Pride Month: Stonewall

I'm back on track with my original intention for this year's Pride Month theme thanks to a little thing called a VPN.

Forgive the stretch I am about to make, but it's thematically appropriate. I had always thought of a VPN as something you did in a dark alley somewhere, not unlikely a gay street kid in New York turning a trick. It was something to be ashamed of it and it exposed you to risk. 

Turns out, nowadays, a VPN is something built into your standard antivirus program, mine being Norton. 

As you might recall, last week I tried to watch Roland Emmerich's Stonewall as my first movie in this four-movie Pride Month series, focused on the history of the gay rights movement, but it was geoblocked. Because my AppleTV is linked up to the U.S., it showed me the movie as an option through a Cinemax subscription, which I would get free for a week before being charged $8.99 a month after that. But watching it? That's when it came up with the big "this is not available in your country" message. (And the mishap caused me to miss the week's grace period, so it's ended up being an $8.99 rental of the movie.)

When it came time for me to figure out the second movie in the series, and I was not willing to give up on Stonewall, I tried going to Norton first, as a better option to finding some VPN of unknown providence out there in the wild somewhere. Turns out, there's a spot on the Norton dashboard where you can turn on a VPN, easy peasy. And though mine connected me to Australia by default, which was no help, I found it was just as easy to change the country to the U.S. And boom! Suddenly Stonewall would play.

Funny the things you've written off as adjacent to piracy, that turn out just to be normal parts of a modern internet security setup. And when I googled what most normal people use VPNs for, the second listed choice was to bypass geoblocking -- as though this was such a perfectly legitimate usage of a VPN that mainstream companies like Norton have just made it a standard part of their offerings. 

Before we get into the particulars on this lightning rod of a movie, I could tell it was a great match with last week's movie, The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson, within the first five minutes, when none other than Marsha P. Johnson is introduced as a character. And there's something really funny about this. The actor playing Johnson was Otoja Abit. You wouldn't recognize that name, but I immediately did. You see, back in COVID, I happened to select one of the many new Netflix Christmas offerings, quite randomly, to review on ReelGood. That movie was A New York Christmas Wedding, which I wrote about positively, awarding it an 8/10 on our ratings scale. Who directed that movie? Otoja Abit.

"So what, Vance?" you say. "So you saw a movie directed by a guy who was an actor in another movie."

But the thing about Otoja Abit is that he is one of only a handful of directors who have ever reached out to me after reading my review of their movie. I can't at this point remember the form that reaching out took, but I believe he emailed me. (That would seem to be the only explanation, since I didn't post about the movie here, nor are there any comments against the review itself.) I exchanged a few emails with him and he was very appreciative of my coverage. (I should pause to say that I have assumed pronouns for this person. Otoja Abit could be a she/her or a they/them, so apologies if anyone reading this has identified a mis-gendering on my part.)

Okay so this movie. A lot of people hate it.

I did not hate Stonewall. Did I like it? I can't say that either.

The people who hate it seem to be a lot more qualified to hate it than I am, because it is a representation of them -- and a very failed representation at that.

I read a smattering of comments about it on Letterboxd after I'd posted my own 2.5-star rating. Their reservations resonated with me, to be sure. They found the representation of even the wide array of gay men in this movie circa 1969 to be highly problematic. The lead character, played by Jeremy Irvine, was white-washed, more like a straight white guy that they made gay in order to allow audiences to relate to him. The more effeminate men were too effeminate by half. And then there were too many scenes that reeked of gross dismissiveness of the gay experience, like one character crying while receiving a blow job from a stranger in the park.

These things did register with me as I was watching. But pretty early on in this movie, I decided that this was sort of like the Baz Luhrmann version of the gay experience: big, broad, and lacking in the sensitivity of the finer details. 

If you know me, this sounds like a compliment. I am a Luhrmann fan. But what I saw when I watched Stonewall was what I imagine Luhrmann haters see when they watch Luhrmann films. And this takes some putting myself in their shoes. I expect that a Luhrmann hater does not see an incompetently made film; they see a film whose pleasures are entirely disposable, like a pop song that they also hate but that they recognize is catchy. 

So this didn't work for me like a Luhrmann film works for me, but it felt like a Luhrmann film in the sense of providing an "epic" version of the subject matter, one told with a big budget mentality, not a keen eye for the finer details of representation. 

Now, we know that this is a story it's okay for Emmerich to tell. Emmerich is gay. So the Stonewall haters shouldn't have a "how dare he?" component to their hatred. They just think he's out of touch, that he's sold out to a wing of homosexual activism that tries to mainstream gays rather than to celebrate their individuality, and that his career's worth of sub-par disaster movies indicate that he could never tell a story like this. 

