The rise and fall of Alden Ehrenreich

When was the last time being cast as Han Solo made somebody less famous?

Trick question! Only two people have ever been cast as Han Solo, and we certainly know how it worked out for Harrison Ford.

But it's a trick question that does have an answer, which is: 2018, when Solo: A Star Wars Story was released.

Have you heard from Alden Ehrenreich since then?

I haven't. But then again, I didn't watch the 2020 TV series Brave New World. But then again, that's the only thing Ehrenreich has appeared in these past five years.

It makes me almost sorry for having written this post, when Ehrenreich was first cast, and the only thing I'd ever seen him in was the disappointing Coens movie Hail, Caesar! Simply put, I questioned his ascendancy ... and it appears everyone else soon started to do the same.

In fact, until I saw him in the movie that prompted the writing of this post, I had forgotten that I had forgotten him. 

Could it really be that Solo was so underwhelmingly received that it did, indeed, put the brakes on Ehrenreich's career?

I wouldn't have thought so, but I don't know what else to conclude. I did a little light googling to find out if I'd missed some story about how he opted out of the entertainment industry, or had some scandal that got him cancelled, but of course I found nothing.

Well, he clearly hasn't opted out of the industry because he has a starring role in Elizabeth Banks' Cocaine Bear.

And guess what? I really liked him! It was by far my favorite Alden Ehrenreich performance to date.

Sadly, he and O'Shea Jackson Jr. were the only things I really liked about the movie. It had a few very fleeting moments of inspiration, when it approached being the thing I wanted it to be, but then would go back to being about as uninteresting as a movie about a bear addicted to cocaine could ever be.

But I felt myself rooting for Ehrenreich, strangely enough, and feeling good about the fact that he has two more movies set for a release in 2023, one of which is from one of the biggest directors we have: Christopher Nolan. 

Now, there are 13 actors listed a head of him on the cast list for Oppenheimer -- but I guess it's a start.

So maybe this piece should really be called "The rise and fall and rise of Alden Ehrenreich." And maybe now he's coming into the charisma that wowed everyone else, but not me, back when he first came on the scene. 

Baz Jazz Hands: Strictly Ballroom

This is the first in my 2023 bi-monthly series rewatching the six films of director Baz Luhrmann.

Twenty-twenty three is starting to seem, quite early on, like the year where I'm regurgitating a lot of previous output. Last month's first entry in my monthly series, Audient Classics, involved revisiting Sherlock Jr. -- which I had seen and written about as part of my 2016 silent movie series, No Audio Audient. It was the second movie in that series.

Now, it's the third movie of 2014's Australian Audient that I'm revisiting. Strictly Ballroom came up as part of that series, and I wrote my thoughts on it then. And even though that's nearly nine years ago, I feel like my takeaways this time will be very similar. As we did with Sherlock Jr., I'll write it up first and see what I said back then after the fact.

I'm worried I'm going too heavy in that regard in 2023 and I'm going to regret it. Of the 30 films I expect to watch in 2023 as part of four recurring series -- that would be 12 for one monthly series, and six each for three bi-monthly series -- only six of those films will be new to me, those being the three each from Kathryn Bigelow and Jane Campion in Campion Champion and Bigelow Pro. Well, I do tend to rewatch a lot of movies each year -- 26 former #1s in 2022, as you know. I guess my rewatches will be just a little more curated than usual this year, though I may find myself growing weary of it sooner than I thought -- especially if I wrote about those movies on here the first time.

Well, let's dive into Strictly Ballroom and see how we go. I don't expect there to be a lot of Baz Jazz Hands overlap after this, since I don't recall writing about Baz Luhrmann's other films, though I've certainly mentioned my love for Moulin Rouge! at least in passing.

In addition to seeming like a blueprint for a number of future Luhrmann movies -- Rouge! and The Great Gatsby in particular come to mind -- one thing that really registered to me this time was how Australian this movie is. That's something I would have noted the first time but also would have appreciated more today, after being in the country for nearly ten years, as opposed to the six months I'd been here at the time I first saw it. Certain templates of an Australian male that I've come to know quite well are firmly on display here, certain ways of saying things that strike me as so uniquely Australian. There's a scene where the lead, Scott Hastings -- played by a man, Paul Mercurio, who is today a member of the Victorian Legislative Assembly -- asks another dancer, who is also Scott's best friend, what he thought of Scott's new dance steps. The friend, played by the wonderfully named actor Pip Mushin, thrice states "I don't know," in this particular way where each one-syllable word has at least three syllables, yet it all comes out with a sort of dismissive rapidity that just made me crack up.

You might argue that this is a template for another Luhrmann movie, Australia, since these are his only two films set in his native country. But this is a look at a "real" sort of Australia, even as it is drenched in fantasy, whereas Australia represents a very cinematic sort of Australia, the type an outsider might make. I'll probably have more thoughts on that in August, when that movie comes up on the schedule.

How real? In the opening scene we see Scott and his soon-to-be former partner competing in the Waratah Championships, which just sounds so parochial. Waratah means a number of different things in Australia -- it's the name of a plant, and there's a place called Waratah Bay here in Victoria -- but the name is meant to indicate a little backwater competition, even though the dancers here are considered candidates to take home the coveted top prize at the Pan-Pacific Grand Prix Dancing Championship. Which in its way could not seem further away from Waratah.

Even though it shows Luhrmann's more modest origins, before he became "Baz Jazz Hands," the movie does reflect a certain ambition in terms of its soundtrack. It uses Strauss' "Blue Danube Waltz" at the beginning, then later scores a key sequence of romantic escalation between Scott and his dance partner/love interest Fran (Tara Morice) to a cover of Cyndi Lauper's "Time After Time." (Sung by Morice, I am now learning.) The movie also features as its theme song "Love is in the Air" by Australian disco star John Paul Young, which I think I always thought was a Burt Bacharach song.

The movie also really showcases Luhrmann's tendency to view the world through a sort of warped, fish eye lens. Some extreme closeups of characters reminded me of things we might see from Terry Gilliam, specifically the scene involving Jim Broadbent in Time Bandits. (That may be no coincidence, as Broadbent would go on to appear in Moulin Rouge!) Things like this would have registered Luhrmann as a filmmaker with a particular aesthetic specificity, the kind that might win him a Shakespeare adaptation starring major Hollywood actors his next time out.

Though of course, the swoony romance itself would have been a bigger factor in making him the logical interpreter of Romeo & Juliet. As I tend to be in most Luhrmann films, I was really taken with the sweetness and earnestness he brings us in the development of the feelings between Scott and Fran. It's obvious they're going to get there because that's the sort of movie this is, but Luhrmann was even back then capable of framing iconic moments to enrich that journey. 

One last random observation. The lead, Paul Mercurio, is almost a dead ringer for fellow Australian Guy Pearce. Although I don't see a lot of mentions of their similarity on the internet -- just one query about whether Pearce was in Strictly Ballroom -- don't tell me you don't see it:

I've always thought Australian men have a tendency to look a certain way that signals they are Australian, which I can't really define, but which I know when I see. This could be an extreme example of that ... or just a coincidence.

Okay, let's see what I said the last time I wrote about Strictly Ballroom.

Some similar sentiments, though maybe not as many as I thought. I remembered writing about the technique where Luhrmann pans from a lower to a higher floor of a building (or vice versa), a technique with echoes in later films, so I specifically didn't mention it this time, though I did still enjoy that quite a bit. This paragraph stuck out to me in particular for repeating some of the sentiments I've just written, but is also notable for its failure of fact-checking:

"It's interesting to see how much of the Luhrmann flourishes already exist here. One is what we will call the "frenetic close-up," where Luhrmann swoops his camera in at the unnaturally frenzied face of a character, making them appear almost grotesque. Think Jim Broadbent dancing in Moulin Rouge! Another is his earnest repurposing of pop music, as (cover versions of) both "Love is in the Air" and Cyndi Lauper's "True Colors" are used prominently and to emotionally cathartic effect."

