Pride Month: Stay on Board: The Leo Baker Story

Stay on Board: The Leo Baker Story checked a number of boxes for me as my third weekly viewing of trans movies during Pride Month:

1) It's a documentary. Through ten Pride Month viewings over three years, I had yet to watch a documentary. 

2) It's about a trans man, which worked with my decision to watch two movies about trans men and two movies about trans women, alternating weekly.

3) It addresses a topic that is vital to trans athletes, which is where they fit in the gender-divided sports world which has fairly strict, though hopefully loosening, guidelines on who can compete against whom.

Leo Baker was born Lacey Baker, and the first thing I found noteworthy about Nicola B. Marsh and Giovanni Reda's 2022 documentary was how much it engages with Leo's dead name. In a narrative film, you can choose how much or how little to do that, and it may be a key component in what you're trying to explore with your theme. The characters don't have a choice, because the writer makes that decision for them.

When Leo chose to tell his story, he probably had some choice over how often Lacey was invoked. You can see it makes him visibly uncomfortable to speak too much about Lacey, though also that he knows this is part of telling his story in as honest and as complete a manner as possible. 

First Lacey, then Leo, is one of the great skateboarders for his age group, and during the setting of the film, is one of the athletes preparing for the debut of skateboarding during the 2020 (eventually 2021) Tokyo Olympics. However, his ascendancy has resulted in steadily becoming more masculine in his appearance, while still competing under the name Lacey, against other girls (he's a teenager), however reluctantly. In addition to society marking him as a certain gender, by convention, the world of competitive skateboarding has to mark him as a certain gender, by necessity -- especially since, as far as they know, he is indeed a woman.

But the dishonesty of continuing to compete under his dead name is having severe consequences on the young skateboarding prodigy, in addition to losing him some of his endorsements when he cuts his hair and starts shaving his head. The world seems to get that Leo is trans, even before he's told them.

The interesting thing about skateboarding is that it's one of those sports that seems like women and men can do equally well. You obviously would not want men and women in the same boxing ring, but the gender division of skateboarders is far more arbitrary. It relies more on fine motor skills than the brute strength that has traditionally justified the separation of men and women in competitive sports.

And though that exact arbitrary division isn't belabored in Stay on Board, it comes through clearly. If men and women were just assigned to compete against each other, which they really could in this case, how Leo defines himself as a trans man would not be relevant at all, and his upward trajectory might be less damaged. (Of course, I don't know that there's any Olympic sport where men and women compete against each other, so the Olympics, while apparently a boon for the skateboarding community, are actually a focused moment of challenge for Leo.)

Another thing I found interesting about Leo's story was his relationship with his girlfriend. I don't mind telling you that the sexual preferences of trans people is something I have questions about. If you are a trans man and you are dating a woman, are you better classifiable as a heterosexual trans man, a lesbian, or just something else entirely? The "something else entirely" is probably a good single encapsulation of what it means to be queer, especially trans.

But the effect of his transition on his girlfriend, who remains supportive, is an interesting one to note. She's obviously a lesbian and she got together with Leo when he still identified as a woman, though this is a bit blurry, because they reveal a conversation they had soon after meeting where the girlfriend asked him about his preferred pronouns. He started with a hurried "she/her is fine," before changing that answer to "he/him" the next day. (Though interestingly, some other interviewed subjects refer to Leo as "they/them," another indication of just what kind of spectrum this is.)

It seems evident, though, that the girlfriend (I should probably look up her name rather than continuing to refer to her as "the girlfriend") imagined she was falling in love with a person who was primarily a woman, at least physically if not emotionally. Leo saving money for his top surgery is acknowledged as a potential moment when they might have to consider breaking up, because the physical side may soon no longer be what the girlfriend wants. (That's my last reference to her and I never looked up her name, which is too bad because she's lovely, both physically and emotionally.)

Stay on Board is a little meandering in terms of its structure, and it barely ekes out a complete feature length at only 72 minutes. There's definitely some repeated material here. Generally, though, the film follows a satisfying forward momentum in Olympic preparations, and our checking in with Leo's mental state as he deals with the expected obstacles is poignant.

Okay, next week is my final Pride Month viewing for June, with a story about a trans woman that's one of the more prominent ones out there -- and potentially problematic in some ways. Stay tuned. 

