From Paris (Texas) to Cairo (Illinois) to Athens (Georgia)

This is my attempt to catch you up on two cities and a movie, all in one confusingly titled post.

The Paris, Texas part is the movie. On the plane from Rome to Cairo -- and I guess there's a fourth city if you include Rome -- I watched The Wrong Paris on Netflix, that having been one of two movies I quickly downloaded in the airport when I thought it was likely Egypt Air did not have screens on the backs of the seats.

Not only was I right about that, but this was a plane from another era entirely. The first class seats were only slightly wider seats with only about double the leg room. So instead of three seats on one side, there were two. And there were screens -- but they were the communal screens, the ones that lower from the ceiling, which was our only way to watch movies on the plane before maybe 20 years ago. 

So I actually could have watched a movie on this flight. They handed out wired disposable earbuds for us. But I wasn't paying attention when the movie started, and it's just as well as it is not a movie I could even place from its images. Only when I happened to notice their intro video to the movies they conceivably offer on Egypt Air -- on our flight out of Cairo, earlier today -- could I retroactively identify as The Salt Path, a movie starring Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs (I thought that was her but couldn't be sure). This was released this year, so would have worked well with my desire to accumulate films I can rank for the current year. Having never heard of it, though, I don't regret having missed it. (Our flight to Athens today was too short for a movie, but had an episode of the TV show Superman & Lois playing.)

Anyway, before I get too sidetracked, I'll tell you a bit about The Wrong Paris because it does tie in nicely to our trip and is crucial to the strained logic of the title of this post.

The Wrong Paris is about a young woman living in Texas (Miranda Cosgrove, who at age 32 is at least ten years older than this character is supposed to be) who works on a farm but has dreams of going to art school in Paris. She doesn't have the money, though, because she spent some of her savings helping her grandmother (Frances Fisher) with medical bills after a fall the previous year. So she tries to go on a dating show set in Paris in order to just stay behind once she gets booted off of it, taking care of some of the expenses she can't currently afford.

Only the producers of the dating show have pulled a bait and switch on the contestants, and this dating show is set in Paris, Texas, which is less than an hour from where she lives. 

I have always liked Cosgrove from the little bits of her show I Carly that I've seen over the years, and she's transitioned effectively to an adult star, albeit one with a low ceiling. She can definitely appear in the Netflix movies that Lindsay Lohan doesn't appear in for the next few years. 

And in truth, I liked The Wrong Paris more than that, giving it an actual recommendation in the form of three stars on Letterboxd. The director, Janeen Damian -- Michael's sister -- directed the aforementioned Lindsay Lohan in last year's Irish Wish, and she's already gotten much better than that at making this sort of movie. It certainly helped pass the time on the plane, and I did not hate myself in the morning for watching it.

Oh and it did tie into our trip, of course, because we were in Paris. It's been more than two weeks ago now -- jeez, closer to three -- but we were there. And this movie does get there as well, spoiler alert.

The idea of American towns named after foreign cities did get me thinking, though, and that gets us to the rest of the title.

There is a town in Illinois called Cairo, but they call it "Cay-Row," because of course they do. It is Illinois' sothernmost city and it has a population of 1,733, according to Wikipedia. According to Wikipedia, Cairo, Egypt has a population of nearly 10 million itself, and 22.8 million in the larger metropolitan area. I think we saw each and every one of them spilling through the streets or peddling something near our hotel, if not driving by in cars or on mopeds, honking their horns constantly.

Someone mentioned Cairo, Illinois to me recently, so I did think of it as we were landing in one of the largest cities in the world.

Nothing particularly cinematic happened to me in Cairo, though there were two movie theaters within an easy walk of our hotel. Only one of them was showing a western film, and that was The Conjuring: Last Rites, which you will remember I already saw in Barcelona. So interesting as it might have been to see a movie in Egypt, and it wouldn't have cut into any of my duties, I did pass on it. 