As it turns out, the Cyndi Lauper cover was not "True Colors" but rather "Time After Time," which came out around the same time and was also a ballad, so it was easy to confuse them. And the "Love is in the Air" that appears here is not a cover, but actually the original.

Okay, in April I'll catch William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet for the first time in 27 years. I certainly won't have any old thoughts to compare that one to, though I am currently watching Claire Danes in the TV show Fleishman is in Trouble, so that might make an interesting point of comparison. 

Stilled voice

Earlier this week I lost a true mentor from my teenage years. He was a coach but he was not my coach. He was the group leader for the high school aged kids at a place I went during the summers, and under his leadership we laughed, we cried, we played games, we participated in trust activities. It was the most growth a 14- through 17-year-old could ever expect to glean from a single week's vacation, repeatedly annually. 

The man was an incredible physical specimen -- he once worked out with Arnold Schwarzenegger -- which just makes his passing at age 74 all the more incomprehensible. Sure, most people aren't a spring chicken at 74, but this guy was. He was still running road races. He was kayaking when he had the shocking heart episode that left him effectively brain dead. He was removed from life support five days later and still, somehow, lived another five days in his bed at home, with his loved ones around him.

I'm not here to give him another complete eulogy that highlights everything he did and everything he was, and how he could see right into your soul and express to you, both wordlessly and with words, that you were loved. I've written a couple of those on social media and I also wrote a handwritten six-page letter to his widow, who was just as important to me.

But I did want to relate how I happened to have watched Terence Davies' Distant Voices, Still Lives the same night I found out. 

Or rather, copy and paste what I wrote about the film in Flickchart Friends' Favorites Fiesta, since it depicts my melancholic state when I watched it in a way I can't convey any better by changing a few words here and there. 

Here's what I wrote:

I went on quite the journey trying to find a film of [Redacted]'s I could watch in February. The hand I was dealt was his #1, Terence Davies' The Long Day Closes, but as anyone who has been following posts on this page learned, I couldn't find it in any form without purchasing it for about $60, which I was not willing to do. Then I shifted to Rosetta, his #12, having first made certain I could see it. But the YouTube copy I'd selected was -- you guessed it -- only in French with no subtitles. French is the language I know best other than English, but after one minute I just knew it would not be possible.

The next two I tried to find were also unavailable, though my searches for them started to feel increasingly cursory. Those were Come and See (#28) and Yi Yi (#32), both of which have been on my list to see -- I've been looking for Yi Yi for 20 years it feels like.

Finally, appropriately, I landed sort of back where I started, with a film by Terence Davies. Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) is Mike's #36, and there it was, sitting easily available on Kanopy.

It was a good place to end up for a number of reasons.

It caught me in a very contemplative mood. Earlier that day I had learned that an old mentor of mine from when I was a teenager had unexpectedly died of a heart attack, which is crazy because he was super fit, even though was 74 at the time. The melancholy of learning this blended directly into Distant Voices, Still Lives, which is like a treatise to memory, particularly the most melancholic sorts of it.

I don't know whether to call this a movie or an art installation, and please believe me when I say that's a compliment. These dreamy memories are hung on sort of a loose narrative framework, but the film does not even invite you to try to learn much of substance about its group of disparate characters seen in a working class British neighborhood in the 1940s and 1950s. Their substance is their very anonymity.

The first half of the movie ("Distant Voices") deals largely with the death of the paterfamilias, who was played by the one actor I recognized, Pete Postlethwaite. He's a miserable bastard alright, but his passing is still the occasion for a strange sort of sorrow among the family he so regularly shunned and abused. We see them contemplating him and engaging in activities related to his memorial, interspersed with these horrible things he did, but also these moments where it was clear he was trying the best he knew how, which are incredibly touching. The film seems to suggest that even when people are horrible, their passing is the occasion to consider mortality itself and extend them a sort of forgiveness and attempt at understanding.

I don't recall ever seeing such purposeful technique by Davies, though I should say I've only seen two or three of his other films. The film is so committed to immersing you in the collective memory of this neighborhood that it is quite literally a sepia-toned photograph come to life. There's one device where you're sure it's an actual photo until the people start moving, another photo of the departed father hanging on the wall behind them, and the camera sort of holds them in place and moves to each of them as it shows us some memory associated with that particular person. It was in these moments that I was really reminded of an art installation, and the sense of being in a fugue state of memory is palpable.

Another way this movie delves into a sorrowful kind of melancholy is that it has far less dialogue than it has groups of people singing pub songs, songs that are clearly central to the very fabric of both their larger culture and the immediate culture of this neighborhood. Everyone knows each song by heart, everyone understands the sorts of sentiments and pains bound up in each lyric. There are times when this film just travels from face to face as it captures each of these increasingly familiar faces, singing along with what might be a funeral dirge for an entire generation. An intentionally artificial construct has never felt so truthful and so insightful.

The second half ("Still Lives") moves ahead a few years and was actually shot a few years later. There is some progress as the family has moved past the long shadow of their deceased father, but they are clearly older, and the film makes it clear that you never steer clear of tragedy for long. The songs continue and so does the loss of life, but we also see weddings and births and the lifeblood of this community continuing to pump. It's thrilling in a way that seems to be entirely anathema to the subject matter.

Obviously I was pretty blown away by this, and I think being in the right mood to receive it helped immeasurably. I don't know if it will crack my top 500 but it might. Let's find out:

Distant Voices, Still Lives > Strike a Pose

Distant Voices, Still Lives > The People vs. Larry Flynt

Distant Voices, Still Lives > The Age of Innocence

Distant Voices, Still Lives < Ponyo

Distant Voices, Still Lives > Timecrimes

Distant Voices, Still Lives > Dirty Rotten Scoundrels

Distant Voices, Still Lives < Picnic at Hanging Rock

Distant Voices, Still Lives < Berberian Sound Studio

Distant Voices, Still Lives > Waking Ned Devine

Distant Voices, Still Lives < Apocalypto

Distant Voices, Still Lives < The Past

Distant Voices, Still Lives > Shane

469/6206 (92%)

Wow, pretty strong. In fact it beat three films ranked higher than 500.

Thanks [Redacted]!

Obviously my mentor was a better father than Pete Postlethwaite's, by so many orders of magnitude that you wouldn't talk about them in the same breath, in the same book, even in the same written language. But the fact that it dealt with the loss of a father -- my mentor's daughters were on either side of me in age -- just made the universe's choice of this film for me on this particular night seem even more profound. 

The songs in Davies' film only increase the sentimentality and solemnity of the experience. My mentor used to leave us entranced during campfire sing-a-longs of the song "All My Trials," popularized by Joan Baez. He was a maestro on the acoustic guitar just like he was a maestro in life, with a singing voice that was both gentle and clear.

And now that voice is still.

I saw him only once in the past 30 years but I will miss him terribly.

Rest in peace.

I'm not adding anything to the end of Salma Hayek's name

Salma Hayek is now Salma Hayek Pinault.

Nah.

I noticed the change to the way she was credited when writing up my review for Magic Mike's Last Dance, but I just blew it off.

No disrespect to the person who has now shifted the way she self-identifies to reflect the identity of a man she married 14 years ago. But I'm just not going to do it.

When you are credited the same way for 30 years, that is your brand -- no matter if you divorce the person who gave you that name, if you marry someone new with a different name, what have you.

I might have accepted the name change if she'd changed it professionally when she married Francois-Henri Pinault in 2009. At that point I would have only been aware of her "Salma Hayek" credit for 15 years, and it would have been more of a "Courteney Cox Arquette" or "Rebecca Romijn-Stamos" situation. (I believe the hyphen belongs in one but not the other, but I can't be bothered to look it up.)

But whatever you think of the wisdom of changing your identity to reflect your union with David Arquette or John Stamos, you could argue that each of those names gained something sonically from the addition. With Rebecca Romijn, the first syllable of "Stamos" has a rhyming vowel sound with the second syllable of "Romijn," which I think makes it catchy sounding to the ear. With Courteney Cox, I'll only say the "Arquette" flows well enough and doesn't ruin anything.

