Should looking like Superman make someone the next Superman?

News broke this week that they have selected a guy to play Superman in James Gunn's upcoming DC movie Superman: Legacy. You may recall that Henry Cavill was crying about the fact that he wasn't going to play Superman in any future DC films, despite having played the role longer than anyone other than Christopher Reeve.

And guess what? The new guy looks just like Reeve, Cavill, Brandon Routh and Dean Cain -- particularly Cavill, which probably irks him even more.

(I won't say he looks like George Reeves, because that was a different time and George Reeves looked kind of like a cheeseball.)

David Corenswet is this man's name, and you have already seen a picture of him right here in this here post. You might know him from such films as Pearl. I didn't see Pearl, so I know him from such films as Look Both Ways. He's been around for about six years. 

He actually looks sort of absurdly like Cavill. 

Which is really not what you'd hope for a quarter of the way into the 21st century.

Now I don't believe that we need a Latino Superman or a Vietnamese Superman or an LGBTQ Superman. (Though I think the Supergirl in The Flash might kinda sorta be that last one? Maybe?) I've never felt diversity for diversity's sake was wisest, despite its potential to please particular factions of the viewing audience (while also risking coming across as pandering).

But as long ago as Chris Evans' casting as Captain America, people were asking if having such a blond, corn-fed looking guy playing this ultimate symbol of American heroism was really the way to go.

Superman isn't quite so specifically American, though of course he was raised in Kansas and any depiction of him has historically gone for that sort of thing. And by casting yet another guy who looks like all the other guys who have played Superman, Gunn and DC have shown a total lack of creativity and opened themselves up to accusations of insufficient diversity in their representation.

Look, we all have an idea in our head of what Superman looks like. But does he have to look exactly like that? Here, if you didn't see the Cavill comparison, these photos make it more manifest:

I mean, it's as though Gunn specifically chose Corenswet to attain maximum verisimilitude in the continuity from Cavill. Which is completely unnecessary as this new movie, as far as I understand it, is not specifically supposed to be a part of the DCEU, though Gunn's involvement might suggest otherwise. Maybe DC really just can't quit the DCEU. (I continue to wonder more and more why I was under the impression The Flash was the last DCEU movie.) It's like it's a parlor trick so see how close you can get to casting the absolute perfectest Superman. 

Speaking of The Flash, one thing that was cool about it was that we did get to see a different take on the character. In a trope that now feels quite familiar from the recent live-action and animated Spider-Man movies, among others, we do get a brief glimpse of an alternate universe Superman in which Nicolas Cage played the character, with long and flowing hair, as he would have looked in the mid-1990s when Kevin Smith's Superman project Superman Lives, to be directed by Tim Burton, was first being talked about. Even if the device was recycled from other and possibly better movies, I thought it was cool, for once, to get a different Superman. 

Twenty-five years after the cancellation of Superman Lives, the character has lived on in many other forms -- or, more correctly, in one form with many minute deviations. And the next deviation is the minutest of all.

Is this really progress?

Pride Month: Ammonite

I'm surprised it's taken me three years to see Ammonite, considering what it looked to me like it could be: the next Portrait of a Lady on Fire.

I probably haven't prioritized it sooner, even with its availability on Kanopy, because then I thought "If it were the next Portrait of a Lady on Fire, I'd have heard a lot more people talking about it."

Ammonite does, though, make a great final of my four weekly LGBTQI+ viewings for Pride Month this June, especially since it bookends with Wilde, both qualifying as gay romances set in the historical past -- this one a good 50 years before that one.

And even though it boasts two Oscar nominees in Saoirse Ronan and Kate Winslet -- the latter having actually taken home a statue -- Ammonite proves that a similar time period, similar rocky coastal setting and similar subject matter are not enough to conjure the distinct alchemy of ingredients that makes a masterpiece like Celine Sciamma's film. 

And that's okay -- Ammonite should be content just to be very good.

The film, set around 1850 it would seem, features Winslet as Mary Anning, a slightly older -- compared to her paramour anyway -- woman living in Lyme, Dorset, who specialises in digging fossils out of the cliffside and filing away the extra dirt and mud to reveal only the scientific discovery left behind. She is indeed a scientist by nature, though to pay the bills she has to sell these ammonite treasures to collectors on the high end of the scale, tourists on the low end. Her shop also features cheaper, as in less scientifically significant, products like mirrors lined with seashells.

It's a fairly grumpy and solitary existence -- she has a little support, though not very lively support, from her mother (Gemma Jones), who is also her roommate -- but it leaves Mary contented enough. It's evident from her pained interactions with a former lover played by Fiona Shaw that she never expected to have a man around, and that any of her own children were then obviously out of the question.

Her routine is jolted by the arrival of a gentleman (James McArdle) who wants to observe Mary in her work as his own form of scientific exploration, and is willing to pay her for it. His wife Charlotte (Ronan) is recovering from the shock of losing a child -- we can assume based on only very minimal evidence in the dialogue -- and is rarely fit enough to get out of bed. When he's called back to London for an expected period of six weeks, he offers to further compensate Mary if she'll take Charlotte out with her, as the sea air and companionship will do her good. And if you saw Portrait of a Lady on Fire, you can guess what happens from there.

Francis Lee's film is not nearly the swooningly romantic film that Sciamma's is, though it makes up for that in fairly graphic love scenes, especially considering the high profile of these actresses. Still, it convinces us easily of the development of intense feelings between the two women, both recovering from a sort of trauma, holding on to the other as a sort of life preserver. Winslet and Ronan are capable of expressing an untold number of internal ruminations just through a few flicks of their facial features, and it's a joy to watch them work with each other. They develop a palpable chemistry, but also a tremendous respect for one another. Their union is certainly opportunistic in nature on both halves, but it's not exploitative. They come together mutually, rather than either taking advantage of the other's fragile state.

I was also interested to see Lee explore the conflict between love and Mary's professional pursuits. At the time this was set, the idea that any woman would pursue anything professionally was absurd, and yet Mary thinks progressively enough that she balks at the idea of sacrificing her career, even if it means closer proximity to the woman she loves. 

I further enjoyed this being the only of the four movies I watched where the characters' sexuality is not specifically a point of societal outrage. Surely side characters in this film suspect what is going on between Mary and Charlotte, but there never needs to be a scene where one or both of them is dragged out into the town square and flogged, metaphorically or otherwise, for engaging in sins of which proper citizens can barely speak. This really is just a love story between two people, and the fact of their same gender is almost incidental.

And perhaps that is a fitting note on which to end a month of movies whose underlying goal, for all else they may set out to accomplish, is to help normalize same gender romance for as much of society as possible. 

Feelings double feeture

Yes I know I spelled "feature" wrong.

I wrote earlier this year about the existence of two 2023 films with the word "feelings" in the title, but since their U.S. release dates were separated by a month, I didn't envision that they would make a viable theatrical double feature.

Fortunately, in Australia their release dates were separated by only a week.

Nicole Holofcener's You Hurt My Feelings hit cinemas on June 15th, with Gene Stupnitsky's No Hard Feelings following suit on June 22nd. On Tuesday night, I saw them back to back, because I was not missing that opportunity.

As an extra novelty, my wife joined me -- but only for the first film. (She felt someone needed to go home to feed our kids dinner.) We think it was the first movie just the two of us had seen in the theater together, without our kids present, since Joker, which was not a pleasant experience for either of us.

The extra casualness with rules -- leaving our 12-year-old at home in charge of our nine-year-old -- was a result of it being school holidays. I usually get off work around 4:30, and judged that we could make it to Yarraville by 4:50 to see No Hard Feelings. (And only just did -- I didn't factor in the extra time it would take during rush hour traffic.) Then with only about ten minutes in between them, You Hurt My Feelings would follow at 6:50. Popcorn and peanut M&M's would suffice as my dinner.

Neither film reached the heights I had hoped. As it's been out longer, I wrote a review of You Hurt My Feelings first, which you can find here. I expect to write my No Hard Feelings review tomorrow if you want to check the link to the right. 

I've already landed on a 7/10 (3.5 stars) for Holofcener's film, which I think might be a little generous -- and if I end up with the same rating for Stupnitsky's, it will also be a little generous.

But because I really don't want these films to disappear from the theatrical release schedule, since these represent two of the more endangered types of mainstream films, I don't mind if I assess them a little more generously than they deserve.

And anyway, I really don't want to hurt their feelings. 

Audient Classics: Ace in the Hole

This is the latest in my 2023 monthly series watching movies from before I was born that I loved, but that I had only seen once.

This year marks ten years since I wrote Flickchart Road Trip, a weekly 2013 series on the Flickchart blog in which I "drove" throughout the United States, watching one movie I hadn't seen set in each of the 50 states and then dueling it against five other films from that state I'd already ranked, to see where it landed among them. I also wrote a blurb about each movie, like a mini review, as well as a description of what I "did" while I was in that state on my trip. (Since I was actually in none of those states, this part was a lie -- perhaps following in the footsteps of the man featured in this month's film.)

