The year of "remember when they made that?" movies

Nostalgia has been coming on strong in 2023, and I'm not just talking about movies like Barbie, The Super Mario Brothers Movie, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny and all the other revivals of familiar IP.

This is also a year where we can't get enough of -- or at the very least, they can't make enough of -- movies that look at a product or cultural craze of the past and how it came to be. 

I've just seen the fourth such movie of its kind last night.

The Beanie Bubble is just the latest to drop this particular template on us, the first to be about an actual toy. The others have been about:

- A basketball shoe (Air)

- A phone that can send emails (BlackBerry)

- A highly addictive video game (Tetris).

I'd be inclined to say the returns are diminishing, except that the first of these I saw was the one I liked the least (Tetris). Air and BlackBerry are currently in my top ten for the year, and The Beanie Bubble now lands somewhere in between.

I suppose Barbie is even a variation on this sort of movie, given that it does include an albeit highly fantastical version of Mattel, the company that makes the world's most famous doll.

(Speaking of famous dolls, I think we should now expect a movie on the Cabbage Patch Kid craze, and possibly Furbees.)

We should probably be getting sicker of this trend than we actually are, which points up how generally durable it is. We have an apparently inexhaustible appetite to have the cultural fascinations of our earlier years projected back to us on screen, beyond the obvious ways the movies have always done this with their constant sequels and remakes. We at least profess to be interested in how the thing we love came to be.

This trend is, of course, not new this year. Without doing an exhaustive survey of past examples, movies like The Social Network, the various Steve Jobs movies and even something like the McDonald's origin story The Founder have all been previous successful examples. They all center on something we know and love, while creating the opportunity for a Goodfellas-style narrator to talk about how they were making money hand over fist and it was going to their heads, and giving a screenwriter leeway to imagine juicy conversations that took place behind closed doors.

But however popular this form may have always been, it's coming on like gangbusters in 2023. And we're only 60 percent of the way through the year, so there could be more. (Movie titles creep up on me a lot more these days than they used to. So if there's a movie about the Easy Bake Oven later this year, I won't be surprised.) 

As for The Beanie Bubble in particular ... I did like it reasonably well (3.5 stars), but template fatigue may have begun setting in a bit. Also it seems like the film could have been 25% more unhinged, given the opening statement that "There are parts of the truth you just can't make up. The rest, we did." I wanted a little more of this movie to beggar belief like that text promised it would.

That said, I am really glad to see Kristin Gore -- Al's daughter and a former Futurama writer -- make good with both her first screenwriting credit since the disastrous David O. Russell film Accidental Love in 2015 (shared with Zac Bissonnette), and her first directing credit overall (shared with Damian Kulash). (That she had to share both with a man is a funny reality for a film about a soured partnership between the characters played by Zach Galifianakis and Elizabeth Banks.) Gore comes back admirably from a flop for which she presumably bears only a small percentage of the responsibility. 

Barbie babies and Oversold Barbie

I got out to see Barbie yesterday, totally unexpectedly.

My son's basketball team, which I coach, had a bye yesterday, so I trained into the city to watch a friend play baseball. I used to play baseball myself, you might recall, but I took this season off because of the conflict with coaching. It worked out well as we were also scheduled to be in North Melbourne, where I lived for my first eight years in Australia and where the baseball field is, for a friend's birthday dinner that night. I met the rest of my family there later.

I was expecting to watch my friend play and drink beers with him during the second game, but he got hit in the batting helmet with a pitch and actually took himself out of the first game early. That meant we could catch up for the rest of that game, and by the time it was over he was already cancelling his plans for that night. He was fine, just had his bell rung a bit, but I suddenly had more time between the baseball and the dinner than I originally anticipated.

Hello, Barbie.

I got myself over to Cinema Nova in Carlton and experienced a similar onslaught of Barbie fandom as I'd seen Thursday night at the Sun in Yarraville. Lots of pink outfits, lots of tickets sold. Instead of an oversized Barbie toy box to take pictures with, there was a big Barbie cake downstairs, decked out in layers of pink, in the window of the patisserie adjacent to the escalator you grab to get to the cinema.

In fact, there were so many tickets being sold that I actually bought the very last one for the 3:45 show.

This gave me pause for a moment. Do I really want to watch the movie from the worst seat in the house, likely the end of the front row on the side?

But that moment quickly ended when the woman told me they were assigned seats and this one was actually in the back row, on the aisle no less. "You got really lucky with this ticket," she said. Yeah, you know a movie is a phenomenon when the scarcity of tickets and the frequency of turning disappointed people away is an active reality for the cinema workers.

It was a relatively small cinema -- 75 seats, maybe? -- so indeed my seat was going to have a plenty good view. I did have to let people in and out a dozen times in the commotion before the start of the show. I guess I tend to forget what it's like being in a packed theater, where this person always has to leave to get food, or that person has to return from going to the bathroom, or the other person has to leave to talk to people two rows in front of them. Yes, it appeared that parties were separated by the scarcity of assigned seats near one another, and had untold amounts of checking in with each other they had to perform.

When the movie started, though, I was wondering how lucky I really was to have scored this particular seat after all. 

The first thing I heard as the first images came on screen were the cries of a baby. "Not where I thought they would go with this material," I thought. Then I realized that this was not part of the movie, but a baby in our auditorium.

A woman quickly walked into the aisle with a maybe four-month-old in her Baby Bjorn, up the steps and out of the theater. I rolled my eyes a bit at this, but at least she had the sense to leave entirely. Too bad she couldn't get more than ten seconds into the movie before she had to leave, but I guess that was her problem.

Then moments later, a man followed -- also wearing a Baby Bjorn and trying to shush a baby of the same age. The twin of the other, I imagined.

Only he didn't leave the auditorium. He bounced his child pretty much right next to my seat.

And then, perhaps emboldened by her partner's unwillingness to miss any of the movie while their child fussed, the woman came back in, so they were both bouncing and lightly shushing.

This story may sound like it has a horror show ending, but it doesn't. Like a miracle, both babies quieted down in less than a minute and were not heard from again. The parents returned to their seats and, presumably, enjoyed the rest of the movie undisturbed.

It was risky, but I suppose by four months, they needed to get out of the house, and this probably aligned with the kids' normal nap time.

The disturbances next to my seat were not over, though.

A man then came in with an usher, trying to locate the elusive last seat in the house that he'd paid for. They spent a few minutes talking quietly and pointing and gesturing to a spot that looked to be in the second row or thereabouts. 

But the man didn't move toward that seat. Instead, he continued standing next to my seat after the usher left.

Having someone stand over me, hovering as it were, is potentially even more of a distraction than a crying baby, especially for a person like me. (I hate to be seated while someone is standing over me, unresolved, and I attribute it to the fact that I am tall, so I don't like others to be over me. Look I'm not saying I'm proud of it.)

This story also has a happy ending. The usher returned with a chair, and the man sat down and watched the movie from this chair. As with the babies who were no longer bothering me, I quickly forgot about him too as I got engrossed in the movie.

So I don't know if the movie was actually oversold, or if they just determined the degree of difficulty in getting to the seat after the movie had started was too high. But considering that there were only 75 seats in the theater, it seems like he could have at least made the effort to get to the proper seat, if he'd paid money for it and if there weren't somebody already sitting in it.

In a way, since there were also two babies, you could say Barbie was oversold by three.

It occurs to me before you started reading, you may have though the word "oversold" in the title of this piece meant that its merits as a movie had been overstated. Well I'm glad to tell you that's not the case. 

I won't say I loved it, but I really liked it. I might have only laughed at 60 percent of the spots most of the crowd laughed at, but they were good laughs. And occasionally my own chuckle burst out of the silence at something no one else seemed to think was funny. Usually something Ryan Gosling was doing.

So obviously this won't be a discussion of the film in any substantive way, but I can say that I probably slightly prefer Barbie to Oppenheimer. They're both getting four stars from me on Letterboxd, though, which is quite a good outcome indeed of this hyped release date battle.

