No problem money can't solve

In Anora, Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn) has a problem. Despite having access to riches beyond anyone's wildest dreams, he's got a finite visa that will prevent his preferred indefinite stay in New York. He's got to go back to Russia unless he can solve this problem.

Also in Anora, Ani (Mikey Madison) has a problem. She lives in a squalid apartment with a disagreeable roommate, and only sex work in a nearby strip club can afford her even this meager existence. Since the strip club does not provide her health insurance and a 401K, she'll have to keep working there under a work schedule of their choosing unless she can solve this problem.

A certain sum of money can solve both their problems. For Vanya, it's the amount of money necessary to make Ani his girlfriend for a week, which includes enough lavish living to tempt her into a marriage that can get him a green card. For Ani it's the same amount of money, but really, it's never having to think about money again after she's the wife of the son of a Russian oligarch -- and certainly never having to work at the strip club again.

I also had a problem I needed to solve, and money -- a much smaller amount of money -- was also the solution.

I'm looking at less than three weeks to see about 20 more movies I want to/expect to see before I close off my 2024 rankings. Some of these are movies I can scrounge up on rental, streaming or the plane ride back to Melbourne. Most are not.

In fact, my list of unseen "important" end of year awards contenders just released or not yet released in either the US or Australia includes, or up until recently included, the following, listed alphabetically:

Anora
The Brutalist 
A Complete Unknown 
Conclave
The Nickel Boys
Nightbitch 
Nosferatu 
Queer 
A Real Pain 
Sing Sing

Possibly all of these movies will be available in theaters in Los Angeles. I can't say for sure and will be able to check with a clearer head when I get there later today. But even so I will get to see at most two of them before we leave on Saturday night.

Then some others will be available in Australian cinemas after I return, but again, I'll only be able to prioritize three at most in what will then be 11 days before my deadline.

So on Sunday night, our second and final night staying outside San Jose with hosts who go to bed early, I needed to fit in one of these titles available on iTunes -- even if it meant I had to throw money at the problem to make it go away.

The choices were Conclave and Anora, both of which would cost me $19.99 to own. No option to rent, though I would have happily paid that same price to do so. 

As you know from this post, I don't like to buy movies via digital purchase -- even ones I know and love, but especially those I've never seen. But I also like to make problems go away, especially at this time of year.

Conclave had the benefit of being 18 minutes shorter, and as the movie I thought I might like less, I was less worried about the less optimal viewing environment of the child's bedroom we've overtaken the last two nights while we've been staying here. (It's actually the guest bedroom, but she's informally moved into it because she no longer wants to share a room with her eight-year-old brother, three years her junior.)

However, I was also taking the long view here, a logical approach when it comes to permanent ownership. Sean Baker has made two movies that made my year-end top ten, while Edward Berger has only made a remake of All Quiet on the Western Front to which I was rather indifferent (that I've seen, anyway).

The clincher for Anora, though, was that there was no future rental date visible for this movie on iTunes, while Conclave will be available to rent on January 10th, a full week before my deadline -- possibly even at the lower rental price of $5.99 or $6.99. And while both will be available in Australian cinemas when I return, I shouldn't be watching either that way given that there will be other titles on the above list where I'll only have the theatrical, not the iTunes, option.

So for the second time this week I added a movie I haven't seen to my permanent iTunes library. Hey, it's that time of year.

Repeat viewings of Anora will probably be somewhat unlikely, but that's all I'll say about it until I post my rankings -- though there will also likely be a review posted in the next few days, linked to the right, if you want to know my thoughts. That was another problem I solved by buying Anora -- the movie, not the person like Vanya did -- which is that I wanted to write and post one more review before returning to Australia, and it needed to be a movie already released there. Anora qualified in that regard as well.

I've heard the phrase "mo money mo problems," but never any musical contemplation of the problems the small sum of $19.99 can solve.

The year of the clever genre movie

You might think the simple approach to my annual post looking back on the year, chronologically timed to the actual end of the year (published on December 30th for some number of years running), would be to contemplate Americans willingly unleashing Donald Trump on ourselves a second time, and somehow tie it in to the movies. (I'm not sure what the time stamp will say this year, because the timing works out for me to post it on December 29th in America, which will be December 30th in Australia.)

