A quick survey of French movie posters

As we've been walking through Paris the last few days, I've taken pictures of -- well, everything. I think it might be starting to annoy the rest of my family, all except my youngest, who likes to scroll through the camera roll whenever I will let him. Anyway, I love this city, and if it involves falling a few steps behind the others and then having to scurry to catch up, so be it.

So I thought I'd post today with a couple of the French versions of posters of new movies coming out, which are each notable in some way for some slightly different reason.

First of course there is the poster above for The Conjuring: Last Rites. Here this is called The Conjuring: L'Heure du Jugement, which even those of you who don't speak French can probably figure out translates to The Conjuring: Hour of Judgment. 

There are a couple notable things about this:

1) The franchise name is not translated. If it were, it would be Prestidigitation, which is also an English word that I love. Except it would be pronounced "Press-tay-dee-jee-tah-syon," with the n sound at the end mostly dropped. I suspect there's too much value in the internationally known franchise name to translate it. Or, they should have translated it years ago when the first movie came out, but I guess never did -- though the literal translation is not quite the same as what the movie is going for, as I believe the French word "prestidigitation" has more to do with magic, as it does in English. 

2) The subtitle is needlessly changed. Don't they have last rites in France? It would be Derniers Rites, which seems fine to me.

Here's the second poster accompanying this in the Metro, which I love for its breathlessness:

I especially love the word "Palpitant." "Le meilleur de la saga" means "the best in the series." It's funny that we only use the English word "saga" when talking about Star Wars. I have no idea why.

This was the first one I noted and it might have led the post, except I already used this poster in my most recent post, only the English version.

The notable things about this poster for The Roses:

1) They've gone for the full title of the book on which this movie was based, as well as the title of the original movie version from 1989 starring Michael Douglas, Kathleen Turner and Danny DeVito, which the young version of me was confused was not a sequel to Romancing the Stone and Jewel of the Nile. I prefer this for the movie, actually. "The War of the Roses" is actually a reference to a series of civil wars in England in the mid 15th century, though I hardly think that should have made Hollywood squeamish in terms of naming the movie, especially since there was already a movie named this 36 years ago. A disinclination to evoke the idea of war at all in these troubled times? More likely, a desire not to confuse stupid Americans about the type of movie this is. 

2) I didn't consciously realize that in French you don't pluralize last names when talking about more than one person in the family. "Des Rose" means, of course, "of the Roses," but I suspect if you were just talking about them you'd say "Les Rose." Important to know if you were talking about Schitt's Creek in France. (I noticed belatedly that you can see the same thing in the Conjuring poster, where it refers to "Des Warren.")

And finally:

The notable thing about this is the extreme fealty to a Hollywood logic that does not work at all for a movie in the Downton Abbey series, at any point in history that the film would have been released, but particularly at this moment in history, when Roman numerals in film titles have become very passe. Roman numerals are more suited for a Rocky movie or a Star Trek movie. and 40 years ago rather than today. Besides which, I am pretty sure that in the English-speaking world it is just Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale.

Or was sure of this, anyway. When I went to IMDB just now, I see the movie listed as Downton Abbey 3, with the original title Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale. Somehow this is even worse than Downton Abbey III, as the Roman numerals are at least a classy way to number sequel titles, making you think of a monarchy or something. 

I've loved spending time in Paris, but now it's on to the South of France for the next five nights, during which we will recharge our batteries after walking an average of about 18,000 steps a day in the two biggest and oldest cities in Europe over the past week. And that means another five days of using my broken French from 12th grade with French shopkeepers.  

Feast or famine in holiday review posting

The first Monday-Friday week I was gone from Australia, there were no reviews posted on ReelGood.

The Monday-Friday week ending right now, there will be four.

Yes it did take me a little while to get the hang of both blogging and posting reviews on this tablet, but I've finally got my groove down.

To be sure, there was supposed to be a review posted during that first full week. I didn't get my act together in Dubai to write my review of Eddington, because we were just too damn busy, but I did write it on the plane to London last Tuesday, so I should have been ready to hack my way through a posting of it before the weekend. 

Then the thing writers hate most happened: Only a paragraph-and-a-half of the review was saved.

I don't know why. It might have had something to do with thinking I was saving it locally to the tablet, but somehow only being able to save it to OneDrive, which was obviously offline while I was on the plane. (Not obviously, I guess, but we couldn't figure out how to get free WiFi and never paid for it.) I thought it might have had something to do with the fact that it was saved the Downloads folder. Maybe that folder is only meant for actual downloads. Then I thought there could have been a problem with the fact that I accidentally saved a space into the file name. I saw it as it was happening, but I just couldn't be bothered to fix it. 

In any case, I had to write the review all over again, which writers simply hate to do. Even if what you wrote wasn't that great in the first place -- as was the case with my Eddington review -- devoting even a limited amount of mental energy to writing it again just feels like an incredible hassle. I had something worth posting the first time, and now I have to regurgitate as much of it as I can remember from that previous instance of writing. I'm sure some felicitious turns of phrase were lost, while others were gained.

Anyway, it took me another several days to finally get back to shitting out another Eddington review, which was somehow 150 words shorter, during which I just considered not reviewing it at all. But at that time, I didn't know that a bounty of other reviewing options would be on the horizon, and besides, as you recall from this post, I paid the premium $19.99 rental fee just so I could have something to post in my first week away.

I didn't finally post it until the beginning of the second week, this past Monday. (I don't post on the weekends.) And that was no easy feat. 

I had to fight to figure out how to download images to the tablet, which, as it turns out, involves pressing and holding on the image until you get the option to download it. (Who knew?) I also had to fight to figure out how to get the embed URL from YouTube to include the trailer. (You have to be on the "desktop site," an option I know now and is now easy.) And finally I had to fight to post links of actors, directors and movie titles to IMDB by copying and pasting bits of html. Why did I have to do this? Because when you try to link it using the front end on WordPress, the interface just flashes repeatedly and you can't paste anything into it. Three reviews later, I still don't know why it does this.

So yeah, that was Monday. Then on Wednesday I posted my review of Caught Stealing. Then on Thursday I posted someone else's review of The Roses. Then on Friday I posted my own review again of The Thursday Murder Club. And I'm glad to say I can finally do this fairly quickly and efficiently, though the html bit with the link posting is still incredibly tedious.

