Airplane movies make a comeback

I guess if you don't have actual live baseball playing during a flight, the temptation of the internet is not a death knell for airplane movies after all.

You may recall that last week I discussed taking my first flight on which free WiFi was available. I followed that up on Sunday with my second such flight, where I doubled my single movie from the first flight, narrowly fitting in two to what was described as a 3 hour and 45 minute flight. (It took a little bit longer than that, as it turned out, because air traffic control had to slow us down to avoid congestion above Melbourne. Or so I am told that's what the pilot said. I could not hear him over the general white noise of the aircraft, in his typically calm and quiet pilot voice.) 

And because it was after all the day's baseball had been completed, I resisted the apparently irresistible pull of in-flight internet and got back to the basics of what I usually do on flights: watch movies.

Here are my thoughts on the two I watched.

How to set up 199 sequels

Will we ever tire of movies about exorcists? I suspect not. There's another Exorcist reboot coming this fall as well.

Julius Avery's The Pope's Exorcist was a fairly traditional example of such a movie, which is not to say it was bad. Actually, I quite enjoyed Russell Crowe's performance, injected as it is with a bit of humor.

But the movie apparently thinks we are ready for as many as 199 more in the Pope's Exorcist series. 

Spoiler alert -- Crowe's character, Gabriele Amorth, emerges alive from his tanglings with a demon, or the actual devil, or whatever it may be. So does his colleague, Father Esquibel, played by Daniel Zovatto. It is revealed that the place they do their battle is one of 200 such sites on earth where fallen angels turned to demons are waiting to wreak havoc on the unsuspecting people who happen to live nearby.

In discussing that their may be 199 more places where they are needed, the two characters give each other that knowing glance and say things like "We have been put on this earth for a purpose" and "Okay, but I can't do it without a partner" and "Let me check with my agent to see if I am available to shoot the sequel." Okay maybe not that last one.

When you see this familiar setup occurring at the end of a movie that is hopeful of giving birth to multiple subsequent franchise instalments, it doesn't usually expand the potential field of future engagements so infinitely, and with such a precise number. It felt rather comical. 

Also a bit comical: The family whose son gets possessed isn't checked in on before the closing credits, except for one priest telling another "The family returned to America and the boy made a full recovery." Now granted, this is supposed to be Crowe's character's story, not a portrait of the family, but it was almost as brief and hand wavy as "Poochie died on the way back to his home planet," albeit with a happier ending.

One possible limiting factor, at least in terms of the apparent intentions of the filmmakers, is that The Pope's Exorcist ends with a postscript about how Gabriele Amorth (a real person, apparently) continued performing exorcisms in service of the church until his death in 2016. Would you include such a postscript if you wanted to make 199 sequels? Perhaps it was a hedge against the film performing poorly and this being the only one.

However, the internet does confirm that a sequel is already in the works. Plus the story takes place in 1987, 29 years before Amorth's death, so that still indicates the possibility of numerous other demon-exorcising adventures in the years to come -- whether they be real or fanciful. Hey, it's worked for The Conjuring's Ed and Lorraine Warren, hasn't it?

Donnie Darko for the astronomy set

My wife started to watch BlackBerry on my recommendation, as I finally broke down her unfounded objections by telling her it would remind her of Silicon Valley. But she had to stop because she was enjoying it too much yet finding it too hard to hear all the dialogue over the aforementioned ambient white noise. We'll watch it together at home, which is good because I am looking forward to my second viewing. 

She had wanted to watch Cocaine Bear, which had been promised to her when she'd looked up online what might be playing on the flight. But either she checked in the wrong place or it had just hit its expiration date for available content. 

So I steered her blindly toward the second movie I planned to watch, Colin West's Linoleum, thinking she might get a few laughs from it because it stars comedian Jim Gaffigan, in addition to featuring Rhea Seehorn, recently of Better Call Saul.

Unfortunately, it wasn't that sort of movie.

And the sort of movie it was was, like, almost exactly Donnie Darko. 

I won't spoil too much about the plot, but I'll give you the general setup. Gaffigan plays the host of a science TV show like Bill Nye the Science Guy, focused specifically on astronomy, who gets booted from his show in favor of a younger man who looks almost just like him (also played by Gaffigan). So he considers trying to build a rocket to live out his failed astronomer dreams. Seehorn plays his wife and co-star on the show.

The number of allusions to Richard Kelly's 2001 cult film, a personal favorite, were so many that I had to stop counting. I'll do my best to recall them all here, two days later.

1) Both movies feature an object of unknown origin falling from the sky into a suburban neighborhood, displacing the family who lives in the house where it lands. It's part of a plane in Darko, a rocket in Linoleum.

2) Both films climax in a Halloween party at which someone is either run over or almost run over by a car. (Apparently, Linoleum is more hesitant in converting than Darko, as its car accident and rocket are both near misses, while the plane engine and the car are hits in the earlier film.)

4) Both movies present a high school setting in which an oddball boy and an oddball girl connect with one another, one of the two of them being new arrivals at the school. 

3) Both movies feature suburbia and high school as mild satirical targets, including the usage of bullies.

5) Both movies feature a mysterious white-haired woman, who they call Grandma Death in Donnie Darko and whose identity is not immediately revealed in Linoleum. (We find out Grandma Death is Roberta Sparrow, who wrote a book about time travel.)

6) Both movies feature a shot set to music where the camera follows several characters through a setting, the excellent "Head Over Heels" high school montage in Darko and an example at the TV station where the science show is produced in Linoleum. Both sequences even feature a character meeting another character and shaking hands. 

7) Both films want to fry our noodle with metaphysical and existential quandaries, with astronomy substituting for time travel here. But suffice it to say there are elements of the story that are not presented straightforwardly that imitate the notion of time travel.

8) Both movies try to get you in the end with an emotional denouement, with pretty different levels of success. 

I have no doubt Colin West would own up to all these moments as intentional allusions, not just thefts. But their sheer quantity becomes embarrassing, even if you are doing it as a form of flattery to an obvious influence.

Linoleum gets to some semi-interesting places, but falls well short of its predecessor, as well as mildly short of a recommendation from me.

And with one plane flight, order is restored in my movie-centric world. 

The world's oldest picture gardens

I've whiffed on some of my recent attempts to see a movie in the theater while on vacation. In a town that boasts "the world's oldest operating picture gardens," I wasn't going to whiff again.

The cinema in Broome is unique in a number of respects, as you will see with the pictures I'm including below in the post. But I'll list them here as well:

1) It's old as f**k. Sun Picture Gardens was opened in December of 1916, and has been operated continuously since then. It was converted for sound in 1933. Apparently it was regularly flooded under, which did not stop them from showing movies. Legend was that you could catch fish during a movie.