Barbie wins

The Most Hyped Release Date in Movie History arrived yesterday in Australia, and I was indeed out at the movies.

The Sun Theatre in Yarraville was prepared for the dual releases of Barbie and Oppenheimer, the hype around which -- each movie separately and the two as box office opponents -- I have somehow managed not to discuss thus far on my blog.

Perhaps a little more prepared for one than the other, as we shall see.

To end the suspense, Oppenheimer was the movie I saw. That's why I chose this poster. It was my first time out at the movies since I saw Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, an unthinkable three-week drought, only one of which can be explained by being out of town on my ski trip. 

I might have preferred to watch Barbie -- any time you have to sit down for a three-hour movie, it feels like a chore -- but I already have writers assigned to review that movie. Since I had some vague notion I might get the review up for Oppenheimer on Friday before the weekend, which is technically still possible despite the fact that I haven't yet started writing it, I opted for Christopher Nolan's three-hour opus, which would start at 8:50 and get me home sometime after 12:30. (Leaving no realistic chance to start writing the review last night, and making the whole decision-making process questionable at best.)

The real way to go would have been to go to a double feature, but since I was going out to dinner with my wife, there was no way that was happening.

I won't be able to go too many more days without seeing Barbie, so will probably try to go by Tuesday at the latest.

Especially after seeing how the Sun prepared itself for her arrival.

This is what I saw first when arriving at the cinema, and the small print will prompt me to explain it if i you can't read it:

On one side of the marquee it reads "HI BARBIES!" and on the other side it reads "HI KENS!" For the record, this is the first time I have ever been to the Sun when anything other than the names of the movies playing appeared on that marquee. Or I should say, maybe some other message appeared -- but the names of the movies also appeared.

My ability to snap this photo was short-lived, since almost immediately afterward they started changing it to this:

Same message still there, but now pushed entirely to the left, with OPPENHEIMER 70 MM now appearing on the right. As though someone in theater management had remember their journalistic oath not to show preferential treatment to one of the two political parties.

At first I wondered if it was a clever staggering of the marquee message based on the start times of certain films. But I had to toss out that theory when I remembered that the only reason I wasn't myself attending the 70 MM version of Oppenheimer was that it started at 7:30, when I was eating Italian food with my wife back in Altona. (More on the version I did attend in a moment.)

When you got inside, though, it was all Barbie.

How about this?

Or this?

Or this?

Yes, that last is an over-sized Barbie package where you and your Ken (or your Barbie) can take a photo. I didn't have a Ken or a Barbie with me so I had to settle for a photo of this woman taken on the sly. (Besides, it would have been weird to pose in there without even going to the movie.)

I want to say Barbie was playing on about three screens -- at least three screens -- and the place seemed to be full of people gabbing about the movie, having either just gotten out of it or getting ready for it to start, clogging the hallways to keep me from passing as they rested obliviously in their state of pre- or post-viewing. At least one of the screenings was sold out, which is unheard of these days. There may have been earlier sellouts but the earlier showtimes no longer appeared on the screen.

And as you can get a sense of from this last picture, the prospective and past Barbie attendees were usually dressed up in an outfit accentuating the color pink, or at least something clearly celebratory. I didn't see any drag -- in fact I only saw one man that I was sure had just come out of the movie -- but I have to suspect that element was or would be present as well.

How did Oppenheimer counter this?

Well there were no Oppenheimer-related promotional materials except for the poster advertising its arrival that had been on the wall for months already. I guess the studio didn't sent a mushroom cloud in front of which viewers could pose. But the movie had been accorded the cinema's biggest screen to play in glorious widescreen format. I may have discussed in the past that this is one of the cinemas that set itself the task of outfitting a screen to play The Hateful Eight in 70 mm nearly ten years ago now, and I believe still shows it sometimes. I've also seen 2001 in this format here.

When I'd checked that 7:30 screening earlier in the day just to gauge what percentage it was sold, to give myself an idea whether my own screening at 8:50 was likely to sell out, most of the tickets did seem to be bought. Those people were in the middle of their movie when I arrived so they were nowhere to be seen.

But there was my own screening about to start, so where was the Oppenheimer contingent for this one?

Well, I was a full one-third of it.

That's right, although the 70 mm Oppenheimer did get the royal treatment, the other instance was put on one of the theater's smaller screens, in an auditorium with only 40 seats. They were leather couch seats, a benefit for a movie this length. But the couch cinema is almost always used for smaller, more independent releases, the ones that haven't invested a huge budget in their sound design and are expected to attract a more niche crowd. 

In this auditorium, two other solo men and I were dispersed about as far away from each other as we could be. Both of those men were over 70. In fact, I joked to myself that they were watching the movie because they were contemporaries of J. Robert Oppenheimer.

It's too early to know what the verdict will be from the U.S. box office, but all signs point to Barbie right now. That three-hour running time does tend to kill off a lot of interest, even in the latest movie from the guy who made three Batman movies.

While Barbie seems likely to win the battle (i.e. the opening weekend box office), the outcome of the war (the critical reaction) is less certain. You reading this may already know the critical response, but I haven't sampled it yet, in part because I'm about to write my own review and I don't want to be influenced.

I will say that Oppenheimer will definitely have a shot in that regard. My positive feelings for Oppenheimer, while muted in some respects, are probably more uncomplicated than for any Nolan film since The Dark Knight. To be clear, I think Inception is the better film, but my first viewing of that film did leave me wanting, and I only appreciate it more after two subsequent viewings. The third Dark Knight was fine, didn't love it. Interstellar has its problems despite some obvious strengths. I famously didn't like Dunkirk when I first saw it (and only appreciate it a little more on a second viewing), and Tenet is problematic despite strengths -- kind of like Interstellar, except Interstellar is better.

So you have to take being less of a Nolan fanboy into consideration when you receive my words of Oppenheimer praise, but yeah, this is kind of Nolan "returning to form" -- despite still being at least 30 minutes longer than it probably needed to be

I'll see if Barbie's 114 minutes hit the sweet spot in the next couple days, and surely report back.

Not the reason for Mimi Rogers' stage name, and other Gay Divorcee coincidences

I might not have watched The Gay Divorcee on Wednesday night had I known it was a Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers musical. Not that I have anything against those. Just that they tend to blend together in my mind, which isn't such a problem on random reflection, but becomes more so if I am dueling them on Flickchart. "Did such and such happen in Top Hat or was it Swing Time?" So goes this hypothetical conversation.

But I plucked the title off Kanopy because a) it's a title I'd heard, and the potential controversy of its subject matter in the early 1930s interested me, and b) while I've been rewatching old films for Audient Classics in 2023, I don't want to drop the impulse to watch old movies I've never seen.

At least The Gay Divorcee (1934) will distinguish itself from other Astaire-Rogers films by virtue of having a title that will easily remind me what it's about -- something that neither Top Hat nor Swing Time can claim.

I'm not going to go into details about the movie itself. It's interesting for being only the second pairing of the legendary hoofers, but otherwise, the movie itself is pretty much the formula we would come to know: a romantic story in which Astaire plays a likeable cad, fairly minimal in its plot structure, draped atop a number of thrilling dance sequences.

One word about the potential controversy, though. Through the lens of today, the word "gay" might be the controversial word in the title, though homosexuality was so little discussed that most people assumed the primary meaning "happy" when reading it at that time. No, it was actually "divorcee," though not, I would learn, because divorce in itself was necessarily a taboo subject. (I wrote a couple months ago how it was a primary plot element in George Cukor's The Women, released only five years later.) The book on which the film is based is called The Gay Divorce, but it was changed to Divorcee for the film because the studio thought that a divorce itself could not be gay -- though a divorcee could be. (Interestingly, this is not really an accurate descriptor of Rogers' character.) (Also, I can't imagine what kind of hay today's homosexual community has made repurposing this title.)

No, today I want to focus on coincidences, as I sometimes like to do on this blog.

The first I noted is that Rogers' character is named Mimi in The Gay Divorcee. Mimi? Rogers? Hey, there's a person named Mimi Rogers!

