I'm not taking a half day off work to see Marty Supreme

Here we are, down to my last post before I reveal my 2025 rankings tomorrow.

And as much as I would have liked to have written a post called "Final movies of the ranking year with Timothee Chalamet," it's not to be. 

You see, my last movie of 2024 was A Complete Unknown, which was a strangely timed Friday night advanced screening that capped off that ranking year. Similarly, this year, Chalamet appears in Marty Supreme, which opens in Australian cinemas today.

In another year, I would have gotten in Marty with ease, because I'd have had plenty of time after work to see the movie and to adjust my in-progress rankings accordingly for this final entry. It wouldn't be until 12:30 a.m. that night, which is of course really the next day, that I'd need to finalize those rankings. 

This year, though, I am going to see David Byrne in concert tonight. It was supposed to be with my wife, but she's had to be out of town, so it will be with my younger son, who basically doesn't know any Talking Heads or David Byrne. That should be interesting. 

When I first heard about this conflict, and didn't yet know my wife was going to be out of town, I imagined going into the office today, and then meeting her at the concert site in time for David to start plucking the strings. In between the end of my workday and the start of the concert, there would be a Marty Supreme-sized window of time -- or at least, the window of time necessary for a movie of moderate length, unlike the presumably bloated 149 minutes of Marty Supreme.

But now that I have to accompany my 12-year-old into the city, there just isn't the time, and I'm not willing to take a half day off just to fit in this movie.

Yeah, that was another option. And I have actually taken days off to fit in juicy new releases on the final day, which was necessary in 2014 for Inside Llewyn Davis and Her, and in 2016 for The Hateful Eight, Carol and The Big Short. (Those are the years in which the Januarys fell, not the release years of those movies.) 

But the cost-benefit analysis seems to favor at least two movies for this to be worth it, and considering that it's something I haven't done in ten years now, it's also something I haven't considered worth it in any respect in quite some time.

And certainly not for a movie that a critic I trust said gets very repetitious and ultimately exhausting, which I might have known from the movie to which it is drawing the most direct comparisons, Uncut Gems, also directed by Josh Safdie. Will-to-power narratives where the main character has an excessive amount of arrogance are not really my bag, especially not for the price of a half day's salary. 

You can't get in every movie, but this year, I got in a higher total than any other, and that will have to be enough.

A cinematic connection between New York City and Oklahoma!

I didn't expect to be writing about Richard Linklater's Blue Moon again so soon, but I guess that's the risk you run when you write about a movie in anticipation of an upcoming viewing. You never know what the actual viewing will inspire.

This is a superficial observation only, and maybe I could have fit it into one of my year-end wrap-up posts later this week, but let's just do it now and get it out of the way. I have nothing else planned for this particular Wednesday. 

Blue Moon makes you think a lot about New York City, where it is set, and the show Oklahoma!, which is the catalyst for change among its characters. As I was ruminating on these topics, I was reminded that it is not the only 2025 film that features both of these elements.

Spike Lee's Highest 2 Lowest memorably opens with drone shots (or maybe they're helicopter shots) of New York City, specifically the part of Brooklyn on the opposite side of the Brooklyn Bridge from Manhattan. And what music, counterintuitively, is playing over it?

Why that would be "Oh What a Beautiful Morning" from, you guessed it, Rodgers and Hammerstein's first and most popular collaboration, the one at the center of Blue Moon, Oklahoma!

But wait that's not all.

Of course in late 2025/early 2026, we're all thinking a lot about Rob Reiner. I've already written about the guy a good five times since he passed. And he's got a role in this as well. 

In Reiner's 1989 classic When Harry Met Sally, in one of their moments of bonding that is interrupted by Harry spotting his ex, Harry and Sally are walking through a store singing "Surrey With the Fringe On Top." The store is, of course, in Manhattan, and the song is, of course, from Oklahoma!

If there are more movies that would fit here, I'm not going to try to figure them out today. 

Accidental Christmas movies

I have a rule about not watching Christmas movies after Christmas. My rule is so extreme that I don't even really like to watch a Christmas movie on Christmas day. Christmas Eve is pretty much my cutoff. So January 19th is certainly out of the question.

But when it happens accidentally, well, there's not a lot I can do about that.

This was the case with The Baltimorons, my penultimate viewing of 2025 before I post my rankings early Friday morning my time. I was already committed to my $5.99 rental by the time I was ushered in to the movie by the familiar sounds of what sounded like the Vince Guaraldi version of "O Tannenbaum" from A Charlie Brown Christmas. (Looking it up online, I can see that this was just composer Jordan Seigel's loving homage/ripoff of Guaraldi.)

There were two reasons I had to doubt/never consider that The Baltimorons might be a Christmas movie:

1) The title. It wasn't A Baltimorons Christmas or Jingle Balts or something that would have given it away.

2) The release date. When I looked it up on IMDB to confirm its eligibility for 2025 -- this being a movie I only recently realized I should watch, it being directed by a Duplass brother -- I saw that it had hit U.S. theaters on September 5th. The second half of the year, at least, but not otherwise within the logical range of releasing it in conjunction with the holiday.

Of course, if I'd actually read its synopsis, I would have been set straight: "A newly sober man's Christmas Eve dental emergency leads to an unexpected romance with his older dentist as they explore Baltimore together."

I guess in the end I'm kind of glad I didn't, because I would have skipped it and then might have continued skipping it in perpetuity. When December rolls around each year, we tend to watch new Christmas movies and classic Christmas movies, rarely seeking out the middle ground between the two. 

But it wasn't only liking the movie enough to be glad I'd seen it. It was that I happened to also be taking down our Christmas tree last night, so it seemed appropriate.

Yes in my house we keep our Christmas tree up for most of January. Traditionally we don't take it down until Australia Day, which is next Monday, but I'm starting early this year. I'm giving up the ghost on Christmas. My wife is out of town and has been so all month, tending to a family matter. She won't be back by Australia Day, so unless she reads this, she won't even know I took it down early -- nor will she care. But it's been dead for several weeks now and in the Australian summer, that becomes a fire hazard.

I was slow-walking the undecorating. I'd started it the day before, but then got distracted by another household chore, since I'm doing all of them myself at this point. (I'm not bothering to make my kids help me with them. Let them have their summer.) But I resumed last night while watching the Australian Open, and soon I'd gotten all the ornaments I could see removed from the tree. In order to help see them better, I turned on the Christmas lights for the first time in probably two weeks.

That looks nice, I thought.

So I didn't unstring the nights, deciding I'd let them illuminate my second-to-last viewing of 2025, whatever it might be.

And of course it ended up being a Christmas movie. I felt the coziness of the holiday there in my living room, even on January 19th.

And it's kind of nice that the Michelle Pfeiffer film Oh. What. Fun. is not the only new Christmas movie I watched in 2025. That one was forgettable, or rather, bad enough to be memorable, which is probably worse. It didn't give me that warm fuzzy feeling.

This one did, and I'll take it, even on January 19th. 

A premature end to a long ranking year

The way I feel right now, totally exhausted, I'm not sure how anything could be "premature" about the end of ranking 2025 movies, which will come later this week after a record total ranked this year. I'll save any further discussions of that record for later in the week. 

It's premature only because it's not coming as much later in the week this week as it usually does.

The Oscar nominations are revealed at 12:30 a.m. Friday morning, my time, which is early Thursday morning in Los Angeles. I usually work it out so I have a movie finishing no later than 10:30 on Thursday night, giving me two hours to finalize things -- and to hope that the last movie I chose to watch doesn't totally throw a wrench in the parts of my rankings post I will have necessarily prewritten.

This year, that last viewing is early enough that any and all wrenches can be easily dealt with. 

At the moment my plan is to watch that final movie tomorrow night, Tuesday night rather than Thursday night, which means only two more total to watch, including whatever I watch tonight.

No, I haven't suddenly turned into the sort of person who finishes something well in advance of the deadline. I never finished a paper in college more than 12 hours before it was due, and it makes sense that I always work up to the deadline in this case, considering that the deadline itself is the thing that tells me it's time to stop watching movies. 

