A longevity record for original sequel numbering

There aren't many good excuses, IMO, for a Scream 7, but here's one:

I think Scream may now have set a longevity record for any series still using numbers to denote sequels and still using the original numbering.

I mean, it may have already set that with Scream 6, but if so, it's just broken its own record.

How many other series can you think of that have been going on for 30 years and are still numbering the movies according to a plan set out at the beginning?

Granted, Scream has not stuck to the numbering at every step of the way. The movie that is technically Scream 5 was just called Scream. Also with the sixth Scream, they technically switched to Roman numerals for one movie. It's technically Scream VI. 

But yeah, a few small asterisks aside, this is still the original numbering system, 30 years later. 

If you think of other series with a ridiculous number of sequels, they either haven't been doing it as long, stopped using numbered sequels a long time ago, or never used numbers in the first place. Some examples of some of these would include James Bond, Saw, Friday the 13th, Star Wars and Star Trek. And some of those are examples of more than one phenomenon at once.

But I've thought about it, and I can't think of another series that's done what Scream has done -- which, granted, it was only able to do by missing 11 years in there from 2011 to 2022, in which there were no Scream movies. Maybe if they'd had a Scream movie every three years during that period, they'd already be at ten and would have decided to go with Scream: Ghostface Returns for one of the ensuing titles. (As if that could ever be a specific enough title within the series. Ghostface returns in every movie. It's kind of the point.)

I have to state that it doesn't really count if you have only one sequel. For example, The Odd Couple II (1998) came out 30 years after The Odd Couple (1968). It doesn't count or a lot of reasons, but primarily, they wouldn't have even established a numbering system until there was a second movie, so you can hardly say that they have maintained a sequel numbering system for that long or longer. (Bambi II is a particularly hilarious version of that, coming out 64 years after the original.)

Even before Melissa Barrera made her controversial Gaza comments -- which, it seems, effectively cancelled her, and not just from the Scream series -- I was not a fan at all of Scream VI. So I think I'm sitting Scream 7 out. Though it's coming out so early in the year that I'll obviously have many opportunities to watch it before my ranking deadline, and that could easily happen almost accidentally.

Okay I found one other contender, but for now, Scream still holds the record. Just for a few more months though. And this one benefits from fewer movies and more lengthy gaps, but it still definitely qualifies.

Toy Story 5 is coming out in June. I'm not any happier about it than you are. I don't know, maybe you're happy about it.

Toy Story came out November 22, 1995, which was just about 13 months before the original Scream. (The original Scream was released on the last release date before Christmas. Who knew?) 

I suppose if the world ended tomorrow, Scream would finish by holding this record, because none of us would ever seen Toy Story 5. But Scream will have to pass the baton in just a few more months. At least until Scream 8. 

But maybe, hopefully, there won't be any more movies in either of these franchises, and Toy Story -- the much better franchise by any measure -- will get to retire in victory. 

It's perhaps a more deserving champion as well, having stuck this whole time purely to numbers, without even involving the Romans or reboot titles at any point. 

Eyes heard, loud and ... cleard

It had been nearly 14 years since I'd last seen my #31 on Flickchart, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, a movie I've seen more than a dozen times overall. And when I saw it on Thursday night, it was like no time I'd ever seen it before.

Hear My Eyes is a periodic Melbourne series where a local musician creates an all new score to accompany a classic film, and it gets showed a small number of times with live musical accompaniment. I've attended the series exactly once before, when it appeared during MIFF of 2017 and allowed me a new experience of a new favorite, 1972's Fantastic Planet, which I saw for the first time in 2008 but have now seen five times in total. That was a trippy experience, and so was this one. 

The musicians in this case were all electronic, led by lead composer and performer Peter van Hoesen, with a cohort called MESS Snythesiser Ensemble on stage with him, and a laser light show orchestrated by Robin Fox. More on the laser light show in a minute.

You pay $89 for the experience, but trust me, it was well worth it. 

Here are a couple ideas of what Hamer Hall in Melbourne looked like prior to Thursday's show, the middle of three. I had to take these photos a bit surreptitiously as there were already several people walking around holding up an iPad which showed a camera with a red Ghostsbusters-style cross through it. I know that was meant for once the performance started only, but I didn't want to unnecessarily anger anyone with what seemed like a blatant violation of the thing they were requesting of me. 

Under the screen you can see a DJ station that was eventually occupied by about eight people. I should say that I don't totally understand live DJing in most contexts. I get that many DJ sets are not totally pre-planned, or if they are pre-planned, then they do the transitions live anyway. I mean, I don't think they're just up there pantomiming. 

But for something like a score, where the music is timed out exactly to what is happening in the movie, there would be no reason I could see why they couldn't just press play on a pre-recorded sequence of music when the movie starts. I guess because then it wouldn't that cool. I do wonder if there is the freedom to interpret in the moment -- I mean, I can't imagine all the eight people up there were just pressing a button when it came time to press a button. But obviously there were certain moments within the movie that had to be respected, without any chance that a freestyle musical interpretation would step on them, such as when the music goes down in time for Arnie to say "Trust me" before he's about to not kill anyone with his gatling gun. 

I wondered, as I was watching, how they managed to squelch the original score, which I have subsequently learned is by a composer named Brad Fiedel. (I had always assumed the score was by one of the household name industry giants, like a Hans Zimmer.) And this gets us to the elephant in that very big room, which is that Terminator 2 is a particularly difficult film score to replace because of how iconic it is. The "dum dum dum da-dum" that we all think of when we think of T2 is so inseparable from the movie itself, would we miss it? But I'm getting sidetracked and I will come back to that in a moment. 

What I mean about this question of squelching the score is that I would have thought there'd be times that the score would be playing over key sound effects or dialogue in the movie. How would they erase the score without erasing the sound of smashing metal or human beings crying out in pain? 

I did wonder if it was similar to how you can reduce a song to individual tracks. There's a podcast I listen to once in a great while called One Song where they do just that, playing only individual parts of a song to analyze those parts unto themselves, in the course of considering that single song over a 45-minute period. Maybe Van Hoesen et al are doing that here. In any case, it was seamless.

The score itself? Pretty great. The word "cyberpunk" came to mind as I was listening to it, but "industrial" would have worked -- a lot of metallic scratching sounds, deep bellows, that sort of thing. The word "atmospheric" also came to mind, because there are moments in the film where I believe there probably was no score originally -- though I am eager now for a comparison viewing -- and they were accentuated here by a background humming, a howling of wind, or a sinister sonic wallpaper that added to the overall sense of dystopia. If I were a music critic rather than a film critic, I might be describing this better.

I did wonder, if just to throw us a bone, whether it might have been nice to acknowledge the "dum dum dum da-dum" of Fiedel's original, especially in the opening credits. I don't think anyone would have accused them of being too influenced by Fiedel if they'd just done the equivalent of a shout-out to that. But no, the music over the opening and closing credits was a bit more like what I would call "technical malfunction music," the sonic equivalent of a robot going on the fritz, with scraping and springing sounds reminding us of a future gone haywire.

Okay now it's time to talk about the lasers.