My first thought was that Tom Cruise's first wife -- born Miriam Ann Spickler -- had chosen her stage name based on a love of The Gay Divorcee and perhaps Ginger Rogers in particular. 

As it turns out, it's not actually a stage name. "Mimi" is short for Miriam and Spickler married a man named Jim Rogers in 1976. (So while it may have been Cruise's first marriage, it was her second.)

So after doing the research, is this really a "coincidence"?

Possibly not, though I do wonder if Mimi Rogers herself has ever made the connection.

The second one definitely is.

Earlier in the day I read a Quora article on Anna Kendrick's knees. That's right, you read that correctly.

I didn't know that's what I was reading when I started. The question was "Which actresses have unique legs?" (Hey, I don't decide what gets emailed to me from Quora, but I do read a number of them -- even the ones that make me sound like a might be a perv when I write about them later on my blog.)

Apparently, Kendrick has something called "knock knees," which I guess is a term I've heard (maybe mostly as a compound adjective, "knock-kneed"). I guess the knees turn inward so when you walk, you run the risk of the knees knocking into each other.

Lo and behold, later on the same day I watch The Gay Divorcee and there's a song in it called "Knock Knees."

Are all coincidences worth telling you about? Surely not, but I thought these were.

Audient Classics: Harakiri

This is the seventh in my 2023 monthly series rewatching pre-1973 movies that I loved but have seen only once. (What is 1973? The year I was born, of course.)

Masaki Kobasyashi's Harakiri becomes easily the movie in this series that I'd seen for the first time most recently. I watched it for Flickchart Friends Favorites Fiesta in May of 2019 -- late May at that. 

So it isn't so much dereliction of my duty to rewatch older films I love that has brought me back to Harakiri, but rather, excitement about seeing it a second time.

That's a funny comment for a film that runs two hours and 13 minutes, whose actual plot might justify a running time an hour shorter than that.

Yes, this is a samurai film with almost no sword fighting, a movie about seppuku in which the act is talked about far more than it actually occurs. (I just looked it up, and "seppuku" is essentially a synonym for "harakiri," and apparently, the only word the Japanese themselves ever use.) And boy is there a lot of talking.

Didn't matter. I was just as engrossed.

I'll give you a little bit of the setup.

The film has a flashback structure that is kicked off when the inciting incident recalls a similar incident within the past year, which is then also recounted in detail. A samurai named Tsugumo Hanshiro (Tatsuya Nakadi) arrives in the forecourt of the estate of the Iyi Clan, asking to engage in the ritual of harakiri on the grounds of the estate as a means of further ennobling the act of the samurai taking his own life. It's 1630 and a period of general peace in Japan has resulted in many samurai being out of work and starving. Instead of reducing themselves to pathetic societal leeches, these samurai profess a desire to end their own lives. The man is received with a certain suspicion, since the circumstance of him approaching the estate recall those of another man earlier in the year, Chijiwa Motome (Akira Ishihama). This samurai also asked to end his life on the Iyi grounds.

Unfortunately, Motome had the misfortune of arriving at the tail end of an epidemic of starving samurai showing up on the grounds of local clans and requesting to commit harakiri. One clan had, to their regret, offered work to one such samurai when he came asking to kill himself, which led any number of other samurai to their doorstep -- samurai who didn't actually intend to kill themselves, but were looking to be turned away in exchange for a small amount of money, which the estate would gladly give in order not to deal with the logistics of hosting this ritual and disposing of the body afterwards. 

So they call Motome's bluff, and it does indeed appear they were correct to do so. However, Motome may not have exactly the motivations they think he has. Nonetheless, they are convinced he must go ahead with the harakiri -- to send a message to other prospective beggars -- and threaten to strike him down themselves if he tries to renege.

I don't think I should give you any more of the story, but let's just say there are plenty of unseen twists and turns to this tale -- none of which qualify as big revelations, exactly, which could just be because Kobayashi's mode is so restrained. The script is incredibly clever, and also insightful about human nature, about our tendency to teach lessons to people who try to trick us -- possibly involving assumptions about them that turn out to be incorrect.

When I saw this in 2019, I was truly blown away. It's inevitable that I was not quite as enamored with it the second time. Some of that had to do with my state of exhaustion at the time I watched it. Things are going to get busy for me in a few weeks so I wanted to get this viewing in before too much more of July elapsed, leading me to choose this particular Tuesday night. I may have still had some lingering fatigue from a bad night of sleep on Sunday night, though, or maybe the heat was just on too high in my living room. (That's a thing now that we've had our split system installed earlier this year.) In any case, I didn't get through the running time without stopping for about three short naps that each lasted less than 15 minutes.

But there's no doubt that this is a truly exceptional example of the samurai film, and I reckon far more memorable than one that tries to endure in our affections on the basis of fight choreography and other action. There is action in this film, eventually, and our wait for it, in which we are simply spellbound by the words of the characters and how they dramatize the characters' world view, makes its ultimate arrival all the more rewarding.

If I am drawing comparisons to the work of other Japanese masters, I'd say there's a part of this that reminds me of Kurosawa's Rashomon, given the flashback structure and how it relies on characters' interpretations of events based on the incomplete understanding inherent in their limited perspectives.

As for anything else you might care to know about it, well, just see the movie.

See you in August for the next installment of Audient Classics. 

Low energy

I can't profess to be an expert on Kenya Barris. I probably should be, considering that I have a friend who wrote for the show he created, Black-ish, for many years. That show has existed entirely since I moved to Australia and lost my connection to network television, so I haven't seen a single episode.

But I've consumed some Barris in recent years, and I'm starting to get an idea of his style. Which can be described thus:

Low energy.

That describes the remake of White Men Can't Jump, which he wrote and produced, to a T.

What do I mean by low energy?

Characters have no distinctive facial expressions. They talk out of the sides of their mouths. Even the extremities of emotion result in no real change in their outward appearance. Any comedic bit is played at the lowest possible wattage, such that you're not even sure it's a comedic bit.

Only with the benefit of having seen White Men Can't Jump do I realize this is kind of what I was getting at in my review of You People, which he wrote and directed (and produced) earlier this year. Here is what I wrote about that film's uneasy relationship with laughs:

And so the result is that there are not a lot of laughs, a problematic outcome when the movie is structured as a series of outrageous set pieces in a standard comedy format. As you’re watching, you can tell the scene calls for a laugh, if you are at all a student of how these films are written. The punchline, though, is usually a cringe rather than a laugh, and sometimes these seem exaggerated beyond what might really happen. And while cringeing is valuable, especially since it forces you to confront the true irreconcilable differences being explored here, you sometimes get the impression the filmmakers wanted the laugh but couldn’t deliver.

Prompting cringes is, of course, different than low/no energy. There's quite a bit of cringey racial humor in White Men Can't Jump, too. But I think it all goes into this vaguely contemptuous mode that Barris brings to the screen, where characters are "low key" disdainful of each other (I hate the phrase "low key" but it applies here), which manifests itself in a flatness in which minimum effort is required or displayed.

What I am now realizing is Barris' style, an intentional choice, first registered to me as a total lack of charisma by Jump stars Jack Harlow and Sinqua Walls. I have no experience with Harlow, but seeing that he is a rapper made me roll my eyes a bit. Just because you can rap doesn't mean you can act, especially if you are a white rapper, I would argue. 

With Walls, though, I know he can act. He was my favorite part of the admirable but ultimately unsuccessful horror film Nanny from last year, where his personality, playing a doorman at the building where the title character works, shined through easily. In Jump, Walls seems almost challenged by the material, so limited is the range of his emoting -- which I now attribute to choices by Barris and director Calmatic.