My perspective as a film critic is a little different. The reason I wanted to watch Stonewall is that I was a big fan of Emmerich's 2011 film Anonymous, an opulent costume drama that questioned the authorship of Shakespeare's plays. I thought this was a really successful filming of a really intricate script, and it made its case so convincingly that I, too, now don't believe that Shakespeare wrote his plays. (So, perhaps my entire credibility is now out the window with you.)

So for me, I see a director screaming to get out of the career path that forced him to make a dozen movies in which the White House gets destroyed, and to make more intimate films. One of which is Stonewall, even if it's intimate only by Emmerich's standards. Let's say "more personal films" instead. 

Is his depiction of the June 28, 1969 Stonewall Riots a success? Not entirely. Not even mostly. In fact, I found the riots themselves to be oddly anti-climactic in the narrative. There's definitely a bit of a sound stage quality to how the riots looked on that street in Greenwich Village where all the movie's "gay street kids," as they are called, hang out. 

But I can't bring myself to fault the man for trying. This subject obviously feels near and dear to him. The thing is, Roland Emmerich does have significant limitations as a filmmaker. As much as I like Anonymous, and appreciate films like Universal Soldier and 2012, this is not a man who has ever been considered "good" by the critical community. He gets the job done, and his movies make money, but I think a lot of people don't even consider him to be as good as Michael Bay. If he makes an imperfect Stonewall Riots movie, maybe that's what we would/should expect. 

In any case, I was glad to have the opportunity to learn more about these riots than I did in The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson, which was not itself a Stonewall movie as such. If I keep watching movies this month that relate to Stonewall -- and there are at least a handful of other options available on my streamers -- then maybe I'll get a fuller sense of what turned out to be four days of protesting, the unofficial launch of the gay rights movement. And then maybe I'll see all the other ways Emmerich's film is deficient.

Before I go, there was one other thing I wanted to say about the movie. Although indeed the characters we initially meet, one of whom is played by Caleb Landry Jones, are quite effeminate, and perhaps not in the best possible way, I was interested to see the movie present the contrasting styles of gay activism at this juncture. A character played by Jonathan Rhys Meyers represents a less radical form of gay activism, but also the one the movie clearly sees as insufficient, in which they are trying to mainstream gays, put them in suits and ties, so that heterosexuals, the ones currently firing them from their jobs, will accept them more as equals. While we understand today that this is not helpful and is in fact an instance of suppressing what makes gay men (and a few lesbians) themselves, you can see why this was considered as a tactic at the time. 

The performances in the film vary in quality, but I did want to give a special mention to the film's second lead, a character named Ray, played by Jonny Beauchamp. He's the "gay street kid" that we are supposed to relate to the most, our most accessible in to the experience, if we are considering the lead, Danny, to be our surrogate. He's flamboyant but he's not being "aggressively sexual" with Danny, which is how others come across to him at first. And he goes through a pretty heartbreaking character arc in which he questions his worth. The performance by Beauchamp makes this one of the more resonant parts of the viewing experience.

Okay, back in a week's time with another Stonewall-adjacent movie, in all likelihood. 

Eric Roberts, the hardest working man in show business

If you were to ask me why I keep reading the mostly very stupid answers to questions by people on Quora, which get sent to me in multiple-times-daily recap emails, it's because every once in a while I come across something really useful.

When I saw the question "Who holds the record for the most films made by an actor in America?" I figured the answer would be interesting, no matter who it was. 

Just guessing, I was figuring it would be some kind of bit player who worked for a studio in the 1940s or 1950s, whose job it was to appear at least as an extra in whatever three to five movies they were filming that day on the lot. When making movies was more of a business with something more like set office hours, extras volumes like this would have been achievable. (Though, perhaps not memorialized on IMDB all these years later.)

Nope. It's Eric Roberts.

Which made me think "When was the last time I've actually seen Eric Roberts in anything?"

I guess Eric Roberts is just not making the sorts of films I see. But my God is he working.

If you go to Roberts' IMDB page, you'll see this:

And no, that's not a misprint. 

Those are not all movie roles, of course. That includes TV acting, of which he has a huge abundance as well. But to the Quora contributor's credit, they do make this distinction. I'm not going through to verify, but they say he has 455 film roles and 191 television roles. That doesn't add up to nearly 926, but after a certain point, you just wave your hand and say "It's a lot."

