Random rewatch: Time Bandits

It's not entirely accurate to refer to my Saturday night rewatch of Time Bandits as random.

First there was the fact that someone recently got the movie assigned from my Flickchart in the Facebook group Flickchart Friends Favorites Fiesta, where each month you are assigned to watch the highest ranked movie you haven't seen from another member's chart. The person really liked it -- I suspected she would from her tastes -- and the comments section engendered a bit of a discussion about the movie's ending, which multiple people found troubling. (It's a head scratcher to be sure, but I've never had a problem with it.)

Then there was Friday night's viewing of Jabberwocky, and yesterday's writing on The Audient about that disappointing viewing, which whetted my appetite for another Time Bandits viewing as a point of contrast and a bit of a palate cleanser to rid myself of the bad taste of Jabberwocky.

But the clinching reason I watched Time Bandits Saturday night was that I have a very periodic series on this blog called Random Rewatch, in which I use a random number generator to choose a movie on my Flickchart to rewatch, and once I've watched it, I do it again. 

Sometimes it takes years for me to watch the next movie. This time, it took a little under a year. Last June I rewatched Zack Snyder's Sucker Punch, and drew Time Bandits as the next movie. A very favorable draw, since the movie currently ranks 29th on my chart, but because I'd only last rewatched it in 2020, I was not in a hurry to put it on my schedule straight away.

But the confluence of recent events promoted it to the top of my viewing queue, and now, at the end of me writing this post, the next movie in the series can be selected.

Because I've written about Time Bandits a lot over the years -- including most recently yesterday -- I thought I would just give you a few takeaways from this viewing, even if they are thoughts I may have expressed in the past.

1) Yesterday I talked about how Jabberwocky was missing a good appearance by John Cleese, which Time Bandits does have. In fact, the appearance is so good -- even if it is over inside of five minutes -- that Cleese actually gets top billing in the movie. In fact, his name is the very first image of any kind against a screen of black when the movie starts. Either Cleese demanded it to do this favor for his friend Terry Gilliam, the co-writer and director, or Gilliam just thinks that highly of this brief contribution.

2) The actor who should actually be first-billed, if we were going only by the main character of the movie, is Craig Warnock as Kevin. Two things about this. One, I find it interesting that I had to wait for the closing credits to learn/remember his name. I am fairly likely to know the names of kid actors from formative movies for me in the 1980s. For example, I could tell you the name of every actor or actress in The Goonies. But for some reason, Craig Warnock is never a name I committed to memory -- and that could certainly be because Warnock never had much of a career after this, while Goonies like Corey Feldman and Sean Astin did. The other thing about this character is that Amazon's synopsis for the movie -- I rented it on Amazon as a convenience instead of having to hook up my old computer to watch it on DVD -- shows his name spelled as "Keven." Fortunately, I checked other resources and this seems to be just a typo.

3) Speaking of Gilliam as a co-writer, want to know his other co-writer? Michael Palin. That appears to be a course correction from Jabberwocky, which Gilliam wrote with some person named Charles Alverson. No wonder this is an infinitely better script. Alverson is listed in IMDB as an uncredited writer for Brazil, though nothing after that. Maybe that's why I don't love Brazil.

4) Speaking of Palin, I laughed the most during the two exchanges between him and Shelley Duvall, one in the Middle Ages and one aboard the Titanic. That's not news. But I did have a new takeaway about this, which is that the rule of three would have ordinarily meant they placed these two actors, with their various embarrassing physical issues (she's got "an enormous --" and we never hear what), in one more scene, either in the Battle of Castiglione scene with Napoleon or in the Ancient Greece scene. They didn't, and I think that's to the movie's benefit. They have priceless comedic timing and chemistry and one more might have ruined it.

5) I'm pretty sure the best comedic performance in the entire movie, though, belongs to David Warner as the Evil One. I relished it this time as much as I ever do. I don't have anything specific to say about that, but I thought five takeaways was a good round number.

You know I love Time Bandits. Let's let that be it for today.

But there's one more piece of business, which is to choose the next movie in this series.

There are currently 6477 movies on my Flickchart, so that's the number I am plugging into the random number generator as we speak. Let's see if I get something more challenging than my top 30 movies of all time.

Ooo, much more so. I got 6012, so this is going to be a movie I really don't like. And that movie is ...

The animated movie Doogal from 2005, which is based on a property my wife watched as a child.

I don't see anything to be gained from watching Doogal again, but rules are rules. I'll put it on the schedule sometime between now and 2030.

Adjacent to Python, not adjacent to good

Terry Gilliam directed or co-directed two of my top 50 movies on Flickchart, those being Monty Python and the Holy Grail (#41) in 1975 and Time Bandits (#29) in 1981.

In between, he directed one of the least funny turkeys I have ever seen.

That's 1977's Jabberwocky, which I finally saw last night on Kanopy. That delay seems unimaginable for a person who grew up steeped in Monty Python, and who, in fact, memorized an entire scene in Holy Grail which he can still quote today. (Which will actually come up in a minute.) But that's just an indication of how little people who liked Python actually talked about this movie, even though it features fully half of the Python players and is directed by one of them.

Based loosely (if at all) on the Lewis Carroll poem, Jabberwocky acknowledges its connection to Carroll by kicking off the action with that poem's famous opening: "Twas brillig and the slithy toves ..." I guess these words are being spoken, or at least thought, by a butterfly, because they end when a poacher (played in his one quick scene by Python Terry Jones) steps on and crushes the butterfly while tromping through the woods. A few moments later, this character is going to be skeletonized by the titular beast, unseen at this point, which at least set me up for something interesting.

Nope.

Poor Michael Palin, saddled with being the movie's main character and having to act out a movie's worth of bad ideas by Gilliam and co-screenwriter Charles Alverson. He keeps his chin up and at least is a beacon of sweetness within all this grossness and drudgery.

Yes, if there's something Monty Python collectively understand, it's the grossness and drudgery of the Middle Ages. Most of the characters in Holy Grail and in this portion of Time Bandits look like gnarled gnomes with bad teeth. Python think it's funny what cretins these people were, and mostly, they're right. Just think of the scene in Time Bandits where John Cleese's Robin Hood -- ah, what Jabberwocky might have done with a good dose of John Cleese -- is giving out stolen goods from the rich to the poor, but the price of each receiving their small amount of riches is that one of Hood's goons, with teeth practically coming out of his forehead, must punch them square in the face. And it's not just men, as this menace is knocking the block off of women as well.

