A significant release year miss

When I started watching the movie F on Thursday night, the "latest" from 47 Meters Down director Johannes Roberts, I thought it had quite a strange look to it. 

There was an out-of-time quality to it that I couldn't place, that I attributed to it looking like TV rather than looking like a movie. This was streaming on Amazon, but it's the same feeling I remember having about a Netflix straight-to-streaming movie I saw a couple years ago, Blood Red Sky. I didn't think either movie was bad -- not by this point of F, anyway -- but I do think there's something uniquely unsavory about a film that looks like a TV show. We all know that we love TV shows that look like movies, but the reverse is not true.

It was only when I got to the very end of the credits, which I watched despite not liking the movie by its very strange ending, that I realized why this 2026 film looked so odd:

It was made in 2010.

Of course, if I'd already seen the poster above -- a poster from the movie's DVD release -- then of course I would have known its vintage. But I had only this to go on:

Huh? In what way, shape or form is this a 2026 film?

Even if Amazon had newly acquired this film, which it seems like they must have, that is not the same as a release year. 

I checked the Wikipedia page to see if it mentioned anything about some new release agreement, some kind of streaming debut, that would, in any conceivable way, qualify this as a movie released in the current year. But I found mention of nothing like that.

You may recall that Amazon has biffed this sort of thing before. I wrote here about watching the movie Corner Office, thinking it was being released in 2024 but then finding out that the actual release year was 2022.

I get that. Release years are slippery things. A festival debut here, a theatrical release there, and then a streaming release, and you could conceivably have a three-year range of ambiguous possible release dates.

There is no way to miss a release year by 16 years. 

So now Amazon is requiring me to do all my homework before watching one of their "new" releases, which takes away some of the spontaneity of just finding it on the streamer and pressing play. 

I guess a movie that looks like a TV show, supposedly released today, is the kind of thing that should give you pause. 

Watching old Netflix films

What exactly is an old Netflix film?

It's a Netflix original that you somehow missed at the time it was released, but you end up watching at a later date. 

I say "somehow" because I have pretty complete coverage of the Netflix original films I ever wanted to see. 

Watching one belatedly almost never happens, but it happened when I watched the 2017 film The Ritual on Wednesday night.

Why does this almost never happen? I should clarify, it almost never happens to me, but it could happen to others. Still, I don't think it happens much to them either.

Netflix movies, more so than most movies that debut on streamers, seem to exist for the exact two-week period after they were released. Sure, they will remain on Netflix likely forever, but watching them ten years after their release seems anachronistic. They were meant to be one-and-done in that first fortnight. After that, they're no longer promoted, and if you didn't catch the exact name when they were being promoted, good luck to you in trying to find them again. 

This may not be uniquely the case for Netflix as opposed to the other streamers, but since Netflix was the first streamer to release a notable quantity of content branded with its name, it kind of created the template for this. 

Why did I miss The Ritual in 2017? I shouldn't have. It's a genre film with plenty of apparent genre goodies. It stars Rafe Spall, an actor I have always liked. And if I needed further incentive, it's only 94 minutes long, the perfect length not to think twice about it and just press play.

I guess I'd have to say it was early enough in the Netflix original films era that maybe I didn't have the same sort of coverage I have today, when I'm running a review website and often reviewing a lot of Netflix movies in that capacity. I didn't get that responsibility until early 2020, in fact just a few weeks before the start of the pandemic. 

Still, even back then you'd think I would have been scouring the streamer for movies to add to my annual rankings. But I guess I'm not appreciating how long ago this really was, and how little I'd established standard practices when it comes to things like this. 

But then I looked in the Wikipedia pages devoted to Netflix original films, which I use surprisingly often. I'm mostly on the page for the current year, because I want to see if there's anything out now, or coming out soon, that I can review. But sometimes I go into the old ones too.

And I couldn't find it.

It appears the movie is not a "Netflix original" the way some other films are. It premiered at TIFF in 2017, where its international rights were purchased by Netflix. I guess because it was released theatrically in England by a company called eOne Films, it didn't qualify -- at that time -- as a "Netflix original." Since then, I think they've relaxed that stance, and take "ownership" over whatever they see fit to claim as their own. 