And he's only 70, so he's still probably got a long ways to go. He'll be over 1,000 in no time. 

(Incidentally, I didn't realize there was such an age gap between him and Julia. He's got a dozen years on her.)

Here are just a few tributes to Roberts' prolific output:

- In 2026 alone, Robert has 24 acting credits. The year is not even half over yet. 

- The section devoted to Roberts' upcoming endeavors, those that have not yet had their release, has 86 titles in it. Twenty-one of those are 2026 projects.

- He's got so many credits that a movie with a 2027 release date is already listed as a past credit for him. Roberts works so much that he can travel into the future. 

- Looking only at the most recent year that's already in the books, Roberts had 52 credits in 2025. I'm not going to say that was the record for his career, because that would require a lot of fussy counting. But let's just say if it isn't, it should be. 

I'm not going to delve further back into his history, because I think you get the point. Roberts will be in anything.

One funny example from that 2025: Roberts plays General Watts in a film called Pandora: Fire and Ice. If you are wondering for a moment whether he was in the most recent Avatar, and maybe it's just listed in a funny way on IMDB, well, that's what the movie wants you to think. But no, this is another one of those titles by the Asylum, designed to extract a $4.99 rental from your unsuspecting uncle. And I'd be willing to bet we'd find one to two dozen other Asylum titles in his credits. 

You might think my perspective on all this work would be to look down on it, but I've actually got mad respect for it. I can look down my nose at someone like Nicolas Cage when he's the star of eight terrible straight-to-video movies a year, because we know he could do better. Roberts? Roberts probably can't do better, though I always thought he was pretty good at what he does, not a total hack. And there's almost something physically impossible about what he's pulling off here, like he almost literally can't be in all these places at just the right points of their shooting schedules, yet somehow he's still doing it. 

And it's not like Roberts is actually one of those studio bit players I theorized about, who could be seen in the background of Bringing Up Baby. If you're hiring Eric Roberts to be in your movie, it's because of his very credibility as a known name and a sibling of the one-time most eligible A-list actress in Hollywood (not to mention father to Emma). If you're hiring Eric Roberts, you are probably featuring him prominently in the advertising materials. If you're hiring Eric Roberts, he's going to have at least 20 lines of dialogue and possibly as many as four or five days of shooting. 

So since Roberts had 52 credits in the year 2025, that means he averaged one role per week. Let's hope he managed to squeeze two or three into at least one of those weeks. This is a man who needs a vacation. 

Anyway, color me impressed. 

My first Letterboxd rental

I was going to say "And possibly my last," except I worked out the problem.

You may not think of Letterboxd as a source of video rentals, but it is. I was actually planning to rent a movie through Letterboxd back in January, through its Video Store application, but the movie a friend recommended that he'd rented there, It Ends, was not something I could find, for whatever reason. So I couldn't add that movie to my 2025 list, because it was a Letterboxd exclusive -- except not for me, apparently. 

When I saw that a movie from my 2026 watchlist, Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie (feels like there should be some punctuation in there), was available through Video Store, I felt the urge for a delayed scratching of that "new platform itch." I'm sure this movie is available to rent through other means, but that itch made me dive in for a Sunday night viewing.

A Sunday night viewing that almost wasn't. 

The rental went fine, it picked up my payment details and everything. Clicking the start of the movie registered the start of my viewing window, since it said I had 48 hours to complete my viewing.

But the movie wouldn't start. The little colored circle just kept on spinning, and this did not change through multiple refreshes, uses of the backward arrow on my browser and even a reboot. 

I was about to click "send" on a complaint message to Letterboxd, asking for a refund before quickly switching to another movie even though it was now 10:30 and we'd gone for a long hike earlier in the day, when I realized that perhaps the internet issues that had plagued me all weekend were a factor here. 

You see, my older son must be playing some sort of new game that sucks up the available internet, because starting with his student-free day on Friday, when I was at home working, I've struggled to complete normal tasks that involve the internet. And that's almost all tasks, especially since I am connecting in to remote servers for work, where I am accustomed to high-speed processing. He says this is a game he's been playing for weeks, but the evidence is pretty strong that something had changed, and that he was the one hogging our bandwidth.

He was still playing the game on Sunday night at 10:30, so I decided to switch to running my laptop off my phone, whose WiFi I would also turn off so I'd be running the whole thing just from mobile data. And suddenly, Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie was ready to play.

After this, no issues. Letterboxd is still in my good graces. Though I did check just now, and I could have rented it for the exact same price from Amazon anyway, so perhaps the novelty was only the new platform, not the scarcity of the movie's availability. 

