Movies about the same thing should not have the same title

Every time I see a movie that has the same title as another movie, I cringe a little bit. 

I know there are a finite number of words in the English language and I know that there are some titles that are too good to belong solely to the movie that happened to use the title first. But I don't love it. Not only do I now have to use a year in parentheses any time I include the movie in one of my lists, but I have to go back and retroactively add parentheses to the other movie to distinguish it from the new one.

I get it, though, in instances where the movies have nothing to do with each other. If talking about the two different versions of Frozen, you aren't likely going to confuse the one about magical ice princesses and the one where two people are in danger of freezing to death on a ski lift, with hungry wolves circling below. (And though Disney's Frozen has obviously become the far better known film, it was not the first of these two -- and when I heard the title of Disney's movie, I did feel the aforementioned annoyance because I already had the ski lift movie in my lists.)

Remakes are another scenario where it's okay. To use a recent example, I wouldn't expect them to call the remake of Road House anything other than Road House. You will need the parentheses, but you can easily distinguish them in casual conversation by saying "the original" or "the remake." (Now, if they remake it multiple times, like A Star is Born, then you have to start saying things like "the Judy Garland version," but I still would not expect them to come up with a new title.)

The one that kind of gives me the shits is using the title Frida to refer to two movies about Frida Kahlo, the more recent of which is not a remake of the first -- even if both movies are quite good.

Last night I watched Carla Gutierrez' new documentary on Amazon Prime, which uses the words from Kahlo's diaries and interviews to narrate her life, and animation of her paintings as the stand-out gimmick to accompany old photos and film footage. It's one of my favorite movies of the young 2024.

But there was also a 2002 biopic of Kahlo called Frida, directed by Julie Taymor and starring Salma Hayek and Alfred Molina. 

I get that Kahlo is not a good title for a movie. But since it is the painter in her own words, what about I, Frida? Or Yo, Frida? (I guess that last might sound like you were yelling at someone. "Yo! Frida!")

Also I know this is a little bit of a flawed distinction to be making about the relative difficulty of distinguishing between the movies. If you can say "the Frozen about the stranded skiers" or "the original Road House" you can certainly say "Frida the biopic" or "Frida the documentary."

And here's something interesting to note: When I added the movie to Letterboxd just now, movies named Frida from 2018, 2020, 2021 and 2022 all also came up as options. I didn't check them to see if they were also movies about Frida Kahlo, but what else would they be? Whether this makes Gutierrez' reuse of the title more or less acceptable is, I suppose, a matter of perspective. 

I do hope a lot of us will be making this distinction, because not only is this already a contender for my top ten of 2024, but it also breathes some much-needed life into the documentary format, which has not been wowing me in recent years with a lot of outside-the-box examples. 

And having been reminded of the trajectory of Kahlo's life in a way that's in conversation with her art, Loving Vincent-style, I am now inclined to revisit Taymor's film as well. 

Potentially a lot of Frida's in my immediate past and near future. 

Continuing to revisit other people's favorites and 1990s Jim Carrey

I followed my Thursday night viewing of Bull Durham, a favorite of other baseball fans but not a favorite of this baseball fan (points to self), with a Friday night viewing of The Mask, a favorite other Jim Carrey fans but not a favorite of this Jim Carrey fan (points to self).

I had only seen each movie once, though, so it was time for a reconsideration of The Mask just as it was time for a reconsideration of Bull Durham.

It also follows a little mini theme for Carrey himself, since I only just rewatched Carrey's The Truman Show earlier this month as well, also for the first time since I originally saw it in the 1990s.

It also happens to mark 30 years since The Mask was released, though that's just a fortuitous additional benefit rather than a driving force behind the viewing.  

The Mask viewing went better than the Bull Durham viewing, and I think it had everything to do with expectations. 

In checking out the star ratings I gave these movies retroactively when I added all my movies to Letterboxd in 2012, I saw it fit to consider Bull Durham a four-star movie, while Carrey's second major feature after Ace Ventura: Pet Detective was worthy of only 2.5 stars. I wouldn't say I could flip-flop those ratings, because four stars is too high for The Mask. But 2.5 stars also might be too high for Bull Durham.

I assumed no one else really thought The Mask was all that great, but my experience recording with two younger guys for The ReelGood Podcast convinced me otherwise. They seemed to both have a genuine fondness for the 1994 Chuck Russell film, considering the "Cuban Pete" number in particular to be comedic gold. There was one podcast we did where one of the other guys made a bit of a meme of the "Chick-a-boom" refrain from the song, which of course didn't mean anything to me because I didn't remember it. Back then, a seed was planted that I should probably rewatch The Mask, which I have now finally done.

You'd think I should have liked The Mask more. I went for Ace Ventura: Pet Detective quite a bit, watching it three times during a single five-day rental (a weird sort of anomaly that I have never repeated with any other movie), and Dumb and Dumber and The Cable Guy constitute two of the three Carrey movies in my top 50 on Flickchart (the other being Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind). The way Carrey commits to his comedic choices is one of the things I value most about him, and he certainly commits in The Mask.

So what held me back? I think it's the same thing that keeps me from embracing Looney Tunes as much as some others of my generation and some other animation fans embrace it. I don't think seeing eyes bug out of Carrey's head or his heart bug out of Carrey's chest is as fun as some people find it. I don't think watching a man who is literally and figuratively a tornado, where everything he says is in quotation marks, is such a hoot. In short, tone it down a little please.

On this viewing, I wasn't significantly more ingratiated to the alter ego of Carrey's Stanley Ipkis, though I didn't find him actively annoying, which was good. And I found all the material where Stanley is not possessed by the mask to be better than I remembered. Since I feel I am quite familiar with the other Carrey from this era, having seen each of the movies I listed previously at least four times, watching The Mask was kind of like uncovering a treasure trove of hidden material from an actor whose other work from this era had already provided me plenty of joy.

Of course, you can't talk about The Mask without talking about Cameron Diaz, who was first introduced to us here. (She even gets an "and introducing" credit at the start, which is appropriate since this was her film debut.) Friends and I were instantly infatuated with Diaz from this movie, which isn't surprising, because the movie presents her as what we would have called a "sexpot" back then. In part because she seemed to actively avoid this sort of role afterwards, this is a unique version of Diaz that we wouldn't see again -- even the shape of her face seems to be different in the many other roles she immediately started getting after this one. So while this shouldn't be considered Diaz' signature role and it certainly isn't her best example of the craft of acting, it does hold a certain unique spot in her career as such an anomaly in the types of roles she played. It was immediately apparent the sort of star power she had, and she immediately took that star power and transformed it to speak more to the sort of persona she wanted to cultivate. That's a hard trick to pull off in your early 20s. 

I also find myself really skeeved out by the look in the eye of Peter Greene as the villain. As I was watching the movie, I realized he shares a sort of glower with someone like Aidan Quinn when he has played a villain, even with recent Oscar winner Cillian Murphy when he plays a villain. Is it just me or do you see something similar in the eyes of all three of these actors? The comparison to Quinn first hit me because I looked up Greene to see if he had been in Stakeout, and of course that was Quinn. (Which would be another movie to rewatch, though that one would be a personal favorite of mine.) In fact, it was difficult for me to believe that the only other movie I really know Greene from is Pulp Fiction, where he plays Zed. That look in his eye must be ingrained in me from that movie and not from some other performance of his that I've seen multiple times.

Okay, I think I will continue my long four-day Easter weekend with something new tonight. 

A bunch of Bull

The late 1980s were the heyday of baseball movies that starred or could have starred Kevin Costner. He was in both Bull Durham and Field of Dreams, of course, and couldn't you just imagine him playing the Tom Berenger role in Major League?

Well, it's a problematic heyday for me in certain ways. I had a major negative reappraisal of Field of Dreams a few years ago, I was never that warm on Bull Durham in the first place, and, well, Major League, which is my favorite baseball movie of all time and in my top 200 on Flickchart, does not actually feature Kevin Costner.

But a Bull Durham viewing has been brewing for a couple years as a possible choice to watch on the eve of baseball's opening day, as per my annual tradition. Even though it was never a favorite -- as evidenced by the fact that I have only seen it that one time in the early 1990s -- I did generally feel fondly toward it, and thought that its general vibe would be a perfect thing to usher me in to six months of baseball.

I did feel fondly toward it.