I might not have this impression of Barris had it not been for my primary example of seeing him on screen as an actor. That was in his 2020 Netflix show BlackAF#, a lightly fictionalized version of Barris' own life in which Rashida Jones plays his wife and there are about four or five kids in the family. The limited range to his performance style may be an indication of the fact that he is not, first and foremost, an actor. However, it also seems to be an extension of this philosophy of not giving another person, especially another person who can be described as a fool you have to suffer, any bit more of your personal energy than absolutely necessary. The result was a weird disconnect in the narrative payoffs of that show, whose 35-minute running time for episodes was also a violation of normal situation comedy rules. In the end part of each episode where Barris, playing in many ways the typical sitcom dad, is supposed to be on the receiving end of a mild comeuppance, he instead proved himself the smarter -- or on the receiving end of such a mild comeuppance that it could barely be recognized as such.

We of course have to pause here to discuss the elephant in the room, which You People spends its entire running time discussing: race. There is every chance that Barris has made a choice to limit the range of emotions of his characters to counteract a long and pernicious history of Black characters asked to play the fool and dance around like clowns. Cinema history has had enough of that and Barris does not need to oblige anyone's desire to see a single minute more of it. 

I'm not sure the opposite of clowning, though, is having so little affect that it is confused for a total deficit of charisma. And that's what comes across to me in the performances of Harlow (who is of course white), Walls, and other characters in White Men Can't Jump. The whole film feels like it exists within parentheses, asserting its existence so lightly that it never grabs hold of us and certainly never builds any narrative momentum toward a climax. This may be a choice, but it is the wrong one dramatically for a film like this, if the result is so bland and so parenthetical.

The thing is, Barris isn't so far removed from a movie in which this was not the predominating style. In reviewing his IMDB credits, I am reminded that Barris co-wrote the 2017 film Girls Trip, which was a true favorite of mine that year. I'm not sure you could enforce a stultifying performance style on this film's MVP foursome: Regina Hall, Jada Pinkett-Smith, Queen Latifah and Tiffany Haddish. But at that time, maybe Barris wasn't trying to either. Which means he can get back there. (He also co-wrote Coming 2 America, which maybe isn't guilty of the same issues either. But that film didn't entirely work for me so it's not a great example in the current discussion.)

I suppose we also have to acknowledge what we are comparing it to. In the original White Men Can't Jump, the jump-off-the-screen charisma of Wesley Snipes, Woody Harrelson and Rosie Perez is a thing to be reckoned with. You can't walk away from any ten-minute slice of that movie without a lasting impression of the personality of these characters. They may go big sometimes, but it's an equal opportunity bigness, where you have a Black man, a white man and a Latinx woman all acting at the same volume. And it's the volume we need for a comedy. Their performances are what have made that movie an enduring comedic classic in certain circles.

Barris has turned the volume way down on everyone in his movie. There may be good intentions behind it, but the results are entirely forgettable. Not only will 2023's White Men Can't Jump not endure over the years, it may not even endure over the course of the weekend in which you watch it.

The Mission: Impossible release weirdness continues

As I patiently await my two critics to submit their joint Mission: Impossible review -- patiently, I swear -- I couldn't help but notice this yesterday.

What you are looking at is the marquee from Cinema Kino, downstairs from my office, which I attend on Wednesdays and (most) Thursdays.

This was a Thursday, which means it was the weekly new release day -- and also the day that was originally advertised as the release date for Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One, before it mysteriously came out last Saturday, as discussed here. (I still haven't figured out how to handle all the punctuation in that title, and I'm not going to look back to see if I've been consistent with previous instances.) In fact, as you could see if you blew this picture up, that date is also advertised on a poster for the movie right out front.

As you can also see, the movie is not currently playing at this cinema.

I guess I wouldn't say that it's a guarantee that a cinema will actually show a movie they've advertised in their lobby, especially if they advertise it months earlier before any of these things are settled. 

But when the movie is already released, and it's not playing despite the fact that you're still advertising it in the cinema's most prominent external location, right next to the entrance, facing the food court where everybody eats their lunch?

Yeah it's a bit weird.

If you look deeper into this photo, dear reader, you will see the posters for Insidious: The Red Door and Carmen -- two titles you will see on the marquee above.

Which means the lack of showing Mission: Impossible sticks out like a sore thumb even more.

And since I am, at least theoretically, having two other guys review this for ReelGood, I have no idea when I'll see it either.

The worst movie I have ever seen

Bruno Dumont's 2003 film Twentynine Palms had a reign of 12 years, 10 months and 22 days as the worst film I have ever seen.

That reign is now over.

And July 12, 2023 is a day that will go down in infamy.

Considering that I named Harmony Korine's Spring Breakers my second favorite film of the previous decade, you'd think I would have acquainted myself with his entire filmography as a director by now. In fact, that isn't all that close to being the case. 

Setting aside films he only wrote -- Kids -- the only films he'd directed that I'd seen were Gummo, The Beach Bum and the aforementioned Breakers. I liked the first and third and hated the second. (I didn't much care for Kids but at least I have a grudging respect for it.)

That left a whole three Korine-directed films I hadn't seen: Julien Donkey-Boy (1999), Mister Lonely (2007) and Trash Humpers (2009). (There's also a 2003 "television documentary," as it's described on Wikipedia, called Above the Below, but movies that debuted on television 20 years ago, before the streaming era, present categorization issues for me. So I'm going to set that one aside.)

It was last night, a fateful Wednesday night in July -- a winter night here in Australia -- that I encountered Trash Humpers on MUBI, and threw it on due to its 77-minute brevity. 

This was not my first awareness of Trash Humpers. Unlike Mister Lonely, which I had not heard of until a friend mentioned it in the context of Korine's career during a mid-movie message chat, Trash Humpers was a piece of toxic cinematic sludge (or so I assumed) that crept into my awareness possibly through an Entertainment Weekly review at the time it came out. Indeed, in googling it I am seeing that Owen Gleiberman was the critic, and though I'm not going to re-read his review now, the F he gave it stands out clearly in my memory.

Is there such a thing as an F minus?

Before I start tearing into Trash Humpers, I have to start by stating a couple things clearly.

It's hard to ever really be sure that a movie you are watching is the worst you have ever seen. A while ago, I made a policy not to add a movie to my Flickchart until 30 days after I'd seen it, to calm my initial feelings, positive or negative, and gain enough perspective to rank it properly. A movie that moves you greatly or angers you greatly may settle into something more even-keeled upon a month of reflection. 

The second thing to state is that there is arguably something positive and useful about a movie that angers you. In this line of thinking, anything that stimulates a strong response is doing something right, either because to anger you was the filmmaker's intention (meaning they succeeded in what they set out to do) or because it is hitting close to home in some way that warrants introspection in the viewer. These are both within the broadly outlined goals of art. In this line of thinking, a person's least favorite film of all time should actually be the most lame, the most cynical or the most technically disastrous movie they'd ever seen, not the one that they found the most off-putting.

All I can say for sure, though, is that if I were to add Trash Humpers to my Flickchart today, it would lose its duel to Twentynine Palms.

What exactly is so God-awful egregious about this movie?

Well, the poster above should tell you a lot about what the experience of watching this movie feels like. These two "characters" -- men in masks/makeup to make them look elderly -- join a third female character (played by Korine's wife, Rachel, who is also in Spring Breakers) to form this film's trio of "protagonists." I call them "characters" because they are not developed beyond their tendency to make humping motions at trash cans, trees and other inanimate objects, smash and shatter television sets and plastic dolls, and engage in other general mayhem. They do occasionally speak but more often they communicate in rooster sounds. 

Their narrative-free existence involves occasionally rubbing elbows with other characters -- some of them children, some of them prostitutes, some of them other Leatherface-like rednecks without the makeup -- and engaging in conversations (the other characters usually do the talking) that involve acts of debauchery and discussions of genitalia. The language is foul and discriminatory (there's even a warning on MUBI about discriminatory language) and the net result of any scene is nothing close to a lucid commentary on whatever that passage of the film is supposed to be about. These scenes take place in desolate parking lots, rubbish-strewn alleyways and squalid apartments. Violence and sex are simulated almost constantly. The whole thing is captured in grainy VHS, even showing on-screen VCR text like PLAY and PAUSE now and again as the whole thing lags and emits static. 

