Getting psyched up for the baseball season with ... Cobb?!?

I can't have already run out of movies to watch at the start of the baseball season, can I?

Per tradition, I always watch a baseball movie the night before opening day, though this year, two nights before worked out better for my schedule. I've watched Major League more than once, but I need to give that a rest for a few seasons. Two years ago it was my first-ever watch of The Natural, and last year I rewatched Eight Men Out for the first time in 25 years or more. Bull Durham is a good candidate for a rewatch one of these years, because I sense I'd feel a bit more favorably toward that on a second viewing.

It would seem like I don't have too many other choices than those, though, because this year I settled for ... Cobb.

And it wasn't even a first viewing.

The reason I say "settled for" is that I don't think Ron Shelton's 1994 film is very well liked. In fact, I know it's not. What's more, it deals with journalist Al Stump (Robert Wuhl) writing a biography of the legendary ballplayer and legendary asshole Ty Cobb (Tommy Lee Jones) in the year before his death in 1961, when he was over 70. In other words, there isn't that much actual baseball in it.

But I'd always liked this film, and 2023 was the time to revisit and judge the younger version of me to see if he was crazy.

Here's what I wrote about it in my review for AllMovie, written probably sometimes in 2001:

Ron Shelton could not have painted an uglier portrait if he'd made a movie about Adolf Hitler. But with one of the most notorious personalities of the 20th century as his subject, it doesn't even feel like caricature. Cobb is a triumph of original thinking in many respects: a baseball movie with very little baseball in it; a biopic that focuses on the last year of its subject's life, sparing the viewer his "greatest hits," both literally and figuratively; and a career-best performance from a small-time actor (Robert Wuhl) who holds his own alongside Tommy Lee Jones at his blistering best. The dynamic Shelton explores between the legendary ballplayer and Al Stump, his harried biographer, is thoroughly engrossing, eliminating the need to rely on re-created old-time footage that might have served as a crutch. Several scenes perfectly capture the reckless, spiteful essence of the man, including a trip around the bases in which he spikes no less than three fielders, and one in which he drives down a mountain at 60 miles per hour in a blizzard. Counterbalancing this, however, is the gracious treatment given Cobb wherever he goes, which demonstrates the empty flattery accorded celebrities by starstruck fans who don't really understand who they are. Shelton's adaptation of Stump's book makes Cobb and his biographer more similar than either would like to admit: each exploits the other for his own self-aggrandizing purposes, even if Stump's are sanctioned under the guise of journalism and the slippery quest for "truth."

Ultimately I still stand by most of that. Where I don't stand by it, it's a matter of degree.

First off, calling this "a triumph of original thinking" seems like a stretch. The things that surprised me about the movie back then don't feel like such a surprise anymore. Also I've probably seen 300 more biopics today than I had back then, so the approach doesn't seem as fresh. Of course, you shouldn't fall into the trap of subsequent pieces of art rendering earlier ones less distinctive, but that's not what I think I mean here. I just mean I've seen more biopics so I don't think the approach Cobb took was quite so unique, even at that time.

Also, I called it a "career-best performance" by Robert Wuhl, and that may be true, but again that is just relative to his own career. Wuhl has his moments, but I actually found some of his scenes to be a bit awkward. He has a dumb bird-like look on his face a fair bit in this movie.

The ugliness of the portrait was something I got right. It was interesting to watch Cobb only a few days after hearing an interview in which the subject was talking about telling someone's story being an act of making us sympathize with them, no matter how nasty they may be. I didn't really sympathize with Cobb, though Shelton does allow a very rare flicker of his humanity to seep through. That's probably the right amount.

Still, my review back then was rather too glowing. I'd still say I like this movie, but it's more in the three-star range. That reads more like a four-star review.

The question really should be: Did it prime me for the baseball season?

I suppose it did, yes. But then again, I don't need much help. I've got my real baseball team and two different formats of fantasy league teams about to take to the field tomorrow. Mentally, I'm already there.

Bull Durham would be more the mood I'm going for in 2024 ... though after three straight years of rewatching something I'd already seen -- I rewatched, and was disappointed by, Field of Dreams in 2020 -- maybe I need to dig deep for unseen baseball gems that may have eluded me. 

Liking and loving serial killers

Don't prepare yourself for a hot take on the fact that audiences love true crime, be it in televised, movie, or podcast form. I'm currently watching a TV show about that very thing (Only Murders in the Building) but that's not what this post is about.

Rather, while watching the new movie Boston Strangler on Thursday night, I had my attention drawn to a speech detail we see popping up in movies about detectives, which this one was.

It's always in discussions between detectives, or in this case, between a detective and a reporter. And it must be a real thing, because we see it so much.

It's them talking about who they "like" for a crime.

"I like the husband for this," one of them might say. "He had a motive and he has no alibi that night."

Or "I like the nun. She was possessed by the devil at the time and witnesses said her eyes were glowing red."

Boston Strangler takes it one step further, as Alessandro Nivola's character, in discussing the titular case with poster girl Keira Knightley, says of one potential suspect who had recently been ruled out, "Yeah, I loved him for this."

Nivola's character also at one point takes a job as a creative consultant on a TV show, a guy from the profession in question who sits beside the director and offers his opinion on whether the portrayal seems realistic. I don't suppose that makes his character any more likely to be realistic himself, but it does suggest Boston Strangler probably had someone filling that function on set, and probably gave using the word "love" and (more implicitly) "like" the thumbs up in this context.

I don't doubt the authenticity of the trope, to be sure. In fact I rather like the phrasing. It's insiderish and jargony without alienating the viewer. You feel like it's how a real detective would talk in shorthand with other detectives, and the meaning is easy to grasp.

What I think is funny about it -- and it may speak to that larger obsession I mentioned in the first paragraph -- is that at the most superficial level, it talks about liking or loving someone who has just decorated an apartment with somebody's guts -- or in this case, left them a strangled corpse. 

Of course you can't remove the context of the rest of the sentence, but you still have sentences that feature the phrases "I like" and "I love" in relation to this hideous monster.

Is it true that on some level, these detectives -- and by extension, those of us who watch their exploits on TV and in movies -- do like these criminals? I think that goes without saying. For one, without them they wouldn't have a job. But on a deeper level, it has always been said that cop and criminal can be two different sides of the same character. Many cops go into the profession to channel a violent nature and an unfocused hatred -- or even, sometimes, a hatred that is focused, as their job gives them chance to vent it. The events of the last 15 to 20 years have left no doubt of that being the case.

But if we don't want to indict cops specifically, we can just chalk it up to part of human nature. We are indeed fascinated with these people who show behavioral aberrations, who will violate the laws of society by just killing some random person who was having a normal day up until that point.

I'm getting back into hot take territory now -- and by that I really mean "hot take," as in, not a hot take. 

I think I just wanted an excuse to talk about the jargon, and Boston Strangler, a pretty mediocre movie overall, gave me that excuse. 

Campion Champion & Bigelow Pro: An Angel at My Table

This is the second in a 2023 bi-monthly series finishing the final three films I haven't seen from directors Jane Campion and Kathryn Bigelow.

I accidentally went and let 11 days pass from when I watched the oldest Jane Campion film I hadn't seen, An Angel at My Table (1990), and when I've finally come to write about it. That kind of delay doesn't benefit the writing of a piece like the current one, especially when the movie in question didn't make a huge impression on you.

I suppose, for the similarity of subject matter, time period and corner of the world, this biopic of a famed New Zealand writer felt most similar to Gillian Armstrong's My Brilliant Career, a biopic-like story of a fictitious Australian writer. It's been a while since I've seen that, though, so I don't know if my comparison holds any water beyond the superficial commonalities. I didn't love My Brilliant Career either, though, so the films have that in common for sure.

