Adorable senior citizens

Not everyone can grow old gracefully. 

Those that can? They can be quite adorable.

Last night I watched The Dink, the pickleball movie, in which 73-year-old Mary Steenburgen plays a potential love interest for 48-year-old Jake Johnson. I say "potential" because, without spoiling anything, it doesn't go down exactly as you might expect. And though they describe it as a 30-year age difference, I suspect that is more the flattery to Johnson of aging him down than aging Steenburgen up. 

It reminded me of a similar potential relationship in the movie Hello My Name is Doris between a character played by Sally Field, who was then 68, and a character played by Max Greenfield, who was then 35.

Why did these two potential relationships feel almost plausible?

Because Steenburgen and Field are both actresses who have mostly let their faces do what it's supposed to do when they age, and as a result, have maintained all the expressiveness and all the goofy charm that caused us to find them so appealing when they were ingenues.

People who have lots of work done usually don't maintain the same type of command over their actor's tools, and seem a lot older a lot sooner than these two.

It would be pretty boring if my main reason for writing this post was to say "actresses shouldn't have work done," which is a pretty tired observation and which has sort of come around the bend nowadays to involve actual body shaming. Not only boring, but also a bit problematic. 

No, I'm writing it mostly because I hadn't seen Steenburgen in anything in a while and I was amazed to find that she still seems as young and spry as she has for her whole career. And that her aging doesn't seem to be occurring at the pace I thought it should.

Even back when she appeared in Step Brothers in 2008, and I guess would have been 55 at the time, I thought of her as a bit of an adorable senior citizen, remarkably well preserved and as nimble a comedienne as she ever was. I guess I was the one aging her up back then. 

Maybe it's just that Steenburgen has always been in roles that were intended for a slightly older actress. I suppose playing the mother to Will Ferrell, who is only 14 years younger than she is, in Step Brothers tended to accentuate that. Even with her being a love interest for Doc Brown way back in 1990 in Back to the Future III, at only age 37,she seemed older then, in part because she was matched up with Christopher Lloyd, who is 15 years older than she is. Not that that sort of age gap is uncommon between a man and a woman in Hollywood.

I think I might be rambling a bit. 

The point is, Steenburgen can make us believe that spring chicken Jake Johnson might fall for her because she is still bringing oodles of charm to the screen and is still the sort of person you yourself might fall for, in part because she's just so adorable. 

I guess that's enough of a reason to post during a week when I've again been busy and not producing a lot of other interesting observations.

Needless expirations

I'm sure this isn't the sort of publicity the nice publicist wanted for the French film The Party's Over!, which I will be reviewing in the coming weeks. Then again, the idea that my little blog qualifies as any sort of actual "publicity" is somewhat humorous. 

The thing I'm writing about today doesn't have anything to do with this movie in particular or even, likely, with this publicist. It's a funny methodology baked into their way of getting screeners to critics, and even then it is not a big deal, as you will see -- just one of those minor inefficiencies that I liked to talk about on my blog.

Namely: They're expiring the screeners a lot earlier than they need to.

Back on July 31st, I agreed to review The Party's Over! for its eventual August 27th release. That seemed like ages away, so I thought I'd just get something in my back pocket to tackle as I saw fit over the next month.

When I went to casually check on it yesterday, I noticed the screener was set to expire that very day. So, I immediately had my evening's viewing plans sorted.

When I went to watch it starting at just after 10 -- not an ideal time to start a movie, but that's my reality these days -- the password would not work on it. It didn't tell me the screener was expired, just that the password was wrong.

I determined that they must be one in the same when I went to my email and saw a new email from the publicist, from just two hours earlier, telling me that the screener had expired and did I want him to send me a new one, and then also to let him know when and if I post a review. ("If"? I didn't know "if" was an option.)

A bunch of things going on here:

1) The screener shouldn't have expired. If you say something is expiring on August 10th, that should mean August 10th at 11:59 p.m. That should mean you can watch it at any time on August 10th.

