Blaxploitaudient: Car Wash

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

When adding films to my potential viewing list for this series on Letterboxd -- and I've only got 11 so I still have an opening -- I wasn't sure whether or not Michael Schultz's 1976 film Car Wash counted as a blaxploitation movie. It would be the first movie I'd be watching where crime plays no explicit role in the plot, although there is a minor criminal act that occurs as part of the multiplicity of set pieces that make up the film. What's more, it is, I believe, the first film I've considered for this series where there is no reference to blaxploitation within the characterization of the film on Wikipedia.

However, having rubber-stumped it to go ahead -- remember, I've only pulled out 11 candidates for this series so far -- I found it felt quite appropriate for Blaxploitaudient as soon as I started watching. Then just now, to make extra sure the word "blaxploitation" did not appear on this film's Wikipedia entry just to support my claim in the previous paragraph, I found the word does appear after the text for the entry -- as one of the Wikipedia categories with which Car Wash is associated. If Wikipedia feels Car Wash belongs as part of a category called "blaxploitation films," then so should I. 

Now that we've confirmed its right to be here, let's get into the movie proper.

Car Wash is the quintessence of the hangout film. In fact, if you had told me Richard Linklater based the structure of Dazed and Confused on Car Wash, I would not have been surprised. The film takes place entirely within one day at an urban Los Angeles car wash next to an urban Los Angeles diner, the latter of which gives the film a secondary location to relieve some of the burden on the primary location. We follow more than a dozen characters as they arrive for work and clock out at night, or drop by regularly to hang out with the people who actually work there, with cameos from other actors (some famous, some not) as customers of the two establishments.

"Follow" might be a strong word. Joel Schumacher's script doesn't give us many hard story arcs to keep track of, and the exposure to characters is initially only a glancing one. Over the course of the narrative, we do get an increasingly firm understanding of who everybody is, and even some sense of their goals in life, but the script has no interest in ramming this down our throats, or possibly giving us definitive conclusions to every storyline. 

There are a number of guys who wash the cars, who love playing pranks on each other and sometimes on the customers. There's the profits-first owner and his son, who is an amateur Marxist. There's the car wash employee who is sweet on the waitress at the diner. There's the ex-con who is just trying to keep his job despite embarrassing visits from his parole officer. There's the cabby who makes more visits to the car wash than is probably necessary. There's the Black Panther wannabe who has given himself a Muslim name. There's the whore with the heart of gold who is potentially waiting to do business in the back alley.

And sure enough, I was comforted to see, the majority of these characters are Black, which was really what I wanted in order to feel good about including this film in this series. I wasn't expecting them all to be Black, because there are white characters in each of the blaxploitation movies I've watched so far in 2024. Just 70%, and Car Wash hits that percentage easily enough, with one Native American character thrown in for good measure. (Though, given the Los Angeles location, surprisingly few if any Latinos.)

And what a cast. When looking up the posters for possible inclusion with this post, I was amused to find the DVD cover that shows Richard Pryor and George Carlin as though they were the stars of the movie. Pryor has one scene that is short and sort of superfluous -- except that it also features the Pointer Sisters, which I enjoyed -- as he appears as a character in a limo named Daddy Rich. Carlin is the aforementioned cab driver, but after appearing several times in the front half of the movie, he basically disappears. Neither of these guys would accurately be described as the star of the movie.

Then again, in an ensemble movie, I suppose if you are going to emphasize anyone, might as well emphasize the two guys who had the biggest careers outside of this. Others I knew and really enjoyed were Garrett Morris of SNL fame, Antonio Fargus (who is making his second appearance in this series after last month's Foxy Brown, and plays an out homosexual), Bill Duke (who plays the would-be political activist with anger and frustration to spare), Melanie Mayron (the car wash cashier) and others whose faces I recognized if maybe I didn't know their names before this. (On Wikipedia just now I noticed there was a TV-only version of this movie in which Danny DeVito appears.)

At first thinking the movie might be too slight to really make an impression on me, I got into its groove and enjoyed it in the same way (though perhaps not to quite the same extent) that I enjoy the aforementioned Dazed and Confused. There are a lot of funny little bits here, such as the woman who stops at the car wash with her husband in a full body cast in the passenger seat, and how Morris interacts with the man whose words cannot be fully heard. I also enjoyed the pranks, such as one employee stuffing his co-worker's burrito with hot peppers.

And the individual story arcs did ultimately strike me, particularly the two that culminate in a joint scene at the end of the movie. That's the story involving the ex-con (played by Ivan Dixon) and Duke's frustrated revolutionary, who was fired earlier in the day and tries to hold up the car wash after closing. (Spoiler alert, I guess.) The ex-con Lonnie needs to prove to the world, perhaps especially himself, that he is trustworthy, so when Duke's Abdullah tries to rob the place while Lonnie is counting the cash, the stakes are high. However, more than anything, Lonnie cares for his hurting brother, so the way he talks him down from the possible heist, knowing from experience the impact it could have on Abdullah's future, is a lot more than a man just trying to save his own hide. Given the tone the film had had the whole time, I knew it could not conclude with some sort of minor tragedy, and Car Wash proved me right.

Director Schultz had directed Cooley High, another blaxploitation adjacent film, the year before, and this seems well within that mode. I find it a slightly more unusual project for Schumacher, whose career would feature many different modes, but not a lot that really would come to remind me of this. I learned also just now that this was originally envisioned as a stage production to be adapted for the screen, which is how Schumacher got involved, though it sounds as though the stage version never took off. It was also possibly going to be a musical, which is why we get one song from the Pointer Sisters and another half-song from the car wash employee who is smitten with the diner waitress.

Oh, and I can't forget to mention the titular song, which plays a couple times and which I always love hearing. 

Okay we've crossed the halfway point in Blaxploitaudient. On to July. 

Pride Month: Valley of a Thousand Hills

As my Pride Month viewings get further along, I'm noticing themes develop beyond the original themes.

At the outset of this June, I decided I was going to watch four LGBTQI+ movies that I had never heard of before, plucked from my streaming services, one per week. The first two were both on Netflix, so I've decided not to try to diversify and go only with stuff on Netflix. 

But as I chose my third movie this week, I noticed a second theme emerge, which is that this has become a bit of a world tour.

I started, appropriately enough, in Australia in week 1, with Ellie & Abbie (and Ellie's Dead Aunt). In week 2 I shifted to Italy, which played host to The Invisible Thread. 

Now, week 3 finds me in South Africa, where the action of 2022's Valley of a Thousand Hills takes place. 

It'll be easy enough to stick the landing on this secondary theme as long as my fourth movie is not set in Australia, Italy or South Africa. 

One of the things that drew me to this movie -- other than it appearing in the LGBTQ filter on Netflix -- was the title. Having watched the film, I now know and love what it means.

Bonie Sethibe's film doesn't put too fine a point on it, but I caught it. When the woman you see in this poster, Thenjiwe (Sibongokuhle Nkosi), tells her secret lover, Nosipho (Mandisa Vilakazi), about the life they could have "just beyond these hills," it's suggesting a future free from worries about being ostracized or shaming their families -- or possibly even violence directed at them -- that is so close they can almost see it. But the true measure of their distance from this dream? What seems like only a few comparatively small hills is actually a thousand summits they have to cross -- the thousand roadblocks to a future happiness they should not have to fight for.