But seven weeks or so after the election, I've continued to sequester what happened in a small isolated area of my brain. And besides, I don't want to give that guy any more words of publicity, even negative publicity, than he's already getting. (Maybe that little eye twitch he's experiencing at this exact moment in time is the realization that some infinitesimal amount of his spotlight is dissipating into thin air.)

Instead, I want to talk about how in 2024, I could not escape the genre movie.

I'm not talking about there being a preponderance of the sorts of genre movies that have been dominating the movie landscape until recently, like the superhero movie. No, I mean that everywhere I looked in 2024, a prestige horror or thriller was looking back at me. So much so, in fact, that after awhile I started to wonder where all the dramas had gone.

I'm not sure this is the time to crunch actual numbers, since that's something I will do plenty of in less than three weeks. However, I do think the sense of this was palpable, such that I asked myself if I needed to skip the next one of these I came across, just so I wouldn't be only ranking high-concept horrors or thrillers at the end of the year.

Just quickly scanning down my list -- which will not be complete for another 18 days -- I find the following titles (listed alphabetically) to conform to this notion in some sense:

AfrAId
Arcadian
Atlas
Blink Twice
Borderlands
Don't Move
Drive-Away Dolls
House of Spoils
It's What's Inside
Late Night With the Devil
Longlegs
Monkey Man
The Platform 2
Strange Darling
The Substance
Trap
The Watchers
Woman of the Hour

Well, my premise for this post was not really borne out by a list of the titles, which actually seems to be more piddly than I thought, especially when taken in comparison with the many other 2024 movies that could not even be squeezed in to fit that premise.

But really, when I'm thinking back on a year and trying to encapsulate it on the cusp of the calendar flipping over, it's more about a feeling I get. And the feeling I got in 2024 was that genre movies with slightly hooky conceits were where studios wanted to spend their money, and there were parts of the year where one seemed to be coming out every week.

The good news was that many of them were very good. I'll focus on one now.

It's probably not worth going into too many details about Strange Darling, JT Mollner's structurally ambitious movie about a serial killer. At least not without a spoiler warning, so here it is: SPOILERS FOR STRANGE DARLING.

The movie is told in six chapters, but the chapters are not shown in order. Because Wikipedia summarizes the plot linearly, I can't tell you what the order was, but I think it was something like 3-1-5-2-4-6. I know 6 was last. In the course of watching this movie, you go from thinking one of the two main characters is the victim of the other character, to realizing that the one you thought was the victim is actually the killer. It's very well done, I didn't get out ahead of what it was doing (though I understand some people did), and I found that the sequence of the chapters was exactly perfect to pull the wool over our eyes for just long enough to blow our minds. 

The thing is, I didn't even find Strange Darling particularly unusual in 2024, as it was just one movie doing something really interesting along these lines (though not always as successfully). Another was It's What's Inside, and I'll spare you any spoilers for that one if you haven't seen it yet. 

Will this be a defining way we look back on 2024?

Probably not, but hey, it's better than spending this post talking about Donald Trump. 

Who will be the next generation of distinguished British thespians?

Mild spoilers for The Critic.

The last line of Anand Tucker's The Critic is spoken by Ian McKellen's titular theater critic with an ominous look heavenward: "I won't be here forever."

That is certainly true of McKellen the actor, who at age 85 is still sharp as a tack in terms of his craft, but we know that can't last for more than another decade, optimistically. For a contemporary like Anthony Hopkins, who was not nearly as good in another movie I saw this week (Mary), the window of professional effectiveness may be all the shorter.

And so it occurred to me that another generation of great British thespians may soon be lost to us, and also caused me to contemplate who may take their place.

Since we cinephiles seem to group like with like, I've been informally grouping great British thespians for some time now. The original group of approximately contemporaneous great British thespians that I identified were one generation above this one, and were led by the likes of Laurence Olivier, Peter O'Toole, Alec Guinness and Ralph Richardson. The one I lump in with them who is still alive, meaning he probably more appropriately belongs with McKellen and Hopkins (and Patrick Stewart while we're at it), is Derek Jacobi. Throw in Malcolm McDowell if you like as well.

It isn't as clear to me who will succeed the current generation of senior citizens, though I have some thoughts, as you might expect. And one contender I might not have considered is in this very movie, his presence in it alone being one of the things that bolsters his candidacy.

