Souvenirs of COVID

I didn't really want to end the year writing about COVID, except in the positive way I wrote about it yesterday: as something we were moving past and leaving behind. Of course, I let the cat out of the bag in the post-script to yesterday's post that we haven't moved past it, at least not in our household. The two adults in my family currently have COVID. We don't think the kids do, but we haven't tested them in the last couple days because the mere act of testing would possibly expose them if they haven't been already. And we have grandparents we need to start seeing again, having not seen them since Tuesday afternoon. (Fortunately, they are here until January 20th.)

One of my souvenirs of this round of COVID is a puffy red right eye. It's basically pink eye/conjunctivitis, as far as I can tell, and the eyelid being very swollen makes me look a bit like a boxer who's gone too many rounds. It also looks pretty concerning to everyone else in the house. I got it on the first day and it has yet to recede noticeably, though at least I'm not having the thing I had yesterday, where I needed to shut my eye whenever I stood up to help control the pressure that resulted from that act of sudden ascension.

Having a messed up eye has not so far prevented me from having another projector marathon in the garage, where I have been isolating even after my wife got her positive test two days ago. That test has only meant that I've slept in the bed the last two nights, which has been a relief. I haven't generally changed my daytime isolation, in part because she is happy to convalesce in our bedroom. Even if you can't get the other person sick, being sick is fundamentally a solo activity. 

Although I could knock out a significant number of the movies still on my watchlist prior to closing my list on January 24th, I also don't want to massively exceed last year's record total of 170 movies ranked. I'm at 151 now, having fit four 2022 viewings into the last few days, as well as two rewatches and three movies I'd never seen from other years. 

And in truth, I actually only have about 20 more movies (in 24 days) that I consider must watches, with some of them only rising to that level because of the ease of getting a hold of them. Each year at this time I whittle down my Letterboxd watchlist to a list on paper that includes only the movies I realistically will still prioritize seeing, and as of this writing there are only 19 movies on that shorter list. Very manageable, such that I might devote today, the last day of the year, to knocking out the remaining episodes of Andor, with maybe just a single movie to break things up.

Ray was the first non-2022 movie I watched during this second COVID marathon, but I already wrote about that. Today I'll write about the other two, and not just because they've inspired the subject of this post -- though I'd be lying if I didn't admit that I thought of the post title first and what I wanted to say second.

There's another sort of 2022 homework I realized I could accomplish, by catching up on some prior viewings that will place a new viewing in a different context. One of those 19 titles is Joanna Hogg's The Eternal Daughter, which is the third in what we might rightly consider the SCU (Souvenir Cinematic Universe). Hogg's 2019 film The Souvenir and her 2021 sequel The Souvenir: Part II both feature characters who appear in The Eternal Daughter, and even if this third movie may not be directly part of that two-part story, those movies will certainly be useful background. I had seen neither.

Fortunately, I only had to rent one of the two, as the sequel was available streaming for free on Amazon Prime.

SPOILERS FOR THE SOUVENIR AND THE SOUVENIR: PART II.

I'll say right off the bat that I didn't go for these movies like other critics did. I'll also say that they work a lot better in conjunction with each other than they do independently. That's a rather obvious statement for a sequel, but a first movie should stand on its own two feet. This one does not, probably because Hogg always knew she was going to make a second, listing the fact that a sequel was coming in her closing credits. 

The Souvenir is effectively a roman a clef for Hogg, exploring her days in the late 1980s as a film school student, in the form of a character named Julie (pretty close to Joanna), played by Tilda Swinton's daughter, Honor Swinton Byrne. Her real-life mother plays her mother here, though it's a smaller role. 

The much larger role, other than Byrne's, goes to Tom Burke, who I quite liked in this year's The Wonder. My feelings about him in this film could not be more opposite. He plays, what I called in a rant to a friend, "an obnoxious, superior junkie prat." Yes that's right, his Anthony is an older intellectual who oozes into Julie's life on a wave of negging and generally disagreeable behavior. Part of that behavior is that he's revealed to be a chronic heroin user, though you wouldn't know it by looking at him -- he looks more like an effete academic gentleman who looks down his nose at everyone.

The problem with The Souvenir, as I saw it, was that Anthony does nothing to deserve what comes to be a strong romantic dependence on him by Julie. In retrospect, I determined that Hogg didn't want to make a film in which grand romantic gestures and magical moments manipulate the audience into seeing this as a "special" romance, a cinematic romance. It's much more humdrum, as most romances are. But that doesn't change the fact that I needed something from Anthony other than just the mild disdain, haughty wordplay and ultimately dispiriting junkie behavior that defines him. There's realism and then there's too much realism.

This becomes a major issue because the movie really doesn't have all that much to do with her experiences in film school -- she starts to miss a lot of class time due to her obsession over this twat -- but only to do with their relationship. For sure, this is probably close to how Hogg experienced it at the time, assuming it was based on a real experience from her life. (I could look it up, but, I have COVID so nah.) But it makes for an insufferable viewing experience. Throw us a bone, please, Joanna.

The Souvenir looks a little better when it is ultimately revealed as source material for The Souvenir: Part II. Here's the important spoiler: Anthony finally has his overdose and dies near the end of the first movie. Good riddance, I say. Julie is obviously torn up about it, in part because she believed she loved him, and in part because she may have felt like she turned him away at a time of need -- probably not resulting in the overdose, but not helping either. Surely, she did enough to enable him before then, to the point that we kind of disdain her (I think Hogg may have disdained her own self in that relationship), but maybe the previous enabling was part of the problem as well. With drug addicts, you're damned if you do too little and you're damned if you do too much.

In any case, Part II didn't get off to a very good start for me because it picks up almost immediately after the end of the first movie, and therefore, Julie is still quite actively mourning Anthony. So if I already heaped scorn on the first movie for giving this asshole too much of its emotional investment, the second starts off in exactly the same way. I was rolling my eyes, which is not great when you have one swollen eye.

Fortunately, the direct grief over Anthony recedes, and we see how Julie uses the experience of that relationship to make a film about it. This is an important bit of growth for her, because her original idea for a graduation film, pitched at the start of the first movie, was to make a movie about dock workers. Her professors called her out that she didn't know much about that, and urged her to consider something closer to her own experience. She gets there with the film she makes in Part II.

So while I was still annoyed that so much energy was being devoted to Anthony, I did appreciate exploring how a filmmaker uses life experience to guide their artistic choices. The Souvenir is our chance to see what happened; The Souvenir: Part II is our chance to see how Julie interpreted it and committed it to celluloid. I wished Hogg had been just a bit more on point with that mission statement, as she does meander a bit, depicting some ultimately random experiences Julie has during this time (that she herself probably had when she was that age), checking in on characters who ultimately don't matter that much. I also could never really figure out the function of her parents, who are very supportive but whose role doesn't seem to extend beyond that. Maybe Hogg just wanted to make a tribute to them. Maybe more will be revealed about them in The Eternal Daughter.

Hogg almost lost me when she brings back Burke for a sort of fantasy sequence near the end of Part II, which seems to be an allusion to the long dance sequences we find in the third acts of classic Hollywood musicals. The impressionism of this extended scene left me feeling we are back in prime Anthony mourning mode, when I thought we were finally all done with that. I still don't feel like these two movies should be devoting so much time to a guy who was clearly a total prat.

However, I did ultimately get there with The Souvenir: Part II, landing on a three-star assessment on Letterboxd that could grow the more I think about it. The Souvenir remains at two stars, though I had originally considered giving it 1.5 and would have done so had I not immediately watched the sequel. (I still wonder how people who had to sit with the original Souvenir for two years before the sequel liked it as much as they did.)

So with that I will unceremoniously wish you a happy new year. 

The year we defiantly repudiated COVID-19

Twenty twenty-two was the year I got COVID. Three people in my family got it, actually. My younger son was first in early April, and I followed him in late April. My older son didn't get it, that we know of, until September. My wife has still never tested positive.

I say "that we know of" because I now think I may have gotten it twice. In September, I had some sort of COVID-y symptoms, but it was not the first time in the six months since my documented bout that I'd had some sort of light sniffles that proved to be nothing -- it was about the sixth time. So I never tested, but when my son had the same symptoms a few days later, we did ultimately test him and he returned a faint line indicating a positive result. I tested negative at that time but it stands to reason I might have been positive before that. (Bad Vance. Bad, bad Vance.) The point is, any of us might have had it another time and not tested, though my wife was vigilant about testing so it's pretty certain she's COVID immune.*

* - we understand that no one has a proven immunity to COVID-19, and would not intentionally contribute to any misinformation about the virus. 