2) It's partially inside, partially outside. About half the seats are outdoors while the other half are under the protection of the beams above. This unique exposed situation must mean that you can hear the movie from the neighboring businesses, which doesn't really matter because most businesses in town close before the 6 p.m. start time of the first movie. Yes this area is dead as dead can be at night. Something about the layout of the place reminded me of a makeshift cinema for troops serving in Vietnam or something like that. In addition to playing during floods, the movie plays rain or shine. 

3) It is basically directly under the landing strip for the nearby airport, so planes fly over during the movie. Unlike most major cities -- and Broome only qualifies as such by the local standards of the northern part of Western Australia -- the airport is basically right next to downtown. When planes land, they fly over the town's main street just before landing, a sight which never ceases to be awesome. Because Broome is not a common destination for travellers, these planes are only landing at most every 30 minutes by this time of the night, but several did land during the movie, a truly enthralling spectacle.

A friend of mine told me he'd seen Jungle Cruise in this theater when he and his wife travelled around Australia in 2021. That seemed especially appropriate, given what I've already said about the theater reminding me of a ramshackle Vietnam War cinema. Their friend, my friend told me, had seen Dunkirk here, and the planes landing made for a mind-blowing three-dimensional experience for that particular film. 

Both great choices. Ours was not as great, on the surface. You may recall I posted last week that I hoped The Blue Beetle would be playing, but had already determined that it was not. I guess I didn't look enough further to determine that an equally satisfactory kid-friendly option, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, was playing during school holidays instead. Not thematically fortuitous, perhaps, but a movie my kids could see that I also was curious about. From what I had seen of the trailers, the animation reminded me of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, always a good thing.

As it turns out, only one of the two kids wanted to go. The older one would have watched literally any other movie playing there -- which included Barbie, Oppenheimer, The Meg 2 and The Equalizer 3 -- so much is he over "baby things" like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. So he opted not to go at all. Same was true for my wife.

But the nine-year-old and his auntie both were thrilled by the idea of watching a movie here, and the best of two TMNT showings while we were in town -- the other being programmed for the later, rather than the earlier, of two nightly time slots -- was that very evening, Wednesday evening.

The experience was great, all the more so because the movie was really fun. It is a bit Into the Turtle-Verse, but to be honest, it was pleasantly uncluttered when compared to this year's Spider-Man sequel. And there's some really respectable talent behind the camera, so to speak, including writers Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, and composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. Plus a great array of vocal talent, from the unknowns who played the four turtles to stalwarts among recognizable names, particularly Ice Cube as the villain, Superfly.

In short, see the damn movie. It's way better than you might expect.

And there was even an appropriate thematic element. No jungle setting, no planes flying through the movie to play off the air traffic overhead, but early on in the movie, the turtles do go see a movie screening outdoors in their New York neighborhood. (They watch Ferris Bueller's Day Off, one of only a few parts of the movie that isn't animated.) 

The experience of watching the movie was a real vibe, too, to quote my absent older son. There were plenty of kids there, some of whom were twirling around down front, with only a little bit of running up the aisles, minimal enough to come off as charming rather than annoying. They were able to drag down big beanbag chairs to sit in the front if they so chose. (One group was a camp, we found out while the group leader was buying tickets in front of us, and sent her colleague off to get 22 cans of soda from the snack bar.) 

A pair of less-TMNT-enthused adults in the row in front of us considered the setting informal enough to start chatting at normal volume near the climax of the movie, which threatened to really annoy me. In such situations I'm only willing to make increasingly louder "shhh" noises, but still quiet enough that the hope is they don't identify where exactly the shushing originated, and would get it almost subliminally. My sister-in-law had no such concerns. She basically openly told them to shut up, and to their credit, they did.

It was a beautiful night and easily one of the most memorable experiences on the trip. I think my sister-in-law and I even liked the movie more than the nine-year-old.

Oh, here are the pictures I promised:

Please note the plane landing in the upper right-hand corner of this next shot. This was the better of two attempts to capture how close the planes are as they are landing.

A locally themed 6,500th viewing

It seemed likely that my 6,500th viewing would be the new movie Joy Ride -- not to be confused with the 2001 movie Joy Ride, which I quite liked. I had rented it on iTunes and downloaded it to my computer, ostensibly to watch it at a time when the internet was too weak or non-existent to stream -- or then just to watch it at my first opportunity when that wasn't the case.

Of course, in my first opportunity that wasn't the case, there's a nice big TV on the living room wall of the villa in the resort where we're staying, so that attracted my attention more.

And so I went scrolling in the Netflix account that was already logged on.

In one particular section of movies, I was laughing at how I had seen literally all of them. I kept scrolling to the right as my wife, who was not planning to watch the movie with me, and I both played a game of naming off the titles we had seen.

The first one I got to that I hadn't seen, but she had -- the only such movie on the whole list, in fact -- was the Australian film Red Dog, which is beloved enough that they made a sequel. I knew even before this that she was favorable on it, which had put it on my list, albeit distantly. But the next thing she said clinched it for me:

"And that's set in this part of the world."

I needed no further encouragement to click into it, especially for a milestone movie on holiday.

Indeed, I am in the northwest of Australia -- as opposed to the southeast, where I usually spend my time -- and indeed, Red Dog is set throughout this area, but primarily in a port mining town called Dampier. On the map it doesn't look all that far from my current location of Broome, but Google tells me it is more than 850 Ks, which will take you almost nine hours.

Movies about beloved dogs, perhaps especially those based on a true story, have a built-in eyeroll factor, if you are a cinephile -- probably even if you are a dog lover cinephile. They tend to be precious and the standard for the filmmaking is pretty low. 

Red Dog gleefully upends most of those assumptions, especially in the filmmaking. The director with the highly suspicious name of Kriv Stenders has a real eye for putting together an image, as this is a truly crisp-looking picture with a lively sense of visual wit. (Cinematographer Geoffrey Hall has a long history in Australian projects, the only one of which that stood out for me was Chopper -- not a movie I remember having noteworthy visuals.) Even the tug-at-your-heartstrings dog stuff is, though, fairly muted by the standards of such a movie.

The movie looks at this shaggy community of miners in the 1970s, who have blown to Dampier from all corners of the globe and stayed where the work was. Other locals look down on them and doubt they have the capacity for the sort of kinship that forms between them, in large part due to a dog found in the middle of the highway by the two credited with starting the ramshackle community, one of whom is played by Australian character actor Noah Taylor. This serene canine seen in the poster above takes a shine to their group, available to anyone for a pat and a dose of being adjacent to the dog's intrinsic sageness, but allowing no one to call him his master. Until an American one day saves him from a game where the miners are betting on things like how quickly the dog will eat a bowl of food, before they can change up the stakes to eating a live chicken. Like I said, these guys are rough around the edges, but not incapable of a little personal growth when they're in the vicinity of Red.

