The single point of genesis of my two favorite Star Trek movies

And the word "genesis" is chosen intentionally, as you will see.

But first some background on why I just read a book about one of the most beloved epsiodes of television of all time, why there's an incredible controversy about it, and why it fits appropriately as a post in my movie blog.

You may recall I told you last year that I wanted to read more about films. Sure, reading is a time I cherish for specifically not doing movie-related things. But reading about films is also part of deepening your love for/knowledge of the movies. So last year I vowed, at least in the short run, to read a book about movies or filmmaking as every second book I read, starting with Quentin Tarantino's Cinema Speculation, which I read in November and December and wrote about several times on the blog.

So after reading Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles in January, I turned my attentions in February to a project I'd been putting off.

Last year, an old friend sent me the book you see above, as well as a graphic novel depiction of the same controversial Harlan Ellison episode of the original Star Trek series, "The City on the Edge of Forever." He also sent me a Red Sox t-shirt that is in my regular rotation, since he's a lot more Star Trek than Red Sox. 

All three items were appreciated, but the two Star Trek ones seemed like they could cause me a headache. 

See, a few months ago I started to read the book you see above, and it starts with Ellison basically in the middle of a diatribe whose beginning I had not heard. Ellison, you see, was not only a legendary science fiction writer, but he was also legendary for his belligerance and argumentatitve nature. This did not just make him a boor; it appears that his friends cherished him, and he had many professional relationships that were cordial. But he didn't suffer fools and he rarely kept quiet about something that bothered him, or at least, not "forever." (He was sitting on his "City on the Edge of Forever" gripes for something like 30 years before spewing them all here.) Anyway, the tone of the rage-filled rant, which eviscerates people like Gene Roddenberry and which had not (initially) provided me the sort of background context I'm trying to provide you here, caused me to set down the book and save it for another day. 

The basic background here is that Ellison submitted a script for the 28th episode of the first season of Star Trek that, according to Gene Roddenberry, could not be filmed. Having read the teleplay, I'm inclined to agree. There's so much plot in this one episode that it was better suited to being a feature film, not a single 48-minute episode of television. 

Did Roddenberry et al make gutless decisions in rewriting the teleplay so it would fit into their standard allotment of screen minutes and their standard budget? I'm sure they did. And I'm sure everyone who took a pass at the script -- which seems to have been about 13 people -- was a less talented writer than Ellison. But then they took more credit for it than Ellison thought they should, especially as they sprinkled their discourse about it with disparaging comments about him. 

Well, the episode was a success in two very specific ways, or three, if you consider its legacy. In the moment, the episode won an award both for the televised version, and the teleplay that Ellison submitted for consideration -- even though those two things were quite different. Its legacy? "The City on the Edge of Forever" edges out "The Trouble with Tribbles" to be considered the favorite episode of the original series, any time a vote is taken about this sort of thing.

The plot? I'll give you that as well. Kirk and Spock must go back in time to the U.S. of 1930, following a troubled Enterprise crewman who is escaping the rest of the crew and whose presence in 1930 is going to alter the course of the future beyond all recognition. While there, Kirk falls in love with a woman who, in space-time terms, is a focal point of this point in history, and who must die in order for the future to proceed as it has. Ironically, it's the troubled crewman who is trying to save this woman, while Kirk must let her die.

Heady stuff. Much headier in Ellison's script than the pallid facsimile we get in the TV show, though of course, this also became the favorite episode of the entire series, so they had to be doing something right. They couldn't have known, at the time, how much better the episode would have been with more of Ellison's original ideas intact, but then again, that would have been twice the length. (When the graphic novel version of it was made, it was made into five separate comic books, which tells you a little something about its length.) 

I'm writing this post for two reasons: 1) I need to get something up on my blog after leaving you with a rant about racism at the movies three days ago, and 2) I want my friend to read this as my reaction to reading the book and the graphic novel, and then finishing it off with my first-ever viewing of "The City on the Edge of Tomorrow," which I did last night after buying it on AppleTV. So I may at this point shift to not clarifying everything I'm talking about as I address my comments more to him, though we'll see how that goes. The journalist in me demands to provide context at every juncture. 

So yes, it's quite clear that Ellison wrote a very thoughtful treatment in which the bad seed on the episode is a drug-dealing Enterprise crewman (not a poisoned Dr. McCoy, as he turned out to be on TV) and there's a lot more of interest in the scenes of Earth of 1930, which take place in an unspecified American city. His vision of the planet with the time portal, which gives the episode its title, is undeniably more grand, but that's where the budgetary restrictions of a show with a weekly production schedule come more into play. In any case, the graphic novel is a glorious realization of Ellison's every hope for the episode, and on this occasion he is inclined to offer plenty of praise, as he says he was "over the moon" for how they conceived of his words in the artwork. 

And it's true that very little of that survives on the show. In fact, there are points where it feels like they could have used some of Ellison's original turns of phrase or other dialogue, because the stories are similar enough, but they deviated from those words more out of spite than actual necessity. So that gives credence to some of Ellison's charges that Roddenberry and others were acting in bad faith, though I suppose it also gives credence to the idea that Roddenberry and others bore a greater responsibility for what was actually on screen -- and this is the notion that perturbs Ellison the most. 

I do think it's funny that there is such a controversy over this episode, because often controversies, especially those resulting from tampering with the creative process, are the result of something that failed spectacularly. "The City on the Edge of Forever" was a spectacular success, by any measure. So I think that's what initially struck me as obtuse about Ellison's complaints. Can't everyone just be happy that a really good Star Trek episode resulted from this? They all get dragged down by the "success has many fathers" nature of the controversy. Just be glad it was a success, I think.

But watching the episode, especially after already reading four treatments of Ellison's material across the two books, it does seem very puny by comparison to what Ellison wrote. Surely it needed to be streamlined, but within that, you can see the lack of courage in the decisions. Ellison wanted Kirk to approach doing the wrong thing, or actually not be able to do the right in the moment and need to be saved by Spock. In the completed version, Kirk does do the right thing, and we don't even really see any emotional aftermath of it. 

The thing that I find really interesting about this whole thing, though, is that fans had to already love the episode to even get to this point of there being a controversy and there existing an unexpurgated version of this story. My friend introduced this to me as the episode that made him love Star Trek, which is funny, because I am coming at it from the angle that the episode is pretty weak compared to what Ellison wrote. Then again, this is just part of my theory that you like the first version of something you encounter the best, a theory that usually applies to songs. For example, if you hear the remixed version of a song first and fall in love with it, you will not like the original, even though without the original the remix would not exist.

I wonder if I would have felt differently about it if I'd watched the episode first, and maybe my friend assumed I was already familiar with it. Maybe then I would have been attached to the decisions on the show and found Ellison's choices perverse. Then again, I suspect most people who love Ellison's take had already seen (and loved) the televised version, yet still had a place in their heart for his original version. Me, I'm a Star Trek fan, have been since The Wrath of Khan. But interestingly, I've only seen a couple of the original episodes all the way through. I just didn't watch the show at the time -- obviously, I wasn't alive yet -- and never went back to it over the years, even though I love these characters and the movies they're in, and even though reruns were surely available on television stations I had access to as a kid. 

Although I have a clear preference for Ellison's version, I do want to acknowledge something that I thought the episode got right that Ellison got wrong. And here we get into the stereotypical Trekkie complaints, the kind William Shatner lampooned when he was on Saturday Night Live, that get way too into the weeds. But they're weeds that I think Ellison would respect.

In Ellison's version of the story, the time disruption caused by the drug-dealing crewman Beckwith, when he goes back in time, results in significant changes to this version of the universe. But not so significant there is not still a ship sitting at the exact coordinates of where the Enterprise was when the crew beamed down to the planet, and is, in fact, actually the Enterprise itself -- just manned by a pirate crew. It would be reasonable to argue that if Beckwith had caused a permanent rift in time, not only would the Enterprise not be in that exact space at that exact time, it might not exist at all. (Ellison would probably have an explanation for this, maybe that the renegade crew/pirates constitute a visual representation of an altered universe, containing the ring of truth if not actual plausible scientific truth.)

In the TV show, the Enterprise is, in fact, gone. The crew that are with Kirk and Spock -- which includes Uhura, who utters the cringe-worthy line of dialogue "Captain, I'm scared" -- are stranded on the planet, rather than stranded on the Enterprise with a crew of renegades. At least the Trekkies who thrive on pushing their glasses up the bridges of their noses can appreciate this more believable outcome. (Of course, if we were going full Back to the Future, then probably they would all just vanish from existence -- but then you wouldn't have an episode.)