It was a fun and arduous project, since I was not only watching and writing one of these each week, but I was also formatting it and posting it. (And also trying to source the movies, which was not always easy in the days before streaming was huge, and involved me buying some random DVDs that are still kicking around my house somewhere.)

 It was especially arduous because I also moved to Australia -- quite unexpectedly, if you had asked me in January when I started Flickchart Road Trip -- and didn't miss a beat despite the massive upheaval and not having internet access in my new house for the first couple weeks. It remains probably the defining example of my dedication to projects I start and my refusal to miss the internal deadlines they involve. The only reason I didn't tell you about it on this blog was that I was still going incognito at that time, writing under the alias Vancetastic rather than my name.

Because I lived in Los Angeles at the time, I started "driving" east from there and would make California my final stop in Week 50. The first two movies I watched both bowled me over, each earning a full five stars on Letterboxd. In Arizona it was Smoke Signals, the moving portrait of life on a modern Native American reservation, and in New Mexico it was Billy Wilder's 1951 Ace in the Hole.

Rarely will you see a more excoriating portrait of the profession of journalism -- which had been, and in some ways still is, my own profession. I loved it.

And it turns out, still do, even though I was way too tired on Monday night to watch it. (I couldn't sleep during the morning baseball games that started at 3 a.m. local time, since it was the end of a very close week of fantasy baseball, which I'm glad to say I won.)

The brilliant thing about Ace in the Hole is that the ways Kirk Douglas' Chuck Tatum is a compromised professional -- corrupt? yes, close to that -- are ethically debatable enough to prompt discussion among journalism professionals. He doesn't lie, cheat or steal -- not exactly -- so the ways he milks his story are potentially within the realm of fair play. However, the real journalists who employ him at his Albuquerque newspaper, where he has landed after a series of previous firings, can tell right away that his methods are sketchy. And is it turns out, they might cost a man his life.

Tatum has been kicking around Albuquerque for a year, trying to return to New York, where he experienced his glory days before getting canned. He's given the editor a great deal on his services in the hopes that exposure is all he needs to get back to the big time. However, a year later, he's still covering lame local ceremonies like the rattlesnake hunt to which he is headed when he learns there's a man trapped in cave, into which he had spelunked in order to acquire buried Native American artifacts.

I was surprised on this viewing to see that Tatum doesn't immediately grasp the opportunity here. It's the cameraman he's traveling with who at first seems more interested in the story. It doesn't take Tatum all that long to realize the chance that's presenting itself, but I found it funny that it takes him any time at all given that he's just given a whole speech about the professional doldrums that is this Albuquerque beat. You'd figure he'd grasp at any straws that present themselves, especially on his way to an assignment that typifies the misery he finds himself in. 

But soon enough Tatum is formulating his idea for a long-running human interest story that he can stretch out for days. He's not exactly going to impede the efforts to save this man from where he's buried, ironically just out of reach of a place people can get to. Tatum, the doctor and others can make their way almost to within arm's reach of Leo Minosa, but the unsteady walls of the cave prevent them from going any further to avoid dumping a fatal avalanche of rocks onto the pinned Leo. They bring him food and water and cigars, and at first Leo is pretty jovial about the whole situation. As that stretches on, with crews digging down from above in careful ways to reach him, his outlook becomes steadily more grim.

True enough, Tatum has been able to whip this in to a media frenzy, getting an arrangement with the local sheriff to help promote his reelection in exchange for exclusive rights to comments from the police and being the only journalist allowed to make his way down to Leo. Meanwhile, Leo's wife Lorraine (Jan Sterling) seems to be just waiting for him to die, as it turns out they had a bad relationship and Leo was cruel to her. Thousands of people gather around the site, to the extent that a whole commercial shanty town has built up, including amusement park rides -- hence the original title of this film, The Big Carnival.

What makes Tatum so mercenary is that he also plays a role in helping ignore some potentially useful advice about an alternate method of saving Leo -- all so his story can achieve him the maximum possible fame and exposure to the career opportunities he wants.

The overwhelmingly acerbic sensibilities of Wilder really surprised me while watching this film, which I saw at a time that I hadn't yet seen some of Wilder's darker films like Sunset Boulevard and The Lost Weekend. (Actually, my records show that I'd seen Sunset Boulevard, but it was only four months earlier so perhaps my impression of Wilder had not yet fully shifted. Sunset Boulevard also immediately preceded Ace in the Hole in Wilder's career, so what a run for him.) 

And what a mature understanding Wilder showed of the fickle media cycle, where a story becomes a sensation for a week at a time and then is completely forgotten once it reaches its resolution one way or another. The characters who are portrayed as heroes probably are not -- not only is Leo bad to his wife, but he was only in the cave on what was essentially a mission of thievery. Of course, those who bring the story to us might be even worse. The carnival outside Leo's cave is a perfect symbol for the overwhelming quantity of attention paid a story while it is hot, and its ability to leave town as soon as it is not.

Because it only just happened, I was reminded of the story of the Titan, the Titanic submersible that was lost last week, killing its five occupants. Although there would have been no Chuck Tatum figure, the man with the exclusive who kept the story in our news feeds, I can imagine that news editors everywhere wanted that story to go longer without a definitive resolution, since we all eagerly refreshed our browsers for updates on it. When the debris was found, meaning the loss of the souls aboard, we all quickly moved on and I bet many of us have not even thought about it again since.

Douglas, accustomed to being a hero at the time I think, really leans into the villainy of his character. Chuck Tatum is not fundamentally an awful person, just a selfish one -- as well as a violent one. The way he treats Lorraine, grabbing her hair and once strangling her with a mink shawl, is repulsive. But it would be overplaying this film's hand, so to speak, to suggest that Tatum is the epitome of evil. He's genuinely ashen when he learns that his own decisions may have doomed Leo. However, one wonders whether the main reason he cares is that the only way he comes out rosy in this whole affair is if they do eventually save the man. If they don't, he can kiss his prospective career gains goodbye.

It seems clear that the same circus surrounding the media, so to speak, has been in place for time immemorial. Still, Ace in the Hole seems prescient about the function the media has in our world today. Although there are very good journalists depicted in this film -- Wilder's message is certainly not that they are all venal and corrupt -- the film certainly has its finger on the segment of the profession that will sensationalize just to sell newspapers. Or get eyeballs. Or accumulate mouse clicks.

Okay, on to another classic in July. 

Watching all the Indiana Jones movies twice

Clarification probably needed on the subject of this post:

I have already seen Raiders of the Lost Ark, my #4 film of all time on Flickchart, about seven or eight times, and I think my recent rewatch of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom was my third overall.

So in order to prep for this week's release of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, I didn't need to see those movies again if my goal were to have at least two notches on my belt for each Indiana Jones movie. The Last Crusade and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, though, both lay in my way. So I took care of them both this past weekend.

It would be a surprise for most of you to learn that a child of the 80s like me, who worships at the altar of Spielberg only slightly less slavishly than other Gen X kids, would have seen the second-best Indiana Jones movie only once. Some crazy people even argue that The Last Crusade is better than Raiders, though as I said, they are crazy.

I can probably blame the timing for only the single viewing. Since The Last Crusade came out in 1989, the time it would have been playing on cable on repeat was right around when I graduated from high school in 1991. And in my college years, my movie viewing understandably dropped considerably, especially with movies on cable that you'd already seen. I can't remember if I had cable at all while in college -- always too poor.

At the time I saw it, I did indeed have little doubt that the third Indiana Jones was better than the second, which I would have had time to watch on cable -- if not at my own house, since I think my parents had ditched cable by then, then at a friend's house, which is where I likely did see it that second time. The Last Crusade was a solid course correction that I enjoyed quite a bit.

But obviously, not enough to watch it again in the 34 years since it was released.

It's actually long been on my list of movies to catch a second time. I can remember trying to prioritize it as long as five years ago. I initially had other ideas about what to watch on Saturday night, but when my wife assured me that my first idea wasn't really Saturday night viewing, I did finally move Indy to the top.

And I found it solid again, though I must say, not even in the vicinity of Raiders in quality.

I remember the set pieces being a strength of this film, but I didn't really have that impression on this viewing. The ones I remembered -- particularly the opening with River Phoenix -- weren't as good as I'd recalled. And though it was certainly good to have the Nazis back as villains, they didn't have very satisfying comeuppances -- at least not compared to the face melting at the end of Raiders.

One real deficit, I thought, was the female lead, who crosses over from Indy love interest to villain. Everyone knows Karen Allen is awesome in Raiders, and say what you will about future Spielberg wife Kate Capshaw in Temple of Doom, but at least you remember her. Alison Doody is pretty much of a nothing in the role of Elsa, which may be why we haven't gotten much from her in the decades since. (Though in looking at her IMDB, I did note with a bit of a chuckle that she was in RRR.) 