I said I liked Durham's general vibe, but the movie is more of a vibe than an actual story. And it turns out I don't like its vibe all that much.

Let's start with Costner as Crash Davis. In my memory, this was sort of a Han Solo of baseball, a wiseass who's flawed but charming, and has the best personality in the room. In fact, I found Crash to be a bitter asshole. He's not as funny as I thought, he doesn't have an instinct for kindness in his body, and he's not above the fray like a Han Solo, falling into an immediate petty rivalry with his charge, Tim Robbins' Nuke LaLoosh, getting into as many as three fights with him, at least two of which he bears the lion's share of the responsibility for starting. We are supposed to want Crash to succeed and to win the heart of Susan Sarandon's Annie, and the trajectory of the narrative and the development of Nuke is supposed to confirm that she was wrong to pair up with Nuke. Instead, I thought Nuke seemed like the more deserving suitor by the end -- a credit to Crash helping mature him, sure, but not something we are supposed to be thinking as the narrative reaches its end.

It occurs to me that rooting for the wrong person was actually a problem with both of these Costner baseball movies in the late 80s. Part of the reason I turned on Field of Dreams (you can read that post here) was because I realized the movie is trying so hard to make a villain out of Timothy Busfield, when in fact his pleading with them not to build a baseball field on their property is the most sane action by any character in the movie. I felt similarly toward Nuke here. Although I loathed him at first -- the movie makes it impossible not to -- I ultimately found Nuke easier to like than Crash, who reaches his bitter low point when he refuses to congratulate Nuke on his promotion to the majors, and then tries to start a fight with Nuke, throwing a billiard ball at Nuke with his back turned while Nuke is walking away. Classy.

And that makes a good transition into the many ways this movie gets baseball wrong. When Nuke gets his call-up to the majors at the end, he's skipping two levels of minor league ball in order to get there. The titular Durham Bulls are a Triple-A team today -- meaning the stop just below the majors -- but in the 1980s they were a Class-A team, which means that both AA and AAA stood between them and the majors as logical stopping points for players on their ascension. It's not unheard of for a major league team to call up someone in the low minors when rosters expand at the end of the season, but it would be pretty rare -- and certainly not immediately after a stinker of a game by the player.

So let's talk about that stinker of a game. As narrated by Annie -- and there is a lot of random narrating in this film that follows no pattern -- the game "got out of hand" once Crash was ejected for arguing a call at the plate. We see one of the fielders make three errors with his cursed glove (more on that later) and a number of other hits sprayed around the park against LaLoosh. And yet when she wraps up her narration of the game, she reveals that the Bulls lost the game 3-2. How is that game "out of hand"?

It would be one thing if we were supposed to believe that Annie just doesn't understand very much about baseball, which would be a bit sexist but at least would explain her sub par assessment of the dynamics of the game. But no, this is a woman who offers players advice on their swing and attends every game. It's writer-director Ron Shelton who doesn't seem to understand baseball, not Annie. (Which is a strange charge to make as Shelton made a handful of baseball movies, including the one I started the 2023 baseball season watching, Cobb.) 

And let's also talk about Crash's ejection. It takes ages to happen. While arguing an out call at the plate -- which he does to try to fire Nuke up -- Crash is nose to nose with the umpire for minutes of intimate shouting before he's thrown out. He even bumps chests with the umpire early in the argument, to which the umpire lamely responds "Don't bump me!" (Physical contact with an umpire is an automatic ejection, and likely suspension, today, but even back then it would have been unusual and warranted an immediate response.) Finally only after the umpire baits Crash into calling him a cocksucker does he get thrown out. No self-respecting umpire would put up with that much crap before ejecting a player.

It's clear that Bull Durham does not fancy itself a conventional sports movie building toward a conventional climax. I mean, it is the anti-Major League in that way. The loveable losers in that movie work their way up to winning the big game -- not the World Series, but the single game that decides who is going to win the A.L. East, which is still pretty big stakes. The loveable losers in this movie have a winning streak that's underpinned by Nuke's abstention from sex -- as though Nuke might pitch every game the team plays, another misunderstanding of how baseball works -- but then I don't even remember if we find out what becomes of that season. The movie sees fit to end on Nuke getting promoted and Crash getting released, with post scripts that have to do with Crash trying to set the minor league home run record on a different team (a big deal, you'd think, but the movie considers it an afterthought) and with him finally bedding Annie.

I know these are different times, but if a player were about to take the all-time lead for minor league homers -- a dubious honor, of course, because it means you're just good enough for a lot of at-bats in the minors but few if any in the majors -- it would be celebrated and the player's pursuit would be monitored. Instead, the Bulls release Davis even though he's having an indisputably good hitting season. We know he needed 20 homers at the start of the season to set the record, and you don't release a player who is having that sort of productivity at the plate. Especially because you want to "call up" a young catcher. Um, Class-A is pretty much as low as it gets, though technically, rookie ball is one step lower. 

The movie views Crash Davis as some great tragedy, because Crash views himself as some great tragedy. I didn't feel sorry for the guy in the slightest. He's a jerk to everyone and he had a minor league career in which he hit 247 homers. In a season in which you've already hit 20 homers, there would be no reason not to keep playing next year. Instead, the movie makes it seem as though he has no other option than to consider a coaching gig the following season. I'm sorry, any player who can hit 20 homers is going to be wanted by somebody.

But Vance, you say. It's just a movie.

Yes, I'm probably doing it wrong if I am scrutinizing every detail of a baseball movie. But a baseball movie needs to be good enough in the other things it's doing to make me relax my tendency toward this sort of scrutiny. I'm sure there are things about Major League that don't add up, but they don't distract me the least from my love of what that movie does. Here, I'm muttering and distracted constantly.

Even if Bull Durham wants to be more of a hang-out movie than a sports movie, it needs to do that better. The "fun" sequences don't even strike me as such because I don't care much about the main characters and they didn't do much to introduce me to the supporting cast, another way this falls short of what Major League accomplishes. 

I was frankly shocked at how labored this script is. I can't remember any examples off the top of my head, but there were moments here where a dialogue exchange goes on for any number of words longer than it should have because Shelton failed to excise clearly superfluous material, like little semantic exchanges about what someone said, or needless repetitions of things not heard properly. If the semantics are the point, a good script can make that funny. This script is not good, from the overall story structure to the inconsistent use of voiceover to the details of the dialogue. 

I don't want to say I hated Bull Durham. That's too strong. I do enjoy certain isolated parts of it, though I don't ever think it's funny. I think it thinks it's funny, which is really unbecoming.

Oh I mentioned earlier that I was going to come back to the fielder who thought his glove was cursed and made three errors, a guy named Jose, played by Rick Marzan. This guy is always rubbing beads on his bat and is a believer in voodoo. I thought that was funny because the character of Pedro Cerrano in Major League, played by Dennis Haysbert, is basically an expanded consideration of this plot. While that would sound as though Bull Durham finally has the advantage over Major League on something, again I can spin this in Major League's favor. Major League takes something that was ventured tepidly by Bull Durham and makes it big and richly comedic, if probably a little culturally insensitive by today's standards. What's more, it's another example of how we know the characters better in the later film and better appreciate their specific traits and foibles. We don't know anything about Jose. Heck, we barely even know anything about Crash.

So Bull Durham did not really psych me up for the season, which is my stated reason for this little Cerrano-like ritual of mine over the past decade or so. (My wife even referred to it as a ritual last night.) But that does not matter, because baseball itself psychs me up for itself. 

Happy opening day, everyone. 

Delayed appreciation for Groundhog Day: The Musical

About seven weeks after Groundhog Day, which means winter would be over even if the rodent of the day had seen his shadow, my family and I went to see Groundhog Day: The Musical this past weekend.

It was a blast.

My appreciation of it today is delayed in a couple senses.

For starters, I should have written about this the very next morning. But the very next morning was my fantasy baseball draft, and once it's baseball time of year, my mind gets paralyzed to all outside influences. I've been working on getting a second fantasy league off the ground again for 2024 -- which involves a lot of entering of information in a spreadsheet -- and even though I haven't gone two nights in a row without watching a movie, writing about anything here has been another story.

And then there's the fact that this show first opened in 2016, so any thoughts shared on it would not be "new." I thought it might only just be premiering because I had never heard about its existence until a few months ago, and because the music and lyrics are by Australian Tim Minchin. But no, when it opened earlier this year (perhaps in time for Groundhog Day), that made Melbourne the third location to get the show, after a 2016 premiere in London (and a 2023 revival) and a Broadway run in 2017. We did get the same star of those shows in Andy Karl, who must be feeling exponential deja vu by now, playing the same show over and over about a day being played over and over.