I'm not sure how useful this post was, and maybe if I had realized earlier that The Ritual wasn't on the Wikipedia pages of Netflix original films, it might have skewered the premise of the post before I even started writing.

Also, the very idea that The Ritual has a short shelf life is sort of belied by the fact that I hadn't heard of it before I went on Netflix to browse Wednesday night, but it was placed before my eyes during a fairly shallow browsing session. If it weren't being promoted at all, well, I just never would have found it. 

But then it also makes me wonder: Why did it pop now? Why do I never remember seeing it any time previously in the more than eight years since it appeared on Netflix in early 2018? 

So it's an old Netflix film for sure, whatever path it took to get there. 

Do I need to see a 3D Billie Eilish concert?

When I went to see Project Hail Mary in IMAX a few months ago, there was a trailer for the new James Cameron-directed Billie Eilish concert movie, which of course was expected to use all the latest tricks in the technology-forward director's arsenal. 

Because I wanted to see what a concert looked like when given the same care as filming a Na'vi, I thought I would probably go.

Strangely, though, it isn't even playing at the IMAX theater where they advertised it, at the Melbourne Museum, which is unusual. When you see something in IMAX, usually they only show trailers for other things that are almost definitely going to play at that theater. IMAX is a different animal, where you don't get any of the filler ads for local restaurants or telecom companies, and you get straight to the movie while only seeing glimpses of other future ways you will be awed in these very seats.

Billie Eilish: Hit Me Hard and Soft is indeed opening today, but is normal 3D, in normal theaters, enough of a draw for me?

Should a slight difference in size really matter that much in determining my interest in this film?

You see, I don't love Billie Eilish. Her music, to me, is a bit like Charli XCX's music, which is that I mean it is exactly adjacent to all sorts of bands that I have, historically, loved, but that this particular brand of what she does -- of what they do -- does not quite work for me. For a person who has been as popular as she's been for going on ten years now, I don't even know that many of her songs, and the one I probably know best, "Bad Guy," is probably my least favorite of the songs I know.

But still, I'm kind of interested in a 3D concert with James Cameron's imprimatur. 

But it's not like this is the first 3D concert I would have ever seen at the movies. Almost exactly 16 years ago, on May 2nd, 2010, I went to see Phish 3D with my friend Gregg, since we are both Phish fans. In fact, I wrote about it here, though you should probably only follow that link if you want to see a blog post with really ghastly formatting. 

The gist of that post was to discuss five total hours of two very long movies (the other being The Baader Meinof Complex) I saw on the same day that really knocked the wind out of me. If I lost my wind even from a band I used to, and possibly still do, consider one of my favorites, what chance do I stand listening to that much music that mildly annoys me, when I've already gotten the 3D concert experience in an inherently more favorable setting? 

(Side note: Looking up the date of my viewing of Phish 3D, which I originally tried to do on Letterboxd before having to opt for my Microsoft Word document, acquainted me with the fact that I never put in a retroactive logging on Letterboxd for this viewing. Since, at that time, I was just going down my movie list from this Word document to add my movies, I have to imagine Phish 3D wasn't available to add to Letterboxd when I first tried to do that. It is now, so I've belatedly rectified that.)

To be fair, Hit Me Hard and Soft comes in under two hours, and I know it's not only concert footage, as Phish 3D was. I know this because my younger son and I had a joke about one of the things in this trailer, which was that the big "dramatic moment" in the trailer was Eilish crying because her brother couldn't be present with her on tour. Not because he was sick or anything had happened to him, just because he wasn't present.

And just writing that last paragraph made me realize: The whole premise of this post is wrong.

It wasn't Project Hail Mary where I saw the Hit Me Hard and Soft trailer, it was Avatar: Fire and Ash. My younger son was with me for that one, not for Project Hail Mary. And we saw that in Hobart, the capital city of Tasmania, not my local IMAX theater. Which, therefore, did not actually create an implicit promise to screen this film that it did not fulfill. 

So yeah I guess I'm not going? I don't know. 

