Asian racquet sports double feature

I was going to possibly choose Lurker as the second half of my double feature at the cinema on Wednesday, since I've heard great things about it and I don't know that I'll have access to it through rental or steaming before my ranking deadline next month. 

But then I thought, why pass up an opportunity for an Asian-themed double feature, especially since my rankings are light on foreign language films? And because it might spur me to write a post on this blog, which I have been neglecting lately?

See the first movie was Park Chan-wook's latest, No Other Choice, which is one of a couple movies I've seen at advanced screenings that won't be coming out in Australia until January, when I will be quite busy trying to cram in all my other "must haves" before my list closes. It's a bit of a black comic riff on Parasite, and I think I'd be saying that even if the directors of both films weren't Korean. 

And besides, Elizabeth Lo's Chinese documentary Mistress Dispeller was starting 20 minutes earlier.

I knew both movies were from Asia, but I didn't realize they would both feature racquet sports -- and that they would both spell the word "racquet" differently in their English translations.

Tennis is a very small part of No Other Choice. It's a pastime enjoyed by the wife of the main character, one she decides to give up when he loses his job and their family falls on hard times. It isn't integral to the plot, but it comes up enough in conversation that her hopeful husband talks about buying her a new "racket" when he gets back up on his feet.

In Mistress Dispeller, a documentary about a woman who helps break up extramarital affairs, the couple she's trying to save are badminton aficionados. We see them playing this multiple times, and at one point someone talks about the correct way to hold the "racquet."

I'd say "racquet" is correct, yet I'm sure for many years in my life I thought it was "racket." 

Though looking at it just now, I'm not so sure. AI tells me that "racket" is the "older spelling, preferred in American English." Which would have been why I wrote it that way for so long. "Racquet," AI explains, is preferred in other countries. 

But I'm pretty sure I would have stopped writing "racquet" long before I moved to Australia. See, "racket" already means something else. It wouldn't be the first word to be spelled the same way and have two different meanings, but "racquet" clearly tells you what it's talking about without any ambiguity. I mean, a "tennis racket" could technically be a corrupt enterprise around the sport of tennis -- you know, point shaving or something. 

Both movies in this double feature also got 3.5 stars from me, which qualifies as a mild disappointment. (It's funny how I've come to think of this is a "disappointing" rating, when some people would use it as a signifier of great affection.)

This is actually a step up for Park, since his last film, Decision to Leave, was such a disappointment to me that I could not even give it a positive star rating (2.5). I've never seen another Elizabeth Lo movie, but I guess I hoped this one would blow my mind. I did really like it, but I spent entirely too much time questioning how someone makes a documentary about a cheating husband and his mistress, with tons of footage of them, without them understanding that this documentary is about someone trying to break them up. 

So I guess I won't be raising a racket for either of them when I review them (har har). 

A change of projector locale

I didn't originally think I would "take advantage" of my wife being out of town in any way, except maybe leaving some dishes unwashed for longer than I ordinarily would, or never making the bed.

Then I realized that our bedroom would make a perfect location for the new portable projector screen she got me for my birthday, and that shelf that runs along the length of our bed, above the pillows but under the windows, would be the perfect height to hold the projector.

And so it is that I set up the screen in front of our bureau, which she accesses more than I do, and that's where it's been since Friday evening, with a few more days expected since she's had to extend her trip. 

This is a picture from the first film I watched, After the Hunt, which I didn't particularly care for. I've subsequently watched Until Dawn, Yi Yi, First Blood, Rolling Thunder and Freakier Friday. Quite the mix of films there. 

It's fun, and unusual, for me to watch movies from bed. I usually take the living room, and my wife winds down her night in bed with her device, on nights we aren't watching something together. 

However, I have to admit it is not as comfortable as I might have thought. I need one of those pillows with the arms that used to be all over the place when I was growing up, so instead I'm kind of slumped over, scrunching up as many normal pillows as I can to try to recreate the same effect. Suffice it to say, I won't miss it when I have to take it down when my wife gets back on Wednesday, but it's been a fun novelty. Change is as good as a holiday, or so they say. 

Not a lot more to say today, just wanted to let you know I'm still here, and already feeling a bit snowed under -- though not in Australia, where today is the first day of summer -- by end-of-year obligations at work and with Christmas coming up.

The annual Netflix movie I'm blocked from streaming

Tonight I am going to an advanced screening of Nouvelle Vague.

Why, you ask, should I have to go to an advanced screening of a movie that's already available on Netflix? In fact, why should I be seeing a movie that's going to be available on Netflix in the theater at all, given the other priority decisions I must make for theater viewings at this time of year?

Ah, because Richard Linklater's latest movie is not available on Netflix -- in Australia.

We tend to get a "one world" idea of Netflix, like if a movie is available in any location, it's available in all locations. I may not have taken the time out of my schedule to complain about it in past years, but I know this not to be true.

Oh it might be true for their small buys, or the films that are fully branded as Netflix from the ground up, like Rian Johnson's Knives Out sequels -- one of which I could see tonight in the theater after Nouvelle Vague, which would be quite the unusual double feature considering that I've only ever seen one other movie that would soon be available to me on Netflix (David Fincher's The Killer) in the theater. 

But each of the past three years, there has been a prestige release that simply wasn't going to be available on Netflix in Australia -- possibly ever. In fact, I'm still not sure if the other two have ever made their Australian Netflix streaming debuts.

In 2023 it was May December, which made my top ten that year, but only because I got wind of its imminent lack of availability on Netflix and went to an advanced screening like this one. 

Last year it was Emilia Perez, which also made my top ten even higher than May December, which I was able to see in that case because I was in the U.S. at Christmas, making it available to me. In fact, I think there were two like this last year, as Maria was also available there, but I did not prioritize seeing it and still have not seen it. 

I'd be able to get Nouvelle Vague on my list this year because it's coming to Australian theaters on January 8th. But I'd rather spend those January theater hours on movies I can only get in the theater, in any part of the world, than be reminded that I can't see this movie otherwise because of Netflix's capricious distribution strategies.

Look, I know this whole thing is more complicated than I'm making it out to be. I'd rather just whinge (Australian word) about the unfairness of it than to look into why it's done this way. There are different deals for different markets. I know this.

But maybe I'm just feeling a bit sensitive to these exclusive arrangements these days. Just this morning I was reminded of the fact that Jim Jarmusch's Father Mother Sister Brother, which is getting some of the year's best notices, is a MUBI exclusive -- but that even if I were subscribed to MUBI, I still probably wouldn't get it in Australia, because that's what happened a few years ago when I was subscribed, but I still had to find another way to watch Ira Sachs' Passages.

I also feel like it should be possible to predict these things better. I understand all the cheapo buddy comedies going to Netflix simultaneously around the world, and would expect nothing less. But if the restriction is only on prestige films, why was I able to watch Train Dreams this week? (Speaking of Netflix movies that might make my top ten.) And what will happen with Noah Baumbach's Jay Kelly, which is also available in Australian cinemas right now? I haven't even looked into when/whether that one will be coming to my local Netflix.

As for Linklater, seeing Nouvelle Vague tonight will mean I get at least one of his 2025 films in my 2025 rankings. Blue Moon, which does not hit Australian cinemas until the end of January, may just go by the boards. 

Margot Kidder plays French Canadian

I've continued watching the movies Quentin Tarantino discusses in Cinema Speculation, and I haven't had to jam too many of them in to keep pace with my reading. It helps when you only budget 20 minutes of reading time a day on trains. Don't judge.

Last night it was Sisters, the third previously unseen movie I've watched after The Getaway and The Outfit.

As those two were more or less carbon copies of each other, crime capers with equivalent three-star ratings on Letterboxd, it was a nice change of pace to get to the Brian De Palma psychological thriller, which I gave a half-star more than that.

I don't know what Tarantino's take on it is because I haven't gotten there yet in the book, but I know what I'm going to talk about today: the decision to make Margot Kidder's character French Canadian.

