)

In Paul, Plainview sees an able rival -- one who pisses him off because he doesn't fall for Plainview's tricks when Paul comes to offer him information on where to drill in exchange for a $500 payout, but all the smarter for that stubbornness. In Paul he sees someone like himself. Paul is intelligent and he knows exactly what cards to play at what time, just like Plainview himself. And he's also only in it for his own gain, just like Plainview.

Eli is equally venal in his way but he hides it behind a veil of religious righteousness, which disgusts Plainview. The difference here is that Plainview rarely engages in outright lies; he omits certain details, and engages in half-truths, like telling the Sunday family he is camping on their property to hunt quail. In a way that is a full lie, but in spirit it is more like not telling the whole story. And as evidence of some sort of core honesty in his business dealings, Daniel admits pretty readily that he knows about the oil on the Sunday property and is interested in it when Eli cross-examines him. He doesn't have elaborate stories at the ready that won't hold up to scrutiny. Rather, he presents simple lies ("my wife died in childbirth") and then when someone wants to pump him for more details, he says things like "I don't want to talk about those things." It's as though the necessary price for shrewd business is these minor fabrications, but he stops short of spinning yarns he can't control.

To Plainview, Eli is a constant, consistent liar in his revival-style religious performances and his claim that he can drive the spirit out of people, heal their sicknesses, etc. This is a much more harmful form of getting ahead, Plainview seems to believe, as it requires people to believe a protracted lie that just keeps getting more and more complicated. The lie itself is the thing, rather than the means to the thing -- even if both characters are, at their core, seeking financial enrichment.

To Eli, Plainview is an obstacle because he will not submit to any part of Eli's will, and in fact, openly despises him. Neither is he a potential convert, as someone like Daniel Plainview will never choose to believe in a higher power. In fact, the despising by Plainview is even more pernicious to Eli, in the sense that it is both open and veiled in politeness at the same time. When Eli approaches Plainview about his plan to bless the opening of the drilling -- a plan that twice makes mention of Plainview saying his name, a gratification of Eli's ego -- Plainview appears to agree to it with simple affirmations like "That'll be fine." Of course, when the time actually comes, he leaves Eli as just another face in the crowd while bestowing the ceremonial honor on his little sister -- a "daughter of these fair hills," an intentional and perverse bastardization of the very phrase Eli wanted Plainview to use for him.

It's on. And Daniel has the upper hand most of the time. When Eli has the audacity to storm up to Plainview to check on the status of his family's enrichment, Plainview slaps the shit out of him and ends up pushing his face down into the mud, in a humiliating sequence that highlights one person's total domination of the other. Tellingly, to further underscore the similarity between them, Eli then delivers the same sort of humiliating beatdown to his own father -- calling him "you stupid man" -- while still caked in the very mud Plainview despoiled him with.

Of course Eli gets his revenge. He gets the upper hand later on when Plainview needs the cooperation of old man Bandy, the only homestead in the area that did not sell to him, whose property is crucial to erecting the pipeline that will finalize Plainview's fortune. Bandy is a religious man, and he requests that Plainview repent his sins in the church. In gleeful relish of his position of power, Eli makes Plainview praise god and admit in loud tones that he has abandoned his son. Because he just can't help the chance to exact some physical vengeance on Plainview, he slaps him a half dozen times as well -- any more than that probably would have raised too many eyebrows in his congregation.

At that time, Plainview never gets the advantage back over Eli. Eli leaves on a mission and gets to depart town with a haughty look on his face, while Plainview looks away hurriedly. Eli would have "won," as it were.

But then in 1927, more than 15 years after these events, Eli finds himself needing to work with an alcoholic and spiritually broken version of Plainview -- who doesn't awaken from that bowling alley floor when Eli screams to him that a fire is consuming the building, only when he softly announces who is standing above him, an unresolved foe from the distant past. Sensing his own advantage in this scenario, Plainview turns the tables on Eli one last time, forcing him to shout "I am a false prophet and God is a superstition," then delivering his epic final smackdown about "DRAINAGE!!!," which finishes with the classic milkshake line. 

It's hard to say who ultimately wins in the end -- it seems they both destroy each other. Plainview literally beats Eli to death with a bowling pin, but you sense this is one murder he isn't going to be able to cover up. When his manservant witnesses the aftermath of the murder, you don't get the sense that Plainview is going to try one more murder and get away with it all. He says, meaningfully, "I'm finished." It's in the sing-songy voice that would usually be used in a context where you are asking someone to remove the empty plate of food in front of you, but we all know what it really means.

The looks on the faces of these actors as they deal with each other are priceless. Although Day-Lewis is the GOAT here and he outshines Dano in almost every aspect, the subtle crumpling of Eli's face whenever he realizes Plainview has shat upon him is the ultimate expression of this film's loathing. Even though it is Plainview who loathes as a hobby, and loathes many more people in this film that Eli loathes, Dano might be the best at it. 

As I was watching Day-Lewis here, I was reminded again of the sort of mafia boss who chills us to the core in the best gangster movies -- or maybe, in a more modern example, someone like Homelander in The Boys. His power and his capacity for holding a grudge are limitless. Just witness his eternal grudge against the oil company man who once dares to suggest that selling out to them and becoming a millionaire would allow him to spend more time with his son. He tells this man he will sneak into his house at night and slit his throat, and renews the threat during an otherwise innocuous interaction years later, when all this man wants to do is play nice. 

Still, the movie's scariest scene might belong to Eli as he rages against and beats his own father. He loathes the weakness and frailty of that old man more than he ever loathes Plainview. 

Interestingly, Dano wasn't even supposed to play this part originally -- apparently, the actor cast to play Eli got freaked out by Day-Lewis' method acting and he left the movie. Dano was only supposed to play Paul. Imagine how much weaker this film would be if Dano had been in that one scene and then left the movie. (To say nothing of how it amplifies the differences between these two brothers to have them played by the same actor.)