See, it's not just being British and reaching a certain age that makes you a contender. I'd argue that while Michael Caine passes the smell test in many ways, he also misses it in important others, like his general lack of engagement with classical material. You have to gravitate toward a certain type of movie, and a certain type of role within that certain type of movie, one that emphasizes the character's refinement, social class and education level. 

And Critic co-star Mark Strong seeks out such work with regularity and reliability. Yes, he also appears in more traditional Hollywood fare -- but then again so do McKellen and Hopkins. You can't play Gandalf and Magneto and be considered only a devotee of projects that would have played well on Masterpiece Theatre.

I'm still not sure Strong is a perfect fit. For one, I think he might be too handsome. These thespians would traditionally have achieved their renown on the basis of their skills, not their looks. Then again, none of these actors profile ideally for one specific template. You might call Oliver one of the OG distinguished British thespians, and he was considered dreamy as hell.

Perhaps a more obvious match would be someone like Kenneth Branagh, older than Strong and some of the other candidates I have yet to mention, but not really in the McKellen/Hopkins generation either. Although he exists more as a director than an actor these days, there may be no actor more associated with the regular portrayal and interpretation of Shakespeare than Branagh, and that makes him sort of the prototype for distinguished British thespianhood. Similar tweeners in terms of their age might be guys like Ralph Fiennes and Gary Oldman.

Candidates closer to Strong's age would be guys like Michael Fassbender and Benedict Cumberbatch, but then we really would be throwing out the criterion of not being conventionally handsome. It's likely that fewer actors are gaining that initial foothold nowadays without having traditional movie star looks to go along with their talent.

Lest you think you need to be male to be a distinguished British thespian, this movie also contains an example of the female version of the acting group I've been profiling here.

Lesley Manville has a small role in The Critic, and though she is a relatively recent addition to my personal awareness of British actresses of a certain age, I do now think of her alongside women like Judi Dench, Helen Mirren, Emma Thompson, Fionnula Flanagan and Julie Walters.

Because grouping these women together is a more recent thing for me, I may not be observing the splits between the generations as closely here as I do for the men. For example, Manville is a full 22 years younger than a member of this group who recently left us, Dame Maggie Smith, though I do still lump them together, even though there is obviously a gulf between their respective talents.

The Critic also contains one candidate to succeed this older generation, though she's imperfect enough that I suspect she makes a better jumping off point to discuss other contenders than an actual contender herself. That's Gemma Arterton, who has never particularly wowed me, but has steadily gained my respect over the years. 

More obvious contenders who are more or less in her generation -- or at least, clearly not in the older generation just yet -- include the likes of Kate Winslet, Helena Bonham Carter, Olivia Colman and Kristin Scott Thomas, though I suppose at age 64, the latter is with Emma Thompson if she's with anyone.

I suspected The Critic, which I watched on the plane to San Francisco instead of Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World when my laptop would not charge despite being plugged into the outlet between seats, would primarily provide grist for the mill as a contemplation of my own profession, even if McKellen's character judges plays rather than films. Indeed, there is a little there to touch on, and now is as good a time as any. 

McKellen's Jimmy Erskine gets up to a fair amount of no good in this movie, but none of it emanates from him in a vacuum. Unless, that is, you consider it to be "no good" for a critic to tear a person a new one, and resort to insults it is impossible not to take personally, just because that person happens to be bad at acting. Jimmy is the sort of old school critic who relishes the vitriol that he believes entertains his readers, and because he has always been protected by the newspaper that employs him, he expects to be able to continue delivering such vitriol in perpetuity, entirely free from personal consequence.

Of course, the death of the man who originally hired him, who had always been his champion, is a reminder that nothing is permanent, least of all his immunity from sacking. This critic had enjoyed a lifetime of indulgent mud slinging when the slinging of mud was required, and never believed it would be necessary to compromise his voice or his unflagging commitment to personal honesty in order to stay employed.

When his job is actually threatened, though, he's staring the void in the face, contemplating for the first time not only what it would mean to no longer be a critic, but what it would mean to no longer be alive. For Jimmy, they are one in the same, as he refers to this hypothetical unemployed version of himself as "walking death."

I wouldn't say I am as close as (name) is to being out of a job, with the other notable difference being that I don't really get paid to be a critic, other than seeing movies for free. I control exactly how long I'm doing what I'm doing, at least for now.