Given that I knew this was a beloved Australian film, I was a little surprised that the lead is played by Josh Lucas. Most Australian films keep it local. Then again, this was based on real facts, and I imagine the real John Grant was American, so there you go. 

Anyway, the story is basically a portrait of this community throughout the life of the dog and John, though spoiler alert, it was the 1970s so the dog is not still alive. However, I wouldn't consider this the sort of "tragic dog death movie" that triggers dog lovers, and potentially gets the eyes rolling among more cynical cinephiles. 

In fact, for me it was just pure pleasure. It would have made a great 6,500th viewing even if it weren't set in the place I am currently spending my vacation. 

Stiff competition for airplane movies

I had a four-hour flight from Melbourne to Broome on Sunday. It was plenty of time for two movies, as long as they were short-ish -- or maybe not even so short, considering that we were on the tarmac for an extra 30 minutes at the start, with access to the entertainment system, as they fixed something wrong with one of the cargo straps.

I was lucky to get in one.

Granted, Benjamin Millepied's Carmen was 116 minutes, but the bigger obstacle -- and the cause for numerous pauses throughout the movie -- was being on my first-ever flight on which free WiFi was offered.

Free WiFi, of course, meant messaging people about my free WiFi -- "I'm sending you a message -- FROM AN AIRPLANE!" -- as well as what seemed like a true luxury for me: watching live baseball during a flight.

One of my fantasy pitchers was pitching during the flight, making it all the more special. (And potentially nerve-wracking on the second-to-last day of the matchup, had I not earned the bye week in my fantasy baseball playoffs.)

Fortunately, the baseball was laggy enough that I only watched it in little pieces here and there. But then I was also checking other scores, reading baseball news ... in short, all the things I usually have to do as soon as the plane lands.

If this is going to be the standard going forward, airplane movies may be in trouble. 

Now, it may not be. These circumstances were somewhat unusual. We flew Qantas, our preferred airline and one of the most consistently generous on in-flight options, but we flew it domestic, which we almost never do. In fact, we only rare fly domestically anyway, as international travel is more common for us. To my knowledge, you still don't get free WiFi on the international flights, though it's been a year since I've taken one of those on Qantas. (Our flight to Vietnam earlier in the year was a different airline.)

But if I do have free WiFi, especially on an international flight, I think the days when I collect four or five new movies on a flight may be gone. It's just too much of a temptation to resist, even if it is only things like playing Lexulous and Wordle, or checking Facebook.

And how much did an internet distraction impact my feelings on Carmen?

Well I can't say I would have liked it a lot more without pausing, but I liked it quite a bit. And since I obviously missed its theatrical run, it was going to be a paused viewing regardless.

Yeah, you should definitely check out Millipede's movie -- I mean, Millepied's movies. Does having a thousand feet make you a better director? Whether that's the case or not, I really liked his modern-day take on the opera, starring Paul Mescal and Melissa Barrera, though I did check Wikipedia after the fact and determined the actual story here (a border town romance) only has a very few things in common with Georges Bizet's work. Having a thousand feet does apparently make you a better dancer, as Millepied is a dancer himself and dancing features memorably and romantically in the film.

I suppose I could have checked Wikipedia during the movie, but what can I say -- I have not worked out all the advantages of in-flight WiFi just yet.

A bold vision of the future

 Um, that's a joke.

I went fishing for something old and campy last night, on the night before I leave on my trip to Broome -- and most of all, something short.

Amazon has a ton of really marginal crap, stuff Netflix would never consider offering, and that's one of the reasons I love it as an alternative. You don't really want the streamers to be indistinguishable from one another, do you?

I thought I was in the mood for cheap horror, and I guess the movie I ended up choosing was technically given that genre. But it was the prospect of seeing the 1969 idea of what the future looks like that caused me to land on Larry Buchanan's In the Year 2889 after passing over some other good contenders.

And you know what? The year 2889 looks pretty much like the year 1969.

It's a very quaint notion that it would take the human race all the way until 850 years from now, and more than 900 years from when it was made, to destroy itself via nuclear holocaust. In a way, that is a very idealized version of our trustworthiness with nuclear weapons, especially at a time when the cold war was blazing hot. 

Then again, I guess everything just develops very slowly in the mind of Larry Buchanan, given that there is not a single design detail in this movie that suggests a modicum of scientific advancement in those 900 years. 

Buchanan does not even remotely try to update the fashion, the architecture (what little of it we do see, just a single house) nor the speech patterns of his seven characters, which dwindle as the narrative progresses. To underscore the dwindling, the most sinister character sings "Ten Little Indians," which is apparently the sort of enduring classic that is still on everyone's lips nearly a millennium later.

Look, we should not expect much from a movie like In the Year 2889, which distinguishes itself from a movie like Manos: The Hands of Fate only because the story and the dialogue represent a slightly better application of competency. Technically, it's almost just as shoddy, with the camera repositioning itself in the shot if it wasn't positioned correctly, instead of just starting the shot over, and editing that might have been performed by an epileptic. 

I do think, though, that if you are imagining an ominous future for the human race, one that current audiences feel might be closer than they feared -- and you also plan not to do any envisioning of the changes wrought by 900 years on this planet, if only because you don't have the budget -- then you are probably better off calling it In the Year 2116, or some other comparatively close future. 

(I did wonder if the title was chosen to evoke a very distant future because the song "In the Year 2525 (Exordium & Terminus)" by Zager and Evans was also released in 1969. It would be like that year's version of The Asylum. I found myself singing the song all night, at the very least.)

In fact, the only thing that makes In the Year 2889 slightly entertaining from a genre perspective is some of the makeup and mask effects used to offer us human beings mutated by radiation. You get some Creature from the Black Lagoon vibes here and there.

For the most part, though, you just get 1969 humans wearing 1969 wardrobes and 1969 bathing suits talking like people from 1969 would talk, not to mention singing songs that were considered relevant in 1969.

Bold, ideed. 

I just don't want it

There's nothing wrong with Disney's live-action Little Mermaid remake.

"Nothing" is a bit of an exaggeration. You can quibble with casting choices here, flat-looking CGI there. But it's basically exactly the movie you would expect it to be.

But I discovered another reason to reject it as I was watching it:

I just don't want it.

