Ranking ten years of Happy Madison on Netflix

In writing my review of Happy Gilmore 2, which will be up tomorrow, I thought I'd mention the approximately decade-long deal Adam Sandler has had with Netflix. And then when I looked it up, I discovered it isn't approximately ten years, it's almost exactly ten years, give or take a couple months. 

The Ridiculous 6 -- which was the first movie in the deal between Netflix and Sandler's production company, Happy Madison -- hit the streamer on December 11, 2015. Since then, many if not most of Sandler's obligations have been Netflix-related, even if he himself hasn't appeared in all the movies. 

Yes he's gotten time out to do things like act for the Safdie brothers in Uncut Gems, and Benny Safdie returns the favor by appearing in HG 2. The Hotel Transylvania movies are also not related. 

For the most part, though, Sandler has been Netflix's bitch for ten years now, being involved in some way, shape or form with 16 movies released by his production company and distributed by Netflix.

Now typically, if I were going to rank a certain type of movie based on some sort of milestone -- I've most often done this with directors, but there have been other ways of lumping like things together -- the following two criteria would usually be met:

1) That I'm a completist on the movies that fit the description of whatever I'm ranking;

2) That the movies I'm ranking are, for the most part, good.

The Happy Madison movies with Netflix do not satisfy either criterion. However, I decided to write this post anyway.

But not before I took Saturday night to see where it all began.

Apparently, I was highly suspicious of these films, as I did not see any of the first five of them. Those are, including release dates:

The Ridiculous 6 - December 11, 2015
The Do-Over - May 27, 2016
Sandy Wexler - April 14, 2017
The Week Of - April 27, 2018
Father of the Year - July 20, 2018

Strangely, after whiffing on these first five, I have then seen every other movie the company has subsequently released to Netflix, 11 in total, up to and including Happy Gilmore 2. 

I figured, might as well make it an even dozen and see just how bad The Ridiculous 6 really is -- the film famously received a 0% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, one of only a few films to do so -- which is what I did on Saturday night, having watched Happy 2 on Friday. 

I won't specifically set aside a section of this post to tell you my thoughts on that movie. Instead, I thought I would just touch on it during its blurb within my rankings, which are below.

I thought of going worst to best, to build toward the big reveal, but you know what? With these movies, which are not widely known for their quality, the thing you're building toward is really the worst one, not the best, am I right? 

So here they are, listed in order from best to 12th best: 

1. You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah (2023, Sammi Cohen) - Nepotism has been a major element of the Happy Madison movie, and usually a limiting part of the Happy Madison movie, ever since Sandler first cast his wife Jackie in The Benchwarmers in 2006, which appears to be her first role after they married in 2003. (The first role where she appeared as Jackie Sandler rather than Jackie Titone). So I was not expecting that a movie where all the major stars were his own family would be the best of these movies. YASNITMBM makes such good use of Sandler's daughter Sunny in the lead role that I was genuinely surprised when her role in Happy Gilmore 2 amounted to almost nothing, while her older sister has the larger role as Happy's AA sponsor. Anyway, Sunny Sandler is great in this smartly observed and executed coming of age story that made my top 30 of 2023, and I hope she'll get another chance to shine in one of the company's upcoming projects -- or even better, someone else's project.

2. Murder Mystery (2019, Kyle Newacheck) - It might have only been being on vacation in Hawaii that made watching this movie so intoxicating for my wife and me, but we were charmed as hell by Sandler and Jennifer Aniston -- and watching it on the lanai in the place were staying in Maui certainly did not hurt. I don't need to try to match the word count from my previous entry on this one. I'll just say that this movie really works for what it's trying to do and is fun and funny. 

3. Happy Gilmore 2 (2025, Kyle Newacheck) - This might be better than the other Kyle Newacheck film I just wrote about, but I'll push back against recency bias and give the nod to Murdery Mystery. In my not-yet-posted review I said that this repeats the shaggy charm of the original, and that's a good place for this movie to be. An old Happy Gilmore beaten down by life works for the ethos of what is now, I suppose, a franchise, and I'd more than welcome a Happy Gilmore 3. The cameos from real golfers are some of the funniest bits, and Scottie Scheffler might have a future in this business if he ever gets tired of being the best golfer in the world. 

4. Hustle (2022, Jeremiah Zagar) - The only Happy Madison film with Netflix (that I've seen anyway) that does not really profile as a comedy. This is a fairly mid sports movie as far as I'm concerned, but it's made well and has good performances, which easily elevates it above most of the rest of the crap I am about to talk about. 

5. The Ridiculous 6 (2015, Frank Coraci) - So if I had been a critic whose work is tabulated on Rotten Tomatoes and I had seen this in 2015, I would have broken its perfectly imperfect 0% score. Or maybe it takes being ten years removed in order to appreciate The Ridiculous 6. This is a very silly move, and that's the point. It's right there in the title. Ridiculous 6 gives me Mel Brooks vibes, and it's way better than the similarly themed A Million Ways to Die in the West. My star rating of three is the lowest you can give a movie and still recommend it, but it makes the cut. I'll be damned if I wasn't grinning through the whole scene where John Turturro as Abner Doubleday is making up the rules of baseball as he plays with our heroes, arbitrarily making choices because they benefit him in the moment, and Vanilla Ice as Mark Twain is oddly inspired. The movie has about two dozen funny people you like, even respectable ones like Will Forte, Steve Zahn and Terry Crews, and I just can't understand why a whole critical community was breathlessly offended by this movie.

6. Leo (2023, Robert Smigel, Robert Marianetti & David Wachtenheim) - Sandler's Hotel Transylvania movies don't have anything to do with Happy Madison, but the company has dabbled in animation, which is this film about a lizard and a turtle (voiced by Sandler and Bill Burr) who are the pets in an elementary school classroom. I had high hopes for this one but it just didn't work for me. It's not bad but it didn't give me all that much. The rest of the movies I'm going to discuss are actually bad. 

I should pause here to acknowledge the huge, huge dropoff in quality between #6 and #7. I pretty much hate the second half of this list.

7. Home Team (2022, Charles & Daniel Kinnane) - When a movie that lets former NFL coach Sean Payton off the hook for his participation in a real-world scheme to injure opposing players, and then even saves room for a tone-deaf cameo from him, is the best of the final six movies we're talking about, you know this is a bad group. There isn't much at all positive I can say about Home Team, only that I gave this movie a 3/10 when I reviewed it, and would not have been that kind to any of the remaining five -- and was not, for those that I actually did review.

8. The Wrong Missy (2022, Tyler Spindel) - What's the next least bad out of this truly rotten bunch? I guess the winner is The Wrong Missy, but that's primarily because I know a few people who like it and whatever brief words of praise they may have given it have rubbed off on me in some infinitesimal way. But I was really put off by both the way this movie makes the ancient David Spade the object of about three different attractive women's interests, and especially put off by the over-the-top performance of Lauren Lapkus. 

9. Kinda Pregnant (2025, Tyler Spindel) - I suppose there's a chance that Kinda Pregnant -- which also features Will Forte -- is better than The Wrong Missy. During the last third of this movie, I started to try to tell myself that it might be okay, or more okay than I was giving it credit for. I tend to give Amy Schumer the benefit of the doubt whenever I can. But when I think about this film now, I think "No, I don't like it." But it is definitely better than the last three I have yet to mention. 

10. Murder Mystery 2 (2023, Jeremy Garelick) - How do I know Murder Mystery 2 is better than the last two of the 12 Happy Madison Netflix movies I've seen? Because it finished only fifth from the bottom in my year-end rankings, while each of the other two finished dead last in their respective years. Since that is not perfectly an apples-to-apples comparison, it did give me pause for a moment. But then I realized that I still like the pairing of Sandler and Aniston enough that it earns the movie a few sympathy points just on that basis. Other than that, absolutely everything good about Murder Mystery gets frittered away here, rather quickly.