Cheating on a movie theater, using its own popcorn

I had to say two things that were inspired by my viewing of How to Train Your Dragon on Friday night, but I think you'll agree my diatribe about the humans improbably surviving the improbably ineffectual dragon scourge was worthy of its own post.

This one has nothing to do with the movie, directly.

You may remember, but probably not, that the Sun Theatre in Yarraville, my regular theater, gives its customers a nice benefit, if they happen to attend the last screening of the night and they're still hungry when they get out. Instead of tossing their leftover popcorn in the bin (to use the Australian term for a trash can), they bag it up nicely in the individual bags they use when you purchase it, and leave it on the counter of the snack bar/ticket purchasing area for anyone who wants to collect it on the way out. There's no sign that tells you this is why it's sitting there, but there's no one else around, it's 11:30 at night, and it doesn't take much to put two and two together.

Sometimes there's just one sitting there. On Thursday night there were six. So naturally I did my part and grabbed one on the way out of Dangerous Animals.

Being good, I gave myself just a taste of the salty goodness with the faint butter taste, saving the rest for the next day. 

I figured I'd munch on it whenever the mood struck. I was going in for a rare Friday in the office because my longtime work computer, which I've had since 2020, was finally forcing my hand and requiring me to turn it in for a new one, something they wanted me to do at least two years ago. A piercing fan-whirring sound, which started on Wednesday, was too much for me to continue tolerating, forcing me to give up on the hardware that had served me so well. I hate change, but I have to say, the transition to my new computer, which also involved moving to Windows 11 for the first time, was pretty smooth. 

Anyway, being in the office may have preventing me from getting the idea to snack on it. While I can shove handfuls of movie popcorn into my gob when sitting in my home office, it tends to beg questions, or at least funny looks, when you do the same thing in the office. So even though only a very scant number of people I actually knew were in the office that day, I just let the opportunity go by the boards.

Which meant I still had more than half the bag remaining when I went to the movies again that night.

Ordinarily I don't get to movies on back-to-back days these days, but when my wife suggested I stay in the city to go to a movie after my rare Friday in the office -- a possibility that had been in the back of my mind anyway -- I'd already gotten the idea to go out to Dangerous Animals on Thursday night. My wife encouraged me to do both.

And I must say, it's been a long time since I've stayed in the city for movies after work. I used to do this with some regularity, maybe once every six weeks, but both of my usual days in the office, Wednesday and Thursday, now feature for me some obligation on the home front regarding my kids' sports trainings. It's my older son's second basketball team on Wednesday and my younger son's only soccer team on Thursday. Yes, my wife could take them to these on occasion, but it would be an inconvenience for her so I haven't claimed the benefit yet. Going in on a different day made for a great opportunity to take advantage. 

So that takes us to my 6:30 screening of How to Train Your Dragon at Village Crown, the first of two Village Crown screenings, followed by Materialists. (If you want to see how much I disliked that particular movie, my review is up here.) 

And even though I'd had an earlier dinner at my favorite ramen bar, I still found enough room in my stomach for the remainder of that Sun Theatre popcorn, given freely to me at one movie theater and eaten at another.

If it's actually cheating, it can't be a very serious case of it. Given my lack of viewings in the city lately, I am seeing about 90% of my movies at the Sun these days. They can't feel any serious envy. They know my loyalty is true.

Then again, they don't benefit very much from that loyalty. My tickets are always free due to my critics card, and I only rarely by a small packet of lollies (or so they are called here). I did buy a $3 small bag of mixed gummies for Dangerous Animals.

And if you think this was a betrayal of Village -- after all, I did bring in outside food -- I made up for that one later on. Before Materialists, enough of a hole in my stomach had opened up again that I could not resist the purchase of a box of their sweet and salty popcorn. Which, it must be said, was mildly disappointing next to the Sun popcorn. 

I might have seen this movie just for its poster

Actually, Australian director Sean Byrne has good credibility as a horror director from his previous film The Loved Ones (2009), so I was interested in seeing his newest film, Dangerous Animals, on that basis. I'm wondering if his follow-up to that movie, 2015's The Devil's Candy, was a dud, considering that he wasn't able to follow up that film until ten years later.

But it's been a long time since I've drawn your attention to a poster, so that's what I'm doing today.