I also had occasion to think of Raiders of the Lost Ark while at the Egyptian Museum, as there was mention of Tanis, which is where the ark is discovered in Spielberg's movie. Unfortunately, dragging my kids through museums on this trip only results in a very glancing interaction with any of the knowledge stored within them, so I didn't get to go down any sort of an Indiana Jones rabbit hole while looking at all these relics.

Then today it was on to Athens -- Greece, not Georgia. But we all know there is an Athens Georgia, as that is the birthplace of R.E.M. and The B-52's, among others. And they do pronounce that one correctly.

Since we only just got here about four hours ago, I can't tell you what wonders Greece will have in store for us, but we'll be here for the next -- and last -- nine days of our trip, so I will have plenty of time to tell you later.

I finally saw: She's All That (sort of)

And wouldn't it have made a good movie for my 2025 bi-monthly series Audient Zeitgeist if I'd thought of it rather than randomly coming across it on Netflix in our Air BnB in Rome?

But that is where I came across it, I already have my final two movies for that series picked out, and September is the wrong month to be watching a movie from the series anyway. 

I had consumed most of a bottle of very bad red wine when I sat down to it on Thursday night. We were eating on the balcony that night, a rare night on this trip when we weren't eating out. (But you can't eat out every night, or you will go even broker than you're already going by being on a trip like this.)

It wasn't really the magical experience we were hoping. We weren't able to find any actually fresh pasta, because the place we were staying was about three blocks from the Colosseum. That area is not set up for tourists to make their own dinners in their Air BnB's. It's set up for them to eat out.

There is oodles of not-fresh pasta, much of it intended to be bought and brought back with you from whence you came, to give as a gift to somebody. They don't care what you do with it, as long as you give them as much of your money as possible. (Am I getting a little cynical after a month on the road?)

Even though we have two kids who would never be charmed by an experience of eating on our balcony at sunset -- one because he is very ambivalent about the concept of eating food, the other because he is very ambivalent about the concept of showing enthsusiasm for anything, even the great wonders of the world we are seeing -- we nonetheless thought we could make this a sort of special experience. But then we also couldn't find any garlic bread that we could prep in the oven, my wife couldn't find a drink she liked (she's not into red wine anymore), and when we first boiled the water in our kitchen, there was some sort of weird scum bubbling on the surface of the water, so we had to throw out the boiled water, clean it thoroughly and boil some more, which still looked a little weird. (The apartment was otherwise beautiful and quite clean, so this was a bit of a mystery.) Anyway, the sun had long since set before we had the pasta dinner with the pesto my younger son likes -- the kind we'd been lugging around a month from Austrlaia -- ready to eat. 

The good news is, the not-fresh pasta actually tasted great. Though by this point I'd already committed myself to getting the most out of the experience by drinking myself as close to the bottom of this bottle of shitty wine as I could.

Because we had all this wrapped up by 9 o'clock, I knew that just watching an episode or two of Santa Clarita Diet -- which I have belatedly chosen as a trip TV show -- would not really get me through to my proper bedtime. I needed to find something that would go down easily while I was this drunk, and She's All That is such a part of our cultural conversation that I chose that when I saw it on Netflix on the living room TV.

The premise is, of course, the occasion for great ridicule. In our comparatively unenlightened era of 26 years ago, we bought the idea that Rachael Leigh Cook was "ugly" but that if you only removed her glasses and put her in a dress, she would not be. The movie has since become a conversational touchstone any time we need to evoke the narrow thinking of an earlier time. 

Strangely, though, I thought that being a movie people regularly referenced meant that it was thought of as a classic, even with the dubious thinking that underpinned it. Like, this movie could only be as prominent as it is in the cultural conversation if it was actually, you know, good.

Nope.

It has a lot of stars. Like, many more recognizable stars than you would think. Paul Walker is even in it. So is recent Oscar winner Kieran Culkin. 