But just because Groundhog Day is only "new to me" wouldn't prevent me from writing about it here, of course. If it did, I'd only ever discuss movies released within the past two weeks.

Going to the show was our Christmas present to my sister-in-law, which became quite the expensive present when you consider that we also procured tickets for my wife and me and our two kids. This was the first time to see a live, professional musical like this for either of my kids, although my younger son reminded me that he did see a staging of Charlotte's Web (likely intended for children), and my older son reminded me that he and I went next door to see the all-girls high school perform The Wizard of Oz when he was maybe six or seven. Obviously neither of them had ever experienced anything like this, and given the generally shoddy production of The Wizard of Oz (I wasn't there Charlotte's Web so I can't comment on that one), my 13-year-old did not have high hopes for this particular experience, but came along gamely enough.

I'd say it still probably wasn't totally his bag -- he's an athlete and at the moment has little appreciation for the dramatic arts -- but I could tell he was also really impressed with the scope and quality of this performance, especially in contrast to The Wizard of Oz. He made a number of unprompted comments about the quality after the fact. The younger one obviously really appreciated it but he's a bit of an easier target than his brother. His later comments were mostly about the plot and some callbacks to some funny lines or song lyrics.

Me, I thought it was one of the best live shows I'd ever seen. It's probably about 15 minutes too long, with my wife pointing out that there might be one too many interchangeable songs about the hopes for love or fulfillment of various characters, but the production design was indeed magnificent, and after a slow start in the humor department, I caught up and was laughing very regularly for the rest of the time. The Book of Morman is my favorite live musical performance of all time -- not my favorite musical but my favorite staging of a musical -- but this was easily in the top five, maybe as high as the top three. That's high praise. (Incidentally, you could make a top three almost exclusively out of things I've seen in the past ten years since coming to Australia, since Come From Away was also way up there.)

Of course, I wouldn't be writing about this here at all if this weren't an adaptation of a movie, so I thought I should spend the rest of this piece comparing and contrasting with the seminal Harold Ramis comedy from 1993.

For starters we should probably talk about Karl. My wife said she thought he was too handsome to play Phil Connors, but I thought he was just right in every aspect of a demanding and arduous role that requires him to be on stage almost the whole time, and it was interesting to see him do little things with his face or his voice that were an intentional quotation of Bill Murray. The performance is not so indebted to Murray that it doesn't stand on its own, but it does make reference to the icon whose shoes he is inhabiting, which I thought was right.

Elise McCann as Rita is also a bit of a quotation of Andie MacDowell, but more in terms of them having similar frizzy hair. She's adorable in this, and given my feelings on MacDowell, McCann would have been a better choice for the movie if she hadn't been an infant at the time it was made. I did almost wonder, in these times, if we might see a Rita with a different skin tone, but nope, two white leads. There were some minority faces in the larger ensemble, who appeared to be Maoris. 

As you might expect from a stage show, many of the cast, other than the two leads, played multiple roles, jumping in and out of different costumes all night (all afternoon actually) as they have to assume different characters multiple times in separate iterations of the same day. With sets moving in and out and down from the rafters all night, it was a whirlwind of activity, executed flawlessly. But I'm drifting away from comparisons to the movie again.

One of the most creative sequences in the show is the number that accompanies Phil's suicide montage. In a movie that sequence is easy, because you just film it and edit it together. Without belaboring each setup on stage, though, and keeping it all within one song, they pulled off this truly nifty trick -- which I thought approached the quality of a good stage magician -- in which Karl is continuing to sing the song while disappearing off stage to be hit by a car, electrocuted by a toaster in a bathtub, and dropped from the top of a water tower. Each time he appears again in the bed set in the middle of the stage, as if by magic, starting a new day to get to the next time he tries to off himself. Even when I caught on to what they were doing, I still found it hard to always identify how Karl was disappearing and then reappearing somewhere he should have no physical ability to be. Obviously a double was used but it was so seamless that it was truly a master class on sleight of hand, if you will.

One way the material gets updated from 30 years ago is that although Phil does repeatedly stare at the ass of a beautiful local girl in Punxatawney -- which I assume was taken from the movie, though I haven't seen it since 2010 so I can't say for sure -- she gets some agency here in terms of a song. We have just enough time to be uncomfortable with Phil reducing her to an object, before she unexpectedly starts Act 2 with a song about wanting to be more than her physical attributes. I thought that was nice, even though it's probably one of those things that made the show 15 to 30 minutes longer than the tightest version of itself would have been. 

Okay, back to my regularly scheduled aimless mental preparations for the beginning of the baseball season.

The latest example of my extra sensory perception

Sometimes I just know things.

The most dumbfounding example came when my wife and I were watching a TV show set in a hospital. It wasn't ER but I don't remember at this point what it was. In fact, I think it's more likely that most of the show was not set in the hospital, but there was a single scene taking place there because one of the characters had had a medical emergency. 

I do remember that they were trying to save this character's life, but in the style familiar to all of us from seeing hundreds of life-saving scenes in hospitals in movies and TV shows, it was about time to "call it."

So I spoke aloud these words:

"Time of death, 2:36 p.m."

About two seconds later, the doctor on screen spoke these exact same words. 

All the explanations like "I saw a clock over their shoulder" or "I had already seen the episode before" or "I'm lying right now as I tell you this" were ruled out. It was a gosh darn miracle, of sorts.

I'm not going to say that what happened last night as I was watching the Road House remake was in the same category as that, but it was at least enough to write about.

During a nicely staged scene where Ellie (Daniela Melchior) takes Dalton (Jake Gyllenhaal) out on her boat to a shallow sand barge in the middle of the water, where they can drink beers and sit in lawn chairs without drowning. Ellie asks Dalton where he's from, originally, because she knows it's not the Florida Keys.

Immediately this popped into my head: Montana.

After the sort of thoughtful pause that is common to Dalton, he says "Montana."

I suppose getting a character's place of origin right when I had a 1 in 50 shot is not as impressive as naming a character's exact time of death, which required not only a correct 1 in 1440 guess, but also the knowledge that they were about to say this line of dialogue in the exact correct phrasing. But I still thought it was pretty impressive, and in some way indicative of powers we don't fully understand. 

I did do my due diligence to make sure I had no reason to have Elwood Dalton's correct birthplace implanted in my head. 

I went back to the start of the movie to make sure there was no Montana license plate visible in any of the shots. You do actually get a side glance at Dalton's license plate, but you can't make out the state and I certainly don't know what a Montana license plate looks like off the top of my head. Besides, there is no indication that's even where the opening scene is set, and considering that Dalton has become a drifter of sorts, there's no reason to expect he'd be likely to have returned from whence he came.

Then I thought about whether the original Road House, which I only saw for the first time recently but it's still been more than six years, was set in Montana. Nope, Missouri.

Then I thought about whether Jake Gyllenhaal hails from Montana and this is some sort of nod to the actor's own personal history, which I might have known about subconsciously. No, he's an LA baby as his parents were in the industry before he and his sister were. (Just to be sure there was no distant Montana connection, I also searched his Wikipedia page for mentions of the state, but there were none.)

Finally I checked to make sure Brokeback Mountain wasn't set in Montana, not that this would especially give me more reason to guess that as the birthplace of a character from a different movie that is not in any way related to Brokeback Mountain. No, that's set in Wyoming.

So I guess it's just a miracle then.

As for the movie itself, what a fun time. I'll have a review out in a couple days if you want to check back on the links to the right. 

"Prison breaking" into retirement

When I saw posters up in the cinema for The Great Escaper, starring Michael Caine and Glenda Jackson, I thought "Another movie about old British people that I can skip." There are a lot of those.

More recently I realized that I should probably not skip it, since it appears to be Caine's last film.

News broke last year? was it? that Caine, now 91, intended to stop acting in films and formally retire. It was a sad but inevitable day. He doesn't want to have to be wheeled on set to stumble through lines he can't remember. Caine is the kind of dignified performer who deserves to go out with as many of his lifelong skills intact as possible.

My next thought, though, was that from the title alone, it reminded me of another retirement film from one of his peers, which was Robert Redford's The Old Man & the Gun from 2018, a little side diversion for the otherwise visionary David Lowery.

