What if Halloween fell on Friday the 13th one year?

The subject of this post is a dumb joke I like to make. I don't know if I would quite call it a dad joke. It doesn't rely on puns. It doesn't make you groan. It's more in the category of what I call "dumb guy humor," where you say something earnestly that you pretend you don't know contradicts itself or is disprovable in some obvious way. Though of course you have to be careful because you could slip into what I call "double dumb guy." (I'll explain the distinction some other time.)

In any case, to spell it out laboriously, Halloween can't fall on the 13th of the month because Halloween always falls on the 31st of the month. It's actually fun sometimes to watch people listen to this joke, because for a second you see them thinking "Oh yeah, I wonder if that's ever happened?" before it clicks in for them.

Well, this year, Halloween may not be falling on Friday the 13th, but Friday the 13th is falling on Halloween. The month of Halloween, that is.

That's right, I'm back to consuming an entire series of horror movies, just as I did two years ago, when I watched all the Halloween movies I had not yet seen. Which in that case was 10 movies, though I also rewatched the original just to lay the groundwork. I only skipped one movie in the whole saga, which was Halloween III, because I'd only just seen it for the first time in the year or two before that. As it happened, in that series, Halloween III: Season of the Witch is not part of the larger chronology anyway. Michael Myers isn't even in it. (It's also the best movie in the series after the original.) 

In 2026, I'll be applying the same treatment to the Friday the 13th series, with just about the same number of viewings, again starting with a rewatch of the first and again skipping one movie I'd seen recently (the 2009 remake, which was part of last year's Halloween viewings). 

I was actually going to start with Friday the 13th Part 2 from 1981, and even watched a few minutes of it last night. Enough to note that it starts with a kid singing "Itsy Bitsy Spider," which I thought was funny because I had just listened to Carly Simon's version of that song earlier in the day. 

After that I was going to skip Part III (yes they switched to Roman numerals at this point), because my records say I've seen it. However, I'm highly skeptical of any records when it comes to this series. Even when I originally compiled my list of movies way back in the 1990s, I suspect I had said "I've seen one of the other Friday the 13th movies" and I just decided on Part III, remembering that I'd had a fascination with that one because it was presented in 3D when it was in theaters. (Not that I would have been in the position to see in this in the theater, being only eight years old at the time of its August 1982 release date.)

Incidentally, did you know that not a single of these movies was released in October originally? They go May, May, August, April, March, August, May, July, August, April, August, February. 

But after five minutes of Part 2, when I realised that my memory of the original was decidedly rusty, I decided to start with the original, to also watch/rewatch Part III, and to just go on the whole damn journey from start to finish. Excluding the aforementioned 2009 remake, of course.

Good thing I started on the first of the month.

So my entire journey will consist of this:

Friday the 13th (1980)
Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981)
Friday the 13th Part III (1982)
Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (as if!) (1984)
Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (1985)
Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (1986)
Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (1988)
Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989)
Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (1993)
Jason X (2002)
Freddy vs. Jason (2003)

I'm not sure whether that last should be part of this franchise, part of the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, or whether they get to share it.

By the way, how crazy is it that this series cranked out eight movies in one decade? That's gotta be some kind of record, especially since to even qualify for it, a series would pretty much have to start with the first year of the decade, which this one did.

That's 11 movies, the same as with Halloween. It worked out okay then, but I had to be persistent with it, obviously. Also, that year, I didn't get started until October 3rd, plus I had a five-day trip to Singapore, during which I took a break from watching Halloween movies. This year my only weekend away is a camping trip, though I still won't be able to relax at any point. 

So let's get right into discussing this first one, shall we?

It's not really much of a movie, to be honest with you. In fact, it was so different from what I thought the first Friday the 13th was, that I had to keep checking to make sure I wasn't still watching the second one. In any case, it's a bit of a surprise that it even engendered a series with this sort of longevity. 

For starters, you would probably know that Jason Voorhees is not even really in it. You do see him once in the brilliant jump scare ending, in which he jumps out of the water to overturn the canoe carrying The Final Girl. (Who, I should mention, does not die here. I had remembered that this was the last shot of the film, but the next shot is her sitting up in bed, sometime after she's been saved by police officers from a watery grave. Disappointing.) But the hockey mask is not even established as a series trope until the second film. This I did remember.

Who is the killer, then? Well Jason might actually be the killer -- I'm unclear on that -- but the person with equally murderous intentions is his mother, still grieving even though I believe it's been two decades since her son drowned, as one of the things that put a curse over Camp Crystal Lake. (Wikipedia confirms that the unseen killer is meant to be the mother. It could be Jason, in theory, because for the majority of the kills, the killer is not seen at all.)

So that makes a good transition into the next thing I expected from this movie: actual camp life.

I was under the misapprehension that the movie takes place with camp actually in progress, but it's entirely before the potential reopening of the camp, which had closed due to the high number of previous tragedies. (One of which is the murder of two counselors the summer after the drowning, which we see in this film's cold open.) And because the camp isn't even open yet, it does not really feel like a camp at all. It could be any woodsy setting where a murder might take place. No children around, only horny teenagers. 

The thing I found funny is how many of these teenagers -- who include Kevin Bacon by the way -- are actually killed before a single one of them discovers the dead body of a single other of them. It might be 30 minutes of screen time from the actual first death to the point that any corpse is discovered and any horny teenager screams in fear. In other words, a highly improbable amount of time within the world of the film, where these teenagers are all basically together on one night at the camp, some of them prepping for the season, some of them playing strip Monopoly, that sort of thing. The way it's staged, they had to be wilfully dumb and wilfully avoid seeing each other's corpses -- which probably just solidifies this as the template for the whole slasher genre, along with Halloween, which was released two years earlier. 

Because the action, such as it is, is all very samey, with at least three different brunettes who I could have sworn were the same brunette that had already been killed a few minutes earlier, the film has quite a lack of narrative momentum for most of its running time. It just feels like one after another pair of teens having sex or doing solo prep projects, meaning they are isolated enough to be killed by Mrs. Voorhees. And because they take so long to discover that their other friends have been killed, the stakes take a very long time to progress. We don't even meet Mrs. Voorhees until there are only about 30 minutes remaining in the movie, which I think is also the first time we hear the name Jason spoken. At this point I was really relieved to have some sort of plot taking shape and giving a definitive direction to what I was watching.

Of course, we have to note the contrast in quality with a series like Halloween, which is naturally a far superior entertainment product. (Though I suspect some of the later movies in both series will be equally bad.) While that series was launched by horror master John Carpenter, this film's creative voice is a guy named Sean Cunningham. Sean S. Cunningham, to be exact. This was his sixth film directed, but I haven't heard of any of the movies that came before or it, nor any that came after. He didn't direct another Friday the 13th film after this one. 

And yet the slasher movie, even when executed at this basic level, was such a relatively new thing that viewers ate it up, such that it launched an unprecedented production schedule for sequels, enabling them to crank out another seven films before the decade was over. You have to put yourself back in 1980 to really be able to understand the attraction, because none of it holds up particularly well today. Then again, Halloween itself is far more sophisticated and predates it by two years, so it's not like it would have been impossible to make something better. 

Noted special gore effects guru Tom Savini has a credit on this film, so you'd think the gore effects would be a bit better. There were one or two clever effects, but overall it feels quite pedestrian.

I do think the final jump scare, and the appearance of the waterlogged and horribly deformed Jason, was the kind of thing that was propulsive enough, in itself, to keep this series running. However, if even the first one is not very good, well, I'm a bit concerned where we go from here. 

Hey, I've been watching too many movies that I like lately, bringing my overall percentage of movies I've given a thumbs up -- which, yes, I track in my big movie spreadsheet -- all the way up to 68.48%, an all-time high. Maybe this October can throw some cold water on those numbers. 

I don't know if I will be writing about each movie as I see it, nor that I will have a huge amount to say about each movie. I think this might differ from Halloween in the complexity of its mythology. I'm expecting many of these movies essentially to be a remake of the previous movie. 

However, that wouldn't be the worst thing in the world, because in October of 2024, I got really into the weeds with the Halloween series, analyzing all the internal contradictions and other failings of the series. I wouldn't mind if the Friday the 13th movies were more a case of going in one ear and coming out the other.  

How cute are they?

It's October 1st, and I feel like that is the beginning of Oscar season.