But good? It is not good. In fact, I found it pretty terrible as a movie. In fact, I'm not even sure it is better than He's All That, the remake from a few years ago that I also thought was pretty terrible.

Since I am, still, on this long holiday -- Cairo currently, which I'm sure I will tell you about at a later date -- I'm not going to give you a deep analysis of why She's All That is bad. But it goes way beyond whether it has a solid theory about beauty and popularity at its core. Really, this is just a movie with very wobbly construction, a terrible "hero" in Freddie Prinze Jr., and few if any moments that struck me as iconic or enduring or quotable.

Then again, I only "sort of" saw it.

That first night -- yes, I watched it over two nights, remember how much of that wine I'd consumed -- was particularly shaky in terms of being sure I'd seen the parts of it I thought I saw. I know I closed my eyes for a minute or two here and there, but every part of the setup struck me as lacking, and even more indicative of the era of its creation than I would have thought it would be, given that we still talk about it today.

On the second night, when I'd had only one glass of wine (beyond what I had for our dinner out, which was a wine and a margarita), I was fully engaged but apparently it was too loud for my older son, who asked me to turn it down. I turned it down enough that I even turned on the subtitles, which I suppose added to a slight disengagement from it.

So yeah, I've seen She's All That, mostly, and I gave it 1.5 stars. It's shallow, it celebrates people who are lame (and demonizes people who are even lamer, at least), and I'm not going to entertain the possibility that I might have liked it more if I'd seen it in 1999, or when not drunk. 

Late deliveries to Italy

Last week -- or was it the week before? I can no longer keep track -- I took a look on this blog at some French posters for new movies coming out. In those cases, though, it was the same new movies that were coming out in other parts of the world.

Not so with the most hotly advertised film in the Rome metro stations.

The film they are calling Father of the Year -- Il Padre Dell'Anno -- is a Michael Keaton vehicle you would not recognize by that name. 

See, in Australia, it came out way back in November of 2024 as Goodrich, which doesn't mean much by itself to Italian audiences. Hence the name change. It wouldn't have meant much to us either, but I guess we can handle an abstract title based on a person's name, while Italians cannot.

This is not, however, the most delayed delivery of a movie to Italian cinemas that we've seen in the two days since arriving in Rome. 

Earlier in this piece I was going to say this was the most hotly advertised film in the Rome metro strations second to Il Babysitter, which indeed I have seen spruiked more often than Il Padre Dell'Anno.

But when I went to look up Il Babysitter, I found only I Babysitter -- a 2016 Italian film directed by Giovanni Bognetti. And yet that film has the same poster on IMDB as I was seeing in the Roman metro stations.

Why they are advertising a nine-year-old film, which does indeed appear to have been released nine years ago as planned, in the Rome metro stations in 2025 is not even something I'm trying to look up right now. 

Flirtations with Italian cinema history

As we've made our first real exploration of Italy -- I'd been here in 1994, but only in the far north to go skiing, and this is my wife's first time setting foot in the country -- we've expected to become reacquainted with our impression of Italy from the movies. 

In Venice, Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now was invoked multiple times. As I'm writing this, we have not yet been to Rome, but we're already talking about a visit to the Trevi Fountain, because that's where Anita Ekberg frolicked in La Dolce Vita. (I had been saying it was Brigitte Bardot. Oops.) Perhaps more relevant to me personally, I will be on the lookout for scenes from Roman Holiday.  

What we were not expecting was what we found in the town of Arezzo in Tuscany, where we spent Tuesday night, chosen only for its relative equidistance between Venice and Rome. 

The town has the old buildings and piazzas to make it sort of the platonic ideal of a "small" Italian town. Small by the standards of Venice and Rome, anyway.

That must have been just what the producers of Roberto Benigni's Life is Beautiful thought, which is why they chose to shoot the opening section of the film here.