With four reviews this week -- which I think equals the most I've ever posted in a single week -- I could easily go another week without posting and it would be okay. (It would likely be "okay" if I went the entire time I was in Europe without posting, but that would not be living up to my own standards.) But I've requested a screener to review for a movie coming out next Thursday, and my writer in Australia, the only other one working consistently for me right now, has four more screenings to attend before my trip is over, one of which is next week. So next week will probably be a modest -- by the standards of this week anyway -- two-review week. Which is good because I think the options on Netflix are drying up for a few weeks.

You'll be glad to know that in among all this activity, I've still managed to enjoy both London and Paris. 

Something Bri-ish to watch in London

But also something not very good.

My two Great Britain viewings ended up being the aforementioned Caught Stealing, notable for its iconic venue (as discussed yesterday), and The Thursday Murder Club, notable for its British subject matter (and being plastered on the side of every double decker bus in London). 

Only one of them was really worth recommending, but the other was somewhat worth recommending, at least among non-cynics, just because the Netflix algorithm is so dastardly efficient that it usually slops together at least mildly entertaining fare.

The Thursday Murder Club also made the most logical next candidate for something I can review, not knowing when I'll next see a new release in the theater.

And I didn't want to wait until France, where we are headed today, to watch it. It did not seem right.

As you likely know, the film stars Helen Mirren, Ben Kingsley and Pierce Brosnan, three of the most prominent still-living British icons, as well as Celia Imrie, someone I didn't know but now like. You can throw in two more British semi-icons from their same age bracket (Richard E. Grant and Jonathan Pryce), a middle-aged semi-icon who has been Doctor Who (David Tennant) and a new face of potential British icon-hood, in more ways than one, in Naomi Ackie.

Watch in France? I think not.

I did have a couple questions though.

1) Why does this movie need to be nearly two hours long? As a result I had to watch it over two nights in the living room of the flat.

2) Why does the dialogue have to be so frigging on-the-nose? It's undignified coming out of the mouth of someone as dignified as Helen Mirren.

Anyway, I'll keep this one short as we are, indeed, off to France in about an hour.

I will say I did enjoy the British-ness of it, while I was still in Britain. Maybe not the "good" British-ness of something like Masterpiece Theatre, the BBC or any of the countless Shakespeare productions being mounted somewhere in England at this moment -- including at the Globe, which we visited but could not tour due to bored children, which is playing The Merry Wives of Windsor -- but British-ness nonetheless. The titular club are residents of a retirement home that reminded me of Downtown Abbey, and Brosnan's character watches a football match with his son -- something I also did with my sons while here.

Okay, on to the next one. 

A vacation movie intersecting with my personal film/music history

I didn't know where or when I might see my first film in the theater on this long trip, which is now ten days old as I write this. Realistically, I thought I might just be too busy in both London and Paris, where we are spending only four and three nights, respectively. Taking out two hours to see a film, a thing I can do anywhere, might not be paying some of the most famous cities in the world, each of which I have only visited once previously, their proper due.

Then two things happened:

1) Sunday, our first full day in London, was designated, by unspoken majority opinion, a recovery day. We'd been racing through Scotland after racing around Dubai, and barely made it in by train from Manchester in time to watch the Saturday football match of my son's favorite team, Chelsea, in their iconic Stamford Bridge Stadium. After this, we were pooped for the rest of Saturday, and needed a quiet day on Sunday lest we started to fall apart before we'd really even begun.

2) I learned that there is a new, upscale cinema in the Battersea Power Station, which is just a 20-minute walk from where we're staying. 

Don't know what the Battersea Power Station is? You might not think you do, but you do. 

Here it is:

And here it is also is:

That's right, it's on the cover of an album from one of my top five bands of all time, and that album cover is quoted in one of my top 20 movies of all time, Children of Men.

And now it's an upscale shopping center.

It actually has more of a cinematic history than I realized, which we'll get to in a moment.

So when I saw that the cinema closest to where we're staying just next to Battersea Park was actually in the Battersea Power Station, and Sunday was already a day where people were going to get to do their own thing if they wanted, well, it was basically a fait accompli.

And I even managed to play it so it didn't have to be my idea.

I'd already clocked the cinema in my own research, but then as my wife and I were looking at the little booklet the Air BnB owners left for their guests, it popped up there as a local "to do." And she was the one who spoke its existence out loud, creating a tacit permission for me to go there and see a movie. (She knows I like to do this and she supports me, but my compulsion has caused difficulties now and again in the past, so if the idea can originate externally to me, it makes me feel a lot less guilty.)

The day worked out perfectly in that I did actually do things with the family up until 3 o'clock, at which point, we'd exhausted ourselves again from walking around Battersea Park, and I was in the clear to hoof it down to the station for a 3:45 show of Darren Aronofsky's Caught Stealing. (My review will be up shortly, if you want to check the link to the right, but suffice it to say that while I liked the movie quite a bit, it's not going to make Aronofsky a contender to pick up his third personal #1 for me after The Wrestler and The Whale.)

The next decent-sized bit of this post is going to be photos of both the Battersea Power Station and the cinema itself, so sit back and just do some looking rather than reading for a minute or so.

The pictures describe it far better than my words could, but also, I'm on holiday. I'm trying to keep up appearances on the blog, but I'm also not trying to spend all my time writing. Anyway, you can tell they've done an amazing job with it.

I did want to mention the additional cinema history, beyond the Children of Men reference I've always cherished. 

Before Caught Stealing actually started, the cinema included maybe a minute-long montage of uses of the Battersea Power Station in movies, which date back to the middle of last century, though I didn't immediately recognize some of the older films. I did recognize such films as The Dark Knight (which I thought was shot entirely in Chicago) and one of the Fast & Furious movies, though I have no idea which one. Hilariously, it was also a setting for ... Superman III? Yes, there's a shot of Christopher Reeve flying through the sky and carrying Richard Pryor in this short film. I'll have to look up the rest of the references.

Given that it had been used in films because of its dystopian, bombed out quality -- I believe the power station sat unused for more than 20 years -- is it a bit of a shame that it is now an upscale shopping center?

I suppose it is and I suppose it isn't. Sure, it will never again get to "act" in a film in that way. But now we can all spend time inside of it, and in fact, earlier this very evening, my family went for a drink in a bar called Control Room B, which looks like this:

I love the way they've revitalized an iconic building whose ominous grandeur Pink Floyd immortalized nearly 50 years ago. 

And if we want to see it how it used to be, we'll always have the movies. 