Sure enough, I checked the plot synopsis of The Great Escaper and it has to do with an 89-year-old World War II vet who "broke out" of his retirement home in order to attend a 2014 70th anniversary remembrance of D-Day. It's based on a true story. 

What is it with screen legends who want to sign off on their careers with prison break movies?

The Old Man & the Gun, you will recall, featured Redford as a character who held up banks with three other geriatrics who were slightly younger than him. This was also based on a real person, and that real person would routinely get caught and then break out of prison. I'm not looking up the details now, but I think he escaped prison something like 30 times, which just sounds made up. At what point do they just throw away the key?

Redford chose this as his "last" project -- more on that in a moment -- and now Caine has done the same. And in this case the title has additional metaphorical significance, as Caine is also "escaping" the career that probably did not feel very much like a prison to him, although who knows.

The thing is, I just checked on IMDB to see if Redford was as good as his word, and of course he has not been. I say "of course" maybe because Redford is still only 87 now, and probably realized he was still capable of working if he wanted to work, and he obviously did. Perhaps he was contractually obliged to reprise his MCU role in Avengers: Endgame, though they certainly could have worked around that -- maybe he was only in the big final funeral scene, I don't really remember. That doesn't explain his vocal work in the 2020 film Omniboat: A Fast Boat Fantasia (huh? what the hell is that?), though at least he didn't appear on screen, and maybe the movie sat on the shelf for a couple years.

I'll miss Caine, but these guys should never say never. Maybe that's why Clint Eastwood, now 93 with his film Juror #2 in post-production, never does.

Who or what the hell?

I've written posts before about how when they're advertising a movie and they need to choose a still from the trailer for social media, they'll choose the most salacious image possible in order to get the extra clicks. This was one example of such a post.

However, when a freeze frame is chosen and you don't even know what the hell you're looking at, I just don't know what to make of it.

That was my experience when coming across this Facebook ad for The Marvels. I spent about two minutes trying to orient myself within the image and figure out what anything was, before giving up.

Okay, so only one thing do I know I'm looking at for sure: hair. The thing above the play symbol looks like it could be a shoulder, so maybe the person is wearing a sheer black sleeve, and there's some kind of cleavage visible to the right side of the play button. This, then, would be a traditional clickbait and switch.

But the more I look at the photo, the less I'm willing to commit on anything but the hair.

And the other thing is, whose hair is that? That's not the way Brie Larson wears her hair in the movie, and sure as hell not the way Iman Vellani, Teyonah Paris nor Zawe Ashton wears her hair. 

Okay, looking at some of the other pictures of the movie, I guess it would have to be Larson's hair. But then anything nearby her in the picture that might be clothes couldn't be clothes, because Larson no more wears a sheer sleeve outfit in this movie than she wears a tuxedo. She's either in uniform or wearing sort of dressed-down casual clothing.

And what's going on in the upper half of the photo? It looks like some sort of control room, maybe. And there are control rooms in The Marvels.

But then in the upper left hand corner it looks sort of like a woman in a black cocktail dress with her right arm stretch out in a come hither pose, but that is totally not something that happens in this movie either.

The only other things I can possibly identify are in the lower right-hand corner. That might be a little slice of the earth seen from space. And that might be some kind of handheld computerized device with a green display. But they could also be literally anything else. 

I guess we are just looking at the rare occasion when someone completely botches their assignment to raise awareness of a product on social media, and perhaps I captured it in the few moments between when it was first published and when someone shared with them a variation on the thoughts I've just written, causing it to be taken down and fixed. 

Yes, I'm the guy who watched Irish Wish on St. Patrick's Day

When Netflix dreamed up their algorithm, they had saps like me in mind.

Yes, there are certain people who are so accustomed to choosing thematically appropriate viewing material at certain times of the year that they will watch a bad Lindsay Lohan movie on St. Patrick's Day just because someone decided to take a standard romantic comedy plot and set it in Ireland.

And just so there was no confusion about whether you were supposed to watch it on St. Patrick's Day, Netflix released it just two days beforehand and called it Irish Wish.

To be fair, I didn't actually know it starred Lindsay Lohan just from the promotional materials, those being one of the screen-saver stills Netflix offers you when you've paused too long, showing each for ten to 15 seconds. It's actually one of my most common ways to learn about new viewing options on Netflix.

I saw the red-haired woman and just assumed she was some Irish lass I didn't know, since red hair seems to be a common thing in Ireland. I mean, she looks like Lindsay Lohan, but it never even occurred to me that it might be Lindsay Lohan because I thought they drummed Lindsay Lohan out of the industry years ago. So gone was Lindsay Lohan from my mind, I didn't even think "That woman looks like Lindsay Lohan."

So I first got Irish Wish on my radar as a bad romantic comedy not starring Lindsay Lohan, and it was not my first consideration of what to watch on Sunday night either. At first I considered a personal favorite like John Carney's Once, but I did already watch Once on St. Patrick's Day six years ago. That's a recent enough viewing for that film, much as I love it, plus, the people who like their thematic viewings also like finding new ways to interpret the themes. Plus, I had already rewatched something on Saturday night -- Andy Muschietti's It -- and I felt like alternating new and prior viewings on this particular weekend.

Without another obvious candidate for an Irish film I needed to see sitting in the informal watchlist in my brain, I decided to just go with Irish Wish and continue to build my 2024 list. If I'm not going to watch this movie now, I'm certainly not going to seek it out in August, when there will be a dozen more bad romantic comedies on streaming services to choose from that will benefit from being more recent.

It was only then that I finally figured out it was Lindsay Lohan.

And at the point that I had already committed to it, I used this this new information to support my choice rather than detract from it, albeit for reasons of morbid curiosity.

Those reasons being: What does a Lindsay Lohan who has been seven times through the ringer still have left in the tank at this stage of a career that I did not know was still going on?

Actually Lohan has been working more than you might think she'd been. If I'd already seen the Mean Girls remake, I'd be able to tell you she had what sounds like a cameo in that (her character is listed as Mathletes Moderator). She's had work sprinkled throughout the rest of the previous decade, with no credits in some years but multiple credits in others. And yes, some of these are just cameos, and in one of them she plays herself, but now that she's got her second movie of 2024, it's reasonable to wonder if it would be possible for her to make a comeback -- even at age 37, when most actresses are starting to see their roles dry up rather than take off.

Well, from Irish Wish, I'd say not really.

Lohan is not unappealing. But the teenage spunk that gave her her initial breakout in a movie like Mean Girls or The Parent Trap or Freaky Friday -- I think the reason I confuse the plots of those last two was because Lohan was in both -- just isn't there anymore. Naturally gifted performers would retain that even through all sorts of personal and legal troubles. For example, years of drug-related disasters did not take any of the shine off recent Oscar winner Robert Downey Jr.'s craft. With Lohan, though, the years have taken a toll on what she brings to the screen. 

And this is not because she's looking old, which would be a standard sexist gripe to make about a woman nearing 40. She's pretty well preserved, though she's probably had a little of that proactive plastic surgery women get so that when they really need plastic surgery -- according to them, anyway -- it isn't such a shock to us. Still, to even discuss any meaningful way Lohan looks different from how she looked in Mean Girls, beyond being 20 years older, has no value, because she looks pretty much exactly like a 37-year-old Lindsay Lohan should look. I only didn't recognize her in that first still from Irish Wish because for a minute there, I sort of forgot she existed.

But she doesn't really have the dexterity or the fitness for light physical comedy or the easy charm of a goofy facial expression that she once had. It's like she's performing self-consciously, aware that we are all looking at her and wondering if she's still got it. It's like she knows that she needs to -- or feels like she needs to -- apologize for her past transgressions, and hope we're still willing to accept her into our hearts. 

Which doesn't make her unappealing, as I said, but it does put a likely cap on her opportunities going forward.

As for the movie itself, well, it's just standard romantic comedy pablum, given a superficial sense of Irish charm by being mostly set there, by having a few characters with exaggerated Irish characteristics and by setting a romantic scene at the Cliffs of Moher. Movies that really have Irish bonafides would be about an Irish protagonist rather than an American book editor (is book editor the most common job for a romantic comedy heroine?) who is only in the country for an Irish wedding. 

I guess asking Lohan to do an Irish accent, when she's just trying to get a steady paycheck, would be a bridge too far.