Because he didn't tell me, I'm not sure exactly why my friend was convinced of his love for Star Trek by "The City on the Edge of Forever," but I can tell you why it would have convinced me, even if I have to retrofit an explanation that might not have made sense if I'd first encountered the episode years ago. And here now we finally get to the two movies I referenced in the subject of this post.

"The City on the Edge of Forever" features primary components of both Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, far and away the best of the original six Star Trek movies. And those two components nourish two different parts of the brain of the devoted Star Trek fan. 

Let's start with the fun one.

There's a decent argument to suggest that without "City on the Edge of Forever," Star Trek IV would not exist, or not in its current form. Talk about time-related causalities. 

The Voyage Home involves a return by the Enterprise crew (though not the Enterprise itself) to present-day San Francisco of 1986, the year the film was released, in order to acquire a humpback whale to prevent future Earth from being desiccated by an alien craft trying to make contact with the (now extinct) whales. As notably the only movie in the series where "comedy" is an appropriate genre, the film relies heavily on the rapport between Kirk and Spock as they try to blend in with the San Franciscans, much of it very funny. The rest of the crew are there, on different missions and also blending in, but Kirk and Spock -- and a present-day love interest for Kirk -- are sequestered on their own mission. 

That this features the essential fundamental dynamics from "City" is no accident, though it should be noted, the Voyage Home version of Kirk and Spock do not appear to remember their previous trip to 20th century America. I think we're meant to take this as similar to the James Bond movies, where we don't really believe that this James Bond has had all the experiences of the previous James Bonds -- though the fact that Kirk and Spock are played by the same actors does make this problematic.

For me, this movie came along at the perfect time, as I was still high off of wrestling with the time travel conundrums presented to us in Back to the Future the year before. And while there are not quite so many "if you change this, then this" moments in The Voyage Home -- no one is fading in and out of existence, for example -- it still delves deep into the problems of being in an earlier time period, including the fact that things you need to get back home haven't been invented yet. That's also a plot point in "City," I should mention, as well as Back to the Future. Although Ellison says The Voyage Home was one of about four Trek movies he was approached to write, he didn't write it -- though his fingerprints are all over it. This is certainly the more "Roddenberry accessible" version of a thing Ellison might have written, especially since it gives Kirk a happy ending with the girl.

And this is just the "fun" part of Star Trek. Sling-shotting around the sun in order to travel back in time. Building a tank on a Klingon vessel (remember, the Enterprise blew up in the last movie) in order to transport a whale. Scotty trying to talk into a mouse to address the computer. It's great stuff and I get a grin on my face just thinking about it.

But "City" also has the much more serious theme at the heart of The Wrath of Khan, not to mention its band of renegades, Khan's crew, who were first envisioned by Ellison in his version of the "City" teleplay.

I don't suppose I need to give a spoiler alert for The Wrath of Khan, seeing as how it turns 44 years old this year, and seeing as how I didn't avoid spoiling that Kirk gets the girl at the end of The Voyage Home. But here is your Star Trek II SPOILER ALERT anyway.

So you know that after a ripping yarn about a mano-a-mano space battle between Kirk and Khan, during which Kirk is also grappling with his own mortality and the surprise of being in close contact with his estranged son, we get the gut punch of the death of Spock. It's not a permanent death, of course -- you already know, because I've told you, that he was in Star Trek IV. We have the Genesis planet to thank for that, and now you see why I included that word in the subject of this post. A weapon of either ultimate creation or ultimate destruction gets fired at a nearby barren planet, which quickly becomes verdant and teeming with life -- and which is where Spock is ultimately "reborn," a saga that continues throughout Star Trek III, which is of course subtitled The Search for Spock. (And one of the reasons The Search for Spock conforms to the Trek rule of thumb that the odd-numbered movies are not so good, is that the regrowth of Spock into an adult is never not weird and is always wobbly in its execution.)

But at the time Khan came out, we couldn't know for sure that this was not the end of Spock. Maybe Leonard Nimoy wanted out of his contract or something.

Anyway, Spock must expose himself to untold amounts of radiation to help save the Enterprise crew, which he does, knowing it will be the end of him. His death scene, one of the more emotional out there, contains this famous line: "The needs of the few outweigh the needs of the many ... or the one."

Which is pretty much the thesis of the sacrifice of Edith Keeler in "City."

Kirk has the chance to save her, but he knows that it will mean either the loss of the Enterprise entirely (on TV) or the loss of the crew to a band of renegades (in the teleplay), which amount to the same thing, for all intents and purposes. And though in the show we don't know if this version of the universe is worse -- we just know the Enterprise is no longer there -- in the teleplay we know that renegades run amok in the galaxy, avoiding punishment and spreading evil.

And so yes, the needs of the many outweighed the needs of the one. Outweighed the needs of Edith Keeler, but also outweighed the needs of James Kirk.

So yes I'm glad to have spent this time with "The City on the Edge of Forever," even if Harlan Ellison created a very difficult entry point at first with his spewing of bile at the already dead Gene Roddenberry. (And to be fair, he did castigate himself every time he did this because you're not supposed to speak ill of the dead.)

I am convinced that his version of the story is better, but both versions contribute wonderful things to our culture, and both versions helped make my friend a Star Trek fan. So I'm glad both versions exist.

And as a last comment, seeing the teleplay and then seeing the TV show give me a great glimpse into the creative process, which is what makes this another invaluable part of my project of reading about film. Any script undergoes great changes before it ends up on screen, whether it's a TV script or a movie script -- and this exercise gave me a greater appreciation of just how complicated that process can be. 

Movies that hate their Black characters

Earlier this month I posted that I didn't have a formalized plan, in terms of scheduled viewings, for honoring Black History Month on my blog. Never have. Too close to the end of my ranking year to start up another big project that involves multiple viewings in the very first month after I'm free from that previous commitment. 

However, I do seem interested in digging into issues related to Black representation on film this month, as evidenced by that post and now this one. The unspeakably awful decision by Trump to post the racist video of the Obamas was just the cherry on top -- and should be the cherry on top of his disqualification as president, but we know it will just be on to the next scandal, soon forgotten. 

The thing that triggered the current post was Gaspar Noe's Climax, though I'm using the poster for another movie because I just used Climax on a different post two days ago. 

First off let me say that the representation of Black characters in film is very complicated. I don't need to go into the whole history here, which I did as recently as three years ago. So yeah, this isn't the first time I've written about issues like this on the blog. But we've gone from representing them carelessly, leaning into pernicious stereotypes, to representing them way too angelically, such that a Black character in certain movies can't even be guilty of an impure thought, let alone an impure action.

The good news about maybe the last ten to 15 years is that we've landed somewhere in the middle, where we recognize the disservice we're doing with either extreme, and actively seek to find a middle ground. In other words, to make these characters real human beings.

But there's that part of us that's still in there, that worries when a film seems to be making them too human. 

Take Climax, for example. 

I don't think you can say that Noe is racist, or if he is, he's hidden it so well that he's been able to use Black actors to compose a third or more of his primary cast of about 20 in Climax. Or really, Black dancers, I should say, because the cast are dancers first, actors second. 

But let's consider what some of these Black characters do in this narrative, and again in this post we have CLIMAX SPOILERS. 

The character Dom repeatedly kicks and knees a woman in the stomach, even after the woman has just said she's pregnant. Dom believes this woman has spiked their punch with acid -- she didn't drink any due to the pregnancy -- but it's a pretty big and callous gamble on the idea that the woman is lying about her pregnancy. Dom also participates in an effort to eject a man out of the building and into the snow. That man later dies. 

The character Taylor is obsessed with the romantic life of his sister, five years younger, and as the evening goes on, we learn that this obsession goes beyond that of the standard overprotective brother. He's actually got a sexual interest in his sister that he acts on under the influence of the acid, in addition to telling her that he loves her -- which we take to mean that he's in love with her. He's also just led the lynching party of the man who was ejected from the building with the accusation that he spiked the punch, simply because this man has been dating (and having sex with) his sister.

The characters Kyrra and Cyborg, in the early stages of the evening, have a conversation in which they talk humorously about their sexual prowess and what they would do to various women there. It's humorous to them anyway, and seems harmless at the time despite the graphic content -- it could just be "locker room talk." But later, we see them carrying out these desires -- not necessarily without consent, but with dangerous abandon, and in the middle of the dance floor. These two are also part of the lynch mob of the man they expel from the building, Omar.

To be clear, the remaining characters in this movie are also pretty rotten in their own ways. There are only a few characters who are actually harmless, actually possibly good people either under the influence of LSD or not. And the character who actually spiked the punch is not one of the Black chraracters. 