Now, Kidder herself is Canadian, but she's not French Canadian. Big difference. One speaks English with a barely detectable accent you can only perceive when they say "house." The other speaks English like a Parisian playing around with the language and its grammatical conventions for the first time.

So yes, Kidder has to sound like the latter in this movie, even though she's the former. (And she probably doesn't even say "hoose.") 

It's a curious choice.

Normally when an actor speaks English with an accent in a movie, it's for one of three reasons:

1) They are actually not a native English speaker, and this is the best they can do;

2) They are making a movie in English where the characters are from a particular part of the world, so they speak with that sort of accent to give us some sense of authenticity, when for commercial and practical reasons they can't actually film in the local language;

3) They are making a movie set in the past, and a generic British accent makes it sound more old-fashioned than their normal "just stepped off Venice Beach" accent would make them sound.

So what I'm saying is, Margot Kidder speaks with a French Canadian accent even though there is no story reason, no geographical reason, nor any practical real-world reason she has to do it. The movie, you see, is set in New York. The choice to make her French Canadian is, it would seem, completely random.

Fortunately, this is a pretty helpful scenario for our friend AI to pop its head in and lend a hand. 

This is what AI has to say about De Palma's reasons:

Brian De Palma wanted to add to the film's "joyful fakery" and create a sense of vulnerability that a foreign accent would provide. Her accent contributes to the dramatic and thrilling tone of the film, making her seem more "adorable" to other characters. 

However, I read elsewhere -- having trouble finding it right now -- that a lot of people at the time thought the accent was poor, even laughable. For her part, Kidder said she could do the accent because she had lived in Quebec.

And hey, I did think she did a pretty good job with it. Though maybe I'm just happy to discover my Lois Lane in movies where I'd never seen her. 

The silent rebellion of trying to thwart the inevitable

I've become contemplative again about firstly the state of film criticism, and secondly my relationship to it.

Very contemplative. And maybe which is first and which is second is the other way around.

Since returning from Europe about seven weeks ago, and this has become a possibly coincidental benchmark for a lot of things I've been thinking about, I've been really going through the motions as a critic. I'm dutifully supplying between one and three reviews a week, and mostly covering the films I feel need to be covered. And it's not taking me any longer to write my reviews, with a notable exception that I'll mention in the next paragraph. I'm just quicker to accept that the tack I've started on is a satisfactory one, and I'll just keep spouting off various disconnected observations until I reach my word count.

But then I also had something that hasn't happened to me in a while: I started to write a review that I just totally abandoned. It was for Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein. I wrote two paragraphs that I decided were a dumb way to start the piece, and instead of starting over again, I just left it unfinished. When I searched my soul, I decided I didn't have a single goddamn thing to say about Frankenstein. 

This isn't usually a problem. I always power through it. There's a core standard of professionalism to which I hold myself, acting as though I were on deadline even if the only deadline is in my own head.

Sometimes there actually is a deadline. For any film where I've gotten a screener or attended a premiere, there's the expectation that you'll deliver your verdict by the opening Thursday, if you have enough time, or at least before the first weekend. I do always meet that deadline, and Frankenstein wasn't an example of that scenario, as I waited until it was available on Netflix.

But the Frankenstein episode did disturb me a little bit and it awakened a fear in me that I wasn't ready to confront, and am only forcing myself to confront in the piece I'm currently writing:

I don't know how long I want to keep on doing this.

There are lots of arguments why I wouldn't keep doing it:

1) It no longer brings me (enough) joy.

2) It is becoming less and less financially viable. I'm paying the monthly bills to run the website, and those costs are basically offset by the free tickets I get with my critics card. I'm not running the numbers right not to figure out if I'm coming out a little ahead or a little behind, but it could just as easily be the latter -- which is one of the reasons I'm not running those numbers, because I don't really want to know that. 

3) It is pretty exhausting. You're always rolling that ball up the hill. You're always trying to figure out when you need to see a movie in order to put up a review at an optimal time so that your theoretical audience -- and I think the audience is also becoming more and more theoretical -- can use your recommendations as a practical consideration in whether or not to see a movie. And you're making some decisions that might disrupt other areas of your life, such as time with family and friends. Last night I was going to go see If I Had Legs I'd Kick You, which came out on Thursday, which means I really want to review it this week before it becomes totally old hat. When my wife heard that was the movie I was going to see, she asked if I could wait until the weekend so she could see it with me. I didn't want to, from a reviewing standpoint, though fortunately, my commitment to my wife won out over my commitment to my work, and I went to see The Running Man instead. 

Sorry, this is becoming a bit stream of conscious. I'll get to my point.

There is one big reason I don't stop. Let's set aside the small reasons, like the fact that I'd have to start paying for movies again. The big reason is:

1) If I stop being a critic now, I will never be a critic again. 

I believe this is true even though it is technically not 100% true. I could worm my way back into something in the future, not likely an actual publication with a history or consistent readership, but my own equivalent of the site I currently run. Heck, by writing this blog I am still technically using the same muscles involved in film criticism. 

The scary thing is: Maybe I don't care if I'm not a critic anymore.

Maybe. I haven't fully worked that one out yet. 

If I think I'm having an existential crisis now, just imagine what it will be once I'm actually not doing the thing that gives me some sense of the validity of that existence. Professionally speaking of course. 

As I've gotten this far into this piece, it occurs to me that I've written pieces like this on this blog before. I think that was likely assumed in my opening, in which I talked about being contemplative "again." 

And indeed, in looking back, I found this post just over three years ago, in which I shared many of these same sentiments. If you want to go there, you can see how similar it is. I'm not checking it now.

There's a difference this time, and maybe a similar optimistic ending, but we have to get a bit darker first. 

On a walk this morning, I listened to the bonus segment of a recent Slate Culture Gabfest, the segment that is only available to subscribers, of which I am one. They were talking about a New York Times article about the death of criticism, broadly, which used the widely publicized elimination of a number of key critics jobs -- including the one held by Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune, which left that paper without a film critic -- as its jumping off point. 

The four podcast panelists came around to end on sort of a high note, as I think you are often compelled to do in such a discussion. You can't leave your audience on a note of pure doom and gloom as it is just too depressing. But before that they each said "Yes this sucks, and I don't know if there is anything that can be done about it." The media paradigm is just changing too much. They know where all the clicks are, and they just aren't on movie reviews. Or other types of review, of course, but the panel's movie bias put the focus there.

They also, though, mentioned the efforts of the secret intellectuals who kept alive Greek philosophy in medieval Christian Europe, when there was every bit the chance that the prevailing forces would snuff it out. Those people were heroes, we can appreciate that now.

There is obviously not a direct correlation with film criticism. Ten years from now, films may not even look like they do today, let alone criticism bearing any resemblance to the current form of criticism. Though I suppose it will bear some resemblance, considering that criticism is already on its way out.

The thing is, people like me -- struggling to decide whether it is even financially worthwhile to keep running a website -- can be the sorts of people who stand in the way of what the prevailing forces are trying to accomplish. Simply by not removing myself from the landscape, I allow that landscape to continue existing, in the same way that every vote counts in an election, and every movie ticket sold is an endorsement to keep making that movie.

I think of it as similar to my most beloved of cinematic entities, the single-screen cinema. I'm sure I've told you it is my dream to run a single-screen cinema in some semi-remote town, just far enough away from the multiplexes to serve the local population usefully, but not so far away that I myself can never get to those multiplexes. 

No one makes money on those cinemas. They are financial losers, pure and simple. You can't sell popcorn for a high enough price to recoup the costs of licensing films, paying your staff, keeping the lights on. Which is why only people who are already rich usually run them, as a labor of love.

If it were only about the financial, they wouldn't do it. But it's about something more than that. It's about the romantic notion of single-screen cinemas continuing to exist in the world, so we can show the young people what their history looked like, and so we can continue to live that history ourselves.

And I think there is a romantic notion to criticism itself that must be preserved. No, it may not be entirely consistent with the modern marketplace for people to come looking for a particular critic to tell them whether they should see a movie or not. But criticism is also a place where intellectual discussions are hosted, either actual discussion (through a comments section) or implied discussion in the form of the debate a reader silently has with the person they're reading. 

