I go into the office on Wednesday every week, Thursday most weeks. Because Cinema Kino is downstairs from my office, I always take a gander at the marquee on Wednesdays, as another way of keeping up on release dates when some of the methods I once used have fallen by the wayside.
The thing about Wednesdays, though, is that it's the day before new movies get released, meaning everything I see on there should be at least six days old.
It's a bit confounding, then, that the marquee changers are already showing tomorrow's new offerings.
And I'm not talking about late at night when they are legitimately preparing for tomorrow. I'm talking about first thing Wednesday morning.
This week the phenomenon became egregious enough for me to write about it.
On the marquee you see above, there are no less than three titles that aren't actually coming out until tomorrow (or today, by the time I post this).
I thought it was four, but then I checked and Saltburn is already playing.
The Old Oak, Uproar and Bottoms are not.
I just think it must be frustrating if you are a potential drive by customer on a Wednesday and you say "Oh, I've heard great things about Bottoms! Think I'll go grab myself a spontaneous viewing."
Only to find out that you are 24 hours early.
I get trying to hype the new product. But isn't this false advertising? Is it too much to ask that the movies that appear on your marquee are actually playing?
To say nothing of the disservice it does to currently playing movies whose heat has cooled enough for them to get dropped from the marquee. I guess Kino is discouraged enough about the viewership of Cat Person that they don't care much about trying to get one last drive by viewing.
I sometimes wonder why I bother to maintain my movie list where I keep track of the movies I've seen on a particular calendar date. Instead of explaining that further, let me just show you an example of what I'm talking about:
November 28 =
18
In Love and War (2005), Keane (2007), The Prize
Winner of Defiance, Ohio (2008), Anvil! The Story of Anvil (2009), Jonah Hex (2010),
Mother (2009) (2010), Death Race 2000
(2011), CQ (2011), Bronson (2013), Hotel Transylvania 2 (2015), Say Something (2015),
The Overnight (2015), Home (2015), I Was Born, But … (2016), The Children Act (2018),
Palm Springs (2020), The Water Diviner (2022), The Old Oak (2023)
"Obsessiveness" is the only reason I usually need, but yesterday I got another reminder of its practical usage -- practical, at least, in terms of identifying coincidences.
(Oh, and as a key for deciphering the example above -- the bolded title is the best movie I've seen on that particular date, which in this case is Bong Joon Ho's Mother. And yes, I don't remember the circumstances, but I did apparently see four movies on November 28, 2015.)
Last night I watched The Old Oak, which has been billed as the final film from Ken Loach. That's not because he's dead and they aren't sure if there's a hidden movie out there that may still emerge to complete his filmography. It's because in a rare move for a director, Loach is willingly retiring at age 87. Usually, directors either stop making movies because they die, or because people stop selecting them as a viable option to tell stories people care about.
In order to give myself some additional context about his career before writing my review -- since I had, improbably, seen only a single other Ken Loach film (The Wind That Shakes the Barley) -- on Monday I watched his 2016 Palme d'Or winner I, Daniel Blake. I was probably overdue for a viewing of this anyway, since I remember being annoyed, at least retroactively, that this movie prevented Toni Erdmann from presumably winning the Palme d'Or. (And again Toni Erdmann rears its head organically on my blog.) Because I hadn't yet seen Toni Erdmann at the time I heard the Palme d'Or winner announced, had only absorbed some of hype about it, I was a lot more annoyed at Asghar Farhadi's The Salesman, which nabbed the Oscar I thought Erdmann deserved.
Anyway, doing this sort of context viewing for a review is rare. Given all the other viewing priorities I have, watching one movie in order to write one review is hard enough, let alone investing nearly four hours of movies for that one review.
In fact, I think the last time I did it was almost on this very same date last year, in order to review a movie far less potentially important than The Old Oak.
You'll notice on the list above that on November 28, 2022, I watched Russell Crowe's The Water Diviner.
Why did I do that at a time of the year when I should be ramping up for my big end-of-year blowout by watching only current year movies?
Well, because I was reviewing his new directorial effort Poker Face, and I thought I would benefit from some prior knowledge of Crowe as a director -- maybe especially on an Australian review site.
As it turned out, and as I could have probably guessed at the time, Poker Face was an instant cinematic footnote, perhaps especially because it was immediately overshadowed by Rian Johnson's television show of the same name starring Natasha Lyonne, which was debuting right around the same time. I didn't hate it but it was also a weirdly paced movie, with lots of build-up and a blink-and-you'll-miss-it climax.
I did actually quite like The Water Diviner, so if I had been watching it the hopes of it providing fuel for snark in my Poker Face review, I was destined for disappointment.
With The Old Oak and I, Daniel Blake, I am more a fan of the newer film in this case. Perhaps carrying in a little of my retroactive Toni Erdmann bias, I found Blake a bit on-the-nose and didactic in its anti-bureaucracy agenda, which made caricatures of many of the government workers. I was overall favorable towards it.
And it did provide some helpful context for my review The Old Oak, which I plan to write later today, and which brings a similar progressive/labor-positive agenda in examining a Northern England town dealing with an influx of Syrian refugees in ways both productive and not so productive. In fact, by the time you read this, the review may already be linked over to the right.
This is the final installment of my 2023 bi-monthly series Campion Champion & Bigelow Pro, in which I watched the remaining three films each I had not seen that were directed by Jane Campion and Kathryn Bigelow.
To paraphrase former football coach Dennis Green, "It was what we thought it was."
Because Jane Campion is the only woman ever to receive two Oscar nominations for best director, winning one of them, there's been an inclination to reappraise her 2003 thriller In the Cut. At the very least, the hosts spoke about it with some favorability when they looked back on it on Filmspotting. It's tempting to give an artist who has made some indisputably great films a little leeway when looking at her misfires. Dare I say this tendency might be even greater when it's a woman, of whom there are relatively few to celebrate at this level in this industry.
But everyone is capable of making a stinker, even Jane Campion.
I should say the rating I am giving my final Campion feature on Letterboxd is two stars. That might clear it from "stinker" territory. So either this film does have some saving graces, or I am not immune to the notion of boosting my appraisal of the films of someone like Campion.
It's just that when it came out in 2003, it seemed like yet another one of those erotic detective thrillers that had their heyday in the 1990s before slowly starting to peter out in the 2000s, and that's pretty much exactly what it is.
In fact, if I were looking for something to differentiate this from others of its ilk -- some little twinkling idea that Campion brought to the project that a lesser director couldn't have -- I can't really find it.
If you're hoping for a strong character from Meg Ryan, representing an undercurrent of feminism in the film, you'll be disappointed. Even someone with Campion's smart sensibilities is unable to prevent this from being a character who has things happen to her, not who drives the action. She spends a fair bit of time crying pathetically as men toss her around like a rag doll. This was standard practice for a woman in a thriller in 2003, but it has not aged well, and it would have seemed like Campion could have done better by her lead character, even back then.
Then there's the men. Each is reprehensible in his own way, which is okay depending on how it's handled -- perhaps this is the feminism of Campion peeking through. But even though their behavior reads to us as vile, within the film itself it is not sufficiently repudiated, leaving an unsavory taste. Particularly unsavory, at least by today's standards, is the monstrous behavior of a young Black man who is one of Ryan's students, one of the red herrings about who might be the killer. There's a scene where it is implied he would have raped her had there not been a deus ex machina sort of intervention.
Mark Ruffalo is good, as he always is, but I loathed his character and his retrograde opinions about women, even some possible racism. (He says the way to flirt with a Black chick is that you stare back at her.) Clearly Campion is not trying to present us a knight in shining armor, but even within his own character there are inconsistencies. For example, he violates protocol by asking Ryan's character out even though he's just interviewed her as a potential witness to a murder. Perhaps it's not the same as asking out a suspect, but it's sketchy anyway. Then later in the movie there's a line where he says "I was doing perfectly fine before I met you," as though she were the instigator of their relationship and to blame for messing with his head. Then he's got a sexually aggressive quality throughout that is especially hard to stomach today.
