The ideal movie to watch while having a tooth extracted

No, this is not a rip on the quality of the new Christmas movie -- probably one of a dozen new Christmas movies -- released by Netflix.

It's actually what they put on while extracting my tooth.

Some background is required here.

Back in July, my dentist told me it was probably time to extract my most wickedly misbehaving tooth, which has caused me problems throughout my life. It has a crown and it got a root canal more than 20 years ago, possibly closer to 30. I really don't remember because I am one of countless average citizens who don't keep close track of their dental history. Anyway, its partner on the bottom row has already been extracted, so it wasn't even doing any chomping. It was just causing me pain, or had the potential to anyway. 

I was going to the U.S. at the end of the month, and she told me it was fine to wait until I returned. Naturally, I did not schedule that appointment when I got back -- the past six months have been a perpetual state of life admin, and I didn't want to add anything to that list if I wasn't being forced to.

On Friday night, my hand started to be forced.

I had to take some strong aspirin that afternoon after work -- too strong, probably, as I spent the rest of that day in a daze. I managed through Saturday without too many problems but on Sunday it became a real issue. While my older son was eating popcorn at the movies, I was popping aspirin. Maybe that's why I didn't particularly care for Strange World.

My intention was to make an appointment on Monday, but there were no appointments available that day, so I set up the appointment for Tuesday at 10:30. Just as I was preparing to leave, the dentist's office called me and said that the dentist had to stay home with a sick child, so all her appointments were cancelled that day. I took the next available appointment, today at 4:45.

Fortunately, this pain seems to be less of a problem during the day, so I worked both Monday and Tuesday without any major issues. But Tuesday night was hell. I needed more of that really strong stuff to get to sleep, then woke up at 4:30 with no more of the strong stuff left. I moved down to the couch but I still couldn't get back to sleep. I watched another episode of The Last Dance on Netflix (finally making my way through it about a year after everybody else), and had no idea how I was going to make it through until 4:45. At this point I knew work for the day was out of the question.

As I was walking home from dropping my son off at school, I got a call that the dentist had a cancellation and would I be able to come in at 10 a.m. instead.

Would I ever.

Now, this dentist's office has something I've never seen before: a TV on the ceiling. Not high on the wall facing down on the room at an angle, but actually on the ceiling, so you have a perfect view of it when you're lying back in a fully reclined position. That is, unless there's the head of a dentist bobbing in and out of your view as they go to work on you.

At first, there was some news program on, with closed captions allowing me to sort of follow it. This was fine with me. I was not planning to be here any longer than it took to pull out this tooth.

But as they were actually going to start numbing me up and working on me, the hygienist asked if I wanted to watch something on Netflix. I never want to start something unless I'm going to finish it, so I told her the current show was fine, but she either didn't hear me or assumed I was just choosing the option that was easier for her. 

So as she started to put it on, I figured I ought to at least decide something I could watch for a few minutes with some interest while not worrying about finishing it later. I decided on Is It Cake? Why not.

However, she never asked what I wanted to watch. She just put on Christmas With You, the latest in what I assume is a long line of Christmas movies starring Freddie Prinze Jr. Who is looking a lot more like Freddie Prinze Sr. nowadays.

I have to assume there was nothing premeditated about this choice. It was probably just the first thing suggested on their Netflix home page.

I watched enough of it (about seven minutes) to momentarily ask myself if I ought to finish it when I got home, but given all the movies I want to see that are a priority for me this time of year, I decided not to worry about it.

Of course, instead of one of those, I actually watched the 2020 drama Pieces of a Woman as I lay convalescing on the couch.

Unfortunately, I won't know until later if the tooth she extracted was actually what was causing the pain. Since it was a generalized pain in that part of the mouth, not something that could be specifically tied to one single tooth, we had to do the extraction on blind faith, knowing we probably needed to do it anyway.

Once some of the pain from the extraction, which is not too bad right now, wears off, I'll be able to see if I think we got it, or if it's going to be another miserable night made only slightly better by over-the-counter drugs.

Actress vs. the actress

I saw a funny grammatical choice in a Quora question and I decided it was worth making a whole post about it.

The question was "What made the actress Carrie Fisher unhappy?"

In typical Quora fashion, this question is 

a) awkwardly phrased, but more specifically

b) phrased in such a way as to provide a question for an answer they already had, kind of like Jeopardy! or Johnny Carson's old Carnac routine.

But it's the definite article I'm focusing on today.

This question would be ten percent better as "What made actress Carrie Fisher unhappy?" and 20 percent better as "What made Carrie Fisher unhappy?"

My argument is that Carrie Fisher is such a household name that you don't have to specify that she's an actress. We all know that. Even if she's not a name the youngest people immediately learn (since she's, you know, no longer alive, and probably wouldn't be working regularly if she were), Star Wars is generally a movie they are exposed to early on, and Fisher immediately stands out for her star power. But, this could just be a generational thing so let's move on to my actual argument.

Which has to do with the difference between "the actress" and "actress."

"Actress Carrie Fisher" means "in case you can think of another famous Carrie Fisher, I'm talking about the one who was an actress."

"The actress Carrie Fisher" means "if you dig deep into the recesses of your brain, you may remember that there was once an actress named Carrie Fisher."

What a difference a "the" can make.

And I'm not even sure I can really explain why this difference arises from the two different phrasings. To a person who doesn't analyze grammar the way I do, they may strike a person as the same thing. It's a "know it when you see it" kind of thing.

Unfortunately, the people on Quora rarely know anything when they see anything.

Did anyone else find Not Okay homophobic?

I first saw this poster for Not Okay in America, and always liked the poster. It led me to imagine a lot of possibilities for what the movie might be about. 

What it was actually about was pretty disappointing, but more on that later.

The poster alone was probably responsible for putting it on my docket on Thursday night, when I got a late start on trying to watch a movie and realized that my recently acquired iTunes rental of Tar was 158 minutes long. (The movie was 158 minutes long -- the rental was 30 days, then 48 hours once I started watching.)

**Spoilers for Not Okay.**

I'll start out by saying that almost every character in this movie is disagreeable in some way or another. I can think of only two, possibly three, or maybe a fourth character who doesn't make you want to slap them at some point during the movie. (Actually, the constantly crying dad is pretty slappable, even if his other traits are innocuous enough.)

But the gay characters are particularly disagreeable.

Let's start out by establishing our protagonist. Danni Sanders (Zoey Deutsch) is a hapless flibbertigibbet who is a photo editor at online culture magazine Depravity, but desperately longs to be a writer. Unfortunately, she has no clue. She submits an article called "Why Am I So Sad" that includes what she considers to be valid reasons for sadness, like living in Bushwick (Brooklyn) and having missed 9/11 because her family was on a cruise. I think you can already see the broadness of Not Okay. Danni is forever walking a line between just pitiable and actually toxic. 

However, this is our protagonist, and in the tradition of other flawed protagonists, she means well and acts out of insecurity/awkwardness more than malice.

That leaves the malice up for grabs, and the gay characters snatch it.

One more thing about Danni before we get to them. A text at the beginning gives a "humorous" twist on a trigger warning, letting us know that in addition to flashing lights, the movie has an unlikable female protagonist. This does end up being true. See, to get attention, Danni posts a bunch of pictures on Insta of supposedly being in Paris for a writer's workshop -- a "harmless" ruse that ends up becoming a problem for her when the actual Paris is rocked by a series of terrorist bombings. Danni has to explain her own safety and regale concerned followers with the experiences she's just been through. Instead of coming clean, Danni leans in to the attention and concocts a big survivor story that snowballs, goes viral, and ultimately unravels in a way familiar to anyone who's seen a movie about a character who gets in over their head on a "harmless" lie.

At the point of her first interaction with the two gay people who work with her, though, she's just insecure and awkward.

First we meet Harper (Nadia Alexander), a kiss-ass who shows up at the door of Danni's editor's office moments after said editor has chewed Danni out for the tone deaf story she submitted. By contrast, the editor (also a wicked caricature) heaps praise on Harper, who gloats superciliously and in a manner that seems specifically directed at Danni. She's the antagonist in this film in the strictest literary sense, in that she most directly counteracts the desires of the protagonist. This is not, of course, to say that anything she's guilty of is worse than anything Danni is guilty of.

A scene or two later, we see the two of them riding in an elevator alongside Larson (Dash Perry), another openly gay staffer at the magazine. Larson is initially friendly enough with Danni, explaining that he and Harper are going to "queer bowling" -- but understandably stiffens when Danni meets that with a cringey appropriation of "Yassss queen!" Fair enough. He quickly shuts her down when she makes an overture toward attending, confirming the event is only for people who identify as gay. After a few more awkward moments by Danni, she exits the elevator ahead of them and Harper says "I hate straight people." (I might be conflating this with another scene, but Harper definitely says she hates straight people at one point.) 