That might not have worked, tonally, but by the time Gilliam had made Time Bandits, he knew a) how to pull off the tone and b) that small doses were all we needed. Jabberwocky is essentially one hour and 45 minutes of a goon punching you in the face, and it's as unpleasant as that sounds. 

There are jokes here about shitting, eating grossly, bawdy sexuality, inbred-looking royalty, terrible hygiene and the general awfulness of people. Under the right circumstances, some of this stuff might make me laugh. Since none of it did -- I literally did not laugh once -- each new flailing attempt just stacked the deck against this movie. The most I can say is that I appreciated what they were trying to go for once or twice, but they were quite far from achieving it.

Why does this stand in such stark contrast to Holy Grail and to Time Bandits, which also features Palin as well as Cleese? Is Charles Alverson that much of a detriment to Gilliam's comedic instincts?

Because this is, really, very close to those two movies in many respects. It looks shoddy, which is a feature not a bug of Holy Grail (and a product of its mid-70s origins to some degree). It has the bawdy humor that Gilliam explores more credibly in Time Bandits. There are even some things that are so directly explored in the earlier film that they would be considered rip-offs if the same creative talent were involved. For example, Palin's character is named Dennis, which is the same name as the character who talks King Arthur's ear off in the aforementioned "constitutional peasant" scene in Holy Grail. (You don't remember me aforementioning it? That's the scene I memorized when I was 14 and can still recite to this day.) There's a black knight in Jabberwocky, just as there is in Grail, and there are rude guards at the top of a tower, just as there are in Grail, although all they do is urinate off the tower. 

That's a good metaphor for what is being traded off between these two movies, though. Although the French guards delivering their complicated insults in Holy Grail has faded over time for me as one of that film's best sources of humor, more silly than masterful comedy writing, it's Shakespeare compared to two guys urinating off the top of a tower.

I do think this gives us an idea of how important the other Pythons -- who included Graham Chapman and Eric Idle in addition to the ones we've already mentioned -- were to the writing process of Holy Grail. When you only have some of them, and when the one who is directing it has not yet come into the visual powers that would later distinguish his career, you get a lowbrow, mean-spirited and unfunny slog like this. 

I thought this might make me a Gilliam completist, but just checking now, I see I have not yet seen The Brothers Grimm, one of two movies he directed in 2005 (along with Tideland). That one was not well received, so I won't rush to fit it in.

In a year in which I am reviewing outlier movies from favorite directors, Jabberwocky does not qualify. In fact, looking over Gilliam's filmography for this piece, there are actually more Gilliam movies I dislike than like. While the two movies I've discussed glowingly in this piece are obviously my favorites, Twelve Monkeys is also around my top 100 on Flickchart, clocking in at #127. From there, though, things drop off pretty steeply, as only one movie he has made since then -- and that's nearly 30 years -- has gotten three stars from me on Letterboxd, which is The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, and I may have been generous with that rating. All the others since 1995 are some sort of misfire, and I'm no fan of Adventures of Baron Munchausen, which came before Twelve Monkeys, either. (I like Brazil fine, but not as much as most people.)

In the grand scheme of things, it should not be a surprise that Jabberwocky stinks, because Gilliam missed more than he hit. And we now know he's not a great guy either, aligning himself with right-wing politics, so you know, he and his shitty 1977 movie can go eff themselves. 

Blaxploitaudient: Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song

This is the fourth in my 2024 monthly series watching blaxploitation movies that I have not previously seen.

I had been curious about seeing Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song -- checking the correct number of A's and S's, and confirming -- ever since I saw the movie about the making of that movie, made by the son of its director.

Mario Van Peebles directed the movie Baadasssss! in 2003, and he plays the role of his father, Melvin, who wrote, directed, produced, edited and starred in Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song back in 1971. As an interesting side note, Mario also appears in the movie as the 13-year-old version of the character his father plays for the rest of the movie.

Having vaguely understood that this was a significant movie in the history of blaxploitation, I found that a little funny because I never considered Mario Van Peebles to be quite that black. Now, it's highly problematic to tell somebody they aren't "black enough," and that's not really what I mean. More than anything, I mean that Mario Van Peebles never struck me as someone who particularly bucked the system or fought for the rights of people who looked like him. I didn't see any of the Mario Van Peebles movies that might have undercut my impression of him -- for example, New Jack City is a notable omission. But he always profiled as someone who went down easily and was not very confrontational.

His father's movie does not go down easily and is highly confrontational.

In fact, at first, I had no idea what to make of it. This is a genuine arthouse movie, the first such I've encountered in this series. While the movies I've seen so far have showcased both the grit and the humor of blaxploitation, they have all stayed within bounds in terms of the narrative. Even a fairly outlandish narrative like the one in Petey Wheatstraw is still something that is more or less easy to follow.

Well, Melvin Van Peebles wanted to make this movie his way. He had made the studio film Watermelon Man the year before in 1970, and apparently didn't take to the rules and restrictions of a studio film. So he blew that all up and made a movie so experimental that it leaves you scratching your head for large quantities of it, until at some point you decide it might be brilliant.

There isn't much of a plot in the movie, and what is there has been forgotten to me in the nine days since I watched it. (I really would have been better off writing this post straight away, but life doesn't always work out that way.) What I can tell you is that the main character, who bristles against the system the whole movie, is known for his "sweet back" and for having intercourse with various women as a sort of performance art in groovy settings that are into that sort of thing. (Er, whorehouses I guess.) At some point in his young adult life he runs afoul of the police, getting caught in a scenario where the cops were trying to frame him and a couple of the officers ended up being killed. This puts him on the run for most of the movie as corrupt and blatantly racist officers try to track him down, and we see his interactions with various other characters throughout. (Including, I was pleased to see, a young John Amos as a biker, who is billed as "Johnny Amos.")

