Keeping tabs on my opposite

As a movie guy, I'm naturally interested in what other people are watching on planes, especially on the long flights between the U.S. and Australia. With the people sitting around me, I always get to know what sorts of movies are calling out to them over the course of the flight. 

Sometimes, of course, it's not movies at all. The woman whose screen I could see in the crack between the seats to my right was only interested in the Sex in the City sequel series And Just Like That, as any time I looked over, there was something going on with Carrie, Charlotte, Miranda and the new characters in their lives. Given the unending sameness, I quickly lose interest in what such people are watching. 

The woman through the crack on the left, on the other hand, was doing me better than I do me, only with a a certain opposite quality. 

Not opposite because of the quality of what she was watching, but because of the vintage. But also because of the quality. 

Me, I always jam pack a fight with releases from the current year. That's especially the case in December, when my current year is starting to wrap up, and it's crunch time in terms of getting a lot of middling movies available on the plane -- where I won't care so much about their quality -- onto my list before I close things out for the year. 

That sometimes leaves me a bit jealous of the people who aren't doing that.

Before we even left the ground, this woman had started in on Galaxy Quest. I think I might have watched more of Galaxy Quest than the thing that was on my own screen, Tig Notaro's Am I OK?, which she co-directed with Stephanie Allynne. That's an exaggeration, of course, but Galaxy Quest is one of my favorite comedies of the last -- well, can't say quarter century now because it came out just more than 25 years ago. Though maybe I don't need to qualify that comment at all, as it is just one of my favorite comedies, full stop.

Am I OK? is not destined to become one of my favorite comedies of any time period. It isn't bad per se, but it is just so middling -- so perfectly representative of the sort of film I would/should watch on a plane -- that it was easy to very quickly stop watching every moment to glean its finer details. Being from Notaro, I would expect it to be about the main character's sexual identity, which it is. I would also expect it to be funnier, which it is not. 

After Galaxy Quest, she didn't make a perfect second decision, but then again, neither did I. While she spent her next segment of the flight on Tim Burton's Corpse Bride, which got only 2.5 stars from me as a retroactive rating on Letterboxd, I was slogging my way through Annie Baker's Janet Planet, which ultimately got only 1.5 stars from me. In fact, this was the most tedious time I had with any of the five movies I watched on the flight, even when the mere task of watching another movie was starting to feel burdensome. Fortunately, I also chose this time to address a bunch of Christmas cards I was planning to mail after we landed, which made the experience far more tolerable. 

Before I finished Janet Planet, she got herself back on track in a major way with her third movie, which really made me jealous: Crazy Rich Asians. I've already seen CRA three times within the relatively short six years of its existence, and it would have been four, except I was geo-blocked from streaming it when we were in Singapore in October. That's right, it was on an Australian streaming service (Stan) which I am unable to watch when I'm not in Australia. It was funny enough to me at the time that I was going write a whole post about it, but never ended up doing so.

Crazy Rich Asians was the movie that primed me to want to visit Singapore in the first place, and to do some of the things we ultimately did on our trip, like go to the Marina Bay Sands hotel (the one with the rooftop pool on the 57th floor) and to the food hawkers place that the movie makes look like a culinary paradise, Newton Food Centre. (Never mind that at the actual Newton Food Centre, my stomach started doing somersaults and I had to use the facilities twice in only 90 minutes -- and not for #1.)

I'd wanted to watch the movie while on our trip both to point out places I'd already been and to remind myself of any new ones we hadn't done yet before we ran out of time, so watching to the left through the seat cracks gave me a chance to do a little bit of that. I was mostly curious to see how Newton Food Centre was depicted, since the real one ended up seeming more grubby to me than the one I remembered from the movie -- but indeed, they used the real one in the movie as well, and I had just romanticized it because that movie is an example of the expertise of romanticizing a city on film. I watched that scene through entirely, and only got little snippets of the rest of the film.

Meanwhile, on my own screen, I was watching what ended up being the first of three consecutive musician biopics, though I didn't realize the middle one qualified as such until I'd started watching it. That first was the Amy Winehouse biopic Back to Black. Ho hum. The musician biopic is the very definition of the sort of middling mainstream fare that a guy ranking all the movies he sees in a given year should watch, but little more than that. 

She was still a bit ahead of me -- I think I paused to sleep a little bit at some point, though not very long -- and she started her fourth before I started my fourth as well. Perhaps primed by seeing Michelle Yeoh in CRA, she then transitioned into Everything Everywhere All at Once, which I loved (it was my #4 of 2022) but which I haven't yet rewatched. Aside from one little detour into mediocre Tim Burton fare, this woman was making all the right moves, and my eye was especially caught by this movie with its constant quirkiness and visual invention. (Though I was also reminded how long it is, which is perhaps one of the reasons I have not yet revisited it.)

Me? At least I was now watching my best movie of the trip so far, Kneecap, which is the story of three Irish-language rappers that feels a little bit like a spiritual successor to Trainspotting. (Yes, I know that Ireland and Scotland are not the same, though I sometimes forget which accent is from which country.) The really interesting thing about Kneecap is that the real-life rappers play themselves, which was an especially strange revelation for me from the credits, since I thought I recognized two of the three of them from other movies and spent a considerable amount of time wracking my brain to remember which ones. They are supported by people obviously not playing themselves, such as Michael Fassbender.

Her fifth -- and as it turns out, final -- movie was another animated misstep. Hey, nobody's perfect. Letterboxd tells me I gave Vivo (2021) three stars, but as I was catching little bits of it, it felt more to me like the 2.5-star equivalent of Corpse Bride, with the latter certainly having more claim to endurance in the culture. 

After Vivo, she went to sleep -- for the remainder of the flight, it would appear. Which was another source of major jealousy for me. 

Watching five movies and still getting to sleep for a good four hours? She did me far better than I can ever do me. 

I also watched five movies -- more on the fifth in a moment -- but it was with less than an hour of sleep. Which, really, is not so surprising, given that our plane lifted off at 11:30 a.m., meaning I wouldn't naturally feel inclined to sleep until just when we were landing in LA. But you need more sleep than that on an international flight, if at all possible. 

The time I spent not watching movies was this sort of jagged, in-between period where I distracted myself with things like two episodes of Saturday Night Live, which I never get to watch now that I live in Australia but which my wife and I watched religiously for about the first five years of our relationship. These were consolidated 55-minute episodes that did not include the musical numbers, but did include a fair amount of mediocrity as well as a widespread failure to stifle laughter by both the guests and the regular players. 

My fifth movie felt like a grim endeavor indeed, but when else would I make the time to watch Bob Marley: One Love?

Don't get me wrong, I love Marley's music, but even if I were to watch a biopic of my favorite musician of all time (Trent Reznor) I would probably find it at least something of a chore. Then again, I hope Trent Reznor would not allow a biopic of himself to be made without some interesting artistic choices. Then again again, biopic subjects rarely get to decide how their own lives are portrayed on film, since it's more likely for them to be dead (Marley and Winehouse) than alive (Kneecap and Robbie Williams, in the brand new biopic that I really liked, Better Man). 

I gave One Love a milquetoast three stars, same as Back to Black, which seems to be reserved for movies where there is nothing really wrong, except that the musician biopic form itself tends to be very limiting. We'll see if I get a chance to see, or ultimately prioritize, the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown before 2024 is out.

What I found myself wondering about this other woman was if she has good taste (60% good taste anyway) or whether she just stumbled into some very good movies. Because then the question comes up, if she had not seen these movies already, what does that say about her actual taste? Or if she was revisiting them, what does it say about her wanting to revisit Corpse Bride and Vivo? 

Maybe it was a hybrid approach, where she had already seen the three greats and was revisiting them just for her pleasure, while she wanted to hear what all the hype was about (there was no hype) for the other two animated movies.

But then again, if she was watching half new movies and half old ones -- new to her, old to the rest of the world -- then she isn't properly my opposite, now is she? 