Why do movie characters wear college shirts to bed?

Here's another leftover from last weekend's plane movie viewing. 

I could have made this the latest entry in my Tiresome Tropes series -- you know, the one that has barely any entries at all -- but I don't know that this really rises to the level of a trope. It's just something I've noticed, and I'm sure you've noticed, that warrants an explanation.

My last viewing on my flight from Melbourne to Dubai was The Friend, the movie where Naomi Watts has to deal with a Great Dane bequeathed to her following the suicide of her friend and former lover (Bill Murray), which was not, unfortunately, anywhere near as potent for me as the similarly titled Our Friend, the Gabriela Cowperthwaite-directed film that was my surprise #1 of 2021. There should be no reason it would be -- movies with similar titles have no likelihood of being anything like each other in quality or otherwise, it goes without saying -- but this also had the pedigree of writer-directors David Siegel and Scott McGehee, who directed one of my top 25 of last decade, What Maisie Knew. Alas, despite all this spuriously reasoned potential for success, I could go no higher than 3.5 stars on The Friend. 

Although it was going to be cutting it tight to finish the movie before we landed -- and I of course pride myself on not starting a movie I can't finish on the plane -- I did take a minute to go back earlier in the movie and get this screenshot. This was the best of about three I got, but the others were not very flattering to Ms. Watts, whom I noticed in this film is starting to show signs of aging, but is doing so gracefully at least, without any apparent signs of plastic surgery:

Anyway, they all illustrate today's topic: For some reason, screenwriters think that people disproportionately wear merchandise from a college or university when they go to bed.

Why is this?

I'm actually going to ask Google in a minute to see what AI slop will come up on the topic. But first, a few ideas.

1) It is a good character shorthand. The quality of the university you use for their nighttime garments indicates their intellectual prowess or lack thereof, though I suppose it would take a real familiarity with instituations of higher learning for most viewers to be able to discern a specific commentary the screenwriter is making from the choice of shirt. Like, I can't think of a university you would use if you wanted to show that a character is not intelligent, at least in a way the majority of viewers would immediately get. Of course, wearing a shirt from a college doesn't necessarily mean you went there -- it could be you have a son or daughter there, or you just visited on a road trip -- but that could also be its own form of commentary. If a known dummy who is a wannabe intellectual wears a Harvard shirt to bed, I suppose that tells you something.

2) It is good shorthand for the region of the world this takes place. Many movies don't work to belabor their geographical location, but they like having a quick signifier like this that will do some of that work. That doesn't really work in The Friend, though, as the movie takes place in Manhattan but UC Berkeley is of course in the San Francisco area.

Okay let's see what Google Slop has to say about it:

Movie characters wear college shirts to bed for narrative effect: they signify youth, innocence, rebellion, or a connection to a specific institution and character archetype, providing a visual shorthand to quickly convey information about their personality and background without needing extensive dialogue or exposition. This practice also draws on real-life behavior, as the wearing of old, comfortable clothes for sleeping was once common and continues to be a casual, relatable behavior. 

Well dang, that's pretty good, and not as much Slop as I would have predicted. And it hits on my points as well.

I didn't consider the comfort angle, though I suppose that's just because I was trying to find something more objective. Certainly we're talking adults here, and their college shirt would most likely be something they'd had for a long time, making it old and comfortable.

Even with a solid narrative foundation for the choice, it interests me how often it is used. So often, in fact, that I would say it verges on cliche -- or, a trope, as mentioned earlier. 

A concert t-shirt would have many similar functions, and I'd say is the next mostly likely option in this situation to a college shirt. I'd argue you can actually say more about a character through a t-shirt with a rock band on it than you can with a t-shirt with a college on it.

Then again, maybe the concert tee is a prized possession that is better for daytime use.

8,000 channels and nuthin' on

Forgive me the paraphrase, Mr. Springsteen.

So I'm finally getting a chance to update the blog just about a week into our trip. I thought I might write a post on the plane, but we didn't have WiFi on any of the three flights we've taken so far. (With another couple weeks now before we take another.) So instead, I'm writing this on a train with free WiFi, between Manchester and London.

But because the only movies I've watched while we've been gone have come on those flights --  yes, we've been busy, and also very tired -- I'm writing about something from the very beginning of the trip.

The thing I always heard about Emirates Airlines was that they somehow had 8,000 entertainment channels. It sounded like a number a child would make up, like "eleventy million," so divorced from reality did it sound. But, I think it may have actually been reality.

The list of possible movies was so deep that I never even made my way anywhere near the end of it. Even the "new releases" section almost defeated me, and it seemed to go back in chronological all the way to movies released in 2023. 

For me, this was mind-blowing, although certainly more than I needed. My wife said that she could still not find anything worth watching, but I think it was more that she was actually defeated by it, not that there were no options. (Though I'm glad to see that she took my recommendation of The Ballad of Wallis Island on our second flight, from Dubai to London, and loved it.)

Me? I watched Inheritance, Love Hurts, In the Lost Lands and The Friend on the first flight, and William Tell and Oh, Canada on the second, with lots of regrets and honorable mentions. 

How do I know it was actually 8,000?

Well I guess I don't. But the movies I watched all had a four-digit channel associated with them, in the 6,000 range. There may have been unused numbers, but the capacity for, well, I guess at least 7,000 seems to exist. 

Anyway, on the flight back in early October there should be plenty of fresh new options, which I am looking forward to. As well as the 7,800 others I didn't already scroll through. 

While I have you, I wanted to whinge (the Australian word for "complain/whine") a bit about the difficulty of blogging from my tablet.

I've just annoyed the rest of my family to no end with a lot of heavy sighs and the like. For some reason I can't seem to figure out how to download an image from the web to my tablet where I can actually access it through the Blogger uploading mechanism. So yes indeed, I've just taken a picture of the Emirates logo and uploaded that to this post. Apologies for the poor quality.

I'll get my routines down as we progress further onward -- or I assume I will, anyway. 

Holiday ro-OOOO-oooo-ooo ... um, uh, OOOO ... ooooooo ... oooooad.

Yes, my European vacation is about to begin.

If you noticed a few extra O's in the word "road" above -- though really, the jury is still out on the correct way to reproduce the elongated vowel sound from Lindsey Buckingham's "Holiday Road" -- it's because we are embarking on the longest trip I've ever taken. It's six weeks. 

My wife has taken longer. But I have not. And obviously my kids have not.