2) Why expire a screener for a movie that's not set to come out for another 17 days? Aren't most people not going to watch and review the film until much closer to its release date?

3) If he's already asking after the review, does that mean he wishes I'd already posted it? Wouldn't you rather have someone read a review when they are within just a couple days of actually being able to buy a ticket? Out of sight, out of mind, right?

When I get my next screener, I'll be curious to see how quickly they expire it. And I'll be sure not to let that happen. Regardless of whether it should even be happening or not. 

MIFF: Duelling masters at my MIFF Astor debut

Asghar Farhadi and Hirokazu Kore-eda have a shared lineage in my personal film history as well as my personal MIFF history.

Both had a film in the early part of last decade that bowled me over, the first I had seen by the director in each case. For Farhadi, it was A Separation, my #1 of 2011. For Kore-eda, it was Like Father, Like Son, my #2 of 2014 (though its release year was 2013 in Japan). 

Both then popped up regularly at MIFF, each time feeling like a slam dunk in terms of films I wanted to be sure I got on my schedule. In the case of Farhadi, that meant seeing The Salesman in 2016 and Everybody Knows in 2018. With Kore-eda, I saw After the Storm in 2016, Shoplifters in 2018 and Monster in 2023. And in each case, only one of their films I saw was not in the very upper reaches of my list that year, as Everybody Knows was my #3 of 2018, and Shoplifters and Monster finished #11 and #4 of their respective years.

If Kore-eda got ahead of Farhadi, it's only because Kore-eda is prolific and Farhadi is not, though Farhadi is also from a country that punishes filmmakers for defying the government. In fact, MIFF in 2016 and 2018 both featured a film from each director. I'm not going to say they synched up like women spending a lot of time together and getting on the same cycles for their period, but if you want to say that, I won't disagree with you.

When I heard both directors were again having a film in 2026, I knew I had to get tickets for both. And when I learned both films were playing on the same day, a plan started to take shape.

And when I learned both films were playing, six hours apart, at the Astor Theatre on Saturday, August 8th, a plan really started to take shape.

You see, this would be my first time attending the Astor as part of MIFF. About damn time, I'd say.

The Astor Theatre is an old single-screen movie house in South Yarra with a ton of history. I don't see a lot of movies there, in part because it specializes in repertory screenings, in part because it does not take my critics card, and in part because of its location (more on that in a moment). But it's the place I saw The Hateful Eight in its properly projected 70 mm format, and I've seen a few repertory titles there as well. It's the kind of place you feel like it's a treat to attend.

The reason I don't go to its MIFF showings? Well, it's not in the CBD.

The benefit most MIFF venues have -- outside of the regional Victoria screenings -- is that you can ping pong between a half-dozen different theaters in Melbourne's central business district. If you are trying to go to two back to back, you need at most about 25 minutes to hoof it between the theaters, even if it's between the IMAX at the Melbourne Museum (where I saw I Saw the TV Glow a few years ago) and ACMI, which are probably the two venues most distant from each other.

You can't hoof it to the Astor at all. South Yarra is at best a train ride from the CBD, and enough of a train ride that you couldn't make it there after another movie in the CBD unless you had at least an hour between the two showings. Not that it would take you an hour, necessarily, just that you'd want to allow that much time to make sure nothing went wrong. After all, mechanized transport is outside of your control the way travelling on foot is not. You wouldn't feel good planning a night around it, in any case.

But two showings on a Saturday, when the CBD doesn't even need to enter to it? Now that was something I could go for.

Kore-eda's Sheep in the Box was playing at noon, and Farhadi's Parallel Tales was playing at 6. So all I had to do was leave my house around 11 to make sure I had plenty of time to get there, and then bring some stuff with me to kill the 3+ hours between the two movies. And because South Yarra and neighboring St. Kilda are nice places to spend an afternoon, it sounded quite nice to just make a day of it -- unlike the night before, when my MIFF downtime was more nebulous and unsatisfying.