Throughout the town you see little plaques like the one I've included above. I should say, we saw three of them. I assume there are only as many plaques as there are Arezzo locations that are recognizeable from the film. I recognized these specific locations only in the vaguest sense, having rewatched the movie as recently as five years ago, but still not having the familiarity necessary for full recall. 

However, the idea of the Italian piazza -- in movies ranging from Suspiria to Cinema Paradiso to the aforementioned films of Federico Fellini -- has been fully established for us, meaning the familiarity feels strong.

And then we discovered the view. 

We ascended to what we thought was Arezzo's highest point to look at a medieval cathedral, and then noticed the park beyond that. Which -- very casually, it seem to us -- had this view:

I know this doesn't even really convey it, but it's the best I've got without including members of my family.

So at this point I inevitably thought of a different sort of film set in Italy, the sun-drenched romantic films such as Under the Tuscan Sun, if you want a movie I haven't actually seen, or La Dolce Villa, not to be confused with La Dolce Vita, which I saw earlier this year, if you want films I have seen. And though I can't name them at the moment, I've seen a lot of films like this, travelogues with a lot of food porn at their center. 

So I guess I am reaching the following not very interesting point: I've seen a lot of depictions of Italy on film, and being in Italy proves that these films were actually shot on location?

Two other quick general thoughts about Italy in terms of its role in film:

1) When we were making our way through the rabbit warren of Venetian streets, I found myself wondering where they showed the films in the Venice Film Festival. There was not a single place I saw that I recognized as a likely, or even potential, screening area.

2) In Arezzo I ended up wearing my "The Good, The Bad and The Wookie (sic)" shirt, which you can see below, which I thought was appropriate as it invokes spaghetti western master and revered Italian director Sergio Leone.

Oh and here's another panorama image of Arezzo, just because:

R.I.P. Robert Redford

As we continue our trip through Europe -- I'm currently on a train between an Italian town in Tuscany called Arezzo and Rome -- I don't really feel equipped to memoralize Robert Redford.

However, I also don't feel I can call myself a movie blog if I don't stop for a moment to acknowledge the passing of one of the greats.

It wasn't just what Redford brought to the screen as a matinee idol and acting icon. It was what he fostered as a champion of independent cinema through his long association with the Sundance Film Festival, named after his most iconic character. The fact that he was also a strong proponent of my cherished progressive causes is also really resonating for me, especially this month.

But because I'm not currently in a position to do a deep dive into IMDB and give a granular consideration of a career that started in 1960 with a role on the TV show Maverick, I'm just going to pay my respects to Redford with a little free associating today.

The first thing I thought when I heard Redford had died in his sleep at age 89 was "Robert Redford was 89?" Even though it would make sense that he would be, Redford always projected boyish good looks that belied his age, even when he was in his announced final role in The Old Man and the Gun in 2018. (Which, incidentally, was the second to last film I saw with my mother, and the last while she was compos mentis.) Given how there Redford clearly still was for this film -- maybe not looking a day over 68 -- it seemed strange that this would be his final film. (He did have a few bits of voiceover work after this, as well as one Marvel cameo.)

Because he did add a youthful vigor to whatever he did, the fact that he lived nearly nine decades does seem strange. But when you go back and look at the titles, well, you remember what a part of the cinematic landscape he was for six of those nine decades.

If we are talking about his role in my own personal viewing history, consider also that Redford was in the first movie I ever saw on video with my wife. That may seem like a strange milestone to honor -- our first movie together was in the theater, The Aviator, which played at the bar after our wedding per our request -- but I do remember that we watched Redford's The Clearing in her apartment in our first month of dating. Redford would have been something special to me even if I weren't a cinephile. 

The listing of his classic titles is not something I'm going to do here. The internet is filled to the brim with Redford appreciations right now. You know the titles. Me proving I can also list them does not do anything for you.

To illustrate these two personal examples, however, gives you a little something different. It suggests Redford's cinematic everpresence, even in films from the twlight of his career. He was solid, he was reliable, he was charming as hell, and he made many a person swoon with his beauty. It's all we want and need from a movie star. 