I'm telling you all this to set up the context for how weird it was that we so definitively moved away from COVID in the second half of the year, both on a collective level as a society and a personal level in our minds.

And since this is a movie blog, my inclination is to determine how that change was reflected in the movies we watched.

The moment when I realized how much this cognitive transformation had occurred was when I watched Claire Denis' Stars at Noon about three weeks ago.

This movie was a pretty big whiff for me, which is funny because it took down one of the top prizes at Cannes -- though I'm finding that other critics and viewers were similarly put off by it. (Cannes results never promise to translate to general success with audiences.) 

There were plenty of things I didn't like about it -- the stars, the plot, the failure to make any of it interesting -- but one of the biggest things that took me out of it was the fact that the characters wore masks at various intervals throughout, not as some essential part of the story or themes, but to place the story within a specific historical context ... that historical context being within the last two years.

All I can tell you was that when I saw these masks, I said to myself: "We're still doing this?"

On the one hand, given the long gestation period for most movies, we should only just now be seeing movies where the telltale masks of COVID-19 could be incorporated into the story. Because that production schedule has been collapsed in recent years, and because some filmmakers worked hard to get out movies that directly dealt with the pandemic in order to engage with something that was consuming us both mentally and physically, we ended up seeing movies with masked characters nearly two years ago, around the start of 2021. One might have even snuck out in 2020, I don't really remember. (Actually yes, a small independent film I reviewed and enjoyed called Love in Dangerous Times was released in November of 2020, as just one example.)

On the other hand, though, my reaction to seeing the masks told me that COVID was a cultural and sociopolitical context that we wanted to stop grappling with the moment it was "over." I suspect any movies still coming out that are trying to deal so directly with the pandemic will seem like johnny come latelies as well.

What a weird realization. Clearly this is a world transformative event, and the sort of thing we should be collectively wrestling with for years, maybe even decades to come. But we, as moviegoers, are viewing it as some embarrassing mistake that we want to get past as soon as possible, never to discuss again.

I think this sort of gets at the intended timelessness of movies. You know how in movies, a character will say "My brother died 17 years ago" rather than "My brother died in 1983"? It's this sort of dialogue-writing trick that is designed to set the movie in an eternal sense of "now." Even if that person in real life would be more likely to list the year, the important thing for the viewer is to know how long ago it was, to get an idea of how fresh the wound still is. We do this so that a movie can always seems like it is taking place "now."

But movies made during COVID lose that, especially if they incorporate masks when it's not an essential component of the themes being considered. Rather than taking place in the eternal "now," that movie takes place in 2020 or 2021, and for the rest of its life as a work of art, it will remind us of this period we want to forget.

However, earlier in the year this was not yet a problem.

I really enjoyed Judd Apatow's The Bubble, even though it was the consummate COVID-19 movie, about characters trying to make a blockbuster effects film involving green screens and motion capture, while also social distancing. I watched that on the 1st of April -- happy April Fools Day -- before any of us had actually had COVID. That was a different time, but also, COVID-19 was central to the story, not just a design detail like it was in Stars at Noon.

Of course, no film symbolizes our societal departure from the pandemic times more than Top Gun: Maverick. That was released near the mid-point of the year on May 27th, and went on to shatter box office records, proving once and for all that you can't push movie audiences permanently to the small screen. This behemoth has grossed nearly 1.5 billion dollars worldwide, and has become Tom Cruise's biggest hit ever. Every calculation he did to delay the release as long as possible -- this was the last movie delayed by COVID to finally debut, almost to the point where it was becoming a punchline -- was validated and then some.

Top Gun has paved the way for other big theatrical moneymakers, most notably Black Panther: Wakanda Forever and now Avatar: The Way of Water. It's a chicken and the egg thing. Would audiences have remembered they craved a big-screen spectacle without it? We can't really say, but as ever, even at age 60, Cruise clearly has the entertainment industry on his shoulders ... and don't be surprised to see his next two Mission: Impossible movies racking up similar dough. (Before Avatar 2 I saw a little featurette on the making of the soon-to-be-famous motorcycle base jump stunt, and I have to say I am excited.)

I'd be lying, though, if I didn't say that part of the desire to return to theaters was the collective desire to give COVID the middle finger. We still don't want to play fast and loose with our health, but even the most progressive of us seem to trust in the efficacy of the vaccines ... while those who never believed in them never cared anyway. Together, it means that we trust the fellow members of our society, even the fringiest and least compliant, to not get us sick. Or if they do, we feel confident enough that we'll recover ... confident enough to embrace movies like we used to, embrace the social intimacy that is part and parcel to them. At least the biggest ones with the most star wattage.

But even the smaller movies have been coming to us in a torrent, even if we haven't needed to -- or been able to -- go to the movies to see them. A common theme in my writing over the past month has been how difficult it's been for me to stay on top of an ever-growing list of movies to check out on my Letterboxd watchlist. I think the biggest change is in the streamers. In past years, Netflix was the only one that put out a new movie each week -- sometimes multiple -- that felt like it was part of the larger cinematic conversation, not just some minor foreign film they acquired on the cheap. This year, Amazon upped its own frequency to about that level, and if others were behind, they weren't behind by much.

It's hard not to leave the year without a sense of optimism for where we're going, both in our physical health as a society and in the health of the film industry. Seeing the money to be had through a well-made theatrical release, studios will surely want to try to duplicate the success of Top Gun: Maverick, knowing that an appetite is there if only they can feed it. But the appetite for movies seems to be there generally, meaning streamers may continue to up their game, even if the most expensive ones that don't get the desired number of eyeballs (such as Netflix's The Gray Man) still prove the underlying flaws in the model. 

This may be a bubble -- no pun intended, Judd Apatow -- and it may be about to burst. 

But maybe if it only bursts by 25%, I'll actually be able to stay on top of my 2023 watchlist.

Note: After writing this but before posting it, I got COVID again. So did my wife, finally. I had my positive test on Tuesday, she got hers on Thursday. Oh well. I decided not to change anything I've written because the majority of what I said is still perfectly true ... only my personal experience of it has changed slightly. 

Audient Bridesmaids: Ray

This is the latest in a periodic series in which I'm watching all the best picture nominees I haven't seen, in reverse order.

If I'm trying to slow my roll toward a record number of movies ranked in 2022, there's an easy way to do that: take a break from watching 2022 movies.

So I picked back up Audient Bridesmaids with Ray (2004), having left off after the first entry in the series, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, back in April.

It occurred to me as I was watching that we usually don't go back to watch biopics after the year they were released. Among cinephiles with an omnivorous mentality, biopics are worthy of our attention precisely because they are new, not because they are intrinsically worth watching. Having a good director helps, having a compelling subject helps even more -- but then again, if you are a fan of the person being profiled, you should be seeing it when it first comes out due to eagerness alone. So both the cinephiles who watch everything and the people who love the film's topic are seeing it in the first year. Everyone else may never see it.

Another reason why it's hard to pull off a delayed viewing of a biopic, however, is that biopics may be more inextricably linked to the period in which they were made than any other genre. At one point, every biopic was a hagiography, focusing only on the good parts of the person, either because the film was made by somebody who already had stars in their eyes, or because the filmmaker required the cooperation of the estate of the person in question. Then we realized we needed to see the warts of our heroes in a movie about their lives, if we wanted that movie and ultimately that person to be taken seriously. Now, especially after incisive parodies like Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, we've realized the limitations of the "cradle to the grave" biopic and demand movies that focus on only a small slice of the person's life in the spotlight. Even that is starting to feel a bit hackneyed, though, and the biopic is simply crying out for another reinvention, which explains the truly artsy and unconventional approaches we've seen to the form.

Watching Ray in 2022 feels like taking two steps backward on this evolutionary scale. The wickedest and most parodic parts of Walk Hard seem to be a direct response to a movie like Ray. Walk the Line is the more obvious reference point, given both the similarity of the title and the similarity of Dewey Cox to Johnny Cash, but Ray seems equally responsible for that film's jokes. As I was watching the beginnings of Ray Charles' heroin addiction, all I could think of was the hilarious scene in Walk Hard where Tim Meadows tells Dewey all the reasons he "don't want no part" of the drug in question -- even when it's marijuana and it "isn't habit forming!" And "it makes sex even better!"

And with this context in my head, it wasn't possible to take Ray as seriously as I might have in 2004. Taylor Hackford's film -- and I've always considered that an unfortunate name for a director -- uses every biopic cliché you could dream up, from the montages of show dates and songs climbing charts, to the put-upon wife at home who can't abide by the star's philandering, to the scene of succumbing to the shady handler, to the betrayal of close allies, to the single childhood trauma that appears to explain the artist's entire life. In this case, it was Ray's younger brother drowning in an outdoor bathtub as Ray looked on -- and yes, this is when he still had his sight. At random moments throughout the film he is haunted by visions of the lifeless body in water. Each time he staggers backward dramatically to demonstrate how much this still eats away at his mental well-being.