I don't think they ever got any better than the opening. As you recall, we start on a future battle between the human resistance and the machines, and there are literal blue lasers being shot in the movie. These same blue lasers strobed through the theater, prompting oohs and ahhs from all of us. The use of lasers continued to be interesting throughout, though none as effective as our first experience of them. There were lasers to accompany the lightning as the terminators arrived from the future, for example. There were lasers, thinner in their thickness and more diffuse in their spray patterns, during the film's big explosions. There were single lasers that held, for things like a sudden knife thrust through somebody's skull, though I didn't think these were the best use of the gimmick. When Sarah has her gun sight set on the back of Miles Dyson's head, a single laser pointer from the back of the theater mimicked this, which we all loved. There were also lasers creating patterns on the screen any time we saw something through the eyes of the terminator, which as you remember are through that computer readout.

The whole thing was just generally enthralling, as an alternative to our normal T2 viewings though certainly not a replacement for it. I reckon Peter van Hoesen conceived of this project not because he thought "I can do better than Brad Fiedel's score" but rather, because he loved it so much that he wanted to add his own interpretation to a movie he loved dearly. All the rest of the times I watch that movie, I will get Fiedel's score, so I'm glad I got van Hoesen's once.

And the cumulative impact of this experience was having a strange emotional impact on me. I don't usually get emotional during T2, and if I ever did, it would probably be what we think of as "spectacle tears," where the sheer size and scope of something moves us. In this case, I found myself getting a bit choked up at the film's actual emotion moments, something I don't think I'd ever experienced with this movie. 

Before I let you go for the day, I did want to include a smattering of first-time observations about the movie itself. Or if not first time, then things I was reminded of that I wanted to mention to you now.

1) There's something inconsistent about Sarah's behavior when she's in the mental institution. Clearly she's been working on a campaign to be released, or at least get a visitation from her son, which has involved six months of good behavior. Good behavior that her doctor acknowledges. Why, then, has she also recently stabbed the doctor in the knee with his pen? Surely she would realize this sort of thing would be disqualifying for her release?

2) I think we're supposed to believe that the T-1000 finally getting into a close quarters fight with Sarah at the end is significant, because he's finally sampled her physically and can finally mimic her. When in reality, he already touched her way back at the institution, when his metal sword arm slashed down through the elevator roof and cut a groove into her shoulder. I know they never subsequently shared any spatial dynamics where mimicking her would have been a benefit, but he could have mimicked her at any point from the mental institution onward.

3) There's one single moment I find kind of cringe that I started thinking of as "the most Michael Bay moment in Terminator 2." It's the moment where Sarah, John and the T-101 pause to watch two kids at a service station pointing toy guns at each other and screaming at each other, that leads them to conclude that human beings are doomed. It's not that James Cameron is above hitting you on the head with a message, but the subsequent slow-mo image of the two kids wrestling with their guns, silhouetted just a little by the sun, made me think of that as right out of the Michael Bay playbook. I mean, when you come down to it, Bay is basically just a very shitty version of Cameron, right? 

4) This is something I always say about T2, so it's not new, but I continued to be annoyed by the fact that John and the T-101 just watch for five minutes as small puddles of the T-1000 reassemble themselves after being heated up following the liquid nitrogen freeze. They could have been miles away by the time he fully reformed, yet instead they're barely 50 paces ahead of him. 

5) And speaking of John, I really appreciated how good Edward Furlong is in this movie. I think there might be some people out there who find his at-times squeaky performance to be cringe in the same way Jake Lloyd's performance as Anakin Skywalker is cringe, but I feel just the opposite about Furlong. I feel like this is one of the great child acting performances out there, to be honest. I was noticing little details of his performance, like the moment when he's looking at his mother as she tries to bury him under bulletproof jackets in the fleeing police truck. In this one prolonged expression you see three things: 1) sorrow that he never took his mother seriously all these years, 2) a sense of pride that his mother is so strong and capable, and 3) a desire to take in every part of her face, because it may be the last time he ever lays eyes on her. All in one expression. 

I feel like there is a cohort out there -- maybe even the majority of people -- who think of The Terminator as the masterpiece in this series, and T2 as just a capable follow-up. Maybe even a great movie, but nowhere near in the league of the original Terminator in terms of creativity, world building, that sort of thing.

I just don't see it. I've seen the original Terminator only one time all the way through. Maybe twice, but no more than that. There's just nothing in that movie that makes me want to come back to it the way this one does. This is the masterpiece. 

I said earlier that I might want to do a comparison viewing, especially while my Hear My Eyes experience is fresh. Well, I might get that chance. When the movie came up over dinner this week, in the context of discussing where Daddy would be on Thursday night, we thought it might be okay now to show these movies to our kids, even the 12-year-old, despite the violence. I think they could have more trouble with the nuclear annihilation scene -- that's the one that gave me trouble when I was 17 -- but I think the 12-year-old could probably handle all of it, and the 15-year-old certainly could. So that may be in the offing sometime soon.

If you happen to be in Melbourne and you happen to be reading this shortly after it's posted, there's one more performance tonight. 

Audient Bridesmaids: A Room with a View

This is the latest in a periodic series in which I'm watching all the best picture nominees I haven't seen, in reverse chronological order.

When I first envisioned the Audient Bridesmaids series, I imagined myself building up a head of steam on the project and occasionally rattling off a couple in a row. I did expect there also to be droughts, which is why this is periodic series rather than committed to some regular time interval. But I figured I'd still make steady progress on it.

Well, before now, the closest two posts in the series were the four months between viewings of My Left Foot and I'm Still Here -- an old bridesmaid and a new bridesmaid -- last year between March and July. There was a similar gap in late 2022 and early 2023. If you take those two out, these have never come any closer than seven months apart.

I guess I must be getting serious now, because I just posted one of these 11 days ago when I saw Hope and Glory. And now I'm back with the unseen best picture nominee before that, James Ivory's A Room with a View, which I'll call from 1986 because it was nominated alongside the other 1986 nominees, even though many sites list its release year as 1985. 

Watching A Room with a View also enabled me to confront a childhood fear, which sounds like a strange thing to say about a movie that in almost every respect is a very light period romantic comedy. Considering this childhood fear, that certainly isn't how I would have pegged the movie.

The phrase "childhood fear" is a little misleading. It's not like I was afraid of A Room with a View the way some children are afraid of the dark or of a monster under the bed. But I did have a traumatic experience of sorts with the movie, one that has stuck with me all these years later.

It occurred on an airplane. I'm guessing it was the summer of 1987, because that's consistent with when this movie might have appeared on an airplane. My family would have been going on a trip to the Rocky Mountains. However, it's possible it was a year earlier than that, when my family did our summer trip to the UK -- which would make a bit more sense because a) the movie is set in the UK, and b) that trip would have been only about three months after the film's theatrical release. Whichever year it was, it was almost 40 years ago.

I hadn't paid to get headphones for this movie -- which I don't think my parents would have done even with a movie that was tailored to a 12- or 13-year-old -- but that didn't mean I was immune to seeing its images. And I clearly remember getting up from my seat to go to the bathroom and seeing this:

I think I might have literally stumbled backward.