Larson never demonstrates anything other than justifiable annoyance with Danni, but he also shows no spine. Once she's "returned" from her trip and is telling her story to a group of eager onlookers at the Depravity offices, his superficiality emerges as he changes course and invites her to queer bowling -- so eager to sell out his own instincts about her problematic behavior in order to become a starfucker. (You might say this is compassion after Danni's ordeal, but the movie depicts him as having stars in his eyes at Danni's sudden celebrity.) Harper is also in attendance at this story, apparently also suckered by it, but we can tell from some quizzical looks that she's onto Danni.

We don't see a lot more of Larson, but Harper then proceeds to set about trying to ruin Danni -- partly out of the professional jealousy that has arisen from Danni's sudden success at Depravity, and partly out of, well, malice. (Doing a civic justice by exposing a fraud might also be a very small part of it, though she does mention how writing this story will benefit her career. Ugh.)

I might not be writing this post if it weren't for the extremely uncharitable representation of the film's third gay character, who is obviously coded as gay even if his sexuality is never mentioned. This is a talk show host played by Preston Martin, who unleashes a slew of vapid lingo as he conducts the most superficial interview ever with Danni -- cutting her off with "And that's all the time we have" before she's even gotten two sentences into her story, so they can do "goat yoga" or something. It's likely meant by writer-director Quinn Shepherd as a critique of the media in the social media age, but the way it's presented, his vapidity is intrinsically linked with his queerness.

Here's the problem with my whole argument: Shepherd herself is gay, and she's actually in a relationship with Alexander, who plays her antagonist.

Surely there is an argument to be made that being gay yourself excuses you of any accusations of homophobia. Any member of a minority group has unofficial license to skewer their own kind.

To me, though, this does not excuse you from careless filmmaking, even potentially irresponsible filmmaking. Even if I am not gay myself, I think I can sense when a movie is a bit too mean to its minority characters, whatever the minority might be. And I don't think it's being appropriative to feel offended on their behalf.

Shepherd might have helped things by including one queer character who wasn't vindictive, spineless or excessively shallow. The way she's structured the movie, the only characters who are given any depth at all are Danni and another actual survivor (of a school shooting) who has become something of an activist celebrity, played by Mia Isaac. Harper would probably be next closest, but any depth we get reflects poorly on her. When Danni asks why Harper has worked so hard to expose her, Harper's answer is "Because I don't like you."

Not great.

Sure Danni is clueless and easily led down bad paths, but when we first meet her she's friendly and it's clear she is just trying to find her place in the world. That Harper decided she doesn't like her at that point seems like excessive dumping on a person who is already her own worst enemy. 

I was surprised on Wikipedia to see that Not Okay has received "generally favorable reviews." I wonder if that has to do with what number of "sharp" critiques of our social media age those critics had seen before this one.

My classic example of this sort of movie is Ingrid Goes West, a 2017 film that made my top ten of that year. The pitfalls of "following" (i.e. online stalking) and watching others live their "best life" through Instagram are explored wickedly there. 

But if I saw Ingrid Goes West for the first time today, I'm sure it would suffer from the fact that I've seen too many other movies like this -- for example, just having seen Sissy less than a month ago. I didn't like Sissy much, and Not Okay is even worse. Even a superior example of the form like Ingrid Goes West has a tough battle to fight if the material has been done to death, which it now has.

Add in some (probably unintentional) gay bashing by a gay filmmaker, and you have a film that is, well, not okay.

One-timers I worry won't hold up

The movie Juno came up for discussion on Filmspotting in a recent episode -- an episode I was listening to on my way in to work on Wednesday -- where they were talking about great father-daughter pairings at the movies. (I'm actually wondering about the wisdom of mentioning Juno in this context nowadays, considering that Elliot Page was clearly playing a daughter in that movie, but identifies as a man now.)

They played a clip that reminded me how much I liked that movie, having named it my #3 movie of 2007. And also how the writing was specifically one of the things I liked about it, something it's easy to forget since we all turned on Diablo Cody rather quickly.

But I haven't gone back to watch Juno again, in part because I'm worried that when Rainn Wilson calls Page "home skillet," it'll seem pretty cringey. Is that reason enough not to rewatch a movie that once made my top three for a year? Almost certainly not.

So I decided to go through my Flickchart and identify other favorite movies I've seen only once to see if fears like this are holding me back there as well. For the purposes of this exercise, a "one-timer" is just as simple as it sounds: a movie I've seen only once. I'm clarifying because sometimes we use that term to describe a movie we can bear to see only once because it's so confronting or triggering, even though it may be excellent.

I'll do ten, and I'll list them in order of where they appear on my Flickchart, with the number serving as the number this movie is ranked out of 6182 films. And just to make the project slightly easier, I won't exclude Juno from the group.

173. Rushmore (1998, Wes Anderson) - This remains one of the movies it's weirdest that I've never rewatched. It took what I thought I had discovered with Wes Anderson in Bottle Rocket and absolutely crystallized it. I still think of it as one of my top few Anderson movies. However, I've also turned on Anderson enough over the years -- specifically his last film, The French Dispatch -- that I'm worried some of his later fussy quirks might spoil my so-far pristine feelings about Rushmore, since I'll be confronted with the fact that they were there all along. There's still no excuse for not watching this again, though, so I probably will. I should be further encouraged by the fact that a recent rewatch of The Royal Tenenbaums actually turned me from a Tenenbaums hater (or disliker, at least) to a Tenenbaums lover.

353. Good Night, and Good Luck. (2005, George Clooney) - This ranked even higher than Juno, ending its year as my #2 movie, behind only Hustle & Flow. I'm not so much worried that this has aged poorly as that my affection for it was inflated to begin with. The fact that it feels like a chore to potentially watch it again is a good indication of how my thoughts may have changed on it -- though it's not like I'm always stumbling across it on streaming and choosing not to watch it. 

372. Face/Off (1997, John Woo) - This is another case, as with Rushmore, of later-developed feelings about a director likely ruining a film for which I had uncomplicated affection the first time around. When I think of John Woo today, I think "That's that hack who puts doves into scenes of slow-motion gunplay, no matter how ridiculous." Yes, there are incongruous doves in the climax of the Ben Affleck vehicle Paycheck -- even though that scene takes place underground. 

378. Oldboy (2003, Park Chan-wook) - I think I really like Oldboy -- at least I'm ranking it that way on Flickchart -- but am I sure? I am not sure. I think I may have constructed a narrative here. I do remember that when I was watching it a friend's house, we were into it, but we did find some things confusing. I also remember that another friend was in the room but was not reading the subtitles, and then complained that he didn't know what was going on -- which is sort of hilarious, because obviously. I worry that if I watch this again, the fact that Park has been more hit than miss for me in the past ten years -- The Handmaiden being the exception -- will make me realize we were right to be confused about the poor storytelling the first time.

381. Juno (2007, Jason Reitman) - Home skillet. As discussed. 

422. Mr. Nobody (2009, Jaco van Dormeal) - The extremity of my positive reaction to this the first time around -- I gave it five stars on Letterboxd -- is more why I'm including it here than me secretly thinking it might not be good, and avoiding it for that reason. I'm actually not avoiding this movie per se, and have a couple times considered watching it again. But I think it slips in and out of availability on streaming, and the fact that I'm not willing to pony up to rent a movie I gave five stars suggests I think there was some excess positivity in my response. 

434. A Beautiful Mind (2001, Ron Howard) - I ranked this movie in my top ten of 2001 and remember being genuinely moved by its climax. I'm now more ashamed of the type of movie it is, and having this reaction to a movie that seemed so pointed at Oscar glory, than I am doubting that I'd tear up again at the end of a second watch. A Beautiful Mind is not in the same category of regrettable Oscar winner as Crash or Green Book, but it's not something people regularly talk about today, and there's probably a reason for that. 

485. Erin Brockovich (2000, Steven Soderbergh) - Erin Brockovich was, until recently, my highest ranked Soderbergh film -- but you also know from this post that I don't tend to rewatch any Soderbergh. Out of Sight has now gone ahead of it, Traffic is just behind it, and I've also now rewatched both Side Effects and Full Frontal, the former confirming my affection for it, the latter dropping it significantly in my estimation. When I first discovered that Brockovich was my highest ranked Soderbergh, I instantly doubted it, because (like A Beautiful Mind) of the type of film it is -- a legal drama about an unlikely crusader. Does not seem as worthy as his other output, and I haven't checked again to confirm whether it actually is. 