Finally answering the question about collateral nudity

Ever since we first started getting customized movie experiences on planes -- ones you could watch at your own seats, rather than on the dozen communal screens spread throughout the cabin -- I've always wondered what from those movies we'd have to trade off for the luxury.

Like, is it worth watching a movie on the plane if you aren't going to get all the nudity and blood and guts that it would have if you saw it in the theater, or in your own living room?

After all, the children still need to be protected. And though they can't hear all the naughty things the characters might be saying, a random shot of boobs tends to be very easily noticed. It grabs your attention even if you were wholly fixated on something else. In fact, you might not even need to catch it out of the corner of your eye. Among horny enough early teenagers, there might even be a sixth sense that boobs were available to be seen in the near vicinity. (Sadly, another change with the times is that available boobs are probably not even a novelty for early teenagers, who can watch whatever they want, whenever they want, on their phones.)

Most of the movies I've watched over the years that I've been flying to and from Australia, I've assumed would be available in pretty much their original form. But if I was ever unsure, I'd usually opt for something more family friendly instead, if I had any sense that I'd be getting only some fraction of what that movie had to offer.

Finally, after more than 17 years of trips to and from Australia, including what (by my count) is now 17 individual legs, I've seen somebody do something about this.

Before almost all of the six movies across two flights I watched during my 40-hour Wednesday -- which I may discuss separately in a post tomorrow -- the following message appeared:

If you can't read the fine print, it says "Please be mindful of those around you. If you feel that you or others may find this content offensive, please choose another title."

It may be that United has been running this warning for some time, but we usually fly Qantas, and probably would have had on this trip had my wife not gotten annoyed with them about the way they did or did not refund us on some previous trip.

There are a number of noteworthy things about a message like this:

1) It is asking you to be conscientious of others, which is a rare thing these days.

2) It is not designed specifically to protect children, but perhaps also any nuns or very elderly people who might be sitting next to you. 

3) It is also designed to protect you, in case you are a child, a nun or an elderly person, and don't have any idea what you're getting yourself into.

4) It confirms that you are, in fact, getting the pure and unadulterated version of the movie. I mean, if it's going to be The Human Centipede, they just don't make it available in the first place.

The profanity warning is interesting as that part can only ever be aimed at the viewer themselves, since there is no way to make the sound heard by anyone but someone wearing a pair of headphones. If the headphones came out -- which happened a lot of times for me on this flight as I wriggled and shifted -- then the movie continues without any sound. 

Then again, you probably also need to protect the lip readers in the child, nun and elderly communities. 

I thought Tarot was Ouija

On the occasions I've had to think of Spenser Cohen and Anna Halberg's Tarot -- which have not been a lot, but there have been a few -- I've always thought I would probably leave it unseen for my 2024 rankings.

"I don't really need to see a movie about a stupid ouija board," I'd tell myself.

Of course, when I got to actually watching the movie last night, as a way to usher in my departure for America with something undemanding after two straight nights of foreign films, I had a slightly different perspective on it:

"Ohhhhhh, Tarot is about tarot cards, not a ouija board."

It was just a case of conflating two probably similar things, not an actual failure to understand what the movie was about, though I couldn't really tell you if Tarot is similar to the 2014 film Ouija (ten years old? really?) because I haven't seen the latter. 

I can tell you that Tarot was slightly better than I imagined it would be, which still doesn't make it more than a two out of five stars. I considered 2.5 for a hot minute, but then thought better of it.

Now if it had also fit in a ouija board, then, maybe.

I didn't miss Red One after all

One of the greatest Christmas movie calamities I can remember was the release of a 2004 film called Surviving Christmas, starring Ben Affleck, James Gandolfini and Christina Applegate. I've written about it on this blog before and recounted its salient talking points before, but that was back in 2010, and repeating a story every 15 years is, I think, quite alright.

Famously, the movie was released so early in the "Christmas season" (October 22nd) and performed so poorly at the box office ($15 million worldwide gross) that they released it on video in time for that very Christmas, to recoup any little bit of their $45 million investment. And that was in an era when the window between theatrical release and home viewing release was as wide as it has ever been. Releasing a movie on video a mere two months after the theater -- when theaters would, ideally, still be playing it -- was unheard of.

But times have changed, and in retrospect, there seems to be a certain brilliance to the move, even if it was born out of desperation. The drawback Christmas movies have always had is that they may do big business in the theater, but the home video market is likely to have significantly depleted profitability due to the fact that there is no point to release it there a mere three to four months after it was in cinemas. Because no one wants to watch a Christmas movie in February, you wait until the following year, at which point it's old hat -- or at least, no different than any other old movie a person chooses to rent or buy.

I have to think Surviving Christmas did make a little extra money on video just by virtue of being a "new" movie -- people always love the new -- and by being easily available at home when they still wanted to watch Christmas movie.

Nowadays, it was likely always the plan to release Red One on Amazon Prime in time for this Christmas, which they did last week -- even though they released it only a month before that in cinemas. That's in spite of how well it did in theaters, which was reasonably well: $175 million globally. That's nothing compared to a budget of -- am I reading this right? -- $250 million, so yes, it's not a hit, though it's more of a hit (percentage-wise) than Surviving Christmas was. Obviously not what they were hoping for, but it's not going to tank the studio or anything. 

I had resigned myself to missing Red One. Not with a huge amount of regret, but I do like to watch a new Christmas movie or two each year, and not just limit myself to the pap and dreck that's released on streaming. (That's an oversimplification, as some of the Christmas movies I've enjoyed most in the past ten years -- Klaus, Spirited and Jingle Jangle -- all went straight to streaming.) It was easy to see that Red One would lose out in a crowded field of awards contenders when vying for my limited viewing time.

But then the other weekend, I took my younger son to the theater to see Moana 2 as part of a birthday party for one of his friends. He was looking at one of the trailers playing in the lobby for Red One, with a certain knowledge of its existence and essential details that could have only come from interest (or watching something about it on YouTube). That was when I experienced a small amount of regret, as it could have been a way for us to usher in a Christmas season that has been slow to get started, in part because we are going overseas tomorrow, and therefore have not gotten our own tree or done much in the way of decorating. 

Then all the sudden, there it was, available for streaming. 

And I felt just like the Surviving Christmas viewers of 2004 must have felt, only with significantly more optimism. 

I had hoped to watch it with my ten-year-old on Saturday, but we are also building a deck -- don't ask -- and my wife was concerned about a preplanned engagement to watch the movie cutting short our deck time. However, it was clear we were ahead of our pace, so she happily approved the potential viewing. Only when I put it to my son, offering him either Saturday or Monday as possible dates, he opted for the Monday -- a small, but ultimately unimportant, setback.

I did watch it with him on Monday, on the hottest day of the year so far, when we were cocooned inside our air conditioned living room, feeling almost as cold as the polar climates depicted in the movie. 

I think he might have slightly preferred not to watch it, since kids have short attention spans these days, and the video games he would have otherwise been playing are more natural fits for that. The evidence of this was that at one point during the movie, he had to get up and "twirl around" behind our couch for a few minutes. Yes, he's prone to being antsy, but it doesn't mean he's not enjoying or doesn't have the patience for the activity in question. He might even do it during the brevity of a Simpsons episode.

But he hasn't yet turned 11 -- that's just a few weeks off -- so I still have him as a captive audience for another year or two, as a kid who would rather make his dad happy if all it takes is spending a little bit of his unlimited fungible free time. This time next year, it might already be that much harder to watch Red One.

And in the end, the movie was not a huge hit with him. He called it "alright," then tried to hastily upgrade his assessment when he saw my surprise at his middling level of approbation. (It turns out, his reaction to the movie was more in line with the general outlook than my own.) Probably two hours and three minutes is too long for this movie, but not when you consider how absolutely bursting with ideas it is -- both good and not so good.