11. The Out-Laws (2022, Tyler Spindel). Ugh this movie. Ugh Tyler Spindel, who directed three of the last four movies I've mentioned, and would have been a lot lower in my director rankings in this post if I could have already tallied Kinda Pregnant as part of his total. Ugh also to Adam DeVine, who I adored in Modern Family, and then have pretty much hated ever since because he's been in so many movies like this one. (Dishonorable mentions: Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates and Game Over, Man!, also a last-place finisher back in 2018.) DeVine robs a bank dressed in a Shrek costume in this movie. Need I say more?

12. Hubie Halloween (2020, Steven Brill) - Is Hubie Halloween really as bad as all this? It couldn't possibly be, I tell myself. Like The Ridiculous 6, it boasts a huge ensemble cast of funny people I basically like. But I'm just so dead-set against Sandler playing a simpleton, as he does in another of my least favorite Sandler movies, The Waterboy. Nothing about the conception or execution of this movie works in the slightest, and I felt terrible for all those members of that ensemble cast. A miss is a miss, a turd is a turd, and Hubie Halloween is both. 

So I've spent some time here shitting on some movies that starred Adam Sandler, Rob Schneider and Jackie Sandler. And some others that didn't feature any of them. Some pot shots were definitely taken.

But you know what?

The good news about this is that I have just finished a weekend in which I watched two Happy Madison Netflix movies that I liked. In fact, I liked them enough that I am inspired to catch up with the other four, all from 2016 to 2018, that I haven't seen.

Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, maybe not even in 2025. But when I've just watched the one that, by all statistical measures, should have been the worst, and actually liked it, well then, what right do I have to prejudge The Do-Over, Sandy Wexler, The Week Of or Father of the Year?

After all, completism is completism. And I do likes me some completism. 

I may even come back and tell you what I think once I've watched them.

Reminders of "the COVID movie"

It's only been five-and-a-half years that we've known what the word -- actually acronym -- "COVID" means. And truly, only for five of those years were we actually calling it that, because the original, more generic term "coronavirus" was what most of us used for those first couple months. 

Yet more and more each day, we are wanting to distance ourselves from that time like it never happened, and tend to be vaguely irked by reminders of it -- like it's something we did wrong and are embarrassed to talk about again. 

I'm not telling you anything you don't already know. However, I'm telling you of a new way I was reminded of this last night.

It goes without saying that we don't want to see movies about COVID. As I was flicking through the options for this year's MIFF yesterday -- and I was going to write a post about the dearth of exciting options, until I realized I'd already written essentially the same post this time last year -- I saw one that was about the panic that overtakes the medical staff of a hospital as all their patients get COVID. I clicked away from that movie as quickly as my wrist could manage it. 

But the movie I chose to watch last night, Matt Vesely's 2022 film Monolith, was a different reminder of COVID. It isn't overtly about COVID, though there is a plot point about a disease that is spread by sound. Rather, it's a movie that was made with COVID restrictions in mind, that likely would have been conceived differently if COVID hadn't been a thing.

You know it when you see it, instinctively. The movie has comparatively few actors and locations. In fact, Monolith has one actor and one location. 

It took me about 15 minutes to realize that actress Lily Sullivan was the only actor we had seen on screen, and the rest of the characters were only voices we heard over telephones, their stories recorded for this podcaster who looks into the paranormal. 

Before we get too much further, I should tell you something about this Australian actress.

I have something of a fascination with Lily Sullivan, given that she served as a muse for the street artist Rone in an unforgettable exhibit we saw. Rone's thing is to paint large portraits on the walls of mouldering mansions, among the detritus of an abandoned society life from 100 years in the past, which appears to have been interrupted by some unnamed apocalypse in which all the people vanished. These necessarily temporary exhibits are usually housed in buildings that have been left to decay but are about to be refurbished into something else, though we've also seen an exhibit of Rone's in a proper gallery that was just made up to look like one of these buildings. 

Here are a couple images from the exhibit we saw, Empire, all of which feature Sullivan:

This last we actually bought as a separate piece of art that is now framed and hanging in our house. Yes, that's a library on the back wall that has Sullivan's face painted on the spines of the books, and the room is half submerged in water. Pretty impressive stuff.

This has nothing to do with what I'm talking about today, but I'm including it as a general shout out to the work of Rone, and an acknowledgement of the fact that this work has elevated Sullivan in my mind as having this sort of mythic, preternatural, transcendental beauty. 

Anyway, she's a decent actress too, the type who can could carry a whole movie if need be. (She was in a television remake of Picnic at Hanging Rock that we liked, as well.)

In COVID, Sullivan did need to do this, and it was this movie. 

I might be able to look on the internet to learn whether writer Lucy Campbell always had this sort of script in mind, or wrote it specifically to film during COVID. I'm assuming the latter, but it may not be true. I will say that the director, Matt Vesely, gives everything a highly accomplished sense of style and visual energy, which is probably why it took me so long to glom on to the fact that there was only one actor we were seeing on screen. 

However, once I did, I realized I was having a bit harder time focusing on what the people on the other end of these phone conversations were giving us in terms of the story. There was a lot of rewinding and relistening. They're steadily building up a narrative about these mysterious black bricks that have been given to them over the course of years and maybe even decades, that have a sort of hypnotizing effect over them and may even be alien in nature. That's all I'll say in terms of the story, as Monolith is good enough for me to avoid spoiling it, and for me to marginally recommend that you see it.

The recommendation is only marginal because I ultimately found that I wanted, maybe needed, to see the faces of these people in order for their words to sink in with me more, and for them to have more dimension in my imagination than still photos we see of them. The story is meant to chill us, but I found that outside of a few select moments, it came up to the edge of being chilling but then stopped short. There was too much of a disconnect, a distance.

The kind of disconnect and distance we had in COVID.

In the process, I discovered that not only do I not really want to be reminded of COVID in movies, I don't really want to be reminded of the "COVID movie," i.e. the movie made under COVID restrictions, either. 

Monolith is doing a similar thing to what Andrew Patterson's more successful 2019 film The Vast of Night is doing. Only that movie doesn't operate under the same restrictions, as one of its most memorable moments is this impossible long take that travels through a part of the small town where the movie is set. The sort of shot that just wouldn't have played if you're trying to make a movie where the cast and crew don't catch each other's diseases.

We can't fault Monolith for being made at the time it was made, of course. In fact, just think how bereft we might have felt at that time, if no one had tried to make any cinema during any of the various lockdowns. We needed these movies to sustain us, to remind us that the outside world still existed, that art still existed.

Unfortunately, we don't need them so much anymore, and maybe we won't like them as much as we should for reasons that are not their fault.

Does anyone else dislike Superman just because it sucks?

My flirtation with seeing Superman finally came to fruition on Tuesday night.

I had first considered watching it on the night before I left for America, the night of its release, before thinking better of it. Especially considering that this was my family reunion we were attending, I thought it best not to skip out for three hours (including commute) on the night before we left just so I could try to review it, leaving my wife with all the last-minute packing details and wrangling of the kids' packing. It's one of those things you have to accept passive credit for having done, but I'm sure my wife would appreciate it if she knew I'd thought better of it. Of course, she'll never know.

Then there was an easy opportunity for me to see it one of the nights in Atlanta before we got to the lake, at a theater that was near where we were staying. Smarter heads prevailed for a similar reason, and at that point I dropped the notion of reviewing it. 

Then if it had been raining one of the days at the lake, as we had been told it might, my cousin actually mentioned the idea of seeing it. It only rained for a single hour on two different days, so lake time obviously took priority.

Well, I'm glad I didn't get to see it in time to meet my own standards for how soon we must review it after its release, because I thought it sucked.

This, unfortunately, gives me something in common with MAGA.

We all know MAGA hated this movie sight unseen as soon as director James Gunn described it as an immigrant story. It was going to be the latest in a line of movies they tried to kill, with varying levels of success, because it was "too woke," joining titles like the 2016 Ghostbusters, Captain Marvel and The Little Mermaid. All female-fronted movies, until this one. Go figure.

But I don't dislike Superman because it's "going woke." I think you should know that about me by now.

No, I just dislike it because it sucks.