494. Argo (2012, Ben Affleck) - Another questionable best picture winner that made my top ten in the year of its release. I assume I would still actually like Argo, but it feels like a strange best picture winner in retrospect -- not a film anyone hates, but a film we all kind of forgot won. If you were recounting the best picture winners from the 2010's, this is the one you would forget. (You wouldn't forget Green Book, even though it's a worse movie, just because of how mad it made you when it won. Argo didn't make anybody mad. In fact, I'm not sure it inspired great love or great hatred in anybody.)

503. Away We Go (2009, Sam Mendes) - A friend of mine was the one who gave me doubts about this one. I really embraced this movie, again ranking it in my top ten for the year, but a friend had a wildly different reaction to it at the time, as I wrote about here. Apparently I have secretly wondered since then if he was always right. 

That's ten.

And yet an argument can be made that if I am ranking a movie in my top 500 on Flickchart -- Away We Go is the only one of these that (narrowly) misses that cutoff -- it's something I do really like. Or at worst, I should watch it again to ensure it deserves its lofty ranking. If it doesn't, I should begin busting it down to where it really belongs in my rankings. (A fate that befell the aforementioned Full Frontal, among other that spring to mind, such as Igby Goes Down.)

Given then I've already identified ten and it would be easy enough to come up with two more, it might make for a good monthly series one of these years -- except that I've already done something like this with what was then a weekly series in 2010, conducted over a couple months, called Double Jeopardy. At that time I subjected such films as Disney's The Kid, Click, U-Turn, Alpha Dog and Bedazzled to a new viewing to confirm my previous affection. But in none of those cases were the films ranked as highly as these are. (However, the series also helped boost two others into this rarefied air, as it made me realize my love for The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou and The Story of Us were intense enough to call them legitimate personal favorites.)

For now it's useful just to have identified this list. That way, if I have a random night where I can't figure out what to watch, and one of these titles appears before me on Netflix or Amazon, I'll remember I have this unfinished business. 

I can't let Weird go by

In continuing this past week's theme of all the 2022 movies that are still on my Letterboxd watchlist, I concluded over the weekend that some of them -- many of them? -- would just not get watched before my January 24th deadline and there was little I could do about that.

But I really don't want one of them to be Weird.

I'm at the point in my movie podcast listening where they are all now talking about Weird. And without exception, all loving it. It feels like a movie I especially need given recent conversations I've had with other cinephiles about how funny movies are in short supply these days. (No, I'm not blaming woke culture. I'm blaming risk averse studios and a lack of ideas by writers.)

If you live in the U.S., Weird is easy to watch. Sure it's on a streaming channel nobody has heard of -- The Roku Channel? -- but it's actually free to watch, so the obscurity of its platform is irrelevant. 

Here in Australia, though, we can't get The Roku Channel. Which means I can't get Weird.

Now, there's a simple solution that was once part of my standard operating procedure as an Australian viewer. Back when we first moved here in 2013, Netflix had yet to become available, though that would change within a year. Before it did become available, we continued to access our U.S. Netflix account using a VPN.

But it's been seven or eight years now since I needed to do anything like that, as the things I needed steadily became available, and the things I didn't need were easy enough to drop.

But I can't drop Weird.

Or, in any case, I don't want to.

Will I get back on the VPN bus just to watch Weird? Or will Roku find a local Australian partner to make this available to me before my ranking deadline?

I've got exactly two months to figure it out. 

I guess I'm up to speed after all

After despairing on the weekend about falling hopelessly behind on 2022 movies, I came in to work yesterday and saw this appearing on the marquee for Cinema Kino.

Having seen The Wonder last Thursday night on Netflix and She Said Monday night at the Sun in Yarraville, I have now seen all of these movies.

I can't remember the last time I looked at a marquee and had seen everything that was playing there. Now, I wouldn't be surprised if there were one or two titles that might play one time a day, meaning they don't really earn the marquee real estate. But all the movies they saw fit to showcase -- which are the movies I'm most interested in ticking off my list anyway -- are now in the "done" column for me.

As for She Said, I really liked it. I went in having heard some complaints about how the story was what you would expect, in a way that suggested it was ordinarily or unimaginatively executed, but that the performances were good. Well, I think the whole thing was good. 

You can check out my review here. 

Ghosts and goblins

Wendell & Wild was a real hit with half of my family. My younger son and I loved it; my older son and my wife were falling asleep. 

What're you going to do.

I was planning to watch this early enough after it was released to review it, sticking as I do to a policy of putting up reviews at the very latest two weeks after the Australian release date. And in the cases where I do go that long, it's usually to accommodate another writer, who is dawdling on completing their review. Wendell & Wild hit Netflix on October 28th, which is just too long ago. 

The reason I didn't review it within that timeframe? My wife came into the living room when I was five minutes in and said "Oh, I thought this was something we might watch with the kids." So I stopped, knowing that meant the death of the review. When we watch something with the kids, my wife never wants to hurry it up so it will happen as soon as I need to write the review. When I try to force it, it never has good results. (If I'd been planning carefully, it could have been part of our October 30th Halloween double feature -- but with two other 2022 movies already lined up, it was just too much.)

If I'd known how it was going to turn out, I would have roused the eight-year-old from bed, watched it that night and given it my glowing review. Now you'll just have to hear me talk about it glowingly here as a secondary outcome to why I'm writing about the movie today.

After the two (semi) haters had shuffled out of the room, I mentioned to my younger son that we should watch The Nightmare Before Christmas, another Henry Selick film, especially considering that this was the season for it. Delving further, I discovered that he might have enjoyed Wendell & Wild as much as he did in spite of the stop-motion animation, not because of it. We will definitely watch it anyway.

During my pitch I said "You'll like it, it has ghosts and goblins in it too."

Ghosts and goblins. It's a phrase that probably comes from my childhood, that people a generation younger than us don't use. But without ever having specifically thought about it before, I'm pretty sure it's a phrase that extends beyond my own house or immediate circle of influence when I was a young person. I feel like it's a general phrase we use to describe any content in any medium featuring the macabre supernatural -- in movies, anything you might watch at Halloween, more likely something directed at children.

The reason for the phrase is obvious: alliteration. And it's got to be the sound it has in common, not just the spelling. That's why we don't say "ghosts and gnomes." 

But it occurred to me for the first time last night:

There are a shit ton of movies about ghosts, but almost none about goblins. 

If you are going to consider Wikipedia a nearly exhaustive resource, which it usually is, the Wikipedia category "Goblin films" includes a mere nine titles:

The Black Cauldron
Goblin
Hellboy II: The Golden Army
Hobgoblins
Labyrinth
Scooby Doo! And the Goblin King
The Spiderwick Chronicles
Strange Magic
Troll 2

And that's not just some superficial list of only movies with "goblin" in the title. They've gone one level deeper and considered whether goblins actually appear in the story. I've seen more than half of these movies but wouldn't have remembered that goblins were in most of them. And while there are surely some missing, you wouldn't say that number would be more than a dozen or two.

The category "Ghost films" on Wikipedia?

For starters it takes you to a page with eight different subcategories, then also a flat list that currently has *copies to Excel* 526 titles on it. And you'd have to say the actual number might be higher by orders of magnitude. 

So clearly ghosts and goblins are not on equal footing here.

Of course it's easy to identify what's going on when we use that phrase. In order to make the alliteration work, we are not referring to a goblin literally as a "small, grotesque, monstrous creature that appears in the folklore of multiple European cultures." (Thanks again Wikipedia for that definition.) No, it's a catch-all term to describe ghouls, trolls, gnomes, leprechauns, gremlins, ogres, and a half-dozen others on a taxonomy of creatures who go "boogedy boo." Most people probably don't know what a goblin actually is -- a hand wave is good enough.

Well there are definitely ghosts and goblins in The Nightmare Before Christmas, and within a few weeks, we'll discover whether my son likes a movie like this because of or in spite of its animation ... or even likes it at all. (I always found this movie something less than perfectly great. I mean, did they really have to torture Santa Claus on a rack?)

I can now watch iTunes rentals on my projector - sort of*

You may recall that I met a weird outcome when I tried to watch an iTunes rental on my projector last year -- I wrote about it in this post.