No, it's that this year, I have conflicts on not one, but both of the final two nights before my ranking deadline. 

And they both came in the form of Christmas presents. 

When I got tickets to the Australian Open, which will be my first time going since 2021, I noted the date of Wednesday the 21st and thought "Hmm, that's right before my ranking deadline." When it was later revealed that I got tickets to see David Byrne at the Sidney Myer Bowl, the very next night, I thought "Hmm, that's right on my ranking deadline."

Of course I did not make these thoughts known to the givers of the gifts. I just thanked them for their generosity, with plenty of real gratitude. Indeed, I am excited to do both things. 

But there was a part of me that acknowledged that this year's home stretch will feel a bit different, as I won't be running right up to the wire as I usually do, and am already now down to my last two movies of the year. Better choose carefully. 

I'm including the Blue Moon poster with this post because I expect this to be my last viewing. I've waited as long as I could for the rental price to come down on this one (it isn't out in Australian theaters yet) and it did, at some point, come down from $19.99 USD to $14.99. That's still a lot more than I've paid for any other rental this year, but at least I did save a couple bucks by waiting. If I wait until tomorrow night instead of watching it tonight, there's a small chance it will be down to $9.99 by then. 

I might have just let this one go by, but there's something I'm planning to do that requires me to have seen this movie, the details of which will be revealed later in the week.

I tell you, though, I won't mind having the extra time to smooth over my rankings, rather than feeling under the pump to get it just right with only two hours to spare. 

Twenty twenty-five was certainly a "different sort of year," to put it mildly, so I suppose it makes sense that I'd be finishing it in a slightly different manner. If we were going only on last year's ranking deadline, I'd already be on my second day of recap posts by today, so no wonder I feel so exhausted. 

Double Tap

No, I did not just revisit the sequel to Zombieland.

Yes, I did just confront my first Rob Reiner film since the director was killed last month. 

Two of them, actually.

As I mentioned in this post, in 2026 I am going to rewatch six of my favorite Reiner films and watch six previously unseen Reiner films for the first time, all part of intertwining bi-monthly series with the same name: Remembering Rob Reiner.

I also mentioned that I had a seventh of each type of movie that wouldn't directly fit into the series, so I'd watch them first as a double feature, before formally starting the first bi-monthly series later this month.

Those are, of course, This is Spinal Tap and its sequel, the 2025 new release Spinal Tap II: The End Continues. 

It's not every day you get a sequel to one of your top ten movies of all time, and that's what This is Spinal Tap is, currently my #9 on Flickchart. So why, you ask, didn't I rush out to see this when it was in theaters? Long before Reiner's sad demise? 

Well its September 12th release was smack dab in the middle of my trip to Europe. And though I did see two movies in the theater when I was in Europe, it wasn't playing at the Barcelona cinema within walking distance of my Air BnB when I saw The Conjuring: Last Rites on that exact day. As it turns out I didn't see another movie on the trip, but if I had, I was trying to catch One Battle After Another in Greece. 

I might have watched it earlier on video, but then came the sudden shocking news of Reiner's passing. I needed a few weeks to get over that. In fact, I might have taken longer, but now my ranking deadline is the end of next week, and I wanted to include The End Continues with my 2025 rankings.

Well, it was tremendous to watch this as a double feature, and each movie is so short that I think I watched them both in the time it took for the last battle to play out in Avatar: Fire and Ash. Not only are these movies short, but they have such delicious comedic pacing that they feel even shorter than they actually are. 

Now clearly, that is more of an attribute of the 1984 original, which benefits from the actors being young and spry, and from shooting in a number of different locations around the U.S. (Or at least setting scenes in a number of locations, whether they were actually shot there or not.) There was never any question as to which of these movies was going to be better in that regard. To even suggests that there could have been a question is silly. 

However, I did really appreciate how well these actors remembered how to play their roles. The best in that regard is Christopher Guest, even though we'd ordinarily give more credit for their ongoing abilities to Michael McKean (recently in Better Call Saul) and Harry Shearer (in The Simpsons for nearly 40 years now). Perhaps without the distractions of other significant work, Guest was better able to home in on what made Nigel Tufnel Nigel Tufnel. Though they all provide credible incarnations of their earlier selves as those characters. 

If there was one I was disappointed with, it may have been Shearer, possibly because he just doesn't have enough to do. Derek Smalls is a low-key MVP of the original film, the "lukewarm water," as he describes himself, that allows him to function as glue for the group -- which has a fairly literal interpretation now, as we see Derek as the proprietor of a glue museum. I just didn't feel like the character got so many opportunities to shine in this low-key way -- never stealing the scenes, but sometimes being the funniest aspect of them anyway -- in the new movie.

Still, I liked The End Continues even a bit more than I expected to, which is why I'm giving it four stars on Letterboxd. Yeah, some of that may be nostalgia and my out-sized love for the original. If you were to try to argue with me that this is really more of a 3.5-star movie, I'd cede the point to you pretty quickly. 

But the minor miracle this movie pulls off is how similar it feels to the original. And part of that is Reiner's central role, both as a director and as a character. He's playing the same Marty DiBergi here as well, the same earnest filmmaker who allowed Spinal Tap to be who they were on camera, never for a moment doing anything less than being perfectly generous to them. 

That was something I appreciated about Reiner's performance this time when watching the original. He certainly questions the things the musicians say -- the most famous example, of course, being when he wonders why they couldn't just make 10 the highest volume setting on the amplifier when the volume units are arbitrary units of measure anyway. But he never questions them with the intention of embarrassing them, and it's this kind of kindness that make us love both him and them. They are able to show their foibles, their imperfect understandings of the way things work, and he just continues to encourage them, though not, you sense, because he thinks it's dynamite footage that is going to make his movie better. 

In fact I think the only thing that didn't totally work for me about Spinal Tap II was its very last image, which I think I can spoil, but if you don't want to know what it is, you can skip the next paragraph after this SPOILER ALERT. 

Interviews play over the closing credits here just as they do in the original, another strong choice to remind us of that original. The final interview is with the band's current drummer, an enthusiastic young woman who happens to be gay, though that's not important right now. She's played by Valerie Franco, a real musician. The subject of this interview is of course her ability to survive her experience with the band without dying in a gardening accident, choking on vomit (hers or anyone else's) or spontaneously combusting. I could see the joke coming from a mile away, that she was then going to start choking on the piece of fruit she was eating, at which point DiBergi jumps in and starts to give her the Heimlich Maneuver. The movie ends on a mid-Heimlich freeze frame. I think it would have been stronger to end with one of the band members, preferably Nigel as in the original, and not on a freeze frame, which is a cinematic device that's beneath someone like Reiner. 

I could probably go on and on about both films, but I've seen This is Spinal Tap so many times that I'm not sure if I'm actually getting new things from it each time I see it. I did, however, want to delve into one thing that has always puzzled me but that I've never actually looked up before, so I just fed Google this prompt to see what AI would say:

"Why is Bruno Kirby listed prominently in the end credits of This Is Spinal Tap?"

You would reasonably say that Kirby has no bigger role in that movie than any other actor who has a cameo of a minute or less. Yet he gets the "And Bruno Kirby" credit at the end of the movie. Why?

Here's what AI says:

"Bruno Kirby is listed prominently in the end credits of This Is Spinal Tap (1984) because, despite having a relatively short on-screen role, his performance as Tommy Pischedda, the limo driver obsessed with Frank Sinatra, was a significant improvised contribution to the film's success."

Well that's dumb because they had to create the credits before they knew whether the movie would be a success. Wrong again, AI. 

I guess that one will remain a mystery. Maybe he was better known at the time than the others who made cameos. AI goes on to speculate that it has to do with his close relationship with Reiner, appearing in several of Reiner's movies, but that's another retroactive analysis, considering that this was Reiner's first film. 

As for the sequel, I did enjoy the bits that I thought some others may have had issue with, like the cameos by Paul McCartney and Elton John. But in terms of "Can they still do it," I was indeed impressed by the vocal and musical fortitude of these three actors in their late 70s and early 80s (Shearer is 82). Any staging they did of any song we knew was a pretty darn good version of that song, as far as I was concerned, especially the little studio bit they did of, I believe, "Give Me Some Money," which ends with them fading out into just quieter and quieter repititions of the chorus. Some great harmonica, which I assume was real, by McKean there, too. I also love their reaction to realizing they've just been in total harmony and knocked out of the park.