Because Ray is so beholden to these tired tropes, it seems hard to envision it getting an Oscar nomination for best picture. Of course, without yet having a movie like Walk Hard to identify just how tired those tropes were, we were living in a different time. The thing that certainly elevated the movie was one of the things I liked best about it as well: the performance of Jamie Foxx.

Foxx's success in the role of Ray Charles went a little to his head unfortunately. There was a time afterward when I think he thought he was Ray Charles, showing up on Kanye West records, flashing the million dollar Ray Charles smile, and generally thinking he was the shit. Since we had only just started to realize that the former In Living Color star was, you know, actually a good actor, it seems a shame to acknowledge that this was really Foxx's peak. The now 55-year-old has continued to work throughout, appearing as supervillains, the star of a Tarantino movie and Rico Tubbs. But he never topped Ray, and I've always wondered if being high on his own supply for a while there was a factor.

Still, this is pretty remarkable stuff, this impersonation of Ray Charles. It's also a cliché to say this, but you sometimes forget you are watching Jamie Foxx and just think that's Ray Charles up there on the screen. Foxx had his style at the piano and his personal speaking style down perfectly. It was a deserving best actor win. There are a few moments that I found a bit awkward, but I attributed them to the hack of a director, like forcing Foxx to repeatedly do that "awakening from a nightmare" thing after one of those visions of his dead brother. I'm not sure any actor could pull that off credibly.

I was also surprised to learn just what a "sinner" Charles was. When someone is blind, we tend to think of them as the opposite, as a saint. Charles was not. He was a dope fiend for something like 15 years. He repeatedly cheated on his wife. He was just plain mean sometimes. Ray earns points for showing us all this, and educating me on it. 

The last thing I liked about the movie was anything related to the logistics of being blind. For example, when he was starting out, Charles used to ask to be paid in one dollar bills so he could count them himself. If they threw another bill in there by accident it was on them and to his benefit. Of course, we also see that people became frustrated counting out 80 or more one dollar bills. Charles did eventually get people he could trust to count the money, but the movie was a constant reminder of how easy it was, how tempting it was, to potentially abuse that trust and to rip him off. The way he chose what color socks to wear (he had a number sewn into them) and other logistical challenges were always interesting. There's also a heartbreaking scene where as a child, he falls over and calls out for his mother, who is silently watching from the other side of the room -- seeing what he will do to fend for himself and to develop the essential survival skill of memorizing his environment. 

The good things mentioned in the last few paragraphs were enough to earn Ray a mildly positive review from me.

This series will continue at some unspecified point in the future with The Prince of Tides in 1991. Yes, that means I've seen every best picture nominee from 1992 to 2003. 

A list endgame uncomplicated by getting to the theater

When Boxing Day passes in Australia, it's usually a metaphorical starting gun shot off for me, meaning I have access to a bunch of end-of-year awards contenders that I have to fit in before I close my list. Boxing Day, as I've told you in the past, is the biggest theatrical release day on the whole Australian calendar.

This year, it's quite a different story, as exemplified by having just purchased a $3.99 rental of The Banshees of Inisherin from U.S. iTunes.

Banshees is one of a number of movies that became available in Australian theaters on Monday, also including the likes of Triangle of Sadness, I Wanna Dance With Somebody, The Lost King and Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile. Well, I already watched Triangle last week through an iTunes rental, The Lost King I saw at an advanced screening more than a month ago, and we happened to go to Lyle yesterday to escape from the hottest day of the year -- though we needn't have, as this is available on iTunes for me as well. The only one of those titles I can't get my hands on without going to the theater is the Whitney Houston movie, and I'm not even sure I'm prioritizing a viewing of it before my list closes.

Shift forward ten days to our next regularly scheduled Thursday and The Fabelmans comes out on January 5th. I'll probably choose to see this one in the theater, but not because I have to. It's also available on U.S. iTunes, though it would be the premium rental price.

Aftersun also becomes available for rental on January 17th, a week before my list closes, and two days later is when Babylon hits Australian theaters. I'll probably see that in the theater but by that point it may have been nearly two weeks since my last visit to the theater to see The Fabelmans -- totally unheard of in the January sprint to the finish line.

There are some movies that don't actually hit Australian theaters before the list closes, like Tar and The Whale, but I've already seen both of them -- thanks again to iTunes (paid the premium rental for Tar) and the good old advanced screening. 

There may be some titles I'm not considering that could actually slip by me, but if I'm not considering them it means they are totally devoid of the year-end anxiety I always feel, when I push against every last fiber of my wife's good humor in trying to get out to the theater no less frequently than every fourth night.

It definitely feels strange. And since my friend and I who do our year-end lists decided to go with the day the Oscars chose to release their nominations, January 24th, we already have a week longer than we used to have to see whatever movies we haven't seen yet. I'm already close to 150 for the year with 27 days still remaining, and he's already (gasp) around 330. Actually I think he was around 330 a week ago, so he's probably far eclipsed that by now. 

Should I pump the brakes? Should I star watching dumb Netflix movies like Mr. Harrigan's Phone that I had never intended to watch? (Note: Mr. Harrigan's Phone may be a perfectly fine film.)

You probably know that I actually don't like setting personal records for movies seen in a given year. When I hit 170 last year, which bested my previous high by nearly 20, I didn't view it as a new benchmark I'd try to beat this year. I viewed it as a sign of many misspent hours I could have been doing other things. Not that I don't love spending time on movies, mind you -- you know I do -- but I likely could have gotten a perfectly good representation of the year's movies with around 140 or 150. That's especially the case when you compare notes with the average person, who, if they even bother to identify their favorite movies of the year, might be choosing from 40 titles at most.

Well, this is who I am, and at least this year, who I am won't be involving any additional stress. Due to the changes in the cinematic business model in recent years, everything I want is there for the taking -- and take it I will. 

Ranking my 26 previous #1s

It's a project that's been in the works a whole year ... or some might say, 25 years.

Last January/February was the 25th anniversary of the first rankings I ever wrote, in early 1997 for the movies of 1996. Nearly a year later, it's been closer to 26 years and I do have a total of 26 previous #1s. As you would know, when you have an anniversary of something, it often means you have one more than the number of years in between, seeing as how I revealed a new #1 in both early 1997 and early 2022. You don't need any additional time spent on explanations that seem mildly defensive in nature.

However, I will remind you that in 2022, I rewatched all 26 #1s, starting with the most recent (Our Friend) on January 10th -- actually a part of reassessing it for my 2021 list -- and finishing with Beyond the Hills (my #1 of 2013) on December 12th. The 24 others were spaced at approximately two-week intervals throughout the year, though those were sometimes collapsed (the shortest interval was two days) because I had to expand the interval at other times, as when I went to America (leading to a 39-day interval at that point). 

In fact, since I have you, since it doesn't take very much time to read a list (you can just skip it if you want), and since I recorded it (because of course I did), here is the order I watched the movies, along with their dates:

1. Our Friend (1/10/22)
2. A Ghost Story (1/21/22)
3. Looking for Richard (2/1/22)
4. Hustle & Flow (2/12/22)
5. Children of Men (2/26/22)
6. Gosford Park (3/16/22)
7. Parasite (3/30/22)
8. Moon (4/14/22)
9. Titanic (4/25/22)
10. Toni Erdmann (4/27/22)
11. Ruby Sparks (5/13/22)
12. Run Lola Run (5/29/22)
13. I’m Thinking of Ending Things (6/11/22)
14. The Wrestler (6/22/22)
15. Inside Out (7/7/22)
16. Hamlet (7/18/22)
17. Lost in Translation (8/26/22)
18. Adaptation (9/4/22)
19. Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (9/16/22)
20. 127 Hours (9/29/22)
21. A Separation (10/11/22)
22. There Will Be Blood (10/24/22)
23. Happiness (11/7/22)
24. First Reformed (11/20/22)
25. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (12/1/22)
26. Beyond the Hills (12/12/22)

Inside Out actually got rewatched twice, since my dad and his wife wanted to watch it while we were visiting them in Maine. If I'd have only known.

The above list also reminds you of the titles we're dealing with ... even though I'm sure you don't need it because most of you devoted Audientheads (Audientphiles?) would have done your due diligence and committed them to memory.