Given how incredible this film is at showing rather than telling -- I mean, this is a movie that has no dialogue for its first 14 minutes -- it surprised me a bit last night that Paul Thomas Anderson felt the need to put such a fine point on things that were conveyed wordlessly. If not for the juicy way Day-Lewis delivers this speech -- hell, every speech or line he has in the whole movie -- it might seem entirely superfluous:

"I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed. I hate most people. There are times when I look at people and I see nothing worth liking."

There Will Be Blood demonstrates this from beginning to end, and it never stops being fascinating.

A Madeleine McGraw early adopter

Just as a baseball scout takes eternal pride in a player whose potential they noticed very early on, who went on to great things, I am taking pride in my "discovery" of Madeleine McGraw.

The 13-year-old actress, who stars in The Black Phone (which I finally saw last night), is also one of the supporting characters on a Disney+ TV show we watch with the kids called Secrets of Sulphur Springs. She plays the younger sister of the main character.

And damned if I didn't say, from her first moment on screen, that she's got "it."

Now that I've written enough text to clear the space taken up by the Black Phone movie poster, I'll show you who I'm talking about in a still from that movie:

This picture does not, of course, do justice to her charisma, her spunk, and her astonishing acting chops, but if you saw the movie, you probably already experienced them for yourself.

In the TV show, she's a ten-year-old with an attitude, who acts circles around many of the other actors, some of whom are really not ready for primetime. She brings that attitude to The Black Phone, where she has several scenes in which she hilariously drops f-bombs, and one of tearing a couple detectives a new one. But it's not just sassiness she excels at, as there's a scene where her father (Jeremy Davies) beats her mercilessly with a belt, and the tears she summons are total and overwhelming.

I actually thought of writing this post when I first saw the trailers for The Black Phone, but I never did. After finishing it -- and really liking it -- I knew it was time.

Except ...

Except there is not a straight line between Secrets of Sulphur Springs and The Black Phone, or in any case, the former is not the start of that line. As I was singing her praises to a friend on messenger, he said "Isn't she also in Ant-Man?" And by that I suspected he meant Ant-Man and the Wasp.

Indeed, McGraw plays the young version of Evangeline Lilly's the Wasp. I suspect she's only in one scene as it took me about 30 cast members on IMDB to get to her, but I certainly would have seen Ant-Man and the Wasp before I first saw Secrets of Sulphur Springs. So perhaps my overwhelming sense of her star power was more a recognition that I had seen her somewhere before.

Not only once actually, but more than once. 

McGraw is also in Pacific Rim: Uprising and American Sniper, though I don't suspect either of those would have been places I remembered seeing her. 

It's not just on screen roles where she has "it," though, either. People seem to think very highly of her voice, which I get, as it's a bit raspy. She also does vocal work in Cars 3, Toy Story 4 and Mitchells vs. the Machines.

Okay so everybody thinks she's awesome, not just me.

I still want to go on record with a prediction, though, which is that five years from now, she'll be one of the biggest stars we have going. Of course, no one ever really knows how a child actor will transition into an adult actor, whether it will be the relatively smooth sailing of someone like Chloe Grace Moretz, or whether it will involve a long and possibly permanent period of trainwrecking, someone like Lindsay Lohan. 

But the thing about McGraw is that she seems to have the intelligence to make the transition, the natural instinct for how to do this, that certain something.

And because the internet has a way of permanently hanging on to things, I can look back on this post in October of 2027 to see how I did. 

You may not have heard it here first -- or maybe you did -- but Madeleine McGraw is one to watch for.

For example, do I have to watch The School for Good and Evil?

As you know because I've been discussing it, I'm trying to control the onslaught of 2022 films, which are coming faster and furiouser than I ever remember them coming before. It's to the point where each time I learn of a new movie that I "have" to watch, I start to get a bit squidgy.

I learned about The School for Good and Evil for the first time when they plastered the train station near my office with advertisements for Netflix, as discussed here. Each time I've passed the two or three spackled-up posters for it -- some of which have been torn away by cheeky escalator riders, or gotten eyes or teeth blacked out by Sharpies -- here is a sampling of my thoughts:

1) "God those women have annoyingly perfect cheek bones."

2) "Maybe it's a TV show so I can skip it."

3) "Oh nope, it's a movie."

4) "Maybe the annoyingly, generically perfect cheek bones means it's some crap for young people that I can just not watch."

And so that's kind of where I had landed.

Until The School for Good and Evil itself landed on Netlfix last night and they started promoting the hell out of it, meaning I discovered that the movie also stars Charlize Theron, Cate Blanchett, Kerry Washington (who I did recognize in the poster), Michelle Yeoh and Laurence Fishburne.

Dammit.

I still came to write this post without the following bit of knowledge, which I have just determined after downloading the poster: It's directed by Paul Feig.

Dammit.

The number of films from big directors or with big casts that are coming out this fall are starting to truly stagger me. It's gotten to the point where I have to fit in even streaming movies the moment they're available if I don't want them to get swept away into oblivion. It was for that reason that I watched the new Australian movie, The Stranger, starring Joel Edgerton and Sean Harris, the first night it became available on Netflix last night -- which is also how I became acquainted with the cast of The School for Good and Evil.

I've already got such a backlog of kid-friendly Halloween movies that I'm planning an October 30th double feature of The Curse of Bridge Hollow and Hocus Pocus 2 for my family. Am I going to have to make this a triple feature?

It isn't even November and 2022 is already drowning me in movies. 

Time is running out on Black Adam

What are you talking about, Vance? The movie doesn't even come out until tomorrow, or Friday if you live in the United States.

Tell that to Hoyts.

In an email sent out this week, the Australian movie chain had a funny strategy for artificially inflating the urgency to buy tickets to Black Adam:

"Don't wait before it's too late! BLACK ADAM tix on sale now."

