Milestones revisited

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul was the 6400th movie I've ever seen.

There's nothing special about that milestone. Nothing at all.

Except that this happened to be the milestone that prompted me to create a separate Excel spreadsheet to record all my previous hundred-movie milestones.

Ever since I started keeping track not just of the movies I saw, but the order I saw them, I have made note of the new passing of every 100th movie by bolding it on the running list I keep in a Microsoft Word document. This dates all the way back to when I started this document on the occasion of my 1500th movie of all time, which was watched on February 22, 2002, and was the documentary American Pimp, directed by Allen and Albert Hughes.

Why have I cared to mark these milestones? I don't know, exactly, except that a list-maker always thinks that more is more when it comes to the data you make note of. 

But it's something more driving this impulse than just obsessive documentation. I like to think there's something, I don't know, distinctive -- meaningful -- about what movie happens to make up each hundredth I watch. I don't know what that could possibly be, but I think this nonetheless.

I should mention the implied given here: that each hundredth is random and unpremeditated. That's a key part of this whole process, that it has to occur organically. 

That's not always possible. For starters, sometimes I intentionally choose what the milestone movie will be. But that only comes every ten hundreds, or put another way, every thousandth movie. Each new thousandth movie I see is worth marking in some specific way, and I'm comfortable with that.

The other nine milestones every one thousand? I want it to be whatever is randomly up next in a viewing order dictated by my week-to-week viewing priorities, determined by the new releases that are out, whatever I'm reviewing next, the movies I'm watching for various series on this blog or other movie challenges, and everything else that fights its way to the top of the queue to reach my eyeballs. (Ali: Fear Eats the Soul was a good example of this organic process, as I had determined to watch it during the week this week -- it not being a weekend night movie -- in order to listen to them discuss it on Filmspotting.)

For some reason, when I hit #6400, I decided to go back and record all 51 movies that have gotten bolded in my Word document since I started it with American Pimp. (Yes, it's been a busy 21+ years, watching 4900 movies in that time.) So I got together an Excel spreadsheet the other night.

And because any time I do a project like this, I also feel like I should tell you about it on my blog, this is me doing that.

I should say, though, that this is not merely a masturbatory impulse just to dump information on you. There's actually real insight to be gleaned from this. That's because one thing I decided also to do was determine the number of days that transpired between each installment of 100. I can see the times in my life -- in the last two decades of my life, anyway -- when I was most focused on watching movies, and the times when I was least focused. Like, in the year before my 2008 wedding I was not watching movies with the same sense of urgency, as well as in the year 2003, perhaps because I was more focused on my girlfriend at the time and watching movies together was something we did relatively infrequently. (Though I did spike after my first son was born. What does that say about me?) Then of course there were the years when I was watching features to include them in the human rights film festival, an activity that nearly doubled my usual movie viewing during the closing months of the years 2015 and 2016. 

So I will include the list of each milestone movie below, as well as the amount of time that transpired since the previous one, followed by a few stray comments. I should mention that these are only first-time viewings I'm talking about here, so high periods of repeat viewings might have sometimes caused me to take longer to get to the next milestone. 

#1500 (2/22/2002): American Pimp (1999, Allen & Albert Hughes) 
#1600 (10/3/2002): One Hour Photo (2002, Mark Romanek) 223 days
#1700 (6/23/2003): The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984, W.D. Richter) 263 days
#1800 (6/14/2004): The Fog of War (2003, Errol Morris) 357 days
#1900 (4/12/2005): What the Bleep Do We Know?! (2004, William Arntz) 302 days
#2000 (9/16/2005): Casablanca (1942, Michael Curtiz) 157 days
#2100 (2/3/2006): Monster-in-Law (2005, Robert Luketic) 143 days
#2200 (8/12/2006): Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (2006, Adam McKay) 187 days
#2300 (1/30/2007): The Power of One (1992, John G. Avildsen) 171 days
#2400 (8/18/2007): Superbad (2007, Greg Mottola) 200 days
#2500 (3/8/2008): Flightplan (2005, Robert Schwentke) 203 days
#2600 (10/17/2008): Sex Drive (2008, Sean Anders) 223 days
#2700 (3/13/2009): Role Models (2008, David Wain) 147 days
#2800 (8/27/2009): Freddy Got Fingered (2001, Tom Green) 167 days
#2900 (1/2/2010): Michael Jackson's This Is It (2009, Kenny Ortega) 128 days
#3000 (5/12/2010): Mr. 3000 (2004, Charles Stone III) 130 days
#3100 (10/1/2010): The Ghost Writer (2010, Roman Polanski) 142 days
#3200 (1/27/2011): Freedom Writers (2011, Richard LaGravenese) 118 days
#3300 (7/17/2011): Drive Angry (2011, Patrick Lussier) 171 days
#3400 (11/30/2011): A Better Life (2011, Chris Weitz) 136 days
#3500 (4/14/2012): The Big Year (2011, David Frankel) 136 days
#3600 (11/2/2012): God Bless America (2012, Bobcat Goldthwait) 202 days
#3700 (3/27/2013): The Descent (2005, Neil Marshall) 145 days
#3800 (9/22/2013): It's a Disaster (2012, Todd Berger) 179 days
#3900 (1/14/2014): Sightseers (2012, Ben Wheatley) 114 days
#4000 (8/17/2014): Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927, F.W. Murnau) 215 days
#4100 (12/28/2014): Willow Creek (2013, Bobcat Goldthwait) 133 days
#4200 (5/15/2015): Capricorn One (1978, Peter Hyams) 138 days
#4300 (9/15/2015): The Visit (2015, M. Night Shyamalan) 137 days
#4400 (12/21/2015): A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence (2014, Roy Andersson) 83 days
#4500 (4/21/2016): The Last Emperor (1987, Bernardo Bertolucci) 122 days
#4600 (9/3/2016): Jane Got a Gun (2015, Gavin O'Connor) 135 days
#4700 (12/3/2016): Living and Other Fictions (2016, Jo Sol) 91 days
#4800 (5/7/2017): Get Out (2017, Jordan Peele) 165 days
#4900 (9/24/2017): Patti Cake$ (2017, Geremy Jasper) 130 days
#5000 (2/8/2018): The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T (1953, Roy Rowland) 137 days
#5100 (7/20/2018): Paddington 2 (2017, Paul King) 162 days
#5200 (12/2/2018): Outlaw King (2018, David Mackenzie) 135 days
#5300 (4/30/2019): School Daze (1988, Spike Lee) 149 days
#5400 (9/12/2019): Downton Abbey (2019, Michael Engler) 135 days
#5500 (1/16/2020): Vox Lux (2018, Brady Corbet) 126 days
#5600 (6/24/2020): Wasp Network (2019, Olivier Assayas) 160 days
#5700 (10/20/2020): Yes, God, Yes (2020, Karen Maine) 118 days
#5800 (2/14/2021): Synchronic (2020, Justin Benson & Aaron Morehead) 117 days
#5900 (7/12/2021): Black Widow (2021, Cate Shortland) 148 days
#6000 (11/18/2021): The Bible: In the Beginning ... (1966, John Huston) 129 days
#6100 (3/15/2022): The Tinder Swindler (2022, Felicity Morris) 117 days
#6200 (8/24/2022): She's Funny That Way (2014, Peter Bogdanovich) 162 days
#6300 (12/9/2022): The People We Hate at the Wedding (2022, Claire Scanlon) 107 days
#6400 (4/26/2023): Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974, Rainer Werner Fassbinder) 138 days