How do I know this? The first film by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu in four years, and the first one with any heat since The Revenant 11 years ago, opens today. This after a very transitional September in which I only got out to the theater four times, two of which were in the same night, due in large part to a dearth of anything worth seeing.

Well, there will be things worth seeing from here on out to the end of the year, starting with Digger. 

Will Digger be any good? I don't know, but it will be worth seeing, if you are considering that to be only a proactive judgment about a film. After the fact, we may think it was not worth seeing, but beforehand, it passes the test. 

I expect to write more about Digger after my wife and I go to watch it on Saturday night, because it will be the first movie I see -- maybe even the first movie they play? -- in which The Sun in Yarraville uses its new projector capable of projecting in VistaVision. 

I'm not even going to pretend I am speaking about that in a technically accurate way. I'm pretty sure the projectionist will give us a little intro to explain it, because that's the kind of theater this is. I do know that this might be the only camera like this in the Southern hemisphere, because that's also the kind of theater this is.

But for now, I just want to talk about the experience of buying tickets. (Due to the special presentation, I didn't think I was capable of using my critics card. And since this is a date night with the wife, you want to take greater precautions than just rocking up and trying to score a free ticket. Plus if a movie theater is going to put in a VistaVision camera, I want to give it some of my money.)

And now you understand my subject, and the screenshot above.

In another example of what kind of theater this is, The Sun has gone to the trouble of showing occupied seats with a little shovel, just for Digger. 

They had to care enough to have someone reprogram the functionality of their core ticket-buying system just for this one movie, and just to bring a smile to the face of someone who was already about to buy a ticket anyway. 

In other words, it isn't something promotional with a calculated intention of increasing sales. It's just fun.

I hope the movie will be too. I'll report back. 

Dropping my irrational opposition to Louis Theroux

I had never seen any content featuring Louis Theroux prior to watching Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere on Wednesday night. That includes things you would define as a TV show and things you would define as a movie, and anything else in between. 

Yet someone I thought I was qualified to roll my eyes at him.

I don't know why this is, but I do have a few theories.

One is that I resent new people. I'm phrasing that in an intentionally broad way to poke fun at myself. But I notice this tendency in myself when a new celebrity of any sort pops on the scene, and then is treated as some sort of stratospheric riser whose fame and popularity we are meant to incorporate into our lives as a serious and justified thing. 

I wrote about this in a post about Ariana Grande back when Wicked came out, which you can read here, as young pop musicians particularly fall into this category. Even without hearing their music, I instantly feel annoyed by them because I reject the human weakness of become infatuated with what seems like a flash in the pan person who will never get more than 15 minutes of fame. When they exceed that 15 minutes, usually I welcome them into the fold. However, a few in the Grande mold who are still in my celebrity jail: Olivia Rodrigo and Sabrina Carpenter.

But you'll be glad to know this is not just some mildly misogynistic tendency that applies only to twentysomething female pop stars. It also applies to 56-year-old men like Louis Theroux.

The thing is, Louis Theroux is not "new." He may be new to me, but he has been around for 25 years, doing his thing. Just because I haven't sampled any of that thing doesn't make that Theroux's fault, though I'm just trying to be honest here and describe my perceptions, however irrational they may be. 

I guess when we explore it a little deeper, I am opposed to people who declare themselves a brand. I feel like branding is what goes on with young pop stars who are fed to us by the publicity machine, but it is no less true for a man who goes around trying to expose injustices in the name of journalism. It's especially strange for me to find fault with that because that's the sort of mission that I, a former journalist, fully support.

But you've got to earn it. Michael Moore earned it. He took a unique approach to documentary filmmaking that showed him as unafraid to hold up a mirror to people at the highest levels of power. Sure, at some point his theatrics wore thin, but by then he was already entrenched. He had passed my personal relevance test that allowed me to welcome him in, kind of like Ariana Grande did.

Louis Theroux? What test had he passed? Who was this johnny-come-lately who had only been around for ... cough cough ... 25 years?

You can see the problem with this line of thinking. Instead of rolling my eyes when I saw the name Louis Theroux attached to something, I should, you know, actually watch it to see what I thought of it.

And so finally I did. And now I'm on board. 

What I liked about the way Theroux exposes the shortcomings of influencers in the manosphere -- "shortcomings" being a pretty hilarious way to categorize their toxicity -- is that it lacks the finger wagging of someone like Moore. While it's clear that Theroux would never have made a movie with the aim of celebrating these men, neither is what he's doing "gotcha journalism." 

His manner of interviewing about a dozen of these truly awful men is to "just ask questions." Now I know that phrase is a bit problematic and is actually used by men like these influencers, and right-wingers in general like Charlie Kirk, to attack the left. To say racist and homophobic things while externalizing it from their own brains.

But Theroux, to me, is asking the sorts of questions that you would ask any person you were interviewing while meaningfully engaging with their core identity. Your original series of questions are mild, encouraging enough of their world view without actually supporting it, and then you logically follow up on things they say to attack the veracity of it or to point out its internal inconsistencies. You don't appear to have an agenda and you continue in a very mild manner the whole time.

The thinking is that in order to "ensnare" a man who talks about his philosophies, when they surround "one-way monogamy" (his partners are monogamous to him but he isn't to them) and other problematic views on the acquisition of wealth and the laying of fault against groups who don't deserve it, is that you have to trick the person into thinking you endorse these things. You have to encourage them to incriminate themselves through your own comments that, at the very least, do not indictment them for those views, and may even suggest your complicity with them.

Theroux does not do that. Any time he has the opportunity to tell one of these men that he believes they're wrong, he does, even if it results in an awkward silence, even if it risks ending the interview then and there. But he also phrases it carefully, not telling them they are wrong, but telling them that he thinks they are wrong, that he thinks the things they are saying are untrue. It's a subtle difference between telling someone they are categorically wrong and telling someone that you differ with their opinion.

Still, this approach should have ended a lot of interviews before they began, or before they got far enough to be worth including in a documentary. And who knows, maybe there were some interviews like that and they just ended up on the cutting room floor. Surely, these men would do the research necessary to figure out the perspective Theroux is likely to have on them, and never even allow themselves to be across from him in the first place.

Or would they?

The other brilliant thing about his approach to this material is that he knows many of these men can't help themselves. They are so addicted to the sounds of their own voices, and the cameras that bring those voices to their followers, that they are willing to go before said cameras, to sound off said voices, under almost any circumstances. 

He also knows how confident they are. He knows that even if these men know Theroux is out to do a hit piece on them, they believe they have the ability to turn that agenda against him. They believe they have the ability to beat him. Or perhaps even more to the point, they believe so much in the things they are saying that they believe it is impervious to hit pieces. If they feared being raked over the coals for their views, they probably wouldn't even spout them in the first place -- and their millions of followers are proof enough that everything they say reflects a viable and profitable truth. Which, sadly, may be true for their core audiences.

But Theroux still "gets them" in Inside the Manosphere, because after having dozens of these mild-mannered interactions with Theroux in which he calmly tells them he does not agree with what they're saying and tries to carefully show them the limitations of their words, each subject ultimately feels triggered, and then ultimately burned, by Theroux. In fact, there's significant footage in this film of the subjects bad-mouthing Theroux to their followers, and even seeming pushed to the point of wanting to punch Theroux in the face if they ever shared the same room together ... which at this point they probably would not.

And yet this is not because Theroux violated their trust. It is not because he did anything differently than the exact thing he said he would do. After watching one Theroux movie, I am of the opinion that Theroux would rather abandon a project than to lie to one of his subjects in order to extract the material from them that he wants to extract.

And proving just how little of a coward he is -- though that's certainly one of the things they accuse him of -- he does return to speak to one of these men, in the presence of his own mother, even after the man has shown such frustration with Theroux that you worry it will spill over into violence. And certainly, this guy is jacked enough that he could put Theroux in the hospital without much effort. 

Perhaps his mother being present ensures this kind of thing won't happen. But that is to a point by Theroux too. If you truly believe these things about women, surely you should be just as happy to say them in front of your own mother, a woman who worked six days a week as a solo parent just to feed you. 

The real reason these men are so triggered by Theroux is that some part of his mild-mannered inquisition has caused them to question their own core beliefs. Or, if not question the beliefs themselves, at least question whether they can hold them and still consider themselves a good person. And isn't that the ultimate goal of any film like this?