And the movie did not disappoint -- or if it did, it only disappointed very slightly. How could this movie with a lofty 7.9 rating on IMDB disappoint? The only possible way is because Matt Johnson has such a successful track record with me. Of his three previous features, the one I rank lowest is Operation Avalanche, and that movie got four stars from me. The Dirties and BlackBerry were both 4.5 star movies on my Letterboxd. So when Nirvanna was "only" another 4 stars -- though I did consider 3.5 -- it couldn't help be not quite the level of achievement I was hoping.

But this is a very fun movie, which pulses with Johnson's trademark shaggy charm, not to mention an intense love of Back to the Future. Plus multiple scenes of people parachuting off the CN Tower in Toronto. Who could ask for more? In the end, I realized that it was a silly usage of the milquetoast 3.5 star rating on a movie with this much creativity, joie de vivre, and deployment of unsuspecting real Toronto citizens. 

Our fascination with fictitious pop megastars

The subsection of recent films dealing with pop megastars -- usually female but not always -- is becoming sort of cottage industry unto itself.

And I'm there for each one of them. 

The latest I've watched is Smile 2 on Friday night, but that's the second such movie I've seen since the start of April and the third in (approximately) the last year. That third was released just a little over a year ago. Take it back two years and it's at least four.

Those other three, in reverse chronological order, are Mother Mary, Hurry Up Tomorrow and Trap, each of which, like Smile 2, shows the pop star in question involved in some sort of crisis, and in the meantime, strutting their stuff on stage in front of arena audiences of thousands. 

In the past decade, you can also include films like Vox Lux and Her Smell. I'm not going to include a movie like K-Pop Demon Hunters, because it's about three musicians rather than one, it's animated, and it isn't going for the same tone. 

I suppose there's a little bit of cherry-picking involved here. During this period, there would have been the same number of films, probably more, about other sorts of celebrities, such as actors/actresses and athletes. 

But there's something about the pop megastar, usually the female pop megastar (as is the case in all these examples except The Weeknd in Hurry Up Tomorrow), that seems to drive filmmakers to this place of intense darkness and operatic creativity. When we see these pop megastars on stage, there's something about their costumes, their sets, the very songs they're singing, that feels apocalyptic in nature.

At the same time, the thing that makes it so fascinating and profound is that these depictions don't feel inaccurate. Although a typical Lady Gaga concert has its share of joy, of course, there's also something alien by design in the staging of certain songs, something that feels just a bit dangerous -- especially if you are a teenage fan trying to come to grips with your identity, sexual or otherwise, at a very precarious time of your maturation. These films capture the sinister streak involved in the music of most current pop megastars.

And I'm there for each one of them.

It seems a little reductive to make this the focus of a blog post about Smile 2, which I only gave an additional half-star from the original (4 vs. 3.5) but which entranced and scared me enough that I flirted with 4.5 stars. If director Parker Finn went for it with the original Smile, he goes for it even more here, upping the ante on the violence/gore, the disturbing sound design and score, and especially the lead performance by Naomi Scott, who leaves none of her arrows in her quiver on this one. Although at the time it was released in 2024, I was daunted by its 128-minute running time, I am already planning a second viewing just to appreciate its grisly details once more. (In fact, only the length prevented it from being the movie I watched in Singapore on our trip back in 2024. Instead I watched The Wild Robot, of which I was not a fan.)

With all that Smile 2 does right as a movie -- and there are a ton of things -- I don't know that it would have the same impact on me if it were just about an ordinary citizen. Something about Scott's character being a pop star elevates the movie into this extra epic stratosphere, even when it doesn't concentrate as much on the music scenes as movies like Mother Mary and Trap. (And I should stop to clarify that those two movies have some other issues, but the music sections are not part of the problem.)

I feel like I will continue to see movies like this popping up in the cinematic landscape, and next time, I won't let length alone delay my viewing for two years. 

Streak, interrupted

I don't know if I'd have any way of accurately checking this -- I could laboriously go through Letterboxd, back to 2002 -- but I've just finished my longest ever streak of watching movies that I gave the same star rating. 

Predictably, that star rating was the all-purpose, ever-reliable, ever-milquetoast 3.5 stars.

And it was a rating I gave to every new movie I watched between May 29th and June 2nd, which in this case was seven movies.

Not a huge number? Maybe. Not a huge time period? Definitely. But as I was looking at it on Letterboxd, it felt gigantic.