The movie has all sorts of elliptical editing, quick cuts, half-seen camera angles, interesting uses of close-ups and slo-mo, and a soundtrack of what I might call "protest soul" by Brer Soul and Earth Wind & Fire that is equal parts joyous, chaotic and desperate. This movie is a scream of rage against the establishment in the package of a cool 70s movie that is constantly in dialogue with the racism of society, but rarely in ways you can easily parse.

If you want to understand where this movie is coming from, in the opening credits it describes itself as starring "the black community," and is dedicated to "All the Brothers and Sisters who had enough of the Man." In reading up a bit more about it now, I see it is rightly described as a "picaresque." That's a good word and I should use it more often.

I see also that the film is considered instrumental in the creation of the blaxploitation genre. So if I am considering its style and rhythms to be an outlier in what I have seen so far, that may be because other blaxploitation films realized that they could not be quite so abstruse and still connect with an audience, even though SSBS seemed to pull that off just fine. (And while we're talking about the inception of blaxploitation, I should say that two of the films I've watched, Shaft and They Call Me Mr. Tibbs!, are actually direct contemporaries of SSBS, so which chicken hatched out of which egg at which time is a subject of some uncertainty and/or disagreement.)

I was flummoxed by large sections of this film, and it took me a really long time to decide it was not a slog. The realization I really had, as I was going, was that this movie did not want to feed me easily understandable narrative beats with conventional satisfactions. That's beside the point of what this movie is trying to accomplish, as this movie defines itself by being different. And the technique applied to making it distinct represents a true artist's understanding of the tools of cinema, and how to blow them up and use them in confronting ways. You can't make something so shaggy and ragged unless you understand exactly the things against which you are contrasting it.

I doubt I will ever see Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song again, but I respect it immensely -- and I think there is a good chance it will make me curious enough to revisit Mario's homage to his father, who was still living and continued to be so until 2021, the aforementioned Baadasssss!

On to May.

Audient Outliers: True Lies

This is the second in a 2024 bi-monthly movies reconsidering a single outlier in the career of a director whose work I otherwise champion.

I may not love every James Cameron movie I've ever seen, but they all would receive at least 3.5 stars from me on Letterboxd -- with one exception. (Emphasis on "I've ever seen," as I am not a Cameron completist. I have not seen Piranha II: The Spawning.)

That exception is True Lies, which I laughed and groaned through during my single viewing in the summer of 1994.

One of those sounds positive, but I was laughing for the wrong reasons. (Actually, there's one really legitimately funny joke in the movie, which a friend of mine and I would quote back and forth. When Bill Paxton puts Jamie Lee Curtis' head in his lap while he's driving his convertible, and a surveilling Arnold Schwarzenegger and Tom Arnold notice this, Tom Arnold quips "Maybe she's sleepy." For some reason we always thought his line delivery there was hilarious.)

The fact that the best joke in this movie is one about implied blow jobs really gives you an idea of how the tone is off in True Lies. And that's the problem I still have with the movie today. 

In case you need reminding, this is a film where Schwarzenegger's spy character spends the majority of the movie -- I think it's fair to say that -- spying on his own wife to see if she is cheating on him. It's pretty gross and it really goes against the good guy persona Schwarzenegger had been cultivating in his last few movies, especially the delightful Kindergarten Cop. 

The thing is, True Lies actually sees him as a good guy rather than a jealous creep, and that's part of the problem.

If he were just obsessed with the possible adultery as a result of being an insecure fool, that would be one thing. But he becomes kind of a creepy perv -- there's that word "creep" again -- when he concocts a ridiculous and logistically improbable scenario where he's going to sit in a darkened hotel room as she strips down to the sexy lingerie he asked her to wear, all while using a series of pre-recorded phrases on a tape recorder so she won't know it's him. 

Set aside for a moment that this is twisted and needlessly perverse for a mainstream movie. What I want to know is, how the hell did Harry Tasker think this would even work? Any movie that relies on someone using pre-recorded dialogue on a tape recorder strains all credibility for me -- yes, even the bit in Ferris Bueller's Day Off -- but this just takes that way over the top. You get the sense that it's really important that Helen does not identify that it's Harry there in that room, yet he takes all sorts of risks, like trailing a flower down her face after he's told her to keep her eyes closed, while relying on a highly flimsy setup with very little chance of succeeding. Given how bizarre it also is on a character level, that scene should have just been pulled altogether.

Though in 1994, I wasn't really liking True Lies even before that. The cold open is competently executed and I have fairly fond memories of Schwarzenegger riding his horse on an elevator as he pursues the Arab terrorists who are the villains in this film. (One element that dates it, as Arab terrorists as villains in a movie today would just promote unhelpful anti-Islamic sentiments.) But I remember finding the setup to be lacking, the set pieces not doing enough to make up for it, and then the whole thing being sexist and gross.

If you are considering similar sorts of filmmakers being on a continuum from prestige to hack, you'd ordinarily put James Cameron on the prestige side (maybe with Christopher Nolan even above him) and Michael Bay on the hack side, with maybe Zack Snyder in between them. In True Lies, though, it's like Cameron's inner Bay came out. (It would have to be pre-Bay, though, since Bay had not yet made his first film in 1994.) The focus on the body of Jamie Lee Curtis in this movie is fairly shameless, not only in the stripping scene, but elsewhere. You get a clear view of her cleavage for most of the last 30 minutes of the movie, and what's worse, she's acting a bit like Kate Capshaw acts in the second half of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, always complaining and screaming and requiring saving.

I feel like this movie was a misstep for both Schwarzenegger and Cameron, and yet I feel like it is basically seen as of a piece with the other star vehicles for the former and films for the latter. Sure, True Lies had stiff competition from other Cameron movies in the 1990s, as this movie was bookended by the stone-cold classics Terminator 2: Judgment Day on one side and Titanic on the other. Tough to compete with that. Most people, though, would probably consider True Lies the equal of a film like The Abyss, when I really think that's being unfair to The Abyss.

My opinion of the movie did not change this time around. I will say, however, that it has some moments that I think are pretty iconic, such as:

1) The shot of Arnold as he swims under water while there is an explosion going over him. I doubt Cameron was the first person to do that shot, but I feel like that shot gets used a lot in montages or Oscar clips. 

2) The limo falling away as Arnold grabs on to Jamie Lee's arm from the helicopter.

3) The fight atop the harrier jet. It's ridiculous, but in a good way. 