Seeing the context that led up to this -- a brief fight in a Florence square that otherwise has nothing to do with the story, with minimal impact on the characters -- might have made it less shocking. But it was first laying my eyes on the screen and seeing this soon-to-be-dead man covered in blood, and eyes wild with the fear of approaching death, or maybe already dead -- well, it was a lot for preteen me to handle.

I don't think I had nightmares about it or anything, but it did always surround A Room with a View with a certain fascination on my part. 

As I said, this ends up being a complete anomaly within what amounts to one of the most whimsical Merchant-Ivory movies of this period -- or any period. And I enjoyed all of it quite a bit.

There isn't a huge amount to the plot. It's basically a chamber piece set across two settings, Florence and England, in which Helena Bonham Carter's character tries to forget her brief infatuation with Julian Sands' character, while entertaining a more practical engagement with Daniel Day-Lewis' character, in the first decade of the 20th century. Incidentally, this is the youngest I would have ever seen Day-Lewis on screen. This performance wasn't enough to get him Oscar nominated -- the nominations in this movie went to Denholm Elliott and Maggie Smith -- but he does play quite the clueless prig. And he'd win his first Oscar only three years later, in the aforementioned My Left Foot. 

Although I enjoyed the story, which went by for me on a cushion of delight, it was perhaps the performers that I enjoyed most here. I didn't anticipate how many names I might know in this film. There were the character actors from my personal favorites, like Elliott (Raiders of the Lost Ark) and Simon Callow (Four Weddings and a Funeral). There were the dames, one of whom we've lost (Smith) and one of whom is still with us (Judi Dench). There was poor Julian Sands, lost on that hiking trip. There's of course Bonham-Carter in the earliest of the two types of film for which she would become known (Merchant-Ivory films and Tim Burton films). And then any film with Day-Lewis is worth a watch.

I must admit, I didn't know Merchant and Ivory had such senses of humor, though of course credit there should probably go to their frequent collaborator, screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. It's a really funny film and the actors are on board for it. She also earned an Oscar nomination for this script. 

I also didn't realize how few quintessential Merchant-Ivory films there actually are. This one is probably the most quintessential. They were such a known pairing at the time that it was almost as if they were a genre unto themselves. But really the only other significant M-I films from around this same time were The Bostonians (1984), Mr. & Mrs. Bridge (1990), Howards End (1992) and Remains of the Day (1993). Could there have been so few? Their producer-director collaboration featured a lot more movies than just these, of course, but then you get into a bunch of pretty obscure titles both before and after, films that were not responsible for whatever time they had in our zeitgeist. I guess they had a strong imperial period but then left the center of the culture. 

Fun fact: James Ivory is still alive! He's 97. Merchant, though, has been gone for 20 years now.

Don't expect another post like this in another 11 days, but when I do get to the next movie in this series, it will be Prizzi's Honor, the John Huston film from 1985. 

The limits of hype

I came across this on my phone this morning. You only get the first line before you click to reveal more, so all I saw was:

"The end starts here. Are you ready for the final"

The final what? THE FINAL WHAT?

Oh yeah. Mission: Impossible. 

Which came out last May. 

I know you still have to hype a movie on its streaming debut -- or even if it's not the streaming debut, its streaming debut on your streamer -- or even if it's not the streaming debut on your streamer, you just have to hype your streamer anyway. 

But the language of that hype feels a little inflated when it's a movie we've all had easy access to for nearly a year. 

As a side note, I think it's funny that the still they chose to advertise this movie is not Tom Cruise, but Angela Bassett, whose role (as far as I remember) is comparatively small in that movie. She isn't even one of Ethan Hunt's spy gang, which has collected some new names over the years but still has some of the originals as well. Isn't she just some sort of bureaucratic functionary?

Of course, if they had used Tom Cruise, there would have been no mystery about "the final what" and I probably wouldn't be writing this post at all. 

Audient One-Timers: Solaris

This is the second in my 2026 monthly series in which I'm rewatching my 12 favorite films, according to Flickchart, that I've seen only once.

The second movie in this series, Andrei Tarkovksy's Solaris, a lot more closely conforms to what you'd think I mean by the term "one-timer" than the first movie, Chris Eyre's Smoke Signals. Both films do have in common the fact that I saw them for the first time in 2013 -- and that comparative recency probably explains more than any other factor why I haven't yet seen them again.

Solaris, as you would know if you've seen it or if you know Tarkovsky, is long, ponderous and slow-paced, the sort of film you would definitely only watch once if you didn't care for it, and might take a while to get back to even if you did. In fact, given that the other two Tarkovsky films I've seen in the years since then -- Stalker and The Sacrifice -- have not worked for me as well as the #172 ranked Solaris obviously did, I was definitely concerned about the possibility of this just going over my head and seeming as ponderous as the other two, on a second viewing. 

But I don't think "ponderous" always has to be a negative appraisal of something. Tarkovsky's film is ponderous, and I think that's the best thing about it. (And it made me want to revisit Stalker, which I didn't dislike but which definitely tried my patience more with fewer rewards, while actually bearing a lot of similarities to Solaris otherwise. Before I do that, it would probably be best to see the three Tarkovsky features I haven't seen: Ivan's Childhood, Andrei Rublev and Mirror, the latter of which also has a good copy on YouTube, which is where I saw Solaris. Not even any ad breaks!)

My affection for Solaris was especially noteworthy given the baggage I brought in, which was seeing Steven Soderbergh's remake ten years earlier and not caring for it. I suppose that might have made me more receptive to a good version of Solaris, but it could have also made me wary about the possibility of any good version existing. Now that I've seen the original two times, and confirmed my affection for it with a rewatch, I'm wondering if I might be more open to what Soderbergh was doing, or just more critical of it. That's another rewatch to consider some day.

My first viewing of Solaris was around the same time that I decided I really loved Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, to which Solaris owes a few very small debts. My two twenty teens viewings of 2001 were what elevated it all the way up to #12 on my Flickchart, the first of which was only two weeks after I watched Solaris (and no doubt inspired by the fact that I'd just seen Solaris). 

Tarkovksy's film does capture the eerie and unnerving qualities of unexplained occurrences in outer space that Kubrick gave us in such a memorable way four years earlier, but it doesn't really use space the way you imagine it would. Although the sense of being on a space station is clear, especially with our views of the ocean planet below, we get almost none of the traditional space backgrounds you'd think you'd get in a movie like this, with stars twinkling against a sea of infinite blackness. I recall exactly one, and it serves more as a transition between the scenes set on Earth (which run longer than a half-hour to start the film) and those set in space. Once the characters are in space, Tarkovsky is not that interested in continually reminding us of that fact through shots of space or footage of anyone doing a space walk. Everything we see can be, and obviously was, shot on Tarkovksy's very earthbound sets in Russia. (2001 was not shot in space, of course, but when I was younger, I believed it was.)

So it's a credit to Tarkovsky's movie magic that we never doubt our location. The sets themselves look like we imagine a space station would look, or rather, a space station that was inhabited entirely by Alzheimer's patients, as it's been left in disarray with various objects strewn about and loose wiring letting off sparks. Then the images of the swirling surface of the ocean planet, whose swirls ebb and flow and change according to the mysteries that are unfolding for the characters, are chilling in their otherworldliness.