Nosipho is the daughter of an elder in their rural village, which keeps up some of the connections to the old ways but incorporates all the modern conveniences. The traditional outlooks are one of the connections to the old ways they keep, as Nosipho knows her father would not accept anything from her other than marrying a man as is expected of her. It isn't so much that any one person in this film is homophobic, but that they just have such an ingrained belief in what is the normal way and what might be a sign of someone being possessed by demons. Her mother has died, and her father is sick. Fortunately, she has a sympathetic auntie who knows and supports what Nosipho is without her having to spell it out in so many words.

We see the vociferous objection to their sexual preference more in Thenjiwe's mother, who overrides the gentler disposition of her husband in trying to marry their son, Thenjiwe's brother, to Nosipho, to strength ties and for the traditional exchange of cows and the like. Thenjiwe is more comfortable in her sexual orientation than Nosipho, more rebellious by nature and happy enough to cut herself off from her family and move to the closest big city, Durban, if that's what she needs to do to pursue a life that is true to her authentic self. But she's in love with someone who doesn't have the same sort of confidence, and that's a problem.

When I first started watching Valley of a Thousand Hills, I thought it might be one of those movies that does a lot more telling than showing, all the signs of a novice filmmaker. (This is indeed the only feature listed on IMDB for the writer-director.) As it went, though, I developed a real appreciation for some of the sophisticated things it's doing that don't call attention to themselves. One particular shot I loved showed Thenjiwe on the floor with the man who is meant to be her husband standing over her. We see her straight on and we only see him in the three mirrors behind her, a tryptic of reflections that loom over her. I'm not saying it's a new device to show a character who is in power from an angle that emphasizes his power. I'm saying that the image of three of him surrounding her, representing the obstacles of society at large, was executed excellently and with clarity of purpose.

At first I was not sure if the movie would be a bit tame, in adherence to the more traditional values of its expected audience. Like, I can make a movie for my fellow South Africans in which characters are lesbians, but showing them kissing would be a bridge too far. But we do ultimately see them kissing, and even in bed without any clothing, though it is all pretty tasteful and the bedsheets are in all the right places to keep it so. 

The movie reminded me a bit thematically -- and in other ways I won't spoil -- of my #5 movie of the 2010s, Tanna, in which the forbidden romance also has to do with an arranged marriage, though the characters there are heterosexual. In that Vanuatu-set film, Wawa and Dain are kept apart because she's been promised to the son of a chieftain from another tribe, also in that case to solidify ties between the previously warring tribes. (Ain't that what they've tried to do throughout history, am I right?) However, I did take from Tanna what I thought was a secret "love is love" message, thematically a movie about gay marriage even though it was overtly about heterosexual marriage. So this film just takes it one step further. And yes, I do realize it may seem like I'm comparing them primarily because they both involve characters with black skin, living in or with ties to the traditional ways, which I suppose is my own shortcoming. Though since you probably haven't seen either movie, you'll just have to trust me that the similarity is there.

In another way the film defied my expectations, I thought the performances might seem like real novice turns. But I really liked what both of the leads bring to their roles, perhaps especially the conflicted Vilakazi as Nosipho. It was a film that majorly grew on me as it went, culminating with difficult truths that prevent what we hope can just be a happy ending. With gay people still fighting the prejudices of their own families, especially in parts of the world where progressive thinking is in short supply, the endings don't always get to be happy.

One more movie to go next week before we wrap up another Pride Month on The Audient. I'm choosing between two different titles, but each of them involve gay men, to get the gender balance right.

iTunes brain lapse

There's a first time for everything, and the first time for forgetting I'd rented a movie and then letting its 30-day rental period expire was on Tuesday night.

Or, some unknown time before that, but Tuesday was when I discovered it.

I'd gone on iTunes to rent Celtic Pride -- which I wrote about yesterday -- only to get the message "The rental period for 'La Chimera' has expired."

I'd forgotten I'd even rented La Chimera.

It looks like I just missed it, as the receipt I received to my email for the rental came in on May 19th. This was June 18th. So it had expired within the last 24 hours, maybe less than that.

I doubt I would have watched it if I'd discovered this the night before, as coming home from 90 minutes of tennis, after a day I'd been in the office (and a night I'd not slept well), was not my ideal viewing circumstances for this acclaimed but likely challenging film. A film that's been on my radar for so long I think I was hearing about it in 2022, yet it still qualifies as a 2024 release.

Having blown this rental, I'm not sure how keen I am to rent it again right away. 

Maybe I can just let its release year ambiguity -- I guess it's really only been a year on my radar as it debuted at Cannes in 2023 -- take it out of contention for this year, and I'll just watch it when it shows up on Kanopy or something in a year or two.

Or maybe it'll be so good that it's worth double the rental fee.

In any case, I feel dumb about this, especially as it has never actually happened to me before. I may have run out of time on a rental due to unforeseen circumstances after leaving it too late, but never have I entirely forgotten I'd rented the movie in the first place.

The onset of Alzheimer's? Or maybe just too distracted by the NBA Finals?

At this point, given the glorious outcome of that event, it doesn't really matter to me, any more than to just write this post and move on. 

The movie title I'm really feeling today

This blog is old enough for me to have written three commiseration pieces when my Boston Celtics did not win it all after coming oh-so-close -- even though the earliest one was 14 years ago. And yes, each time I've managed to tie it in to the movies.

Here is that earliest one, a loss in Game 7 of the finals to the archrival Los Angeles Lakers.

The team had about a decade of not really contending, and then in 2022, when they lost in the finals to the Golden State Warriors, I was back.

Then last year, when a repeat performance was expected of them, they went down 0-3 to the 8th seeded Miami Heat in the conference finals and were only a Jayson Tatum twisted ankle away from storming all the way back to become the first team in NBA history to erase that sort of deficit. They lost in Game 7, and here I was again. 

Finally, in 2024 -- for the first time in 16 years -- I am capping off the NBA season with all smiles.

The Boston Celtics defeated the Dallas Mavericks, 106-88, in Game 5 of the NBA finals yesterday, one game after being embarrassed by 38 points when they were trying to complete the sweep in Dallas. The way it played out -- despite causing us 72 hours of anxiety and soul-searching about yet another postseason collapse -- it appears they just wanted to win it in Boston, to see the confetti falling from the ceiling of their home stadium as they were lost in a delirium of the fans' adoration and their own happy tears.

I shared those happy tears with them. Multiple times.

I'm afraid not much work got done yesterday from the hours of 10:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m., Melbourne time. Oh I had my work computer within arm's reach, but I was too amped up to focus on it very much as I sat in my garage with the game projected on the wall. I answered an email here and there and tried to get back to it after it ended, but it was pretty much a lost day.

Lost in the best possible ways.

I won't go on at length about the game -- which was a ten-point differential after one quarter, a 21-point lead at halftime and never seriously contested after that -- but I will tie this post in to movies once more.

Last night, to celebrate, I watched, for only the second time, the 1996 film Celtic Pride, starring Daniel Stern, Dan Aykroyd and Damon Wayans, and directed by some guy named Tom DeCerchio. More interestingly, it was written by some guy named Judd Apatow, which I either didn't know about or had entirely forgotten.