To say I didn't love An Angel at My Table, the biopic of Janet Frame, doesn't mean I didn't like it. Or at least admire it. Did I enjoy it? Not really. Did I see the point of making it? Again not really.

Never having heard of Frame outside the context of this movie doesn't have much to do with my feelings about her life having the worthiness to be documented on film. Though at the start, I did wonder why we were watching a movie about this shy redhead, whose hair is her most defining personality trait, who has a flair for behaving oddly but is otherwise a rather normal seeming young woman growing up in the late 1920s and early 1930s.

Then I started to see the full design of the movie, and that Frame would be hospitalized for psychiatric reasons multiple times and for long stretches during her young adulthood. In fact, she received frequent doses of electroshock therapy and was even scheduled for a lobotomy that was cancelled just before, and only because of, the winning of a literary award by a collection of short stories she had written.

When she is ultimately, finally, saved from the clutches of a backwards medical profession, she starts to have a normal life including the fits and starts of relationships, and travel abroad to Spain and England.

One of the things that tested my patience a bit about An Angel at My Table is that it's two hours and 38 minutes long, which was not at all a customary length for a movie in 1990, particularly not a movie that doesn't have ambitions toward being a sweeping epic. Only poking around with some research afterward did I discover why this is: It was originally produced as a television miniseries before being packaged as a film. This explains both its length and its episodic nature, and the overall structure is what it is because it's a dramatization of three different autobiographies by Frame, the middle of which lends its title to the movie.

After I got over some of my initial "why am I watching this?" vibes, I did grow to be interested in Frame, as you do with a character with whom you spend a lot of time -- in, for example, a miniseries. Lacking a prior understanding or appreciation of her career made it difficult for me to place her life in a useful context, but it also occurred to me that there are many, many lesser films made about the lives of people we know very well. Better to have a good film made about someone I don't know than a bad film about someone I do.

Plus it gave me a chance to appreciate the early cinematic gestures of Campion, whose first film, Sweetie (1989), really captivated me when I saw it five years ago. That film captures personality types that have come familiar to me due to living in this part of the world, in all their bedraggled eccentricity, and An Angel at My Table starts out in much the same vein. I'm more naturally inclined toward a modern-day portrait of off-putting weirdos than I am a biopic of a writer, but An Angel at My Table does seem like an important bit of progression for Campion, one that allowed her to really break out with another period film in The Piano three years later. 

I'll check in with the next Campion film I haven't seen, 1999's Holy Smoke!, in July. But in the meantime it's back to Bigelow in May with Near Dark. 

Remembering Al Leong

If I told you there was one actor who had appeared in movies alongside a veritable Mount Rushmore of action movie stars -- Bruce Willis, Mel Gibson, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Keanu Reeves -- you'd say "That's impossible, such a person does not exist."

And yet you'd be wrong, because Al Leong does exist.

Yes that's in the present tense. Al Leong is still alive. I'm sorry if my title for this post gave you the opposite impression, especially coming directly after a genuine "in memoriam" piece yesterday.

But I doubt I'll hear it when the now 70-year-old former actor and stuntman does die, because his name is not going to make it to the top of the list for celebrity death notices. I reckon most people have never heard of him.

Well, my high school friends and I are not "most people." And that's really what I'm remembering today, two days after seeing him pop up in Big Trouble in Little China on my second viewing of it.

Sometime around 1990, when my friends and I watched movies we'd rented from the local Videosmith every Friday or Saturday night, we began noticing this one distinctive stuntman/henchman appearing over, and over, and over again. We wouldn't have had IMDB at the time, obviously, so we eventually searched out his name in the credits: Al Leong.

Why so distinctive? Certainly there were plenty of Asian stuntmen in action movies at that time?

Actually, no -- there may have been Asian stuntmen in movies made in Asia, but if you were talking about Hollywood movies, there tended not to be as many. And then there was the fact that Leong's trademark long hair -- at the back of a heavily receding forehead, no less -- made him stand out, even if others of Asian descent might have appeared in the cast. He wore his hair that way, as well as his trademark beard and moustache, no matter what film he was in and no matter what it might have otherwise required of him. 

I guess we also thought there was something funny about him, and we weren't the only ones. He also appeared in comedies. It's here where I admit I cheated a little bit by saying he appeared alongside noted action star Keanu Reeves, because this was long before anyone saw Reeves that way. Yes, Leong appears in Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, possibly in his most prominent role ever, playing Genghis Khan.

Would you like a list of the other prominent movies from that era that featured Leong? It's pretty impressive.

Lethal Weapon
Action Jackson
Die Hard
They Live
Black Rain
Death Warrant
Hot Shots! Part Deux
The Last Action Hero
Beverly Hills Cop III
Escape from L.A.
Lethal Weapon 4
The Scorpion King

I'm going to assume he dies in Lethal Weapon, so I'm going to assume the continuity people weren't too worried about him popping back up in Lethal Weapon 4.

I suppose I could be reading the resume of any person who makes a career as a stuntman or henchman, but you'd never know it because you'd never notice those people. But how could you not notice Al Leong?

Here he is in Die Hard:

And here is in Death Warrant:

And here he is in Lethal Weapon:

And as Genghis Khan:

And because it was the movie I just rewatched, here he is in Big Trouble in Little China:

And though it turns out I've actually mentioned him twice on this blog before -- here and here -- I may not have had occasion to think about him since the second of those posts in 2015, even though I have of course seen Die Hard more recently than that. So that's another way I'm "remembering" him today, in addition to thinking fondly back on those high school Friday nights frittered away on dumb action movies.

Of course, even the friskiest and most unbreakable stuntman can't hang around forever, and by 2005 it was time for Leong to hang up his kicking shoes and fireproof jackets. He worked until he was 52, though, and that's pretty good for someone who basically has no acting ability. 

Someone did dust him off for the 2014 movie Awesome Asian Bad Guys, though, in which he plays, appropriately, "Al." I'm wondering if that's sort of like an Expendables, except for former Asian henchmen.

Maybe that needs to be next on my list.

R.I.P. Lance Reddick

Lance Reddick was not primarily a movie star. I remember him a lot more vividly from TV shows like The Wire and Fringe.

But I happened to have just seen him in a movie last Saturday night: Don't Say a Word, which I already wrote about here. And I remember at that time appreciating him again, like I always do -- I mean, specifically thinking about how good he is, how much he commands the screen, even in a small role, rather than just noting him and moving on.

Six days later, I learned he had had passed at age 60 from what was listed as natural causes, but natural causes that were also described as sudden.

And then when I went to check out his IMDB to see exactly what the breakdown between TV and movies was, I was reminded of how many times he did appear in the movies -- which is why it feels like Reddick has been in my life even though I haven't seen an episode of Fringe or The Wire in a good decade.

He's been in all three John Wick movies, and we'll see him in the fourth (though sadly, not the inevitable fifth). 

He was in the 2018 film Little Woods, which I just saw and really liked last year.

He was in Riley Stearns' Faults, which I really liked, and Spike Lee's Oldboy, which I liked more than most people did.

A point of reference I wouldn't have had was the "Down" movies, none of which I've seen, such as White House Down. They probably didn't burnish his resume but they do provide further evidence that Reddick was a regular presence in the movies.

Twenty-five years ago, near the very start of his career (he got a late start), Reddick even worked with Alfonso Cuaron on his adaptation of Great Expectations.

But I don't really need to spend all this time justifying why I am writing about Lance Reddick on a movie blog. I should really be spending my time on praising the man.

Reddick had an intensity that outshone anyone else on the screen. This does not mean he was always turned up to 11, and in fact, that's not what his intensity was about. It was more often a calm intensity, anchored by a cool look in his eyes that nonetheless pierced you and held yours until you had to drop them. 