Though I think if there's one single key to why Solaris gets under our skin, it may be the sound design. Every sound is chosen for its maximum pscyhological impact on us, as it mirrors the mental dissolution the characters are experiencing as they walk this space station and see the physical embodiment of some person from their past, inexplicably walking the corridors next to them. I don't find the moment-to-moment experiences with these characters, one in particular (the dead wife of Chris Kelvin), always chilling, though individual moments are quite so. The scene where she's banging on the door to get out of it -- and then bursts through the metal as though it were wet cardboard, leaving jagged edges -- is quite effective in that regard.

Because of its length (2:42) and the practical necessities of my Sunday schedule, I split Solaris in half the way the movie itself splits itself in half after about 1:19. Although you'd think you'd be under the movie's spell more as it reaches its climax, I found myself more gripped during the first half, which include those establishing scenes on Earth and all the shots of nature around Chris Kelvin's home. This film definitely relies on anticipation of what's to come in creating its mood.

I really get a lot out of the portion of the film that you wouldn't think would really be eerie, which is the character Burton explaining his experiences while on a previous rescue mission to the surface of the planet to try to find two lost crewmen. We see an older version of Burton, alongside Kelvin and a few others, watching a hearing of a younger version in which Burton explains what he saw. A hearing does not seem like the sort of place we'd become entranced by the film introducing its concepts to us.

But here is where Burton talks about seeing a massive infant four meters long on the surface of the planet's oceans, and later reveals that the infant had the appearance of the orphaned son of one of the lost crew members, something Burton only realized later when he met that son. Even twice removed from the actual events -- a character watching his own verbal account of this experience -- it sets our imaginations alive. 

And here I think is part of the film's very small debt to 2001, only because the ending of 2001 also involves the image of an infant, the Star Child. It's such a small debt that I hesitate to even mention it, because Tarkovsky is clearly doing his own thing here and not ripping off Kubrick in any way. Maybe both of them realized that seeing images of small children in outer space, where they certainly should not be, is pretty eerie.

Okay I've used enough synonyms for "eerie" and "unnerving" and "chilling" for one day. 

Remembering Rob Reiner: The Princess Bride

This is the first installment of the second of two bi-monthly 2026 series that have the same name. Every other month starting with January, I'm watching the six Rob Reiner films I haven't seen yet. Every other month starting with February, I'm watching my six favorite Reiner films other than This Is Spinal Tap, which I watched before the series started. I know, it's a little bit complicated.

My intention with this version of my 2026 intertwining bi-monthly series, the one where I watch six Rob Reiner favorites, was to go chronologically. I had a special viewing of This is Spinal Tap (1984), my favorite Reiner film, before we even started, watching it as a double feature with Spinal Tap II: The End Continues last month. Next up would have been The Sure Thing (1985), technically my seventh favorite Reiner film, but we're excluding my favorite for the purposes of this series since I already just watched it. And I was really looking forward to this one, because my records say I have not watched The Sure Thing at any point since I started keeping track of my rewatches, nearly 20 years ago. 

But you know what? I can't find The Sure Thing anywhere.

This surprised me, especially in the wake of the loss of Reiner. I know that the passing of a beloved personality does not necessarily change the availability of his or her films, because that has to do with contracts and rights and all that stuff. But you do sometimes see films surface because there is a hunger for watching them at a particular time.

Not The Sure Thing. Not where I've looked, anyway. 

I won't get into where I looked and whether I missed somewhere obvious. I don't think I did, because Google AI tells me:

As of early 2026, The Sure Thing (1985) is generally not available on major subscription streaming services, but it is available to rent or purchase. It can be found on digital platforms such as Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV, and sometimes YouTube.

Yeah, well, I looked in all three of those areas, and no go.

I'm not giving up on watching The Sure Thing. I'll find it somewhere this year even if I have to buy it online as a DVD and have it shipped to me from America. But I will have to give up on ordering this bi-monthly series chronologically, so instead I'll use the order these films are ranked on my Flickchart. (And I can't build toward a climax by going in reverse order, in case you were wondering, because reverse order would also dictate that The Sure Thing was up next.)

That means that after #9 This is Spinal Tap, up next is #11 The Princess Bride (1987), which is actually skipping over two movies in the chronology after Tap. 

It had been almost eight years since my last Bride viewing, which was when I showed it to my kids one time when my wife wasn't there -- a decision that I regretted when she told me how much she would have liked to be present for their first Princess Bride viewing. There has not been one since, and though my younger son might still be into it, the 15-year-old definitely would not be. Like the boat boarded by Vizzini, Inigo, Fezzik and Buttercup, that ship has sailed.

The 2018 viewing, my first since before 2006 (as far back as my rewatch records go), also reminded me how much I cherish the movie. The next time it came up in a Flickchart duel, it jumped from 29th to 11th (yes, I keep a record of these things as well), which is where it has stayed to this day. 

Although this series is designed to sing the praises of Reiner, we also know that Reiner was not a director with a signature style. He had signature touches and collaborators -- watching this reminded me that he re-teamed with Christopher Guest after Tap, and would use Billy Crystal again in When Harry Met Sally -- but otherwise none of these three films is directly comparable to one another. Reiner presided over them, but as I was watching The Princess Bride this time, it made me realize that the person I probably really wanted to praise in this post is William Goldman, who wrote the screenplay based on his own book. We lost Goldman in 2018, only a few months after my last Bride viewing.

This is not to say there will be no Reiner in this post. But as I was watching, I decided to start jotting down quotes, and those quotes can be attributed to Goldman, not Reiner.

You see, when I got to the Princess Bride portion of my in memoriam post to Reiner in December, I wrote "You can quote 30 lines from this movie and there would still be 30 more honorable mentions."

Impulsively, I decided to see whether that was hyperbole or really true. 

So the following is a list of quotes I wrote down, mostly as they occurred, but a few out of order because I only realized I wanted to do this about ten minutes into the movie. So I went back and added a few I knew I had missed. I'll write them here in the order I wrote them down. 

Did I stack the deck in favor of getting as close to 60 as I could, to prove my previous casual hypothesis correct? You can be the judge of that. I had a hard time drawing distinctions between lines that I thought might actually be repeated by people -- repurposed for use in their daily lives, as we do with the movie lines we love the most -- and just good lines of dialogue that I remembered because I've seen the movie a half-dozen times. It may not have been perfect, but I will tell you that there were some where I decided they definitnely did not belong as quotable lines -- so I was not always erring in my own favor.

Also, although most of them are jokes or funny lines, a few aren't. 

Okay, presented mostly without context, because quotable lines should allow you to bring up the context in your head automatically:

1) "Unemployed! In Greenland!"

2) "As you wish."

3) "No more rhymes, and I mean it! Anybody want a peanut?"

4) "The Cliffs of Insanity!"

5) "Is this a kissing book?" (Incidentally, the only quote from the Fred Savage-Peter Falk portion of the film.)

6) "Inconceivable!"

7) "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

8) "Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die."

9) "I am not left-handed."