To give you one idea of a scene that stuck out to me from this mess -- actually one of the tamer scenes -- two men pretend to be twins conjoined at the head with some sort of getup involving panty hose. They squirt a bunch of dish detergent on top of pancakes and eat them while the other characters dance around and chant "Make it don't fake it!" Whatever that means.

I know I am precisely the sort of square Korine is trying to make squirm with these emptiest of empty provocations. Or at least I am playing this role in my distaste for the movie. The thing is, Korine should know that I like a movie he made that isn't so far off from this, Gummo, just for some slight tweaks in the sympathy of his camera and the minute adjustment in his approach to capture a possibly real subsection of the American population. The trash humpers are something out of a non-existent fantasy of depravity, and there is nary a moment of trying to excavate anything redemptive.

I should stick an asterisk next to that, but it's really more of an example of that problematic adage "the exception that proves the rule." Korine closes the film -- it's no spoiler to tell you about the closing scene of this sort of movie -- with an image of the wrinkly female played by Rachel Korine, singing a lullaby to a baby in a carriage on a desolate street lit by sickly lamplight. This seems like an attempt to soften the blow of what we've been watching. But there is nothing empathetic in the character's face as it is still just this saggy makeup/mask that makes this character look like something out of a nightmare. And since we don't know who this baby is, nor do we have any more sense of a progression of narrative than we do in any other scene, it doesn't do anything except identify that Korine knows this has all been too much, and that he has to finish with something that might be considered uplifting from a certain point of view. (The too muchness, some would argue, is the point.)

The other hesitation I have in calling this the worst movie I've ever seen, which speaks to my earlier concerns about labeling it this, is a conversation I had during the movie with the friend I mentioned earlier. (And if you think carrying on a conversation on Facebook while this movie is going on means you have any lesser chance of experiencing what it is providing, you are seriously misunderstanding what it's like to watch this movie, try as I might to explain it.)

My friend loves Spring Breakers as much as I do, but he has a limited love for Korine's entire career for the way it demonstrates this man's progression as an artist. He agrees that there is the immature provocateur in Korine, but he also believes Korine has a vision for demonstrating "something" -- some portrait of the margins that would probably represent selling out to the bourgeois mainstream if it were any bit more accessible than it is. The point is that we're supposed to hate it, but I suppose also that we are supposed to interrogate why we hate it, and this is part of its value. It provokes something in us, which most films do not, and the more raw and unprocessed that is, the better it is doing its job.

This may all be. And in a month's time -- really more than a month before I get to it -- it may not lose that duel to Twentynine Palms. Which might mean writing a post in which I call it the worst film I've ever seen is premature. 

But the reality is, when you have seen nearly 6,500 films, the occasion of watching what might be the worst film you've ever seen is one that requires written reflection -- especially if you write a movie blog.

And the fact remains that I just find Trash Humpers to be chaos for chaos' sake, nihilism for nihilism's sake, trash for trash's sake. 

If I were to conjure up an artistic justification for this film, the closest I might get is that Korine wanted to make an apparently found footage version of the way human beings acted in the early 21st century, if for some reason this were the only document aliens recovered upon arriving on a decimated planet Earth 500 years from now.

And he just thought it would be funny to punk the aliens. 

Just four days ago I added another half-star movie -- the lowest rating you can give without it looking like you just forgot to rate it at all -- to my Letterboxd. That's the new Netflix film The Out-Laws, the review of which you can read here if you are interested in watching me go off on a movie. 

It has a decent chance of being my worst movie of 2023, and I felt for sure it would be my worst movie of July, which is also something I keep track of (along with my best each month). 

But it doesn't stand a chance against the worst movie I've ever seen -- at least for now. 

Campion Champion & Bigelow Pro: Holy Smoke

This is the fourth in my 2023 bi-monthly series watching the remaining three films each I had not seen directed by Jane Campion and Kathryn Bigelow.

I had already thought of Harvey Keitel as our leading portrayer of depraved men with psychosexual hangups before I had even seen Jane Campion's fifth feature, Holy Smoke (1999). (The exclamation point seems to be used sometimes and not other times, though IMDB has it without, so that's what I'll go with. Excessive punctuation in titles usually bothers me, and in any case, the exclamation point doesn't appear on screen in the movie itself.)

The fact that the movie doesn't fully see him this way, despite ample evidence to the contrary, was just one of the problems I had with it. However, I did still like it overall.

Keitel re-teams with Campion after her third feature, The Piano, where he was also a highly sexualized though clearly more sympathetic character. He doesn't show his junk in this one, so Campion must have nixed his request.

It's her first (and so far only) collaboration with Kate Winslet, who does show her junk, if the female genitalia can be referred to as "junk." It's a naked performance in more ways than one, as Winslet portrays Ruth, an Australian in her early 20s who has come under the spell of a guru on an Indian ashram. That choice is an obvious example of her unstable mental state, but the cure by her family -- luring her back to Australia on the false pretense that her father is dying, then handing her over to a man (Keitel) who specializes in extracting people from cults -- is liable to cause even more confusion for the young woman.

Especially when the horndog played by Keitel, DJ Powers, proves quite incapable of keeping his junk in his pants, even if we never see it on screen.

It's probably obvious where things will go with the two of them when the are alone in a remote hut in the outback, within a reasonably close drive of her family if they need to check up on the progress. That's because DJ also has a tryst with Ruth's married (sister? I think? I wasn't sure about all the family connections) earlier in the story, and we already know he has a female partner who stayed back in the U.S. who is also his romantic partner. 

However, I think we assume that DJ has never been unprofessional in situations like this before, with other confused young women who were in cults. This is where seeing the tail end of one of DJ's previous successes may have been helpful. It's an old screenwriting trick to show the skills of a central character in practice at the start of the film, to demonstrate both their talent for their job and what a successful outcome of these skills looks like. (Something, for example, Christopher Nolan's Inception does not do, to its detriment.) If we'd opened with DJ breaking the spell on another innocent young woman, we'd know that he typically earns both his paycheck and his reputation as one of the premier practitioners of this very specialized line of work.

Since this is really Ruth's story, though, the opening is devoted to images of her in India, involved in cult behavior that does not seem all too toxic, and perhaps, may actually be the quest for enlightenment she direly wants and needs. The movie interestingly refuses to condemn the guru, who we see only briefly, leaving us unable to determine whether or not he's a charlatan. The opening credits and the few minutes afterward actually make this whole thing look sort of joyous, as they replicate Ruth's perspective more than the perspective of her concerned friend who dobs Ruth in (to use the Australian lingo) to her family. In these scenes, Campion also dabbles with some visual effects to document the dizzy delirium of it all -- while stopping short of saying this can do Ruth no good. It's a good look on Campion and I'm sorry not to have seen her go back to that sort of thing more often in her career.

So we don't really get DJ until the movie is maybe 20 minutes old, at which point, we are going only on what he's showing us in the here and now. And at first it all looks very promising. He's using an approach that is more cooperative than confrontational, attempting to challenge Ruth's assumptions in unexpected ways that really seem like they have a chance of succeeding. We can see why he's successful at this, so in a way, this does fulfill the script function of showing us DJ at the height of his skills. Since we've never seen him close the deal, though, we have no idea if he falls apart at the end in other cases. (Presumably not, because that sort of thing would have gotten out.)

Since he does fall apart in this case -- it's not spoiling too much to tell you that -- we then don't really know what it is about Ruth that causes this reaction in him. It's very challenging, from a screenwriting perspective, to communicate to a viewer exactly why a particular close-quarters relationship results in something emotionally tumultuous. In his exceedingly frank way, DJ himself admits that his attraction to Ruth is sexual, an immediate inability to deny his physical urges, rather than intellectual or emotional. However, his initial loss of professional distance becomes less of a slip-up and more of a full-bore spiraling downward, at which point it's obvious that there's an intellectual and emotional connection he can't resist. 