Now, this is the sort of streak that is utterly within my own control. I decide the star rating I'm going to give a movie, and if I were between two different star ratings, it would be easy to select 3.5 stars instead of 3 or 4 stars just to keep the streak going.

But no, I feel like each of those star ratings of 3.5 was given fairly, with no shenanigans. 

If you want to know the seven movies in this streak, they were:

Eleanor the Great
My Dead Friend Zoe
Ever After
Americana
The Crash
Fay Grim
The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson

I don't need to spend any additional time discussing them. Two of them I've already discussed. 

When I started watching Girl, Interrupted for the first time ever on Thursday afternoon, I sensed the streak was going to "finally" (too short to use that word) end. But I thought that's because I was going to give James Mangold's film four stars. Yes, despite reservations about the probable overwrought nature of this movie, which had kept me from watching it for 27 years, I was vibing with it well in its first half. 

It might have been around the time our heroine, played by Winona Ryder, tries to insult a nurse played by Whoopi Goldberg by talking in a racist take Southern Black accent that my feelings on the movie started to turn. (In 1999, perhaps this was not disqualifying of our sympathies, plus the movie was set in the 1960s.)

Or maybe it was during a suicide sequence that is so drawn out in the narrative that the audience is ten steps ahead of the characters during the entire staging, including the episode of verbal abuse leading up to it by co-star Angelina Jolie.

Whatever the case, Girl, Interrupted did morph into the movie I thought it would be at that point, and instead of a half-star above that 3.5, I went a half-star below. And probably could have gone lower, but I did retain the positive feelings from the first half.

Jolie? I'm not sure it's an Oscar-worthy performance, especially during the climax.

I know I'm not starting another streak because the next movie I watched, the idiotic "sharks in a hurricane" movie new to Netflix called Thrash, received a rare 1 star from me.

Pride Month: The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson

I'm back for my fourth straight year watching four movies in the month of June in honor of Pride Month. 

And for the fourth straight year I'm going for a theme, though I'm not sure entirely how that theme is going to come together.

Just to recap, in 2023 I watched two movies about gay men and two movies about lesbians, one from present day and one from the past for each. In 2024 I watched LGBTQI+ movies from around the world. In 2025, the focus was on trans movies. 

This year? I think I'm doing movies about the history of the gay rights movement, but the movie that inspired the theme may not actually be available. 

I'm not a Roland Emmerich apologist, but I do have an outsized amount of love for one of his movies that went beyond his wheelhouse of large-scale disaster movies. That movie is the 2011 film Anonymous, a highly accomplished film that helped establish my controversial and largely debunked view that William Shakespeare was not actually the author of his plays. (Let's not get into it.)

And so I always thought there was a chance I would like, more than the average person, Emmerich's 2015 film Stonewall, which has a much more significant negative reputation attached to it. It looks at the Stonewall Riots that were considered the birth of the gay rights movement in the United States.

But it's a pretty elusive movie. I didn't find it on any of my streaming sites, even for rental. Until it popped up on AppleTV, but only with the caveat that I try Cinemax for free for a week before subscribing for $9.99 per month. (Please remind me to cancel this subscription before it kicks in.)

I don't usually like to sign up for these sorts of deals. They stress me out. I know some people work this system to perfection, but I'm always worried I'll get a head injury or a sudden bout of amnesia and forget to cancel the subscription. Or that there's another way they will secretly "get me."

But I took the plunge this time, because indeed, my 2026 Pride Month theme sort of depended on it. 

When I went to press play on Tuesday night, I got the message that the movie wasn't available in my country. (Then why show it to me in the first place, dammit.)

I should tell you that I am betwixt and between on my Apple subscription. It's a U.S. account, and that usually means anything they show me on iTunes is available for me to rent. But ah, iTunes no longer exists, as of these past few months. Now it's all AppleTV, and though the functionality for most things seems to be the same, it may be that there's now actual geo-blocking for certain apps and movies, rather than all that being determined by the country with which my account is associated. If true, that will be a big disappointment come the end of the year, when I usually rely on this resource for accessing some films that came out earlier in the U.S. but are not yet available in Australia. 

I don't want to take too much more time from the actual movie I watched, but let's just conclude by saying my ability to watch Stonewall is now very much in limbo. It could be as simple as needing to set up a VPN, which may be something I'll try. 

For now, though, I needed to watch a Pride movie on Tuesday night, and I tried to stay on my expected theme by picking up The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson on Netflix.