But every time I do consider giving up the Sisyphean life of the critic -- I'd once thought of stopping at 500 reviews for ReelGood, though I'm now up over 600 -- I also stare that void in the face. And I know that if I stop being a critic now, I may never be a critic again, or at least not for a brand as reputable as the one I currently write for. The recent removal of all the reviews that I and the other critics wrote for AllMovie -- which still probably requires its own post at some point for me to properly grapple with -- is just another reminder that the opportunities for critics are shrinking, not expanding. If you've got your hands on one such opportunity, hold onto it for dear life.

Because it's hard to know if my generation of distinguished film critics -- British or American or Australian or otherwise -- will even have successors.

When buying is cheaper than renting

Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World is one of a handful of really long movies I am still trying to watch by January 17th. 

A lot of my regular movie-watching scenarios do not afford a good chance to watch long movies. I either have to start really early in the evening, thereby reducing my role in winding down our children and our house for the night, or I have to block out a window of time on a weekend afternoon, which has some of the same complications. Simply put, I will not have many more opportunities to do this for the 2 hour and 43-minute Radu Jude movie before my deadline for releasing my 2024 rankings from first to worst.

Fortunately, my time before then involves several irregular movie-watching scenarios, including two plane trips that perfectly accommodate that length of movie. 

The trouble is, Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World is not the sort of movie that is usually available on a commercial flight. 

Of course, nowadays it doesn't need to be. We can watch whatever we want on our own devices, assuming it's not, like, porn or something.

The trouble then is my own device.

I'm typing this post on a laptop that is now more than four years old, and though it's doing okay for being that age, it's not strong in a couple of key areas -- including its battery life. But I vastly prefer this as an option for watching a movie on my own device, in part because I don't even have a tablet with me, in part because my phone is too small, and in part because this is where I have iTunes set up, and iTunes remains one of my primary sources for renting movies. I'm not talking about the streaming version, I'm talking about opening the iTunes software on my computer, going into the Apple store, and renting a movie. And because I need to watch it without internet, downloading it is also part of that process.

But my laptop will run out of battery way before 2 hours and 43 minutes have elapsed.

So the likely scenario for me actually watching DNETMFTEOTW on our flight to San Francisco Saturday morning is if the plane has a way for me to charge my laptop in flight. I'm pretty sure I saw the familiar three prongs of a charger symbol on one of the flights we took last week, I just don't know if it was the international one or the domestic one. 

But if I've got that charge, I'm watching that movie. If I don't, I'll watch it when I get back to Melbourne. After all, I've got 30 days from the date of rental.

Then again, this is not a rental, and that leads to the thing I actually want to talk about today.

So as it turned out, I had just been discussing with my sister how I have a funny attitude toward renting movies vs. buying movies. Because I have a collector's mentality and don't want to buy something unless it is a purposeful addition to my collection -- in other words, a movie I have vetted and know I love -- I would much rather rent something than buy something, even if they are the same price. The logic is a bit fuzzy, especially when you have an unlimited amount of cloud storage for these purchases. (It may not actually be unlimited, but it seems that way, at least when you haven't bought a lot of movies this way.) But I think about having had to buy Black Adam for my kids to have something exciting to watch on New Year's Eve a few years ago, because it was only available for purchase at the time. It still pops up in the collection of movies I own on iTunes, and I still have not watched it.

When I was looking at movies I needed to watch, especially those I might be able to review before I can get back to Australia to watch them, I looked at the critically acclaimed Anora from Sean Baker. I might have been willing to rent it for the premium $19.99 rental price, but when I saw it was only available for purchase at that price, I balked. Silly logic, maybe -- but fortunately, logic that only holds up to that certain somewhat arbitrary point of being the same price.

Because what do I do if the purchase price is less than the rental price?

Well then I buy the movie.

That's what happened with DNETMFTEOTW. When it came to the option of watching the movie one time for $5.99 or unlimited times for $4.99 -- but in all likelihood, still only one time -- I had to buy it. I may have funny rules, but I'm not the kind of guy who will throw away a dollar for no reason.