Just look at this beauty.

The shape of this boat's wake is no mistake. The movie is about a scraggly Australian psychopath, played by Jai Courtney in the continuation of a grand tradition in this country's filmography, who kidnaps tourists and feeds them to sharks from the end of his boat. That shark fin wake -- blood red, almost as if the victims had been ground up in the boat's motor rather than the teeth of sharks -- is a perfect way to depict what the move is about in a single shot.

And as it turns out, there was much greater reason to see this movie than just its poster. This is an intense and clever cat-and-mouse game between Courtney and one particular victim, and if it's a little more conventional in its details than The Loved Ones was, that may have been the price Byrne had to pay in order to get another of his films up. The Loved Ones didn't always sit with me perfectly, even though it was striking, so I think I might actually like this one a bit better.

How to Train Your Dragon strikes me as unrealistic

Now wait just a minute here.

That title is a joke, yes, but it's revealing a real truth underneath. 

Of course a movie in which dragons play a significant role is not realistic in any strict sense of the word. But we all know that a good movie strives for its version of realism within the larger fantastical context it is presenting.

And on that front, the live-action remake of How to Train Your Dragon fails spectacularly. 

I don't want to hear "but that's how it was in the original!" I'm sure it was. I haven't seen that movie in a long time, but these live action remakes -- Dreamworks is getting into the game after Disney has been doing it consistently for the past decade, most recently with Lilo & Stitch -- tend to be slavishly devoted to the source material, so that wouldn't surprise me at all. So let's just take this movie on its own terms, as we really should with any movie. 

The people in this movie should all be dead a hundred times over.

Let's start with the living conditions. 

To set the stage, we open on a dragon attack on the Viking island of Berk, where the story takes place. Apparently, these attacks are a semi-regular occurrence as the character infrequently narrating the story, Hiccup, tells us that all the buildings are new, suggesting their recent rebuild. 

And what about the people? Are the people new?

What we see here is no less than 70 dragons bearing down on the village with the full brunt of their firepower and other destructive ability. Even if it is only 17 rather than 70, it's enough to kill every living thing in the village each time they attack, not to mention razing every manmade structure in town. I mean, you saw what Khaleesi and was it one? two? dragons did to King's Landing.

And yet these dragons are likened more to pests, to rats, than to killing machines the size of four elephants that also have flamethrowers in their throats. The narrative considers their attacks whimsical, unlikely to result in even a single death on any given attack. And true enough, the only actual character we have heard of losing her life to a dragon is Hiccup's mother, and this seems to have occurred many years ago.

We are also told, by the eventual trainer of the teenage characters, that a dragon "always goes for the kill." Then how to explain raining fire and fury down on a village for something like 45 minutes straight and not claiming a single life? Let's consider the ways a dragon can kill you:

1) Fire. Of course.

2) Biting you in half with their mighty mouths and sharp teeth. (The main dragon we meet here, Toothless, actually reveals teeth, so I'm not really sure of the origin of the name.)

3) Stepping on you with one of their heavy claws.

4) Running into you in flight, which would be something like a train hitting you at 150 miles per hour.

Not only do they not kill anyone, but any significant edifice in the city -- like the meeting hall where they all gather for inspirational speeches from the chief, Stoick -- seems to be completely undamaged by their fury.

Okay let's leave the opening attack alone there for a bit and move on to the training.

Soon after this attack we learn that Hiccup and a quintet of is friends -- actually more like jerky rivals who happen to be his same age -- are about to start training to be able to slay dragons. This is conducted by the aforementioned trainer in an arena which, very much like a Roman coliseum, is rung by contained cells where something like a half-dozen dragons are held just so they can assist with this training. 

I don't understand why all six of the trainees are not killed on the very first day of training.

On this first day, they are engaging with an angry, vengeful dragon who has been chained up and probably not fed enough, for God knows how long. A dragon that always "goes for the kill." And they are, it would seem, barely 16 years old, and in some cases -- at least in Hiccup's case -- utterly unacquainted with combat, with evasive action, with the tricks you learn in training to emerge from an interaction with a dragon alive.