Namely, there was something about the technology that kept movies played through iTunes from being visible when a projector was connected to that computer. Not all projectors, I think, just older ones -- or maybe cheaper ones. My projector was new at the end of 2020, but some projectors run in excess of $10,000 and mine was a mere fraction of that. It's much better than any projector I've owned previously, but apparently it does have its limitations.

Something has changed since September 2021, though, and now I can play them -- or maybe I misdiagnosed the problem in the first place. 

Now I can play them -- with an asterisk.

I made the discovery on Saturday night, when I had planned to use the projector in our garage to watch Kwaidan, the 1964 Japanese film by Masaki Kobayashi that presents four ghost stories over a three-hour running time. That's my draw in this month's Flickchart Friends Favorites Fiesta. The projector was still set up from when my 12-year-old and I watched a Celtics game earlier that afternoon, and my wife was going out for dinner, so I knew I'd get an early enough start to fit in all three hours. (I ended up finishing at 2:45 a.m. after multiple long "naps," which ended up leading to significant narrative confusion -- I thought there were only three stories, so I was having a really difficult time figuring out how the second half of the third story related to its first half.)

I knew as a backup I could watch this on our normal TV through AppleTV. In fact, I expected that's what would happen, given my previous difficulties with iTunes rentals on this projector. Try as I might, I could not find Kwaidan streaming through another source, not even for rental on Amazon, which makes a good option in cases like this because it's under no such technical limitations with regard to my projector.

Since I'd be starting the 48-hour viewing window regardless, on one device or the other, it made for a unique opportunity to test the iTunes problem on my projector one more time. Lo and behold, this time the movie played -- though it was clear straight away there were still weird software issues going on. 

The biggest issue was that I could not go full screen. I'd play the movie and then try various maximize options, but it never got bigger than most of the screen, always leaving a blank space on the bottom, not to mention my taskbar. I just can't watch a movie with the taskbar visible at the bottom. Too distracting.

I also tried to move the window to fill the screen better, pulling out its corners to actually alter its dimensions, but here was where the weirdest thing happened. Any attempt to move or adjust the window led to duplicating it, so there was one window playing the movie behind the other window -- and not even at the same spot in the movie. There was like a five-second difference between the two. 

There was one point where I thought I had the window in only one iteration, and it filled most of the screen in a tolerable way. But then iTunes sensed something unstable about that situation and automatically contracted it back to the original dimensions that were its preferred means of presentation. 

The solution I finally landed on was to block out part of the projector.

That's right, I got a viewing scenario that iTunes was happy with that filled the entire top of the screen, leaving a big white patch at the bottom that was the default white background of the iTunes software. Then of course the taskbar was visible at the bottom because I could never do anything about that. So I found a carboard box in my garage that was just tall enough so that if I fussed with it, I got it to sit in front of the lens in such a way as to block out all the white and the taskbar at the bottom. 

This created a small part on the lower left side of the screen that was a bit blotchy and fuzzy, but it was a very minor inconvenience and I pressed on forward through the rest of the viewing this way.

The consequence of this arrangement, though, was that the cardboard box was reflecting the projector's light onto the back wall and off to the side where I was sitting. I couldn't do anything about the back wall, but it basically just meant that the room was not as fully dark as it usually was. I got used to it pretty quickly.

I wasn't going to get used to the part reflecting out of the side and directly into my eyes. So what I did was place a ping pong paddle so it was leaning against the edge of the box and the side of my projector, blocking out the most piercing of the light.

Not ideal, but it worked in a pinch.

Since I've got you, I thought I would share my review of Kwaidan in Flickchart Friends Favorites Fiesta, as I have been doing these past few months, especially since it also contains a short narrative of the confusion that resulted from not knowing the correct number of stories in the movie:

I had a funny experience watching [Redacted]'s #2, Kwaidan (1964), that stems entirely from getting it into my head that it was comprised of three horror stories over three hours rather than four. Yes, I'd actually asked Wade earlier in the month if I could watch the four stories over multiple nights, but sometime between then and now, my mind converted that to three. And then I found an occasion to watch the whole movie in one night, as is my preference.

I watched the first two stories, "The Black Hair" and "The Woman in the Snow," with great interest and affection. I loved the simplicity of the storytelling combined with a great visual design that blended real scenery with painted backdrops in a compelling way. The eye painted in the sky in "The Woman in the Snow" is chilling, and the titular black hair gave me a good indication of where later J-horror, such as The Grudge, was born. I was really digging this and it was really reminding me of Akira Kurosawa's Dreams, which surely also took inspiration from Masaki Kobayashi's film.

But when "The Woman in the Snow" ended and the intermission came up, I got worried. How would "Hoichi the Earless," what I understood to be the final story, possibly run for the remaining more than 90 minutes? If you are going to combine a couple different stories like this, I vastly prefer they all be about the same length. Helps considerably with the pacing.

Of course at this point it was also getting late at night, meaning my head was not as clear and I was starting to have the occasional small head rolls. Suffice it to say that I missed the moment when "Hoichi the Earless" transitioned into "In a Cup of Tea," probably in part because I was a bit out of it but in part because I had no expectation that there was a fourth story coming. So then I really had a hard time figuring out how the second half of "Hoichi the Earless" related to the first half, especially since "In a Cup of Tea" also contains a story within a story, making things all the more confusing. I blamed it on bad storytelling and began mentally preparing a review talking about how much I liked the first two stories but that the third was interminable.

Of course, this morning when I looked on Wikipedia to try to get a sense of why the plot had taken such a weird turn in "Hoichi the Earless," I realized there were actually four stories. So I rewatched "In a Cup of Tea" and now I feel a lot better about the movie on the whole.

Without getting into the plots of the individual stories, I found each a mysterious delight in its own way. While I don't think any of the four stories really hit me solidly with its conclusion, I enjoyed the experience of watching immensely. Maybe it's a bit too Twilight Zone or Alfred Hitchcock Presents or Amazing Stories to expect each story to hit you with a big ironic twist at the end, and at least one of these stories does try to do that. I guess none of them stuck the landing in exactly the way I wanted them to, but it's a pretty minor complaint, and this was a really interesting watch -- and clearly a big influencer on future Japanese cinema. However, for me it pales in comparison to Kobayashi's Harakiri, which is my #139 (and was also found in this group -- thanks [Redacted]).

Here's how it entered my chart:

Kwaidan > Strike a Pose

Kwaidan > A Good Old Fashioned Orgy

Kwaidan < Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

Kwaidan > Fantasia

Kwaidan > The Emperor's Club

Kwaidan < The Sea Beast

Kwaidan > Newlyweds

Kwaidan < Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events

Kwaidan < Topsy-Turvy

Kwaidan < Tomorrow Never Dies

Kwaidan < Gaslight

Kwaidan > The Terminator

891/6182 (86%)

Thanks [Redacted]! Despite some minor complaints and confusion, obviously I got a lot out of this.

I can't even with all these movies

Cinema is dying? In what universe?

It's gotten to the point where I can't go on the internet without learning about a new movie that's coming out before the end of the year. 

A statement like that can never be anything but an exaggeration -- I'm on the internet anywhere from multiple to four dozen times a day, depending on what you consider a distinct browsing session -- but in this case it really feels close to being true.

My Letterboxd watchlist is supposed to be dwindling at this time of year, not ballooning outward toward triple digits. Remember that the watchlist no longer includes movies I've already seen, which number exactly 120 for 2022. Emancipation, whose poster I have included here, is nothing special -- it's just the latest to get added to the list. (Though I suppose, being Will Smith's first release after the Oscars, it could turn into something special, an object we will all want to gawk at.)

If I were to watch all the movies on my watchlist -- which, realistically, never comes close to happening -- I'd be well over 200 for the year. Which would be more than 30 movies higher than the record total of 170 I set last year ... which was already 19 movies higher than my previous record. 

However, I do usually get down to only movies that didn't actually get released this year after all, movies I can't access because they haven't been released in Australia yet or I don't have the right streaming service, and a dozen stray others that just get overlooked. This year, I can't see how I will have any fewer than 50 still on the list when all is said and done ... and it'll probably be more, considering that I don't think I'm anywhere near done adding to my watchlist.

You think I'm exaggerating, but I'm really not. There are currently 90 films on my watchlist. 