I thought about launching into an extended rant about all the things in Superman that don't work -- which, if I'm being honest, is almost all the things in Superman. But again to be honest, I'm just too tired after staying up until 1 a.m., and then heading back into the city for work for the second day in a row, only three days after returning from an international trip where I was not even on the ground long enough to fully recover from my jet lag going in the other direction.

So instead, I'm just going to share my back-and-forth with a friend in L.A. -- let's call him "Paul" -- on Facebook Messenger, after getting out of the theater last night.

"Paul" was the first person I heard about who didn't like Superman, when he posted his reaction on Facebook -- and then, subsequently, kind of the only one. I thought "Paul" must be crazy. "Paul" was not crazy. 

Forthwith, excluding all the various heart and laugh emojis that were provided:

Me: Ugh I couldn't agree with you more on Superman.

Paul: Oh thank God!!!!!

Me: It was so unpleasant to watch. All the jokes fell flat. I didn't like any of the performances. Just a total miss.

Paul: 100%. A complete disaster.
I hated the dog.

Me: Me too! 
Nicholas Hoult as Lex Luthor was not fun at all. Gene Hackman is rolling over in his grave. Jeez even Zack Snyder is rolling over in his grave. Which is hard to do when you're still alive.
It's probably not worse than Superman IV.

Paul: Oh ... Supe IV is another level of terrible.

Me: Yeah
I'm also not sold on this Rachel Brosnahan. In another of my worst of the year so far (The Amateur). 

Paul: Hated:
Krypton parents want him to fuck everyone and take over Earth?
Earth parents are dumb country bumpkins?
Too many characters, and superheroes. Just make a Superman movie.
Superman gets his ass kicked the whole time.
It's overstuffed, especially the 3rd act.
Jimmy Olson is hitting Lex's GF on the side, but he doesn't even like her?

Me: Yes his constant ass kicking was terrible. I like Pruitt Taylor Vince and his nastigmas (sp?) but not here. Also the extended argument during the interview? Unbearable!
(Reply to) Jimmy Olson is hitting Lex's GF on the side, but he doesn't even like her? Oh my God, CUT IT.

Paul: Lois flies a space ship cause Mr. Terrific says it's very intuitive??

Me: Also that "engineer" was just a weak sauce T-1000.

Paul: Yes ... that's exactly what I started calling her.

Me: I have to go watch The Suicide Squad a hundred times just to purge this from my memory.

Paul: My biggest issue was that everyone loved it. WHAT??

Me: I know. Except MAGA, who hate it for entirely different reasons. The enemy of my enemy is my friend?

Paul: No ... still my enemy!

Me: No doubt. Okay I'm going to bed, fun ranting with you.

Paul: One last thing. Supergirl is a drunk sorority girl???

Me: No
One more thing: "I just thought she was sending me sexy selfies. I guess I didn't realize that every sexy selfie was taken in front of a map, blueprint or encoded message. Some journalist I am! Good thing Lex didn't notice!"

We resumed a little bit this morning but it tapered off at that point. 

I so wish MAGA could have been wrong about this movie. Instead they are just right for the wrong reasons. 

Rami Malek can't play an average joe

This will be my last post about movies I watched, or that someone else watched, on my recent spate of plane trips, six of them over the course of about eight days. I think it will be the last, anyway. 

Of the 11 movies I watched on those six flights -- including one repeat viewing -- The Amateur was not the worst. That dishonor goes to The Avengers -- not Joss Whedon's 2012 Avengers, mind you, but the 1998 one starring Ralph Fiennes and Uma Thurman, about John Steed and Emma Peel. Yesterday I mentioned that I rarely deviate from a certain philosophy of movie watching on planes ... well, this was one of those rare deviations. I thought "When the hell else am I going to watch this movie?" And to be honest, I was exhausted and did not want to watch another taxing movie, after the last three I watched were all in a foreign language -- or at least required subtitles, since I decided to turn them on for the Australian prison drama Inside, just to make sure I understood everything. 

Where was I? Oh yeah, The Amateur.

It was not the worst of the 11 movies, but it only avoided that outcome by the skin of its teeth. 

Let me count the ways I did not like this movie, before leading up to the subject of this post:

1) It's basically a spy movie, in that it exists in the world of CIA operatives and analysts. I don't like spy movies. 

2) It's also a revenge thriller. There have certainly been plenty of good revenge thrillers, but this became a tired excuse for a movie a long time ago.

3) It's also a revenge thriller where the protagonist's wife, played by Rachel Brosnahan, gets fridged in the first ten minutes of the movie. I thought we didn't do fridging anymore, especially fridged wives or girlfriends. But I checked, and indeed, The Amateur was released in 2025. 

4) It's also a revenge thriller where the protagonist's fridged wife is listed second in the credits, meaning either she's not actually dead, or that she's going to appear in enough gauzy flashbacks, designed purely to sentimentalize their relationship and cement the righteousness of the protagonist's revenge, to warrant that high placement within the credits. Unfortunately, it's the latter.

5) It's also a revenge thriller where the protagonist, played by Rami Malek, is supposed to be a "normal guy" who gets in over his head.

The problem is, Rami Malek cannot play a normal guy. 

There are plenty of roles Rami Malek can play. If you don't recognize that name and are still not clicking in from the poster above, Rami Malek won an Oscar for playing Freddie Mercury. Who was not, you'll remember, a normal guy. He's also been a Bond villain, among other similarly ostentatious roles. 

Normal guy? Rami Malek cannot play that.

It's something about the eyes, I think. I'm not going to say Malek is unattractive, but his eyes have a certain reptilian quality that prevents him from just blending into the crowd of any old person you pass on the street. Malek has a distinctive appearance that is not soon forgotten.

And the idea about most normal guys is that you soon forget them. 

So I guess technically, Malek's Charlie Heller is not purely "normal." He's a bit of a savant in that he's very good at his job as a CIA cryptographer. You wouldn't reserve the word "normal" for a person of his brainpower. 

But the whole idea is that he's not a killer or a traditional vigilante, who has the necessary hand-to-hand combat skills or weapons skills to make an effective hunter of the assailants who killed his wife. The role calls for him to be "normal" in the sense of being physically unimposing and generally unmemorable. 

Really, he's "normal" in the sense that you could see Jimmy Stewart or Cary Grant playing this role if the movie were made 60 years ago. I'm choosing those two names specifically because they have both appeared in films directed by Alfred Hitchcock, who was known for putting "normal" people into situations that they either could not fully comprehend or were not fully prepared to deal with. They were everyman heroes who we cheered because we hoped we'd manage similarly to how they managed, coming up with enough unlikely desperate cleverness or resourcefulness not to die in the situations in which they find themselves. They remind us of us. 

Rami Malek does not remind us of us. 

And you'd think that a good actor, as Malek has proven himself to be, would be able to rise to this challenge. Rather than looking like a chameleon -- I tell you, it's those eyes -- he'd be the chameleon any actor should be, and become this normal person when the role requires it.

But it was funny to see how Malek struggles with the basic and seemingly simple requirements of such a role. His reaction to learning that has wife has died has an odd disconnected quality to it. Malek certainly seems like he wants to play that reaction differently to how we've seen it played most often, but in doing so, he only underscores how little he seems like an everyman, making, at one point, a sort of alien gasp that at best reminds us of an extra terrestrial imitating a human. 

If Malek can only play "weirdos" -- to be reductive in our description of his filmography -- is he even, then, an actor worth watching?

Oh sure. There are plenty of people we want to watch because they are weirdos, and the weirder the better. 

But if you think of some of our more gonzo actors -- Nicolas Cage of course comes to mind, but then I also thought of Gary Oldman -- those actors are distinguished by the fact that they can be normal, when they want to be. For a time, Cage even seemed like he wanted to play the role of traditional dramatic or romantic lead, as he did in such films as The Weather Man or The Family Man. 

Nicolas Cage might be a true chameleon. Rami Malek might only look like one. 

The hidden value of random old movies on international flights

As I've told you previously, I'm a real lookee loo when it comes to what other people are watching on the plane. I make a game of trying to figure out what they're watching as quickly as I can, even if it's not something I've seen before, based on a few cast members or disconnected images from the movie (or TV show, but that's not as fun).