So I found parking more easily than I thought, though only between movies could I confirm that I had, indeed, parked legally, and that there wasn't a ticket waiting for me. I know the general rule of thumb is that if you can't see a street sign that speaks to how long you can park, you can park there forever, but my spot was only a few blocks from the Astor, so it seemed too good to be true.

My first impression of the Astor, which I had not attended in any form (could it be?) for almost ten years, is that it was an heir apparent to the Comedy Theatre (which no longer shows MIFF movies) in terms of the comfort of the seats. Which is to say, no comfort at all. Like that other theater, the Astor seems to have most of its original fixtures, including hard wrought-iron seats with cushions that hardly meet the definition. The bigger problem, for a tall guy like me, was that there was no good place between the seats in the row in front to wedge my foot, which I often need to do during a movie. Suffice it to say that I learned my lesson in the first movie, and in the second one, opted for a chair that had no row in front of it, and plenty of room to stretch my legs.

And so started Sheep in the Box, which was, sadly, firmly in the lower half of the nine Kore-eda films I've seen. 

The director is known as a humanistic director of realistic family dramas, which places him as an heir to Ozu, though I don't know if that thought is original to me. In saying that, I forget that one of the first films he ever made, After Life, was about a posthumous bureaucratic waystation, making it not realistic in the slightest. However, let's just say that all his other films I've seen are safely within the bounds of the realism of our present day world.

Sheep in the Box deviates from that in that it is set in the near future, where drone delivery has become common, and refrigerators try to keep you to your diet. And unfortunately, its actual subject is derivative in a way a film by Kore-eda rarely is. 

The film is basically Steven Spielberg's AI: Artificial Intelligence, if it was made by a Japanese director who liked realistic modern-day films that are humanistic at their core. It imagines a company that can make replacements for your loved ones, specifically your children, should they die prematurely, and it invites all the familiar questions of whether an AI can have a soul and the capacity to love -- and whether we have the capacity to love it in return.

I'm not going to say this film is clumsy, nor that it isn't mildly touching in spots. But my concern was that Kore-eda doesn't do enough with the ideas that I personally first remember thinking about in AI, especially given that the 25 years since AI have featured a lot of other variations on that theme, particularly in the last five years. Nearly every director is freaking out about AI these days, and I guess I just don't feel like Kore-eda has ever, in his career, done what "nearly every director" is likely to do. He brings his own touch to it, to be sure, but it wasn't enough for me, and the film went on for 20 minutes longer than I thought it should.

After checking to be sure I didn't get a parking ticket -- and that was just for my ease of mind, since I wouldn't have bothered to move it once I'd already gotten the ticket -- I continued walking in that direction to St. Kilda, which took another 30 minutes or so of walking. Which was good, because I needed to get my steps in for the day.

I got to a cafe just as it was about to close, but not before they made me a flat white and an almond croissant. (They didn't make the croissant fresh. They already had it.) I noodled around on my computer while enjoying these, and would have liked to linger longer, except that people want to get out of there ASAP when they close their cafe for the day. They didn't rush me, but I rushed myself.

So then I spent another hour-and-a-half on the beach. This was really nice, as I set myself up at a picnic table for a restaurant that was closed, meaning they weren't using it. They didn't rope off their seating area, so I didn't feel like I was trespassing or anything. And I took my shoes off and kneaded my feet in the sand, which added to a sense of relaxation. I caught up on more computer stuff, including writing part of yesterday's post about my first night of MIFF. Sooner than I imagined, it was time to get back, especially if I wanted to grab a kebab on my way back for my dinner.

I again arrived in plenty of time and even ran into someone I knew in the lobby of the Astor. I caught up with him a little bit about film and MIFF in general, though I then extricated myself, because he was with a friend and I didn't want to be a third wheel. 

Farhadi's Parallel Tales, like Sheep in the Box, was a bit of a deviation for the director. We say we want our favorite directors to expand their repertoire and not limit themselves, but do we really? I'm not so sure.