Yet Redford also had a career as a producer, director and film festival impresario, cementing his status as one of the more titanic cinematic figures of the second half of the 20th century, and even the first quarter of the 21st century. He poured his all into his love of cinema, and we were the beneficiaries.

Rest in peace, Sundance. 

A quarter baked

We interrupt our normal holiday blogging for some unscheduled non-holiday blogging.

(In other words, this is the first post I've written since we left -- correct me if I'm wrong -- that has nothing to do with being in Europe.)

We use the term "half-baked" to describe an idea that we think is good but has not been fully fleshed out, or has been fleshed out in incomplete/ problematic ways. I suppose using the terms "baking" and "fleshing out" in the same sentence is kind of a mixing of metaphors, but I think you're following me.

A quarter baked? That's something where you can see there is an idea there, but it is really very far away from being anything remotely rigorous that would stand up to scrutiny. 

Jake Johnson's 2023 film Self Reliance, which I watched Monday night in Venice, is a quarter baked.

(I did say this didn't have anything to do with Europe, and I still contend that's true even though I've told you I watched it in an adorable little apartment that overlooks a Venice canal.)

I wasn't actually planning to watch anything on Monday night, but we got back to the house before nine, and I wasn't going to go to sleep within the next hour even though I'm a bit sick and had a terrible sleep two nights ago. I also didn't have the appetite to try to watch something new so I could review it, having actually posted four new reviews (between myself and another writer) within the past week. 

So Self Reliance was what I found on Netflix -- and because it was a Hulu original, I think being in Italy was the only reason I found it on Netflix, as in Australia this would probably be on Disney+. (Meaning I also could have found it.) I think you'll agree that its premise helps us enter the realm of baking metaphors. 

Johnson plays a man who was recently dumped by his girlfriend of 23 years (!), who is approached to appear in a dark web reality show where he has to survive people hunting him for 30 days in order to win $1 million. It's not actually as difficult as that sounds. He can survive as long as he is with someone else, in other words, in arm's length of them. So he has to do that for the entire 30 days. 

The movie has an obvious interest in exploring the difficulties of accomplishing this, both physically and mentally. While it's tricky to logistically find yourself always next to someone else -- the best realization of the film's themes comes when Johnson's character rushes to the toilet in the middle of the night so he can be next to his brother-in-law while his brother-in-law is taking a shit -- it's also mentally and emotionally challenging to constantly be in the presence of another person.

The film does next to nothing with either of these ideas, and is strangely lacking in rigor when seeing through its high concept, to the extent that it does see it through at all.

I guess I have to SPOIL Self Reliance from here on out, so be forewarned.

Johnson is of course aware of the constraints involved in this challenge, and has brushes with what might happen if he doesn't follow them, but is strangely unworried amount momentarily straying from his satefy of numbers. (By the way, the character has a name, but I'm just going to call him Johnson, even though only Andy Samberg, and belatedly Wayne Brady, appear in this movie playing themselves. That would prepare you for a lot more funny than this Lonely Planet movie actually is.) One example comes when Johnson is going out to a night club and waiting for the homeless man he's hired to shadow him, another funny idea that isn't used very interestingly. He takes a phone call and wanders halfway down an alley to take it, for no apparent reason, and in blatant disregard of any need to adhere to the rules of the game, especially when a failure to adhere to them could result in his own demise. And indeed, he gets attacked in this alley, but only by someone who tries to strangle him to death. Why this person wouldn't just have a gun, if they are specifically hunting him in order to try to kill him, is never explained by the movie.