The viewings were of course leading up to an epic ranking of only these 26 titles on Flickchart, which I accomplished with a separate account. I didn't know how long it would take to reach a definitive order, but it took less than a thousand duels, and probably closer to 700. (I didn't make a note of the number of duels when I started. It wasn't zero, as I hijacked this account from when I used it to help determine my top 25 of the 2010s.)

I had thought of doing a set number of duels, but by the end I had gone something like 200 duels without a single lower-ranked movie beating a higher-ranked movie, meaning that the movies had stopped changing positions. Of course, many of these movies had now dueled the same other movie countless times. And it was easy enough to remember the decision I'd made on the previous occasion, so after a while, that's what I remembered rather than giving each of these films a fresh assessment on every new duel. But I also saw no reason to call into question my previous thoughts on the matter, given that they were recorded within the past week.

And after a while it all became a big blur. I'd have to stop and look at the titles carefully as they hard started to lose all meaning. It was coming to the point where I had basically memorized the movie's chart position, and it was easy in one moment to say "Well, #19 obviously beats #22." This was a good indication it was time to stop and to publish this list.

So here are those definitive rankings, with a couple sentences on each to give my thoughts on the ranking, and how the movie may have changed in my mind on this viewing. For the sake of a drama you probably don't need, I'll go ahead and list them in reverse order:

26. Gosford Park - Robert Altman's film has had a lot of challenges in its time since being named my #1 of 2001, as I rather quickly regretted not giving the top spot to Memento, and then it became my only #1 not to make my top 25 of the 2000s, though I did take pity on it in the form of an honorable mention. It's no surprise that my latest rewatch didn't do much to bolster its case, though we're still of course talking about a very good movie here -- just not one that can compete with these others.

25. Hustle & Flow - Craig Brewer's film may have suffered more than any other film I rewatched this year. Don't get me wrong, I still really like it, but there were some moments I found broader and more melodramatic than I remembered, and I couldn't fully get past them. And yes, it kills me that it's so low considering that this is my only #1 where the lead character is Black. (Leave it to Vance, who writes a post about race approximately every three weeks, to bring race into it.)

24. Looking for Richard - It took until 2022 to finally rewatch my first-ever #1, and after 25 years, I did wonder what all the fuss was about. To be sure this is a useful academic and artistic exercise, but it did act as a de facto confirmation of my idea about the "documentary ceiling" -- i.e., the notion that even the best documentaries have a ceiling to their impact on us, especially when up against a narrative film of equal quality. It's no surprise another documentary has yet to scale my year-end heights.

23. Ruby Sparks - This was the other movie (along with Gosford Park) that I knew would likely be in trouble during this project, since it also only made the honorable mentions in my best of the 2010s list posted in early 2020. I think this viewing was a slight improvement on the one in 2019, but it still leaves Ruby Sparks on the outside looking in, the initial excitement I had for it in 2012 steadily becoming more muted over time.

22. I'm Thinking of Ending Things - I've felt very positively about this movie in all three of my viewings since it topped my charts in 2020, but others' criticisms of it have, indeed, seeped into my consciousness over time, maybe especially the very ending of the film -- whether that's just the last few minutes or the 20 minutes before that. For sure Kaufman remains on top of his game here, and as I said previously, this assessment is relative to other #1s. 

21. Our Friend - And both of my #1s from the 2020s are in the 20s. This and Looking for Richard are my only two #1s that I've seen only twice, and I am conscious that Our Friend is the only one I did not rewatch specifically for this project -- having retrofit it into the project because I'd already watched it for another reason at the start of 2022. I'm not sure how I would have seen it with a slight adjustment in my agenda, but I did blubber like an idiot in January, and I'm quite fond of this film. (Also, reverse recency bias could be at play. Films need time to amass classic status.)

20. Toni Erdmann - I feel like I have a weaker grasp on my true level of affection for this film than most others on this list. On a good day, it could beat many of the next ten titles ahead of it. However, I do have to acknowledge that there's an uneven quality to Maren Ade's film that may only be exacerbated by its length -- as an example, I still don't really care for the "Greatest Love of All" scene, which many people cite as a standout. Still, Toni Erdmann takes you on a real journey and I still loved that journey after this third viewing. 

19. Hamlet - I talked earlier about the documentary ceiling; maybe this is the "Hamlet ceiling." In other words, though I obviously got an incredible amount out of this version of Hamlet back in 2000, it's still Shakespeare's play and it could not have contained any actual surprises for me in terms of the story, just in terms of Michael Almereyda's staging. Again, we're talking about grading on a curve here, and I think pretty soon we'll move into the territory where I can stop apologizing about why one of these excellent films is "so low."

18. Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) - Each Birdman viewing, I think it's going to seem significantly worse to me than it did the time before, but that never happens. As I've discussed a couple times on this blog, Birdman backlash is a real thing and I'm not immune to it. But I still think the movie's core trick is a technical wonder, and the themes considered here are interesting ones.

17. The Wrestler - I think I expected Darren Aronofsky's film to drop considerably in my estimation on this viewing, and it totally didn't. I still love Mickey Rourke's performance and am still amazed that Aronofsky can so confidently make a film that seems so fundamentally different, in both style and substance, from out-there movies like Requiem for a Dream and mother!

16. Beyond the Hills - This did suffer just a tiny bit on this viewing, my fourth. Before this project I would guess that this might finish around 11th, which is where it finished on my best of the decade list -- ahead of some films that have yet to make an appearance on this list. I can't rule out that its length, combined with it being the last of the 26 I rewatched, had some impact on me. I was probably exhausted at this point.

15. A Separation - It remains a fascinating social puzzlebox in which not all the clues even mean anything. On this viewing I learned that although you're never actually told what happened to the money that Nader thought Razieh had stolen from him, the answer is in the first 15 minutes of the movie, if only you had known to look for it -- Simin just grabbed it out of the drawer when she needed some money for something. Just one of many reasons this rewards repeat viewings. 

14. Happiness - I had thought this was sort of a black sheep among my #1s, and my difficulty getting my hands on it seemed to confirm that. (I ultimately had to buy a DVD copy to be shipped from the U.S.) But I liked this odd, twisted, and strangely humanistic movie as much as ever on this viewing, which allowed it almost to sneak into the top half of my #1s rather than somewhere in the early 20s as I might have forecasted before I started.

13. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind - If Happiness is a riser, Eternal Sunshine is a faller. Look, this movie is still crazy brilliant. But on my last two viewings, which came in 2021 and 2022, I have felt a little less enthusiastic about it than originally -- maybe it just seems a little twee. Then again, it's top-notch, high-concept intellectual and emotional creativity on display, and lists like Sight and Sound keep reminding me how great others think it is. At least it's still in the upper half of my rankings.

12. Moon - The pairing of this and my #11 is a pairing of men caught in desperate solo situations from which they might not emerge alive -- and they were also my #1 in consecutive years. I guess I was pretty easy to profile psychologically in 2009 and 2010. (Though I'd only just gotten married in 2008, so let's not read too much into it.) The existential issues at the core of Moon still really do it for me -- though I am starting to doubt if Duncan Jones will ever make another good movie. (Yes, I didn't even care for Source Code.)

11. 127 Hours - The other half of the 11-12 pairing, which probably could have gone either way. Given the other favorites that emerged from 2010 after the fact (Tangled, The Social Network and Rabbit Hole all made my top five of the decade), I kind of thought 127 Hours would be the Gosford Park of its year and this would continue to reflect negatively against it -- but I still like it quite a bit every time I see it, and this viewing was no exception. That it could beat heavy hitters like Moon and Eternal Sunshine is really saying something.

10. A Ghost Story - I've had one sub par Ghost Story viewing mixed in with three great ones, but this year's was one of the great ones. In fact, it was after watching it -- as what proved retroactively to have functioned as my second viewing in the series -- that I decided to go forth with the project of watching all 26 and ranking them. Combined with Our Friend, I was already 1/13th of the way there. The level of existential wonder wrapped in this minimalist indie package continues to knock my socks off.

9. First Reformed - I'm already up to five First Reformed viewings, and it only came out in 2018. I wouldn't keep watching this movie if there weren't something about it that fundamentally speaks to me. Artistically, I feel like there's some element of it that goes hand in hand with A Ghost Story -- maybe it's the 1.33:1 aspect ratio. Even in five viewings I have yet to have an off one, and at this point it looks like I never will.

8. Parasite - With each viewing of Parasite (four now) it reveals itself more and more as a stone cold classic. Forget the fact that I gave it "only" 4.5 stars when it first came out. Bong Joon-ho's film comically yet poignantly examines the same themes as A Separation while containing the sort of narrative surprises Rian Johnson thinks he's giving us in the Knives Out movies. This is a clear riser given that it finished behind both of the previous two movies in the best of the decade list (where it finished 13th), and if I ever do this sort of thing again I suspect it will rise further. 