As a critic, I operate under the assumption that every film has the potential to be the very best version of itself, and as such, has the ability to be a good or even great movie, full stop. That perspective assumes that every genre or type of movie you can find out there has the potential to yield up a five-star experience, if they get every detail exactly right.

It's a helpful perspective when reviewing movies because it allows you to look for the strengths even in genres that aren't naturally your thing. As critics, we have a responsibility to be as blank a slate as possible when coming in, open to every experience and poised to consider any film a candidate for your favorite of the year. 

But when faced with movies like The Little Mermaid, which are pretty much the exact realization of what you expect them to be, it's valid to say "I just don't want a live-action remake of The Little Mermaid."

Some context here: I don't consider the original Little Mermaid from 1989 some sacred text that should not be remade. In fact, I've seen it only once. That's not the argument I am making. 

The argument I'm making is that it's possible to say a movie is handled just about as competently as you might expect within its basic anticipated parameters and yet you still just don't care for it.

I think maybe the key phrase there is "anticipated parameters." These Disney remakes are only rarely capable of straying outside certain predetermined dimensions. David Lowery's two Disney remakes, Pete's Dragon and Peter Pan & Wendy, are good examples of movies that allow some of the director's own creative instincts to breach Disney's controls. It's kind of like when a Taika Waititi is able to shake up the Marvel formula, only to prove that this is really the exception as scads more basic bitch Marvel movies follow it.

It occurs to me that there was a chance, at least in unsubstantiated internet rumors, for The Little Mermaid to be that truly special exception. Before the spate of Disney live-action remakes really took off, Sofia Coppola was linked to the original Hans Christian Anderson material. Actually, now that I google it, these rumors are substantiated, as there is even a cast list for this project that never was. (AnnaSophia Robb was to have played Ariel.) Absolutely she would have deviated from the rigid template offered up by the screenplay of the original 1989 movie, as every movie made by Sofia Coppola -- with the possible exception of On the Rocks -- is very evidently a Sofia Coppola movie.

Disney never would have allowed such deviations, and so instead, The Little Mermaid was made by Rob Marshall -- who does not have the same directorial signature. Yes he was the director of Chicago, which I love, but beyond that he has felt more like a director for hire, and The Little Mermaid feels like a movie lacking in vision.

(As a side note, given all the other ways this movie succeeds in terms of representation, I'm a bit surprised they let a man direct the movie, having options within their own family of someone like Niki Caro, who directed Mulan for them a couple years ago. That's especially the case with material that has traditionally received criticism for failing to give agency to its heroine, who literally does not have a voice for much of the movie.)

So am I really saying anything other than the fairly standard complaint of "The Little Mermaid could have been better if they were willing to just take actual risks and did a slightly better job with the CGI?"

Maybe I am, maybe I'm not. But the reason I'm writing this post is that I did have sort of a revelation while watching this movie, that flies in the face of my previous critical assumptions:

Some movies can basically tick all the boxes and undermine your critical nitpicking and still just be something you don't, and maybe never did, want.

Perhaps this is the very example of the modern definition of mediocrity.

A long wait for The Dry 2

I'm going to be in Broome in Western Australia next week on vacation. Naturally, I did some advanced scouting of the movie theater there. (It's pretty small so I assume there's only one.)

I was hoping The Blue Beetle, which opens today, might be playing, because that's something I can see with the kids. But it doesn't look like it at this particular theater.

Just to be sure, I checked out the coming soon movies, and followed it to the end of the listings, which is where I found something really funny.

Now, Force of Nature: The Dry 2 was supposed to already be out. But cascading consequences of the writer's strike -- something I need to write about at some point -- has pushed forward the release date.

But I didn't think it would be pushing it out this far:

In case you're having trouble reading that, I thought I would blow it up for you:

I think they might have gotten the release year of The Dry 2 confused with the year in which its neighbor, Dune 2, takes place. 

Audient Classics: The Virgin Spring

This is the ninth in my 2023 monthly series watching great movies from before I was born that I've seen only once before.

A rhythm had developed with Audient Classics, where just before the new month would begin, I would develop a seemingly spontaneous but then unshakeable hunger to watch one of the movies I'd identified for this series. I'd usually follow through with no problem in the first two weeks of the new month.

That didn't happen in September, and in fact, I had to go fishing around for a bit before I landed on my choice.

The Virgin Spring is the lowest ranked movie on my Flickchart that I've watched for this series, coming in at "only" 735 out of 6354, or 88%. There are plenty of contenders ranked higher who will miss out on the series, since I have only three installments remaining.

But I landed on Ingmar Bergman's 1960 film after a couple of other choices weren't as easy to come by on my existing streaming services as I'd hoped, and this one clearly was. In fact, not long after I jumped into my Kanopy watchlist, there it appeared -- all the sweeter for only being 90 minutes, which is especially useful for me still being a bit sick after eight days of nursing a persistent cold.

The choice was also fortuitous because it has just become spring in the southern hemisphere. As I've mentioned many times before, the seasons change on the first of the month in Australia, and September 1st marked the arrival of spring after a fairly moderate winter.

Of course, it took my second viewing of The Virgin Spring to be reminded that it's not the season this title is evoking, but rather, the water source. Since I'd forgotten the exact nature of the final scene of this movie, that moment in the story produced a little gasp from me when it arrived.

As I did the first time, I considered the fact that this movie provided the template for The Last House on the Left and its various reboots, one of which, Chaos, currently holds the second lowest spot on my Flickchart. In truth, though, I've only seen the original and Chaos, and I've now seen this twice since I've seen either of them, so this movie is more of a current frame of reference for me than either of those. 

The almost disarming simplicity of this story made it a good choice for a sick night. Bergman's films tend to be on a continuum from very challenging to not very challenging, and if something like Persona is on one extreme end of that spectrum, The Virgin Spring might be on the other.

I don't really consider it a spoiler to talk about a film that is 63 years old, but just in case: SPOILER ALERT.

The plot is as simple as it can be. In medieval Sweden, virginal girl and the only child of her parents goes on a day's journey to take candles to a church. Trusting by nature -- fatally so -- she shares her lunch with a trio of herdsmen, two men and a child, who proceed to rape and murder her. They steal her fancy garments in the hopes of selling them, and try to do so at the place they are staying for the night. That happens to be the home of the girl who is now missing, and her mother recognizes her daughter's clothes when the lead herdsman proffers them to her. She tells her husband, who awakens the men from their slumber to murder them. 

It's the final scene I alluded to earlier that I found particularly interesting in the way I frequently find religious miracles captured on him (in Carl Theodor Dreyer's Ordet among others) compelling. When the family and its companions track down the girl's body (with the help of their servant, who considers herself to blame for the daughter's death due to her feelings of jealousy), a mysterious spring of water appears from behind where her head is lying in the grass. This is, effectively, God's answer to the vows of the father, who says he doesn't understand God's ways but also feels guilt over his own murderous vengeance, declaring he will erect a church in this very spot.