Now the promised random comments:

1) A disproportionate number of these seem to be gross-out comedies. In that category you have Superbad, Sex Drive, Role Models and Freddy Got Fingered -- and that's just from 2007 to 2009. Those types of movies definitely died out a bit after that ... or maybe I just watched less of them.

2) I thought it was funny that consecutive milestone movies had the word "writer" in the title, from #3100 The Ghost Writer to #3200 Freedom Writers.

3) Is it weird that the only director who has directed more than one milestone movie for me is Bobcat Goldthwait? He directed my #3600 God Bless America and my #4100 Willow Creek ... and only five other movies altogether, only three of which I've seen. 

4) I was very consistent with my movie watching pace in 2011 and 2012, as it took me 136 days to get from #3300 to #3400 ... and then exactly 136 more days to get from #3400 to #3500.

5) For the most part I feel I've been fairly consistent with my pace during distinct eras of my life, but there are random exceptions that interest me. Considering that same period above, where I went exactly 136 days between milestones twice in a row, I then random jumped up to 202 days to get to #3600 in the middle months of 2012. Actually, when I started writing this little blurb, I thought it was random ... and then I realized that that was when I moved house. I'm sure a lot of movie watching was lost during that transition, and that period also featured the Boston Celtics making a memorable playoff run that the Miami Heat ultimately extinguished. Then there was also a trip to the east coast during that period. (We still lived in Los Angeles.) So I guess, not so mysterious after all, and when that period calmed down I went right back to 145 days between #3600 and #3700.

6) The 215-day gap from #3900 to #4000 was because of my vow to cut down on my movie viewing until I found a job after my move to Australia. Like clockwork, though, I went back up to a scant 133 days for my next milestone after I'd had luck in that endeavor. 

7) The vast majority of these were movies I watched on video, in whatever definition that term held at the time. The only ones I watched in the theater were Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, Superbad, Sex Drive, The Visit, Get Out, Patti Cake$, Downton Abbey and Black Widow. 

8) I've seen exactly one milestone movie on my birthday, which I watched on October 20, 2020: Yes, God, Yes.

9) For the sake of posterity, I ought to make note of the thousand-movie milestones, the ones I chose intentionally: #2000 (first time I watched Casablanca), #3000 (Mr. 3000, an obvious tie-in), #4000 (I wanted a classic I had not seen, and Sunrise fit the bill), #5000 (The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T, again an obvious tie-in and a rather disappointing movie) and #6000 (a movie about the Bible chosen because of the 6,000 years the world has supposedly existed). 

10) The longest gap between hundred-movie milestones is easily the 357 days, nearly a whole year, it took me to get from #1700 to #1800. I can easily remember a lot of the movies I watched with my ex-girlfriend during that time ... which may just be an indication that it was a relatively uncommon experience. I suspect since I was relatively poor and there was no streaming, so you had to pay for every rental (unless you were using the library, which I wasn't then), I ended up just not watching as much. Streaming has really made a difference in my totals, obviously. Also, you can really tell that starting to date my wife in early 2005 re-stimulated a possibly temporarily dormant affair with movies, since it went from taking 302 days to go from #1800 to #1900 to a mere 157 for the next hundred, nearly half that. However, during that period I did also renew writing for AllMovie after they had needed to stop using freelancers for a while. That's probably a better explanation for the activity we're seeing during that time.

11) The shortest interval was a mere 83 days between #4300 and #4400, and indeed that was during the intense period of vetting movies for my first of two years with HRAFF (Human Rights & Arts Film Festival). A year later it took me 91 days to watch 100 movies during that same busy period. Weirdly, though, the third shortest was when it took me just 107 days to watch 100 movies last year, to get from #6200 to #6300. I don't have a specific explanation for why I was so ravenous for movies at the end of 2022. 

12) The most common amount of days it took me to watch 100 movies was 135 days. That happened three times.

13) However, the average amount of time it took me to watch 100 movies over this period was 157.8 days.

And now I release you to go continue pursuing your own weird obsessions. I'm sure you have them. 

Got the wrong lunkhead for the next Fast & Furious

The Fast & Furious series has been lousy with lunkheads.

I don't use that term in a negative way. I love a good lunkhead. Some of our most charismatic movie stars are lunkheads.

I can see that the actual definition of a lunkead is "a slow-witted person." I suppose that's part of the picture I'm painting when I use the term, but I'm using it more in terms of the person's physique. I think of a lunkhead as a big, muscly guy who, yes, might be best suited as a mechanic or a bouncer at the hottest nightclub, but also makes a good addition to the long-running Fast & Furious series. And can be super charming and funny, which usually requires an intellectual capacity in excess of "slow-witted."