But let's say that even one of the trainees died on the first day. You have to agree that an angry, vengeful dragon let loose in an arena with six children, who have only the barest of protections from shields and other obstacles, should be able to kill at least 17% of them? That would be an awful tragedy that would immediately put the value of the whole training program into question, causing intense soul searching in the village about whether these trainees should have just been abstractly training against large Vikings pretending to be dragons.

But not only do all the trainees emerge intact from the first training, they emerge intact from every training, every day, for what we can only imagine is weeks worth of training in order to give them the necessary skills to fight dragons.

Now let's skip ahead to the end, when the Vikings, through the unwitting help of Hiccup, find the nest from which all the dragons originate. In this scene, we realize the estimate of 70 dragons may have been way, way on the low end, as there are hundreds of them here. 

How the hell do you expect to dive into what amounts to a volcano full of dragons, one of them the size of 50 whales, with only 50 warriors, and a) do anything meaningful to capture or kill any significant portion of them, and b) expect not to lose a single one of your warriors in the process?

Of course, whether that was the expectation or not, it is the reality.

As they arrive, a bunch of smaller dragons are expelled from the cave, these ones maybe the size of cows. Even a dragon the size of a cow flying through the air, if it happened to hit you, would completely and utterly kill you, knocking that Viking helmet right off your head and smashing your head on the rocks.

Look we're not going for realism in a movie like How to Train Your Dragon, and we're certainly not going for a bunch of gruesome death in a movie aimed at children.

But did they really have to spit so mockingly in the face of any shred of realism?

Other than that it was fine.

Pride Month: Funeral Parade of Roses

When I decided to focus on trans movies for my four Pride Month viewings in June, I figured I'd be limiting myself to movies from the last 15 years, 20 at most. Anything before that likely would not engage earnestly with the trans experience, or if it tried to do so, might do so ignorantly.

But then over the weekend I was going through my watchlist on Kanopy and saw the title Funeral Parade of Roses, a 1969 movie that I'd added to my list at some point in the past year, only because I was intrigued by the title and what little I could see of it from the image on Kanopy -- a variation on the image you see here. Enough of a variation, I should add, that I had to click into the details to be sure it was a trans movie.

For sure it was, but here's one different from 56 years ago: Back then, the term "transvestite" was what got used. And that was fine, then, but we've since moved past that word, probably for the best.

In truth, "transvestite" only appears in the Kanopy description of the Toshio Matsumoto's movie, and presumably only then to meet it on the terms of the era in which it was made. It never appears in the movie itself.

Though a "funnier" (a.k.a. less enlightened) term does appear. As one part of this experimental film in which an unseen interviewer addresses various homosexual men in Tokyo of the day, he asks them how long they have been a "gay boy." They aren't offended by the term. It was 1969, and that homosexuality dared speak its name in public at all was something relatively new.

Before going into too much of the particulars of the film, such as I am able to synopsize them, I'll start with the feel of it. If the first movie I watched last week, Runs in the Family, were the feel-good, it'll-all-work-out-at-the-end-of-the-day trans movie, Funeral Parade of Roses is something far more existential and bleak and ultimately sort of hopeless.

I read the plot synopsis on Wikipedia just now to remind myself of some of the finer details -- it was pretty late last night when I plowed through the final 20 minutes -- and it does have a plot that can be laid out fairly clearly and succinctly. That was not my experience of watching it, though.

This is an arthouse film with a capital A. In fact, much of what's here is the sort of thing that would later be spoofed by people like Wayne and Garth, only they'd attribute the style to Eastern Europe rather than Matsumoto's Japan of 1969. All the arthouse hallmarks are here, from use of black and white, to the periodic harsh editing and insertion of images that bear no relationship to anything that's come before, to the use of discordant and ominous music, to the free-flowing general lack of a plot.

What plot there is surrounds Eddie, played by an actor known as Peter. Peter does not, apparently, consider himself a trans woman (he's still alive), but he's a gay icon of sorts in Japan, and there would be no question of his legitimacy to play this role. Remember, this is a different time -- pronouns might be she, but they might not be, and clearly this character is not assuming a full female identity in that she (let's go with "she") uses the name Eddie.

Anyway, Eddie is a dancer at a gay club and is involved in a rivalry with the club's madame, Leda (Osamu Ogasawara), both of whom are involved in a relationship with the club's manager, Gonda (Yoshio Tsuchiya) -- Eddie covertly, Leda overtly. Eddie also is friends with an arthouse filmmaker and the filmmaker's crew -- the scenes from his film are wild -- and they all do drugs and go about town. 