And surely there will someday come a time when even the notion of an intellectual discussion is outdated, a reality that AI may be hastening. But I'm not so cynical as to think that day is close.

And movies? There are a shit ton of them. Every time I think this industry might be truly contracting, I then look at my Letterboxd watchlist and am overwhelmed by how many movies from the current year are still out there that I haven't seen, that I want to see before the end of the year. 

While there are still movies, there should still be critics, and to the extent that I play any small role in that being true, I will continue to do it. 

For now ... 

Playdate but not Play Dirty

One of the easiest annual methods of goosing my movie count is to watch everything the streamers offer me. In fact, depending on how you want to stretch your definition of what counts as a movie -- there are a lot of quickie Netflix documentaries out there -- I could probably watch a similar number of movies to the total amount I rank each year, drawing only from Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+ and Stan. It would be a pretty sad year, though.

Because "free" and "easy to access" are both powerful motivators to me when watching movies, it takes will power not to watch all of these movies. But it's will power I take pride in exercising. 

And the easiest place to cut fat, in terms of return on the time I'm investing watching these movies, is with buddy action comedies. The streamers are lousy with those at the moment, probably beause they continue to make the algorithm happy.

But you can't skip all the buddy action comedies. So which do you watch and which don't you watch?

One easy opt-in is how early it comes out in the year. At the start of the year, I'm desperate for new content as long as it has that year's release date on it. In fact, the very first movie I watched in 2025 -- that counted for 2025, I should say -- was the Jamie Foxx-Cameron Diaz buddy action comedy Back in Action.

Had Back in Action come out in September, I might have skipped it. Though I find both Foxx and Diaz appealing, so it might have made the cut. 

But January? To get my 2025 list started? It was a no doubter.

A buddy action comedy released later in the year, when I have plenty to choose from, really has to hit all of my personal four quadrants in order to make it before my eyeballs. (I don't actually have a "personal four quadrants," I'm just trying to repurpose some industryspeak to make my point.) So last year, when the Mark Wahlberg-Halle Berry buddy action comedy The Union came out on August 16th, it didn't stand much of a chance. 

That said, my feelings toward the Foxx-Diaz duo and the Wahlberg-Berry duo are pretty similiar, so maybe The Union makes a real-life test case for the hypothetical later releasing of Back in Action. Anyway, yeah, I skipped The Union. And now that I didn't see it in the year it came out, where it at least had the justification of being rankings fodder, there's probably little reason for me to ever see it. 

But release date is not the only factor here. I'm also looking at whether the premise of these movies has a "certain something" that potentially makes them stand out from the pack. And it doesn't take a lot, just a whiff of what looks like inspiration. Which brings us to another Mark Wahlberg vehicle, which I am also skipping.

I've had the ability to watch Amazon Prime's Play Dirty for the entire time I've been back from Europe, as it was released only a few days before our trip ended. But I am snubbing it and expect to continue snubbing it, unless I find myself in some weird circumstance where it's the only thing available to me.

Why? Well perhaps it's this logline, courtesy of IMDB:

"A ruthless thief and his expert crew stumble onto the heist of a lifetime."

Yawn. Boring. 

Meanwhile, a movie with a similar title and similar prospects of actually being good was released six weeks later into the year, also on Amazon Prime, meaning it was probably six weeks less likely for me to actually watch. Though watch Playdate I did this past weekend, on the second day of its availability, perhaps due to this logline, also courtesy of IMDB:

"Brian has just been fired from his job. He becomes a stay-at-home dad. He accepts a playdate invitation from another stay-at-home dad who turns out to be a loose cannon."

Although the actual writing in that logline leaves something to be desired -- and to be honest, I've only just now read it for the first time -- it does point to the fact that there's a sort of interesting idea here. The buddy action comedy stuff will grow out of a playdate gone pear-shaped, which is at least not a scenario I've ever seen in a movie, and has the potential to be funny. 

Now I should note that Kevin James and Alan Ritchson, the stars of Playdate, have a significant disadvantage next to Wahlberg and Lakeith Stanfield, the latter of whom I particularly like. If I were going only on the extent to which I find the stars compelling, Play Dirty would easily beat out Playdate. But the premise of one has that "certain something" while the premise of the other makes me yawn, so that is the deciding factor in this case. (And I've already gotten plenty of Lakeith Stanfield, who appears in both Roofman and Die My Love, in 2025.) 

While we're on the topic of James, I'm actually putting his other 2025 film in the "skip" category, though I don't know if it profiles as a buddy action comedy in the same way. It certainly profiles as streamer fodder that the algorithm has willed into existence. That film is Guns Up, which co-stars Christina Ricci, though it doesn't sound like a buddy action comedy in this case:

"On the brink of leaving 'The Family,' a mob henchman's final job goes off the rails. With the clock ticking, the ex-cop has one night to get his unsuspecting family out of the city before he gets snuffed out."

Yawn. Boring.

And that one's not even grammatically correct. The mob henchman's final job is on the bring of leaving The Family?

Unfortunately, the Playdate vs. Play Dirty choice, assuming the artificial scenario that I could choose only one of them, was made poorly. I can't comment on Play Dirty of course, but I can tell you that I thought Playdate was terrible, even though Ritchson tried pretty hard to make it better than that. James did not try very hard. 

But anyone who thinks there won't be enough buddy action comedies that debuted on streamers in my 2025 rankings, don't you worry your pretty little head. In addition to Back in Action and Playdate, we have:

• Heads of State, starring John Cena and Idris Elba, which debuted on Amazon Prime on July 2nd
• The Pickup, starring Eddie Murphy and Pete Davidson, which debuted on Amazon Prime on August 6th
• It would have been nice if there were a third one, but I guess that's it

Actually there is one other film worth mentioning, but it breaks the mold in one important way: There are three buddies instead of two, which takes it out of the realm of "buddy action comedy" as I've been defining it.

The best one of these movies -- and the only one that is currently in my top 40 movies of the year -- is called Deep Cover, and it stars the trio of Orlando Bloom, Bryce Dallas Howard and Nick Mohammed, the latter of whom you might know from Ted Lasso. This is also an Amazon Prime special, having debuted on June 12th, meaning that the only two movies in this whole piece that came from Netflix were The Union and Back in Action. 

Deep Cover definitely has the most promising of these loglines:

"Three improv actors are asked to go undercover by the police in London's criminal underworld."

See? Good ideas are not totally dead after all. 

I have regrets

There was simply no way I was going to like Wicked as much on the second viewing.

I watched it again last night, realizing only yesterday that the release date for Wicked: For Good was coming up already this week. If I were going to watch the first one, my #2 movie of 2024, as preparation for the concluding half of the story, Saturday night was the last weekend night I'd be able to do that, assuming I'm going to try to get on the sequel early in its release in order to review it. And you need a weekend night for a movie like this with its 160-minute running time.

I knew almost from the moment I started watching that Wicked was not going to do it for me the way it did it for me on the first viewing.

And I don't think it's just a year's worth of realizing what everyone else thinks of Wicked, of inevitable Wicked backlash, of other cinephiles you know and love -- and more to the point, respect -- thinking your aesthetic judgment is compromised if you have made this movie essentially your vice president of 2024 movies. That's right, if The Substance ever died, Wicked would become president of my 2024 movies. (Because I saw The Substance first, fortunately, Wicked was never in a position where it was actually ranked #1 in my rankings in progress.)

No, I think it's just that my first Wicked viewing occurred under circumstances that could never be duplicated, even if they were unremarkable circumstances in most respects.

When I saw the movie around this same time last year, it was as a weekend matinee, possibly even a pre-11 a.m. start time. I've been eyeballing movies with early start times like this this year as well. It's a way for me to get in a few extra screenings in the theater, especially since we're getting to the time when I'll have a harder time seeing these on video before my mid-January ranking deadline. 