Characters struggle with their faith repeatedly in the films of Ingmar Bergman, and this one in particular considers the eternal question posed by such people: "Why do good things happen to bad people?" The daughter Karin, played by Birgitta Pettersson, is the epitome of the innocent, the one who doesn't see the danger in other people and therefore succumbs to it. 

It was interesting to me to see how swiftly Bergman orchestrates the deaths of the characters who die, as though he acknowledges that these are necessary waystations in the thematic journey of the narrative, but he does not relish them in any sense. Karin's rape is more implied than shown, although there's some depiction of her desperate struggle. When she is killed, it is from only a single blow with a stick. While most movie characters survive injuries that should kill them, she is the opposite, expiring symbolically as much as she expires physically.

The same restraint is shown when her father (played by Bergman regular Max Von Sydow) kills the men. Their struggles are a bit more elongated, but in each instance the knife he drives into their bodies does not seem the kind of wound that would kill them instantly. The child suffers a similar death to the man's own daughter, from a head injury suffered by being thrown by Von Sydow's character into a shelving unit. Bergman shows no instinct to luxuriate in any of this physical violence. It's the violence of human nature that is of greater interest.

Bergman's regular DP Sven Nykvist renders the proceedings simultaneously plain and suffused with a sort of dark magic. The incredible look of this film makes it clear why Bergman wanted to continue working in black and white as long as he could. In fact, every Bergman movie I've seen in color, even the ones I've loved, has made me long for the non-color alternative that so expertly underscores his themes. 

Okay on to October, when I have to decide if there's a horror movie that qualifies for this series. 

Tom Sizemore has 28 more posthumous projects

I didn't do an "in memoriam" piece for Tom Sizemore when he died earlier this year. As you would know, I don't write them for a lot of people, even some genuinely great actors or directors, if I didn't feel a special connection to them. If I felt obligated to be the blog of record on deaths of movie industry people, that's all I'd be writing. 

With Sizemore, it wasn't even a consideration, because he wasn't a very good guy. I'm not going to refresh my memory on what made him not a very good guy right now. I don't need to go out of my way to speak ill of the dead.

The reason I'm speaking of him at all is something outrageous I saw when I went to his IMDB page yesterday.

If you read yesterday's post on Blue Steel, you would know the reason I was doing Sizemore research. I wanted to see how many other Kathryn Bigelow films he had appeared in. As it turned out, it was two.

Due to a (fairly) recent redesign, IMDB now segments projects by what have already been released ("Previous") and what have yet to be unveiled ("Upcoming"). 

As my eyes drifted upward to the "Upcoming" section for Sizemore, I saw the absurd number 28 appearing there.

Now, it's customary for an actor who dies while still working to have two, three, four, even five projects yet to be released. Checking out this section can be a comfort to us as we try to determine how many more chances we have to savor work of theirs we've never seen.

But 28?

The number is high on its own, but it's even higher considering that I don't remember the last time I've seen Tom Sizemore in something new. In fact, just now I bemusedly scrolled back through, what, a hundred titles? in order to find the last one I'd seen. That was 19 years ago with Paparazzi, which is in my bottom 40 films on Flickchart. That was the kind of career Sizemore had.

And except for the fact that he's just a lesser celebrity than those I'm about to mention, we'd probably be more familiar with the fact that he'd gone the route of guys like John Travolta and Bruce Willis, appearing in whatever straight-to-video schlock someone was willing to consider casting them in. The other reason for my bemusement was just how few of the titles I recognized -- almost none in the past ten years, except for TV shows. 

This sort of indifference to where his money was coming from is, of course, why Sizemore had loaned his mug to so many movies that have not yet been completed or released. If I remember some of the vague, unsavory details of his life correctly, he needed the money due to repeatedly blowing it all. 

The crazy thing is the four-letter word in the subject of this post that I should draw your attention to: "more." Given that he already has nine 2023 credits in his "Previous" section on IMDB, it's likely that at least five of them, probably more, were released since his death in early March. So if you'd gone to his IMDB that day, you might have seen 33 pending projects instead of 28.

Alas, none of those projects serve that ideal function for when someone beloved passes. I have no inclination to savor anything else that may still be coming from Tom Sizemore. If I do one day decide to reappraise him, I'll of course have plenty of other unseen movies to choose from.

Campion Champion & Bigelow Pro: Blue Steel

This is the penultimate in my 2023 bi-monthly series watching the remaining films I had not yet seen by Kathryn Bigelow and Jane Campion, two of the three women who have won the best director Oscar.

Alas. This series' three films directed by Kathryn Bigelow started with a whimper, and also ended with one -- though it seems quite misplaced to describe any of Blue Steel's histrionics as a "whimper."

Her first film The Loveless also disappointed me, so her portion of this series was only salvaged by Near Dark, which I loved and gave four stars on Letterboxd.

Jane Campion isn't doing a huge amount better, though my feelings on her first two films were more like lukewarmth. Whereas my star rating for Blue Steel just kept on dropping and dropping throughout the film's running time, until it was about as low as it could go.

To give you some sense of why I disliked this film so much I will have to spoil it. (The bold and italics are meant to indicate that this is your spoiler warning.) The film is 33 years old so I suspect you will have decided long ago whether you planned to see it. If you still plan to, you can stop reading this now.

Much of my disappointment has to do with mistaken expectations when coming in -- expectations that seem even more mistaken given what I've been able to gather from the tenor of Bigelow's other films, all the rest of which I had now seen. 

Perhaps only because the promotional materials for the movie all show Jamie Lee Curtis in her beat cop uniform, I was under the impression that this was some sort of realistic look at a female police officer -- that still seeming something of an anachronism as late as 1990, when this film was made -- and how she cuts her teeth on the force. I expected sexism to play a role (it only plays a very small one) and I imagined it to be a lot more like a procedural.

No, this is a classic, and very bad, example of that inescapable 1990s thriller, the cat-and-mouse game between a cop and a killer and how the killer gets inside the cop's head.

Yawn.

These can be done well. I'm sure I liked a number of these movies back in the 1990s. This one is not done well. 

We are introduced to Curtis' Megan Turner as an academy hopeful with an earnest desire to work as a police officer. She seems to be a totally by-the-book type who just wants to serve the people and do honor to the badge.

But on her very first shift -- almost as much of a cliche as the very last shift -- she shoots dead a man trying to rob a grocery store. (Tom Sizemore, whom Bigelow would use again, in bigger roles, in Point Break and Strange Days.)