Subtextually, this is a film about self-loathing, fuelled by the perception of others loathing you. As has been the experience for transgender people in society who dare to show any of their tendencies, knowing that the largest percentage of people they come in contact with will show no willingness to accept them or even tolerate them. (Yes, there is a difference between those two terms. "Tolerance" is also, it strikes me, a term that has fallen out of favor, as it seems to indicate that this person has a power to tolerate or not tolerate someone. No bigot should have that power. They can mind their own fucking business and just let the trans person be.)

I kept writing down lines of dialogue that I thought made this movie seem really suited for Pride Month. Here was one:

"But gay boys have their own pride, don't you think so?"

And another:

"Each man will have their own mask, some they will wear their entire life."

And a third:

"If you love someone, their gender doesn't matter."

Matsumoto is confronting with his themes, mostly in a good way. There's a scene where Eddie walks through a gallery of various gruesome portraits of faces, but they're almost like more realistic versions of Picasso faces, with excess orifices in the wrong places, too many noses, that sort of thing. They are meant to serve as a hideous reflection of what Eddie thinks the world thinks of her. 

There's happiness in Eddie's world, to be sure, and a certain wonder to some of the scenes captured that belies these feelings of self-loathing. I am thinking specifically of a scene where the camera travels up a tower so high that I thought it must be the Eiffel Tower, if the Eiffel Tower were in Tokyo. The camera passes various beams and openings as it ascends, looking out over the city. There is a Man With a Movie Camera aspect of what this film captures that I appreciated.

But we always return, in no uncertain terms, to the loathing, especially in an ending whose significance I didn't understand until I read the plot synopsis. The final images of the film are a striking representation of the way a "transvestite" views him or herself, depending on what pronoun they wanted to use, but I didn't quite understand what had literally happened in the plot to get us to that point. I may have missed it due to sleepiness, but I think the occasionally abstruse presentation of the story meant that I might not have gotten it anyway.

I felt a fascination with this film, but I did not always think it was successful. I suppose that's kind of the idea behind an experimental film. It confronts you with feelings rather than always delivering on a coherent story, and by definition, the choices it makes will work better for some people than others. I guess I wished it had worked for me a little more often than it did.

Still, I feel like I've seen a seminal document from its time, which I now understand has a reputation as something of a masterwork. And certainly, I didn't imagine I'd see anything so forthright in its depiction of these issues made at a time before I was even born. 

I hope it's "gotten better" for trans people since 1969, but I fear it may not have -- not by the margin we would hope, and certainly not in Trump's America. 

Domhnall Gleeson: From everywhere to nowhere

Sorry, the title of this post sounds a bit like the title of a biopic. I don't like to make you think of biopics unless I absolutely have to.

There may have been no more in-demand actor in the second half of the twenty teens than Domhnall Gleeson. And then -- poof! Twenty twenty came and he was gone.

Let's consider the chronology.

If you were paying close enough attention -- and I must admit I was not -- you'd have been tracking Brendan's son for his role as a Weasley brother in the final two Harry Potter movies. Taken in combination with an appearance he made in Never Let Me Go in 2010, Domhnall Gleeson was actually in a movie that made my top 30 two years in a row, as Never Let Me Go was my #28 movie of that year and the final Harry Potter movie, Deathly Hallows Part 2, actually cracked my top ten of 2011, finishing just outside my top five at #6.

But if I'm being honest, I wasn't really tracking him until About Time in 2013. That's when I remember learning his name. It's a thing you'd remember, as you don't meet someone named "Domhnall" every day. It was around then that I figured out his relationship to Brendan. 

It was in 2015 that he really took off, with Ex Machina, and of course that year also ended with Star Wars: The Force Awakens. For a few years after that, he was incendiary. Between 2015 and 2019, there were two more Star Wars sequels, The Revenant, my personal favorite mother!, Doug Liman's American Made and a couple of movies aimed at kids, Goodbye Christopher Robin (which I haven't seen) and Peter Rabbit.

And then after that, the aforementioned poof!