"Salma Hayek Pinault" just doesn't sound right to me. As I was listening to the Filmspotting hosts discuss the third Magic Mike movie, they referred to her alternately as Hayek and Hayek Pinault, and the latter just never sounded right. Plus I suppose you could drop the Hayek altogether and just refer to her as Pinault, which really doesn't sound right -- and doesn't give the casual listener, raised on another name, any idea who you're talking about.

Women who marry and take their husband's last name have dealt with this kind of identity crisis throughout history, and as a man, I once welcomed the prospect of giving my own name to another person. But my wife did not actually take my name, and I'm glad she didn't -- she has a cooler last night than mine (literally, for anyone who knows her) and it certainly sounds better with her first name than mine would. Her first name ends in an A sound and my last name begins with an A sound, so the two words have no defining break between them and get kind of slurred together if you were to say them quickly. It's much better that she stuck with her maiden name, which I suppose is not actually a maiden name if you never changed it -- it's just her name. 

Maybe because I have it in my own family, I don't want or need Salma Hayek to take her husband's last name. But it's also been different for famous women, particularly famous women in the entertainment industry. You create a brand when you start out, and it sometimes isn't even your own name that you start out with anyway. It's common for people to take a stage name that at least changes their last name, but sometimes they change their first name as well. 

Salma Hayek has a particularly good brand, sonically, because it does a similar thing to what's going on in "Romijn-Stamos," where the second syllable of "Salma" has a rhyming vowel sound with the first syllable of "Hayek." The four total syllables also make for probably an ideal name length, though I might be biased there because my own name has four total syllables.

The "Pinault" doesn't do anything sonically -- and in fact, I'd argue it doesn't do anything, for anybody, except possibly her husband's ego.

And for her daughter. When I googled it I found that back in 2010, when Hayek legally changed her name, she attributed the decision to her feisty three-year-old daughter, who asked why she had only one last name. (Which is particularly uncommon in Latin culture, where there can be all sorts of last names, many of which are dropped in casual reference to the person.) 

But Hayek didn't change her credit until Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, if IMDB is to be believed. Again according to google, she had to finally overcome studios' objection to affixing the Pinault, which she has apparently been trying to do for years.

It's interesting because I probably have a professional obligation to refer to someone the way they are credited. And I noticed the change in time to use the correct credit in my Magic Mike's Last Dance review (which you can read here). 

But I don't know ... I just couldn't do it. Salma Hayek has been Salma Hayek since I first noticed her in Desperado in 1995, even though that's not a great movie. She was too good at creating her brand and now I refuse to acknowledge a new one, like Dunkin' Donuts telling me to start referring to the company as Dunkin'. I just won't do it.

At least my stubbornness is on the side of a sort of feminism. 

I dropped Wild Things on someone else's Netflix viewing history

The AirBnB we stayed in this weekend has a couple smart TVs, a large one in the living room and one mounted on the wall near the ceiling in the bedroom. I used one each night, both to watch things on Netflix. (I was the only adult present, as I took the kids out of town for two nights to give my wife some alone time in our house for her birthday weekend. We went to Gumbuya World, an amusement park that has rides, waterslides and a zoo, though we only did the first two.)

The one in the living room appealed to me because of its size, but not its convenience. It's one of those TVs that has access to all the apps you could possibly want, with none of them logged in. That means you could either log in with your own information or not use them at all. So I did log in with our Netflix username and password in order to watch the romantic comedy The Incredible Jessica James, which was a perfect little slice of light, under-90-minute viewing for a Friday night.

It was on Saturday night that I realized I had a problem by having logged in with our details on the other TV. The TV is smart -- it's right there in the name -- so it remembers those preferences. It does not require us to keep logging in each time.

I figured this out, of course, because someone was indeed logged in on the TV in the bedroom, though it didn't seem like the owners' account. Or at the very least, if it did belong to the owners, they had been inconsistent with their application of their login, only putting it on one of the two TVs in the cottage.

In any case, the profiles on this Netflix account did not match what I knew to be the name of the guy I had been in touch with regarding the booking, Brian. These profiles belonged to Katherina, Steven, Harrison and Nixon, the last two of which were children.

Though something was a bit goofy with the settings. You know how Netflix goes into screen saver mode and shows you a bunch of slides of current offerings? I tend to get mesmerized by this and might sit there just watching it for ten minutes, playing little games like trying to guess the title before it appears on screen. Well, this particular screen saver mode was showing everything from the Little Rascals movie, presumably a selection that would only come up on a kids profile, to Anaconda, a movie where people get eaten by a large South American snake. (Incidentally, the last day to watch The Little Rascals on Netflix is February 28th. I better get on that.)

Seeing this account logged in made me realize that we could be the next account still logged in when the next people who stay at this house get here, possibly as soon as Sunday night. So I better get us logged off the living room TV.

At first I was unsure how to do this. The app version on the smart TV does not include an option for logging out, or not one that I could easily see anyway. You can exit Netflix, but of course once you get back in, it's still you.

I did ultimately figure out how to remotely log out using the website, though at first it was ambiguous which session needed to be logged out, because its geographical location did not match the geographical location where we were. But before we left, our profiles were indeed safe from the next guests.

I cannot say the same for Katherina, Steven, Harrison and Nixon.

Though it didn't occur to me until after I started watching Wild Things on Saturday night that I might be creating a problem for someone.

I think it was the Katherina profile I used to watch the steamy 1998 Florida noir, which has more double crosses than a whole convent of nuns. (When they make that sign in front of their chests, is it considered a "double cross"? It's a stretch.) But I'm not sure if that makes the situation better or worse.

In theory, I realized too late, Katherina or Steven would see the title appearing on their recently watched movies, and have no idea how it got there -- except that the other might have watched it surreptitiously and then later denied doing so. Just going on heteronormative assumptions here, Steven might have snuck in a peak at illicit Denise Richards boobs, but put it on his wife's profile to "hide" the "crime." Alternatively, if Katherina were have doubts about her sexuality and Steven suspected them, it might only push that conversation further into uncomfortable places.

I supposed I could delete the movie from their viewing history, but I think this is another thing that can only be done from a computer, not from an app. So Katherina and Steven (and Harrison and Nixon) may be stuck with my viewing of Wild Things. (And let's not dismiss the possibility that Harrison or Nixon are reaching an age when they are curious about the opposite sex, or well past that age, and it might look like they hacked into a parent's account to watch some illicit Denise Richards boobs.)

I say it didn't occur to me until after the fact that I could be causing a problem for this other family, but I can't deny that I thought two other things simultaneously, failing only in putting two and two together. Those things were 1) being out of town is a perfect time to watch some illicit Denise Richards boobs, 2) it being someone else's Netflix account means there will be no record of it that will come back to bite me.

Of course, every time I confess something like this on my blog, it means I'm obviously not that interested in keeping it a secret. Anyone who wants to come here and read this will know that I watched some illicit Denise Richards boobs on Saturday night. But will I tell my wife what I watched on Saturday night, when she was watching Everything Everywhere All at Once back at our hourse? Probably not.

Though it didn't honestly occur to me until after the fact that my viewing might not be causing a problem for me, but it could be causing a problem for someone else.

Well, there wasn't any way around it assuming I wanted the novelty of watching a movie in bed, something I never do. If I couldn't log my own account out in the living room using the app, I certainly couldn't log out theirs. 

In truth, Wild Things is a lot more tame than I remembered. It only actually has two nudes scenes -- or only two female nude scenes anyway. The other female nude scene belongs to Theresa Russell in a rather explicit sex scene, but then you also get to see Kevin Bacon's schlong, which I remembered. So Katherina could have been watching not for secret lesbian reasons, but to get a two-second glimpse of Bacon dick. 

