Sweet, sweet validation

I have been carrying a (relatively) lonesome burden in the past six weeks regarding how much I disliked one of the year's bigger word-of-mouth hits, Oz Perkins' Longlegs.

I wrote about it here, but my snide remarks were part of a bigger consideration of the bait-and-switch it shared with its partner for a double feature I saw that week, MaXXXine, both of which purport to be horror movies but are really more serial killer movies.

But at that time, I hadn't even published my 1/10 review of it on ReelGood. I can now point you to that review if you want to dig deeper into the choice words I had about it. 

There were a few others who joined in my distaste for the movie. My oldest friend, who used to comment here as Don Handsome but has (rightfully) put blogs in his rearview mirror, greeted the mere news that I had seen the movie -- I wasn't going to tell him my thoughts in case he hadn't seen it -- with the single comment "Boo," and we went from there. His partner disliked it equally. And then there's the estimable but slightly risible critic Rex Reed, whose 0 rating on Metacritic stood in stark contrast to the next lowest one they saw it fit to feature on the film's main page, a 63. The others were 75, 80, 80, 90 and 100. 

Those scores of 75, 80, 80, 90 and 100 were the things that made me secretly worry that Rex and Don and I might be idiots. We knew how terrible the thing we saw was, but if you hate something that everyone else loves, maybe it's you, right?

Well this was a good week in the journey of my dislike for Longlegs. 

It started with one of the other ReelGood critics finally seeing it -- a horror aficionado at that. Here was what he thought:

"Wouldn't go as low as 1, but it wasn't great."

Now you get a SPOILER ALERT for the rest of his comments:

"Just crazy how many different elements he threw in there. Psychic detective, haunted dolls, Satanism.

"Not sure if it was meant to be a bit ridiculous or he just had no idea what he was doing."

Bingo!

That gave me some comfort, but it did not quite give me the sweet, sweet validation I spoke of in the subject of this post.

I had seen that a discussion of Longlegs was coming up on The Slate Culture Gabfest, catching up as I have been from many months behind, now to only about a month behind. I was a bit worried about the prospective positive tenor of this podcast, though, given the episode title: "Longlegs has legs."

As it turned out, this title was nothing more than a statement of fact: The movie had become a word-of-mouth phenomenon and was making far more money than most movies of its basic components make, effectively burrowing into the zeitgeist.

It was not a statement about their appreciation of the film.

In fact, I am not sure if I have ever heard these three people -- who have discussed hundreds of movies in the ten years I have been listening to them on this podcast -- so lambast a film.

The two women, Dana Stevens and Julia Turner, were a bit measured in their albeit clear disappointment with the film. Perhaps it was their "feminine sense of empathy" that compelled them to point out things they thought were good; in one case, quite wrongly, the performance of Nicolas Cage.

Stephen Metcalf? He was howling with how preposterous the whole thing was. 

A grin split my face in two as I was walking home from the train station, listening to an increasingly giddy takedown of the movie. Steve's sheer delight with how bad the movie was quickly won the other two over.

But wait there's more.

I don't know if you are a Slate Plus member, dear reader, but if you are not, it might be worth signing up just to hear the BONUS EPISODE they recorded in which they could continue to trash the movie, only with spoilers. Especially if you are a Longlegs hater like I am. 

We're not talking about a full hour of content, but rather, each regular episode of the Gabfest includes a bonus fourth segment, after their weekly endorsements, that is only for Slate Plus subscribers. It runs about 17 minutes, or did in this case anyway.

And those 17 minutes were devoted to tearing the movie to shreds with the freedom not to censor themselves to avoid spoilers.

It's exquisitely entertaining listening, and it has put a spring in my step for the 48 hours since I listened to it.

So look, you might have come to this post because it's about Longlegs and you liked Longlegs. I'm sorry that you had this clearly incorrect experience with the movie, but at least you are in the majority. Maybe it's me.

Or maybe it's me, my friend Don, Don's partner, Rex Reed, my ReelGood critic, and Dana, Julia and Steve. 

One day, maybe everyone will realize what a turd this movie is. 

Closing out MIFF from the balcony

It was possible I was going to see two movies on the final night of MIFF. One of them was going to start at 11:45.

After a day of drinking, I realized that was ridiculous.

"A day of drinking" is a little misleading and makes me sound like someone 30 years younger than I am. (Or possibly an alcoholic.) College students engage in "a day of drinking."

But it's true that I had three beers while watching my friend play baseball on a beautiful afternoon. I used to play with him a few years ago, and his new team had made what they call "finals" here -- otherwise known as "the playoffs." A win would put them in the "grand final" (which we know of as "the finals"). Left to my own devices, I would have had only two beers, but my other friend who was watching with me convinced me to have one more after the game ended, as it was our first chance to catch up with the guy who had been playing. This was okay because I Ubered to the game in both directions (my wife needed the car), but also left me a little wobbly even from the mid-afternoon. 

I had only about 45 minutes at home before leaving again for an evening that would culminate in actress Noemie Merlant's second directorial feature, The Balconettes. The movie didn't start until 9:15, but my wife and I had to catch the five o'clock train into the city in order to make a six o'clock dinner reservation. 

The dinner was at a fancy restaurant called Supernormal, and it was fancy enough that the more ideal reservation times -- particularly if you are trying to match it up with a 9:15 movie -- were all taken. It ended up working out, though, because this was what was called "The Ultimate Supernormal Experience for 2 guests - Our premium banquet menu, guided beverage with our Sommelier, and the Supernormal cook book." So it took almost two hours to complete.

Why were we doing this particular dinner on this particular night, other than having a date night?

Well this was a present from my oldest friend for my 50th birthday last year. My wife and I were actually going to use it earlier this year, but had to cancel. There's a small part of my brain devoted to worrying over the potential expiration of an unused gift card, and though this one wasn't going to expire until 2026, that part of the brain receives a measure of relief when the gift card finally gets used. 

I won't linger on the dinner except to say that the food was amazing and there was a lot of it. And the guided beverage included four more drinks, bringing my daily total up to seven.

At the time we left the house, I had not technically ruled out the idea of going to see my final MIFF film at 11:45 p.m., after The Balconettes ended, while my wife went home to relieve the babysitter (my sister-in-law). But the first of these four additional beverages ruled out the possibility that I would have the stamina for a midnight movie, meaning Vulcanizadora -- the latest from Buzzard director Joel Potrykus -- will remain a tantalizing mystery to me for now.

In truth, I didn't even have what it took to make it through The Balconettes.

Because there was still some time to kill between the end of dinner and the beginning of the movie, we went for yet another drink -- which would be eight for me over a period of eight hours. That's not totally unmanageable -- I wasn't sloppy or anything -- but you can imagine exhaustion was setting in by now. When you also factor in my son's soccer practice in the morning, I had spent a total of about three waking hours in my house that day, the rest of the time being out and about. 

It didn't help, of course, that the film was in French.

Finally seeing a foreign film in MIFF 2024 was a much desired outcome. Not a single MIFF has ever gone by without me seeing a movie entirely in a foreign language, but this one had the chance. See, there was about five minutes when we thought we might have to cancel both the dinner and the movie on Saturday night because my wife had a friend visiting from abroad and this might be her only chance to see her. That ended up getting otherwise resolved, meaning that the tickets we'd gotten for The Balconettes would give us one movie in French. (Give me one movie, I should say. My wife has seen two movies in Chinese, one in Turkish, and I don't remember what all else.)

Whether that was a good thing or not, I was now questioning.

Despite getting the largest Pepsi you've ever seen at Hoyts Melbourne Central -- like, I don't know if they could even make it larger in the U.S. -- I spent a total of at least five to ten minutes of The Balconettes fully asleep. The rest of it felt like it took an eternity to get through, and I still had more than half my Pepsi left when it was over.

Because I was not at my best, it's hard to trust my own assessment of The Balconettes. It is, however, a lot easier to trust my wife's assessment. She had had half as many drinks as I had -- one fewer at dinner, and none at the baseball game, since she wasn't there. And she didn't much care for it either.

If you don't know the name Noemie Merlant, you probably know the face. She was the co-star of Celine Sciamma's Portrait of a Lady on Fire, my #2 movie of 2019 and #25 movie of the whole decade. And she accounted for my second straight MIFF movie directed by a French woman known primarily as an actress, after Ariane Labed's September Says on Wednesday night.

I think this movie has good aspirations and intentions. Described in the program as sort of a #metoo revenge fantasy, the story involves three women who spend a lot of time on their balconies -- the title in French is Les Femmes Au Balcon, which I believe translates to The Women of the Balcony -- during an awful heat wave in Marseilles. Merlant plays one of the women. At least one of them is an exhibitionist, as the actress Souheila Yacoub almost always has her breasts out -- which is nothing compared to the nudity Merlant herself gives us. So yes, if you have prurient interests, you might want to see this movie.