It didn't take me long over the weekend to identify that my neighbor was watching Gladiator, a movie that is now 25 years old.

Because I have a very specific plane agenda from which I only rarely stray -- new releases from the current year, assuming my trip is late enough in the year for those to be available -- I tend to turn my nose up at people who are not doing the same thing. 

Don't worry, I know there's no validity to this reaction, and I try to squash down such snobbery as soon as I notice it. But there's a moment it flares up before I have a chance to do anything about it. And I think "Why the hell is this guy watching Gladiator? Surely he's seen Gladiator before. How very mid of him."

The answer is obvious. Sometimes people just want to watch movies they like when they're trying to pass the time. They don't need to find the latest marginally enjoyable new release, the type that will never appear on the plane again after its three-month window of value to passengers like me. In a way, the fact that I'm watching this far more mid programming, rather than a classic that has been enshrined as such as a result of winning best picture, is very mid of me.

But more than the obvious answer: When you're on a flight of 10+ hours, it might be better to watch something you already know, rather than something you're trying to absorb for the first time.

That way you can fall asleep.

Another issue I've dealt with over the past week, regarding the desire to sleep and the desire to distract yourself with content, is listening to podcasts in order to fall asleep at night. The reason this doesn't always work for me is that I don't actually want to miss the podcast content. So my mind fights to receive it, which it can only do if it is awake and conscious. So even though the actual act of listening to someone talking is the kind of thing that can lull a jet-lagged or sleep-deprived person to sleep, listening to new content you care about undoes most of the value of that.

So perhaps for this guy, Gladiator is a movie he's already seen seven times, and sleeping through it won't be any measurable loss to him. 

You'd think I'd consider a similar thing, considering how many of the movies on this flight I had already seen (possibly as many as 100 of them). But no. I'd rather pause a movie I'm really enjoying -- in this case it was Paddington in Peru -- about 27 times, for two- to three-minute naps. 

Airline announcements as video pop-ups

When flight attendants or the captain interrupt what you're watching to make an announcement, their abuse of their power can verge on the comical.

As I watched a final six movies across three flights, to complement the five I'd watched on my way over to the U.S., I repeatedly got the chance to imagine doing this as some sort of skit on Saturday Night Live.

As you would know if you've ever flown before -- which likely describes everyone reading this -- when a flight attendant or the captain is speaking, your movie freezes and often gets a printed text across the screen that reads something along the lines of "announcement in progress." 

There are two primary ways they can try your patience when they do this:

1) Speak slowly, redundantly or with long pauses, where they refuse to release the intercom during the indulgent and stylized breaks between chunks of their dialogue, meaning you can't get back to what you're watching until they've finally stopped depressing the intercom button;

2) Release the intercom button, but then come back to say something else two to five second later, which means your movie has only a brief chance to resume before being rudely cut off again.

This is where the SNL skit would come in. In this skit, all this behavior would be exaggerated, and our hero would be some annoyed guy just trying to get through the remaining five minutes of his movie before the plane lands. 

Now, I acknowledge that some of the information they're conveying to us can be useful, and we should listen. Collectively as a society of air passengers, we're now to the point where we so routinely ignore the safety instructions, that I think we probably would just run around, shitting ourselves, in the event of an actual water landing.

But sometimes, it's just a variation on that old school relationship between the pilot and the passenger, a remnant of yesteryear, when there really were a significant number of us who cared what major cities we were expected to pass over during the duration of our flight. 

Well, I'm not here just to whinge, I'm here to tell you about what I thought was a really good workaround to some of this, used by Air New Zealand, which we were using for the first time ever to travel to the U.S. (We may have used it ten years ago when we actually went to New Zealand, though I can't remember, and if so, they were not doing the thing I'm about to tell you about at that time.)

Namely, some of these announcements are handled simply by a text that appears at the bottom of your screen as you're watching, a text you can manually dismiss once you've read it -- or even before you've read it, if you're fast enough. 

Mostly this was used supplementally. Like, in their attempt to make interactions with the flight attendants offering meals more efficient, they'll remind us of what the breakfast options are -- remind us, because indeed, they did also tell us through one of these more traditional intercom interruptions. 

But I more appreciated that the technology existed, rather than whether it was fully being used to excise superfluous communications. 

I found I'm a lot more likely to read and absorb the information presented to me in such a pop-up than I am to hear and absorb it when someone is speaking it to me, with the sorts of long, deliberate pauses that only further annoy me as I am trying to watch a key moment of my movie, when I might tune it out from sheer frustration.

A pop-up, as it turns out, is not equally annoying, as it's something you control, and can leave on your screen for as long as it is useful to you, before dismissing it at a moment of your choosing. And it's at the bottom of the screen, so it is not really blocking the action on screen, nor cutting off any dialogue mid-sentence. What's more, it ensures you have a chance to actually take in what is being conveyed. 

And those meal options, by the way? Well, Air New Zealand was also giving us some of the best airline food we've ever had. So we may use them again in the future, even if it involves one additional leg and more travel time overall. 

(The image with this post, you ask? Well, since I decided it didn't really make sense to include the poster for any of the six movies I saw across three flights -- the first of which was actually a domestic flight on Delta -- I'm instead including a still from the current Air New Zealand safety video, which features Kiwi NBA player Steven Adams.)

Into the Cosmo(s)

When I saw Cosmo Jarvis in the first movie of my last two flights on the trip to America -- there was a leg to Auckland, a leg to Los Angeles and a leg to Atlanta, and this was the first one leaving Auckland -- I thought for sure he was a real brain-damaged man being given a chance to act in the Australian prison drama Inside, directed by Charles Williams and starring Guy Pearce.

Little did I know that not only had I already seen him elsewhere, in such places as Lady Macbeth and Persuasion, but I'd see him again on this very succession of flights, bookending my final two of those three legs in the Barry Levinson film The Alto Knights on the trip from Los Angeles to Atlanta.

And, the guy is not even Australian, making him the only one in Inside who isn't. 

I might have just found my newest Vincent D'Onofrio, an honor I bestow to chameleons who can slip into any role.

And it was a good way to spend my time (not quite) in the cosmos, but close enough. 

Chameleon? In both of the movies on these flights, he played criminals, but very different sorts of criminals -- a modern-day man accused of raping and murdering a girl when he was 13, and a would-be assassin who fails in the attempt to shoot one of the two characters played by Robert De Niro in 1950s New York. But in the two movies where I'd seen him previously, he played 19th century men, albeit of very different social classes.

Any time I think a regularly abled actor might actually be brain-damaged, that gives additional layers to his range. 

See, in Inside, Jarvis speaks with a slur, the presumed result of multiple vicious beatings inside prison walls. See, prisoners hate rapists, though I suppose not as much as they hate pedophiles. And though the girl Jarvis' Mark Shepard killed was 13, so was he, at the time. 

The slurring, maybe more of a lisp, is accompanied by the slouching of one side of his face. You can kind of get the idea of how it looks from the poster above, where he's over the left shoulder of the kid who's front and center. You probably would know he's not over the right shoulder, because if you don't recognize Guy Pearce by now, where have you been the last 30 years? But you do probably need to know he's over one of the shoulders and not the kid in the center.

It's a pretty incendiary performance, and the fact that I thought it might have been from a non-professional actor only makes it more so. That may not be clearly the case, because with a non-professional, you excuse the flaws in the craft due to the authenticity they bring. Jarvis' performance does not have those sorts of flaws, but I thought it was a performance that could only be given by a man who had been hit on the head too many times. That's pretty high praise. 

In fact, the actual non-professional, or should I say the one without very much experience -- Vincent Miller, who is in the middle of that poster and has only two credits on IMDB, including this one -- is the one who held Inside back from being better than the 3.5 stars I gave it. Both Jarvis and Pearce are great, but Williams maybe could have looked a little longer for his lead actor, who is pretty blank. 

