Clearing the history on 2022

Twenty twenty-two was a year in which my family experienced a lot of challenges, which ranged from the merely annoying and time consuming to the downright sad. Holiday season COVID was just the last of them.

I won't get into them. That's not the sort of blog this is ... unless I feel like I can relate it directly to the movies, and if I'm also happy to forfeit my privacy to divulge them to you.

All you really need to know is that the movie Clear History -- which might not really be a movie -- was the perfect way for my wife and me to end the year, a few hours before the stroke of midnight. 

We'd really like to wipe the slate clean for 2023, and a movie with that title has a possible symbolic role in that quest.

Of course, since the movie is little more than a glorified episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, that symbolism is more likely to backfire than not.

I'm not even sure I should call Clear History a "movie" ... at least not one as I have traditionally defined it.

For starters, this was made for HBO back in 2013. That was long before the days when every streaming service had bespoke movies that certainly counted as an official movie, and hold your tongue if you suggest otherwise. HBO was not a streaming service back then, it was just a cable channel ... the cable channel that carried Curb Your Enthusiasm, in fact. 

Even if you didn't watch that show, though, you'd probably know from just one look at Clear History that it's TV. It may run for 95 minutes, but it's got sitcom written all over it. Like on Curb, Larry David is the star, and though he doesn't play "Larry David," the character he does play -- alternately known as Nathan Flomm and Rolly DaVore -- differs from the character "Larry David" in exactly zero ways. He nitpicks differences in social etiquette. He hangs on to grudges. He can never let anything go, which is sort of the same thing as hanging on to grudges. He is always on the verge of getting out of some tight situation before he can't leave well enough alone. He's even in a relationship with Cheryl Hines at the start of the movie, and JB Smoove becomes an important character in the plot later on.

Basically, David just got together his favorite Curb collaborators, on both sides of the camera, and decided to make a 90-minute version of Curb with a different character in name only. Plus give it a little pizzazz by adding famous on-screen talent like Jon Hamm, Amy Ryan, Kate Hudson, Michael Keaton, Bill Hader and Danny McBride.

And it was a lot of fun. I'll give you that. I laughed a lot. Since I'm not an HBO subscriber (or Binge subscriber, which carries HBO in Australia), it's been a while since I've seen an episode of Curb and I've missed it.

But is it a movie? I don't really know.

The first strike against that claim is that it looks exactly like an episode of Curb. Maybe there are a few more outdoor scenes than you would get in a Curb, but this is shot like a comedy, and not an imaginative comedy that does anything with form. In other words, it was made for pretty cheap I suspect.

Another is that at that time, I did not consider "movies" that debuted on a cable channel to be "real" movies. I remember having this debate with myself about the "movie" Recount, which still does not appear on any of my movie lists, and it's probably for this reason that I've never seen Steven Soderbergh's Liberace movie Behind the Candelabra.

But I probably need to get over that. The doors have been thrown wide open in terms of what qualifies as a movie, and it's okay for me to retroactively let some people into the room. Maybe I should just prioritize a Beyond the Candelabra viewing in early 2023 to symbolically kick the doors even wider open than they currently are. 

But what sold me most on deciding to call this a movie was

a) wanting to write this post about it, but 

b) it was directed by Greg Mottola.

Now, I think of Greg Mottola as a movie director, not a TV director. His IMDB does show both sorts of credit, and a lot of movie directors started out in TV. But it wouldn't be fair to talk about the Russo brothers, the creative force behind some of the biggest blockbuster hits in history, primarily as TV directors, now would it? Mottola directed Superbad, The Daytrippers, Adventureland and Paul, all before directing Clear History. He'd made that transition I reckon. 

So even though it bore the closing credits of a TV show -- not a scrolling listing of names, but names appearing on screen in chunks and then disappearing to make way for the next chunk of names -- I had already made up my mind at that point. So it goes on all the lists and it officially ends my 2022 at the movies, with a staggering 282 movies that were new to me -- my most since 2016, when I still vetted movies for that film festival and my numbers were inflated well over 300 accordingly. 

And maybe in the process I'm doing a little clearing of my own history -- out with the old way of thinking, in with the new. New Year's is always a time to bring a new outlook on life, whether that involves going to the gym or retiring rules that are too rigid by half.

Here's to your attempts to do the same in 2023.