The series began with a lunkhead. Vin Diesel was the series' original lunkhead, and has been in every movie since the fourth, having taken the second and third off for reasons of his own inflated self-worth.

Lunkheads added to the series over the years included Tyrese Gibson, Dwayne Johnson, John Cena and even Jason Statham, though I think that last stretches the term a little bit. The point is, this series has collected these physical types over the years, the balder the better. If they started out famous for another reason -- such as pro wrestling -- even better still. 

In my review of F9 in 2021, welcoming Cena into the fold, I predicted the next lunkhead to join the series: Dave Bautista. It seemed a natural fit.

Well I don't know if Bautista sees himself as better than this series -- I kind of think he is -- or whether he hasn't ever been offered a role. But he's not in Fast X, due for release next month.

However, there is a new lunkhead in the new movie.

Welcome to the series, Jason Momoa.

Now, Momoa is not quite as bald as I'd hoped. In fact, his flowing hair is perhaps his most distinguishing feature, if you aren't including his biceps.

But he total fits in with what the series has been going for so far. He's big. He's charismatic. He should be either a mechanic or a bouncer, though in this series he's likely a racer who might also be a spy or a hitman. (I haven't checked to see whether he's a good guy or not.)

So what other lunkheads might we expect in the future?

There's only one more Fast & Furious movie after this one -- so they say -- and since they're winding down, they might not really be able to introduce any more new characters at this point. Bautista is still out there, but here are some others we might consider:

Hafpor Julius Bjornsson - The Game of Thrones actor who played The Mountain is just about the biggest lunkhead out there, in terms of actual size. However, he might have to play a smaller role because his Thrones role did not require very much dialogue, and his abilities in that area are likely limited.

Terry Crews - I had to check just now to make sure Crews wasn't in one of the earliest installments, before we really knew who he was. Crews is more of a comedic actor nowadays, and rightly so -- he's great at it. But beginning his career as a football player gives him additional candidacy here. (I'd say he's too old but he's actually younger than Diesel.)

David Harbour - This one's a stretch too, since he doesn't exactly fit the mold -- though I sort of think that anyone whom you'd cast to play Hellboy has a bit of a lunkhead look. If Harbour showed up in a Fast & Furious movie, he'd likely be more of a charismatic villain than a mechanic type. But hey, when you are listing people you have to include at least three.

And that's all I could think of today.

So I guess the available lunkheads who are currently doing anything in the movies are pretty much tapped out. Good thing Fast 11, or Fast X Part II, or whatever they are calling it, is the last one.

Audient Classics: The Wages of Fear

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

When I was watching the masterpiece The Wages of Fear (1953), from director Henri-Georges Clouzot, last night, the famous quote from director Howard Hawks came to mind: "A great movie is four great scenes and no bad ones." 

Of course, that's not actually what Hawks said. The bar was actually lower for Hawks, who only required three great scenes.

Because I didn't remember that in the moment, I thought it was a particularly apt description for The Wages of Fear, which contains four terrific major set pieces on the 300-mile journey to deliver nitroglycerin by truck over uneven and unpredictable roads. And because it has no bad scenes, well, it's a great film indeed.

If you don't know the story, it involves four men (Yves Montand, Charles Vanel, Peter van Eyck and Folco Lulli) who are selected from a pool of applicants for a job they know may be their last. They're in a dead-end South American town with no money or means of moving on, but an opportunity arises when the SOC (Southern Oil Company) needs to truck the nitroglycerin to the site of one of its wells, which is a raging inferno that has already taken a dozen lives. The nitroglycerin is design to help blow out the inferno -- like a candle, one character says -- but first they have to get it there, and any sort of hard contact or even too vigorous bouncing on the road will blow the whole truck sky high. Fortunately, they've got two, meant to be spaced 30 minutes apart from each other, though that doesn't exactly work out as planned. The job would pay them $2,000 apiece, a fortune in 1953 and for these men in particular. 

(Just so I don't forget, Montand's character is named Mario, and Lulli's character is named Luigi. I have to think that was a coincidence and not the basis for Nintendo's flagship product, but it was funny to note it, especially just days after seeing The Super Mario Bros. Movie. A few others on the internet have commented on this but it does indeed appear to be a coincidence.) 

The harrowing journey itself would obviously be enough to sustain an entire feature, but Clouzot starts us off with a good 45 minutes in this town, which establishes the personality of the characters as well as the hopelessness of their situation. Both times I've watched the film, I've wondered if we needed that much in the town -- and both times I've decided we do. It contributes to the epic scope of the film, and since we're going to spend so much time with these characters, it's useful to see them outside of the context of their suicide mission. As a point of contrast, William Friedkin's 1977 remake Sorcerer clocks in a half-hour shorter, at two as opposed to two-and-a-half hours. Some of the plot details are changed -- if memory serves, that movie involves more political intrigue -- but the long opening section is also lost, just one of the reasons that one doesn't hold a candle, so to speak, to this one.

Once we do get on the road, it's just one moment of clenched teeth after the other. You know, because of the length of the film, that at least one of the trucks will survive certainly the first, but very likely the second and also the third pickle they find themselves in. That does not decrease the tension one iota. And because there are two trucks, you really don't know when one of them will go kablooey -- but almost certainly that one of them will.

I don't want to tell you too much about the obstacles these four men encounter along the way, because if you haven't seen the movie, you need to correct that straight away. But I do want to tell you something about them, and I might as well tell you about the first one -- don't worry, even knowing that both trucks make it through, you'll still feel stressed as hell watching the scene. It involves a stretch of road called "the washboard," whose regular bumps will certainly be enough to detonate the nitroglycerin -- unless you go really fast or really slow. The fact that the two trucks each choose one of these methods of bypassing this area -- remember, there were no CB radios for them to talk to each other -- is all you need to know to grok just how disastrous the scenario has the potential to be.