For starters, I want to contest the basic grammar of that statement. It should be "until" not "before."

Then within the body of the email:

"The time is now! Book your tickets before it's too late."

What the hell does "too late" mean in the context of movie that will be on at least three screens at every Hoyts in the state of Victoria?

Sure, if it's a limited engagement of some sort -- an old movie being brought back for a one-week run -- I get it. Or something that's so small that a lack of ticket sales could push it out of theaters prematurely. 

But Black Adam stars one of the world's biggest movie stars, is a superhero movie, and has been getting a huge advertising push from its distributor. I have seen the trailer at least two times, even though I haven't gone to a huge number of movies recently that would naturally host a trailer for this movie.

"Too late?" Too late to see the matinee screening on the first day?

Even if the movie tanks, which it won't, Australian theater chains do not quickly drop movies. You can still see movies an absurd number of months after they've been released, usually because not as many movies get a theatrical release in Australia as in the U.S. As just one example that strikes me as pretty funny, Everything Everywhere All at Once is still playing at Cinema Nova, and that came out in early April here in Australia. Now that's an arthouse cinema that sort of plays by its own rules, and has something like 16 screens to play with, but it does indicate a larger proclivity by Australian cinemas.

"Too late?" Too late to contribute to the film's opening weekend box office?

I considered for a moment whether "too late" might have something to do with the theme of the movie. Maybe some aspect of Black Adam involves racing against time. I know they've alluded to another aspect of the movie in other text from the email, where they describe this as "the calm before the storm" with Black Adam opening in cinemas on Thursday. I believe Adam has some command over the weather, if the half attention I was paying to the trailers are any indication.

But the fact that I believe weather is a theme of the movie just makes time less likely to be one.

Well it's funny -- I have sort of decided I might not see Black Adam.

A couple things are informing this. One is yesterday's post, in which I bemoaned that I am on very close to the same crazy movie-watching pace I was on last year, when I had a record 170 movies watched before my year-end rankings. Having tried to pump the brakes before, I want to do that even more so now. And movies that aren't pulling me in strongly, and feel more like an obligation, are a good place to start.

Plus I am, like many people, tired of superhero movies at this point. I will continue to watch every Marvel movie (and I have another one of those coming up soon) because I believe I have to -- one aspect of being a film critic is that you need to be conversant on the industry leader in whatever genre it is, and with superhero movies, that's Marvel. But Black Adam seems to me more like a Venom, where I can opt in or out. (I opted out of the most recent one of those last year.)

Then there's the fact that tomorrow heralds the release of two other films that would take precedence for me, Park Chan-wook's Decision to Leave and the new horror film Barbarian, about both of which I have heard good things. I can only definitely get out to one movie each week, and if I push it I can get two. Three is almost impossible, and once another Thursday rolls around, you get set back even further by more new releases that demand your attention.

The one factor that might assist is that tomorrow is my birthday.

I'm currently scheduled to work -- I have an important meeting before lunch -- but if I decide to take the afternoon off, it'll be to get out and see a matinee movie. If I do catch either Barbarian or Decision to Leave in that time slot, or possibly both, that might leave me available to watch Black Adam in one of my normal evening viewing slots. After all, its fits the criterion of being a high-profile release that my readers want me to review.

If I do miss my opportunity to see Black Adam, though, it won't be because I waited until it was "too late." Strike me down if it's not still playing in a couple theaters at the end of November. 

An October century mark in movies

Since I'm keeping my year-end rankings in real time, so that only a few final tweaks are needed before I publish in mid-January, I obviously notice when I've hit certain milestones in terms of total movies viewed for the year. As an extra bit of information that I don't publish, I also include in parentheses after each title which number it was in the chronology. For example, Hotel Transylvania: Transformania -- the first 2022 movie I watched back in late January -- appears as Hotel Transylvania: Transformania (1) for the whole year, until I finally remove that information before publishing. 

The reasons for that were originally so I'd be able to see, at a glance, things like whether I was showing a recency bias in the movies that made my top ten, that sort of thing. But it also helps determine my pace relative to previous years.

This year's 100th movie -- which is the Australian film Everything in Between -- has now come and gone as of Monday night. So for the rest of the year it will appear on my list as Everything in Between (100). 

It's all too easy for me to remember when I wouldn't see my 100th movie until late December or early January. I've been trying to pump the brakes a bit this year, whenever possible, to avoid setting another record for total movies watched, like I did last year when I ranked 170. (You'd think setting records would be a good thing, but this is when I have to look at myself hard in the mirror and consider how many books I could have read in those 340-odd hours.) 

But how has pumping the brakes worked? Because I still have last year's list with the numbers in parentheses, I can tell you exactly what #100 was last year, and exactly when I saw it.

It was Spiral: From the Book of Saw, and I saw it on ... October 16, 2021. 

So basically, I'm only a single day behind last year's pace.

Good grief.

There are explanations. I took a number of international and domestic flights in July and August, and watched a total of 13 movies on those flights ... though only ten of them were movies I'm ranking for this year. Most of that difference is made up by the fewer MIFF movies I saw because I was on that trip for most of MIFF.

I figured watching a total of 26 former #1 movies -- I've got five more to go -- would take up a number of available viewing spots for new movies. That would settle down my total a bit. But I've found other ways. Life finds a way.

The truth is, I can never really slow down that much because I have to keep feeding the review beast. Of the 100 movies I've watched that count for 2022, 45 have been films I've reviewed for ReelGood. And I still need to see the movies that other people review, or that I saw too late to review them. Plus there are movies I thought I might review but just never got around to it.

Oh well. One hundred seventy-one, here I come. 

Actually, as long as I stay one day behind, it will be only 169. 