No need for 20 points of differentiation

I was listening to my fantasy baseball podcast this morning – and apologies for making this my second straight post with a baseball tie-in, though it doesn’t stay there – and they were doing a segment called the “believe-o-meter.” The task among the hosts was to submit an answer on a 1 to 10 scale of how much they believed in what a certain previously fringy player was doing this season.

Simple, right?

Except that one guy gave the answer of a 3 ½ out of 10 on one player. And another, I think sort of as a joke and to indicate his own uncertainty, gave a 4 ¾ on another one.

It reminded me how I am sometimes asked by my writers if it would be possible to introduce halves into our rating system.

ReelGood rates movies on a scale of 1/10. For those accustomed to the sort of five-star system Letterboxd uses, it’s the same thing, you just have to multiply the star rating by two. The previous editor somehow introduced a poop emoji when he wanted to go lower than 1/10, but I don’t know how he did that within the current functions available to me, and I’m not eager to repeat it anyway. 1/10 should be the minimum, just as a half-star on Letterboxd is the minimum. If you try to rate a movie 0/5 on Letterboxd, it just looks like you didn’t give it a star rating at all.

In either system that’s ten points of differentiation in quality. And ten should be enough.

We don’t need 20.

In the extremest of olden days, I think there might have only been four-point rating systems for the quality of things. One to four stars, no halves. I agree that that is too limiting to indicate finer points of quality, and so various systems involving five points (a five-star system) or eight points (four stars but with halves) were introduced. Our current ten-point scale is the best iteration anyone's thought of so far.

But the reality is, when you only regularly use a couple different ratings to indicate movies you like but don’t love – from 3 stars to 4, or from 6/10 to 8/10 – you do sometimes feel the need to indicate more nuance.

So that same former editor will sometimes say to me “I might give it a harsh 7,” or “I might give it a generous 8.” That would be talking about the same movie, but in one case you go a tick above, and sometimes you go a tick below. A rating of 7 ½ would solve the problem.

But are we really so wishy washy that we can’t take care of this problem in just ten different points? Our readers require us to be definitive, while understanding that not every film can be distilled down to a number, and that of course it’s just our opinion anyway, and opinions differ.

The real problem – and this is one I continue to come back to time and again on this blog – is that I am not making full use of the full range of ten ratings. Because I’m a bit of a softie, I give a significant number of films somewhere in that 6 to 8 range, in that I can usually find something about it that’s good enough to give it a 6. But sometimes I even feel bad about a 6, like it’s a slap in the face. And that leaves five whole numbers to indicate small gradations in films that are not very good.

I’m not going to change my rating system overnight to the one my former editor already uses, in which he reserves 8s for films he truly loves and almost never gives out 9s and 10s. That’s too far in the other direction, but it does mean he’s using more of the range, or perhaps at least is less reliant on halves. He might be using the same amount of the range, just shifted more negatively.

And I might not use the rating range as I ideally would, but at least I recognize that halves have no place on a ten-point scale.

Baseball and Star Wars

Today is May the 4th. No I will not say "May the 4th be with you." (Dammit. I just did.)

I wasn't reminded of the "holiday" by anything on social media. I mean, it's not even that day in the U.S. yet, so the social media barrage will probably not come until tomorrow.

No, I was reminded of it just by watching a weekend's worth of baseball.

I can't give you specific examples because I watch a lot of different games, and I can't remember what I saw where. (You may recall I play fantasy baseball, so I don't watch any one specific team. In fact, I don't have anyone on my fantasy baseball team from my own major league team, the Red Sox, so I might watch them just about the same amount as I watch any other team where I have no players on my team. The Red Sox have won four World Series in the past 22 years and that's good enough for me, so now I'm basically all fantasy baseball, all the time.)

But the point is, I don't need to try to remember where because pretty much every baseball park seems to have some sort of May the 4th tie-in.

In fact, they have it even if their team isn't going to be home on May the 4th. The ones I saw this weekend were probably for teams who were home over the weekend, but are going on the road for the actual May the 4th with the series that begins on Monday. Either that or they just think a promotion night works better if you also do it on a Saturday.

I just think it's kind of funny. What do Star Wars and baseball intrinsically have in common?

