The year there was a writer's strike and I turned 50 and I didn't write about either

You could say that me not writing about the people who were not writing scripts was a sign of solidarity with their act of not writing.

Really, I probably should have been writing about them all the more, to bring attention to the way the studios -- specifically the streamers -- were trying to take as much advantage of them as possible.

So why didn't I write more, really at all, about the writer's strike in 2023, even though it went on for months and forced a number of high profile releases forward to 2024?

One reason was surely that it would have required more research than I really wanted to do to make sure I got all my facts rights. Although I do consider myself reasonably well informed about what the stakes were -- in part due to hearing one of the writer's guild's chief negotiators, writer David Goodman, appear three times on one of my podcasts -- the minute details were not something I could have had at my command without looking them up.

Then I'd need a clear perspective other than "The writers are getting screwed!," which is a fairly boring and obvious thing to say.

And if I'd gone on and on about how I wouldn't be seeing the second Dune movie until 2024 due to the strike, it would have sounded like I was blaming the writers for holding the normal mechanics of Hollywood hostage. The point was to hold those mechanics hostage and to make it hurt for studios, which they eventually did. Besides, the year-end slate got plenty busy without the second Dune, and prevented Timothee Chalamet from duking it out with himself in Wonka. 

The thing I find it a little more shocking not to have discussed this year, though, is the fact that I turned 50 in October. 

Oh I made references to it in certain posts, like this one. But given the way I like to capitalize on almost any personal milestone out there -- a certain number of films watched, a certain number of reviews written, a certain number of posts on this blog -- you'd think turning the half century mark would have prompted me to create some sort of series on my blog, or to look back at the films of 1973. In fact, the only 1973 film I rewatched in 2023 was the one in the post mentioned above. I did see two new 1973 movies, Day for Night and Live and Let Die, but neither was watched specifically for the purpose of recognizing my birthday. 

I don't think it was denial. Turning 50 did not make me feel any angst, or a sense that I was now on the back nine of my life. (Although obviously I've been on the back nine for a while, unless I plan to live past 100.) But neither did I necessarily want to celebrate it.

I remember at the actual time it occurred, thinking about how I should write something. But I don't usually write things on this blog because I should. I write them because I get an idea about something I want to say that I feel like I can't not write. Even things that are extremely trivial, I feel the need to share. 

It helped that on my actual birthday I was in Sydney, having flown there the night before, so I didn't have any excess time to ponder the occasion. I do think it's funny that this was what I posted on my birthday, having already written it the day before. It just really has nothing to do with the actual thing that was happening in my life. 

But the actual thing that did happen in Sydney made a great way to celebrate my birthday, even if it had nothing to do with movies.

For ages I had wanted to climb the Sydney Harbour Bridge, ever since I first came to Sydney in 2009 and learned that this was a thing. It's a three-hour trip and you are attached by cables to the bridge and it's stepping rather than climbing, with only one area where you have to go on ladders. Really, there is no danger. But it looks scary from the ground level, and a seeker of thrills like me was always into the idea. 

My wife got a climb for me as a birthday present. She didn't join me -- she's afraid of heights -- but she sent me on my way with a big smile on my face.

As a funny coincidence, this year marked exactly 25 years since they started doing these climbs -- so, exactly half my life. But there was a measure of the entire length of my life that I got to share time with, by virtue of doing this climb.

At your peak parts of the climb, they take pictures of you in front of the Sydney Opera House down below. And the Sydney Opera House is exactly as old as I am.

We discovered this on a trip to Sydney back in 2021 to see Hamilton. We came across a plaque that said the iconic landmark had been dedicated by the queen on October 20, 1973, which is my birthday. Mind = blown.

So I actually got to spend my 50th with the opera house on its 50th, though we didn't get to see the big light show they put on that night because our dinner in a revolving restaurant took nearly three hours from start to finish. (Yes, my wife took really good care of me on my birthday.)

It was a special birthday I'll never forget, but no, it didn't have to do with the movies. Not everything does. 

And that's a lesson I bring with me into 2024, as I finish the year having seen about 25 fewer new movies in 2023 than I did in 2022. Life isn't always about the next movie you need to see, even for a cinephile. As I head into my second half-century, that's a good thing to remember. 

Happy New Year. 

King Darren: The Whale

This concludes my 2023 bi-monthly series rewatching six films from Darren Aronofsky, in the year after the film I'm watching this month, The Whale, made him the first director to top my year-end list on two different occasions.

My second viewing of The Whale was both the viewing in this series I was looking forward to most and the one that worried me most. 

The trepidation resulted from the fact that the praise for this film was by no means unanimous. Yes Brendan Fraser won an Oscar for this role, but many critics disliked it, for reasons ranging from it being fatphobic (I disagree with that) to it being too tied to its origins as a play (I can see that) to it being highly melodramatic (I can see that too, but in the best sense of that word).

On a personal level, I wondered if my emotional reaction to watching the movie last December -- I cried on four or five different occasions -- had crippled my critical faculties, and boosted this movie beyond the level of adoration that was warranted. 

It was actually a rather cut-and-dried case, in that moment. Darren Aronofsky's primary competition was Olivia Wilde's Don't Worry Darling, a film that had even more detractors than Aronofsky's film. Despite my also being enthralled by that movie, the haters had more time to get under my skin since I saw it two months earlier. The films in my third and fourth positions (Turning Red and Everything Everywhere All at Once) had no real shot at leap-frogging these two.

But whether I had justly chosen The Whale as my #1 movie of 2022 or not, I knew there were red flags about it, including the notion that some people found it fatphobic. When a movie may be biased against an entire demographic group, and I still name it my #1, I have to ask myself if I am failing to recognize a core insensitivity that makes people in that demographic group actively hate it.

There was also a bit of pressure on this second viewing. Way back at the start of the year, when I was watching Pi or Requiem for a Dream and it came up with my wife that I intended to finish with The Whale, she said she would watch it with me. Since I always like to show my wife my favorite movie of the year, I was sort of looking forward to this all year.

But then when December actually rolled around, she found the weight of all the end-of-year activities too exhausting, and it seemed likely that she would opt out of his verbal commitment. My wife is down to maybe only ten to 20 movies a year as it is, and spending nearly two hours with a man who is eating himself to death probably did not seem like her idea of how to spend the holidays. 

We're down in Tasmania right now visiting my mother-in-law, and I calculated that Wednesday night was the best time for me to watch it, to make sure I did actually get it in before the calendar ticked over to January. As it happened, not three minutes into the movie, she saw I was watching it and settled herself on the couch of the place we're staying, not knowing how much she would fit in but willing to give it the old college try.

This hadn't worked during our last high-pressure (for me anyway) viewing, which was Skinamarink at Halloween time. As that movie is one of my favorites of 2023, and as it is scary as hell, I had hoped my wife would find it a good Halloween-themed viewing. Instead, she gave up after about 45 minutes -- which is more than some people would give that movie.

I'm glad to say my wife made it the whole way through The Whale, and got a little teary at the end. However, she couldn't give it her full endorsement, saying she wasn't sure exactly what she had thought of it. I guess that's better than the people who hated it outright.

For me, I could tell the viewing wasn't going as well for me this time as the first time. I felt being stuck in Charlie's apartment more than I had the first time, which is kind of the point of the movie but also something that can exhaust a viewer for the wrong reasons. My viewing circumstances were decidedly different this time: on holiday, after a few beers, whereas a year ago I'd attended a morning screening. 

The other pressure was self-inflicted. When I revisit a movie where I cried the first time, I'm always curious to see if the reaction will be the same the second time. In a way, tears are like laughter, as both result from being taken off guard by something the movie is doing, for very different reasons. Just as I don't expect to laugh as hard at a movie on my second time watching it, I don't expect to cry as hard. But if I didn't cry at all during The Whale, what would I be left with?

Although the tears did not flow freely, I did get moist on a couple occasions, which maybe was as much as I could have reasonably hoped. The Whale had a tough act to follow, as my previous year's #1, the cancer family drama Our Friend, actually caused me to cry more on the second viewing than the first. That's basically unprecedented, and unfair to The Whale.

The scene that still got me the most was between Charlie and his ex, played by Samantha Morton. The script prepares you for her to be a boozy asshole, so on both viewings I was utterly taken aback by her emotional generosity in her one powerhouse scene. Like every character in this movie, she's a real person, not a one-dimensional sinner or saint. And the way she refers to the man who stole Charlie away from her, calling him "your friend" with this touch of sentiment and possibly even love, just broke my heart. 