Jarvis does not have nearly as significant a role in The Alto Knights. He's one of the first actors we see, as he tries to shoot one of De Niro's two characters in the movie's cold open -- does shoot him, but the bullet curves around the head and exits the other side without doing anything more than superficial damage, a thing I always heard about when I was younger but which never seemed like a real thing. Then we see him berated by the other De Niro, who put a hit on this De Niro, for not going in for a couple more shots to make sure the job was done.

Because the actor only pops up a few more times and it's only in the lighter context of him being a semi-competent henchmen, I can't say that I reserve the same high praise for this role, but only because there's so little exposure to it. However, it does round out my idea of what this actor is capable of.

The thing that deserves higher praise than I expected to give it is the movie itself. I must admit I watched The Alto Knights because I thought it was supposed to be one of those trainwrecks we had to see to believe. Having watched it, I now think the reason The Alto Knights had a bit of a moment in the zeitgeist was because it was incredibly expensive and is oddly out of sync with today's cinematic environment, where we just aren't looking for the next Goodfellas anymore. The performance De Niro gives here is -- or should I say, performances are -- very much in the manner of Goodfellas, though probably more if he were playing Joe Pesci's shorter tempered character in the more sinister of these two roles. Anyway, I'm not sure if I thought I'd see De Niro working in this register again, and Levinson has mounted a very credible version of one of these movies that had their heyday 30 years ago, though is ultimately hampered by feeling anachronistic.

Maybe the highest praise I can give The Alto Knights is that I was very entertained by it, never bored, which was crucial for the last stretch of a crushing three-leg journey that took effectively 24 hours, at which point I should have been ready to gouge my eyes out. Because of The Alto Knights, I wasn't. 

We're not actually done with Jarvis in 2025, either. Some people would have already seen him in three movies this year, as the Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza co-scripted and co-directed film Warfare counts Jarvis among its soldiers. 

I'll be watching that one when I'm on terra firma, as it's now streaming on Amazon. 

Audient Bridesmaids: I'm Still Here

This is the latest in a periodic series in which I watch best picture nominees I haven't seen, working backwards from the newest to the oldest.

Yes this is the latest in a series getting its first new entry since I watched My Left Foot in late February, meaning this is an unusually short amount of time between entries in Audient Bridesmaids.

But the real headline here is that this is the first blog post I have ever written, and will likely also publish, while on a plane.

I'm currently en route from Auckland to Los Angeles, where I'll spend about four hours before flying to Atlanta, where I'll spend about two days before meeting relatives for a reunion at a lake house that's about a three-hour drive from there.

It was while I was en route from Melbourne to Auckland that I watched I'm Still Here, the only 2024 best picture nominee I had yet to see, which usurped the spot of John Boorman's Hope and Glory (1987) as next up in this series by failing to beat Anora for 2024 honors. It was a good reminder that I need to pick up the pace a bit here, unless I want every movie I watch in this series to be a usurper.

But what a good usurper it was.

Before we get to the film proper, let me tie off this "blogging on a plane" topic.

This isn't the first flight I've ever had that had WiFi open to the internet at large -- you may recall how I enjoyed watching baseball on a plane in this post -- but it's definitely the first time I've blogged on a plane. This flight is 11+ hours and that one was only 5+, so you can appreciate that I'm craving the variety, even though I'm less than half the way in and have only watched one movie so far. So here I am. Because I'm typing with just one thumb on my phone, I might keep it short.

I'm Still Here, the Walter Salles film not the Casey Affleck film, immediately inserted itself right into the mix in a year where I had six best picture nominees in my top ten. It might have only been seventh, but then again Conclave, which my wife watched and loved while I was watching this, might have beaten it as well. Anyway it would have definitely beaten Anora and A Complete Unknown, likely top 15 material and definitely top 20.

Because it's a recent film and is only just coming off the period where it was being widely feted, I won't subject you or my thumbs to a plot synopsis or a full analysis of its merits.

I will say that the first half of this film absolutely floored me, from setting the mood of the joy this family was experiencing in their lives of 1970 Rio, without overplaying that, to overturning it with both parents spending time as disappeared, temporarily or otherwise, while being questioned, imprisoned and tortured. You can describe the performance of an actor, in this case Fernanda Torres, as strong in all her scenes, but I think the good acting you remember is in little moments. The one I noted most with Torres was something she's doing with her mouth when she's s being questioned, a kind of tremor, which marks the moment she goes from being perturbed and unnerved to truly frightened. Maybe you saw that moment too.

I think it was the movie's two time jumps in its final 30 minutes that prevented it from truly sticking the landing and being able to bypass some of those higher ranked nominees on my list. (On this flight, my wife continued running through the nominees with Emilia Perez, my #4 of last year. I lost track of how far into it she was and thought she'd had to quit it early, but to my relief she watched the whole thing and liked it.) 

Sorry for the tangent. Although I appreciated seeing what became of the family in the long run -- and seeing the elderly Eunice Paiva played by Torres' mother, Fernanda Montenegro, herself an Oscar nominee -- I found myself taken out of the intensity of the story and those characters at that age, just a bit.

Okay, rest time for my thumb. I hope to get to Hope and Glory before next Oscars.

Note: I didn't actually end up being able to post in flight. Although the WiFi allowed me to download the I'm Still Here poster, Blogger wouldn't let me upload it to the post. *shrug*

Orlando Bloom's still working, just not in Jurassic World

When I saw the character Martin Krebs appear on screen in Jurassic World: Rebirth (review here), I thought "Boy is it nice to see Orlando Bloom on screen again!"

I was never a huge Bloom fan, but I always thought it was strange, and a little unwarranted, that he was unceremoniously ushered out of the spotlight during what should have been the prime of his career. I don't even remember the reason for it. Was he cancelled? Not that I recall. Did he stop being good? Not that I recall there either. 

The guy is only just now 48 years old. It's not like he hasn't been working, it's just that the projects have been almost exclusively what we would have once called "straight to video."

I mean, this was a guy who appeared in two of the iconic trilogies of the early 21st century, those being Lord of the Rings and Pirates of the Caribbean. At one point, he was among the highest grossing actors of all time in terms of the money made by his movies. Both of those trilogies had other future installments, and Bloom appeared in some of those too.

Then sometime around the end of the Hobbit trilogy, which is now 11 years ago, he just stopped appearing in high-profile movies, with only his appearance in 2017's Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales as a reprieve from that. But I don't even think that was a lead role, if memory serves. I believe it was a cameo.

The only problem with all these fond recollections of Orlando Bloom's career is that Jurassic World's Martin Krebs is not actually played by Orlando Bloom. He's played by Rupert Friend, which I didn't realize until the closing credits of Jurassic World: Rebirth. 

Easy mistake to make. I knew the internet would have a good picture of them side by side, so here it is:

Imagine my surprise, then, when the very next movie I would watch would actually feature Orlando Bloom.

That's Deep Cover, a new Amazon Prime movie I first clocked a few weeks back when it was being advertised as coming soon. I noticed Bryce Dallas Howard in it (more on her in a moment) but I didn't pay enough attention to identify her co-stars at the time.

But when Wednesday night rolled around, after I'd seen Jurassic World on Tuesday, that was the logical next movie up for me, and there was Orlando Bloom in the flesh. 

And killing it, to be honest, making me wonder again where he's been all our lives.

The movie has a pretty delightful premise, even if that premise comes to strain credibility a bit. What is the biggest problem faced by undercover cops who are trying to infiltrate a criminal organization? It's being able to stay in character the whole time, adapt to any changes, and supply credible information about their character at a moment's notice, in the highest stakes situations where a misstep could get them killed. There was a whole speech about it in Reservoir Dogs. 

Who best to do this sort of thing, then? How about improv comedians?

Bloom's character is actually coming in to improv as a desperate attempt to keep his career afloat. He envisions himself more as a serious actor, just a serious actor who has been failing to get any work outside of commercials. This leads to much hilarity, especially the way Bloom plays him: deep into the method and forever blind to his own practical limitations as a person who is not actually a gangster.

The whole movie works well overall, with an enjoyable third lead performance by Nick Mohammed of Ted Lasso fame, as the unconfident, stammering member of the trio most likely to lose face and get them killed. 