In the Cut is one of those movies that uses the psychosexual dynamics of its lead characters as a driver for the parts of the story that are supposed to interest us most, and that's the problem with every erotic thriller -- maybe the reason why it essentially died out as a viable genre. Maybe there was a time we did feel like the animal magnetism between two characters and the various ways they tear each other's clothes off was enough to hold our interest. That time has now passed.
Really, I doubt my impression of In the Cut would have been any different 20 years ago -- no better, no worse. I don't think any one of those erotic thrillers became a special favorite of mine, though if I drilled down into my Flickchart account I'd probably start to find the exceptions. Watching this movie, I kept trying to find the Campionisms, the bits of filmmaking prowess that elevated this material. Outside of a few shots -- there's one involving water on an out-of-focus light that I found quite distinctive -- this felt like it could have been the work of any old hack.
It's also one of those movies that reminds me of something that's probably obvious, which is that 20 years ago is now a long time ago and films looked a lot different back then. There's a lot of super saturation of color and unfocusing of backgrounds that probably registered as visually dynamic back then, but today just ages the film. I don't suppose any film can really escape the era in which it was made, but some are more indebted to it than others. The great films become ageless, while the lesser ones become part of the wallpaper that defined a particular time period.
Well I wish I could say the end result of this series were more positive. It turns out I'd made smart choices in which Campion and Bigelow films I'd seen and which I'd left to catch up with at some future unspecified date.
There's some positive news in that I loved Bigelow's Near Dark, the vampire movie she made in 1987. (Which almost certainly looks like a film made in 1987, though at least that's a look we aspire to nowadays.) However, I was significantly negative on the other two films I watched, The Loveless and Blue Steel, with Blue Steel actually having a huge amount in common with In the Cut. If I were ranking these six films, Bigelow's would be at either end of the spectrum, occupying spots 1, 5 and 6.
It's hard even to say which Campion film I liked best, though I guess it would have to be An Angel at My Table from 1990. The way the film is tied into her New Zealand roots -- almost to the same extent as her debut, Sweetie, which I really like -- gives it a certifiable edge over Holy Smoke, which shares too much in common with In the Cut in terms of the aforementioned psychosexual dynamics. So I suppose, that does make In the Cut a logical part of her oeuvre, even if it's too generic in all other respects.
Having now done this in three straight years with Orson Welles, Martin Scorsese and these two women, I plan to give the "complete a filmography" format a rest in 2024, at least for one year. But that doesn't mean I won't have a bi-monthly series, maybe just the one, as opposed to the three I've been working through in 2023. I'll tell you all about that in January.
Not long after I wrote this post, in which I aired hopes of trying to finish off the Bond movies I hadn't seen at the Sun Theatre's four-day Bondathon, I realized that the three movies I would need to see -- the first three starring Roger Moore -- play on the same day of the week that I coach my son's basketball games.
Basically giving up hope, I still said "Well, maybe we'll have a bye that day."
Because we'd already had one bye this year and it was only four weeks ago, I considered the likelihood of that pretty low.
And then, it came to pass. I just found out a few days ago, since they only set the schedule about two games in advance.
So now instead of coaching his basketball game next Friday, December 1st, I will be seeing Live and Let Die, The Man With the Golden Gun and The Spy Who Loved Me -- conveniently starting at 5 p.m., after I've already finished work for the day.
The next movie in the sequence would be Moonraker, the first Bond movie I ever saw, so that would be a wrap on all 25 Eon movies.
I watched them chronologically, but in two separate chronologies. Until I saw Dr. No in 2006, I'd seen every Bond movie from Moonraker onward in the order it was released. I then also worked my way forward from Dr. No -- with seven-year breaks between Dr. No and From Russia With Love, and between Goldfinger and Thunderball -- while continuing to intersperse the new releases as they came out. (Actually, there was one other chronological break, as I didn't see the 2008 movie Quantum of Solace until 2015.)
Now, as soon as I realized my availability for this small part of the Bondathon, I also realized I had some work to do. In order to remain chronological but watch only those three Moore movies that did not conflict with my work schedule, I had to watch the only George Lazenby movie, 1969's On Her Majesty's Secret Service, and the last Eon Sean Connery movie, 1971's Diamonds Are Forever. Fortunately, all the Bond movies are streaming on the Australian service Stan, to which I am a subscriber.
On Thursday night I got to work.
While I don't think I'll ever be able to remember the difference between certain Bond movies -- I could only guess at which events happened in Thunderball and which happened in You Only Live Twice -- On Her Majesty's Secret Service has a number of things to distinguish it.
For one, it's the only Bond movie starring Australian George Lazenby, who is still alive at age 84. In fact, he's only five days older than my dad, who is also still alive.
Then there was an event that I knew happened in this movie, I just didn't know when. So now it's time for me to issue a SPOILER ALERT for this 54-year-old movie.
Have you averted your eyes?
I had always known that OHMSS was the movie where James Bond gets married ... and also where his wife is killed on their wedding day.
I didn't have any idea how this actually played out, dramatically. But I had assumed it was an inciting incident sort of thing. We meet Bond's fiancee at the start of the film and get to know her for about 15 minutes, enough to feel a little more than surface-level sorrow when a bullet takes her out in her bridal dress. The rest of the movie, vengeance for Bond.
In fact, the event happens so late in the narrative that I thought I'd gotten it wrong that it even happened in this movie.
During a climactic fight on bobsleds between Lazenby and Telly Savalas -- Savalas took over the role of Ernst Stavro Blofeld from Donald Pleasance -- I thought there was no way for Lazenby and Diana Rigg to still end up at the altar in this movie. Not only is there an inherent comedic aspect to having a fight on bobsleds, but the Bond one-liners had been particularly groan-worthy. When Savalas finally exits the fight, it's by getting caught on a branch. "He's branched off," Lazenby quips, to no one in particular.
It was really hard to imagine transitioning from this silliness to Rigg's Tracy dying, but in the last five minutes of the movie, that's what happens.
After they've left the ceremony, Bond pulls the car over on a coastal road to remove some of the flowers from the outside of their car. They've been waxing poetic about how they now have "all the time in the world." Anyone who's ever seen a movie about a detective on his last case before retirement knows this is the kiss of death.
Indeed, Blofeld and his henchman drive by for a drive-by. Bond is missed but Tracy isn't so lucky.
The way Lazenby plays his last moments on screen as Bond really surprised me. You'd expect bottomless rage over the death of his new bride. Instead, he cradles her head in his lap and tells a passerby, who I guess doesn't know what's going on, "She's just having a little rest," weeping in a barely noticeable manner.
Roll credits.
Bold way to end a film. We get invested in Tracy for an entire film, rather than 15 minutes, and it remains to be seen what kind of revenge Bond will seek for her death.
And I have to wonder if how they do ultimately handle this was dictated the fact that Lazenby didn't return as Bond, which was his own choice.
Historically, to the extent that the character has any memory of the events in his own life at all, that memory has been limited to the time that a particular actor was playing James Bond. In fact, at the start of this film, there is a cheeky reference to this never happening to "the other guy." This was, after all, the first time James Bond had been played by anybody other than Connery.
With Connery resuming the role for one more movie in Diamonds Are Forever, I have to suspect the murder of his wife will not be the most recent event in the life of his James Bond. In fact, they might pretend if never happened at all, since referencing it might remind everyone that Connery's was taking up somebody else's sloppy seconds. Connery's ego wouldn't have that. They could possibly saddle Moore with the memory of these events in his first outing, but I guess I'll find out next Friday.
As for Lazenby, it's a shame he didn't want to continue as I do think he did the role proud. He was only 30 when the movie came out so he could have had a standard number of Bond outings and not even approached middle age. But, he just wasn't interested, and you have to respect him for that.