I need to cool my jets on Millie Bobby Brown

The time I became obsessed with Millie Bobby Brown must have coincided just about exactly with her 18th birthday, which does make me feel a lot better about it.

To be clear, this infatuation is not of a sexual nature, but more a matter of becoming so overwhelmed by the strength of someone's charisma that you almost have to look away in embarrassment. 

And because I've never actually tagged Brown on my blog before (perhaps motivated by shame in that regard) and because Brown has a new movie out, I thought it was time to delve into this crush that would make me stammer like a fool if I ever met her in person.

I can remember the exact moment when I realized the power of Millie Bobby Brown. 

For the first few seasons of Strangers Things I had been sort of poo-pooing other people's declarations of her greatness. To me, she was just a kid with a shaved head who scowled a lot. And if this marks me as a person who isn't naturally struck by the good looks of a woman with a shaved head, so be it. What I loved about Sinead O'Connor back in the day wasn't her appearance either, though I have no doubt it would have been if she had played the conventional music industry game and tried to make herself as pretty as possible. (But then, you will agree, she wouldn't have been Sinead.)

But then during season 3 of Stranger Things, Eleven finally grows her hair out and blossoms into something she was not before. I remember very specifically this conversation she has with Finn Wolfhard's Mike when they are both sitting in a mall. For the first time she struck me as traditionally vulnerable rather than just a simmering powder keg about to explode, and for the first time she smiled. (Look, I didn't say these series of confessions were going to make me look very good.)

(Oops, and another thing that isn't so great: Brown was not 18 in Stranger Things season 3. She was more like 15. I thought she was 22 right now, but it turns out she's only 20. What are you going to do. I'm not trying to find her to ask her out on a date or anything.)

Anyway, I remember melting when she brandished that smile at Mike. I was going to say literally, but that's not the case. And I have been a puddle in Brown's presence ever since.

Here, just let me show you how I've written about her in her four films I've reviewed since then.

From my Enola Holmes review. Careful with this one, I do go on and on:

Millie Bobby Brown has been earning raves since the earliest days of Stranger Things, where she plays the telekinetic teenager known as Eleven. If there was anyone who didn’t immediately recognise her star power, that could be because she spent those early days looking at the world with timid doe eyes, broken up by occasional eruptions of rage. By the third season she really started smiling, at which point, her charisma manifested as a physical force that radiated off her for all to see, and few to resist.

And a bit later in the same review:

By giving us a light diversion that is purposeful about its sense of fun, Netflix has now weaponised Brown’s charisma. When she turns to the audience to break the fourth wall with a conspiratorial glance, you are practically inclined to blush.

And:

The movie around Brown is quite enjoyable, but could probably never equal the special talents she brings to the table.

And as if that weren't enough:

She provides something for everyone in this role, dressing as boys on several occasions to more closely approximate the head-shaven, asexual mode in which we first met her in Stranger Things, but she also spends time in corsets and other Victorian garb, with the flowing locks to match. In all modes she has spunk and joie de vivre to spare.

Okay finally moving to Enola Holmes 2, where I do rein myself in a bit, but only a bit. And sorry for the some of the out-of-context excerpts:

Surely that’s enough time for us to appreciate all the different charming facial expressions Millie Bobby Brown is increasingly capable of making.

And:

The Netflix-style excessive length (this being a product of Netflix after all) draws attention to how much narrative filler there is when we’re not watching Brown’s face. She’s on screen for most of the movie, so there’s a lot of face watching, but this film’s writer (Jack Thorne) and director (Harry Bradbeer), both reprising from the original, confuse our interest in their charismatic star with a genuine interest in unravelling the mystery. 

And look how self-conscious I was that you were onto me, even though I was relatively restrained in my praise of Brown in this one:

A lot of the credit for that energy goes to Brown, who has already received her share of praise in this review.

I even doffed my cap to her charisma in Godzilla vs. Kong, a film I otherwise disliked, though fortunately, this was her only mention in the review outside of a first reference to her playing her character:

And while there’s a lot Millie Bobby Brown can do (and to a lesser extent, an under-utilised Kyle Chandler), she can’t through sheer force of charisma turn this into something more than a smash-em-up with bad dialogue.

Then this week I was back in raving form with my review of Damsel:

But Brown is such a good actress and compelling presence that she doesn’t need to make this character an ass-kicking badass. In fact, from the number of times Brown cries out in real agony from a gory injury, we are reminded that women can be strong and still be real(ish) people.

And:

There are plenty of standard components in Damsel, but the production has found an actress who can make these components feel somewhat fresh. The impossibly charismatic star of Stranger Things continues her relationship with Netflix in a manner that requires different things from her than the plucky heroine of the Enola Holmes series. This material is darker and more in sync with Stranger Things, and Brown is equal to it. The fall into this pit, slowed only by the gnarled branches that allow her to reach the ground in one piece, has left her with suppurating wounds and a stew of rage and fear. Brown has all the gifts in her repertoire to give her character a sense of real struggle and probable defeat.

And finally:

If Damsel is getting a slightly higher rating from me than it possibly deserves, that’s probably due to Brown, who is on screen almost throughout this film. Great movie stars have the power to take middling material and thrust it upward through sheer force of will, and Millie Bobby Brown is a great movie star.

At least this time I am more praising her acting skills and less obviously infatuated with her? Maybe?

The thing is, I don't love love her like I sit there day-dreaming about what it would be like if I were 30 years younger and happened to work in the movie business, meaning I might actually rub elbows with her. I do find her attractive, obviously (she's 20 so it's okay if I say it), but there are a million attractive people in Hollywood of both genders and I don't fixate on most of them the way it feels like I've fixated on Brown. (And thank goodness most people wouldn't have been reading the above reviews in conjunction with one another -- that is, before I conveniently cobbled them together in the same post as I have done here.)

No, there are two things about Brown that really get me:

1) Her eyes. They penetrate right through you.

2) Her charisma, you won't be surprised to learn as that word has already appeared in this post about 17 times. Especially in Enola Holmes, it became clear just what a variety of charming facial expressions she was capable of making, all of which speak to the inner fire of her personality.

There I go again.

I do think it's time for me to pump the brakes a bit on all this, though, and let's call my blog a bit of my own personal confessional, where I tell you things in order for them to stop having such a hold over me and to make them less shameful.

I think here about how a critic, probably especially a male critic, has to be careful how they write about an actress, which I think is something I've discussed before (though I don't remember when so I can't search for it among my more than 3,000 posts). I think about how the New Yorker's Anthony Lane got in trouble for sexualizing Elastagirl in his review of The Incredibles 2, which I always have in the back of my mind any time I'm trying to convey that an actress or a female movie character has that certain something. Words like "beguiling" and "incandescent" and "effervescent" might make their way into such a review, though it appears I have not used any of these three words in connection with Millie Bobby Brown.

So what am I trying to do in this post?

I don't know, just maybe it's my way of trying to tell myself not to be so head over heels for this woman (yes, she's a woman not a girl) the next time I review a movie of hers, which seems likely not to be until 2025 as her four future credits on IMDB include only one film that is in post-production, while the others are all in earlier stages. 

I've told the world I find her darling enough times, and even once is probably superfluous when it's something they can so plainly see with their own eyes.

*Note after publishing: I think it's funny that I devote as much mental energy to this person as I do and yet I can never remember if it is Milly Bobbie Brown or Millie Bobby Brown. I've fixed it so it is both consistent and correct now, I believe. 

The sadistic delay

Note: In this post I am using the term "he" instead of "he or she," because it's quicker and because the post more generally involves the actions of male characters than female characters. I am not trying to sideline women. Thank you for your understanding.

I was watching a movie last week -- I don't remember which and it doesn't matter, as you will discover in a moment -- in which a good character survived as a result of a delay in killing him by a bad character. 

I am going to call that moment "the sadistic delay," and I'm going to explain what I mean by that.

(But first: The movie in question wasn't Dune Part Two, but I thought an image of Feyd-Rautha would at least give the post a sense of immediacy. Plus he looks really badass, and whether he's actually guilty of this behavior or not, he's just the sort of villain who would be.)

A "sadistic delay" occurs when a bad character has the opportunity to kill a good character, but does not because he's got to savor the moment before applying the kill. He may only savor the moment for a few seconds, but in doing so, he botches his advantage and allows a third party to save the day, or even the prospective victim to save himself.