But then, you might also be one of its targets. There are a number of men behaving awfully in this movie -- at least three, though I may have slept through another one or two -- and the movie involves the revenge, intentional or otherwise, that these women get against these men. It isn't spoiling anything to tell you that people die, and the plot revolves around what to do with bodies and the like.

There's a bit of an awkward line being walked here though. On the one hand, there is a serious message about the casual malevolence and sexual violence men perpetrate on women. On the other, this is a madcap farce at times, and "loud" in the way I find a lot of French comedy to be loud. The combination doesn't really work, and the volume these characters are turned up to did not make me laugh.

Also, I quibbled with a lot of choices about how Merlant shoots this. I didn't like the quality of the images, but more than that, Merlant is guilty of holding her camera way too close the faces of her subjects, in a way I found almost grotesque. If it was the men, that might be the point. But it's the women, and I felt that it made it harder for me to sympathize with them, this shoving of the camera in their faces.

The film is very French, in that it is constantly confronting us with everybody's sexuality and wearing that as a badge of honor. I felt this was showy for the sake of being showy, and it wore thin on me very quickly.

But also, I was really, really tired.

I wouldn't have traded seeing my friend play baseball and having a lovely dinner with my wife -- and the drinking that went along with both -- for potentially liking my final MIFF film of 2024 a little better, and I'm not sure that would have been the outcome anyway.

So this brings another MIFF to a close.

I'm tempted to do a little recap, but it was only seven films I saw this year, and I did just do a recap of the 100 films I've seen over 11 years in my last MIFF post. So I might be a bit capped out.

I do want to acknowledge, though, that MIFF constitutes the time on the calendar each year when my attentions fully turn to current-year films, which will probably make up a good three quarters of my viewing from here until mid-January. And at least one film I saw at this year's festival -- Grand Theft Hamlet -- has already started to help shape the conversation around the top ten I'll be revealing five months from now. 

The perils of losing a five-cent bet

As I touched on briefly in yesterday's post, I quite enjoyed Alien: Romulus. I'm not going to use this post to get into any more specifics of what I liked about it. I'm not opposed to that, but that's not what this blog is usually about, as you probably know.

Rather, I'm going to focus on a small nitpick -- one that does not have any bearing on how much I liked the movie. (There were also nitpicks that did have a bearing on how much I liked it, which are contained within the last ten to 15 minutes of the film, if you've seen it.)

Today I'm going to focus on an innocuous, completely spoiler-free occurrence in the film's first ten minutes. I won't even really be able to remember the particulars, but I can remember the outcome.

Suffice it to say that two characters make a bet on something, and when one loses, the other says "You owe me five bucks."

My mind immediately went to: Just how gosh darn little is five bucks worth in this Alien future?

In order to consider this properly, we're going to have assume a few things that are probably not safe assumptions. One is that the rate of inflation in this future is about the same as it is today and as it has been for the past 100 years. Another is that when they are talking about "bucks," they are talking about U.S. dollars or a currency with a very similar present-day value to U.S. dollars. In a science fiction movie where people work in mines and live on planets where the sun never comes out, neither of these things may be anywhere close to correct. However, we have nothing else to go on. 

But let's say for the sake of argument they are. If so, these two characters bet each other about a nickel. Maybe less.

How do I know this?

Well online I found a handy dandy inflation calculator. You put in a dollar value for a "basket of goods" in a certain year, then choose the next year where you want to find the value of this same "basket of goods." Unfortunately, it only operates between the years 1966 and 2023, but for our purposes this will be sufficient.

So working backwards and trying to get into the range of that $5 amount of their bet, I discovered that a "basket of goods" worth 50 cents in 1973 was worth $5.60 in 2023. I'll explain in a minute why I used that 50-year period, beyond the restrictions of the inflation calculator and 1973 being the year of my birth. 

I'm not sure how perfectly this whole thing works, because when I first did the year 1974 -- hoping to do a 50-year range to 2024 -- I got a very different result of $4.85. Shouldn't a later year be closer to today's value rather than further away from it?

But never mind that. What we really want is a ballpark figure here. And by averaging the two years, we can see that inflation has increased this value approximately ten times in the space of 50 years. 

If we go back in the other direction another 50 years, back to 1923, and assume the same rate of inflation, that 50 cents in 1973 turns into five cents in 1923. So in one hundred years, the items has increased a hundred times in value.

It may not track for everything, but for a fairly small item, it makes sense. The chocolate bar that would cost you five cents in 1923 would now cost you around $5. Hey, we have $5 chocolate bars in Australia. I've eaten them. 

So now let's look in the other direction. 

In doing a little research, I found out that the original Alien takes place in 2122. Alien: Romulus is supposed to take place 20 years after that. So that would be about 120 years from now.

If we are considering this same rate of inflation, the $5 2023 amount becomes about $500 in 2123. I think I'd have to be slightly better at math to determine what another 20 years does to that amount, since I'd have to know the rate of inflation year over year, so let's just throw a number out there and say it's $700.

So if these betting Alien: Romulus characters wanted to make a bet that would hurt the loser about as much as a $5 bet would hurt you and me today, they would be betting each other about $700. 

But I can see why a line of dialogue "You owe me seven hundred bucks" does not work as well, does not communicate the relative insignificance of the bet as well, as "You owe me five bucks" does. We don't analyze their reality when we hear that line of dialogue. We analyze our own. And we would think "Jeez, why would they bet $700 on something stupid like that. I hope they can pay the rent that month." Because of course, neither can we envision what rent would cost in 2142. 

And how much did they actually bet each other, from their financial perspective of the world? Nay, of the cosmos?

About a nickel.

Maybe less. 

My 100th MIFF movie, plus my top and bottom five

This is one of those times that keeping lists really comes in handy.

A while back -- though not from the start -- I began keeping a list of all the movies I've seen at the Melbourne International Film Festival, which includes the date and the venue. Once I started, it was easy to go back and fill in the ones I'd missed, thanks to other lists I keep. No star ratings, though I could probably go back and retroactively add them if I wanted, since they're all logged in Letterboxd.

And this was useful, because in my 11th MIFF, I have now hit triple digits.

My 100th MIFF movie was Ariane Labed's September Says, another scheduling-related convenience on Tuesday night -- and originally, a hoped for first 2024 MIFF film entirely in a language other than English. Of course, even though it is directed by a French actress who you'd know from such films as Assassin's Creed and Flux Gourmet, it's an English language film.

I didn't plan it this way, but my 100th film was at the Forum -- the same location as my first film back on August 2, 2014. That was White God, a film that left me a little flummoxed -- just like September Says left me a little flummoxed. (Not confused about what happened, but confused about what I assume is a fair amount of praise for the film.)

The Forum is a symbolic venue for my 100th film for other reasons. Although it is not my favorite MIFF venue -- that's the Capitol -- it is, in a way, the most iconic MIFF venue. If I were a better architecture student, I could tell you more about its design, but with my limited language, suffice it to say that it is an old theater that has some gothic stylings. The prior theater space has been subdivided into two spaces, but curiously, it's the upstairs portion of the previous audience that is the theater now, where the downstairs part hosts gala events, and has previously served as a festival hub where you can get cocktails and light food items. It's not doing that this year as this function has shifted to a bar at Federation Square, but I have lots of memories of coming here for a drink, sometimes meeting a friend.

To give you an idea of its grandeur, allow me to attach a couple photos.

No, Naomi Watts was not in my movie. (September Says does resemble a movie Watts appeared in, though I won't tell you which one because that would contain spoilers for September Says.) This was from the ads beforehand. I suspect you would know I would not have my phone out during the movie proper.

So before I get to reflecting on a hundred movies at MIFF, first a bit on #100.

September Says was actually my second movie of Wednesday night, though the first was not a MIFF movie. Just a week after saying I never had watched the bonus movie first and the MIFF movie second -- never to my recollection, in any case -- I did it again, catching a 6:15 show of Alien: Romulus before the 9:45 September Says. Quick thoughts on Alien: Really enjoyed, a few nitpicky plot reservations, and a couple standout scenes that felt really new within the context of a series that now consists of seven films.

After killing more than an hour between the two movies, I reported to the surprisingly sparsely attended September Says. It was so sparsely attended, in fact, that on approach I wasn't sure if I had the venue right. (The Forum also currently has scaffolding out front, contributing to its sense of desolation.) But no, it was the right place, and even though the available seating was less than a third full, we were given allocated (a.k.a. assigned) seats. That may have been the first time I've ever had that at MIFF. I could have of course moved from my assigning seating, but it turned out to be fine, quite central though farther back than I would have chosen. The way they have had to use this preexisting space, all the seats are quite far back from the screen. 

The film focuses on a pair of teenage sisters, July (Mia Tharia) and September (Pascale Kann), with the third significant character being their mother (Rakhree Thakrar). The sisters are close enough in age that they were dressed in matching outfits and photographed by their artist mother when they were younger. However, they have subsequently become outcasts and are dealing with the bullying of fellow high school students in the film's rural Ireland setting. (One of the bullies is a girl in a wheelchair, which I thought was an interesting way to expand our ideas of which types can/should play which roles.)