A couple other takeaways:
1) This was the most interesting editing I had ever seen in a Bond movie. It was the first Bond movie for editor John Glen, who is better known to Bond fans as the director of five straight Bond movies, those being Moore's last three and Timothy Dalton's only two. He was also editor of the two Moore movies before the first he directed, so I'll have to note if there is similar editing in The Spy Who Loved Me. The fight scenes are fast paced and exciting because each shot lasts a half-second less than you would expect for it to look clean. The jagged results at first seem like they could be poor or dated technique, but I'm ultimately landing in the camp that it was an intentional way of underscoring their rough physicality.
2) Before he finally picks up a machine gun at the end of the movie, the only other time Bond wields a gun is when he shoots the eye in the standard Bond opening. For the first 80 percent of this movie Lazenby engages in fisticuffs and knife-throwing only. I feel like I remember reading somewhere that this was something Lazenby wanted.
3) This was the only time I'd seen Rigg in a movie at this age, becoming familiar with her through her role on Game of Thrones and remembering that her final role was in a film I did not like, Last Night in Soho. She was a looker.
Okay, will tick Diamonds Are Forever off the list one of the nights in the next week, preparing me for the Bondathon ... or, about 1/8th of the Bondathon, in any case.
It's useful for a cinephile to periodically go through the Wikipedia page "[current year] in film," not only to check the release schedule and see what you might have missed, but also to see who died without you noticing.
I did that just now. The random prompt was the death of an actor I didn't recognize named Peter Spellos, who actually was in one of my favorite movies of all time, Bound. This is not an in memoriam piece for Peter Spellos.
My eyebrows raised over a few I hadn't noticed as they occurred, but my face drooped when I read that a different Peter S., Peter Simonischek, had died. This happened back in May.
You may not recognize that name, but you probably recognize the face in the photo I've included here.
Indeed he played Toni Erdmann in the film of the same name, my #1 of 2016.
I had only seen Simonischek in one other film, as the attention he garnered from Toni Erdmann earned him a small role in Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore. As such, that would not meet my ordinary threshold for eulogizing him here. So maybe more than anything I am writing this post to suggest the value of reviewing Wikipedia's film-related deaths in any given year.
But I am also more saddened by this than I would be by the death of most other actors I had seen in only two films. And it has something to do with the perfect mixture of whimsy and melancholy that Simonischek poured into the titular trickster, who's actually a softie who just wants to connect better with his daughter. Although Simonischek was 76 when he died, which is not exactly young, I didn't feel like the man I saw in that movie just seven years ago was this close to death's door.
Also I suppose I have had Toni Erdmann on the brain a bit lately as I know that the movie's other co-star, Sandra Huller, appears in one of this year's most acclaimed films, Anatomy of a Fall. Which had me thinking how I wanted to make sure I saw that film, even beyond the fact that it is acclaimed, just because Huller is in it.
And that got me thinking how we come to feel as though the people in our favorite movies are sort of "our own," especially if they are a favorite not widely shared. I think anyone who saw Toni Erdmann thought it was excellent, but I think a lot of people didn't see it, and even many of those who did would not have named it their #1 of that year. I did, so both Peter Simonischek and Sandra Huller "belong" to me in a way that others of you out there may understand, even if it is not about these two in particular.
Maybe when I see Anatomy of a Fall, I will raise a toast to the woman on screen and the man who played her father in one of the more moving portraits of a complicated father-daughter relationship I've ever seen on film.
This is the penultimate in my 2023 monthly series Audient Classics, in which I rewatch films from before I was born that I loved, but have seen only once.
I wrote yesterday about Internet Archive, the site where there's a chance you'll find movies that you can't seem to get through normal channels (either a digital rental or a streaming service). And plenty you can get that way, but since I view the site sort of as "cheating," I usually use it only for the lost causes.
But then there are also movies that have been around so long that I feel like I shouldn't have to pay for them. I don't know, maybe after all this time, they've slipped into the public domain? That's my thinking anyway.
And so it was that I started to watch my second-to-last film in Audient Classics on Internet Archive -- for about ten seconds, until I realized it would have no musical score.
At that point I capitulated to paying the $3.99 for an iTunes rental of the 95-year-old The Passion of Joan of Arc, in order to watch/listen to it as I did the first time back in 2012, with Richard Einhorn's 1994 score "Voices of Light" accompanying it. (Hiring a live piano player to come play with the Internet Archive version would have cost a lot more.)
It was as part of another series on this blog that I first watched the movie. That was my 2012 Getting Acquainted series, where each month I chose some cinematic luminary whose works had so far eluded me, and watched three of them. That was a great April as I also watched Carl Theodor Dreyer's Ordet, which is also in my top 200 on Flickchart and was also a candidate for this series. (The third film, Day of Wrath, was good, just not in the same stratosphere as these two all-timers.)
As you would know, The Passion of Joan of Arc contains what is considered to be one of the single greatest acting performances of all time by Maria Falconetti. I'm not reading up right now on what her method was, but Falconetti seemed to effortlessly produce tears on command, to give these thousand-yard stares that indicated the way she was weighing her duty to God against her instinct for self-preservation. I'm sure there are some viewers who would think of her performance as too much, as would be the case with any performance that might qualify as someone's description of the best of all time. A consensus best acting performance would also come close to a "most acting" designation, but I challenge anyone to watch this movie and not see it as an unparalleled commitment to embodying an emotionally tortured woman.
One thing I forgot about -- both from history and from this film -- is that Joan actually lost the battle between her ideals and her survival instincts, at least initially. Her judges from the church, eager not to actually execute her, held her limp, defeated hand up to a confession written out for her on parchment, though we are meant to believe it was she who ultimately made the movements that would qualify as a signature.
But then, before she lost all respect for herself, she recanted -- meaning that she was more or less lashed to a stake within the hour. Or so this movie tells it.
It's the storytelling of this film that so fully astonishes. In 1928, obviously we were on the verge of the sound era and of film truly graduating to the more dynamic medium we know it to be today. But it still amazes me that Dreyer was doing such interesting things, that seemed so far ahead of their time, with angles, shot depths, camera movements and editing. Close-ups were never used as memorably -- before, but perhaps also since -- as they are in The Passion of Joan of Arc.
Did I catch some Jesus Christ Superstar-style anachronisms in there as well? Joan lived in the early 15th century, but some of the outfits of military types reminded me more of the late 19th century, possibly even World War I (which would have been only ten years in the past at this point). This I did google, and it turns out they are meant to resemble Prussian soldiers. The Franco-Prussian War was in 1870 and 1871, and that makes sense as that would have still been in the memory of some French who were alive in 1928. It's the soldiers who are most anachronistically dressed in Jesus Christ Superstar as well.
Which makes a good transition to Joan as a Christ figure. I was reminded here of the way the Romans and Pharisees were simultaneously contemptuous of Christ and basically pleading with him to save himself, which he refused to do. Joan underwent the same ordeal with the same outcome. That may be obvious to students of history, but since I know what I know about Joan from this film (and to a lesser extent the one directed by Luc Besson), rather than from the history books, it was helpful to be reminded of the real parallels between hers and Christ's martyrdoms.
As impressed and sometimes shocked as I was about parts of this film, there may have been no part that left me more shocked than the way it continues to go back to Joan's corpse after the fire has already consumed her. It's not graphic by today's standards, but neither is it left to the imagination. Eventually the charred body slumps over and disappears from view. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. This woman had a corporeal aspect, but the film leaves little doubt that it believes her soul escaped her and into eternity. Or if it doesn't believe this, at least it believes that Joan believed it.
Although I've already got my final film in Audient Classics already line up for December, I do now really want to rewatch Ordet -- and there's nothing stopping me once this series is over. Dreyer continued to wrestle with Christian themes like resurrection and martyrdom throughout his career, Ordet being a prime example.