There were scenes that I felt were a little stagey, a little on-the-nose, where I was wrapped up enough in everything not to notice those aspects the first time. Overall, though, if I'd had it to do again, I still would have slotted this ahead of Don't Worry Darling last year. It's still a powerhouse movie with an incredible central performance, and excellent performances around it.

And on the subject of its fatphobia or lack thereof ... I ultimately come down to this conclusion: If you are ever going to make a movie about a morbidly obese man, you are going to get accusations that the film is repulsed by him. So either the choice is never to make a movie about such a character, or to go beneath the knee jerk reaction and decide to grapple with what the film is actually doing. The film is obviously concerned for Charlie, but not because he "looks gross." It's because the condition of his body is most likely going to kill him, and because it's a reaction to a depression that results both from things he could control and things he could not control. I said it at the time and I say it still: This is a movie about a person, not a body. 

Interestingly, though, it may be no better than my third or fourth favorite Aronofsky movie. I'd definitely place Requiem for a Dream and mother! ahead of it, the latter benefitting from repeat viewings after finishing at #15 in 2017, and the former remaining a singular nightmarish vision of addiction that finished at #13 in 2000. And then don't forget the film that actually won Aronofsky his coveted #1 ranking in 2008, The Wrestler, which remains steady in my appraisals each time I watch it.

In other words, four of Aronofsky's eight feature films are movies I absolutely cherish, with Black Swan and Pi both staking a strong claim to my affections. 

That makes Darren a king in this or any year. 

Sarah Silverman has been "upgraded" to Margot Robbie

I never really think that my little blog has any influence on the larger world, but sometimes I wonder. 

I've written a handful of posts with enough traction that they still get comments even sometimes a decade after I've written them. For some reason, these posts almost all seem to focus on a particular actress -- and not always in ways I'd like to have as part of my legacy, delving into some negative aspect of the actress in question. I don't regularly dwell on negative aspects of actresses, but over the course of 3,121 published posts, I'm bound to do it from time to time -- and these are the posts that seem to catch on with the internet. (Possibly a discussion for another day.)

If this current post "goes viral" within my own ability to do that, it could be for the same reason. But I can't help point things out like this when they happen.

Only two weeks ago, I wrote about how Sarah Silverman was an unlikely poster girl for a video repeatedly advertised to me on YouTube about the 50 most paused movie moments. Not only was I surprised at how frequently this comes up for me (the search term "trailer" has been enough to do so), but by the fact that they chose a picture of Silverman not looking very sexual suggestive as the enticement to click on the link.

Well, either someone read me or they came to the conclusion on their own that they needed someone more traditionally sexy in a more traditionally alluring pose, because the image you see above is now what comes along with this video.

And unlike with the picture of Silverman, I can tell which Margot Robbie movie this is from: The Wolf of Wall Street.

Where indeed, famously, Robbie appears fully nude from the front angle. 

There seems likely to be a little capitalizing on Barbie here as well, given that this is a pink outfit Robbie is wearing and that her appearance in Greta Gerwig's film has made her all the more famous than she was previously. Who wouldn't, I'm sure the thinking goes, want to see Barbie with her clothes removed in a movie they may not be aware of from ten years ago?

The market inefficiency has been corrected, as it always is. 

Incidentally this realization, attained while I was searching up the trailer for Rebel Moon (full review here), comes only a day after I saw Silverman in Maestro. Maybe appearing as Leonard Bernstein's sister was the thing that finally did her in as a spokesmodel for stolen glances at the exposed flesh of actresses? 

Pondering religion in Christmas Day viewings

Religion played an unexpected role in our Christmas Day viewings, for a family that does not associate ourselves with any particular religion.

First it was A Charlie Brown Christmas, which we showed the kids for the first time as a better option for our dinner viewing than another Christmas-themed episode of The Simpsons. My wife made plates of leftovers from lunch, while we finally got to eating at close to 9 o'clock.

Best possible outcome: My wife and I revelled in the nostalgia of our own childhood viewings, while the kids made no comments about it being old or lame. 

One thing my wife, the notable atheist, did comment on was that she had forgotten how religious it was. She seemed only a tad put off by this because it does have that place in her own childhood, but as you will recall, Linus teaches us all a lesson on the true meaning of Christmas by quoting from the Bible. 

I wouldn't say this is unambiguously a message of support for the Christian origins of the holiday, and in the context of the special, it is presented more as an antidote to Charlie Brown's concerns about the holiday's increased commercialism and materialism. Don't forget, the thing that ultimately "saves" Christmas is the kids decorating Charlie's woeful little tree, the one so skinny that its back is broken by a single bauble. Still, the traditional nativity story is never even mildly repudiated, which would happen if A Charlie Brown Christmas were made today -- or likely they wouldn't even go there in the first place.

It did prompt me to comment that I thought the nativity story and all the bells and whistles of Christmas were inseparable. I don't feel you could have one without the other. As basically devoid of religion as my wife is -- though I was raised as a Unitarian, and my lone tattoo is actually Unitarian themed -- I still could not give up the nativity story. As a child, I loved hearing this story read during the annual Christmas Eve service, as the church became steadily more lit by candlelight. Without it, the gift-giving frenzy and all the decorations would just be too garish. That said, that part is the most present in my life, so I'd never be able to sustain my holiday season on just candlelight and wise men and frankincense and myrrh.

My religious pondering was put to a further test in my chosen viewing for the evening, Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. I'm conscious of a desire to watch something wholesome on Christmas night, but something that nonetheless has the possibility of being one of my favorites of the year. Last year it was Marcel the Shell With Shoes On, which didn't exactly rise to the heights I hoped it would -- was sure it would. With a little less pressure but probably similar acclaim, Margaret did rise to those heights.

I must have not read the Judy Blume book, though, because I forgot it was primarily about a girl's attempt to incorporate a religious outlook into her life. I knew she talked to God -- it's hard to escape that conclusion when you've got a title like that -- but I thought these conversations were mostly about her first bra, her first kiss, and getting her period. I didn't remember, or possibly didn't know, that she is the child of a Jewish father and a fallen devout Christian mother, whose parents effectively disowned her when she married her husband. And she samples Judaism and about four different Christian denominations throughout the narrative, none of them giving her a sense of the presence of God.

It's easy to watch Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret and have your experience be entirely about the nostalgia easily recreated by Kelly Fremon Craig, including the aforementioned significant benchmarks in the life of a girl who's just turned 12. But Craig clearly cares about the struggle to find God within the character's life, considering it more than just a necessarily evil to adapting this novel. The film is earnest in every aspect, and its conclusions about feeling the influence of the divine in our lives, even in ways that would otherwise seem perfectly secular, was an enriching takeaway of a Christmas Day viewing indeed. 

Christmas movies aren't really about Christmas

I saw three new Christmas movies in 2023. 

Three of the ... carry the one ... 278 new Christmas movies there were on various streaming services and what have you.

If the three I saw were any indication, they've cracked the code for a Christmas movie: Just make a regular movie and add some Christmas stuff into it.

Family Switch, which we watched with my family and my mother- and sister-in-law on Christmas Eve, was an example of that. We ultimately enjoyed it quite a bit (which I can't say for the other two on this list), laughing a lot and ending with grins on our faces. 

But did it need to be about Christmas? No it did not. (I mean, the poster doesn't even have any holly or a Santa hat in it.) 

It's basically Freaky Friday, except both the kids switch with both of their parents, matched on gender. And it's sort of the second such movie Jennifer Garner has starred in. They even name check her film 13 Going on 30 just to make sure we didn't miss it. 

And whenever it goes too long without having anything to do with Christmas, they sprinkle in a carol on the soundtrack just to remind us. 

Maybe it's a Netflix thing. Netflix also put out the Melissa McCarthy vehicle Genie this year. It's basically just a genie movie, with a few scenes set in the snow and a few Christmas songs popping up to remind us. (This one was terrible. This and Candy Cane Lane, which does intrinsically have to do with Christmas, can duke it out to see which was worse.)

I'd be cynical about this, but after having my spirits lifted by Family Switch -- which was directed by McG of all people -- I'm less inclined to go that way. 

And since it's my instinct to leave you with a Christmas post that lifts your spirts, I'll put forward this thought:

Christmas movies aren't really about Christmas, anyway.

Even in the best of times, with the best of Christmas movies, Christmas is really just a backdrop. Yes we love these movies in part because they engage with the tropes of the holiday season, and they increase our sense of holiday good cheer. But even terrible Christmas movies do the first and try to do the second. The ones that succeed are a success because of something else about them ... some essential understanding of the world and the people who live in it.

So whatever you watch on Christmas Eve, or Christmas Day, or even in the days after it and leading on into 2024, I hope it has that keen understanding of life -- because the rest, really, is just window dressing.