Harrison Ford's interactions with Sean Connery remain the best part of the film, and it's not even close. Connery in particular is the real win here, as he out-charismas even the charismatic Ford. 

I could probably continue analyzing the parts of The Last Crusade that work well and not so well, but to be honest, the viewing didn't really trigger that part of my brain. It was an enjoyable experience that pretty much went in one ear and out the other.

I do have more to say about Crystal Skull. 

I didn't hate Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull when it first came out. I did rank it 77th out of 87 movies in 2008, and the movies below it are pretty bad. But I think it sunk in my impression the farther I got away from it, and by the end of the year there were only ten I considered worse. At the time, though, I remembered being mildly entertained by it.

But there's a reason that the phrase "nuke the fridge" has persisted in our culture alongside the phrase "jump the shark," because indeed, Indiana Jones surviving a nuclear blast by hiding in a refrigerator is the sort of shark-jumping moment that requires its own special term. As I watched that ridiculous scene, I thought about how the mere propulsion of the refrigerator several miles from its source would have been enough to kill Indiana Jones, let alone the proximity to the radiation. This scene does not require any analysis to confirm its absurdity.

Bothering me more than this, though, were the digital gophers. (Or prairie dogs, or whatever they were.) Nowadays I can't remember all the topics of outrage this movie inspired in people, but the digital gophers had to be one of them. George Lucas and his bad judgments are all over this film, as characters interacting with digital gophers is something right out of one of the prequels. (Oddly, though, I was reminded most of the porgs in The Last Jedi, which is not actually a product of Lucas' mind.)

Then Shia LaBeouf's greaser. I don't like greasers, as movie characters or in general. The fact that he's always taking out his comb and running it through his hair is not ingratiating, and it's probably worse now that we know LaBeouf didn't become the beloved star everyone thought he might become 15 years ago, but rather a massive creep.

There's fan service in this film, though probably not the sort of fan service I expect we'll see in the movie that comes out this week. And one of my favorite sequences is the escape from the warehouse full of government crates, one of which does contain the ark of the covenant. But then another scene that struck me as fan service, this time servicing Temple of Doom, was the terrible scene where they go over three consecutive waterfalls in their boat car. The sequence utterly fails to play up the real possibility -- nay, likelihood -- that if you go over three consecutive massive waterfalls, the last of which ejects all the passengers from the vehicle, you will lose at least one of your group. In fact, never for a moment is there a doubt that all five will emerge fine, and Indy doesn't even lose his hat.

Of course finally you have the aliens. To show you just how I didn't remember all the details of this film, I thought I remembered the reveal that it was aliens being held to the very end of the film, making it all the more head-smacking. Instead, it's a crate from Roswell they're looking for in the very first scene, so the emergence of a UFO from a South American temple only feels like the cherry on top of a bad idea, not the sudden explosion of third act idiocy I had remembered.

I did notice that the movie was very faithful to the amount of time that had passed in the real world since the last movie. While Temple of Doom takes place in 1938, this film takes place in 1957, and 19 years also passed between the 1989 release of the first film and the 2008 release of this one. If they continue with that, Dial of Destiny should take place in 1972. Whether that will work or not, we'll see.

These two movies did make me nostalgic for a time when a movie that crossed two hours in length was considered indulgent. Both of these movies are in the 120s in minutes, which seems very reasonable nowadays. Without even looking, I knew Dial of Destiny must be at least 2:30 -- and true enough, it's 154 minutes long. 

Will all that extra time mean that much extra good?

Doubtful, but I guess I will find out later this week.

How to haunt a house (and how not to)

Between Thursday and Friday nights, I saw one of the best horror movies I've ever seen, and one of the worst.

That second assessment may be an exaggeration. The first is not.

I might have gotten to Skinamarink sooner except that Josh Larsen on Filmspotting brought it into my awareness half-apologetically. I can see why he did, but he should have sold it harder that first time. (And made up for it by naming it his #2 movie of 2023 so far, on a mid-year podcast I just listened to.) 

Josh's hesitation was a result of the acknowledgement that this film would not work for everybody. It is the horror movie version of slow cinema, but it's even more inaccessible than that to a certain crowd. None of the four characters in the film are ever seen clearly, nor heard in any traditional exchange of dialogue. The images and sounds that do make up the film's 100 minutes are strange canted angles of a house in 1995, lit primarily by old cartoons on TV (in the public domain, as told to us by the film's opening credits, which are all the credits), and strange guttural sounds, possibly voices, that we can rarely make out without the assistance of subtitles. And it goes on this way for the entirety of the running time.

And my skin is crawling just remembering it.

I don't want to spoil the experience of discovery that is Skinamarink by telling you too much more about it. All I really want to say is that while Kyle Edward Ball's film is in conversation with familiar horror tropes, not a one of them is presented in a way you can predict or in a way you've seen a hundred times before. The grainy imagery triples the level of dread as you're watching shapes move (or possibly not move; are your eyes playing tricks on you?) and sounds burrow themselves into the core of your deepest fears. This is a movie you need to watch with all the lights out, with no other distractions, and with as few pauses as you can manage. If you think it sounds like a chore, you won't have to wait long to be completely in its spell and frightened like you haven't been in years.

It was still in a state of post-viewing joy, 24 hours later, than I chose the remake of The Amityville Horror as my Friday night viewing. I'd seen, and quite liked, the original for the first time as recently as Halloween 2017.

I had no illusions that this was going to take me to the same place as Skinamarink. However, the reason I landed on it was that one of my podcasters -- on a podcast that doesn't ordinarily focus on movies -- had recently listed it as a film that contained an image she couldn't get out of her mind. I couldn't remember what that image was, but these sorts of testimonials are the foundation for potentially unexpectedly good horror, and at only 90 minutes, Andrew Douglas' film seemed well worth taking the plunge.

It was not.

This is a pretty terrible haunted house movie. It throws at us your standard series of haunted house images -- your dead girl here, your wall unexpectedly full of maggots there -- and even if the original movie should be justly credited with introducing some of these tropes to us, the remake does nothing with them and is just incredibly boring. I received exactly one chill in this movie, and it was also with an obvious effect that just happened to be reasonably well done so it got me.

The most interesting thing about the movie was seeing Ryan Reynolds at the very beginnings of a career that would dominate the box office for the next decade-and-a-half, not to mention Chloe Grace Moretz in what must have been her first role, seeing as how the credits "introduced" her to us. Anything related to horror or hauntings or trying to maintain the good name of a beloved horror classic? Utterly worthless. The house, renowned for how its front windows look sort of like eyes, doesn't have a personality in the slightest. 

I will say, however, that it was astonishing how ripped Reynolds was then:

Yowza.

Oh, and the image that had bothered this podcaster so much? A dead girl takes someone's finger and sticks it into the bullet hole in her head. It didn't bother me at all, even if I'd never seen it before.

It isn't easy to scare somebody, so the viewing of Amityville Horror increased my appreciation of the sort of feat Skinamarink had pulled off. I may just have to revisit it as a Halloween viewing this year, maybe share it with my wife, if she'd be patient enough to stick with it.

Diana Prince, cameo queen

I have to wonder how Gal Gadot feels about being asked to lend her star wattage in cameos in other DC movies, when they won't even make a third Wonder Woman movie.

The Flash marks the second 2023 DC film, and the second 2023 DC film in which Diana Prince makes a cameo. 

It's not a spoiler to mention The Flash, because the cameo comes in the first 15 minutes. It may be a spoiler to mention SPOILER ALERT Shazam: Fury of the Gods, because they hold that one to the very end and I'm sure they wanted us all to be surprised. Of course, we live in an era where everyone is all too eager to report that stuff, and who really cares about this kind of spoiler anyway. (Mine was a fairly ineffectual spoiler alert because the image above is from this movie.)

Well, it isn't obvious from either cameo that Gadot is annoyed, but I can't imagine she wouldn't be.

Now we all know Wonder Woman 1984 wasn't great, but I think we can all also admit it wasn't terrible. Okay, some people thought it was terrible. My love for the first movie and Gadot's performance in it probably allowed me to cut it some slack and give it a passing grade of three stars. But whatever you thought about it, the first was great and the character deserved to have a chance at a third.

There are a number of rumors floating out there about why it was cancelled, from Patty Jenkins walking away (that idea may have come from the fact that she was trying to juggle responsibilities on the Star Wars movie Rogue Squadron, which has also been cancelled) to DC changing the way it's doing things (an idea supported by the fact that The Flash is considered to be the last film in the DCEU). The reality is, studios bend and break their own rules if they think there is a reason to do so, and apparently they just didn't think WW3 would have the legs to be a success. 