If I haven't mention the names of any of these denizens of the manosphere, it isn't because I've forgotten them or am too lazy to look them up. It's because these cretins already have too much of a platform, and I don't need to contribute to their names appearing on the internet even one more time. Louis Theroux is the one I want to give a platform, however belatedly I've reached that point.

A questionable association with the year 2011

Last night I finished a rewatch of The Cabin in the Woods. I should really say this morning, because I finished around 1:30.

I did watch it again from the start, but it was the continuation of an attempted rewatch from a couple months ago. When I got in no more than 25 minutes on that attempt, instead of finishing it the next day, I abandoned the viewing. That's how I'll usually handle an interrupted rewatch, though first-time viewings always get completed the next day.

I thought it might have been my first rewatch, but no. My records tell me I watched it for the second time back in 2014. That makes sense. It's a movie I really liked and continue to really like.

But something bothers me about it just a little bit, and it has nothing to do with the movie itself, which I already discussed in detail in this post if you've read into this post for that sort of analysis of the film.

When you look up The Cabin in the Woods on either IMDB or Letterboxd, it is listed as a 2011 film. Which we all know is wrong. It's easy for me to remember that the film belongs with 2012. I saw it in the theater in April of 2012, just after its release, and one of the reasons I easily remember it's from that year is because of this post, which is still the only post on this blog ever written by a guest writer, in which he talked about the feat of watching and ranking 212 movies in the year 2012. (Which is a laughable thing to be impressed at nowadays, since the same guy has subsequent watched nearly 500 films during the same period.) Anyway, as you can see, The Cabin in the Woods is responsible for the art for this post. 

So why, then, the 2011 year?

Well of course it is the usual suspect in cases like this: a film festival from the year prior to its release. The moment a film debuts in any public venue, it gets slapped with that release year on places like IMDB and Letterboxd, never to relinquish it. And though that annoys us, we can accept the reasoning and we just move on with our lives.

So where did The Cabin in the Woods play in 2011, you ask? Was it TIFF maybe? That's a September festival, and might have given in the necessary thrust for an early 2012 release. The Cabin in the Woods is not the sort of film you necessarily debut during Oscar season. Which isn't to say it's not good -- of course it's quite good -- it's just that you'd correctly assume it could help prop up the otherwise weak start of a release year. October would also be a good time to debut it, for Halloween, but that would be too soon after TIFF to build any sort of marketing campaign.

So I looked it up on IMDB, and there was exactly one festival in which it appeared, in December of 2011. On December 11 of 2011, in fact. It was:

The Butt-Numb-a-Thon Film Festival.

I will allow a moment's pause for you to finish laughing like Beavis and/or Butthead.

Oh my.

What exactly is this festival, you ask?

It's cooler than it sounds, it turns out. It was a secret 24-hour film marathon held at the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin from 1999 to 2016. It was the brainchild of Ain't It Cool News founder Harry Knowles. That's a name I haven't heard in a while. In fact, when I just looked him up, I discovered the festival appears to have ended as a result of his expulsion from the Austin Film Critics Association in September of 2017 following credible accusations of sexual assault. So that's why I haven't heard about him lately. 

Ever helpful despite its impending takeover of the world -- not inappropriate for a discussion of this movie -- AI tells me that the festival was in celebration of Knowles' birthday (December 11th) and that it contained "a lineup of films kept completely secret from the audience ahead of time. It featured a mix of rare vintage prints, cult classics, and surprise high-profile studio premieres."

So that last is where The Cabin in the Woods comes in.

But is the fact that an estimated 200 people (according to AI) saw it with three weeks remaining in 2011 enough to associate it in all public documents with the year 2011?

I say it is not. And so when I list the movie in places like my Most Recently Seen area on the right, I will continue to write 2012 as the release year. Because that was the real release year for this movie.

But what happens when I'm old and no longer remember that The Cabin in the Woods came out in 2012 and that a friend of mine wrote a blog post about the 212 films he ranked in 2012? What will I do then?

I guess I will just pop in my dentures and my bionic eyes and enjoy the viewing. And if I've forgotten some of the film's twists and turns, all the better. 

Zombies are actors too

As I was proofreading my writer's review of Resident Evil, which I saw myself on Sunday night, I noticed something interesting that I think speaks to human nature -- or at least, to critic nature.

Namely, an actor playing a zombie is apparently not credited for their performance.

And normally, you wouldn't think they would be. Individual zombies are generally disposable in zombie movies. (Resident Evil may or may not be considered a zombie video game series. I'm sure both suggestions would be considered controversial, depending on the context.)

But some zombies have big roles, and I would say that's true of the zombie credited as "Pedestrian" on IMDB, played by Andrea Miltner.

I know Andrea Miltner is her name because I checked it myself, not because my writer included it in his review. Again, no shade on him. 

The notable contradiction is that he did include the name of the guy who plays the police officer who stops our protagonist while he is trying to ferry Pedestrian to the hospital, having hit her with his car and found her in a gnarled position in the woods, too far away from the car to have been thrown there. (The footsteps leading off into the snowy woods are also a dead giveaway.) 

That actor is Johnno Wilson, by the way. And he definitely has less screen time than Miltner has.

Now you might say that Johnno Wilson is just a better known actor than Andrea Miltner, and when you include a name in parenthesis during a review, you're usually trying to let the reader know they may have seen this person before, in addition to crediting a working professional for their work. But while Wilson does have small roles in films you've heard of, like King Richard and Bride Hard, Miltner was in both The Crow and Nosferatu, two very prominent films from just two years ago.

No, I think it's just that we consider a zombie to be a triumph of makeup or digital effects, but not a triumph of performance. The character is sub-human, but that doesn't mean it's not played by an actual human with a lot of ability to scare and discomfit us.

Which Miltner certainly does here. She has to make a lot of choices in her affect as she goes through various states of confusion, agitation and catatonia. She's in the movie for 15 minutes all told, maybe even 20, and her collaborations with the director, to freak us out as much as possible, are not insignificant. 

Here's just one:

When I noted the absence in his text, I thought of looking up the actress' name and adding it. I did look up the name, obviously, but didn't end up adding it. Apparently I opted to write this post instead as a way of crediting her. 

But I do want it to go on the record that zombie acting can be some of our most demanding and some of our least recognized. Yes, most movies only require an actor to shuffle and look vacant, and murmur "Brains ..." every once in a while. That's the stereotypical, degraded version of zombie acting.

But just think about movies where characters you actually know become zombies. I hope this isn't a spoiler -- well it is, but I hope you don't care -- but just think about the end scenes we get with Robert Carlyle as a zombie in 28 Weeks Later. I've only seen that movie once so I can't remember if Carlyle's craft is brilliant or anything. But I do remember being taken by the zombified Carlyle, and I'm able to remember it because it was actually a known actor behind all that zombie makeup.

You know what? I just went back to the published review and added Miltner's name.

And feel better about that. 

Monty Python and the Holy Grail, live and on stage

Or, "I finally saw: Spamalot."

Spamalot, the musical adaptation of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, has existed for 21 years. Now, those 21 years have not been a particularly fruitful time for musical theater in my life, though we have tried to make up for it some in the past decade. In the seven years immediately before its Broadway debut, I lived in New York for three years, where I went to a handful of Broadway shows, and I dated a woman for nearly two years, who was involved in the promotion of musical theater, so I saw a fair bit of that in Los Angeles.

But Spamalot came along at just around the time I started dating my wife, who is not a musical theater buff -- though she does like going to shows. I'm not sure we ever went to a live musical during the eight years we were together in Los Angeles before moving to Australia, where we have tried to make up for it a bit lately.

All this is to say that my first exposure to Spamalot is long overdue. Not only am I huge Monty Python fan, which you might not know because I don't have occasion to touch on it here, but The Holy Grail is my sacred text. In fact, there are two things in particular you should know about the film, which I may have told you before, but if so, that was ages ago:

1) My first time seeing King Arthur's fight against the black knight is the hardest I have ever laughed. Is that definitely true? No, of course not. I might have laughed harder at some random thing somebody said sometime. But I can't remember that random thing, and I can remember The Holy Grail. So if ever asked my memory of my hardest laughter ever, this is the answer I give.