Merry Christmas. 

The time of year I get a little panicky

I've been slow-playing the end of my 2023 movie watching season for a while now -- watching movies for other series, watching TV shows, having nights where I don't watch anything at all.

But once you're a few days before Christmas, all it takes is a late-running Christmas party one night and a Survivor season finale the next night to throw you into a bit of a panic. 

That's two straight nights without watching a movie, and when all the year-end lists and Golden Globe nominations are coming in, that turns the slow play into a fast sprint.

It's just over a month until the Oscar nominations are announced, and that's when I close off my list -- with oh so much still to watch. I haven't even seen Killers of the Flower Moon yet!

I considered not watching the Survivor finale last night, after we got home too late Wednesday night for me to do anything but watch a 39-minute episode of The Crown, during which I still fell asleep. But in my Survivor pool I still had two of the final five contestants, meaning there was (hypothetically) a 40% chance I would win $200 on my $20 investment. Spoiler alert: I did not win. (Spoiler alert retracted: you have no idea which contestants I had.)

Whether I watched the movie in this poster last night or end up watching it tonight, it looks like some drastic action is called for.

The Holdovers is a movie I would usually wait on. It releases in Australia on January 11th, well before my deadline. 

The reasons I will probably watch it tonight, meaning I will need to spend $19.99 on a rental from iTunes, are twofold:

1) I have a feeling it will come up on the super-sized episode of Filmspotting in which the two hosts and two friends of the show will all reveal their top ten of the year. That episode drops in the next few days and I usually try to listen to it between Christmas and New Year's. I have never seen all the prestige films I hope to watch by the time I listen to this episode, but I do also like their choices to act as confirmation of my own rough draft of my list. The more movies I haven't seen that they like, the less there is of that -- and the more chance I have to be biased by what they've said, even if they don't delve into each movie with deep discussions.

2) If The Holdovers is going to contend for my top spot, I'll want to sit with it for a few weeks before enshrining it thus.

Because that's the other thing about 2023: Right now, my #1 is totally up for grabs. The movie I have slotted in there is a movie I love, of course -- you can't have seen 130+ movies in a given year and not love at least one of them -- but it is certainly not the movie I expected to be in this spot at this time of the year. If it finishes there, it will have earned it, but it needs to face off against some tough competition in the coming weeks. Such as:

Poor Things.

Priscilla. 

Dream Scenario.

Anatomy of a Fall.

And yes, Killers of the Flower Moon, which I will eventually carve out the four hours and 78 minutes to watch.

The Holdovers is a logical thing to keep an eye on. Alexander Payne has made my top ten three times as a director, most recently with About Schmidt, and people say it's one of his best. 

It grinds my gears to have to pay $19.99 for a rental, in part because we were trying to be a bit modest on Christmas spending this year (didn't happen) and in part because I just think that's a ridiculous amount of money to spend on a rental. Then again, the other option is not being available for home viewing at all, meaning I'd have to wait those additional 20 days until it hits Australian cinemas.

But I'm chucking $19.99 out the window on a regular basis during December, buying stocking stuffers with no idea whose stocking they'll be stuffed in, a "collect it all now and sort it out later" mentality that overtakes many of us this time of year. At least spending 20 bucks on The Holdovers accomplishes a tangible goal for me, even if I don't end up loving it. Knowing you don't love something is valuable information to have as well. 

Besides, the fewer theatrical commitments I have in January, the better. My wife is pretty good about letting me get out to movies I need to see, even in periods of increased activity, but the permission isn't granted without a small roll of the eyes, which I'd always rather avoid.

So probably The Holdovers tonight, before I potentially shift into Christmas-themed viewings over the next couple days. (Oh yeah, and then there was the fact that I learned, only just yesterday, that The Holdovers is actually set during the holiday season, giving me all the more reason to bump it up my list.)

It's a panicky time of year anyway, all this not being sure you got enough or the right gifts for everyone, and that you have all the food ingredients you need for Christmas lunch. You just gotta jam it all in. 

Sydney Sweeney has it both ways

Rarely, in recent times anyway, have I seen a mainstream movie poster try more shamelessly to sell the delectable flesh of a young starlet than the poster you see to your right. (And this one is relatively modest, allowing her lower half to be obscured by the title. Some show the lower half as well.) Yes okay, we get some beefcake here too. 

And yet when I could have been at an advanced screening of Anyone But You on Monday night, instead I was at home watching Sydney Sweeney in a very different form.

This was just a coincidence.

As I get down to only about a month before I finalize my 2023 movie rankings, yesterday I did an inventory of the films remaining on my Letterboxd watchlist and whether I can acquire them on the various streaming services to which I already subscribe. And failing that, how much they cost to rent on iTunes. (And had some positive result of this. Rye Lane is available on Disney+, at least here in Australia. Who knew? I'll watch it tonight.)

Sweeney's movie Reality had been evading me for most of the year, either because it actually wasn't available, or because of its incredibly poor search engine optimization as a title. When you search for this in on any service, all the service does is offer you up its cornucopia of reality TV shows. (Until I decided to write about Anyone But You also, I was going to call this post "Worst search engine optimization ever," with the voice of the Comic Book Guy implied.)

Then during this inventory, it came up as available on Amazon for a pittance -- only $2.99 AUD as a rental, which is closer to $2 US. Considering that most of my recent rentals have been $5.99 USD or more, I jumped on it. What's more, the 1 hour 22 minute running time was music to my ears on a night I planned to go to bed early, after falling asleep during most of my movies over an exhausting weekend of shopping and other holiday business.

It was just a coincidence that this was also the night they were playing an advanced screening of Anyone But You before its release later this week. I considered going for half a second, until I remembered a) I had just used up some of my wife's screening-related good will Friday night to go to an advanced screening of May December, which isn't available on Netflix here and won't be coming to cinemas until February 1st, and b) Anyone But You is not going to move the needle on my year-end list, and is an easy miss despite two stars I find compelling.

I find it interesting that Sweeney is able to move easily between the two worlds presented in these two very different films, one a standard romantic comedy and one a formally daring, essentially real-time interview between two FBI agents and the real-life person they believed was an NSA whistleblower. One would assume it is the romantic comedy that makes use of her physical assets that is purchasing her ability to star in a no-budget drama/thriller in which her acting assets are fully on display. You know, kind of like how Steven Soderbergh and Francis Cord Coppola make the schlock in order to pursue their more eccentric interests.

It would have been easy for Sweeney to just sell her body in every single role. She is amply endowed, and has been unafraid to show it off, first in the decidedly sad context of a series like Euphoria, and then in the more traditional sexy context of an erotic thriller like The Voyeurs. There are also selfies and such of her sans clothing, but don't ask me how I know this.

A person who just wants to get as many Instagram followers as possible does not make a movie like Reality. Tina Satter's film features only four actors, only three of whom have many speaking lines, as the script is built from the real transcript of two agents cross examining a woman named Reality Winner who was suspected of intentionally releasing classified national security documents to the media. (I won't say what the documents were, because I didn't know myself when I started watching the movie and I thought that was better.) 

Because it is beholden to the real transcript, the film assumes a naturalism that places the actors' choices beyond any shadow of a doubt. That is not to say they don't make choices. They most assuredly do. But the choices relate more to what was happening in the room during recorded audio whose every inflection and tone of voice is a matter of public record. What they were saying and how they were saying it are indisputable. What their faces may have been doing is unknown to us.

And boy is Sweeney on point here. The real Reality Winner adopted a very interesting "not too innocent but not too guilty" attitude when the FBI agents arrived at her home on that day in June of 2017. Clearly she knew that protesting too much would get her in trouble -- Gertrude knew that as long ago as when Shakespeare wrote Hamlet -- but an innocent person should logically appear more surprised to be getting pinned in by FBI agents as she exits her vehicle carrying groceries. Winner plays it cool, a skill she undoubtedly adopted in the field as a soldier, and tries to suss out exactly how much these agents know before playing all her cards. 

Over the course of the interview, we see her steadily start to break, the lower half of her face puffing out as though she wants to start crying, but either knows this will give her away or considers herself too tough to collapse in this way. The gradual progression from her starting position to her position at the end of the film is astonishing to watch, as Sweeney never relies on anything that would be described as showy. Perhaps the real transcript had a beneficial restricting effect on her technique, but that's just a jumping off point. And there are not a lot of actors who could play this role the way Sweeney does.

Tellingly, this film has nothing to do with the assets on display in Anyone But You.

Oh she's in short jeans, but her men's dress shirt disguises anything else about her figure. And she has no makeup, able to make her eyes wide and vacant and eventually indistinguishable from a pauper on the street who knows all is lost.