And I didn't actually watch it for prurient reasons, per se. It took a fair amount of scrolling before I finally found it. In fact, my first instinct was to watch The Flintstones, if you can believe it. The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas was, like The Little Rascals, another movie disappearing from Netflix on February 28th, as the screen saver showed me. I thought "Hey, I never saw the first one of those, maybe this would be a good opportunity." But Netflix wasn't carrying it, and just jumping straight to the sequel somehow seemed wrong. I mean, I'd be totally lost.

But when Wild Things did come up, I confirmed it pretty quickly as the choice. For one, I've started 2023 with a number of repeat viewings of movies from that vintage (Pi, Orgazmo, The Sixth Sense). Nineteen ninety-eight is 25 years ago, which makes now a useful round number of years later to reconsider those films. Secondly, it was always considered rather "wild" -- it's right there in the title -- and I wanted to see how much that held up, given the way it got gums flapping back in the day. Being able to watch it without my wife walking into the living room and wondering aloud why I was watching it was only really the third consideration.

As for Katherina, Steven, Harrison and Nixon ... good luck sorting out the issues that illicit Denise Richards boobs may have caused you.

And if this is just the owners' account but with weird dummy names thrown in for misdirection, well, now they think I'm some perv I guess.

Review #500

It seems like only five years, seven months and 30 days ago that I was writing this post, which I considered a landmark at the time, in which I notified you that I had reached the august heights of 100 reviews written for ReelGood -- and which remains a repository for all the reviews I had written before or have written since, updated every time a new one publishes. 

Five years, seven months and 30 days later, I have added another 400 to that total.

That's right, yesterday's review of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania -- which you can find here -- took me to half millennium's worth of reviews, a much more impressive benchmark.

Spoiler alert: I didn't really care for it.

Four hundred reviews in 2070 days means on average one every 5.175 days.

And during that time it has sometimes just felt like a perfunctory instance of feeding the beast. The beast is hungry. The beast demands more.

Up until very recently, I haven't examined the analytics for ReelGood, and even after doing so I don't really understand half of what they mean. So I don't really know if the beast is also an audience that demands new reviews at such regular intervals.

But I do have a sort of professional commitment to uphold, as I am a member of the Australian Film Critics Association based on a certain frequency of output that I've told them I have been making, which has mostly been true. 

I've got other writers for the site, but they are strictly volunteers who write or not at their pleasure. I mean, we're all volunteers in that nobody gets paid, but at least I do get to see movies for free, whereas they only see them for free when I send them to a screening. In any case, I'm not getting the volume from them so my own reviews must make up the substantial difference.

And most of the time I still like this. When I do finally sit down to write a review, I write it quickly and energetically. In extreme examples the writing process can take as little as 20 minutes, which is interesting because I don't actually plan out what I'm going to say before I start. I have a way to open the review in mind, and as I'm writing I pluck loose threads and impressions from my brain to fill out the rest. Of course, knowing that I'm going to synopsize the plot in about three paragraphs about two paragraphs in -- followed by another three to five paragraphs of substantive analysis -- means I can do this all quickly and efficiently in getting to a word count in the neighborhood of 1,000. Having written 500 of anything means you've got the process down pretty well.

And yet I sometimes wonder if reaching a milestone like this should be the occasion for introspection, for reconsidering what you're doing and whether it's all heading somewhere satisfying.

I'll be 50 in October, and I know I won't be writing reviews forever. But right now is a particular time of introspection for a handful of reasons:

1) There's some weird issue going on with trying to transfer the registration of my site to me. It has to do with the fact that I'm a new registrant but I use the same email address as the old registrant. I tried to get the registration transferred something like a year ago, and it obviously didn't work properly, and I made a couple calls to the company that hosts the domain and it was all getting very complicated. The fact that the registration hadn't properly changed hands seemed like it didn't matter for ages, and then for the past couple months they have been sending me a reminder email about every three days that action is required on it. With all else that's been going on in my life, I've been blowing it off and just hoping that one day I don't wake up and have no website.

2) The ReelGood Film Festival has been off for a year but is returning in April, or is it May? There's been some chatter about the fact that my site and this festival nowadays have very little to do with one another, and whether there wasn't some brand confusion resulting from this. I don't actually know where this discussion is going to go at the moment. Could be somewhere positive, could be somewhere not so positive.

3) I'm kind of just tired. It's become increasingly clear that reviewing the latest releases plays a significant role in what movies I watch, when, which may be a rather obvious statement. But it's always been clear -- as in, always since I started writing for ReelGood in 2014 -- that there are certain movies my wife might like to watch with me, only I've already watched them because I had to "feed the beast." In fact, it's very possible that part of the reason she has gravitated toward TV rather than movies is that she doesn't want to be forced to watch a movie when I need to see it, but she would ultimately like to watch it with me, but by then all the good movies are gone because I've already watched them.

So as recently as about 20 reviews ago I thought "What if I just review 20 more movies and then call it quits?" I don't know how seriously I was thinking it, but the thought did cross my mind.

There are two big reasons I don't:

1) If I am no longer writing reviews, I can no longer legitimately renew my membership with AFCA, which means I would go back to paying for all my movies like any other schlub. To be honest, I've gotten used to strolling into a movie theater and only having to pull out my wallet because that's where I keep my critics card.

2) If I stop being a reviewer for ReelGood, I may never review films again.

It's the last one that sends a blast of cold to the pit of my stomach. This thing that has defined me for more than 25 years -- at least in my own mind if not other people's minds -- could be ending, never to resume again.

I'm not ready.

And though I have not yet figured out what my 501st review will be, I did just watch the new Netflix movie Your Place or Mine last night -- also didn't care for that -- and if I put up a review on Monday, it would still be within the two-week window since its release, which is my typical guide for whether a movie is still fresh enough for a review.

There would be a certain beauty to stopping at 500, but certain beauties are overrated. When I wrote my last review for AllMovie after more than a decade of writing for them from 2000 to 2011, it was my 1218th -- not a round number at all. (A lot of that was backfilling their database with reviews of old movies that didn't yet have one, and the reviews were only about 300 words, so it doesn't make for a particularly useful comparison to my current run.)

Of course, AllMovie was the one that told me they could no longer use me when they stopped using freelancers and brought all their reviews in house.

I'd have the chance to go out on my own terms with ReelGood, if I wanted to, and the way things are structured right now, I'm my own boss so nobody can tell me to get lost. There are other potential pressures that could "force" me out, but nothing quite like serving at the pleasure of a higher power that decides whether or not to pay me or publish me. I don't get paid at all so that makes those sorts of factors pretty much moot.

But I guess I'm not ready to go out yet. I'm not even 50. Don't put this film critic out to pasture when he can still write quickly and energetically and tell you that the latest Ant-Man movie isn't very good because the quantum realm is a shitty digital environment that fails to make use of the series' tendency to show small things and big things in opposition to each other.

They'll still be 30 more Marvel movies to review before they have to probably pull the plug on the MCU, and I'd like to be here to tell you whether you should see them or not. 

Audient Classics: Roman Holiday

This is the second in my 2023 monthly series watching classic movies I loved but have seen only once.

I chose Roman Holiday for February in conjunction with Valentine's Day, but I should have questioned the wisdom of that when it was 10 o'clock on Tuesday night and I hadn't yet started it.

My first port of call was to have my wife watch it with me -- it being the holiday that celebrates romance and all -- but it's hard to pin her down to watch any movies these days, let alone a 70-year-old one that she's probably already seen more than once. (I've only seen it once, hence its inclusion in this series.)

When she didn't want to, I was thinking of watching it Wednesday, in conjunction with American Valentine's Day.

But then it turned out that we decided not to do anything for Valentine's Day at all. Our lives have been busier than we can handle lately, and her birthday is this weekend, so February 14th doesn't have much of a presence in our household even in a year when we're less busy. When we decided to treat it as a normal night rather than faking it, it was actually a huge relief.

But that meant that once we had had a cocktail and started our newest puzzle -- which I guess means we were, sort of, celebrating it -- I did have time to watch the movie, after we were all cocktailed and puzzled out.