But assaulting someone with the possible outcome of causing them to abort their fetus, whether you believe the prgenancy is real or not? Framing your sister's boyfriend so you can have sex with her? Talking about violating women and then proceeding to actually do it, whether it's consensual or not?

Yes, these are not good looks for these four characters.

I should say that there are at least three other Black characters who aren't guilty of any shocking behavior, and then there are a number of others who are mixed race. But the four characters above are quite clearly of African descent, on both sides of their heritage.

There is certainly a fair amount of conversation about this on the web. People pointed this out in their reviews at the time. For me, I was so caught up in the other crazy things this movie was doing to really focus in on these unfortunate characterizations. 

But it brings us back to our original idea about how to find the middle ground between portraying Black characters as barbarians and as saints. Surely it would be okay for one or two of these characters to behave abominably. But when Noe has negative behaviors he wants to dole out between multiple characters, and he has nearly 20 to choose from, couldn't he have given some of these plotlines to white characters?

I'm not sure how seriously this cuts into my feelings about the movie, but it cuts into them enough to go public with my thoughts about it.

The reason I've chosen The Ballad of Wallis Island as the poster for this post is that there is a different sort of uncharitable characterization of this film's only Black character, one that gave me enough pause that it ate away at me a bit, and made me wonder whether the movie truly belonged in my top ten of 2025.

Just to briefly summarize the relevant plot points, the characters Herb McGwyer and Nell Mortimer, both white, were once part of a successful folk duo, and were in a romantic relationship as well. That was maybe a decade ago, but they've been summoned to the same small island off the British coast to play together once more -- and maybe, at least McGwyer hopes, to rekindle the romantic relationship. 

The only trouble is, Motimer already has a husband: Michael, who is a Black American. He doesn't represent unfortunate stereotypes in the way the Climax characters do; he's an intellectual who favors bird watching. 

But as the story goes on, we also realize that he's bitter and mean. He has one vindictive speech where he dresses McGwyer down for being a has-been, or a never was, and he does it with cruel relish. In a movie with essentially five main characters -- including two who live on the island -- he's the only bad guy. 

The fact that these two movies leave a bad taste in my mouth for two very different characterizations of Black characters gives some idea just how deeply complicated this issue is. I don't want Black characters to be shown as violent and aggresive with insufficient empathy, but I also don't want Black characters to be effete and intelligent ... with insufficient empathy.

So empathy is the crux of the issue here, isn't it? What these five characters have in common is that they engage in cruel behavior thoughtlessly. They are being mean for its own sake, I would say, whether that meanness is actually of a criminal nature, or just emotionally toxic.

Clearly there is a greater risk of Noe being a racist -- the web has other examples of his perceived deficiences in this area -- than the director (James Griffiths) and writers (stars Tom Basden and Tim Key) of The Ballad of Wallis Island. The latter are making a more genteel sort of film to begin with, and they respond to a commendable desire to add some diversity to a cast that might have just as easily been all white. The only problem is, the role they had available for this diversity was the one functioning as the antagonist within the context of the film, and not just an antagonist because he's providing a narrative impediment to the protagonist's goals. He's providing actual malice, some would say unwarranted malice, toward the protagonist.

But then we're back to our original question. Should these characters be saints? Can Black characters never be villains or bad actors?

I think it is a "know it when you see it" sort of thing. If a film leaves you with a bad taste in your mouth, maybe that's reason enough to suspect that there's been an insufficient amount of nuance applied to the representation.

If you don't get the bad taste until your fourth viewing -- or you still name the film as part of your top ten, even with the bad taste -- then I guess that tells you how much work on this we all still have to do.

But it also recognizes the inherent complexity I've touched on multiple times. Artists should have the presumption of innocence until proven guilty, and maybe, in trying to make this a more diverse world as represented on film, they just haven't done it as delicate a job as they might have. 

Will Arnett profiles as Jake Weber

When I first got a glimpse of the poster for Bradley Cooper's Is This Thing On?, I thought "Huh. Bradley Cooper has decided to resuscitate the career of Jake Weber."

Imagine my surprise, then, when my critic at ReelGood reviewed it this week, and the star is Will Arnett.

Could have fooled me.

The reason for my conclusion?

Well, just look at that poster. Isn't that Jake Weber?

It's obviously Laura Dern -- no mistaking that -- but I really did think the other guy was Weber.

Who's Jake Weber, you ask?

Well it's this guy of course:

Now do you see it?

He's been in a bunch of things, many of which don't come to mind at the moment. One of them is my beloved The Cell, though that's a pretty small role. Then again, he's a character actor, albeit one with a leading man's good looks. 

Since we're going to the trouble of mentioning him anyway, let's throw in another couple titles I like that feature Jake Weber: Those Who Wish Me Dead and Dawn of the Dead. You have to have "Dead" in the title for Jake Weber to be in your movie. 

I don't think you need me to tell you what Will Arnett is in. Though, we haven't seen a lot of him lately either. 

I was googling as much as I could to get an actual picture of Jake Weber in profile. But when you google "Jake Weber in profile," you get actual profiles -- as in, magazine or internet puff pieces -- not pictures of him from the side. 

Which sort of makes me wonder how many other actors look like someone else when you get a rare glimpse of them in profile. 

Confirmed fourth viewings, and then some

The first time you see a movie, it's out of omniverousness. You want to see anything and everything. Usually you've heard something good about the movie, or you like the director or cast. Sometimes you've heard something bad, and you want to see how bad. Sometimes it's just a Tuesday night and it's sitting there on a streamer.

The second time you see a movie, it's either an endorsement of the first viewing, or an attempt to see what you missed on the first viewing. 

The third time you see a movie, this is probably a movie you really like, maybe even love -- or you could still be feeling around with it, making one more attempt to see what you missed on the first and second viewings.

The fourth time you see a movie? Well, that's the moment it becomes yours. You've stopped trying to make films happen that aren't going to happen. That's the confirmation that it is in your regular rotation, and you probably plan to see it every five years until you die. 

I saw Gapsar Noe's Climax last night for the fourth time, and if you read to the end of this post, you will get a massive spoiler section on why I watched it last night. But there's plenty of good content before then, so don't turn away too early. 

It's the fourth time in less than eight years, which means yeah, I pretty much love this movie. My first viewing was in August of 2018, and then I watched it again in 2019 (to consider it as part of my best of the decade, though it didn't make the cut) and 2021 (just for fun, or "fun," because there are parts of this movie that are an endurance test). In fact, I watched this movie so frequently early in its existence that you could say my fourth viewing broke something of a Climax drought, as it took another four-and-a-half years -- a lot closer to that "every five years" timeframe I mentioned a moment ago.

This is only a way in to what I really want to talk about today.

When I rewatch a movie, I add it to a Letterboxd list I have. I should say, I add it only if it's not already on the list. If it is already on the list, I change the order so it appears at the top, as the most recent. In the notes, I list the other dates I've rewatched this movie, as well as the original date I watched it, if it's available.

This has grown out of a list I keep in a Microsoft Word document, and that list turns 20 this year.

That's right, it was the year 2006 when I decided I should keep track of when I rewatched movies. The first rewatch I ever recorded was in June of 2006, when I saw it fit to make note of the fact that I had rewatched Ghostbusters. I can't tell you the exact day in June of 2006 that I rewatched Ghostbusters, because for the first year-and-a-half I was doing this, I just listed the month and the year. But then with my Christmas 2007 viewing of The Empire Strikes Back, I started adding the exact date and have been doing so ever since.

What this 20-year period does is it allows me to have an exact viewing count of certain favorite movies -- exact for the ones that have come into existence since 2006 or that I've watched for the first time since 2006, I should say. For others, it is only a "confirmed viewing count."

This is what I'm looking at today.

Now, this post is going to give no love to some of my favorite movies of all time. In fact, it's going to give no love to four of my top five movies on Flickchart, and most of my top ten. Let's stick with four of those top five so we don't get too bogged down on this point. Back to the Future (#2), Pulp Fiction (#3), Raiders of the Lost Ark (#4) and Citizen Kane (#5) are all, obviously, movies I love dearly and have seen many times. However, I happen to have seen each of them only a couple times in the past 20 years, for different reasons in each case, that I don't need to get into right now. For these movies, I have a fairly low "confirmed viewing count."

The extreme example of this is probably National Lampoon's Animal House, which might be the movie I've seen the most simply because we watched it about once a week in my freshman year of college, though perhaps I came in and out on some of those and it may not have been a complete start-to-finish viewing each time. Since 2006? Just a single viewing on February 6, 2009. Probably worth a revisit.