Okay, only one more film to go before this series is a wrap.
I've mentioned the website Internet Archive on here a couple times, so I thought it was time to finally devote a proper post to it -- especially since I was planning a weekend of watching movies I had unearthed on this internet library that I couldn't find anywhere else.
That only half worked out.
The Internet Archive, which can be found at archive.org, describes itself thusly:
"The Internet Archive, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, we provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, people with print disabilities, and the general public. Our mission is to provide Universal Access to All Knowledge."
Now, I'm not quite sure how this mission coexists with the copyright held on particular films, and the right for the owner to show or distribute those films in a manner that generates them revenue. But the fact remains that this free resource exists, is open to the general public, and contains, by its own current count, 16,255 feature films.
Not only have I used this resource to get my hands on several films I had to watch for various movie challenges and could not otherwise source, but sometimes I go fishing to see the availability of more common films, ones with a healthy expected digital rental market, just to continue to blow my own mind that this resource exists.
I don't want this to become a replacement for watching films that are available in other forms. For one, it involves me hooking up my computer to my TV with an HDMI cable, which is a bit of a hassle. Sometimes I'd just prefer to click a button on the TV. Then there's the fact that there's some buffering involved in most viewings, so it makes sense to pause it and let it catch up for a while if you have the time.
But the way it gave me hope of seeing films I hadn't seen in ages, or had never seen, was exhilarating.
On Friday I watched the film whose poster you see above, Ken Annakin's The Pirate Movie from 1982.
Anyone younger than I am probably has no idea what this is. But imagine a spoof of Gilbert & Sullivan's The Pirates of Penzance that was clearly inspired by the success of Airplane!, but in additional to parodies of the songs from that musical, there are also pop songs and gooey love songs written in 1982 that are meant to turn stars Kristy McNichol and Christopher Atkins into dreamboats who would appear on the cover of Teen Beat or the gone-but-not-forgotten magazine Dynamite, to which I had a subscription.
Don't remember Dynamite? Thanks again to the internet for obliging in a different manner:
Had this been McNichol's hairstyle in The Pirate Movie I might not have fallen hard for her. But she looks as she does in the poster you see above, and is spunky as heck, so it was love at first sight.
It was sometime between 1983 and 1985 that I encountered the movie, as those were the years we subscribed to The Movie Channel and my mom recorded all sorts of movies on VHS that she never watched, that sat in plastic tubs in our basement with her cursive handwriting appearing on the labels. She recorded movies for me as well, and those were the movies I watched repeatedly as a kid.
Despite a mixture of incongruous ambitions that probably wouldn't fly today, The Pirate Movie worked on me like gangbusters as a ten- to 12-year-old. I laughed at the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker style jokes and swooned at McNichol as she sung about her character Mabel's tragic love with the pirate Frederic (Atkins). I'm sure I watched it ten times but if you told me it was 20, I wouldn't call you a liar.
But after about 1990, it was completely unavailable.
More accurately, I should say I did not seek it out during the 1990s, as these were my college and grad school years and I probably wasn't seeking the jolt of nostalgia The Pirate Movie would have provided. I'm sure you could have found it on the shelves of video stores, at least for a time.
Suffice it to say that it did not make the transition to DVD or digital. Now that nostalgia is more important to me, I've casted about for The Pirate Movie over the past decade or so, sure I would brush up against it accidentally at some point. Never happened.
Until Internet Archive.
I hadn't actually thought to use Internet Archive specifically to look for The Pirate Movie until Friday during the day at work, when I must have been on there for some other reason. Upon finding The Pirate Movie, I was so excited to put it on that I actually started watching it while I was still working.
There's something else I should tell you about The Pirate Movie: Everyone else thinks it's terrible. In fact, in searching back for my mentions of The Pirate Movie on The Audient -- a little surprised to find there had only been one, or at least only one time I tagged the movie -- I found this comment on this 2010 post:
"I'm sorry, but there's no excuse for liking the Pirate Movie. It's one of the worst movies and waste of money of all time."
So in the 30+ years it's been since I've seen The Pirate Movie, I've had time to think of it as the ultimate guilty pleasure. Something I should be ashamed of liking, that when I did finally see it again, I would find to be terrible.
Guess what? I still love it.
Now, I don't think it's possible to separate out the nostalgia component. You can't see a movie you first watched 40 years ago with a clean slate that's unencumbered by your memories. Part of the joy of watching an old movie is remembering the line readings, the inflections in actors' voices during jokes, the jokes themselves, etc. For those of us who watch Airplane! today -- something I have now not done in probably 15 years -- you don't watch them to laugh anew, but to remember the laughs of yesteryear in jokes that you wear like a favorite bathrobe.
But I got the same joy out of watching The Pirate Movie that I would have gotten out of Airplane! or The Naked Gun, and I still fell a little bit for the spunky charm of McNichol, a truly charismatic performer who didn't have the career she should have had. Speaking of careers cut short, the film's hilarious villain is played by an Australian actor named Ted Hamilton (the whole film having been shot in Australia). Given how funny this blowhard is, imagine my surprise that The Pirate Movie was the only feature film he ever appeared in. (Actually, it wouldn't be too late to appear in another, as he's still alive at age 86.) The movie was obviously such a failure that he slunk back to a few guest appearances on TV shows, amassing only four more credits before his career ended in 2002.
In honor of an actor who should have gotten more work, I invite you to watch this clip, to give you a sense both of his presence and of the movie's general Airplane!-style tone.
Now that I've discovered Internet Archive has The Pirate Movie, I think I'll make revisiting it a more regular thing. However its jokes land for you, I found it an incredibly good-natured movie that leaves me with a warm fuzzy feeling. It nourishes me like the best cinematic comfort food.
But I can't rely on its long-term availability on Internet Archive, because another movie I thought I was going to watch there is already gone.
I can't say for sure why Dominik Moll's Lemming had such an impact on me when I saw it in 2007. It's a four-person French psychological thriller that, if memory serves, involves mental breakdown, exchanging of partners, and weird noises in the night in an apartment. My memory of the movie is largely a memory of a mood.
I was hoping to refresh that memory when I saw that Lemming was available on Internet Archive. In fact, I'm quite sure I wasn't imagining it, since I saw it fit to mention my planned upcoming viewing of the movie in this post.
I arrived home too late on Saturday night from watching the Melbourne Aces play a doubleheader to be able to watch the 2+ hour movie then. So I teed it up for viewing last night instead.
And found no trace of it on Internet Archive.
I tried all sorts of different search terms. I tried the name of the director. I tried the name of the stars. I tried the French title for the movie (which didn't help, because it is also Lemming).
Had I not actually seen this available on Internet Archive? I thought I had actually begun playing the film to test it out, which is what I do anytime I find a too-good-to-be-true availability of a film on a certain resource (usually YouTube).
Or did the copyright owner come and track it down after all?
It would be hard to say. I'm sure if a movie was once on Internet Archive but the site faces a legal challenge, they just purge the item in question, no questions asked. I'd say the mission statement of this site likely protects it from the notion that someone would be making money on the copyright, but that when someone comes after them, they just stand down straight away.
If that's the case, I wonder what the hell the Lemming copyright owner does intend to do with the movie, because I can't find it anywhere, and this makes me very grumpy. It's an especially strange outcome given that it stars Charlotte Rampling and Charlotte Gainsbourg.
Alas, there are also the movies I haven't been able to find and still can't find. I hoped Internet Archive would finally expose me again to a favorite from the 1990s, Suri Krishnamma's A Man of No Importance, starring Albert Finney, Rufus Sewell and Tara Fitzgerald. You'll know how long I've been looking for this from another 2010 post, the second I've linked to in this post, in which it is one of a few movies I focused on that I already couldn't find then. The post even got its name as a riff on the title: "Movies of no importance."
Well, Internet Archive does have the trailer for the movie. But not the rest of the movie.