Perfect Pauses: Men

To get myself off the schneid -- that's a losing streak in sports, but it applies here when I'm in a bit of a rut in terms of ideas -- I decided to do a Perfect Pauses post, since it'd had been a while since I'd done one.

Of course, you can't do a Perfect Pause post unless you have, you know, a perfect pause. Fortunately, a pause during Men last night qualified.

In this case it's not anything that really speaks to the themes of the film, though I certainly don't think Alex Garland would have chosen a grapefruit for Jessie Buckley to cut through unless he found there to be something vaguely symbolic about it -- you know, cutting something open to reveal its pink insides. That's the way Garland's mind works I'm sure.

No, it's that the pause is perfect because the cut has already started to occur but the half that is not pinned down by Buckley's fingers has only just started to fall toward the cutting board underneath it. (A lot of my Perfect Pauses are action captured midway through its completion, in a moment you'd only have a split section to grab, like this post about Luca's title character in the final millisecond before he gets hit by a glass of water.)

Since I have you I might as well tell you what I thought of Men.

Well, for about a half of a movie I thought it was going to be a masterpiece. That scene with the echoes in the tunnel is so eerily beautiful that I think I could have watched it for about 45 minutes. But, the idea wears thin pretty quickly and ultimately doesn't bear very clear thematic fruit. There are some potentially provocative ideas in this movie but they are not executed with much coherence.

Loved all the stuff related to the husband who might have committed suicide or might have died of an accident, though. Garland is really good with such flashback scenes, one of the strengths of the far more successful Annihilation. 

No I was not eaten by a smile monster

Blog inspiration comes and goes.

I posted eight days out of nine from September 20th to September 28th, and then another four days in a row from October 2nd to 5th. Since then, only three posts, and none in six days running now. 

Well, I still haven't thought of anything to write about today, except this.

I might as well not even write anything until I actually have something to write about, but since my last post was about a horror movie in which a smiling entity slowly takes over your life, I thought it was worth letting you know the same fate had not befallen me.

I mean, it is October, the month when you can believe anything.

It smiles

WARNING: Smile spoilers to follow. 

Smile was definitely a good movie for me to catch, even with other priorities like Amsterdam waiting unseen, due to the sort of disappointing start I've gotten to October horror viewing. To wit, I've started off with a new horror comedy that was only so-so (My Best Friend's Exorcism); a revisit of a 2020 horror I'd loved, but didn't hold up on second viewing (Nocturne); and Rob Zombie's 2007 version of Halloween, which was tedious and not at all scary.

Smile was not all I had hoped it to be either, though. That's largely because I liked it better the first time, when it was called It Follows.

If you don't know the premise of the movie, it's that there's a contagious entity that ends up killing the person it inhabits. It is passed from person to person when the first person kills him or herself, and the second person witnesses it. That person starts freaking out and seeing creepy smiling figures wherever they go, and within a week's time, they become the creepy smiling figure at the moment of their own suicide, which is witnessed by the next person in the chain. And so on. And so forth.

It's not a sexually transmitted demon as in the David Robert Mitchell film, but it's close enough. 

The similarities don't end there though. Both films:

1) Have people who are always explaining the rules of how it works.

2) Reveal to us that the figure can come in any form, either a stranger or someone you know, maybe even someone long dead.

3) Suggest that the only way to rid yourself of the curse is to pass it on to someone else.

The means of passing it in Smile is to kill someone else, in front of a witness of course. Because then the witness receives the curse without its previous host having to end their own life. 

This is not to say I didn't enjoy Smile, just that it's not the groundbreaker it might think it is. In fact, it's rather obviously not that groundbreaker. 

Some other Smile thoughts:

1) There are a couple really good jump scares in this movie, but the single creepiest moment is when the protagonist sees a shadowy figure of the girl who committed suicide in front of her earlier that day, in the dark of her kitchen, with only the smile peering through like the Cheshire Cat. 

2) That protagonist is played by Sosie Bacon, the daughter of Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick. I had never seen her before. I didn't think she was quite charismatic enough.

3) Some actors are better with the creepy smile than others. You really want the eyes to be cavernous and dead, and some people just don't have the face for it.

4) The ending is, in some people's mind, a bit of a shocker, but if actually sort of reminded me of a much better horror movie from 2021 that I loved -- though to avoid spoilers for that movie, I won't mention it here.  

See it, but don't expect it to make your Halloween season, if you've gotten off to a similar lethargic start as I have. 

Why I'll probably skip the Hunter Biden movie

You probably read that post subject and thought "The real question is, why would you even consider seeing it in the first place?"

Perverse fascination for one. 

But I have a history of watching movies outside my comfort zone -- waaaay outside my comfort zone -- just to prove that I don't have a comfort zone.  

As a critic, I like to see a cross-section of all the available movies out there, regardless of my personal interests or predilections, which is what a critic should do. If a critic just picks and chooses, he or she is limiting the scope of the movies he or she could recommend, as well as pan. 

In the past this has led me to watch -- I think only one, but maybe more -- Dinesh D'Souza's cinematic output. I know for sure I saw 2016: Obama's America. (Yeah, just checked, that's the only one -- which is weird because it was his first one, which means I couldn't have heard of him and decided it was time to reckon with his propaganda.) I also watched the right-wing An American Carol, an extended lambasting of Michael Moore, and have several times willingly sat down to watch movies that Kirk Cameron starred in. There's actually one of those I really like.

Dana Stevens did her critic's duty by watching My Son Hunter, the Breitbart-produced imagining of scandals involving the younger Biden behind closed doors. Probably some of it is based on fact. Probably most of it isn't. I know they make Joe Biden look like a monster, naturally. Anything not to get him reelected in 2024. 

Interestingly, this film is directed by Robert Davi, who appeared in such 80s movies as The Goonies and Die Hard, and then became a raging conservative, if he wasn't already. Gina Carano is one of the stars. You know, the one who made a big stink after Disney fired her from The Mandalorian for being an ignorant asshole. Pretty soft landing spot here. 