The great thing about both movies is that this kind of earnestness is embedded within a world defined by partying and showboating. They allow us to see the humans beneath the rock stars. And that's Reiner all over, earnest to a fault, earnest to the end. 

I don't know what the form will be of Spinal Tap at Stonehenge: The Final Finale. For what it's worth, Reiner is not listed on IMDB as an actor in this movie, so it could just be a concert film, without a lot of jokes or great moments from characters we know and love. Maybe it was conceived just as a way to show us how much these men could really do as musicians.

I'll take any last little bit I can get, because it will, indeed, be the last. 

Seeing the one-timers twice in 2026

I've told you about my bi-monthly series in 2026 -- which is actually two intertwining bi-monthly series with the same name but slightly different functions -- but I have yet to reveal the details of my proper monthly series. 

Well friends, the wait is over.

(You weren't actually waiting.)

This one is about my Flickchart, or uses it to get the movies, in any case. (Actually, the bi-monthly series, at least one of them, sort of does as well.)

First I should say that I expect my experience with Flickchart to change at some point in 2026.

I'm a "Flickchart insider," which means I know personally (though not IRL) the Flickchart creators, and then all sorts of Flickchart superfans who communicate with each other in a Flickchart Facebook group, and do movie challenges. One of the two creators, who I know significantly better than the other, shares the same favorite band with me, Nine Inch Nails, so we chat about them from time to time. I also take pride in having recommended him one of his favorite movies of all time, also one of mine, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, in one of the aforementioned challenges.

Anyway, from chats in this group, I have been expecting a change in the core dueling mechanisms of Flickchart, for something like ten years now. It's been known as v. 2, and indeed, they've been working on it forever. Some users are currently beta testing it, though it has a lot of bugs at this point. Viewing this as an outsider in that sense that I'm not one of the ones on v. 2 yet, though I could be if I wanted to, I know it uses a strange, more counterintuitive algorithm for how films duel each other and how they move within your chart once they win or lose that duel. I suppose it's strange to me only because I don't understand it.

For now, I am happy to not yet be on this new version. Because as I've told you many times in the past, I like to keep an offline version of my Flickchart in an Excel spreadsheet. Which is easy to do, because a victorious movie just jumps one head of the movie it beats, which is easy to keep on top of in a spreadsheet. This new method may not be so easy.

I probably didn't need to give you this whole preamble, though I do think this prospective change in the ranking mechanism happens to lend additional urgency to doing this series this year, because I'm not sure what my chart will look like after I'm ported over to v. 2 along with all the other Flickchart users out there in the world. 

So what I want to do in 2026 is rewatch my 12 favorite movies, according to Flickchart, that I've seen only once. I am calling these "one-timers," and so the series will be called Audient One-Timers.

Now, the term "one-timer" usually connotates a movie with either subject matter you can't bear to sit through a second time, or gargantuan length. Both of those will likely apply here to some extent. In fact, I can think of one movie each in my top 100 that could potentially qualify for each.

But in my case, it's more literal, in that it's a movie I love, but I've only seen it once.

The purpose of this will be twofold:

1) If you love a movie, you should see it more than once. That's just being kind to yourself. It's always good to expose ourselves to things we love a second time. 

2) If you love a movie, you should prove to yourself that you actually love it by a second viewing, especially if you are committing that love to the "permanence" of something like Flickchart.

So yes it's possible that some of these will be movies I don't love as much on the second time -- in fact, I'm pretty sure that's inevitable. At the moment, I don't plan to forcibly re-rank them on Flickchart to a more appropriate position after each viewing, though there have been some instances in the past where a rewatch has revealed a Flickchart position so out of whack with my actual thoughts on the film, that I've been compelled to do this anyway. My most recent experience with Field of Dreams, for example -- as described here -- was one such case. 

The end result should be that I've seen every movie in my top 175 on Flickchart at least twice. That's right, my current 12th highest one-timer is exactly at #175 on my Flickchart. 

Now, it's possible I will end up having to watch some movies that are ranked lower a second time, because there may be some of these that I can't get my hands on for a second viewing. Their lack of availabililty may be why I've only watched them once. 

But I'd still like to start out with my 12th best one-timer first, and go forward from there. It's more exciting to build toward the best than starting off at the best. And then if there's a higher ranked movie I can't find, that month I will shift and watch the 13th best, or the 14th best if it happens twice, even though that means going out of order for at least that one month. 

I should note two other rules:

1) If, through the normal course of dueling movies on Flickchart, a movie that is not currently among my top 12 one-timers defeats a higher ranked film, and therefore becomes part of my top 12, I will do my best to include it. This is not particularly likely to happen, but it could happen.

2) Even less likely is that a brand new viewing will be so beloved by me that I will rank it within that top 175 just from a first viewing. I don't think it serves any point to just go immediately watch this movie a second time because it is now within my top 12, so if such a thing happens, I will exclude it from consideration for this series. (That's especially less likely because I remain very far behind in adding my new viewings to Flickchart.)

I'm including as the art of this post my current 15th best one-timer, because a) I think it's unlikely to be part of this series, and b) even if it were to come up as a potential replacement for a higher-ranked unavailable movie, I doubt I could find it. John Cameron Mitchell's 2006 film Shortbus, currently my #191 on Flickchart, contains scenes that can accurately be described as pornography, or pretty darn close to it. It's also beautiful and made me cry. However, the porn adjacent aspects are what made it very difficult for me to get my hands on originally, and potentially impossible to get now. 

One-timers, they come in all shapes and sizes. And in 2026, I will be engaging with a dozen of them, either deepening my appreciation of them, or potentially, at worst, sending them to a more appropriate place on my Flickchart than they've been occupying since I saw them, in many cases years in the past.

Seems like a worthwhile venture to me. 

Broken English

I'm so focused on seeing movies from the just completed year in January, that I clearly remember the movies I've seen that fall outside those goals. 

To show you how far back my memory goes on these things, in January of 2017, for example, I clearly remember watching the 2009 film Mystery Team while we were staying in Los Angeles and I was in the home stretch of my viewings for that year. That viewing was on the 7th of January, and came up as a joint viewing with my wife -- I'm sure a reluctant viewing on my part, but I'm also sure that I never let on about it, because any time she wants to watch a movie with me, I'm game for whatever it is.

Then two years ago it was an unscheduled rewatch, on the 14th of January, while we were away for the weekend with friends. They wanted to watch something that our older kids could also watch -- I'm pretty sure my younger son was sequestered elsewhere for this one -- and though I'm sure I tried to nudge them toward a 2023 release, what we ended up watching was Michael Bay's The Rock. The funny thing is, most of the people watching ended up peeling off before it ended, and because I like to complete what I started (so I can add it to my lists, in this case my list of rewatches), I was one of the few who finished.

Of course I am leading up to telling you about that exception for this year, which will live on in my memory largely because of how much I disliked it.

First I should tell you that we are becoming big Rowan Atkinson fans in my household. A few years ago we really got into watching Man vs. Bee, his Netflix TV series about an extended fight between a housesitter and a buzzing insect in a fancy smart home, which I actually wrote about here despite the fact that it is not a movie. (And yes, my mention of it now means that I am tagging this not-movie for the second time on my movie blog.)

Well, Atkinson has made a sequel to Man vs. Bee called Man vs. Baby, which we also watched earlier this month -- though should have watched last month because it's set at Christmas. Oh well, I bent my usual rules that stipulate you aren't allowed to watch Christmas-related material after Christmas. I think I enjoyed this one even more, because Atkinson's main character is less cringe-worthy and more competent this time around, which is something we really want for this charming, loveable goof. 

That is not the charming, loveable goof I got when I watched Johnny English with my younger son a few nights ago. He rewatched Man vs. Bee after we watched Man vs. Baby and was primed for more Atkinson material. 