I had reason to forget everything about Celtic Pride -- more on that in a minute -- because I had not liked the movie very much. I didn't even see it until nearly ten years after it was released, having stayed away on bad word of mouth, which I think I generally found to be justified when I finally did see it. (Though I was surprised to see that my Letterboxd ranking, given retroactively in 2012 or so, was 2.5 stars, so I obviously didn't hate it.)

I actually wanted to find a different movie to watch last night in celebration. But unlike with many other of the world's most venerable sports franchises -- your Yankees, your Lakers -- Celtic Pride is pretty much the only movie that comes up in internet searches for movies related to the Boston Celtics. Some others do come up, but they are documentaries about the team, and that really wasn't the vibe I was going for.

I was going for something that would make me laugh a little (it did), and make me experience the excitement of the NBA finals through a fictitious representation of it (which it also did), without being nervous about an outcome that was not yet decided.

Mission accomplished.

I actually had a great time watching Celtic Pride, even though -- and this is one of the details I forgot -- the Celtics do not actually win the championship in this movie. (Spoiler alert.)

I should have probably figured that, given that all the Celtics players portrayed in this movie are anonymous nobodies -- and predominantly white, an intentional joke by Apatow -- and that the player whose personal growth we are following is the Utah Jazz' Lewis Scott (Wayans), a superstar with a super bad attitude who is disliked by his teammates.

The schlubs played hilariously by Stern and Aykroyd -- a washed-up former athlete currently working as a gym teacher, and a never-was plumber -- sort of accidentally kidnap Scott in order to help their team win the NBA finals.

I think I thought this kidnapping would leave a bad taste as I was watching, or worse, would play on uncomfortable racial dynamics that we'd know better than to put on screen in 2024. Really, that's not the case. All the schlubs intend to do is get Scott so drunk that he's ineffectual in Game 7, but when they all get decisively hammered and he ends up sleeping on their coach -- actually Aykroyd's bed -- they wake up to see that they duct-taped his hands together, a last drunken impulse to capitalize on this situation they've found themselves in, which they don't remember doing.

I didn't really believe that a star athlete out partying after a big win would stop dancing with the ladies and start drinking with two schlubs who pass themselves off as Utah Jazz fans, but some things you just have to accept on face value. And where this movie goes is pretty harmless -- Aykroyd's character does have a gun, but it's some sort of antique Russian pistol that looks like it belongs in a museum. And there isn't any true violence to speak of. What's more, Scott is smart and clever and ultimately belies his reputation as a jerk through the course of the movie. The schlubs, of course, do some learning too.

As I was watching with a celebratory $25 beer -- yes, this import beer we love is $25 per can -- I jotted down lines from the movie, and other moments, that seemed either true to my lived experience as a passionate basketball fan, or to these NBA finals in particular. I'll number them just to keep them in the order of the notes I took.

1) The earliest was this quote, by Stern's wife who has announced she is divorcing him: "I can't stand seeing you in a good mood when they win and a bad mood when they lose. I won't let the Celtics run my life!"

My wife has been there. My bad moods when they lose are more like sad moods, but I think last year, the sad mood lasted for about three days. I said something ridiculous like "But life goes on," which of course it does -- and this was like two days later. Sports, man.

2) Then Stern screaming in a gymnasium full of six-year-olds as she's walking out: "I'm not ashamed to say it. I LOVE THE CELTICS!"

3) Early on I decided that the corollary to Lewis Scott in this series was Kyrie Irving, public enemy #1 in Boston. Irving -- he of anti-vaxxing, flat earth, sometimes anti-Semitic fame -- spent two tumultuous seasons in Boston and left everyone with a bad taste in their mouth after leaving as a free agent when he'd given every indication he was planning to stay. I didn't have NBA League Pass in those seasons so I didn't see it all up close, but I understand he quit on the team, and he famously later stomped on the Celtics' leprechaun at mid-court (in about 2021 I would guess). You shouldn't do that. Irving has won only one game against the Celtics since then -- Friday night's debacle -- and he is booed relentlessly each time he comes near a Celtics fan. 

I can definitely see Celtics fans enacting a real-life Celtic Pride on Irving, and maybe they would have if he hadn't had a sub-par series. But like the version of Scott that matures in this film, Irving actually said all the right things in his press conferences this series, and sounded super evolved, especially by his standards, as he gave out respect to the Celtics -- and earned some from us as well.

4) Superstitions of sports fans are legendary, and that might be even more so with Boston fans. When they're sitting down in the old Boston Garden to watch Game 6, they suddenly realize they are in the wrong seats. "This is an even game, isn't it?" one says to the other. They quickly get up and exchange seats. Later, they kick out this random guy Chris McCarthy -- played by an early Darrell Hammond -- because the Celtics started losing their lead when he arrived at the game. I once watched New England Patriots games with a guy who believed if he did not sit in his seat in the bar, and if he uncrossed his fingers -- like, all his fingers -- at any point during the game, the Patriots would lose.

5) When this movie is set, the Celtics haven't won a championship in ten years -- an unusual fallow period for a franchise with the most championships in the history of the sport. (Hang on a bit longer, as it would be another 12 years before they finally did win.) Thinking themselves on the verge, they comment "This is the start of a new Celtics dynasty." That's the very thing we're saying about the current Celtics team.

6) In Games 6 and 7 in this movie, the Celtics lose big leads. This is also one of the things that dogged this year's championship team. In one regular season game, for example, they lost something like a 22-point fourth quarter game against eventual playoff opponent the Cleveland Cavaliers. Even in winning 16 of their 19 playoff games, they several times lost leads that turned easy wins into nail-biters. (They also had at least one fantastic comeback from such a deficit, in Game 3 of the eastern conference finals against the Indiana Pacers.) My current Boston sports fans and I would have died watching these two games against the Utah Jazz.

7) Larry Bird, my favorite Celtics player of all time, makes an appearance in this movie, in that bar on the night they get Lewis Scott drunk. He has a great comment about fickle sports fans, which describe one of my friends in particular: "Fans like these make me sick," he says. "You love us when we're winning and you hate us when we're losing. You guys need to learn something about loyalty! Fans like these? You can have 'em." (For the record, I pride myself on not being such a fan. The one friend I alluded to earlier in this paragraph becomes apoplectic when the opposing team goes on a 6-0 run and imagines not only that the whole world is crashing down, but that it is a result of some core incurable weakness by the players.)

8) Stern's and Aykroyd's characters live together and you can momentarily see the address on their front door at one point. It's 44, which is almost undoubtedly a reference to Danny Ainge, who wore that uniform number during his time in Boston (which included the '86 championship team, considered possibly the greatest of all time). Ainge was also the general manager of the team and built a great winner once again in 2008, though this was after the movie was made.

9) When the guys are forced to wear Jazz jerseys at Game 7 in order for Scott not turn them in to the police, they explain to the other fans around them that it is a reverse jinx. Let's just say that reverse jinx psychology gets a LOT of discussion in my Celtics-related message threads.

10) I enjoyed seeing the presence of other legends, including the great Bob Cousy, who at age 95 is still hanging around and recently made the comment that all he wanted to see was one more Celtic championship before he kicked off. The one who didn't quite make it, who serves as a commentator on Game 7 here with Marv Albert, was Bill Walton, who died a few weeks ago. The Celtics wore strips on their uniforms that read WALTON, white lettering over a black band.