In their personal relationship, September is domineering yet fiercely protective. She often gets her sister to do outrageous things (the title is a variation on Simon Says), but perhaps more problematically, gets her to promise to do other things as a means of proving her devotion. It's devotion July gladly gives to her, but agreeing to kill herself if her sister dies is, um, not healthy. 

This film has some interesting moments and explorations of its central themes, but there are long slow patches between these moments, and then some tangents -- such as a one-night stand for the mother in which we randomly hear the mother's voiceover -- that didn't work for the thrust of the film at all. I was trending toward a marginal thumbs down but eventually ended up with a marginal thumbs up, committing a three-star rating to Letterboxd. 

Okay, so, 100 MIFF movies. Since I have it, I thought I would include the total list for you to either peruse carefully, or zip right through, barely glancing at a title. 

1. White God – August 2, 2014 – The Forum 
2. Black Coal, Thin Ice – August 8, 2014 – Hoyts Melbourne Central
3. Night Moves – August 11, 2014 – Capitol Theatre
4. Why Don’t You Play in Hell? – August 12, 2014 – Capitol Theatre
5. The Skeleton Twins – August 16, 2014 – Capitol Theatre
6. The Lobster – July 31, 2015 – The Forum
7. One Floor Below – August 7, 2015 – Cinema Kino
8. The End of the Tour – August 11, 2015 – Comedy Theatre
9. The Witch – August 14, 2015 – The Forum
10. The Salesman – July 30, 2016 – Comedy Theatre
11. Certain Women – July 31, 2016 – Comedy Theatre
12. Toni Erdmann – August 3, 2016 – The Forum
13. I, Olga Hepnarova – August 3, 2016 – ACMI
14. After the Storm – August 5, 2016 – The Forum
15. The Lure – August 5, 2016 – Hoyts Melbourne Central
16. Christine – August 6, 2016 – Hoyts Melbourne Central
17. Baskin – August 7, 2016 – ACMI
18. Seoul Station – August 9, 2016 – Cinema Kino
19. Paterson – August 10, 2016 – Comedy Theatre
20. Graduation – August 10, 2016 – The Forum
21. Ingrid Goes West – August 6, 2017 – Comedy Theatre
22. The Ornithologist – August 8, 2017 – ACMI
23. Fantastic Planet – August 10, 2017 – Comedy Theatre
24. My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea – August 10, 2017 – Cinema Kino
25. Let the Sunshine In – August 12, 2017 – Comedy Theatre
26. The Killing of a Sacred Deer – August 12, 2017 – Comedy Theatre
27. Golden Exits – August 16, 2017 – The Forum
28. The Square – August 17, 2017 – Comedy Theatre
29. The Lovers – August 19, 2017 – The Forum
30. Strange Days – August 19, 2017 – ACMI
31. Mandy – August 3, 2018 – Hoyts Melbourne Central
32. The Night Eats the World – August 4, 2018 – ACMI
33. Wildlife – August 4, 2018 – ACMI
34. Climax – August 4, 2018 – Comedy Theatre
35. Euthanizer – August 8, 2018 – Cinema Kino
36. Shoplifters – August 10, 2018 – Comedy Theatre
37. People’s Republic of Desire – August 10, 2018 – Cinema Kino
38. Cold War – August 12, 2018 – Comedy Theatre
39. Everybody Knows – August 14, 2018 – Comedy Theatre
40. Profile – August 14, 2018 – ACMI
41. Chris the Swiss – August 15, 2018 – The Forum
42. First Reformed – August 15, 2018 – The Forum
43. The Australian Dream – August 1, 2019 – The Plenary @ Melbourne Exhibition Centre
44. In Fabric – August 3, 2019 – The Plenary @ Melbourne Exhibition Centre
45. Deerskin – August 3, 2019 – Capitol Theatre
46. Vivarium – August 4, 2019 – Hoyts Melbourne Central
47. Matthias et Maxime – August 4, 2019 – The Plenary @ Melbourne Exhibition Centre
48. The Day Shall Come – August 6, 2019 – Capitol Theatre
49. Brittany Runs a Marathon – August 7, 2019 – Hoyts Melbourne Central
50. Berberian Sound Studio – August 7, 2019 – Hoyts Melbourne Central
51. A Family – August 8, 2019 – Hoyts Melbourne Central
52. Baby – August 10, 2019 – Hoyts Melbourne Central
53. Extra Ordinary – August 10, 2019 – Hoyts Melbourne Central
54. I Lost My Body – August 15, 2019 – Sofitel Theatre on Collins
55. The Lodge – August 15, 2019 – The Forum
56. First Cow – August 6, 2020 – Our living room
57. Marona’s Fantastic Tale – August 8, 2020 – Our living room
58. Kala Azar – August 9, 2020 – Our bedroom
59. Shiva Baby – August 12, 2020 – Our garage
60. Black Bear – August 12, 2020 – Our living room
61. The Killing of Two Lovers – August 15, 2020 – Our bedroom
62. Wendy – August 15, 2020 – Our living room
63. Prayer for a Lost Mitten – August 16, 2020 – Our bedroom
64. Just 6.5 – August 18, 2020 – Our living room
65. La Llorona – August 20, 2020 – Our living room
66. Freshman Year – August 8, 2021 – Our living room
67. Ballad of a White Cow – August 10, 2021 – Our bedroom
68. All Light, Everywhere – August 12, 2021 – Our living room
69. Zola – August 13, 2021 – Our living room
70. La Veronica – August 14, 2021 – Our living room
71. The Nowhere Inn – August 15, 2021 – Our living room
72. We Are the Thousand – August 17, 2021 – Our living room
73. Ninjababy – August 17, 2021 – Our living room
74. Night of the Kings – August 18, 2021 – Our living room
75. Riders of Justice – August 19, 2021 – Our living room
76. The Night – August 20, 2021 – Our living room
77. Language Lessons – August 21, 2021 – Our living room
78. Hit the Road – August 21, 2022 – Our living room
79. Plan 75 – August 24, 2022 – Our living room
80. My Sunny Maad – August 25, 2022 – Our living room
81. The Integrity of Joseph Chambers – August 26, 2022 – Our living room
82. Neptune Frost – August 27, 2022 – Our living room
83. Past Lives – August 5, 2023 – Comedy Theatre
84. The Bird With the Crystal Plumage – August 5, 2023 – Cinema Kino
85. It Lives Inside – August 6, 2023 – ACMI
86. Anselm – August 11, 2023 – Hoyts
87. Shut Eye – August 11, 2023 – Cinema Kino
88. Bad Behaviour – August 16, 2023 – Comedy Theatre
89. Banel & Adama – August 18, 2023 – Capitol Theatre
90. Monster – August 19, 2023 – Hoyts
91. Art Talent Show – August 21, 2023 – Our living room
92. The Face of the Jellyfish – August 22, 2023 – Our living room
93. Sorcery – August 24, 2023 – Our living room
94. Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman – August 27, 2023 – Our living room/our garage
95. La Cocina – August 9, 2024 – Capitol Theatre
96. I Saw the TV Glow – August 9, 2024 – IMAX Melbourne
97. My Old Ass – August 10, 2024 – Hoyts Melbourne Central
98. Grand Theft Hamlet – August 10, 2024 – Capitol Theatre
99. Matt and Mara – August 13, 2024 – Cinema Kino
100. September Says – August 21, 2024 – The Forum

You'll note that the venue for the films where MIFF was streaming, or at least had a streaming portion, are listed as the room in my house where I watched them.

You'll also note that some of the films are films that were not released in the year I saw them, and some of them are actually repeat viewings for me. So the hundred viewings does not include all new or new-to-me viewings. I've excluded these films from the top and bottom five I'll be including in just a moment.

A few stats about these viewings:

Venue I've seen the most films: The Comedy Theatre (15). The funny thing about this is that the Comedy Theatre has not actually been a venue in operation for a number of these years, including this year. It regularly has a stage production playing, and I think they've decided it is just too disruptive to try to factor MIFF viewings into the stage schedule -- to say nothing of a lot less financially rewarding. It also has legendarily uncomfortable seats, which did not prevent a large number of movies I wanted to see from playing there. I guess technically I saw more than 15 films at my previous house in North Melbourne, but I hardly think that counts.

Year I saw the most films: 2018 and 2021 (12). Twenty sixteen was the year I expanded my MIFF viewings from three or four each year to as many as I could reasonably see, and I saw double digits in each of those first three years, capped off with the most in 2018. However, given that streaming from home can be done virtually any night, even if it isn't quite the same experience, I did get up to 12 again in 2021. 

Year I saw the least films: 2015 (4). In part because I had a friend visiting that year, though he did attend one screening (The Witch) with me. 

Films seen in a public venue with other people: 69

Films seen at home: 31

Now on to my top and bottom five.