The Slate film critic and Slate Culture Gabfest co-host then wrote a piece entitled "I Watched the Hunter Biden Movie So You Don't Have To," a title she claims was not her own choice -- and, implicitly, a sentiment she sort of resented. Even a critic writing for a liberal organization like Slate doesn't want to be accused of prejudging a movie by attributing certain assumed viewpoints to her readers.

Of the three panelists on Dana's podcast, only one of them was willing to really drag the film, that being Stephen Metcalf. Though even he agreed that the film makes unusual gestures toward humanizing Hunter, if only to make his father look all the worse for corruptly manipulating him. 

When I thought there was no chance the movie would be worth more than used toilet paper, I thought it might be worth watching for a laugh. Now that I know that it does aim for some nuance, and maybe even achieves it, I think I'm out. 

There are two options here, and neither of them are really palatable when it comes to my year-end rankings:

1) I hate it. I rank it at or near the bottom of my 2022 movies. I try to argue to myself that it's the inferior filmmaking that earns it this position, or the dissemination of false truths related to the 2020 election that I think are actually damaging to society, and not just because I disagree with it fundamentally on a political level. Knowing that Hunter Biden might be depicted as something of a tragic figure, and not the embodiment of evil, lessens the likelihood of either of the first two. And then I am just left with shunting a movie to the bottom of my list as an act of political resistance, which is not a great look for a critic.

2) I like it, and then I have to explain to people not only why I watched this propaganda produced by an evil alt-right news organization, but why it is in the upper half of my year-end list. 

Then the problem is, the very act of viewing it -- paying for it since I know it's not going to be on one of my streamers -- is an act of endorsement. I have to put $4.99 in Breitbart's pocket and implicitly say to them "Yes, more please."

Perhaps I have already paid my due diligence to traditional conservative values by watching Last Seen Alive, the awful Gerard Butler vehicle I made fun of earlier this year because its poster made Butler look like a frightened old man. I picked that up as a 99 cent rental and watched it Wednesday night. I don't specifically know that this was made by conservatives nor that Butler would endorse their viewpoints, but I do know it peddles retrograde fantasies involving kidnapped wives and the men who come to save them. In fact, I toyed with writing a post called "The retrograde fantasy of the kidnapped wife." I'll just restrict my thoughts to this here paragraph instead. 

That movie is -- as My Son Hunter would hopefully be, on its own merits or lack thereof -- near the bottom of my chart as things stand now. Maybe that's all the political diversification I need in 2022.

Besides, I don't want to disappoint Dana. She watched the movie so I didn't have to. 

All is forgiven, Olivia

For some time now I have been trying to figure out how to write about the whole fracas involving Olivia Wilde that we have known about for a couple years, which has just gotten more intense with the press leading up to the release of Don't Worry Darling.

The narrative that I probably all too easily believed was that Wilde had cheated on poor Jason Sudeikis with Harry Styles, a crime I considered all the worse because I did not consider Styles a person of substance. Yes pop stars can graduate into beloved movie stars -- for me the obvious example is Justin Timberlake -- but I wasn't ready to believe that about Styles yet. Instead I believed that he was a frivolous homewrecker. At one point I wanted to write a post about how annoyed I was when I first heard his song "As It Was," which was introduced by him on the local radio station, in a prerecorded spot, as "my new hit single." If a single is new, how do you even know it's going to be a hit? (Well, now the song is breaking records for weeks at #1 on the charts, so I guess the joke is on me.)

That seemed like a safer approach than the dangerous tack of criticizing Wilde, since it's very easy for this sort of thing to cross over into the (unintentional) appearance of misogyny. We've just come off a major he said/she said event involving Johnny Depp and Amber Heard in which Heard was the clear loser. I never got so deep into that one to figure out if this was the just outcome, but I did find myself again too easily believing the negative actions and motivations ascribed to her. I think they're probably both just assholes.

Is Olivia Wilde that kind of asshole? She might be. But just because she prompted Sudeikis to pour out his heartbreak in Ted Lasso, which became one of the biggest TV hits of the past few years, doesn't make it so. In fact, more recent revelations -- or revelations I learned of more recently, anyway -- that Sudeikis served her while she was speaking on a panel make it seem like no, maybe he's the asshole, and maybe he's the only asshole in that former relationship. I also learned that maybe the timelines didn't line up and Wilde actually got together with Styles after she ended things with Sudeikis.

But then all the terrible press about Don't Worry Darling started to come out. I learned of it sort of belatedly. I don't need to rehash it here, but involves alleged screaming matches, a desperate phone call to Shia LaBeouf recorded on video, and what we now know of as Spitgate -- another black mark against Styles.

This made it easier to believe that no, maybe indeed Wilde was the trainwreck, and maybe indeed she had made an epic misfire that would have us all laughing in a sort of rich schadenfreude. The first review I heard quoted about this movie was that it said something along the lines of "Worry, darling."

And then I saw the movie last night.

Wow. Just wow.

That's a good wow. That's an amazing wow. The movie floored me. 

I could have written a review twice this length with all the things I wanted to say about it, but I had already exceeded by nearly 200 words my rough guideline of sticking to around 1,000. And because I have other things to do today, I won't give you a sort of second review of it using slightly different words. Instead I will just link the review. You can find it here. 

I'm not sure if artistic success excuses bad behavior, but then again, I'm not even sure now that Olivia Wilde was guilty of bad behavior. I tend to only get the gist of these stories before forming conclusions. I should probably research them more deeply, especially if my conclusions are going to be aired out in a public forum like a blog, but I'm not the kind who follows my prurient interests down big rabbit holes. It's too close to being a consumer of tabloid newspapers in the old days, and I have my standards.