4) This exchange of dialogue while Arnold is on truth serum, which may actually qualify as the film's second good joke:

Helen: "So have you ever killed anyone?"

Harry: "Yeah but they were all bad."

True Lies is not bad. It's misguided, but it's not bad. 

I don't really think it's good either, though. 

Probably the most interesting thing about it is it's weird existence as a series of questionable choices shoved into a really expensive action movie package, and its dated gender politics and Islamophobia. 

And speaking of that Islamophobia ... one thing I discovered on this viewing, and I'm glad to have discovered it so I can stop making this mistake, is that I thought Kiwi Cliff Curtis played the lead villain, Salim Abu Aziz. I've always thought that and I've mentioned it to people on occasion.

He's actually played by Art Malik. You'll have to let me know if you think the two are similar enough for me to have made this mistake legitimately, or if I was just an idiot.

Here's Art:

And here's Cliff:

There's definitely a similarity. And the fact that Curtis appears in Avatar: The Way of Water makes me think Cameron sees the similarity too. 

Has Jon Cena surpassed the other wrestlers?

There have been professional wrestlers-turned-actors as long as there has been professional wrestling. We all remember how Rowdy Roddy Piper starred in the cult classic They Live, and that Hulk Hogan tried his hand at acting there for a while, with terrible results. There would be other examples I'm sure.

But we are now living in a golden age of actors who were once wrestlers, and in fact, who found acting to be such a better way to pay the bills that they stopped wrestling entirely. (Of course, their age, and a desire for a less strenuous activity for their bodies, were likely also factors in this.)

The one who paved the way for this new generation was Dwayne Johnson, and I'll mention his stage name because we're talking about wrestling here: The Rock. He was the one who made us realize that ringside charisma could really carry over to movie star charisma, and that if he didn't naturally have the performance instincts to become a decent actor, he had the building blocks to learn them. And despite some obvious examples of on-screen struggles, he has become a genuinely capable actor able to play a variety of different modes, even comedy quite effectively, as well as one of the biggest movie stars and highest paid actors.

Then came Dave Bautista, who we would still likely consider the most technically skilled actor to emerge from wrestling. Bautista let us know early on through his role in Guardians of the Galaxy that he was an adept comedian, but he has also become a go-to guy for a big director like Denis Villeneuve, who doesn't have much of an instinct for comedy at all. Everyone who watches Dave Bautista on screen knows he has "it."

The johnny-come-lately, whom I have taken a long time to really accept, has been Jon Cena. I'm not sure what my primary hesitation was regarding Cena, except for the "Okay, prove it" mentality I have toward any wrestler who tries to transfer over to mainstream acting. I think some of the earliest movies he appeared in were not personal favorites of mine, such as Trainwreck, and then I think his face reminded me a bit too much of steroid heads I considered bullies back in high school.

Now, though, I'm wonder if Cena isn't close to becoming the standard bearer for wrestlers-turned-actors.

My Friday night viewing of Argylle is not really the appropriate occasion to write this post, both because his role in it is quite small and because I didn't like the movie at all. However, I'm writing it now because Argylle made me realize how much I'm seeing Cena, how interested casting directors are in casting him. And with good reason. When I saw Cena pop up in Argylle, I got an immediate jolt of optimism -- one that was unwarranted, unfortunately.

Cena did have more than seven minutes of screen time in another movie I saw recently, Ricky Stanicky, the latest from Peter Farrelly, and likely the best we could hope for from a latter-day Farrelly brothers movie. Although I opted for a 3.5-star rating on Letterboxd, I flirted with four stars, as the film reminded me of that mix of heart and gross-out comedy those brothers were capable of producing at their height. 

And a lot of that was thanks to Cena, who plays the title character -- a fictitious creation by a trio of friends on whom they blame everything from a Halloween prank gone wrong (in their youth) to the reason they have to miss a baby shower (now, as adults). Cena's character is actually an aspiring actor who does porno music parodies -- in other words, he sings a familiar pop song on stage in costume, but changes its lyrics to be X-rated -- in Atlantic City, but he agrees to play the role of this fictitious friend when their wives begin wondering why they've never met him. 

Anyway, this role could have been played very broadly, as a disaster with a heart of gold who only stumbles into not constantly ruining everything. Surely in part thanks to Farrelly, Cena gives this character a lot more than the traits the role calls for, and this comparative restraint was one of the things I liked best about the movie.

So to get back on track, how it is that I now view Cena as possibly the equal or even the better of Johnson and Bautista?

Well for one, those guys seem to be scaling back ever so slightly. If you take away his appearances as Drax the Destroyer -- which should be over now -- Bautista has only been appearing in about one film per year the last couple years. That seems to be by choice, and to be fair, he does currently have ten projects of all shapes and sizes that are scheduled for future release, according to IMDB. Johnson seems to be stepping back even more than Bautista. Since he had two high-profile movies in 2021 -- Jungle Cruise and Red Notice -- Johnson has had only one movie he's starred in, that being 2022's Black Adam. He had an uncredited appearance in the end credits of the last Fast and Furious movie, but that hardly counts.

Cena is only too happy to fill this void. Perhaps with the energy of being five years younger than Johnson and eight years younger than Bautista, Cena had five movie credits in 2023 and already the aforementioned two in 2024. Like the others, his IMDB credits are also littered with various WWE things, but I suspect many of them are running series that are listed near the top of their most recent activities simply because that's how TV shows are handled on IMDB.

But more than the quantitative advantages Cena currently has, he's got some qualitative advantages too. Cena seems a bit more committed to comedy than either of the other two, Johnson because he can't do it as well and Bautista because he seems eager not to be defined by Drax the Destroyer. Cena will gleefully show up and be funny, and in fact, now we kind of expect him to do that. And he doesn't disappoint. 

His work seems to have gone from "wait and see approach" to "possible comedy gold" with his involvement in The Suicide Squad and the series that has spun off it, which I still have not seen, but which I feel I can make positive assumptions about, that being Peacemaker. He understands how to be on tone in movies featuring almost a gleeful level of violence, where the comedy has to be just right in order to keep our stomachs from turning.