At its core, the film still has the sort of "he said she said" social dynamics of what I have often referred to as the domestic thrillers he makes, whose conflicts arise from semantics and misunderstandings. That's there in this film, but it's a bit more high concept, which I didn't think suited him as well. And sadly, the film, set in Paris, contains zero Iranian content. 

I thought the first character we meet, played by Adam Bessa, might be Iranian by heritage, but IMDB says nothing about that. He's "just" a Frenchman, it would appear. And we know the others are French, because they are played by such French legends as Vincent Cassel, Isabelle Huppert and (in just one scene) Catherine Deneuve. 

It's not the first time Farhadi has made films outside Iran, though The Past at least contained Iranian characters. Everybody Knows does not contain any Iranian characters and is set in Spain, but in that case, I don't know, it just worked for me. (I'm sure Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz had something to do with that.)

This one? I missed the Iranian connection for sure. It felt like "just" a French film, which was not what I was looking for.

And the meta story worked for me only sporadically as well. Without going into too much of a synopsis, let's just say Huppert plays an aging writer whose publisher (Deneuve) tells her her books are old-fashioned and won't sell. So she essentially throws out her current manuscript, which is a love triangle based on what she imagines is happening in an apartment across the way in which the two men and one woman produce foley work for films. Adam, the character played by the aforementioned Adam Bassa, is an ex-con who has been hired to be sort of an assistant to the aging writer, and he essentially fishes the manuscript out of the trash and passes it off as his own. He uses it has an excuse to meet the female foley artist, who has caught his fancy, and a "life imitates art" situation arises out of her imagined story in the manuscript and the actual reality of the three foley artists.

Parallel Tales deserves more than that quick synopsis if we want to pull apart everything it's doing, but I've got to be honest with you: I've got to go make dinner.

Suffice it to say that although the film grew on me as it went, and I found there to be some interesting elements in how the story wraps up, before then I did not get enough of a sense of what makes this distinctly an Asghar Farhadi film. Like, I wouldn't say I was surprised if you told me he'd directed it, but that certain something that has allowed almost all of his films to profoundly impact me -- save the aforementioned The Salesman -- just wasn't present here in the quantity I wanted it to be.

Okay, I now have almost a week off from MIFF before I return for another double feature next Friday. Back to our regular programming for a few days. 

MIFF: Expensive hamburgers and long downtimes

It used to be that when I went to the Melbourne International Film Festival, I felt like the time between when my work gets out and when the first film starts was full of food, errands, and other activities that only enhanced the experience of watching a pair of movies before the end of the night. Walking through the city on a brisk winter night, it felt like the world was my oyster.

For my first MIFF movies of 2026, well, there was a lot of thumb twiddling and downtime. 

I don't know whether it had to do with leaving work earlier than I usually do on a MIFF night (in other words, on time, rather than staying late) or a later start time for the first movie (6:45), but I found myself with more than an hour after I finished eating but before the movie started, during which I had no idea what to do with myself. (I ended up messing around on my computer unproductively, which was pretty unsatisfying.)

And before that, I spent a fortune on burgers.

Five Guys is a burger concept that began taking off in the U.S. right around the time I was leaving back in 2013. I assume the chain existed long before then -- in fact, the internet tells me it started up in 1986. But I'm guessing it was one of those things that was regional for at least the first 20 years of its existence, before it finally started creeping to areas I lived.

Anyway, I never tried it before moving, and only in the past year or so have I noticed there are restaurants open here. Fancying myself a bit of a burger connoisseur -- or at least the less sophisticated sounding "lover of burgers" -- I had been wanting to check it out.

But a number of times in a row now, I've gone to my favorite ramen place after work but before a movie, and when I continued walking on, it was only then that I remembered the Five Guys was just two doors down. This happened most recently on Wednesday when I went to see Ice Cream Man. 