So what I'm looking at today are movies where I can confirm at least four viewings. That means I've rewatched them at least three times in the past 20 years. 

And I think it won't surprise you to know that there are a lot of these -- so many in the case of four viewings that I will just give a big list without delving in any further on them. 

The ones higher than that will get a little more time, because they truly rise to a special level. 

Before I give you the info, I want to start out saying I am embarrassed to confess that only a single film from before I was born appears here , and it was only a few months before I was born. While that is disappointing in some respects, it does reflect a genuine preference in me as a cinephile for films that came out when I was capable of seeing them in the theater for the first time. At the very least I am more likely to revisit those films. I'm not going to analyze that tendency today, just report it as fact. 

There's one other little detail I'd like to make you aware of. I started recording inital watches in 2002, and there are a number of movies I saw for the first time after 2002 that I definitely rewatched in those four years before I started recording my rewatches in 2006. Some of those have also gotten a +1 on their confirmed viewing count because I know the post-2006 rewatches were not my first rewatches of those movies. However, I have given them only one additional confirmed viewing, not multiple like some of them may deserve. 

Let's go in reverse order, with the highest first. There are some lists where it's worth working your way up to the highest, but I don't think this is one of them.

9 confirmed viewings
Films: Tangled (2010, Nathan Greno & Byron Howard)
Comment: Everyone who reads this blog knows how much I love Tangled. In fact, this is the 15th time Tangled is getting tagged on my blog, if we are talking accumulated stats. That's nine viewings in just more than 15 years, so I see it more often than every two years. The first five of those were in the first five years of its existence, and I've pumped the brakes a bit in the past ten years. In fact, after last year's ninth viewing disappointed me just a little bit, I am vowing to take a bit of a Tangled break, so I don't know how soon it will get to double digits. However, coincidentally, I only just yesterday was talking about it because I learned of the first casting news regarding the live action version of the movie, with two actors I didn't know in the lead roles and Kathryn Hahn as Mother Gothel. I think this is barely in preproduction, so at this point it doesn't seem likely we'd see it any sooner than 2028. So maybe that'll be a good time to finally make Tangled my first movie to reach a confirmed double digits in viewings. 

8 confirmed viewings
Films: None! 
Comment: We can skip right over this one. Just another indication of how Tangled has dominated my affections during these two decades.

7 confirmed viewings
Films: Children of Men (2006, Alfonso Cuaron), Galaxy Quest (1999, Dean Parisot), Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (2006, Tom Tykwer)
Comment: I have to tell you that I am cheating just a little bit with this viewing count for Galaxy Quest, for reasons I cannot entirely explain, though I'll try. I've only rewatched Galaxy Quest five times during this 20-year span, which should mean, by the rules I've laid out, that I can only confirm six viewings. Except a memorable feature of my initial Galaxy Quest viewing back in 1999 was that I saw it in the theater on two consecutive nights, that's just how much I loved it. Because this second viewing in 1999 functions effectively as a confirmed viewing, and doesn't require any fuzzy logic like "I'm sure I've seen this three or more other times in the intervening years," I'm going to give it a seventh confirmed viewing. I've probably seen it two other times, in reality, which would equal Tangled, but then would be behind others with a bunch of unconfirmed viewings, which I've already mentioned. 

The two 2006 films finished in my top ten of that decade, with COM all the way up at #2, and they are films I look forward to revisiting as often as I can. Interestingly, both could be higher but the last time I watched either of them was when I watched Children in February of 2022. I last watched Perfume in 2020. 

6 confirmed viewings
Films: Adaptation (2002, Spike Jonze), The Cell (2000, Tarsem Singh), Donnie Darko (2001, Richard Kelly), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004, Michel Gondry), Raising Arizona (1987, Joel Coen), Spring Breakers (2013, Harmony Korine), Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015, J.J. Abrams), Step Brothers (2008, Adam McKay), Vanilla Sky (2001, Cameron Crowe)
Comment: Donnie Darko is worth singling out here because it's one of the ones I mentioned earlier, which got credit for a single unknown rewatch in the years between when I first saw it (early 2003) to when I started recording rewatches in 2006. I may have actually watched Darko as many as three times during these three years, since I was pretty obsessed with it in those first years after watching it, ultimately still fond enough of it seven years later to name it my #1 of the decade. Subsequent viewings have been fewer, but I still do catch up with it every four or five years.

Raising Arizona is, of course, my #1 on Flickchart, but I specifically draw out viewings of this to about every four years just so I can savor it on each viewing and never get tired of it. (See: Tangled.) The only other one from this group that I'll spend an additional comment on is Spring Breakers, which was on a viewing pace similar to Tangled in the first x number of years after it came into existence. But after watching it as the final movie I was vetting for my best of the 2010s -- it came in second to Tangled for the entire decade -- I haven't seen it again since. That was December 30, 2019. I haven't lost any love for Spring Breakers, it's just not come up again for an organic viewing since then -- but that indicates how much higher it could be if I'd kept up anything like my original pace.

5 confirmed viewings
Films: Elf (2003, Jon Favreau), Fantastic Planet (1973, Rene Laloux), First Reformed (2018, Paul Schrader), Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008, Nicholas Stoller), Henry Poole is Here (2008, Mark Pellington), Inside Out (2015, Pete Docter), Kissing Jessica Stein (2002, Charles Herman-Wurmfeld), Lost in Translation (2003, Sofia Coppola), Major League (1989, David S. Ward), Moon (2009, Duncan Jones), mother! (2017, Darren Aronofsky), Ruby Sparks (2012, Jonathan Dayton & Valerie Faris), Run Lola Run (1998, Tom Tykwer) This is Spinal Tap (1984, Rob Reiner), Titanic (1997, James Cameron)
Comment: Getting a lot more titles now, unsurprisingly. This is Spinal Tap just made it into this group a few weeks ago, though of course there are lots of repeat viewings of this top ten movie on Flickchart littered throughout the pre-2006 days. First Reformed and mother! are notable for getting to five viewings in only a brief nine years of existence -- even though I listed the release year of First Reformed as 2018, it's usually listed as 2017 because that's when it appeared at festivals. It was my #1 in 2018. (I'm hugely inconsistent on how I handle this, for some reason. Run Lola Run, which also appears here and is in my top 20 on Flickchart along with being what I anointed my #1 out of all my movies that I've ranked #1 for a given year, was actually my #1 of 1999, but I've listed its 1998 German release year here. Who can understand how my brain works, though I think the distinction is between whether it's a foreign film or a domestic film.) Henry Poole is probably the most surprising inclusion here, as I loved this movie enough that I overloaded on viewings of it soon after I first saw it -- though have not now seen it in ten years. 

4 confirmed viewings
Films: Agora (2009, Alejandro Amenabar), Beyond the Hills (2012, Cristian Mungiu), Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu), Bound (1996, Lana & Lily Watchowski), The Cable Guy (1996, Ben Stiller), Climax (2018, Gaspar Noe), Creed (2015, Ryan Coogler), The Empire Strikes Back (1980, Irvin Kershner), Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994, Mike Newell), A Ghost Story (2017, David Lowery), The Guru (2003, Daisy von Scherler Mayer), Idiocracy (2006, Mike Judge), Inside Llewyn Davis (2013, Joel & Ethan Coen), The Iron Giant (1999, Brad Bird), Monty Pyton and the Holy Grail (1975, Terry Gilliam & Terry Jones), 127 Hours (2010, Danny Boyle), Parasite (2019, Bong Joon-ho), A Separation (2011, Asgar Farhadi), Sideways (2004, Alexander Payne), The Skeleton Twins (2014, Craig Johnson), The Social Network (2010, David Fincher), Starship Troopers (1997, Paul Verhoeven), The Story of Us (2010, Rob Reiner), Tanna (2015, Martin Butler & Bentley Dean), There Will Be Blood (2007, Paul Thomas Anderson), Time Bandits (1981, Terry Gilliam), Under the Skin (2014, Jonathan Glazer), Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (2007, Jake Kasdan), War of the Worlds (2005, Steven Spielberg), Watchmen (2009, Zack Snyder), What We Do in the Shadows (2014, Taika Waititi)
Comment: Was it even worth listing all those out? Well, I've just done so, no taking it back now. 

I'm a little self-conscious about having done this exercise, because part of me is worried that knowing the number of times I've watched a movie -- bringing it to the forefront of my thoughts, as an exercise like this does -- makes me less likely to commit further rewatches on a purely organic basis. Like "Wow I can't believe it's been seven years since I watched Spring Breakers, I really need to change that." The beauty of not knowing is that the rewatches represent only a true desire to see that movie in that moment you choose to rewatch it. If I'm conscious of the horse race aspect of it, something pure is lost.