Whether I should have started a nearly two-hour movie after 10 p.m., when I'd already had cocktails, if I wanted to fully appreciate it, is another matter. Welcome to my last week of movie decisions.

Although I was never bored, I did find the movie a bit slow, as in, it seemed like relatively little was happening to fill a whole two hours. It takes nearly the whole first hour for Gregory Peck's Joe Bradley and Audrey Hepburn's Princess Anne to even finish up their first night together.

Now, that makes a certain sense as the whole movie covers only about 48 hours in these characters' lives. And I didn't make this observation out of boredom, as suggested previously. I was just amazed that William Wyler's film had been entertaining me relatively well on so relatively little for so relatively long.

I'm not sure if any movie can keep me from falling asleep on my couch nowadays, as lately I'm too tired to watch basically any movie uninterrupted. So yes, I did fall asleep a couple times (always and forever pausing when I do this) and didn't finish until 1 a.m.

Basically I was very charmed by the movie, but I didn't swoon for it like I did the first time. You wouldn't recall this, I'm sure, but I included it as one of five movies I would watch on a blimp in this post, based on a silly ad they were playing at MIFF, and I chose it specifically for its swoony romantic qualities. Those registered this time but they didn't overwhelm me or anything.

I was, as I always am, reminded of how much I like Peck as a romantic lead, and how darling Aubrey Hepburn was in the right role. (Unfortunately, the role that is probably her most iconic, Holly Golightly, also appears in a movie remembered for its awfully racist impersonation of a Japanese man by Mickey Rooney.) There's a lightness to this movie, even at the times it feels slow, and Eddie Albert makes the perfect third wheel for part of their adventures, playing the cameraman who secretly snaps all the shots of Princess Anne on her "day off."

Shots that he turns over to her at the end, unpublished. The ending of Roman Holiday certainly makes use of conventional Hollywood narrative arcs, as Joe Bradley stops short of his betrayal of Anne, reforming himself before it's too late in a fairly standard case of character redemption. But Dalton Trumbo's script doesn't insult our intelligence by having Anne drop everything and run off with a reporter who has been interacting with her on false pretenses. They had a lovely adventure together but they both have real lives to return to, and hers is just a little bit sad, since we know its many routines and proprieties are suffocating to her. We hope, of course, that a taste of freedom might mean she can learn how to incorporate similar adventures into her future, so that her whole life feels a bit less stultifying. And I suppose if you are a true romantic, you might believe that even she and Joe may find each other again, outside of the bright heat of the spotlight.

The sort of romantic who comes out on Valentine's Day, and watches a romantic movie on February 14th even if it kills him.

Bruce Willis already wasn't usable in Glass

Spoilers for Split and Glass.

I watched the first two movies of my informal M. Night Shyamalan weekend, The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable, to examine Shyamalan's filmmaking choices in two of his most highly regarded films.

I ended up thinking about a different one of his choices in my Sunday night film, Glass -- the choice to use Bruce Willis. And yes, my own choice of the word "use" has two meanings there. 

Glass was the only post-Sixth Sense Shyamalan movie I hadn't seen, and by seeing it now instead of 2019, I have an entirely different perspective on it than its initial viewers would have had.

It was less than a year ago that we learned that Willis has aphasia, a language disorder that affects people's ability to speak, read, listen and write -- which also provided a sad explanation for the Willis we were getting in a dozen cheap-o genre movies a year. This news was immediately followed by concerns that an obviously compromised Willis had been exploited by filmmakers eager to cash in on his name, though I think it's more complicated than that as it was revealed that Willis himself also wanted to keep earning money while he still could, to provide for those who depended on him.

Was M. Night Shyamalan one of those filmmakers?

Given Willis' usage in Glass, you'd have to think so.

I wasn't counting, but I don't think Willis' David Dunn has more than ten lines of dialogue in the whole movie. Given that his was the character who launched the whole eventual surprise trilogy that started with Unbreakable and includes Split as a middle film, you'd really expect him to factor in to the final movie more than he does. I'm only exaggerating a little bit when I say he almost has more screen time in his cameo at the end of Split than he does here.

You don't do that with a star of Willis' caliber unless you know something is wrong. And it seems Shyamalan had to have known. 

Now, this is not me accusing Shyamalan of anything, except possibly entering into an agreement with his friend Bruce to appear in the movie even though he couldn't remember more dialogue than about seven words in a row. I do think it's interesting to have this perspective on Glass, though, because it reveals a lot about what Willis was dealing with even back then.

For example -- and here comes the spoiler I warned you about -- his death scene. In fact, in the film's climax, all three of the characters you see on the poster above die within about a minute of each other outside the institution where they were being held for scientific study and/or simple detention. 

Pointedly, James McAvoy's Horde (is that the right character name?) and Samuel L. Jackson's Mr. Glass both get sentimental, old school Hollywood death scenes, where they are closely attended by a loved one and they speak poignant words, through tears, that put a bow on their characters as they are expiring.

David Dunn? He gets unceremoniously drowned in a small puddle in a pothole.

In addition to that being a rather ridiculous way to kill a character that the audience presumably loves, it points up the limitations that Shyamlan may have felt he was dealing with. He may not have felt it was possible for Willis to deliver anything approaching a dramatic death speech.

Then again, when you drown, you don't get to give a death speech. So it worked out that the manner of his death did not require a speech, which I suppose was always going to be the manner of his death since it was revealed that water is David Dunn's weakness.

But really, Willis is barely in this film otherwise. There are a couple fight scenes but it is obviously someone else doing the fighting, another detail made logistically easier by the fact that Dunn wears a black rain slicker that shrouds his face. Though maybe a fight scene was something Willis would have been capable of doing.

I started this long movie too late, after two beers, so I wouldn't say I had the most uninterrupted viewing of Glass. But I could swear there was a good half hour in there when Willis doesn't appear on screen at all, which is strange indeed -- unless you know what was happening with him.

Again there is a potential justification for this. It's certainly arguable that Willis is the least essential of the three characters, at least as far as this particular film is concerned. It's an immediate continuation of the story of the Horde, who we just spent an entire film with two years earlier. But it's also named after its other main character. David Dunn -- who I guess is called the Overseer (who knew?) -- is a distant third in terms of importance, especially as Glass is executed.

Overall, with my maybe eight (!) short naps during the movie and finishing at 1:42 a.m., I'm probably not the most qualified person to tell you how good Glass was or was not. But I did find that it was really too long for the little amount that happens in the story, and that it didn't end up in what I considered a satisfying place.

But at least with all three characters dead, Shyamalan won't be tempted to make a fourth movie directly in this universe ... another element related to this film that Willis' condition has rendered fairly convenient.

Okay, back to non-Shyamalan movies. 

Excessively explanatory from the start

In my review for Knock at the Cabin I said that "Shyamalan characters have become excessive explainers recently."

It would appear that "recently" was the wrong adverb to use there, as was the verb "become."

I did keep my informal and unpremeditated M. Night Shyamalan weekend going last night by rewatching Unbreakable for the first time since I saw it in the theater in 2000, and I couldn't help notice about how Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson) is constantly spelling out every single one of his thoughts on a) who he is, b) who Bruce Willis' David Dunn is, and c) what their relationship might be to one another.

The thing I found particularly funny about this is that in another bout of excessive explanation of their respective roles vis-a-vis comic book characters, Elijah tells us -- or is it his mother? -- how there are two sorts of villains, the one who can physically fight the hero and the one who can mentally fight him. Elijah would obviously not be a case of the former given his brittle bone density, but I'm not sure how he could even be a case of the latter given that he's always telling David exactly what he thinks and rarely committing anything that feels like a subterfuge emanating from superior intellect. 

And I didn't realize until this viewing that this movie, which I'd always assumed didn't have a twist, does sort of have one when it reveals that Elijah Price was responsible for all sorts of different mass murder events in trying to find the man who was his opposite. Maybe it didn't register as a twist at the time because it seemed so dumb to me. And dumb is, again, not what Elijah Price is supposed to be.