I suspect we'll continue to see Sweeney in Anything But You and movies of that ilk for some time. Who knows, maybe she elevates that film beyond what we would expect from it.

But as long as she keeps making movies like Reality, her career will be one to follow indeed. 

Audient Classics: The Long Goodbye

This is the final entry in my 2023 monthly series rewatching movies from before I was born that I'd loved, but that I'd seen only once. 

Going into December, I'd had representatives in this series from every decade from the 1920s onward -- except the 1970s. 

There are only three years to draw from in the 1970s if you want to get something from before I was born, but that doesn't mean this decade should be excluded from all the fun.

So I finished with a film from the year I was born, 1973 -- which indeed feels appropriate, since I just celebrated my 50th birthday two months ago.

Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye came out exactly 227 days before I was born, on March 7th of that year. It took me until 2012 to see it, despite an obsession with the films of Robert Altman that was already more than 20 years old at that point, dating back to the release of The Player. I shouldn't suggest to you that I'm an Altman completist -- in fact, there are a staggering 25 films Altman has directed that I haven't seen, compared to 11 that I have seen. Still, The Long Goodbye seemed like my most notable Altman blind spot when I finally got to it 11 years ago.

And loved it. 

In fact, the film single-handledly made me question my assumptions about whether I liked noir or not. I am still trying to figure that out today, having just rewatched another instance of Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe on film, The Big Sleep, a few weeks ago, after finishing reading the book. You can read about that here if you want. 

Now that I've had a year of noir films in 2021, in which I identified probably my new favorite noir (Key Largo), as well as done the whole Big Sleep revisited project, it seemed like a good time to look at where noir's road to recovery began with The Long Goodbye.

Well ... 

I'd say that my holiday season exhaustion claims another cinematic victim, except that would be overstating the decrease in my affection for The Long Goodbye on this viewing. I still liked it, maybe even quite a bit, but I was fighting sleep and a tequila on the rocks I'd had before dinner. There were naps and I felt discombobulated for much of the film.

Then again, this is a discombobulated film, which is one of the things I loved about it the first time. It's shaggy as hell, personified by Elliot Gould as Marlowe, always confused about what decade he's in and how the present seems to have left him behind. Marlowe's actual heyday was three decades earlier in Chandler's original incarnation of the character, so Altman specifically confronts this Marlowe with things like beautiful nudist neighbors doing yoga and a cat that will only eat one sort of cat food. 

In fact, I'm pretty sure I fell in love with The Long Goodbye's first ten minutes, back in 2012, and never looked back. I was in love with this film's milieu, and once the film grabbed me at the start it would have taken quite a lot to loosen the hold.

The hold was looser this time, in part because I wasn't as surprised by this movie as I was the first time (though the ending is still pretty shocking, a total upending of our understanding of Marlowe as a character from the Chandler books, and completely different from the actual book). The film shambles along with not exactly a plot but a number of individual interludes, which do add up to something interesting, but maybe not something quite as interesting as I thought they did 11 years ago. 

One thing I did consider this time is how this film is in conversation with the first Altman film I ever saw. There's a lot of The Player here, in the way this film is directly in conversation with Hollywood. The Long Goodbye features a security guard to a gated Malibu community who does a different celebrity impersonation for each car that passes. Can't you imagine this guy trying to get a job on the same lot where Griffin Mill works as an executive? Then there's the fact that one of this film's suspects is a boozy screenwriter who has to spend his time in detox not to kill himself or someone else. 

As much as I do like Altman's films set in and around Los Angeles -- you can add Short Cuts to that list -- another great candidate for this series would have been McCabe & Mrs. Miller, which I also love, and which came out two years before this. I owe that film a second viewing, having started a second viewing sometime in the past five years and having had to abandon it before I finished. Either the movie was due back at the library or I just decided that I'd missed my original window once I didn't finish it that night. Maybe something for early in 2024.

There's probably more I should say about The Long Goodbye, but instead I'll say goodbye to this series. Here's a quick reminder of what I watched:

January: Sherlock Jr. (1924, Buster Keaton)
February: Roman Holiday (1953, William Wyler)
March: The Exterminating Angel (1962, Luis Bunuel)
April: The Wages of Fear (1953, Henri-Georges Clouzot)
May: The Women (1939, George Cukor)
June: Ace in the Hole (1951, Billy Wilder)
July: Harakiri (1962, Masaki Kobayashi)
August: The Great Dictator (1940, Charles Chaplin)
September: The Virgin Spring (1960, Ingmar Bergman)
October: The Birds (1963, Alfred Hitchcock)
November: The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928, Carl Theodor Dreyer)
December: The Long Goodbye (1973, Robert Altman)

The 1960s had the most representatives with four movies.

In addition to varying up the decades, I varied up the other demographic details, never repeating a director and selecting works from a variety of locations around the world, the U.S. being the only one that was repeated.

Of course I can't help but think of all the movies that were on my larger list that I couldn't fit in, as is inevitably the case in a series with only 12 spots. Here are the ten movies I most regret not getting to watch, in alphabetical order, which only means I may know how to direct my "just for pleasure" rewatches in 2024:

Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972, Werner Herzog)
Arsenic and Old Lace (1944, Frank Capra)
The Battle of Algiers (1967, Gillo Pontecorvo)
The Conformist (1970, Bernardo Bertolucci)
Key Largo (1948, John Huston)
Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936, Frank Capra)
Ordet (1955, Carl Theodor Dreyer)
Rope (1948, Alfred Hitchcock)
Solaris (1972, Andrei Tarkovsky)
Zulu (1964, Cy Endfield)

Even picking this list of ten was difficult, so I've got some great viewing ahead of me.

I'll tell you about my 2024 monthly series at some point soon after the calendar changes. 

Apple has dumb ideas about the name of Gran Turismo

Last night I got through a little more than half of Neill Blomkamp's Gran Turismo. That's been a bit of a pattern the last few weekends. Exhausted from the day, start watching a movie at close to ten o'clock and then take a loooong nap in the middle. Then wake up around 1 and have the good sense not to try to watch the remaining hour of the movie before going to bed. I mean, the next day is going to involve more buying of presents.

I haven't watched enough of the movie to tell you what I ultimately thought of it, but I have watched enough of the movie to laugh about what Apple thinks this movie is called.

On my iTunes rental, I noticed the full title was Gran Turismo: Based on a True Story.

Oh brother.

Is this an Apple thing? The last time I wrote a post about the silly titles Apple gives movies was when I told you I refused to call the Michael J. Fox documentary by its complete title Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie. I'm still at Still on that one.

Not all instances of title lengthening are ones I disregard. I was all in on Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire. It was just weird enough that I allowed it.

But the Based on a True Story part of Gran Turismo is come by dishonestly.

When the title flashes up on screen, it's only Gran Turismo. About five seconds later, you get in block letters: "BASED ON A TRUE STORY." Which is a pretty standard disclaimer -- is disclaimer the right word? -- at the start of a movie.

Why someone decided to incorporate this into the proper title, I have no idea. To distinguish the movie from the Playstation game on which it was based, I guess? But even in the poster above, you can see it is a tagline more than part of the title. 

As usual in these cases, I go to IMDB and Letterboxd to get a final ruling. Fortunately, they're both with me on this one. No Based on a True Story to be found in either title. 

They do both go with the longer title of Still, so I guess maybe I need to re-think that one.

Knee deep in a Maestro takedown before I even knew it

The coverage of prestige end-of-year releases and my access to watch them has been way out of sync this year, such that I've left several episodes of my favorite movie podcast, Filmspotting, unplayed. Usually in this situation I try to "listen loosely," letting the words go by in order to get to the parts of the podcast that don't relate to the movie in question, without really taking in what's being said. But this failed so stupendously when I tried to do this for Anatomy of a Fall -- one of those movies that may slip by me after I missed seeing it at MIFF -- that I gave up the endeavor entirely for the next few that were up.

It's not necessarily that I think the two opinions on these movies will either alter my anticipation of the movies, letting me know in advance whether I should actually be looking forward to them, or even that they will spoil the movie, since Filmspotting in particular takes care to advise us if they are going into spoiler territory -- usually handling such material in its own separate segment at the end of the show. It's that I will potentially be reviewing many of these movies and I don't want them putting ideas into my head about what I might say.

Maestro seemed likely to escape this fate, as it doesn't appear as a discussion topic in any of the waiting Filmspotting podcasts, and releases on Netflix on Wednesday I believe. A good chance for me to pop up a review next week, at a time of year when I'm generally too busy to get out to the theater with any regularity and I need something I can watch at home, my opinions unmolested by outside influence.