Then why keep putting Gadot's legs in your movies?

I can't necessarily say that I'm frustrated that there will be no Wonder Woman 3, in a vacuum. Any indication that our unquenchable appetite for superhero movies might be dying off strikes me as a good sign for the movies. I'm not saying we have to get rid of them altogether, but maybe each studio gets to make one each year and that's it. I think their scarcity would certainly make us appreciate them more.

No, it's more like why does Wonder Woman not get a third movie when so many lesser properties do? I'm sure someone is out there making Venom 3 -- in fact, I've just confirmed it on IMDB -- and the first one of those movies was shite. I didn't see the second. 

Even more interesting about this whole "end the DCEU thing" is that The Flash is actually really good. Say what you want about Ezra Miller, you have every right and it's deserved, but Andy Muschietti delivered a damned entertaining movie. Don't tell me someone couldn't have found an awesome way to go with Wonder Woman in one more movie. And it wouldn't even have to have included all these other fools, because she was essentially the only superhero in the first two. 

But the really sad thing is: Without any of these other movies, we may not even see Gadot as Wonder Woman again. In fact, I think that's most likely. 

And try as she might, she just hasn't quite been able to duplicate that appeal in her other projects.

A Cyborg movie? Aquaman 2? 

Anything for one more movie from the cameo queen.*

*But wait a minute ... they are making an Aquaman 2. I forgot about the whole recasting of Amber Heard controversy. So why are they saying The Flash is the last movie of the DCEU? I can't keep any of this straight anymore. 

Elemental and The Flash, Take 2

I did actually take two on Wednesday night, when I watched all of Elemental and the 83% of The Flash that I missed on Sunday when my son and I had to leave the movie early. 

And I really liked both of them.

The context of learning all the details of Ezra Miller's many trespasses -- literally and figuratively -- in the time since I started my Flash viewing did not turn me off to them. In fact, I thought they were hilarious in this film, at the times they were supposed to be hilarious, and poignant in the times they were supposed to be poignant. (Miller is non-binary, hence the "they" pronoun. The grammarian in me still has a hard time with that pronoun and wishes there might be a better option.)

But let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Wednesdays are the day I most consistently go into the office. I didn't last Wednesday because I was still at the tail end of being sick, nor did I any of the other days last week, but this past Wednesday it was back to business as usual.

So Wednesday is also the day when I am out of the mix for domestic things, a price my wife will gladly pay because she enjoys having the house to herself those days. And she doesn't really have an issue with me just extending my absence until, oh, 11:30 at night if that's what it takes for me to catch up on the movies I haven't seen in the past two weeks.

The only thing about the schedule I drew up for Elemental and The Flash, though, was that it worked best for me to come halfway home on the train rather than staying in the city, and to see both movies at the Sun in Yarraville. That's my favorite cinema so no issue there. The issue is that the Sun is also where I started watching The Flash on Sunday. They are so casual at this place that I know they're not keeping track, but I did feel bad about making the same cinema give me a free ticket to the same movie twice. I did wonder whether it would be the same clerk who had served me on Sunday, but it wasn't, and they probably wouldn't have cared anyway.

But I am getting ahead of myself again as Elemental was the first up at 4:50. I had to leave work 20 minutes early to make it on time, but my boss is also one of those who doesn't care about such things. I had barely gotten the words out of my mouth (I didn't state the reason I was leaving early) and she was metaphorically brushing me out the door with her hands. In fact, I left early enough that not only did I catch the train I needed to catch to make the movie on time, but I caught the one before it.

As I said, I really enjoyed Elemental. It steadily climbed from 3.5 stars to 4 stars to 4.5 stars as I was watching, and though it's a generous 4.5 stars, I don't give that rating out willy nilly. It got there in the end, as Pixar usually but not always does. (In fact, wondering if I were too generous toward Pixar in general, I've re-read my two-star review of last year's Lightyear, to confirm that I'm not totally in the bag for this company.)

The Flash was set to start at 7:30, which left me plenty of time to go next door to Grill'd to get three sliders, a Corona and a basket of fries, or chips as they call them here. While waiting for the food to arrive, I started my review of Elemental -- and while eating it, I finished it. Yeah, I've gotten this review-writing thing down to a science. (You can read the review here.)

But I also took my time with it. Seven thirty came and went and I was still leisurely wrapping up my dinner.

It wasn't that I knew the Sun plays a lot of trailers. They don't, actually. You can rely on a movie to start within five minutes of its scheduled start time.

It was that I had already seen 25 minutes of The Flash just three days earlier. In fact, I think I arrived late on purpose just for the novelty of it. 

I got in at about 7:38, and sure enough, the movie had already been going on for a couple minutes. 

I wondered for a moment if the other people in the audience shook their head at me casually sauntering in late. I had wondered the same thing about the woman who'd gotten me my ticket -- who was the same one who had gotten me my Elemental ticket, and we had a little laugh about that.

But I know I didn't miss any of The Flash -- in fact saw 20 minutes of it twice -- and that's all that matters.

And I'm glad I prioritized tying up that loose end, as I really liked this one too. The review is here if you would like to read it. 

And just when I thought I was all multiverse'd out. 

Pride Month: Pariah

Although there have been great steps forward in cinematic LGBTQI+ representation in recent years, there's still one subsection of this community that remains drastically underserved:

Butch lesbians.

I have often wondered why there are so few -- any? -- movies about butch lesbians out there, but I actually haven't really wondered because the answer is obvious:

A studio does not feel like it can sell a movie about butch lesbians.

Gay men? Easy, especially lately. Lipstick lesbians? Sure. It's every man's fantasy. Transgender or non-binary? We are starting to see these characters really flourish on screen.

But butch lesbians remain a tough sell. For one, there is nothing flamboyant about them, and flamboyance is something that plays well on screen in whatever form it takes. If you're talking about two characters who have short hair, wear flannel shirts, are maybe a bit pudgy and bear a bit of a resemblance to one another, that is not the sort of colorful display to which a camera is traditionally drawn.

In a way, lipstick lesbians and butch lesbians are each others' exact opposites in terms of cinematic appeal. The former could potentially please all four quadrants of the cisgender viewing population: straight men, gay men, straight women and gay women. Straight men fantasize about lipstick lesbians, if we are to believe the copious amounts of porn in existence about such women. Gay men find them a bit fabulous and aspirational, especially the drag portion of the gay male audience. Straight women are generally supportive of women on screen and also aspire to the beauty of these characters. And of course gay women, either lipstick lesbians or butch lesbians, have many of the same fantasies about such women that straight men do, and if they don't, they are in it just for the representation.

Butch lesbians? One quadrant at best. And even the gay women in the audience may want something more aspirational, something that doesn't remind them so much of themselves. (Yes, there is self-loathing among all people, and especially in the gay community.)

(Side note: I am aware that these terms are very reductive. I know no person is reducible to a set of stereotypical traits. However, these terms have also been used historically to differentiate for the purposes of commentary and analysis so I am engaging them here.)

Despite the likelihood of disappointment, I was determined to find whatever butch lesbian movies were out there. As discussed, the pickings were slim. Though to be fair, I stopped after one reddit thread because I recognized one of the two titles mentioned right away, both by the film itself and by the director. (The other was a Thai film and I didn't even start to look it up.)

Dee Rees directed a movie that made my top ten of the year it was released, Mudbound in 2017. At the time I saw and loved it, I knew that Rees was known for her prior feature, Pariah, which was her debut and released in 2011. 

Pariah might not be a butch lesbian movie quite in the way I had anticipated. I guess my core idea of a butch lesbian is the sort of white women wearing the clothing and with the haircut I mentioned above. But no one would call Alike (uh-LEE-kay) -- known as Li -- a lipstick lesbian, so at least that's something.

Li (Adepero Oduye) is a 17-year-old living in New York, an aspirational writer whose primary medium is poetry. She isn't out to her family, though they have their suspicions, especially her younger sister (Sahra Mellesse), who teases her but is accepting of what she knows her sister is. Their mother (Kim Wayans) doesn't want her daughter to hang out with her out friend Laura (Pernell Walker), the closest this film has to a true butch lesbian, and sees what's going on despite the fact that she can't bear to think about it. Their father (Charles Pernell) is kinder to Li but only because he's in deep denial. Li starts to see a new girl (Aasha Davis) on the sly, and things are about to become a lot more complicated for all of them.

A very brief 87 minutes, Pariah is not heavy on plot as it basically takes Li through a familiar series of coming of age beats -- or, maybe more appropriately, coming into her sexuality beats. More than its details about that part of her growth, the film distinguishes itself for the intersection between its look at sexuality and its look at the Black community of 2011. Although Rees is too shrewd of a filmmaker to come out and say it, the film is wrestling with a particular level of acute homophobia that has always been ascribed to the Black community. There are some interesting gender complications thrown in here as well, as both Li's and Laura's mothers are the hardest on them, inclined to shut them out completely. This has already happened with Laura's mother and Li's mother seems to be going down a similar path. 