This made him work well as an authority figure, which he frequently played. It could also be harnessed for villainy, which I'm sure he also played on occasion, though no examples are immediately coming to mind.

Maybe the reason I can't think of any examples of Reddick playing villains was that you wanted to like him. He was such a likeable presence. He could stare you down and dress you down with quiet efficiency, but when he cracked a smile, it was just the reward you were looking for. Reddick was the authority figure we all wanted in our lives -- a man who does things by the book, but will twist the rules if it's in the interest of the greater good. And he was like the stern parent whose hard-won smile we craved.

I'll miss seeing Lance Reddick on my screens, be they big or small. 

What does Quentin Tarantino plan to say about us?

As you would have heard if you've been following movie news this week, it's come out that Quentin Tarantino is planning to start filming on his tenth and final film this autumn. The script, whose plot details are under wraps, is called The Movie Critic.

While I can't necessarily see that title sticking, it did fill me with a sudden sinking feeling.

"Oh no," I thought. "Quentin Tarantino is about to tear the entire profession of film criticism a new one."

Then immediately I thought "Wait no he won't. Quentin Tarantino likes film critics, or at least he should anyway. Because they love him."

If Michael Bay were making a movie called The Movie Critic, I'd get it. Jon Favreau clearly has some issues to work out toward critics, as seen in Chef.

But Tarantino? He's a critical darling.

So what is he going to say about us?

It has also been revealed that the protagonist is female and that it is set in the late 1970s. So what is this, a Pauline Kael biopic?

I checked quickly to see if Kael might have had anything bad to say about Tarantino, but she retired from The New Yorker a year before Reservoir Dogs. That probably rules out some sort of fevered revenge fantasy against Kael. Even if she had dropped some attitude toward him in retirement, I suspect he'd be over it by now.

But there's some sort of revenge fantasy in almost every Tarantino movie, so I don't know why I should expect The Movie Critic to be any different. Will the titular character be the avenger, the avenged, or the one who knows his name is the Lord, when vengeance is laid upon her? Because we don't even know if the lead is the same as the character referenced in the title.  

With someone like Tarantino, speculation likely gets us nowhere. He'll purposefully zig when we expect him to zag. Whatever the movie is, it will feel like it came from the brain of Quentin Tarantino even if we never ultimately could have guessed what it was about. Maybe that's the mark of a great auteur -- you always know they made the film, but that doesn't mean you predicted how it was going to unfurl.

If it shoots this fall, I'm guessing maybe it'll unfurl at the end of 2024. 

Tarantino's whole "ten movies and then I'm done" thing is admirable, in a way, and I suppose if anyone would stick to such a pledge, it would be him.

But I'm sure we won't be done with him yet when he leaves -- audiences and critics alike.  

Feelings ... nothing more than ... Feelings

It's been a long time since I've written a "hey, that's a coincidence!" post, so here, this will slake your thirst.

Did you know there are movies coming out in 2023 called You Hurt My Feelings and No Hard Feelings?

Granted I am probably stealing material from myself for my year-end portmanteaus post, but I'm sure I'll think of something else to talk about at that point.

I had been aware of the former, which is Nicole Holofcener's latest and stars regular Holofcener collaborator Julia Louis-Dreyfus. (Well, they've collaborated one other time, at least.) Amber Tamblyn, Tobias Menzies and David Cross fill out the cast. That one hits theaters, in the U.S. anyway, on May 26th.

Only four weeks later on June 23rd, it's No Hard Feelings, which I only just learned about this past weekend. That stars Jennifer Lawrence, with Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Natalie Morales and Matthew Broderick co-starring. It's directed by Gene Stupnitsky, who directed 2019's Good Boys, which I really liked.

But Vance, you say. I'm sure there are multiple movies that come out every year with the word "feelings" in them.

Not quite. In fact, if you want to know how many other movies I have seen -- out of 6,375 total -- with the word "feelings" in the title, the answer is: zero.

IMDB does produce a smattering of other results when you search the word "feelings," including a couple other movies with each of these titles, but not a one of the results had I ever heard of before now.

In a couple months I'll be able to see if either of them gives me the feels. 

Everything Everywhere All the Awards

If I wanted a night where my highest rated best picture nominee had a formal coronation as a modern classic, tonight was a good night to be watching the Oscars.

It was also a night to be reminded that my critical tastes are not as out of sync with other people's as I sometimes think.

You see, not only did my #4 film of the year, Everything Everywhere All at Once, take home a stunning seven Oscars -- the most for any film since Slumdog Millionaire in 2008 -- but the third most Oscars were won by my #1 film of the year, The Whale, which picked up a surprise best makeup Oscar in addition to the expected best actor win for Brendan Fraser. 

The second most? All Quiet on the Western Front with four. I ranked that only 67th for the year, but that could hardly detract from my overall satisfaction with how things played out.

And that included the ceremony itself. With Jimmy Kimmel casting a comfortable calm over the proceedings after "the incident" last year, this was a competent, enjoyable, and totally unremarkable Academy Awards.

Unremarkable, I suppose, except for the absolute dominance of Everything Everywhere All at Once, which almost made us sick of seeing the charming Daniels on stage. By collecting statue after statue over the course of the evening, EEAAO conspired with AQOTWF to entirely shut out five best picture nominees, a full half of the field: The Banshees of Inisherin, Elvis, The Fabelmans, Tar and Triangle of Sadness. Of the remaining best picture nominees, one Oscar each was picked up by Avatar: The Way of Water (visual effects), Top Gun: Maverick (sound) and Women Talking (adapted screenplay).

Since Elvis and The Banshees of Inisherin were also in my top ten, I was a little disappointed to see them come away empty handed -- except again, see the whole "nine combined Oscars to films in my top four of 2022" and know that "disappointed" could never be the right word.

And hey, my #2 movie of the year, Don't Worry Darling, even got a mention when Kimmel asked Malala, of all people, whether Harry Styles actually spit on Chris Pine. I couldn't hear what her response was, but those who did, including Kimmel, seemed to think it was funny and/or appropriate.

I could look up what Malala said, but I'm here to give you the same sort of instant impressions I've always given you in the past, free from the reading of ten Oscar recap stories -- as though I were, in fact, writing it in the wee hours of Tuesday morning, like I usually do, rather than mid-afternoon on Monday. That's right, if you read yesterday's post, you know that I saw the Oscars live this year for the first time since moving to Australia, due being off work for the Labour Day holiday. I have enough of my own observations that I don't need to steal anyone else's, inadvertently or otherwise.

So with all the deserved kudos to Everything -- which failed to win an award in only three categories where it was nominated, those being original song, original score and costume design (with Stephanie Hsu failing to win best supporting actress but her co-star Jamie Lee Curtis winning instead) -- let's move on to the page of notes I scribbled as I was watching the ceremony on my projector in my darkened garage.

- Kimmel parachuting in. Nice memorable entrance and a unique nod to "the film that saved Hollywood," Top Gun: Maverick.

- Kimmel mentions that Ke Huy Quan and Brendan Fraser appeared in Encino Man, making this a bad night for Pauly Shore. It would be even worse when both won the Oscars for which they were nominated.

- Five Irish actors nominated for Oscars? That's a lot.

- Kimmel's Will Smith jokes are good. It came later, but I'll mention it now: When the documentary feature was about to be presented, that being the category where Smith slapped Chris Rock last year, Kimmel quipped that he hoped it "would go off without a hitch, and without Hitch." Good line. I didn't end up posting much during the ceremony -- the notable exception coming in just a moment -- but I at least thought about posting "Will Smith is currently trying to schedule a time when he can slap Jimmy Kimmel." But then I just decided not to delve into that particular controversy. (Hey, Smith has tried to repent. I'm aware of that.)

- He had a good opening monologue but I did think it went on a little long. Having the RRR dancers dance him off the stage was a nice touch.