Outside of the four distinct impossible scenarios these trucks face, each of which is more anxiety producing than the last, the dynamics between the characters are just as easy to savor. We spend a lot more time with Montand and Vanel, both Frenchmen, whose bond takes an unexpected turn when one of the pair reveals himself to be a coward, in direct opposition to his previous bluster. The fact that they have this bond makes the situation all the more complicated -- one man would like nothing more than to ditch the other, except that he needs him, and the other would almost rather wander off and die of heat exposure in the wilds than keep waiting for it all to just end in a flash. The relationship is fascinating, demonstrating a complicated form of love between the men.

We don't spend as much time with either the Dutchman (Bimba) or the Italian (Luigi), but we do get snippets of their downtime conversations and life philosophies. All four are fully drawn characters with their strengths and weaknesses, all of which will be on display over the course of the film.

Their solutions to their issues are equal parts ingenious and nuts. This sort of task means being on a knife's edge between survival and calamity, and the ways they do or don't rise to the occasion are always fascinating.

And there's a gut punch. I won't tell you about the gut punch. But it's a good one, an unexpected one. 

I watched The Wages of Fear at end of the day on a holiday (ANZAC Day) after too many late nights in a row. I did consider whether being able to get through a two-hour and 28-minute black and white movie, mostly in French or Spanish, was in the cards in this scenario.

Well, as great movies always do, The Wages of Fear kept me wide awake, straight to the end, wondering what would happen -- even if I already knew.

The Pixar movie you'd pitch as a joke

I finally took my younger son to see The Super Mario Bros. Movie today (ugh) and I saw my first moving images of the next Pixar movie, Elemental.

Which confirmed where Pixar gets its ideas these days: from comedians who make jokes about Pixar.

I don't know any actual comedians who make their livings in humor related to animated movies, but if not a comedian, then some snarky but wise cinema commentator -- maybe even a blogger -- would have made the joke about a Pixar movie where elements all live together in a city, which probably most closely resembles Disney's Zootopia, but it's all under the Disney umbrella.

The actual joke I did see was a listing of all the movies Pixar has made and how each one involves the characters in the movie having feelings, even though you wouldn't expect them to. I believe they were posed as a series of questions: "What would happen if toys had feelings? What would happen if cars had feelings? What would happen if bugs had feelings? What would happen if monsters had feelings? What would happen if souls had feelings? What would happen if feelings had feelings?" (That last one is the best.)

"What would happen if elements had feelings?" feels like the joke there, but now it's real. 

I'm teasing Elemental, but in reality, I probably want to see it just as much as any other new Pixar movie that's coming out these days ... though that level is decreasing a bit from what it once was. Even with Turning Red snagging my #3 spot in 2022, that was offset by Lightyear, which I kind of hated. Their success rate is still very high -- it was only 2020 where both of the films they released that year were in my top ten -- but I no longer consider a Pixar movie a slam dunk. 

And for sure, the animation looks really nice. The character designs of the apparent Romeo & Juliet-style romantic leads -- a fire girl, a water boy -- are good. (And so what if they remind me a bit of characters in Inside Out and Soul ... I think it's inevitable at this point.)

Have all the things that could have feelings had feelings by this point? 

Likely not. They still haven't done ... kitchen appliances. Yeah, kitchen appliances.

You think I'm kidding, but just you wait. Check back here in 2028 and we'll be talking about the movie where the whisk and the vegetable peeler go on an exciting journey through the refrigerator.

King Darren: Requiem for a Dream

This is the second in a bi-monthly 2023 series rewatching the filmography of Darren Aronofsky, in celebration of him becoming the first director to direct two of my year-end #1s.

Every time I sit down to watch Requiem for a Dream, it frightens me a bit.

When you feel fear anticipating the viewing of a movie, it's usually because of unknown horrors that await, based on the reputation of the film or its MPAA rating. It's not usually with a film you've seen at least three times before, possibly four.

That's just how unsettling Darren Aronofsky's sophomore effort truly is. 

Each time, I'm not sure if I can handle it. I'm not sure if I will feel safe.

And that's a thrilling situation to find yourself in, if you are a real cinephile.

Of course, I do know now that I can handle Requiem for a Dream. While some -- most -- viewers stopped at one viewing, I have revisited it at least twice -- and I remember the experiences vividly. There was the time I watched it in my apartment in Sherman Oaks in what would have been 2004 or 2005, before I started keeping track of repeat viewings. And there was the time I rewatched it while away at the hotel for one of my weekend projector festivals back in 2017. Was there one other between 2004 and 2004/2005? Likely not -- if I don't remember the experience, it probably never happened. Because you remember watching Requiem for a Dream.

Each of those experiences were also characterized by being alone. This isn't a movie I want to watch with my wife making her usual trips back and forth through the living room, trips she makes because she settles down for the evening later than I do. And though Wednesday night's viewing was conducted while she was at home, it was in the garage on the projector with the door closed, where at least she'd have to intentionally expose herself to it by coming to ask me a question. She never did.

You don't really want to have to explain why you have chosen to pass a particular evening by watching Requiem for a Dream. It feels like you have to be responding to some disturbance in yourself to watch it. Sure, I could explain that I am rewatching Aronofsky's films for this series on my blog. But I likely wouldn't get that chance, because she wouldn't ask and would just reach her own conclusions.

I tried watching it with someone once. It didn't work out very well. I'm sure I've told this story on this blog before, but it would have been ages ago. The first time I saw Requiem, it was on a second date, back when I lived in New York City. She was a cinephile so it wasn't a ridiculous suggestion on my part, but I had to know the movie would be confronting. I couldn't know that she'd have her face pressed into me in the final sequence, either crying or just kind of half-moaning, half-screaming in agony. And no, this was not just some kind of ploy to cuddle up to me -- she was destroyed. You'd think it would have been the last date, but we did have about two more -- though no more movies I don't think. (We saw Quills on our first date. I probably should have gone with a rom com the second time.)

Since this was indeed at least my fourth viewing, I'm not sure how many new takeaways I have. Though there were a couple things I'd forgotten. Such as:

- The appearances of Dylan Baker and Keith David. I of course remember the film's four stars and the returning Aronofsky collaborators from Pi (Sean Gullette and Mark Margolis), plus Christopher McDonald from the TV program Ellen Burstyn's character is obsessed with. But the other two faces I recognized, who appear in small roles, I had forgotten.