But even if I never actually raked Olivia Wilde -- or Harry Styles, who's very good in the film -- over the coals on this blog, I can certainly forgive them on it. I can forgive them for the things I thought about them, even if some of them are true, when they make a movie like this. 

And yes, I'm ready for a period of several months leading up to the end of the year in which I find myself defending a movie other people seem to hate. I can't pretend to understand those people any more than I can pretend to understand what really went on with Olivia Wilde and Jason Sudeikis and Harry Styles ... and Florence Pugh and Shia LaBeouf and Chris Pine while we're at it. I can only understand what's in my own mind, which I said in my review:

This might just be a masterpiece.

Settling the Scorsese: The Age of Innocence

This is the fifth in my 2022 bi-monthly series in which I finish the Martin Scorsese narrative features that I haven't yet seen. 

However the previous four films in this series went -- and there was finally one I liked in August -- I knew that I probably had a treat in store come October.

I've read Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence, and by that I mean I listened to an unabridged audio book of it back in 2012, when I was commuting between the San Fernando Valley and my office in El Segundo, which regularly took the better part of an hour. You can have your own definition of reading if you want, but if I listen to every word of a book I consider myself to have read it.

And I loved it. I got caught up in Wharton's writing and in the wistful romance at the film's core, plus in how it resolved itself. We've all had an ache for a person we could not have because it conflicted with our values, or some other part of our reality. Wharton's novel captures that melancholy perfectly, and then some.

And so does Scorsese's film, I'm glad to report. 

Yes I really liked The Age of Innocence, but I'm trying to decide how much of that credit to give to the film, and how much to give to the source material. 

If I had not read the book, I'd just be like "Great film, 4.5 stars." Since I've read the book, I might instead be like "Great film, 4 stars." (I still haven't entered my star rating on Letterboxd as I try to work this out.) 

I'll talk about the things the film does well as a film, but first, a little plot synopsis.

It's New York high society of 1870. Daniel Day-Lewis' character, Newland Archer, is from one powerful family, and he's betrothed to a young woman from another powerful family, May Welland, played by Winona Ryder. Another relation of the Wellands is the Countess Ellen Oleska (Michelle Pfeiffer), whose Polish count husband she has left back in Poland due to his philandering and other disgraceful behavior. Because society tends to shun women who walk out on their marriages, she is having trouble being received in polite New York society upon her return, though with the help of May, Newland and their various other family, friends and acquaintances, she starts to make headway as a woman living on her own in the city in which she was raised as a child.

Newland is brought into greater acquaintance with the countess when his legal expertise is called upon to advise her in the matter of her desired divorce from her husband. A bit of a proto feminist, Newland starts to be taken in by the countess and her poignant fight for her own freedom -- a largely symbolic fight since she already enjoys the freedom of being an ocean away from her husband, possibly never to see him again. As his admiration turns into attraction, and the attraction becomes mutual, Newland pushes for a shorter engagement to May, feeling like being married will answer the question of his split attentions. It isn't as simple as that for any of them, including May, who rightly suspects his reasons for hastening the marriage, even though he denies them and even though she feigns believing what he says.

I'm not sure why The Age of Innocence struck me more profoundly than other stories about star-crossed lovers. I feel like the sort of romantic period of American history, combined with Wharton's splendid writing, could be the reason. Though there are a lot of people who write splendidly and a lot of periods of history that are romantic in their way.

I suppose it captures in a particularly poignant way that feeling of being in a relationship, a relationship that you really value, while also feeling your heart pulled in another direction. It's something everyone has experienced at some point in their lives, and it creates an extraordinary sense of tumult in a person's mind. I think Wharton's novel really captures that tumult.

We see that most in this film in Day-Lewis' performance, the small changes in his expression at the receipt of new information, the struggle to produce a facade of ease for his wife, when he feels anything but ease. Although the attraction between Newland and the countess is not based on anything hugely dramatic, such as an intense mutual experience, we believe its development and we believe that these kindred spirits would reach out to each other in a society that doesn't think the way they do.

It's clear why Scorsese was drawn to the material, and would become even more clear in the context of Gangs of New York nearly ten years later. Although his film career was forged in modern-day New York, Scorsese yearns for an understanding of the city that dates back hundreds of years, or 120 years in this case. The sets have been magnificently created and lovingly detailed, and Scorsese's camera takes in every detail. It may be no surprise that coming off of Goodfellas, whose Copa tracking shot is one of its most famous components, Scorsese would provide a similar tracking shot here, through a mansion during a ball. We get acquainted with the players in this society just as we got acquainted with the mobsters at the Copa.

He also uses a trick that I've seen before, that I remember from films like Bram Stoker's Dracula and Moulin Rouge!, where there's a soft focus "spotlight" of sorts drawn around two characters, to isolate them from the hubbub around. In this case it's between, of course, our two romantic leads at the opera. There's a classic feel to it, and the cinematography here resembles something from maybe two decades earlier. I couldn't help but think of something like Barry Lyndon.

Scorsese's Christian themes are, fortunately, not foregrounded here, though I assume they're lurking somewhere in the background that I didn't specifically notice.

I was compelled to look for a thing that I always heard about The Age of Innocence, which is that there is a careless modern-day wrist watch in one of the shots, or something of that nature. But googling it now, I see I must have confused this with another film because I can't see anything about it. 

In summary this is an extremely handsome and well-acted film, my favorite in the series so far, but maybe not something that I expect to dwell on in the coming weeks -- even as much as I love the themes it addresses. Whether it's because Scorsese isn't the perfect match for the material, or just that his specific interests don't bring more out of it than what is native to the source material itself, I'm not sure. Hey, I shouldn't have to be arguing myself into thinking it's Great, when many films are merely great. This is one of those films.

I'll wrap up in December with Kundun, assuming I find a place to get my hands on it. The pickings are slim right now on that front. 