- Dwayne Johnson is looking older than I've ever seen him look.

- It was interesting to see Ariana DeBose choke up when she read Ke Huy Quan's name. I'm not usually in favor of when presenters let their preference be known, but this was clearly unpremeditated. (Who knows, maybe the enormity of the moment would have made her choke up over any name that was in that envelope.)

- Here was my one post on Facebook while the ceremony was airing: "Yes Ke Huy Quan just thanked Chunk." Chunk, of course, is a character in The Goonies, in which Quan also appeared, and he was played by Jeff Cohen. I recognized the name, though I assume not everyone would have.

- Before we move on from Quan, I'll say that only in the past year have I learned how his name is actually pronounced. When I first learned of him in The Goonies and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, I always chose to pronounce his name as "Kay Hu Quan." At least I got the Quan part right. There were no pronunciation websites back then, nor do I expect most media who would have said his name at the time -- though I may not have heard any -- would have gone to great lengths to get it right. So he's always been "Kay Hu Quan" to me, but I will try to change it to "Key Way Quan" now, especially now that he's an Oscar winner and there's a good chance he is going to become instantly overexposed.

- Curtis wins best actress and delivers this good line: "I am hundreds of people." One of a number of choice lines about the collaborative medium that we would hear on this night.

- Nice touch giving David Byrne hot dog fingers in his song from EEAAO. That's a direct descendant of his famed big suit. Byrne was also the first celebrity whose age I looked up, and the first to guess exactly right before I looked it up. He's 70, and that's what I guessed he was.

- Why did the makeup winners for The Whale take so long to get up on stage?

- Samuel L. Jackson was the next age I guessed. I guessed he was 74. He is, indeed, 74. Wow I'm good at this.

- Ruth Carter wins for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever costume design, repeating her feat for the original Black Panther (and becoming the first Black woman to win two Oscars, I now see looking online. My rules are, I'm allowed to verify facts, just not steal other people's observations). Her line about her mother becoming "an ancestor" this past week was touching. Then later we learn her mother was 101 when she died. So, I guess it wasn't a surprise.

- The RRR song brought the house down, in a typical example of Bollywood's commitment to spectacle. I almost wonder if some of the voting occurred during the ceremony, as I was not expecting "Naatu Naatu" to win best original song (nor its writer to sing his acceptance speech!). But I'm glad it did as the only other two songs that probably stood a chance, from divas Lady Gaga and Rhianna, were blandly inspirational tunes with no staying power.

- Also, why the extreme close-up during your song, Gaga? It looked like she had some kind of rash on her face that they didn't cover very well with makeup.

- Women Talking winning best adapted screenplay might have been a bit of a makeup call for Sarah Polley not getting a best director nom, which was fretted about quite a bit. Although you will recall that I did end up liking that film quite a bit, its dialogue is clunky in enough parts that I don't know if a writing category was the best place for it to be honored. I did like seeing Polley, a longtime favorite of mine, giving an acceptance speech.

- I'm not sure how Walter Mirisch, who I had to google, snuck in to steal the last spot in the "in memoriam" section, when they seemed to have it all cued up for Raquel Welch. He produced In the Heat of the Night, and good for him for doing that, but it wasn't a great way to reach a climax in this sentimental tradition.

- I guessed Mindy Kaling's age wrong, but not really. I guessed she was 47, but before I looked I thought "No, she's only 43." But for some reason I counted the original guess as 47. She's actually 43.

- The editor for EEAAO, Paul Rogers, didn't really win me over with his humble brag that this was only his second film. (Also I quibble with the accuracy of that, as he shows as the credited editor on both Daniel Scheinert's The Death of Dick Long and the documentary You Can't Kill David Arquette. I suppose he was only talking about fiction films.) I know he didn't mean to say "Wow, I'm such a prodigy, I won an Oscar in only my second film" and it was really probably more like "I really didn't expect this given the relative infancy of my career," but then he made it worse by talking about how working with the cast was "the honor of his career." Yes, a career that is only two narrative features long.

- Winning as an original screenwriter -- or was it as a director? -- Daniel Kwan gives another good line about the collaborative process: "Genius emerges from the collective."

- Really glad to see Fraser win. I hope this once and for all silences everyone who didn't like The Whale and thought I was crazy for picking it as my best of the year. I know it won't.

- Michelle Yeoh, you are certainly not past your prime.

- Loved seeing Quan stand to applaud Harrison Ford as he walked on stage to give out best picture, and was reminded again how funny Harrison Ford is. Whenever you think he'd rather be smoking pot on his ranch and is only involved in entertainment for cynical reasons, he starts appearing in every other TV show and movie and giving out the final Oscar of the night. You're an old estabalishment-embracing softie, Harrison, we all know it. You can't fool us. 

- Kimmel gets off a final good line about joining Good Morning America already in progress, and exits next to a sign that reads "Number of telecasts without incident: 001." 

- In the end I did finally guess one age definitively incorrectly. I thought Kimmel was 56, but it turns out he's only 55.

So that finally closes the book on 2022. Now what do I do with the rest of my day?

The novelty of watching the Oscars live

I'm not sure why it hasn't happened before, but this year, for the first time since I arrived in Australia, the Oscars telecast coincides with our Labour Day holiday.

The Oscars being a famously moving target is certainly one reason it hasn't yet happened. Let's review Oscar telecasts since my 2013 arrival to see how the stars have never aligned previously. (Oscar dates, like Labour Day dates, are all on Australian time, which means a Monday rather than a Sunday.)

2014 - Labour Day March 10th, Oscars March 3rd
2015 - Labour Day March 9th, Oscars February 23rd
2016 - Labour Day March 14th, Oscars February 29th
2017 - Labour Day March 13th, Oscars February 27th
2018 - Labour Day March 12th, Oscars March 5th
2019 - Labour Day March 11th, Oscars February 25th
2020 - Labour Day March 9th, Oscars February 10th 
2021 - Labour Day March 8th, Oscars April 26th
2022 - Labour Day March 14th, Oscars March 28th
2023 - Labour Day March 13th, Oscars March 13th

Ding ding ding ding! We finally have a winner!

Twice they had landed within a week of one another, but never closer until this year. 

Incidentally, what the hell happened in 2020 where the Oscars were almost in January?? I guess they lucked out, because if the show had been scheduled for a month later they'd have had to cancel. 

The alignment of these events is significant because it means that for the first time that I've been on Australian soil, I get to watch the Oscars live.

Instead of grinding through a Monday in the busy first term of the year -- I work for the department of education, so my busy times are the schools' busy times -- I'll be at home, enjoying the tail end of a three-day weekend. And enjoying an Oscar ceremony that I usually delay until after 9 p.m. Monday night, having dodged spoilers the best I could before then.

Adding to the novelty is that the U.S. has just had daylight savings but Australia hasn't yet, so the ceremony begins at 11 a.m. my time, meaning watching it won't even entirely destroy the day. (Though I've been asked to take my kids out to breakfast before then, to make up for my Oscar viewing, so we better be back in time.)

I don't know that I will make my own live comments on Facebook as the awards get doled out, but it'll be nice to know I don't have to stay off Facebook, and I'll have the option to chime in on other people's witty observations. 

Also, when I write my wrap-up post that's dictated by a main storyline, then becomes a long list of peculiar or noteworthy details, I'll have plenty of time to write it up in order to post it after the clock flips over to Tuesday my time. (See, I can't post it straight afterward due to my Audient rule never to post more than once in a day, and you are currently reading the Monday post.) Usually I'm cranking it out after midnight, probably closer to 1 a.m., just so I can get to bed as soon as possible, and just so I can get it online before I'm too late to the party for post-Oscars chatter.