I struggled with whether to make this a top five of all films, or just films that I was not likely to see unless I'd picked them up at MIFF. However, I decided that for this landmark, hidden gems was not really what I was going for -- and then I decided maybe I'd just include five hidden gems as well.

I also decided not to rank them from best to fifth best, or worst to fifth worst. I'll just list the five best and five worst in alphabetical order. And because I've been consistent about writing about them, I might as well link to when they were discussed on The Audient. 

Top five:

Climax (2018, Gaspar Noe) - A film subdivided into a joyous celebration of dance and a Boschian nightmare. I've seen it twice more in the six years since then. Audient link here. 

First Reformed (2018, Paul Schraeder) - The first (alphabetically in this list, not chronologically) of two MIFF films that have gone on to be my #1 of the year -- so far. Audient link here. 

The Killing of Two Lovers (2020, Robert Machoian) - This could have easily fallen into the aforementioned hidden gems category, but I have such fond memories of it had that I had to include it in the regular top five. Only one of the top five I saw on streaming. Audient link here. 

Toni Erdmann (2016, Maren Ade) - The first time at MIFF my mind was truly blown, and also the hardest I have ever heard any audience laugh at a movie (nude brunch). The other MIFF movie that was my #1 for its year. Audient link here. 

Vivarium (2019, Lorcan Finnegan) - I have also watched this twice more since seeing it and it's been out for three fewer years than Climax. Chef's kiss for head trip movies with an undercurrent of social satire. Audient link here. 

Honorable mentions: Ingrid Goes West, Shoplifters, The Skeleton Twins

Now, the five that I really did not like:

Bad Behaviour (2023, Alice Englert) - It's the right adjective for this misanthropic story of a former child star behaving badly at a wellness retreat. Audient link here. 

La Cocina (2024, Alonso Ruizpalacios) - Yes, one of the five most irritated I've been at MIFF came just a couple weeks ago with this pretentious black-and-white movie about kitchen workers in a Times Square restaurant. Audient link here. 

Shithouse (2020, Cooper Raiff) - You'll see this listed as Freshman Year in the list above, because that's how it was released in Australia, but most people know it is as Shithouse, and it is. Audient link here. 

Shut Eye (2023, Tom Levesque) - If I had ranked these movies, this would have been the least bad in the bottom five, and there were about four other candidates that could have taken its place. This New Zealand movie about a woman who becomes obsessed with an AMSR star just wasn't well made, nor did it deliver on examining that distinct world. Audient link here. 

Wildlife (2018, Paul Dano) - I have no idea how this movie was selected as the opening night film that year, because it somehow manages to be both overwrought and inert at the same time. Just a misfire. Audient link here. 

Dishonorable mentions: Baskin, The Lodge, Wendy

And now five hidden gems. These are all movies I hadn't heard of before I saw them in the program, nor was I familiar with the talent involved. Some of them may have gone on to acclaim, but they were hidden from me at the time I selected them for viewing: 

Grand Theft Hamlet (2024, Sam Crane & Pinny Grylls) - I loved the concept of Shakespeare performed within the world of Grand Theft Auto, but until I saw it I couldn't have guessed that it would be profound in addition to funny. (I have since learned it won a big award at SXSW, but that doesn't mean I'd ever heard of it.) Audient link here.

I Lost My Body (2019, Jeremy Clapin) - Another one that became acclaimed, but after MIFF, as this went on to be nominated for an Oscar. But at the time I picked it, it was just an animated French movie about a disembodied hand trying to find its owner again.  Audient link here.

La Llorona (2019, Jayro Bustamante) - There was a bad Hollywood movie about La Llorona. This was not it. Blew me away with its filmmaking. Audient link here.

The Lure (2016, Agnieszka Smoczynska) - Who knew the Poles could make a movie about murderous mermaids in the 1980s? I certainly didn't when I picked this. Audient link here.

La Veronica (2021, Leonardo Madel) - In perhaps the most formally intriguing film I've ever seen at MIFF (or almost anywhere else), a soccer wife and social media star is at the center of every single frame of the film, with only her background changing. A real deep dive into navel gazing and encroaching personality dissolution. Audient link here.

Honorable mentions: The Face of the Jellyfish, Seoul Station, Shiva Baby 

Okay, that's enough of that.

But it's not quite enough of MIFF 2024. I will finish with at least one more film, but probably two more films, on Saturday. 

Who drugged Gretchen during The Evil Dead?

Before we get started, let me just say that analyzing Donnie Darko is so 2007. Back in those days, which were within five years of my first viewing of the movie in 2003, I kind of obsessed over the movie and devoted some thought to each and every little nugget of it. It's not a very 2024 thing at all, as most of us have transitioned to thinking of Darko as a one-time favorite that we still love, but it occupies more of a place of nostalgia for our younger years as cinephiles who were hungry to pore over a good head trip movie, not a current going consideration.

But I watched Donnie Darko for the first time in four years over the weekend, and that 2020 viewing was also four years after my previous viewing (which was six years after the one before that). That tracks with my discovery that we -- or at least I -- tend to watch favorite movies about as often as there are Olympics or presidential elections, the most-cited example on this blog being my favorite movie of all time, Raising Arizona.

It might have been a few more years for Darko except that I also just listened to the two episodes of The Next Picture Show -- the podcast devoted to comparing a new release to a classic film that may have helped inspire it -- that dealt with Darko and I Saw the TV Glow. Now that I finally saw Glow at MIFF, I've gone back and listened to the discussion of it on three different podcasts, which I avoided at the time they were released. (And I'm glad I waited, since one of my podcasters hated this movie, and I don't know how I would have avoided having his complaints in my head when I watched it.)

On this particular podcast they liked it, with some reservations, and the whole episode devoted to Darko got the juices flowing for a rewatch. Even if that movie is more nostalgic for me than it is currently breaking my 50-year-old brain, I still love a good rewatch merely for the purposes of nostalgia.

And I did think it was worth diving into one part of the movie that had always troubled me a little bit, but I've never written about it. (Spoilers, I guess.)

In the scene where Donnie (Jake Gyllenhaal), under a trance, decides to burn down the house of self-help guru Jim Cunningham (Patrick Swayze), ultimately revealing his kiddie porn dungeon to the firefighters sifting through the ashes, he's seeing a revival of Sam Raimi's The Evil Dead at the town movie theater. (The Last Temptation of Christ is also playing here, as the marquee shows us, but that would be a whole different avenue of thematic investigation.)

His girlfriend Gretchen (Jena Malone) is accompanying him, but I can't imagine she's very enthusiastic about it because she falls asleep practically during the opening credits. It's at this point that the man in the rabbit costume, Frank (James Duval), sits next to her, and he and Donnie speak to each other across her blissfully sleeping body.

Even though I've seen this movie about seven times -- I could tell you exactly, except I didn't start recording the dates of rewatches until 2006 -- I always kind of think of this as a midnight movie they attend, hence explaining that Gretchen falls asleep almost immediately. They are the only two in the theater, which also suggests that it is playing at a strange time of night. (Though maybe a midnight movie would actually attract more excited cinephiles than an 8 p.m. showing.)

Except of course it's not a midnight movie, because during this scene, director Richard Kelly cross-cuts with an event going on at the same time -- Talent Show '88, as the banner reads, which is taking place at Donnie's school and includes a performance by Donnie's sister Samantha (Daveigh Chase) and her iconic dance troupe Sparkle Motion. The rest of Donnie's family is in attendance for this, as is Cunningham, conveniently sparing him a death by flame back at his house. (Donnie's a bit of a confused kid, but he wouldn't have lit the house on fire if there were anybody in it.)

But you get the sense Donnie would only do this if he were sure he had an alibi and his tracks would be covered. If you are at the movies with your girlfriend, you have that alibi -- but in order for her not to know you disappeared for 45 minutes or more, she has to not be conscious to bear witness.

Even as deranged -- that's too harsh a word -- as Donnie is, he wouldn't assume Gretchen would sleep for the whole movie. In fact, he wouldn't assume she would sleep at all during a primetime movie that's taking place at the same time as a family-friendly high school talent show. If she did fall asleep, it might be for five minutes, and she would at least stir a few times, even if she did ultimately resume her slumber.

You might propose the theory that Gretchen did stir, and when she saw Donnie wasn't there, she assumed he was in the bathroom and nodded off again. However, she's also alone in a movie theater with a scary movie playing, so this would work for one momentary awakening maximum. If she awoke two or three more times, and Donnie still wasn't there, she'd start to freak out, especially since she's living in fear of a crazy stepfather who is on the loose after stabbing her mother.

So the only way any of this works is if Gretchen is drugged. 

But who drugged her? Donnie? We know he takes medication, but the meds are meant to even him out, not put him to sleep. And there's nothing else to suggest Donnie is this kind of kid. Not only do we not have any reason to think he has access to these sorts of drugs, but he's fiercely protective of the people he loves. And he may just love Gretchen. 