10) "No one of consequence."

11) "Plato? Aristotle? Socrates? Morons."

12) "And find out who is right, and who is dead."

13) "You'd like to think that wouldn't you!"

14) "Never get involved in a land war in Asia!"

15) "Never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line!"

16) "I am no one to be trifled with."

17) "I spent the last few years building up an immunity to Iocane."

18) "Life is pain highness. Anyone who says different is selling something."

19) "I died that day!"

20) "Death cannot stop true love."

21) "Good night Westley. Good work. Sleep well. I'll most likely kill you in the morning."

22) "Rodents of Unusual Size? I don't think they exist."

23) "The Pit of Despair. Don't even -- (clears throat) -- Don't even think of trying to escape."

24) "Boo! Boo!"

25) " ... my wife to murder, and Guilder to frame for it. I'm swamped."

26) "If you haven't got your health, you haven't got anything."

27) "There will be blood tonight!"

28) "I would not say such things if I were you!"

29) "You are the brute squad."

30) "I've seen worse."

31) "Your friend here is only mostly dead."

32) "I'm not a witch, I'm your wife! But after what you just said, I'm not even sure I want to be that anymore!"

33) "Have fun storming the castle!"

34) "Mawage. Mawage is what brings us together today."

35) "Wuv. Twoo wuv."

36) "Oh you mean this gate key."

37) "I think that's the worst thing I've ever heard."

38) "Stop saying that!"

39) "I want my father back you son of a bitch."

40) "I killed you too quickly last time."

41) "Hello lady!"

42) "Don't worry, I won't let it go to my head."

A few stretches there maybe, but I got to 30 pretty easily even if you take out a dozen stretches. And the stretches and the ones I didn't write down can certainly qualify as the "30 honorable mentions."

So yeah, this script is amazing -- incredibly paced in addition to the priceless writing of dialogue. Goldman was a true master, except when he wasn't. (Did you see Year of the Comet? Yeah, don't.)

But without the actors, scripts are just words on a page. And that's where Reiner comes in. Without the line deliveries of these actors -- for which I think we can credit them and him equally -- Goldman's great lines don't stand a chance of committing themselves to permanence. 

Just think of the performance of Wallace Shawn, instantly iconic, but who before this was primarily known for stuff like My Dinner With Andre. Not the same sort of material at all, but Reiner found the comedic genius within him and brought it out.

Or -- speaking of Andre -- there was Andre the Giant, who was not an actor at all. Even with his heavily accented English, the wrestler is responsible for -- *stops to count* -- well, only three of those lines. But he is also responsible for inserting himself forever into our hearts, such that on this viewing, when he'd already been gone for more than 32 years, I got a little choked up on his line "Hello lady!"

To say nothing of how this made stars of Cary Elwes and Robin Wright, though Wright famously turned down a half-dozen ensuing rules that would have made her a lot more famous than she ever became. 

The script is great, but Reiner's touch with actors and with material -- whether we can fully quantify it or not -- makes The Princess Bride what it is. Which is my 11th favorite movie of all time.

I could probably dig for a number of other things I got out of this viewing, but The Princess Bride is not exactly new territory in terms of movies about which to rhapsodize. So I won't even bother.

But I did want to ask one thing: What's with all the weird Christmas stuff in the grandson's bedroom? (I only just now realized Savage's character doesn't have a name.)

What weird Christmas stuff, you ask? You never noticed it either?

Well I'll show you.

How about this crazy, angry homemade Santa?

Or the snowman over his shoulder here?

Or the long-bearded, European-style Santa whose long beard and red coat you can see in the middle of the picture here?

There's absolutely zero indication that this movie is supposed to be set at Christmas. Nor was it released at Christmas, having come out in September of 1987.

I'm not looking on the internet. I know the internet will have an explanation. I don't want it. I'd rather just speculate. 

More than anything I like how it gives this kid's bedroom a real, lived in quality. No, you might not actually decorate your own room with Christmas stuff, but I like that there is nothing remotely choreographed about the items in his bedroom. (I keep wanting to call him Kevin after his Wonder Years character.) Our bedrooms -- I would have been 13 when this came out, so maybe a little older than this kid -- defied a set dresser's perfect idea of what a bedroom should look like, and whoever dressed this set honored that truth and then some.

Going by order on Flickchart, my April viewing will be my #3 Reiner film, at #26 on my Flickchart, When Harry Met Sally. And that one should not be hard to find. 

Lousy with two-time Oscar winners, and just lousy

The original Predator from 1987 famously had two future governors in its cast, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jesse "The Body" Ventura.

Predators from 2010? It had two future two-time Oscar winners, one of whom had already won one of his Oscars.

That's just one of the things I wanted to talk about in a post about the two movies in the larger Predator franchise -- if you don't count the Alien vs. Predator movies -- that I hadn't seen before this weekend.

When the movie-watching year resets and I can watch anything I want again, I've made a habit of completing little projects like this in recent years. Last year in February I watched The Amazing Spider-Man 2 and Spider-Man 3, which were the only two Spider-Man movies I had yet to see -- though maybe it would have been smart to wait for my younger son on that one, considering that he's since become a Spider-Man fanatic. Instead we've started this year watching Marvel movies he hadn't seen from the Captain America and Avengers franchises, which is another example of a project like this, though not in this case watching movies that I hadn't seen myself. (We also watched the original Spider-Man from 2002, since he was raised on Tom Holland as Spider-Man and only saw Toby Maguire in the role in that new Spider-Man movie from a couple years ago.)

I thought there was a similar thing in 2024, but perhaps not because I'm not seeing it. Though in 2023 around this time of year, I did complete the Rocky series with a viewing of Rocky II the night after I watched Creed III. 

Enough historical precedent. The reason to watch Predators (2010) and The Predator (2018) seems obvious enough. I'm clearly a new devotee of this series, having placed both of Dan Trachtenberg's live-action Predator movies in my top ten of their respective years, first Prey in 2022 and then most recently, Predator: Badlands just this past year. Although I may like Prey more, Predator: Badlands was even higher than Prey, #5 vs. #7 -- which says more about the quality of the competition than an absolute value for each film. The animated Predator: Killer of Killers also did very respectably in last year's rankings, but nowhere near the top ten. 

I'm going to finish this project off with a rewatch of Predator: Badlands tonight, since it's just recently arrived on Disney+. I suspect I'll write about it tomorrow, but don't hold me to that.

Another reason it was important to watch these movies is that I have been implicitly damning them every time I write about a new Predator movie I like -- which was not exactly fair, given that I'd never seen them. I don't diss them specifically, of course, but I have assumed it was safe to refer to the entire franchise as a "moribund franchise" that Trachtenberg raised out of the depths of its despair. 

I started with Nimrod Antal's Predators on Thursday night, though I didn't finish it until yesterday afternoon/early evening/later evening. Despite the interruptions, I liked it almost enough to recommend it, though in the end it fell short of that at 2.5 stars. I was sort of glad that it dipped in quality near the end, because that added weight to my previously risky argument that the franchise hadn't been any good before Trachtenberg came along. (At least not since the original.)