Problem is, this isn't really in Campion's dialogue. Ruth is manipulating DJ as much as DJ is attempting to (benignly, at least at first) manipulate her, as much as the guru (possibly benignly) manipulated her. She wants to destroy his defenses, mock and laugh at him, pretend she's interested only to pull the carpet out from under him -- all as a complicated form of payback for being placed in this situation to begin with, even if those feelings would more appropriately be directed at her family. However, Campion also want us to find her genuinely vulnerable and possibly in the midst of some sort of breakthrough -- though we can rarely distinguish this from her (justifiable) trickery.

The end result is that when things go big in the finale, it doesn't really feel earned. If DJ does this for a job, he should be up against these fragile emotional stakes all the time. And if this is the career he's chosen for himself, he himself should not be so vulnerable to the beauty and breasts (at one point he admits to having a particular thing for her breasts) of the women he is trying to help.

Even though it does get a bit confused, and seems to let DJ off the hook too much for behavior that is shamelessly exploitative, I was ultimately won over by Campion's filmmaking and her perspective. If you set aside the two main characters, the way the supporting characters act is quite reminiscent of the eccentricities we saw in her first film, Sweetie, and even on into her second film, An Angel at My Table, which is the first Campion film I watched for this series. There's a sort of wildness to these Australians that we might also see in a film like Mad Max -- a blue collar shagginess that is somewhere between punk and bogan. ("Bogan" being the Australian word for redneck.) 

I want to call attention to two actors in particular, one I didn't know and one I did. The one I didn't know plays Ruth's mum, and her name is Julie Hamilton. She has a lot of traits that are really familiar to me from living in Australia, and I guess she did a lot of work before this, not so much after. She's the neurotic and panicky type, so her trip to India to try to convince Ruth to come home, where she's worried about being touched by everything, is both brave and comedic gold. Then there's Dan Wyllie, a character actor who shows up in Australian TV and movies all the time, but whose work I mostly know from the last ten years. It was good to see him show up here. 

Okay, in September we get to my final Kathryn Bigelow movie for this series, Blue Steel. 

Ryan Gosling looks like a young Alec Baldwin

You may recall I watched Glengarry Glen Ross last Saturday night in appreciation of Alan Arkin. Well, I had an observation from that viewing that had no place in my remembrance post for Arkin, and then I went out of town and forgot to write it up separately.

And I don't really need to tell you what that observation was because the subject of this post has done it for me. 

I didn't glean a lot from Glengarry that I hadn't on previous viewings, in the movie itself, but I do have a perspective on it that I wouldn't have had, at least not to the same extent, the last time I watched it in 2011.

In 2011, Ryan Gosling was still a relatively new presence in our lives. Oh his "breakout" role -- to the extent that you can call such an independent film a breakout -- was ten years earlier in The Believer, after which he started getting roles with some regularity. And I had definitely already seen a half-dozen of his movies by 2011. 

But maybe Ryan Gosling wasn't so ingrained in my head that seeing the merely 34-year-old Alec Baldwin in Glengarry was enough to remind me of him.

That version of Baldwin sure reminded me of Gosling this time, though.

I spent about three agonizing minutes -- and his one outstanding scene isn't much longer than that -- trying to figure out who this version of Baldwin reminded me of. It wouldn't have been an older actor, I figured, and when I realized it was someone younger I landed on Gosling relatively quickly.

Of course, I'm not the only one to make this observation. Although I created the side-by-side images above myself, the internet had some other ones to share as well if I hadn't wanted to do the work, such as this one:

The similarity here might be even more striking, but that's an even younger Baldwin, and besides, I wanted the Baldwin from Glengarry.

It isn't just the appearance, either, but the mannerisms. I could easily see Gosling doing that same bit Baldwin does where he mocks the salesmen, pretending he's them throwing back an invisible drink at a bar, complaining to anyone who would listen about how sales is a "tough racket." Gosling would nail that.

Naturally that got me thinking who else I would select if I were going to recast Glengarry Glen Ross with doppelgangers 30 years later.

Now, finding actual doppelgangers for Jack Lemmon, Al Pacino, Alan Arkin, Ed Harris, Kevin Spacey and Jonathan Pryce isn't going to be a cinch, so I think I'll go easy on myself and choose actors would look sort of similar, but also do similar things with their craft. And so as to not spend too much time on this post I won't agonize over my choices too much. 

I'll start with the easiest:

Ricky Roma - Oscar Isaac has felt like the heir apparent to Al Pacino throughout his career, so I'm not going to look any farther for my new Roma.

Shelley Levene - Possibly the inspiration for Gil the struggling salesman on The Simpsons, Shelley "The Machine" Levene is a little harder to cast because Jack Lemmon was a true original. However, the name that came to mind is Brian Cox. Now, without even seeing Succession I know that Cox has often played men who dominate or are very much self-actualized, which does not describe Shelley. But Cox could do Lemmon's profane rants and is certainly more than capable of playing desperate.

George Aaronow - Here's Arkin's character. I can't help but look for somebody tall and skinny with a bald head, and for some reason Matt Frewer keeps coming to mind. He may not work a ton these days but I think he could do the character's neurotic, doomsday energy.

Dave Moss - I couldn't think of a good match for Ed Harris so I cheated a little bit on this one, googling "Ed Harris lookalike." However, the photo result I got was a false positive that actually led me to my answer.  A photo came up for Harris and Viggo Mortensen appearing at a promotional event for the movie Appaloosa, which I haven't seen. I checked on IMDB and they don't play the same characters at different ages, or even related characters. (And I just realized they are also both in A History of Violence.) But I was surprised at how much alike they looked and I think Mortensen could equal Harris' intensity.

John Williamson - We don't want to spend any time thinking about Kevin Spacey these days, but for this exercise we're going to have to. Who's our best example today of a smarmy, menacing creep? It's probably not Jude Law, but for some reason that's the name I keep coming back to. Law likes to take on challenges and has a sinister quality to him that I think would work. 

James Lingk - The naive, gullible client who probably wanted to be Ricky Roma's best friend more than he wanted to buy real estate from him was played there by Jonathan Pryce. I'm having a real hard time thinking of someone to play this mousy and timid character. However, for some small similarity of appearance and the fact that they are both British, I am going with Jim Sturgess. Why not?

I hope no one makes this movie because it would be terrible.

Something weird going on with the Mission: Impossible release date

Something I have never seen before is happening with the Australian release of Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One, and the damned internet refuses to explain it to me.

When I was wrapping up my ski holiday, I remembered that two of my writers were supposed to attend an advanced screening of the seventh Mission: Impossible movie on Monday night and write me a review. I try to remind them they've agreed to these things, since they're younger than I am and in my experience, millennials don't have the same notion of remembering things and remaining committed to things that we sturdy Gen Xers have. I reminded them about a week beforehand but forgot to remind them a day beforehand, so I thought the next best thing was to check in with them after the fact. I didn't figure they could turn back time, but at least I'd know sooner rather than later whether I was expecting a review from them.

Well, I shouldn't besmirch their names because my fears were unfounded. They did indeed go. They didn't need some person who is (almost) old enough to be their father to provide them a paternalistic reminder.

They wouldn't, however, be ready with a review before the week was out, which I expected. They lead busy lives, or at least they perceive them to be busy, which amounts to the same thing. 

This didn't matter, though, because I knew the movie was not coming out until next Thursday, and indeed reviews were actually embargoed up until today. 

That's when one of the guys told me they'd said at the premiere that the movie was opening on Saturday.

If we had been in the same room they would have heard me scoff. Instead I wrote in our Facebook chat, hoping the scoffing tone was only in my head and not my words, "I don't think it would come out on a Saturday but I also don't think the release date is until next Thursday."

I mean, of course a movie would not come out on a Saturday. When have you ever heard of a movie coming out on a Saturday? Unless of course that Saturday falls on Christmas. 

The response came "Yeah I agree but that's what they said at the premiere and that's what flicks.com.au is reporting."

Lo and behold, it was true.

I didn't go to that website, but I did go to Hoyts. No shows Thursday, no shows Friday, but then lo and behold, shows Saturday, Sunday, Monday, and I pretty much stopped at that point.

What?