Wicked I viewed as sort of an obligation. I put on my "ReelGood is a paper of record" hat and went to see it so we could get a review up. (If you don't know what that means, a "paper of record" is how journalists describe a newspaper that wants to in some way include all the news that's out there. If it happened, you'll find it somewhere in the pages of the newspaper.)

I was not expecting to hate Wicked, of course, but I had no attachment to the source material, never having seen it or really knowing much about it other than its obvious placement within the Wizard of Oz universe. I was expecting to find it middling with a possible high-end outcome of being sort of good. Crucially, I saw it early enough that I had not even heard what others thought, so I was able to go in with these low expectations. 

Then of course I was floored by it, and I cried during the scene at the dance. 

Tears go along way toward clouding my judgment about a movie. You may remember I have expressed some similar regrets at times about The Whale, which found me in a similar vulnerable spot emotionally (at a similar time of the day, wondering if that's related), and that elevated it all the way to my #1 of 2022. Tears are the purest expression we have that whatever sparks them is having a profound impact on us, and when that's a piece of art, it means there is something fundamentally good, or at least effective, about that art.

I never got to an equivalent place in the rest of Wicked as I did with that scene at the dance, but I was already a goner for this movie at that point. I had already computed the five stars in my head.

After last night's viewing, I'm thinking "Four? Three and a half?"

Because I've lived with my opinion of Wicked for a year and enshrined it in permanence when I published my rankings, I cannot comprehend nor abide such a drop in my feelings toward it. But let me try to delve into it:

1) This time I came in on guard. I had sort of convinced myself that my affection for Wicked gave me something in common not with the cinephiles I respect, but with a less discriminating form of moviegoer. I'm supposed to be above the more conventional movie tactics that speak to those sorts of moviegoers. And though I do know plenty of "respected critics" who felt strongly about the movie, it's the snobs' opinions we always remember, that eat away at some inner insecurity in us. 

2) I was a lot more distracted by the many digital effects in the film. Maybe that's just a year more in our collective shunning of digital effects weighing on me there. But I did really notice how much of this movie is not really there.

3) I started watching it at 10:30, after a handful of drinks. (Drinks also being a factor in my Friday night viewing of Friendship, as I wrote about yesterday. Okay, maybe drinks before movies is not a good idea.)

I think the last factor is the one that prevents me from having quite so much despair about liking Wicked so much less.

Whereas I suspected I might have missed some moments in Friendship, I know I missed some of Wicked's 160 minutes due to short bouts of sleep. It couldn't have been a lot, becaue I still finished around 2 after naps of indeterminate lengths in which I paused the film. But I definitely missed some. I usually pause a movie when I fall asleep, but that's only if I see it happen and I don't try to fight it. When I try to fight it, sometimes I lose.

I also was pretty sure it wouldn't matter if I slept during some of Wicked. I'd already seen it. This was basically just a refresher to put me in a Wicked: For Good mindset. 

So I don't think it really made a difference that I missed some of it. I think I just liked it less.

Ariana Grande's performance had been one of my favorite parts of my first viewing. It was here too, but I didn't remember as many moments where I felt so charmed and disarmed by a particular choice. There was definitely an element of surprise in that the first time, and obviously you don't get surprised by things on a second viewing.

My second Wicked experience reminds me even more of an underlying reality of ranking movies: You can't possibly know which will endure in your hearts. You can make educated guesses, but really, you are describing a moment in time, an exact set of circumstances that existed in both you, as the viewer, and the cinematic landscape at large. I saw Wicked a couple weeks after Trump was reelected. Did that have something to do with it, particuarly in the case of a Black actress playing an outcast in the person of Cynthia Erivo? Sure it could have. I may have even consciously acknowledged that to myself at the time. Now I'm just a year more dead inside due to the Trump presidency in progress, more resigned to cynicism with my emotions less on the surface.

The reason I'm writing this post is, well, because I post most days and I am usually writing about one of my most recent experiences as a movie lover. But there may be an extra boost of urgency here, because I think I do want you, my readers, to know that although I think Wicked is a very good film, I no longer feel the five-star enthusiasm that I felt this time last year.

Maybe now I can adopt a position that splits the difference between what the most serious cinephiles in my orbit, and what the lovers of big spectacle and musical theater in my orbit, think of this movie. 

Friendship is rare

Whenever I had thought about finally seeing the Andrew DeYoung-directed Tim Robinson vehicle Friendship, which has gone through a series of "about to occurs" based on a date we had with another couple to see it that was cancelled several times, I couldn't help but start singing the first few lines of the Tenacious D single "Friendship":

Friendship is rare
Do you know what I'm saying to you?
Friendship is rare
My derriere
When you find out much later that they don't really care

It's rare, to me

Can't you see

It's rare, to me

Can't you see?

I can stop there because I wouldn't usually get that far in the lyrics spontaneously appearing in my head. But I used to love that Tenacious D album, so I'm pretty familiar with the song.

When I finally saw the movie with my wife on Friday night -- a prelude to getting together with this same couple to see a different movie, Good Fortune -- I came to realize how rare the movie truly is.

It's rare because you don't usually see a movie this lacking in formal coventionality getting greenlit. If you're a fan of the Robinson show I Think You Should Leave, which I am, then you know Robinson's thing is to build these three- to five-minute vignettes off twisted versions of recognizable social interactions, usually where there's one insecure or petty party (usually played by Robinson) who violates normal social boundaries in trying to connect to other people. The ideas are wild but at least they are contained to within that short period of time, and you can usually remember them in order to tell your friends about them.

When you expand this to feature length, it's surprising how little you can remember and how little there is to talk about with people later on.

Now, it could be that I was fading in and out after having two beers, which I thought was probably a good way to watch this movie. But I know I didn't miss any significant portion of the film, I just missed the nuggets of crazy weirdness that have such a good showcase in short form. In this elongated form, I couldn't remember wanting to talk about anything afterward except what a slog it had been.

The movie is also rare in the sense that it is undercooked. There is a rigorous version of this material that keeps all the cringe, that goes on wild and fruitful tangents, that doesn't make a huge amount of sense from moment to moment, and yet that still feels like a cohesive whole that understands and incorporates the differing requirements between a feature-length film and a five-minute sketch. I searched in vain for that rigorous version of the material this whole movie. 

What was left to me was raw and limp and uninvolving, and also a poor return on what I hoped was going to be a consideration of male friendships with a fatal power imbalance, something in the vein of my beloved The Cable Guy. But even the title is a bit of a misnomer, because friendship is only a relatively small part of what is explored here, with the Paul Rudd character even disappearing from the movie for ten-minute stretches here and there. This shrimp needed a lot more time on the barbie.

The unfortunate thing about the rareness of this film? It does seem to put a damper on Robinson possibly making this more stringent version of his unique anti-comedy sensibilities at some point in the future.

Then again, maybe it won't. Friendship is a movie a lot of people have talked about this year, and that has obviously not just been, or even mostly been, people bashing it. In fact, although all the conversations I heard were in the context of people recommending it only with a large asterisk -- like, know what you're getting into -- I don't recall hearing anything fundamentally negative about it until my wife reported that her friend, the one we're seeing tonight to see Good Fortune, stopped watching it when she and her partner tried to watch it at home. He finished it but I won't know until tonight what he thought.

And then actually my wife had a different experience of it than I did. She agreed it was probably too odd for its own good, and lacking in a more sound construction that could have gotten more out of it, but she found herself charmed just to be watching something so strange and different. I would have thought this would have been my opinion and my opinion would have been hers, given that I feel like I'm the one who has to push I Think You Should Leave on her and she's a bit more resistant.

The other thing about rare movies, in whatever form they take, is that it can take some time to decide how indeed you do truly feel about them, because they are challenging you in ways where any predetermined potential reaction might be invalidated. Even though I thought I knew what to expect from this movie, and it did contain much of what I did expect from moment to moment, I may not have been prepared for how loosey goosey it would ultimately be from a structural perspective. And maybe that takes some time to sort through and figure out.

I think I'll have to go with my largely negative impression in terms of where Friendship slots in with my 2025 films. I'm not going to watch it again in the next two months. But it may be that I will confront it again some time down the road, meaning its long-term spot in my heart, as encapsulated by my Flickchart rankings, is still up in the air. 