Audient Bollywood: 3 Idiots

This is the 10th in my 2022 series Audient Bollywood, in which I better familiarize myself with Bollywood filmmaking.

When I first came across the title 3 Idiots (2009) a couple years back, I had two immediate thoughts:

1) "Huh, I guess the Indians make lowbrow comedies, just like we do."

2) "But they still make them nearly three hours long."

I was right about one of those two things.

Although 3 Idiots does indeed contain some puerile humor -- a guy gets an electrical jolt when he pisses on a conductor, for example, and there's a lot of pants dropping and spanking of the exposed rears that result -- my first tipoff that it wasn't most appropriately defined as a "lowbrow comedy" was that "comedy" isn't even one of its genre assignments on Netflix. 

I'd figure whoever was assigning genres on Netflix would have just thrown "comedy" in there based on this poster, but instead, the genres are "social issue dramas," "movies based on books" and "Indian." Then there's the section that says "This movie is," and for 3 Idiots the moods are considered to be "sentimental, irreverent, emotional."

It was almost enough to make me balk at my choice when I fired it up on Saturday afternoon. In realizing I only have three movies remaining in this series, I've wanted to utilize those slots for specific purposes, one of which was to watch a straight comedy -- something that maybe the Indian version of the Farrelly brothers would make. If 3 Idiots wasn't going to be that, should I just pass it up for something else that I otherwise won't fit in, like an LGBTQI+ movie?

But I trusted the implied tone of that poster and went forward with the choice, and boy am I glad I did. 3 Idiots gets in all those tones, and the comedy too.

The three idiots of the title are engineering students at a top university devoted to that pursuit, and one of them is played by Aamir Khan, who is the star of last month's Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India. (He's the one in the center, with the orange shirt.) The movie is told from the perspective of ten years on, when a rival (not pictured) tries to hold Rancho (Khan) to an agreement he made to return to this rooftop meeting spot in a decade's time to see who was more successful. See, the rival (Chatur) believed that constant studying, and periodic backstabbing, was the path to success, while Rancho favored questioning the system that places so much pressure on its students, and outside the box thinking. But Rancho has not been seen since graduation.

The film is a bait and switch in the best of ways. We are indeed set up for a broad comedy when Farhan (R. Madhavan, the idiot on the right) gets a call from Chatur (Omi Vaidya) just as his plane is taking off, stating that Chatur has found Rancho. Farhan fakes a medical emergency just so the plane will land and he can hurry off to meet Chatur. Similarly, Raju (Sharman Josi, left idiot) gets roused from bed by Chatur's phone call, and leaves the house without wearing shoes or pants. 

What follows, though, is a sometimes sobering consideration of how academic pressures, and the pressures to make one's parents proud, can lead these students down dark paths. There's one suicide within the flashback story we follow for most of the time, which runs through their four years at the university; there's another attempted suicide; and there's a third suicide referred to before the events of the story. The shrewd adjacency of the film's primary two tones is highlighted during one particular dance number -- I believe it was called "All Is Well," which is Rancho's mantra -- that is very cheery ad high energy, though it ends with a drone the students built rising up to the outside of a classmate's window, where we see him having hanged himself. It's a devastating choice by director Rajkumar Hirani, highlighting the fact that for these driven engineering students, indeed all is not well.

This classmate had asked the school's director, Dr. Viru Sahastrabudde (Boman Irani), for an extension on a key project, since his father had recently had a stroke. "I can give you sympathy but I cannot give you an extension," he barks. There's a reason the students have nicknamed this man "Virus."

3 Idiots has it all ways, and the extraordinary length of 2:43 -- extraordinary for a "comedy" if not for a Bollywood film -- allows us to really get to know these characters and understand their particular arcs. Farhan is trying to make good on the sacrifices his family made for him, giving him the house's only air conditioner so he could sleep well and study, and forgoing a car just to pay for his education. But he really wants to be a photographer. Raju actually does want to be an engineer, but he's having difficult with the pressure -- and he knows his family, including his very sickly father, is relying on his education to raise them out of poverty. Rancho is the mystery, the inspirational leader, the manic pixie dream boy, though we eventually learn why he disappeared after university and where he is now. The generous time spent with the characters almost comes to resemble what you would get over the course of a season of a streaming comedy, maybe something like Never Have I Ever -- though the fact that both are about the Indian experience is strictly coincidental in this comparison.

And of course it is a Bollywood film in all the ways I have come to expect and love over the course of this series. There are about a half dozen song and dance numbers, the most memorable of which takes place in the students' shower as they are covered in soap. And of course there is a love story between Rancho and Pia (Kareena Kapoor), who is the daughter of the director -- naturally.

The successful exploration of its social message about students under pressure, which never feels too heavy handed, is what really puts the cherry on top of a very entertaining film. It never gets weighed down by these considerations, nor does it make light of them or short change them. The end result was one of my favorite films in the series so far.

Only two installments left of Audient Bollywood. I'll miss it when it's gone -- which of course only means that I'll be more inclined to keep watching, just for pleasure. That's the goal of any series I do.

The best way to talk about diverse casting is not to talk about it

It was only two years ago when The Personal History of David Copperfield was released. It was during an early pandemic lull in June, when we Victorians thought we might try to sneak back out and see a few movies. The cinemas had tentatively reopened after the first wave of COVID. They were on the verge of closing again for a much longer period of time, but while they were open, Copperfield was one of two movies I snuck out and saw.

The significance of this was that it was one of the first times I remembered seeing a period piece in which the ethnicity of the performers was entirely disregarded in the casting decisions. Victorian England (different Victorian) was, in reality, composed exclusively of white people, but the cinematic depictions of it needn't be. Not only was there Indian Dev Patel in the lead role, but the supporting cast had as many Blacks as it had whites, and at least one Asian. 