Me? I had cause for my optimism. I ended up giving it a 7/10 in my just-posted review on ReelGood, and I'd be lying if I said there weren't moments when I flirted with an 8. Clearer heads prevailed, and by the time I actually wrote the review, I realized the things I had to say were more in line with a 7. 

But a 7 can be a pretty positive review, and it's way better than the half-star (out of five) I would have given Surviving Christmas if I'd been in charge of the star rating on the old site where I reviewed it. (In a now strange-seeming procedural move, some editor at the site gave a film a star rating based on available consensus, and it didn't matter if what you wrote was relatively out of sync with it.) (I just went to my old review site, AllMovie, to check to see what the star rating was, and this is how I discovered the fairly momentous news that the writing we all did back then appears to have been largely scrubbed from the site, replaced by a Wikipedia plot synopsis and a place for people to add their own reviews. This would be an even bigger deal if I hadn't printed out all my reviews at the time, though I must admit that this is a thought-provoking turn of events for me as a critic that may require its own separate post at some point. For what it's worth, the current star rating for Surviving Christmas is a quite-laughable three stars out of five.)

In any case, since this is a time of year for Christmas movie recommendations, I can give you one for Red One. It doesn't have any chance of entering the canon of classic Christmas movies, but it's a lot better than the average pap and dreck released directly to streaming -- and not only because it has that desirable imprimatur of having gotten released on the big screen just a month ago. 

Always double check your Amazon release years

I was supposed to watch the Survivor finale last night, but I couldn't get that part of the TV to work. By the time I'd rebooted the Fetch box a couple times, it was already about 10:20, so I had to pivot to something quickly. 

My preference would have been to consult my list of 2024 movies I still have to watch in the next month-plus, but that often involves doing an iTunes rental (something I initiate from my computer) and I could not be bothered at this point to go into the other room and do it. So instead I hopped on Amazon Prime, noting that there would likely be a new movie I'd never heard of that immediately struck me as something rank-worthy to watch.

True enough, there was: Joachim Back's Corner Office, an office satire staring John Hamm. It had the 2024 release year and everything to prove it.

Thirty minutes in, I was enjoying this movie so much that I went to check Wikipedia on my phone. I figured, if the release were just in the last week or so, I could actually write up a review -- possibly as soon as tomorrow morning. (Otherwise, this would be a full work week bereft of reviews. I did actually write a review for Better Man, but that's not coming out until December 26th, so I won't post it yet.)

So imagine my disappointment when the first thing I saw on Wikipedia was that Corner Office was listed as a 2022 movie. Not even 2023, but 2022. 

That was when it first appeared at Tribeca, anyway. I quickly checked just to be sure it hadn't had a circuitous route to rear its head for the next time on Amazon Prime, but no, it was released in the U.S. August of last year. 

Just to confirm a second time, I checked my friend Don's 2023 movie list, and there Corner Office was, ranked at #242. (That may sound like a particularly bad rating, but Don ranked 436 movies last year. He didn't like it as much as I did, in any case.)

Darn.

It's always a good experience when you see a movie you like. But in the month of December, I've gone from ahead of my previous pace to -- well, not quite behind it, but struggling to keep up with my ever-growing watchlist, and conscious of the days ticking away. Yesterday was the 12th day of December and yet I have seen only four films in December that qualify for 2024. (And don't forget, I still have to watch that Survivor finale.)

Amazon has gotten me this way before -- or, I should say, nearly gotten me until I avoided calamity at the last moment.

There's a certain subjectivity to their release years. They're not so deranged that they list the release year as the year it first streamed on Amazon Prime, though in the case of Corner Office, those would be one in the same. Really what I think it is is that the release years are at least, to some degree, customized by country, and I believe it's an Australian version of Amazon Prime I'm getting. (Even though rentals I purchase through Prime are charged to me through iTunes, somehow, because that's where my Apple TV is, and I have a U.S. Apple TV. At least I believe that's how it works.) It seems likely that the actual Australian debut of Corner Office was in 2024, and that's the explanation for the year. That doesn't help me in terms of my year-end rankings, though, since I go by U.S. release year.

It does resolve one problem for me, though -- a problem that has been accentuated by Don's middling ranking of the movie. As I was watching, I was having a hard time deciding just how good the movie was, but it was somewhere between really good and great. Because at this time of the year, I'm always willing to give a new movie a chance to blow up my current top ten, I was trying to decide if Corner Office was that good. Now, I don't have to worry about that. 

It is, however, the third movie I've watched this year in which Hamm's history playing Don Draper was somehow invoked. You may recall from this post that back in May, I saw two movies in one weekend in which both Hamm and John Slattery appeared, one not invoking Mad Men in any explicit way other than the pairing, the other featuring a direct riff on their characters from that show. Corner Office was a bit more like the latter, as the premise is that Hamm's character, a socially awkward office drone, discovers an unused room in his dystopian high rise that resembles the best corner office that series might have ever created, with perfectly appointed mid-century furniture and other luxurious details, which helps his character become more focused and get ahead at work. 

It certainly shouldn't surprise us to see someone like Hamm excelling in that environment, given the hours he toiled in such an environment as Don Draper. 

Putting the "Gah!!" and "LA!" in the gala premiere of Better Man

You may recall from earlier posts that I've had to cancel two screenings in the space of about eight days, able to keep this Sunday's Sonic the Hedgehog 3 screening with my son and one other. The other I kept was Michael Gracey's Better Man, a biopic of Robbie Williams with a unique gimmick, even though I couldn't have told you a single song Williams sings before coming into this movie. (As it turns out I knew two, I just didn't know they were him.)

There was a time before the show when I wished I'd kept one of the other ones, but let's not get ahead of ourselves here.

Forthwith, the "Gah!!"s and "LA!"s of this gala premiere:

Gah!! I arrived at Village Cinemas at Crown Casino, not one of the typical premiere spots, to find that there were already 150 people in line ahead of me. I foolishly thought I could show my printed out ticket (yes, I still print these out) to the two gatekeepers and I'd ascend the escalator, but oh no. We had to get lanyards and then we'd be told what time our showing would be. That's right, there were multiple showings, which I might have guessed from the fancy red carpet being walked by people who are not quite famous, but probably recognized by some people. (Williams wasn't here, in any case.) That meant standing in a slow-moving line for nearly a half-hour. There was not really any panic, especially as 100 more people joined the queue behind me -- we were all getting in. But I was hot from a long walk from work to get here just on time, and it now looked like I'd be quite a few minutes from a refreshing beverage lest I sacrifice my place in line. 

LA! Once I was past the gatekeepers, I saw what all the fuss was really about. There was a second red carpet on the cinema's second floor, but that wasn't the half of it. (With my backpack slung over one shoulder and five days of stubble, I was hardly photogenic.) They'd installed a giant lighted star in the second floor lobby, and the bar was giving out Negronis. Not just any Negronis, but smoking Negronis. That's right, a guy would unleash this bubble above the drink, and when it burst, it dropped a brief cloud of smoke into the icy beverage, which disappated after about five seconds. If you drank it quickly enough you could even inhale some of the smoky chemical flavor. I drank the second one quickly enough, but then decided that was probably enough. 

Gah!! Standing in line as long as I did ruled out the possibility of a second movie after Better Man. I had scoped out a later screening of Heretic, but I quickly realized this was not in the cards. When I finally reached the lanyard station, they told me the movie was going to start at 6:45. It was ten past 7 when things finally got underway. 

LA! Although the movie was playing on at least three screens, I appear to have picked the lucky one, despite having had all those other people ahead of me. There were about ten cast members and producers at the front of the auditorium, introduced by the head of VicScreen, the most notable of which was Michael Gracey himself, a Melburnian. A screening always has a little extra juice if the director is there. I suppose, if our films were really staggered, this group could have shuffled into each screening before it started, but the people certainly didn't look as though they'd just gone through two other incarnations of this dog and pony show. 