I suppose the reason Gleeson's disappearing act seems so total is because until I saw him in Fountain of Youth today, I had forgotten that he was gone -- and then it made me contemplate and just how gone he has been.

I think Gleeson shares something with Star Wars co-star Adam Driver in that just looking at him, you would never have expected him to become a star. But there was something about his persona that made it impossible to take your eyes off him, and once his stardom was confirmed via casting in a bewildering succession of major movies in a short period of time, it seemed like he'd be a star forever.

But then, poof!

Wikipedia characterizes what's happened in his career since 2020 as a "pivot" to television and theater, and sure enough, you can find Gleeson popping up in those places. But an actor rarely chooses to go TV when he's at the height of his powers, though I suppose perhaps his role as the sniveling General Hux could have typecast him a bit. 

And it's not like age got him either. He's only just now 42. For actors (though sadly not for actresses), that still leaves you with 20 more years of prime. 

I rooted around a bit more on Wikipedia but no, no cancellations or personal setbacks that I could see.

Who knows, maybe Gleeson's sudden fame was a fluke after all. I'd like to tell you I was glad to see him back in Fountain of Youth, but really, Guy Ritchie's film doesn't use him all that well -- just one of its many faults that I won't get into right now.

However, the Gleeson who bowled me over in the second half of last decade, coming from nowhere and convincing me that it was right that he was everywhere, is someone I'd be glad to have return. If he did actually choose to pivot away from movies, he appears to have pivoted back now, as he's got another movie with Julianne Moore and Sydney Sweeney, Echo Valley, set to release next Friday on the same streamer as Fountain of Youth: AppleTV+.

If the Gleesonaissance is here, the return of Gleeson's domhnination, I'm ready for it. 

Pride Month: Runs in the Family

Welcome back for Year 3 of my Pride Month series, in which I watch four LGBTQI+ movies in June, one per week, and tell you about them here.

The theme my first year formed as it went, and I ended up watching two movies about gay women and two movies about gay men, one of each in the "ancient" times of the past (both were before 1900) and one of each in present day. Last year, the movies I chose had the simple criterion of being previously unknown to me, and I think I ended up finding them all on Neflix, though that was not strictly a requirement of the theme. 

This year, it's an idea I flirted with last year: trans movies. I expect three of them to be previously unknown to me, leading to a fourth that I should have seen by now, but will not spoil until the time comes. 

And it feels like a good time in my cinematic journey to watch some more movies about trans people. Just last year, two movies with significant trans subject matter made my top ten of the year, those being Emilia Perez (#4) and The People's Joker (#6). And though I suspect that my affection for Emilia Perez might actually lose me some credibility in parts of my potential trans readership, since I know not everyone thought that was a good exploration of the trans experience, I think I'm in the clear on The People's Joker.

Netflix is likely be a crutch again this year, but I already know my final movie will not be available there, so at least my Pride Month series is not also a case of shilling for one particular streamer.

The last trans movie I watched was, in fact, on Netflix, that being Will & Harper, which I saw on the eve of my ranking deadline in January. That film has something in common with the first trans movie I'm watching this year during Pride Month, which is Ian Gabriel's 2023 film Runs in the Family.

No, the commonality I'm talking about is not that both feature trans characters. It's a bit more specific than that. Both movies feature a road trip between two characters who have known each other for a long time, and are feeling each other out following the (relatively) recent coming out of one of them as trans.

That's a bit of an oversimplification of what's going on in this South African film, which, you'll be surprised to know, does not feature Sharlto Copley at any point. It does more or less start with this road trip, which features single father Varun (Ace Bhatti) and his 24-year-old son, a trans man named River (Gabe Gabriel, related to the director I'm sure). Varun didn't have any help raising River because his mother bugged out when he was a baby, claiming she never wanted to be a mother but that Varun made her bring the baby to term. She's Monica, played by Diaan Lawrenson. As you might expect from such a character, she's now in a rehab that she can't leave without a relative checking her out, which is where Varun and River come in. River has disavowed her and hasn't seen her since she left, but Varun doesn't qualify as a relative because he never actually married Monica. They can't dawdle, though, because River has to get back in time to perform in a big drag show whose top prize is $50,000, which he wants to use for his top surgery. 