I've called Jon Cena the johnny-come-lately, but you know what? His first movie was 18 years ago, in 2006, when he was not even 30. It was called The Marine, and I watched it primarily because a guy I know had a significant supporting role in it. I didn't like that movie and I didn't like Cena in it, because 2006 was not a time when big muscle heads realized they needed to be self aware and not take themselves too seriously. But that's only a few years after Johnson started making movies, and a whole eight years before I first identified Bautista in the original Guardians. So by any reasonable assessment of things, these three are all contemporaries, with Bautista the johnny-come-lately of the three if any of them are -- which is also true because he started when he was a lot older than they were.

But I liked Dave Bautista instantly, and Cena had to earn it. Now that he's earned it, though, I am always pleased as punch to see him appear in a new film -- and his face doesn't even remind me of the chemically enhanced bullies who used to punch me on the shoulder in the hallways.

A month without going to the movies

Thought that roadside kangaroo did me in, now didn't you?

In my last post from a week ago, I raised the specter of that being the last post I would ever write, since there was a chance we would become roadkill after hitting some roadkill on our drive from Uluru to Darwin last Sunday morning. As you can see, that did not occur. We did, however, see more roving cattle, as well as a pack of about seven wild camels, which was delightful. (Let me not get into the long history of why there are camels in Australia. It's not the only fauna that thrives here without being native to this land. Damn humans.)

The long delay between posts, not being due to my death, was due to the hard crashing return to reality, as well as the de rigueur post-travel head cold, which slowed my movements for parts of three days. (Though I did work through it.) 

However, today I am writing about another long delay, or rather hiatus, which has just come to an end last night.

My viewing of Alex Garland's Civil War last night marked the end of 35 straight days without seeing a movie in the movie theater. 

When I mentioned this to my wife, she was quick to contradict me. She pointed out that I had just seen the 2022 Australian film Sweet As in the "theater" last Saturday. In a different version of events, I was intending to write about this viewing on this blog, in fact. But with returns to reality and head colds, I'll just move on.

I don't count that viewing. It was a free viewing in a cinema that was part of the hotel complex where we stayed. There's only one screen and they only show Australian films. Yes, it was a "big screen," in that it was larger than my living room television, but it does not count for the consideration of my current drought.

So yes, when I saw Love Lies Bleeding on March 14th, I had no way of knowing I was going on a month's long vacation from my second home. (The Sun Theatre in Yarraville, that would be.)

So now you will know why I haven't seen Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, Abigail, Back to Black, Late Night With the Devil, Monkey Man or Challengers, though that last one did just come out yesterday. My neglect of Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (shitty title) was intentional and totally free from regret. 

I'm not going to comb my records to compare this drought to other droughts. That's too tedious for a post I am barely squeezing out at the end of the day on a Friday to finally get something new up on my blog for the first time in a week. Besides, I'm sure I went longer than this in the time around my wedding. I was shocked recently to see some of the gaps that occurred in the beginning of 2008. For example, I only saw seven movies, full stop, in the month I got married (April 2008). 

But yeah, it's definitely been one of the very longest droughts of my adult life, though it does make sense. Even before we left to go on vacation for ten days, we had relatives in town for about five days before that. That whole two-week period was never going to be possible for going to the movies, and the two-week period before that was characterized by excitement over the beginning of the baseball season and a dearth of new movies that were really grabbing me.

In some version of events -- there is that hypothetical "some version of events" again -- the family and I would have gone to see Ghostbusters in a layover day in Darwin between legs of our adventure, but if you read my last post, you know we had to change our travel plans to avoid a 4:30 drive through the desert at night without phone service, which probably would have been closer to six with the extra care we needed to take when driving. We may try to see it this weekend, though I haven't heard anyone talking about it so it's probably bad.

Anyway, now I'm back in action and I may try to see Challengers this weekend as well.

If you want to know my thoughts on Civil War, well, I've done you the service of spelling them out in review form, which you can find here. Suffice it to say that it has jumped straight up near the top of my in-progress 2024 rankings. 

** Note following publishing: Duh, when theaters were closed during COVID, that was much longer than this. But, I had no control over that. 

Off the grid

It's not every day that I write about a movie I have not yet finished watching, but then again, these have been an unusual past ten days. 

I have not been off the grid that whole time, but I have indeed been to some of the most remote parts of Australia, where there was definitely no internet, as well as a non-zero chance that I might die.

Kind of like the characters in The Maze Runner, or so I would assume, since that's the movie I have not yet finished watching. 

I started it on our final night in Kakadu National Park, staying in a caravan park where I watched the previous movie I wrote about, a full week ago now: Billy Crystal's Here Today. I was there today, and internet gone tomorrow -- but I'm getting ahead of myself.

The Maze Runner was one of three movies I quickly downloaded during a short period of WiFi access at a visitor's centre -- forgive me for using the Australian spelling -- and I watched about half of it before going to bed last Saturday night. I usually try to power through a movie nowadays, even if I'm too sleepy, knowing that the experience of breaking it up over multiple days is never really satisfying. 

I figured to polish it off during the first night of our stay at Davidson's Arnhemland Safari Lodge, a truly off-the-map location north of Kakadu that we had to fly into using its own airstrip because some roads are still washed out from the wet season. If this were a different kind of blog, I'd tell you all about this experience, rather than just making a few mentions here and there of the sort of things we did. (See crocodiles? Yep. Go swimming in a swimming hole where there were no crocodiles? Yep. Catch and release giant barramundi? Yep. See amazing indigenous rock art? Yep. Die? Nope, thankfully, but I was keenly aware that some of the interactions with the crocodiles could have gone in another direction if the circumstances had not been favorable to us.)

But let's not get sidetracked from what this blog is actually about, which is movies.

Because of an inordinate amount of walking in unimaginable heat on our first day, I only had the energy for 20 more minutes of The Maze Runner that night before sleep did me in. (We never went to bed after 9:30, which is about two-and-a-half hours earlier than I usually go to sleep.) 

I tried to watch the last 30 minutes on Monday night, but guess what? Netflix had expired it on me. Yes, this is a good time to question why Netflix bothers expiring downloads of material that is free to me as a subscriber after 48 hours -- actually, it had to be less than that because it was already expired on the third night, even though I'd started watching it later than that time on the first night. If I didn't have too much else to tell you about, I could devote the whole post to this silly choice. 