Want to hear the stops? You must forgive me for referring to some places by a city name and some by a country name. Although the journalist in me screams out for consistency, this is how we talk about the various stops on the trip, consistency be damned.

1) Dubai.

2) UK. (Includes both England and Scotland)

3) Paris.

4) Toulouse. (South of France.)

5) Barcelona. 

6) Venice.

7) Rome.

8) Egypt. 

9) Athens.

10) Crete. 

And yet all we could do was curse the number of places we're not going. 

If we wanted to make it a pure, unadulterated Europe trip, leaving out the stops in Asia and Africa, maybe we could have fit in a Germany, a Prague (there's that inconsistency again), a Netherlands. My older son requested Switzerland for some reason. 

But when you're pretty far away from this part of the world and haven't actually been here in 20 years -- 20 years and two months, actually -- you have to make the tough decisions, and the adults get to decide the must-do's and the unfortunately cannot do's. 

I'll have a tablet with me and I do hope to keep up with some blogging. We'll have to see how well that works out. And I am curious indeed what form my European movie viewing will take.

I've said I might not watch very many movies in those six weeks. But who am I kidding. I'll probably curl up with some crap on Netflix at least every third night. And hope to hit at least two movies in the theater, though where this will occur is one of the many unknowns.

It feels daunting, these unknowns. I've been away from the comforts of home for three weeks, maybe even three-and-a-half. But never this long. What if I forget something?

I'll be fine. They have stores in Europe.

I don't know when my next post will be up ... it might be ten days from now, or I might have WiFi on the plane and write something straight away. In either case, you now have this programming note to explain my absence, however long it may last. 

Paying $20 for multiple Eddington gains

Eddington opens in Australian cinemas today. I leave for Europe tomorrow.

You already know where my mind goes on a thing like that. 

But if I thought better of squeezing in Superman the night before our trip to America last month -- yes, that's two international trips in two months if you're counting -- there were reasons we had to do it this way -- then you better bet I didn't even get to the point of needing to think better of seeing Ari Aster's latest on Europe Departure Eve, when we're going away for six weeks rather than one.

So I saw it last night instead.

How did that happen, you ask? Well I rented it through U.S. iTunes, of course, since it's already been out for a couple months in the U.S.

Of course, that meant the steep $19.99 rental fee that I try to avoid paying, and usually only pay at the very end of the year when trying to catch movies I won't otherwise be able to see before my list closes. That's compared to the free admission I would have gotten if I'd gone to my local cinema. 

But seeing Eddington now helped in two important ways as I ready for my trip:

1) It gave me a new release still in the chamber that I can review sometime next week and still have it post in a timely way on the website. Coverage while I'm gone is going to be tricky, as my other writers are not always reliable -- no shade on them, but they're both lawyers and one has a baby who is under two. Anything I can prep myself for later posting is a boon to the continued appearance of normalcy on the site while I'm gone.

2) I can finally listen to the next episode of Filmspotting. I like to listen to my podcasts in sequence if possible, and since I knew my viewing of Eddington was roughly soon, and that episode was the next one up, I haven't listened to an episode of this podcast in about six weeks. I don't like to fall behind on any of my podcasts, and though I can't always see the films they discuss before I listen to the episode, I decided an Aster film, with all its potential surprises, was one where I should. (They don't spoil, but it can be difficult to avoid spoilers entirely.)

And since I do plan to have a review up early next week, I won't give you my extended Eddington thoughts now, especially as I am still trying to sort through them.

To be honest, I'm posting this mostly so you don't have to look at the poster for Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey at the top of my site any longer!

Not pooh-poohing Pooh

I was a Winnie the Pooh kid growing up. 

Or at least my parents thought it was a good thing to get me into. 

It was one of the earliest favorite things that I dropped, probably even before I was eight years old. But there were Winnie the Pooh stories around my house and I believe between us, my sister and I had a stuffed Pooh and a stuffed Piglet, I think her the latter and me the former. I don't remember now the character's incarnations on TV and the movies at the time, and now that I think about it, I don't think I have any movies featuring Winnie the Pooh from this era entered into my big movie list. But I remember very well the voice actor who played Pooh, and the exact tone he would use when he said "Oh bother!"

Well I haven't seen Winnie the Pooh, the 2011 Disney animated movie.

I haven't seen Goodbye Christopher Robin, the 2017 film directed by Simon Curtis, in which the characters of Hundred Acre Wood appear. 

I haven't seen Christopher Robin, the Ewan McGregor starrer that came out a year later, that also features Christopher, Pooh, and Pooh's other animal friends.

And yet I have now seen the 2023 film where Winnie the Pooh is a demented backwoods killer in the mode of Leatherface from the Texas Chain Saw Massacre. 

I noticed Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey show up on Kanopy a little while back, in the past couple months, and added it to my watchlist pretty much straight away. But I couldn't make any progress toward an actual viewing. There was just something too horrible about it.

In case you aren't up on how this came to be, in 2022, A.A. Milne's classic characters came into the public domain after the 95-year copyright on the material expired. That meant that anyone could use Winnie the Pooh in any way they saw fit, without the need for permission or without providing any recompense. 

So of course someone made a horror movie. I'm not sure if this is even the only horror movie someone made. In fact, it's definitely not as there was a sequel a year later, which would have been last year.

On Friday night, I took the plunge.

And did not hate it.

A writer-director with the greatest name I've heard in some time -- Rhys Frake-Waterfield -- actually has some skill. This movie might have been made for hackish, prurient, opportunistic and distasteful reasons, but it is not made without skill. 

In fact, I was somewhat taken with the explanation for why Pooh and Piglet go bad. After Christopher Robin "abandons" them -- in other words, grows up -- they have a tough winter in which there's no food, and go feral, killing and eating Eeyore. After this, they vow never to speak again and to kill any humans who cross their path, specifically Christopher Robin. This is told in the sort of simple, merely suggestive drawings you might see in a children's book like the ones A.A. Milne actually wrote, with narration from a sufficiently intellectual sounding Brit.

Nothing that happens after this is merely suggestive.

No explanation for what happened to Owl, Kanga, Rabbit, Roo and Tigger -- yes I had to look these names up, all but the last -- but Pooh and Piglet are still living in Hundred Acre Wood, a bit like the Leatherface family would have lived if they'd lived there instead of Texas. When Christopher Robin returns with his wife? fiancee? to try to find them -- having no idea what happened to them after he last saw them -- it's not going to turn out well for them, or for a bunch of girls staying in a nearby cabin.