2) From the days when I performed Monty Python skits on stage at the place I used to work in the summers -- and I may have performed a half-dozen of them -- I still, to this day, have the dialogue memorized from the "Constitutional Peasant" sequence of the film. I did this on stage in 1987 as all the three speakers in the scene, back when I was a guest on that island rather than staff. I have no idea if it worked at all, though there was at least polite laughter. Anyway, it became permanently ingrained and I can still dictate it, if anyone were ever interested in that sort of party trick.

My actual interest in tracking down Spamalot, though, has been fairly low.

I'm not sure why this is, really. A sense that it could never be as funny as the film? A slight wariness from having read Eric Idle's memoirs and finding them a tad self-indulgent? (He's a relentless name dropper.) Whatever the reason, I never leapt at the opportunity to see it nor did I feel any FOMO that I hadn't seen it. Nor do I even know if I ever actually had the opportunity to see it. (According to Wikipedia, it probably would have been on North American tours in 2008 and 2009.)

That opportunity finally came this past weekend, when my sister-in-law got us tickets to it for a Saturday matinee for its nascent run in Melbourne. She's been initiating all sorts of cultural activities this year, though many of them are with my older son, who dutifully accompanies her even if he doesn't have any actual interest in these things. (Oh to be a fly on the wall when they watched Anthony LaPaglia in Death of a Salesman.) These were the end of the previews, and the proper Melbourne run is now launched. (The only thing, incidentally, that distinguished this from the proper run is that they addressed the audience after the final curtain, which I'm sure they will no longer do.)

The story, such as it is, pretty closely follows the plot from The Holy Grail, though some of the scenes are out of sequence. But the actual title is a callback to a separate Python sketch from 1970 called "Spam!" And because this was the likely to be the only time Python material would ever be staged, Idle -- the show's co-writer with John Du Prez -- needed to fit in "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life," which is actually from the Python film Life of Brian. 

Before I get too deep into the show, I should tell you that someone famous played King Arthur. Or at least locally famous. Australian actor Stephen Curry -- and yes that is the same name as the basketball player -- has 84 credits on IMDB, most of them Australian content, though not obscure Australian content. I took notice of him in a film I really like called Hounds of Love. But he's also been in The Castle and Rogue, and you might know him from what I assume was a very small role in Thor: Love and Thunder. (Anyway, small enough for me not to have remembered he was in it. Though then again, I was not particularly following the career of Stephen Curry with the foreknowledge that I would one day see him in Spamalot.)

I thought the second act worked a lot better than the first. Even though there is a professorial type who occasionally says things in his capacity as a narrator -- which reminded me a little bit of the similar character in The Rocky Horror Picture Show -- I still feel like this story is fairly lacking in context, and its first act density of songs without any plot momentum further complicates the problem. Plot was never the strong suit of Monty Python, as even in a generally coherent story like The Holy Grail, they were fundamentally stringing together unrelated sketches that followed a central theme. That feels like even more of a problem on stage, when you are relying on a narrative spine to carry you through, particularly when the songs are inevitably going to slow down that progression. Here I felt that there were sometimes only about four lines of dialogue before it was time for another song, and because Python has a wicked digressive streak, these songs rarely actually furthered the narrative. (There's one song where a character complains about the fact that her part is too small, although this is actually in the stronger second act.)

This is a good time to pause and acknowledge how Idle has made gestures toward preventing this from just being a sausagefest, like the film. (The Python ensemble themselves usually played the female roles, with one important exception that I will touch on two paragraphs from now.) One way to gender diversify is that there are four women who basically serve in the role of backup dancers, though there are many actors doing multiple duty in order to keep the total ensemble to under 15 people, so they do have other, more consequential showcases. But there's also a female lead, who does sing that song about her small role, and this is The Lady of the Lake, who in the film is responsible for bestowing Excalibur on King Arthur and making him king -- though is not an actual character. Here she keeps showing up and has about five songs, so it's strange that one of those songs is that the story hasn't checked in with her in a while. 

One of the reasons the second act is better is that it has most of the actual skits we enjoy. I thought they might not be able to include the black knight fight due to the impossibility of knocking an actor's arms and legs off on stage, but instead they just make use of the large screen at the back of the stage that plays animations throughout, including Idle playing God. In this instance, they have the black knight on the back screen and Arthur fighting him, coordinating his sword clashes with those of the two-dimensional image. And then at four key junctures, his two arms and legs are lopped off. It works, but of course did not make me laugh like in the mid-1980s. 

I could continue to list the various scenes, but it's probably better to mention what they don't include. And one of those is the scene alluded to earlier that has the lion's share of the film's women, which is that scene where one of the knights spends an interlude in a castle full of sexually aggressive women. This is the only part of Holy Grail that totally turns me off -- it's just not remotely funny -- and I thought it was a wise decision of Idle to consign this to the dust bin of history. The only set piece that I enjoy that they didn't include is the one where the knights must cross the chasm and are asked a serious of questions, where if they get them wrong they fall into the chasm. I think this might have just been cut for time.

Unfortunately, the overall impression of the scenes they do include is that they sort of pale in comparison to my love of the sacred text. I realize this would not be a problem for everybody, but it is for me. For example, during the scene where the French guard taunts the knights, all I could really focus on was how the actor was intentionally changing the inflection on the lines so it was not a direct impersonation of the actor from the film. While I certainly understand that instinct, I guess the thing that I loved about Python was the familiarity, the exact sound of the words and the exact line deliveries, that resonated so much with me that I still have them in my head today. I know a piece of original stagecraft is not just trying to regurgitate the film, but most of these scenes just weren't that funny to me. Maybe I've heard them too many times before.

There were some "cute" executions of famous moments from the film, which were, I believe, intended as a wink at the meager options available in a stage performance. For example, a rather small inflated cow is catapulted on the knights by said French guards, while the catapulting of the Trojan Rabbit is on the video screen on the back. Then I was wondering how they would do the fight against the other rabbit, the one that kills so many of the knights in the film. It's a stuffed rabbit thrown at the neck of one knight, who holds it to his throat and mimics it chomping his neck. Obviously you can't get a rabbit to fly around the stage. 

Spamalot shows its age in a couple spots. I didn't love the bit where it starts to talk about itself as a Broadway musical, which would have tickled us in 2005 but feels a bit old-fashioned now. More problematic is the song where they talk about how you can't have a Broadway show if you don't have any Jews. My wife and I agreed that this became dated very fast. Not only don't we want to teach people like my children that Jews are associated with the entertainment industry, but the last few years have also not been a great climate for making light of anything related to Judaism. I suppose that's in the text, so if you want to mount Spamalot, you have to include it. Then again, these are sketches, so any individual part lifts right out.

Oh and do you want to know how it ends? Famously, the film doesn't have a proper ending. The remaining knights get arrested by London police officers. Here, after they use the holy hand grenade of Antioch (which was a pretty funny scene) to blow up the rabbit, they get a clue to the location of the grail, which is that it's under one of the seats in the audience. Sure enough, that unwitting audience member gets to come up on stage with the cast. We debated afterwards whether it was the same seat for every performance or if they vary it up. I took the former position and my wife took the latter. My thinking: they could improvise the dialogue that's related to the specific seat number, but it would be easier just to use the same one every time. You don't usually have to worry about repeat audiences, and if anyone's coming back for a second time, surely it means they love the show and are not going to fault it for using the same seat over and over again. 

And then, because they've previously acknowledged that a Broadway show has to end with a wedding, Arthur gets married to the Lady of the Lake, revealed to have a name: Guinevere. Which brings thing back in sync with Arthurian legend. 

My overall impression was eventually a positive one. I'm glad to say that the show was salvaged a bit by its second half. But I found the first half to be pretty groan worthy, I'm sorry to say. 

My kids? Well there's not much chance this will push them down a Monty Python rabbit hole, to make yet a third reference to rabbits. The whole thing must seem very odd and dated to them. While we were taking our seats at the start, they used that back screen to play skits from other films and from the TV show, and the kids just looked at them dumbly, without having any context or without being on their wavelength. My older son even asked "Is this the thing we're here to see?" which I thought was funny.

The director came on stage afterwards to thank us, as a preview audience, and to award us by emailing every ticket purchaser with a discount code to come see the show again during its proper run. I was impressed to learn that they had only rehearsed for 13 days. It's not a show heavy on sets or staging logistics, but I still think that's pretty impressive. 