I doubt David would have been cast in this role today. He's sort of the personification of Marion's downfall, as he sleeps with her himself before bringing her into the debauchery that climaxes her character arc. Casting a Black man in this role today would just be too problematic.

- How much the song "Lux Aeterna" by Clint Mansell is used in the movie. And the thing I learned is that this was his own composition, even though it sounds like a repurposed bit of a classical symphony. (I also remembered that the Paul Oakenfold version of this song is called "Zoo York.")

- That Mansell did the score. Like Aronofsky, he's one of the ones credited on two of my #1s, having also scored Aronofsky's The Wrestler and Moon.

Without getting in to too many specifics, I was also reminded just how ground-breaking this felt when it was released, with Aronofsky's trademark drug-taking montages, those quickly edited sequences that end with a pupil dilating, as well as his use of split-screen. But those are just the editing techniques. He also places his camera in extremely confronting angles, as when he puts it just in front of the character, attached to their body but pointing back at them, to create a fish-eye perspective on whatever terrible thing is happening to them.

I think especially as some people have felt wary of his later efforts -- mother! and The Whale in particular -- the take on Aronofsky has become that he's in love with flashy technique that reveals his true try-hard nature, and that he pushes buttons just to push them. He certainly does these things in spades in Requiem for a Dream.

But he also thrills us like few other directors can -- enough to make this cinephile come back to the movie that haunted people's dreams, resolving them to never see it again, for at least the fourth time.

I'll skip the next two films in King Darren's filmography as I've seen both The Fountain and The Wrestler in the past two years. Conveniently, that will leave four more films in four more bi-monthly slots, starting with Black Swan in June.

I'm slipping

I devour movies on international flights. It's kind of my thing.

Yet I had 16 hours of international flights over the past ten days, and I watched only three movies. (It was actually closer to 18 hours, but that included two internal flights of less than an hour in Vietnam, when I was obviously not going to watch a movie.)

Part of the explanation for that is our return flight yesterday was a red eye, meaning I would try to sleep as much as I could. And I did end up being able to sleep about three of the eight hours. But that left five other hours, more than enough time for two movies. I watched only A Man Called Otto, with about seven distinct pauses for sleep. (And a brief period of panic when it appeared that my entertainment system had stopped working, leaving me dumbly pushing at the touch screen for about ten minutes on and off, probably annoying my older son in the seat in front of me -- a period when I was not even sure I'd even finish the one.)

The bigger surprise was on the way over, when the whole eight hours of the flight was conducted during daytime hours -- or at least non-sleeping hours, as it was dark when we arrived. (The sun sets right around 6 p.m. every day when you are that close to the equator.) During those eight hours I watched only I Wanna Dance With Somebody and Living.

This is probably not a significant enough drop in airplane movie activity to write a post about, but I just got back and I don't have a lot more movie-related things to report from my trip. (I was going to write about watching Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, which I'd already seen, in a swimming pool on the Friday night of our stay, but it turned out you couldn't actually swim during the movie, and then conflicting plans meant that I watched only the first hour of it.)

One reason for the drop in my usual voraciousness is the time of year we flew. When it's April, it's too early in the movie year for any of the movies released in 2023 to already be available on the plane. So instead of getting to bulge my 2023 list with releases I ignored when they were in the theater, I'm cleaning up the 2022 movies I ignored when they were in the theater. Less of a satisfying pursuit.

The other reason was Sudoko.

JetStar had the best version of airplane Sudoko I've ever seen, for this one reason: It was the first time I had ever seen a mechanism for adding a small version of a number in a square, to show you had determined that a certain number must appear in either this box or this box -- an essential component to resolving any Sudoko puzzle of a certain level of difficulty. All the other times I've played Sudoko on a plane, I've had to stick those little numbers you usually mark down in pencil in my brain instead, with mixed and usual negative results. In this version, I could play the second hardest level ("Hard," as opposed to "Genius" or whatever the hardest level was) and still eventually solve the puzzle -- though on both of my eight-hour flights, I won one and made a mistake on/was stumped by the other. Still, it was engrossing enough that I spent a couple hours on it each time.

A long time ago I used to actually read on the plane, but that hasn't been much of a factor since they started shutting off the cabin lights so other passengers could sleep if they wanted -- even during daytime flights. I never want to read enough to turn on my own reading light and bother those around me.

Now that I'm back from Vietnam I will attempt to resume the viewing schedule that my trip interrupted. I feel like I've gone quite far astray from that, which is of course what you are supposed to feel on vacation, so I did that right. I have a couple viewing series to return to in the ten days before the end of the month, plus I feel like I don't even know what's in theaters right now, even though I actually only missed one new release date when I was gone.

Netflix on the big screen, with Vietnamese subtitles and mildly racist English audio description

When I watched The Magician's Elephant with my nine-year-old Wednesday at the resort in Vietnam, it involved about four different firsts:

1) First time I'd seen a movie released by Netflix on a screen bigger than a TV (or my own home projector).

2) First time I'd seen a movie with Vietnamese subtitles on screen.

3) First time I'd seen a movie at a movie theater in a resort.

4) First time I'd seen a movie with the audio description turned on for blind people.

I'm not even sure what order to discuss these things.

I can get 1 and 3 together in one, I think. Yes, the resort where we're staying has a small cinema. It seats about 50 and plays movies at 10 a.m. and 2 p.m., plus once at night on weekends. It's a pretty nice little cinema, all things considered.

You know how I like seeing movies on vacation, especially if it's a novel venue. This might not have been as novel as the time I saw Aladdin with my boys on the top of a mountain in one of Australia's few ski resort towns, but it was that sort of thing. 

I ideally wouldn't have seen a movie I can otherwise get on Netflix, but each movie on the schedule was only playing in one time slot during the week we're here, and this was the best combo of a movie I hadn't seen and a movie I actually wanted to see. Other kid-friendly candidates were Lightyear, which I hope to never see again, and DC's League of Super Pets, which my son had just watched half of on the plane -- his second viewing. Puss and Boots would have been the best option but it was playing the first morning we were there, and we hadn't gotten a hold of the schedule yet by that point. Rounding out the options were the latest Minions movie, a Tad the Explorer movie, And Wish Dragon, which we had both already seen and liked -- and which was also available on Netflix. (There were some random Asian movies playing in the afternoon slot that I could have gone to if I'd wanted to go solo, but it seemed better to make it an activity with my son.)