Just to establish our default terms here, movies release on Thursdays in Australia. Full stop. The only exception I can think of is Boxing Day, which is, for some odd reason, the biggest release date on the whole calendar. If Boxing Day is a Sunday, then one time a year movies come out on a Sunday.

They don't even especially seem to come out early, like you sometimes see in America when a movie jumps the standard Friday release date and comes out on a Wednesday or Thursday. See, Australian Thursday is already early. It's how I got to see Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny before anyone else, as well as every one of the new Star Wars movies. And since Australian Thursday night is actually only Thursday morning in the U.S., I might be seeing these movies 36 to 48 hours before my American counterparts. Not only is the release day a day earlier, but the day of the week arrives a day earlier because of the time zones. 

A Saturday? A Saturday is unheard of. It's two days late for the Thursday release date and five days early for the next Thursday.

The first thing I could think of was that Tom Cruise had mandated that this movie must screen in the United States of America before it screens anywhere else. That was the only thing I could think of to explain the odd release day. By our Saturday, the U.S. Friday would have passed and now the movie would be safe for pirates the world over.

But as far as I can tell, the movie doesn't actually release in the U.S. until next Wednesday, the 12th. So yes, Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One is going early for the Friday release date in the U.S., opening on a Wednesday, but it'll be four days later than Australia.

And Hong Kong, it would seem. On IMDB, Australia and Hong Kong are the two countries that have a July 8th release date. Perhaps even stranger, though since it's not in a Christian part of the world it may not matter, the movie opens on Sunday the 9th in the United Arab Emirates.

But if Tom Cruise's paranoia over piracy is not a factor in any of this, what explains it?

Dunno. The internet won't tell me.

Either I'm not googling the right search words or no one thinks it's nearly as interesting as I do.

There is one more release date for Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One that we have to discuss, and that's the actual release date on this poster: July 14th. That's the Friday and that would be when you'd see this movie if all else were equal and nobody were jumping any guns to try to boost the hype. And this is the release date for countries ranging from Bangladesh to Ireland to Taiwan.

Did I say one more? Thursday the 13th -- the day that it says it's releasing in Australia from a May 25th blurb that google picks up -- has countries like Argentina, Hungary and the Netherlands.

A wide array of slightly disparate release dates is nothing new, and I only mention it because it's something we're already discussing.

The weird thing -- in this particular case, and at least from an Australian movie industry perspective -- is definitely the Saturday. You're missing anyone who might want to go to the movies on Friday night, hamstringing the opening weekend box office by excising one of the two biggest time windows for making money on that weekend.

But maybe this is just a sign of how much things have changed within the industry, and how big of a hit they know this movie is going to be. If this movie does anything like the box office for Top Gun: Maverick, they could limit the movie to weekdays before noon and it would probably still make a billion worldwide.

When Harry met a ski slope

You might not have noticed it from my continued posting -- I've been pretty fertile lately, and had about three posts already in the can -- but my family has been away on a ski trip since Sunday our time.

Yes, skiing. Yes, I live in the southern hemisphere.

Only about a two-and-a-half hour drive from my house in Melbourne, you can get to a mountain high enough where there's skiing. You might remember I posted about seeing Aladdin on Mt. Buller in 2019, though that was only a day trip with the boys and we didn't ski, just built snowmen and stuff. If you don't remember that and want to go back to read the post, which includes our harrowing adventure getting down the mountain and multiple shenanigans involving snow chains, you can find it here.

No movie this time -- I knew we'd be tired from skiing, and I also knew I'd lose a lot of credibility with my wife. ("You can't even go three days without seeing a movie?" she might ask. And I have, since I haven't watched a single thing since Saturday night before we left.) 

Truth is, I didn't actually feel the inclination, in part because I did scratch that itch with Aladdin four years ago.

I do, however, have a movie tie-in from this trip, and it's an odd one.

We're staying in the little village at the altitude necessary to ski, which costs a pretty penny, but we decided we had to have a "rich person's ski trip" at least once in our lives. Many of the food options are fit for hungry skiers who are not very particular about what they're eating, happier to get out of the cold and take off their ski boots than worrying about the quality of the grub. However, since the people who stay here do have a lot of money -- a lot more than we do, as this is probably a one-time thing for us -- there figured also to be some fine dining.

The place we chose also happened to have a When Harry Met Sally theme.

Sort of. 

As you can see from the art at the top of this post, the place is called Harry Burns, which is the full name of Billy Crystal's character in Rob Reiner's classic 1989 romcom. My wife, who was the one who researched the dining option for our date night, knew it had a When Harry Met Sally theme (sort of) but did ask me why it was called Harry Burns.

"Because that's the character's full name," I responded.

She laughed. I doubt that's a thing a lot of people know about the movie, since they don't make a big deal out of it. In fact, I wondered if I would have been able to produce his last name on my own, or just knew as soon as I heard it that it sounded right. I guess I'll never know.

The place is halfway up one of the slopes along a road that runs up to some of the villas higher on the mountain. You can ski directly in during the day, but we were getting there about 7 o'clock so of course that wasn't an option. My wife had thought of organizing a shuttle, but since I'd seen it from the lift I knew it wasn't that far of a walk. Yeah, tell that to my legs that spent the entirety of the last two days skiing. It was less than a 15-minute walk, but the last ten of those were uphill.

It was worth the hike. The ambience was nice, the food was great, and two alcoholic beverages each -- I had pinot noir, she had an old fashioned -- were just the ticket at the end of a long day of skiing.

But the place had essentially nothing to do with the movie.

It was decked out with just your standard alpine accoutrements, like a wall comprised of firewood, and another decorated with (tasteful) animal fur. 

The artwork on the walls had nothing to do with Billy Crystal or Meg Ryan either. Unless this is supposed to be Meg Ryan:

Well the menu surely has funny drink names related to the movie, right?

It does not. It has standard drink names. 

I tried to think if there's a scene of skiing in When Harry Met Sally, and I could have almost convinced myself that there was. I can see a funny bit of physical comedy where Ryan is trying to carry her ski equipment and the poles and skis are all splaying out in different directions and knocking people over. But that isn't really a scene in the movie.

So what the hell is the connection? Were we even right that it was a When Harry Met Sally-themed restaurant? Could Harry Burns just be the name of the guy who owns this place?

It might be, but that doesn't mean he's ignorant of the connection, and indeed, we found exactly one piece of evidence tying this great restaurant into this great movie:

If you're having trouble reading that, it's the front of the drinks menu, and it reads "I'll have what she's having," partly in fancy curlicue letters and partly in all caps. 

I thought about asking the very nice waitstaff what the deal was with this non tie-in tie-in to the movie, but they were giving off such good vibes that I didn't want to seem the slightest bit miffed about their restaurant, nor make them question their choice of workplace. For all I know, they brag to their friends about working in a restaurant that takes inspiration from -- it's fair to say that at least -- a 34-year-old movie that many of them may be too young to have ever seen.

I checked their website and this is what it says on the landing page:

"'The first time we met, we hated each other.' Instead, it's love at first bite at Harry Burns, newly arrived on Bourke Street and inspired by the movie When Harry Met Sally. Pop in for high-end Modern Australian (cuisine? it doesn't say) and signature cocktails in a cosy cabin style restaurant with open fireplace in the heart of Mt. Buller Ski Village."

Yeah who knows.

My wife and I wondered if the person who opened the restaurant just loved this movie and decided this was the best way to show that love.

It's debatable, but the food was sensational. 

How many different ways can we say "revenge"?

It should be perfectly obvious that half the action movies out there -- and probably all the action movies featuring Liam Neeson -- deal in some way with the concept of revenge. Revenge for something that's already occurred, or pre-revenge for something that might hypothetically occur. 

Now, the task is just to communicate that in the title.

I find Neeson's most recent film, set to be released this August, a particularly humorous example of that.

The title Retribution has almost a clinical, scientific quality to it. While the words "revenge" and "vengeance" both have a raw, bloodthirsty quality to them -- you can almost taste the blood -- "retribution" is the version of the word you'd see appearing in a legal document. Someone's motive in a crime seems much more suitable for court when it is described as "retribution" rather than "revenge."