Only two days later, it was easy to remember that I wanted to try Five Guys, so I took out a second mortgage on my house and bought a burger, shake and fries. 

The main sticker shock came from the burger, which was priced at either $26.50 for the bigger one or $24.50 for the smaller one. Now I should say that this wasn't just the plain burger, it was a bacon cheeseburger -- I could have gotten the plain one for a few dollars less. But I decided if I wanted to give Five Guys a real shot, I should get the sort of burger I would normally order, and that would have bacon on it. 

During a little banter with the checkout woman over the price -- very jovial on my side, I can assure you -- she explained that it was the ability to add as many as ten extra toppings, free of charge, that made the burger more expensive. I say, keep your toppings and charge me $3 less for the burger.

In the same vein of wanting to give the place a fair shot, I also ordered a small fries and a peanut butter milkshake.

It was all fine.

In fact, everything was pretty big, especially the "small" fries. Maybe they inherited the sizes from the U.S. too. So I don't really feel like I didn't get enough food for the $40 (!) in total I spent on it. 

But the reality is, it didn't make my toes curl with its special mixture of flavors, and so I can just as easily say that this is probably both my first and last Five Guys visit. Not because I would never eat there again, but because the prices are just so inflated that I'd rather have a nice Chinese sit down meal in neighboring Chinatown (which I also plan to do during MIFF) than fast food burgers for the same price.

The slightly less than satisfying meal was followed immediately by the realization that I had too much time and not enough to do. Sometimes when I'm in this situation, I go and lie on the lawn outside the State Library, but they had it fenced off to allow the grass to recover from the footsteps of 10,000 feet. So I ended up just sitting on a bench next to it, a bit glumly, with my computer. After about five minutes, six police officers started some very elongated and gentlemanly arrest proceedings for a motorcyclist who had no plates and a suspended license. He ended up sitting right next to me on the bench. I might have moved except the whole thing was, in fact, very civilized.

When it finally came time for the movies, I didn't like either of the first two movies as much as I would have liked. 

The first was my annual choice for "outsider animation," of which I try to get at least one every year. (In fact, I prefer it to be exactly one, but there is another coming later in this festival.) It's from China and is called Light Pillar, and though I enjoyed a lot of the experience of watching it, halfway through I decided I was glad I wouldn't be reviewing it. (Forgetting, of course, that I planned to give you a mini review here.)

There isn't much in the way of narrative, but the film takes place largely in the winter and at a basically abandoned movie studio somewhere in China. We see the staff do mundane activities like lean against walls, smoke cigarettes, and suck drops of snot back up their nose. (One character is doing this every time we see him, which is unnerving.) Their overlord bosses -- really just middle management functionaries, one of whom is never seen without a microphone, even when it doesn't make any sense for him to have one -- come through and try to inspire them by telling them that this year, they will get paid every three months rather than every six. Guilted into lackluster applause over this, the employees applaud with zero enthusiasm.

We follow one guy, who seems to be a wallflower teenager, and talks just about as much as anyone, which is to say, almost none at all. Small laugh-out-loud absurdities occur all over the place, including, for example, the fact that there is a Roomba that lines up along with the rest of the employees, and wordlessly engages in the same activities they engage in. The director, Zao Xu, has captured a great sense of a mouldering future, where everything is dingy but the technology is advanced enough that you realize it isn't quite right now. The fact that snow is covering everything makes it even more desolate and lonely, though I suppose, if you are of the right mindset, oddly cozy as well.

The "hook" of this setup is that our main character has an escape from this dreary dead-end world through a VR headset, and when he goes into the VR world, it's our world. Or, not exactly our world as this is also quite expressionistic, and filmed so. But it's live action, and in this version of the world, he can come to life a bit, he can venture toward another online character who interests him, and he can try to become the best version of himself. 