And in any case, The Magician's Elephant counts for 2023, which you know is a thing I care about.

It did occur to me that this is the first time I'd be seeing a Netflix movie on the big screen. I had remembered considering going to Roma and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs and Marriage Story, but in each case I ultimately caved to the ease of having them available in my living room. If I hadn't gone to this, who knows how long the streak of not seeing Netflix movies on the big screen would have continued. 

It should not be a huge surprise that there were Vietnamese subtitles on screen, but I think Chinese subtitles might have been more useful. Although I don't consider myself very good at determining the heritage of particular Asians from appearance alone, my wife surmised that many if not most of the other guests here are Chinese, given that China is only about a four-hour flight from here. The presence of all these Chinese made me feel less bad about our Vietnamese hosts having to communicate almost exclusively in English. It turns out it's as much for the Chinese as it is for westerners like us, since English is the language we have all sort of agreed to understand. 

The Vietnamese subtitles might have been distraction enough for my son, but there was one other element to the movie that was far more distracting:

Someone had accidentally turned on the English descriptive audio option, the one used by people who can't see very well or at all.

For half a second I thought this was some kind of odd narrative device, where an omniscient narrator is describing the events on screen as some kind of framing device. When it didn't stop, and when it interfered slightly with the words of the film's actual narrator, I thought back to moments earlier when this same slightly robotic female voice had told us that the movie's title was now appearing on screen, and knew we were in for a movie's worth of superfluous description.

My first thought was to notify the projectionist and explain what was going on. But then I thought about some of the communication challenges I'd had the past few days about far simpler things, like how to book the basketball court for my older son to play basketball, and I knew that even if I did manage to explain what was going on, and did manage to convince them to turn it off, I'd lose no less than five minutes of the story. And I hate to sacrifice any part of a movie, if I can help it. 

My second thought was to sacrifice the whole movie. It was clear my son was not excited to put up with this for the next 95 minutes. 

But then, remembering how much I enjoy a novel experience like this, and thinking how few other options on the schedule would work as chances to watch something in the cinema, I convinced my son to stick it out.

We did get used to it, and in fact, I found myself marveling at the task from a narrative and logistical perspective. You have to describe what's going on in a way that is descriptive enough but short and to the point, and entirely avoids the film's actual spoken dialogue. It does mean that there are few if any points in the movie where it was actually silent for a moment, but it didn't prevent us from getting absorbed in the movie.

I did want to mention its slight racism though -- or if not actual racism, then at least "racial awareness."

Like essentially every film made in the past five years, The Magician's Elephant is conscious of having a racially diverse cast. And the audio description sure let us know about it.

Sample: "The action shifts to the apartment below. A tall black man and a petite white woman are sitting at a table."

Now, the argument can be made that if you are trying to create as accurate a depiction as possible of what the person would be seeing on screen if he or she could, you know, see, then the skin color of the characters is something you should provide. But the whole idea behind our current progressive era of representation is that the casting is "race blind." A "blind blind" person might logically be able to envision the characters however they saw fit, and if they're good at identifying the race of a person by the sound of their voice, more power to them.

In the end, we both liked the movie a lot -- in fact, it might be my favorite of 2023 so far, in a very small sample size. My son, whose ability to fight these distractions I was more worried about than my own, actually gave it a 9 out of 10, he said.

I'd only go as high as 8, but that's still pretty great for a slim pickings option watched at a resort with Vietnamese subtitles and descriptive audio telling us the skin colors of all the characters. 

Off to the home of war movies

As I mentioned in yesterday's post, I'm going on a trip to Vietnam, starting today.

This may sound like a far-flung and generally unattainable destination to my American readers, but when you live in Australia, it's only an eight-hour flight -- and it's only that long because I'm coming from the southeast part of the country. 

A few years ago, around the start of the pandemic, my wife took advantage of a deal designed to capture our future -- and really unattainable at that time -- travel impulses. It was at this resort in Vietnam, and it only needed to be used within two years.

The way it turned out, we couldn't use it within two years, and thought at first that we would lose it entirely, which would have sucked. In the end, we got the amount we had already paid as a credit and just had to pay a little bit more to have the same trip.

So now we're doing it, and will be gone for the next ten days. We'll start with two nights in Ho Chi Minh City -- once known as Saigon -- before pampering ourselves at the resort the rest of the time.

Outside it being a tourist destination, or so I have read, Vietnam holds two specific meanings for me:

1) My dad did two tours in the Vietnam War. Fortunately for me, he was never close to any action. He worked in a weapons depot and the most dangerous thing that happened to him, if memory serves, was an explosion about a mile away from where he was stationed. He was smart to enlist rather than waiting to be drafted, and since he was an MIT grad, he was given a job befitting someone of his intelligence.

2) Most of the war movies I've seen are set in Vietnam.

Now, at this point, I may have seen more World War II movies than movies about the Vietnam War, and those movies would not have been set in Vietnam. (Was there even fighting in Vietnam in World War II? I doubt it.)

But before I'd seen as many war movies as I've seen today, the advantage was definitely in favor of Vietnam movies. American filmmakers were really grappling with the after effects of that war in the late 1970s, through the 1980s and into the 1990s, with movies like The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket, Good Morning Vietnam, Casualties of War, and Oliver Stone's trio of Vietnam movies: Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July and Heaven & Earth. 

There have continued to be a steady stream of them since this heyday, and Wikipedia lists a total of 76 movies about the Vietnam War, including movies produced in other countries. The first listed in that group is Marshall Thompson's A Yank in Viet-Nam in 1964, the last Spike Lee's Da 5 Bloods from 2020. 

I've only seen 13 of those films, so not the overwhelming quantity I might have suggested. Of course, that's plenty enough to give me an idea of what I might see over the next ten days in terms of flora ... without quite as many bodies riddled with machine gun bullets or blown apart by landmines. 