Therefore, I would argue it doesn't roll of the tongue very well, which is one of the more important elements to consider when coming up with a title.

It also really feels like they just went to a thesaurus to see what other synonyms they could find for "revenge."

If that's the case, in the future you can expect the following Neeson movies to come out:

Reprisal
Repayment
Avengment (really?)
Reciprocation 
Comeuppance
Requital 
Counterplay
Counterblow
Satisfaction

All of those don't work equally well ... but most of them are still available. 

Get them before Neeson does. 

I finally saw: Mauvais Oeil

July marks the 25th anniversary of one of the best and worst road trips of my life.

On July 26, 1998, two friends and I started out on a three-and-a-half week drive to see baseball games in 12 American ballparks, and two Canadians ones. It was supposed to be 14 American and 16 total, but we had to skip Detroit (had to fix an issue with our car radio) and Pittsburgh (end-of-trip exhaustion and one guy had to leave early for a job interview).

We ended up seeing games in Montreal, Toronto, Chicago (Cubs), Milwaukee, Minnesota, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles (Dodgers), San Diego, Denver, Kansas City, St. Louis, Cleveland and Baltimore. Not too shabby. 

In reality, it was the best road trip, full stop. However, I can't say we weren't totally fed up with each other by the end, and I was almost out of money. I literally think I had less than $20 in my bank account by the end of the trip.

But the movie I'm telling you about today ties in to the very beginning of the trip -- the very first night, in fact. 

I had spent all the previous night moving out of my apartment in Providence, literally not sleeping as I again poorly planned how much time it would take to move out of an apartment. My last trip up to Boston, an hour drive, included so many things strapped to the roof of the car, and so much blocked visibility, and so much lack of sleep, that I'm surprised a) I didn't die or at least b) I wasn't pulled over by the police. And then after finally unloading all this stuff in my dad's garage, then I had to pack to go out on the road for nearly a month.

Our first stop was Montreal, and that meant all of the sudden reading signs in French. As if I weren't disoriented enough.

French was, in actual fact, the default foreign language of the school system the three of us attended. Our town wasn't actually that close to Montreal -- I believe it was a four-hour drive to get there on that first night of our trip -- but we were a lot closer to where people spoke French than to where people spoke any other language. (Spanish was eventually offered in middle school, and by high school you could take Italian, Latin and other languages.)

Our first sign of the change, literally and figuratively, was when we saw road signs advertising the different directions you could go on other roads. E was not an issue -- both the English and French words for "east" start with E. The thing that made us laugh was east's opposite, which was indicated by the letter O: "ouest." Tickled by this and only 25 years old, we over-pronounced the beginning part of that word.

The stadium in Montreal was called Stade Olympique, as it was built for the 1976 Olympics. This only increased my sense of oddness and disorientation. The Expos' stadium had this odd cobra-like tower sticking out over the top of the field, so when you looked up, it was looking down at you like something out of 1984. We were quick to label it dystopic. Here, see for yourself:

Sadly the web isn't obliging with a view looking up from field level, but suffice it to say it was ominous. 

I'm finally getting to the point of this post.

As we watched the Expos and Giants, a video ad for the new Brian De Palma movie starring Nicolas Cage played on the big screen. Students of cinema, we knew this movie to be called Snake Eyes.

Of course, in French it had another title:

Mauvais Oeil.

(Mo vays oy, if you want to know how it sounds.)

As proven from the highway sign example, we considered French words starting with the letter O to be funny. But that wasn't what made us laugh so much about this title. From eight years of taking French, we knew the actual translation of Snake Eyes would be something like Les Yeux du Serpent. 

This translation was:

Bad Eyes.

And actually, not even Bad Eyes but Bad Eye, singular, since the plural of "un oeil" is "les yeux."

We laughed and laughed, and it became the first meme of the trip. Many an utterance of "MAUVAIS OEIL," in the overly serious voice of a French ad copy reader, followed.

Twenty-five years later, I have finally seen this movie. 

(And please forgive the indulgent preamble.)

If I'd really wanted to honor the anniversary month of this occurrence, I would have waited a day to watch it. It was my final viewing of June on Friday the 30th. But at least I'm writing this post in July.

The movie is a bit of a hot mess, but that's probably exactly what Mauvais Oeiul should be: a mixture of the really good and the quite terrible.

Really good: De Palma opens the film with a 20-minute Steadicam shot inside an Atlantic City casino and boxing ring, at least 12 of which occurred in one take, with some hidden edits in the other eight. The degree of difficulty is high, especially coordinating all those extras, but the actual occurrences within the shot are fairly straightforward, mostly walking and talking. A movie like Extraction 2 might laugh at its relative simplicity, but for 1998 I suppose it was pretty impressive.

Quite terrible: Many of the other storytelling choices. De Palma uses character POV about three different times in this film, and there's a reason you don't see this device used more often. It's pretty hacky and it has the effect of making the character who's doing the viewing seem like a deaf-mute. Even if the character speaks during the scene, the voice has an alien, disembodied quality to it. The conceit of the film, rather poorly realized, is that different characters have different perspectives on the assassination of the secretary of defense during a boxing match, Rashomon-style. This POV approach is meant to approximate that. But because little new information is actually yielded from these differing perspectives, it just makes the awkward device all the more pointless.

The handling of Cage's character is a mix of the two extremes that tear this movie apart. It's admirable that De Palma attempts to treat this character with a modicum of realism. Cage plays a corrupt cop, and he's actually, really corrupt, not just a hero with a few blemishes that are easily smoothed over in the grand scheme of things. No, he really is on the take from criminal organizations and he really does look out for his own hide before anything or anyone else. Of course he has some maturation to undergo in that regard during this night, but he starts out as pretty crap.

The funny thing is that he also starts out pretty dumb -- and kind of stays that way. We'd at least expect Rick Santoro to be shrewd, and he is in some respects. However, he's also easily duped on multiple occasions, trusting people he shouldn't despite ample evidence that he shouldn't, and even making costly errors in keeping secret the location of the witness he's harboring (Carla Gugino). If we can't expect a hero to be morally spotless, at least we expect them to be clever, and Santoro is not. 

(Incidentally, I kept thinking of former senator Rick Santorum during this film, which made me laugh.)

I did appreciate De Palma's commitment to realism in terms of the medical realities of getting beaten up by a boxer. As most noir heroes do -- this is vaguely a noir -- Santoro gets roughed up as the villains try to extract the witness' location. When it's a professional boxer -- nay, the heavyweight champion of the world -- doing the roughing up, you don't recover from it quickly. Some movies would have had Santoro just bounce back, but Cage spends the latter stages of this film in a state of real medical emergency, his face all fucked up, his ribs broken and affecting his ability to walk properly. Instead of a cut on his cheek perfectly manicured by the makeup department, it's refreshing to see a hero, in his inevitable moment of ultimate triumph, with his eye drooping disturbingly toward his cheek, barely able to enunciate his words. Talk about a mauvais oeil. 

De Palma's status as a filmmaker who continually examines the darker side of human nature gives Snake Eyes -- sorry, Mauvais Oeil -- a little more staying power than it would otherwise have. But in reflecting on it a couple days later, I'm more inclined to remember the things about it that didn't work than those that did. 

One thing I thought was really random: The villain, played by Gary Sinise, is named Kevin Dunne. The actor Kevin Dunn also appears in the movie, and even has to speak the full name of the character Kevin Dunne on at least one occasion. There had to be a reason behind it, because you can name a fictitious character anything you want. Either the screenwriter had already named the character, and then they thought it would be funny to hire the actor into a different role in the movie, or they had hired the actor and as some kind of inside joke, changed the name of the character. I suppose they wanted to avoid questions by having the character have an E on the end of his name. Plausible deniability, you know. 

Anyway, this has kicked off another round of me saying "MAUVAIS OEIL" -- at least in my head -- and for that I am grateful.