Just watch the rest of it streaming, right?

Nope. Davidson's Safari Lodge does not have WiFi, or rather, it does, but the signal is so weak that they do not give out the password to guests. Apparently, if two people are on it at the same time, it takes down the whole thing, and they need it to run their booking system and, you know, contact the outside world if there is a major emergency. (I tried about 20 guesses to get the WiFi password, then gave up.)

This was the real off the grid part of the trip. For 72 hours I had no internet, which is not a thing I can remember happening since my honeymoon 16 years ago, though I'm sure it has happened. It was very weird being out there, isolated, not knowing if someone had assassinated the president or anything else that could happen when you are away from the news for three days. The thing I was most annoyed about was not being able to set my fantasy baseball lineups, but again, it's not that sort of blog.

When we finally returned to reality, we had about a day of internet, during which I caught up on all my baseball but not The Maze Runner. It was a busy 24 hours as we were also saying goodbye to the other two-thirds of our party, which included three grandparents, three others from my generation and two other kids, who were all off for different parts of Australia than we were.

Us? We were off to Uluru, once known as Ayer's Rock, a giant rock in the middle of the continent that is a sacred spot to indigenous people. That's where we are now as I write this. (Not actually at the rock. It would be very dark and the dingos would get us. We're at a resort about 15 kilometers away.)

To get here, we had to go off the grid again -- way off.

Due to a logistics mishap by my wife -- who does all the logistics for our family, so I do not blame her one bit when there is a logistics mishap -- we were flying into Alice Springs, which is about 450 kilometers from Uluru, and not the airport that is actually at Uluru. (Not at Uluru. That would also be strange for a sacred site. Some 20 kilometers away.)

When we finally realized this -- which would have been earlier if we were not off the grid for 72 hours at the eco resort -- we knew we had to change our flight to an earlier flight, because our current flight had us coming in around 7 p.m. to Alice Springs. If this had been a 7 p.m. flight into Uluru, the resort would have picked us up at the airport for free. But they did not have a free service to Alice Springs, some 4.5 hours away by car, and that's not a drive you start a 7 p.m., because there is mobile service for precisely 1.7 percent of that trip. You hit a kangaroo in the middle of nowhere, you are not getting to a hospital, and no one is going to save you from the guy in Wolf's Creek as he drives the roads looking for potential victims.

We didn't actually see any vehicles on the road that I thought looked like they might be driven by that guy, but he probably doesn't come out until after dark. We did not get to the resort by daylight, even arriving at around 1:30 on our earlier flight rather than 7 p.m. After faffing about at the airport for a while, trying to reach Qantas on the phone to resolve a conflict about our duplicate flight, and also trying to find a rental car we could drive only one direction and leave at Uluru (without success), we finally left around 2:30, which meant we would arrive at the resort around 7.

The sun sets before 7, but perhaps worse than that, for the time the sun is setting, you are driving directly into it. That means terrible visibility of the kangaroos who are most likely to come out in the gloaming, but also a need to maintain some semblance of your previous speed in order to get there at a reasonable hour. 

So yes, there was a white knuckle phase of about 45 minutes in which I was counting down the remaining time and kilometers before our arrival, calculating what distance I could walk for help should we need it, all the while scanning the roadside in the fading light as my wife drove. (I had driven the earlier part of the trip and thought I'd be taking over again. Maybe she didn't trust me not to hit a kangaroo.)

Since I am writing this, you can probably guess we did not hit a kangaroo. In fact, we did not even see a kangaroo, though there was one point where some random loose cattle were trying to cross the road right as we were reaching the spot where they were. Fortunately, my wife saw this in plenty of time.

So we arrived safe and sound and had multiple drinks over dinner to celebrate. After which I finished watching the new Netflix movie Scoop, which I downloaded while we were still in Darwin before flying out, all but 15 minutes of which I had watched on the flight from Darwin to Alice Springs.

At this point I am not sure exactly when I will finish The Maze Runner.

It's an appropriate movie, though, because -- as you probably know -- it features a number of young men trapped in the center of a maze, very much off the grid, without any memory of their lives before they were sent there, remembering only their names. Just like me for a couple harrowing days in two different remote parts of Australia, they have no contact with the outside world, and are just hoping everything will turn out well.

If this is my last ever post on this blog, it may be because we hit a kangaroo on our way out. Because we can't drop our rental car here, we also have to return to Alice Springs on Sunday for our flight back to Melbourne. The thing is, that flight is at 12:30. At a small airport like Alice Springs, you really only need to get there an hour early, maybe not even that. But that still means leaving the resort by 6:30 if we want to give ourselves a half-hour buffer for potential problems.

And at 6:30, the sun won't be up yet, meaning the roos may still be out and bouncing around the side of the road, unaware that there is even a thing called a car that could kill them and leave everybody inside that car dead as well.

Let's just hope they're winding down for the night by that point.

Avoiding a de-aged Billy Crystal

There are two common ways of showing an actor playing a younger version of his or her character: 1) make the actor look as young as possible, even if it's ridiculous; 2) cast a different actor.

Billy Crystal thought of a third way, and maybe it's the best way: Don't show the younger version on screen at all.

One of three movies I downloaded in the Kakadu National Park visitor center the other day, so as not to place too much stress on our limited amount of data (we don't have WiFi in our rooms here on holiday in the Northern Territory), was Here Today, Billy Crystal's 2021 film that I'd never heard of until it just popped on Netflix the other day. Tiffany Haddish is his extremely charming co-star.

Crystal's character is in the early stages of dementia, and there is a lot of reflecting back on his wife who died 20 years earlier. She's shown at the correct age in these flashbacks and is played by Louisa Krause. He's not shown at all.

How do they manage this? Well, the scenes are just shown from his perspective, where you can hear his voice but you never see his face. Which makes sense, because they are his memories, so he's not likely to appear in them now is he?  

If more filmmakers don't do this -- I should have specified that Crystal is this film's director in addition to its star -- then it could be because the first-person perspective is generally something filmmakers try to avoid. There's something -- uncanny is not the right word, but you get what I mean -- about seeing the world from the perspective of a particular character, meaning you don't actually see that character. It's kind of similar to if you are showing the world from the perspective of a family pet. It's not serious filmmaking.