And to demonstrate how the experience was overall a good and memorable one, the rest are also "LA!"s. 

LA! We got a water and a popcorn on each seat. The four people sitting next to me changed their seats when they found friends they wanted to sit with, but they'd already left an empty Negroni glass behind them, and one of them took her water with her. The picked over quality of the other seats meant that a few other candidates for these seats ultimately rejected them, leaving me with two extra popcorns within my reach without even having to get out of my seat. I thought I would only eat one -- I had finished almost the entire first one before Michael Gracey even stopped talking -- but I ended up eating both. Plus two little individually wrapped Lindt chocolates that had also been available at the entrance. (I didn't partake of the champagne.) 

LA! It wouldn't be a musical if there weren't one "LA!" saved for the singing itself. I came away feeling very favorably toward the Williams catalogue I was exposed to, especially the two songs I knew, which had incredible staging: "Rock DJ" and "Angels." 

LA! The central gimmick -- that Williams is embodied as a talking and singing monkey -- really works! In fact, even calling it a gimmick is unnecessarily belittling. It was just a choice, a choice I had not seen before, and a choice that never ceased to be interesting. The motion capture performance by Williams is really good too, with lots of subtle expressions capable of being captured in that simian face. (I actually see that he only did a small amount of the mocap stuff, and the actual person worth crediting here -- who was also present -- is an actor named Jonno Davies.)

LA! I realized afterward that it doesn't feel like Christmas season without seeing a screening for one of the films that doesn't come out until Boxing Day. Last year it was Ferrari -- which I think actually came out the first week of January -- and although I did like that film, it doesn't have the same feeling as a joyous, jubilant musical. 

 

Audient Outliers: Primer

This is the final in my 2024 bi-monthly series Audient Outliers, in which I've rewatched a film I didn't like by a director whose work I otherwise love.

In a series that has already involved a lot of cheating on the rules -- out of only six films, mind you -- I'm finishing with perhaps the biggest cheat yet. 

Nevertheless, the fact remains that Shane Carruth's Primer (2004) was one of the films I had in mind when I first considered this series, only I couldn't find it streaming anywhere all year, until it finally popped up on Kanopy a couple months ago.

Why such a cheat for Primer?

Well, Shane Carruth has one film I like a lot, one film I don't particularly care for ... and no more films.

How can a single film you don't like possibly be an outlier from the majority of films you do like, when there is only one other film?

Answer: It cannot.

However, here's an interesting counterargument: When I think up these series, the underlying goal is to give myself a reason to watch particular films, whether that's for the first time or a revisit. And ever since loving Carruth's Upstream Colour, I have wondered whether I needed to give Primer another chance. 

And if I didn't understand it a second time, at least this time I'd have a Wikipedia plot synopsis there to help me -- something that probably was not yet part of my regular routine with movies I didn't quite grok back when I saw this the first time in 2006. 

And at least it's incredibly short, lasting only 77 minutes, which is great for this time of year. In fact, I watched this as the third consecutive night of knocking out my "obligations" -- two films I had to watch for series on this blog, and one for a series external to this blog -- before setting my sights on 2024 films from now until the end of January.

Let's start with the history.

My then girlfriend, now wife and I watched Primer together in September of 2006, back in the days when she used to watch a couple movies a week with me. Now it's more like a couple movies a year. That's okay and irrelevant to this.

But it's movies like Primer that might have steadily eroded her support of movies in general, short though it was. We were both befuddled by this movie, me angrily so. Although I did give it 2 stars -- a bad rating, to be sure, but not the kind of rating I give a movie I hated -- it has still become a go-to rant movie for me, one that easily comes to mind as an example of a film that received a lot of hype but that I thought was pretty unsuccessful.

The reason Primer was/is so unsuccessful is something I can expound on better now that I've freshly watched it again. It's a time travel movie whose details are described in such shorthand that it's like you are watching two people who know their own technology inside and out and so do not need to give even a whiff of expository dialogue about it. They discuss it with such a melding of their two minds that they are almost completing each other's sentences, and therefore, no explaining is required. It's as though you were a fly on the wall for two people discussing something like, I don't know, cold fusion, or a microchip. They know what they're talking about, but you don't. And while that is an incredible case of "realism," it is not an incredible case of filmmaking, since (most) films require the audience to follow what's going on. I'd say especially films about time travel.

It is easy to have a surface-level appreciation of what Carruth is doing here as an exercise in asking a lot from an audience in pursuit of that so-called "realism." Almost every time travel movie you've ever seen has laboriously laid out everything you need to know about it, preferring to err on the side of dialogue that is purely for the audience, even if it would be entirely superfluous for the experts involved in the conversation. This sort of spoon-feeding is an essential component of most cinema. We need to understand the world these characters are in, even if they already understand it. 

Primer makes absolutely zero concessions to audience understanding. On this viewing I'd say I had a marginally better idea of what was going on in the plot in this movie, up to a point, at which point I felt my mind giving up again. The part I understood better was how the characters discover that the other technology they are trying to develop in order to get venture capital funding -- which I wasn't totally sure about either -- had a strange offshoot that allowed them to accidentally build a time machine. What I still didn't understand was the part of the story where they start to use the time machine, how it works, how and where the second versions of their characters are supposed to be, and the actual plot that involves an angry ex-boyfriend (who we never see) bringing a shotgun to a party and threatening his ex. There's one point where Carruth's character says "I'm hungry, I haven't eaten since later this afternoon." While that's a great line of dialogue, it comes out of left field in terms of my own subjective experience of what's going on, because I'm already too confused to know if it makes sense in context. 

I believe that Carruth understands what's going on in his movie, and if we could understand it, it probably holds together great and might have the sort of "Whoa" Keanu Reeves mind-blowing that I discuss in this post, the last time I talked about Primer on this blog. The thing is, he lacks either the skill or the desire to explain it coherently, and that is the film's fatal flaw.

Now, I should tell you that Upstream Colour is far from a coherent film. However, I believe that film is designed to be incoherent, and it's all about colors and moods and character relationships. If we don't understand the science in that film -- something about pig genes and mind control -- it doesn't matter because that stuff is really secondary to the film's vibe, which I love.

Time travel films should be held to a much higher standard for coherence. As I said in the post linked above, we need to understand if something that's supposed to blow our minds is actually cool, or if instead it makes absolutely zero sense within the context of the world they're presenting.

It is impossible to determine this in Primer. It might be amazing. It might be total nonsense. And the fact that we don't know the difference is a problem.

I secretly think that the people who loved Primer did so because they were impressed by the balls of Carruth to make something so incomprehensible, yet with a clear sense of intention that is admirable. They probably thought that if they didn't get it, that was on them. And therefore, they awarded the effort more than the result. Apparently, I cannot do the same thing.

I said I would use the Wikipedia plot synopsis to try to understand Primer a little bit better this time. And so now, already at this point of the writing, I will read that synopsis and tell you if it changes my opinion at all on what Carruth is doing here. 

Okay I'm back. That was a good plot synopsis. Whoever wrote it is either very smart, or watched the film about 20 times. Maybe I should have read the synopsis before I watched it, considering that I had already seen it before so I would not, technically, be spoiling anything. 

As I've said a couple times, I think this script is probably watertight, which is why some cinephiles really ate up this movie. They either watched it in slow motion or with the patience to sort it out. Two times now I have not done that, and there may not be another. 

In that same post above, I said I'd like to give Primer another shot after loving Upstream Colour. I have now done that, and I'm not mad I did it. Sometimes it's good to know that the version of you 18 years ago was not crazy. 

I do find myself bemoaning the fact that Carruth has not made/has not gotten to make another movie after Upstream Colour. One thing I'll say for sure is that he has a singular vision, and it's a shame when the cinematic landscape is deprived of that, largely for economic reasons. Though at least we do see his spirit live on in people like his contemporary Darren Aronofsky, and in the works of Something in the Dirt directors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead.