Imagine my surprise when another favorite podcast, A Typical Disgusting Display, hit me right up front with a surprise broadside of Bradley Cooper's new movie. 

The podcast bills itself as "a podcast for writers, by writers who hate writing," and true enough, the two co-hosts, Alec Sulkin and Julius Sharpe, are Family Guy writers and former or current showrunners. (I also went to high school with Julius, though that's his stage name.) They do sometimes talk about movies, but they're more likely to talk about something that's been in the culture for years, sometimes giving humorous re-appraisals of the plot's core components.

Alec likes to joke about his big nose (as Julius likes to joke about being bald), so his point of entry was faux outrage about the fake nose Cooper dons to play Leonard Bernstein. But then he proceeded to just rip the movie to shreds, using observations I can now no longer make in my own review. 

I thought of turning it off, but it was into the deep end of the diss so quickly that it hardly seemed worth it at that point. (And his rant was funny.)

It puts me in mind of an issue I'm sure I've discussed here before, which is how to remain unbiased in the wake of a cultural conversation that crops up almost immediately about these entertainment products as they are released. And unfortunately, Maestro is already out for its brief theatrical run, which means I'm not really getting it at its first availability to me if I wait until Netflix to see it.

I guess it's another reminder of how real critics -- I mean, those who write reviews as part of their paid full-time job -- get to the first pre-release screenings, before anyone knows what we will all think about the movie once it comes out. I do sometimes go to these -- I've already seen Ferrari, and I don't think that comes out in any country for a few weeks -- but most of the rest of the time, it's catch as catch can.

I will still review Maestro, I think, but there's no doubt the words of a funny podcaster will be ringing in my ears as I do. 

Rest in police, Captain Holt

My wife and I are slowly making our way through the last season of Brooklyn Nine-Nine on Netflix. Our gradual pace is so we can draw out the inevitable arrival of Andre Braugher's final, hilarious utterance as Captain Raymond Holt.

Little did I know it would be Andre Braugher's final utterance himself. Braugher died this week at 61 after a short illness.

I'm devastated. 

This assessment of my feelings naturally occurred to me to type in a Facebook chat with some friends after I found out of his passing in that chat. One of them came back with a gif of Holt saying "I'm devastated." I hadn't realized this was an actual line of his dialogue, spoken in a total deadpan, as consistent with the apparently narrow emotional range of this dedicated career police officer. Of course, we all knew Holt for the softie he really was.

Like most people, I became aware of Braugher through his great work in Homicide: Life on the Street. But it was another TV show that ingratiated me to a different version of Braugher, one with a little more levity, which paved the way for his Brooklyn Nine-Nine work. That show was the sadly short-lived Men of a Certain Age with Ray Romano and Scott Bakula. My wife and I loved it. No one else seemed to have heard of it.

Because this is a movie blog, of course I should talk about Braugher's movie work, of which there was less, but still, some important and good examples.

Most recently he appeared in She Said, my #11 movie of 2022, where he played the uncompromising newspaper editor Dean Baquet, who went toe-to-toe on phone calls with Harvey Weinstein, and didn't blink even in the presence of implied and actual threats from the powerful Hollywood mogul. That movie belongs to its two female newspaper reporters, of course, but the extra support provided by Baquet is invaluable, and Braugher's performance of it steady and true.

It's surprising how few others there were. One I hated, which was Stephen King's The Mist. One I loved but haven't seen in ages, that being Edward Zwick's Glory. I'm due for a rewatch, and Braugher's presence in the cast might make me prioritize that early in the new year.

When it comes to the death of a beloved favorite like Braugher, though, I don't need to sit here and justify to you why I'm writing a memoriam piece about a TV star on a movie blog. Braugher was a lovely presence on my screen, no matter what form of viewing entertainment it was. He was intense on Homicide, establishing himself as an incendiary dramatic actor. He steadily took the path toward becoming an even better comic actor, the most compelling presence on an enduring sitcom that was characterized by the strength of its ensemble. Everyone probably had a non-Holt favorite character on Brooklyn Nine-Nine, but I can't imagine anyone wouldn't have selected Holt as their favorite overall.

And consider the character he played. A Black precinct captain who worked his way up through the ranks due to his impeccable demeanor and policing skills, but who met roadblocks at every step of the way due to his race. Brooklyn Nine-Nine did not shy away from discussing matters of race, and in fact, it was the real-world race-related police brutality in 2020 that caused the whole show to consider whether it was still funny to make a show about police officers. Eventually they decided it wasn't, and are so far going out gracefully, while also being topical about the reality of a show about police officers.

But oh wait. Holt was also gay. For the entire series, through some ups and downs, he was in a loving relationship with Kevin, played by Marc Evan Jackson, who put a photo of them posing in a loving embrace on Instagram as a tribute. Holt was Black and gay and still a police captain with aspirations for even more senior positions within the NYPD. Every part of that was in Braugher's performance, but it never defined his performance. His performance was defined by incredible comedic timing and an even-keeled delivery that prompted jokes about him being a robot. That only made his occasionally bouts of succumbing to one emotion or another all the more hilarious.

I would have missed Andre Braugher at the end of Brooklyn Nine-Nine, which we will get to in another four episodes or so. But I would have assumed he'd rise again, and in fact had heard he had already been cast in a new Netflix show, though not a comedy in this case.

Now he'll only rise again in content I haven't seen, but should probably seek out, because if Braugher was in it, it was probably great.

Rest in peace. 

Sarah Silverman: the ultimate temptation for excitable movie nerds

As part of posting my reviews on ReelGood, I regularly go to YouTube to get the film's trailer for embedding in the post.

Almost every time, the first search result I get is the image you see to the right.

The title of the video being pushed on me is "50 Most Paused Movie Moments."

There are a couple things about this I find strange.

One is that the advertiser has apparently paid to have this come up in every YouTube search that contains the word "trailer." I have only a simplistic understanding of how the money works at YouTube, but I do know that to have something like this come up so regularly, in contexts that are so unrelated to it, there has to be money exchanging hands.

What I find strange is that it comes up with the word "trailer." If you are seeking to be titillated on YouTube, how likely is it that the word "trailer" is going to be one of your search terms? A trailer would actually, in most cases, be pretty clean, because most of them are going to be viewed by audiences of potentially all ages. 

Yes there are redband trailers, and you can see those on YouTube too. But the advertiser is overpaying for an algorithm that is not doing what it wants it to do, especially when the most recent trailer I searched for -- getting this result yet again -- was for the Eddie Murphy family Christmas movie Candy Cane Lane. (You can read my review here if you like.)

Then there's the poster girl they've chosen to try to titillate us.

Now, I have no idea which Sarah Silverman movie this is, but the image is barely suggestive of anything naughty. Silverman is in a pool and appears to be wearing a rather modest bathing suit. Is she bottomless? Maybe, but the image certainly isn't implying that. You have to really stretch to get there.

And then there is Silverman herself. I have always found her to be attractive, but never has she presented herself, or been really considered by anyone in the public discourse, to be a traditional beauty or to be traditionally sexy in any way. She's also now 53 years old. You'd be much more likely to use a picture of, I don't know, Megan Fox in an advertisement like this, or maybe Sydney Sweeney if you are trying to stay current -- which for this advertiser, it would really make sense to do to accomplish their goal.

Maybe they got a lifetime contract with YouTube for a relatively small fee, and I will continue to see a picture of Sarah Silverman in a pool wearing a modest bathing suit every time I search for a trailer on YouTube, from now until the end of time. 

Baz Jazz Hands: Christmas cards with Elvis

This is the final in my 2023 bi-monthly series rewatching the films of Baz Luhrmann.

We ordered our Christmas cards late this year, but they arrived early. I think it might be part of a ploy by Snapfish to create the impression of excellent customer service, to tell you your order is expected on Friday and then deliver it on Tuesday.

Having been out all day Wednesday at work followed by Ferrari and Saltburn, though, I couldn't start stuffing them in envelopes until Thursday after work, and because of my younger son's school holiday concert, couldn't actually start until that night. When I wanted to watch a movie.

I figured, what better accompaniment to the task than the last entry of Baz Jazz Hands, Baz Luhrmann being a filmmaker whose strengths (some would say weaknesses) come across through an overall impression of what he's doing, not a minute attention to every detail on screen? Especially if you've already seen the movie once?

If I actually wrote in my Christmas cards, it probably wouldn't have worked, but I gave that up ages ago. The only writing I do is the address and the return address on the envelope, and all I was really doing at this stage was writing my return address and the recipient's name on each envelope, kind of like a machine completing a task in parts. I'd look up their addresses later on when I wasn't watching a movie.