If there is something a little rudimentary in the storytelling of Pariah, it could be because a) small independent dramas are not typically heavy on complicated plots or unexpected developments, and b) in 2011, a story like this was probably new enough in "mainstream" cinema (I'd hardly call this a mainstream film, even though it features some known actors) that it doesn't need to be anything more than a primer on this type of character and the prejudices she endures. Those prejudices are pretty strong, as the title suggests exactly how unwanted Li feels.

And to its credit, Pariah has a very strong denouement -- perhaps not an unexpected one, but one that is executed confidently and with emotional potency. By the end of only 87 minutes we have come to really understand Li and have some better idea what she's going through -- knowing that without actually walking in her shoes, we will never fully understand it. When she weeps on the floor in frustration, our hearts really go out to her.

I guess I'm still looking for my idea of what a real butch lesbian film would look like. Perhaps because Li is an artist, because she is reasonably stylish and because her sexual preference doesn't scream out from her appearance, I feel like this is still a marketable lesbian story. Perhaps, because it's the movie business (emphasis on "business") we are talking about, we'll never see "real" butch lesbians as protagonists of their own movie.

One final film next week involving lesbians from history, who I can tell you for sure will not be butch.

Neither Elemental nor The Flash

I've been sick on and off for about two weeks, so that also means I haven't really gotten out to the movies. I'd say I haven't gotten out at all, except that's not exactly true -- though more on that in a minute.

In fact, because I started to get sick two Tuesday nights ago, I hadn't been to see a movie since the Saturday night before that when my older son and I went to see Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. That was 17 days ago, an eternity in my world.

I'm a grown-up and I can wait to get back to the movies. But my website can't wait -- or at least, that's what I tell myself. You need to keep feeding reviews to your hypothetical audience or else they will leave you.

There haven't been any good streaming releases lately, and the offerings at the cinema hadn't really been wowing me either. That is, until all the sudden in one burst they started to.

Last Thursday saw the release of DC's The Flash, Pixar's Elemental and Nicole Holofcener's You Hurt My Feelings, all of which I planned to see and review. And by this past Sunday, I was feeling well enough to take my kids to one of them -- though probably not the one starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus as a woman in a co-dependent relationship.

My first instinct was Elemental, since I still consider Pixar movies to be events and since I knew there would be no issue of the content appropriateness for my younger son. I knew it would probably rule out my older son, but he's getting pretty indifferent to movies in general -- or wanting to watch things like Scream VI, as I wrote about yesterday.

The problem with Elemental is that the younger one is going to daytime activities at his school some of the days during school holidays, which starts at the end of this week. One of those is going to see Elemental, and my wife didn't want to lose that as a carrot on the end of the stick to get him to go to those activities without complaining.

So I shifted to The Flash. Bad idea. 

The older one still didn't want to go -- he's a bit superhero'd out -- and the younger one agreed with a shrug, which seemed to say "I wouldn't have considered it, but okay." He's still at the age where any activity with his daddy is a good activity.

But my son has a couple sensory issues, and one of them is an aversion to loud noises. The cinema assumes the opposite of its viewers, that the louder they play it, the better. So the Sun in Yarraville played it as loud as reasonable, which was exactly the right amount of loudness for someone like me.

Not for him. He clamped his hands over his ears quite a number of times in the first 25 minutes, which I didn't interpret as an attempt to shut out the movie entirely. I figured it was kind of like how some people will put cotton balls in their ears at a concert so they can hear the music better but block out all the noise.

I can't tell you what he did after the first 25 minutes, because that's when we left.

It's been a long time since I've had to leave a movie prematurely -- never with this one, and only once or twice that I can remember with his older brother when he was several years younger than the younger one is now. But I soon realized that whatever was ailing my younger son was not going to be fixed by telling him to close his eyes for a minute.

No, see, he told me he felt like he was going to pass out. 

He asked if he could go outside. Now, I'm embarrassed to admit what I'm about to tell you, but because I ultimately did the right thing I am going to proceed. I tried to arrange a plan where he would go outside for a few minutes and then come back in once he felt better, and was trying to make sure he had a ticket so he could get back in. You'll be glad to know that I abandoned this train of thought after no more than ten or 15 seconds. I left the theater with him, knowing that we probably wouldn't be back. For a movie completist like me, it's either see the whole thing or you might as well have seen none of it.

You'll also be glad to know that my son was fine. He wasn't having a medical episode and he didn't throw up. I just think the movie was too intense for him. The volume got him off on the wrong foot, and then things like Batman involved in a shootout with fleeing criminals on his Bat cycle just ramped up the intensity beyond what he could handle. I suspect it didn't help seeing Barry Allen's mother having been stabbed in a flashback.

He never told me what exactly it was that had bothered him to a point that reached critical mass, and because I didn't want to make him feel any worse than he already did, I didn't ask. It appears he was worried he had disappointed me by making me leave the movie -- and though that's true, I can't really help that and I really don't think I let on. My first instinct may have been to salvage the viewing experience, but my next was to be there for my son, and I really don't think my demeanor suggested I was put out by it.

So Elemental would have been the right choice, right?

Not so fast. Then the next night at dinner, my wife mentioned the school program during the school holidays and how they'd be going to Elemental. He didn't look too pleased by the idea. Apparently some friends had seen it this weekend and they told him it was "really bad," and that "everyone was kissing," or something like that. 

So if neither Elemental nor The Flash is the right movie for this son, what is?

You may recall that this is the same son who was supposed to see Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse with some friends the first weekend it was out, with me as their chaperone. Those kids ended up getting sick, which is when he bowed out so he could go with them on another day while I went that night with my older son. Poor kid, he probably didn't figure the option to go was never going to come up again -- but I gotta say, that movie wore me out enough that I don't really think I can sit through it again. 

So now, neither Elemental nor The Flash may get reviewed on my site at all, depending on how the rest of this week goes. Instead of those two top prospects with You Hurt My Feelings as a promising third, on Sunday night I watched and reviewed ... Extraction 2 on Netflix. (Which I liked quite a bit, actually. You can read the review here.)

Hey, gotta feed that hypothetical audience. 

Now I'm the one contributing to delinquencies, and other Scream VI thoughts

I've written at various times in the past about the movies my kids have been exposed to before we thought they were ready. I think I mentioned the time my older son sat in on a viewing of The Suicide Squad -- the really violent James Gunn one from two years ago -- when we were over for a dinner party in my wife's friend group, where each of the families has a child around my son's age, though in their case it's the youngest son while ours is the oldest. I know I didn't mention, because it only happened about a month ago, when he watched American Psycho under the same circumstances.

Well, we had a dinner party at our house on Saturday night, so I thought it was my chance to return the favor.

Of course the four 12- and 13-year-old boys wanted something aspirational, and it was clear my usual recommendation of a handful of Marvel movies was getting no traction. It was my own son, though, who was fixated on the idea of Scream VI.

Even though he's never seen a Scream movie, my son does have a history with the franchise. We came into possession of a Ghostface mask, and he's worn it on multiple Halloweens. Then last year on our trip to America, he sat next to me as I watched last year's Scream reboot on the plane. He asked questions and I'm sure saw selected images from it, and I know it lived on in his curiosity, fascination and probably deep-seated fears.

Having already planted the seed myself, through both the plane viewing and the mask purchase, it was obvious I was going to comply with his request -- especially since getting a kid to agree on a movie when his friends are over is a victory in and of itself.

Plus in the back of my head I had the fact that my younger son, who is still only nine, has friends who have told him they've seen The Exorcist, which is far more graphic than the umpteenth Scream movie. 

None of them stumbled out of the garage two hours later with any apparent scars, and I'm guessing the other three, who all have older siblings, have already seen a lot worse. (One could argue that both The Suicide Squad and American Psycho are a lot worse, and those are only the ones I know they've seen.) 

My own son seemed fine too. He acknowledged it was violent but he reminded me "I've seen American Psycho." 

When I watched it myself later, the rental having promoted it to the top of my viewing queue when otherwise I might not have seen it until October for Halloween, I was trying to figure out which there are more of: f-bombs or stab wounds. 

Did I watch movies like this when I was 12? I don't think so. I was not naturally drawn to horror as a younger viewer. By 12 I might have been trying to see R-rated movies that had boobs -- I can't remember exactly when that started -- but teenagers being chopped up was not a priority for me. Unless, maybe, they showed their boobs before being chopped up, which was much more of a thing back then. 

Every parent knows that today's kids grow up faster than they did, and whether that's actually true or not, there's no doubt we believe it. Even my wife, who tends to be a bit more careful with things like this, sort of shrugged when I told her our son wanted to watch Scream VI. She later told me it was because she considered it more horror comedy, which I don't think the Scream series really is -- at least not anymore. Sure they try to get a laugh here and there, but it feels more like typical serial killer drudgery to me nowadays. Which brings me to my next point ...