I definitely would not see Spamalot again, so my sister-in-law can use that discount on herself or maybe a friend. But it does feel like by seeing it, I've finally scratched an itch I may never have known I had. 

Audient One-Timers: Greed

This is the ninth in my 2026 monthly series Audient One-Timers, in which I'm giving a second watch to my top 12 films on Flickchart that I had seen only once.

The most one-timery movie on my list for this series, if we are thinking only of length-related obstructions to a second viewing, is Erich von Stroheim's silent film Greed from 1924. Also my oldest film in the series, you won't be surprised to learn.

The version of this movie I saw almost exactly ten years ago, in December of 2016, was one of the longest films I have ever seen: 239 minutes, the result of a 1999 "reconstruction" that was attempting to restore von Stroheim's original vision. 

Which it never had any hope of fully doing. Von Stroheim's first cut was more than nine hours long, with most of that footage having been lost -- and of course that was not the version released theatrically. The reconstruction sought to put back some of that material in the form of still photographs, and I found that effect profound. It was one of the primary factors in me awarding the film five stars and a healthy spot within my top 100 on Flickchcart. (It's currently sitting at #95.)

But a viewing of a 239-minute movie feels daunting no matter when you're trying to fit it in. A weekend in the middle of September is better than the heart of Christmas season, as I did in 2016, but it's still not optimal. 

But the version of Greed on Kanopy was not 239 minutes. It was 130 minutes. 

Interesting.

It wouldn't be the first film in this series that was a different version than the one I'd loved. I saw a longer version of Das Boot a couple months ago, and unfortunately, in that case, the extra length hurt the movie, making many of its set pieces more interchangeable. And that choice was, indeed, dictated by what was readily available.

Now, I wish every movie had exactly one version and there would be no doubt as to its absolute quality. I hate this approach of continuing to revise movies after they've already been released. But with Das Boot I recognized it would make an interesting exercise to see how my love stands up to a different version of the material. I can't control that multiple versions exist, I can only choose how I'm going to engage with them. 

With Greed losing nearly two hours of its running time, there was a chance that what I'd loved about it would be severely truncated. But when you watch at least five movies a week, shorter is usually better. Add in the fact that it was easily accessible for free on Kanopy, whereas I'd likely be paying to watch the reconstructed version, and it was easy to give myself a break here.

So this was my first viewing of Greed in which all the images were moving. And I'm glad to say that Greed also works quite well as a conventionally constructed film. 

Whatever may have been missing from my four-hour version, and I don't remember that version all that well, it did not feel like an absence on this viewing. As I acknowledged the last time I wrote about it, a lot of the missing material was from sub plots that were only tangentially related to the central narrative. So purely as a streamlined viewing experience, I shouldn't be surprised that Greed did not disappoint. One of the core principles about any sort of narrative art is that you should "kill your darlings," so a more economical version is usually better at least in that respect.

I'd say Greed probably did not have the same impact on me this time, though. That could be the general phenomenon of second-time syndrome, though with my favorite movies, they only exhilarate me more with each viewing. I think it also points to how much of an integral part of the viewing experience I found the effort to reconstruct the original movie. 

But the things I remember liking about Greed, I still liked on this viewing -- nay, loved. 

What I forgot was that this movie is not actually, primarily, about the greed of the film's protagonist, a decided anti-hero in the form of McTeague, played by Gibson Gowland. We meet McTeague when he's throwing a man down the side of an embankment in a gold mine, which isn't fatal for the victim but which showcases McTeague's miserable temperament. McTeague is also weak, as he later kisses his future wife while she's a patient in his dental chair and while she's unconscious. So not only is he weak, he's also rapey.

However, he doesn't seem to be particularly greedy. In fact, for a time in the middle of this movie, he mostly seems to be doing the right thing, trying to make an honest career as a dentist and do the right thing by his future wife, after the initial transgression that she doesn't even know about. The fact that his future wife, Trina (Zasu Pitts), wins $5,000 in the lottery isn't a factor in his decision to propose to her, as it occurs after they are engaged but before they are married.

No, it's her who has the Scrooge McDuck tendencies. She doesn't have enough gold coins to try to swim in them, but she does frequently visit them and go wild-eyed with obsession over them. There's even a great shot where you only see her arms, looking skeletal and gnarled, allowing the doubloons to sift through her finger. 

What Trina displays goes beyond greed. As the text says at one point, it's almost like a mental illness. She's unwilling to spend almost any of the $5,000, even when it sends her to scrubbing floors at a local kindergarten. But you sense it is almost a paranoid sense of miserliness more than actual greed, though I suppose they might be two sides of the same coin. Someone who is truly "greedy" fixates on the acquisition of more wealthy, not necessarily the extreme protection of the wealth she has. However, the damage it does to their relationship, and their lives, makes whatever it is perhaps even more pernicious than greed.

I was thinking about how this film deals with many if not all of the deadly sins, beyond just greed. Envy is hugely at play here, as the film's third most important character, Marcus (Jean Hersholt), comes to greatly regret his initial generosity in stepping out of the picture so McTeague can marry Trina. See, he was originally dating Trina, and it was McTeague's heartfelt confession of his love for her -- based on sexually assaulting her in the dental chair (though Marcus doesn't know that) -- that caused him to magnanimously make way for his friend. He may not have truly loved her, otherwise he wouldn't have given her up so easily, but after she wins the lottery, he becomes increasingly miserable until he morphs into McTeague's main rival and antagonist.

There's also a bit of sloth. After McTeague loses his dental practice due to not having attended an accredited dental school, he loses all ambition and becomes a total layabout. It's at this point that his inclination toward the drink starts to turn him into a truly miserable character after he'd spent an hour of screen time fighting his instincts and doing better than that. 

Pride, gluttony, wrath and lust are in there as well. Gluttony really only has one showcase, which is at the wedding scene where the characters are seen stuffing their faces and the text even talks about them gorging themselves. Wrath? Well, McTeague is wrath incarnate, even if he sometimes gets it under control. We know about the lust, of course, that caused him to kiss Trina while she was sleeping. Pride is the hardest one to specifically pull out, but it is probably also the most generic of the seven deadly, applicable as you choose to apply it.

It's interesting to me that my inclination is to talk more about its story than the film's technical merits on this viewing. But I found many of the shots quite profound, as von Stroheim has a good instinct for framing and for the use of lighting. The close-ups are confronting in the way you want, and he even has a knack for some symbolic imagery, such as when he intercuts scenes of a cat waiting to pounce on McTeague's birds in their cage as a metaphor for one character trying to attack another. 

The only thing I found worse this time was the performance of Zasu Pitts. In my previous post about Greed, I talked about how the performers weren't "playing to the back of the theater." That wasn't my impression of Pitts this time. She widens her eyes at the drop of a hat, almost as though she thinks she's about to be eaten by that cat. When this is in reaction to monstrous behavior by McTeague, it makes sense, but there are a lot of points where it seems to totally unmotivated. In fact, if I were seeking a motivation, it would be to play to the back of the theater. 

And to finish with just one more story bit: The climax in Death Valley is as arresting as it was last time.

I feel like I could say more about Greed, but great films are like that. If I want to watch it again, I'm glad to know I have a very acceptable shorter version I can watch without having to set aside an entire weekend to watch it.

In October I will be watching Edward Zwick's Glory, my #90 on Flickchart. 

Resident Evil prep, and sleeping through large chunks

I went into Thursday night with a rare lack of agenda in what I'd be watching, but since I'd been going a bit heavy on 2026 movies, I thought I'd go for something from a different year. 

I thought it would most likely be a new movie, but when I saw Paul W.S. Anderson's original Resident Evil from 2002 streaming on Stan, I thought it would make a good time to revisit it. After all, yesterday was also the release date of Zach Cregger's new version, which I may watch sometime this weekend. 

Besides, although I did not particularly like this movie, there were some deaths in it that had a big impression on me at the time. 

You may remember the scene. If not, spoiler alert.

The paramilitary strike force trying to infiltrate "The Hive" gets trapped in a hallway by the Red Queen, the AI that controls the whole testing facility that's been infected with a virus and overrun by zombies. The Queen shuts off all the exits and then goes about eliminating the four soldier in the room with a laser beam that cuts from one end of the hallway to the other.