It may one day provide "universal access to all knowledge," but not today.
I've been stalking The Last Voyage of the Demeter on iTunes for several months now. On all my previous checks, it was only for $19.99 purchase and then $19.99 rental. Thursday was finally the first time I checked where a $5.99 rental was available, so I snapped it up.
Why the fixation on what was likely to be a sub par movie?
Well ever since seeing Bram Stoker's Dracula more than 30 years ago, I've had an affection for the gothic stylings of the Dracula story. Francis Ford Coppola's film may have been where my beloved wax stamp fetish was born (for more on that phenomenon, read here), and it still remains within my top 100 on Flickchart, its many delights overcoming possibly a few weaknesses. (I say that mostly to throw a bone to the BSD haters out there. Honestly, I love the thing from start to finish.)
Since that first dalliance with Dracula, I've seen a dozen other versions of the character on screen, if you are to consider even parodies like Dracula: Dead and Loving It. It may be more than that. They don't let Dracula rest for very long. The Last Voyage of the Demeter is actually at least the second Dracula movie of 2023, the first being the fun romp that concentrated on his familiar, Renfield.
But no Dracula movie I've seen has said boo about what happened on the count's journey from Transylvania to London.
Andre Ovredal's film is based on the log from the Demeter, the ship that transported him and showed up with its cargo intact but its crew missing (presumed dead). The details of that sea crossing may get some prominence in Stoker's actual book, but they don't in any movie I've ever seen. And I can't really tell you one way or another because the one Dracula-related thing I haven't done is read Stoker's book.
We need more than a hand wave about what happened upon that ship. It's rather significant.
So here's the plot as I know it to be:
1) Dracula summons Jonathan Harker to his castle in Transylvania to discuss real estate in England.
2) Dracula develops a fondness for Harker so keeps him enslaved to his succubae.
3) Dracula develops even more of a fondness for Harker's fiancee Mina, who reminds him of his own dead wife.
4) Dracula decides he most go find Mina in London.
5) En route, Dracula fucks shit up on a boat for two weeks. (Emphasis mine.)
6) Dracula continues his pursuit of Mina.
WHAT? I need to know more about #5.
The Last Voyage of the Demeter to the rescue.
It's the same mentality as taking the Hamlet Cinematic Universe and squeezing out the play-then-movie Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, only its with the Dracula Cinematic Universe. Take a relatively minor part of the story and plumb it for all the wonderful content it's worth.
And I did end up finding this content to be pretty wonderful. To tell you more about it, though, first I must issue a giant SPOILER WARNING.
It's interesting watching a film and being introduced to a bunch of characters, all of whom you know are going to die.* (*It's possible that not all the characters die, but my current analysis does not require me to tell you who if any survive.) It's like the opening of United 93. You are saying goodbye to them even as you are meeting them. These guys ain't going to make it.
As you are meeting the characters, the gruffness of a particular few guarantees their demise. But then there are some really sympathetic characters that you can't imagine going down to a Dracula bite, such as the doctor played by Corey Hawkins, the stowaway played by Aisling Franciosi or the young boy played by Woody Norman.
Let's start by talking about that young boy. Did you heed my spoiler warning?
He's extraordinarily sympathetic, one of those kids whose purity emanates from him in his big pleading eyes that temper optimism with worry. He's a good candidate to leave the boat on a life raft, right?
Nope. He totally buys it.
In fact, he's one of the first characters to go, which is a really bold choice. Oh, he doesn't go until you've gotten a chance to get to know and cherish him for at least 50 minutes, at which point, him getting bitten is shocking. But then you think "Well, he's not dead, maybe they will bring him back with a blood transfusion or something. He might be undead but they were already using a blood transfusion on the bitten stowaway."
Nope. He totally burns in the agony of the sun, and you watch his charred corpse sink to the bottom of the ocean.
It's just one of the ways this film goes there on things you wouldn't expect, steering into the horrors of this doomed ship rather than steering away from them.
The burning scenes -- it happens with three characters in total -- always surprised me for the way they lingered, to show us what it really might feel like to burn to a crisp. This is no mild Dracula outing meant to entice Stoker fans of all ages.
Some other things I really liked:
1) A crucifix? Ha. To underscore the bleakness of their circumstances, writers Bragi F. Schut and Zak Olkewicz have a character attempt to ward off the monstrous incarnation of Dracula you see above -- which is really his only form in this whole movie -- with a crucifix on a chain. Does it work? Hell no. The captain played by Liam Cunningham (of Game of Thrones fame) raises the dangling cross and shouts "I renounce you, devil!" several times. This does not even break Dracula's stride. Seconds later he's munching the captain's neck.
2) The doctor played by Hawkins is, in many ways, an example of color blind casting, since most would say there was little historical likelihood that anyone in Stoker's novel would have had black skin. But instead of the movie just pretending his race doesn't enter into it, the fact that he's Black is touched on several times and adds context to some of his motivations. The social positive of casting actors of color is one thing, but when you can fit an actual thematic subtext of race into a story about a vampire tearing a ship's crew to shreds, that's one better.
3) There didn't need to be a Titanic-style secondary antagonist. In Titanic, which of course I love, it's not enough that the ship is sinking, there also has to be a crazed Billy Zane firing shots at you. Here, despite their gruffness, there's no character that is trying to undermine the common good of fighting off the vampire, and with only one very minor exception, each shows courage when that is called for. I found this to be a valuable sense of optimism within all the bleakness.
The Last Voyage of the Demeter exceeded my expectations in all regards. Now all that stalking really seems justified.
I've been playing CineNerdle for something like eight months now and I've never even mentioned it to you.
One of the countless online puzzles that grew out of the Wordle craze, as you can tell by its "-rdle" suffix, CineNerdle requires its players to find five movie titles or themes in a 16-box grid. Each title or theme is comprised of four individual boxes. For example, if you had "Space," "Wookiee," "George Lucas" and "It's a Trap," you'd swap boxes until these four appeared on one row or column, and your answer would be Return of the Jedi. (Lucas didn't direct Return of the Jedi, but he is affiliated with it.) You get 15 swaps to find all five themes or movie titles, and the trick is that there's one where each of the first four answers contributes one box to a fifth answer.
Once you get three, the boxes turn yellow to let you know you're one away. However, sometimes you'll have two series of yellow overlapping crossing the same rows, so all four boxes in one row or column will be yellow, meaning you have to move one of them to a different row or column, thereby wasting precious swaps.
The original version of CineNerdle involves getting five movie titles from clues that are not the names of movies. Then there is also the reversal version, accessed from a different tab on the game interface, where you are given titles of movies and then need to figure out five themes that relate to four of the movies each. For example, all four of the movies might be directed by Ron Howard or all four might feature Harrison Ford. But then it even gets silly and superficial, like all four movies have a number in the title or all four movies are about a talking duck.
Then there are also logical games, only about a dozen of which have ever been submitted because they are very complicated. There's a grand theme for the puzzle and then clues about where things need to be moved, like "the four movies directed by Quentin Tarantino are in the four corners" but then also "no films featuring Meg Ryan are adjacent to any of the Quentin Tarantino movies." You get five chances to see if your configuration is correct. These are very rewarding but very time consuming, so they don't easily fit into my need to pass the time quickly for five minutes, which is when I usually play.
I was big into CineNerdle when I first started playing. I had exhausted all the puzzles and had to wait for a new one to be released each day. (The benefit of CineNerdle over something like Wordle is you can play all the puzzles in the archive, so you can pick up any time and not miss any of the games that have ever been offered.)
But then during baseball season, I had the more pressing need to read player news updates or even just stare at the accrued stats of my current fantasy players. Yes, there is a lot of starting at information you already know by heart in fantasy baseball, such is the strength of the obsession. So for six months I really fell behind on CineNerdle, and had more than 100 of each of the mainstream types of puzzle waiting to be played, and a handful of the logical.