Ordinarily, this first day on the job would just be considered very bad luck and would not, should not, define Officer Turner's upcoming actions in her chosen career. Clearly they need to investigate the shooting, but witnesses would corroborate her story that she told the man to drop his gun multiple times before opening fire, and only did so when he turned the gun on her. 

Unfortunately, she immediately loses all credibility by starting to act incredibly erratically, beyond the standard ways common to a rogue cop who has to break the rules to prove what he or she knows to be true but what no one else can see.

She tries to arrest someone while on desk duty -- or is it actual suspension? -- with a gun she shouldn't have. She handcuffs the internal affairs officer on her case to the steering wheel of his car so she can follow a hunch to try to catch the man who is stalking her. (And nearly gets him killed, for the first of two times.) When she's in the hospital as a patient, she punches out another officer so she can steal his uniform -- for reasons that are totally unclear beyond what seems like Bigelow's interest in staging the final shootout with Turner in her beat cop clothes.

Adding to the ridiculousness, even though it has been established that she shot Sizemore on her first day as a beat cop, she is treated throughout like a veteran, offered benefits of the doubt only accorded to those who have logged countless hours and cases, as well as given their level of access to case files and to higher ups in the NYPD, including, if I'm not mistaken, the police commissioner himself (Kevin Dunn). We're talking about a woman fresh out of cadet school who shot someone five times on the first day of the job! She would be granted exactly zero benefits of the doubt, especially because -- the film notes but does not follow through on -- she's a woman. (Really, the fact that Blue Steel was not more about her gender is a major disappointment that I cannot overstate. Bigelow could have really pushed this and she just didn't.) 

But one of the main reasons she should not be accorded this sort of preferential treatment is because they can't find Sizemore's gun, leading to doubts that it ever actually existed. (The witnesses seem unable to confirm it, which is ridiculous -- they're all on the floor, and they wouldn't be just because a guy was waving around a knife.)

But if she shot Sizemore dead, then his gun would have clattered to the grocery store floor and been collected as evidence, right?

That brings us to the movie's villain, played by Ron Silver, a Wall Street day trader. And boy is he a doozy. 

Silver's Eugene Hunt is at the grocery store at the time of the shooting. He also drops to the ground. When Sizemore is shot, his gun does clatter to the ground -- right next to Eugene. Who surreptitiously takes the gun and leaves the scene without staying to provide witness statements.

Why does he do this? Lord knows, but I will try to hazard a guess.

Apparently this Wall Street day trader has always been a psychopath in the waiting and was just looking for someone to drop their gun next to him in order to push him over the top. And if you're expecting this to lead to an exploration of toxic masculinity on Wall Street and for Eugene to be a character in the mold of Patrick Bateman, I'm sorry to disappoint you there too. Bret Easton Ellis didn't write American Psycho until the following year. Who knows, maybe he was inspired by Blue Steel.

So Eugene has this gun and has gone back to work and we don't really know anything more about him just yet. But then he waits outside in the rain for Megan after she's been stripped of her badge and her gun. She doesn't know him from a hole in the ground because he left the scene of her shooting without anyone seeing him. She just thinks he's a kind stranger -- a kind stranger in a fancy suit and a neatly cropped beard -- who offers her a place in his taxi.

He takes her to dinner and takes her on a helicopter ride and seduces her. Why he's interested in her outside of it being one of those dumb conveniences these movies need is initially unclear, and I think still unclear after the film's bogus explanation. But you should know that now that he has a gun, he has decided to start shooting other random people around the city and carving Megan's name onto the bullet casings. I guess to frame her? But that couldn't be -- people don't have personally monogrammed bullets. Just to mess with her I guess.

He's keeping separate the seduction from the cuckoo behavior until one day he decides to spring on her the idea that she might be his soulmate because she also can unflinchingly shoot someone. So I guess when she shot Sizemore it turned him on and he thought he might have found the woman who can be the psychotic other half of his fetishistic desire to shoot people. (Silver, by the way, has some really demented moments that work in isolation, but as a realization of some actual psychological disorder, they're pretty absurd.)

And this is when she starts behaving more and more erratically, though of course she never has anything solid on him -- and her bringing of her hunches to the police brass is particularly ludicrous given she would know she needs evidence. His lawyer (a young Richard Jenkins) makes sure that nothing can stick to him precisely because of this lack of evidence, and even though Eugene and the lawyer are both supposed to be smarmy and acting in bad faith, you kind of agree with the lawyer that's there's nothing she can actually pin on him. Agreeing with this lawyer is not where we should be at this point in the movie.

The characters here are so poorly drawn, their motivations so sketchily established, that their behavior as the movie advances toward its finale just gets more and more ludicrous. To give you an idea of how hopeless things have gotten by the end of the third act, let's fast forward to the moment when Megan is in the hospital and has just punched out the cop to take his clothes. This was instead of taking a sedative to make her sleep after Eugene broke into her apartment and shot the IA agent (Clancy Brown), though somehow not fatally, and injured her enough to send her into the hospital before himself disappearing again -- as he is, as all mysterious killers are, wont to do.

So Megan is back in her blues that she hasn't worn since that very first night, I suppose walking aimlessly in an attempt to find Eugene. She goes down into a subway, and suddenly he's there on the subway platform, aiming a gun at her back. Despite the fact that aiming a gun at somebody's back does not involve any noise -- they don't show the gun's hammer clicking or anything -- she whirls around and fires a shot at him just before he can try to shoot her.

The staging here is particularly peculiar. It does not seem as though Eugene has followed her down into this subway station. The staging suggests he was already in the subway -- he's finally ditched his suit for the clothes of an indigent person -- and she just happened to walk down onto the platform in this particular station, where he already was. What? That doesn't make a bit of sense.

It appears as though Bigelow wanted to have this showdown in the subway so Megan could be knocked off her feet, with her head exposed to an oncoming train, so she could move it out of the way at the last moment. It wasn't worth it.

Their showdown surfaces to street level where they shoot at each other from behind cars and not once, not twice, but at least three times empty their cartridge and then look stupidly at the gun to see why it's no longer shooting bullets, continuing to pull the trigger despite the lack of further emanations from the barrel. Gee, might the gun have run out of bullets? It's the dumb movie version of someone tapping a microphone and saying "Is this thing on?" only it's "Is this gun working like it's supposed to?"

Finally there's a moment where she has him at close range and after a long pregnant pause, she blasts him three times in the chest -- at which point he falls forward. Not backward, but forward. 