Imagine my surprise, then, when the opening scene of Elvis actually features Christmas cards. Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks) is putting away a box of Christmas cards on a high shelf when he suffers the stroke that sent him to a hospital bed from which he would never emerge. I almost did a double take, my own Christmas cards right there in my lap. 

It's not the only Christmas element in this movie. In fact, there's a whole to do that feels like it takes up 20 minutes about whether Elvis will wear his Christmas sweater and sing "Here Comes Santa Claus" on a television broadcast designed specifically for those two purposes. (Spoiler alert: He does not.)

The salient facts about Parker's death seem mostly accurate -- he died on January 20, 1997, so indeed he could have been putting away Christmas cards, though Wikipedia does not say anything about that. He also did not die until the next morning, so in theory, his deathbed narration of this story, by the light of a night in Vegas, could have also occurred. 

That isn't, however, the impression one gets from the Christmas special episode, which bothered me more than it should. But more on that in the moment.

My ranking of Elvis as my #7 film of 2022 was, in part, the thing that inspired me to do this Baz Jazz Hands series. At that time I had seen only two of Luhrmann's six films more than once, and I thought this made a good excuse to revisit the others, to note how Luhrmann's style has developed and solidified over the years. Now that I've done this, I feel I can confidently say he is the only filmmaker -- or for sure, the only filmmaker who has made multiple films -- where I've seen his entire output more than once.

The first 45 minutes of Elvis were an absolute confirmation of the affection I'd felt for it the first time. The colors, the editing, the performance of Austin Butler as the green Elvis, the absolute joy emanating from anything and everything ... it was intoxicating. As Elvis is driving his pink Cadillac, I thought to myself that I had never seen the color pink look quite like that on screen, and I was enthralled by it.

An interesting thing about this film is to watch its color palette become more muted as Elvis sinks deeper into the drug and health problems that would ultimately claim him. You aren't supposed to have as much fun with the second half, or even the final two-thirds, of this film, and that doesn't lessen it as a film -- it just presents the reality of a man's life.

One thing did lessen it, though, and I'd say it probably came about the halfway mark.

I mentioned the whole donnybrook over whether Elvis would meekly accept his commitment of playing a family-friendly Christmas special. In order to draw further thematic resonance from this, Luhrmann chooses to group it together with an event that did not occur, that could not have occurred, at the same time, making it seem as though they were contemporaneous. Two events, actually.

The first in the narrative of these three total events is the assassination of Martin Luther King. We see Elvis receive the news and feel heartbroken. 

Not straight away in the narrative, but within maybe ten more minutes of screen time, we start to get into the Christmas special and whether Elvis will behave. Then as they are preparing the Christmas special and there is excessive discussion of Santa Claus coming or not coming to town, and whether he will be reaching town via the lane that bears his name, Robert Kennedy is shot and killed, creating yet more perspective in Elvis regarding what is and what is not important. 

Here's the thing: King was shot in April of 1968. Kennedy was shot in June of 1968. There was no Christmas season between those events, or especially at the time of either event.

I said in my review of Elvis (which you can read here if you like) that the movie has a strong sense of emotional truth, if not literal truth at every juncture. I was effectively granting Luhrmann license to take liberties with the truth as long as it was furthering the effective portrait of this man.

However, I do take issue with combining events that were so transparently not related to one another, where it is easily verifiable that they weren't. I first came to this by thinking "Wow, I didn't know Bobby Kennedy was assassinated right around Christmastime." Of course, he wasn't. Luhrmann thought that Elvis' commitment to the Christmas show made an effective metaphor for his selling out of his original persona, a slow-moving compromise that had been going on for some time at this point. And that the death of a political leader he admired would demonstrate just how vacuous were the others things he was doing.

If this were the desire -- and if the movie wants to grapple with Presley's uneasy relationship to Black culture and the debts he owes it -- why not have it be King's death he's struggling with at the same time as the Christmas show? Did Luhrmann just figure people would better remember the time of year King was killed than the time of year Kennedy was killed, so it would make his mild subterfuge less noticeable?

I can't say that this really impacted my enjoyment of the film the second time, but it ate away at me for the rest of the movie, so it obviously stuck in my craw. 

Overall, though, this Elvis viewing confirmed the thing I have been steadily realizing all year, or putting into words at least: Luhrmann is a maker of myths. If his characters lack in nuance, it's because he's giving us archetypes, not finely detailed and complicated human beings. If his biopic adheres to the standard components of a biopic, just exploded outward in his unique style, then that's because he wants to make the ultimate biopic, the biopic that might go in the dictionary next to the definition, not something that surprises us by only examining a small part of the subject's life, or examining him by having five different actors play him.

In short, the things Luhrmann does are things I appreciate. The scope of the big screen is strong with this one. He understands that movies are made on a large canvas and that the subject matter should match. 

In thinking about filmmakers with a signature style, I think Luhrmann is one as much as Wes Anderson is one. You know you're watching a Luhrmann movie when you're watching it. He comes back to the same sorts of shots, the same sorts of editing techniques, the same anachronistic use of music. There's one shot in Elvis where the casino owner is writing out the terms of Elvis' contract at the International Hotel -- or more specifically, the benefits Parker will get from this commitment -- and I swear there is another shot just like that, focusing ominously on the letters as they are being written, in another Luhrmann film. At this stage I can't remember which one it was. But the moment marked this as a Luhrmann film as much as anything else.

There are differences between a filmmaker like Luhrmann and one like Anderson, though. These differences don't make one better or worse than the other, but I do think they help explain why Anderson gets so much backlash from his haters while Luhrmann gets relatively little, even though he too has plenty of haters.

For one, Luhrmann has made about half the number of films as Anderson in the same period of time. His style has had less opportunity to grate on us for its repetitious nature, especially when he goes nine years between making films, as he did between The Great Gatsby and Elvis.

But I also think the "same style, different subject matter" approach they share befits the sorts of projects Luhrmann tackles better than the sorts of projects Anderson tackles. Again, no slight on Anderson as I really like two-thirds of his movies. But on the ones I don't like, I smack my forehead about how Anderson seems to be going back to the same well, again and again. 

With Luhrmann -- especially with the scarcity of movies he gives us -- I feel like this well will never run dry.

Thus concludes the series. I will conclude King Darren before the end of the month, which will make Darren Aronofsky the second director whose every film I have seen more than once, and which will bring all three of my 2023 bi-monthly series to a close.

Ursa Major on my movie screen

Short one today.

Last night I saw Saltburn, the second of two movies at the Village Cinemas in the increasingly moribund Jam Factory in South Yarra. I had arrived at 6:30 for an advanced screening of Ferrari, which doesn't open here for another month. To get this out of the way at the start, I liked both movies.

Writing about the Jam Factory today was one option, if I really wanted to depress myself. Might as well fit in some quick thoughts.

Indeed this was once a jam factory, and from the looks of it, they are trying to turn it into one again. When I first went there, the cinema -- which was always the centerpiece of the space -- was surrounded by clothing stores, restaurants and a Big W or KMart or Target, I can't remember which.

Now, all the restaurants and the Big Target Mart have closed, and the one remaining clothing store has its main entrance from the street. The entrance from the interior courtyard doesn't even open.

Here's a photo of the video screen on the way out. You can see behind it where some of the food court style restaurants used to be. This is what we call a "blue screen of death" in IT circles, when your computer has a fatal error that takes it out of the operating system entirely, and you have to reboot. I thought it was a good metaphor for the Jam Factory, only the reboot may never happen.

But instead of spending the lion's share of this post on what COVID hath wrought, I wanted to go slightly more optimistic and just talk about a possible sign of decline of the cinema ... or maybe just a maintenance issue that needs to be addressed.

My Saltburn screen had a mini big dipper on it.

Not the handle, just the dipping part.

What I mean by that is four small pricks in the surface of the screen that emitted a faint blue light from each. 

The small pricks were exactly in the shape of the four main parts of that most famous of constellations.

It's almost like it had to be intentional. How do you get four small pin pricks of equal size on your movie screen, spaced exactly perfectly to approximate Ursa Major? (If I'd been thinking of it, that's what I should have taken a picture of.) Sure, one pin prick could be an accident (if this is actually a physical hole) or screen degradation, but four spaced perfectly like this? Highly suss.

In any case, it did not sufficiently impact my viewing of Saltburn. I only really noticed it when the action on screen was particularly dark. (Which it always was in this movie, though in that case I'm using the word metaphorically rather than literally.) 