Scream and Saw are basically the same thing

Now that we have six Scream movies, it is becoming more evident that this series has quite a lot in common with the most enduring horror series of the 21st century, the Saw movies. I believe there are nine of those, though if it was double digits I wouldn't be surprised.

Consider:

1) Both series have an incredibly serpentine mythology that continues to revisit characters from earlier in the series who are presumed dead, or even if they actually are dead they still loom large over the proceedings.

2) Both series are founded on the idea of copycats continuing to carry on the work of the original killer(s).

3) Both series have an idea of who "deserves" to be killed based on some previous crimes of which they are guilty. 

4) In both series, the original killer is known for the sound of his voice in either pre-recorded messages or live telephone calls, and the exact timbre, vocal ticks, favorite turns of phrase or indications of sadism of the voice can be reproduced by multiple copycats despite them possibly never having heard the original voice, because most of the people who did hear that voice ended up dead.

5) Both series are utterly exhausted at this point. Having liked the reboot of Scream last year -- or "requel," as the characters in this film refer to it -- I felt pretty put off by Scream VI. No, I definitely do not think it's clever any more the way these films are relentlessly self aware, and try to give us credit by winking to us about what they're doing and then doing that very thing. At this point this is really just pandering, and I'm tired of it. In a way, Saw at least has a certain purity in that it presents the material more straightforwardly, without the equivalent of Murtaugh saying "I'm too old for this shit" in all the Lethal Weapon movies. Scream is basically nothing but that.

Perfect pauses: Scream VI

SPOILER ALERT if you care about who the killer was in Screams 1 through 5. 

In one of the many times I paused the movie -- which were a lot, since I was tired and a little drunk after the aforementioned dinner party, meaning I finished the movie Sunday afternoon -- I happened to randomly catch the exact screen shot to show who the killer was in every previous Scream movie.

I've warned you once, now I will warn you again: Don't continue reading or looking down this page if you want to be kept ignorant of this information.

Here was the perfect pause in question:

Now, this was actually a spoiler for me since I haven't seen Scream 3 or Scream 4 -- and in a way, since I remember so little about Scream 2. 

At first I was annoyed, and thought that if I hadn't paused it at this exact moment, the information might have gone in one ear and out the other and I might have just been able to ignore it. They continue to talk about all these past killers, but hearing their names wouldn't have been something I would have remembered on a potential future viewing of Scream 3 or Scream 4. The faces are the things that stick with me, especially if you recognize them. (Hello, Scott Foley -- it's been a while.)

But then I thought: Given how over this series I am, what are the chances I am going to go back and watch Scream 3 or 4 -- ever?

Yeah, we know my stated goal is to watch every movie that's ever been made. But just between you and me, I doubt that's ever actually going to happen. 

Baz Jazz Hands: Moulin Rouge!

This is the third in my 2023 bi-monthly series revisiting the six feature films of Baz Luhrmann.

Moulin Rouge! (question mark optional) has been my uncontested favorite Baz Luhrmann film ever since I first saw it. That may not be saying as much as it seems like it's saying, though, because the only other Luhrmann film I'd see at the time was Romeo + Juliet, and none of the four I've seen since then -- including the one that was released before either of those films -- have been quite good enough to surpass it.

However, on this viewing, which is at least my third but probably my fourth, I am likely to be more critical of it than I have been on any previous occasion.

Does any film you've ever seen go on and on about love as much as this one does?

I have no doubt the intention is 100% earnest on Luhrmann's part -- nothing he does strikes me as cynical, and it's obvious in the way he makes movies that he's a romantic. But my my. A person could make a good drinking game out of every time the word "love" is uttered in Moulin Rouge (no question mark this time) and would be pretty toasted by the end of the 128 minutes.

The fact that it is 128 minutes, and yet I don't feel like very much happens in the plot, is another mild criticism I have of its tendency to go and on. I am never bored in any viewing of Moulin Rouge, but this time I noticed all the ways it could have easily been trimmed down more than I have previously.

It gets to that length because of its heavy reliance on its jukebox musical format, and I must say that I still think this format works extraordinarily well. In fact, this may be the first time I had ever seen a jukebox musical, and though some of the luster has worn off that form, it felt fresh and invigorating that first time.

My favorite moment/scene in the whole film is when you first hear Ewan McGregor break into Elton John's "Your Song," belting the familiar phrase "My gift is my song!" at the heavens and taking us aback. (And watch out, the heavens might answer back, since Placido Domingo plays the moon.) McGregor's variations on this song -- the emphasis he places, the notes that are changed -- left me romantically dumbstruck when I first saw this film, and still does today.

And in many movies, the "Your Song" bit would have been enough. But after a pause, McGregor's Christian follows Nicole Kidman's Satine onto the roof of the elephant she lives in (great set), and they continue romancing each other with popular music. In fact, he's got his little run of familiar lyrics, all of which feature the word "love" -- you know, "all you need is love," "love lift us up where we belong," etc. 

And then, after a while more of this, they do a duet of "Heroes" by David Bowie. The arrangement is great, and there's a delirious sense of the ecstasy of the filmmaking as the camera swirls around them and colors burst behind them, only they don't notice because they're lost in each other's eyes.

Taken individually, it's all good -- maybe I could do without the cutesy run of familiar lyrics by McGregor -- but by the time I got to the end of it, I realized we'd been at this for 15 minutes, when it could have easily been accomplished in five. And to gild the lily even more, "Your Song" enters Christian's narration after the sequence finally ends. When he's back at his typewriter, he gushes "How wonderful life was, now that Satine was in the world." 

Mercy, Baz. Mercy.

Don't get me wrong. The movie still gives me chills and speaks to every little bit of the romantic in me, not to mention the former stage actor in me, not to mention the guy who loves to see somebody really commit, not to mention the cinephile who loves to be bowled over by a spectacle. All this still really works in Moulin Rouge.

But I'm still thinking ... maybe it works better at an hour 40?

I suppose if shaving off 25 minutes would have made us any less invested in the Christian-Satine romance, it wouldn't be worth doing. Perhaps you need that slightly indulgent sequence between their two rooms to really live with the idea of these two falling head over heels for each other. Convincing us that two characters are in love is no small task for a film to try to accomplish, and Moulin Rouge does it better than most. So I guess I wouldn't trade it under any circumstances ... but I won't lie and tell you it didn't bother me just a little bit this time through.

Maybe I'm not the romantic I was in 2001. I've seen Moulin Rouge in approximately ten-year intervals, at obviously different stages in my life. (I also think there was a repeat viewing between 2001 and when I started keeping track of repeat watches in 2006, and even think it was at my friend Justin's house on a visit to Maine. But because I have no written record of it I cannot be entirely sure.)

The first time I saw it, I was heartsick after a relationship I was very hopeful about had ended. (It was a short relationship, but that didn't mean I wasn't hopeful about it.) So I think although I found it beautiful that first time, I also found it a little hard to take -- a little too painful at that time. If I did see it a few years later, by then I think I was in a more promising, longer-term happy relationship, so maybe by then I could finally fully embrace it.

In 2011, it was the first year of my older son's life, so my heart was very full at that time. And the movie found quite a nice home there.

In 2023, I am happy and content, but perhaps being on the verge of turning 50 means that some of the emotions of my youth have dulled a bit. Enough, maybe, to roll my eyes a bit at the number of times the word "love" is used in a film, without a hint of irony.

But again, I say all this still feeling a rush of splendor over the sense of place Luhrmann establishes in that Paris of 1899, in that bohemian quarter of Montmartre where artists pursued earnest ideals and yes, love could blossom under the intoxication of it all. The movie is a master class on production design and setting the scene. If I had to choose a theme for a casino in Las Vegas, I might just choose Moulin Rouge. I don't say that, of course, to undermine or belittle it. If you haven't been to Vegas, I'll just say that you can dream yourself away into a casino that has been designed according to a great theme with all the details gotten just right. The snapshot of this Paris that Luhrmann gave us has that sort of potential. 

Okay, in August I will move on to Australia, which I have not seen since I moved to Australia. We'll see if I think more or less of the movie as a result.

RSVP'ing for an advanced screening you are not attending

This week I RSVP'd for two of my writers on ReelGood to attend a July 3rd advanced screening of (inhale) Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning - Part 1. 

I noticed there were two options for the sort of RSVP you could give:

1) I would like to attend

2) I cannot attend

Who bothers to click on an RSVP button in an email to open up a new responding mechanism with several screens to click through just to tell the PR department for a studio that you won't be there?

Then I wondered:

Shit, should I be politely declining all the invitations I get, just to stay in their good graces?