I should say that from the logline of this film on Netflix, I wasn't sure if it was right as the first entry in this series. There seemed to be at least some indication that this was largely from the father's perspective, on how having a trans son impacts him. Nothing could be further from reality. This film is resplendent with pride and color, much more River's story than Varun's, and it shies away from exactly none of the subjects a movie about trans people should touch on. (Interestingly, I am now remembering that it had a trigger warning for "strong sex scenes" and that those were nowhere to be found -- outside of a scene where River kisses a non-binary character. If that's a "strong" sex scene then I wonder if Netflix isn't a little squeamish with its trigger warnings.)

In any case, there's a huge amount here about drag culture, and that leads me to what I thought was a delightful discovery. Although the very nature of the LGBTQI+ experience is that it takes all kinds, I hadn't previously considered that there were would be trans men who would want to perform drag. Just so we're clear what we're talking about here, a trans man is someone who was born with the biological parts of a woman, who aspires to present in a more masculine fashion as an outward incarnation of how he feels inwardly. Logically, you would think that a trans man wouldn't need to do drag if he wanted to dress in traditional women's clothing -- he could just lean into his biology and be an actual woman. But I loved how it was clear that drag is just part of his community, and he's as likely to be friends with drag queens and trans women as other trans men. 

The film is a really lovely look at all these characters, particularly the supportive Varun. (It's not surprising I would identify with Varun, as a father myself.) You get the sense that Varun has had River's back since one second after he told Varun he was trans, so in that sense, it deviates from something like Will & Harper. Not that Will Ferrell is ever, for a moment, anything less than supportive of Harper Steele, but their road trip is founded on the notion that there is something that's changed about their relationship that they have to navigate to avoid awkwardness. Perhaps that awkwardness is just far in the past for Varun and River, but Varun is so lovely that it's easy to believe it never existed. 

Although Monica herself is a problematic character -- won't reveal too much about her in case you watch this, which you should -- her problems have nothing to do with her being a bigot. In fact, although she's a bit uncouth, her comments are more disarming than sinister. She's not precious around River because she thinks him being trans is not a big deal, and he does not need to be protected from comments that might seem flippant because it's clear to her that she doesn't have a problem with him being trans. And really, that's clear to the audience as well.

And for sure, we don't feel the need to feel precious about River either. I'm going to make a comment now that risks being misinterpreted, but I'm doing it to illustrate a point about the types of expectations some people might carry into watching a movie about the trans experience. One of the most striking things about River is how "normal" he is. That's not to suggest that anything about being trans is abnormal, though we know that there are plenty of people who think there is. It's to point out the fact that even people who fully support trans men and trans women might think there is something essentially impossible to hide about what they are doing, that there is something inevitable about their persona that strikes us as a performance of masculinity or a performance of femininity. That doesn't come across at all with River; in fact, so little did it come across that I was slightly suspicious of the scenes in this movie where someone immediately clocks him as a person born with female body parts, because for all intents and purposes he looks, sounds and acts like a person born with male body parts.

And of course I know that the whole point behind being LGBTQI+ is that there is no one way a person born with male body parts should be expected to look, act or sound. I think what I'm trying to say is that for anyone who thinks being trans is inevitably a perversion that can't help but call attention to itself and be constantly detectable at a perceptual level, River defies those preconceptions. I think many if not most people wouldn't know the difference. Which, for River, is absolutely 100% the goal. 

Runs in the Family of course has its third act crisis and then its happier denouement, and those are all pretty satisfying. I never actually got emotional but on a couple occasions I felt on the verge of getting emotional. Which is to say, it's a four-star movie not a four-point-five or five-star movie. 

It did, however, end on a bit of a sour note that had nothing to do with the movie directly, but did raise my consciousness about what even a film like this, which you suspect would have the fullest support of everyone involved with making it, is up against.

I stayed to watch the whole credits because I was enjoying the music and the still photos of the anonymous (they aren't introduced as characters) drag dancers who appear in the big competition. So that means I stayed long enough to see the following disclaimer on screen:

"Produced with the assistance of Department of Trade, Industry and Competition South Africa, who do not accept any liability for the content and who do not necessarily support such content."

I bet that doesn't appear at the end of every movie produced with the assistance of Department of Trade, Industry and Competition South Africa.

If it wasn't before now, it should be abundantly clear that in every trans success, there's a chilling reminder of how much farther there is to go. 