Since the normal baseball season ended six weeks ago, I've had a chance to catch up on CineNerdle and now I am in danger of exhausting all the puzzles again. I'll deal with how to pass my time next when that moment arrives and not before.
Why am I telling you about this today?
Well, two nights ago I played the game you see above you, reversal #163, two of whose themes were particularly appropriate for The Audient. The print is rather small so let me show you in better detail.
This ...
... is four movies directed by Baz Luhrmann. Immediately below that, at least the way I swapped the tiles, this ...
... is four movies directed by Darren Aronofsky.
Unless this is your first day reading The Audient, you would know that two of my three bi-monthly series in 2023 involve re-watching the films of Luhrmann and Aronofsky. And these two of the three are being conducted in the same months, which are February, April, June, August, October and December.
In Luhrmann's case I'm re-watching the exactly six features he's made, which is easy enough. With Aronofsky, who has made eight, I eliminated the two I had already re-watched within the last two years, which were The Fountain and The Wrestler. The CineNerdle puzzle designer acknowledged that as well, including only titles I was actually re-watching for each series.
To play out the rest of this game and further demonstrate how it all works, the other three answers were:
1) Films directed by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu.
2) Films written by Charlie Kaufman.
3) Films about stage productions.
There's no one right way to orient them, by the way. The answers can appear on any row or column as long as their relationship to each other is the same. It's a smartly conceived puzzle engine.
In a way, the other answers here further the notion that the person who submitted this puzzle reads The Audient. Films written by Charlie Kaufman was my bi-monthly theme in 2021, the year after Kaufman's I'm Thinking of Ending Things topped my year-end rankings. If you want to go one further, Inarritu also directed a #1 for me, Birdman, so this puzzle also includes three directors who have made one of my #1 films -- even if Kaufman is being acknowledged for his writing here rather than his directing. (He needs to direct one more feature before he will have four.)
Look I know it's just a coincidence. Aronofsky and Luhrmann are both big directors. They both had 2022 films that were nominated for Oscars, with The Whale actually winning a best actor statue for Brendan Fraser. I still thought it was funny to see it ... and it gave me an excuse to finally sell you on CineNerdle, if you too are always seeking ways to pass five minutes of your time.
In December I will indeed be wrapping both bi-monthly series by re-watching those 2022 Oscar nominees, one of which was my #1 film of 2022.
I wrote a week ago about how I was about to lose the nail on my left big toe. You can read here if you want to discover all the gruesome details. I paired it with having watched the movie Fingernails, because, obviously.
Later that same day, the nail came off. It was a real relief. No more gingerly putting on socks to prevent tearing it out prematurely.
Who could have guessed that wouldn't even be the worst thing to happen to that toe in that seven-day period.
On Sunday, while building a fence between our yard and sidewalk, I dropped a heavy fence panel on the same foot. In fact, it was only half of a heavy fence panel since we needed to halve it to fit the spot where we wanted it. Imagine what it might have done if it had been the whole thing.
It wasn't just clumsiness. I had the panel resting on a wall about three feet off the ground, where I had intended to remove some screws from some strips running along the height of the panel. It got too close to the edge, where there was nothing to stop it from slipping off and landing on my foot.
And because I was wearing these old, thin running shoes -- which I've taken to wearing because of the days we've been painting -- I got basically no protection from my shoe, to say nothing of the exposure caused by the missing toenail.
I could tell I'd gotten myself good and let out a string of PG-13 expletives, my son playing basketball nearby and all.
He rushed over -- for about the third time that day, since I'd had other minor mishaps that caused me to shout out -- and asked if I was okay. This time I knew I wasn't. When I took the shoe off, the end of my sock was soaked with blood.
It turns out the laceration was the worst part, and the bleeding was pretty continuous for several hours, despite my wife's attempts to wrap it and stop the bleeding. Long story short, we finally went to the ER about five hours later, where they couldn't do anything for us since it was a Sunday night and the radiology department only works until 6. We did get the wound properly dressed but left after nearly two ineffectual hours of seeing a couple different people who couldn't really progress the care. The next morning, I returned to discover I did have a small break at the end of the toe, the kind that would heal on its own as long as I took care of it properly. So now I'm wearing a big bandage that covers that toe and the next one, wrapping them in a bag when I go in the shower, and loath to put on a sock or a shoe.
The connection to movies? Why of course there is one.
After I'd hopped into the garage and crashed onto a bean bag -- and been attended to by everyone in my family, the children hovering without being able to do much -- it seemed obvious that I'd stay there and watch movies on the projector. Of course I would.
Wouldn't you know it, in the first 15 minutes of the first movie -- Lean on Pete, watched on Kanopy -- there is a reference to the lead character being given the right boots to work with the titular horse, so he doesn't lose a toe.
Heh.
I'm not really here to tell you about the "movie marathon" that followed, but since I did take Monday off work and watched four movies on the projector that day, I might as well briefly touch on each.
Lean on Pete
This came out the same year as Chloe Zhao's The Rider, which made my top ten of that year. I think I assumed it was a lesser version of The Rider and not worthy of my attentions, though obviously I did want to see it as it's been in my Kanopy watchlist for some time. Well, I'm really glad I saw it as it is another proof of the filmmaking abilities of Andrew Haigh (Weekend, 45 Years). I was hugely invested in this story of a teenager from a broken home whose story undergoes numerous twists and turns, all of which feel like a direct outgrowth of his environment and the very real difficulties of Americans near the poverty line. It was also a well-timed viewing since the Melbourne Cup was just run on Tuesday, the day I lost that toenail, so I had horse racing on the brain.
Old Dads
I'd been bemoaning the lack of really bad movies I've seen so far in 2023. It's been the year of the mediocre. For maybe the first half of Bill Burr's film, in which he's the star as well as the writer and director, I thought I had a new contender for my worst of the year. It's one of those films where every joke is at the expense of a sensitive liberal whose behavior is exaggerated to make them a PC monster. Lots of disdainful discussions of privilege and pronouns. As the film went, I upgraded my assessment from hating it to disliking it, since the old dads do learn their lesson and some of the rougher edges are sanded off the PC monsters. But I expected a lot better from a comedian who has found a niche that I enjoy. (He's like Joe Pantoliano if Joe Pantoliano were funnier.)
After these two movies, this is when we finally went to the hospital.
Deathgasm
Now I'm cheating a little bit since this movie was actually watched on our living room couch rather than on the projector. This was a suggestion by my wife, and when you are a medical patient and relying on someone who's catering to your needs, it's a good idea to heed their suggestions. I was going to be sleeping there to elevate my foot before my x-rays the next morning, so watching the movie there was probably also the right call. Anyway, this is a New Zealand film from 2015 about heavy metal music turning the residents of a small New Zealand town into zombies. Had a lot of fun with Jason Lei Howden's film, which feels inspired by the works of fellow countryman Peter Jackson.
I returned from the doctor around 10 a.m. on Monday, at which point I had already decided I was going to take the day as a sick day. So after a highly unusual two-hour (!) nap, I continued with my movies.
Reptile
One of the high-profile Netflix releases from around a month ago that had been eluding me. I really enjoyed the depth this movie has the chance to reach by running well over two hours, which made me feel like this world was very lived in. In what essentially amounts to a whodunnit, the script smartly sprinkles around potential suspects without you knowing which ones will be the red herrings. I really enjoyed Benicio del Toro in the lead role. However, my affection for the film has subsequently dimmed a little when a friend challenged me to try to remember the plot a week from now. He's got a point there, though the plot is rarely the thing that connects most with me about any movie. I'm probably more interested in performance and character and things I haven't seen before, and this movie did have some of that.