In a modern movie, Megan would have learned from all her reckless discharging of her weapon and would have placed him under arrest, an indication that maybe she does have a future in the police force and she can put this all behind her. Instead, she drops him dead. (Well, he did kill her friend earlier and tried to kill the IA agent whom she had just slept with, despite the fact that she almost got him killed by handcuffing him to his steering wheel.) 

Because you could run the credits without any sort of epilogue back in this era, that's exactly what happens. A dazed Megan is pulled from the front seat of the vehicle where she was sitting when she finally popped a cap in Eugene's ass, the officer who comes across this scenario where she had just shot dead an apparent civilian never wondering for a moment whether she might be the aggressor, some sort of demented person wearing a cop uniform. Indeed, that's pretty much what she is. Indeed, it's not even her own uniform, as she punched out a nice cop who had just offered her a cigarette and whose only crime was being assigned to sit outside her room at the hospital so no one tried to kill her.

I was half expecting an epilogue, though, where we would see the police commissioner draping some kind of medal around her neck for her bravery, or giving her the key to the city. At this point I was so skeptical of the core ethics of the movie that I thought Bigelow might find this completely justified.

I do feel a little bad beating up Blue Steel and Bigelow because of the optics of it; because of the very thing I said I wished this movie had dealt with more. I thought specifically this movie was going to be about a woman's journey on the police force, in an era in which she was scoffed at for choosing this career path and many people didn't think her capable of doing it. It's fine that Bigelow was more interested in making what is effectively an erotic thriller. It's her business if she wants to do that. What worries me is whether I, a male critic and blogger, will be seen as shitting on this work by a female director with a female star, when I'm sure there were so many other terrible movies conforming to this template made at this same time, that were made by and starring men. 

But it isn't this same time now, and I expect I'd find many of those movies equally lacking if I watched them in 2023. It's conceivable that I would have found Blue Steel slightly more useful in 1990, but I don't know. It's pretty bad.

Speaking of 1990, there was one thing I noticed about this movie as it related to another movie that came out in 1990. That's Adrian Lyne's Jacob's Ladder, which is also set in New York -- and features two of the actors that this film featured. Yes, Elizabeth Pena (Megan's friend whom Eugene shoots and kills) and Matt Craven (a date Megan is fixed up with, who turns up his nose at her career choice) are both also in Jacob's Ladder, which I found strange. Just a coincidence that the two actors were also in a different movie set in New York and made in 1990? Or at least released in 1990? 

No, actually! Both movies featured Risa Bramon Garcia and Billy Hopkins as casting directors, as it turns out. 

In order to finish the Kathryn Bigelow portion of this series on a more hopeful note, I'll say that Blue Steel does serve a useful purpose if we think of it as a a blue print (so to speak) for Strange Days, which is my favorite Bigelow film and in my top 100 on Flickchart. It seems Bigelow is working out some of the ideas and iconic imagery of that film in this one, and at least by then she has really figured out where she stands on the police and their possibility for corruption. It's a theme she would explore more and more ruthlessly up to and including her most recent feature to date, 2017's Detroit.

It's a bit of a bummer that Bigelow hasn't made -- hasn't gotten to make? -- a film in the six years since then, because one of the reasons I chose her for this series is that when she's on, she's really on. Beyond Strange Days, my favorite of hers by leaps and bounds, we've got other films that worked like gangbusters for others even if they might not have worked to that same extent for me, like Point Break, the best picture winner The Hurt Locker, and Zero Dark Thirty.

And I'm grateful I did watch her films this year if only because that gave me Near Dark, which may just end up being my favorite of the six films I watch by these two directors. 

In November, we'll see if Campion's final film, In the Cut, has anything to say about that.

Galaxy Quest and its most direct source of inspiration

It was Australian Father's Day on Sunday, meaning Daddy gets to choose.

We did some other Daddy-chosen activities throughout the weekend -- a bonfire in our new backyard fire pit on Saturday night, including s'mores, and lunch out at a place called Grazeland that has about 40 food trucks on Sunday afternoon. But I also took advantage of the chance to guide our Sunday night viewing priorities, as I did last year when I pushed Star Wars: The Force Awakens on the family for a viewing on the projector in our garage. 

I thought the kids might want to get a bit more aspirational this year, with a movie aimed a little more at older viewers, and my wife and I had talked before about exposing them to one of our favorite comedies. I'd hoped a viewing of Galaxy Quest would accomplish both things. 

Well, my older son laughed one time. It was when Sam Rockwell said "There's a red thingy going toward the green thingy. I think we're the green thingy."

My younger son didn't laugh, but I'm not sure he has the same instincts for comedy that his older brother has. I ultimately didn't really get an assessment of the movie from either of them as we just hurried them off to bed when it was over. Which was fine. At least my wife enjoyed it, as she always does.

After it ended, I did something I almost never do. I took the recommendation by the streaming service (Stan) of another movie to watch if I enjoyed Galaxy Quest.

That movie was Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. I've heard of it.

That's a joke of course. Star Trek II is the movie that single-handedly salvaged the prospects of me liking Star Trek after I was left so cold by Star Trek: The Motion Picture as a kid. Watching it again now, I am surprised I found it such an action-packed adventure, comparatively speaking, since it really is just a giant chess match between Kirk and Khan. But the nine-year-old me was apparently pretty sophisticated in this tastes, and a love affair with that other major science fiction franchise was born. The only Star Wars movie I have ahead of it on my Flickchart, in fact, is the original Star Wars. It's sitting in the august spot of #23 on my chart, and after another viewing, I've again confirmed Wrath of Khan is worth every little bit of that ranking.

It was especially interesting to watch it in the context of having just seen Galaxy Quest, since I'm now formally convinced of something I probably kind of subconsciously assumed in the past: While Galaxy Quest is certainly a spoof of everything Star Trek, it gets more material from Wrath of Khan than anywhere else.

Consider:

1) Both movies contain an extremely powerful device with the power to destroy worlds. In Khan that is Genesis, a technology that can create a vibrant world on a dead planet -- or will destroy and recreate on a planet that is not dead. In Quest, it's the Omega 13, which happens to be a device that rearranges matter to allow a time shift of 13 seconds -- though for most of the movie they don't know what it is, and worry it could destroy all matter in the universe. In either case it serves as a MacGuffin that that rival captain wants.

2) And let's talk about that rival captain. As epic as Khan is in the pantheon of villains, I'd argue that Quest's Sarris is a well-drawn character who has earned his own high level of cult appreciation. Speaking of chess matches, both Khan and Sarris engage in battles of the wills and intellects with the man who is either Captain Kirk himself or a direct spoof of Kirk, Jason Nesmith's Peter Quincy Taggert. Because this is the dominant technological mode, these tete-a-tete battles are carried out via the big control room screens where they one can see the other -- though one difference between them is that Sarris and Taggert (actually Nesmith) do share the same space at one point, whereas Kirk and Khan never do. (A surprising decision, one would say, that ends up never diminishing the chemistry between the two archrivals.)