Given how much it would seem I care about this based on what I've written in this post, it's been another lax Oscar season for me. I only watched one movie I hadn't seen by the time the nominations were announced, Sarah Polley's Women Talking last week, meaning at least I've seen all the best picture nominees before the ceremony. There were other titles I toyed with watching, but, for example, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish is still at the premium rental price of $19.99. Actually check that, right now you can only purchase it for $19.99, until it becomes available for rental next week.

It's consistent with a steady downslide in my interest in the Oscars themselves, which I find a way to mention every year. I sill view it as a venerable institution, I still enjoy watching the ceremony, and I still use the date the nominations are unveiled to close off my list of the previous year's viewings and post my rankings. But I don't get involved in any of the hype leading up to the awards, I don't do very much if any homework to be better prepared for the ceremony, and there are years when the show actually creeps up on me and I only notice it's going to happen a few days ahead of time. This year, I did know it was happening this weekend, but only a few days ago did I make the connection that I'd actually be in a position to watch it as it was happening.

Which I will do, in about three hours.

In the meantime I have to print out an Oscars prediction bracket, like I always do, though I'm increasingly less likely to spend more than a few minutes on it. I have to take my kids out to a late Labour Day breakfast. And I've already got the projector set up in the garage, ready to connect up my laptop once I return with a belly full of pancakes.

Oscars 95, here I come, live and in stereo. 

I finally saw: Don't Say a Word

You'd be right to question the wisdom of going back to catch up with those disposable, interchangeable detective thrillers from the 1990s and early 2000s that you didn't see at the time. For the most part, they existed for that exact moment in time, and had no artistic merit that would prompt a critical viewer to go back and grapple with them 20 years later.

But Don't Say a Word did have that little sing-songy part of the trailer that my friends and I must have seen 50 times back in 2001: Brittany Murphy singing "I'll never tell ..."

Just to write out the words doesn't do it justice. "Tell" really has two syllables, like "teee-elll."

But if you were watching network TV in 2001, as I was in my first months after moving to Los Angeles, they played this ad constantly, so you'd remember it. And if you were like me and my friends, you mocked it out of sheer exhaustion from seeing it so many times.

So after an abortive attempt to watch Sharknado on Amazon due to technical issues -- another "I finally saw" candidate when I do get to it -- I switched over to Netflix and found this.

And two of the reasons I selected it were obvious:

1) An increased appreciation of the aging Michael Douglas, who I watched and enjoyed in The Kominsky Method, and who will not be with us forever;

2) An appreciation I always had for Murphy, who is already not with us.

I hoped the movie would be a real tete-a-tete between these two. The singy-songy "I'll never tell" certainly suggested that Murphy's psychiatric patient was toying with Douglas' child psychologist, and that the thing she wouldn't tell was something she was holding back for spite, in order to make Douglas squirm.

In reality, she isn't the antagonist, and the actual antagonist is far more banal. It's Sean Bean, who is both a jewel thief and a kidnapper, and that jewel thief also committed a bank robbery. So really, it's every cliche you can think of thrown into a blender and reduced to something colorless and bland. 

There's also a different protagonist than you might expect, or at least a third protagonist in addition to Douglas and Murphy, which is Jennifer Esposito playing a detective tracking a killer. Right, so Bean has also killed some people on his path to finding the lost jewel. A number in Murphy's head is the thing she won't tell, and that will lead to the jewel, or else Douglas' kidnapped daughter will be killed.

So yeah, it certainly would have been fine if I'd never seen it.

The trolls rear their ugly heads again

I bet you've never seen such a bright green critical recommendation next to so much angry audience red on Metacritic.

But if you have, I bet it's for another movie that triggers right-wing trolls like The Woman King triggers them.

Now I should say, I wasn't a big fan of The Woman King. I don't remember all the reasons at this point, but I can promise you, it wasn't because it puts Black people in a position of power, defending themselves against the encroachment of white imperialists. (I'll get to one of the reasons, which I think is valid, in a little bit. But there is already enough sabotaging of this movie on Metacritic that I don't want to start out this piece that way.)

The discrepancy between the 77 critic score and the 2.8 audience score is jarring enough, but it becomes even more so when you convert the latter score into numbers. Among the 446 user reviews, 112 are positive, 21 are mixed -- and 313 are negative. 

And most of those negative reviews are scores of zero.

Come on, trolls. You're not fooling anyone. 

You obviously didn't even see the movie, because why would it benefit your world view to even give it a chance? 

Here are two of the examples of what "people" -- as in, maybe Russian bots -- have said about The Woman King, just limited to what appears on the front page:

"Hollywood has no shame and would fake any insane story to attract [sic] woke audience."

"Honestly is just the regular woke racist crap as usual from the leftists."

Yeah, there's that W word rearing its head as well. Didn't some idiot conservative politician recently say that the biggest problem facing the world was woke culture? Maybe they all said it.

Because I was curious how much energy went into making a movie people liked look like a piece of shit, I decided to drill into the negative responses and see how many zeros there really were.

Audience scores start being considered negative at a score of 3. The Woman King has five scores of 3, five scores of 2, 17 scores of 1, and that means ... carry the one ... 286 scores of 0. 

Give me a moment while I burst out laughing.

If you are a serious movie person using these sites in a responsible way, you would never give a movie like The Woman King a zero on a ten-point scale. It is competently made. It has rousing fight scenes. At least some of the acting is indisputably impressive. Zero stars is what you give The Room, and only if its amateur terribleness doesn't bring you a sense of joy. It's not what you give The Woman King.

I didn't bother sifting through the actual text of this copious quantity of zero scores, but I bet there would be racist dog whistles throughout.

The thing is, the reason I had The Woman King on my mind today was because I did, indeed, not like it very much, and the idea of whether Viola Davis should have received an Oscar nomination over Andrea Riseborough came up again on a podcast. But for me, not liking it very much means 2.5 stars out of 5. It doesn't mean 0 stars out of 10. (Incidentally, I don't have an actual opinion on the actresses' comparative worthiness for an Oscar nomination because I have not seen To Leslie.)

I came to Metacritic to read an intelligent takedown of The Woman King, and instead I got ... this monstrosity. Which makes me really want to watch it again and give the things I didn't love about it the highest possible benefit of the doubt.

I promised I'd tell you one, so here it is.

There's a moment in the last 30 minutes where Davis' character comes to some realization about feelings she's been having. I wish I could remember the actual dialogue she speaks to another character, but it involves her breakthrough that she has "denied the child inside her," or something along those lines. In other words, totally bogus 20th or 21st century psychiatry speak from a self help book, not a thought a person would express to themselves 200 years ago -- especially not a person unacquainted with western critical thought, especially not a person defined by training herself as a warrior, denying all other potential distractions in the process. 

For me that moment was emblematic of other failures in the film, which led to a mildly negative experience.

Checking out the more trustworthy part of Metacritic's offerings as they relate to this movie, I was less dispirited, but still somewhat dispirited, to find the critical bias leaning so far in the other direction. Of the 53 critic reviews that had been tabulated, 49 were positive, with only four mixed and none in the dreaded red. I clicked on the lowest score of 40, issued by critic Kyle Smith from The Wall Street Journal, hoping I'd hear my muted impression of the film echoed back at me. 

I couldn't read more than the first 150 words of the review because I hit a paywall, but I also realized ... The Wall Street Journal is a right-leaning organization. So I've got to take this critic's perspective, even as carefully shrouded as it was within some opening praise for Davis, with a grain of salt.  

But should I be taking all these perspectives with a grain of salt, not just the negative ones? I started wondering whether there was some truth to the accusations of excessive wokeness by those on the right, whether they might have their finger on a real trend, even if they didn't actually watch this specific movie. If, indeed, any progressive critic is too shy to say anything negative about The Woman King because it would be failing some sort of woke litmus test. And any critic from a right-wing organization has to go more negative just to compensate.