Shane Black's The Predator, which leaned heavily into what people think is his strength, an almost Joss Whedon-style, f-bomb laden joking camaraderie between the characters? Well that wasn't good from the start. I didn't get anything out of that one, despite the presence of likable actors like Olivia Munn, Keegan-Michael Key and Sterling K. Brown.

In a piece like this, I might ordinarily go into the plot of the two movies, talk about what worked, talk about what didn't work. To be honest, I'm not really feeling that today. So let's get to the headline bit about the two-time Oscar winners from Predators, and see what energy I might have left over to talk about The Predator.

So you'd know that Adrien Brody was the star of Predators -- at least, I knew it, as he was the only one I definitively remembered from the ads I saw of it 15 years ago. You'd also know that Brody just won his second, and presumably final, Oscar last year for The Brutalist, having first won for The Pianist in 2002. (I didn't realize the structural similarity of those two titles until just now.) It being the probable last was one of the reasons he wouldn't get off the goddamn stage.

But you probably wouldn't know that a then-unknown Mahershala Ali was in, and one of the first killed off in, Predators. This is when he was still credited as Mahershalalhashbaz Ali. Ali didn't become known to most of us until he won his first best supporting actor Oscar for Moonlight six years later, before winning his second for Green Book only two years after that. If memory serves, Ali spent only a reasonable amount of time on stage. 

Winning multiple Academy awards is not completely uncommon -- it's also been done this century by Emma Stone, Daniel Day-Lewis, Frances McDormand, Cate Blanchett, Renee Zellweger, Christophe Waltz and Sean Penn, with Hillary Swank, Denzel Washington and Anthony Hopkins having won a second this century after winning their first last century. But having two in the same movie, especially when it's a Predator movie, still strikes me as pretty unlikely. (What little we knew at the time about the potential of Ali.)

Having the characters dropped unconscious from a craft in the sky into a game preserve on a distant plant, and having to awaken mid-air in order to deploy their parachutes, is a good way to get us into the action and set the scene. I was on board for this and thought I could, potentially, be watching another prestige object in the Predator series. In addition to those already mentioned, the film collects a watchable group that includes Topher Grace, Alice Braga, Danny Trejo, Walton Goggins, and a surprise later appearance from Laurence Fishburne as a guy who has been there a lot longer, and has the crazy to prove it.

But as the movie went on, and as the Predators were revealed more and seemed less interesting, it became more and more mid. The affection for this film by Filmspotting co-host Josh Larsen is not totally unfounded, but I'm glad to say this has nothing on Trachtenberg's movies.

The Predator, which I watched immediately after finishing up Predators last night, felt off to me from the start. This is also a frame story featuring a core cast of about seven characters who get picked off one by one, though in this case most of them are part of a ragtag military group who like to give each other shit, almost excessively so, to the point of affectation in the script. They're led by Boyd Holbrook, who has never been a favorite of mine, though as mentioned before, I do enjoy Munn, Key and Brown. There's a Moonlight connection with this one as well, as Trevante Rhodes is also in the cast, though this movie does show the limits of his charisma and I think explains why he hasn't continued to have much work. (Thomas Jane has never been a favorite, though Alfie Allen is always fun to see, because it always makes me think of his sister and the song she wrote about him.)

This story is a bit more all over the place, taking place on Earth and involving alien tech being passed around between shady military people and these ragtag soldiers, as well as a biologist played by Munn. The story also involves the neurodivergent son of Holbrook's character, played by Room actor Jacob Tremblay, who was such a revelation in that movie and so flat in this one, only a few years later. Anyway, it's jokey and messy and for the most part I just wanted it to be over.

The thing I find very interesting about this series -- when I think back to the original and Predator 2, which was actually the first film in the series that I ever saw -- is that I'm not sure any of the movies has any plot connection to any of the other movies. The first sequel would have been the most likely, but because Schwarzenegger didn't return, replaced by Danny Glover, whatever connective tissue there was would have been pretty thin. And it takes place in an entirely different environment. So I'm going to say there was basically none. 

My thought was that Trachtenberg's movies were supposed to connect to each other, but so far, the three are very different. My understanding was that Killer of Killers was supposed to lay the groundwork for Badlands, but an explicit connection between them was thin if it existed at all. I suppose the most similar two movies are Predators and Killer of Killers because both focus on Predators fighting people who have been chosen specifically for representing a different brand of warrior that can challenge them. Did we mention one of the characters in Predators is a Yakuza hitman who's good with a sword? That itself is very similar to one of the three stories in Killer of Killers, albeit from a very different time period.

One funny similarity I did notice? The two movies I watched in the past two days were both exactly 107 minutes, with the one I'm going to watch tonight being only one minute longer than that. The original Predator is 107 minutes and Predator 2 is 108. Trachtenberg's previous two do deviate from that formula just a little, with Prey seven minutes shorter at 100 and the animated movie, perhaps unsurprisingly, running only 85 minutes. 

I'm not quite so interested in getting a holistic view of the entire Predator series that I need to rewatch either the original two movies, rewatch Killer of Killers or Prey, or see the one Alien vs. Predator movie I haven't seen. Besides, there are only so many days in a weekend. But I do look forward to rewatching Badlands tonight, and I'll let you know if any holistic impressions emerge from that viewing. 

R.I.P. Robert Duvall

Robert Duvall was a rock, imperturable. 

You could blow up artillery right next to him and he wouldn't flinch (Apocalypse Now). But watch out if you did perturb him, you might get the wrong end of a baseball bat (The Apostle). 

But not all of Duvall's movies started with the letters "Apo." He was just a constant throughout the movies of the past 50 years, only quitting four years ago when he was 91. 

If mentioning his work in The Apostle seems like a strange way to start a eulogy to the man, who we lost this week at age 95, try telling that to IMDB, who lists him as "Actor, The Apostle (1997)" when you type in his name. 

That film does serve as an exact mid-point between the time that a lot of people might have first become aware of him, in The Godfather (1972), and his last film in 2022, The Pale Blue Eye, which I haven't yet seen.

Of course, The Godfather wasn't nearly the start of Duvall's career. He was on TV starting from 1960, which means he got a relatively late start around age 29 and still had a career that spanned 65 years, if you consider the career to have been effectively ongoing until his death. We wouldn't have really been surprised to see this stalwart still turn up again, even at age 95, would we? His traits played at any age.

And it was iconic performances basically from the start, as he played Boo Radley in To Kill A Mockingbird in 1962. Most of his 1960s stayed on TV, but by the end of the decade, he transferred to film and never looked back, appearing in such films as Bullitt, True Grit, MASH and THX 1138 before Francis Ford Coppola presumably got advice from his good friend George Lucas and cast him as the consigliere Tom Hagen in The Godfather. 

I didn't come to any of this work until I was an adult, and I still haven't see the original version of True Grit. But he was a constant in films I did see when I was younger as well. 

Oddly, the titles from Duvall's career don't read as quite so iconic after the 1970s, which also included films like The Conversation, Network and The Godfather Part II. (He had the wisdom to skip The Godfather Part III, though I can't remember what the story logic was for why he wasn't there.) 