It was actually me that suggested my own reluctant viewing this time around, but only because he had already told me he'd looked up the Johnny English movies to figure out where we might find them on our various streaming services. At the time he mentioned it, it was in the context of something we might do together at some unspecified future date. A couple hours later, I got the benefit of seeming like a hero for "spontaneously" suggesting it for that very evening, which proved to him that I hadn't earlier been just nodding in generic consent without ever intending to do anything about it.

Now that I've seen Johnny English, I'm not sure I have any interest in seeing the sequels, even as a gesture of good fathering to my son.

I think my son did like it more than I did, but he probably couldn't have liked it less. 

My biggest problem is that this movie does not showcase the same kind but hopeless Atkinson that we usually get, who stumbles into disaster despite his best intentions. I don't know that I want Atkinson to play the same role in everything, but the specific comedic persona he had built on things like Mr. Bean and later burnished with the Man vs. shows does make you long to see that brand put to use. (I also showed my son his one scene in Four Weddings and a Funeral, because obviously it would not be worth watching the whole movie just for that one scene -- not for a 12-year-old.)

And to be fair, I'm not sure that this is the type of role Atkinson has always played. Although I didn't watch the whole series and I saw the parts of it I saw many years ago, I think his role in Blackadder was probably a lot more acerbic. 

Still, it was not what we were hoping for, to see him as an idiot, yes, but more of a blowhard idiot, whose embarrassments result more from terrible assumptions and the ways he parades around like a fool in the prosecution of those assumptions. Maybe a purely bumbling secret agent would have been too similar to the existing incarnations of Inspector Gadget, but this was the version of Atkinson we wanted but did not get in Johnny English. We wanted to like him, at least, but Johnny English made that impossible.

More to the point, it just wasn't funny. This is not easily quantifiable, except that I can tell you the only laughs I squeezed out were forced, so my son would not think I was entirely hating the experience. When he laughed, it was with some uncertainty, and he had to look over to me to see what I thought -- which read to me as an attempt to force his own laughter. 

The one thing I did really like in the movie was Natalie Imbruglia, the singer of the big pop hit "Torn," who I had either forgotten or never known also tried to be an actress for a short time. It's unclear to me why she didn't succeed. She's beautiful here, but also has plenty of charisma and as much of the necessary other skills that this sort of love interest role requires. 

Given that the movie was enough of a hit to prompt two more sequels, you couldn't say that its poor reception was the thing that prevented her from getting more than just a sporadic amount of further work. Maybe people at the time thought that everything in the movie worked except for Natalie Imbruglia, whereas I thought just the opposite. (Another of the movie's casualties: John Malkovich with a very exaggerated French accent.)

If I do watch the sequels, suffice it to say that I'll try to push them until after I've finished watching 2025 movies. At least the next one will be free on one of our services. (Yes, I had to pay to rent the first, adding insult to injury.)

Domestic discord with the live-in help double feature

I said yesterday that I wanted to watch some 2025 movies that didn't cost me anything, so then later yesterday I saw two of them -- and they were both on the same theme.

I have to admit the thematic pairing was not a total coincidence. Once I'd already gone to the theater for a 4:30 showing of The Housemaid, free thanks to my critics card, it was easy to recall that the remake of The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, a Hulu original, is available on Disney+ in Australia. 

So it seemed like a good time to get in all my psychopathic maids, psychopathic nannies, psychopathic matriarchs and psychopathic patriarchs, whatever the case may be. (I won't spoil it and tell you which movies contain which, or if some are not in any, but this covers all the possibilities so as to keep things vague.)

I didn't realize how much beyond their superficial similarities these two movies would have in common. And to consider those similarities, I should probably issue a SPOILER ALERT, though the spoilers don't get into anything really juicy about the resolution of either of the plots. 

And since the similarities all have to do with the pairs of women vying for power in the household, and that a housekeeper and a nanny are not exactly the same type of live-in help, I'll refer to them as "the matriarch" and "the outsider."

Consider:

1) In both movies, the matriarch is prone to tirades as a result of a history of mental instability. 

2) In both movies, the oldest daughter also has some version of these emotional problems. 

3) In both movies, the outsider is seen living or recently lived in her car.

4) In both movies, the outsider buys a six-pack of cupcakes with extra frosting as a way of ingratiating herself to the oldest daughter. (I thought this one seemed very specific.)

5) In both movies, the sexuality of the outsider is a threat to the matriarch, though potentially not always because of its impact on her husband. 

6) In both movies, one of the two women lost her family in a fire when she was a young girl, though it's the matriarch in one and the outsider in the other. It's heavily implied that the person whose family was lost was actually responsible for the fire.

7) Again SPOILER ALERT, but in both movies it's ultimately revealed that the person whose family was lost was not responsible for the fire -- though that doesn't mean someone in the movie wasn't responsible for it. 

There were others I thought of as I was watching Hand, but these were the ones I remembered when I started taking notes halfway through. 

Unfortunately, both movies also get only 2.5 stars from me.

Without getting into further spoiler territory that's unnecessary to get into right now, The Housemaid takes a turn at some point that complicates the assumptions we've had all along. This turn dragged the movie up from being something I wasn't enjoying very much to something that felt like it had more promise, but then it came back down to earth as fairly conventional by the end. 

As for The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, the thing I cherish about the Curtis Hanson original is how it showcases that director's excellence with tight genre films, the other example being The River Wild. While that movie gets great mileage from playing out in a straightforward manner, this one needed to do more than that to interest me in 2025. (Release year of the movie, not the year in which I saw it.) One thing I'll say, though, is that Ariel Marx's score is one of my favorites of the year, and the movie is almost worth seeing just for its music. 

It strikes me that this is not the only pair of 2025 movies where one is sort of a remake of the earlier movie, and then one is an actual remake/sequel. The same can be said of The Monkey and Final Destination: Bloodlines. Both movies involve gruesome deaths that play out in a manner that seems preordained, though The Monkey is only a spiritual remake of Final Destination, while Bloodlines is obviously the latest in that series. However, in that case, both of those movies earned four stars from me and are currently both in my top 30 for the year. 

The expensive time of my movie year

Movies are expensive these days -- but not usually for me.

Yes, I did have to pay something like $160 for me and my two sons to watch Avatar: Fire and Ash last week, which is in AUD, and which also includes snacks. That was going to happen in a 3D viewing anyway, but adding to that, we were out of town, so my critics card would not have worked. (And it's not really fair to count money spent on the tickets for other people.)

Normally, though, theater tickets are "cheap as" -- to use the Australian phrasing -- due to the aforementioned critics card, which allows me free entry. It's hard to get cheaper than free. 

But when a bunch of must-see rentals get stacked up and all have to be watched within a short period of time? That's when things get expensive.

And because I've already watched most of the movies that I want to see that are available for me on streaming -- we'll see if I fit in an F1 viewing before next Thursday -- it's gotten expensive since the start of the year. 

Let's go back to Christmas. Since Christmas, I've watched and spent the following, with the currency listed afterward. (I buy things both through U.S. iTunes and through Australian Amazon, so two different currencies. AUD is usually about 60% of the value of USD.) I've watched these:

12/26 - The Long Walk - $6.99 AUD
1/1 - Him - $6.99 AUD
1/5 - Sorry, Baby - $6.99 AUD
1/7 - The Smashing Machine - $6.99 AUD
1/8 - It Was Just an Accident - $9.99 USD
1/9 - The Naked Gun - $6.99 AUD
1/10 - On Becoming a Guinea Fowl - $5.99 USD
1/10 - One Battle After Another (second viewing) - $6.99 AUD
1/10 - Splitsville - $6.99 AUD
1/12 - Twinless - $5.99 USD

And yes I finally saw Twinless! (See here.) 

The one thing I haven't had to do -- yet, anyway -- is splurge for the $19.99 USD premium rental. That usually happens in my final few days, when I've waited as long as I can wait for the rental price to go down but I just have to have the movie -- usually a movie released late in the year in the U.S. that has not yet been released in Australia.

The most expensive I've gone so far is the $9.99 USD rental of It Was Just an Accident, which is why that movie gets the art for this post. That was my "best get" of the season so far and best reminder why my U.S. iTunes subscription has such value to me. The movie doesn't even come out here until January 29th. And that viewing certainly paid off, as the movie became an instant contender.