Seems unnecessary and certainly unlikely. However, the PR industry operates on unofficial rules of protocol, unwritten traditions that allow everyone's ego to be properly finessed and palm to be properly greased. For example, you can't attend a screening and then not write a review. Or rather, you can, but expect those invitations to dry up pretty quickly, as well as possibly a nastygram from the publicist.

I don't think I'm receiving fewer invites than I normally would just because I haven't been saying "thanks but no thanks," but you never know.

Anyway, I'm not going to start now. 

Each new movie is better than the one before

When you don't start out with a really solid contender early on in the viewing year -- at least a likely candidate for your eventual top ten -- you'll find that your favorite movie of the year keeps changing, at a sort of comical rate that calls into question the honor bestowed on each of the previous temporary holders of the #1 spot.

Without a Turning Red (my eventual #3 of 2022) or an Everything Everywhere All at Once (my eventual #4 of 2022) there to stabilize the early rankings, things end up kind of like they have so far this year.

My longest reigning #1 of 2023, as you would know from this post, was Shotgun Wedding, which was my #1 from when I saw it on the 2nd of February until April 1st, a reign of 58 days. 

The very same night I posted that, though, I saw M3GAN, which easily supplanted it. M3GAN held on to the top slot for exactly 11 days.

That's when I saw The Magician's Elephant on vacation in Vietnam, and though at the time I liked it more than M3GAN, I'm suspecting they will ultimately swap relative positions by year's end. M3GAN has stuck with me, The Magician's Elephant hasn't -- though of course I do still think it's quite good.

The Magician's Elephant had a bit longer to get used to its throne, wearing the crown from April 12th to May 20th, a span of 38 days. That's when I saw Ben Affleck's Air, and really enjoyed it, easily naming it my new favorite of a so-far fairly disappointing year.

Air barely had time to blink in the top spot, though, because I was taken aback by the German language World War II western Blood & Gold on Netflix, which I saw just nine days later. This was also the first film of 2023 that I gave 4.5 stars on Letterboxd, and considering that it took until May 29th to do it, that's very long by my standards. 

Now finally we have the latest occupant of the penthouse, BlackBerry, which I saw Thursday night -- drawing the curtain on Blood & Gold's 17-day reign.

It occurred to me that something additionally interesting/significant is that since M3GAN first dethroned Shotgun Wedding, I have not see a film that was better than Shotgun Wedding but worse than whatever the current #1 was. So it's either the best I've seen, or middling. So that means my current rankings are:

1. BlackBerry
2. Blood & Gold
3. Air
4. The Magician's Elephant
5. M3GAN
6. Shotgun Wedding

I don't expect this to continue and it certainly can't continue forever, but it's an interesting pattern that has two-and-a-half months of history in its favor. 

So just what was so good about BlackBerry, the second film this year to dramatize the technical and legal challenges involved in a new techie obsession?

Well for starters, it's what the first film, AppleTV's Tetris, should have been. Have a look here if you want to get into the weeds of why I think that film is ultimately a failure, However, if you'd like the simplified version, I'll say that Tetris got the era and its associated nostalgia right, but it completely lost us with a serpentine plot that involved as many reversals as five episodes of Silicon Valley but without our ability to grasp the stakes of those reversals from moment to moment.

BlackBerry, which charts the rise and fall of the first phone where you could send email, effortlessly explains what's going on from moment to moment, focusing on only a small handful of characters and a small handful of narrative developments at a time. It's amazing how much easier it is to appreciate era-specific nostalgia if you are oriented within the plot. 

Matt Johnson may quickly be becoming one of my favorite unheralded directors. If you don't recognize the name, he's also an actor in his films The Dirties and Operation Avalanche. I liked both of those movies waaaay more than I ever guessed I would, slapping 4.5 stars on the former and four on the latter. BlackBerry gets him back up into the 4.5-star range, and it might have been higher if Johnson had sustained the crack-me-up humor from the film's first 45 minutes. The story wouldn't have allowed it, and that's not the film's fault, but let's just say that in this cinematic desert where we're parched for good comedy, this film's first half delivered like few films have for me in recent years.

Johnson's got a DIY style that kind of looks like he's trying to make a mockumentary, and if memory serves, both of the previous films are technically in that genre. This isn't meant to be a mockumentary but it maintains the same half-grainy look of something being done on the cheap. If you think that's an insult, think again. Johnson's style actually requires a high degree of veracity from his actors to match its apparent authenticity, and Johnson's cast complies.

This is the first film where Johnson has worked with actors you actually recognize, who include Jay Baruchel, Saul Rubinek, Cary Elwes and Michael Ironside. But it was another actor I didn't recognize who really blew me away: Glenn Howerton as Jim Balsillie, the co-CEO brought in by the nerds at Research in Motion to kick the ass that they couldn't kick. If I watched It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia I would know who this is, and when I see other pictures of him I do recognize him from other places I've seen him. Playing bald in this film, though, made the actor totally disappear into the role, and his performance as a shark who gets results was by far the film's most memorable and interesting character.

I should not say "by far" because Baruchel and Johnson are both great and both key to much of the film's opening humor. Baruchel, reminding me a bit of Justin Long here, has some great line deliveries as Mike Lazaridis, the genius programmer who invented the BlackBerry and formed the company with his best friend Doug Fremin (Johnson). Aa man whose confidence is no match for his intellect, he's Jim Balsillie's spiritual opposite -- and eventually someone corrupted by his proximity to his fellow co-CEO. Johnson, meanwhile, wears a variety of different t-shirts celebrating nerd culture throughout, the one who doesn't want to lose his personality and will fight to keep things as they were, while also to grow the company according to their principles -- but is also the most disposable of the three in terms of the company's future trajectory, which becomes a sticking point.

Speaking of nerd culture, there's some great shout-outs here. The room full of genius programmers at Research in Motion -- who will remind you of similar groups of guys in movies like The Social Network -- have a movie night ritual, and we see them all quoting the best lines from Raiders of the Lost Ark and They Live.

I probably shouldn't give you too more because I really want you to go see this. 

It's my #1 movie of the year ... at least until something better comes along.

In about 26.6 days, if the average holds. Or much sooner if we go only on recent trends.

Pride Month: Holding the Man

After last week's first weekly movie for Pride Month was chosen at random by scrolling through three different streaming services, I came up with a framework for these eventual four viewings.

Since that was a movie addressing queer issues from history, and specifically male homosexuality, I decided I'd continue with a modern film featuring primarily gay men, then watch a modern film featuring primarily gay women, and finish with a movie about historical lesbians -- even if that history is fictitious in nature. And part of that structure was dictated by the fact that I already have my eye on a fourth film in the series that will fit into that slot nicely.

Now, I'm aware this does mean that I am basically not considering movies about trans people. That's only an accidental exclusion based on deciding on this system that otherwise equitably distributes the content between men and women, today and yesterday. Then again, there are fewer such movies, especially fewer movies that treat that subject with any sensitivity -- and since those movies would tend to be more recent, there's a good chance I've already seen them if they've reached any level of prominence.

You could argue that the 2015 Australian film Holding the Man is also a bit of history in that it takes place between the 1970s and 1990s. But I think the distinction I'm really making is between films where you really couldn't even talk about being gay in public, and films where at least homosexuality wouldn't get you thrown in prison, like it did for Oscar Wilde. I'm not going to suggest that being gay has ever been easy, even today when it has been allowed entrance into mainstream popular culture and governance of basic human rights.

I also didn't realize until I started watching Holding the Man that it was an AIDS movie, and it certainly seems relevant to have one of those in the four I'm watching this month.

The film was on my radar because it made waves, to the extent that Australian movies make waves, when it was released back in 2015. I remembered it was very fondly received, but once I'd missed it on its initial run, I never found the right circumstance to catch up with it later. I'm by no means an Australian movie completist, and my year-long series viewing Australian films was a year before that in 2014.

The film stars Ryan Corr as Timothy Conigrave (who goes by Tim), the author of a play and memoir about this relationship with John Caleo (Craig Stott). I'm becoming increasingly familiar with Corr's work as he's appeared in two Australian films I've seen in the past year, Russell Crowe's The Water Diviner and Stephen Johnson's High Ground. He's a charismatic leading man, and his Tim is more the stereotype, to the extent that stereotypes had been established back in 1976 when the story starts. He acts and he's known for being gregarious and flamboyant, though Corr really underplays the flamboyance and you're almost surprised when characters accuse him of being effeminate. Stott's John is the "surprise" in terms of the expectations, as he's more quiet and also a football player. (Australian Rules Football, of course.) Footy, as it's called, is primarily popular in Victoria, and indeed, that's where this film is set. I won't say I recognized any locations, but a lot of place names were very familiar.