Plus, it doesn't seem as though this was premeditated. Frank appears to him in the theater and suggests that Donnie "Burn it to the ground." And though we know, or at least think, Frank is a projection of Donnie's overactive imagination, meaning it's something he was thinking about already, he certainly seems surprised enough to have Frank appear there next to him, at this particular moment.

So is it Frank who drugged her?

As far as we know, Frank is not seen by anyone nor can he interact with anyone other than Donnie. There is clearly something "real" about Frank in that this ends up being a real person that Donnie hasn't met yet, but at this point he is imaginary, and you can't drug someone with imaginary drugs.

The notion then is that something about this scenario causes Gretchen to become entranced, something mystical that we can't explain. There are, of course, a lot of mystical things in Donnie Darko that defy explanation, but outside of the stuff directly related to the portals and time travel, there is a real-world basis for all the film's other events. For example, Donnie ends up in strange places around his town at night, but there's a terrestrial explanation for how he got there -- he slept-walked. Or at least, walked there in a trance of his own mental creation. 

There ultimately isn't likely an explanation for this, and there needn't be. Gretchen's 85-minute nap -- that's the length of The Evil Dead -- is probably more a screenwriting convenience than anything with a deeper meaning.

But one of the reasons we have favorite films is that we like to ask these questions and imagine what the answers might be. 

MIFF: "Bonus" movie first, MIFF movie second

But I'll put the MIFF poster first because this is, after all, a post about MIFF.

No, It Ends With Us was not playing at the Melbourne International Film Festival, and never in a million years would it.

But I have a tradition, on days when I have only a single MIFF movie on the schedule, of using the evening's second viewing time slot to watch a regular old theatrical release. I'd say it makes the viewing of that theatrical release more memorable, but as I sit here and force myself to think of examples, the only one I can remember was watching the film that involved Hamlet reimagined from the perspective of his love interest, and retrofitted to have her not kill herself, Ophelia. I thought of reviewing my records for other examples, which would be easy enough to do, but resisted the temptation to sidetrack this post.

In all of those instances, it was a MIFF movie I saw in the 6 p.m. time slot and the "bonus" movie in the 9 p.m. time slot. Given the way the festival has been selling out this year, though, the only Tuesday movie I could find that I had some interest in seeing was in the 9 p.m. slot. So I scheduled to see It Ends With Us in the first slot, and then top it off with the MIFF movie.

Why was I even seeing It Ends With Us at all, and in fact, working out my schedule around that viewing rather than the other way around?

Well I'll tell you, though I hope my writer doesn't read this post.

One of my writers at my review site accepted an advanced screening for two -- though I think he went by himself -- to It Ends With Us last Tuesday, or maybe it was Wednesday. He wasn't sure he'd be able to make it due to a conflict, but then he did make it. I had given a moment's thought to replacing him at the screening, but then thought that if neither of us made it, I'd just tell the publicist that we had to cancel at the last moment. "We" being me because it's my name on the tickets, and if another writer goes, they have to pretend they're me. This always works, though I do wonder why they don't notice the disconnect between the name of the person who writes the review and the name of the person who attended the screening. The tickets are supposed to be "strictly non-transferable," after all.

But the fact is, it's my name on it, so it is officially me who attended. Therefore, it is my name that gets dragged through the mud if we don't write a review. Which was this writer's plan, or rather, what ended up happening when he said he couldn't find a good way in to review the movie. He said maybe he would just skip reviewing this one.

Okay, but that's not really how it works. This is a quid pro quo arrangement. I give you something (an advanced movie screening) and you give me something (a review, no matter how terrible it might be). 

I guess something about the subject matter, which is intended for a female audience, made him hesitate to write a terrible review. One factor in that was he didn't actually think the movie was terrible. (I had told him I hoped it was "non-terrible" and he confirmed that it was.) But also he didn't know what to say about it. One of the responsibilities of writing film reviews is that you can find a way to review anything, but this guy only writes me a half-dozen reviews a year and I get that he doesn't have the years of professional experience that has given me this ability.

In any case, because it was me who supposedly attended -- and therefore, because it was me who would not be writing a review -- I had to swoop in and see the movie in order to review it. Which I did. You can find that review here. I actually liked it a lot better than I thought I would. Maybe it was the belly full of yummy Thai dinner. (Incidentally, I don't know if they actually check if you wrote the review, and hold it against you if you don't. But I come from a generation where people pride themselves on fulfilling their obligations, which is something that has fallen away a bit with the younger folk.)

In fact, I might not have been going to MIFF at all on Tuesday if not for the need to see It Ends With Us and get up a review while it was still within a week of the film's release. As you may recall, my mild disappointment with the MIFF schedule this year meant that I only secured tickets for four movies over the first weekend, so I could review some of them before their second screening -- again fulfilling an implied, if not actual, reviewing obligation. I decided to leave my remaining two free tickets, plus any others I might purchase, up to the whims of fate. Which, as mentioned earlier, were not particularly kind, as a lot of movies -- a lot more than I remembered from other years -- are selling out this year.

Which is how I ended up at my fifth of five 2024 MIFF movies whose primary language was English. 

But, if we're thinking purely in terms of countries and their borders, at least it was somewhat international by being filmed and set in Canada.

Matt and Mara was, in truth, more than just a desperation play to make Tuesday night work out. One of the two titular characters is played by Matt Johnson, the actor-director who has appeared in each of the three features he's directed, most recently last year's BlackBerry, which also played MIFF but which I had already seen through U.S. iTunes by the time the festival started. (Which allowed me to review it as part of last year's MIFF preview on my site.) I was also a big fan of The Dirties and Operation Avalanche, though BlackBerry was the true favorite for me, ending up as my #5 film of 2023. Suffice it to say that at this point, I welcome anything Johnson does.

Plus there was the added benefit of Matt and Mara screening in the same venue as It Ends With Us, as Cinema Kino, the theater downstairs from where I used to work, is doing double duty with regular theatrical releases and MIFF films. After some low-level stress over the weekend in getting to and between venues, this was welcome.

Matt and Mara is vaguely in the mumblecore tradition, which is adjacent to Johnson's most familiar mode of faux documentary. Both forms rely heavily on naturalism, and that's probably a big reason why audiences like or don't like them.

Me, I like them. Matt and Mara is the sort of film that used to be plentiful but which doesn't get made as much anymore. It's a short (80-minute) feature that relies on seemingly improvisatory dialogue between Johnson and actress Deragh Campbell, whose name and face both felt familiar, but with whom it turns out I have no experience. 

He's a big success, seemingly playing a version of himself as the character is named Matt Johnson, and is famous for having written a bestselling memoir of sorts (bestselling within the sphere of Canadian literature, at least). She's teaching literature at a Toronto university and has a child and likable musician husband. He's back in Toronto (from where, we don't know) for a couple weeks and pops in on her, hoping to rekindle a friendship that was once characterized by them being inseparable. Obviously something must have happened between them, because at first she finds his arrival jarring, before quickly falling into the old habits. These include walking around the city and having alternately deep and whimsical conversations in cafes.

There is a narrative spine here, as Mara is planning to take a trip to Ithaca in New York for a conference where she'll be a speaker, and at the last minute her husband can't drive her. (Mara apparently does not have a license.) So of course Matt fills in, and complications ensue.

Matt and Mara is brief enough that when it reaches the end, you feel like it stopped short of really saying anything. I guess that's why we rarely see films that are this short, because you can do just that much more in 90 minutes than you can in 80. However, I also felt a pretty high level of fondness for this movie, as these two actors are wonderfully charming presences with whom to spend this time, and their rapport is that of two old friends. I would not be surprised to learn that in real life, Campbell and Johnson are just that.

Incidentally, this makes for the second movie I've seen at MIFF that has a character named Matt, or some derivation of Matt, in the title. In 2019 I saw Matthias et Maxime, directed by Xavier Dolan -- also a Canadian, but from the French-speaking part. 

Okay, as of this writing, I again don't have my next MIFF tickets secured, but the festival goes for another week and I am sure to get out once if not twice more.

Audient Outliers: Great Expectations

This is the fourth in my 2024 bi-monthly series in which I revisit the one film I don't care for in the filmography of a director I love.

Until his productivity kind of dwindled away there -- how else to describe just a single feature film in a ten-year period? -- Alfonso Cuaron was just about my gold standard for visionary directors who take big swings, and almost always hit.

Children of Men is, of course, the gold standard of that gold standard, having taken my #1 movie of 2006 and, perhaps more tellingly, my #2 movie of that entire decade. 

Harry Potter and the Prisoner Azkaban, Y Tu Mama Tambien and Gravity are all excellent movies, and even when I'm not totally sold on something Cuaron makes -- such as the only movie we've gotten from him since 2013, Roma -- I recognize its artistry, and probably think it's a "me thing" and that I should take another look.

I went back this month for another look at his 1998 film, Great Expectations, even though I never thought not liking it was a "me thing." (And to clarify more fully, I think Roma is a very good movie, I just don't think it quite warranted all the praise it got.)