Just because I have been shelling out so much money, by my standards, I'm looking to find a way to add some movies without money. And hey! I can do that by going to the theater! There are a number of things that came out on Boxing Day here that interest me, such as The Housemaid, Song Sung Blue and Rental Family, and I might see one of them today after work.

Then there are also a few lesser priorities available on streamers. For some reason, though, I just can't seem to pull the trigger on F1. 

Nagging inconsistencies in One Battle After Another

I teased you yesterday that I might not reveal, at least not before I reveal my rankings in ten days, whether One Battle After Another rose in my estimation after a second viewing. 

Clearly there was a part of me that wanted it to rise, to jump into the upper half of my top ten so my feelings would be consistent with those of the rest of the critical community, to say nothing of the audience community. After all, I did watch it for the first time on the same day I returned from Europe, which could have muted my appreciation of the film for all sorts of different reasons. 

Well, I held off on revealing this for exactly one day. 

And I'm writing about it because I do want to air some of the nitpicks that prevent me from embracing it quite as warmly as some other people do. (I do embrace it, just not as much as they do.)

Let's start with Leonardo DiCaprio's Bob Ferguson, a.k.a. Ghetto Pat, a.k.a. Rocketman. 

The thing people seem to relish most about the character -- and I would argue the movie, at least from a comedic perspective -- is his ongoing tete-a-tete with Comrade Joshua, who refuses, over the course of two different phone calls, to give Bob the rendezvous point because Bob can't answer the question "What time is it?"

Bob's anger over Joshua's apparent pettiness is funny, though Joshua is only doing what he's been told to do, based on prudent precautions, especially at a time when their whole network is threatened. That's not what bothers me. It's Bob's attitude toward these safeguards that is problematic, given his own recent behavior toward his daughter, Willa.

Bob was the one exercising possibly superfluous caution, when his daughter left for the dance, what, an hour earlier? Even though this was just an ordinary Tuesday at their house -- okay probably a Friday, since they don't usually hold school dances on Tuesdays -- Bob had to give her his whole song and dance about taking the trust device with her. You know, the thing his fellow revolutionary programmed to play a tune when in range of another such trust device.

Obviously this bit is just for our benefit in the audience, but it does play awkwardly within the reality of these characters' world. For one, it's been 16 years since Bob fled with baby Willa, and they have no reason to think, on this particularly Tuesday, their years of quiet and successful hiding was about to be overturned. He wouldn't need to specifically tell her to bring the trust device; bringing it or not bringing it would just be part of their standard routine. They wouldn't be discussing it this night, one way or another. 

Given that Bob does, however, make a big deal out of it, it's hard to then yield him the moral high ground an hour later when he takes the same eyeball-rolling perspective toward Comrade Joshua that his daughter is taking toward him. We meet Bob as a defender of these methods of identifying simpatico souls, so it's hard to fully be on his side when he repeatedly tears Joshua a new one for requiring the same standard of caution. (Or for us to be on the same side as the other comrade, who ultimately gets Bob approved, but who then makes Joshua apologize, genuinely and profusely, just for doing his job.)

Bob specfiically talks about how he doesn't remember the "code speak," but didn't he tirelessly teach his daughter the same code speak? When she's confronted in the high school bathroom by Deandra -- that trust device sure came in handy quickly -- she repeats back the necessary phrases without any difficulty. She could only do this, of course, if Bob had taught them to her. Not only taught them, but repeatedly drilled them in, so she would never forget them. Which she did not. (Incidentally, you'd think having the trust device would probably be enough, but I guess Deandra wanted an additional level of proof -- even if this 16-year-old standing in front of her could not possibly be working for Steve Lockjaw, and looks exactly like Deandra would expect her to look.)

I think I might be even more troubled by the callback to this code speak in the finale. I probably don't need to issue a SPOILER ALERT but let's just get it out of the way just to be sure.

So after Willa has dispatched the Christmas Adventurer, who could not respond properly to her listing of the names of the three TV shows, she applies the same standard on Bob as he timidly creeps into range of her weapon. I believe the first time she calls out the names of the shows, she hasn't yet clearly seen him. She's obviously amped up and on high alert after just killing a man. 

But the second time she asks for the names of the shows and wants Bob's response, she's already heard his voice, already seen the unmistakeable shambling shape of his bathrobe, and yet she's still not certain this isn't just some exceptional Bob impersonator. I think we are meant to believe she's shell-shocked, but Anderson is trying to create a legitimate worry in the audience that she might shoot Bob, to increase the tension of the moment. I just don't buy it. She's been so eager for a final delivery from this nightmare scenario that it just reads as false that she would be genuinely questioning Bob's identity.

And while we're on the topic of contrivances, I've got a few more:

1) After all is said and done, they just return to living in the same house again? Yes they believe Steve Lockjaw is dead -- he is, but not in the way they think -- but that only means the end of his own pursuit of the pair. Aren't they still wanted for domestic terrorism? Aren't there others who would still be coming after them -- especially at their last known address?

2) The only reason Willa even gets to the end of the movie alive is because the Native American tracker hired by Lockjaw has second thoughts and decides not to leave her in the clutches of the murderous mercenaries, who will kill her without blinking. We are meant to believe that this man does things for pragmatic reasons only. We know he has enough of a code of honor not to kill children, but we also know he knows he's actually playing a role in Willa's imminent death by delivering her to the murderous mercenaries. What did he see about them that would have caused him to change his mind? Did one of the guys have too many tattoos for his liking? So this man, who exists pragmatically and consorts with dirty characters like Steve Lockjaw, decides to his endanger his own life to free Willa, and indeed, does pay for it with his life. I'm tempted to say the only reason he does this is that he's a Native American and the film is squeamish about portraying him negatively, but I think there would have been a cleaner and more plausible way to write this.

3) The only reason Bob even gets to end of the movie alive is because of the extremely poor chain of custody once he's arrested in Baktan Cross. You can almost see Anderson waving his hand through this sequence of events, where two hospital workers conspire to get him out of his handcuffs and down a fire escape. Given that Bob is specifically listed as a target by Lockjaw when he lays out the mission parameters to his team -- a target they planned to "bag and tag," no less -- it seems incomprehensible that there would not have been someone, even Lockjaw himself, overseeing this man in a bathrobe taken into custody after falling off a roof. The arresting officer would not mention this suspicious bit of behavior, especially by a guy who was clearly not an illegal immigrant? How could Lockjaw's team, always portrayed as ruthlessly efficient, botch this one so badly?

My feelings about One Battle After Another did not go up after a second viewing, but they did not go down either. The movie is sitting in the exact spot in my rankings where it sat before I watched it a second time, which you will see, in a few weeks, is quite high.

But I don't think these are just nitpicks. They are, in some cases, genuine plot holes. I didn't even mention the contrived nature of Lockjaw's villain ranting as he hands Willa over to the tracker. If he truly wanted the tracker to believe that she was a "bad hombre" who wouldn't be missed, someone guilty of genuine if unspecified crimes against the U.S.A., why would he indulge in a final rant about how if things had gone differently they could have gotten to know each other? You would not talk about the missed opportunity of getting to know a drug dealer. Who knows how much this contributed to the tracker's ultimate decision to free Willa.

Films heaped with the kind of praise that One Battle After Another has gotten should not have as many questions like this as One Battle After Another has. People are saying it's perfect, when clearly it is not.

So now I have a link I can send to anybody, any time they wonder why I ranked the movie "only" in the spot where I'll end up ranking it. 

A bad back = more movies

Around this time of year, I tend to take my Letterboxd watchlist, which I've been cultivating all year, and refine it further by writing down a bunch of titles I still realistically plan to see before my ranking deadline, on a piece of paper in my notebook. Then I'll go through and cross them off. Hey, there are fewer and fewer reminders of the way we used to do things in this world. I'll opt in on any I can.

I might be going through more of the realistic titles than I expected to, thanks to a bad back. 