Okay so Price (I guess I prefer a last name for a villain?) has decided that there must be someone out there who is his opposite, and he needs to find him. Fine. But I don't get why he a) has this certainty, and b) thinks that by crashing random planes and derailing random trains he will uncover this person in any reasonably short amount of time. First off, this unknown person needs to be living somewhere within his own sphere of easy access or influence, as in either the greater Philadelphia area or somewhere close by that a physically limited person can reach fairly easily. Secondly, Price has to believe that he'll be lucky enough to choose just the right plane to crash or just the right train to derail that will happen to be carrying this person at that time. The odds against this are astronomical, of course -- unless the future Mr. Glass believes that people like David Dunn are actually prevalent enough in society that if he doesn't uncover one, he'll uncover another.

The whole thing just doesn't make a lot of sense and it indicates to me that Shyamlan was in decline a lot earlier than we might have originally thought.

I do think there are some cool moments and camera tricks in Unbreakable, but I was reminded why I didn't glom onto this film at the time it came out, which is that there isn't a lot there. The plot is notably slack and there is indeed way too much talk of comic books and superheroes. 

In fact I certainly had a false memory that this movie was a lot more subtle than it is. I had a memory that only finally by the end of the movie, when he tracks the janitor to the house where he's keeping two children hostage (having already killed their parents), do we even get the idea that this is a superhero origin movie. In fact, the movie has an opening text that thinks it's really profound, about comic books and how many gets sold in each year (um, who cares about that?). This movie is way more on the nose than I originally remembered. 

Also, I found it a bit strange that the movie starts out being about David Dunn's imperviousness to illness and physical damage -- it's all there in the title -- but then ultimately shifts to the fact that he has extra sensory perception that helps him figure out who in the general public is committing crimes just by touching them. For one, I thought about how that same thing was already done much better in the Stephen King novel The Dead Zone and its excellent movie adaptation starring Christopher Walken. But I was also critical of how it needlessly moves off of the core thing about David that makes him interesting, which is his heretofore undiagnosed physical attributes. Sure, no superhero usually only has one thing about them that makes them distinctive, but having both an unusual physical gift and an unusual mental gift seems to be going a bit too far, and confusing the themes Shyamalan labors to unveil to us through copious amounts of thuddingly expository dialogue.

Lastly, why did both the parents of the kids David saves have to die? Sure it's good that the kids didn't also die, but it makes it a pretty downbeat act of heroism. I'd have thought that only the father dying -- which was necessary since it helped identify this janitor for him -- would have been enough. 

Both times I've watched Unbreakable I've watched it too late at night for its slow and deliberate pacing. I still retain the memory of struggling with it in the theater that night in late 2000. And last night I also did have to take a nap during the movie, though that's increasingly common these days with any movie that I start watching after 10 p.m.

But I don't think a third viewing of Unbreakable one day in the middle of the afternoon after a ten-hour night's sleep will make me appreciate it significantly more. I still consider it one of Shyamalan's best three films -- those being the first three that most of us saw, excluding the first two he made -- but that's more an indication of just how weak the rest of his output has really been. 

I haven't decided if I am concluding this weekend with a third movie tonight. If I do, it'll probably be either the third of those three best films -- Signs, which has always been my second favorite of his after The Sixth Sense, and which I have already seen multiple times -- or it will be picking up after Unbreakable with Glass, which I have not yet seen. I know Split fits into that chronology as well, but I don't feel the need to revisit that one before Glass, though I did like it. 

I guess I was disenchanted enough with Unbreakable that I now have to consider if I might like something like The Visit or the aforementioned Split -- or even something like The Village, which is when I thought Shyamalan really turned the corner toward becoming a hack -- better than it. But I may not put that question to the test, because I really have no intention of going down some Shyamalan rabbit hole at the exclusion of all the other projects I've already started in 2023. 

The sweet relief of sudden belief

It's rather incredible that M. Night Shyamlan made one of the best horror movies of the 1990s -- some might argue of all time -- and that the thing many of us cherish about it most is a climactic scene that makes us cry.

On Friday night I watched The Sixth Sense for the first time since before 2006 -- that's how far back my written record of rewatches goes, in any case. I want to say it was probably even five years before that, remembering a specific scenario where I watched it shortly after my arrival in Los Angeles in 2001, which may have been my last viewing. 

I didn't watch it because I've just watched (and reviewed) Knock at the Cabin, or at least not directly because of that. There have been about 10 other Shyamalan movies I've seen since my last Sixth Sense viewing, and none of them prompted a rewatch. I did name-check it in my Knock review, but that wasn't the reason either. 

The actual impetus for the viewing was a segment they did on Filmspotting in conjunction with their review of Knock at the Cabin, which was "top five M. Night Shyamalan moments." Both hosts approached their individual top fives in very similar ways, each granting the fifth and fourth spot to an outlier moment from one of Shyamalan's "lesser" films, each selecting a moment from Unbreakable or Signs for their third and second spots ... and both choosing the same scene from The Sixth Sense as their joint #1.

The moment when Bruce Willis learns he's a ghost? No. The moment when Mischa Barton suddenly comes into view in Haley Joel's sheet fort and is already vomiting up some kind of gray liquid the first time we see her? No, that's just a personal favorite of mine. And it's not even the "I see dead people" scene.

Of course I am leading up to talking about the moment in the car between Cole -- let's use character names rather than actor names -- and his mother, Lynn (Toni Collette), in their joint last scene on screen. 

As you will remember, traffic is stopped because there's been a fatal collision between a car and a bicyclist about six cars ahead of Lynn's. Cole knows it's fatal because he can see all the blood coming from the head of the cyclist as she stands outside his window ... and of course because otherwise she wouldn't be standing there at all.

I should pause here to acknowledge Shyamalan's brilliant mixing of tones. Even though I think we know this scene is headed for a moment of reconciliation between Cole and Lynn -- enough of the movie has gone by that we imagine it has to be wrapping up, and he's already said goodbye to Willis' Malcolm Crowe -- we still get a chill from the way Shyamalan suddenly shows us the ghost of the bicyclist outside the car. But we know that this ghost is different, because Cole has looked at her and then looked away. Pointedly, he's not looking at her when we see her.

Instead he's looking at his mother, finally having decided to reveal his big secret to her. 

At first she is skeptical, as you would be. When Cole says that Grandma comes to visit him sometimes, her eyes sharpen and she says "Cole that is very wrong. You know Grandma is gone." As in, "Whatever direction you want to stage these delusions of yours, Cole, leave my mother out of it. That's crossing a line."

But then of course Cole does the thing that characters always do in movies where they offer inarguable proof of what they're saying, which is that he provides information he could only know if what he were saying was true. He describes both the fight Lynn had with her mother before her dance performance when she was young, and a question she asked her mother at her mother's grave.

Of course, the emotional brilliance of this moment is that Cole's grandma didn't tell him what her question was. That's something private between mother and daughter, which is Lynn's to reveal if she wants to. It also allows Collette to perform the emotional peak of the scene that always gets the waterworks going, when she repeats to Cole what her question was:

"Do I make her proud."

I'm getting a little verklempt. Talk amongst yourselves.

The thing that's so great about this moment is that it is accomplishing two things. I'll start with the most obvious:

1) Lynn is getting a catharsis with her mother that she desperately needed. Although it is certainly implied that they had a good relationship, as Cole knew her well and Lynn misses her desperately, obviously there was something unresolved about that relationship for Lynn, as there likely is any time a parent is lost. So a grief at her mother's passing is allowed to pour out at that moment, but this is a different, more nourishing brand of grief, because it allows Lynn to let herself off the hook for whatever shortcomings she imagined she had as a daughter.