This was already on my Netflix watchlist, so I suspect it was a candidate for a past version of my Pride Month viewings. It's a documentary about the death/suspected murder of the title character, a trans woman who was a leader in the gay liberation movement, back in 1992. The case has been cold since the documentary's 2017 present tense, 25 years after she died, but now crime victim advocate Victoria Cruz is trying to heat it up again. 

Barely a minute into the film, Stonewall is evoked. So then it made me wonder: Should I devote the entire month of viewings to movies that are in some way about Stonewall? I don't know a lot about it, and I'm sure to improve that significantly if I watch four movies about it. And there are plenty of other options, as I discovered in my fruitless searches for Emmerich's film. 

David France's film is constructed in a similar way to any documentary about a person uncovering clues and evidence about a cold case, with one big difference: It barely pretends, even for the sake of drama, that there is going to be anything new forthcoming from Cruz' investigations. It's entirely contrary to the point of the documentary that this would even be possible.

What The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson makes clear over an hour and 45 minutes is that those who wanted to bury evidence of hate crimes against LGTBQI+ people have always been successful at doing so. The system is set up to help them bury this evidence. That would have been particularly the case when Marsha Johnson and the film's other main character, Sylvia Rivera, were dipping their toe into the protest racket back in the 1970s. It was still quite definitely the case in the early 1990s, when Johnson's body was found floating off the Christopher Street Pier in Manhattan, and officially deemed to be a suicide, even though all those who knew her swore up and down that Johnson was not the sort of person to take her own life. And it's even still the case in 2017, a comparatively liberated time, when the detectives who investigated Johnson's death, now mostly retired, tend to speak angrily to Cruz and hang up on her, barely concealing their disdain for the victim.

Watching The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson nine years after it was made, it was interesting to watch the changes that have occurred when talking about trans people, even between then and today. In this movie there is very little consistency about the pronouns used to talk about Marsha. Most in the know try to use she/her, but many others use he/him, even loved ones and other supporters. Of course, some of this has to do with the fact that these standards certainly weren't codified back in 1992, much less than when Marsha first came on the scene as what some consider the mother of the gay liberation movement. 

If I have a regret about The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson, it's that it does struggle, to some extent, to bring Johnson to life as a character, even though the movie's title promises to do that. It's no accident, of course, that the word "death" is listed before the word "life" in the title. We have no choice but to focus on her death more than her life, because the video footage of her prior to 1992 was scant, and filling in with photos only covers that gap a little bit. It's not the movie's fault. I suppose this was just inevitable to some degree.

We do get a lot more of Sylvia Rivera, who is also no longer alive at the time of filming, but who recorded a lot of video in the years after Johnson's death, as she was a crusader in trying to get the probable murder of Johnson properly investigated. We follow her personal struggles as she becomes homeless and is even kicked out of her shanty town "home," in one of the film's many sad scenes. Unfortunately, she's an imperfect replacement for Johnson as the film's central character, as she's not the force of great charisma that Johnson seems to have been. 

Ultimately the story's main character would have to be the investigator, Cruz, whose tireless work tracking down leads forms the focus of the narrative. We see her reconstructing the timelines that led to Johnson's death, and we even see her using one of those corkboards where evidence gets attached with pushpins. This was the only part of the movie that really rang false to me, and that's probably only because I listened to a podcast about how these corkboards with their strings connecting pictures of people is largely a creation of screenwriters and not actual practice in criminal investigations. Of course, that doesn't mean that an intrepid everyman/everywoman couldn't use such a practice as a form of imitation of what they've seen in the movies.

Cruz is a very placid character, unassuming. As the film goes along, and as one metaphorical door is closed in her face after another, we see the rage start to build in her. It never has a traditional outlet in a climactic moment, but where it leaves us -- in a way, no closer to the truth than when she began -- is a powerful reminder of the uphill battle still faced by victims of hate crimes based on sexuality.

I'll be back next Wednesday with my second Pride Month viewing, which will in some way be connected to this first one. 

Remembering Rob Reiner: Stand by Me

This is the third in one of two 2026 bi-monthly series with the same name, Remembering Rob Reiner, but different focuses. In February, April, June, August, October and December, I'm rewatching my second through seventh favorite Reiner movies, having already rewatched my favorite, This is Spinal Tap, before the series began. 

Stand by Me, my #149 on Flickchart, was considered one of the great coming-of-age movies of the 1980s, possibly of all time. That means that, of course, a wide range of people in a wide range of age groups related to its observations on growing up, especially at the characters' fragile age of 12. 

But I bet there were two groups of people for whom this effect was particularly profound:

1) Those who were 12 years old in 1959, when the movie is set;

2) Those who were 12 years old in 1986, when the movie came out.