I don't know how it happened, but on Friday, getting up from my desk, I felt a quick, sharp pain in my back. It's important to tie it to that exact moment, because that's the moment something could have "happened," if something did indeed happen. However, I assure you, there was nothing unusual about this rise from my desk chair to my feet. Maybe this is just old age rearing its head.

But I've spent much of the 48 hours since then wondering if it might be something much more serious. 

I wasn't limited in my actions for the rest of the day on Friday, and I even went in our pool -- for the first time this summer -- with my son. (It's been a cool summer, and only just got really hot in the past week.) By dinner time, though, the pain and stiffening in my lower right back got worse, and I took myself up to my bed to watch The Naked Gun. Unfortunately, I started it way too early to have it be the last thing I did that night, but also too late to try to watch something else after it finished. Around that 10:45 finish time, it was all I could do to keep my eyes open. (Loved The Naked Gun, by the way, and hope to write about it separately at some point.)

That early sleep time left me awake at 3:30 a.m., wondering if I might have appendicitis. 

Now, I'd already googled the symptoms the day before. For appendicitis, the pain is supposed to start in your belly and then move to your lower abdomen. There's also supposed to be fever, nausea and vomiting. I had none of those symptoms. However, I also googled whether back pain could be part of appendicitis and of course it can be. AI will confirm any worry you have if you just phrase it correctly.

This all might have been less worrisome if my wife were in town, but she's not. She's visiting her mother in Tasmania and won't be back until the 18th. So it was on me to decide if I had appendicitis and then if I needed to take myself to the hospital, and how soon. Could I wait for my younger son to wake up, between 7 and 8? Did I dare wait for the older one to wake up, between 11 and 12? Or should I go right now?

I did eventually fall back to sleep, and the symptoms had not worsened by the time I finally got out of bed. So I decided to just monitor them.

They never got any worse, but it was to the point where I couldn't properly bend over, and any action that required any sort of support from my right hip/lower back was only accomplished with pain and great difficulty. So I knew that instead of taking the kids out to go clothes shopping that day, I would spend the day in bed, hoping that this was the right means of tending to the issue, which I was now thinking of more as a slipped disc. However, I'd also be attuned to any worsening, spreading, or indeed, the onset of nausea. 

So yes, I watched two more movies yesterday than I would have. I might have eventually scratched them off my long list, but the daytime viewing slot for my first movie -- On Becoming a Guinea Fowl -- guaranteed its inclusion on this year's list, when the Zambian film might otherwise have fallen into the "too hard bucket" if I'd left it for one night after work.

I found myself frustrated with this film for reasons having to do with frustration with the characters. I think the point of this film is that the patriarchy in this village is poisonous, dismissing the concerns of the female characters, many of whom have been abused in some way by the man who has just died, Uncle Fred, whose funeral celebrations seem to go on for more than a week. I think it was the director's point that the memorializing of this awful man is way out of scale with what he actually deserved, but this was a case where I felt like I demanded a justice that this film was not ready to give us -- or at least not in any clear, traditional manner. The actual ending of the film is open to interpretation. 

I also split this movie in half, thinking I'd have the chance to watch the whole thing before the Celtics game, but then needing to take a nap. I suppose that did not help it.

The next movie I watched all the way through, but this is one that I didn't need to scratch off my list because I'd already seen it. Yes, I had my second date with One Battle After Another, which was another thing that could have fallen by the wayside, this time because of its length. But I did want to give the movie one more shot at being higher on my list -- where it was already set to receive a very respectable ranking. Whether that happened or not, I will save for another time.

Finally I finished with Splitsville, probably a good thing to watch while my wife was out of town, given its subject matter involving open marriages. Really liked this one as well.

I might have gone into more about all of these movies except the purpose of this post is mostly to just tell you that I'm here and still watching movies. It had been a few days since I last posted, which is unusual in January, where I'm usually so overflowing with content that I have twice, in recent years, had streaks of more than 30 consecutive days with a post at this time of year. That ain't happening this year. Again, 2025 has been a challenging one.

And now, at least if I do suddenly pass from a ruptured appendix, you'll have one last post from me before I go. 

Far and away the best thing about Anaconda

When we were at the cinema yesterday to see Avatar: Fire and Ash, we almost became material supporters of the last movie we'd seen at the cinema, which I truly did not like. My son liked it more than I did, so I could have justified it on those grounds.

However, the only grounds on which I needed to justify it is that a good piece of movie merchandise is a good piece of movie merchandise, no further discussion needed.

And that good piece of movie merchandise is what you see here, a popcorn bucket with a snake mouth at the top in support of Anaconda. 

At first I thought it might have been a drinking vessel, despite its enormous girth, the type you usually only see in the case of popcorn containers. I thought that otherwise, the venmous jaws might be too hard to reach your arm around to get to the popcorn, whereas a straw would just slip comfortably by. 

But then I remembered we weren't in America, the only place in the civilized world that has drinking vessels the size of popcorn tubs.

My 12-year-old would not have asked me to buy this. He's too good of a kid, not the kind who whines until he gets something. No, it was me myself who was going to be the driver of this purchase, especially since I knew he wanted that large popcorn. 

When we asked the price, though, the gentleman behind the counter asked if we were Village Rewards members. I told him we were not. 

He said it was $55 without membership, $27 with. 

Now, he probably would have allowed me to sign up right then and there and get the $27 price, which would have been a totally reasonable price to pay for such a thing. But neither my son nor I considered that, in part, probably, because it was time to get in and take our seats, and any additional admin might have endangered the start of Avatar. (Of course there were still approximately 27 minutes worth of ads after we took our seats.) 

I made a point of thanking my son for being such a good kid and not whining until he got it. I don't think he's every done that once, actually. 

Besides, as great as it is in the moment, a thing like that just goes home and gets thrown in a box and has to be thrown away at some point.

Probably the best thing to do would have been to buy it when we saw Anaconda, before we (or at least I) knew that it was terrible, but it wasn't a Village cinema where we saw the movie. They had only the normal popcorn tubs at that cinema. 

As a bit of a joke I asked the man if it cost anything for me to take a picture of it. Fortunately he knew I was joking, got a big grin and told me to go for it. 

So here's also one with the mouth closed:

I lost all hope several times during Avatar

We went horseback riding on my honeymoon back in 2008. I'm not a huge horseback riding guy, so any amount of horseback riding might have been more than I wanted, but we got a lot more than we bargained for on this particular outing in the jungles of Belize. I had the horse that liked to gallop, while my wife, the more trained rider, had the equine version of Eeyore, trudging through the woods at a snail's pace. There was one moment when I could be heard yelling, helplessly, "Too fast! Too fast! Too fast!" Fortunately, I was never thrown -- which could have been a disaster, since the guy at our eco resort told us about one thrown rider who had to spend the whole afternoon having the spikes of a local plant removed from her arm.

There arrived a time in the day when, after waiting as long as I possibly could, I ventured to ask the guide how far away we were from the resort. I expected him to say "Oh it's just around the next bend" or "Just another ten minutes, sir." Instead he revealed to me that we still had a full hour left to go. 

This is how I felt when I first checked the time during Avatar: Fire and Ash with my sons.

Now, I don't usually have my phone on at all during a movie. They only tell you to silence your phones these days, but I always turn mine all the way off. But with this particular film -- this particular three hour and 17-minute film -- I thought it would be a good idea to know how close we were to the end, because I was worried about one of my two viewing companions.

Although it was two-and-a-half years ago now, and he would have only been nine at the time, my memory is still fresh of how my younger son couldn't handle The Flash, and required us to leave after less than 15 minutes. It wasn't that the subject matter itself was so assaultive to him, but that he couldn't handle the loudness of the film and some of its overwhelming visuals. 

So Avatar -- a loud, visually overwhelming film, especially when watched in 3D -- could have been a recipe for disaster for him, even though he has subsequently survived plenty of loud and visually oppressive films on a slightly smaller scale. Never mind the fact that he also feels a bit embarrassed about forcing me to leave The Flash and would not likely let a similar thing happen again. (Have I held it over him? I hope not, but I suspect I have let some comments drop here and there that could be interpreted as passive aggressive.)