I suppose there are romcom undercurrents to this movie in terms of the fact that Johnson is eager to learn why his girlfriend of 23 years (!!!), played by Natalie Morales, broke up with him. The scene where he finally confronts Morales to learn this information is absurd, because anyone who had been with someone else for more than two decades, without getting married, would have good reason to break up with the other person. It also highlights how many actors this film has who were called in to do just a single day, maybe just a single hour, of work. But the reason I'm mentioning the film's romcom angle is because it involves Anna Kendrick, the other major name (other than Johnson) working on the project for multiple days, and one of my main draws in wanting to see the movie.

So Kendrick plays a woman who is also involved in the reality show, targeted for termination if she is not with someone, who contacts Johnson so they can team up. This also seems like a good idea and pushes the idea of a romcom meet cute turned into something else, which also explores the perils of a fast exposure to another person and the physical expectations this scenario might entail for them. However, we eventually learn that Kendrick is not actually involved in the game -- which explains some of her own failures to adhere to the rules for her own safety -- and just answered an ad from Johnson because she was bored. You'd think that, from her perspective as a potential romcom heroine, this is the romcom character who is hiding a big secret that the two have to overcome to find their bliss, one of the most standard tropes in romcoms. Instead, after this reveal she just drops out of the story. Huh?

The days keep ticking forward toward Day 30 as the movie continues to lose interest in seeing through the ideas it set in motion, revealing itself more and more as a limp entity hanging atop solid bones. As we get to Day 30, we think there's going to be some big twist that explains both the movie's lame attempts at storytelling and Johnson's apparent success at winning $1 million despite being a very pedestrian competitor who repeatedly fails in small ways to safeguard himself and keep his quest going. The movie introduces ideas that this is a hoax, that his life was never in danger, and that we should question everything we've been seeing. 

However, again, it does nothing with those ideas. When we get to the end, indeed the two strange European men who initially pitched him the competition are there, along with all sorts of other people we've met along the way, ready to reward him his million. The only "twist" is that they're paying him in some foreign currency and can only pay him $4,000 per month for 12 years, which is still an outcome most of us would be incredibly happy with, though the film makes it appear as a bit of joke. You wonder how often they throw this competition if it is this easy to survive it by doing so little in the way of contestant ingenuity. 

Throughout this wobbly affair, there's the persistent bit of flimsiness that we have to just trust that none of the people hunting him will fail in their mandate not to kill him if he is with someone else. Johnson doesn't actually know anything about this game and has nothing but the word of these two eccentric European men that people willing to commit murder actually have not only the moral rectitude to follow the rules set out, but also the fine motor skills to prevent an accidental killing. Are we meant to believe that these people are constantly pulling out their mental tape measures to determine if the person accompanying Johnson is sufficiently close to him to ensure his safety?

A quarter baked? I think Self Reliance may actually only be one-eighth baked. 

Squeezing in a Barcelona movie

I didn't want to include the poster for The Conjuring: Last Rites for my second straight post, so instead, you get to see a picture of Sagrada Familia, the unfinished Catholic church by Antoni Gaudi, which began construction in 1882 and is still going nearly 150 years later. It's such a popular attraction that it was sold out when we tried to go earlier today, and will also be sold out tomorrow, when we leave for Venice. So this is the only view we got of it, but my is it impressive. We did scratch our Gaudi itch with the also incredibly impressive La Pedrera an hour later.

So yes, nothing move-related happened in Paris, other than me looking at posters, though I did watch a screener of a movie to review in Toulouse in the south of France, which did not seem to warrant a mention on this blog.

Instead, I'm telling you about my second theatrical viewing of the trip, which occurred last night, the first having come back on August 31st. If my current pace of about one every two weeks keeps up, I'll watch one more on the trip, though I could squeeze in two (One Battle After Another?) if I get really ambitious. Most likely the next one will come on our final week in Crete, the last week of September, in part because we will really slow down that week, which will making getting to the movies much easier.

As you can see below, The Conjuring: Last Rites is called Expendiente Warren: El Ultimo Rito here in Barcelona. So, basically the opposite of France, where they kept the franchise title but changed the subtitle. "El Ultimo Rite" translates to "The Last Rite," but as far as I can tell, "Expediente Warren" translates to "Office Hours Warren," which is just hilarious.