I do wonder how that particular set of circumstances arises, and the only thing I can think is that the two prices are governed by two sets of considerations and do not check each other for internal consistency. A rental price for a movie is likely established as a result of some certain amount of time since it has played in movie theaters, whereas a sale price is likely looking at how many units are moving -- in terms of actual purchases -- and a desire to get more of them moving to turn more of a profit on that side of the docket. There is probably no one who checks that these two prices are in logical conversation with one another.

And so it is that Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World is now the fifth in a very slowly growing gallery of movies I own on iTunes, which also include the following:

Black Adam (as discussed)
Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief (believe this was only available for purchase the year I needed to rank it; still have only watched that one time)
Duane Hopwood (only available for purchase when I watched it for a movie challenge some five years ago; I liked it a fair amount and could potentially watch it again)
Major League (an all-time favorite, though I still think it only joined my collection because there was no way to watch it for free at the time I wanted to watch it, sometime within the last decade. It has subsequently become available on streaming)

What will be the long-term fate of DNETMFTEOTW in terms of potential rewatches vs. just taking up (cloud) space? I hope to find this out in about 24 hours, and you'll know more when I release my rankings.

For what it's worth, in the same purchase session I was willing to spend $9.99 on a rental of We Live in Time, which will arrive in Australian cinemas only just before my deadline, so getting to it now was important. Or would have been, if I had ended up liking it as much as I usually like movies featuring Florence Pugh.

Martha Mary Maria Matilda

Had to take a funny picture of this search beginning with "Ma" on Netflix, as it reminded me of the title Martha Marcy May Marlene.

I was searching for Mary to make for the middle of three straight 2024 Christmas movies starting on December 23rd, which began with Hot Frosty and finished (on the morning of the 26th, horror of horrors!) with Our Little Secret, after I fell asleep watching it Christmas night. Although the other two did not come in with fabulous credentials, no better than Hallmark movies with a modicum of self awareness, DJ Caruso's film was easily the worst of the three. I'm not going to go into what makes Mary so bad right now, but let's just say it doesn't deserve an in-depth discussion. 

I thought this search result was telling, though, because I'm reminded just as I'm leaving New England to head out on the next portion of our trip that there are so many 2024 movies I have yet to see. Both Martha and Maria are new films, films I "should" probably watch, but may not. 

Matilda is old, and I don't know what Mafalda is, but that breaks the four-name theme anyway.  

Christmas Light, or all I imagine as website problems

It's Christmas Eve Eve -- and Christmas Eve in Australia by the time this gets posted -- and I have yet to really give you a Christmas-themed post, except for the one a week ago about Red One. So I'm shoehorning this post about problems posting to ReelGood into an ill-fitting Christmas-movie-post outfit, especially since I don't know if I'll post again before The Big Day.

My Christmas trip to America has been great so far, despite a few minor complaints: A teenager who can't fully kick jet lag and has the mood to match it, bitterly cold weather without the offsetting benefit of any snow. But the family time has been really good and the logistics have mostly matched that.

One thing I thought had the potential to derail me was that I was getting a weird error when I tried to post my review for All We Imagine as Light, which I watched via screener last Monday and which opens in Australian cinemas on Boxing Day. I had intentionally watch it a number of days before the start of my trip because I wanted to give myself ample opportunities to write the review, whenever the mood struck me or the time allowed me. And I ended up getting it written a few days ago in our AirBnB. 

When I went to prepare it for posting, though -- knowing I'd actually post it some eight hours later when it was Monday morning in Australia -- I was getting an error on Wordpress that a database connection could not be established.

I had first gotten this the day before, when I'd gone to paste the text of my review into the site just as a form of backup (in case anything should happen to my computer), but I was headed out the door and I waved it off as a weird temporary thing.

Well, it may have still been temporary, but it was still happening 24 hours later.

I'd make small bits of progress, getting into the body of the review itself, but then when I tried to upload a photo and save it, it would crash back into that error again. And after a while, I wasn't even getting back into the review or even the screen where I'm meant to log in. 

I looked this up online and determined that the most likely explanation was a password issue. This did not make much sense, though. I haven't changed that password in nearly five years, which is obviously a security problem, but has never presented any other sort of problem. In fact, I'm not even sure I know what the password is, though it's probably saved in my browser. It's possible they put an expiration on the password, but if so, I did not receive a notification of it. But because I couldn't get the login page to load, I couldn't even try to reset the password, if that's what was wrong. 