But he was always around, turning up here and there, and always contributing an intensity you didn't soon forget. He also had a way of laughing that made you think it might be a prelude to killing you. 

Duvall may not have been a personal favorite, but there was never any doubt that I needed to write a remembrance of him here, which I have done quickly now as I prepare for work and another busy day. That was the purest indication of his impact on cinema during the entirety of my lifespan. 

Rest in peace. 

Having to choose on Valentine's Day

Most of us don't have to choose on Valentine's Day. You either have a significant other or you don't. 

For those who have multiple families, well, I guess you do choose the one you like best and then you're on a business trip for the other one. But that's not a lot of people.

Of course, it's not actually Valentine's Day in the movie Eternity, it was only Valentine's Day when I watched it. And I had to choose to watch it over the other movie I planned to watch, which wouldn't have had a Valentine's Day theme at all. But when my wife and I finally watched the first episode of Pluribus with our dinner, that brought me on to AppleTV+, where I was reminded that Eternity is an Apple movie and it's only just been released on their streaming platform -- in time for Valentine's Day, of course. Whenever possible, I do enjoy a themed viewing. 

Pluribus was our only joint viewing last night. While my wife and I do sometimes watch a movie together on Valentine's Day, and it even sometimes has a romantic plot, it's not expected or even typical. You see, we don't really celebrate Valentine's Day in our house. Not that we've never celebrated it, but when we did, mostly in our earlier years, it was more for my benefit than for hers. See, her birthday is only five days later, and she is even more opposed to the tacky commercialism around Valentine's Day than I am. Americans are raised with a tolerance for this sort of thing; Australians, at least some Australians, are not.

And this year, there was a reason we weren't doing anything at all to acknowledge the holiday, but it's not something I need to get into right now. I'll just say it doesn't have anything to do with our relationship. It's external to that.

Anyway. Let's discuss the movie. 

David Freyne's film was my biggest accessible regret before my 2025 rankings closed. I could have seen it in the theater before that deadline, but I just couldn't make it work, in part because of the same unnamed thing that's been going on with our family for the past couple months. 

But I generally love movies with high concepts and movies involving the afterlife. One of my favorites, to which this bears more than a passing resemblance, is Albert Brooks' Defending Your Life. I had high hopes for a movie in which an elderly woman dies of cancer, and then in the afterlife has to choose whether to spend eternity with the husband of 65 years who died just a little bit before her while choking on a pretzel, or the husband who died 67 years earlier in the Korean war. She wasn't "unfaithful" to either of them in life because she was single when she met and married both of them, but now she's got a dilemma. 

The husband she lost in the 1950s represented only young love and endless possibility. He was handsome and charming. The husband she had for 65 years after that was a person whose every wart she learned over a lifetime of everything life throws at you. You could see why she might not want to spend a literal eternity with him after spending a figurative eternity with him on Earth. But also, she doesn't really even know the husband she lost 67 years earlier because they only had a couple years together and it was all unrealized promise. 

It's a more interesting dilemma than it is an interesting movie. I'm giving Eternity a marginal thumbs up, but I was more conscious of its missed opportunities than I was of its successful execution of the central dilemma. I was also really conscious of the earthbound nature of the sets. There are a few scenes that give us something with a true afterlife vibe, but I was continually noticing how most of the scenes were likely just shot in a hotel hallway somewhere. Maybe it would have been too much of a distraction, and problematic in a different way, to have the whole thing look like Pixar's Soul -- not to mention costly, which is likely the most relevant factor. But in a movie like this, you want to think more about the heavens than you think about Courtyard by Marriott. 

I think the movie probably did not want to wrestle with its more interesting existential concept, which it introduces as "the void." As lovely as some of the eternities appear to be -- and you can choose from multiple packages like you were choosing a vacation -- they are a single, final choice, so you have to select them carefully. If you try to escape from your eternity to get into another one, well, there's a small chance you'll succeed. But the greater chance is that they'll catch you and send you off to the void: which is just blackness for eternity, the closest thing to hell that exists.

Unless you are inclined to believe in heaven, we mostly think of death as a light being switched off and an end to consciousness. You're no more conscious of the time after death than you were conscious of the time before you were born. This film posits a potential eternal consciousness of nothingness, which indeed would make someone insane pretty quickly. But the film doesn't really go there. It doesn't show us this, only suggests that it exists. 

For reasons that I again won't go into -- but I've hinted enough at them that you might be starting to guess them -- Eternity was actually the most thematically appropriate film I could have watched on Saturday night, having nothing to do with Valentine's Day and having everything to do with early February 2026. Death was on my mind. And even though Eternity didn't grapple with it in as satisfying a fashion as I might have liked, any grappling with death is helpful in terms of coming to grips with it, and getting closure with it, in our own minds. 

On that cheery note, Happy Valentine's Day, for what remains of it in your time zone. 

Audient Bridesmaids: Hope and Glory

This is the latest in a periodic series in which I will ultimately watch all the best picture nominees that didn't win that I haven't seen, in reverse chronological order.

For the first time in this series that has been going on since 2022 and has featured a scant half-dozen films in those nearly four years, I've gotten to a movie I didn't really know anything about before going in. I was familiar with the title Hope and Glory from hearing it mentioned here or there, but I didn't know who was in it, who directed it, or what it was about. (And even after watching it, I don't really know who was in it. The only actor I recognized from anything else was Ian Bannen, and I only know him from one of his final films, a one-time favorite of mine, Waking Ned Devine.)

As it turns out, John Boorman's film is a coming-of-age story set against the backdrop of World War II in England. 

That sounds like it has the potential to be very boring. Or at least, it might not be the kind of thing we see made much in 2026. 

But I had a great time with this movie, which struck me as a cross between different sorts of movies that have worked well for me, at least in some cases. Its setting put me in mind of some of Terence Davies' films from this period, one I really like (Distant Voices, Still Lives) and one I don't care for as much (The Long Day Closes). However, in terms of its sense of making nostalgia fun rather than stuffy, it also reminded me of a family favorite that speaks to my dad's midwestern childhood, A Christmas Story, though Hope and Glory is surely not pitched at quite such a zany level, nor does it have as much narration, nor is it American in any sense. 

The Christmas Story comp may be inexact, but I offer it to show you just how much I enjoyed myself while watching this movie that (like A Christmas Story) follows one family, in this case over most of the war as they evade bombings and play around in the rubble afterward. 

The thing Boorman gets really right here, perhaps because this story is autobiographical, is what it would have been like to perceive the war from the perspective of a child, who isn't capable of comprehending just how serious its impacts were. This child and his friends are more likely to want to smash the remaining intact parts of decimated homes -- in a gleeful rather than an aggressive manner -- than contemplate the loss around them.

One perfect example of this is when a neighborhood girl, who appears to be around 13 or 14, loses her mother in a bombing, and is standing there looking sort of shell-shocked and vaguely miserable, yet still mostly composed, in among the rubble. There's this one boy running around telling all the other children, in the same tone he'd use if he just saw a UFO land on the lawn, that the girl's mother got killed last night. He's so excited to be the messenger that he has to tell every child he sees, and when they don't believe him, he invites them to go ask the girl. She confirms with sort of a sullen nod. As if this is not humiliating enough, and insensitive in a manner only a child could not comprehend, he then finds another disbelieving neighborhood child, and the whole embarrassing routine begins again. 