And that by not loving The Woman King, I am somehow aligned with these people.  

It's really troubling that we live in an age where if you like something that is mediocre but has honorable intentions, you must love it to death, in order to fight off the people who hate it so much, they'll go to any lengths to drag it through the mud.

It seems that The Woman King is an ideological battleground as much as it's a battleground between Africans and European invaders. 

Finishing the Rocky series -- but not with Creed III

I finished the Rocky series on Tuesday night, but the newly released Creed III was not the final piece in the puzzle.

Oh, I did see Creed III, but that was Monday night. You can read my review here.

No, on Tuesday I night, I finally corrected the strangest oversight in any long-running movie series where I've seen the majority of the films. I finally saw Rocky II.

Yes, Rocky II came out in 1979. Yes, that was 44 years ago.

Here's how the oversight happened. 

Rocky III was the movie that came out closest to when I started caring about movies. In 1982 I was still only eight for most of the year, so I didn't see it in the theater -- I'm pretty sure my parents would have thought it was too intense for an eight-year-old, and they would have been right.

But the release of Rocky III was perfectly timed to be available on The Movie Channel a few years later when we got cable. We recorded it on VHS and it quickly became one of my favorite movies, one I have probably watched close to ten times, though probably only once in the past 30 years.

At that point I went forward rather than back, catching the subsequent movies as they released. I only finally broke the chronology in 2013 -- just about a month before leaving for Australia, in fact -- when I went back and watched the original Rocky. Hard to believe that I only watched the original Rocky ten years ago, but it's true. And I gave it five stars. Really connected with me, so to speak. 

You'd imagine that finally seeing Rocky would have put a viewing of Rocky II pretty urgently on my schedule, but that did not happen. I had to watch three Creed movies -- and love the first one in the same neighborhood that I loved Rocky and Rocky III -- before I finally sat down with it on Tuesday night.

I didn't finally put it on the schedule one night after seeing Creed III because that movie left me so jazzed up about boxing movies. If you checked out that review, you've seen that my reaction to Creed III was positive but on the tepid side, a somewhat generous 7/10 on ReelGood's rating scale. 

Rather, I made a claim in the review I had already finished but not yet posted, which was that Rocky and Creed were the two best Rocky movies. (Rocky III figures in there somewhere for me, as the review also states, but I decided I didn't want to die on the hill of calling it the best.) 

It didn't seem fair not to consider Rocky II as a candidate for that honor if I hadn't even seen it.

Well, Rocky II isn't one of my top three Rocky movies, but it did have enough going for it. Like its predecessor, it's a very gritty 1970s film. The first way I noticed this was through its title card. Not the first title card -- which does pan the title across the screen in giant letters -- but the second title card, the one you mightn't have thought was even necessary given the first one. But it looks like this:

That is, of course, not from Rocky II, but from the original Rocky. The internet was not forthcoming on the one from Rocky II.

But it looks exactly like this, though I think the lettering might have been yellow.

A very unassuming choice, especially when you are following a movie that didn't have any pretensions -- making it a justified choice in that movie -- but then blew up as a popular and critical success. A very 70s choice. A very hard hat, lunch pail, working class choice. In fact, I believe the background images are the city as shot from a moving car from a bridge, not dissimilar to the opening credits of the TV show Taxi.

In other words, a very Rocky choice.

I wasn't sure how quickly the tone of the series would pivot from what works so well in Rocky to what works so well, but is very different, in Rocky III. The answer is, pretty slowly. Rocky III is equally light on the boxing scenes, only getting to them at the beginning (establishing the series' tendency to recap what happened at the end of the last movie through exact footage from that movie) and at the end. In between, it's a lot of growing pains, early trappings of fame, mild domestic discord, and training sequences. In other words, good stuff except that Rocky already did that better than this movie could hope to, and in my mind I was hungering for something a bit more like Rocky III.

The quantity of boxing was clearly something the filmmakers sought to correct by the time of the third movie, which features not only the recap of Rocky II at the start, but also the exhibition fight against Thunderlips, the first fight against Clubber Lang, and the second fight against Clubber Lang. Boxing from start to finish is a more exciting way to grow the franchise into the new model for what blockbusters could be. Don't forget that we'd only just really started to become acquainted with this form of blockbuster four years before Rocky II with the release of Jaws, so Hollywood had not yet identified how to lather up such a movie with non-stop action.

I admit I did fall asleep several times during Rocky II -- pausing as I always do -- but that's more a commentary on me than the movie. I always fall asleep, for at least a little bit, during movies I watch at home these days. I'm sure it is impacting my overall experience in some way, but I just haven't found in my new house that perfect balance between comfort and rigidity, the kind of sitting position that keeps me awake but is also relaxing. In the old house, our coach was backed up against a wall, so when I sat on the floor leaning back on it -- my preferred viewing position -- it provided exactly what I need. In this house if I try to do that, and if no one is sitting on the couch to weigh it down, I push it backwards. So instead I sit on it, or lie on it, and well it's pretty easy to guess what will happen from there.

One thing I enjoyed about Rocky II was seeing Rocky's start as a pitchman. When he gains his fame from the bout against Apollo Creed, which he does not win in the first movie, he needless to say comes into a little bit of money, and also is sought after to hawk products. He's so bad at reading his lines, though, that he gets fired by the exasperated director. Which is just as well because he also thinks doing this is shit. He's much better at this by Rocky III.

It's interesting to note that he's also intended to be retired way back at the start of this movie, after his one fight inflicted so much damage on him that his wife Adrian can't stand to watch him continue to take a pummeling. So that means the idea of him being retired is something that was being grappled with as early as the start of the second movie ... and that his retirement doesn't actually take for the full length of five more movies. 

I had wished we'd spend a little more time with Creed. Given that the last three movies in this series have borne his name and been devoted to his legacy in some way, it was useful to spend some more time with him and see how much that feels justified. Of course, in Rocky II he is still just basically a villain, even baiting Rocky to fight him again with cheap insults in the newspaper. In this movie, he's the one living in the fancy house, insecure about his standing within boxing and the controversial result of his fight with Rocky. Creed wouldn't become the beloved figure so mourned in the three Creed movies until Rocky III, and then of course especially in Rocky IV, so seeing him here really wasn't that instructive. 

There's also a long sub plot about Adrian going into a coma while she's pregnant -- at least I think I've got that right. This is where I was dozing off a bit.

I did find the final fight pretty rousing, but I realized I already knew its main beats -- from the start of Rocky III. So yeah, I'd already seen Rocky over-punch on his last swing of the match, leading him to lose his balance as both he and Apollo fall to the mat at the same time. Only Rocky gets up. It's a sufficiently epic climax to a boxing match, but I'd already seen it so it didn't hold any surprise for me.

I say that I have now completed the Rocky series, but is that really true? 

Apparently, it is not true.

Although I said Creed III was the time to end things in my review, that may have been more wishful thinking than Hollywood reality. Perhaps I thought Michael B. Jordan et al would show the restraint that previous Rocky movies have never shown, even though I had no reason to assume that. I mean, Adonis Creed is actually retired at the start of Creed III. Perhaps I didn't think it was possible for two different Creed movies to start with him as retired, because it would just be too silly. Then again, when has a character being too old ever stopped Hollywood before? We're preparing for the next Indiana Jones movie this summer.

But yes, Michael B. Jordan has confirmed -- perhaps hot off the box office success of this movie -- that Creed IV is already in the works. It's true there are storylines they have not yet explored. Spoilers for Creed III, but Adonis Creed has not yet lost a fight while holding the championship belt. In other words, he hasn't had his Rocky III lowest moment.

So all I can say is that I'm a Rocky Cinematic Universe completist for now. Who knows, maybe the only way for Adonis to fully shake off the baggage of his father and his former trainer is to end up appearing in more RCU movies than either of them. 