But what can I say. I'm a stats guy. I always will be. I'm maybe even more of a stats guy than I am a movie guy, but shhh, don't tell anybody. 

Okay, now it's finally time for the SPOILER section I mentioned earlier.

This SPOILER section relates to both Climax and to the other movie I saw yesterday, Sirat, so if you haven't seen either of these movies, DO NOT GO ANY FURTHER.

I'm serious. This is your last warning. Though I'll also give a new heading in case you'd like a more definitive line of demarcation.

The thing that made me rewatch Climax after watching Sirat

So both of these movies can be described as "a movie about dance music where the kid dies."

Look I told you to stop reading.

So in Climax, this big group of professional dancers -- like almost 20 -- are housed together in what I understand is a school, in the middle of a blizzard. They're practicing this incredible number for an upcoming dance competition, and if you think I use the word "incredible" lightly, watch the first ten minutes of Climax and you will see that I do not exaggerate. While none of the dancers offers an exact duplicate of what another offers, they all have an astonishing ability to contort their bodies and to bounce with the beat. Not only is there this great opening, set to "Supernature" by Cerrone, but there's another sequence at about the film's midpoint -- just before things go off the rails -- that captures their dance moves from the God's eye view of directly above where they're dancing.

Then someone spikes the sangria with acid, and everything goes to shit.

This particular post does not require us to delve into all the ways the things go to shit, but they are impressive. It does require us to talk about what happens to the only kid present, who appears to be about six years old -- maybe as young as four -- and is the son of a woman who is not dancing, but was once part of this group. 

When she realizes she is unexpectedly high on acid, has never had it before, is super freaked out and does not know the best way to handle it -- and that her son also drank some of the punch -- she takes the little boy and locks him into an electrical closet, so no one can do anything to him and so he can't do anything to himself. (The flaw in the logic of that last assumption is going to soon become tragically clear.) Terrifyingly, we hear his screams to be let out echoing throughout the space, just one of the features of the descent into hell that Climax becomes. 

She's told him to stay clear of that box against the wall because it could kill him. So it's not like she's taken no precautions. But she's also lost the key she used to lock him in, and because everything is so chaotic and because there's a saboteur in their midst, it isn't clear whether she's going to find it in order to finally let him out.

At some point a few minutes after we've last checked in with this plot, the electricity shorts out -- and there's only one conclusion of what happened. One of the other dancers -- who, even before they were dosed, were pretty short on empathy -- shouts out "Tito got fried!" And indeed, that's what happened.

Grim.

Though maybe not as grim as what happens in Sirat, which is why it's dividing critics between those who have decided it's among the best of 2025 and those who are decidedly mixed, perhaps even negative, on it.

There are some big surprises in Sirat that I don't need to spoil, but I do need to spoil this one, and you can't say you haven't been warned -- though I did already give it away. 

A father and his early teenage son are trying to track down their daughter/sister at a desert rave in Morocco. They don't find her at this rave, nor do they even find anyone who knows her, but given her movements in such circles, they think there's a good chance they may find her at the next scheduled desert rave, closer to the border of Mauritania. Which is going to be difficult to get to, given the terrain.

Against their better judgment, a group of five other ravers across two large vehicles, a bus and a truck, allow the man and the boy to follow them in their small and ancient vehicle that's not cut out for this sort of environment. The man's inadequate vehicle comes into play in what happens to his son, but not in the way they expect. 

While the adults are all working to push one of the trucks out of the place that it's been caught in a dip in the road, finally succeeding, the boy -- and his dog, we should point out, who has already had a bad trip himself from eating some human shit containing LSD -- are waiting in their vehicle. For reasons that are not entirely clear except for "shit happens," the vehicle starts to slide backward on the incline. The boy is not old enough to think on his feet and does not pull the handbrake. The car pitches over the side of an embankment and down, down, down, hundreds of rocky and sandy feet below to its ultimate demise, and the demise of the kid and the dog inside.

Grim. Fucking grim.

I think it hits harder in Sirat because the movie is not already set up as a black comedy with a wicked sense of humor, as Climax is. And it's laced with bitter irony because the man is desperately trying to find his daughter, missing five months now, and in the process loses his sweet and earnest younger son as a result of taking imprudent risks. Not to mention the dog.

Both movies are a voyage to hell fueled by drugs and music in their own way, and they made an interesting double feature -- though maybe not to people who love kids and/or dogs. I guess that makes me the sick pervert who doesn't love either? 

First give me the chance to not turn my phone off

I am usually the one who holds other fellow audients to a higher standard at the movies. Whether I actually enforce it or not, I'm not above glowering in the direction of someone being rude at the movies, or delivering an extra perturbed "SHHHHHH!" if the movie has started and some people near me just won't shut up.

So it certainly puts my hackles up when someone tries to police movie behavior on me.

I was at the advanced screening of Sirat on Thursday night, which isn't actually due out in Australia for another three weeks. You may remember this was my #1 regret that I had to exclude from my 2025 rankings, so I was pretty eager to see it, even though in some respects it is "too soon" to start watching movies from 2025 again.

The expected start time for the movie had passed and they hadn't gotten it started yet, so I decided I'd play a game from the Connections archive. You know, it's the New York Times game where you have to assemble 16 words into four groups of related words. It's just the right level of difficulty, in that I get it most of the time but it beats me maybe one out of every six. I don't need to have the 99%+ success rate that I have at my other NYT game addiction, Wordle. And since I've only really started playing Connections in the past two months, I have plenty of archives to tackle -- all the way back to 2023. 

Anyway, I'd only gotten one of the four groups and made one wrong guess when the movie got started. Not the movie proper, mind you, but the few little theater-specific graphics that tell you to silence your phone and whatnot.

Which is just what I was about to do when a woman in the row behind me said, in a shrill voice:

"Can you turn off your phone? It's really bright."

I'm not sure if that was the exact wording, but whatever the wording was, don't believe for a second that there was anything polite about the way she said it. In fact, the way she said it was as though she had waited as long as she possibly could and finally had to shut down the menace in the row in front of her.

I felt like saying something back. I didn't. I just turned off the phone. Which is what I was about to do anyway. 

Actually, I did keep it on a moment longer, because right as I was motioning to turn it off, I remembered the thing that sometimes gets me on these Thursday evening screenings. I have an alarm that goes off at 6:45 each Thursday night to remind me to take out the garbage cans for the next morning, and the alarm is instructed to actually power on the phone in order to deliver me this reminder. And then I really am the asshole.

So it took me another ten to 15 seconds to get to the right spot to pre-silence this alarm, during which I imagined this woman really stewing in her juices as she interpreted my ensuing actions as disobedience of her request.

Look I would feel the same way as this woman if I actually had my phone on during the movie. But aren't we all sort of in agreement that before the movie proper starts, talking, getting up and down out of your seat, laughing, chucking popcorn at your friends, and yes, checking your phone, are all fair play?

You need to give me the chance to actually violate our social contract before you cut me down to size for doing so.

As for the movie ... well, it's wild. Sorry, I'm not going to tell you anything more about it right now, because I suspect most of you out there haven't seen it yet. But it's definitely worth a watch.

Black is beautiful

There, how's that for a subject line that will get your attention?

I don't do anything on my blog to acknowledge Black History Month, which is a bit of a shame. I certainly could. I mean, it's only February 3rd, so I could even do it this year. If we are looking for precedent with other themed months, look no further than Pride Month in June, when I watch one pride-themed movie each week.

Why don't I do this in February to celebrate Black creatives and films with Black subject matter? I mean, this is certainly something in my thoughts, at least as much as issues related to pride. 

I think part of it is that I've just recovered from my big end-of-year push, and I don't really want to be getting myself back into a big month-long project -- even just one viewing per week -- right after I've freed myself from watching the films from the previous year. I want February to be a bit loosey goosey, where I watch whatever I want, whenever I want, both new (to me) movies and rewatches. Heck I'll watch a few actual new movies as well. Gotta start 2026 sometime.

But I thought the least I could do was use a spot at the beginning of February to address the latest controversy regarding race-related casting, sparked this time by that douche-nozzle Elon Musk.

I'm only going off a headline here because I don't want to dignify Musk's comments by actually reading the article. But apparently the thing is that Musk thinks Christopher Nolan has "lost his integrity" by casting a Black woman -- Lupita N'yongo, to be specific -- as Helen of Troy in July's The Odyssey.

Please.

What he thinks he's saying, or at least wants us to think he thinks he's saying, is that Helen of Troy was blonde and that any representation of her should acknowledge that.