I thought, if I were able to determine how much time was left, I'd know whether I could push him through to the end, or if it was too far off to do that. Which, actually, was sort of a faulty idea from the start, since any Flash-style reaction to the stimuli would have happened in those first few minutes of the movie, not the last few. 

Turns out, it was me who needed to check the time -- though I wished I hadn't. 

I had made the argument that I thought the movie would never be boring, and would not seem like more than 180 minutes. I didn't know if I believed my own argument, but it was an attempt to try to set the kids at ease. Not that either of them needed the encouragement. They were both keen to see the movie. 

Well, due to the problematic narrative structure of the film -- it reaches a point partway through when a non-James Cameron filmmaker might have split it in two -- there did indeed come a storytelling lull, which you will probably remember if you've seen it. It was around here that I dared to check my phone, thinking we were at least halfway through the running time. 

Nope. We still had two hours to go.

Two hours!

I knew our 10:45 showing was scheduled to get out around 2:25, so I was under no delusions about the length of this experience. I just couldn't imagine we were only around an hour and 20 minutes into that experience. 

Fortunately I had the good sense not to tell either of my kids about how long we had left. Though this did set off a flurry of me checking every 20 minutes or so for the rest of the movie. I did occasionally get caught up in what was happening, and sometimes when I checked, more time had passed since I last checked than I feared had passed. Though sometimes it was way, way less.

Say what you will about either of the previous two Avatar films, but at least in both cases they felt like single stories -- single very long stories, but single stories nonetheless. Checking their times just now, I'm surprised I didn't remember that Avatar: The Way of Water was only five minutes shorter than this, because indeed, the time did pass faster in that one. The original Avatar seems like a model of restraint by comparison, clocking in at a modest 162 minutes. 

But by the third film in the series, Cameron has accumulated so many characters who need to have their own story arcs -- there are about four "chosen one" characters in this story alone -- that it's just way too much story for one movie. At the same time, it feels underdeveloped in the way Cameron stories often do. 

For their part, my kids did pretty well with it, though I could tell they were also exhausted. For my younger son, he had his 3D glasses removed at some points, his shoes removed at others. He did a lot of wriggling around, which is funny because he was the best equipped of the three of us to handle the cramped seating. My older son wasn't fidgety like that, but he engaged in the single most symbolic act of despair during the whole movie, at one point crossing his arms on the seat in front of them and burying his head in them, as if fully defeated. Fortunately, this only lasted about two to three minutes.

Despite all this, and despite the fact that I had to take an hour-long nap when I got home, we all enjoyed the movie to varying degrees. In a situation like this, I am likely to award the film "achievement points," which basically comes down to a half-star higher than the movie is really worth, based just on the difficulty of making it. I mean no doubt, all these movies are very impressive achievements, meaning I'm ultimately giving it 3.5 stars even though it's probably only a three-star movie.

As for the fourth and fifth movies in the series, maybe -- just maybe -- Cameron will have storied himself out on these three, and can show comparitive judiciousness by bringing the next two in around that 2:40 mark. I mean probably not, but a girl can hope at least? 

Remembering Rob Reiner in 2026

After ten days of thinking intensely about the murder of Rob Reiner and his wife Michele, I've managed to suppress it from the forefront of my thoughts in the next ten days. My regular life has been intervening in a big way since then, requiring most of my attention. In fact, after being up on every minute development of the story in those first ten days, I don't even know if there have been any new developments since then, such as a motive for the killings, beyond the sad reality of the mental instability of their son. 

While many people spent parts of that first week after his death revisiting favorites from his filmography, I did not. The pain was too fresh. 

I'm planning to make up for that in 2026, as I plan to devote significant time to thinking about the man I've recently called my favorite director, hoping only to occasionally dwell on the exact circumstances of him departing this earth, if I can help it.

As you would know from previous experiences with my blog, early January is when I usually tell you about my blogging series for the new calendar year. It's that lull between Christmas/the actual end of the previous year, and ramping up to reveal my film rankings later in January. During this time I devote one post each to telling you about my new monthly series and my new bi-monthly series.

I haven't told you about the new monthly series yet, though will probably post about that within the next week to ten days. It's an idea I came up with a while back, and has yet again pushed back two other pending ideas, which have been patiently waiting their turn for several years now. 

It was the bi-monthly series for 2026 that I had been stalled on. I had a flimsy idea, but I wasn't super excited about it. I won't tell you about that one because I may come back to it in 2027. 

Initially, though, the idea had been to return to the format of watching the final six movies I had not yet seen by a prominent director, which I have done previously with Orson Welles, Martin Scorsese, and Kathryn Bigelow/Jane Campion (three each). I did it initially with Spike Lee, though I didn't really do it right in that case, because there were nine films I hadn't seen and I watched only six of them. (The remaining three remain unwatched to this day.)

I had Hirokazu Kore-eda in mind for this, since this is a director I love and there are a number of movies of his that remain unseen by me. However, that number was more than six, and I do like my round numbers. (Which is why I watched an extra Kathryn Bigelow film the year before I started watching her final three. I don't want to repeat the Spike Lee mistake.) So I was going to watch one or two Kore-eda films in 2025 so I'd get down to the final six unseen. Suffice it to say, that did not happen, and it's also a bit of a dangerous undertaking, considering that I haven't figured out whether I can even source all of his old movies. When I was supposed to watch his film After Life for a movie challenge a couple years ago, I had to order a DVD copy from the U.S. just to be able to see it. And that's one of his more prominent ones. 

Then Rob Reiner died on December 14th, and I got an idea for not only one 2026 bi-monthly series, but two. Confusingly, they will have the same name: Remembering Rob Reiner. 

"Isn't that just one monthly series, then, Vance?"

You might think so, and you might be right. But I'm thinking of it conceptually as two, and I'll explain what I mean by that. 

First off, though, I want to say that having two criss-crossing bi-monthly series on this blog is not unprecedented. I did it in 2023 when I criss-crossed Baz Jazz Hands, the series where I rewatched Baz Luhrmann's six feature films in the year after Elvis, and King Darren, the series where I rewatched six of Darren Aronofksy's films the year after The Whale made him my first director to direct two of my #1 films. It felt a bit hectic but it was really only six extra viewings over the entire year. 

This year will be a bit more focused, as it will be all about Reiner, but it will be about two different kinds of Reiner.

In one bi-monthly slot, I will be watching the six Reiner films that I haven't seen, all of which are from the past 14 years. This is imperfect because there will soon be a seventh film. Reiner's final feature as a director, Spinal Tap at Stonehenge: The Final Finale, will be released this year. When I first thought of this idea, I wasn't considering the fact that I wouldn't be up for watching Spinal Tap II: The End Continues in 2025. I'll still watch it within the next few weeks before my ranking deadline, with some trepidation, but I may not formally consider it a part of this series. 

This bi-monthly slot will include one movie that will be very hard to watch: Being Charlie. I will struggle with that one when I come to it. At this point I'm not sure if I will be going chronologically or not. 

However, a series devoted only to what are probably some of Reiner's worst films does not feel like a very good way of really celebrating him. And so this is where the other bi-monthly slot comes into play. 

During those other months I will be rewatching my six favorite Reiner films, many of which are from that acknoweldged stretch of dominance starting in 1984, and one of which is not. This corresponds perfectly with the fact that I have six Reiner films in my top 200 on Flickchart, which is the very thing that led me to conclude I can and probably should consider him my favorite director. 

Now, there is a wrinkle to this one as well. My seventh favorite Reiner film is The Sure Thing, which is "only" #396 on my Flickchart. It, along with A Few Good Men, are the two films from this pre-North Reiner imperial period that I have not seen since I started keeping track of my rewatches in 2006. But A Few Good Men is not a realistic consideration for me because it's around the middle of my Flickchart, and I don't feel like I have a lot new to glean from it. (I would kind of like to catch up with my eighth favorite Reiner film, The American President, but I have to draw the line somewhere.)

So what I will probably do is exclude both This is Spinal Tap, my favorite Reiner film, and its sequel, and watch them as part of a special double feature in the next few weeks. Then that will give me Reiner films #2 through #7 to join with what will be six unseen Reiner films by the time his last remaining film gets released. Does that math make sense?