Audient Bridesmaids & International Women's Day: Women Talking

The next movie I'm scheduled to watch in my periodic Audient Bridesmaids series -- in which I'm working my way through, in reverse chronological order, all the movies I haven't seen that were nominated for best picture but didn't win -- is scheduled to be Barbara Streisand's The Prince of Tides from 1991.

But a movie has come along to usurp its spot in line -- that is, assuming Women Talking does not come up with an upset win for best picture this weekend. 

That certainly seems like the wrong entry point to discussing the lone 2022 best picture nominee I hadn't seen, given that I watched it in conjunction with International Women's Day -- and that the very idea of a bridesmaid might be considered fundamentally anti-feminist, if not in casual usage, then certainly on a day like today. 

Nonetheless, it's true -- I expect it to become officially eligible for this project next week, except that I've removed it from the queue preemptively.

The only reason I didn't see Sarah Polley's latest before my list closed was that it wasn't released in Australia until about three weeks after that -- February 16th, to be exact. In fact, I almost missed it, as the 4 p.m. showing in the theater downstairs from my work was the only one still on the schedule.

Probably unusual for a recently released best picture nominee before the Oscars have even aired, but that could be an indication of the tepid reception it's getting from audiences. (I haven't checked the box office, either here or in the U.S., and on a day designed to celebrate equal treatment for women around the world, I don't want to depress myself like that.)

Truth be told, I didn't contribute to its box office either. I used my critics card. However, I told myself that if they turned me down for any reason, I'd still pay for it. That's something I guess.

At least it'll show a ticket printed for this movie in its one showing on International Women's Day, which was being honored right above where I was watching the movie by a rally at the end of the street. I didn't know that was happening until after the movie got out, and trams on Collins Street were actually stopped for the gathering to occur. I would have liked to linger, except I had to get home to help with dinner. (In fact, I'm writing this at the train station, having missed stopping my train from departing by about three seconds.)

It hasn't been a lucky train day for me. In the morning, a track was broken, meaning buses replaced trains for part of the route in, and a trip that should have taken about 50 minutes took two hours. I even left home in time to catch an earlier train, in order to leave work early for Women Talking, all for naught.

But enough about me and the logistics that are very tangential to the aim of this post. Let's get to this movie.

At the start, the reaction was tepid from me as well. There is a purposeful artifice to Sarah Polley's approach to this story of women deciding whether they will leave a Mennonite community after multiple women of multiple ages have been drugged and raped by the community's abusive men. But we are wise to take heed of Polley's opening on-screen text: "What follows is an act of female imagination." As in, "Don't try to graft your version of realism onto it."

The first 30 minutes of the movie are very discourse heavy, as about eight women from three generations in three families debate two options that all the women in the community have voted on: whether to leave the community, or stay and fight. "Fight" is to be taken not in a physical sense, though one of the women has already tried to attack one of the men accused of these crimes. The men have shown themselves only too willing to quell any physical threat from the women with a violent retaliation that would be way out of scale with what the women intend. There were not enough votes for the option "stay and do nothing," so that has been taken off the table -- in itself a victory.

Because the women have purposefully not been educated -- they can neither read nor write -- they have asked a sympathetic man from the community, who had been away at university, to record the minutes of their meetings. 

But because they have no formal or information education, one does wonder if they would express themselves as eloquently as they do here -- as eloquently as a screenwriter like Sarah Polley is capable of having them express themselves. At the start I was distracted by the notion that this is more appropriately one woman talking than eight, one voice rather than eight different voices of eight different characters who have eight different life experiences, even as sheltered as they are in this community.

Then I realized: This might be a problem if Polley intended to do that and didn't succeed. I don't think she intended to do that at all.

In their conversation -- which relaxes into less didactic scenes, not all located in this one barn, as the movie moves along -- the women have what amounts to an extended philosophical discussion of the meaning of forgiveness, its possibility to exist as such if not given genuinely and without coercion, and the extent to which it is even deserved by these awful men. And in this extended conversation, with its ebbs and flows and diversions, we do meet these characters and learn more about their individual histories, what makes them distinct, and what makes them not just Polley wearing slightly different masks.

I won't say that my early misgivings about Women Talking were forgotten by the end of the movie, but they were certainly banished to the distant background -- enough for me to award the film four stars on Letterboxd, when I started out thinking it might get only half of that.

How much did I contribute to the cause of International Women's Day by watching Women Talking today? When I didn't even pay for a ticket?

Not much, probably. 

But it's not my role, really. My role is not to tell you all that women are equal to men and that women should be treated with respect and that assault against women in any form is a reprehensible act of cowardice by the man who perpetrates it. You already know this anyway.

My role is to listen, like the scribe who took the minutes for these women listens.

Even he steps beyond what is asked of him at times -- he can't help it. He does so in the meekest way and with the most earnestly helpful intentions, but his input is still not what's wanted by the women present -- not in that moment, not in that way.

We men can't help ourselves sometimes. We don't always know what to do. Often we don't know what to do. Even the best of us switch off listening mode and go into fixing mode. Even the best of us have a chivalry we can't always turn off, a chivalry that might be totally at odds with the situation and further accentuate a patriarchal mindset that is anathema to a day like today. On my various train rides today, I wondered if today, especially today, I should give up whatever seat I might have to a woman. Before immediately realizing that's not what International Women's Day is about, not in the slightest.

It's about listening, and making whatever change we need to make in our own lives so that the next International Women's Day feels just a little less direly needed than this one.

Strong skills of deception

When I started to watch the new Amazon movie Somebody I Used to Know on Saturday night, from the description of the trigger warning I thought it might be the streamer's next The Voyeurs.

The movie allegedly contained "Strong nudity, strong crude sexual jokes, strong sex scenes."

Not quite.

I'd take them in order except that I'm not even sure I remember any of the strong crude sexual jokes. So let's start with the other two.

Strong nudity?

That was certainly the promise to the single male Amazon viewer trawling for flesh, because the movie stars Alison Brie, often considered to be quite the attraction to such a demographic. 

The movie doesn't lie about this -- parts of her naked body are seen twice -- but it's not in a sexual context at all. In fact, it's in the context of nudism. 

In the first situation, she streaks across a golf course. So does Kiersey Clemons. However, they're shot at least a hundred yards away, and it is not titillating in the least. 

The second is almost like a makeup call for the first. Brie's character is interviewing an actual nudist at the end of the story, who is seen fully from the waist up but is also in her 50s if not her 60s. The reverse angle shots of Brie are specifically shot in such a way to cover her up. Then at end of the interview, she does shift enough so that you are given a full view of her upper half -- almost as if the movie is saying "Okay, guys, here's finally what you came for, but ha -- you had to watch the whole movie first!" It's debatable that that's what they came for.

Strong sex scenes?

These don't involve Brie or Clemons. In fact, they involve Julie Hagerty, who'll be 68 in a couple months. 

In fact, they don't even involve any nudity from Hagerty herself. In one of the scenes you see the naked butt of her sexual partner, who I think is played by Leigh Guyer. In the other scene, you just see him under the covers pleasuring Hagerty, but that's more implied activity than anything visual. In either case, both scenes are played for comedy, like "Ha ha, old people don't have sex!"

Strong crude sexual jokes?

Did somebody pretend to fellate a bread roll at some point? I don't really remember.

In any case, the point of this piece is that while none of these descriptions may be technically inaccurate, the use of the word "strong" oversells them considerably -- and leaves you nowhere to go when you've got a movie that is really shocking sexually. 

Let's say someone was actually using these as a trigger warning, rather than a promise of goods contained within. Too many of these and it's a total boy who cried wolf situation, and suddenly you are watching Salo or Caligula and thinking "Oh my God what just happened."