What he's really saying is much more sinister:

A woman known as essentially the most beautiful woman of all time could not possibly be Black.

Please.

I don't know why these people want to keep coming out against any form of "woke" casting. It's the same people who said that Ariel in The Little Mermaid couldn't be Black and that there was no such thing as a Black Targeryan in the Game of Thrones spinoff.

Can't we just, like, stop?

And when I say "we," I certainly don't include myself in that group.

I'm not going to dignify Musk's comments any further by actually offering him an explanation about why Helen could have dark skin. I understand some people have dignified him in this way. 

It's not even worth it to do that, even if you have a "good" argument. The argument doesn't need to be "good." The only argument needed for race-blind casting is that people in any audience want the opportunity to see themselves in characters they see on screen. We got over a long time ago the idea that there might be Black people in the upper crust society of a show like Bridgerton, when of course we know that is not historically accurate, and to keep having this argument about any new character who comes up for cinematic representation, maybe for the first time in our modern era, just sullies us all. 

There are only a few characters I think it does not make sense to have played by a Black woman, or not without the very casting being part of whatever your confrontational, satirical aims are with the film. Just a few off the top of my head:

1) A slave owner! Probably not a good idea to have a Black character owning Black slaves. 

2) Eva Braun! We don't have to pretend there's a world where Hitler would have been married to a Black woman.

End of list.

As if we needed any more reasons to talk about what a complete and utter piece of shit Musk is. 

R.I.P. to one of the funniest comedic actresses of her generation

What? Catherine O'Hara?

No.

Never would it have occurred to me that the 71-year-old actress, most recently seen by me in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and the TV show The Studio, would be at death's door. But here I am, having to memorialize a wonderful presence in our comedy lives gone way before her time. 

I guess she wasn't at death's door, really, as she succumbed to what Wikipedia is calling a brief illness. Those kinds of illness are worrisome as they can get any of us, even those who looked like they were still going to keep making us laugh for years into the future.

It's another blow to the Christopher Guest mockumentary cinematic universe after the loss of Rob Reiner. After Reiner stopped making movies like that but Guest continued, Guest cast O'Hara in Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show, A Mighty Wind and (unfortunately in this last case) For Your Consideration. She was great in all but one of those, and along with collaborators like Eugene Levy -- later her collaborator on the wonderful series Schitt's Creek -- and Fred Willard, she became synonymous with Guest's engaging brand of improvisational comedy.

Of course, to more mainstream comedy fans, she took the scene by storm with her roles in Beetlejuice and Home Alone. Neither of those are personal favorites, though I do like both quite a bit. O'Hara was adept at pleasing both comedy nerds and a broader audience, always making particular choices with her character work, and always being very, very funny. 

I always associated O'Hara in my mind with Madeline Kahn, as if a baton had been handed off by Kahn and O'Hara picked it up and ran with it. There are a dearth of actresses whose primary mode is comedy who get to have such long careers, which is a shame. (Just looking it up now, I realize we lost Kahn at only age 57, to cancer.)

In looking back at a career that goes all the way back to 1980 -- yes that's a 45-year career, unheard of for most actresses -- I'm seeing I've already listed the films and TV shows that I think are the major touchpoints for most of us. But O'Hara made anything she was in better, often showing up in key supporting roles as comic relief rather than needing to operate as the lead. Maybe that was a key to her longevity, that she needn't be the thing the movie was selling you on. She was the thing that always put a big smile on your face when she appeared.

And certainly she wasn't limited to this sort of role, but she was so good at playing a character with a quick wit and perhaps slightly questionable priorities, but someone you always ended up rooting for, even if it was only because it was O'Hara playing her. 

It's a huge loss at a time when we've had too many of them. 

Rest in peace.

Considering 30 years of #1 movies

I may be done reflecting on the movies of 2025 on this blog, but I'm not done reflecting on my #1s throughout history.

That's because Together just became the 30th #1 I've ever given out.

That's right, I started out with Al Pacino's Looking for Richard way back in 1996, and that brings us a full three decades later to my #1 of 2025. 

I already did a celebration of this milestone with this gargantuan project undertaken last year. I said in that post that I maybe should have waited until around now to do this, but that the idea had lit a fire under me and I couldn't wait.

I got this current idea a few months later, and I did wait until now on this one, because I needed that 30th to make it work. 

So the idea here is to reflect on the choices I've made with past #1s, and see what the world has thought of those choices with the benefit of hindsight.

When you are selecting a #1 movie, you only know what people think of it in that exact moment, the first year of its existence as a piece of art. And in some cases, you choose something obscure, so you don't even really know what most people think of it because they haven't seen it yet -- and without your recommendation, may never see it.

But it occurred to me that any time any person chooses a #1 movie, you can later look back on it as one of the following three things:

1) A stone-cold classic that everyone thinks is one of the greats of its era;

2) A weird personal favorite that may not be for everybody but that you still staunchly defend, or

3) A movie that you may still like well enough, but that has not aged particularly well in the sphere of public opinion.

After 30 years of doing this, I decided that I'm going to trisect my past #1s so that I have ten from each category.

Obviously this will be imperfect. There are some movies that will be between two categories. I may feel like I have 17 or 18 stone-cold classics in my past #1s, but there's only room for ten. (I don't; this is just hypothetical.) A movie I classify as "weird" may not be weird in any traditional sense of its narrative or execution.

But I do think these three categories more or less encapsulate the range of potential outcomes for a movie to settle in over time, assuming you don't turn on a previous #1 so much that you actually dislike it. They can all be abbreviated to a three-word phrase: "stone-cold classics," "weird defensible favorites" and "haven't aged well." When I was jotting them down on the back of a piece of paper on the train, I listed these as SCC, WDF and HAW. 

This is a necessarily reductive exercise, but let me state a few more caveats just to address a few other considerations:

1) Some of these movies haven't had a chance to age at all, especially the one I crowned my favorite only a week ago. So in some cases I will have to be projecting their eventual reputation based on what I believe it is now.

2) This is not listed in order of my own favorites. I already did that a few years ago in this post. This is an imagined order based on the opinion of a disinterested outsider, who is only analyzing the films on their reputation and not on their own personal opinions. 

3) I'm going to list them in an order that reflects the extent to which they conform to the tier they are in, and how close they are to the tier above or below them. So my top-ranked "stone-cold classic" will be the one that the most people think is the stoniest, coldest classic. And so on. 

Hey, and unlike some of my other posts where I wax poetic about these movies for hundreds of words, I'm going to keep it brief on each. You've got stuff to do today. 

Also there are a few films whose release year is ambiguous -- released in its country of origin a different year from when it was my #1 -- but to keep things less confusing here, I'm list the year it was my #1. 

Let's not waste any more time on rules. I think you understand what this post is. So let's get into it.

The "stone-cold classic" tier

1) There Will Be Blood (2007, Paul Thomas Anderson) - We may have near universal consensus that Anderson's One Battle After Another is the best film of 2025, but TWBB is usually considered one of the best movies, if not the best movie, of the entire 21st century. It's hard to compete with that.

2) Parasite (2019, Bong Joon-ho) - If you wanted a consensus runner-up for that same time period, you'd have a hard time beating Parasite, which also unifies cinephiles in their affection -- and, like One Battle After Another, is also incredibly fun. 

3) Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004, Michel Gondry) - Even if my own last viewing of this underwhelmed me just a little bit, this is consistently a crazy performer in all the "best of the century" lists, and basically you never hear anybody who says it didn't work for them.

4) Children of Men (2006, Alfonso Cuaron) - I felt a bit out on the limb in my affection for this at the time, but everyone -- and I mean everyone -- has since joined me on that limb, such that we had to convert it from a limb, which was breaking under our collective weight, into a steel fortress.

5) Lost in Translation (2003, Sofia Coppola) - Most people acknowledge that Coppola tapped into a magical vibe of unsurpassed staying power in this movie about two jet-lagged strangers connecting in Tokyo, proving that romance was not dead and did not have to be sappy either. 

6) Inside Out (2015, Pete Docter) - Consistently appears at or near the top of Pixar's best lists, although it usually has to fight films I like a lot less, like Wall-E and Ratatouille. 

7) A Separation (2011, Asgar Farhadi) - It may not be a huge performer in the zeitgeist, because your average cinephile doesn't always see Iranian films, but the film's impeccable critical reputation easily earns it a spot in this tier. 

8) Run Lola Run (1999, Tom Tykwer) - Again, maybe a German-language film isn't getting constantly rewatched, but the general respect for this film is quite high. (Plus I actually listed as my #1 when I ranked all 26 a few years ago, though I'm not sure if I would still do that today.)