And twice in two days I am wrapping one of my 2024 series, the last one. I'll be back with another bi-monthly series in 2025, probably returning to finishing off the final six films of a renowned director, if I can find one who fits perfectly for that project. 

Blaxploitaudient: Shaft in Africa

This is the final installment of my 2024 monthly series Blaxploitaudient, in which I have been watching blaxploitation films that I had not previously seen.

After watching Shaft to start this series back in January, I got the idea it might be nice to bookend the series with Shaft movies, meaning I could finish in December with the second sequel Richard Roundtree made to the original film, though there was also a short-lived TV series (seven episodes). 

Then for a while I thought it would be better if I did not revisit too much similar material or too many actors who popped up in too many of the same movies. 

But by the time I had watched my third movie in the series starring Pam Grier, I decided that there was not really any reason to avoid doubling up, and Shaft in Africa was back on for the month of Christmas, to tie a bow on the series, as it were. 

(Quick note: I have only just now realized that in watching Shaft in Africa, I skipped over the first sequel, Shaft's Big Score. I don't know how I missed that that movie was a thing, but it's too late now to go back and do anything about it.) 

Having watched the film, I find it hard to believe it was the last movie starring John Shaft until the character was rebooted in 2000 in the person of Samuel L. Jackson. This is a pretty successful third entry, and they were clearly setting him up to be a James Bond-like figure who could continue to appear in movies as long as the audience was willing to continue forking over their hard-earned dollars. (Which they weren't; this movie flopped.) 

How do I know this was the intention? Well, early on in the film, there's a scene where Roundtree's Shaft is meeting with some kind of gadget guy, and he actually says he's no James Bond. Bond himself had only been around a little more than ten years at that point, but they were a busy ten years, featuring three different actors stepping into the role, including the debut of Roger Moore that very year (1973).

Before we go on, can I pause a minute to talk about what kind of year 1973, the year of my birth, was for blaxploitation? I've mentioned it before in this series, but now that we've reached the end, I can give you an actual percentage of the films I watched for Blaxploitaudient that were released in 1973. And that percentage is 42. That's right, it was five out of the 12. In the order that I watched them: Cleopatra Jones, Black Mama White Mama, Ganja & Hess, Coffy and Shaft in Africa. Because I didn't watch Cleopatra Jones until July, that means that I watched zero 1973 movies in the first half of the series and then five of the last six. Sometimes it just works out that way.

So back to this film's ultimate failure, which led to the launch of the TV show, which was also a failure. Was James Bond the wrong way to go? How James Bond is this, really?

Here are the things John Shaft does in this movie that make him like James Bond, even beyond the gadget scene where Bond is name-checked:

- Travel to multiple continents, not just Africa (the film finishes in Paris);

- Bed multiple women, one of whom is killed (not by Shaft) shortly after their bedding;

- Make various Bond-like quips both to women and villains;

- Evade torture initiated by very Bond-like villains;

- Confuse me on what's actually going on in the plot.

Yes, on that last front, I didn't fully understand what was happening at any given point in Shaft in Africa, though this is typical for me in a spy movie, and I usually just go with the flow. Which worked out fine here. Instead I focused on the glorious use of Africa in this film -- all those scenes were actually shot in Ethiopia -- and details like Shaft bedding a woman in a raised thatch hut, and doing battle with adversaries with wooden sticks. Shaft does get his gun back, but in a number of scenes he doesn't have one, and I thought that was a good way of switching things up and forcing him to rely on his ingenuity.

The plot itself? Shaft is trying to break up some sort of illegal slave trade operation run by a very Euro baddie. Beyond that it may not be important.

In conclusion, this was an enjoyable way to end the series, and I found that Richard Roundtree's charisma -- already high in the previous movie I saw -- just gets better and better as he goes, and he's fully in sync with the intended tone of the film. I'm sorry it was not a hit, as it would seem likely that the target audience would have enjoyed an African excursion. Maybe they too were confused by the plot.

Shaft in Africa ends things with a rating of 3.5 stars, which is very typical of the films I watched this year. Three received higher than that (each of which got 4 stars) and only one received lower than 3 (which was 2.5). So I think my takeaway is that while these films were and are historically important, none of them were what I would consider a brilliant film -- but also none of them were disasters. Ganja & Hess, Coffy and Sweet Sweetback's Badasssss Song all showed flashes of brilliance, but were overall very good, not great. Those are the ones I might revisit in the future, at which point, maybe I will decide they are great. And then films like Car Wash and the Shaft movies were just a lot of fun.

Okay, that's a wrap on Blaxploitaudient. Sometime after the start of the new year, I will tell you about the monthly series I have in store for 2025.

Not enough room for this Room

I've gotten a bit greedy accepting invites to advanced screenings the past few weeks. Greedy and unrealistic. 

As I've told you, we are leaving for America on December 18th, and the time before that will involve my wife stressing out a lot and thinking we don't have enough time to get everything done. Trying to add advanced screenings to that mix is just a fool's errand.

It started with this past Thursday, when I RSVP'd for an advanced screening of Conclave, and even put it in our calendar to claim my right to it. However, the attempt to do the rare right thing in terms of noting my events was of little use, because it was soon revealed that this was the night of my younger son's school holiday concert, a big outdoor affair (remember, it's summer here) complete with food trucks and a lot of heat. Fortunately, I think I got some points for telling my wife I already knew I couldn't go, and the reason was the concert, rather than her having to remind me of these things.

Then this upcoming week I have two more that I am going to: Better Man on Wednesday, and Sonic the Hedgehog 3 on Sunday. Only the first of those two "counts against me," since the other one is a family activity in which at least my younger son and I will attend, and the others are welcome if they want. 

So then the ambitious one, The Room Next Door on Friday, also figures to lose out, as I have not even mentioned it to my wife yet. (Plus it would mean I'd have to miss my son's soccer game, and I feel like I need a good reason for that -- especially since I missed this past Friday while having the Christmas party I told you about yesterday.)

Which means I probably won't figure out how to get in Pedro Almodovar's latest before my 2024 rankings close. I do like his movies, but not enough to prioritize them -- I've seen only about half of his filmography.

But I might not have written this post just to lightly "bemoan" this fact, except that I am getting lost with all 2024 movies with "room" in their title.

In addition this Julianne Moore-Tilda Swinton starrer, there's also:

- Red Rooms, a horror directed by French director Pascale Plante, which has been recommended to me by a friend who loves horror movies, and

- The Front Room, another horror, from directors Max & Sam Eggers.

I could have sworn there was another but I can't find it now.

Similar titles seem to seek each other out. Speaking of Better Man, for a while there I got confused between this and A Different Man. "Different" does not necessarily mean "better." By the end of this week I'll at least know which of these is better, but Better Man has an uphill battle given my feelings on A Different Man. 

Which franchises do we actually need?

I was out with two of the critics who write for my site last, who each write separately as well as jointly with each other, as what has historically been called "The ReelGood Christmas Party." This is actually a thing that has only happened about four of the 11 years I have been associated with the site, five at the very most, and at some point I think it happened another time of the year entirely, but was still called that. We used to record a podcast and then we would go out for many libations, but my new house is by a main road and not advantageous from a sound perspective, plus I'd have to remind myself how to work the recording technology. 

To give you some idea of the scarcity of these parties, this was our first since 2020. Yes, we did have one during the pandemic, when that might have been hard, though that summer (it's summer in Australia) we were essentially COVID-free for a blissful couple of months. And then we have not had one since, when it would have been easier. In fact, we almost cancelled this one when one of the two guys couldn't make the original date, which was next Friday. Instead of delaying it until an unspecified time early in 2025 (which would likely mean it would never happen), we pushed it forward a week and had it last night. I had the guys over for drinks and BBQ in my back yard (even though it was lightly raining) and then we went out for drinks afterward. 

I'm telling you all this because of course we talked about movies almost non-stop. In fact, it was one of those conversations where when you get to the end of it, you think of all things you might have discussed that just never came up. Always better that way than running out of things to say halfway through the evening.