However, in researching the artwork for this piece, I found at least Amazon has a totally honest alternative poster for Somebody I Used to Know -- honest in what they believe is the reason you're watching this movie, and honest in terms of what they're actually giving you. 

Behold:

Audient Classics: The Exterminating Angel

This is the third in my 2023 monthly series rewatching movies from before I was born that I loved, but that I've seen only once.

The thing about movies you love is, if you loved them, you've usually found a way to write about them on your blog at some point -- especially if you've had that blog for a long time. And since I've now passed the 14-year mark on The Audient, it's getting increasingly likely that choices for a rewatch series are movies that I saw, and wrote about, during that time. 

At least with my first piece on The Exterminating Angel in 2016, it wasn't the sole focus of that piece. It was a piece that combined two movies about dinner parties that went disastrously wrong, the other being The Invitation. Still, I'll write about it now before I see what I wrote about it then.

Thursday night found me in a particularly interesting fugue state to watch this movie.

An hour before I started, I scarcely felt myself capable. To get my steps in, I'd taken an hour-long walk before dinner. That isn't the kind of thing that normally wipes me out, but it did this time, or at least the end result was that I was collectively wiped from a busy day at work and, I don't know, maybe the last three years of my life. My wife had also talked about being extremely tired, and we'd even COVID-tested my younger son when he came home from school because of some sniffles he was reporting. He was negative and neither of us really felt our "symptoms" were enough to warrant a test for ourselves. That's proven to be the right choice as I felt fine again yesterday.

Because I was going to be out all day yesterday -- I didn't return home until after 1:30 last night, in fact -- I made sure to do an extra dose of the normal nighttime chores on Thursday, putting away enough laundry for three families before it was finally time to sit down with the movie. And then I noted, well, maybe this was a partial explanation: I was starting to get a migraine. My migraines aren't usually painful, but they do involve the blotchy visuals that present a bit like retinal burns, and they can last for more than a half-hour.

So it was exactly in this condition that I did sit down with Luis Bunuel's film. I might have called an audible if not for the fact that I had already seen the movie and knew that its Spanish language dialogue was not going to be crucial to consume in toto, seeing how little it has to do with establishing a rigid plot. 

The plot of this movie basically is: A bunch of fancy Spaniards attend a dinner party, and then they can't leave.

They get to what we would think of as an ungodly hour, but it might not be for the Spanish. In that country where we famously know that they often will have dinner at 11 p.m., a 3 a.m. evening is not particularly out of the ordinary. But at that time that they would usually close up shop and go home, instead they all start reclining on the fancy furniture and camping down for the night, the result of a sort of unspoken group decision. A few comment on the apparent absurdity of it, but not with any aim of resisting.

A week later, they're still there. Not only in that house, but in that particular room of that house. 

And since all but one of the servants left before this even started, the only ones they're sharing the house with are a trio of lambs running up and down the stairs, and a bear cub that can be seen climbing the various columns and bannisters.

Yep, this is Bunuel at his finest alright.

We don't actually know it's a week -- one of them says it feels like a month. But before long the passage of time becomes difficult to discern, the guests begin hallucinating -- one even sees a disembodied hand creeping around the room -- and their collective sanity is hanging by a thread.

I'm quite certain there is a specific inspiration for this satire beyond just Bunuel's typical interest in warfare between the classes. In fact if I remember reading something about it at the time, there may have been coded references to a particular government or foreign conflict or something of that nature that 1962 audiences would have understood.

I could look that up, but I prefer not knowing. I like thinking that Bunuel's surreal ideas spring just from his imagination, not from something so banal as a political protest. 

The visual splotches of my migraine did dissipate after maybe 15 minutes, but at certain junctures of the movie I had to give way to short naps. That's become increasingly common in my movie viewing, but in The Exterminating Angel it seemed particularly appropriate. I was watching a movie about people who couldn't understand how they'd found themselves draped over the furniture, sleeping the night after an ordinary social outing, rather than at home in their beds. And I woke from these one or two naps with a similar sort of disorientation, draped over my own couch, my TV having gone into a screen saver mode, showing images that were not from 1962, but rather, deserts and oceans and other random bits of beautiful photography from the 21st century. It was dreamlike for certain.

If I liked it a little less this time, it's only because The Exterminating Angel is such a wonderful oddity that subsequent viewings can't compare to your initial discovery of it.

Let's see what parts of Exterminating Angel I chose to focus on in 2016.

Well, it's only fair that I don't correct earlier mistakes made in this piece. The sharper of you will already know that I got the location of the movie wrong. Although Bunuel himself was Spanish, this movie is set in Mexico, which makes the original lateness of the hour I mentioned less of a cultural tradition. Oh well, egg on my face I guess. 

Actually as it turns out, I didn't want to tell you even as much as I've told you in this piece (which is not nearly all of it) because I thought it was so lovely to discover the plot developments of The Exterminating Angel without them being spoiled in advance. There's only a single paragraph devoted to the movie, as the piece existed largely as a vehicle to discuss five other movies (also briefly) in which disastrous dinner parties occur. Those were Clue, Gosford Park, It's a Disaster, Rope, and Bunuel's own The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.

That last is something I should also rewatch, though not for this series -- I'd like to at least vary up the classics I watch by subject matter, filmmaker and country of origin. 

Let's see what April has in store. 

Jungle hospitality

I decided I was going to treat Wednesday night as a "shut your brain off" night at the movies, and I thought my brain would be shut off quite nicely by The Rundown, a 2003 film by Peter Berg, one of the first star vehicles for Dwayne Johnson. (I thought it was the first, but then was reminded of his prior appearance in The Scorpion King, which I also had not seen.)

The version I watched on Netflix, though, had the international title in the movie itself, even if it had the U.S. title on the Netflix menu. That title was Welcome to the Jungle.

I found this particularly funny because it's not the only movie Johnson has made called, at least in part, Welcome to the Jungle.

As you may recall, the 2017 Jumanji reboot was called Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle.

Guns N Roses are raking in royalties left and right.

It made me wonder if there are other actors who have appeared in two movies with (mostly) the same name that were not actually related to one another. I'm sure it has happened at some point. 

I also wonder if Johnson thought it was funny that they titled the Jumanji reboot this, or whether the international name for The Rundown may have actually factored into what to call the movie.

I also wonder why they thought The Rundown was not a suitable title for this movie in non-U.S. markets.

I'd hoped to derive more enjoyment than I did. For one, it looked really shitty. Whoever lit this movie and chose the film stock did a very poor job. 

It also felt pretty rough from Berg as a director. He's gotten a lot more polished since then, but this was the first action movie the former actor directed, having debuted as a director five years earlier with Very Bad Things (for which I have a soft spot). The action wirework is laughable. The way people fly around when kicked is ludicrous. 

Though he gains footing as he goes, Johnson also doesn't look that comfortable in this movie. His charisma does start to come out as it goes along -- which is not necessarily a case of gaining comfort, since movies are shot out of sequence -- but at the start it's pretty much non-existent.

Interestingly, I found that he seemed most comfortable in a comedic scene, in which he's been temporarily paralyzed due to a toxin in a jungle fruit, and he has to try to shoo a monkey away from the still paralyzed bodies of him and Seann William Scott. He and Scott not fully able to move their mouths, but still trying to get the monkey to get lost, was comedic gold, and previewed that Johnson really had a fitness for this sort of performance -- which he would continue to explore, notably in Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle and particularly in its sequel.

Also: It was funny to see he him when he had hair.

I was originally going to call this post "Two decades of Dwayne 'The Movie Star' Johnson," until I noted the earlier release dates of The Scorpion King. It's funny to think that he's been on screen for so long, because I still kind of thinking of him as transitioning from wrestling relatively recently. 

Yeah, and Mark Wahlberg was a rapper just yesterday too.