7. Inside Out - There's a perfect echo between this and my top ten of the decade list, as Inside Out finished in seventh in both places. It was my highest #1 movie in that list that was specific to that decade, and still holds that crown here. Perhaps the best indication of its ongoing impact on me is that as mentioned previously, I watched it twice this year -- about three weeks apart, and unwittingly the second time when it was suggested for viewing on a visit to my dad. If anything, it actually might have had even more of an impact on me in the second viewing. Just Pixar at its absolute finest.

6. There Will Be Blood - Even though this movie has always lingered around the middle of my top 100 on my regular Flickchart account, I think of this as possibly the biggest riser as a result of this year's viewing, which just confirmed what a total masterpiece Paul Thomas Anderson's best film is. My relatively recent third viewing was only so-so, but it rocketed back up in my estimation after this one. There's a reason many people consider this the best film of the 2000s.

5. Titanic - My Titanic loyalty knows no bounds. Truth is, as confirmed when I watched this during COVID isolation for probably the fifth time overall, I still get a huge charge out of the spectacle as well as the sweeping old-school romanticism of it all. At this point, the ultimate fodder for backlash will never add me to its list of detractors.

4. Lost in Translation - Given their overwhelming romanticism, and that the years 2003 and 2004 found me in a very melancholy place in that regard, I always link this with Eternal Sunshine in my mind. But while Eternal Sunshine has steadily lost some of its luster, Sofia Coppola's tone poem of dislocation and connection continues to ride its ethereal soundtrack to great heights -- even when I go more than 11 years between viewings, which is what happened in this case.

3. Adaptation - Adaptation has truly been the "little #1 that could," having had times throughout the latter part of its decade when I debated how good it was (it was only 11th on that decade list, which is decent but not fantastic). In the last decade, I have continued to marvel at how it's one of the most ambitious scripts ever written and that every single moment of the film leaves me feeling intellectually thrilled. On the 20th anniversary of its existence, it has forged a permanent place in my affections.

2. Children of Men - This is the only film other than my #1 that had a chance to be my #1, and in fact, it is actually a few spots higher on my regular Flickchart than the one that came out on top here. Instead of bemoaning its failure to become the champion, I'll just say again what a technical masterpiece this is, what a totally realized creation of a future world that easily feels like an outgrowth of our own. And despite its everpresent sense of misery, it touches you with it ultimate optimism. Alfonso Cuaron has made other incredibly praised films, but his achievement here (with a big assist from DP Emmanuel Lubezki) tops all others. 

1. Run Lola Run - Although I'm not sure if my #1 ever actually dueled my #2, I had kind of thought from the start that this would end up as my #1, considering that it has spent years now in the top 20 of my regular Flickchart account, and I'd be lying if I said knowing it held that lofty position didn't factor into my duels here. I regularly deferred to the decisions made by Previous Me over many years. Other movies may surge to favorite status among my previous #1s during short periods of time, but Tom Tykwer's film always outlasts them. I need to look no further than two (or was it three?) viewings ago, when I got emotional during the opening credits of Run Lola Run just because they were so awesome. 

One more final piece of business I want to accomplish is to see how these rankings deviate from their relative ranking in my actual Flickchart. This year's decisions were made in a smaller set and therefore I find them purer, since they aren't polluted by the imperfection of the process, when more titles are involved, many of which may not be in the correct spot in my Flickchart. Especially since, as I mentioned, their rankings on my normal account were definitely in the back of my mind when I was doing this.

So here's the order these appear on my actual Flickchart, with a number and percentage, and a + or - next to them to indicate if they are relatively higher or relatively lower. 

1. Children of Men (17/6201, 100%) -1
2. Run Lola Run (20/6201, 100%) +1
3. Lost in Translation (36/6201, 99%) -1
4. Adaptation (41/6201, 99%) +1
5. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (50/6201, 99%) -8
6. Titanic (62/6201, 99%) +1
7. There Will Be Blood (70/6201, 99%) +1
8. Moon (92/6201, 99%) -4
9. A Separation (97/6201, 98%) -6
10. Parasite (144/6201, 98%) +2
11. Inside Out (151/6201, 98%) +4
12. Hamlet (156/6201, 97%) -7
13. Toni Erdmann (158/6201, 97%) -7
14. A Ghost Story (165/6201, 97%) +4
15. Ruby Sparks (166/6201, 97%) -8
16. I'm Thinking of Ending Things (168/6201, 97%) -6
17. First Reformed (169/6201, 97%) +8
18. Happiness (170/6201, 97%) +4
19. Beyond the Hills (171/6201, 97%) +3
20. 127 Hours (185/6201, 97%) +9
21. The Wrestler (194/6201, 97%)  +4
22. Our Friend (201/6201, 97%) +1
23. Hustle & Flow (208/6201, 97%) -2
24. Gosford Park (244/6201, 96%) -2
25. Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (270/6201, 96%) +7
26. Looking for Richard (275/6201, 96%) -1 

Some quick thoughts about this:

- Large variations are generally explained by a movie debuting very highly during my peak enthusiasm for it, then steadily falling as my thoughts take more shape and it begins losing duels. This takes a while though. Ruby Sparks was once as high as around 90 on my Flickchart, and it's taken years to fall only to #166. I sometimes forcibly re-rank a movie if I realize it is way out of place, but in these cases I would just let them gradually fall.

- How funny that four consecutive #1s appear from 168 to 171 on my Flickchart ... and it's actually six out of seven if you consider there are also two at 165 and 166. I guess this is where #1s go to cluster.

- Given that there are some pretty big disparities between these two lists, it lends credence to the idea that even my current ranking of the 26 is not a true indication how I feel about them, and that it just takes one really good or really bad viewing to have a big impact. I don't think I'll be watching any of these for a couple years now, at which point other changes in the way I see the world could impact how I see these movies.

I'll really finish -- no really this time -- with a handful of pormanteaus, since I'll be doing that in a couple weeks for the movies of 2022 and it's already on the brain.

Toni Birdman - A father trying to connect with his daughter joins up with another father trying to connect with his daughter for a road trip involving Raymond Carver adaptations and false teeth.

Children of Erdmann - Ines Conradi is the last pregnant woman on Earth, and is mortified that the world's only grandfather spends his time dressing up in outrageous wigs. 

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Moon - A clone working on the moon undergoes a procedure to have his memory continually wiped in order to forget the manic pixie dream girl that got away.

Looking for Ruby - It turns out that Shakespeare wrote the world's first manic pixie dream girl, but it takes Al Pacino to explain it to the public. 

Inside Our Friend - The emotions inside a terminal cancer patient try to boost her spirits by restarting Goofball Island.

Gosford Parasite - A wealthy British estate owner is stabbed not by one of the guests at his party, but by the stir crazy Korean living in a hidden bomb shelter in his basement.

Lost in Separation - In order to reinvigorate their failing marriage, Nader and Simin travel to Tokyo and pretend to meet as strangers in a hotel bar. 

There Hills Be Blood - Daniel Plainview is the victim of witchcraft when he attempts to drill for oil on the land of a Romanian convent.

Okay maybe more than a handful.

Four directors of my 26 #1s have a new movie in 2022, those being Darren Aronofsky, James Cameron, Cristian Mungiu and Alejandro G. Inarritu. I don't think I'll be able to get to Mungiu's R.M.N. (which might end up being a 2023 movie), but I should catch the others. 

Do any of them have a chance to be my first two-time #1 director? You'll find out in about three weeks.

And that brings this 25th anniversary celebration of looking back on my former #1s to a close. See you in another 25 years. 

Wait what's her name?

We didn't watch Elf this year. In recent Decemers we've watched it about as often as we haven't watched it, but we had other holiday favorites on the docket in 2022.

However, it's a movie I've seen about seven times, and I had no idea the name of Zooey Deschanel's character until today.

My older son and I were watching the Christmas day basketball game between my Celtics and the Milwaukee Bucks -- the teams with the two best records in the NBA -- and the TDNorth Garden in Boston was doing a trivia game for the crowd that involved guessing the names of characters from beloved Christmas movies.

I started out strong naming Ralphie Parker -- which would have been easy for me even if we hadn't just watched it -- but then the name George Bailey eluded me. I also couldn't provide the name Yukon Cornelius in a timely fashion, and some other misses were combined in there. I finally recovered a bit with John McClane, but then couldn't remember that Tim Allen's character in The Santa Clause was Scott Calvin -- though I did get his alternate character name of Santa. (Duh.)

When Deschanel's character from Elf came up in her familiar Gimbels elf garb, I thought "I should get this."