But let's get to that second lead: Bryce Dallas Howard. Who has also been on my mind this past week.

You may recall that I mentioned Howard also in connection with Jurassic World: Rebirth, when I was contrasting her with Scarlett Johansson in this post, since Johansson was effectively inheriting the lead female role from Howard in the Jurassic movies. I said I liked both actresses but that I respected Johansson while I did not particularly respect Howard. 

Well, lo and behold, Howard reminded me in Deep Cover that I respect her pretty well, too, and she's a lot more than just Ron's daughter. Perhaps I always knew that, but my goal in that post was to boost Johansson, so I had to have a straw man against whom to compare her. 

It's funny that Johansson and Friend would have scenes of pairing up with each other in Jurassic World and Howard and Bloom would have scenes of pairing up with each other in Deep Cover, kind of like alternate universe doppelgangers. 

Oh but we're not done with the actors in Deep Cover in terms of funny proximal viewings.

Two movies before I saw Deep Cover, I saw Heads of State. These are both genre movies, effectively both action comedies, released on Amazon Prime, and they both feature Paddy Considine in a villainous role. That may be the actor's specialty these days, but two in the same week underscored just how much that's the case. 

But wait there's one more, and this is entirely within Deep Cover, and it was surely intentional by the filmmakers. 

I mentioned Bloom's history in the Lord of the Rings movies. You know who else was also in those movies, at least the first one?

Sean Bean, who appears in Deep Cover as their liaison within the police force. 

If I don't use the word "coincidences," does this still count as another post about coincidences? (Oops, I just did.) 

Understanding Editing: How the West Was Won

This is the seventh in my 2025 monthly viewing series Understanding Editing, in which I alternate between best editing Oscar winners that I've seen and that I haven't seen, going forward chronologically, to get a better sense of what other editors think is a superlative version of the craft.

If I had seen this poster prior to watching the opening credits of How the West Was Won, my jaw might not have dropped so much in seeing the names listed.

Now, I'm not as versed in classic cinema as I wish I was -- more than the average person, less than the average cinephile -- but even I knew almost every name in these opening credits, for a movie released 63 years ago. And with each new name, my anticipation for what lay ahead increased. 

(Incidentally, they don't make movies like this anymore, where the very studding of the stars is kind of the point. I'm thinking of something like It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, which came out one year later in 1963.)

In fact, so studded is it with stars that the movie needed three directors: John Ford, Henry Hathaway and George Marshall, though I must admit I was not previously familiar with the last two. (I see Hathaway directed the original True Grit, which I haven't seen.) 

And I can't help wondering if part of the reason Harold F. Kress won the Oscar for How the West Was Won was because he was working with the material of three different directors who each directed multiple individual sequences, and yet he wove it all together to feel like a cohesive whole. While we're on the topic of Kress, let's get his bonafides out of the way now: He also won the best editing Oscar 12 years later for The Towering Inferno -- another movie studded with stars -- and received four other nominations. 

To be sure, there are sequences in How the West Was Won that required top-notch editing skills, similar to the ones I've been pointing out in the first six months of this series, involving fast-paced action and the threading together of multiple camera angles on that action to great a fluid sense of momentum. These include a big fight scene at a trading post, a harrowing sequence on white water rapids, a horse chase right out of something like Stagecoach, a cattle stampede, and a train robbery sequence, where the uncoupling of trains is captured with high intensity.

But I'm rattling those off in one paragraph, rather than devoting special time to each, because I'm not sure if any of them rises to an inarguable level of impressiveness, and I also think there is something more insiderish going on in the awarding of this award. 

I don't mean that in a bad way, but I do expect that there was a lot of respect accorded Kress for his work with the multiple directors. You might expect each director to have his own editor, someone he was comfortable working with over the years. And in many films where multiple directors contributed, each director would submit his (or her) own work as a completed unit with its own complete production team, whereas Kress was taking submitted footage and finding a way of making it all work as one.

What's more, Kress had only worked with one of these directors, and only once before, if the handy dandy listing of his filmography, with directors listed next to each, on Wikipedia is to be believed. He editing Marshall's Imitation General four years earlier, but had never worked with either Ford or Hathaway. (Interestingly, though, he does not appear to have worked with any of them again afterward, so maybe it wasn't a perfect experience for everyone, despite the accolades.)

When I set out to do this series, I expected to be learning only about the craft as it appears in the final product, which seems rather obvious. But How the West Was Won reveals something a bit more ineffable about the craft of editing, an ability to take disparate material and present it as a grand unifying whole, in ways you can't necessarily point to or pick out. 

If the cinematographer had been doing the same thing, that might be even more impressive -- but there are four credited cinematographers on this movie, such that I suppose you couldn't refer to any of them as a "director of photography." Each director had his own DP, it seems, or in some cases, even more than one. But one guy did all the editing, and he surely helped make this movie proceed forward as briskly as it does, making the 2.5 hour running time pass quickly.

I haven't said much about the story, but indeed it is a decades-spanning epic, in which several generations of one family do play a central role, appearing in a succession of approximately 35-minute sequences exemplifying various old west paradigms. The parts of this film, though never listed on screen, are described in the credits with such titles as "the rivers," "the plains," "the Civil War" and "the outlaws." It's like a taste of everything you could want in a movie about American expansion westward, replete with the biggest stars of the day. And all narrated by Spencer Tracy, a final unifying detail that brings it all together. 

One last comment about the film has to do with its look. This was shot in a widescreen format called Cinerama, and it's still astonishing to look at, even on the small screen. At the time it was first screened, it played on screens so wide that they curved at the edges, and you can sometimes see this curvature in the shots. Kind of reminded me of watching some of the first IMAX films in the giant Omnimax Theater at the Boston Museum of Science, way back in the day.

And you wonder why this got craft-related awards? (It also won for its sound, and was nominated in all the other major technical categories.)

Time for my next rewatch of a previously seen movie in August, and that will be William Friedkin's 1971 film The French Connection. 

I think it's fair to say Mikey Madison's Oscar was unexpected

I had been considering an invite to review an upcoming VOD release called All Souls, from a publicist who usually sends me emails about similarly low-profile movies, all of which I think I may have ignored. Undaunted, he still has us on his mailing list. 

Why this one? 

Well, it stars recently minted Oscar winner Mikey Madison, so it's got to be at least half decent, right?

Reading the synopsis, I'm not so sure. 

"Young single mother River (Mikey Madison) is coerced against her will to become an informant for the police against Silas (G-Eazy), an infamous drug lord and father of her child.  After an undercover operation goes wrong, River soon finds herself fighting for her life and on the run to protect her daughter."

I mean, it could be good, but probably not.

But this synopsis gets at the larger issue with this movie, the one the other half of the above banner reveals:

Look, I'm not into judging books by their covers, but there's a reason this exists as an aphorism. We all do it, and when the cover shows me "Gerald 'G-Eazy' Gillum" as a co-star, I go straight into judging mode.

This is not a universal indictment of rappers as actors, either. Some rappers are great actors, have even become beloved icons specifically for their acting. But, not "Gerald 'G-Eazy' Gillum."

The thing I really want to tell you about was how buried this movie was until Madison won her Oscar.

Checking it out on IMDB, I noticed it's not even a 2024 release -- it's a 2023 release. That's right, it hit the internet in Canada and the U.S. on December 8, 2023. At which point it earned a 4.9 from the collective raters on IMDB, who often tend to be generous with their ratings unless they are ganging up to troll a movie whose subject matter they find too progressive. (A rant for another time.)

The movie trickled out with a theatrical release in the United Arab Emirates (!) on March 27, 2024, and a random Swedish internet release date of April 28th of this year. (It's possible there were other releases along the way, though IMDB did not capture them.)

Now finally it's seeing the light of day in August in the Australia/New Zealand market.

And I will not, in fact, be reviewing it.

It isn't a bad idea to try to capitalize on Madison's sudden marketability. I mean, my own curiosity was piqued, almost to the point of emailing the guy that I would do it, before cooler heads prevailed. 

But it does indicate to us how recently Madison was making movies like All Souls, and how, if not for Anora, she might have been back to that sort of movie again right away.