9) Adaptation (2002, Spike Jonze) - I know there is a contingent out there who isn't as sold on this film, but its sheer structural complexity and the breadth of its ambition easily earn it a spot in the top tier -- or maybe not easily since it's only #9. 

10) Toni Erdmann (2016, Maren Ade) - Probably the least seen film in the top tier, in part because of its great length, Erdmann has huge respect in cinephile circles and was also included at #59 in the recent New York Times list that circulated about the best 100 movies of the 21st century.

The "weird defensible favorites" tier

11) First Reformed (2018, Paul Schrader) - This film has some detractors, but those who love it really love it, such that it has nearly graduated to the "stone-cold classic" tier. I've also seen it four times in the only 7+ years of its existence, which isn't actually relevant to this discussion. 

12) The Substance (2024, Coralie Fargeat) - This ranking is based on the fact that I can see this movie aging into a classic. I think The Substance, already liked quite a bit by some, will gain in popularity -- at least as a cult film if nothing more -- when some people give it a second viewing.

13) A Ghost Story (2017, David Lowery) - I don't know if Lowery's film has really seen its profile rise since it first came out, but the movie continues to earn points, and I would assume ardent fans, based on its truly individual concept seen out to unexpectedly poignant ends.

14) Beyond the Hills (2013, Cristian Mungiu) - Probably among the least seen in this whole list, Beyond the Hills is certainly beloved by those who have seen it -- but its low profile will always keep it out of the top tier. 

15) 127 Hours (2010, Danny Boyle) - If some of the shine has been lost from this, it's because James Franco is the star, not because it's anything less than unimpeachable as a movie, that shows off all of Boyle's strengths and none of his weaknesses. 

16) Moon (2009, Duncan Jones) - Again another film that does not necessarily come up a lot in cinephile discussions, but one that remains an engaging noodle fryer, even after there were a lot more movies that came out and tried to do what Moon does so effortlessly. 

17) The Wrestler (2008, Darren Aronofsky) - Is it just me or is there a bit of Aronofsky backlash out there? If so, I suspect this one gets caught up in it, a movie that people might only remember so much now because of Mickey Rourke's great comeback performance. But I can still strongly defend this one, so it goes in the middle of this tier.

18) Happiness (1998, Todd Solondz) - This one might divide people by the ick factor of, well, several things about it, but this used to be a really highly thought of film in a different era of independent cinema, and seems easily to be Solondz' best. Can't drop down to the low tier because of that lingering respect.

19) I'm Thinking of Ending Things (2020, Charlie Kaufman) - The dislike for this one is strong in some quarters, and in other quarters it is the recipient of very high praise. That puts it near the bottom of this tier, but still a movie that I think is doing incredibly thoughtful and provocative things. In any case, you're never going to be embarrassed to say you love it.

20) Our Friend (2021, Gabriela Cowperthwaite) - The critical community is never going to come together to embrace, or even see, this little-seen and unassuming movie about a family going through cancer and their friend who helps get them through it. And I'm never going to not cry during it, so it will remain always at the end of this tier in my heart.

The "hasn't aged well" tier

21) Titanic (1997, James Cameron) - I like Titanic better than several of the films in each of the above two groups, as it remains one of my top ten #1 movies overall. But I understand this is not a serious critical opinion, and the most common way to think of this movie, critically, is to be embarrassed that we showered such praise on it. So it is, regrettably, in this tier, but at least it is the captain of the tier. (I may have also kept it out of the "weird favorite" tier because it seems funny to call Titanic "weird." The only other option is a stone-cold classic, and though I may see it that way, I don't think others do.)

22) Skinamarink (2023, Kyle Edward Ball) - Although this would certainly qualify as a "weird favorite," it's landing just outside that tier due to the fact that some people are so bored that they can't even get through it when they try to watch it. They just didn't watch it long enough to discover it's one of the most chilling movies they've seen this century. 

23) Hamlet (2000, Michael Almereyda) - For the first of two films involving Shakespeare in this tier, I don't think anyone who has seen this adaptation thinks ill of it, unless they object to the cheekiness of the Blockbuster video "to be or not to be" speech. But when I most recently rewatched it, I definitely did not feel the original draw at the same strength.

24) Together (2025, Michael Shanks) - I wanted to rank this a little closer to the next tier, but based only on the reactions I got to this being my #1 of 2025 -- almost no one even gave it mid-level praise -- I suspect that I am going to stay out on the limb on this one far into the future. 

25) Hustle & Flow (2005, Craig Brewer) - This was a very cool pick in 2005, but it has lost a lot of its luster since then. It's not just that subsequent viewings haven't been as good for me, it's that they've revealed there are some actually bad moments of acting in the film -- and also that people aren't really talking about this movie anymore. 

26) Ruby Sparks (2012, Jonathan Dayton & Valerie Faris) - I remember how much my head was spun by this the first two times I saw it, and how surprised everyone was that I had selected it as my #1. My opinion gradually started to gravitate toward theirs, but this is still a movie I will enjoy quite a lot if I am in the right mood for it. 

27) Gosford Park (2001, Robert Altman) - This is a very solid predecessor to Downton Abbey and an engaging whodunnit, and it was a best picture nominee, but I just don't think it stands out within Altman's career, and I did actually rank this last when I ranked them all a few years back. 

28) Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu) - That this beat out Boyhood for best picture has become a conversation piece among cinephiles, who all too easily roll their eyes at the one shot gimmick and other of the film's indulgences. I still like it, but I feel fairly lonely in that opinion. 

29) Looking for Richard (1996, Al Pacino) - My very long-delayed second viewing of this convinced me that it might not be a whole lot more than an above-average documentary, but I still have fond feelings toward it -- especially as my first #1 ever.

30) The Whale (2022, Darren Aronofsky) - I have blubbering uncontrollably to blame for this #1 ranking, which I do still stand by. I've tried to argue that this movie is so much more than what some perceive as fatphobia, but I'm afraid that the perceived fatphobia is the only thing that really lingers in the court of public opinion. (But don't forget, Brendan Fraser actually won the Oscar, so I wasn't totally crazy.)

Do these tiers have the ring of truth to them?

On to the next 30. 

Audient One-Timers: Smoke Signals

Welcome to the first in my 2026 monthly series in which I am rewatching my 12 favorite films, according to Flickchart, that I have seen only once.

So we start out this series with a very unassuming film to be among my 12 favorite movies of any kind, though I suppose the standard is a bit lower for what I'm calling "one-timers" -- films I've seen only once.

To call a film a "one-timer" implies that it is very difficult to sit through a second time, either for length (such as The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King) or for subject matter (such as Requiem for a Dream, which I have actually seen at least four times.) That's not the way I'm using it here. There's no judgment, it's just a literal fact: the 12 films in this series are the highest ranked on my Flickchart that I have seen only once. Yes some of them will be long and some will have difficult subject matter, but those are merely secondary factors in their inclusion in this series. (Though they may be primary factors in why I've seen the film only once.) 

And that 12th favorite, with a current ranking of #175, is Chris Eyre's Smoke Signals, which I watched for the first time just about 13 years ago, give or take a few weeks. 

The film was significant for me in that year of 2013, which ended up being the year I moved to Australia, though I didn't know it at the time I watched Smoke Signals. Eyre's film was the first in a weekly series I wrote for the Flickchart blog called Flickchart Road Trip, which involved me watching a movie set in each of the 50 states, driving along an imaginary path that started from where I lived in Los Angeles at the time. I'd then "duel" that movie, just in the blog post, against five other movies from that state that were already in my Flickchart, seeing where it landed among them. 

It was a very harrowing commitment because I'm the guy who refuses to miss posting deadlines on a project like this, even if real-world reasons gave me a good excuse to do so. Such as moving to a new country and not having internet at my house for a few weeks, meaning I'd have to go to the library or a nearby hospital to do everything I needed for each post, as well as continuing to source one new movie per week to watch from each new state -- which was far less easy back in those largely pre-streaming days. I got to the end of the year with a sigh of relief and a vow to never do anything like that again.

The first stop on the road trip, geographically after California, was Arizona, where the second half of Smoke Signals is set. So that's the film I chose. (I had already decided that I wasn't going to start with California, but save it for #50 -- though I can't remember now if I "flew" to Alaska and Hawaii before or after California, so it might have been #48.) 

And I was floored by Eyre's movie. In fact, it kicked off two straight five-star movies to begin the series, as Billy Wilder's Ace in the Hole would be up next in New Mexico. That movie might also be in this series because it's ranked high enough, but I've already seen that one a second time. After those two movies, the series never got close to reaching those heights again, but it was helpful in providing an immediate endorsement of this project I'd taken on. 