What I would have said in a review if I'd written one is that this is a clever setup, but the animated world is so drily funny and rich that we feel a little bit disappointed anytime we see real human actors, even if this is undeniably adding thematic dimension and distinctiveness to the project. I'd have also said that I started off kind of loving this film, and as it became clear to me that it wasn't going to have a satisfying payoff, I became increasingly uncertain about my own reaction. I am also having strange difficulty remembering all the details of it, which could have been the result of nodding off every once in a while. So it feels a bit like a dream, but a dream that I mostly enjoyed.

After another hour's break in which I loaded back up on drinks and snacks for the second movie, I returned upstairs into Hoyts Melbourne Central -- it occurs to me that I hadn't named the venue previously -- for my second of a Hoyts double feature. And if the whole first evening was a bit sluggish, that could be because Hoyts is kind of a disappointing place to start MIFF. It's not one of the unique venues that only get used for movies during MIFF, which presumably have other uses that keep them in business during the rest of the year. Hoyts is just a regular movie theater multiplex that I visit to see regular movies, having just seen The Odyssey and Spider-Man: Brand New Day there, and it doesn't feel very festivalish. 

So the 9:15 movie was Radu Jude's The Diary of a Chambermaid. If you don't recognize that name, Jude is the latest Romanian sensation whose film Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World perplexed me more than it seemed to perplex most people, and whose Dracula I haven't seen yet. (He also directed the provocatively named Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, which I also haven't seen.) Even though I didn't particularly care for End of the World, it did indicate to me that Jude's films were ones I wanted to grapple with, which is why I prioritized this one. 

There's nothing as audacious in this adaptation of the Octave Mirbeau novel as the 40-minute unbroken take of a safety video that ends End of the World, but that's not to say there is nothing convention-breaking in this otherwise fairly straightforward film. The film is conceived as a satire of class politics in Paris, where a Romanian maid is looking after an upper-class family while earning enough money to send back to her daughter and mother in Romania. And at most of the points, Jude is content to let little telling moments speak for greater indignities, in a way that is fundamentally based in realism.

The break from conventions comes from interspersed stage performances of Mirbeau's original novel. These do have a literal existence in the narrative of the movie, since the lead character (played by Ana Dumitrascu) has been cast playing the titular chambermaid. Some of these scenes are wild, ostentatious and overtly sexual portrayals of what I have subsequently learned are actual plot developments in the novel, such as a man's sexual fixation on the boots of his chambermaid. These are played loudly and with some intent to discomfit us. The chambermaid also has some narrative asides when she's telling stories to the Parisian boy she's looking after.

Still, it always returns to the spine of the story, which is the way her employers use and abuse her in passively aggressive ways, in order to bring about what's best for them even if it's worst for her. To his credit, Jude doesn't exaggerate any of these, he just lets the actual way upper-class Parisians would handle this -- aware of the need to not come across as monsters, but only just -- speak for itself. The story takes place, sort of in the diary format of the title, in the three months leading up to Christmas. And if you think this woman is going to get back to Romania for Christmas to see her daughter the way she promised, well, that's probably not going to go exactly as planned.

I was getting a little bit of Jeanne Dielman from this at first, but I brushed that away as a stretch ... until I saw the poster you see above. It can't be a coincidence that it looks so similar to this, can it?

In any case, Chambermaid is less than half the length at only 94 minutes. 

I definitely liked The Diary of a Chambermaid better than End of the World, but I think I might have gone for it even more if it did not have such an abrupt ending. And I don't mean an ending that doesn't work out for the protagonist, I mean an ending that seems to come without a resolution one way or another. I suspect for a rule breaker like Jude, that might have been the point, but I still think that actual ending needed to be rethought. It doesn't even end on a moment of dramatic irony, which I thought would have been our bare minimum expectation.

Okay, back at it tomorrow with another two movies to wrap up a busy first weekend. 

Right-wingers are still ruining IMDB

Why does there have to be such overlap in the Venn diagram of people with right-wing politics and people who know how to commandeer the internet for evil?