I'm pretty sure I saw Great Expectations before I saw Y Tu Mama Tambien in Cuaron's filmography, but it would be hard to confirm that because I didn't keep track of the order in which I watched films until early 2002, the year after Y Tu Mama came out. And I definitely don't remember watching it as a result of loving Y Tu Mama, though I suppose that could have happened. So let's just say Great Expectations was my first introduction to Cuaron.

If so, it didn't leave me with very great expectations.

Now I should say it's possible I wouldn't particularly care for any film version of Charles Dickens' novel, which I haven't read, and which I have never seen adapted into a period appropriate film. This rewatch confirms that this story is not of particular interest to me, even though I consider myself a romantic who is ready and eager to swoon over such material, if it is presented just so.

In fact, I couldn't help but think of Titanic, which came out the year before Great Expectations, as I watched this. I went in hook, line and sinker for Titanic -- if you'll allow the marine metaphor -- so you'd think that would leave me particularly susceptible to the way Cuaron et al try to conjure a similarly intoxicating romance between Ethan Hawke's Finn and Gwyneth Paltrow's Stella. I'm sure this is straight from the novel so I'm not trying to accuse Cuaron of ripping Titanic off, but there's even a scene where the young man draws/paints the young woman in the nude.

Suffice it to say I was not intoxicated.

And there are materials here with which to intoxicate a person. Specifically, Paltrow. I'll confess that Gwyneth Paltrow of this period does make me swoon just a bit with that perfectly coquettish partial parting of her lips. Both the actress and the character are keenly aware of the power they may have over men, and use it mercilessly. 

The problem is, I don't feel any energy between her and Hawke, an actor I have always liked very much, but perhaps slightly more so in the 21st century than the 20th. I feel there is a lot of play-acting of an almost fairytale style romance, what with the mouldering Florida mansion where the young versions of the characters first meet and share that ten-year-old kiss at the fountain they are both drinking from -- a moment I do admit works, and that I remembered well from my previous viewing. I just don't feel like the film gets beyond play-acting.

I suppose this is a logical progression for Cuaron after his debut English language feature, 1995's A Little Princess, which is one of those movies I went back and watched after I'd already been floored by his work. I really liked that one and it does indicate the sort of fantasy world where Cuaron finds himself in Great Expectations. (I should note here that I thought myself a Cuaron completist, but it turns out I haven't seen 1991's Love in the Time of Hysteria, a Spanish language film, so I probably ought to rectify that at some point.)

But I think it's pretty telling how Cuaron thought Great Expectations went that he immediately scrambled back to something smaller and more culturally specific to his experiences, with a cast of no-names, two of whom went on to become big stars. Y Tu Mama Tambien feels like a reaction to having "sold out" to make a big movie starring big movie stars and not having it go well, and I think we can say pretty definitively that it enabled him to have this legendary career.

So what's actually wrong with Great Expectations?

It's hard to encapsulate it through concrete examples. It just doesn't feel very true. As I was watching it Wednesday night, I was initially critical of how I didn't think it was very visually inventive, even with long-time collaborator Emmanuel Lubezki serving as the DP. But I did notice, as the movie went on, things that I thought were at least attempts by Cuaron to showcase that sort of creativity. They just lack impact.

One thing I felt is that it hasn't aged very well, or probably more accurately, it was not made at the time with an eye for how it would age. A moment that particularly stood out to me is that an early romantic scene between our leads, which is meant to take place in the late 1980s, is scored to a Soundgarden song. Chris Cornell's voice feels like it situates this very exactly in the early 1990s, which is neither the era that is being depicted in this movie -- there was definitely no grunge before 1991 -- nor the era that the film was actually made, when grunge was already on its way out. (Not all the music had this effect on me, as I was pleased to hear the voice of personal favorite Tori Amos at one point, in a song I didn't previously know -- though I think her music transcends the specific period of its creation a lot more than Cornell's does.)

To show you how little I remembered the details of this movie, I was surprised to see Robert De Niro's role as the criminal Finn helps escape, back when he's still a child, who is ultimately revealed to be his benefactor. I sort of remembered it as I saw it happening, but if you had asked me beforehand if Robert De Niro was in this movie, I would have told you surely not. 

Without a real acquaintance with the original novel, I couldn't get a grasp on what themes were meant to be explored here, specifically through that character but just generally. What is it supposed to mean that Finn saved this gruff character -- albeit very much against his will -- from certain capture by the police, and that this man secretly funded his rise in the art world over the next 20 years? Is that supposed to mean Finn didn't really make it on his own? And is this supposed to be a defeat for the character? If that's the idea, it isn't explored very conclusively.

Rather, it seems that what this movie is really "about" is that Finn falls in love with a coquettish woman who parts her lips just so, and she basically toys with his emotions, and that's mean. The false way these characters have been developed really reveals itself in a scene after a big art opening Finn has in New York, where he's swigging a bottle of booze and walking through the rain to (what he believes is) Estella's apartment. He then shouts up at her window about how he has attained fame and fortune and success in the art world and it's still not enough for her. The fact that this moment feels so abrupt within the narrative is a sure sign that the proper work hasn't been done. Why is he so mad? Is it such an epic betrayal to tease someone?

Then when he realizes it's not Estella obscured up in that window, but rather, the eccentric old woman who owned the mouldering Florida mansion -- Mrs. Dinsmoor, played by Anne Bancroft -- he has to have it out with her as though she bears a significant responsibility for Estella breaking his heart. It's not at all convincing that this might be the case -- she even told him the girl would break his heart, many years ago -- and yet the scene culminates in tortured grandeur as Dinsmoor cries in agony "What have I done???" while Finn storms down the stairs and out of the building.

I think in the end I have to say that this is like the Calvin Klein jeans ad version of Great Expectations. There's a lot of shots of people looking sort of pretty and sort of tortured and generally dressed in dynamite clothing. There's scenes of wild rain and leaves blowing around as if staged by a set designer. And then of course there is the grand mansion, overgrown with ivy and other plant life, sort of like Gatsby's mansion if it had been left to seed.

In fact, the evocation of Gatsby got me thinking about what Baz Luhrmann would have done with this material. Not only would he have made it grander by making it more of an obvious caricature, by outsizing its romance until it blew off the canvas entirely, but he would have made it fun. There isn't a single thing fun about Great Expectations, and that could be why it's so hard to care about any of its characters.

I wouldn't say that a sense of humor ever became Cuaron's strong suit. But he didn't need one in the movies he would make later. (And you're wrong if you think Children of Men doesn't have any funny moments.) All he needed was the vision he found along the way, which may not conform to the sorts of commonalities between works we ascribe to an auteur, but was consistently characterized by being ambitious -- ambitious in a way that failed him in Great Expectations.

But we should also be incredibly thankful for Great Expectations.

Let's say his vision for this movie had been very well received, had even resulted in Oscar nominations -- hell, for the sake of argument, let's even say it won best picture. Those things happen and there's almost a zero percent chance we get Y Tu Mama Tambien, or the best Harry Potter movie, or the craziest post-apocalyptic movie about mass sterility that contains some of the most technically challenging scenes ever filmed, or an absolute game-changer in the making of outer space films.

And how much poorer would we be for that. 

Blaxploitaudient: Lord Shango

This is the eighth in my 2024 monthly series watching blaxploitation movies I haven't seen before.

My August selection in Blaxploitaudient, Lord Shango, got me asking the question: 

Just because a movie features primarily Black people -- in this case all Black people -- and is set in the 1970s, does that necessarily make it a blaxploitation film?

Ray Marsh's 1975 film came on my radar by doing a search of the word "blaxploitation" on Kanopy, earlier on the very night that I watched it. See, I had only 11 films in my Blaxploitaudient list of potential candidates for this series on Letterboxd, meaning I'd need at least one that wasn't on the list. I considered watching Coffy, one of the remaining four I had not yet watched, but I get the sense that this is another film fronted by a female badass, and I've watched a film that profiles like that in two of the past three months with Foxy Brown and Cleopatra Jones. I'm saving Ganja & Hess, which I understand is a horror movie, for October, and I'm questionable on whether I am going to ultimately watch either Dolemite or Shaft in Africa, since I've already watched a Rudy Ray Moore movie and a Shaft movie.

And I actually did welcome the change in subject matter with Lord Shango, which deals more with the occult than the traditional blaxploitation elements of drugs, crime, guns and groovy music. Whether or not that makes it a blaxploitation film, well, I may leave that up to wiser people than me, and in any case, with MIFF on this month, I'm definitely not going to fit in another one.

I was concerned at the start that this might be extremely low budge, and that the film's technical limitations might make it even more of a B movie than usual in a series comprised of essentially B movies. It did pick up in its confidence a bit as it went, though it likely still remains the most anonymous movie that I've watched, considering that I wasn't familiar with a single cast member -- a first for this series.