This is because bad people like killing too much to do it quickly.

And this has led to the survival of numerous heroes throughout the history of cinema.

Now, when a good character kills, he kills with a grim determination and plenty of regret. He capitalizes on his advantages and kills quickly. And afterwards, it is clear he is disturbed by having had to do this. But the previous transgressions of the the person he killed, in probably a kill-or-be-killed situation, meant there was no other choice.

A bad character?

He gets a sadistic grin on his face. He raises his weapon higher than it needs to be raised. He might throw a bit of triumphant shade at his prospective victim. He might even laugh.

And in that delay, which can last anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes if he wants to deliver a pre-kill victory speech, he usually lets his entire motivation in the movie go unrealized. (Though really, villain speeches are a different category of screenwriting transgression that numerous others have already written about.)

And yet this villain will do the exact same thing next time, if he survives this interaction. 

It's funny how hacky screenwriters can be when they want to be. They're so worried about making sure we know this is a bad character, that they will not resist any opportunity to remind us of this. The other 32 terrible things this person did in the movie? Maybe they don't mean anything if he doesn't preemptively gloat at the key moment of the narrative.

And this can pop up in the most ridiculous of scenarios. A villain can be getting beaten terribly in a battle, having lost most of his army or other support structures, and to any impartial observer would appear to be on the verge of utter defeat.

But if he thinks he has a moment where he is absolutely sure to finally kill this hero who has been getting the better of him?

Cue that sadistic grin and that sudden unwarranted confidence that totally misunderstands the dynamics of the current situation.

Because this person has a taste for killing, and perhaps this will be the most satisfying kill he has ever performed.

I say, savor it after the fact when you have already nuked the city or gotten the magic amulet. There will be plenty of time to gloat later on.

And they tell us villains are supposed to be smart. 

I am not an auteurist

Clarification of the subject: I am a big fan of the auteur theory. That is not what this post is about.

Yesterday morning I was very belatedly listening to an episode of The Next Picture Show, the podcast hosted by staff of the former website The Dissolve, in which they were discussing a pair of Sofia Coppola films: Marie Antoinette and Priscilla. The structure of the show is to compare a new release to a classic that it echoes, one each week in a two-week pairing, and choosing two films from the same director's career is not uncommon. (A recent show I listened to was their 400th, so they've had to stray from the purity of the conceit on plenty of occasions, plus are rapidly using up their available pool of "classic" films. Though I do love Marie Antoinette so in this case I think it qualifies.)

As the discussion progressed to Priscilla, I found two things very unsurprising:

Hosts Scott Tobias and Keith Phipps basically loved the movie.

Host Tasha Robinson, long branded the show's contrarian, did not love it, though she respected it. 

(Fourth host Genevieve Koski, who produces the show and sometimes doesn't appear in the main episodes, was somewhere in between.)

I described the above reactions as unsurprising, but that is only a criticism in the case of Scott and Keith, because I agree with Tasha and have the same basic reservations about Priscilla that she does.

It can be hard to defend Tasha Robinson. Although she is undoubtedly a critic with immaculate film coverage and is easily the most well spoken of the four, in terms of having a voice and a delivery made for podcasts, she can sometimes dominate the discussion and occasionally comes off as a blowhard. Plus there are all those contrarian opinions, some of which are more defensible than others.

But you know what?

Give me a contrarian any day over a person who blindly rubber stamps the latest film from an acclaimed auteur.

Sofia Coppola certainly fits that description, perhaps more so than any other female working director. You know when you are watching a Sofia Coppola film. (Except, maybe, On the Rocks.) And I love Sofia Coppola, having named Lost in Translation my #1 film of 2003 and having felt very strongly about The Bling Ring, The Beguiled and the aforementioned Marie Antoinette.

But you know what? Coppola does not make a great film every time out, as evidenced by previous misfires Somewhere and the similarly aforementioned On the Rocks. Priscilla is better than those two, but it now joins that group, to some extent. (If you want my thoughts on the one feature film of hers I haven't mentioned, I want to like The Virgin Suicides more than I do, but I still respect it quite a lot.)

Scott and Keith appear to find Coppola incapable of misstepping. One of them also talked about how Somewhere, which had a decidedly middling reception at the time of its release, has lately been embraced as the classic that it is. Maybe I have to watch Somewhere again, but I doubt I would reach that conclusion.

Even On the Rocks was thrown some love. "It's her least essential film, but it's still pretty good." Um, no it isn't. 

Today I am interested in examining this compulsion.

If I were being truly cynical, I would say it stems from fear. If you think someone is going to call your critical bonafides into question if you don't like the latest movie from a respected auteur, you will find yourself emphasizing all the things you like about it, and dismissing anything that doesn't work for you.

But even in that case, you should be able to acknowledge the things that didn't work for you in a free-ranging, 30-minute discussion of the type they have on The Next Picture Show. Tasha was very reasonable in stating her concerns with the movie, which I won't rehash here (you can read my review if you want). It was like she was begging Scott and Keith to meet her halfway. Instead, they just kept doubling down, gainsaying anything that she said and coming across more like the contrarians themselves. Not in a disrespectful way, but more as a sign of their own recognition of the absurdity of their contrasting opinions, the other two were laughing in spite of themselves -- almost as though this were a snapshot of the podcast's core personality dynamic writ large. (I find it an interesting side note that the two men were the ones in favor of the movie directed by a woman, while the two women were critical of it.)

Or it could come from insecurity. If some people think a master made a masterpiece, and you did not see it that way, maybe the problem was with you and you didn't get something essential about it. I feel this sometimes especially about older classics that I am just seeing for the first time. But you have to have the confidence to state that something about a film doesn't work the way it should or as advertised, because I guarantee you there is someone else out there that feels the exact same way. 

Then it could just be a case of giving deference to a great artist. Even if they made a movie that was less than their best work, you don't want to denigrate their overall output in the way a mixed or negative review would do. It's almost like this awesome creative force doesn't have the power to withstand your pan. If anything, that person has a lot more power to withstand it than the fledgling newcomer would. 

I feel like none of these things are stumbling blocks for Tash. And this is why I will always defend Tasha. She may reach some conclusions I don't agree with, which is the nature of differing subjective viewpoints on films among the critical community. Worse, she may reach some conclusions where I can attack the logic of her reaching that conclusion, beyond the conclusion itself. But never do I think she has decided she likes a movie even before she has started watching it. I have exactly zero doubt that Tasha Robinson considers every movie on its own terms, and this is the sort of critic I fancy myself being, as well.

I'm sure Scott and Keith fancy themselves that sort of critic. What critic wouldn't. And in truth, I often admire them considerably more than I admire Tasha. They may not sound as professional in the podcast medium as she does, but their thoughts are always well researched and soundly argued.

The thing is, I can't get over the idea that on some level, they aren't being as critical as they should be about the work of a favorite director. They are not going to surprise us. They are going to provide us reactions that fall well within the critical mainstream.

Take their favorite films of 2023, for example. Scott went for The Zone of Interest. I believe Keith went for Killers of the Flower Moon. (Genevieve, who is being neglected in this post, was not on that show. Part of her problem is that she is a TV editor and has to watch a lot more TV than movies, so she might be selecting from 20 movies for her best of the year, and 15 of them would be films discussed on the podcast.)

Tasha? She anointed Saltburn as her #1.

Now, Saltburn is my least favorite of those three films, but it was still barely in my top 30 for 2023. (Oops, no, it was my #33.) And I find it to be a much more interesting choice, one that does not just elevate the most recent offering from one of the industry's undisputed greats. 

Bill Skarsgard seems like a good Crow

I go through long periods of neglect of my ReelGood email account, such that I sometimes come back after a month and discover I've missed invites to ten screenings I might have otherwise liked to attend. These are inexcusable lapses in doing my due diligence as the editor of the site, but I have an excuse that's even less excusable: I just don't remember to check. 

Yesterday I checked, though, and one of the emails hyping an upcoming movie was about the remake of Alex Proyas' The Crow, which I vaguely remembered was a thing but had not thought about in ages. As it is releasing in a couple months, it happens to be timed -- or maybe was intentionally timed -- to the 30-year anniversary of the original, which was of course overshadowed by the on-set death of Brandon Lee.

The original film had huge significance for me in 1994, when I was 20 turning 21, and when I was transported by its triumvirate of primary strengths: the soundtrack, the action sequences and the overriding sense of melancholy, which exudes from the themes of the movie itself, and then is expanded exponentially by Lee's death of a gunshot wound from a prop gun.