But then I was all "What the hell is her name?"

Don't you know, it's "Jovie."

Um, no, I did not know.

The number of times her name is spoken in the movie must be very few for me to have never picked up on it before now. Or really, never picked up on it, since it's not like playing along with a trivia game qualifies as "picking up on it." And it's a distinctive name, with a Christmas twist, so I wouldn't forget it like I might if it were Sarah or Jane.

But I also feel like I should have learned it by writing about her character at some point in the past. Deschanel is easily one of my favorite parts of the movie, and if I've never written about her it was not for lack of appreciation. I might have written about her but just referred to her as "Zooey Deschanel's character," because I guess that's how I've always thought of her. She may have lost some luster as a performer as she's been revealed as a bit of a one-trick pony, but Elf was peak Deschanel.

Oh well, it doesn't matter what her name is. It matters what she brings to Elf, which is a ton.

And we had quite the jovial Christmas this year, even without Elf or Zooey Deschanel. One of the best I can remember actually -- great food, great company, great presents. If yours is still going on I hope it's just as good.

(And the Celtics won big, making for a very Merry Christmas in our house indeed ... even if it was Boxing Day.)

A Christmas Story Christmas Story Christmas ... with subtitles

On my side of the family, we have only one Christmas movie that has been passed down from the generation before mine; or rather, a Christmas movie that we jointly discovered in the first years of its existence, nearly three decades ago.

That's Bob Clark's A Christmas Story, but to call it "Bob Clark's" feels like a misplaced possessive. Clark was the guy who directed Porky's, and I feel like that's more indicative of his directorial output than this. (Want some more titles? He also directed Baby Geniuses and its sequel, the Sylvester Stallone-Dolly Parton movie Rhinestone, From the Hip, a movie called The Karate Dog, and of course Porky's II: The Next Day.)

But before this turns into a full Bob Clark dumpfest, let me at least say it's good he has this one outlier on his resumé.

It's been quite some time since I've watched it -- more than 15 years for sure. (I started keeping track of my rewatches in mid-2006, and it's not on that list.) And having my dad and his wife in town for Christmas seemed like the perfect occasion.

Making it all the more so is that the next generation, my kids, haven't seen it yet, though my wife has. (We must have watched it together the first Christmas we were together in 2005.) 

Our Friday night viewing was only a single viewing for everyone in else in my family -- my wife, who doesn't particularly care for it, was going to skip it, but ended up watching the final two-thirds and liking it better than she did the first time. For me, though, it was the first of a double feature, the second movie being ...

... A Christmas Story Christmas, the newly released sequel that finds Ralphie and his family 33 years later in 1973, days after the December 19th death of his father, and trying to make this a great Christmas so they don't always associate the holiday with his passing.

I had at one point considered having my dad (and the rest of us) watch the sequel, but he said he was fine just watching the original. Given the likelihood of it not being very good, that seemed like a good decision. 

And indeed it was the right decision, though I still gave A Christmas Story Christmas three stars on Letterboxd. That's well short of the five that its predecessor got, but at least it achieved the minimum star rating necessary for a recommendation.

The first movie got off to a potentially rocky start when the closed captioning was set into the ON position. This would have only taken a moment to correct, but seeing the captions as an option allowed my dad's wife to seize on the idea of leaving them on to assist her with the dialogue. (She says she's becoming hard of hearing, though it doesn't impact her in day-to-day conversation.) 

At first this annoyed me a bit. When you are watching a movie that you understand without subtitles, it can feel like quite the encumbrance to have them on. Try as you might, you can't really ignore them -- you end up reading them and then there's a temporal disconnect between what you're hearing and what you're reading. In some instances the captions reveal a joke before it's been spoken, for example.

I must say, though, that in the case of this movie, which relies heavily on Jean Shepherd's cleverly written voiceover as the adult Ralphie, it sort of added to my appreciation of the writing. There are some jokes that maybe I didn't get the last time I saw it (even though I've worked out I must have been 32), and having them spelled out for me only added to my enjoyment of the film, in the end.

And what enjoyment. The three of us on the coach -- my dad, me, and my dad's wife -- did the most laughing, but my wife and older son joined in as well. My younger son seemed sort of restless, but he claimed also to have liked it when all was said and done. (Incidentally, it should have been him sitting between the two of them on the couch -- what kid doesn't want to cuddle with his grandparents during a movie? -- but when he saw that his older brother wasn't going to take the bean bag chair, he said he wanted it. Yeah kid, me too. Three adults should never have to sit together on the same couch, even with a movie as short and as delightful as this one.)

I could tell my dad was really chuffed (to use the Australian word) to have watched it and to have gotten such good reactions from everyone else present. I had asked the kids to be on their best behavior in terms of exactly how honest they were in their post-movie comments. Fortunately, they didn't need to force positive words or a polite and toothless "it wasn't my favorite" sort of rejection. You can fake enthusiasm for something, but you can't fake the goofy grin on your face when you're watching something you enjoy.

My dad's wife shared some popcorn with my older son and everyone enjoyed a personal ice cream at the midway point, so it was a big win for Christmas Eve Eve. And by opting to watch it in the living room rather than on the projector in our garage, we got to have the lit Christmas tree -- which they helped decorate a few days ago -- shimmering warmly in our peripheral vision. 

The sequel started out strong enough that I was immediately kicking myself for not pushing harder to watch it with everyone, and mentally calculating whether the 48-hour rental window would still allow a Christmas Day viewing. Fortunately (I guess), it quickly stopped delivering -- not totally, but enough to reinforce the decision I'd already made not to watch it collectively. Though I suspect we all would have found it cute enough, and harmless enough, as was my experience of it.

One issue I had with A Christmas Story Christmas was that there were too many callbacks. Not only did they try to echo most of the vignettes from A Christmas Story, even straight-up repeating them in some cases, but Darren McGavin's "The Old Man" hovered over this movie ten times more than T'Challa hovers over Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. McGavin, like Chadwick Boseman, did die, but that was ages ago, in 2006. Although I certainly find him to be the funniest and probably best character in the original, it's hard to assume that your whole audience feels a huge amount of sentiment for him, such that his best lines from the original movie echo throughout this movie as Ralphie's memories. (Or maybe I just didn't need to be reminded of them because I had literally just seen them.)

Interestingly, although I was pleased to see how well someone like Peter Billingsley can still act, my favorite parts of the movie were two actresses who were new to the "franchise," if you want to call it that: Julie Hagerty, who has taken over from the still-living Melinda Dillon as Ralphie's mother (probably because she's 16 years younger), and Erinn Hayes, who I mistook for Lost's Maggie Grace, who plays Ralphie's wife. Both women are great and both spend a lot of the movie drinking. It's pretty hilarious.

It's a nice movie that seemed like it could have been ten percent better than it was without too much effort. But that ain't bad at all.

It was interesting for me to note that while both movies provide something of a window into my dad's and my childhoods, both are also just before our time -- in fact, by almost exactly the same amount. At Christmas of 1940, my dad was about 14 months old. At Christmas of 1973, I was about two months old. However, in both cases, the toys these characters wanted were still going strong when my dad and I were old enough to actually want them ten years later. My dad talks about his own Red Ryder BB gun -- he still has it -- and though I don't specifically relate to the Easy Bake Oven that Ralphie's daughter wants, I'm pretty sure my sister had one. (Ralphie's son wanted, and got, a sled, which was also something I wanted -- but his was a sled with the metal rails, while I always wanted the plastic-bottom ones.)

Anyway, it was a pretty nice three+ hours of Christmas cheer on the night before the night before Christmas.

If I don't talk to you again before it becomes Christmas where you are, I hope you have a merry one.

Who do you share your movies with?

The life a film critic, even an ordinary film enthusiast, is a solo one. We stopped worrying years ago about someone labeling us a loser when we're sitting in the theater by ourselves, if we ever did worry about that. We know other people can't keep up with our breakneck viewing pace, and if they did, they might have different films they needed to prioritize anyway. Simply put, it's not the passion to pursue if you are looking for it to be a social experience in any meaningful way.

That said, having other viewers echo your experience of a film -- if and maybe perhaps especially if they aren't watching it with you -- is an essential part of the passion. We care about we think of a film first and foremost, but we also care a whole lot about what other people think, especially in the case of actual film critics, where the whole pursuit is based on the idea of convincing another person of the correctness of your viewpoint. 

That sounds like an ego thing, but really it isn't. It's more like "This piece of art floored me; I'm curious if it has the same impact on you, and for the same reasons." We are always trying to understand the ineffable effect movies have on us, in our quest to locate that effect again and to revel in it.

All this is a big preamble to explaining how a movie I like doesn't mean as much to me if my wife isn't having the experience with me.