I assume you believe me, but just to prove I'm not lying, and to demonstrate exactly how ridiculous it's gotten, I'm going to list them for you, in reverse order of how I added them:

1. Emancipation
2. Descendant 
3. Till
4. The Son
5. Aftersun
6. Dead for a Dollar
7. Spirited
8. Hellraiser
9. Speak No Evil
10. Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon
11. Mr. Harrigan's Phone
12. Breaking
13. Bones and All
14. The Whale
15. Not Okay
16. Slumberland
17. Confess, Fletch
18. The Night of the 12th
19. Honk for Jesus, Save Your Soul
20. Master Gardener
21. Women Talking
22. Wendell & Wild
23. God's Creatures
24. Tar
25. Nanny
26. Eo
27. Weird
28. Is That Black Enough for You?
29. She Said
30. The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes
31. See How They Run
32. Goodnight Mommy
33. I Wanna Dance With Somebody
34. The People's Joker
35. Disenchanted
36. Babylon
37. Glass Onion
38. Sharp Stick
39. White Noise
40. You Won't Be Alone
41. Blaze
42. Inu-oh
43. Mad God
44. Paris, 13th District
45. Triangle of Sadness
46. Something in the Dirt
47. The Silent Twin
48. R.M.N.
49. The Pez Outlaw
50. Incredible But True
51. The Humans 
52. Emily the Criminal
53. Broker
54. Dual
55. Vengeance
56. Fire of Love
57. Dear Mr. Brody
58. Fire Island
59. Playground
60. The Fallout
61. Where Is Anne Frank?
62. Mothering Sunday
63. Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile
64. A Chiara
65. The Menu
66. Strange World
67. The Forgiven
68. We're All Going to the World's Fair
69. I Love My Dad
70. Both Sides of the Blade
71. River
72. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
73. Pinocchio (del Toro)
74. The Deer King
75. Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths
76. Poor Things
77. The Eternal Daughter
78. The End
79. The Fabelmans
80. Showing Up
81. Avatar: The Way of Water
82. The Killer
83. Asteroid City
84. Disappointment Blvd.
85. Infinity Pool
86. Good Luck to You, Leo Grande
87. Killers of the Flower Moon
88. The 355
89. Belle
90. Marcel the Shell with Shoes On

There are so many titles, I am not even going to go back through and italicize them. Do me a favor and please imagine the italics.

Before you say "Wait a minute, not all those movies are coming out in 2022," I'll say "Yes, I know." But when I added them, I thought they were. And I don't like to remove them, because I'll just have to add them back next year. So yeah, you can chop about ten titles off that list for that reason.

But that still leaves 80 for 2022, and just as I'm going through I'm noticing the films I haven't added, like one of two Claire Denis films this year, Stars at Noon. There, I've just added it. That makes 91.

And before you say "I've never even heard of a lot of those films," I'll say "Neither have I." I mean, I obviously heard them mentioned at some point during the year, which is why I added them in the first place. But many of them were movies I heard of once that have since disappeared from my or anyone else's radar. Every year has some of those too.

I still feel overwhelmed by what's left. 

Let's look only at my perceived obligations for the coming week or so. I've watched but not yet reviewed The Wonder, but I noticed the new Will Ferrell-Ryan Reynolds Christmas movie, Spirited, has also opened on AppleTV+. Then Glass Onion hits Netflix in time for Thanksgiving. But She Said is also now open in theaters. And so on. And so forth.

It's too much for one cinephile to handle.

Of course, the choice that most sane and rational people would make is just not to worry about it. See what absolutely interests you the most, and let everything else fall by the wayside. You'll see it eventually, or maybe you'll never see it, but either is okay. You can still have a definitive year-end list even if you don't see every movie that some person out there may love.

I'll try. Really I will. But I never said I was sane and rational.

What I don't get is that movies are supposed to be in decline. When we all bemoaned the pandemic-hastened closing of some big movie theater chains and historic single-screen cinemas, we seemed to believe it was the form itself that was in trouble, not just the venue in which that form was once most frequently viewed. People wanted TV that spun out over six seasons, not characters you were done with after two hours.

Today I won't ponder what has changed that. It feels a bit like year-end contemplation material. I'll save it until I need it then. 

Today I'll just stick with the glut of titles -- a glut I should want, since it indicates the health of an industry I dearly love -- that currently feels like it will bury me.

I've worked to rein in my viewing this year, both the total number of titles I see for my year-end rankings, and the total number of new movies I see in the calendar year. In the latter area I am at 242, meaning I would have to see 36 more new films in the 41 remaining days of 2022 to exceed the 277 new-to-me movies I saw in 2021. Probably won't happen because I would expect to watch at least five more movies I've seen previously before December 31st. But at this point it's clear that it won't be a significant reduction from last year. I am sure to break 270, which would still make it the fifth most movies I have ever seen in a year. (The 325 and 303 I saw in 2016 and 2015, respectively, are safe for the foreseeable future.)

I probably won't eclipse the 170 movies I ranked last year, but at this point I wouldn't rule it out. That'll take only 51 more viewings in a longer period of time than December 31st, going all the way to January 24th. 

In the past few years, my other friend who releases his year-end list and I have had to break with the Academy on revealing our lists on the same day they reveal their nominations, because those have not happened until February (last year) and March (the year before). This year, we've decided to take their January 24th release date, even though it's a few weeks after the date on which they had been revealing the nominations prior to 2021. It's close enough that it's worth restoring our previous alignment of the dates, even if it means the slog of watching as many movies as we can will carry on for most of the month. It's even a week longer than last year, when I smashed my previous record after we sort of arbitrarily chose a date of January 17th. (Which was January 16th U.S. time.)

I suppose I might end up being able to use the extra time. My dad and his wife will be visiting us in Australia from December 20th to January 20th, so at least this January 24th date clears me for a last bingeing of movies after they leave. Truth is, we'll separate from them early enough on most nights that it won't severely limit my viewing, though chances are still that I could lose two to five viewings I might ordinarily make during that time. And probably it won't be quite as easy to get out to the theater, which is usually a crucial component of the final stretch. 

In any case, the cavalcade of newly discovered titles leading up to the writing of this post has changed my thinking on an intentional viewing slowdown. Whereas I had been taking one and sometimes even two nights per week off from movies recently, I think that's probably going to stop. My cinephile lizard brain requires me to keep current, either because I'm reviewing the movies themselves or because I want to stay up to speed on the discussion. 

So as I start thinking about how to watch two new movies today, records will fall where they may. 

Looking for Richard - again

If I'd wondered why they were doing an advanced screening of Stephen Frears' The Lost King six weeks before its Australian theatrical release, well, it finally became clear when I walked out of the cinema and noticed this poster. 

Since yesterday was November 16th, I guess that was the day the print was going to leave town, so they had to get us in just under the wire. 

(Do prints "leave town" anymore? Are there prints? I don't think so.)

I was a bit tricked walking into Cinema Kino, the cinema below my office, when I saw staff pouring champagne into flutes and mixed drinks into tumblers. But that, bewilderingly, was the opposite direction of where my Lost King screening was. Had they made some mistake?

Not only was there no champagne, there wasn't even a free popcorn and drink, which you often get at these screenings. And I'd eaten nothing before the 6 p.m. start, anticipating such treats.

Upon leaving, I finally figured out that the alcoholic drinks were part of some gala associated with the closing of the festival, attended by fancier people than I. I don't know what movie they showed, but given this poster, it's reasonable to assume it was also The Lost King, just in a different auditorium. The fancy people turned left when they went into the theater, and the unwashed critics with our backpacks and slightly askew hair turned right.

I was going to call this post "My unwitting attendance at the British Film Festival," since in the past I have written about other film festivals that occurred at Palace Cinemas, the German Film Festival and the Scandinavian Film Festival. Then, though, something substantive about the film made me change the title, which I'll get to in a minute.

I suppose you wouldn't know automatically that the picture above of Steve Coogan, Sally Hawkins and a third guy you've probably never heard of (his name is Harry Lloyd) was from The Lost King, especially if you've never heard of the movie. But you've heard of Coogan, Hawkins and director Frears, so you should be hearing about this movie soon.

You've also heard about the tidbit of news from ten years ago now where they found the unceremoniously buried body of Richard III under a parking lot in Leicester (or "carpark" as they say here and in Britain). This is the movie about how that came to occur, and it's delicious subject matter for the always fruitful, not always satisfying genre of "recreation of quirky minor news event from the last 20 years."

Of course finding the buried body of a former king of England is not a minor event in most traditional senses of that phrase, and the circumstances that led to it are rather amazing and improbable. 

The thing I found of most interest is how closely this marries up with the first movie I ever named my best of the year, back in 1996 -- and how much this movie felt like it could have been heading for a similar fate. Which also makes it a great thing to have occurred in a year in which I'm looking at all my previous #1s.

(I'll save you the drama and confirm that The Lost King is not a realistic contender for my #1 movie of 2022, but the fact that it was even in the conversation is saying a lot.)