Okay, maybe artificially inflating and deflating user ratings for movies is not your classic definition of "evil," but it is still subtly and inaccurately shaping the larger sense of truth in our world, and I do think that that can be construed as evil.

You never hear of groups of liberals teaming up to upvote a movie on a website like IMDB, or shout down a movie that might be putting bad things into the world. Only right-wingers do that, and usually, the movies they shout down are actually putting good things into the world -- just not things they think are good. (They're wrong, of course.)

My latest is not an example of something they're making seem shitty that isn't shitty, and fortunately, the prominent examples of this in the past are not jumping immediately to mind. (For some reason I thought of Emilia Perez, but it's possible that film's 5.3 rating on IMDB is as much a product of upset progressives as upset conservatives, and then there were probably others unaffiliated with either, who had a beef with it just on the level of its production.)

No, it's an example of them making something a bit fringy and definitely right wing seem like it might be a new classic. 

I mentioned in yesterday's post that one of the films I reviewed this week was Young Washington, a film released a month ago in the U.S. and only yesterday in Australia. I knew right from seeing Kelsey Grammer's name in the credits that there might be something fishy about this movie, since Grammer only seems to work these days if he's pushing his right-wing agenda. None of the other cast were people I could identify as conservatives, but I was pretty sure the movie was still coming from that place. 

And sure enough, I found later that it was produced by Angel Studios, which specializes in "values-based entertainment," according to their own promotional materials. There are a bunch of standard faith-based type movies in the list of their movies on Wikipedia, though to be fair to them, a movie they made last year called Sketch was one I really liked -- and I didn't get a whiff of Christian propaganda from it. (Though now that I know this, I sort of want to go back and check.)

Anyway, I don't hate Young Washington at all. I gave it a 5/10. It's competent, but it feels pretty mid. And to be fair again, it is not overtly right wing. But in my review I referred to it as "dog whistle conservatism," meaning you could hear it if you were looking for it but might miss it if you weren't. Grammer was the tip-off for me, but if you are looking at just the subject matter, it celebrates a great white man from history and puts that man's origins (and therefore the origins of the whole country) on a pedestal, making it pretty Trumpy indeed.

I could understand some people, even some people who don't share its values, liking it more than I did. There are some good battles and the whole thing looks decent. 

But if some people liked it better than I did, some people would also like it worse. An IMDB rating about 6.0 would be pretty generous for it.

Young Washington's actual rating? 7.4.

Come on.

It's really telling to click into the rating and see the breakdown by country.

In the U.S., a full 44.9% of those who rated it rated it a 10 out of 10. That's patently absurd. We might expect it to be better appreciated in the U.S. than elsewhere around the world, but nearly half of the people giving it the highest rating? Total bullshit. 

And you can pretty much tell it's grade inflation because even a more measured rating of 8 or 9 is down to 15% apiece, with 7s at 10.6%. Every other grade accounts for under 5% of the total vote.

So I guess the way we look at this is, only people who already have some bias in this area even see Young Washington, probably, and among those, most like it, or at least pretend they like it. Some are willing to be honest about how much they like it, some not. Few really dislike it, and among those are probably people like me, who aren't bringing in a pro-conservative bias.

The contrast is really significant as soon as you leave the country. 

Canadians? They drop down a little bit to 6.7 overall, and they still have 10 as the highest percentage with just over 21%. Eight comes next at almost 20, but then the third highest percent is those who rated it only 1 out of 10, which accounts for more than 17% overall.

Switch to England and you see just how much a totally disinterested group of people dislikes it. (Or maybe they're still bitter about the Revolutionary War. Who's to say.) The overall rating drops all the way down to 4.3/10, with more users (29%) giving a 1 than any other ratings. Interestingly, though, the second most is still 10. 

Sri Lanka and India are the only two other countries. The top rating is over 50% in India and in Sri Lanka, it's 93%! Then again they are weirdly worshipful of light skin colors in that part of the world.