And as inevitably happens, we talked about franchise fatigue, about how many intellectual properties had completely run their course, but Hollywood was too risk averse to abandon them in favor of new ideas. And believe me, I get that. New ideas often fail spectacularly, and Hollywood is not a business that can afford to fail with any regularity.

And then this question occurred to me:

"Well, we have to have some franchises. Which are the ones we actually need?"

No one had a satisfying answer to this question.

And if you are reading this piece in the hopes that I have come up with the answers in the 14 hours since this conversation occurred, many of which have been spent sleeping and severely hungover, I'm sorry to disappoint you.

One of the guys ventured that some of the horror franchises had continued to sustain interest, a theory I did not openly disagree with, though I do sort of disagree with it. But I countered that horror franchises were always going to be a different story because although they appealed to a passionate subsection of the moviegoing populace that's eager and willing to spend their money, they were never going to rake in $300 or $400 million at the box office. For that you need something that can appeal to everyone in the family.

And no one could think of an example.

We didn't linger on the topic very long. In movie conversations, there's always another fruitful tangent to be followed. 

But I've lingered on it in my mind, a bit, at least enough to write this post. I still don't really have answers, but I have a few ideas. 

What you're really looking for, here, is an intellectual property that's new enough to not have exhausted us through a half-dozen or more cinematic incarnations, but reliable enough to be an easy green light for a studio. Dune was one idea I had. We're not sick of Dune yet, and I think this version of the franchise with these characters could sustain at least two more features before we reach that point. But Dune is also a bit of an anomaly, a fundamentally sort of inaccessible text that was matched up with a director who could really enthrall us. Dune is not your everyday reliable IP.

Using recency bias, I suggested Wicked. But immediately kind of ate my own words. There will only be one more Wicked, though if it's as big of a hit as this one, I could see spinoffs like Scarecrow: From the World of Wicked. Still, in trying to produce answers to this question, we're not talking about something that is fresh and new (even if its origins go back some 30 years to the publication of the novel), we're talking about something we already knew was viable a month ago. Then again, I guess Wizard of Oz is really the franchise here, so that's been going on a lot longer. 

I have no idea if they're making a Barbie sequel -- I'd be surprised if someone wouldn't want to do it, even if that person is not Greta Gerwig. But a single sequel is almost guaranteed to be the most more we could take of the concept without really turning on it, and it's far more likely to be a creative failure than a success.

If you try to look for guidance from the biggest franchise in movie history -- Marvel, DC, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, James Bond, Jurassic Park, etc. -- it's really hard to find one that has been relatively judicious in its engagement with the cinematic landscape, enough not to wear us out by the year 2024. It doesn't mean we, especially I as a critic and a completist, won't see these movies. It just means we won't be enthusiastic about the prospect, and will grouse about them at film website Christmas parties when given the chance.

There's one franchise, though, that I specifically excluded from the list in the previous paragraph. Because we were also talking about this as a continuation of a discussion in a message thread earlier in the week, I proposed that I would really look forward to another Star Wars movie. It's been five years now, and as I sit here, I don't actually know if any of the proposed plans for future trilogies is actually going forward at this point. I know the Patty Jenkins movie was scrapped, and I think the various creative teams who had been assigned an idea -- like the Game of Thrones guys -- are also in some sort of turnaround. I suspect we'll get something before 2030, but I don't know what it will be.

And when I realized that made me sad, it also made me realize that I do, in fact, have an answer to this. We need Star Wars.

These guys are younger than I am -- one 12 years younger, one 17 -- so I had the opportunity to regale them (not for the first time) with the story about how I had seen the original Star Wars in the theater on its initial release. But instead of that just being another rehashed story, not unlike the franchises themselves -- and we had a talk about rehashed personal stories too last night, though not related to this -- it was an opportunity for me to lay the groundwork for why I will give Star Wars an unlimited number of additional chances to wow me. Any time I see a new character activating a lightsaber in a setting I've never seen before, it will stir the excitement of that child who saw the first lightsaber ever extended. 

And it's not the same to see it in a TV show. I think Disney ultimately knows this. In fact, I have only watched one episode total from the most recent two Star Wars series.

We all know that the movies are where franchises truly live, truly exceed the limitations of the small screen to exist in all their glory and grandeur.

And I don't know about the rest of you, but I need Star Wars to prop up my personal cinematic landscape.  

The challenge of rewriting

To this day, one of my greatest triumphs as a writer came back when I was in college, even if no one other than myself and my professor knew about it. Come to think of it, he would have no idea what I went through, only that he gave the final product an A.

I was writing a paper for a class that combined film theory and literary theory, and I got off on completely the wrong track with it. It was one of two major papers for the term and I could not afford to screw it up.

After I'd written more than half of it -- probably at least 2,000 words -- I decided I needed to scrap my approach and start off with a new one. It was a radical move and it worked like gangbusters. Yep, I got that A. 

This stands out in my memory not because I got the A. I did get my fair share of those. Rather, it's because of how rarely I've done something like that. We writers -- many of us, anyway -- usually adhere to the sunk cost fallacy, which is that if we've already dedicated significant time and effort to something, we are very unlikely to change horses midstream. There comes a certain point where you are pot committed, to use another economic metaphor, and however it's going to be received, you have to continue along the course you've started. 

As a critic, I almost never rewrite anything. In fact, I am far more likely not to write the review at all if I think it's not going well -- something that's an easier choice since I am my own editor, and (usually) there is little consequence to aborting halfway through. I think of the review I tried to write for my favorite comedy (so far) of 2024, Jerry Seinfeld's Unfrosted, and how after about two paragraphs, I was not saying what I wanted to say. I think I did intend to ultimately shape it up into something publishable -- after all, two paragraphs is more like 400 words than 2,000 -- but time got away from me, as time does, and before long I'd missed my window.

When I am reviewing something I watched via a screener I got from a publicist, though, there is not the option to abandon it unpublished -- not if you intend to keep getting screeners from that publicist. This was the case with The Dead Don't Hurt, as you may remember from Monday's post, which also discussed how there was a major aspect of the film's structure that I did not understand while watching it. (I blame the distracted viewing of the Christmas season, especially as we are also preparing for a three-week trip to the States.)

As also discussed, I did watch the movie again, across Monday night and Tuesday afternoon, hoping to see just how much of a dunce I was to have missed this core aspect of the script, and hoping that I would just amend an author's note to the review I'd already written. 

After that viewing, in which the film climbed a half-star in my assessment -- and it might have been a full star if I still didn't sort of blame the film for not making this device clear enough to me -- I decided I liked it enough more that I owed it more than an author's note attached to a flawed review.

So I did indeed rewrite it, and that left me with the following question:

How do I actually do this?

I knew there were some observations in that review that I was still proud of, and the plot synopsis was mostly sturdy. But the connective tissue had a backhanded compliment, or even sometimes outright critical, aspect to it, and so I'd likely have to reword even within the passages that I thought were still relevant. 

So what I did was copy the whole thing into a new Word document, and just see where I went. 

I decided to incorporate the content of the proposed author's note into a new opening paragraph. I don't usually like to use the first person in my reviews -- I probably only include the word "I" in one of every ten reviews, and sometimes I might go six months without doing so -- but I thought this was a situation that called for it. Because not getting this essential thing about The Dead Don't Hurt was, in fact, relevant to the movie I had watched and reviewed the first time, and I thought my audience deserved to know about it, if only to prevent them from having to watch it twice to get all they could out of it. (Because if they didn't get all they could out of it, they'd never bother to watch it again.)

The confessional first part went simply, as writing in that mode comes pretty easily to me, given how much practice I get on this blog. It also allowed me to take the piss out of myself a little bit, which was warranted.