Without going on and on about how much I love Barcelona, especially the El Born area where we are staying, let me just say that with a 15-year-old and an 11-year-old, we don't have the stamina to stay out and eat dinner at 11:30 with the other Spaniards. Given that our dinner was over by about 8:40, I thought it might be the perfect opportunity to get over to Mooby Aribau, the closest cinema to El Born, for a 9:30 showing.

Now, I should tell you that it wasn't straightforward getting there, but that's because I was trying to exist only on the maps that I'd had when I was in range of a WiFi. I'm trying to keep my phone on airplane mode whenever possible on this trip, to avoid roaming charges. My wife got an e-sim, so she's on a mobile network when we're out and about and need one. We can connect to her hotspot or other available WiFi, but otherwise, my older son and I am offline. (My younger son does noes not yet have a phone, and you can sense that he might complain about that if he weren't so sweet.)

My experience in America has been that if I plug in a destination on my phone map when I'm in range of internet, the map will keep directing me even after I've gone offline. This also generally worked in Singapore last year. It has not worked particularly well in Europe, the latest example being last night.

When I left the tapas bar where we had dinner -- our second sub-par tapas in as many days, unfortunately -- I had about a 25-minute walk to get me there by about 9:15 for the 9:30 show. I got about halfway through the serpentine streets before the map went to "Waiting for location" and never came back out of that mode. I wonder if this is more of a problem when you're walking than driving, though even the walking worked okay in Singapore. 

So I did have to turn on my roaming, and that got me to the theater in plenty of time, by about 9:20. My hope was to get home using only my memory, which was a fairly bold approach. 

But first, the movie.

I ordered my large Coke Zero in Spanish, after buying my ticket through a kiosk. I have no idea how close I got to being actually correct, but the guy had no trouble with what I meant, probably because he is an expert at picking through broken Spanish, and also because there was a natural limit on the things I could be asking him for. (Barcelona is very set up for English. Almost everyone speaks it and I heard English being spoken by tourists constantly, much more so than in Paris.) I said "Por favor, me gusteria uno Coca Cola sin azucar, grande." Anyway, he gave me the right thing. 

There was a small part of me that worried I might have ended up in a dubbed session, even though I'd check to make sure it was "version original," which would mean in English with subtitles. The trailers were also in this form, though the chain made sure to let us know that it carried both original versions and dubbed versions at all its locations, in a promotional video after the trailers. There were a good 40 other people there, I assume mostly Spaniards, but given the prevelance of English in their city, I doubt most of them even needed the subtitles.

Just a side note to say I continue to enjoy watching English language movies with Spanish subtitles, which I've done a half-dozen times before for one reason or another. It does help with remembering some of my Spanish, but I haven't needed it here, and you get the sense that most locals would prefer just to speak to you in English. That is not the case in Paris, where they only speak English if they really have tto. Anyway, after tomorrow I won't need my Spanish at all.

The movie is not good. I have already written a review but will not be posting it until Monday. You can find the link then if you want to read it.

At the end of the movie, I could not find my way back without turning my phone back on to roam for another day. (At least, I assume it's another day because it was after midnight for much of my return walk.) There has been some debate on this trip about whether my sense of direction is good or bad. I think it's good. Everyone else thinks it's bad. Anyway, the majority must be correct, because I ended up in some intersection that was very unfamiliar to me -- not that anything should be very familiar to me after only about 30 hours in the city -- and discovered that I was, indeed, heading away from El Born rather than towards it.

It's been a week between entries on this blog, though I have gotten you something from every country so far, if you don't count Scotland as a separate country from England, and if you lump in my musings about the offerings on Emirates Airlines as part of my Dubai experience. I'll try to keep it going in Italy, where I will be for the next six days, following three days in Venice with three days in Rome. 

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!