But why can't it be? It is certainly the most realistic version of a memory. We are not trained to find a person speaking to the camera as a natural mode in fiction filmmaking, but it's not only closer to the truth, it also solves a lot of problems. No we don't have to worry about whether the younger actor they chose looks like Billy Crystal, or heaven forbid, we don't have to see the 73-year-old version of Crystal -- which is how hold he was when he made the movie -- appearing as a 40-year-old. 

Here Today has all sorts of clever ways of handling aging. Sharon Stone and Kevin Kline have guest spots in this movie, playing themselves as the stars of a hit movie Crystal's Charlie Burnz wrote 30 years ago. We see a clip from that movie, and it's Stone and Kline -- but they are both wearing Halloween costumes that feature masks, so we can't get a proper gauge on their ages.

The other person who appears as themselves, in a manner of speaking, is Jerry Orbach, who has been dead these past two decades. A crucial part of the plot has to do with a play Charlie wrote some 20 years ago, which starred Orbach. Of course this is not a real play, but the use of Orbach's real name definitely further places Charlie in our world. And I doubt anyone in Orbach's family was opposed to it. After all, this is comedy legend Billy Crystal we are talking about here.  

Defining the aughts style

The farther removed you get from a particular decade, the easier it is to see the hallmarks of that decade in the culture – most notably in things like wardrobes, hairstyles and technology, but certainly as well in an area that gives a showcase to all three: movies.

We all know what a 70s or 80s movie looks like, and movies from the 1990s are starting to have a certain flavor to them as well. But what of the movies from the aughts? We are either still too close to it, or those movies don’t have a defining quality that speaks to where we were as a culture at that time.

I may have found a defining quality.

Jaco Van Dormael’s Mr. Nobody, which I rewatched last weekend, has an interesting position of straddling two decades. It played film festivals in 2009, even receiving a ten-minute standing ovation at one of them, but then it had a very circuitous route to distribution, doing poorly on its initial run in Belgium and then even more poorly when it finally received a limited U.S. release in 2013. I saw it in early 2014 after it finally got its video release on the back of that U.S. theatrical release.

I was quite taken with the movie, giving it five stars on Letterboxd and bemoaning that I felt I couldn’t consider it for my best of the teens because of its technical 2009 release date. I still liked it quite a bit on this viewing, but I now properly see it as part of a distinct 2000’s trend at the movies: the head-trip movie involving causation, fate, alternate timelines, and romance. If butterfly wings make an assumed or actual appearance, all the better.

You might say some of these things didn’t really take over the culture until the last few years, as the multiverse has become a popular concept delivered at a level that it can be consumed by comic book fans (the MCU) and Academy voters (Everything Everywhere All at Once). The actual multiverse itself may not have taken off until then, but ideas of paths chosen or not chosen, and the sort of elevated indie style that characterizes a movie like Mr. Nobody, were huge in the 2000’s.

It may serve you better to be familiar with Mr. Nobody to understand why this movie qualifies so well for this particular 2000’s aesthetic, but let me give you a couple examples of the sorts of things you would find in these movies.

1) Time lapse photography. Any will do, but best is if there is an animal decomposing in chronological or reverse chronological order.

2) A section of the film where a throwback version of a scientist from a previous decade explains a concept that will have a secret relevance to the film’s themes.

3) Uses of montage and multiple film stocks.

4) Non-linear storytelling.

5) Dabbling in science fiction, preferably with at least one scene in space, even if (especially if) it runs contrary to the rest of the story.

6) A central tragic romance.

Now, you could just say I’m fresh off Mr. Nobody, which contains all these things, so I am just listing characteristics of this particular movie. That may be. But you can find elements of these things in other big movies from the decade, some of which were written by (or inspired by) Charlie Kaufman but some of which have no connection to Kaufman and just pick from things that were in the air at the time.

Coming at the end of the decade, Mr. Nobody feels like a particular summation of what we learned during the past ten years of filmmaking. This piece would probably be stronger if I went and listed a number of other films that exemplify what I’m talking about, and even stronger if the best example I can think of, Cloud Atlas, weren’t from 2012, two years after the decade ended. But as it happens I'm on vacation right now. I suppose also it’s possible it was more of a 2005 to 2015 thing.

In any case, the real point of writing this post is that I now realize we are far enough away from those years to have certain films feel like a true time capsule of that era, and Mr. Nobody does that more so than most. It’s still a really good movie, and well worth the viewing if you haven’t seen it. But instead of feeling as original to me as it did in 2014, it now feels like the consummate example of a number of films that clearly inspired it.

Werewolves not swearwolves -- nor cookies

When I first heard the title of the werewolf movie Ginger Snaps, I thought it was a play on the name of that old cookie -- and then seeing that the title character had red hair just gave it another layer of meaning. (The "swearwolves" reference in the title is just a quick and loving nod to What We Do in the Shadows, which will make no further appearances in this post.)

But as I was watching, I realized there is a third meaning, and it comes if you say the title as a sentence.

This is a movie about a character snapping -- and boy does she ever.

She doesn't snap the way the title character of Carrie snaps, where she's taken as much abuse as she can take and then she starts fucking shit up. But Ginger does get bitten by a werewolf, which means she becomes a werewolf, which means she has indeed "snapped" and taken leave of what tethers her to her sanity/reality.

I wasn't sure if I was enjoying this movie's low budge vibe at the start, but I did get into it and ended up liking it quite a bit by the end.

What role my third interpretation of the title played in that enjoyment, I cannot say for sure. 

Music first

A childhood friend of mine wrote the music for the very good documentary The Greatest Night in Pop. Which is kind of a funny thing to do, since most of the music we hear in the movie is snippets of "We Are the World."

But he did have a very good song that accompanied the opening credits, and for that he got the "music by" credit. A richly deserved credit for a really good musician and a really good guy.

When he posted about it on social media, though, perhaps the most interesting thing about the credit was revealed: it was the first one in the movie.

Considering that his contribution was "only" that bit of music we hear for about a minute over the opening credits, it's a strange position of prominence for his credit. (Please note the quotation marks around "only." It's a great honor, he performed it well, and it's a lot more than I could do.)

After watching Frida the other day, I've determined that this appears to be a thing.