1) Both The Lost King and Looking for Richard involve Richard III, the last Plantagenet king of England, brought to the larger world in Shakespeare's play of the same name, who was thought to have had a hunch, to have killed his nephews, and to have been in desperate need of a horse moments before his death on the battlefield in 1485.

2) Both The Lost King and Looking for Richard view the king through a modern lens, in the latter case as an attempt to understand Shakespeare better in the 1990s, and in the former case to find his body.

3) The name of the project designed to raise money to locate Richard's corpse was the Looking for Richard Project. Which almost makes me wonder if it was a conscious allusion to the name of the 1996 movie, since this was all happening around 2010 (with a culmination of the events in 2012). (One terrible failure of accuracy, though, was that Hawkins' character's kids go to see Skyfall at a fairly early point of the narrative, and that film wasn't released until two months after Richard's body was discovered. For shame!)

The big difference between the two is that I never realized, from the earlier film, that there was a significant quantity of people out there who feel like Richard was improperly branded a usurper, who support his legitimate claim to the throne, and who thought that the traits ascribed to him (the hunch and the predilection for nephew murdering) were propaganda pushed by the new Tudor regime in trying to help the populace embrace the new king, Henry VII. After all, Shakespeare's play was written more than a hundred years after Richard's death, so how certain should we be of its accuracy?

It was actually a campaign by the Richard III Historical Society, of which Hawkins' Philippa Langley was (and I assume still is) a member, that led to the digging up of that carpark and the identification of Richard's remains. 

I won't say any more because I owe it to The Lost King to allow you to discover for yourself the other twists and turns along the way. It's well worth it.

I will say that I'm glad I didn't opt out of this screening to attend another one the same night. The advanced screening for The Menu, which comes out next Thursday, was also held last night, across town. I did RSVP The Lost King first, which was one of the main reasons I stuck with it -- even though I don't like holding onto a review until the film releases six weeks later. (In part because I have trouble forcing myself to write such a review so long in advance, and by the time I do get around to it, I've forgotten some of what I wanted to say.) Fortunately, having to only walk downstairs from my office to attend this screening was a deciding factor.

Interestingly, because Looking for Richard has dropped a little in my estimation after my second viewing, I may actually like The Lost King better -- or that could just be recency bias. Either way, it was a delight, largely because of a fun narrative device that I won't spoil, that blends the realistic events with a bit of fantasy. In any case, you should check it out. 

Audient Bollywood: Sholay

This is my 11th and penultimate film in my 2022 series Audient Bollywood, in which I'm familiarizing myself with the cinema of India.

Eleven months into this series, I'm finally figuring out the perfect hack for how to watch Bollywood movies while still keeping a normal schedule.

Namely, watch the first half on a weekend afternoon during what we refer to in our house as "quiet time" -- a period from about 4:30 to about 7 when the kids are allowed to be on their devices -- and then the second half that night after you and your wife go your separate ways for the evening.

Conveniently, Sholay (1975) even had an intermission to provide a line of demarcation between the two.

Yes, my 11th installment of Audient Bollywood was what I was referencing last weekend when I wrote this post about intermissions. I meant to hop on the regular monthly Audient Bollywood post in the day or two that followed, so as not to forget too much of what I wanted to say about Sholay, but this led to that and I'm only just getting to it now. I think I remember most of the salient takeaways of my viewing.

While researching the post about intermissions, I discovered they are still common in Indian cinema today -- and in Indian cinemas, referring to the locations rather than the industry, where they will insert intermissions into many longer western films that obviously don't have the when we see them. Interestingly, though, this is the first film I watched for Audient Bollywood that featured an actual intermission that was considered to be part and parcel to the film, part of the print that endured and that we watch today. And it's not like Sholay is the longest film I've watched for this series, though at 204 minutes, I suppose it's second longest only to Lagaan, which is a full 20 minutes longer.

No, I think the intermission we'd see if we were watching something in an Indian cinema nowadays is inserted after the fact and can be excised when the movie is distributed internationally. In 1975, that was not the case, and the break in Sholay came along just as I need to start making dinner for my kids. 

One other funny, non-story observation to make about this film before I get into its plot. I can't tell at what point over the years this was added in, but every time a character started to smoke a cigarette -- which was not a huge number of times, maybe a half dozen over the course of the film -- a message came on screen reading "Cigarette smoking is injurious to health." It would stay on screen for the duration of the cigarette being smoked, and then it would disappear. Too funny.

I chose Sholay because a) I wanted one more older film, as in pre-1990s film (I'll be finishing with a film from the 1990s in December), and b) it was on the list of top ten Bollywood dance numbers from Time Out, which I have been consulting all year. Since my December movie is not on that list, I'll finish this series having watched exactly half of those ten movies: Sholay, Baar Baar Dekho, Lagaan, Bajirao Mastani and Dil Se. That means that Devdas, Dabangg, Khalnayak, Mr. India and Mughal-e-Azam will all have to wait for future viewings intended purely for pleasure. 

(And since this is the last time I will mention this list, I should probably answer the question as to why I considered this one random list to be definitive. The answer is, I didn't and don't, especially given some of the disappointing dance numbers the list singled out. But I had to go with something, and I didn't want to overcomplicate things.)

But once I started watching Sholay I realized there was a reason to watch it beyond its supposedly superior dance number, a reason specific to me but one that should apply to any cinephile: It's kind of a loose adaptation of Kurosawa's classic Seven Samurai.

There are only two "samurai" here -- thieves Jai (Amitabh Bachchan) and Veeru (Dharmendra) -- but they fulfill a similar function to the titular samurai in Kurosawa's film. They are brought to a remote village to defend it from a band of marauders led by the wicked Gabbar Singh (Amjad Khan), having proven their mettle as criminals and their abilities as sharpshooters. The jovial pair were identified by a retired police officer named Thakur (Sanjeev Kumar) when he was hunting them as part of his job. Thakur is kind of the paterfamilias of the entire village, and when the threat from Singh and his cohorts seems impossible to resolve, Thakur can think of only this pair to help quell it. 

Of course, Seven Samurai engendered proper westerns, most obviously The Magnificent Seven, but likely others as well. Sholay, then, feels like a western as well, as it involves guns and horses and all the other traditional western ingredients. As such it is my first western, of sorts, in this series. And its debt not only to Kurosawa, but also to Sergio Leone, is clear. (If memory serves, there is sort of a whistling score from time to time, and at least one scene that relies on no dialogue and mostly sounds and close-ups of action, like the opening of Once Upon a Time in the West.) As if director Ramesh Sippy wanted to make every one of his allusions completely clear, the actor who plays Thakur, Sanjeev Kumar, even has a bit of a Japanese appearance to him. You look at this guy and tell me if he wouldn't look completely normal turning up in a samurai film:

Even though some of Sholay verges on theft, it ended up being yet another film in this series to exceed four stars on Letterboxd. Actually in this case I ultimately went with exactly four stars, but I was considering 4.5 for a while. It has a satisfying epic arc, and explores the central relationship between the two thieves with a nice sense of humor that offsets the moments of violence and sadism by Gabbar Singh.

A discussion of Sholay would not be complete without mentioning Veeru's love interest, a frivolous carriage driver named Basanti, played by Hema Malini. She's a self-proclaimed chatterbox and she brings a great additional energy to the movie, supporting the humor that serves as an undercurrent between the two leads. In a scene involving her that is not played for humor, Singh requires her to keep dancing in the hot sun or a sniper will put a bullet in the captured Veeru. Singh's men break glass at her feet, and she has to keep dancing even while the shards are cutting the soles of her feet.

I had hoped this was the dance number that had been singled out by Time Out, but actually, it involves an older Bollywood icon who went by the single stage name of Helen, who had become famous as a Bollywood "vamp." In a one-off scene, she also dances for Singh's men. This scene did not particularly speak to me, and I imagine the writer included it primarily to honor this Bollywood legend. It's another case where the list may have had the right movie, but had the wrong dance scene in that movie. 

Jai also has a love interest, played by Jaya Bhaduri, but she doesn't sing and dance, so she doesn't get a paragraph to herself. Or at least, not a very long one. 

One final note about Sholay: Every time I see the title I can't help singing "sho-lay, sho-LAY, SHO-lay, SHO-LAY!" to the tune of Dolly Parton's "Jolene."

Okay I will wrap up Audient Bollywood in December with a movie that had a minor cultural moment in 2022. 

A complete inventory of multiple-time #1 people

As I continue to march along in my year of looking back at previous #1s, I've gotten serious about something I used to just track informally.