And here's an interesting indication of the obscurity of Lord Shango -- it does not have its own Wikipedia page. It's mentioned in the Wikipedia pages of some of the actors who appear in it, but it never got its own. Which is a shame, because I watched this last week and wanted a refresher on the plot. So I've just got to do my best on that one. 

Let's start with the logline on IMDB: "A tribal priest returns from the dead to take revenge on non-believers." News to me, ha ha.

So the movie opens with a woman Billie (Avis McCarther) being taken for her christening in a lake ceremony. Her fiancee Femi (Bill Overton) arrives to try to break this up, I believe since he is pagan. (Is he the tribal priest? I did not get that.) In the struggle to remove him from the ceremony, though, Femi accidentally drowns, sending Billie into a pit of despair.

The main character then becomes Billie's mother, Jenny (Marlene Clark), who knows that a mysterious bystander to this ceremony named Jabo (Lawrence Cook) has a connection to the occult. The movie takes on the thrust of summoning the spiritual leader Lord Shango to save and protect Billie, though of course this has unintended consequences, and certain people who wronged the pregnant Billie are likely to get quite the comeuppance.

I ultimately gave this film three stars on Letterboxd, but my only memory of it now is hazy, and I can't say it did a great job keeping its audience up to speed with the plot points. This is becoming a theme in my posts, but I watched it on a night I was really tired, and there were naps involved. Cognizant of how busy I would be during August because of MIFF, I watched it before the festival started, but you could rightly say I was sort of jamming it in just to tick it off the list. There were ultimately things about the film that I thought worked enough to give it this narrowest of recommendations, but since I can't fully recall what they were now, it feels a little empty. I think just best to move on.

One realization I had during the movie, when retroactively pondering my August choice, is that although this series was inspired by watching Elvis Mitchell's Is That Black Enough for You? at the end of my 2022 ranking period, I don't believe I've watched many, if any, films that I learned about from that movie. There were a lot of blaxploitation movies I already knew about that I hadn't seen, and those have made up the bulk of the series so far.

So I have now vowed to check the inevitable online list of all the movies mentioned in Is That Black Enough for You?, and choose two of them to go along with Coffy and Ganja & Hess for the final four movies in this series. September seems like a good time to do the first one. 

MIFF: My old ass ran, and Shakespeare profound

For the second night in a row on Saturday, I trained into the city for MIFF, though this time it wasn't a workday. That might have been a key factor in why I casually took the 5:42 train, for a movie that started at 6:30, when I clearly should have taken the 5:22.

Forty-eight minutes might seem like plenty of time to get there, if you didn't know where "there" was. I take a 7:42 am. train on the mornings I go into work to get there at 8:30, but I'm usually walking in the door right at 8:30 -- or was, before my office moved. Now it's more like 8:37.

And getting to Hoyts Melbourne Central requires as much hoofing, if not more, than getting to my old office. What the hell was I thinking?

So instead of enjoying a casual trip into the city, I anxiously watched the minutes count down and stressed over every perceived delay in service. When we finally arrived at Flinders Street around 6:12, I knew I would probably make it, but I also knew that the next decision was key. Do I take a tram up Elizabeth Street to Melbourne Central, or do I just walk? The former held the promise of a (potentially) faster arrival time, but the latter left the speed I got there within my own control, and the control of the traffic lights.

Well, I chose to ride the tram for those three stops -- and immediately regretted my decision. Because the intersection of Flinders Street and Elizabeth Street is a terminus point for all trams travelling down Elizabeth Street, that also means the tram operator can take an indeterminate amount of time -- up to a schedule or up to his or her own whims? -- before deciding that as many people who intended to board had boarded before leaving. And in this case, that was an interminable three minutes or so. 

When we were only at the second stop by about 6:24, I decided to bail. I got out and raced the tram up Elizabeth Street, now at a full run -- or at least a full jog. 

I did beat the tram there, but only just, or should I say, it was a tie, except I was already on the correct side of the road and didn't have to wait for others disembarking the tram with a lot less deliberation that I would have intended. In short, it was the right decision, but an even better decision would have been to walk the whole way. (But considering that this day already included the steps from the end of my MIFF outing the night before, several thousand of which occurred after midnight, I ended up with more than 19,000 steps for the day, so the short break on the tram was welcome in some respects.)

Scampering around people and up escalators, I actually made it before the MIFF pre-show advertising even began. I guess I was more worried about not scoring a decent seat than actually missing the start of the movie, but that turned out fine as well. 

Oh, the movie was called My Old Ass, hence the subject of this post.

And it was a charmer. The premise is pretty delightful: Aubrey Plaza plays the 39-year-old version of approximately 19-year-old Maisy Stella, an actress I'd never seen before who I found radiant with charisma. Both play Elliott, but we're in the younger one's current time. She's a lesbian -- or so she thinks, more on that in a moment -- who is meant to inherit the Canadian cranberry farm that has been in her family for generations, but would rather leave that to her keen brother and move to the big city (Toronto). She's enjoying a final three weeks of summer before this move with some friends around the lake, and when they take mushrooms one night, she is visited by, or possibly conjures, the version of herself 20 years in the future.

My Old Ass is not meant to be super high concept, as it toys with some of the possible conundrums of whether this is real or not and if so, how learning about things that happen in the future will affect the space-time continuum. Megan Park's movie is more of a coming-of-age story than anything else, and Plaza is not in that much of it -- only three scenes by my count. Which makes sense for an in-demand actress who was likely doing a favor for this small production. (There are actually a couple other recognizable actors, one being Maria Dizzia -- who I often confuse with Elizabeth Reaser -- and one being Maddie Zeigler, apparently still able to get work after her performance in Sia's Music was widely panned because she was playing a character with intellectual disabilities.) 

The movie has a light spirit, a lot of humor and some touching moments, but I have to say there was one thing about it that bothered me. I suppose this qualifies as a mild spoiler, but the central romantic relationship in the movie is not between Elliott and a woman. It turns out she is discovering she might not be gay, or that at least she might be bi. While I suppose that would certainly be some people's journey, I had to wonder if there was something about it that was a step in the wrong direction.

After My Old Ass I got a sort-of disappointing chicken burger from Oporto and made my way back to my favorite MIFF venue, The Capitol, for the second night in a row. This was a much shorter and much more easily travelled distance, and I arrived in plenty of time.

And here was where I had my first major MIFF discovery of 2024, my first of those moments that I've managed to find every year, even when I don't feel like the program is particularly great: The reminder of why I love MIFF to begin with.

I don't know what kind of exposure or release Grand Theft Hamlet is going to get, and in fact, there is a good chance I would never have come across it if not for MIFF. And it has quickly jumped to become among my handful of favorite films so far in 2024. 

In the subject of this post I teased "Shakespeare profound," which may seem like an obvious statement. I mean, it's Shakespeare, so of course it's profound, right? (Or whoever wrote the works attributed to Shakespeare. A discussion for another time.)

But those of us who have lived to a certain age have seen so much Shakespeare that after a while, it might feel more banal than profound.

Enter Grand Theft Hamlet, which places the staging of Shakespeare's most famous? (maybe Romeo & Juliet is more famous) play within the world of one of the most popular and enduring online gaming communities.

I won't go into too much detail here, but rather, link my already-posted review here. But in case you don't want to follow that link, I'll briefly say that two out-of-work British actors (Sam Crane and Mark Oosterveen) were playing too much Grand Theft Auto at the beginning of 2021, during Britain's third lockdown, when they got the idea that they could try to put on a performance of Hamlet within the game space, using other interested gamers who happen to have an interest in Shakespeare. (There's a funny moment when they acknowledge that the Venn diagram of online gamers and Shakespeare enthusiasts yields a fairly small result.) Without conventional stages being available, all this world could be their stage.

And in a similar mix of the funny and the poignant to what I experienced at MIFF with my #1 film of 2016, Toni Erdmann, Grand Theft Hamlet knocks this concept out of the park. The game mechanics themselves result in moments that left our audience screaming with laughter, but underlying the obvious humor was the profound undercurrent of sadness and dislocation -- both of the GTA world itself, where people are constantly killing each other, and of the real world at that time, when COVID and racial strife were tearing us apart. And then there is the profound of seeing these famous speeches from Hamlet set against this immaculately designed game space.

But now I'm starting to repeat my review, so I will just leave off there. Simply put: Seek this one out.

The holiday-themed towns of Massachusetts

I'm such a sucker for themed viewings that I likely would have waited until this Thanksgiving to see Thanksgiving, which I missed last Thanksgiving. 

However, sometimes I surprise myself, and I ended up watching it this past Thursday night.

(At least it was on a Thursday, if we're looking for themes -- though that was unintentional.)

And as I was watching, I realized there was something familiar about it.

No, it wasn't that I had seen an abbreviated version of it back when I saw Grindhouse, back when Planet Terror and Death Proof were considered to be one movie, the two halves separated by fake trailers. One of which was Machete, which has already been made into a movie (a movie that got a sequel), and one of which was Eli Roth's initial pass at Thanksgiving. Without watching that fake trailer again, I don't know if his fake trailer had anything to do with the direction Roth ultimately decided to go with his movie.