Then I wondered whether it was an issue with the particular WiFi connection I had in our AirBnB, knowing that I was probably grabbing at straws. So I went over to my father's house next door -- yes, convenient location for our AirBnB -- and had the same issue. 

Then I started to worry about a more sinister possibility: The film festival guys had cut me off.

I don't know if I've told you about this, but ReelGood, the site I write for, also has a short film festival that runs each year in March. (I'm sure I've told you, but maybe not recently.) Both things grew out of the same creator, but he stepped away from both in 2020, and since then they have grown apart both in function and in staff. I don't have anything to do with their festival (except when promoting it in the weeks beforehand) and they don't have anything to do with my website. 

Because the festival is, arguably, the more prominent usage of our brand, they have at times wondered if the thing I'm doing -- basically just reviewing feature-length movies -- is actually consistent with their focus on short films by Australian filmmakers. Theirs is very specifically focused on the country where we're located, and mine barely ever has that focus, though I am slightly more likely to try to make sure Australian films get covered than any random film website would be. 

So it was easy to wonder if some change had been made to my access or something, poorly timed for just before Christmas. 

I emailed one guy from the festival, who has helped me with technical issues in the past, but got a bounceback email that he is no longer with the festival. Which I would have known if I'd been able to attend this year's annual general meeting in November, but I had a conflict and couldn't. So I emailed another guy, a guy I know much better but who is less technically oriented, and waited with bated breath. I of course didn't accuse them of anything, just wondering if they knew anything about any possible change.

The guy got back to me once it was Australian morning again, and no, he didn't know anything. 

And then I got back on the site and it was working fine. 

Who knows?

So yes, the review is now up and you can read it here if you want. 

And though this movie would not have anything to do with Christmas, being set in India and all, it does have the credentials of an awards hopeful released in the holiday season (it's already been nominated for a Golden Globe and an Oscar will likely follow). Besides, the concept of light is certainly a seasonal one.

So I hope you'll let a little light into this darkest time of the year -- in the cold state of Maine, at least, where we're truly having to imagine the light -- with a really good movie.

And if I don't talk to you again before Christmas, have a merry one. 

Hollywood stars speaking the language of their cultural heritage

Before I saw Emilia Perez, I couldn't have told you if Zoe Saldana or Selena Gomez could even speak Spanish.

Now, I've seen them both give performances in that language that could win them awards.

Saldana and Gomez have both been nominated for supporting actress Golden Globes for Emilia Perez, though you could argue that Saldana's role is more that of a typical lead actress. Maybe you could also argue that you can't be the lead actress in a film that gets its title from the name of one of the other female characters (even if she starts off as male). Anyway, Saldana's is the first character we meet, and we don't meet the titular character until something like 20 minutes in. I'm sure Saldana and Gomez are receiving their flowers from other critical bodies as well.

The point is, nothing I've seen them do in their professional careers so far has required an ounce of Spanish from them, though it could just be that I've watched the wrong things. 

The cultural heritage of Gomez is obvious, given her name. I think it's a bit more unclear with Saldana, though not primarily because she has the more uncommon last name. Rather, the roles that she's played, if they have emphasized anything, have emphasized her darker skin color, suggesting her more as Black than Latina. (Which Emilia Perez actually makes reference to in one line of sung dialogue. You can certainly be both, but in American culture, we are often eager to assign a person one dominant cultural heritage, pushing the other to the background, if present at all.) 

Unlike some other actresses of clear Latina heritage, like Salma Hayek and Penelope Cruz, neither of these women speak English with a strong accent, nor do they have a significant history of non-English language performances. There's a good reason for that. Since both were born in the U.S. -- Saldana in New Jersey, Gomez in Texas -- they don't have an accent nor (m)any Spanish language roles. 

Saldana's debut was in a 1999 episode of Law & Order, followed by her theatrical debut the next year in the movie Center Stage. Happy 25 years in the industry, Zoe. There's some history of using her Latina heritage in her roles, as she played a character named Anamaria as long ago as Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl. In 2005, she appeared in a film called La Maldicion del Padre Cardona, which does not even have an English translation on IMDB, and I would not be surprised if her Spanish was used at least fleetingly in a film like Colombiana, which I have not seen. Overall, though, professional uses of her Spanish would be very limited, if not entirely absent outside of the one obviously Spanish language title listed above.