But I think equally crucially:

2) It is the sweet relief of realizing her son is not crazy, and that what he is saying has to be true. All this time she has been trying to figure out a way to cure her son of whatever ails him -- and at this point we still think that includes hiring Malcolm as a child psychologist. Now she realizes both that it may not be curable but that it may be okay, since Cole has seemed to learn how to incorporate the wild, sometimes destructive desires of these ghosts into something positive, or at least something he can handle. Her son is going to be okay. 

And then even a third thing:

3) It is indisputable proof that there is some sort of afterlife, and death is not the final stop on our journey.

Any one of these things happening would be enough to overwhelm someone. All three at once? That's something else. 

And Collette gives a performance equal to that moment, starting to first tear up as the realization is hitting her, then climaxing in one of the most satisfying demonstrations of the emotional impact of a moment that I've ever seen on film. These aren't just the tears an actress can train herself to produce. This is the full body experience of being suddenly overwhelmed, including pauses in her speech to summon up the courage to speak a word that's pregnant with significance, even momentary displays of embarrassment about having this sort of reaction. 

I'm obviously not the first person to diagram the effectiveness of Lynn and Cole's final moment -- in fact, what I've written here is probably rather banal to someone who has done a lot of reading and thinking about The Sixth Sense.

But it is the first time I've written about it myself -- that I recall, anyway -- and whether others got there first hardly matters. The brilliance about cinema is that when you are in that moment and having it yourself, you feel like the first person to have that moment -- even if it's a moment you had for the first time more than 23 years earlier.

A few isolated other thoughts about The Sixth Sense:

1) As we are always inclined to do on a second (or third, or fourth) viewing of The Sixth Sense, you watch to make sure that Shyamalan did indeed play by his own rules, never showing anyone interacting with Malcolm other than Cole (and his wife in the opening scene before he dies). The only moment that doesn't fully satisfy me is the quick flick of the eyes in Malcolm's direction that Lynn gives when Malcolm first comes to their house. Since they are sitting across from each other when Cole arrives home, you feel like this is an instance of cheating by Shyamalan -- until you realize that they don't actually interact in that moment, though Malcolm may imagine they are interacting. As she's leaving Cole alone with Malcolm -- or just alone, which is what she would have perceived -- she does quickly look in Malcolm's direction as she's leaving the room.

While this is not proof of anything definitive, I do wonder whether it was a shrewd piece of directing by Shyamalan, or just an accident, or just Collette's instincts as an actress to give another actor in the scene a glancing look as she leaves the room. I don't think it could be option 2 or option 3 so I am going with the fact that it was intentional by Shyamalan, and that it may indicate that Cole's affliction is in some way inherited. She may feel Malcolm's presence in the room even if she can't see it, enough just to make her look quickly as she leaves the room, but not enough to even slow her pace.

2) The scene where Lynn confronts Cole over the butterfly pendant strikes me as interesting, because Cole could have made it so much easier on his mother and himself if he just admitted to moving it -- even if he did not. Instead, he gives her the honest truth, that he didn't move it, without saying who did. This isn't his unfailing honesty toward his mother rearing its head. In the earlier scene where all the kitchen cabinets and drawers were suddenly open moments after Lynn left the room, he willingly engages in the fabrication that he was looking for Pop Tarts. But I think this just shows that his journey is progressing toward coming clean to her. He can no longer engage in simple half-lies as he becomes more and more desperate to reveal the truth of what's happening to him. Osment expresses this wonderfully in his intense look of fear and indecision as to how he should handle this moment.  

3) I caught myself wondering, since Shyamalan has notably revisited Unbreakable in his later films, if he ever considered making a delayed sequel to The Sixth Sense in which Haley Joel Osment plays an adult version of Cole who continues to commune with the dead, and what form that takes for him when he's in his 30s. Especially with the version of Shyamalan we are getting today, this movie would almost certainly be laughable, but I have to admit there is a small part of me that wonders whether it would have the chance to be profound in the same way the original was profound, since it involves the same character and actor. Maybe this is just me wishing that Osment could get meatier roles as a 34-year-old. I did like seeing him show up in The Kominsky Method, but let's just say he is fully a character actor and never gets anything really juicy.

4) Speaking of actors who couldn't capitalize fully on what they demonstrated here, I still can't believe Donnie Wahlberg didn't/couldn't parlay this chilling single-scene appearance into a better subsequent career. He appeared in four Saw movies (maybe that was his first mistake) and then a couple other bad movies that at least you've heard of (Annapolis, Dreamcatcher), but he hasn't acted in a movie since 2011, when he would have been only 41.

I may keep an informal Shyamalan weekend going tonight with only my second-ever viewing of Unbreakable, which will gear me toward finally seeing Glass -- the only Shyamalan movie since The Sixth Sense that I still haven't seen. (And though I'm certainly not watching Shyamalan this year as a viewing series -- I've got enough of those -- it does occur to me that it's probably a good idea to watch the two films before Sixth Sense that I haven't seen.) 

If I do watch Unbreakable, I'm sure I'll have something to say about it here tomorrow.

Hello ... MUBI Tuesdays

I know better than to start another new initiative in 2023. 

However, I couldn't resist the play on words in the title of this post.

With apologies to the Rolling Stones, Tuesdays are indeed a good day to go deep diving into MUBI, to see what weird and wonderful thing I might be able to uncover. You may recall, I previously considered Tuesday to be the ideal night to watch a new documentary every two weeks, an exercise I did for a full year ending last July. 

I eventually felt a bit imprisoned by the regularity of that commitment, breathing a sigh of relief on every alternate Tuesday and then feeling like I had to sit down and figure out which movie I was going to watch on the following one to meet my self-imposed commitment.

So I won't watch a MUBI movie every other Tuesday, or God forbid, every Tuesday. But I do think Tuesday is a good day to periodically sample my new subscription, with no commitment to write about it here. 

Since many of the movies on MUBI will not fit my description of relaxing weekend viewing, that pretty much takes out Thursday through Sunday, since I often do consider Thursday night to be weekend adjacent enough to watch something less taxing on my brain. (For example, last night I watched The Forever Purge.)

That leaves Monday through Wednesday for more challenging, cerebral material, and Monday I often still feel like I'm recovering a bit from the weekend. Tuesday and Wednesday both work for MUBI but then with Wednesday you don't get the Rolling Stones reference.

I started this past Tuesday night with a French movie from 2011 called The Red and the Black, or more easy to find on sites like IMDB, La Rouge et La Noir. It was the film of the day about a week ago. In fact I've also seen it as Red & Black. And it's so obscure that the image you see above was the only thing I could get in terms of a proper poster.

This, I tell you, was the full MUBI experience.

I'm currently reading a book where I never really got my bearings in the story and am now just looking at all the words until it's over. It's a 280-page book and I've been reading it since November. I should just stop. Instead, I have a hundred pages to go.

The Red and the Black was like that experience except writ small. Writ very small, as in only 74 minutes.

But what the hell was going on in this movie? I could not really tell you.

Here's what I can tell you:

French director Isabelle Prim presents a variety of images that appear to include documentary footage of a real French camera designer at several periods of his life, scenes of a hybrid cat and dinosaur being rendered by a 3D printer, and POV angles of two thieves trying to steal a camera. The language is not actually French. The two thieves -- never seen, but ultimately revealed as a mother and daughter -- speak a made-up language that is, fortunately, subtitled. There are also shapes on the screen in a kind of old school digital animation. 

I really don't know what happened in this movie but I did watch all 74 minutes.

And I can't say there wasn't an odd sort of hypnotizing quality to the experience. I did not hate watching it, not by any stretch. But I never from one moment to the next had a single idea what was going on. 

It really did show me what kind of doors have been opened to me now that I'm subscribed to MUBI.

I'll try to get something more coherent my next time around ... which will be on some upcoming Tuesday no doubt. 

Selling Brendan Fraser without showing Brendan Fraser

The marketing for The Whale has been a challenge, which is probably not unexpected.

When you're advertising, you usually want to cater to your reader's/viewer's most basic needs and desires. It's why they choose video stills from the trailer that are the most likely to show something vaguely erotic, even in a movie that is not sexy in the slightest. I wrote about that tendency here. 