This should be fodder for great sadness and misery. Instead, it is a matter-of-fact testament to the whole "Keep calm and carry on" mentality that Britain adopted during the war, which helped them get through the most trying of times.

The boy that's a stand-in for Boorman, Billy (Sebatian Rice-Edwards), is nominally the main character, as he's the one who would be coming of age. But the film is a lot more interested in the movements of his mother Grace (Sarah Miles, who resembles a proto Emily Watson) and his older sister Dawn (Sammi Davis), who is constantly misbehaving, which results in her falling for and getting impregnated by a Canandian soldier. The father, Clive (David Hayman), is also a central figure, but because he's an enlisted man, he's not always there.

I suppose I should give a little plot. Grace wants to send her two youngest away, Billy and his younger sister, but has a change of heart on the train platform where they are to leave to be sent off to Australia. So she pulls them back and in turns forces them to endure the bombings that periodically level homes in their neighborhood, a decision she greatly regrets, but which does not end in tragedy. In fact, one of the reasons the film is so "fun," if that's the right word, is that it isn't lulling us just so it can wallop us with the big death of the father, the mother or the sister. All of these characters survive the movie, and I guess that's a spoiler, but I seriously doubt you were just about to watch a best picture nominee from 39 years ago that was obscure enough that a cinephile like myself didn't really know much about it.

It may be obscure to me, but I bet this was pretty celebrated in England in the 1980s, and it was enough of an artisitic and commercial success -- or at least, Boorman had enough clout -- that a sequel called Queen and Country was made in 2014. I'll have to put that on my list as well. 

It strikes me that the British film industry was really at the forefront during this era, as both the last film I watched in this series (1989's My Left Foot) and the next film I'll watch (1986's A Room With a View) are British, and I've already mentioned that Terence Davies was making celebrated films during this era. Of course, all of Merchant-Ivory's films, of which Room With a View is one, were from this part of the world. To be sure, the British film industry is not dead, but you don't see us talking about modern British films as big awards contenders the way we once did. 

I could and probably should go on providing other examples of things that made me laugh or made me nod with a sense of absorbing their truth. One of those is a memorable sequence where the characters have sort of a dance with an out-of-control unmanned dirigible in their neighborhood, something that has to do with repelling the German attack.

But many of these examples I would hypothetically provide are "typical" coming-of-age stuff. That is hardly meant as a criticism, more as a sense of pleasant familiarity. You know, scenes set at the movie theater, scenes of young boys seeing girls in their undergarments, that sort of thing. It's all very sweet and enjoyable and packaged together marvelously by Boorman.

Besides, I'm not trying to meet a particular word count here -- just telling you I saw another movie in this periodic series that isn't progressing as quickly as it should.

After this year's Oscars, I will have, in all likelihood, a new Audient Bridesmaid that needs to be watched before I can continue with the series' core mandate, which is that I always watch the most recent unseen Bridesmaid next, and am obstructed from continuing back into the longer ago history until I do. That movie will be Marty Supreme, assuming it does not win best picture, which it won't.

But maybe I'll try to watch either one or two more before then. Not because it's really any different to be beholden to watch any one particular film over any other particular film. It's just that I seem to lose steam on this project as the year goes on, especially if I don't feel particularly motivated to catch up with the best picture nominee I only just missed from the most recent year. So, I may try to fit in A Room With a View before the end of the month, and see how that goes, and if goes well, maybe even one more. 

Handling f-bombs in movie titles

I've had a slower start to my 2026 movie ranking season, in part by design and in part by circumstance.

The "by design" part is that I'm trying not to "fatten up on buddy comedies." This is what, when explaining why I set a record in 2025 for rankings, I said I'd done with movies released early in 2025 in order to start building my list for the year. So even if I liked some of those 2025 buddy comedies -- especially the one that kicked off my whole viewing year, Back in Action -- I'm trying to give some of them a miss this year. The movie I have been purposefully avoiding, toward that end, is The Wrecking Crew on Amazon Prime, which stars Jason Momoa and Dave Bautista. Which is a shame, because I like both of those guys. Maybe I'll give in later in the year, but not now. 

The "by circumstance" part is that the most significant new release of 2026 so far, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, hit theaters when I still had a week of 2025 viewings left to complete before my ranking deadline. With some rare exceptions, I don't usually jump ahead to the next year before I'm finished with the previous year, and so I will wait for video on this one.

But I did have to eventually break down and see my fourth 2026 movie, in part because I might try to get a review up of it before the weekend, which would be the only review on the site this week. 

It's F Valentine's Day, or F*ck Valentine's Day, or F--- Valentine's Day, or Fuck Valentine's Day, though how I'm ultimately going to list it is the subject of this post. 

For obvious reasons, you can't use the title that the cheeky people behind this movie, who fancy themselves disruptors, want you to use -- not in a publication designed for any sort of mixed readership, that is. But that's somebody else's problem. They'll call their movie this, and let someone else sort out how we'll refer to it. 

The first area we see struggle with this is the distributor itself, which, like The Wrecking Crew, is Amazon Prime. You can see the struggle here:

It's like they can put a picture that makes the word unmistakeable, but the actual listing only includes the F. 

But then the two most prominent places I look up movie information -- IMDB and Letterboxd -- have differing approaches.

Letterboxd favors greater discretion, using F Valentine's Day, as Amazon does. IMDB, though, is willing to be more explicit, going with what the Amazon poster above indicates, which is F*ck Valentine's Day. 

When these two sources disagree, I have to go to tiebreakers, and also, precedent. And we have some very recent precedent.

Last year there was a movie I watched and ranked called F Marry Kill. That's how I listed it in my lists, pretty much without hesitation. The two sites are consistent with their approaches on this movie, with Letterboxd going with F Marry Kill and IMDB indicating the full word, but bleeping out more of the letters: F*** Marry Kill.

Precedents before that? You have to go way back.

The only other movie I've seen with "fuck" in the title, or any variation on the word, is the 2005 documentary Fuck, which is devoted entirely to the usage, meaning, and cultural history of the f-bomb in our society. 

On this, Letterboxd and IMDB agree: They just go with Fuck. And I think that's because you can't call a movie "F."

In fact, IMDB has six movies of varying length called Fuck. What can you do. Some people just want to bend the rules. 

As always when it comes to how to write a title -- and this is something I've considered on several occasions before (there's three separate links there) -- the best tiebreaker is really how it's printed on screen in the movie. And in ... um, this movie ... you get:

Hmm. Whelp.

That isn't the way it's printed anywhere. F- Valentine's Day. It's like you're saying it was such a bad Valentine's Day that it earned a grade of F minus.

But one thing's for sure ... there are no asterisks, and there's definitely no C-K.

So given the recent precedent of F Marry Kill, and my very quick adoption of that title without a post like this, I'm going with F Valentine's Day.

It'd be so much easier if they just didn't try to draw more attention to a forgettable movie in the the first place by putting an f-bomb in its title. 

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.