The story follows the two over the course of the next 15 years from when they meet and fall in love as high school students, both ostracized by their families initially. There's some improvement in that regard over the years, but in some cases it's more a defeated resignation than an actual embrace of their brother/son and his lifestyle. The film jumps around in time just a little bit, kind of shuffling the deck in time periods, but in a logical way that progresses what we know about the characters and what befalls them, not anything experimental in nature. We witness the pre-AIDS free love period and its unfortunate consequences, and overall, their extreme general devotion to each other, despite the occasional failures to live up to that devotion.

I won't say who gets AIDS, but in any AIDS movie, you know it's not likely to end well. And those scenes are pretty devastating in the commitment to documenting the physical consequences of the disease.

I was really surprised by the amount of support from known names in very small roles. Each man has a father played by an Australian acting icon, Anthony LaPaglia in one case and Guy Pearce in the other. They do ultimately each accumulate maybe ten minutes of screen time, but that's still pretty small in a 128-minute movie. It occurs to me that this is a fairly common practice among Australian actors, to support smaller projects even though they could theoretically have competing offers with more prominent roles from Hollywood. (At least in Pearce's case that could be true, probably not so much LaPaglia.) I can't see someone like Russell Crowe doing this -- he'd make it all about him -- nor someone like Chris Hemsworth, though not for reasons of egotism in his case probably. I can see Hemsworth doing it later in his career.

Then there's also Sarah Snook, who has taken off in the years since (Succession) but was still probably relatively unknown at this point. Finally you have a scene of Geoffrey Rush as a homophobic acting coach, which I was surprised not to see featured in the initial burst of closing credits but rather waiting until the full cast was listed. I know Rush has become problematic/cancelled in recent years (I'm not going to look up the particulars right now) so maybe people were already well aware of it by that point.

Overall this is just a very well made movie about life and love in the AIDS era, never didactic or on the nose in any of the issues it discusses, and always guided by strong performances. I might have given it even more than four stars on Letterboxd except that in the end it ultimately hews to fairly standard presentation and a fairly (sadly) familiar story. It's quite good but maybe just shy of exceptional.

Okay, next week we move on to the first of two lesbian stories, though this third movie is the only one I have not yet identified. 

I finally saw: Last Flag Flying

Whoa! Two days in a row!

Like Sharknado, which I wrote about yesterday, this was also one of the three films I watched on Friday when I was sick. The other one, the Kevin Hart vehicle Die Hart, I will not write about -- and not because I liked it so much that I just couldn't think of anything to say about it. (Plus, I can't have "finally seen" it because it only came out this year.)

The reasons the 2017 film Last Flag Flying qualifies as an "I finally saw" are:

1) I think of myself as a Richard Linklater completist, or at least a late-career Linklater completist. I still haven't managed to get myself in front of The Newton Boys, The Bad News Bears or Me and Orson Welles, but I'd seen everything since 2008 -- everything except this. Yes, even Where'd You Go, Bernadette.

2) It has a personal connection for me that goes back to college.

You probably heard, since it seemed to be pretty talked about to the extent that this film was talked about at all, but Last Flag Flying was envisioned as a "spiritual sequel" to the 1973 Hal Ashby film The Last Detail. Actually, I suppose it was called an "unofficial sequel," because the book it was based on, written by co-screenwriter Darryl Ponsican, was a sequel to the book Ashby adapted for his film. Except, the characters don't have quite the same names. One character who was called Larry Meadows is now called Larry Shepherd, a second character once called Richard Mulhall is now Richard Mueller, and then the third character has a new name entirely: Sal Nealon instead of Billy Buddusky. The reason for these seemingly unimportant yet slightly confusing changes may be known to someone, but not to me.

Those characters were played by Randy Quaid and Steve Carell, Otis Young and Laurence Fishburne, and Jack Nicholson and Bryan Cranston, respectively. Their races, their fundamental personality types and the dynamic between them are all intact between the two movies, so the slight name changes just cause us to scratch our heads more than anything else.

The personal significance of The Last Detail is not that it was made in the year I was born, but thanks for reminding me I'm turning 50 in four months. 

No, the significance of The Last Detail to me personally is that I saw it in college, shown in a lecture hall as an evening activity that tried to prevent students from going out and getting plastered. We did go out and get plastered much of the time, but on this occasion, two friends and I saw the Ashby movie.

And because we'd been a trio of guys going to see it -- a trio who lived together our sophomore year, though I think this was freshman year -- we ended up mapping our personalities on to the characters in the film as a bit of a joke that stayed with us throughout our four years, mentioned only infrequently but still good for a laugh amongst us. 

It was obvious Bryan was the Nicholson character, a guy with attitude and chutzpah and good at charming the ladies. (I can't actually remember if that character charmed the ladies because I haven't seen The Last Detail since then, but Nicholson certainly had that reputation in general.) The character who became Sal Nealon is not particularly successful with the ladies in Last Flag Flying, but this is 30 years later and he's not the young buck he once was. But Bryan did have a bit of a physical resemblance to Nicholson, less so to Cranston, though they do share the same first name.

Nico was Mulhall/Mueller, who in both cases was nicknamed Mule. Nico was white just like Bryan and me -- still is -- but there was something about his personality that made him seem like a good match for Mule. There may have been an actual reason -- was Nico dating a Black girl or something? -- or it may have just been that I was such an obvious match for the other character that Mule was the one left over for him. 

Yep, I was the obvious match for the Randy Quaid character, the virgin, who loses his virginity to a prostitute in the movie, and has a comically premature ejaculation. 

I'm not going to comment on any of the other similarities -- though it's probably worth clarifying that I did not lose my virginity to a prostitute. However, the reality is, I looked almost exactly like Randy Quaid looked in this film.

I'm not going to put up a picture of myself either from the time or now, but if you want to know what I looked like in 1992, which is probably when this viewing occurred, here is a pretty good idea:

I'm the one on the left.

In the movie, Mule and Billy -- whose own nickname is Badass, which Bryan loved -- are escorting Larry from Norfolk, Virginia to the military prison in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. (Did I mention these guys were military?) It seems that Larry was court-martialed and sentenced to eight years in military prison for stealing $40 from a charitable fund. I guess 50 years ago, $40 would be more like $250 today. So yes, a capital crime indeed.

(Incidentally, Portsmouth was another personal connection for me, since I worked in the summers on an island off Portsmouth, and Portsmouth was where we spent our one day off per week.)

Since I have zero instances of theft on my record, the similarities between me and Larry Meadows ended at that point. But to my credit, I willingly accepted the Larry assignation. By 19 perhaps I had already lost any of my illusions that I could ever be Jack Nicholson.

So in the six years since Last Flag Flying was released, curiosity alone should have gotten me in the door even if Richard Linklater hadn't. But I'd heard this was a quizzical choice by Linklater to say the least, and perhaps by the time I'd seen Bernadette in 2019, it felt unwise to go back and dig up other quizzical Linklater choices.

Well, I really liked this movie.

For starters, the actors are great. Cranston isn't Nicholson but he really captures the guy's rough and rascally edges. He puts all his skills and technique into this one, and instead of that looking like a lot of work, it looks effortless. Fishburne's character undergoes the most changes of any of the three, as he's now a pastor instead of a rascal like his cohort, but he indulges in some moments that remind us of the old Mule, artfully dropping the word "motherfucker" when the occasion calls for it.

Carell also captures the mousy quintessence of Larry. I don't think of myself at all like Steve Carell, but he's definitely got the spirit of that virgin thief down pat. But he's also a figure of great tragedy in terms of the particulars of this story -- fresh off the death of his wife, he's also just lost his son in Iraq, and it's their transport of the body that makes up this film's eastern seaboard road trip. Carell probably has the least acting to do of any of the three, but his internalized quality really serves the material well and becomes emotionally potent.

But then I also really just liked Linklater's dialogue. I think Linklater's writing is sometimes accused of trying too hard, the way people accuse Kevin Smith of trying too hard. But I really think they both can be natural and sharp when they want to be, replicating the way people really talk more often than they are given credit for. The script is also clever about the era in which it is supposed to take place, 2003, as the characters each buy cell phones for the first time, and try to make sense of Eminem on the radio. 

And the story just worked for me. A road trip is always a sturdy armature for a script, and when you combine it with the reunion of a motley crew of friends, that armature only strengthens. However, this movie wouldn't be what it is without an undercurrent of deep melancholy, not only in terms of the tragedies that have befallen Larry, but in terms of the changes in personality and -- in a way, yes -- the tragedies that have befallen the others as they've aged. 

As it was for those characters, encountering each other again for the first time in three decades since their first adventures, it's just more than 30 years since I watched that movie with my own two cohorts back in college. I saw them both at Nico's wedding in I want to say 1998, and then I saw Nico again sometime in the early 2000s in Los Angeles. I haven't seen Bryan in those 25 years since 1998 and I haven't been in touch with either of them in nearly that long.

Last Flag Flying made me think how nice it would be to meet up with both of them on a road trip, and make sense of where our lives have taken us.