She and I don't watch a lot of movies together anymore. She has significantly shifted focus to television in the past five years. I can't blame her, though I did think that a passion for movies was something we would share until we were old and gray. Maybe she'll get it back, maybe she won't, but I am fine with either outcome. 

When we do watch a movie together, though, I get very tetchy when she stops watching it, or goes to do something and tells me not to pause it, or something along those lines. 

This happened on Sunday night with a family movie on the projector in our garage, a movie I ended up enjoying quite a lot. From the poster on this post, you have guessed by now that it was Spirited, the new Christmas musical on AppleTV+, starting Will Ferrell and Ryan Reynolds, with music by the team behind The Greatest Showman and La La Land.

We had identified it early on in the holiday season (it has of course been out since mid-November) as something to watch together that the kids would probably enjoy. But it's been quite the challenging December, and with my dad and his wife arriving in Australia for Christmas on Tuesday, I knew Sunday night was probably our last opportunity to watch it. (The two of them wouldn't go for that particular film, and besides, we're watching a Christmas movie with them later tonight. Probably more on that tomorrow.)

My wife reluctantly agreed, understanding that she had entered in to a verbal contract to watch the movie, and that if we didn't watch it before Christmas obviously we wouldn't watch it at all. But she also said she would start it with us and see how she went, maybe peeling off to let the kids and me finish it.

I knew all along she might not finish it. Yet I tricked myself into thinking we had gotten past that worry when I heard her guffawing at the first half as much as I was. Even though it's 127 minutes long and we didn't get started until after 8, I figured the first half of Spirited had ingratiated itself enough to her that she'd be in it for the long haul. I mean, once she'd made it to "Good Afternoon," there was no turning back at that point, right? (By the way, you can read my full review here.)

So when she left to get the kids some ice cream halfway through and told me not to pause it, I shouldn't have been surprised. I thought maybe she'd just be happy to lose a five-minute chunk in the middle and would catch back up. But after delivering the ice cream, she took their dinner plates back to the kitchen and never returned.

Well, I was in a funk for about ten minutes. I think this also coincided with the point in the movie where you start wondering if it might be a little bloated, but first and foremost I was disappointed that might my wife had bailed on Spirited.

Weren't we laughing in delight? Weren't we mentally congratulating the filmmakers for nailing it? Wasn't a Christmas spirit that had been sorely missing from our December suffusing the room?

When I felt such disappointment that the movie was going on with just me and my two sons, I realized how important it is for me to share the experience of a movie with her, especially one we are both enjoying. You want to hear your laughter echoed. When the other adult in the room is gone, it starts to feel lonely indeed -- and without the promise of an echo, the laughter isn't as ready to emerge.

I tried to pick it apart a bit and figure out what this reveals about me.

One conclusion is that there is an ego component of it. If I've suggested we watch Spirited in our last remaining window to do so, I want that to have been clearly the right decision. And on some level I probably want to get credit for my role in giving us all a fun time.

But I don't think that's the core of it. I think it's just that one of the reasons I married my wife is that I value her opinions on things, and I feel like we see the world similarly. One of us usually doesn't find a movie funny if the other doesn't. Big emotional moments in a film touch us similarly. We were tickled equally pink when all the animals jumped out of those trucks in RRR. In short, we both get what makes a movie great, and we see that greatness in similar movies.

So when I'm thinking a movie is great, and the evidence is that she agrees, it's really deflating to see her walk out of that room, never to return.

But then toward the end of the movie I had a different revelation. 

The first thing my younger son said about it was that there was a lot of swearing. (Mild swearing only, but swearing is swearing in his book.)

The first thing my older son said was that it might be the greatest movie he's ever seen.

Now, he's known for saying things like this. But he's also getting older and less prone to hyperbole. I could tell he was liking it from comments he made, and from the fact that one particular joke caused him to keep spurting out laughter for about 30 seconds. He told me that in his head he was laughing about that joke for another two minutes.

My revelation was that I have two other people to echo my laughter -- to share my movies with.

Although I don't get the same thrill when one of my kids loves a movie as when my wife does -- you can't really trust the judgments of children, they could be way off in either direction based on totally irrational reasons -- the truth is, I do get a thrill when I get a movie in their win column. Especially with my older son, who at 12 going on 13 is rapidly becoming a lot more like an adult -- with judgments that are more sound, and an unwillingness to put up with things that aren't working for him. So when a movie does work for him, like Spirited did, I know it's earned.

And you know what? I think those two boys can feed the social component I need when watching a movie with someone else. And they'll do that increasingly better the older they get.

My wife needs to travel on her own entertainment journey. If movies are things she can pop in and out of, even when she's enjoying them, that's her business. That's her journey. I just want her entertainment journey to leave her happy.

As long as my boys will continue to take this entertainment journey with me, I'll be overjoyed to share it with them.

When tragic heroes defy your romantic expectations

I finally got to one of the most acclaimed documentaries of the year on Wednesday night, Fire of Love, even though I probably should have spent the evening frantically completing Christmas-related tasks. What can I say, we decorated our tree last night and I always like to pair that evening with a movie.

Maybe something less heavy would have been in order, but the volcanic spectacle of the movie was certainly a good match. It was no Beasts of No Nation in terms of depressing subject matter for a tree decoration movie, but Fire of Love does indeed end with both of its main characters dying -- which is no spoiler, because it's one of the first things you learn about them and is in every bit of promotional material related to the movie.

When I first heard that a documentary had been made about two married volcanologists who had perished in the line of duty of their passion -- not unlike Timothy Treadwell, made famous in Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man -- I assumed they looked something like this:

When in fact, Katia and Maurice Krafft looked like this:

The difference between the two is how Hollywood would cast them and how real life did cast them.

This is not to say that the Kraffts were ugly. But it is to say that they look more like scientists than L.L. Bean models, which is what the first two people are -- and which is very similar to how they would be cast when/if there is a narrative film version made of their story.

It was interesting for me to consider, though, how much of my expectation to feel sorrow at their tragic passing -- 30 years in the past though it may be -- was bound up in the idea that they would be conventionally beautiful, more like Jack and Rose going down on the Titanic than two eccentrics risking life and limb on the edge of a volcano. I won't say it's likely, but it's certainly possible that more conventionally beautiful people would not have gotten into that line of work in the first place.

And I think the expectations were set by the title Fire of Love, which really places an emphasis on this being a love story, not a story of scientific exploration. And I'm sure it was, though Maurice Krafft's video footage -- oh so much wonderful video footage -- understandably does not highlight any moments of intimacy between them. In fact, the persona they present to the camera is more one of an odd couple, with playful banter directed at one another, and relatively few deep and soulful looks.

And when we are expecting a tragic romance, one that ended when they were both buried in an avalanche of soot, the movies have trained us to envision two people like the L.L. Bean models above. The fact that they are beautiful makes their untimely loss all the more tragic.

Never mind young. When they died they were 49 and 45 years old. That's not "old" of course -- I'm 49 now, and don't you dare call me old -- but it's not the platonically ideal 32 years old, old enough to have had ten good years in volcanology before meeting their makers. Old enough to believably be established figures in their field, but not old enough to have any gray hairs.

See that's Hollywood thinking again.

So who plays them in the movie?

I don't know, how about John Krasinski and Emily Blunt? Blunt is two months away from turning 40 and Krasinski is three years into his 40s. The fact that they are married in real life probably adds an element of tragic romance to the whole thing, as it assumes they will have good on-screen chemistry.

I really liked Fire of Love -- how close it gets to the top of my 2022 list is something that I'm still considering, and will be revealed in a month's time.

But I'm being honest with myself when I ask if it wouldn't end up higher ... if Maurice and Katia looked like this:

Audient Bollywood: Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge

This is the final installment of Audient Bollywood, a 2022 monthly series watching Bollywood films.

Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995) was the very first film I added to my Bollywood watchlist on Letterboxd. But that's not the reason I chose it as the final entry in this series.

I created the watchlist back in January, if I remember correctly, in order to give me a list of films to work from throughout the year, later adding some notes that included whether I could get the movie on one of my streaming services, whether it was a top ten dance scene, and perhaps most importantly, the running time -- knowing I'd have to factor in a movie's length in some months. I compiled it from several resources, though I believe I started with an IMDB list. Dilwale Dulhania La Jayenge must have been the first film on one of that list, because it was the first on my list, a list that grew to 64 titles, only ten of which I ended up watching.

But given that it was 189 minutes long, I thought there was a good chance I wouldn't watch it. I was really focusing in on movies that were closer to two hours than three, if I could help it, or movies that had been singled out for their great dance numbers, or movies that I had already known about through other means (such as RRR or Lagaan). 