Then I transitioned into a modified version of my opening thoughts from my first review on the overall feel of the film. The plot synopsis survived mostly intact, though I chose to change certain things that might now be considered spoilers, given what I'd already said about the film's non-linear narrative. (That was the thing I didn't get. I know, I'm a dummy.)

The rest of the review needed to lose my references to certain things feeling abrupt, because that was no longer relevant -- or I no longer saw it as a weakness, anyway, now that I had an explanation. And that allowed me to replace that material with some thoughts on Viggo Mortensen's performance, which stood out to me a lot more on the second viewing, while still staying within 200 words of my original word count. 

The piece closed with comments that were exclusively positive, rather than the negative note of the previous one, even though both of the ratings had still been overall positive. (Incidentally, the movie also moved up more than 30 spots on my in-progress rankings of 2024 films.)

In the end, the task I had been dreading was accomplished entirely within the length of a 25-minute train ride home from work. Which is good, because I'm busy as hell right now, particularly yesterday, when I still had to create and finalize our Christmas cards after getting home (and attain my wife's approval of the photo choices and design) before going to play tennis. If the former wasn't completed before the latter, we might miss another precious day to still receive the cards in time to have our recipients get them before Christmas.

You never read the first review, but if you want to read this version, it's here. 

It was useful to have to do this, as it lowers my fear of the prospect of having to rewrite something in the future. 

What's more, it shows me something I didn't know before this as it relates to my 20-year-old self:

I've still got it. 

A brief respite from 2024 movies before the home stretch

I've been pouring myself into movies this year, specifically 2024 movies of late.

But first let's look at movies in general. 

By the end of the November, I had seen only two fewer new movies in 2024 than I watched in all of 2023. 

That might seem a bit staggering, since December is always a busy viewing month, but there's a logical explanation -- outside of me just being a freak. In 2023, I rewatched 52 movies that I had already seen. In 2024, that number is only 33. Those extra viewing hours have to go somewhere.

And so they have gone into movies I haven't seen, and disproportionately into movies released in 2024. At this writing, I have seen 132 such movies -- or really, 132 movies that qualify by my rules. (There were three movies released in foreign countries in 2023 that only got released in the U.S. in 2024. And yes I go by U.S. release date even though I live in Australia.)

I didn't watch my 132nd film in 2023 until December 19th, so yes, I am nearly three weeks ahead of last year's pace.

This would be good if I were trying to set records each year. Really, I'm trying to avoid records, because watching too many movies sometimes makes me think my life doesn't have quite the dimension it should. 

There is good reason for me to be ahead of last year's pace. Two, actually:

1) The Oscar nominations are revealed almost a full week earlier this year than last year. In a break from tradition, they are being revealed on a Friday, and that Friday is January 17th. Compare to last year's January 23rd, a traditional Tuesday, and you see I'll lose a week of viewing on the back end this year. That will actually be a relief for two reasons, but I can't number them because I'm already in a numbered set. One is that by early January, I start to crave an end to the madness. The other is that Friday morning will be a Friday evening for me, so I won't have to work the morning after I post my list, and can sleep in after staying up late to watch the nominations live and to post the list. 

2) I am going to America for a little less than three weeks, in a little more than two weeks. And though I traditionally do view a fair number of movies on Christmas trips to America -- well, the single one we've done as a family, which was eight years ago -- I've vowed this year to not make myself absent to other activities that require my presence just because I want to watch some bad horror movie that happened to come out in the current year.

In light of this whole preamble, and despite the last two things I told you, I decided over the weekend that I needed a one-night break from 2024 movies, before I start to really sprint. 

That turned into a two-night break when I fell asleep watching the movie I chose as that break on Saturday night, meaning I had to finish it on Sunday night. And it turned into a three-night break when I watched (only the first half of) The Dead Don't Hurt last night, as I mentioned I might do in yesterday's post, again falling asleep. 

To give you some sense of how laser-focused I'd been, the only two movies I'd watched in all of November that were not 2024 movies were the movie I watched for my monthly Flickchart Friends Favorites Fiesta challenge (Terence Davies' The Long Day Closes), the movie for my own Blaxploitaudient series (Jack Hill's Coffy) and only a single rewatch, a post-election sort of comfort food (Anne Fletcher's The Proposal). All the rest were '24, 24-7.

I had intended to fit one more outlier into November, but since I ended up watching more than half of it on December 1st, that's the month it got credited to.

Sometimes, you just have to watch Red Sparrow.

Why Red Sparrow?

Well, I can do numbers again:

1) They've been promoting it on Netflix. Either it's a new arrival, or it just found its way to the front of their algorithm as requiring promotion. 

2) I like Jennifer Lawrence and have seen (almost) all of her films. 

3) I have to admit I was a little intrigued by the promise of some J-Law nudity, which was a piece of info that escaped about this movie at the time it was released, though that's not quite as much of a novelty after she shed it all again in No Hard Feelings. (In the end, I found whatever hoopla there had been over that a little overblown.)

4) There was a thematic link with the film I'd watched on Friday night, The Crow -- at least a flimsy one. Yes, if I hadn't had this post to write, I could have written a post called "Bird weekend on The Audient."

5) I like spy thrillers? No wait, I don't actually like spy thrillers very much. So we can stop at four.

Like it sometimes feels in late January, when you finally shed yourself of the burden of watching films released in the (now previous) year, it did feel like a bit of a relief -- a respite -- from the status quo. I did feel a little liberated as I watched it.

But I guess more than that I felt sleepy. I mean, it is 2 hours and 20 minutes long. 

And I liked it okay, certainly more than its reputation. There are some things I really like about it. One of which is the effect they achieved of showing Lawrence's character's leg break during a ballet performance, in one uninterrupted shot, in as gruesome a bending as you can imagine. I went back and watched that about three different times to try to pinpoint how they created the illusion, but I could not. 

And the cast is good, with lots of big names like Joel Edgerton, Jeremy Irons, Ciaran Hinds, Mary-Louise Parker and Matthias Schoenaerts. It looks good -- Francis Lawrence is a good director -- and I was mostly interested from moment to moment.

In the end, though, spy thrillers are spy thrillers, and they tend to leave me a bit cold. 

Okay, now it's Tuesday, and I last watched a 2024 movie on Friday night.

I can now quickly transition from a respite to a panic over all the things I haven't yet seen. 

The movie I didn't understand

Spoilers for The Dead Don't Hurt.

I had a very odd experience this week, one I'm not sure I've ever had before. 

It's not that I've never misunderstood a movie. But usually a movie I don't understand is existing on some sort of abstract intellectual plane, or I lost my bearings early on and never got them back, or it's just plain muddled in its execution. I've never misunderstood a movie quite like this. 

I received a screener of The Dead Don't Hurt, the new western from Viggo Mortensen, in time to review it for its December 5th Australian release. In fact, I received it plenty early, watching it this past Wednesday and finishing the review by Friday morning.

It was a bit of a middling review. I certainly liked aspects of the film, while overall feeling underwhelmed by it. That's often a 6/10 for me, and that was the case here. 

I considered including my whole review here, but that's a lot of reading, and I'm not actually sure yet whether I will post this review. I have a few days to decide whether I will rewrite it or just include an author's note, because having gotten the screener obliges me to post something about the movie. 

I don't need to include the whole thing, though, to give you a gist of the feeling I had while watching the movie. One line in the review summarizes the disconnect pretty well: 

"The focus of the script from moment to moment feels a bit arbitrary, the eventual resolutions to various plot threads as flat as they are sudden."

These are the words of a person who detected something about this narrative that was off, but could not put his finger on what it was.

There was one thing I wanted to fact check about my review -- namely, the correct way to describe the character played by Garret Dillahunt -- and so I went to read its plot synopsis on Wikipedia, as I am wont to do. Here are where the spoilers come in, but they're only about the structure of the film, not its content. I really only need to give you the portion on Wikipedia that is relevant to what I didn't get about the movie:

"The film's plot is presented as two sequences of events interweaving each other in a nonlinear narrative. The following is a linear summary of the plot." 