I'd ordinarily bristle at the idea of remaking it, or maybe more accurately, of re-adapting the comic on which it was based. I know Alex Proyas bristles at that idea. And I think this was one of the reasons, other than its incredibly poor quality, that I disliked The Crow: City of Angels as much as I did.

But the casting of Bill Skarsgard gives me hope.

The trick Lee pulled off in the original film was to be both sympathetic and a little -- or maybe a lot -- insane. That describes Skarsgard's cinematic attributes to a T.

In fact, I would go so far as to describe Skarsgard as one of the top two creepy weirdos introduced to us in the last five to ten years, alongside Barry Keoghan. 

Surely this impression was cemented by his role as Pennywise the Clown in It and its sequel. Whatever you ultimately thought about those films, it is inconceivable to me that you weren't scared as fuck by Skarsgard. He is so demented, so sinister, and so giving his all that, if I remember correctly, you see involuntary ropes of spittle emanating from him on multiple occasions. Many actors play evil. In these movies, Skarsgard was evil.

The thing is, this is not Skarsgard's only mode. Not by a longshot.

One of the great fakeouts (SPOILER ALERT) about 2022's Barbarian was the fact that Skarsgard is not the creep. Oh, he seems like he would be/will be, and they are milking our preconceived notions of the actor for everything they're worth. But as we are watching this charming man be charming and kind, and just waiting for the other shoe to drop, and then realizing it isn't going to drop and we are just watching a charming man be charming and kind, it serves as a revelation about this actor and the things of which he is capable.

Well, I think he will get to use both modes in The Crow. At some point in this movie, Skarsgard will make you feel the pain of what has been taken from him, and then in the next moment do something with his eyes that will make you want to go run and hide in the corner. 

Another bit of hopefulness: Danny Huston is also in the cast, presumably as a villain. There's something alien in his aloofness, too, and I think the movie could use this to good effect.

Then again, The Crow is also directed by Rupert Sanders of Ghost in the Shell remake fame, which takes away a little of my hope.

Please drag Sanders, and this movie, to the finish line, won't you Bill?

Blaxploitaudient: Petey Wheatstraw

This is the third in my 2024 monthly series watching blaxploitation movies.

Petey Wheatstraw was, in some ways, the first movie on my list for this series.

I'm being a bit cheeky when I say this. Of course, as soon as Elvis Mitchell's documentary Is That Black Enough for You?? gave me the idea to do this series, I realized that Shaft was my biggest blind spot and the movie I would watch first.

But Petey Wheatstraw was on my Kanopy watchlist even before I saw Mitchell's movie, just waiting for its perfect occasion to rise to the top of that list. That didn't happen until this series, unfortunately -- but then again, previous neglect of blaxploitation is why I'm doing this series.

Of course, part of the reason it came up for viewing as early as March was that a bird in the hand beats two in the bush. When something is already available to you on streaming, it tends to jump ahead of things where you have to shell out some money to see it (as I did with the first two movies, each chosen specially for their months for different reasons).

Another good reason to watch it: It stars Rudy Ray Moore, the character played by Eddie Murphy in Dolemite Is My Name, which was my #14 movie of 2019. Perhaps Dolemite would have been a better Moore movie to watch, but Dolemite isn't on Kanopy -- though the movie he made the year before Petey Wheatstraw, The Human Tornado, is. By getting to it early, it left me with a chance to watch one of these films later in the series, if I really dug Moore.

So, did I really dig Moore?

In parts I did. There is definitely a goofy charisma there that explains why he was popular within this milieu in the late 1970s. (Made in 1977, Petey Wheatstraw is now the newest movie I've seen in this series by more than five years.)

I think I thought he would be more consistently entertaining, which is a funny comment to make about a performer who has stylized himself on the principle of being loud and outrageous and chaotic -- in short, inconsistent by his very nature. But, I can't deny that I hoped Petey Wheatstraw would see its ideas through just a bit more coherently.

Of course, other times I just reveled in the joyous nonsense of it all.

There is not a lot of plot in Petey Wheatstraw, but the chaos is baked into the movie from the very beginning. In a device I recalled from Michael Winterbottom's Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story -- because I haven't actually read the novel on which it was based -- the title character, after some opening introductions to the audience, says he recalls his own birth. So of course we go straight to a scene of this birth, and it's immediately hilarious. Petey emerges from between his mother's legs as a boy of about eight or nine years old, and the first thing he does is start wailing on the doctor, who runs screaming from the shabby house where he's been born. This leads to an immediate scolding by his mother, which adds further hilarity to the affair. No one seems surprised by the fact that a newborn should be as large as he is, should be able to talk or hit people, and should be in a position to even understand what it means to be scolded.

It might have been something to sort of follow Petey through this picaresque childhood, but pretty soon we get to the main plot. Petey is a standup comedian about to open a new club, but that means he's drawn the ire of competing comedians Leroy and Skillet, played by Leroy Daniels and Ernest Mayhand. Apparently, they are so eager for their act to retain the spotlight over Petey's that they are willing to kill for it, and so it is that Petey and a bunch of his cohorts are assassinated -- at a funeral for a boy killed in the previous scene, no less.

Sound grim? Well don't you worry. The corpses littered on the church steps are soon revived, as showing up on the scene is none other than the devil. (He's played by G. Tito Shaw.) Oh, I think I forgot to tell you -- the movie sort of has a subtitle that I don't find used as part of its official title anywhere, so I'm not using it here. But the full title, if you chose to use it, would be Petey Wheatstraw: The Devil's Son-in-Law. (I always like a title that rhymes.)

So Lucifer is happy to reverse what has just happened over the last five minutes if Petey will agree to sell his soul and marry the devil's daughter. We don't see her face right away, but Petey gets a look at it, and he assures us that she is ugly. But, it's better than him and all his friends being dead. So the scene rewinds and Petey has saved everyone, plus been given a special walking stick belonging to the devil that has magic powers. 

After this promising setup, there's a fair bit of meandering in the middle of the movie -- things happening that don't make much sense, and are more enjoyable to appreciate on the level of sheer spectacle. For example, at one point Petey turns an abusive man into a poodle, but I don't think this man or the woman Petey's saving from him have anything else to do with the rest of the movie.

By the end, when Petey tries to fool the devil into getting out of his commitment to marry the girl, the movie has found some of its purpose again, as well as a wild spirit that it never lost in the first place.

I won't say I loved Petey Wheatstraw. It's the first movie in this series to get a technically thumbs down star rating, as it ended up at 2.5 stars on Letterboxd. But the more curious thing was that the things I did like about it were not tied to Moore himself, or not as tied to him as I expected they would be. That speaks well both of the supporting cast and of the wild imagination of writer-director Roquemore, who I would not be surprised to learn was also a character in Dolemite Is My Name. (Does not appear to be the case, though Mike Epps does play Jimmy Lynch, who is Petey's closest friend and second billed in the Petey Wheatstraw cast.)

When I do give the movie only 2.5 stars, it's certainly not because I wanted it to be made any better than it was. The low-tech special effects and makeup are of course a huge part of the fun, and I suspect they wouldn't have wanted to make this movie any better even with five times the budget. This is a movie that is what it wants to be.

I'll see another such movie in April, title undetermined as of now. 

Ed Harris in the control room double feature

With the projector still set up in the garage for the Oscars yesterday morning on Labour Day, I decided to make use of it with two more movies. Which is actually a lot less than I would usually watch, but this is one three-day weekend where we didn't get the projector set up until the final of the three days, in part due to my wife's preference for watching Spaceman together on Saturday night in the living room rather than on the projector. (It's been the hottest three days of the summer, even though it is now autumn. And even though the garage is the coolest place in our house if all else is equal, it doesn't stand a chance against an air conditioned living room.)

One of the movies was one that my son and I started the day before, watching only half of it. The other was a classic from the 1990s that I've seen only once.

Both had Ed Harris occupying a position of dominance in the command center for a project involving the coordinated efforts of thousands of people. 

If I had been looking for a true thematic double feature for Apollo 13, I might have gone with Space Cowboys, which I have never seen and which was one of the "if you liked this, you'll like this" offerings from Stan after Ron Howard's film had finished. But in the time we paused to have dinner and usual nightly chores, I decided I wanted to fish for a previously seen film that I hadn't seen recently -- and The Truman Show, which I only saw that one time in the theater, was a good match.