Though I now think there's a certain poetry to watching the first film on the list last, that was just a coincidence. The reason I watched it was because of a TV show that I didn't even finish watching.

Back in July, my family and I watched the first two episodes of Ms. Marvel on Disney+. My wife and I were keen to continue; my kids, not so much. They thought it was boring. And apparently my wife and I didn't like it enough to promote it into our normal viewing slot after they go to bed. Increasingly, we haven't even watched one of our own shows in that time slot -- Better Call Saul, The Boys, Stranger Things, The Crown, etc. -- so we hardly had time to keep watching Ms. Marvel. It's just been a busy end of the year.

But in probably the last episode we did watch, the lead, played by Iman Vellani, meets a fellow boy of Indian heritage -- one of the "cool kids," I think. They're having a quick exchange in a car about Bollywood -- observed jealously by the title character's best friend who's crushing on her, played by Matt Lintz -- and they bond over the fact that they both know that "DDLJ," as they called it, is the best Bollywood movie. (I guess the majority of people prefer a different title. I don't remember what that title was.)

I immediately googled it, and there was the first title on my Bollywood watchlist.

This mightn't have been reason enough to watch the movie, and choosing my final movie based on this would have carried more weight had I actually finished Ms. Marvel. But what I liked about it was that it was a bit of an inside reference by a screenwriter of Indian heritage, something meant to congratulate others who got the reference and shared the refined tastes of a person who knows what's what. It was the best insider recommendation I thought I might get in the whole series.

And, unfortunately, it was a bit of a disappointment.

In a second instance of finishing up where I began, in a certain respect, DDLJ stars Shah Rukh Khan, who was also the star of the very first film I watched, Dil Se, back in January. That film came out three years later, and is famous for that great dance number on board the moving train. That dance number went a long way toward why I ultimately gave the film 3.5 stars on Letterboxd, because with so much of the tone of that film controlled by Khan, it would never have gotten there otherwise.

See, Shah Rukh Khan is a bit of a buffoon. A clown. An ass. I don't know if he's like that as a person, but that's the character he plays on screen -- which I now feel I can confirm after seeing him in two films. In both of these films, he comes on way too strong when he meets a beautiful girl, romancing her like the worst pickup artist you've ever seen strike out at a bar. On his best days he rises to the level of insincere used car salesman. There's a lot of making eyes and a lot of cheeky smiles and a lot of pranking and goofing. A little of him goes a long way.

And yet in both of these films, he wins the heart of what seems to be a quite reasonable and otherwise independent-thinking woman -- after the requisite period during which she despises him, of course. She's right to despise him, and in both cases, the narrative does not support her change in feelings toward him. 

I'm not sure if you can get it from just a quick picture of him, but at least you will see his annoyingly large stack of hair:

Maybe the hair was just the 1990s. But it's just so ... big.

Anyway, I suppose some basic plot synopsis would be in order.

Simran Singh (Kajol) is a Londoner of Indian descent, who has been promised to a young man back in India whom she's never met, but is the son of one her father's oldest and dearest friends. That's kind of the essence of an arranged marriage. Her father (Amrish Puri, who was Mola Ram in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom) is a pretty traditional sort, but he does melt when his daughter expresses the earnestness of her desire to get a Eurorail pass to "live a lifetime in one month" before returning to do her duty. She reminds him that she's always obeyed him, and he lets her go.

Of course, it's on this trip with her girlfriends that she meets the doofus you see above, a rich kid whose father (Anupam Kher, who you would also recognize from some western movies) is actually proud of him for failing out of university because it confirms their family legacy of failing. Why should he see failing as a good sign? Because he's become a multi-millionaire without even getting as far as his son Raj did, so he assumes Raj will do the same. Raj also lives in London and he also board the Eurorail with a few of his frivolous friends. 

Their continuous meeting cute might be fine if it weren't for the fact that he's just so obnoxious. I knew from seeing Dil Se that eventually Khan would find this soulful, smoldering state of being that would make him better resemble a traditional romantic hero, but it just takes too long here -- and as I said, when Simran does fall for him, it's with insufficient reason. It's like one day they are bickering and she genuinely hates him -- with good reason -- and then the next day they are proclaiming their undying love for each other. I mean, this is a guy who went to apologize her in what seemed like a really sweet gesture, with an offer of a flower -- only to have the flower contain a squirt gun that squirts her in the face when she leans into smell it. That's the kind of doofus this is.

The second half of the film of course involves his going to India to try to prevent her from marrying a real douchebag, Kuljit (Parmeet Sethi), where other complications ensue. There are a few clever things in this section of the film. But the film had to do a lot of work to pull me back to a three-star rating, which it just barely did.

I can't really say why Aditya Chopra's film is considered the movie that Indians "in the know," like Ms. Marvel writer Bisha K. Ali, would favor over whatever it's main rival was supposed to be -- unless that main rival is also not very good. Which would then not explain why these two are held up on such pedestals. Maybe I've just been spoiled by too much good Bollywood this year to see this as an all-timer.

I've got to say that one of the problems was its length. Three hours and nine minutes is a long time to be watching something you aren't really into. (Some people will be saying that after coming out of Avatar: The Way of Water.) I tried to do what I did for Sholay in November, which was to watch up to the intermission during the later afternoon and finish at night, even though there was no intermission embedded into the film of Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge. The first part went fine, as I watched about an hour and three minutes on my balcony on a nice summer afternoon, leaving just over two hours to finish after dinner. For various reasons, though -- one being cumulative exhaustion, one being the consumption of alcohol during the afternoon at two different holiday events -- I barely got through 45 more minutes that night before falling asleep on the couch and waking up at 1. I couldn't power through another 80 minutes starting at 1.

So I finally finished it between about 4 and 6 yesterday afternoon in my garage, again pausing for short naps. 

I might have been carried through fine, even not really liking the protagonist, if the movie had had better dance numbers. It didn't really have anything with big production values, as the few times where a dozen dancers at once were on screen, they were over before they had even begun. And I don't watch Bollywood movies to see two people sing to each other and swing each other around in a field. There are plenty of American movies I can watch if I want that sort of thing, and most of them will at least be a bit more self-conscious about how cheesy they're being.

Even though I ended with probably my second least favorite movie of the whole series, this was, overall, a highly successful experiment. I call it an "experiment" because I went into it with a little bit of trepidation. Bollywood did end up welcoming me in with open arms, but it was definitely outside my comfort zone in some respects, and before I started, the length felt prohibitively long. I probably could have watched 15 or 16 movies in most other series in the time it took to watch 12 in this one.

But you can't argue with the results. Here's a recap of how these movies did:

January - Dil Se (1998) - 3.5 stars
February - Pyaasa (1957) - 4.5 stars
March - Dhoom (2004) - 3.5 stars
April - Bajirao Mastani (2015) - 4 stars
May - RRR (2022) - 4 stars
June - Anand (1971) - 3.5 stars
July - Baar Baar Dekho (2016) - 2.5 stars
August - Eeb Allay Ooo! (2019) - 3.5 stars
September - Lagaan: Once Upton a Time in India (2001) - 4.5 stars
October - 3 Idiots (2009) - 4.5 stars
November - Sholay (1975) - 4 stars
December - Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995) - 3 stars

So only two films in the whole series received under 3.5 stars, and while some of that is probably my own excessive generosity and skewed rating system, I don't behave generously toward a film unless it gives me reason to. I had a hell of a good time watching most of these movies.

The interesting thing in looking back is that even though I gave a quarter of these movies 4.5 stars, it was two movies that I gave "only" 4 stars -- Bajirao Mastani and RRR -- that may have lingered with me the most. The dancing and production designs are out of this world in Bajirao Mastani, and RRR showcases some of the most inventive action filmmaking I have ever seen, continuing to hold its spot on my 2022 list as I realize certain films I had originally ranked higher simply are not better.

I was still floored by Pyaasa, Lagaan and 3 Idiots, though, with Lagaan likely taking top honors for the whole series.

Pyaasa may be the best metaphor for the series on the whole, though. There was a great barrier to entry in this movie at first, and it took me maybe 30 minutes to decide I even liked the movie. By the end, I gave it only a half-star shy of a perfect score. 

It makes for imperfect metaphor for the series in another way, though, given that the opening minutes of my very first movie, Dil Se, smashed through whatever barrier to entry there was for me about Bollywood in general, giving me about two dozen Bollywood dancers on the back of a training traveling through tunnels and mountains as A.R. Rahman's "Chaiyya Chaiyya" rocked the soundrack.

I never looked back.

I'll let you know what I'm watching in 2023 in early January.