Blood and Honey has the courage of its grotesque convictions. And they are pretty grotesque.

There's the physical grotesquery. Pooh and Piglet kill people in a variety of gross ways. They have no weapon of choice. Sledgehammers, car tires, knives, chains, and even just pure blunt trauma, unrelated to sledgehammers, all factor in. And these scenes don't hold back. 

You could say that gore is cheap, but people who have watched a lot of gore know that some gore is silly and forgettable, and other gore you carry with you. I'm not going to go so far as to say that Blood and Honey will haunt me, but there are at least two kills in here that I will remember every time I think back to this movie. As a person who has seen a lot of gore, I consider this a compliment.

But then there's the emotional grotesquery. You'd expect the makers of this movie to have some instinct toward reclaiming the innocence at the core of these characters, before they went feral, but nope, they don't have that. That public domain status for the intellectual property, which I guess is no longer defined as "property," freed them up from having to even make token gestures toward character redemption. And they do not make these token gestures. 

Then there's the part of me that is a little sickened by the idea of making a movie just because you can. I don't love the precedent here. I don't remember if there are other sacred characters who have fallen into the public domain recently, but I seem to remember there was another one beyond Winnie. Well, this movie and whatever success it had -- enough to make a sequel, not enough to break a 3 user rating on IMDB -- means that any other characters who slip into the public domain will, within one year, have similar movies in which they are raving maniacs who saw people's heads off.

Still, I found myself giving Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey a three-star rating on Letterboxd. There's some other technique used here that I didn't mention, for example, the forced perspective scene where Pooh is seen from below, towering over some rough hillbilly type who looks like a cowering child in the foreground, half of whose face he's about to take off with his paw. I credit the evident ability on display here, as well as the memorable gore, in being real with myself and admitting that I liked this movie, even if I didn't like the idea of the movie. 

Making a movie where the Winnie the Pooh is a killer doesn't change anything about the fact that I had a stuffed Winnie the Pooh when I was a kid and I loved it.

MIFF: Dopey grins, and the last Redux of 2025

As I type this, MIFF still has nine days of the festival remaining.

I still have no days remaining. 

It's the earliest I've finished the festival when the remainder of the festival didn't present an actual scheduling conflict for me. I actually only have a direct conflict with the final three days, and could even see some movies next Friday afternoon if I weren't working. But Friday night? Well it's time I finally told you.

My family will be in Europe for six weeks, leaving next Friday night.

It's a trip we first started planning in Vietnam in April of 2023. (I know this sounds like we're world travellers. I guess we are, a bit. But not in an obnoxious way.) I sprung the idea on my wife in the big pool at our resort -- again, I know, this sounds shitty, but we had just lost a close family member from the older generation, which I won't get into right now, so hopefully that makes it sound less shitty, and more of a "remember to live life while we can" thing.

Anyway, we hash-tagged it #europe2025 so we would not lose sight of it, and indeed we're making it happen. There were various incarnations of this trip where it would already be over, as we had once thought of going in May and June, and April was even on the table. The late August-early October timeframe ultimately worked better -- fewer tourists, we hope, since many will be due back in school -- and Friday it finally starts.

I can share the itinerary with you as we go, as I hope I'll still be blogging with some regularity. The device I'll have with me remains to be seen, as I have a tablet I'm currently locked out of, one of the things on my growing to do list before we leave. 

I'm able to do this trip -- well, not really "able," our bank account will be recovering for years -- because of something in Australia called "long service leave." Once you've been working for the same job for seven years, you are entitled to an additional seven weeks of leave on top of your normal leave. I believe it happens again another seven years after that, though I'm only brushed up on the initial seven-year requirement. My seven years as permanent staff at my job, as opposed to the contractor role I fulfilled for four years before that, just came in March. I'm spending it quickly, and all in one place. (Actually, I technically have one other week available, which just gets banked.)

So because all of our attentions have been geared toward this for several months now, the final week before we leave is a period of intense finalising and general worrying. I correctly determined that it would be best for me not to be gallivanting around town seeing festival films for the final week before we left.

But I did a lot of "gallivanting" before that, if you are talking about total steps. I do a lot of walking on the days I see movies at MIFF, in addition to enjoying some of my favorite eateries around the central business district, and if you want to know my step counts on the four days I attended movies, here they are:

Friday 8/8 - 16,166
Sunday 8/10 - 13,740
Tuesday 8/12 - 15,618
Thursday 8/14 - 13,965

I've already told you about the movies of 8/8, 8/10 and 8/12, so it's finally time to finish with the movies of 8/14.

When I wrote my not-yet-published review of James Griffiths' The Ballad of Wallis Island, I called it a "dopey grin movie."

There as now, I then went on to explain that this is not an insult, but rather, an acknowledgement of the pleased trance the movie puts you in, such when you finally notice things like your own facial expression -- feeling it through your muscles rather than seeing yourself, of course -- you realize you've been wearing a dopey grin for, oh, 15 minutes? 30 minutes? You don't know for sure.

Indeed this was my experience of Ballad, which was also the only film I saw that I'd already heard of before the festival started. Without doing a thorough check now, I believe that every MIFF so far has included at least one film I was anticipating before the festival started. I suppose the exception to that could be 2022, the year we missed the festival proper and got back only in time for the streaming portion, but like I said, I'm not checking now.

Usually I like this film to be something I'd heard buzz about but wouldn't be available in theaters for some time -- the example I always think of for this, which is basically the example I use any time I need an example of something good about MIFF, is Toni Erdmann. 

Well, there's no scarcity when it comes to The Ballad of Wallis Island. It's been out since April in the U.S., meaning I can probably already rent it through my U.S. iTunes, and opens in Australian theaters on August 28th. Though as you now know, I'll be out of the country then. So, I guess, this was the only way for me to see it in the theater.

And I'm certainly glad I did, as it immediately became one of my favorite films of the year. Not the festival, where it's the favorite, just edging out 1001 Frames. The year. 

Because it involves two harmonizing singers and hails from the greater United Kingdom, TBOWI put me in mind of Once, which is a high compliment, as Once remains one of my favorite movies of the first decade of this century. I'm not sure whether it will go down as one of my favorites of the third decade, but let's just say it's not out of the realm of possibility. 