I wasn't looking for the contributions of Victor Hernandez Stumpfhauser -- that's some name -- the way I was with my friend Goh Nakamura, but I did notice that Mr. Hernandez Stumpfhauser was also listed as the first credit in Frida. 

It's not something you would ever see in a feature film, so I'm trying to figure out what it is about a documentary that's different.

For one, there are no actors in a documentary. (Or in most documentaries, anyway.) The feature films that do still have opening credits are likely to lead with the names of the actors, adhering to a universal convention that no one questions. (Well, perhaps other people who worked on the film would dispute that they are the most important people in the film, but everyone else accepted it long ago.)

So if we aren't going to open the documentary credits with the music, I guess we need to figure out what other credits could potentially supersede that. And for that I will check both of these movies, because they both are still accessible to me on Netflix and Amazon Prime.

After the music credit, the credits in Pop go:

Music Supervisor, Director of Photography, Editor, Archive Producer, Executive Producer, Executive Producer of USA for Africa, Co-Producers, Producers (three times), Produced by, Director. (Let's not even get started on how producer credits are doled out and the distinctions between them that are only understood by people in the industry.)

After the music credit, the credits in Frida go:

Animation by, Editor, Supervising Editor, Executive Producers (three times), Produced by (three times), Director.

In Frida, if you were trying to showcase a truly distinctive role on this film, you could have gone with the animation first. I'm not saying the music was not distinctive, I'm just saying the thing about this movie is that it animates Frida Kahlo's paintings. You are going to remember that a lot more than you are going to remember the music, even if it's great.

If we were to look at the most similar role in The Greatest Night in Pop -- as in, a visual component about the film that was memorable -- it would probably the archive producer you would honor, because the priceless archives of America's greatest musicians rubbing elbows in one room are the thing you talk about after watching Pop.

Since executive producer positions are often given out as honoraria -- the joke in the industry is that if you want to kiss up to/placate someone, you offer them an executive producer credit -- they could have intensified the butt-kissing my promoting them to the top of the credits. But maybe even a cynical producer knows the executive producer does not deserve that sort of prominence.

Because you typically backload the "most important" roles -- producer and director, as well as writer in a fiction film -- those are not options. Editor? Although editor was third in Frida after music and animation, that job is usually closer to the big three listed at the start of this paragraph in terms of coming closer to the end of the credits than the beginning.

Music it is, then, I guess.

And hey, I have no problem with it. Don't misconstrue my examination of it here. A memorable musical score does wonders for a good movie. It can even elevate a not-so-good movie.

I had just never noticed this before, and then I noticed it twice in two months. (A newspaper editor would tell you that three of something makes a trend. I guess I'm going with two.)

I will keep my eye open for it going forward.

Hiding Sydney Sweeney

You know how when you've got a guilty conscience about something, something always seems to come along to thrust that thing into the forefront of your thoughts?

I've got a little thing for Sydney Sweeney. I don't mind admitting it to you, dear reader. I might not like to admit it to my wife, but she is not one of my readers so we can just discuss it among ourselves. 

It's nothing to be ashamed about, really. To consume popular entertainment is to come into regular contact with people you find attractive, none of whom are realistic romantic partners for you because a) you will never meet them, and you are probably 20 years older than they are and far less attractive than they are, so they would never go for you anyway; b) they may not even be compatible with your sexual identification. I identify as heterosexual but that doesn't mean I dont also have a thing for Ryan Gosling.

So yeah, Sydney Sweeney has turned my head the past few years. I can't deny it.

The thing is, I don't really want it to be obvious to the people who share the same streaming accounts. And that's just what feels like has been happening by the refusal of Sweeney's movie Reality to leave the front page of our Amazon Prime account.

Now, when I saw Reality in December in order to rank it for 2023, I had to rent it from Amazon, because it never popped up on iTunes. I don't have a preference for one place to spend $4.99 over another place to spend $4.99, but I do generally consider iTunes to be my first port of call. Perhaps HBO, which produced Reality, has a friendship with Amazon that it does not have with Apple, because I checked just now and it is still not on iTunes.

I can assure you that I watched the whole movie. It's only 82 minutes long. I don't specifically remember how it ends, but that was a busy time of my viewing calendar. I wouldn't necessarily remember all the details of even movies I liked more than Reality -- which ended up ranked 34th out of the 168 movies I ranked in 2023 -- because some of that late-game viewing period is always a blur.

Amazon, however, does not think I finished watching. And therefore, Reality has stayed in my Continue Watching queue ever since, the big accusing eyes of Sydney Sweeney staring out at me every time I come on the service. 

I may have switched devices halfway through the movie, which is the only explanation I can think of for this state of permanent paralysis that resulted. I've definitely started watching a movie on, let's say, Netflix on one device, and finished it on another. When I return to the first device, Netflix will still think I should resume the movie from where I stopped on that device -- even though it already resumed it from the correct spot on the other device. This usually clears itself up over time, but with Reality on Amazon, it was not doing so.

This would be an annoyance with any movie. With Reality, it was an actual problem -- or so my guilty conscience told me.

And the problem is this: There was no way to clear the movie from Continue Watching.

You can't click in to it try to play out whatever part of the movie it thinks you haven't watched. This was a rental, so if I wanted to try to do that, I'd have to pay the rental price again. And though Reality was my 34th favorite movie of 2023, I'm not in a hurry to see it again, especially not this soon. My conscience isn't guilty enough to pay the rental price just to clear it.

After a couple months it became clear that this movie was going to still be on my Continue Watching on into the next decade, so I looked up online how you can clear something from this queue. And there is a way that's easy enough, so the next time I logged into Amazon on our TV, I did as instructed: I did a long-press on the play button on our AppleTV remote, and was presented with three options of what to do with this movie, one of which was to hide it.

That worked. 

But now I am "hiding" Sydney Sweeney, which is even more damning, perhaps, if it is ever discovered. Amazon tells you that the title will no longer appear in Continue Watching, but you can still find it by searching for it.

So, it'll probably never come up.

But one day, years from now, Amazon will offer an easy way to show you everything you've been hiding, and my wife will stumble into that area, only to see the single title that my secret shame forced me to consign there.

Maybe I ought to hide a Ryan Gosling movie as well, just to be on the safe side.