The 14 years younger Gomez debuted in 2003 in a Barney video -- or at least, her 2003 credits show that first on IMDB. The same year she was in the third Spy Kids movie, which does have a Latin flavor through director Robert Rodriguez, but considering that she is credited as "Water Park Girl," it's doubtful that she was being used in that way. She then became involved in the Disney machine, which at that time would not have needed any Spanish from her (though they are probably slightly more worldly in their approach today). And after that it's just a succession of her own videos and then English language roles. 

When you are as successful as these women are, you don't really need to do the equivalent of famous Australian actors coming home to work in smaller films made in their home country. Saldana has been a part of three of the biggest franchises of the 21st century, with prominent roles in the Avatar movies, the Star Trek movies and the MCU. (You can throw in Pirates of the Caribbean too if you want.) Gomez doesn't have that prominence as an actor, but is likely the bigger known personality because of her pop music stardom. Personal favorites of mine include Spring Breakers and the TV show Only Murders in the Building. 

It's nice to see both of them go back to -- well, maybe not their roots, but the roots of their parents, in any case. Because I am so unaccustomed to seeing them in this mode, it almost seems like some kind of party trick, as when Jodie Foster appears in French-speaking roles. It seems impressive even if they did actually grow up bilingual, which I could not say for sure.

The one thing I do wonder, though, is if a native Spanish speaker would watch these movies and consider their accents awful, or would notice them struggling with certain turns of phrase or other uses of the language. 

I guess since they both have been nominated for awards by an international body of critics, the Golden Globes, their performances likely pass the sniff test. Then again, the last time we could consider the Golden Globes a respectable indication of anything, maybe neither of these women had yet had their cinematic debuts.

And that also makes me wonder if my high level of affection for Emilia Perez is misplaced. Simply put, this is one of the more unique films I have seen in some time -- not only a movie about a transgender cartel leader, but also a musical. Is it actually great, or is it just something that the Golden Globes fete and everyone else finds inferior?

The IMDB rating for the movies only 6.8/10, though I do wonder if some of that is homophobes and transphobes in the user community trying to sink the rating, as you will see in any "woke" movie. Apparently, there is also some question as to how well the movie handles its trans themes, as indicated in one sort of tone deaf number that everyone agrees is the worst part of the film. (I haven't discussed Emilia Perez with anyone, having only seen the film for the first time last night, but one friend made an off-the-cuff comment that indicates he is not a fan.) In less than a month we'll see if the Oscars follow suit in giving this film its flowers.

I should probably also say: As good as both Saldana and Gomez are in Emilia Perez, the real revelation is the title character herself, trans actress Karla Sofia Gascon, who was new to me. She has rightly also gotten a Golden Globe nomination, and hopefully Oscar will follow suit as it would allow them to nominate a trans performer in the acting category that performer would favor as aligned with her own gender. Gascon already won a Cannes acting award, which I guess she shared with the rest of the cast. 

I'll close with something that was once going to be part of my subject line until I thought better of it. If I had not been in America for Christmas, I'm not sure if I even would have seen Emilia Perez in time to rank it this year.

See, this is the rare example of a Netflix movie that's only playing on U.S. Netflix, or possibly Netflix in some other small selection of countries. I can tell you that when I am in Australia and I search for it, it does not come up -- or rather, it comes up with that message "We don't currently have Emilia Perez but here are some other titles you might like."

It looks as though it doesn't release in Australia until January 16th, just a day before my January 17th deadline, which is when the Oscar nominations are announced. So there is very little chance I would have gotten it in at all, and even if I had, whether it would have been given serious consideration for my top ten as such a late-breaking addition. 

But by being in the U.S., I could see it through that same Netflix account that doesn't have it when I'm halfway across the world, and did just that last night. 

And now it will have a full month to fend off other contenders for that rightful spot in my top ten. 

Keeping tabs on my opposite

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finally answering the question about collateral nudity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I thought Tarot was Ouija

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I didn't miss Red One after all

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Always double check your Amazon release years

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Darn.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Audient Outliers: Primer

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

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

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

Why such a cheat for Primer?

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

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

Answer: It cannot.

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

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

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

Let's start with the history.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blaxploitaudient: Shaft in Africa

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- Evade torture initiated by very Bond-like villains;

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

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

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

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

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

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