On its first pass, it takes care of one woman by getting her in the neck. She has a thousand-yard stare as her head slowly slides off her neck hole. A man next to her is screaming because he's lost the tops of four fingers, leaving stumps of different lengths as his hand was at an angle to the laser at the time. 

The second pass gets one guy in the midsection, halving him. I can't remember what happens to the screaming guy, but I'm pretty sure this one gets him too.

That leaves only the team leader, who's just made a gymnastic move involving a beam on the ceiling to improbably avoid the most recent laser. He's got another laser coming that doesn't seem to present too much difficulty, until it shifts into a cross-hatching pattern that is impossible to avoid. He utters one last expletive before resigning himself to being diced into a hundred pieces.

This, I thought, was the innovation of Resident Evil. The zombie stuff? Booo-ring.

Yet on this viewing, I slept through it. 

Now you have to understand my situation regarding sleep in movies. I touch on it regularly so you probably already know some of this stuff.

If I feel a slumber coming on that is impossible to deny, I will pause the movie. I will either sleep for a short time (sometimes I set a 10-minute timer, and then snooze it or reset it) or for like three hours, at which point I give up on the viewing and go to bed. But this is almost always a proactive gesture.

If I nod off during the movie, I usually catch myself and wake back up after only a second or two. I think it might have been longer, but then I go back and I see that I missed about one line of dialogue. It's the amount of time you nod off when you're driving. A lot less dangerous, but I snap awake as though the stakes were the same. 

I never fall asleep for 20 minutes in a movie without catching myself, but that's what happened during Resident Evil. With having seen the movie already, I guess maybe the pressure was off?

But it was funny to awaken, not really sure how long I'd been asleep but assuming it was only one of those nod-offs, but then being totally disoriented within the movie. And noticing that none of that strike team were still with the living characters. 

Did I sleep through the only scene that caused me to want to watch this movie again?

Apparently I had. And it hadn't been just five minutes before where I was. It was like 15 minutes before. At least.

Well I wasn't going to waste the viewing by just going on from there. I had to see that strike team sliced and diced by lasers. So I did go back and watch it again through from there, even though that meant watching the same five minutes again twice, and added on to my bedtime. (On nights like this I don't usually go to bed until after 1. But at least I've already slept some before then.)

I did enjoy, and feel discomfited, by the slicing and dicing once again. Good on ya, Paul W.S. Anderson.

The rest of it? Pretty mediocre, and by the end I was already sleeping again, small amounts, through some of the end-stage scenes. I did not go back to rewatch those.

I don't think the new Resident Evil is anything like an exact remake of this movie. For one, there's no Milla Jovovich character, that I can tell, as the movie stars the suddenly hot Austin Abrams. But just generally, a guy like Zach Cregger doesn't want to make a movie set in a high-tech facility with an AI that's trying to kill everyone. There are plenty of hacks who can make that movie, and Cregger is horror's newest visionary. 

So my takeaway of the viewing is that I need to develop a new level of alert regarding my sleep tendencies during a movie. It is possible for me to sleep unbidden through large chunks of a movie, so I have to become ever more vigilant if I feel the dreaded sleep monster coming on. 

Schnabel channeling Coppola

I finally carved out the time for the 2 hours and 35 minutes of In the Hand of Dante, which showed up streaming on Netflix a couple months ago without any fanfare. When I determined that was Oscar Isaac in the still image that went by in Netflix's screen saver mode, I was even more surprised at the way the film creeped up on me/us. That was hardly the end of the surprises. 

Julian Schnabel's film is being discussed on, well, not the most recent episode of Filmspotting: SVU, but the one I've finally caught up to. Which means it actually dropped on June 30th. During baseball season, when a daily fantasy baseball podcast takes up a significant amount of my listening time, I get very far behind on my other podcasts. And need to scramble to catch up before the end of the year, so at least I can catch the best-of-the-year discussions in real time. 

But at least being behind means I'm more likely to have seen the movies they discuss by the time I get to each episode, though that wasn't the case with In the Hand of Dante, in part due to that ominous runtime. And because I like to listen to my podcasts in sequence if at all possible, I decided to force myself to find the time for Dante, even if it meant starting to watch it on my phone on the train ride home from work. Which is not ideally what I want to do with a film made by a painter. 

As it turned out, any visual interest in the film, and there is some, was almost totally nullified by the strange "failed magnum opus" quality of the film, which takes place both at the turn of the 21st century and the beginning of the 14th century, with a handful of actors playing roles in both timelines.

Yeah it's got Cloud Atlas vibes, but Cloud Atlas is waaaaay better. No, what it really reminded me of was Francis Ford Coppola and the weird passion projects that have consumed him for the past 20 years. Those also are better than In the Hand of Dante. Yes, even Megalopolis. 

Perhaps this kind of thing is a symptom of crossing over into your 70s. Schnabel is 74. 

And used to be great. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and Before Night Falls are examples of him at his peak. Basquiat and At Eternity's Gate both find him just below that level. Miral is not great, but every director is allowed one.

Now two.

There are telltale signs of too much creative control all over this thing:

1) Multiple film stocks used, depending on time period, but not exactly, because the black and white is actually used in two different time periods;

2) Poetic voiceover that sometimes is lucid and sometimes makes no sense at all;

3) A great actor who was trying to vibe with the creative vision of a genius, but who may have made the worst turkey of his career instead;

4) Even a reference to 9/11 in the storytelling.

All of which sound like things Coppola would do. 

Then you have the odd casting, which made me think of something like Richard Kelly's Southland Tales. Also a late period Coppola movie.

You know what the best part of In the Hand of Dante is? Gerard Butler. And if you can remember the last time you thought Gerard Butler was the best part of anything, you've got a better memory than I do.

Laughably, Butler plays a 14th century pope. But the more interesting performance, even though it chews a bit of scenery, is when he plays a turn-of-the-21st century New Jersey hoodlum, a mob enforcer type who goes and puts the fear of God into people who owe money, and more often than not is actually there to kill them. He carries out that task against one person who is otherwise unrelated to the story near the beginning of In the Hand of Dante, and the way Butler really leans into the material, in all its profanity, I found fun and invigorating. At this point, I was still on board with Dante, or at least withholding judgment. 

But then you know who else shows up? 

1) Al Pacino, in one scene, looking very old and decrepit. I didn't feel like this was a coincidence, since we often think of Isaac as an heir apparent to Pacino.

2) Gal Gadot, also playing multiple roles, neither of them well. And this pains me to say this, because I am still smitten with Gadot from the original Wonder Woman. 

3) Jason Momoa, who I believe is supposed to be an actual Italian, since part of this story actually takes place in Italy. (It's about Dante Alighieri, not Dante from Clerks.) He is also a mob enforcer type.

4) John Malkovich. Also a mafioso. Though I thought he was good.

5) Martin Scorsese. Yes this is the third 2026 movie I have seen in which Scorsese acts. 

Anyway that's a pretty odd collection of characters. Except for the fact that most of them are or at least were big movie stars -- I mean there are two members of the Justice League in this movie -- you'd think they were all Schnabel could get, because some of the actors he really wanted got a whiff of this being terrible even if Isaac didn't. But no, Schnabel seems like he could have had a lot of people and yet he chose these people.

I haven't told you anything about the plot. But it involves a modern-day plot to steal and sell an original manuscript of The Divine Comedy, which was thought not to exist anymore. Isaac plays both a writer who is brought in for his Dante expertise, and Dante himself, while Butler is the man with the gun, shooting any and everybody. 

This plot actually interested me. I liked most of what it was doing, at least for the first half.

The part I really did not like was the 14th century portion, in which everybody, including Isaac, seemed over their heads, and the narrative itself was impossible to follow. Let's just say that the film makes some suggestion that Dante and his 14th century love interest, played by Gadot, might be souls who get reincarnated in the modern writer and his own modern love interest, also played Gadot. To put it in the terms of a Coppola movie I love, Bram Stoker's Dracula, it's as though they've "crossed oceans of time" to find each other.

But to be honest, I'm not really sure that's what Schanbel was trying to convince us was happening. There came a point, early in the film's third hour, where I had written it off and was messaging someone on Facebook on my phone in the final stretch.

Didn't give the movie a chance, did I? Ha. When you know you know, and I know this was a turd.