I'll have to try to go see something on screen 4 sometime early next year, to see if this is a recently occurring maintenance issue that will be fixed, or a precursor to the closing of the theater. If things are as depressing for Village Cinemas in this location as they are for the rest of the Jam Factory, they might just be letting themselves go in antiticaption of their own blue screen of death.

And here I thought this second point might be less depressing.

Ranking all 25 Bond films

As promised, my rankings of all 25 Eon Bond films. (I hate that you have to keep sticking in the qualifier "Eon" just because of two others that weren't part of this chronology, one that was intended as a parody.)

I've written enough Bond in the past two weeks to make your eyes bleed, so I will dispense with the preamble on this one.

I did, however, want to say that I didn't agonize too much over the exact order of these, going mostly by feel, and in some cases with a lack of recency that meant I was ranking them on an impression that was formed 40 years ago. I might at some point become more familiar with them and consider this exercise again, but more on that later.

For now, my rankings from 25 to 1, with 50 words or so of explanation about each.

25. The World is Not Enough (1999, Michael Apted) - The worst of any thing you might rank is probably hurt by the conditions in which you experienced it. But either I was having a really bad day when I saw this, or I did really think Denise Richards was that terrible.

24. Die Another Day (2002, Lee Tamahori) - Two Pierce Brosnan films as my worst -- really? Perhaps not, but I do remember hoping DAD would bring me back into the Bond fold after the disappointment of TWINE and being sorely disappointed in that hope. 

23. License to Kill (1989, John Glen) - There was a reason Timothy Dalton was shown the exit after only two Bond films, and License to Kill was it. All I really remember about this is Robert Davi and some sharks. Incidentally, this is only the seventh title that comes up when you search "License to Kill" on IMDB, which is crazy for a Bond movie and indicates how little people remember and/or think about this movie.

22. Quantum of Solace (2008, Marc Forster) - This is actually one of the most recent films I've seen in that I only got to it in 2015, just before seeing Spectre. But I don't remember much about it at all and feel like it was a pretty anonymous entry in the series, the one that temporarily gave them pause about whether to continue onward with new movies.

21. Moonraker (1979, Lewis Gilbert) - "James Bond in space" is the four-word phrase that will continue to hamper my memory of this movie even though it is probably just fine. This is where I first met Jaws, who did scare me quite a bit, but I feel like I ended up laughing at this movie -- even though it may have been the first Bond I ever saw. (There's a debate about whether it was this or For Your Eyes Only, or if I only saw both of those after I saw Octopussy.) 

20. A View to a Kill (1985, John Glen) - "Nope, they couldn't keep up the Octopussy magic" was mostly my reaction to Roger Moore's final Bond movie, though I do remember liking the Duran Duran song and finding Grace Jones a very interesting, confronting Bond girl. I think also the cultural conversation about how he was too old to play Bond (two years shy of his 60th birthday) had seeped into the brain of even the 11-year-old me. It was the first Bond I saw in the theater though. (A friend of mine on social media the other day suggested we saw Octopussy in the theater, but I don't think so.)

19. Casino Royale (2006, Martin Campbell) - There's an argument to be made that this belongs in the 20s since when I saw this, I actually disliked it. However, being in such a minority in that opinion, and the fact that I've always liked Daniel Craig in the role, tempers my feelings about Casino Royale and suggests I should probably watch it again sometime. I remember I was really annoyed by the ridiculous hands in the poker game they play in the movie. 

18. The Living Daylights (1987, John Glen) - I remember being pleasantly surprised by Dalton's first appearance as Bond, and the discussion at the time that they were trying to make Bond less of a lothario. So my only enduring memory of this movie is Dalton quaintly holding hands with Maryam d'Abo as they board the London Eye. 

17. Dr. No (1962, Terence Young) - I hate to not give more love to the original, but the fact remains that I was perplexed about the sedentary nature of the action of this movie. Clearly, in a first movie of anything you have no idea what it's going to be, but my interest in this movie was largely an academic interest in discovering where it all began. (I also still think Dr. No is a funny name for the first movie in a Bond series. Shouldn't the first movie have been called James Bond or something?) Incidentally this is my lowest ranked Sean Connery film. 

16. Spectre (2015, Sam Mendes) - When we all thought this was Craig's last Bond movie, I thought it was a decently satisfying way for him to go out, and met the high filmmaking standard that Mendes had brought to Skyfall. Bonus points for Christoph Waltz as Blofeld. 

15. Thunderball (1965, Terence Young) - This is one of the two movies I'd seen in the last decade before I got restarted with On Your Majesty's Secret Service two weeks ago, and even though I've seen both of them within the past three years, I have trouble remembering what happens in Thunderball and what happens in You Only Live Twice. I do remember that Thunderball was the silly one with an excessive number of boobs, and that it earns it #15. 

14. You Only Live Twice (1967, Lewis Gilbert) - I originally had this movie two spots higher, but considering what I just said about not remembering what happened in which movie, and that I gave both of these movies three stars on Letterboxd, I think I have to movie this one down to just before Thunderball -- though it probably could have also gone just after. 

13. For Your Eyes Only (1981, John Glen) - I don't remember a lot about this movie other than there's skiing in it. However, I do have some memory of it relative to how I felt about Moonraker, which was something along the lines of "This restores order after the fiasco known as 'James Bond in space.'" Incidentally, this was the movie they were supposed to make directly after The Spy Who Loved Me, except that the success of Star Wars prompted them to jump the queue with Moonraker.

12. The Spy Who Loved Me (1976, Lewis Gilbert) - And here we get to another pairing where the plots blend together -- even though I just saw these two movies last week. So I'm not going to use this space to argue for the merits of TSWLM over ... 

11. The Man With the Golden Gun (1974, Guy Hamilton) - ... this movie, which gets a higher ranking because I think Guy Hamilton brought something special to this franchise in terms of goofy humor, whereas if Gilbert was doing that also, it didn't land in quite the same way. (I'm inclined to think I'd view Gilbert's Moonraker differently if I saw it today, potentially making him the equal of Hamilton.) All I know is I had fun during both of these movies on Friday but I don't remember what happened in what movie. 

10. No Time to Die (2021, Cary Joji Fukunaga) - Okay so the top ten is when we start getting serious about really "good" Bond films. Perhaps because of the [unprecedented thing] that occurs in this movie, it holds a really distinctive place within the Bond chronology, and because it's Fukunaga, the filmmaking is also quite good. 

9. Skyfall (2012, Sam Mendes) - After I had not liked Casino Royale and not even seen Quantum of Solace, I was surprised to enjoy this as much as I did. The first time I remember a Bond film seeming "arty," but in all the right ways. Still a little shocked by the way Craig blows off the cold-blooded murder of his apparent love interest right in front of him, though.

8. Goldeneye (1995, Martin Campbell) - The debut of Brosnan felt like a breath of fresh air after the series had been petering out for an entire decade beforehand ... but his reign would require another reboot 11 years later. Goldeneye was one of two good films, the other of which we haven't gotten to yet.

7. From Russia With Love (1963, Terence Young) - Although the Bond series had not yet found its defining traits in only this, its second movie, I was pleasantly surprised by it being a confident step in that direction, after being generally unimpressed by Dr. No. In order to stay in sequence, I watched this the day before watching Goldfinger, which I needed to do for other reasons. The urgency of the viewing didn't make me like it any less. 

6. On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969, Peter R. Hunt) - The only film starring George Lazenby and the only film directed by Peter Hunt obviously made an impression on me when I saw it last month, though I think this might be a little inflated by recency bias, plus by being impressed with where the story goes in the last minute before the credits. 

5. Live and Let Die (1973, Guy Hamilton) - Possibly more recency bias at play here, but this movie is silly and funny and Yaphet Kotto gets blown up like a balloon at the end. What more do you need? 

4. Diamonds Are Forever (1971, Guy Hamilton) - I think I just really like Hamilton's films. Although this movie, which I watched the night before I went to the Bondathon, also loses some of its distinctiveness in my memory because I watched it in the same 24-hour period as three other Bond films, it primed me plenty for those three films and was a lot of fun.

3. Tomorrow Never Dies (1997, Roger Spotiswoode) - Well hello there Pierce Brosnan up in this rarefied air. This is one of three Bond films that I "love" where that affection has also stood the test of time, though I have to say, I can't fully remember why Brosnan's second time as Bond was such a win for me. I'll definitely have to put this ranking to the test at some point in the future.

2. Goldfinger (1964, Guy Hamilton) - And here's Hamilton again, meaning three of my top five were directed by him. This is, by most people's assessment, the "gold standard" of Bond films, the time when Connery and the screenwriters both started really having fun with the role, in terms of both colorful villains and Bond girls, particularly their names. Don't forget, this film features Pussy Galore, Auric Goldfinger and a henchman with a killer hat named Oddjob. 