To spoil or not to spoil?

As you would know from this post, I have recently begun reading Quentin Tarantino's Cinema Speculation, a sort-of memoir in which he mostly just talks about a dozen films from the 1970s that he saw when he was too young and loved, though more as he would analyze them now than much of the experience of seeing them then. Okay I guess there was one from 1968, as he starts with Bullitt.

The first three of these I had seen. After Bullitt he talks about Dirty Harry and Deliverance. 

But then the next was Sam Peckinpah's The Getaway, another Steve McQueen movie and a blind spot for me. I decided to watch it before I read the chapter on it, in a way similar to how you watch a movie when you know it's going to be discussed on a film podcast. I'd certainly get a lot more out of the chapter if the text were known to me, like it was with the other three, but even more than that if it were fresh. Dirty Harry is the most recent of those other three I've seen, and it's been seven years.

The viewing of The Getaway, which I liked but which has some parts about it that have aged very poorly -- Sally Struthers' whole character is incredibly problematic -- did give me a lot more than the previous three chapters. But I quickly realized that movies I had not seen would be the norm for the rest of the book, and I don't know if it's sustainable to keep watching these 1970s movies I haven't seen in order to keep getting the most out of Tarantino's book.

Then again, if I read his soup-to-nuts discussion without seeing the movie, I'll spoil any future attempt to see the movie, assuming I remember any of what he talked about.

I'll give you an idea of what I'm up against. The next chapter -- which I am now ready to start -- is about John Flynn's 1973 film The Outfit, previously unseen by me. After that I get a little break for some mid-book essays, but when those essays are over, we resume with a bunch of others I haven't seen: Sisters (1973), Rolling Thunder (1977), Paradise Alley (1978), Escape from Alcatraz (1979) and The Funhouse (1981). (Okay so there's one from the 1980s too.) In fact, the only remaining film in the book I've actually seen is Taxi Driver (1976), which I've seen twice. 

So my choices seem to be:

1) Watch a half-dozen film from the 1970s (and one from the 1980s) during a time of year that I am usually focused on collecting up films to rank from the current year, jammed together in a short period of time if I want to keep reading the book at a decent clip, or

2) Find out who lives and dies and who gets killed in creative ways that made an impression of Quentin Tarantino when he was a kid in a half-dozen movies I might like to see one day under friendlier circumstances.

Tough choice.

Some people would solve the problem by reading a second book alongside Cinema Speculation, but that's not how I roll. I like to dedicate myself to one book at a time. I guess you can call me a literary serial monogamist. (With apologies to Richard Curtis for borrowing his line from Four Weddings and a Funeral.) 

The decision on The Outfit, of course, will be due first. 

One way to think about it is that I can buy myself a little time by skipping The Outfit, knowing I then have another couple chapters that are extended essays rather than focuses on a single film. So when I resume with Sisters, at least it won't have just been a few days earlier that I watched The Getaway. Then again, I could think of that the reverse way as well -- all I have to do is see The Outfit and then I'll have earned myself a break, and I can keep alive the possibility of taking a completist approach to the films discussed in Cinema Speculation.

Of course, the freewheeling nature of Tarantinto's writing -- which sounds basically exactly like you've heard him talking in interviews, abundant with enthusiasm -- means that he's already touched on plenty of other films, possibly even revealing spoilers about them. And there was no warning for those discussions in the form of chapter headings.

Then there's the fact that memory is poor. Even if I hear Tarantino spoil the shit out of The Outfit, what are the chances I remember what he says when I get to the movie organically, maybe 15 years from now, or maybe never? 

Well, I won't have to make the decision tonight. I've already decided I'm going to watch a Greek film, She Loved Blossoms More, that I was eyeballing at MIFF 2024 but didn't get a chance to catch then. Since it was only released in the U.S. in 2025, it counts for this year.

So I'll kick the can down the road on the great Cinema Speculation spoiler debate by at least one more day.

Characters who play the same song over and over again

I was going to call this post "Characters I don't understand doing weird things," but I thought that would make me seem even more obtuse in my inability to "get" Wong Kar-Wai's Chungking Express than I'm already going to seem. 

And before I go deeper into that, I just wanted to tell you how much it pains me that I didn't get it. 

It pains me generally because I really dislike the experience of not vibing with a movie that I know many people adore. It sends an instant shooting pain to my inner core of self doubt. 

Adore? In fact, Wikipedia has this to say about the movie:

The film premiered in Hong Kong on 14 July 1994 and received critical acclaim, especially for its direction, cinematography, and performances. Since then it has been regarded as one of Wong's finest works, one of the best films of 1994, of the 1990s, of the 20th century, and of all time, as well as one of the best anthology films and romantic comedies ever made.

I'd call that hyperbole, but they've got the receipts. It was at #88 on the 2022 Sight & Sound poll. 

But it also pains me because I had been looking for this movie for a very long time. It had previously eluded me. I'd gone to the various streaming services and rental sources on multiple occasions in the past, and I'd never found it. 

In fact, I was so looking for it, that I watched it on the very day I realized it was available on Kanopy. I mightn't have, but only a few minutes after I saw it was available, I also saw that it was in the "Leaving Soon" category. I didn't bother to test how soon. 

But no, I didn't end up getting it, making this another mortal wound to my credibility as a cinephile. Obviously only one mortal wound is enough to kill you, so I'm using that metaphor poorly.

Instead of further berating myself for not getting on Wong's wavelength, I think I'll tell you instead the ways the movie triggered me. And they have to do with another heralded, influential film that left me even colder than this one, made a decade earlier, and watched by me a decade ago.

I'd already seen plenty of Jim Jarmusch films by the time I saw Stranger Than Paradise in February of 2015. Given that I'd liked most of them, I thought it was time to go back to where it all started. (Almost. He'd made Permanent Vacation four years earlier, which I watched two years later.)

But boy did I loathe Stranger Than Paradise.

There were lots of things I loathed about it, some of which repeated themselves in Chungking Express, where I did not loathe them but I did not like them either. But let's start with the one I've alluded to here in the subject of this post.

One of the things that immediately took me out of the movie was the fact that the character Eva, played by Eszter Balint, is so obsessed with Screamin' Jay Hawkins' "I Put a Spell on You" that it is literally the only song she ever plays. In fact, I think listening to the song might be the only thing she does. She stands around, holding her boom box below her waist, playing "I Put a Spell on You," and when it ends, she starts it over and plays it again. (I don't know if it was a boom box. This is my memory of it.)

I don't believe this as a character trait for a person. 

You may like a song, but you can't listen to the same song over and over again, even if you love it, particularly if you want to continue loving it. You might listen to it a couple times a day, but they would be spread out. And after about a week of this, you'd have gotten it out of your system. 

I don't remember the timeframe of Stranger Than Paradise, but in my memory of it, Eva never gets it out of her system and just keeps listening to this song over ... and over ... and over again.

Incidentally, I think this movie plays a significant role in why I don't like that song. 

It's an unbelievable trait she shares with the character Faye, played by Faye Wong, in Chungking Express.

It's not Screamin' Jay Hawkins that Faye plays. That would be too on the nose for Wong, even though I suspect he was influenced by Stranger Than Paradise in some ways, if not others. 

No, Faye is into "California Dreamin'" by The Mamas and the Papas. This is the song she plays over ... and over ... and over again. 

I do still like "Dreamin'," not so much Screamin'. 

I just don't really understand the narrative function of having a character listen to a song over and over again. Chungking finds this character to be quirky, for sure, but she's also glamorized as pretty cool, with her short hair and her whimsical relationship to her surroundings. Chungking Express is not making fun of Faye. 

The best reason I can tell for Faye listening to this song on repeat is that she really is dreaming of California and she does eventually go there. (Spoiler alert. Wait, you can't spoil a movie like Chungking Express.) However, I find this an excessively literal usage of the song, which is not great either. 