In any case, it will be a fitting, and hopefully not too mournful, send-off for a director who meant so much to me when I was coming of age, like his characters in Stand by Me were coming of age. Actually, that's the other of these film #2 through #7, along with The Sure Thing, that I haven't seen in the last 20 years. 

And by the end of 2026, I will be a Reiner completist -- at which point maybe I'll go back and watch All in the Family if I haven't yet had my fill.

A year with Alan Tudyk, part of it in "Zootropolis"

I'm always interested in what my Letterboxd Year in Review email has to tell me about myself and my viewing habits from the past year. You'll recall that in 2022 this email revealed to me that I'd watched a disproportionate number of David Dastmalchian films in the year just completed. This post is also about my most viewed actor of the previous year, but we'll get to that in moment. 

One thing this email tells me, which I already knew, is that I reviewed 0 films on Letterboxd in 2025. I'm sure this is very disappointing to Letterboxd and I know it is disappointing to some people who follow me on Letterboxd and use that site for its review function more than I do. (They could hardly use it less.) Truth is, I already have two other forums for reviewing movies, if you can say that some of the writing I do on The Audient can be considered movie reviewing, so I leave the pithy Letterboxd takedowns to the unwashed masses who do not have those other forums. I use the site to log my viewings and to submit star ratings, plus to keep lists, most of which are private. 

And it was the logging movies portion of my Year in Review that made me realize I had miscounted the number of movies I watched during the calendar year. As I mentioned in a post two days ago, I thought I had watched exactly 287 new-to-me movies for the second year in a row. But it turns out I'd missed one -- not in the recording of it offline in my Microsoft Word document that I use for that purpose, but in the manual updating of the numerical view count. Letterboxd told me my total was 288, and indeed, that turned out to be absolutely true. 

Then I also learned that Sunday is the day I watched the most new movies, with 51. That likely does not mean every Sunday but one, rather, I'm sure I watched more than one on several of those Sundays. That seemed strange to me, but I guess it's the weekend night I'm least likely to be out doing something else, and most likely to still want to hang on to the weekend with one more "fun" thing before the week starts again. 

The next piece of information I thought was interesting was that Paul Schrader was my most watched director of 2025. This is because I saw two Paul Schrader films: Oh, Canada and Hardcore. In a year where I was not watching the work of one particular director for one of my blogging series, it makes sense that two would be the maximum number of films I'd seen by any director, though I know there was at least one other: Dan Trachtenberg, whose two 2025 Predator films were both watched by me. (Don't forget Predator: Killer of Killers, the lesser known animated film.) Since I did also watch one new-to-me film written by Schrader, which was Rolling Thunder, it makes sense that they would have given him the tiebreak, though I know that was not the reason they did so. 

My most watched actor is the interesting one because it is Alan Tudyk, the actor more known for his voice than for his face. So to say that I "watched" him a lot in 2025 is not totally accurate, though I did hear him a lot. 

He was in four 2025 films that I saw, those being Playdate, Zootopia 2, Superman and The Electric State, the last three of which were all vocal roles. He was also in one 2024 movie that I saw in 2025, which also used only his voice: Moana 2. That last probably put him over the top over any other challengers, though I'm not really in any position to determine who those challengers may have been. Again in a tiebreaker Letterboxd could not have known about, I also saw Tudyk in a TV show, Santa Clarita Diet, as he took over the role of a severed head, first played by Nathan Fillion, in the show's third and final season. 

As I was looking through his IMDB to confirm his viewings and to make sure there wasn't another older film of his that I randomly saw in 2025, I at first wondered if he'd been in one of those Asylum movies. You know, like Snakes on a Train or Alien vs. Hunter or Transmorphers. Because here is what I saw:

But then I thought that looked an awful like the actual Zootopia 2 poster. What gives?

Somehow I never knew that Zootopia was not available as a title to be used in some places outside of the U.S., which apparently includes parts or most of Europe, and by extension, Australia. And Australia must be the default region for my IMDB, so when you click into Zootropolis 2, it lists Zootopia 2 only as the "original title."

AI led me expertly through this one, as I am reluctant to report AI usually is able to do these days. 

Apparently there is a Danish zoo called Zootopia, and this zoo already has rights within the EU -- which the UK was still a part of in 2016 -- for trademark and marketing. But it gets even stranger than that, because Zootropolis also has a conflict within Germany specifically, where the movie is known as "Zoomania."

What AI appears to get wrong is that Zootopia 2 is called Zootropolis 2 in Australia. Even though I said my IMDB must be defaulting to my region, which is why the title is presented this way, I know this was not how it appeared on marquees here when I saw it with my son the weekend it came out. Just to be sure I had not had some kind of episode with my perception, where my mind was expecting a certain series of words and so just translated it without my even thinking about it, I checked current cinemas where it is still playing, and they definitely have it lised as Zootopia 2. 

In any case, Alan Tudyk is in it, and that made five Tudyk movies in 2025. 

I've seen three movies so far in 2026, so that means the likes of Alec Baldwin, Marlon Wayans, Frances Fisher, Jack Black, Paul Rudd, Thandiwe Newton, Steve Zahn and Ice Cube are all the early frontrunners for 2026.

My son's birthdays with Paul Rudd

Whenever we can, we go to a movie on my son's birthday, which is also New Year's Day. He's 12 now.

More often than not, Paul Rudd is also there. 

We couldn't go last year, because -- pity us -- we spent the day at Universal Studios Hollywood instead. But this is now three out of the last five years (I don't know why we missed 2023), and in two of those, it's been a Paul Rudd movie.

The most successful was 2024, when we saw Next Goal Wins, making my son the noted soccer fan very happy -- and the rest of us very happy as well. Paul Rudd is not in that. Paul Rudd is, however, in Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2022) and Anaconda (2026). We enjoyed Ghostbusters quite a bit too, at least that first reboot. 

Four years ago when he was only eight, my son didn't know Paul Rudd from a hole in the ground. Now, however, he recognizes all of his Avengers. We saw a trailer before Anaconda for Crime 101, which stars two of the original six: Chris Hemsworth and Mark Ruffalo. He identified Hemsworth straight off, but I had to point out Ruffalo. I didn't bother to tell him that Halle Berry had been in the original X-Men movie, because I don't think that's a reference for him.

Anyway, I'm pretty sure he knows Paul Rudd is Ant-Man and he definitely knows Jack Black, who has been in a disproportionate number of movies he's seen, most recently A Minecraft Movie.

I was hoping Anaconda would be as fun as that, even if it weren't going to be as R-rated as the original. 

Unfortunately, Anaconda was not fun. It was not funny, and it was not fun. In fact I found it quite painful. In fact I couldn't believe, after it ended, that it was only 99 minutes long.

I don't really plan to give you a full Anaconda takedown in this post -- I'll probably have a review up on Monday if you want to read it -- but I did want to express my disappointment with not keeping the birthday win streak alive for my son. 

Oh, I think it stayed alive for him -- he said that he really liked it, though I think he ventured this a little reluctantly, while the credits were still rolling. I said "Yeah!" in an encouraging tone, which walked the line between enthusiastically endorsing his perspective while also not saying it was actually my own. In fact, I did not speak another word about the movie, positively or otherwise, which seemed to work without being awkward. We just talked about other things on the ride home.

I couldn't tell if my wife shared my perspective, though she certainly laughed a couple of times -- which I think was partly out of a desperate desire to laugh. It's been a rough year concluded by an especially rough past few weeks. 

The 15-year-old? I couldn't tell what he thought. He didn't offer up a perspective either way, he just kept his mouth shut, which maybe shows wisdom beyond his years. 

I'll still go back to the Paul Rudd well if he has a new, age-appropriate movie coming out for my son's 13th birthday, but this does feel like another reminder that we can't have nice things. It's just a bit of a rotten time right now, and maybe proof of that is a disjointed, intermittenly diverting but ultimately soulless Anaconda meta reboot with weakly drawn characters and tangential bits that should have been left on the cutting room floor. (The whole part where Steve Zahn has to pee on Black's leg after Black gets bitten by a spider? CUT IT.)

I guess 2026 can only get better from here?