11) One of the reasons the Jazz win the series is that Lewis Scott finally learns to pass to his teammates. Comparing him to a different real-life basketball player this time, that's like the Celts' Jayson Tatum, a league superstar who had been fighting the reputation of a guy who couldn't win the big game. Tatum wasn't a dominant scorer in these playoffs, with no game over 40 and fewer over 30 than he would usually have, though it should be said that he scored a huge 31 in the clinching game. But the big difference in his maturation was looking for open teammates, and it can reasonably said that his assists were one of the biggest factors in why the Celtics won the championship. (I thought they should have given him finals MVP, which would split the awards with fellow superstar Jaylen Brown, who was a deserving MVP of the conference finals. They gave both to Jaylen.)

12) There's a big moment of two players chest-bumping in this movie. One of the most iconic moments of Game 5 against Dallas was a big chest-bump between Tatum and bit player Payton Pritchard, who was brought in specifically to make a half-court shot at the halftime buzzer, which he did. 

Okay that's enough Celtic pride for one day.

And now I've got enough warm and fuzzy memories to blot out all the memories of the seasons that didn't end this way.

Let the dynasty begin! 

June kaiju frenzy

I don't think I've been intentionally tailoring my viewing to what can broadly be defined as kaiju movies, but the fact remains, June is only half over and I have already seen four movies that can be said to feature kaiju. 

Two of them have Japanese origins and two do not.

The first -- chronologically, but also in my heart -- was Godzilla Minus One, whose title made think it was going to be some sort of high concept movie. Having watched the movie and gaining no clearer understanding of what "minus one" means, I've decided that it must be a numbering convention to indicate a prequel, although I don't know what it would be a prequel to. (I looked up if there was a movie called Godzilla Zero, but there are no exact matches for that on IMDB.) Anyway, I thought it was great.

The next weekend, it was Netflix again as Ultraman: Rising debuted. This film has game-changing animation, but still gives a nod to its anime origins. It involves the titular superhero from Japanese comics, who is about the size of a kaiju and whose purpose is to save Japanese cities from them. In this instances, he also comes into possession of an orphaned baby kaiju and tries to raise it, though even the baby kaiju is massive and can do a lot of unwitting damage. As a cherry on top of this, it's also a baseball movie as Ultraman's alter ego is a massive baseball star in the mold of Shohei Ohtani. (And incidentally, this also has a title that sounds like it should be a prequel.)

The same night that I finished Ultraman, which I had started too late on Friday night, I also watched The Mist, which I wrote about yesterday. Although you would not call the creatures in this movie traditional kaiju, mostly because the movie is set in Maine, some of these beasties are as tall as a kaiju and just as bloodthirsty.

Then finally on Sunday afternoon I watched the original King Kong from 1933. That's right, just like that without any fanfare. I say "without any fanfare" because for some ten years now I have been considering this the movie I am most embarrassed about never having seen, so I thought when I finally did see it, it would have to be some special occasion. The special occasion was that I still that the projector set up from watching the Celtics game the day before, and this had been in my Kanopy queue for too long. I ended up being pretty wowed by how much they were capable of doing, only six years into the sound era -- and I use that just as a general gauge of cinematic sophistication at the time, not specifically because King Kong's achievements are groundbreaking from a sound perspective. But I found the stop motion pretty damn good, and was surprised they could do it as well as that at the time. I can only imagine the movie magic people must have felt when they went to the cinema that night.

Now that I've noticed the pattern, any future June kaiju movies will be tainted.

Audient Outliers: The Mist

This is the third in my 2024 bi-monthly series in which I rewatch a movie I was cool on, from a director whose other work I like.

I knew there was going to be some cheating in this series.

I had hoped to have each of the six movies fit perfectly into the formula of a movie I disliked from a director whose other work I not only liked, but whose other work I had seen the entirety of.

I got through the first two installments of the series following that concept pretty closely. But knowing that there were a lot of square pegs fit into round holes in the movies I identified and added to my Letterboxd list, which I created specifically to keep track of these movies, I knew I'd have to deviate from it somewhat. And that first instance is Frank Darabont.

For one, I have not seen every movie Frank Darabont has directed. There's only one I've missed, but when you've only directed four feature films, that's a pretty significant percentage. The Majestic (2001) escaped me -- which is unusual given how much I also like Jim Carrey -- but I wasn't going to go throw it on my watch schedule and hope I liked it, just so I could do a Frank Darabont movie this month. 

Actually, I'd been even further from Darabont completism up until recently, as I only just saw The Green Mile in 2018, a full 19 years after it was released. I did like it quite a bit, though, which is a bit surprising, because that isn't necessarily the sort of movie that ages well.

So the second way I'm cheating is that in using a preponderance of evidence to determine that Darabont is a director I really like, making the one movie of his I didn't like an outlier, I am throwing in a TV show. Darabont, you may remember, was the creator of The Walking Dead, which actually seems like a natural offshoot of this one movie I don't like that I haven't mentioned yet. I used to love The Walking Dead and still think of some of the shocking deaths in it today, even though it's been a couple years since I finally broke down and paid to rent whatever season I had gotten up to when I lost access to it. (It went to one of the streamers I don't have, I think, and I may still have as many as three seasons to catch up on, to say nothing of the multiple spinoff series.)

With the cheats thrown in, I do think The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile and The Walking Dead are enough to tell me I think Frank Darabont is capable of great things, and usually delivers them. (Shawshank, which has gone unmentioned until now, is currently #27 on my Flickchart, and I don't think my affection for it requires any further elaboration.)

But my goodness did I hate The Mist.

If you asked me to name a movie that made me spitting mad when I saw it, The Mist is one of the first I'd think of. I wrote a pretty epic takedown of it in the very first year of this blog, which you can read here if you want to. (The "Lord Vader" referenced in the opening line was another blogger whose stuff I read at the time, back when we all used to read each others' stuff, and when other bloggers actually, you know, existed.)

If you read that piece I just linked, you'll note that I focused the lion's share of my negative energies on the character played by Marcia Gay Harden, the religious nut job who doesn't show an ounce of kindness to anyone, even when they are overtly trying to be kind to her. I still have problems with this character -- would it have killed them to give her a little nuance? -- but I think I appreciated it more this time as the actress just deciding she was going to chew the scenery and going for it. 

Oh, in order not to bury the lede, I will say clearly: I don't hate The Mist anymore. 

Before I started to watch it on Saturday night, I did momentarily ask myself what the point was. One of the things about being a cinephile is that you think your opinion of a movie is correct. That makes you hesitant to rewatch a movie you didn't like, because you feel like you had a pretty good handle on it the first time and there's little chance your opinion is going to be changed.

Little does not mean none.

Although I came away from the first two movie in this series, Jonathan Glazer's Sexy Beast and James Cameron's True Lies, feeling very similarly to how I felt about them the first time, The Mist did improve significantly for me on this viewing. I must have had something in my craw that night I first watched it in 2009.