I don't think there's probably a single image in The Whale that has the chance to get a heterosexual male all hot and bothered, even when taken totally out of context. But if you can't show anything sexy, at least try to show something that isn't sexy's exact opposite. At least that's the computation the marketing department for a studio -- or in this case, a movie theater chain -- would make.

I get why advertisers don't want to show a picture of Brendan Fraser's Charlie in this film. Charlie weighs about 600 pounds, and there's no angle that doesn't reveal that fact about him. Never mind that Darren Aronofsky's whole movie is designed to make us sympathize with Charlie, challenging our regrettable instincts toward fatphobia to show us the depths of this person's soul, rather than just the surface of this person's body. If the marketing department thinks a picture of Charlie's face -- which, you would agree, is the image you'd extract from the film if you wanted to truly demonstrate what it's about -- will inhibit ticket sales, they won't include it.

Which is why this still, in an advertisement for the movie playing at Hoyts, includes an image of ... Ty Simpkins.

Was Ty Simpkins considered the sexiest thing in The Whale? If you were going sheerly by normal advertising logic, you'd probably go with Sadie Sink, who is young and is generally considered to be conventionally attractive. She's also arguably the film's second most important character, though Charlie has dynamics with a couple characters that are central to the story depending on the angle from which you're analyzing it.

So on the one hand, I guess it's a win that they didn't just go with the most obvious approach of weaponizing the apparent sex appeal of Sadie Sink. On the other, Ty Simpkins? Least essential character in the film, I would argue, though of course all five characters we spend time with make the film exactly the emotional powerhouse it is.

The really troubling inconsistency here is that the ad's copy is specifically selling Brendan Fraser. It starts out with the words "The Brenaissance is upon us!" Which I think is a pretty lively way to market the movie. It rolls off the tongue better than "McConaissance," or however they spelled it when Matthew McConaughey stopped doing romantic comedies. 

But it creates quite a disconnect with the image we see. Yes Fraser undergoes quite the transformation in The Whale, but not even the best actor in the world can play 33 years younger without some sort of significant digital assistance. (Could they really be trying to convince readers this is Fraser? Certainly not.)

And I just don't think The Whale is really a bait-and-switch movie. The title itself is not going to attract anyone outside of marine biologists and Moby Dick enthusiasts, and certainly most people with any inkling to see it must know the premise of the movie. Or at least the sort of person at its center.

And it's not Ty Simpkins.

King Darren: Pi

This is the first in a 2023 bi-monthly series rewatching six of Darren Aronofsky's eight movies, to appreciate him in the year after he became the first director to score two of my year-end #1s.

Darren Aronofsky was pushing the limitations of the human body in the very first moments of his very first film.

The first thing we learn about Max Cohen (Sean Gullette) is that when he was six years old, he challenged his mother's claim that he would go blind if he stared at the sun. He didn't go blind, eventually recovering from a temporary loss of vision. However, he also started getting headaches that still plague him as an adult and have basically ruined his life. Whether he'd have developed the same obsession with mathematics -- or a Rain Man-like ability to multiply two large numbers together and provide an immediate answer -- without the sun staring incident or not, we don't or can't know, because Max did stare at the sun and he did almost go blind.

From his very first film, Aronofsky wanted his characters to challenge assumptions because that's what he planned to do himself. He also wanted them to look at things that made them uncomfortable, and for us as viewers to do the same. It was an assault on our flesh -- or more properly our corneas -- from the very start.

There are certainly scruffy elements that remind us that this was Aronofsky's first film, like the decision to shoot in black and white -- almost nobody makes a black and white first film anymore, though it was pretty common back then. A decade or two earlier, it was guys like Spike Lee and Jim Jarmusch debuting in black and white, and in the very same year, a director who came of age at the exact same time as Aronofsky -- Christopher Nolan -- also debuted with his black and white feature Following. I don't want to get sidetracked, but an extended side-by-side comparison of these otherwise dissimilar filmmakers is warranted at some point, especially since they had moments of potential crossover, as both were once associated with the reboot of Batman.

Scruffy and first filmish or not, this film is possessed of a real certainty of what Aronofsky wanted and planned to do for the next 25 years of his career. (And yes, that makes this a particularly nice year to be doing this King Darren series, as it marks a quarter century of Aronofsky in our lives.) Some of his tricks, which would also become a bit of an Aronofsky trademark, may strike us as the try hard instincts of a film school student. But I gotta tell you, I miss that kind of try hard instinct, and Aronofsky didn't stop at trying hard. He tried and succeeded. 

(It did occur to me, though, whether we'll think back on newer filmmakers who have made their first films, and so easily be able to identify such film school techniques in those initial efforts. If new filmmakers don't use black and white anymore to break into the business, what will be the distinguishing marks of their earlier efforts?)

The repeating short montage of Max popping pills to control his headaches is of course something Aronofsky would expand on in horrific ways in his next film, Requiem for a Dream. We don't need to get ahead of ourselves discussing that one because it will be on the docket in April.

One film we won't discuss in this series, because I saw it again only two year ago and decided to skip it for King Darren, is The Fountain, and there's an interesting repurposing of imagery from this film in that one. It seems Aronofsky is particularly interested in the shaved head of Gullette at the end of this film -- shaving your head being another form of assaulting the body's natural form -- because the first thing I thought of when I saw it is the shaved head of the astral plane version of Hugh Jackman in The Fountain. The themes of The Fountain remain a little opaque for me even after that second viewing, but it seems to be a continuing journey down the philosophical/mathematical rabbit hole that Aronofsky started in Pi.

I think one of the reasons Pi is so tense and haunting is exactly because Aronofsky gets the math right here. Or rather, I should say, we don't know whether he gets the math right or not, but he's presented it in such a way as to make the numbers seem really eerie -- the irrational number that is this film's title, but also the 216-digit number that might both be key to predicting the stock market and may unlock something hidden in the Torah. The whole bit where the character played by Ben Shenkman explains how Hebrew words have corresponding mathematical values seems crazy, even though it is likely something scholars have discussed for centuries. 

This is no easy task. The challenge for Aronofsky here is similar to depicting the work of a brilliant artist or musician. If the paintings suck or the music is awful, it tends to undercut the brilliance of the artist or musician. So if the math that obsesses Max were just a bunch of mumbo jumbo that didn't chill us on some level, the movie would not be nearly so effective.

That said, the character played by the future Hector Salamanca (this is where I first became aware of Mark Margolis) cautions Max about the thin line between mathematics and numerology. In telling Max that he'll start seeing the number 216 everywhere he looks for it, which will seem like proof but really just be a confirmation bias, he's kind of answering the core question of Joel Schumacher's The Number 23, still nearly a decade off in the future.

The other thing Aronofsky really gets right here, which factors into all but his most realistic films, is the paranoia. Max's imagining of ghoulish things in subways -- such as a brain on a staircase -- has a visceral impact. In fact, in that moment when he's prodding the brain with a pen, and it lets out a high-pitched scream on the soundtrack every time the pen touches the surface, it reminded me of a technique Danny Boyle would use in a future #1 of mine. It's very similar to that bit in 127 Hours where Aron Ralston is twanging his nerves like the strings of a guitar. 

Of course, it's not actually paranoia if people are really coming after you, and Max's handling by both the Wall Street people interested in his algorithm, and the Rabbinical folks who are hoping to unlock the secrets of God, keep the unbearable tension close to peak levels. 

I didn't see Pi in time to rank it, and I may have only become aware of it after the fact, possibly in relationship to Requiem -- though I'm quite sure I saw Pi before I saw Requiem. Looking at the movies I did rank in 1998, though, I'm guessing I would have had this just inside my top 20. I really enjoyed revisiting it. 

There's probably more I could say about Pi, but there's also more I have to do in my day today. I might get that chance anyway in April, since Requiem will certainly be in direct conversation with this film.