If you've been following me over the years, you probably know that my 26 #1 movies dating back to when I started this in 1996 have never featured a repeat director. Twenty-six different men and women (and in one instance, a combination of one of each) have been responsible for directing my 26 #1s.

However, that's not to say there are no individual people who have contributed to more than one #1 -- even a director, though he was not the director in his other top finisher(s).

Each year I notice if a new person has joined this illustrious group, usually mentioning it in one of my wrap-up posts. For example, last year I anointed Casey Affleck, who had starred in that year's #1, Our Friend, as well as 2017's #1, A Ghost Story. (Only later, as my repeating viewings of my #1s got going this year, did I realize Affleck is actually in a third #1, Hamlet (2000), very briefly -- making him the second person to be involved with three different #1 movies, and the first to appear on screen in three different ones.)

To this point, though, I've only been keeping track of this casually, in my head. Well, for a list-maker like myself, such informality cannot stand -- especially since it meant I was likely missing some people. And true enough, I was, as we shall see.

So what I did was pull up an Excel spreadsheet and start recording significant contributors to each of my #1 movies, starting with Looking for Richard in 1996 and going all the way through to Our Friend. "Significant," in this case, is defined as the following: 1) the top five to ten actors, or possibly more, depending on the size of the ensemble; 2) any other actors who appear in the cast whose names I recognize; 3) the director; 4) the screenwriter; 5) the names of any producers I recognize; 6) the composer; 7) the cinematographer; 8) the editor. And in one case, the casting director, though I don't expect that to be a regular thing. (Yes, Mary Vernieu has reached the point of ubiquity that once prompted me to write this post about Avy Kaufman.)

"But Vance," you say. "Can you really describe the contributions of Casey Affleck to Hamlet as 'significant'? The guy has no dialogue and appears on the covers of magazines and newspapers more than there is any actual footage of him."

Good question. And the answer is no, Affleck's work on Hamlet is not significant. However, I am not, technically speaking, trying to quantify the value of the contribution here. I am just trying to find a way to limit the people I'm looking at in IMDB to a manageable crowd, so this Excel spreadsheet is not a thousand names long. This group is the ultimate example of getting in on technicalities, and I'll include anyone who I notice is in more than one of these films. But I'm not going to comb the list of art directors and costume designers and key grips and dolly grips to be completist here. I'm already pretty close to completist as it is, going just on the names I've chosen to examine for each film.

Adding the identifiable "significant contributors" to each film didn't produce a list of a thousand names, but it did give me 336, for an average of 12.9 per movie. 

Now, there are some #1s that just have no chance of having any repeat contributors. Out of those 26 films, five are foreign/non-English speaking films. Only two of those are from the same country, Run Lola Run and Toni Erdman, though they are 18 years apart and TE is actually a co-production of multiple countries, not just Germany. And true enough, those movies did not have any contributors in common with any other film, just as A Separation, Beyond the Hills and Parasite had no contributors in common with any other film. I dutifully recorded between five and ten contributors for each movie anyway, given the possibility that these people might be involved in future #1s. 

It ended up being an interesting exercise indeed, and revealed as many as five multiple-timers I had not previously identified. (I say "as many as" because there was one where I couldn't remember if I had noticed him before or not.) I'll get into some stats afterward, but here are the 17 people who have worked on more than one #1, listed in the order in which their second film was chosen by me as a #1. And as you will see, two of them had a third in the offing.

1. Carter Burwell - Hamlet (2000) (composer), Adaptation (2002) (composer)

2. Lance Acord - Adaptation (2002) (cinematographer), Lost in Translation (2003) (cinematographer)

2. Bill Murray - Hamlet (2000) (actor), Lost in Translation (2003) (actor)

4. Jane Adams - Happiness (1998) (actor), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) (actor)

4. Charlie Kaufman - Adaptation (2002) (writer/producer), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) (writer/producer), I'm Thinking of Ending Things (2020) (director/writer/producer)

4. Kate Winslet - Titanic (1997) (actor), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) (actor)

7. Clive Owen - Gosford Park (2001) (actor), Children of Men (2006) (actor)

8. Maryse Alberti - Happiness (1998) (cinematographer), The Wrestler (2008) (cinematographer)

9. Clint Mansell - The Wrestler (2008) (composer), Moon (2009) (composer)

9. Kevin Spacey - Looking For Richard (1996) (actor), Moon (2009) (actor)

11. Paul Dano - There Will Be Blood (2007) (actor), Ruby Sparks (2012) (actor/producer)

12. Emmanuel Lubezki - Children of Men (2006) (cinematographer), Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014) (cinematographer)

13. Kyle MacLachlan - Hamlet (2000) (actor), Inside Out (2015) (actor)

13. Paula Pell - Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014) (actor), Inside Out (2015) (actor)

15. Casey Affleck - Hamlet (2000) (actor), A Ghost Story (2017) (actor), Our Friend (2021) (actor)

16. Ethan Hawke - Hamlet (2000) (actor), First Reformed (2018) (actor)

17. Christine Vachon - Happiness (1998) (producer), First Reformed (2018) (producer)

Yes there are a few problematic names in that list -- more problematic than Affleck is of course Kevin Spacey, less problematic (to this point) is Bill Murray. But this list is not based on merit as viewed through a 2022 lens. It's just statistics.

Let's start with the people that this process uncovered:

Lance Acord - I wasn't really familiar with this cinematographer -- I've probably seen the name before -- and it turns out he shot two of my #1s.

Maryse Alberti - You could fill in almost the exact same description for Alberti as for Acord, except swap out the pronoun "he" for "she."

Kyle MacLachlan - I couldn't actually remember if I'd previously noticed this one, so I am including him here just to be sure.

Paula Pell - I wouldn't have noticed this one at all, if Pell hadn't appeared in consecutive #1s and I happened to notice her name in the cast of Birdman, just moments before I noticed it in the cast of Inside Out. Her contributions in both films are minuscule, but hey, as I said earlier, every contribution counts. 

Christine Vachon - I wouldn't have noticed this either if I were not already familiar with her name. Apologies to other producers whose names I don't know, who may have produced more than one of these films. (Given that IMDB lists up to ten names for each film when you consider producers, associate producers and executive producers, it just felt too tedious to include all of them.)

Other interesting tidbits:

- Only three of these contributors appeared in consecutive #1s: Acord, Mansell and Pell.

- Only two English language #1s don't share a contributor with any other film: Hustle & Flow and 127 Hours.

- The most fruitful of these #1s is Hamlet, which shares five contributors with at least one other film (Affleck, Murray, Burwell, MacLachlan and Hawke).

- Kate and Rooney Mara are the only family members who appear in different films (127 Hours and A Ghost Story), though some do appear in the same film (the Coppolas in Lost in Translation)

- Longest gap between first contribution and most recent to a #1: Affleck (Hamlet to Our Friend). Honorable mention: Vachon (Happiness to First Reformed).

- Every role I identified has someone who appears across multiple #1s except director and editor -- and casting director, in which I only found Mary Vernieu in one film.

Random things I discovered during this project:

- Dominique McElligott, who plays Sam Bell's wife in Moon, is also Queen Maeve in The Boys.

- The Dardenne brothers produced the Romanian film Beyond the Hills, opening up a greater possibility of foreign language crossover at some point in the future.

- Doug Jones, who plays creatures in Guillermo del Toro's movies, was also in Adaptation. He plays the caveman in the section of the film where Kaufman imagines back to the start of time.

Probably another waste of your good reading time brought to you by The Audient -- but I had a good time compiling it. 

And I'll be really excited to see if anyone joins the list in January.

The progress that might not really be progress

Warning: The following post contains major spoilers for Alex Garland's Men, the Australian horror movie Sissy, and Enola Holmes 2. How's that for a motley crew? (I'm a poet and I don't know it.)

The history of representation of Black characters on film has gone through a number of stages, as follows:

1) No representation. At least none featuring actual Black actors. You wanted a Black character, you put a white actor in blackface. Think Birth of a Nation.

2) Careless representation featuring many stereotypes. Black actors could appear in movies, but they were maids, butlers, criminals, or any other member of society considered lowly by the white ruling class. Sadly this goes all the way from around Gone With the Wind through the 1970s, with some notable exceptions.

3) Overly generous representation that bends over backwards to apologize for previous negligence. This is the phase where if a Black character appeared on screen, he or she was upstanding or saintly or a nuclear physicist or in some other way defied the cruel stereotypes of the past. This was a step in the right direction but was problematic in its own ways.