Okay this may not be definitive within IMDB itself, but let's compare IMDB to formats that include only critics, who are, in theory, free from these pesky political biases, though I suppose it's possible that they lean progressive.

On Rotten Tomatoes, Young Washington has a score of 60, so still positive, but not as positive. In fact, that aligns exactly with the 6.0 I thought it should have on IMDB. Even there, though, the top review is from something called AARP Movies for Grownups, which is pretty suss.

Metacritic is actually my preferred port of call, even though it doesn't have RT's name recognition. This is the most similar to my own assessment, with a score of 49, which would basically be 0.1 lower than my 5/10. And some of the snippets I glanced at seem to lay into it pretty heavily. 

So are the right-wing trolls really gaming the system on IMDB for Young Washington?

I don't know. Maybe. Or maybe they're just overflowing with patriotism in the year celebrating America's 250th, and this nourished those instincts without them having to fake it, just to make it seem like the world is full of people who think like they do.

Busy as heck, and it isn't even MIFF yet

I've owed you a post for about six days now.

In fact, I started writing one last Friday, which, if I'd finished, would have been my fifth straight day with a post and my tenth in 11 days. Yes, it's generally been a fertile period for my movie thoughts on this blog.

Amazing how a weekend trip to Sydney will derail you. 

We went up to see my younger son's favorite team, Chelsea, play another EPL team, Tottenham, at Accor Stadium, which was built for the Sydney Olympics. Tottenham beat Chelsea with a goal with about 30 seconds remaining. A thrilling way for a soccer game to end -- unless you're the losing team.

I expected to have time to continue writing that post at some point in Sydney, but it didn't work out that way. I was sharing a hotel room with my wife, who sleeps later than I do and who doesn't like the clacketty clacking of my typing even if she's awake. (It distracts from her morning reading, which I get.)

And then there was the fact that that post required some research to produce some additional movie titles, so it felt easy to procrastinate on it.

Since I've returned, I've had to watch two films for a MIFF preview (Mile End Kicks and Dead Man's Wire), write the MIFF preview, watch a screener for another movie I'm reviewing (Young Washington), write that review, and then attend another advanced screening at the theater (Ice Cream Man). That was just last night so I haven't written that review yet.

In fact, I've been so busy that I haven't even updated Letterboxd with my new viewings, nor my Microsoft Word documents and Excel spreadsheets, and I only just updated the most recently reviewed section of this blog prior to posting this. 

But I don't like to go very long without updating the blog, certainly not six days. When Glen Hansard died last week and I wrote about it, you might have thought I died along with him. 

So this post does not contain much of substance, but it does serve as an unofficial MIFF preview.

Yes MIFF begins tonight with the gala opening night screening of Wicker across a number of venues, or maybe just a number of screens in one venue. I'm not attending that. But I do get into the full swing of things in this first weekend, seeing two movies apiece on Friday and Saturday, before then taking another six days to get back at it again next Friday. The following Tuesday, the following Friday and the following Sunday will round out my expected 11 screenings. 

I say "expected" because some things do tend to change once MIFF actually begins. Sometimes I have to exchange for another viewing, and sometimes I even lose a viewing, though I can't remember any actual examples of that last happening -- I just have a vague sense that it's happened. 

In any case, I've already done one switcheroo in 2026, since Mile End Kicks was one of the movies I was planning to watch at the festival. As I was going through the giant list of titles (384! though some of those are shorts and VR experiences), this was one of the few I found that I knew might already be available on U.S. iTunes, meaning I could watch it as part of my two-movie MIFF preview along with Dead Man's Wire. So I cancelled my Mile End Kicks screening on Tuesday the 18th and exchanged it for a screening in the final time slot of the festival on Sunday the 23rd.

I won't preview the specific movies I'm planning to see, because my tradition is to write about all of them in some form or another. That should start as soon as Saturday. 

And will I finally get to finish the draft I started last Friday, possibly for tomorrow's slot on this blog?

It's not seeming likely at the moment, but let's see how the rest of today goes.