1. Octopussy (1983, John Glen) - What else could it be? For most people, this was just a random late-period Moore film with a titillating name. (Yes, I just realized that both of my top two Bond films have a pussy in them.) For me, it was a beloved VHS tape that I watched about ten times between 1985 and when I graduated high school in 1991. However good it may or may not be, I cannot see past the role it had as cinematic comfort food for me in the 1980s, and so of course even when I watch it today (as I did most recently back in 2012), it still seems great. As I've mentioned several times while writing about Bond these past few weeks, it's the only Bond film I've seen more than once. 

I was curious to see how closely the list I made organically (with only one minor adjustment) matched the actual star ratings I've given these films on Letterboxd, and it's pretty close. Here you can see them in the reverse order with the star ratings listed afterward:

1. Octopussy - 4.5 stars
2. Goldfinger - 4 stars
3. Tomorrow Never Dies - 4 stars
4. Diamonds Are Forever - 4 stars
5. Live and Let Die - 4 stars
6. On Her Majesty's Secret Service - 3.5 stars
7. From Russia With Love - 4 stars
8. Goldeneye - 4 stars
9. Skyfall - 3.5 stars
10. No Time to Die - 3.5 stars
11. The Man With the Golden Gun - 3.5 stars
12. The Spy Who Loved Me - 3.5 stars
13. For Your Eyes Only - 3 stars
14. You Only Live Twice - 3 stars
15. Thunderball - 3 stars
16. Spectre - 3 stars
17. Dr. No - 3 stars
18. The Living Daylights - 3 stars
19. Casino Royale - 2.5 stars
20. A View to a Kill - 3 stars
21. Moonraker - 3 stars
22. Quantum of Solace - 2 stars
23. License to Kill - 2.5 stars
24. Die Another Day - 2.5 stars
25. The World is Not Enough - 1.5 stars

Pretty close to descending order in star ratings, with a few exceptions thrown in -- but never by more than a half-star out of sequence. Only five of these got less than three stars from me, meaning thumbs down rather than thumbs up, and even two of the last three were no worse than 2.5-star movies. 

So I guess I do like Bond pretty well overall, and have had a fun time immersing myself in the character recently.

Fun enough to consider doing my own elongated Bondathon, rewatching all the films in order?

Yes definitely, but not today, and not likely as soon as next year. However, I do note that at least as of right now, it breaks up pretty well as two annual monthly projects, maybe worth starting as soon as 2025 -- and not necessarily in place of a regular monthly viewing series. Maybe I'll need to run it in addition to that as I don't really want to sacrifice two years of good monthly viewing series projects for this, especially since I've already got two years' worth of ideas backed up.

I say "as of right now" because it's unclear how soon we'll get a 26th Bond movie. However, Barbara Broccoli has said that it could start filming in 2024, meaning a potential release as soon as 2025. Then again, they have to cast someone first.

And since I'm all caught up now, that's probably the next time you'll hear about Jimmy Bond on this blog -- when they've told us who's slipping into the tuxedo next. 

You know I'll have opinions. 

To re-MUBI or not to re-MUBI

I have been pretty disappointed with my 2023 subscription to MUBI.

Which is no shade on the person who gifted it to me last Christmas, should he be reading this.

I'd been considering subscribing to the service myself, as I was enamored with their unique model of making movies available for 30 days, with one new movie appearing on the service each day. Each day you could check in to be surprised by some long-lost gem, some elusive title you'd been meaning to watch for years, or just some weird thing you'd never heard of but looked like it was worth trying out. Having the choices pre-curated by MUBI takes out some of the randomness of choosing a single movie from a service that may make thousands of them available.

But during the year, MUBI abandoned its signature format.

I can't remember the reasons for this. I'm sure it presented challenges and I'm sure the cost associated with licensing films for 30 days of viewing was prohibitive, relative to the benefit of the format, when they'd be better off just having it for a year or however long. If they wanted to license 365 films -- and I'm not sure if they do have that many -- better to make them all available for the whole year.

In theory, that's no different of a service from having 30 at a time -- in fact, maybe it is better in some ways. But it means MUBI is not distinct from a dozen other streamers, at least at the fundamental level of its structure. It might offer more interesting titles ... or maybe it just offers a bunch of movies you've never heard of for good reason. 

Then early in the year I learned that they got exclusive distribution rights to the movie in this poster, Ira Sachs' Passages. I've seen most of Sachs' movies and his Love is Strange made my top ten of its year. So it gave me a little thrill that at some point during the year, I'd be able to watch this on MUBI.

Not so much. The distribution rights were for the U.S. I am in Australia. I cannot watch Passages on MUBI. In fact, now I'll probably have no way to watch it before my list closes at the end of January.

Then there were the emails I would get from MUBI telling me about the new availability of some title. Maybe they got my geography wrong -- it makes sense as I have some services set in the U.S. (like iTunes) and some set in Australia (all the others) -- but in these instances as well, almost without exception, I would go into MUBI to try to watch the movie in question, and get nothing. U.S. only, apparently.

If services are going to offer different titles in different countries, they should at least figure out what country you're in so you are not getting constantly teased about movies that you can't watch.

Then the offerings themselves.

Things started on a good note when I watched Cleo from 5 to 7. The Agnes Varda film was a regret for me when I watched Varda films a couple years ago for my Audient Auteurs series, because I couldn't locate it at that time. I hadn't specifically sought it out since, but having it handed to me here gave me a taste of the exclusivity MUBI promised. I was tickled pink by the MUBI possibilities.

But as I tried to delve into random movies I wouldn't hear about elsewhere, some of them were just too random, especially this one called The Red and the Black that I suffered through one night. 

Another MUBI highlight was watching The Balcony Movie, which I had meant to catch at a previous MIFF and really liked. But then there were also lows, as when I watched Trash Humpers, which is now my lowest ranked film on Flickchart. I can't blame MUBI for my poor choice in that respect, but it didn't help with my overall impression of the service, regardless of who was to blame.

Is it possible that these are the only four movies I've watched on MUBI this year?

It's possible. 

I went back through the movies I've watched this year and did discover at least two others: Where is the Friend's House, which I didn't love despite it being Abbas Kiarostami, and Actual People, a movie about as bland as its title. I thought I might have watched The Pez Outlaw on MUBI, but if so, it's no longer available. (Six is a better return on my friend's gift than four, and seven would be even better.)

I've tried to watch others. I've used MUBI as a possible last resort when there was a movie I couldn't find on any other service that I needed to watch during a particular period of time. None of the times I've checked has MUBI actually saved me.

Then the real tease is that MUBI has a page for almost any movie you can think of, even if it can't play the movie. So you get to the page and you get all hopeful, and then there is just no play button.

This past week, as I realized my renewal would be due in late January, I had another determined peruse through the various featured films, to be sure I wouldn't be struck by another sudden rush of optimism about MUBI's potential role in my viewing life. I was struck by more disappointment, namely:

1) There were so few featured titles that the same titles kept on popping up in different featured categories. I'm not sure how one movie can be a film noir, a superhero movie and a romantic comedy, but that's the sort of thing I was seeing. Not that any of the genre assignments were inaccurate, just that the categories themselves were written in such a way to allow the same movies to appear in multiple ones -- creating the impression of more titles than they actually had, an impression easily disproven by the most casual memory of the titles you had just seen featured in the other categories.

2) There was one particular category that focused on 1940s classics. This is the type of place I'd expect MUBI might help me out. There were exactly three movies listed here, all bonafide classics like Citizen Kane. I don't need MUBI to watch Citizen Kane.

3) There should be a three just for good list-making etiquette, but I'm disappointed enough by 1 and 2 that 3 is pretty much superfluous.

If MUBI can't offer me more elusive classics from the 1940s, if it can't offer me the movies it says in the emails it is going to offer me, and if it doesn't even have a unique structure as a streamer, what good is it to me?

And yet I am thinking of renewing.

The idea of MUBI is still powerful. The potential it has to be great is still exciting. It has a lovely layout that supports both this idea and this potential. Simply put, it looks like the sort of exclusive place I want to spent my streaming time, with the sorts of undiscovered gems I want to discover.

Do I have to give MUBI another year to try to realize this potential?

It's hard to say. 

I have almost two months until my subscription expires. It's enough time to give MUBI a red hot go, to use the Australian phrase.

The problem is, these two months are when I'm watching as many 2023 movies as I can before I close off my list. MUBI does not offer 2023 films, as a general rule.

And when it does, like Passages, I'm in the wrong country to even see them.