Rather, it was familiar because I have seen other movies set in a small Massachusetts town that's famous for being associated with a particular holiday. 

That's right, Plymouth is the setting for Thanksgiving, as it contains Plymouth Rock, the location the Mayflower landed in 1620, disgorging pilgrims everywhere and ultimately destroying the future for Native Americans. Appropriately, it is a celebrated with all sorts of Thanksgiving-related hoopla, at least according to this movie. (I didn't check to see if the real Plymouth has a Thanksgiving parade and is lousy with oversized turkeys and people dressed as pilgrims, but it is easy to imagine that they do and are.)

The commercialization and celebration of Thanksgiving in Plymouth, whether it is real or imagined, gives it something in common with nearby Salem, which has the same sort of relationship with Halloween. 

As you would know if you have visited -- or if you have watched movies like Hocus Pocus and its sequel, or The Lords of Salem -- Salem, Massachusetts is all about selling the occult to tourists. There is a regionally famous witch trials museum that has a sort of "show" about the trials that uses light animatronics, and every second shop will sell you potions or Harry Potter stuff. At Halloween, this town goes crazy.

The fact that Massachusetts would have two towns that are closely associated with major holidays that fall during the second half of the year seems rather unlikely, and is nothing I had ever thought of before. It's not just that the towns are closely associated with the holiday, but rather, that no other town -- in the entire U.S. -- has more of a claim to either of these holidays than these two towns have. 

They're only about 60 miles apart from each other, at that.

Burying the lede here -- about halfway between these two towns is the town where I grew up, Lexington, which makes it all the more interesting for me personally. 

The funny thing is, while I know where Salem is because I've been there twice in the past 15 years, I actually had to look on a map just now to remind myself that Plymouth was actually south of Lexington, not north. Some Massachussetsan I am. (I think it should "Massachuten," but that does not appear to mean anything.)

Guess it's been a while since I've been there, or maybe it's just an indication of which of these two holidays I like more. I can tell you that while my Australian wife is always interested in stopping in Salem -- my not-yet-14-year-old son has been there twice, and we don't even live in that country -- she has never expressed any interest in seeing where the pilgrims landed, directly or indirectly leading to centuries of European imperialism and mass murder on that continent. 

As for the movie, a few inventive Thanksgiving-themed kills aside, I found it to be a fairly generic slasher flick where a serial killer wears a mask, and it is ultimately the last person you think it's going to be. Too bad Roth couldn't lean more into the silliness of the opening Black Friday riot at a big box store in which people are trampled to death in outrageously bloody ways. Or better still, have given us the grindhouse version of a serial killer movie set in the 17th century -- like, historically ambitious and deeply pulpy, all at once. 

MIFF: I saw the IMAX screen glow, and sparkler cake double feature

There were a couple of firsts in my first two MIFF movies of 2024, other than obviously being the first of the year:

1) The first time I had ever gone into the city on a weekday to see MIFF movies, rather than working in the city and then staying for my movies;

2) The first time I had ever seen a MIFF movie on an IMAX screen.

That second isn't so surprising, given that I don't believe MIFF has ever had a partnership, before this year, with the Melbourne Museum, where one of the world's largest IMAX screens is housed. 

And because all my past IMAX experiences have involved $200 million blockbusters, that makes I Saw the TV Glow definitely the lowest budgeted film I've ever seen on an IMAX screen.

Jane Schoenbrun's film was actually the second I watched on Friday, so let's start at the beginning.

Which was that morning, when I toured the campus of a high school where my son might want to transfer. That was the reason I couldn't go into work on Friday, though I'd already worked three days in the office this week while backfilling for my manager, so I can't say I minded. He wouldn't be transferring there until the start of 2026, but I kind of hope he never does as it is really too expensive for us, and I wasn't all that impressed by the facilities. (And I promise that was not just my wallet talking.)

So when the workday did come to a close, blissfully ending two weeks in which I was doing two different jobs, I took the train in to the city in time for my 6 p.m. showing of La Cocina at my favorite MIFF venue, The Capitol. 

The 139-minute black and white film by director Alonzo Ruizpalacios was welcome in at least one regard. In my previous post, I bemoaned the fact that none of the first four films I'd picked for MIFF 2024 was a foreign film. Set in New York City, La Cocina certainly isn't "foreign" in that sense, but I'd say that more than half the dialogue is in Spanish, so that's something at least. 

In most other regards, this movie did not work for me. It reminded me of a mode of independent film we haven't seen much of in the past 20 years, the one that invites the word "pretentious" with a capital P. Not only is there the black and white photography, but there are a lot of off-center shots and dialogue that is ten to 20 percent more poetic than it should be. Plus everybody is smoking in nearly ever scene, though I suppose it's possible this film is set in the past. (It isn't specified, and the production design is timeless enough that you wouldn't know for sure, though it does appear to be at a time where touch-screen point-of-sales might be relatively new technology, since we see characters perplexed by trying to work them.)

It follows a day in the kitchen and front of house of what appears to be a touristy restaurant in Times Square, a bit in an upstairs-downstairs mode, though mostly downstairs. A manager is conducting a series of interviews with staff because more than $800 went missing from the till. It's one of those movies where so much happens in a single day that it beggars belief, from a broken water main that floods the kitchen, to a beef between two workers escalating into violence, to a new starter being shown the ropes, to a particular hothead exhausting all three of the strikes the chef gives him in one day. Its origins as a play are pretty obvious, and somehow in among all this, the characters seem to have more time when they are on a break than anything else.

I had been hopeful about the movie because Rooney Mara is the one recognizable star, but I guess Mara isn't quite the guarantee of quality she once was for me. I guess that's not quite saying it right. This movie is "quality" in the sense that it is made with a high level of technical competence and has good artistic instincts, even if they are the instincts of a slightly different era. The conception and execution are both heavy-handed to the point of rolling the eyeballs, though. Since the action is restricted to the restaurant, La Cocina reminds me a bit of how those who didn't like Birdman must have felt about it.

Incidentally, now that I have seen La Cocina, my 2024 movie list contains both movies called La Cocina and The Kitchen. 

After La Cocina, I picked up some not-very-good Asian fast food and meandered my way over to the Melbourne Museum, a walk of about 20 minutes. I arrived with ten minutes to spare, which I quickly discovered was the wrong tack when you're talking about an IMAX screen.

I sit closer to the screen than your average person, subscribing to the notion that a movie screen should fill as much of your field of vision as possible. Forced to sit in the fourth row, I think it was, of an IMAX screen is taking that a bit to an extreme. So while this was a good sort of movie to be overwhelmed by, I would have preferred to be overwhelmed from about two rows back from where I was.

I had purposely prevented myself from learning too much about I Saw the TV Glow before coming in, even going so far as to avoid its discussion entirely on two of my regular podcasts. So I didn't know it was a Buffy-like TV show the characters were obsessed with. I was expecting something more inherently supernatural in nature like the central conceit of Schoenbrun's We're All Going to the World's Fair. 

Although this is a better movie than that, my core assessment of the film's strengths and weaknesses is very similar. Both movies have some excellent visual moments that chill you to the bone, and the overall mood is hard to beat. And both movies come in at only a percentage as successful as I thought they could have been, in part because both fail to stick the ending -- or even really have much of an ending to speak of.

But rest assured, I do feel quite positively about I Saw the TV Glow. Because of how it fizzles out -- pretty much the entire final 10 to 15 minutes didn't work for me -- I can't give it any higher than a 3.5 out of 5, though interestingly, I've slotted it in higher on my year-end rankings in progress than some films I've given a four. I Saw the TV Glow is better than those films in most ways, though still leaves me fundamentally unsatisfied in a manner that prevents me from going to four stars. A film that is a better version of itself than I Saw the TV Glow might get four stars, and still not be the film that I Saw the TV Glow is.

I did appreciate a lot of the thoughts by Schoenbrun, who I believe considers themselves a trans woman with they/them pronouns, on gender fluidity. Much of the movie operates as a metaphor for feeling trapped inside a body that doesn't feel like yours, and not being understood by anybody so seeking to dream yourself away into the popular culture that becomes more of a family to you than your own. And some of those images -- man, I won't soon forget them. Those strange dancing twins whose hair and chin gives them the appearance of crescent moons, and the moon monster himself, Mr. Melancholy, lasciviously licking the face of one of the characters in one of the film's haunting signature images ... I'll rewatch I Saw the TV Glow for them alone.

I promised you a sparkler cake double feature. And true enough, both of these films contains a scene where somebody carries out a birthday cake with a sparkler on top of it, and all the restaurant workers gather to sing happy birthday to a customer. Doesn't get a lot more specific than that.

As I write this I have already attended my second MIFF double feature on Saturday night, but it's too much to cover in this one post so I'll get to it as soon as I can.