In fact, I'm told the Vietnamese are very kind to Americans, and not openly resentful about the war, though of course there would be lingering bitterness on some level. 

Anyway, it's the first big trip we've taken since the pandemic that didn't involve family obligations, and I can hardly believe it's about to happen.

I'll certainly watch plenty of movies and may write some blog posts. We'll just have to see if I can really set aside my routines for a week ... which is the true measure of the sort of relaxing holiday I want to have.

Baz Jazz Hands: William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet

This is the second in a bi-monthly 2023 series revisiting the six films of director Baz Luhrmann, on the heels of Elvis finishing in my top ten last year.

As soon as I started watching William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet, I was struck by the fact that it was a forerunner, in some ways, for two other films I love -- in fact, two future #1s. 

Which means maybe I just wasn't ready for it yet in 1996.

Oh, I didn't dislike Baz Luhrmann's second feature film, the first I had seen at that time. But I do remember feeling a bit irritated by its style, and by some of the histrionic displays of emotion by Leonardo DiCaprio. In fact, as I was watching last night, I asked myself the following chicken-or-the-egg question: "Do I think of Romeo & Juliet as one of Shakespeare's lesser tragedies because of DiCaprio's histrionics, or do I find DiCaprio histrionic because I think of Romeo & Juliet as one of Shakespeare's lesser tragedies?"

I think there's evidence of this being a lesser tragedy, at least from the plot side. Romeo & Juliet is not a play I've seen over and over again like I have with Hamlet (my favorite) or Macbeth (the one that seems to have been remade the most recently, plus I've also seen two older versions within the last five years). So each new exposure to Romeo & Juliet is a reminder of the plot, or lack thereof. 

I didn't mind that I'd chosen this viewing for the night before a four-day weekend, when my brain was dead from two really busy weeks at work. (I should say, it's a four-day weekend for most people -- for me, the weekend lasts until a week from Tuesday, as I am going to Vietnam for a resort holiday. I should probably tell you more about that, but not today.) I didn't mind the timing of the viewing because a) I already knew the basic story, so little failures to parse the dialogue would not make a difference, and b) it doesn't seem that there really is much of a story.

Unlike, as a point of comparison, all the minute twists and turns in the outlook of characters in Hamlet, as well as some really interesting plot mechanics, Romeo & Juliet seems like it can be primarily broken down as such: Boy and girl meet and fall in love. Their families hate each other. Girl arranged to marry dopey guy she hates, so pretends to kill herself to escape. Boy thinks she's really killed herself so then kills himself. Girl sees he's killed himself so really kills herself.

Unless I missed them, there don't seem to be a lot of interesting digressions from this. The characters on each side of the feud exist merely to dramatize the intensity of the feud. A couple characters (Mercutio and Tybalt) are killed near the mid-point of the story, but the only effect of that is really to yet further intensify the feud.

Am I oversimplifying Romeo & Juliet, which, to its credit, does contain some of Shakespeare's most widely quoted text? Perhaps. But last night's viewing did nothing to improve that general impression of the material.

It did make me realize, though, how much of a debt my #1 film of 2000 owed to it -- and how it had some probably more coincidental echoes in my #1 film of 1997.

Michael Almereyda's 2000 version of Hamlet, the one where Ethan Hawke gives the "To be or not to be" speech in a Blockbuster video, was a huge success for me, as I went on to name it my best of that year. And to be certain, I had already seen William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet at that time.

What the passage of four years apparently made me forget was that this movie has exactly the same framing device as Hamlet, which is a television newscaster reading the opening and closing lines of the play, functioning as sort of a Greek chorus -- though it's dialogue that would belong to an actual character in each play (I'm just not going to look that up right now to tell you who). 

When I saw this transpiring in Romeo + Juliet, I was shocked at the directness of how Almereyda ripped off what Luhrmann was doing here. I mean, any modern adaptation of Shakespeare, which both of these are, might be inclined to use a television newscaster as part of the proceedings. But the fact that both films begin and end with it as well? Perhaps critics raked Almereyda over the coals for this at the time, but if so, I didn't hear it. (Granted, it wasn't as easy in 2000 to read all the reviews you could possibly want to read about a movie you loved. I believe this was before the invention of Rotten Tomatoes.)

That's the most obvious way Hamlet is indebted to Romeo + Juliet, but what about a less obvious way, that you'd call a coincidence if both of the films were being produced simultaneously. Actress Diane Venora appears in both films, here as Juliet's mother Gloria, there as Hamlet's mother Gertrude. I almost feel like Luhrmann might have cast her just to be cheeky, since her last name is Venora and the play takes place "in fair Verona." Maybe Luhrmann is a fan of word jumbles. Almereyda seems almost certainly to have cast her in order to evoke Luhrmann's film -- or at least because that film gave him evidence she could do this sort of material.

The second point of comparison that I couldn't help notice was with Titanic, though this likely falls more into the category of coincidental.

It made me realize, possibly for the first time, that there is a real Romeo & Juliet quality to Jack and Rose's relationship in Titanic. Sure the similarity became obvious to me because DiCaprio played both Romeo and Jack, but there are other elements that solidify that similarity. For one, Rose being rich and Jack being poor is a similar sort of "opposites attract" scenario that informs their Montague-Capulet style pairing. But then there are also similarities with the way their romance develops, including scenes of going hand in hand to run around corners and evade the pursuit of the people who would stop them. Even the element of suicide is common between them, as you recall that Rose is considering jumping off the back of the ship at the time Jack meets her.

One other similarity I could not ignore. Although Paul Rudd technically plays the role of Romeo's romantic rival, Paris (Dave Paris, ha ha), Paris is a bit of a drip and doesn't much factor in to the story. (And what a babyface version of Rudd!) Romeo's real antagonist, whom he eventually kills, is Tybalt, played by John Leguizamo. I couldn't help notice a physical similarity between Leguizamo and Jack's rival in Titanic, played by Billy Zane. Imagine them in your mind and you'll see what I mean. (By the way, as many times as I've seen Titanic -- I want to say it's about six -- I had to look up his character's name just now. Caledon Hockley? That doesn't sound right.)