That second group was me. 

Stand by Me was released on August 22, 1986, and I did not turn 13 for another two months. And I definitely saw it in the theater, surely before my birthday, though it would have been possible not to since movies stayed in cinemas a lot longer back then. 

It's hard to believe they didn't know what they had on their hands with this movie, and released it in the doldrums of summer. August has never been a great release date for a movie, even early August. And even though the summer blockbuster era was not, back then, what it is today, surely that logic still applied.

But the release date did also have a certain timeliness, as this movie also takes place at the end of the summer of 1959, just before its four 12-year-olds are going to junior high school and expecting their friend dynamic to change irrevocably. Labor Day, when the movie takes place, is about a week after the film's August 22nd release date. 

Whether this was canny timing or just an accident, I'm sure the end-of-summer melancholy, combined with my age, meant that everything about the themes of Stand by Me really hit home with me. Because of the way my schools were set up, it was not actually a summer of transitions between schools for me, as I still had one more year of middle school left before going to high school. But perhaps, having already undergone this transition once, I was better capable of understanding what the characters were going through. 

As I was rewatching this movie for the first time this century -- and I can't be absolutely certain I even watched it in the 1990s -- it occurred to me that this film has a similarity to the first film I wrote about back in February, The Princess Bride, which wouldn't come out until the next year. 

On the surface? Nothing in common. But when I was writing about Bride, I was inclined to list just a bunch of great, memorable quotes, which I jotted down as I was watching -- reaching a total of 42 before all was said and done. 

I don't think of Stand by Me in terms of memorable quotes, though there are those. The concept for the advertising campaign, as exemplified in the poster above, was based on quotes, which had a certain currency to them even if you hadn't seen the movie yet. 

No, I think of it in terms of memorable scenes, which is sort of the same thing -- and which is also something we would credit to the screenwriter more than we would necessarily credit to the director. (To name names: Stand by Me was written by Raynold Gideon and Bruce A. Evans. I've never heard of them either, unlike Princess Bride scribe William Goldman.)

The common element between the two movies is obviously Reiner, and I think he excelled at making these things memorable through his approach to filmmaking. Coming in at only a scant 89 minutes, Stand by Me is nonetheless chockablock with three- to four-minute scenes where something happened that had quite a strong impression on me. 

A list? Okay. Though it's not going to be in order.

1) The scene where the boys get leeches while going in the water. 

2) The scene where the junkyard dog is sicced on their balls. 

3) The scene where they have to outrun an approaching train.

4) The scene where Lardass prompts a contagious vomiting episode among those watching a pie-eating contest.

5) The scene where Kiefer Sutherland threatens to kill River Phoenix and you really believe he will, like killing somebody doesn't make a damn bit of difference to him.

I'm actually going to stop there, though I could continue. I'm going to stop there because I want to transition to a related point. 

The thing that (almost) all of those scenes have in common is that they involve real danger for the characters. When I'd seen bands of kids together in the movies -- like, say, The Goonies the previous year, which also starred Corey Feldman -- I never felt like they were actually in danger. Don't get me wrong, I love The Goonies. But there's a difference between the peril in which those kids find themselves, and the danger that befalls the Stand by Me crew. There's a reason I use the word "peril" for one and "danger" for the other. Peril has no bite to it. 

Watching Stand by Me, in 1986, was an experience of wondering if these kids would actually make it out of this movie alive. And there was good reason in the story for that fear, because there's death all over this movie. Wil Wheaton's Gordie has already lost his brother (The Sure Thing veteran John Cusack!) to a car accident, just four months before the events of this movie, and the actual point of their journey is to go see the dead body of a young man hit by a train -- who provides the title of the original Stephen King novella, The Body.

(I don't want to get sidetracked, but I will include a parenthetical thought here, one of my only reservations about Stand by Me. In what world do multiple people know about the existence of a dead body that has not even been found by the police yet? And in what world do they clash over who's going to find and report the dead body? That part of is a bit strange, though it does provide good thematic heft.)

So with death hanging over this movie at all points -- and one death that occurs later that we don't learn about until the end -- it was easy to worry about whether our characters would actually survive their interactions with rambunctious golden retrievers, leeches, trains, guns, knives, and even cigarettes. (Yep, it was definitely a grown-up thing for me to see other 12-year-olds smoking cigarettes, which was no part of my personal experience, and would never appear in a movie nowadays except maybe the most grungy indie movie you can imagine.)