I guess they are both extremely popular, but maybe less so for both. Baseball used to be America's sport, but it has been surpassed by basketball and football for several decades now, as those sports seem to speak to a wider demographic. Star Wars used to be American's favorite franchise, and it might still be, but The Mandalorian and Grogu will break a seven-year drought between films as the TV shows are also getting fewer eyeballs, even when they are of high quality (like Andor). 

In theory, athletes and space fantasy geeks don't overlap very much in the Venn diagram. You are probably more likely to find baseball fans who like Star Wars than Star Wars fans who like baseball, because a sport is probably always going to be a bit more selective in its appeal than a cultural phenomenon that speaks to people the world over. As just the most obvious example, American football may be the biggest sport in the U.S., but people generally don't care about it in other parts of the world. 

So each year I scratch my head a bit when I see them going to great lengths at baseball stadiums around the country to bring Darth Vader on the field to throw out the first pitch, or give away bobblehead figures where one of the players on the team is dressed up like a Jedi.

Look, don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of both. They can intermingle however they want. But I just find it strange.

The real answer?

Baseball teams play 81 home games a year. That's a lot of games. They need to do something to jazz up an average Tuesday night game (or in this case Monday night, or maybe even the Saturday before). Which is also why you might see them celebrating Christmas in July, or Flag Day, or -- well there aren't any holidays in August. But you better bet the big other holidays during the baseball season -- Easter, Mother's Day, Father's Day, Independence Day, Labor Day -- get plenty of play at the stadium. Baseball players even use pink bats on Mother's Day. 

But I think the reason I also get "annoyed" about it -- "annoyed" enough to write a blog post like this, anyway -- is that I've never really embraced May the 4th. It was clever that one guy 20 years ago (or whenever it started) realized that May the 4th sounded like "May the Force," and it could have ended there. Instead each year people are given a reason to post memes or put on a flowing robe or go to some other great lengths to show you that they are more of a Star Wars fan than you are.

Maybe there's a part of me that feels like the real Star Wars nerds -- those of us who saw the first movie in the theater when we were three years old, and played with the action figures for ten years after that -- need to be distinguished from these johnny-come-latelys who haven't really earned it. And when I hear 65-year-old baseball broadcasters talking about "Chewbacky" as they are forced to incorporate into their telecast that night's Star Wars mania at the ballpark, it just reminds me that there can sometimes be too much of a good thing.

Zukerman and Novak go back-to-back

I see a lot more Ashley Zukerman movies than most people because I live in Australia, and because Ashley Zukerman is Australian. But Americans would have/should have seen him as well, given that he appears in such places as Succession, Silo and the Fear Street movies. 

Potentially the most notable thing about Zukerman is that when you see him, you have to ask yourself if he's B.J. Novak. 

I'll include a picture of them side by side later on. Right now, I don't have room to do it while still including the posters for the two movies I'm talking about today.

Novak is best known for his role as Ryan Howard on The Office, though he of course also appears/ appeared in other things. He even directed a movie a few years ago, Vengeance, and is responsible for a truly unique children's storybook that we got given to us as a present, The Book With No Pictures. 

As I was watching the Australian movie In Vitro on Wednesday night -- the second Zukerman movie I've seen in the past four months after One More Shot on New Year's Eve -- I thought again to myself "Yeah, here's B.J. Novak's doppelganger again." Of course, I didn't really have to think of it in those terms because the phenomenon of him looking like B.J. Novak prompted me to learn his name a while ago. As a film critic working in Australia, it's also just generally a good idea for me to know these things.

Imagine my surprise, then, when the very next night, I saw Zukerman's doppelganger in another movie.

Although we are a little less likely to see Novak around than we were a few years ago, he does in fact turn up in The Devil Wears Prada 2, playing the douchebag son of the owner of the media company that publishes Miranda Priestly's magazine. (The character isn't reprehensible, but his big recurring character trait is that he can't stop saying "you guys" and always has to correct himself to say "people" instead. As a big "you guys" guy myself, I didn't think this was so bad.)

So yeah, nothing more profound really to say today except that I saw the lookalikes in two consecutive movies. Sometimes that's all you get.

And now that I've written enough other words to exceed the height of the two movies posters, you get your pic of them next to each other:

So I guess there was one more thing you "get" today.