At least with something like Coppola's Megalopolis, there's a kind of madness that you have to appreciate because it comes from a place of sincerity. I'm sure Schnabel was equally sincere, but this just felt like empty madness. 

Adjectives ending in -ed

In between movies of my Tuesday night double feature -- an advanced screening of Heart of the Beast and the Korean film Hope, neither of which I apparently want to talk about here -- I saw a trailer for a new animated film in the lobby of the Village Cinemas at Crown Casino.

I wasn't sure at first which company it was, but I found the animation compelling. I'd lose my sense of optimism if it turned out to be a Dreamworks movie, but then the Disney logo came up, and I realized this was why the character animation/movements reminded me a little bit of Tangled. 

I kept watching all the way through. It involved a girl who apparently has magical abilities and lives in a world involving witches and their ilk. It seemed fun. Now just for the title.

Hexed. Of course.

I say "of course" because I realized for the first time: This is a Disney thing. Titles that are adjectives ending in -ed, I mean.

You have Tangled, of course. That should be obvious.

But then it goes deeper than that. There is both Enchanted, from 2007, and its sequel, Disenchanted, from 2022. 

And here are some others I found, in the larger Disney family:

Godmothered (2020)
Swiped (2025)

And expected in the future, in some cases without release dates:

Spooked
Ripped
Tangled (live action) (2028)

Okay that last one does not count as a separate movie.

I'd actually credit Tangled as the progenitor of this, since they (correctly) thought this would be a more inclusive title for the movie than Rapunzel. However, Enchanted does predate Tangled. 

If I wanted to cast the web wider, Wikipedia will allow me to do that. The larger production apparatus, which involves subsidiaries, had movies called Shipwrecked and Deceived in 1991. But neither of those really fits the description of Disney content as we're describing it here. 

I can see why they wanted to can Coyote vs. Acme

When the world heard that a movie with a very promising concept -- that famous Roadrunner hunter Wile E. Coyote was suing Acme for their faulty products -- was being shelved by Warner Brothers so they could take a tax write-off, the outcry was swift and deafening. And for sure, I was part of that outcry. In addition to an idea that sounded good going down the drain, meaning I'd never see it, it was an ominous development to learn that a movie studio could just stymie the creative efforts of thousands of people, at what seemed like the drop of a hat. 

And then it started happening with other movies. I'm not sure if I actually have the sequence of events right here, but Batgirl was a very public casualty of the same mindset. There were others whose names I'm not remembering right now (and am apparently uninterested in doing a very simple Google search). 

But Coyote vs. Acme was not done. The bad press and public disappointment was so great that Dave Green's film was resuscitated. It opened in the U.S. a few weeks ago, about the time it was playing at the Melbourne International Film Festival. In fact, this film was so much of a curiosity that it played MIFF even though this is not the kind of movie you usually see at MIFF. 

And early word of mouth was good. A friend of mine raved about it on Facebook.

Well, I can see why they wanted to cancel it.

My wife and I watched this last Friday night, a screener version with my email address watermarked right into the center of the image. Pretty obnoxious. They could have put it in one of the corners and still achieved the desired impact of the watermark. I guess they thought some enterprising pirate might try to video the image and crop out a watermark in a corner? An absurd suggestion, but that's all I can think of.

Surely that played some small part of why it disappointed us. But the movie bore the lion's share of that disappointment.

Coyote vs. Acme starts out in a very promising manner. You get a montage of Wile E. Coyote's most spectacular equipment fails from his many dogged days pursuing the Roadrunner. (Meep meep.) Then you see him spot an ad for a local ambulance chaser (played, in what seemed like a very promising development, by Will Forte), and get the idea to sue Acme for product malfunctions that should have killed him a hundred times over. If not for the fact that he's, you know, indestructible.

It turns out this great idea is no greater than an idea for a seven-minute Saturday Night Live sketch. In fact, you can imagine an excellent version of that sketch, and it might have even starred Forte when he was a cast member.

And that gets at part of the issue with Coyote vs. Acme. Forte was on Saturday Night Live from 2002 to 2010, and even back then, the Looney Tunes were already starting to fade from the zeitgeist. To me personally, they're nowhere near it now. My wife and I asked my younger son to participate in the viewing, and he initially agreed when he thought we were talking about going to the cinema to see it, not that we meant "No, starting in the next 15 minutes." But if he had watched, I feel like he wouldn't have gotten any of the jokes or Easter eggs regarding this musty IP, and to be certain, whatever charm Coyote vs. Acme has relies on that sort of familiarity. 

There are other promising elements. John Cena plays Acme's lead attorney, a cowboy hat-wearing smooth talker, and I like him too. But like Forte, he ultimately feels wasted. 

And the problem is, everyone gets wasted because they are working so hard to turn a seven-minute idea into a 103-minute movie. Realizing they had so little, the filmmakers could have made this movie 85 minutes. That would have been perfectly fine. In fact, it probably still would have been 78 minutes too much, but it would have been better.

So what did they do with those extra 78 minutes, or rather, we should say, those extra 96 minutes? Unclear.

The movie doesn't even delve into back stories for its human characters. We know Forte's character is a bit lost because he lives in a motel. But we learn nothing about his family life or what brought him there. Cena, as the "villain," obviously doesn't warrant any such introspection either. Then there is Forte's assistant? legal clerk? who is played by Lana Condor, and she's on screen a lot but has no inner life. To say nothing of the fact that this actress, star of the To All the Boys movies, has zero charisma.

Instead this movie has a lot of "legs spinning fast, no forward momentum" -- both literally and figuratively.

Let's talk about the literal first. I thought I would be charmed by the Looney Tunes stuff, with things bouncing around the screen and characters receiving should-be-fatal injuries by blasting through walls or being flattened by pianos. But you know what, no. I was not. It felt tedious. Every time.

I should say that I don't really care for many of the previous movies done in this style. Like, I never liked Who Framed Roger Rabbit? all that much and I have still seen it only that one time in the theater. 

But strangely, I did quite enjoy Space Jam: A New Legacy, with Lebron James, a few years back. I don't like the original Space Jam, but the sequel really worked for me, even when it did not work for anyone else. 

A New Legacy tells us two things:

1) The Looney Tunes are, actually, sort of still in the zeitgeist. This movie is only five years old, and since it came out, there has also been The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie, released only two years ago. So in the context of Warner Brothers' continuance of the public visibility of its IP, Coyote vs. Acme is not totally out of left field. 

2) I myself have the potential to like the interacting of Looney Tunes characters and human beings, if it is done right.

When you watch Coyote vs. Acme, you are never struck by individual poor decisions. At any given moment, the next scene follows reasonably from the one before.

But the whole thing just feels flat and undifferentiated. "Flat" was my wife's choice of word, and she wasn't only talking about the 2D animation. (To be clear, it would not have been an improvement to make these characters CGI.) "Flat" as in unable to muster any sense of stakes, or intrigue, or emotional investment, or even interest. 

So when the suits at Warner Brothers were looking at Green's final cut, they must have thought the same. They must have seen the legs spinning in a dervish of potential energy, but the body itself not actually moving anywhere. 

Reason enough to seek a tax write-off if you ask me.

To be clear, I'm glad that did not happen. I still stand behind the fact that we should get to see every completed movie, even if it is an abomination. In fact, the greater abomination it might be, the more I want to see it. Coyote vs. Acme is not an abomination. It's just tedious. 

But then everyone seems to really like it. Holy crap, it's got a 96 on Rotten Tomatoes. 

How do I account for this? I expect there are two different things going on:

1) Many critics share my feeling of horror that a completed movie, one with such a delightful concept, could be completely "disappeared." They have to heap praise in order to show Warner Brothers just how wrong it was.

2) Nostalgia goes a long way.

But was Warner Brothers wrong? Maybe in their actual choice to seek the tax write-off. But not, in my estimation, in their judgment of the merits of the film.

I'd been struggling to start my review, but I better get on it because I have to post it one of the next three days. It comes out here on Thursday, and the idea with new reviews, especially when I've gotten a long lead time on watching them, is to post either the day before, the day of, or the day after the theaterical release.

This post has at least gotten my juices flowing about what I want to say. And there are, obviously, a lot of things I want to say.