If you don't know the structure of the movie, it basically contains two halves that focus on two different Hong Kong cops and their odd flirtations with two different women (with the shadow of a second woman hanging over both stories). I was cautiously on board with the first one of these, where the cop is in a 30-day period of hoping his ex will get back together with him, and each day of the month of April -- they broke up on the 1st -- he buys a can of her favorite canned pineapples with the expiration date of May 1st, which is also his birthday. If he gets to the end of the month and she has not gotten back together with them, he will give up and consider their relationship to be expired.

In the meantime, he's also sort of becoming interested in a woman he barely meets who wears a rain slicker and sunglasses at all times of the day, who is involved in drug smuggling with Indian mules. To be clear, I am talking about Indian men and women who are smuggling her drugs. This is sort of a weird combination of story bits, but I am still on board.

It's when Wong wipes the slate clean and starts over with two other characters in the second half that my patience got tested and that I decided I was not really liking the movie. 

I appreciated Chungking in a basic visual way. There are some very compelling tricks going on here, some of which involve a blurry slow motion in which forward movement is captured by a bunch of individual frames of movement (not sure how to describe this any better). Then there's also the effect where two planes of motion are established at the same time, the character moving in regular speed in the foreground and the background speeding by. I liked all this stuff. I just wanted it to be in service of a narrative that spoke to me more.

But I should tell you that I was also being further alienated by another of my triggers.

One of the things I don't like about a certain period of Jarmusch, which also reminds me of a certain period of Godard, is that it relies too heavily on guys wearing wifebeater undershirts and smoking cigarettes. This was also something I didn't like about Wong's Days of Being Wild, made four years earlier in 1990, so I suppose it should be no surprise that it also features heavily here.

Without going too much into my personal psychology, the wifebeater, for me, signifies a form of masculinity that I do not relate to. I'm not devoid of traditional forms of masculinity -- I love my sports, for example -- but a guy who would wear around a wifebeater, even in the privacy of his own home, represents to me a guy who would treat women with casual malevolence and imagines himself as some sort of icon of cool. (I should say that I also don't like wifebeaters for practical reasons, which is that I don't like my neck area and I prefer to have tighter fitting undershirts.) 

I mean, I don't suppose I'm telling you anything new here. There's a reason we call it a wifebeater. 

But for directors like Wong and Jarmusch, and I guess Godard, it seems to represent this ideal incarnation of the human male. I feel like they are trying to tell us that these guys are cool and that we are not, unless we are also willing to throw on a wifebeater and smoke a cigarette while directing casual malevolence at a woman.

The malevolence toward women is absent here, but the associations still stick. And so I find myself feeling negatively toward the Chungking charactes who spend so much time in wifebeater undershirts, and also who feel unselfconscious about the tighty whities they're wearing.

Do my personal hangups constitute real reasons not to like a movie? 

They don't, but when you take enough of them in combination, you can see why the movie doesn't work for me:

1) The song "California Dreamin'" gets played a dozen times, because one character keeps playing it;

2) The plot is alienating in its eccentricity, rather than good in its eccentricity;

3) Too many wifebeaters.

If my goal with this post was not to seem obtuse in my reasons for not liking Chungking Express, well, I may have failed in that regard. But unlike some of the characters in this movie, I'm not going out of my way to show you how cool I might be. I'm happy enough being somewhat lame. It's more honest.

And I do wonder if all the others who say they love Chungking Express are being similarly honest with themselves. 

The precise quality of a Thea Sharrock movie

If you don't know who Thea Sharrock is, it wouldn't surprise me. She has directed four features, two of which I've seen (Me Before You and The Beautiful Game) and two of which I haven't (The One and Only Ivan and Wicked Little Letters).

The reason I'm talking about Thea Sharrock today is that the only two movies of hers I've seen are exactly next to each other on my Flickchart.

And why does this matter? 

Because I have 6676 movies on my Flickchart, so any two from the same director being next to each other is highly unlikely -- especially when those are the only two movies I've seen by the director.

I guess I am not the world's biggest Thea Sharrock fan, because those movies are #5645 and #5646 out of those 6676.

If you don't understand how Flickchart works, you are developing a big list of the movies you've seen from your favorite to your least favorite. The movies land in their positions by duelling other movies that are already on the list. So when you add a new movie, it duels against the movie that's at the 50th percentile on your chart. If it beats that movie, it then duels the movie that's at the 75th percentile. If it loses to that movie, it duels the movie at the 62nd and a half percentile. And so forth until an exact percentile is determined and an exact ranking is handed out from the total number of movies on your chart. 

I saw The Beautiful Game in July of 2024, which gives you some idea how far behind I've gotten in adding my movies to Flickchart. I used to add them right after I'd seen them, but then I decided to try to nullify the effect of recency bias, so I vowed to wait to add movies until 30 days after I'd seen them. But then when you get out of the habit, you get way behind, and at times I have been more than two years behind on adding my films. I'm trying to catch up, but I don't devote a huge amount of time to it, so I'm not making much progress.

Anyway, when I went through this process for The Beautiful Game, the last film it didn't beat was Me Before You at #5645, while it did beat Brett Haley's 2020 film All Together Now at #5646. So that's how it ended up at #5646, pushing All Together Now down to #5647.

This would have meant nothing to me, except that part of this process means adding the movie to an Excel version of my Flickchart rankings that I also maintain, sort of as a backup to Flickchart in case it ever goes offline. So when I went to add The Beautiful Game, I was gobsmacked to see Thea Sharrock's name already appearing on the line above it. I wondered if I'd blacked out for a minute and forgotten that I'd already written her name, but written it on the wrong line.

But no, I looked it up, and Sharrock directed Me Before You, the weepie starring Sam Claflin and Emilia Clarke, where he's paralyzed and she is his health aide who falls in love with him. (Vanessa Kirby is also in it, I just noticed, though I would not have known who she was in 2016.) 

The funny thing is, when I saw it was coming up against Me Before You, I clicked on Me Before You rather quickly as my choice. In theory, when you get down to the very end of the ranking process, you should agonize over decisions because the movies are very much of a similar quality, if you've done everything correctly. When you are very quick to choose one of the two, it probably means the one you've chosen is too low on your chart -- an unavoidable hazard of Flickcharting, given that none of the movies would be in exactly their correct spot, and some can end up off by a couple hundred or more. I like Me Before You better than this ranking, though I do have some qualms about how it ends. 

I should pause here to say that I don't hate The Beautiful Game either, though the fact that I apparently only like a thousand films less than it would suggest that. I just remember thinking it was pretty mid. We watched it for and with my son, who loves soccer, but I don't think even he thought very much of it. It was no Next Goal Wins, anyway, which we all loved.

I'm making a whole post out of something that is obviously just a coincidence. If it weren't just a coincidence, and there was actual meaning behind it, something like this would have happened to me previously. But I do think it's interesting to consider whether a director's movies can be winnowed down to a precise mathematical value for their effectiveness. Which in the case of Sharrock, for me anyway, would be the 15th percentile of all the movies I've seen.

That seems way too harsh. So the least thing I can do, to be fair to Sharrock, is watch The One and Only Ivan and Wicked Little Letters. And if I do like them better, I'll certainly come back here and make sure the internet knows that Thea Sharrock deserves better than this assessment. I mean, perhaps she's even reading these words right now -- it never cease to amaze me how high up a little blog like mine appears in Google search results. 

How I got 19 days ahead of last year's pace

When I closed off my 2024 list of movies ranked at a record 177 films, I exhaled massively. Not only is it exhausting to watch that many movies, especially since you've watched about 30 in the final three weeks, but in this case the exhale also was anticipatory. I wasn't going to watch that many movies again in 2025, no way no how.

See, my family and I were going to Europe for six weeks. That would knock me out of contention right there.

Nope.

The other day, after I watched the 126th film I plan to rank in 2025, I checked to see where that pace compared to 2024. Because I list the order I watch the films each year, I was able to find #126 of 2024 (Mikael Hafstrom's Slingshot) very easily, and then only had to check one more place to see what day I watched it.

I watched Slingshot on November 23, 2024. 