Um, what?

When I was watching this movie, I had no idea the events were being played out of sequence. 

In fact, what I thought were two different sets of characters -- a woman and a young boy -- were actually the same characters, only seen at different times in the story. 

I'm not just an idiot, believe me. And here I have to give you some more spoilers to explain myself.

At the very start of the movie -- as in, the film's very first shot -- a woman dies in bed. She's seen very much in close-up, so it's not possible to get a full sense of who she is, or even which actress is playing this woman. Because I surely would have recognized Vicky Krieps under ordinary circumstances, wouldn't I?

But I did not, and so when Krieps shows up again, maybe 15 minutes later, I figured that this was a new woman, not the wife of our main character (played by Mortensen himself) who died earlier. Again, remember, I have no idea these events are being told out of sequence. 

Then there's a child, who I believed to be Mortensen's child from his marriage to this woman who died. Various events occur in the plot (I don't need to get into them) and another child materializes later as the son of Krieps' character, first a young child and then growing older. It's the same child, but I did not know that. (And also explains why there are scenes where this child isn't present.)

What I don't understand is, was it Mortensen's intention to make it unclear that these events were being shown out of sequence, or was it just poor craft?

And that's really my greatest argument for printing my review as it is, maybe only with an author's note to contextualize it for people who might think I'm an idiot. If I, a person who has seen more than 6,500 movies of all sorts of experimental narrative chronologies, did not realize that was going on here, is that my problem, or the film's?

I didn't think I had any reason to go back and review earlier footage in the movie, and I didn't think that some superficial similarities of these characters -- one of whom I only saw on screen in close-up for one minute -- was sufficient reason to believe they were the same character. I think if you are going to do something like this, you sort of have to hit us over the head with it -- at least eventually. There has to be an "a-ha" moment.

The thing that does make me think I might just have been dumb, though, is that there are locations listed on the screen at times, and years. So if I went back and watched the movie again, I might find that the years actually state very matter-of-factly that events are being shown out of sequence. But that required me to remember that one year said 1861 and the other said 1863, or whatever, and specifically care about that in the moment. When the events occur "a long time ago," whether it was 1861 or 1863 often doesn't matter to us. 

So now the thing I am asking myself is: Do I need to watch this movie again before Thursday? The screener link won't have expired yet. Do I need to come at it with fresh eyes, knowing what I now know?

At this time of year, time is precious and there are a lot of movies I need to see. I usually only watch a select few current year movies a second time, and usually only if I love them. There's only one 2024 movie I've seen more than once, for example, and I can't say I have any plans to rewatch any others before the end of January.

So it'll likely come down to how my Monday and Tuesday night go, and whether I think I have the time for this -- or if the author's note will suffice.

It may actually come down to my impression of how stupid not having detected the non-linear narrative structure will make me seem. If I watch it again and it was clear as day, well, maybe I need to re-write the review. But if it strikes me as equally obscure, maybe I'm okay with what I already wrote. And then I have to consider that if I had never gone to Wikipedia, I would have just published my review, none the wiser. If that were the case, there would not even be the author's note. 

Either way, it's a second reckoning with The Dead Don't Hurt -- even if only just in my head as I weigh out these options, and a I write this post. 

Technically accurate but semantically dishonest

Which of these "award-winning movies" is not like the other?

Awards for Past Lives, according to Wikipedia:

Best Woman Screenwriter - Alliance of Women Film Journalists
Top Ten Films of the Year - American Film Institute Awards
Best Director - Asia Pacific Screen Awards
Outstanding Achievement in Casting - Artios Awards
Best First Feature - Astra Film and Creative Arts Awards
Best Original Screenplay, Best First Film - Austin Film Critics Awards

And that's only the A's. Point proven, I will stop there.

Awards for Prey, according to Wikipedia:

Outstanding Sound Editing for a Limited Series or Anthology, Movie or Special - Primetime Emmy Awards
Best Streaming Film Premiere, Best Costume Design, Best Creature FX - Fangoria Chainsaw Awards
Outstanding Achievement in Sound Editing - Non-Theatrical Feature - Golden Reel Awards
Best Original Score - Streamed Live Action Film (No Theatrical Release) - Hollywood Music in Media Awards

Awards for Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, according to Wikipedia:

Feature Big Budget - Comedy - Artios Awards
Best Supporting Actress - Critics Choice Movie Awards
Best Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy - Golden Globe Awards
Best Actor in a Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy - Golden Globe Awards
Best Original Poster - Golden Trailer Awards
Best Supporting Actress - National Society of Film Critics Awards
Best Supporting Actress - Online Film Critics Society Awards
Best Adapted Screenplay - Writers Guild of America

Awards for Movie 43, according to Wikipedia:

Worst Picture, Worst Director, Worst Screenplay - Golden Raspberry Awards

Now, some of these awards may be a bit fringe, but at least you would write home about them.

Not so for the "accolades" for Movie 43.

So I am trying to figure out Amazon's angle here. 

They are promoting four random movies to us that all are considered "award winners" -- a technically true statement. The thing that separates them from being completely random, I would guess, is that perhaps they are all new to the service within the past few weeks, or at least returned to the service after a temporary departure.

But wait -- Borat Subsequent Moviefilm was an Amazon original movie. It debuted there. There would be no conceivable reason it would have ever left, because where would it go? Streamer originals are on the service forever and ever after, amen. 

So that doesn't explain the pairing of these four movies. And surely, if they just wanted four awards winners, they'd have literally hundreds of other movies on the site that would qualify, especially given the number of existing bodies that lavish formal praise on movies that are never going to get an Oscar nomination. (I mean, even the Teen Choice Awards and MTV Movie Awards exist.) 

What possible incentive could Amazon have for elevating Movie 43 alongside these other films, all of which were critical favorites in one way or another, with maybe only a few detractors for Borat and essentially none for the other two? 

The movie was an all-time turkey, and any of their customers who watch Movie 43 will surely know this right away. They may then investigate why Amazon promoted it to them as such, and find out the technical accuracy of the term "award" -- while still grumbling at the deception.

Because technical accuracy only matters in the legalese that comes at the end of an ad for a new erectile dysfunction drug, or a bargain basement attorney. It only matters if you are trying to indemnify yourself against an angry customer who wants to sue you because something happened with your product that you didn't tell them was going to happen. So you tell them what could happen, and wash your hands of it, and basically live with the fact that you may end up burning some of your future customers, because that's the nature of your particular industry. There are enough potential future customers to compensate for the loss. 

There is no good reason to burn a potential steaming customer, given the comparatively small value of encouraging them to watch any individual thing on your service. Streaming content is inherently a crapshoot, and any streaming customer knows that. The streamer's job is to make the content available, to suggest that you might like it if you liked something similar to it, and to give it a certain visibility in accordance with the streamer's own belief in the content, its own advertising philosophy and perhaps its own agreement with whoever leased the content to give it a certain amount of prominence for a certain amount of days. The rest is just caveat emptor.

But then if you go out of your way to label garbage like Movie 43 as an award winner -- and place it next to three other movies that won awards for legitimate reasons -- you are engaging in actual dishonesty toward your customer that could damage your brand. 

And for what? What do you gain if an additional ten thousand people stream Movie 43? (Answer in the comments, if you know. I really want to know.) That is not an exaggeration given the way ads like these tend to flood our devices, likely going to millions of us, if not billions. (Okay, not billions.) 

You're more likely to lose those ten thousand people as customers than to get them to watch another movie that might be recommended according to their interest in Movie 43, or whatever the flimsy value is that Amazon might get out of this. 

They won't leave because they didn't like this one movie. That can happen any time you click play.

They'll leave because you told them they would like this movie because it was an award winner, when the only awards it won were named after that universal gesture you make with your mouth and tongue, expelling breath outward and creating that farting sound that unmistakeably indicates your disgust.

Leave technical accuracy to the pharmaceutical companies.