But these fears of death are as much about the impending change in our lives -- both the characters and mine -- than any actual fears of death. In my privileged suburb of Boston, we didn't know anyone who had died, not even including any of my friends' parents. Heck, most of us even had all our grandparents. Death was very remote for us in August of 1986.

But change? We already sensed it was coming. We already knew that we weren't going to be friends with the same people in a few years that we were now. It was right around this time that I had a falling out with one of my friends who had been among my best friends to this point, and I'm ashamed to tell you that it wasn't him, it was me. I was the one who decided he wasn't cool anymore, and I actually ended up punching him in the forehead at one point.

It was a volatile emotional time, 12 years old, and that's another impression you get from Stand by Me. Every kid except Jerry O'Connell's Vern has an episode of crying in this movie, and it's not over something like getting hurt. It's over genuine emotional trauma from big, existential things. Gordie lost a brother. Chris is thought of by everyone as a criminal. Teddy's father is crazy and held his ear to a hot stove, permanently mangling it. Even the relatively stable Vern gets shit for being fat. 

So it wasn't only the physical dangers that Stand by Me perfectly encapsulated, it was the emotional dangers. And they all got wrapped up into one intense viewing experience, the sort I'd never had before at age 12, the sort that played a role in maturing me beyond where I had been when I entered that theater.

So even though it may have been more than 35 years since I saw Stand by Me, and there was reason for me to wonder if it still belonged in my top 200 on Flickchart, I can confirm that this viewing brought back all the formative experiences I had when I first watched it. It brought back that feeling that the world was not, in fact, safe, and probably never had been. 

This post was not a lot about Rob Reiner. But Reiner was definitely a key ingredient in bringing this all together, getting incredible performances from child actors, effortlessly blending the comedy and the drama, and giving the whole thing the necessary epic sense to entrench it in all of our minds and hearts -- and not just those of us who were 12 in the summer of 1986. 

In touch with the actual ScarJo

No, you aren't doing a double take -- the title of this post is intentionally playing off the title of the final post I wrote on my trip to Japan.

That's because while in that post, I was spiritually communing with Scarlett Johansson's character from Lost in Translation, but in this post, I am in touch with what the actual ScarJo is doing these days.

And that is ... directing movies?

I don't know why I should be surprised by that. Her instincts as an actor show she has an understanding of storytelling through film, so the next logical step would be directing. 

Eleanor the Great, which was the first of two movies I watched on the plane back from Tokyo (My Dead Friend Zoe does not get its own post), is actually Johansson's third effort as a director. The first two are quite different: something called American Express Unstaged: Ellie Goulding in 2015, and a 2009 short called These Vagabond Shoes. 

Eleanor the Great is also different, in that it's different from what we might expect Johansson might direct, if we had any preconceived notions of that. We might assume she'd follow in the footsteps of a director who had brought her one of her more iconic roles, maybe even make a Sofia Coppola-type film if Lost in Translation still felt like a defining text for her all these years later. 

Instead, she's following in the footsteps of another actor-turned-director, Sarah Polley.

Polley's Away From Her was what came to mind for me as I watched Eleanor the Great. Both films were made by young actresses about elderly women, and both surprised with that choice because it would not seem to be any outgrowth of their own lived experience. I guess the difference is that Polley was really young when she made Away From Her, only 27, while ScarJo has now crossed (gasp!) into her forties, only just. (She's 41.)

Indeed the general subject matter is not the only surprising thing about Eleanor the Great, the June Squibb-led film that deals with a 94-year-old woman who has just lost her best friend, with whom she'd been living for more than a decade. (Squibb is actually two years older than that, now 96, though the movie did come out last year.) It's the specific deception Eleanor gets involved in that's quite the controversial matter, though I won't tell you what that is -- it would be a bit like telling you the central controversy of The Drama, and just about as controversial. 

In any case, I'm pleased to say that Johansson proves herself quite capable on this side of the camera, though not to the level Polley achieved with Away From Her. This is a more mainstream, conventional movie, even with the controversial topic I'm not talking about now. 

So yes I'm back now, and was pretty useless the first few days, as that cold I told you about in my last post didn't get any better. I can tell you it was a lot of fun rolling my bags through multiple airports, stopping every minute or so to sneeze or blow my nose, and just hoping that no busybody airport worker would see me and ask me if I should really be flying. (My cover story for having a runny nose and watery eyes was that I was emotional over saying farewell to a loved one.) I didn't get stopped, but that didn't make the redeye from Tokyo to Brisbane, and then another flight to Melbourne, any less miserable.