I watched #126 of this year, the Jacinda Ardern documentary Prime Minister, on November 4, 2025.

Nineteen days. It's almost enough to pull out an Ed Rooney quote. 

How on earth did this happen?

If I want to answer this question, I can't go through the year and second-guess every bad Netflix movie I've watched. That might depress me too much. And I haven't even watched nearly all of them. I've forcibly skipped some of them that in other years I might have caught.

But I can attack the assumption that I would see fewer movies during the time I was in Europe.

Which seems ridiculous on the surface. I only watched nine movies in the month of September. If you want to find the last month where I watched fewer than nine movies, you have to go back to March of 2014, when I watched only seven, part of a conscious "movie diet" to start that year. That "diet" was designed to help me focus and finally get a job after more than six months in Australia, more than three of which I'd been eligible to work. And I guess that diet worked, since I got a job that month and I've been with the same employer ever since, though in several different roles.

The point is, I actually did what I was trying to do. I enjoyed Europe rather than keeping up my movie pace.

Still: Nineteen days ahead of last year's pace.

Perhaps I couldn't have guessed how much the movies on the plane would fill in the gap.

So let's actually see what number movie I was on on the day I left in August, and the same number I was on the same day the previous year.

The last movie I watched before getting on the plane, on August 20th, was Eddington, my #86 movie of 2025. On August 20, 2024, I watched Doug Liman's The Instigators, which was my #78 movie of 2024. 

So I was already eight movies ahead of my pace this year, even when I left. Perhaps I had been subconsciously front-loading, knowing about the Europe trip. But also, the Europe trip was my second international trip of the year. And on that first trip, I watched exactly eight movies that can be ranked for 2025, on just the plane rides.

So I was on the exact same pace, if you take out that trip. But surely I should have then fallen behind when I went to Europe?

Let's look at my numbers on the date I returned.

We got back to Australia on October 4th. My last movie on the plane was Karate Kid: Legends, my 101st movie of 2025, an increase of 15 from when I left. In 2024 you have go to October 6th to find the closest eligible match, on which date I watched The Platform 2, my 100th movie of 2024, an increase of 22 movies from the total I had on August 20th. 

So being in Europe for six weeks only resulted in seven fewer current-year movies than I'd watched during the same period the year before, which was more than cancelled out by my previous international trip. 

And then since getting back, I've been piling them on, another 25 movies in 34 days -- and that's just the 2025 movies. Actually it's 27, because I've watched two more since I checked my pace. 

What the hell am I going to do?

I know I should not fret about what now seems the likelihood that I will set another viewing record this year. Some people would be proud of that. There was a time when I would have been proud of that.

But I had these wild ideas that I might watch like 25 fewer films this year. Ranking 150 movies would be a perfect number. I don't need to watch more than that, just so an additional couple dozen films can round out the lower tiers of my rankings. 

I'm at 128 now, so to stop at 150, I'd have to watch only 22 more films between now and January 22, when the Oscar nominations are announced. I'm more likely to watch 52 films or even 62 films in that period than I am to watch 22, especially since I keep on hearing about movies I hadn't heard about, and adding them to my Letterboxd watchlist. Which currently has 76 films on it. 

Well I've got at least one idea to slow my roll.

A thing I was going to tell you about separately, though I might as well mention it now, is that I am holding open auditions for a #1 movie this year. I've seen a lot of good films this year, especially recently, when I've added four movies to my top 20 in the past week alone. But I haven't seen the movie, the one I know I would be happy with as a #1 if my ranking deadline were today.

So I think I will set aside some time -- maybe late December, maybe between Christmas and New Year's -- to rewatch the contenders. Not only to decide if any of them is worth being my #1 movie of the year, but also to figure out where they truly belong compared to each other within my top ten, which is also quite a mystery to me right now. 

Even with this, I will probably still break my record, just because the titles keep popping up. 

I'm okay with this. I have to be okay with this. This is what I do.

I just won't ever fool myself again that I might have a "year off" ... unless I actually decide that this is no longer what I do. 

Understanding Editing: The Bourne Ultimatum

This is the second-to-last in a 2025 monthly series watching previous best editing Oscar winners, half of which I've seen and half of which I haven't, to get a better sense of what others think is exceptional editing.

The final film for this series I had not seen previously is The Bourne Ultimatum. Since I saw the first two films in the series, you'd have thought I'd have continued with this one. But I didn't really like those films, which is no surprise because spy movies, generally, do not do a whole lot for me. In fact, I wrote a whole post sort of inspired by this series called "Series I've abandoned." If you want to read that post, it's here. 

Understanding Editing is prompting me to de-abandon the Bourne movies, though I still don't plan to put The Bourne Legacy or Jason Bourne on my watchlist any time soon. You see, The Bourne Ultimatum won an Oscar for its editing in 2007, making it the most recent best editing winner that I hadn't seen. If you want to know now which is the most recent I haven't seen, you have to go all the way back to the 1960s with Z in 1969. 

I was happy to choose this movie because it was not, like some of the other films in this series, a film I could say might have only won the editing Oscar because it was winning all the other Oscars. That should mean that the editing here is being specifically isolated for praise. This is not, though, the only Oscar won by The Bourne Ultimatum. It also won two trophies that are related to the best editing Oscar, best sound mixing and best sound editing. I don't think those are still two separate categories. 

And unlike some other films in this series, it isn't difficult to determine why this film was honored for its editing, at the very least because it could win the Oscar for "most editing," if such an Oscar existed.

I sometimes think of the first decade of the 21st century as a time not dissimilar enough from 2025 to warrant calling it a different era. It may just be that we don't have a lot of nostalgic forms of entertainment that speak specifically to that time. Only in the past few years, I would argue, have we really start to sentimentalize the 1990s, and we may not have gotten there yet with the 2000's. So I still sort of think of it as essentially "now," even though 2007 was 18 years ago. 

It's movies like The Bourne Ultimatum, as well as the 2009 remake of Friday the 13th I watched a few weeks ago, that remind me that this was, indeed, quite a different time.

For one, 2007 appears to be the height of "shaky cam," a favored approach of director Paul Greengrass, which was also popular among many other filmmakers at the time. I can't remember the last time I've seen shaky cam in a new movie, though there may be people who still use it. It was also big in shows like The Office, of course, and for a time, we loved the apparent verisimilitude it brought to what we were watching.

That time is definitely over. As I was watching The Bourne Ultimatum, I kept on thinking to myself how silly it was that the camera is moving -- maybe only a little bit, but still moving -- in scenes even where there is not any sort of kinetic action whatsoever. At the time this felt gritty, but nowadays I don't like it. And no, it's not because I have any sort of issues with motion sickness, I just think it's a lame relic of its time that was probably never a great idea. 

Add in all the crazy editing, and you just have a non-stop dervish of a film that can manage to impress you on a basic technical level while still being unpleasant to watch.

The crazy editing, though, is pretty impressive in and of itself. So let's first of all talk about who did it.

The editor is Christopher Rouse, and this is his only Oscar. He made six films with Greengrass, the last of which was Jason Bourne in 2016. He was also Oscar nominated for United 93 the year before this, far and away my favorite Greengrass film, and far and a way the most vital use of both shaky cam and Rouse's editing style. More recently he edited IF for John Krasinski, in which we no longer see evidence of this style, if it was ever really properly characterized as a signature for him.

The thing Rouse does that's so impressive is that he captures movement within a scene with a fast succession of quick edits, maybe as many as ten over five seconds of screen time. A succession like this can get Jason Bourne up a set of stairs and around a corner in a bunch of half-second shots that are just fast enough to get the job done quickly but just slow enough to allow for a certain continuity within the viewing experience. He's fast without seeming herky jerky, which is kind of the definition of what we look for in superlative editing. 

Needless to say, this approach also pays dividends in fight scenes, where we can see two guys thrown around an apartment, and the various jabs and lunges thrown at one another, without having to linger on any one part of the fight. At worst, this approach is visually incomprehensible, but Rouse pulls it off in a way where we always maintain an understanding of the fight's spatial dynamics while being inevitably excited by the pace of it all.