Speaking of judging, though, I should say that everyone has to start out somewhere. It's the very rare case of an actor who starts appearing in prestige projects right from the beginning. If your first role is as an adult, it's pretty unlikely, as only child actors graduate to prestige movies when they come of age, and only if they were successful child actors. At which point they are known names anyway, and part of the film's marketing campaign.

Actually, this does describe Madison to some degree. Her first credit was in 2013, when she was only 14. She appeared in a couple shorts, then a couple features, then a TV show, and then a Quentin Tarantino movie (Once Upon a Time in Hollywood) and a horror reboot (Scream). So she was already on her way, but she still hadn't broken out, so she thought All Souls seemed like a good idea. (Maybe it was. I haven't seen it.)

However, I also have to wonder if the marketing of the movie has been shifted to make it seem more about her than it really is. The only real evidence I have of this is that in the cast listing on IMDB, Madison's is the 11th listed name. That could be random -- I've seen situations where the well-known star of a movie has their name buried in the IMDB credit, which I know are sometimes entered as they appear in the movie, which could be in order of their appearance on screen. G-Eazy is only fifth listed, so maybe it isn't actually that much about him either. But it could also be a total bait and switch, where Madison isn't really in the movie that much but her name value now gives the movie a second life it never expected to have.

I'm almost curious enough to see it.

But, nah. 

The spiders will never again be real

On Saturday night, in the second installment of our unofficial "spider movie series" -- the first of which I mentioned in Friday's post -- my wife and I watched a 1990s favorite of mine that I hadn't seen since the 1990s, Frank Marshall's Arachnophobia.

As a side note before we get to the crux of this post, my friends and I used to joke that Arachnophobia was a good "action movie." This is because I first saw it with two of them on a triple date, where I ended up making out with my date there in the theater, and then my second viewing was with a different girl I was dating, and we also paused the viewing (which was at her house) to pash a bit. So in both cases I "got action," to use parlance we would have been more likely to use back at that time. 

I can't remember if there was a third viewing at any point, or if Saturday night's viewing was the third, but suffice it to say that after 17 years of marriage, stopping a movie to kiss is not something my wife and I do much anymore. 

I did have some qualms about how well this movie related to the script she's actually writing, which involves giant spiders. (That's why we're watching spider movies right now.) The arachnids in Arachnophobia get their creepy qualities from their quantity, not their unusual size. 

Which is most assuredly a good thing, as we will discuss.

I decided Arachnophobia would be a good movie to watch because it was a good movie. If it also got her "spider juices flowing" -- yes that was a phrase she objected to -- then all the better. 

But I realized there was a more fundamental way than size of the spiders that Arachnophobia differs from the spider movies made today, and from the movie that will get made from the script she's writing:

The spiders in Arachnophobia were real.

Or if not real, they were practical animatronic spiders that looked good enough to be real. 

This is something we will never see again.

I don't constantly write to you on this blog about how digital effects have ruined the movies. The truth of the matter is, digital effects done well, or done for the first time, have given me some incredibly memorable viewing experiences, responsible for movies I cherish. I don't know how they would have tried to do Starship Troopers without digital arachnids, for example. (It isn't really a giant spider movie as such, but it sort of is, especially since they do call them arachnids.)

Even if I don't write about the diminishing returns of digital effects a lot, I do think about them a lot. (Especially when I watch a movie like Snow White, which I watched the night before Arachnophobia.) If I don't say it more, that's probably because saying that digital effects have ruined the magic of movies feels like a boring take, as well as a little bit old man-ish. They have their time and their place, but those places are getting fewer and those times are getting farther between.

And Arachnophobia is not so squirmingly delightful if it uses digital creepy crawlies. It only works as well as it does because some dedicated and skilled professional spider wrangler got together a bunch of spiders and created the necessary conditions for them to crawl out all over the walls and ceilings, on queue, while the camera was rolling. If the camera didn't get it, they'd have to wrangle all those spiders and get them back on their marks to do it all over again.

We will never see this again, and in fact, "spider wrangler" may no longer exist as a job.

Even if wrangling spiders is not expensive, though I have to imagine there's a considerable cost to it, it's expensive in terms of logistics and time taken on set. I don't know how many shots it took to get some of what they had here, but if even one of them had be reshot, I wouldn't be surprised if it required a full hour to be ready to yell "Action!" again. Not worth it when you can just make a fully compliant spider, which always hits its mark, on the computer, right?

In horror films, which Arachnophobia nominally is (it's really more akin to something like Gremlins), there's been a movement to return to practical horror effects, at least as an element that distinguishes you from the other horror movies around you. We get a couple each year, and fans of the horror of yesteryear will flock to them. 

You don't see the same hearkening back to the bug wrangling of yesteryear. If a bunch of spiders needed to come out of a sink drain in a movie made today, as they do in Arachnophobia, I guarantee you those spiders are just a bunch of ones and zeroes.

But it's not just that today's version of Arachnophobia is digital. It's that today's version of Arachnophobia is non-existent.

When was the last time you saw a movie in which escaping small, deadly creatures was even supportable as the primary threat of the movie?

That's why all spiders at the movies are now big spiders, and all big spiders have to be digital. 

Because if using real spiders is too quaint and too expensive by half for today's movies, just imagine how quaint it would be to try to used forced perspective to make a small spider look big. 

I think what makes our skin crawl when watching Arachnophobia is knowing that the spiders are real. That even if the actors were in no danger because the spiders were harmless, the actors were indeed in that space with those spiders. Their reactions to the spiders are, in some ways, real, which makes their reactions contagious to us in the audience.

With digital spiders, all you get is a contagious case of ennui. 

Ten mid movies I've somehow seen twice

As you likely know, I recently passed the milestone of 7,000 movies seen in my life -- that's 7,000 different movies, mind you, and doesn't count rewatches. If you add rewatches into my total viewings, I'm well over 8,000, maybe closer to 9,000. 

But there's a milestone related to that as well on the horizon: 1,000 different movies that I've seen more than once.

Well, it's not that close on the horizon.

Kiah Roache-Turner's movie Sting on Saturday was my 921st movie I've seen more than once. This list doesn't concern itself with the number of times that I've seen each of these movies, it's just a flat list of movies I've seen at least twice.

At the rate I'm going, I probably won't get to 1,000 for at least a few more years. I tend to rewatch let's say an average of 50 movies a year -- some years more, some years less, that's the exact definition of "average" -- and of those, at least half are movies that are already on my list because I'd already seen them at least twice. So it could take more three years even if you're saying that I add 25 titles to this list every year, which may be aggressive.

Really, this is just an intro to a different thing I want to talk about today, the proximity to 1,000 just being my excuse, with Sting serving as my news peg, to use the newspaper term.

Sting is not ordinarily the type of movie I would rewatch, and I don't mean I don't rewatch horror movies or I don't rewatch movies about giant spiders. I mean that I don't generally rewatch movies that I found mid the first time -- forgettable, without any prospect of really gleaning anything further from them on a second viewing. 

Why did I rewatch Sting, you ask, especially when I only just watched and ranked it last year? (In fact, and here is a coincidence about which I would have written an entire post if I weren't already writing this one: I watched it for the first time on June 28, 2024, and I happened to rewatch it exactly a year later on June 28, 2025.)

My wife is writing a script about a giant spider, and I suggested we watch some of the available giant spider movies to get the juices flowing, or more practically, to acquaint her with things that have already been done in movies about giant spiders, so she's at least aware of those things if she's going to be writing similar things in her script. Sting was one of the movies I suggested, and it's especially important she be familiar with this one, given that it was made by an Australian director, as will her film be.

Anyway, it got me thinking about the films we rewatch and why we rewatch them. Generally speaking, I was able to break down the films that any person would rewatch into five broad categories:

1) Films that are personal favorites, which might be movies from your childhood or more recent eccentric choices that you happen to love more than most people do.

2) Films that are considered all-time classics. 

3) Films that have a certain cultural prominence or significance.