Of course, the real similarities are between this and Luhrmann's future work. Naturally it's easy to see similarities to his very next film, Moulin Rouge!, which also includes an illicit tragic romance where the central pair are trying to evade a romantic rival. Some of the most "in your face" aspects of Romeo + Juliet from a style perspective are just getting warmed up for Moulin Rouge! Then the film is also a reminder of the future The Great Gatsby, as there are big parties here that resemble the big parties there -- plus of course both films star DiCaprio. (I caught myself wondering what Luhrmann might have done as the director of last year's Babylon, instead of Damien Chazelle. Would certainly have had a lot more heart.)

To be clear, the style elements that maybe didn't work for me in 1996 do in fact work for me now. In fact, I think they are an essential part of what I've come to call this series: Baz Jazz Hands. If I didn't like the choices Luhrmann made with his camera, with his editing, with his anachronisms, etc., I likely wouldn't be doing a series like this at all.

I have to come back to DiCaprio's histrionics before I close things out for today.

I may be overstating this a little bit. DiCaprio has always been a good actor, even back then, and I suspect any tendency to turn things up to 11 was the result of a direct request from his director. His screaming of "I am fortune's fool!" is something I always think of as a telling moment from this film, and I think I thought it was all a bit too much back then. Which, as suggested earlier, may just be my notion that the whole play is a bit overwrought. 

There are really only a few moments like this, and I do think DiCaprio does a better job than Claire Danes as Juliet. She's not bad, but I did think she seemed a little uncomfortable with some of the dialogue. I do remember really swooning for her at this age, probably because she reminds me a little bit of a former girlfriend, just around the face. (As opposed to, you know, her elbows.) But I also noticed a moment when she does this sort of choking cry that seems a bit off -- and I noticed it in particular because Danes has this really over-the-top crying seen in Fleishman is in Trouble. It's not that her crying strikes me as artificial, but maybe just that few actresses are willing to "cry ugly" the way Danes is willing to "cry ugly."

So as not to leave you with a negative impression of what I thought about these two, I do find their scenes together to be incredibly romantic -- a function of both their chemistry, and Luhrmann's expert ability to conjure romance on screen. 

Okay I clearly had a lot more to say about this movie than maybe I thought I would going in.

In June I'll be back with what has historically been my favorite Luhrmann film, Moulin Rouge! We'll see if it still holds that crown after my first viewing since 2011.

It's April and Shotgun Wedding is still my #1 of 2023

April Fool's! 

No, sadly -- not April Fool's.

I don't want to spoil anything for my year-end rankings released next January (ha ha) but we've just slid into the fourth month of the calendar year -- here in Australia anyway -- and I'm still looking at the Amazon original Shotgun Wedding as my favorite movie of the year.

"But in April you've only seen like eight movies from the current year, right Vance?"

It's twice that. Which is actually probably a little low for this time of year.

But out of 16 movies seen, shouldn't I be able to find at least one four-star movie?

I actually got close with Shotgun Wedding, the second 2023 movie I watched. I felt enough of a surge of enjoyment watching Jennifer Lopez and Josh Duhamel try to save their wedding party from kidnappers on an island in the Pacific that I considered whether it got all the way into four-star range. Ultimately, cooler heads and a sense of critical self-respect prevailed, and I gave it only 3.5 on Letterboxd.

But the memory of that enjoyment, plus the inferior quality of the next 14 2023 movies I've watched, has meant that it hasn't had any serious challengers for the top spot. 

Let's not blow things out of perspective here. I'm technically in the fourth month of the year, but I haven't watched any movies in April yet, and more than half of January is lost to finishing up the movies from the previous year. So we're really talking less than two-and-a-half months of watching movies from the new year.

But what I'm really saying is that I've never not had a really strong movie sitting atop my rankings even at this early juncture. By this time last year I had already seen both Everything Everywhere All at Once, the eventual best picture winner, and Turning Red, which finished one spot ahead of EEAAO at #3 for the year for me. And though my #1 movie on April 1st last year did end up in my top three for the year, I'd be surprised if Shotgun Wedding cracks the top 30.

It could, if the movie year continues on at this pace.

I've only seen one movie I really disliked -- the Netflix rom com Your Place or Mine -- but I've seen a ton of mediocrity, and sequelitis has already hit pretty hard early in 2023. Without having even seen the latest Scream or John Wick, a quarter of my 2023 films are still sequels: Creed III, Magic Mike's Last Dance, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and Shazam: Fury of the Gods. None of those struck me as memorably as I would have liked, a particular disappointment given my fondness for the first Creed and the second Ant-Man.

Then you've got movies totally original in concept, and dripping with promise, that didn't do a lot for me, like Cocaine Bear. Outside of a few sequences, that movie disappointed me like I could never have anticipated.

I think the real issue is that we haven't gotten anything yet from someone I would characterize as a real auteur. April will change that, at least on the American release schedule if not here in Australia. A couple films that missed 2022 release dates, Kelly Reichardt's Showing Up and Ari Aster's Beau is Afraid -- which also missed its 2022 title, Disappointment Blvd. -- are due to debut this month, though the missing of those release dates does not exude a tremendous amount of promise for their potential. Then I only just realized that David Lowery is the director of Disney's new Peter Pan & Wendy, and though I certainly don't need the umpteenth adaptation of a story that has already been adapted to death, the fact that it's directed by a guy who directed one of my past #1s (A Ghost Story) does feel promising at least. (His previous work with Disney, Pete's Dragon, was a real success. I guess he can only make Disney movies about guys named Pete.)

So I guess what I'm saying is, "It gets better," or at least it should. Don't bail on the year after only 70 days.

I do think, though, that a certain malaise has started to settle into the movies, the sort of thing that may have recently made A.O. Scott decide to stop being a film critic. After seeing and feeling underwhelmed by Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves -- a really quite competent piece of popular entertainment that still left me with a middling reaction -- I considered for a moment writing a post called "Every movie is the same as every other movie." 

Sometimes that feels more true than others.