Joy Ride
After two false starts that both seemed too challenging for a sick day, I went with the 2001 Joy Ride directed by John Dahl, not the 2023 Joy Ride directed by Adele Lim, which I have also seen. This was one of those 90s thrillers (released just after the 1990s) that had the chance to be indistinguishable from two dozen other similar films, but I'd always had a soft spot for it. I'd seen it just the once, and of course I had to figure out if it held up. The appealing cast (Paul Walker, Steve Zahn, Leelee Sobieski) still worked on me, though I found the actual story to be a bit more preposterous than I remembered. The central antagonist is a truck driver with the ability to be everywhere at once like the most far-fetched serial killer, as well as setting up elaborate plans that similarly defy spatial logistics. I did enjoy it well enough and it went by quickly enough.
Pearl
As this has recently come to Netflix, I finally overcome some unspecified bias against it and threw on the prequel to Ti West's X. And was astounded. Not only did I like it a whole lot better than X, but I also found it to be completely different, barely even needing to be the same character and containing only a few Easter eggs for X. Mia Goth gives a truly committed performance that is all over the map between sympathetic and sociopathic. I just realized that "all over the map" is usually a phrase of criticism, but the wide-ranging aspect of her performance was key to the success of this movie. Big win here for West.
And finally to lighten up a dour afternoon of murder and gore ...
Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story
My fourth time watching Walk Hard -- has it been that few? -- was as good as any of the others. In fact, I feel like I may have laughed harder in certain spots than I had on previous occasions. So many bits in this just land perfectly. I think we will look back on this as one of the great comedies of the early 21st century. It's just sad that some of its frames of reference are becoming too ancient to resonate with a young audience today, though I'd hope that some of these jokes would work for a younger audience even out of context. Can't show it to my kids yet, though, as it's still too adult (in all the funniest ways). Oh and I guess if I really wanted to get away from the gore, I shouldn't have watched a movie where a young boy cuts his brother in half with a machete in the first ten minutes.
I've taken a machete to my emails in the past 24 hours and whacked 400+ unread down to a mere 47. And those 47 are mostly reminders of things I have to do.
The newest one that came in after that was one of Kanopy's weekly emails about what I should watch this weekend. I noticed Broker was a new addition, and it's just about the only Hirokazu Kore-eda movie made in the last ten years that I haven't seen.
Now, sending me emails to further partake of a free service is already pretty nice. The new credits system is even nicer.
Clicking in to add Broker to my watchlist wasn't the first time I had seen the new credits system, but it was a reminder that came in at a time I was actually in a position to sit down and write about it.
If you aren't familiar with Kanopy's old system for allowing you a certain allotment of monthly viewings, you used to get five credits per month to spend however you wanted. Anyone who griped about this -- I'm not saying there were, but human beings being who they are, there probably were -- was an idiot. You don't pay a single cent to receive the full benefits of Kanopy, all you have to do is have a library card and have your local library participate.
And yet I have also griped. As you will recall in this post, I was attached enough to my five free credits that I did (politely) report the issue when I tried to watch Things to Come but the subtitles were too blurry to read. They happily refunded me my credit, and also explained why the issue occurred, and also explained the steps they were taking to rectify it in the future.
They didn't have to do any of that.
A few weeks ago, they've implemented a new system, as seen here:
Instead of spending a single credit on something, you spend however many tickets they've determined it requires.
Such a change in basic paradigm should rightly make a person raise their eyebrows, as if Kanopy were finally trying to close the loophole that had allowed us all these free viewings all these years.
Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, though I don't know this for sure, it seems like yet another attempt to improve the experience we enjoy as non-paying customers.
I bet you dollars to donuts that some Kanopy user made a complaint -- hopefully as polite a complaint as I made about Things to Come -- that the current credits system was unfair because it priced everything equally. Watching a four-hour movie cost you a credit, but so did watching a seven-minute short film. I don't watch a lot of short films but I did discover this myself when I watched the short film How to Be Alone starring Maika Monroe earlier this year.
So Kanopy decided to respond to this person's complaint by setting up a tiered payment system. How to Be Alone -- which is actually 12 minutes -- now costs one ticket. Broker -- which is two hours and 9 minutes -- only costs two.
And you get a total of 15 tickets per month.
So in case you are bad at math, this means that instead of watching five movies per month, you can now watch seven -- and still have one ticket left over for a short. Or 15 short films, if you're so inclined.
Look I know there is some business model behind all this that makes it a benefit for the people who run Kanopy to provide this service. Things that are totally unsustainable are not sustained.
But to the naked eye, they just seem generous as fuck, and in today's world, that is extremely rare.
Oh sure, Vance. The first Marvel movie with a cast that is basically all women and a Black man, and you want to blow it off?
Now hold on a minute, I have my reasons.
1) I have to admit, the Brie Larson backlash has gotten to me. I take backlash against famous women with a grain of salt, but enough of what I've read about how difficult Larson is to be around has seeped through the first few layers. It sounds like she takes playful bantering with co-stars in interviews and makes it overly competitive and a little distasteful. It sounds like she let playing such a powerful character go to her head, and she felt like she was the character. It sounds like maybe winning an Oscar also went to her head. Is this fair? I doubt it. Has it created a real wariness in me? It has.
2) I didn't get to finish the Ms. Marvel series on Disney+ because my kids didn't like it. I think we watched two episodes, both of which my wife and I liked. My kids couldn't care less. And it's not that they are anti-Marvel, though I haven't seen them clamoring to watch any of the recent movies. We're watching Loki and they like it, probably more than I do this season. They just didn't go for it. I feel like it would be ideal to have the connective tissue from that series when coming into this movie.
3) Marvel fatigue. It's real, even for (especially for?) a guy who has seen all the movies. The third Ant-Man stinks and I was ultimately mildly disappointed by the final Guardians of the Galaxy. There's nothing that states I have to be a Marvel completist, especially when it's getting to the point where their first 40 movies are already planned out.
However, I should mention the pros:
1) The movie is only 105 minutes long. If I'm correctly remembering what I read somewhere, that makes it either the second or third shortest Marvel movie. And it's about half the length of Avengers: Endgame. (Then again, that was one of my favorite Marvel movies.)
2) My favorite use of Samuel L. Jackson's Nick Fury was in the first Captain Marvel movie, Captain Marvel. He's seemed like a bit of an add-on in the other movies, but he felt fully integrated in that movie and was funny as hell.
I think the real issue is that I feel compelled to watch it because of a perceived interest by my readership. Not this readership, but the ReelGood readership. I have of course missed reviewing my fair share of tentpole movies in the nearly four years I have been running this site, but each time I do, I feel like it erodes the site's credibility just a little bit. Is that fair? I doubt it. Has it created a real wariness in me? It has.
More than anything it creates a tangentially related crisis, which is that I don't know what my readership really wants. Theoretically this is an Australian review site, meaning that at least some heed should be paid to films of Australian origin. Also, the site was started with a real indie sensibility, pitched to readers with the same aesthetic values.
Do those readers care about -- checking the actual number now -- the 33rd Marvel movie?
Having found the John Wick movies increasingly repellent as they went on -- from liking the first to hating the third -- I considered myself likely to sit out John Wick: Chapter 4. The two hour and 49-minute running time clinched the decision.
Sometimes I think it's good for an avid film watcher to have conspicuous holes in their viewing. Everyone thinks you are likely to have watched a particular film because of its place in the cultural conversation, and because it came out in plenty of time to watch it before you finalize your year-end rankings. And then you just don't.
But when I told a friend earlier in the week that I might miss both the newest Mission: Impossible and the newest John Wick -- the former of which is still on the table -- he responded with "You should see John Wick."
He didn't want to say anything more than that. I think I know why, but I don't want to get ahead of myself.
So then I started thinking "Maybe ... if it shows up on one of the streaming services I already pay for." It seems like movies without a previously existing relationship with one of those services are, indeed, starting to show up on these services more regularly.