4) Films you didn't like so much, but other people liked, so you think you must have missed something. (Series on this blog where I revisit movies where I felt like I was out of sync with the general consensus, and there have been several such series, are covered here.)

5) Films that were so bad that you have to watch them again just to experience the shock and disbelief all over again.

When cable television was more of a thing, you might have had a sixth category:

6) Films that are on cable all the time so you watch them passively in the background. 

And for parents:

7) Films your kids demand you watch with them multiple times. 

Sting does not fall into any of those categories. It does some things pretty well, and I think I might have liked it better on the second viewing than the first, just a little bit. Generally speaking, though, it is a mid film that I never imagined I would really think about again, let alone see again.

So, because you know my mind wanders toward projects, I thought today I would go through the 921 titles I've rewatched and give you ten that are like Sting, that stand out on this list for the fact that I would never have imagined watching them a second time. I'll also give you a bit of the context for the second viewing.

So you'll note this does not include movies I ended up finding mediocre on a revisit, but was originally rewatching for one of those five core reasons. These have to be movies like Sting, which were rewatched for none of those reasons. 

I guess I could just get nine more because I've already given you Sting, but I'll get ten more. So it will be 11 total.

I should also tell you that I will exclude any films watched purely for my Random Rewatch series on The Audient, a periodic series I do with sometimes large gaps of several years between entries, where I use a random number generator to watch films that land in the corresponding spot on my Flickchart. These have included Who Killed the Electric Car? (serviceable documentary), High Heels and Low Lifes (which I liked but not enough to rewatch), Hollywoodland (which was mediocre to bad) and Sucker Punch (about the same as Hollywoodland). The series has been on pause for a while since I can't bring myself to program the deficient children's movie Doogal. 

Anyway, instead of ranking them I will just go alphabetically. 

The Big Red One (1980, Samuel Fuller) - This fairly unremarkable war movie had a special edition come out in 2005 called The Big Red One: The Reconstruction. I was assigned to review it for AllMovie, but I thought I couldn't properly comment on the edition with the different footage if I didn't have the original as a point of reference. So I watched both of them within a space of a couple weeks, knowing from the first viewing that I did not specifically desire a second. Mark Hamill is in it. I don't remember a lot of the other bits, just that there was a lot of stuff that seemed like a B+ version of things I'd seen in better war movies.

Dopamine (2003, Mark Decena) - When I watched Dopamine on October 9, 2004, it was during a brief period of about two years when I wasn't working as a critic, after AllMovie temporarily eliminated the use of freelancers. When the regime changed in 2005, they gave me a whole bunch of new, and by that I mean old, titles to work on. The ones I'd seen, I didn't rewatch any of them before writing my review, except one: Dopamine. Why Dopamine, a sort of sci-fi indie love story, and not the others? No idea. By the way, it's not bad. 

Event Horizon (1997, Paul W.S. Anderson) - I hesitated to include this mediocre science fiction horror in this ten, because there was something definitive that prompted my rewatch. Namely, it was that something "really scary" happened in this movie, and not just the scare quotes in this sentence. I don't remember what I thought I'd heard was so scary, but I thought when I rewatched the movie, my mind might be blown at that point and I would just know. Well, I never noticed when that thing I thought was supposed to be so scary happened, and the things that did happen weren't all that scary. I think I needed to do more research. 

The Final Girls (2015, Todd Strauss-Schulson) - For some who rewatch, there'd be a bonus entry on the types of movies they rewatched: "films you forgot you watched the first time." I suppose that also works for Alzheimer's patients. (I'm not making light. With my family history, I expect to be such a patient one day.) My destiny may contain a faulty memory, but today, I never forget watching a movie -- except The Final Girls. Although there were less than four years between my October 12, 2018 first viewing and my May 28, 2022 second viewing, I genuinely did not realize I'd watched the movie before. And it took me until like an hour in to be sure. If you can't remember that you even saw a movie until an hour in, that's a great definition of "mid." (Of course, I then finished the viewing. Naturally.)

Housesitter (1992, Frank Oz) - I said Dopamine was the only movie I was assigned to review for AllMovie that I felt the need to watch again before reviewing ... well, maybe there was one other. I can't remember for sure, but I can think of no other reason I would have rewatched one of Steve Martin's more forgettable star vehicles from this period, which is not significantly improved even by the presence of comic genius Goldie Hawn. I know I did review it so this must have been the reason. However, I think this might have been in my first go-around of reviewing movies for AllMovie, which started in 2000, because Housesitter is not among the list of movies I've rewatched since 2006, when I started keeping track of my rewatches. Then again, it could have snuck in between 2005, when I restarted with AllMovie, and my 2006 start date for recording rewatches. 

National Lampoon's Loaded Weapon 1 (1993, Gene Quintano) - And this makes three? A rewatch to review this is the only explanation for why I would have put Loaded Weapon 1 in front of my eyes a second time. I wouldn't say it's terrible, but it is by no means among the most memorable of the bounty of spoof movies from this period ... though it also might be terrible. Likely the presence of Samuel L. Jackson and the underrated comedic abilities of Emilio Estevez gave this movie some funny moments ... but you can bet I am not going to watch it a third time in order to find out. 

Pootie Tang (2001, Louis C.K.) - There was a clear reasoning behind my second viewing of Pootie Tang, but that doesn't change the fact that I knew it was mid and I knew it would be mid on the second viewing. When I saw this movie the first time, in 2004, I didn't really know who Louis C.K. was. The second viewing, in February of 2013, was conducted specifically to see if I would see some of the Louis C.K.-ness of it on the second viewing, now that I had seen and loved two different Louis C.K. shows. I did not see the Louis C.K.-ness. And now we're in a third Louis C.K. era, one where he's been rightly cancelled and has come back with a right-wing bent to his comedy -- and would surely not make a movie like Pootie Tang. As mediocre of a miss as it is, it's still better than anything he's got going on right now. 

Presence (2025, Steven Soderbergh) - Just this year. You may recall the circumstances because I wrote a special post about them. I watched this movie on a screener, even though it was another of my ReelGood writers who was actually writing the review. Then my wife bemoaned that there was nothing for us to see with my older son while my younger son was away at school camp, so I agreed to see it again. I don't dislike Presence to be sure -- in fact, it's in the upper half of my rankings this year -- but I don't think it ultimately works the way Soderbergh hopes that it works, there are some loose plot threads that never get revisited (so I don't know why they were included at all), and I certainly didn't need to see it twice inside two weeks. 

Trainwreck (2015, Judd Apatow) - This is probably the only film on this list where I have no idea why I watched it again. It wasn't to review it, because my then-editor at ReelGood reviewed it. It wasn't to discuss it on the ReelGood Podcast, which we also did, but did at the time of its release when my viewing was still fresh. No, this was watched about 14 months after I first saw it -- after I first saw it and found it among Apatow's poorer efforts, I should add. It could have been because my wife wanted to see it, but that doesn't sound right. Speaking of Alzheimer's, I guess it's fine that I don't remember the reason behind all my rewatches. Human beings are not perfect recall machines, and I'm probably closer to perfect than most people. I guess maybe I thought it was Apatow so I had to give it another chance, liking most of his other films? But I've never given Funny People another chance. 

Word Wars (2004, Eric Chaikin & Julian Petrillo) - Okay make that two movies. You can take your pick among the multiple reasons listed here about why I might have watched Word Wars again. I might have been reviewing it five years after my first viewing, having seen it in 2005 the first time and feeling like I needed to freshen up on it in 2010. But by 2010 I was mostly reviewing only movies I had just seen, having worked through the backlog a long time before that. I might have watched it again because I thought it would be better. (It's not bad but it's pretty forgettable.) But maybe I just watched it again because Scrabble is my favorite board game, and any movie about Scrabble might be worth watching twice. 

When I originally went through my list, I came up with a shortlist of 19. However, those extra nine were easily shaved off as they had other, legitimate explanations, like they were watched for a film festival and then also on opening night of the festival, or that they were too good to be really called mid, even if the decision to rewatch them was sort of random.

With the limited amount of time I have on earth, it's nice to know that I'm mostly rewatching movies for the right reasons.