The thing I remembered most from the first viewing was how the ending absolutely socked me, leaving me in tears. You always remember the tears.

When I got to the ending this time, after the movie flew by (it's only 90 minutes), I could see the part that had made me cry, and I could feel some facisimile of the same emotions welling up maybe as a sense memory. But the ending of the movie is not really constructed as a big make-you-cry moment, so I feel like the tears may have been the result of an accumulation of subtle moments in the study of its two main characters. That speaks very well of the movie, its construction and its perfromances, but perhaps it made me a little less likely to cry this time around, and indeed I did not. 

Jeez, I haven't even really told you anything about the movie while already talking about its ending.

It's the story of two teenagers on an Idaho reservation, who are siblings by adoption and who we see at multiple ages through flashbacks. I'll list the actors who play them as the teenage versions, who are Adam Beach as Victor, the biological son of Arnold (Gary Farmer), and Evan Adams as Thomas, the adoptive son of Arnold after Arnold saved the baby from a house fire that killed Thomas' parents. Thomas naturally views his adoptive father as a hero, but there's more to this story and Arnold is a complicated man living with demons. He eventually leaves the reservation, abandoning the boys' mother Arlene (Tantoo Cardinal) to relocate to Phoenix, which happens before the start of the narrative. In fact, the narrative starts with a report of Gary's death in the lonely spot outside Phoenix where he was living in trailer and seems to have struck up a friendship with one younger woman, Suzy (Irene Bedard), but was otherwise living alone with those demons. Victor and Thomas need to road trip to Phoenix to take care of Gary's affairs, such as they are, and make peace with the memory of this absent father, whom they each see differently.

There isn't much more to the story on a plot level, but there's much more on the level of character and emotion. Still, watching the movie, you are struck by the intentional smallness of its scale. I should say, I was struck by it on this viewing, especially since I knew how highly I regarded the film. 

The relationship between Thomas and Victor is fertile. Thomas is a bit of a dork, a bespectacled kid who is given to great storytelling skills but is not cool in any respect that would be rewarded socially. Victor much more fits that profile as he's more traditionally handsome and is the star of the basketball team. However it's Thomas who is more at peace with his place in the world and it appears that Victor may be wrestling with the start of some of his father's demons. 

If I were to forcibly re-rank Smoke Signals on Flickchart -- which I am not going to do, even though that might be a logical accompanying action for this blog series -- it might fall a little bit. It would certainly end up outside my top 200. Instead, it will only slowly drop over time as it loses duels to certain films that are currently ranked in the next 100 spots behind it.

But that's not the same as saying I regret the ranking. The effect the movie had on me this time might only be 80% of what it was the first time, but it reminded me specifically of the value of a movie like this, which underplays most of its emotions in getting you to a very emotional spot by the end. I also really loved the look inside an American community that we don't see enough of on film. This week in particular, watching the film made it a good companion with the film I watched on Monday for Australia Day, Bran Nue Dae, since there's obviously a lot of overlap between the experience of indigenous Australians and indigenous Americans, particularly in terms of things like the way alcohol impacts their communities.

And to think, the first time I saw Smoke Signals, I wouldn't have even made that connection as I was still seven months away from moving to Australia. 

Remembering Rob Reiner: The Magic of Belle Isle

This is the first in intertwining 2026 bi-monthly series with the same name but slightly different focuses. Starting bi-monthly in January, I'll be watching the six Rob Reiner films I haven't previously seen. The other bi-monthly slot, starting in February, will focus on revisiting six of my Reiner favorites.

Focusing on previously unseen films by Rob Reiner that he directed entirely after 2012 always promised to be rough at times. But at least we've started off with a film that is merely innocuous.

From what I remember of Flipped, The Magic of Belle Isle is probably most similar in Reiner's filmography to that 2010 film, in that both films feature a young girl as their protagonist, and both are set in a summery setting that prompts a nostalgia in viewers for simpler times, even if they never actually experienced that setting or those simpler times in their own lives. Both films also feature the young actress Madeline Carroll -- or, she was young then -- even though in only two years she's aged out of being the protagonist to being the protagonist's older sister. 

Knowing what I now know about Reiner's family, I wonder if these movies weren't both made as love letters to his (biological) daughter Romy, who would have been 13 and 15 at the time those two movies were released. 

The protagonist, Finnegan, is played by newcomer Emma Fuhrmann, and I list her as a newcomer because the film gives her the "and introducing" credit at the beginning. She didn't ultimately stick, not having a credit on IMDB in the last five years, but she did appear in the Adam Sandler movie Blended and in Avengers: Endgame, so there was a little juice there for a while -- and she gives a really good performance here.

But don't get side-tracked, Vance, because this is the plot synopsis portion of this post. 

I'd say she's really the co-protagonist, because the movie's biggest name is Morgan Freeman, who plays Finnegan's cantankerous neighbor in the titular lakeside town in some unspecified location of what I would guess is the Atlantic coast. (The interwebs tell me it was filmed in Greenwood Lake, New York. But I here I am getting sidetracked again.) He's only temporarily housesitting for a rock musician on tour, looking after the dog and trying to drink his way into an early grave. He's in a wheelchair and is a writer who no longer writes due to sorrow over the loss of his wife, some six years in the past. 

Like many cantankerous neighbors in the movies, Freeman's Monte Wildhorn has something to teach young Finnegan, who wants to become a writer, and she has something to teach him about not giving up on life. The lesson sharing is also going to hit Finnegan's mother, played by Viriginia Madsen, who is currently divorcing Finnegan's absentee dad, and who gives Monte a figure on whom to have a chaste crush that is chastely reciprocated. (In other words, this movie is not actually going to give Morgan Freeman and Viriginia Madsen a romantic relationship, not a huge shock since they're separated in age by nearly a quarter century. Interestingly, though, I'm currently looking at a British poster for the movie in which it is called Once More, and the poster certainly seems to suggest more of a relationship movie than the American poster above. Sidetrack much?)

Just from this basic setup, you can probably tell that this is a pretty mid concept for a movie and that you've seen a hundred such "heartwarming" tales if you've seen one. The fact that it was made by Reiner means that it is competent and likeable enough, even if it is entirely lacking in what you would call originality. 

Indeed, it's possible to map out every single step of this script, a collaboration between Reiner, Guy Thomas and Andrew Scheinman. You know the early scenes where Freeman is in full-on cantankerous mode are going to be played for comedy, though Freeman's nephew, played by Kenan Thompson, is actually the straight man here, at least in the scenes where Monte is moving into the house. After Thompson goes back from whence he came, then the comedy comes in the form of interactions with the neighbors and the dog, all of which are grumpy, but in that superficial movie way that is obviously going to melt away the moment Monte is required to do the right thing.

Because the movie is so basic from a screenplay level and in terms of any compelling reason for its existence, I don't think I need to go on at length about it. Then again, there are a lot of movies that we find pass the time well enough even though they do not need to exist, and for me, The Magic of Belle Isle was one of those. It was the perfect sort of movie to watch in the morning, which I did this past weekend on Sunday. 

If I'm looking for hallmarks of the Reiner signature, which I probably should be doing in a series like this, I'm not finding them in terms of the movie being funny, unfortunately. It's pleasant, and Freeman has and delivers some good lines of dialogue, but actually funny in the way Reiner's earlier films are funny? Not really, though I suspect that wasn't at the forefront of his thoughts considering that he was seeing his daughter earnestly in the role played by Fuhrmann. When that kind of thing is close to your heart, you aren't thinking about great comedy set pieces.

Still, the supporting cast is a really nice group with which to spend this time, as it also includes our dearly departed treasure Fred Willard, and Kevin Pollack in one scene. 

The movie is trying to bite off a little more than it can chew, as it's not enough for Monte to have a special relationship with Finnegan. He's also got to have a special relationship with the mentally challenged son of another neighbor, that neighbor being played by Jessica Hecht of Friends fame. Because Monte's primary energies are directed on Finnegan, that plot ends up feeling just about as superfluous as it certainly is from a narrative perspective. It's almost as though Reiner just wanted to make sure there was no chance we'd see Monte as an actual misanthrope.

If looking for Reiner connections, we should also note that Freeman had worked with him previously on The Bucket List. 

If I'm going chronologically, which at this point I will assume I am, next up in March will be probably the most difficult to watch of these previously unseen films, the 2015 film Being Charlie, which Reiner wrote with the son who went on to murder him. 

Sorry to end on such a cheery note.