Before I get into the substance of my reappraisal, I wanted to mention that it was interesting to watch this movie in the context of already having watched The Walking Dead. No fewer than three speaking roles in this film were essayed by actors who would go on to appear in the first season of The Walking Dead, though I won't spoil how long they may have survived on that show. Melissa McBride had the biggest role on The Walking Dead -- Carol, who found herself at the center of many dramas -- but the smallest of the three roles here. The two bigger roles were Jeffrey DeMunn and Laurie Holden, who played Dale and Andrea, respectively, on the zombie show. (I'm going to list all of them in past tense because the series is over now, not because I'm tell you which ones died.) (Incidentally, both of those actors also appeared on The X-Files -- Holden memorably as Marita Covarrubius -- which is interesting, because it does not appear Darabont had any involvement with that.)

Okay I am getting sidetracked.

I think The Walking Dead helps with context for The Mist because it clearly shows Darabont's interest in investigating how people behave in a crisis. The Mist can be seen as a rough draft for The Walking Dead, in a very real way. Inside that Maine grocery store where the patrons are trapped, trying to hide from oversized bugs from another dimension, a Lord of the Flies type scenario plays out that is at the core of Darabont's interest of the breakdown of society under duress. In both cases, the external threat -- zombies, oversized bugs from another dimension -- is secondary to the internal threat, which is what humans will do to each other when there are no rules. In fact, the shocking deaths I continue to think about from The Walking Dead are not those perpetrated by zombies, but by humans against each other.

Led by Marcia Gay Harden's religious fanatic, I had thought these characters were a bit overdetermined, as Darabont wanted to hit us over the head with his ideas. I also thought there was a weird miscalculation by the director to make all the heroes be of a very liberal mindset, leaving all the country folk to be weak-minded bigots. 

This stuff didn't bother me as much this time, and there's a contradiction to one of my assumptions about the film's political perspective that I will get to a bit later.

Anyway, in 2009 I thought the creature effects were bad and I did not feel very scared by them. I'm softer in this complaint this time as well. Of course, it's hard to put yourself back in the necessary 2007 mindset to remember how good or not good these effects looked 17 years ago. But even if they were not all totally on point or up to the current standards, what these bugs get up to is pretty scary. The spider web that burns your flesh. The tiny spiders that burst out of your body. The way your face bloats until you die when bitten by one of the oversized mosquitos. It was grim in the right ways. 

I do have some fresh complaints as well though.

Although I don't remember focusing on this at the time, I do think it's funny how there are basically an unlimited number of people in the grocery store. Even after we've already lost as many as a dozen, due either to death or departure, there might be as many as a hundred others still in the store. Even with people stocking up after a storm that had just come through, I have a hard time believing this store was so chocked to the gills with customers. 

And I do still have a problem with the ending. 

At the time, I thought this ending was a sick joke. Maybe I still do. We see Frank Darabont consciously transition from a man who stared into the bleakness but found hope, as he did in his two Stephen King adaptations from the 1990s, to a man who stared at the bleakness and just saw bleakness. What the main character, played by Thomas Jane, does at the end of this movie is just so out of scope with the actual desperation of their situation, at least in terms of how much time they have been living with that level of desperation, which was not nearly enough to have resorted to what he does. And then to experience an immediate reversal is almost more of a punishment by the filmmaker than the comeuppance delivered to Harden's zealot.

And yet Jane's character, a man of action whose decisions thus far have demonstrated both courage and kindness, is the one traditionally drawn as a liberal. He's a visual artist who does not seem to originate from here, and has a career painting movie posters. (Interestingly, I saw in the credits that his posters were painted by Star Wars poster artist Drew Struzan. I may have forgotten this when I first saw it, but the painting themselves are clearly for already famous properties, such as The Thing and King's own The Dark Tower.)

So what are we to make of Darabont reserving his most twisted last gasp for this man who has been our hero the whole movie? Which is not, I should say, the way King's novella ends?

I don't know, but I do know that not knowing makes this movie more interesting to me.

Darabont has not directed a feature film since The Mist, which I find very interesting. His reasons probably don't have to do with a lack of opportunity, but rather, a different direction for his interests. The old me, who felt the way about The Mist that I used to feel, would have said this was his just desserts for making such a piece of crap.

But I don't know. The bleak Darabont who sees nothing but bleakness has a certain appeal to him, and I might like to see another movie from that guy. 

The interminable wait for Inside Out 2

Inside Out 2 opened Thursday here in Australia, yesterday in the U.S.

And yet it may be many weeks before I see the sequel to my #1 movie of 2015.

Why is this, you ask?

Well, I had the opportunity to see it as long ago as Tuesday, when I could have gone to an advanced screening that was Admit 2. But it was in the evening hours after work, and the same night that my older son has basketball practice. This is relevant because, in what qualifies as the biggest surprise of the year related to him, he actually wants to see this movie. I may have mentioned this in a recent post.

The most salient reason for my skipping it, though, is that one of my critics at ReelGood has been super keen to get to a free screening, only I'd been failing to check my email and let a lot of them go by the wayside. This one I caught at the perfect time, and he was only too eager to snap it up. Having written about 95% of the reviews on my site in the past eight months, I was only too eager to let him.

Besides, I figured I'd be watching it this weekend anyway, and I'd just have to get through reading his review without having too much spoiled for me to reach my goal. I mean, I figured it wouldn't be a great follow-up to Inside Out, a probable cash grab for Pixar, but if there was any chance it was in the same range of quality as its predecessor, this was a movie I needed to see ASAP, to shake up what has been a pretty average year so far.

Well, I appear to have figured wrong.

When I broached with my wife the idea of going to see Inside Out 2 this weekend, using my older son's surprise interest as a way into the topic (my younger son's interest is taken for granted), she suggested that it might be a good thing to save for school holidays.

Which don't begin for another two weeks.

Now, since I've already posted a review on my site by another writer, waiting to watch this movie is something I can, actually, do. If I were the one reviewing it, it would be a different story. Oh, we could have just let the movie go unreviewed, but I can't remember the last Pixar movie that has not gotten a review on our site -- it would have been before I started in 2014. Not about to start ignoring Pixar films now.

But being able to wait to see Inside Out 2 and being willing to wait to see Inside Out 2 are two different things.

Besides, I'm starting to get an idea what people think of this movie, and it's quite a lot. My critic, who can be a bit of a curmudgeon about the mainstream, gave it a healthy (by his standards) 7 out of 10. The IMDB average user rating, I saw just now, is even stronger at 8.0 -- and that's huge as it represents the accumulation of a lot more opinions.

But the one that really hyped me up came just this afternoon, when the father of my younger son's friend came by to pick up a piece of furniture we're giving them. This guy may not be super discerning, but when we asked how he liked it, he said on a scale of 1 to 10 it was an 11. He described it as "so beautiful," and this is a fairly tough guy who used to be a top-rated soccer player when he was younger.

Yeah, I think I'm going to like this movie.

And if my wife takes pity on me, maybe we'll see it tomorrow after all. 

I mean, my Celtics did just miss their chance to sweep the Dallas Mavericks by getting blown out by 38 points, down from a 48-point deficit, which was the largest in the NBA Finals in the past 50 years. I need a little pitying.

Pride Month: The Invisible Thread

In my second week of "Pride Month-themed viewings of LGBTQI+ movies I had never heard of," I chose The Invisible Thread, or Il Filo Invisibile, as it is known in Italian. (And that title may work better with the thread theme they've worked into the poster design.)