First how we got on to Apollo 13, which is my #57 film on Flickchart but which my records tell me I haven't watched since before 2006. 

A few weeks ago, my ten-year-old started telling me what he had learned about the doomed Apollo 13 mission, possibly collected from YouTube. (Hey, maybe if YouTube is educating our children on NASA, it isn't all bad.) Of course my mind immediately went to one of the five 1995 best picture nominees, which had such an impact on me the last time I saw it -- which was probably the second time overall -- that it rocketed up (no pun intended) into the stratosphere (pun intended this time) of my Flickchart, where it regularly beats films you'd think I might like more. Probably a good time to test my loyalty to it.

I did wonder if it would be over the head of my son, but he was the one who was telling me about little things they had to do aboard the ship in order to save it (and themselves) from becoming space junk. Plus, he's pretty advanced for his age, and an interest in space exploration seems like the sort of old-school ambition I'd like to nourish in my children.

I then wondered briefly, given that it is obviously a film intended for adult viewers, whether there would be any language that I wouldn't want him to hear, understanding that he has heard it all before -- just maybe not in films sanctioned by me. I didn't think so, and true enough, there was only the "mild coarse language" promised in the trigger warnings at the beginning. (He asked me why it didn't say "mild curse language," allowing me to define "coarse" for him and explain that "curse" is a noun rather than an adjective.)

What I didn't properly calculate, in a movie all about calculations, is that this is still a ten-year-old and many of the concepts being discussed would be way over his head. Many of the concepts are way over the head of even a 50-year-old.

I'm sure this contributed to the fact that we watched only 55 minutes of a 2 hour and 20 minute movie on Sunday afternoon, when finishing it off would have taken until about 8:20. Even in the air conditioned living room for this portion of the film, I was still secretly grateful that I properly interpreted his squirming and asked him if he wanted to continue the next day. With the heat and with us having gone to the beach earlier, I was all too eager to curl up with one of my late afternoon cat naps.

My son is at an age where he never wants to disappoint his daddy, so he elected to continue on Monday, even though I'm sure his various soccer games on his Nintendo switch and YouTube soccer videos on his tablet held more sway over him than the near-fatal misadventures of Jim Lovell, Fred Haise and Jack Swigert. (The first two of whom are still alive, I was pleased to see on Wikipedia after the film ended.) So we continued watching on Monday, this time in the garage on the projector, and this time with about the same amount of squirming, but only slightly more than half the movie to go.

In the end he said he liked it, and he did make a couple spontaneous comments along the way that proved his investment. However, he admitted that he didn't understand most of what was happening. I suppose the question is with a film like Apollo 13, is it important to understand exactly why their current crisis endangers their lives, or do you just need to know that they need to think quickly in order to save themselves? For me, I benefit from a pretty good understanding of the former, which makes the latter all the more tense. For my son, maybe it didn't quite reach that level.

I also think it is probably interesting for a child to watch a movie whose outcome they already know. He knew right from reporting to me the basic details of the Apollo 13 mission that they survived, otherwise he'd be talking about a morbid space tragedy and that's not the sort of thing that tickles the intellect of this particular kid. I tried to address the issue by saying that I thought the movie was incredibly successful and that the proof of this is that you feel tense and excited even though you know the astronauts made it back safely. Again possibly in an attempt to say what I wanted to hear, he co-signed this, albeit somewhat unenthusiastically. 

As for me, I think the #57 ranking on Flickchart was basically supported. Maybe it'll fall down into the 60s or 70s, but not much more than that. I had to fight back the tears when they finally splash down in the South Pacific. 

As an interesting side note: Apollo 13 is the fourth movie I have tagged on this blog that starts with the word Apollo, the others being the documentary about the first moon landing (Apollo 11), Richard Linklater's rotoscoped coming-of-age story centered around that moon landing (Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood) and a found footage horror about a hypothetical moon mission that never happened (Apollo 18). That Apollo 13 should be the best of those films -- though in a smaller margin over the first two than the third -- and only just now be getting its first tag on my 15-year-old blog is interesting indeed, and maybe a little sad. 

Landing (again, no pun intended) on The Truman Show was something I did after about five minutes of further scrolling on Stan. I wanted something short enough (since I do have to return to work today) yet also something with a bit of a grander scale to match the scale I'd just been watching. As an only one-time viewing, with that first viewing coming more than a quarter century ago, The Truman Show fit the bill perfectly. (And I noted that if The Truman Show were made today, it would have failed my first test for length, as it certainly would have been Apollo 13's 140 minutes rather than the 102 minutes it actually is.)

I was not necessarily the biggest fan of The Truman Show in 1998, in that there were people who embraced it more wholeheartedly than I did. Even as I say that, though, I'm checking my rankings for that year and find it at #10 overall -- which is more an indication of the number of films I ranked that year (58) than a true affection for the movie. I did always like it, but something had left me a little hesitant on it -- a feeling that has resulted in never watching it a second time.

Well, I'd say I probably liked it just a touch more than I remembered. I didn't have some big revelation about it, or a reading on it that seemed new to me. It's about what it's about tightly and efficiently, and I think it interestingly anticipates our fascination with reality TV, and sometimes our inability to separate a real person from a character we want to be subjected to dramatic things. 

Something I hadn't maybe considered about The Truman Show was its relationship to another Jim Carrey movie from that era that I adore, which is my #16 on Flickchart, The Cable Guy. Until this viewing I wouldn't have made the connection that both movies are about our desire to watch, and both movies feature a moment at or near the climax where a rapt audience effectively opts to change the channel and ask what else is on. As the more praised of the two movies, The Truman Show surely gets the credit for these thoughts that The Cable Guy does not -- but let's be real here, people. The Cable Guy predates The Truman Show by two years.

Two more quick thoughts:

1) I liked that before we have really been introduced to this world, we already see it falling apart -- literally as a way to preview its metaphorical collapse. One of the first things that happens to Truman is that he is almost hit by a light falling from the top of the dome, which might have not happened for ten minutes in a less efficient film. This also sets up how they explain away the weird phenomena Truman witnesses in the form of news broadcasts.

2) The efficiency of the script does, though, have a few narrative disadvantages. For one, I was sort of surprised that Truman never has it out with his "best friend" -- or so he thinks -- since he was seven, Marlon, played by Noah Emmerich. (Incidentally, Emmerich's entrance where he leads with a six-pack of beer has always been one of my enduring memories of this film.) Albeit only reading the dialogue that Harris' Christof is feeding into his ear, Marlon tells Truman that if everyone was in on a conspiracy against him, he'd have to be in on it too, and the last thing he'd ever do is lie to Truman. Clearly the actor playing Marlon does not like to read these lines, but he reads them, and he's never held accountable, which would certainly happen in today's longer version of this film. Then again, I like the fact that it is implied, through what happens in the story, that the betrayal of Truman by Marlon is so total, so callous, that he isn't even worthy of a big scene where Truman tears him a new one. Instead, Truman will just leave this world and never look back. 

And what about Ed Harris in all this?

Harris has a similar function but a very dissimilar status as a hero in the two films. In Apollo 13, he personifies the tireless, sleepless, unwilling-to-accept failure dedication of the many NASA employees not to lose these three men in space. Whether it's a particular sense of humanism or just his somewhat jingoist determination not to lose the first American in space on his watch, Harris' Gene Kranz does what needs to be done and does not rest until it's done -- and because he's such a cool customer, nary a hair on his head seems to be out of place.

In a film containing a lot more shades of gray than Apollo 13, The Truman Show's Christof is a lot more of a monster -- but he's not an uncomplicated monster. Yes, he is mostly driven by the vainglorious trappings of having created the most popular and longest running television show of all time. But it's also clear that on some level, he views Truman as a son, closer to him than any real person in his real life. When he therefore risks killing this surrogate son upon Truman threatening to leave him, it reveals significant complexities in the dynamics of this relationship. 

It is clear, though, that Harris was born to preside over a control room, because there is a third movie -- at least a third, possibly more -- I could have added to make this double feature a triple feature. It occurred to me that although his identity is not revealed until late in the movie, Harris plays the same role once again in Snowpiercer. Whether this was a conscious quotation of either of these two previous performances, or just something in Harris that suggests a man in (and possibly losing) control, only Bong Joon-ho may know.