The thing that may be impressive for other editors, if I'm guessing, is that each cut probably only uses a small fraction of the shot the DP took. While many instances of editing use most of the take, and the skill is in deciding how soon to cut in on the shot and when to cut away from it, Rouse is using only the most representative sliver of each take to forward the action. And from where I sat, he did this very well.

Does that mean I liked watching this movie? No it does not.

Look I'm already not a fan of the Bourne movies, and I did not expect this movie to change my mind. But I think I actually liked it least of the three I've seen, to the extent that I remember the other ones. That runs contrary to the conventional wisdom that this might be the best of the original three, which started out with Doug Liman's original movie before Greengrass took the reins from him. 

If I needed to summarize this movie, it would be thus:

"Jason Bourne ducks in and out of corners of a city while stressed out CIA operators behind closed doors bark orders about how to find him."

That's it. That's the entire plot of this movie, as far as I can tell. 

In looking at the plot synopsis now on Wikipedia, I have determined that there are at least three different cities depicted here, maybe as many as four. Yes, that's four: Moscow, London, Turin and New York. The fact that I don't remember Bourne transitioning between any of these cities tells you how samey everything felt, how much I thought of the movie, and ultimately, by the end, how much I was actually paying attention to it. 

Okay I've got one more of these left. In December I will revisit The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo -- the Fincher version, obviously, as that was the one that won the Oscar. I'm especially interested to appreciate how an excellent technician like Fincher gets the most out of an editor. 

A speculative initiative

There comes a point where you're not getting better at the thing you're doing just by doing it. You have to apply additional thought and training to it, if you want to see markedly better results.

I sometimes feel this way about watching movies, or more to the point, reviewing and writing about movies.

I can watch as many movies as I want, delve into the classics as regularly as I am able to find them, but those experiences are not fuelling my greater film knowledge unless I am supplementing them with something else. Something more.

And more, I have determined, means reading.

When the Filmspotting podcast spotlights new monthly subscribers on each episode, an incentive for creating more of us, it will run down that person's answers to a variety of questions. And one of them is their favorite book on film. 

I don't have a lot of favorite books on film. Because I don't read a lot of books on film.

And that, I have determined, is about to change.

A couple years ago, I don't remember exactly when, someone gifted me Quentin Tarantino's film memoir? is that what it is? called Cinema Speculation. It was probably for Christmas. I remember thanking whoever it was, assuming they were present in the room with me, and thinking "That's cool. I like Quentin Tarantino, but I don't really read books about film."

And why don't I do this, exactly?

For one I am a slow reader. I read about six to eight books per year. I might be able to get through more, but I do tackle some long ones -- the one I read in Europe was 650 pages. The bigger problem, though, is that if I'm not liking a book, I don't stop reading it. I just read it very slowly, so that I might end up wasting four months on a book I didn't like very much, when I could have been reading three others.

As a result of this slow pace, there are so many classics I've never read, plus I'd like to keep up on my share of new fiction. Then there are potentially biographies or other non-fiction books. To say nothing of the fact that in theory, I'd like to re-read some personal favorites. I re-watch favorite movies all the time, but due to the far greater time commitment, I almost never re-read books that I love. 

Doesn't leave a lot of time for reading books about movies ... especially when I'm already devoting so much of my time to movies. 

But am I losing out? Is there some indefinable part of my knowledge as a cinephile that is incomplete because I'm not getting deep, academic dives into the texts of these films, and into their making? And wouldn't I like to be just a bit more conversant about the origins of Hollywood and those who ran it a hundred years ago? To say nothing of all the greats who came after that, even ones from my own time about whom I can and probably should know more?

I'm not sure that Cinema Speculation will give me a huge amount of that. But I've got to start somewhere.

And once I've started, I'd like to make every second book I read a book about movies.

I don't think this is a sustainable pace in the long term. But I think it's something I can try to carry out at least for the next year, and see if I feel, I don't know, more complete as a cinephile after that period. 

If I don't, I can just go back to reading whatever, whenever.

I also think that if I am always trying to get to my next book that is not "homework" -- enjoyable homework, mind you, but homework of a sorts nonetheless -- it may increase my overall pace of reading. Which I think would be a good thing in my general quest to read more. 

I don't know that I will report on these books to you here on the blog. I certainly won't commit myself to doing it. I suppose it depends on whether something I've read inspires me to write.

But I think this is worth doing, and I think I will do it, and we'll just see how I go. 

The Pixar directing quagmire

There are some credits given out rather loosely on a film. For example, a film might have dozens of executive producers, as that tends to be the kind of credit you give to someone when the actual thing they've done for the film is not easy to quantify -- or even sometimes if they just ask for it. It increases their ownership of the film in ways that can be useful. (This was explained to me recently as a reason Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross are listed as executive producers on Tron: Ares.)

Directing, you would think, should not be such a credit given out willy nilly. But sometimes it's hard to tell, especially with films where the director is not yelling "Action!" and "Cut!" because there is never any camera rolling. (I know it isn't actually the director who usually yells that. Just go with me here.)

Pixar makes movies like this. For every Toy Story, where John Lasseter is listed as the director and that's that, there is a Brave, where IMDB lists Mark Andrews, Brenda Chapman and Steve Purcell all as directors. I believe in some cases, one of them is listed as a co-director, which is just all the more confusing for me. 

I'm not going back to the credits of Brave to see how it's listed, not when I have a recent example from finally watching Elio the other night.

I'll just get this out of the way now, especially after I posted earlier this year that Elio was the first Pixar movie in ages I had intentionally passed on seeing in the theater: I didn't love Elio, but I certainly did not hate it either. In the end, I think I liked it better than I thought I was going to like it. Three stars.

As with most films, especially animated films, there are two phases to the credits: 1) a first section of credits that gives place of pride to individual names or pairs of names, while being designed according to the design details of the film and possibly even featuring additional footage, and 2) the second, longer section where all the remaining names steadily scroll by.

In Elio's first section of credits, the directors are listed as Madeline Shafarian, a name I did not know, and Domee Shi, who directed the most recent Pixar film I've truly loved, Turning Red. However they determine this at Pixar, Shi was the only credited director on Turning Red, and the positive feelings I ended Elio with, I attributed to her.

When the second phase of the credits rolled, I noticed a very odd first one:

                                                            Directed by
                                                          Adrian Molina

Huh?

Not co-directed, not assistant-directed, just directed. As though serving in contrast to Shafarian and Shi, or undermining them.

Now, this was also a name I recognized. Molina got a co-director credit on Coco, the Pixar film I loved most prior to Turning Red. Where, at the time, I wondered what the nature of his contribution was relative to Lee Unkrich, the man with the full directing credit on that film.

I fished around a bit on the internet and got some generic AI slop about directing credits being based on union rules, but then I also found a story that specifically addressed the role of co-director Angus McLane on Finding Dory, which was directed by Pixar regular Andrew Stanton. It is clear from Stanton's quotes in that article that the co-director has a lesser role, sort of a "jack of all trades" role, but that the role is indispensable. Of course that's what a generous collaborator would say.

The thing is, in Elio, there's no co-director credit. There are three distinct directing credits presented in the credits in two different ways.

Because Shafarian and Shi get the splashy credit, it looks like they are the film's "real" directors. However, the placement of Molina's credit, at the very top of the scroll credits, seems to say "Whatever we told you earlier, forget that. This is the guy who really did the job."

Well it turns out I just googled the wrong thing. My second google reveals that Molina was the original director of Elio, but left due to a change in the creative direction of the film. It couldn't have been a very acrimonious departure because it says that Molina is currently working on Coco 2. 

And this is where the union likely comes into play. Because of the work Molina put in on the film, he had to be credited in some way, but co-director was not correct because his directing work was not contemporaneous to that of Shafarian and Shi, nor should it suggest that he worked in any capacity as a helper to them. 

As a film critic, I think I just prefer it when it's some auteur like Martin Scorsese, and I can just assign him credit or blame for everything that works or doesn't work in the film.