3) Both films feature a scene where an inexperienced captain and/or pilot steers a starship out of a docking port. The scene is played hilariously for comedy in Quest, where Laredo -- actually the grown child actor Tommy Webber -- attempts something he has no business doing and scrapes the side of the ship against the port wall, accompanied by an eternal screeching sound and all the other passengers twisting their head sideways in agony. The comedy is there but more muted in Khan, where Kirk displays his obvious nerves over the fact that Lt. Saavik will be supervising for the first time as her crew pilots the ship out of port. That one goes much more smoothly. (Some dialogue I jotted down. Kirk says to Sulu "I'm glad to have you at the helm for two weeks. I don't think these kids can steer." Well, Laredo is literally a kid -- a grown kid, but a kid on the original show -- and all evidence suggests that he cannot really steer.)

4) In Wrath of Khan, Kirk talks about reprogramming the simulation test Kobayashi Maru that presents a no-win situation for prospective captains, because "I don't like to lose." In Quest, Taggart's motto is "Never give up, never surrender."

5) This might be a little more of a stretch, but both movies contain a scene where a character holds a dying man in his arms and says he will avenge him. It's Alexander Dane's Dr. Lazarus cradling Quellek after Quellek has been shot, when Dane finally is genuinely moved to produce his much-loathed catchphrase: "By Grabthar's Hammer, by the suns of Worvan, you shall be avenged." It's actually the villain in Khan, as Khan promises "I will avenge you" to Joachim, whose name I just had to look up, but is listed on Wikipedia as "Khan's chief henchman." Joachim certainly deserves to be avenged, as he's constantly giving Khan good advice that Khan ignores, and it gest him nothing but a large chunk of the Starship Reliant dropped on his midsection.

And in #4, I found my two unexpected bits of Father's Day resonance. In Quellek's death scene, he says to Dane/Lazarus, "And although we had never met, I always considered you as a father to me." Given their age difference and general relationship, you could think of Joachim as Khan's son, surrogate or otherwise. (In fact, it may have been otherwise -- there are certain places on the internet that flatly state that Joachim is Khan's son.)

Of course the most obvious instance of the father theme in Star Trek II is the fact that Kirk meets, for the first time ever it would appear, his own son, David Marcus, whose mother Carol never told him that his father was one of the most famous captains in the history of the federation. Kirk isn't just a deadbeat dad; Carol actually asked him to stay away. "You had your world and I had mine," she says. "And I wanted him in mine, not off gallivanting through the universe with his father."

There's no David death scene; not in this movie, anyway. (Yes, I may have to reckon with Star Trek III for the first time in forever after having my appetite whetted here.) But it was a really nice way to finish the night to see the two have a somewhat awkward but ultimately poignant hug as David formally acknowledges Kirk as his father and says he's proud to be his son. 

Which shame is dirtier?

When John Waters released his film A Dirty Shame in 2004, I always wondered why he called it that when there was a perfectly good movie called A Low Down Dirty Shame released ten years earlier.

The two movies don't have anything to do with each other, as you can probably tell from these posters.

Point of clarification -- A Low Down Dirty Shame was not "perfectly good" in any sense of the word other than I am using it here. The title was one of the things that drew me to it, and I also liked Keenen Ivory Wayans, but it was a pretty big disappointment.

I didn't have a chance to be disappointed by A Dirty Shame when I watched it on Thursday night because I remembered its reviews at the time and that critics did not like it. Then again, when has John Waters ever cared what critics thought? The person who made Pink Flamingoes -- which I think is absolutely terrible -- would never have made Pink Flamingoes if he cared one iota about basing the longevity of his career on the praise of critics.

Given that I knew it was going to be bad, I actually liked A Dirty Shame slightly better than I would have expected -- and not just because I've always liked Selma Blair, and seeing her with obviously fake giant breasts was a little bit titillating. (Talk about dirty shames.)

To be clear, though, it's not a good movie.

How to decide which is worse, A Dirty Shame or A Low Down Dirty Shame? To decide which movie should feel more shame? To decide which movie should feel more dirty?

Well obviously the word "dirty" is being used differently here. In Waters' movie, it's "dirty" in the way of "dirty movies." Since it is about people who show signs of instant sex addiction after receiving trauma to the head, it is a smutfest from start to finish, and that's just the way Waters likes it.

To refresh myself on the particulars of A Low Down Dirty Shame, which my records tell me I saw in November of 2002, I had to go to its Wikipedia page. Ah yes. Writer-director Wayans plays Andre Shame, a private investigator who runs A Low Down Dirty Shame Investigations. So I guess maybe the movie doesn't find itself either dirty or shameful, but that's for me to decide. 

And since they are not using the terms the same way, how will I decide which film is more of a dirty shame? Really, I can only figure out which one is worse. 

I have my guesses, but I will let Flickchart decide.

Without first consulting the position of A Low Down Dirty Shame on my Flickchart -- though I know it's pretty low -- I'll break my usual rules for delaying adding movies to Flickchart by at least a month and I will pop A Dirty Shame on there right now. Only after I'm done ranking will I check the ranking of A Low Down Dirty Shame, which is the only way I can be sure of not subconsciously influencing the outcome. (Though you could argue that if I were subconsciously influencing the outcome, that would tip my hand about which film I like better, thereby accomplishing the same goal.)

Okay I'm back now. Did you miss me?

I sent A Dirty Shame on its Flickchart journey and it ended up at 5562 out of 6356 movies, good for the 12th percentile on my chart. It's possible it could have been lower, but some of the movies in this area are ranked a bit funny. For example, it ended up right next to Kick-Ass 2, and I thought I liked that movie okay. (No, as it turns out I gave Kick-Ass 2 only two stars on Letterboxd, same as A Dirty Shame.)

Now let's see where A Low Down Dirty Shame sits ...

Well that would be 5930/6356, good for 7th percentile.

And maybe this is correct in terms of their relative positions, even if I think this might be a bit of a harsh assessment of Wayans' movie. Even if I don't always vibe with Waters, I do appreciate his anarchic approach to filmmaking and his perennial goal of tweaking the squares. A Low Down Dirty Shame may have had more merits as a film in certain senses, but the disappointment with it was real, especially since, as I recall, Wayans doesn't even attempt to be funny in it. 

However, I should note, I also gave this movie two stars on Letterboxd, at least retroactively.

So we may have to leave it to history to decide which is truly the more shameful dirt. 

And that's all I have to say about that.