I won't give you a lot of plot right now. My review does that if you can wait a couple days for the link to go up. (This will be my last MIFF review in 2025, so I wanted to kick it forward to the second week, even though I'd written it in time to publish it yesterday. It actually makes an ideal MIFF review because it's playing at regional cinemas on the final weekend of the festival, meaning I'm not reviewing something that's already sold out for its final in-city sessions.)

But as a quick logline, the movie entails the unwitting reunion of an indie folk rock duo who were big around 2010, but had since disbanded, both personally and professionally. That's Tom Basden and Carey Mulligan. Their reunion comes on a small island off Britain, with a population of less than 100, and the show is actually for their biggest fan, played by Tim Key, who will be the only one in the audience, little do they know beforehand. 

Anyway, yeah, I had stars in my eyes for this one. Funny and sweet. 

I had one slight reservation about the movie that I didn't see fit to put in my review, but I'll include it here in this more informal setting, where I don't have the confusing double duty of sort of also promoting the festival. (They gave me free tickets, which does at least make me feel more inclined to choose to review my more positive experiences. Which didn't stop me from also reviewing Good Boy.) 

Mulligan's character is currently married to an American black guy, played by (I have to copy and paste this from IMDB) Akemnji Ndifornyen. Don't worry, there aren't any ugly stereotypes about his character -- he's a bird watcher and a confirmed intellectual. But he's immediately telegraphed as "the wrong love interest" and I'm not sure if the movie gives him a fair shake, in part because he demonstrates emotional cruelty on a couple occasions. And yes, you do notice it a little more because he's the only non-white person in the cast. However, to the movie's credit, the resolution of his character can't necessarily be predicted.

My MIFF finished one movie later on a less good note. It might have been nice if the time slots could have been flipped between these two, and the light current of air under my heels from Ballad could have carried me home. Instead, I had to finish with a mid revenge filler involving the multiverse.

The high concept did get me in the door for Redux Redux, which means that despite the things I'm about to say about it, I am still susceptible to multiverse ideas. It's just this one doesn't really work.

The film is directed by a pair of brothers, Kevin and Matthew McManus, who I thought I might be familiar with previously, but it turns out no. Just because brothers are directing a film doesn't mean that they've already directed another film you know, though it certainly feels like that with all the pairs of brothers directing films who are out there. 

The story involves a woman (Michaela McManus, so I guess this one is all in the family) who is trying to get revenge for her daughter, who was kidnapped and apparently murdered. She knows who the kidnapper and murderer is -- despite the body not having been found, so it's unclear how she knows her daughter is even dead -- and because she has a piece of machinery the size and shape of a coffin, she has the ability to keep killing him and killing him again and again. 

No, it's not a time machine, allowing her to relive the same day to feed her blood lust. It's a machine that allows her to switch between universes in a multiverse, hoping she'll still find one where her daughter is alive, and to kill this monster while she's there.

Good idea for a film, you'd think, but the execution here is so basic. The three McManuses (McMani?) don't give us any particularly clever demonstrations of multiverse logic, and they certainly don't give us anything in the way of subtle dialogue. This is pretty broad, containing all the standard fretting you'd get in a movie about a fridged daughter and the monster who fridged her, without any of the nuance or specific character details. It's all just very generic, even while it obviously feels it has something to say about monsters who kidnap and kill young women. (Like this is a topic that needs to be specifically championed.) 

One area where the film flirts with specificity is in the casting of indie filmmaker and actor Jim Cummings as a man the protagonist meets in every multiverse and with whom she has a tryst. Cummings might be known to you from such films as Thunder Road, The Wolf of Snow Hollow and The Beta Test, and his presence definitely signifies something with a distinct perspective. Unfortunately, he's used poorly here, almost arbitrarily, as he doesn't demonstrate his knack for confrontational black humor, isn't woven into the story in a meaningful way, and is basically forgotten. 

Okay that puts the wraps on another MIFF. We now return to another week of regular programming, followed by six weeks of travel programming, whose exact nature remains to be seen. 

Understanding Editing: The French Connection

This is the latest in my series considering 12 best editing winners at the Oscars, six that I've seen and six that I haven't seen, alternating monthly, to get a better sense of the craft on the whole, and what constitutes superlative examples of it.

I didn't much care for The French Connection the first time I saw it, and on my second viewing, I still don't much care for it.

Five of the six movies I'm rewatching in this series are movies I really liked, mostly even loved, on my first viewing. The French Connection is the exception to that. 

In fact, I'm so puzzled by its appeal that I had to remind myself as I was watching it that in addition to winning the best editing Oscar, it also won best picture.

What's my beef with this movie?

Let me start with a little background.

I frequently tell people that my favorite decade of filmmaking is the 1970s. I should probably be honest with myself and clarify that. The 1970s likely have the highest average quality of films, in that there were fewer concessions to studios being made than in any other decade, which allowed a host of new filmmakers -- some of those profiled in the book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, which gets its title from two movies that aren't from the 1970s -- to really show us what they had. 

They fully honest answer to this question -- and I like to always be fully honest with you -- is that I prefer the 1980s, as this contains the most personal favorites that embedded themselves in my budding persona as a cinephile at just the right age to have the most enduring impact. However, there are a lot more shitty movies made in the 1980s than there were in the 1970s. 

The flip side to the freedom the 1970s filmmakers enjoyed is that they were also held to a lower standard of accessibility. The French Connection is a film I find fairly inaccessible. It doesn't contain many of the standard gestures we get toward orienting the viewer that we see in newer films, and older films. We don't feel like we're properly introduced to the characters and it's like we've started in with them mid-conversation. That can be good, and I hope I don't need things to be spoon fed to me. But in the case of The French Connection, it doesn't work for me.

Oh we do get character moments with Gene Hackman's Popeye Doyle. It isn't all procedural. There's the scene where he gets handcuffed to the bed, with his own handcuffs, by the woman with whom he's having a tryst. This guy is a mess and many of the other narrative beats will demonstrate that amply. 

But maybe I feel like I should like Popeye Doyle more than I do, even as he's making egregious errors of judgment, failures of empathy, and even dropping racial slurs. If made as a prestige TV show in the 21st century, The French Connection would have figured out a way in to Doyle, to ingratiating us to him. 

The actual French Connection does not do that. It just sends him through a series of plot-heavy foot chases, car chases, and often botched surveillances, which each have lesser and lesser impact the more of them there are. 