4) The current phase. In this phase, a Black actor can play anybody: a character previously conceived of as white (like a comic book hero), a character in a historical setting in which there were only white people around, or -- and I think this is the crucial one -- a villain.

I think most people can confirm the general accuracy of this arc and can appreciate that each stage is a step forward from the previous one. But that's not to say that even our current, most enlightened phase doesn't come with its own challenges. And even as I talk about these challenges, I expect to stumble over them and am wary of my chances of getting out exactly what I want to say.

It's the villain part I'm worried about. 

In a way, it is a sign of ultimate progress that a Black character can go back to being a villain -- as long as it is not the sort of villain that screenwriters wrote carelessly back in Stage 2. The sort of villain I think of as dying out around the time of the 1987 Christopher Reeve movie Street Smart, which I wrote about here. 

No, we don't want some villainous pimp played by a Black actor, or if we are going to go that way, it has to be one villainous Black pimp in a movie with six heroic Black pimps. 

But what kind of Black villain do we want? 

It's something I intend to explore over the course of three movies I've seen during the last month, though in each instance, you could argue whether this character is actually the villain, merely villain-adjacent, or the end product of greater villainy. And it's been inspired by hearing the Slate Culture Gabfest do a spoiler discussion of the first movie I'm going to discuss, Men -- a discussion I avoided months ago since I hadn't seen the movie, and to which I have now circled back.

1. Men

Since I've already given the spoiler warning, I can tell you something you probably already know, you discerning cinephile who has probably already seen Men: It's basically a two-hander between Jessie Buckley and Rory Kinnear, with Buckley playing the main character and Kinnear playing almost every other character. There are two other female actors who have smaller roles, and there's one other male actor, seen only in flashback: Buckley's character's dead husband, played by Paapa Esiedu. He's the actor of color, as you might have guessed.

It's unclear whether the film sees him as the villain in the end, which was one of the issues the Culture Gabfesters had with Garland's strangled, possibly misogynistic message. But using all available traditional signifiers, he's shit. He's clearly unstable, as the arguments we see with her show. She wants to leave him, and his response is to threaten suicide. In another argument immediately preceding his death, he hits her -- an action he immediately regrets, but she goes off on him and kicks him out of their apartment. It's moments later that he dies, though the movie leaves it ambiguous whether he jumped off the roof or fell while trying to climb down into their apartment from the floor above. Neither reflects particularly well on him -- either it's the culmination of the threat he used to manipulate her into not leaving him, or he's making a dangerous assault on the privacy she justifiably requested after he hit her. 

2. Sissy

In this movie, the title character is a woman played by Aishee Dee, the grown-up version of a girl nicknamed Sissy as an abbreviation of her given name, Cecilia. She's become a successful social media influencer, but she's never gotten over the betrayal of her best friend Emma when she was younger. The younger Sissy was already showing psychopathic tendencies, which manifested themselves in other 12-year-olds not relating to her, and her clinging too dearly to Emma. When Emma found a different best friend, a best friend who also bullied Sissy, Sissy ended up stabbing the bully in the cheek with a gardening trowel.

When they are both adults, after years of not seeing each other, Emma runs into Cecilia in a pharmacy and invites her to her bachelorette party weekend, where Cecilia is responsible for the deaths of multiple others at the party -- each sort of by accident, but each in a way that might have been avoided if she weren't, you know, crazy. 

3. Enola Holmes 2

This one is kind of the ultimate realization of Stage 4, where actress Sharon Duncan-Brewster is revealed -- remember my spoiler warning -- as Moriarty, the rival to Sherlock Holmes, with her name (Mira Troy) being an anagram of that name. Moriarty was, of course, never envisioned as a Black woman by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, but that's kind of the point of this newest phase of representation, to question our assumptions and to expand the limitations of literature as it was conceived more than a century ago.

Points for the fact that Moriarty is the smartest person in the room -- even outwitting Holmes, who is like the smartest person ever -- but detract points for the fact that Moriarty is basically the personification of evil. At least as envisioned here, she does wicked and cruel things for sport. She orchestrates deaths and deceptions and might actually cackle if that weren't deemed a too on-the-nose depiction of villainy.

Each portrayal is worth lauding in some respect, but each is also problematic. And each gives ammunition to a racist in the audience who is inclined to believe the worst about a person whose skin is darker than his. (Or hers. Women can be racists too.)

In Men, we have a person who embodies weakness of character. Hitting a domestic partner is pretty much the ultimate sign of weakness, but the mind games this man plays are even worse. He's basically blackmailing his wife into staying with him, telling her that if he kills himself, it will be her fault. He's gambling that having such a tragedy on her conscience will keep her from leaving. Whether he was bluffing or not, we don't know, because he might have actually fallen. But the impact of his rash action -- whether that action is killing himself or trying to climb down the side of a building -- is the same. He's basically decided that if his life is ruined, he'll do his damnedest to ensure hers will be too. 

Sissy thinks it's getting away with something here I think, because in the immortal words of Chris Rock in one of his earliest comedy albums, "Blacks aren't crazy." Because mental illness is not traditionally one of the negative character traits a racist might ascribe to a Black person, the depiction here of a mentally unstable Black central character is, in its way, defying stereotypes. But it's also exceptionally cruel from a filmmaking perspective, in part because it doesn't seem like a natural outgrowth of the young Sissy, whom we meet on old video tapes she watches. Played by actress April Blasdall, the young Sissy is sweet and adorable and doesn't seem in the least like a person who could generate, and then hold onto, psychopathic rage. This portrayal then has a credibility problem, and as with the character in Men, we ask: Why did the filmmakers choose to make the Black girl crazy? Was it something more than race blind casting?

Enola Holmes 2 might be the least offender, but it also gives us the only character who has complete agency over her villainy. She's not the product of bullying or a possible immigrant in an interracial marriage who might have cracked under the strictures of white patriarchy. This is a puppetmaster whose machinations are utterly premeditated, making her actually malicious. The filmmakers hope that by crediting her with genius-level intelligence, they are also avoiding the pitfalls of racial stereotyping. But anyone who is inclined to think that Blacks are scheming and conniving and hiding behind a shield of fraudulent victimhood need look no further than Moriarty to find support of their toxic thought processes.

Now it should be said that a racist is going to use whatever evidence that suits him (or her) to reinforce his (or her) worldview. If we try to make Black villains beyond reproach, we are moving back to Stage 3, where they aren't really even villains anymore. And even then we aren't really helping change the mind of a racist.

But I still insist that something doesn't sit as comfortably as it should about any of these portrayals. 

Of course this whole discussion is a product of excessive thinking -- some might say over-thinking. The excessive thinking that governs our entire discourse about race today is, itself, a reaction to the failure to do so before now. The whole idea of being woke is to analyze representation in such a way as to find its shortcomings and to improve upon them. In the past, no one would have given these characters a second thought -- but then again, they likely wouldn't have had these undeniably complicated characters to consider in the first place.

So it goes back to the question:

What kind of Black villain do we want?

I don't know that I have the answer for this. 

It should be said that in each of these cases, there is a potentially worse villain. In Men, most of the most malevolent behavior is given to Kinnear's character, even if he might ultimately be imaginary, some sort of manifestation of the main character's trauma over the death of her husband. In Sissy, we're supposed to end up hating the white bully the most, because not only did she trigger Sissy when she was younger, but it's her failure to bury the hatchet that causes the bachelorette party to go off the rails. In EH2, a white factory owner is ultimately arrested for his nefarious role in knowingly using phosphorous that was fatally poisoning the girls who worked in his match factory.

But I'd be lying if I didn't say that I lingered on the three portrayals of the Black villains -- that should be an obvious statement given how much I've just written about them. 

I think there is a Stage 5 in this trajectory toward greater enlightenment, though it's a pie-in-the-sky stage that will take a lot longer to arrive:

5) Forgetting about race entirely when watching movie characters.

And this one will be truly hard to attain, but it's out there, somewhere, as a potential endpoint to this whole discussion. If we can one day slough off all our preconceived baggage about skin color and how to justly portray characters who have that skin color, it might one day truly not matter who plays what role, and what the filmmakers may be saying -- even if accidentally -- by making such choices. 

I'd like to get this stage because I don't want to have to think about this stuff each time a casting director makes choices like they made in Men, Sissy and Enola Holmes 2. These were commendable choices with excellent intentions, choices made with the aim of getting us to Stage 5 sooner. If no one makes these choices, we truly won't ever get there. 

Until then, though, there'll be a fine line to walk between putting characters of color on a pedestal, and making them guilty of craven things that remind bad people of their oldest and deepest prejudices.