I had already added this to my Netflix watchlist the week before, but when it popped up as the movie advertised on the landing page -- which may or may not be customized to movies I've added to my watchlist, I'm not sure -- that clinched it. Made it seem worthier of my time, somehow. (Damn, advertising really works doesn't it.)

And I ended up being really happy with this choice as well, if not quite at the level of last week's film, Ellie & Abbie (and Ellie's Dead Aunt). (Though I should say, a moment in the climax pushed me to the brink of tears, which was closer than Ellie & Abbie got me.)

If this was only a 3.5-star movie to the previous film's four, it was a very warm 3.5 stars. But there's a reason I couldn't go all the way to four, and it has to do with the film's central conceit. 

The cross-armed character you see here, Leone (Francesco Gheghi), is meant to be making a movie about the relationship of his two fathers, as they weather the political currents that go from allowing them to have a civil union, to allowing both fathers' names to appear on Leone's birth certificate, to potentially losing that last right, thereby returning to a state where one of the two dads is granted more legal legitimacy than the other.

The problem is, after a few opening minutes of footage from the film, the whole concept is basically dropped. Oh there are a few other random references to the movie he's supposed to be making, but 30 minutes of screen time might elapse between them, tending to diminish what at one point seemed like it was going to be a central structural tenet of the film. It was enough so that even though the rest of the movie was charming me and moving me, I couldn't fully forgive what seemed to be such a basic screenwriting error.

Much of the rest of the content makes up for that omission. One thing I particularly liked about The Invisible Thread is that the two fathers, Paolo (Filippo Timi) and Simone (Francesco Scianna), are not happily married. In fact, the story's inciting incident is that Simone loses his phone between the cushions of their coach, where Paolo is sitting when Simone is texted by his lover. This is how he discovers his husband has been cheating on him for two years, though his own loss of spontaneity and defunct notions of romance are partially to blame. 

The reason I liked this is that it's believable. It's real. In most movies we see, there is a tendency to portray people in gay marriages as happy beyond their wildest dreams, and just as loyal. Particularly in pockets of cinema that hadn't previously been comfortable portraying gay marriages on screen -- your bigger studios and the like -- there is a deathly fear that if you depict a gay marriage as less than complete bliss -- or worse, torn apart by cheating -- you are somehow indicting or undermining the entire institution of gay marriage. Any group that finds themselves on the receiving end of pandering tokenism wants to be portrayed complexly rather than as saints, and The Invisible Thread does a really good job at that. Not only is there an extramarital relationship, but each man seeks revenge on the other in petty ways that strike at the heart of the other's materialism.

This is not to say the film is always subtle. You get reminders throughout that these are the countrymen of Roberto Benigni, and so there's more than one scene of physical comedy where characters are at each others' throats and playing to the back row. But really, these are in small doses and they are more funny than they are ever approaching groan-worthy.

Although Paolo and Simone have a significant share of the screen time, the movie is of course told from the perspective of their son, who doesn't actually know which one is his biological father because the two injected a cocktail of their sperm into the surrogate (an American who is still in the picture. She's played by Jodhi May). Leone is not gay, but he does have an interesting relationship with a French brother and sister who have just come to town -- he likes her, but she thinks her brother might be good for him, because she makes a silly assumption about Leone's sexuality based on the sexuality of his fathers. I think we are meant to believe that she made this assumption more because of Leone's smaller stature and potentially effeminate behaviors, but he's understandably mad about it and really, he has every right to be. The time spent on this potential relationship with her (she's played by Giulia Maenza, who could be a model) is probably the time that might have been spent showing him struggle with making his film, though it's probably right that he's involved in a relationship himself because he is the main character.

The content that probably moved me most was this notion that Italian law might annul the previous birth certificate that allowed both fathers' names to appear, so they'd have to go back to just one -- but which one? Now that they might be splitting up, it matters more which name is on the certificate, which sperm swam into the awaiting egg, possibly for custody reasons. They never wanted to know, but now they sort of do, or sort of must, either of which is tragic. It's clear that even though their relationship might be in trouble as a result of actions of their own doing, it has always been threatened by a society that can't quite become progressive enough to fully accept them.

Next week I'll pick another off the watchlist of one of my streaming services, though maybe I'll share the love with something other than Netflix, given that it's gotten my first two Pride Month viewings. 

The final downstairs movie that isn't to be

We're moving out of the office I've called home for the past six years. (But didn't attend very much in 2020 and 2021.)

Tomorrow is my final day there.

For the purposes of this blog, the significance of my office move is that my current, soon-to-be-former office is about six floors above Cinema Kino, the movie theater where I've seen probably 50 to 75 movies over the years I've lived in Australia.

It's not the most convenient theater to either my old house in North Melbourne or my new house in Altona, but it's been the most convenient theater to my office, so that has meant a large number of viewings over time. (Plus, it's one of the MIFF theaters so it's been host to probably a dozen MIFF viewings.)

After tomorrow, it won't be convenient to anywhere. 

I'm being just a bit dramatic here. My new office is not actually that far away, only a 15-minute walk from my old office, ten if you catch the traffic lights right. So I'll probably still go to Cinema Kino.

What I won't ever do again is clock off of work and be in my seat downstairs less than five minutes later.

Although I didn't do it as often as I would have liked, I loved those occasions where I wrapped things up as quickly as I could in order to arrive in time for the start of a 4:20 movie. It felt like some kind of life hack, like I was getting away with something. (And I guess I sort of was, as I am technically supposed to be at work until 4:36.)

Now, most people never get an opportunity like that, so if any violins are playing out there for me, they are probably the world's smallest. 

But since I did get to taste it, I loved how it tasted.

I'd hoped to taste it just one more time, as a ceremonial ending to my final day in the office, but unfortunately, the movies in question just don't work out for me, or don't have convenient start times if they do. Let's look at my options:

Bad Boys: Ride or Die - I haven't seen it, and don't really plan to -- I kind of feel like I'm still punishing Will Smith, and in any case, I gave up on this series after the second one. I'd probably stretch and take the plunge, but it's showing at 3:50 and 6:20. The first is too early, especially on a day when my coworkers are also in the office, and the second defeats the purpose of a convenient downstairs viewing if I have to wait two hours for it to start.

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga - Seen it already, and it has basically the same start times as Bad Boys anyway.

The Watchers - Seen it already, and the start time is even five minutes earlier at 3:45.

The Way, My Way - I don't really know what this is but the screenings are at 1:20 and 6 p.m.

The Fall Guy - Seen it already, start time not convenient anyway.

The Three Musketeers: Milady - I don't really know what's going on with these two French Three Musketeers movies but I don't care about the Three Musketeers and never have. But the 3:30 start time does not even make it a consideration.

Challengers - Saw this ages ago and it only plays at 1 p.m. anyway.

The Taste of Things - More French movies. Not really keen on this one anyway, but its start times are 2:50 or 5:50.

High & Low: John Galliano - The poster for this documentary makes it look interesting, but again, it's at 3:30 and 6:10.

The Three Musketeers: D'Artagnan - Yes you can watch both Musketeers movies, but this one only at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m.

Wicked Little Letters - 10:30 a.m. only.

Perfect Days - 1:10 p.m., 8:15 p.m.

Radical - 10:30 a.m.

Thirteen movies and not a single one starting between 4 and 5 p.m. Maybe I am getting out of here just in time.