I just wish I didn't have to say them. I wish I loved Coyote vs. Acme. But sometimes, the giant behemoth mega corporation trying to make a sketchy financial transaction is also right. 

The United 93 viewing that didn't transpire

On Friday it was the 25th anniversary of 9/11. I'm sure you heard it mentioned somewhere. 

As anniversaries go, this was "the big one." Won't be another one this big until 2051. 

I did think of trying to honor the anniversary with a viewing of the best 9/11 movie, and one of my favorites of the whole first decade of this century, United 93. I fished around for it on the streaming services, coming up empty. I even checked Disney+ of all places. It was not there.

If I had found it, I might have put it on while I worked in the afternoon. That wouldn't have been a great way to really engage with that movie, of course, but I've seen it three other times, so it wouldn't have been the greatest of insults either. 

But I guess I decided paying for it was the dividing line between trying to fit it in and not trying to fit it in. And it's not because I'm pinching pennies at the moment. It was just a measure of how much I wanted to revisit that day, maybe.

Or maybe how much I wanted to immerse myself in anything American right now.

For another two years, we are under the stranglehold of Donald Trump. I assume that after the midterm elections it will be a significantly compromised version of Donald Trump, but that could only make him more dangerous. More likely to lash out.

And of course he has to make 9/11 about himself. The latest is this ridiculous thing about how he was at ground zero and how two firefighters had to lift him up and run him away from danger. As if. I have an actual friend who was at ground zero in his capacity as an EMT and actually had to run away from both buildings as they fell, first one then the other. I'll ask him if he saw Trump that day, but I know what the answer will be. 

But even if we set aside the current state of American politics, maybe there's something else I'm thinking here.

Maybe the best way to remember 9/11 is to not remember it.

And I don't mean to forget it. I don't mean not to think about where you were that day, or how your sense of dormant patriotism was unironically activated, or how many consecutive hours of TV you watched. I come back to those things at random times anyway.

I mean to spare it a passing thought, but then to have a normal day of work, a walk after work, and a double feature of movies that couldn't have anything less to do with it: Coyote vs. Acme and a viewing of the movie Obex on a second consecutive night.

That's what I'm telling myself anyway.

Two for the price of one

I watched and really enjoyed a movie called Obex on Thursday night. Enjoyed the parts I saw, anyway.

I don't want to say I slept through a lot of Obex, but when I tried to form a distinct memory of it on Friday morning, it felt like an Alzheimer's patient grasping for threads in their brain. (I assume, anyway. Hopefully I won't have to deal with Alzheimer's for another 20 years, though I'm pretty sure I will have to deal with it at that point.)

I knew the experience had been a four-star experience. It's a very distinctive black-and-white film that, when speaking about it to a friend, I likened to things like Computer Chess and Pi, in that it is DIY and chock full of throwback oddities to the 1980s, including a ton of era-appropriate computer graphics and midi tunes. There's also some arresting imagery that makes it at least horror adjacent. I checked IMDB and horror is one of three genres listed along with sci-fi and fantasy. If that combination of genres sounds good to you, and you have at least a little appreciation of the two titles I mentioned above, then this movie is for you. It's directed by, written by and starring Albert Birney, a name that was previously unfamiliar to me.

But because I'd really liked what I saw -- which I have to say was at least 80 percent of it -- I wanted to be able to incorporate it better into my brain as an ongoing, living reference point. 

So I watched it again the very next night.

That's a rather extreme reaction except when you consider the following: my $5.99 rental was only going to last for 48 hours, and to watch it again at some point in the future, I'd probably have to pay that $5.99 again. This isn't the kind of movie that is likely to pop up on Netflix.

Plus it was only 90 minutes, so that made it easy, especially since I'd already watched one movie Friday night: Coyote vs. Acme with my wife. I'll probably write a post about that tomorrow, so I won't spoil my thoughts before then. 

This isn't unprecedented. I've watched movies twice in quick succession before. There's the famous story of how the (so far only) two times I watched Wristcutters: A Love Story, they were both in the same day. Just last year I watched the screener of The Dead Don't Hurt twice because I realized I'd missed something key about its narrative structure the first time, and that would prevent me from writing a proper review of it. 

But I'm having a hard time remembering the last time I watched a movie twice specifically to capitalize on a 24- or 48-hour rental window. (I have to remind myself that the 48-hour rental period is relatively recent, maybe only the last five to seven years.) 

Speaking of the last five years, the last one I can specifically recall was The Last Five Years, which I watched for the first time on March 2, 2015, and the second time on March 3, 2015. That would have definitely been during the standard 24-hour rental period back then. 

Now that I've watched Obex twice, I've determined that I didn't miss very much the first time. But I also must have slept through little bits the second time, because there were things I remember happening the first time that I don't remember the second time. Together I'm sure I have one complete viewing.

And I do remember those bits a lot better know. So, no Alzheimer's yet apparently.

But also this is the sort of movie that feels like a dream, in the best possible way. It involves flashes of bizarre imagery that don't necessarily have an antecedent in the narrative, plus the blending of a real world with a video game world, though that would be a 1987 video game world and all the more charming for that fact.

And now that I've deepened my appreciation of Obex through that second viewing, I can return to this dream in my mind at any time of my choosing.

This year's release date asterisk

It Ends was a movie I looked for last year, when it was recommended to me by a friend who saw it and ranked it as part of his own year-end rankings. (Which means it could only be one friend. There's only one other person who would be willing to go on this crazy mission with me each year.)

So why will it be a part of my own 2026 rankings?

I have fairly hard-and-fast rules about release years and when I count a movie toward the current year. And it usually has to do with the film's U.S. release date. Even though I've lived in Australia for 13 years now, Australian release dates are sometimes way out of whack and I just don't consider them to be a reliable gauge of the current film year, not when I'm comparing my own list to those from people who live in other parts of the world. 

If a film has a release in the U.S. in a particular year, it's part of that year for ranking purposes. That allows foreign films, which were often released in their home country in the previous year, to qualify for ranking in that second year.

But if you go to IMDB for Alexander Ullom's head-trippy road movie -- in that it is literally about a road that seems to go on forever -- you'll see the following under the U.S. release:

"United States - December 10, 2025 (internet)"

And then on the very next line:

"United States - August 21, 2026"

Huh? 

A film may get only an internet release, or it may get an internet release after a theatrical release. In fact, I believe this second describes every movie that's been made in the internet era -- though to be fair, IMDB does not usually note the date a movie becomes available for streaming.

But an internet release and then a theatrical release? You don't usually see that.

What happened was that Letterboxd, for a limited time, had exclusive access to the movie as part of its Unreleased Gems series. I noticed in a recent email from Letterboxd that they're doing it again this year. 

In fact, the time was so limited that when I went to look for it a month later, in order to make It Ends one of my final half-dozen viewings of 2025, it was no longer available. I wrote it off as never rankable on one of my year-end rankings, a fate that befalls a large number of releases each year.

But most of those other movies burn their eligibility in that first year. Because of its unusual release schedule, I've now decided It Ends did not. 

It took another eight months to finally get a proper release, but It Ends came out in the U.S. last month, and washed up on our shows last week. I watched it Sunday night as a second movie after the family went to see Terminator 2, as discussed previously. 

I liked but did not love it. Not top 20 like my friend ranked it last year. To each his own. But that isn't really the point of writing this post.

No, the point is to talk about a sort of stretching of the rules that actually sort of pains me a little bit.

I know these are my rules and I can do whatever I want with them, but I also feel like it's good to be consistent. And the way it works out, only foreign films, not English language films like this one, usually get that "second chance" -- which is really just a first chance, since I literally could not have seen those movies in the year of their proper release, unless I'd flown to the country where they were released, or maybe caught them at a festival. 

If I had been a bit faster, I could have seen It Ends last year.

But then again I might not have even noticed it was a Letterboxd exclusive, might not have even had it recommended to me by my friend. And then it would have been like any other film that has a different release year on IMDB than the year of its actual release, a result of debuting at a film festival one year and getting a theatrical release the next. That's especially likely if the festival debut was a later festival, like TIFF. You can't expect all those films to get distribution in that first year, so you rank them in the second year.

And so I am treating the Letterboxd exclusive window on It Ends kind of like an online film festival. 

Hey, it works for me, and these are my rules anyway. Which doesn't mean I am always flexible enough to bend them.