So when I had to abandon the first film I planned to watch on my projector Monday night, the night before a day off work on Tuesday, I did indeed notice that John Wick: Chapter 4 was streaming on Amazon. And that's how I spontaneously started watching a two hour and 49 minute movie at 9:40, when I had planned to watch a movie half that length. (That movie will get watched and reported on later in the month.)
The one thing I will say for John Wick: Chapter 4 was that it did not feel as long as it was. That's rather counterintuitive, because I do think there is the same monotonous quality to the fight scenes in this film as in its predecessors. Also, at least 75 percent of the time I had no idea why John Wick was where he was, what he was planning to do there, or why it was so important. I think part of that is built into the narrative and part of that is me just not caring enough to put it all together.
I was entertained by this film while at the same time considering it only a small step up from the last two movies, neither of which I liked. A few creative sequences sustained me. There's something a little gonzo about the fight scene in the traffic circle around the Arc de Triomphe. In fact, I think there are two separate traffic scenes where assailants are getting thrown about the screen after getting hit by cars. At what point would traffic just drop to a standstill? Never, apparently. Also, I really liked the sequence told from above, as Wick walks through the rooms of a building, and you can see the tops of the walls -- kind of in the style of that old video game Gauntlet. He's got some weapon where he is "flaming" the other people rather than shooting them -- again, I rarely bothered to figure any of this out -- which just increases the sense of it seeming like a video game. In this case I found that a positive, though I wouldn't always.
Overall, though, there's just so many self-serious platitudes about vengeance that it all rings pretty hollow, and I found myself wondering which series has more other characters talking about the central character, Harry Potter or John Wick. I always laugh whenever they raise the bounty on Wick's head -- it gets up to $40 million at one point in this movie -- because it's only then that we see all the assassins limber up and prepare to come after him. Some of them are like "Nah, I don't get out of bed for any less than $20 million. But now? Sure I'll give it a go."
In fact during the movie I imagined writing a comedic short film told from the perspective of one of these random hitman that Wick easily dispatches when they all miss shooting him from ten feet away. You'd start with the announcement that the bounty was up to $26 million, and then you'd go to a conversation between two rando assassins, one younger and dumber than the second, who is a veteran and extremely dismissive of the other's abilities. The younger one would say "You know, I think I might go for John Wick" and then the other would tear him a new one. The rest of the conversation would go something like this:
Older one: "You know how many people John Wick has killed? Four thousand two hundred and 97. You know how many times he's been killed?"
Younger one: (laughing) "Um, zero?"
Older one: "Yes that's right zero. And if you think it's funny just trying going after him."
Younger one: "I don't think it's funny, it's just the way you phrased it, I mean obviously if he's still alive he hasn't been--"
Older one: "John Wick would kill you in his sleep. You'd be the person he took out when he was already fighting with two other people and he randomly blasted you out of the corner of his eye. You wouldn't get within 100 feet of John Wick."
Younger one: "Okay fine I get it."
He'd stew on it for a few days. Then the younger one would randomly see John Wick eating cereal in a diner and walk in and blow him away.
Move to a later scene, involving this guy and some senior High Table guy wearing an overly fancy suit and too much bling. He's got a European accent of indeterminate origin.
High Table guy: "So what did you say your name was?"
Younger one: "Fred."
High Table guy, as if pronouncing a foreign word he's never heard: "So tell me ... Fred ... how did you get the drop on the infamous John Wick?"
Younger one: "He was eating cereal in a diner and I shot him."
High Table guy: "Fascinating. Well here's your $26 million and now no one can touch you. All hail ... Fred."
Sorry, where was I?
Okay so I know why my friend said I should watch this one more John Wick movie, because it's possible it would be the last one. Won't say anything more in order to avoid spoilers.
But of course it isn't. Not when there's money to be made. And I hear John Wick 5 might already be in development.
Like John Wick himself, I should have just stuck to my guns.
Thought I would hit you with that right up top without any trigger warning. Hope you weren't eating breakfast.
I'm the type of person who would require this sort of trigger warning. It's not so much that I can't watch images of people losing nails -- in fact, I pride myself on having no trigger warnings when it comes to movie content. (Except maybe Minions.)
No, the issue I experience is on a physical level, and it comes whenever I even consider the issue of trauma to the toes. Even imagining someone stubbing their toe hard causes my testicles to involuntarily shrivel. I don't know why my testicles have such an empathetic relationship with my toes, but they do.
I'm hitting you with all sorts of fun content today, aren't I.
My own toe trauma originates, I am almost 100% positive, from kicking a soccer ball with my son in the back yard. I understand that toe injuries are common for soccer players, especially younger soccer players, but maybe not for the reason you think. I would have thought there'd be a greater risk of getting stepped on, and there probably is that, but the hard shell of your typical soccer cleat likely serves as good protection from that sort of injury. That same hard shell only makes a different injury worse, which is the jamming of the toe against the tip of the shoe, especially when kicking a ball that might be a tad overinflated.
And I wasn't even wearing cleats when I took one of many shots on our broken down backyard goal, whose net has only about three points of connection with the frame, and which has recently been bolstered by duct tape. I discovered I also like kicking with my off foot, my left foot, though my left foot does not feel the same about the experience.
I initially didn't connect the black blood blister growing under my left big toe with soccer. In fact, I didn't even realize at first that a blood blister was what it was. I'd guessed it was a bruise, which shows you just how often this sort of thing happens to me.
I figured I had to have stubbed it hard enough to cause this but not hard enough to remember it as that time I stubbed my toe real bad. The toenail was black for what seemed like several months, and then on our trip to Broome in mid-September, I noticed it had suddenly turned white -- so white, in fact, that it emitted a slight glow in the dark.
I thought this was healing. Not so much.
Soon afterward, I started to notice that my toenail was no longer fully anchored to the toe. You could wiggle it like a loose tooth. It was then I realized I was going to lose it, and it was then I attributed this to a soccer injury.
Since then the nail has been steadily freeing itself from the rest of the body, and I have been holding it in place with an ever-changing series of bandaids. It's not that I think I am going to save the nail, that its connections to the rest of my foot will suddenly revive themselves into full health. It's that I want it to disconnect at its own speed, and not suddenly as a result of putting on a sock too quickly. (And when I put on socks these days, I look like an old man possibly doing it for the last time.)
At this very moment, it has the slimmest possible connection to the toe, in the lower left corner. I tried tugging it a little bit but it wouldn't let go. Hanging on for dear life, that toenail.
When it does finally go, don't worry, it will grow back. I'm sure you knew that but I had to reassure myself. But it could take up to a year.
I tell you all this because I watched a perfectly timed movie on Sunday about the removal of nails, this time of the finger variety.
Despite a title that you could easily imagine being a horror movie, Fingernails is actually a romantic drama with a sci-fi twist. At least that's how I described it in my review. It does have something that's right out of body horror, though. In this not-so-distant future full of retro technology, there's a test that proves the existence of love between two people, which helps them decide whether their current relationship is worthy of investment. However, it requires tearing out a fingernail and having it tested alongside the fingernail of your partner.
You'd think this would be played for at least a small amount of black comedy, but that small amount is closer to minuscule. Director Christos Nikou may prefer subtle satire, or he may be more interested in an earnest exploration of the film's underlying question: If there were a scientific test that helped determine the likelihood of success of a relationship, would you take it?
Me, I was just focused on the fingernails.
As I watched the characters played by Jessie Buckley and Riz Ahmed use pliers to tear out the nails of happy young couples -- who are trying to figure out if their happiness is real -- I kept thinking that I wouldn't need even a fraction of the determination these people show, nor would it create the same sort of trauma at the wound site. In fact, my situation might be a lot closer to the brief pain of tearing off a bandage, if that.
But I don't know, I haven't progressed to that point yet. The stuff I've read online talks about when the nail eventually falls off, and of course it will do that. Each time enough showers force a change of bandaid, I have a new opportunity to assess what I'm dealing with.
Until then, I am hanging on to as much of myself as I can.