I even considered coming into the office on Friday, which is usually a work from home day but is probably the final day my building pass will work. It also has the benefit of following Thursday, which is the day new movies are released.

And Inside Out 2, the only new movie opening that day, is indeed playing at 4:20 p.m. 

In a way, it would be a perfectly symbolic means of dealing with the emotions -- manufactured a little though they may be -- of moving out of a building you have worked in for six years.

But you know there's a but coming, and it's this: Inside Out 2 makes for the rare movie that all four members of my family might actually watch together, and we'll likely go see it together next weekend.

Yes, you read that right. My 13-year-old son, only two months from turning 14, said he wants to see it. We saw an ad for it come on during the NBA Finals, and I joke-asked him if he wanted to see it. He serious-answered me that he did. You don't have to tell me twice.

So it looks like the downstairs work movie will become a thing of the past without a formal send-off. 

But again, it's not like I'll never come to Cinema Kino again. If I hoof it, I can probably even get there from my new office for a 4:45 movie, if they see it fit to program one.

More than anything, though, I think it is just symbolic of a change I am not dealing with well in other ways, which are also pretty minor but nonetheless still relevant for me. For one, it takes longer to get to my new office, with a longer walk from the train station -- longer by five to seven minutes. Secondly, it doesn't have the same convenience to eating establishments. In my current building, the cinema is ringed by about a dozen different options in an upscale food court, about half of which I frequent.

And I'm a guy who doesn't really like change, in any case. I'll miss silly things like the familiar concierge desk and elevators, and the grandiose complex itself, with its twin skyscrapers flanking the food court, the cinema, a hotel, and a number of high-end clothing stores. The new office does not have any of these charming attributes.

But we do get those fancy curved monitors, so I guess that's something. 

The sunny Super Bowls of Suncoast

I just watched and really liked Laura Chinn's film Suncoast, which is a Hulu movie but is playing in Australia on Disney+. (The latter owns the former.) I really don't want the one thing I say about it on my blog to be a complaint about its adherence to realism. 

But ... I don't usually write about a movie on my blog just to say I liked it, because that's boring. There has to be an angle.

And the angle here is: the bright, sunshiny day on which two of the three characters in this poster watched the 2005 Super Bowl.

Not that this is a relevant part of the discussion, but the 2005 Super Bowl happened to have been a win for my New England Patriots, their third in four seasons, and the beginning of a ten-season drought that would end with another three in the next five seasons. If you want to know its Roman numeral, it was XXXIX.

I know it was this Super Bowl because Suncoast takes place in the days leading up to the death of Terri Schiavo, whose feeding tube was removed, leading to protests from people who believed that every life is sacred. That happened in 2005. It's more a backdrop to the character dramas here, a subtext rather than a text. 

The character in the middle (Doris, played luminously by Nico Parker) and the character on the left (Paul, played with humanism by Woody Harrelson) go to a West Palm Beach seafood shack that he has recommended to her on a previous occasion to watch the game. He's one of the protesters. Her brother is dying of brain cancer inside the same care facility where Schiavo is currently residing, his own days numbered as he is fully unresponsive at this point.

And they watch the game during a Florida afternoon that's so bright that they basically have to squint.

Is this a detail that matters in the story? Hardly. Since these are not real characters, they did not have to go watch the Super Bowl. The outing could have been anything. 

Which maybe makes it all the worse that the filmmakers were so careless with the details, because they literally could have been doing anything else. It's semi-autobiographical for the writer-director, which I suppose is why she included the detail, but not the correct time of day for the seafood shack meal.

So that's the detail I'm referring to: the time of day of the Super Bowl. In Florida.

As confirmed by Wikipedia, Super Bowl XXXIX kicked off at 6:38 p.m. EST on Sunday, February 6th. I remember that day pretty well. We went to my friend Gregg's house to watch the game. I had only been dating my wife for about a month, and it was her first time meeting most of my friends.

It was daylight in California, where I was. It was not daylight in Florida.

In fact, 6:38 p.m. was exactly 30 minutes after the 6:08 p.m. sunset in Miami, which is the closest big city to West Palm Beach, on February 6th. 

But even in California, when it was 3:38 p.m., it wouldn't have been the blinding sunlight of midday that we get in this film.

Does this matter in the slightest to the quality of the film?

Of course it doesn't.

But it does make me wonder why. They got all the other details of early 2005 just right. They played all the right pop songs. The cell phone models were spot on. There was even a People magazine cover of Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt splitting up. 

So why make it look like a sporting event at night in February is taking place on the hottest day of the summer in the wrong time zone? 

Come to think of it, that game would have come on around 10:38 a.m. here in Australia. On a day that would have been bright and hot because it was summer. 

Maybe the director just confused Melbourne, Australia with Melbourne, Florida. 

Pride Month: Ellie & Abbie (and Ellie's Dead Aunt)

I watched one movie per week in honor of Pride Month in June of 2023, and this year I'm confirming it will be an annual tradition.

But, what would be the theme within the theme?

Last year I concocted one on the go, as I watched two movies featuring gay men and two movies featuring gay women, one of each set in more or less modern times and one of each set more than 100 years ago.

This year, I toyed with a couple different ideas. The first was to rewatch some of my favorite movies with gay-themed subject matter, but the first few choices I looked at were things I felt I had seen relatively recently, so I moved on from that idea pretty quickly. (Though, I reserve the right to return to it in 2025 and beyond.)

As I was searching the various streaming services for inspiration, I came across a few titles I was familiar with, which is definitely how I went with the theme last year. All four of the movies I watched last year were already on my radar as things I thought I should have already made time for.

So as I was finding a bunch of titles I'd never heard of this year, I decided to go in the opposite direction and watch four movies that were -- or had the potential to be -- real discoveries.

Of course, this also created the opportunity for them not to be very good. Fortunately, the first one out of the gate cleared the bar rather easily. 

As my first film, I decided to go with an 82-minute movie on Netflix with the whimsical title you see above: Ellie & Abbie (and Ellie's Dead Aunt). I'm not sure whether the "and" or the ampersand is really correct, because I've seen it both ways online. So I am going for a mixture of ands and ampersands.

The length was right for the night my sister left after her two-week visit, when I had understandably accumulated my fair share of exhaustion, and the title promised frivolity that would go down relatively easily.  

I didn't realize until I started watching it that it was Australian, and that it would be so much more appropriate for Pride Month than the plot synopsis suggested.

That synopsis is basically this: Teenager Ellie (Sophie Hawkshaw) has a crush on teenager Abbie (Zoe Terakes), so she is trying to muster up the courage to ask Abbie to the school formal (the equivalent of the prom in the U.S.). This involves coming out rather casually to her mother (Marta Dusseldorp). As she's trying to psych herself up, she is visited by the spirit of her dead aunt Tara (Julia Billington), who doesn't consider herself so much a ghost as Ellie's fairy godmother -- and she emphasizes the word "fairy." The real draw for me may have been Kiwi actress Rachel House, who I saw from the Netflix thumbnail appeared in a supporting role.

So just a goofy existential lesbian comedy with fairly low stakes beyond the central sexual coming of age themes, right? 

Not so much. Oh it is that for much of the time, but it turns out -- and this is a little bit of a spoiler, but not one that would ruin the movie for you -- that Tara died after a gay pride rally 30 years earlier, when a car full of villainous cretins who were never caught ran her over with their car. 