It was, of course, not the first instance of casting without regard for race. As just one example that comes to mind, it was as long ago as 1993 that Denzel Washington appeared in Kenneth Branagh's Much Ado About Nothing, though that would have hardly been the first instance either. Oh, Black people got to appear in Shakespeare, but it was usually as Othello.

Even though this sort of casting has continued in the 30 years since then, it has largely been of the token variety. We all know this. The Personal History of David Copperfield was the first time I remembered this sort of thing not seeming like tokenism.

It's crazy that that was only two years ago, because nowadays it is simply not tenable to make a movie, or a TV show, that does not have a significant percentage of its cast representing diverse ethnic backgrounds. That goes for any sort of film, though you might notice it more in a period piece because it more strikingly cuts against what you know to have been the ethnicity of the characters during the time period being depicted.

Fans of Game of Thrones and Lord of the Rings have certainly noticed it.

I've been fortunate not to have been too exposed to this, since I don't spend any time on reddit or other channels where fans can air their grievances. Nor have I seen either The House of the Dragon nor The Rings of Power. I do know, however, that there is diverse casting in both projects, and that some percentage -- maybe even a significant percentage -- of the fan base is not too happy about it.

The first time I encountered this was related to The Rings of Power. Although I don't hang out on reddit, I do get email notifications from Quora, having looked up something on there once and unwittingly become a subscriber to these notifications. One guy was complaining about the casting of Black elf characters, going into some deep mythology about skin tones in Tolkien and how there's an opportunity to cast Black actors as some certain race of mythological creatures who were known to be Black. I immediately downvoted the article. I hope others have too.

I should have assumed the same thing was happening with House of the Dragon, and indeed, it is. An ad for the podcast Beyond Black History plays during inning breaks when I listen to baseball games, and the host teased one upcoming topic about why Game of Thrones fans can't accept a Black Targaryen. 

Sigh.

Without listing all the reasons the arguments of these haters are ignorant -- you already know those reasons -- I thought instead I would address my own approach to talking about diverse skin colors in the movies I review:

I don't.

Oh, I did back when The Personal History of David Copperfield came out. Here is what I wrote at the time:

However, there is one major step forward – if not for Iannucci himself, then certainly for society – which makes The Personal History of David Copperfield worth not only watching, but also celebrating. And that is the film’s joyous embrace of race-blind casting. While other films content themselves making token gestures in this regard, Iannucci jumps in whole hog.

In the title role, Dev Patel is of Indian descent. His love interest, Agnes, is played by Rosalind Eleazar, whose father is Ghanian. Her father in the film is played by Benedict Wong, a Brit of Chinese descent. If I don’t go on listing, it’s only because there are too many more examples to count. The effect is to be watching a multiplicity of cultural backgrounds in every composition of three or more characters, as the film cheerfully mirrors an idealised version of our modern society. Whereas Iannucci’s usual cynicism is missed from some parts of the film, its absence here is most welcome.

That perspective has held up over the past two years. I'm proud of what I wrote back then, at that cultural moment.

However, now I write nothing, and I think that's better.

Here are the problems with mentioning diverse casting:

1) At best, you run the risk of sounding condescending, or simply of virtual signaling. "Black people get to play roles that used to always be played by white people. Good for them." You risk sounding like you are patting someone on the head.

2) At worst, you look racist, if you stumble into an accidental criticism of the choice -- or especially an intentional criticism of the choice. "In the novel, the author describes the snow white skin of the protagonist, a detail that tends to be lost when they cast a Peruvian actress in the role." I think most of us would know to stay away from this, but not all of us.

3) The whole point of diverse casting is that eventually, one day, we are supposed to not notice it.

As critics, the least we can do is help that day arrive sooner. 

It's not like I don't notice it. Oh I notice it. Every time. 

But what purpose does it serve for me to draw attention to the fact that Cynthia Erivo, who plays the blue fairy in Disney's terrible Pinocchio remake, is Black? Even if I am trying to credit Disney for its good sense, I've already set back the cause by devoting 25 words to it. If the reader knows that Cynthia Erivo is Black, they will conclude that Disney has paid attention to diverse casting and they will either reward Disney or punish Disney for it in their own head. (The latter is not a group of people I'd really want to hang out with, though.) 

Besides, I don't think any critic needs to congratulate a studio for making a decision that is most in line with current righteous thinking, and thereby is not the riskiest decision they could make, but rather, the safest. 

So instead, in my plot synopsis portion of the review, I just put Erivo's name in parenthesis next to the character name, and made no further mention of her in the rest of the review. (She appears only in that one scene and doesn't ultimately play much of a role in the success or failure of the film.)

Ditto for the diverse casting in Bodies Bodies Bodies. Ditto for the diverse casting in Lou. Ditto for the diverse casting in Persuasion, which is probably the most direct corollary to David Copperfield. Since my reviews have pictures with them, and since these diverse cast members usually appear in those pictures, readers can figure it out for themselves if they care about it at all.

Neither do I want some sort of medal for telling you that I no longer mention diverse casting in my reviews. I just want you to, maybe, if you also write reviews or discuss entertainment online in any fashion, consider following my lead. (Nor do I actually think I am a "leader" here, just to be clear.)

The great thing about the prevalence of diverse casting is that, if I myself am to be taken as evidence, it has become commonplace enough to accelerate the very thing it is trying to accomplish. If I were to mention it every time it happened, I'd be writing about it in every review, and that would not serve a purpose for anybody. In reality, it is not, or should not be, any significant factor in why a film does or does not work. And tackling this core question is what you're supposed to spend your entire review doing. 

There is one exception to this rule: if the film itself talks about it. If the diverse skin tones of the cast is text within the film -- something it openly grapples with, something that contributes significantly to the themes being discussed -- then yes, of course, talk about it. You'd be wrong not to.

But it the film doesn't care what color the characters' skin is, why should you?