I do think, however, that the editing in the film is pretty great. And I suspect one of the reasons Gerald B. Greenberg won the Oscar for William Friedkin's film is that he was helping usher in the new era of post-Hays Code gritty filmmaking that would go on to define the 1970s.

(Let's pause for a moment to acknowledge Greenberg's accomplishments. He was also nominated for no less than Apocalypse Now and Kramer vs. Kramer -- which were actually both in the same damn year -- and he worked five times with Brian De Palma.)

The thing I noticed in The French Connection, that I maybe haven't noticed in other films so far in this series, is the tendency to cut the action short just a beat earlier than you would expect. It lends an undeniable kineticism to the proceedings, and also a sense that this is a rough cut of this rough story. If you are a good cinephile, you shouldn't need polish, so this approach rewards your sophisticated sensibilities as a viewer of challenging art.

You see it in the foot chases. You see it in the car chases. (Oh yeah, this film is known for having one of the most famous car chases of all time, where Doyle speeds underneath an elevated train to get to the next stop before the train does.) You see it in the auction for abandoned cars at the impound lot. You see it in a scene where a sniper tries to take out Doyle and his partner, played by Roy Scheider. (I can't actually remember who was in that scene, but let's assume it was Hackman and Scheider.) You see it simply in a scene of Doyle scanning the streets with that furrowed brow and watchful eye he always has.

But just liking this basic technique and being able to clap myself on the back for appreciating what it's doing is not really enough to get me through The French Connection with more that a distanced, academic appreciation of it. I don't like it. 

Would I like it better if they got the bad guys in the end? (They get some of them, but those ones all get off easy, and they don't get the Big Bad.) In other words, am I not as sophisticated as I think, and I need my protagonist to do more than create a ruckus wherever he goes, shooting wildly and indiscriminately, and one time killing an innocent person, a fact that doesn't seem to bother him very much? And once dropping the n-word?

(I don't like his hat, either. There, I said it.)

I don't know. Maybe?

I'll be back in September with my next previously unseen film, The Right Stuff. 

Young horror prodigy doppelgangers?

While prepping the artwork for my review of Weapons, which you can find here, I came across this picture of someone directing Julia Garner on the set of the movie, and I thought, "Why do they have a picture of Oz Perkins explaining the scene to Garner, when the movie was directed by Zach Cregger?"

Oh but that is Cregger. They just look a lot alike.

Like, a lot.

How alike?

I'll let you be the judge.

Here's Cregger:

And here's Perkins:

The comparison might be even more striking when they're wearing glasses.

Cregger with glasses:

Perkins with glasses:

Having approximately the same amount of facial hair in these photos helps.

Okay so there isn't really anything profound to say about people just because they look like each other. 

So instead I'll ask: Who's the better director?

It's a good question.

My conclusion is that Perkins has higher highs and lower lows, and Cregger is more consistent, though that consistency finds me a bit more dispassionate on both of Cregger's projects than the average cinephile might be.

While I liked both Barbarian and Weapons, they both have things about them that give me pause, leading me to give them "only" 3.5 stars on Letterboxd. You can read that above linked review -- come on, you know you wanna -- if you want to get a better sense of my Weapons reservations, though also without spoilers.

By comparison, Perkins is a study in extremes.

I've seen five Perkins movies now to only the two for Cregger, so there's more data. But I can tell you that prior to this year, I had seen one five-star movie directed by Perkins (The Blackcoat's Daughter), one half-star movie directed by Perkins (Longlegs), and then two milquetoast three-star movies directed by Perkins (I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House and Gretel & Hansel). I'm no math major but that should average out perfectly to three stars.

Which puts him below Cregger, who is firmly entrenched at 3.5 stars.

But that was prior to this year, and this year I saw my fifth Perkins movie, The Monkey, which was a four-star Letterboxd rating for me. So that puts them basically on equal footing. 

But I love things that I love more than I hate things that I hate, and Perkins will always have a bit of a special rosy glow for me because of The Blackcoat's Daughter. Cregger has yet to achieve that rosy glow for me in either of his projects, but I feel like he has the potential to do so -- and less potential to really fuck something up as Perkins did with Longlegs.

Since each of their most recent movies was at least 3.5 stars, I'm definitely looking forward to what each does next, I can tell you that. 

For the record, there's a bit of a flaw in the premise of this post as stated in its title.

Neither Cregger nor Perkins is actually "young" in most true senses of the word. Cregger was a sitcom actor and comedic troupe founder before he started directing, and he's now the ripe old age of 44. And Perkins? He's barely younger than I am, having turned 51 in February to my October.

But they're young in the sense that they have only come on the scene in the past five to ten years and are injecting fresh ideas into horror. And may they remain forever so. 

MIFF: ACMI-centric, or maybe not

My third night at MIFF was entirely comprised of films at ACMI.

And maybe this is a good time to mention a disappointment I have about MIFF 2025, which is not MIFF 2025's fault.

The films I selected are entirely in cinemas that I already visit for other reasons. 

My two favorite MIFF venues, The Capitol and The Forum, are both distinguished by their beautiful architecture, design, and old-world theatrical touches. I don't ever get to see movies in them if not for MIFF, so I try to hit both each year, and usually succeed. 

This year, when I'd made my big spreadsheet, lined up good times against my other weekly obligations, and let the algorithm spit out what I'd see, the films were all at ACMI, Hoyts Melbourne Central or Cinema Kino, the cinema that's downstairs from where I used to work. And though I do miss working upstairs from a movie theater, and have not seen nearly as many movies at Kino lately, I've probably seen 100 movies there overall, so there's no novelty.

Hoyts? It's just a multiplex. It was a surprise when it got involved with MIFF at all a couple years ago, but now it's a central venue. (No pun intended.)

ACMI is the one that's a little bit different, but still not great. ACMI is The Australian Centre for the Moving Image, which contains a free museum dedicated to lots of things related to, well, the moving image. Including a lot of movie stuff. It's a good public resource and it's great that it's free, but I liked it better before they reconfigured it about four years ago. 

Anyway.

They do have theaters upstairs, but the theaters have all the charm of two giant lecture halls. They are like multiplex theaters in some respects, but more ... academic. 

They are, however, a novelty within my current viewing habits, so I tried to embrace it.

I'd planned out a whole evening around ACMI. Between the very short 1001 Frames at 6 p.m. and the very short Death Does Not Exist at 9 p.m., I was going to have about 90 minutes to kill. I'd spend the first 45 or so reading. ACMI has these funky couches in the foyer that look pretty comfortable, and are raised up on landings, so you're kind of nestled up in there under the staircase above. A great place to make a dent in my book, which I hope to finish before my big trip next Friday. (I haven't told you about the big trip. I will.)