As Ellie and the spirit both come to grips with that -- Ellie was never told by her mother what happened, and Tara's memory of what happened is a bit foggy for understandable reasons -- the film packs an emotional punch that I was never expecting from that title. And speaks perfectly to what members of the LGBTQI+ community deal with on an everyday basis, both the "little" things (like trying to decide if your crush is actually gay, let alone returns your affections) and the far bigger things (like the violence of intolerant people, which can sometimes be fatal). 

Monica Zanetti's film shows its modest means at certain points, but it really delivers on big themes in this economical package, and is underpinned by good performances. Another name I recognized in the cast was Zoe Terakes, but at first I could not figure out how I knew her. It turns out she made an animated short film I saw a couple years ago called Are You Still Watching?, which was an answer to both COVID and the sexual fantasies of lesbians like her locked in their houses. It's a great little seven minutes of adult-themed and subversive animation -- another film that packs a lot into its brevity.

I was tempted to give Ellie & Abbie 3.5 stars, but just now as I am typing this, only a few minutes after finishing it, I've decided to go for a full four. It's chock full of everything you could want from this sort of movie, alternating between lighter and heavier fare in a way most films cannot pull off -- especially for a filmmaker directing her first feature and writing only her second feature-length script.

Let's hope in the second week of Pride Month, the next of the dozen previously unknown movies, which I've just added to my watchlist on various streaming services, will be half as good. 

Is this a movie: This is Me ... Now: A Love Story

This is the first in what I hope will be a periodic series in which I ask you, my reader, if something I have seen is a movie or not.

The new(ish) Jennifer Lopez vanity project This is Me ... Now: A Love Story was not on my radar until I heard them half-guffawing about it, half sort of copping to a guilty pleasure affection for it on a February episode of The Slate Culture Gabfest. (I've gotten behind on my podcast listening.)

The discussion didn't state the length of This is Me ... Now, but when I got home I discovered it was 66 minutes, which might barely meet my criteria for a movie, and one I could add to my 2024 rankings in progress since it was released on Amazon in February.

But I'm not sure if it ultimately qualifies, and that's where you come in. 

First I will state the arguments in favor of it being a movie:

1) It has movie-style closing credits, with a creatively designed graphic theme and an endless scrawl of people who worked on it. In fact, the scrawl is so endless that it rivals something like Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, which is both a point in its favor and a point against it (more on that in a minute).

2) It is a fictionalized and symbolic interpretation of Lopez' real struggles with finding the man of her dreams. It opens with her working in a factory where they are trying to keep a giant metal heart beating, some kind of steampunk fever dream. Lopez hired real actors (such as Jane Fonda) as well as real musicians (such as Post Malone) and real personalities outside of either acting or music (such as Neil DeGrasse Tyson) to portray roles in the "film" (it's a film even if it's not a movie, since there are also a thing called short films). 

3) It appears alongside other theatrical and streaming releases in one of my go-to resources to check the release dates of new movies, which is the Wikipedia page called "2024 in film" (or whatever year it happens to be). That page has sub pages that show the films released by individual countries. Under "American films" its shows a February 16th release date for the Lopez vehicle, two days after Madame Web and six days before Drive-Away Dolls, those other two obviously qualifying as feature films. (How This is Me ... Now did not make a Valentine's Day release, I have no idea.)

Now, against this being a movie:

1) Although the total running time is 66 minutes, the aforementioned endless crawl of credits starts at 53:30. (I went back and checked.) If the actual content of the movie stops well short of the hour mark, then we are getting into the dangerous territory of Taipei Suicide Story, the 2021 film I saw and loved through an online subscription to that year's Slamdance, but which I rejected for inclusion in that year's rankings because of its 45-minute running time. I have decided that old films that run 45 minutes -- the primary example being Buster Keaton's Sherlock Jr. -- will get included on my various movie lists because standard feature film length had not yet been codified back then. (Though 45 minutes is about my cutoff, as I can't see included a 20-minute film as a feature film.) But something that short today is a different matter. This Is Me ... Now is only a possibly insignificant amount longer than Taipei Suicide Story, though you do always factor in the credits to the length of the film. I just think how more modest credits would have brought the thing in under an hour, at which point I would have had a really hard time including it.

2) I have not seen Beyonce's Lemonade, though if I had, I feel like I would have considered This is Me to be some kind of answer to it. Not an answer to its content, but an answer to its place in the culture. Lopez is a classic attention seeker and she measures her own musical abilities in relation to genuine giants like Beyonce. Lopez may be just as famous as Beyonce, but no one -- even Lopez herself if she were being honest -- thinks of them as equivalent talents. Still, if Lopez saw that Lemonade was a movie made in support an album, you can see her saying "I can do that, too" and putting in $20 million of her own money to make it happen. (Yes, she did that.) The relevancy of the Lemonade comparison is that I never thought that project sounded like something I would rank if I had seen it that year -- though to be fair, IMDB refers to Lemonade as a "TV special" and has no such designation for the Lopez film.

3) And speaking of the Lemonade comparison, there is the nagging impression I have that This is Me is "just" a glorified music video. People have made long music videos before, testing the standard length of a single song by including lots of other plot material in addition to the music itself. ("Thriller" is the template for that, though other pretentious musicians have copied and expanded on the non-pretentious thing Michael Jackson was doing.) Then again, This Is Me ... Now is not a single song, but rather, something like eight from the new J-Lo album, each of which has about a three-minute showcase, comprising about half of the total running time -- but only half, it is probably useful to note. Half of it is definitely something else ... and whether it is guilty pleasure good, just plain bad, or a pathetic display of Lopez' needy inner self is up for debate.

So I am not going to assume you are actually going to comment on this post. You don't do it all that often. That's fine. We're not putting you under a microscope today.

But because of that, I should probably tell you where I'm leaning after writing all this stuff out. 

I noticed that in each of my three reasons to include it as a movie, I felt those reasons strongly and stated them unambiguously. In each of three reasons not to consider it a movie, I included a "yeah but." This tells me that not only do I want to include it, I can poke holes in my reasons not to.

So I probably will. But as you'll note if you look to the right -- fairly soon after I publish this, I should say -- I haven't yet. The last newly watched movie is still last Wednesday's Dial M for Murder, not the short J-Lo thingamabob I watched over two nights on Thursday and Friday. I've got to hurry up and make the choice, though, because I watched half of Five Nights at Freddy's on Sunday night, and I'd like to make up my mind before I finish that.

If we do want one final piece of circumstantial evidence that this is a movie, we need look no further than the fact that I did, in fact, have to break it up over two nights. Of course, I didn't have to -- but it turned out I was too tired when I started watching and I was nodding off nearly from the start. (Having some drinks earlier with my sister was a decisive factor.)

The circumstantial evidence does seem to be in the film's favor. I just wish I had a more firm love-it-or-hate-it take on it. There were some things I liked, some things I laughed at (because they were laugh lines) and some things I laughed at without that being the filmmakers' intention. 

Incidentally, if I do include it, that'll mean that the last week of May was dominated by Jennifer Lopez movies, this coming on the heels of my Atlas viewing. That one was for Netflix, so Lopez finds herself right in the middle of the streaming wars, doesn't she.