Then, although I certainly didn't need this long, I'd have 45 minutes at the festival hub, where the ads for Campari negronis I'd been watching before MIFF movies could finally get their outlet. I might even get to my seat early, rather than habitually almost-late as I have been doing. 

Well the couch area was closed off. I guess the ACMI foyer is extricable from the theater portion upstairs, and on a Tuesday night, they didn't need to be playing host to 51-year-old men who wanted to read a book for 45 minutes. So that was out. 

Then the festival hub was closed to a private party. This always happens with the festival hub. They tantalize you with its glamour and then they always close the velvet rope on you just when you really want to go. 

The place playing backup duty to the festival hub was a pop-up bar, still glamorous but slightly less so, run by Penfolds, the wine maker. I should know. I had a glass of wine there Friday night. But it was only wine, and I wanted that negroni.

But ... 

One of the MIFF staff suggested that he thought they did do cocktails there, but was easily dissuaded from his conviction when I insisted that they didn't. He was probably just being polite. Well of course he was right, as I noted walking by the place and seeing a guy with an empty negroni tumbler. Stupidly, I confirmed that he had indeed purchased it in the bar where he was sitting. He confirmed he had.

So I got my negroni. It was good.

And ... 

Before that I walked up to San Churro Chocolateria, needing more steps by this point like I needed a hole in the head, and had a hot chocolate to drink with a significantly smaller amount of book reading. On a rainy night, it paired nicely with the early ramen dinner I'd had at my favorite ramen bar before the first movie.

And ...

The first movie I saw was my new favorite of the festival.

Chosen specifically because it was foreign -- and I suppose, even more specifically because it was Iranian, and I love Iranian movies -- was 1001 Frames. I'll give you the premise.

We see a montage of about a dozen Iranian actresses, whose stories are woven together throughout the narrative and move forward at the same pace, auditioning for the role of Scheherazade in an upcoming film. They're all nervous because the director they're auditioning for -- the only person in the room they're auditioning for -- is famous, his work beloved, though not necessarily his behaviour. There's a wariness in them beyond their nervousness.

This wariness is warranted. In each audition, which involves very little actual auditioning, his words are becoming uncomfortable, crossing lines, giving lie to the notion that they might be here for an actual job. His comments become unmistakeably lascivious, suggesting quid pro quos, and he becomes too physically intimate with them. Some think it's a test to see what sort of reaction he can elicit in them, which might say something about their fitness for the role, but others see it as the last director unworried about getting #metoo'd. And then he becomes threatening.

Did I mention we don't actually see him? We only hear his voice from the other side of the camera?

I don't want to tell you any more. I'll just say that the really wonderful thing shared by much Iranian cinema is that it contains layers of meaning. No, that's too pedestrian. It contains layers of reality, layers upon which to interpret what we're seeing. 

I should tell you the director: Mehrnoush Alia. Never heard of him. But he shares an approach to cinema with such countrymen and cinematic luminaries Abbas Kiarostami and Jafar Panahi. And that is most certainly a good thing. 

I don't actually think it was shot in Iran. For one, it spends the entire time on a sound stage, which could be anywhere. For another, there were references to New York film commissions and the like in the credits. (I could look this up but I prefer the primary source evidence.) And I also happened to notice that Ramin Bahrani was thanked in the credits, and he's based purely in the U.S., to the extent that he's still making movies at all. (He made one in 2022 for Showtime. That's not that long ago. And I really liked The White Tiger in 2021.)

Anyway, the spirit of the unfortunately not yet dead Harvey Weinstein hangs over this thing big time, and you really feel for these poor, vulnerable women, who can be described as such even when they spit fire and defend themselves. Underneath we can see they are scared, and who wouldn't be. 

After the hot chocolate and the negroni -- a less good pairing than the hot chocolate and the ramen -- it was this year's entry into my unofficial MIFF "outsider animation" category. That's right, every MIFF I try to see an animated movie made outside the animation mainstream, and I think my streak in this case is unbroken. 

The movie is called Death Does Not Exist, and it's French. So that makes three of my five MIFF movies so far originating in other countries, which is not bad. 

I won't really try to describe the animation style, because if you want to know the truth, I'm on the bus riding home from the movie as I write this, and my creativity for the day is pretty much exhausted. (Yes, buses are replacing trains on my route. Buses are always replacing trains on my route at night.) You can get some sense of it from the poster above. 

The story is a fairly simple one, with room for a lot of dream logic and radical philosophizing in the middle. It's told from the perspective of Helene, a somewhat reluctant revolutionary who has signed up with five other friends to try to assassinate some corporate bigwig at his sylvan home. Their act is to be in the name of left-wing change, but at the crucial moment, of course some of them are overcome by the enormity of actually taking another person's life, to say nothing of the fact that they will then be on the run.

The attack of the compound is a total balls-up, and Helene flees. She then spends the rest of the movie wrestling with her conscience about whether she should have left them, even though by that point it was already hopeless. Her conscience takes the form of various figures who travel through the woods with her, some known and some unknown, and a contemplation of the Big Issues -- death among them -- comes to pass.

If the way I'm writing about Death Does Not Exist sounds a little dismissive, I did like the movie. But I also found my mind wandering at some points, and then increasingly more points. For a movie that was only 72 minutes long -- the same length as the dog horror movie I saw on Friday night, Good Boy, which also felt too long -- DDNE started trying my patience more than I wanted for a movie I knew I basically liked. So then that made me wonder how much I actually did like it. 

When we were coming out of the theater I heard someone say that it was very earnest, and I think that was the problem. There are a lot of platitudes presented quite earnestly in this film, and it hasn't much of a sense of humor at all. Not that every film needs a sense of humor; this one probably doesn't. But the point is, you do get weighed down eventually by a film that takes itself a little too seriously, and this may have prevented DDNE from being more of an unqualified success, majestic as it is in parts.

And I'm glad I got my negroni now, because that's it for ACMI in 2025. I might be able to squeeze in another one between the two movies that close out the festival for me on Thursday night, which are (sadly) at Hoyts and Cinema Kino. 

Even when you don't get to go to your favorite venues, though, it's still MIFF. And there's always the promise of excellent movies, two of which I've seen out of my five.