Understanding Editing: From Here to Eternity

This is the sixth in my 2025 monthly series in which I alternate winners of the best editing Oscar I have seen with those I haven't seen, to try to get a better handle on what professionals consider superlative editing. 

I ultimately did have some examples of good editing I found in From Here to Eternity, which I was seeing for the second time overall and first in 20 years, but I wanted to start out by telling you about what I considered a no-no. It's more a decision by a director than an editor, I would say, but it involves the tools of editing so I thought it was appropriate to mention it here.

And yes, it involves "The Scene."

If you don't know what I mean when I say that, it's the most famous scene from the 1953 best picture winner, which you are always seeing in clips packages about romantic moments in movies. You know the one: Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr locked in a passionate kiss on the Hawaiian beach as waves crash over them. A more iconic image of romance in the movies there may not be.

And I was surprised to be reminded that the mood sours pretty quickly after this as the two become petulant and end up in a fight. Some iconic romance.

But that's not the sin I want to talk about today. That sin involves cross cutting.

I think you know what cross cutting it is, but because there is a learning aspect to this whole series, I will belabor it with an explanation.

Cross cutting involves intersplicing action from two different scenes taking place at the same time, such that you spend maybe 30 seconds of screen time in one scene, then shift to the other, then shift back again, for however long it takes both scenes to reach a logical denouement. And they do usually both end at the same time, as this frees them from their entanglement with one another, and the next scene is some place else at some other time. And one scene of cross cutting would not usually follow another, since the device should stand out for its sparse usage.

At least, the idea is supposed to be that the two scenes are occurring contemporaneously. From Here to Eternity violates that rule in a way I found fairly careless, especially for a film that won best picture and was also honored for its editing.

So the other scene that is being cross cut with this beach scene is a scene of the film's other two main characters, soldiers played by Montgomery Clift and Frank Sinatra, going out on the town, getting way more drunk than they should, and picking up women. 

One scene occurs during the day. The other scene occurs at night.

Game show buzzer. Wrong answer, From Here to Eternity!

Like I said, though, we'd be more likely to blame director Fred Zinneman or writers Daniel Taradash and James Jones than we would editor William Lyon, who nabbed his first of two Oscars out of six nominations, the other win being 1955's Picnic. 

And there are certainly some things we can credit Lyon with here, though at first I thought it might be more of a case of Lyon getting swept along for the ride on a movie that won seven other Oscars including best picture. 

I did eventually identify a couple things that I thought were worth commenting on in a post like this, which put me in mind, structurally, of another film I watched for this series, Sergeant York. Both films are nominally war movies that don't have much in the way of war until the very end, at which point they shine in that regard, particularly in terms of their editing. Eternity culminates in the attack on Pearl Harbor, and here we see the frenetic feeling on the ground that morning recreated by the quickened pace of Lyon's editing. Especially strong is a series of shots back and forth between gunners on the ground and Japanese planes they are trying to fell from the sky, the chugging motion of the guns whipping back to the swooping motion of the planes. 

Any time Lyon is called upon to goose this otherwise fairly talky film with a little action, he comes through. Clift's character is a boxer who doesn't want to box, though his superiors at the base are trying to pressure him into it. He's goaded into a fight in the yard with another soldier, at which point Lyon again increases the pace of the shots to feel frenetic, with flying fists and heads recoiling from landed punches.

There was also one instance I liked of cutting on form, where the splashing of a wave (at the end of "The Scene") cuts into the upward rising smoke of a cigarette in the next scene. The wave and the smoke take the same shape, and I thought it was nicely done.

The last specific thing I'll call out that caught my attention was a montage of reaction shots to the playing of "Taps." I won't tell you who got killed because you may not have seen the movie, and it doesn't matter for the purposes of this discussion, but the solemn bugle music takes in groups of faces from around the compound, looking on forlornly to honor their fallen comrade. 

I think I probably didn't like From Here to Eternity as much as when I saw it in November of '05, where it made enough an impression on me that I listed it as my favorite newly seen movie of that month. (Yes, that's something I keep track of.) I still liked it quite a bit, but spent more time than I remembered wondering why we cared so much about these characters and whether anything was ever going to happen to them. (The ultimate calm before the ultimate storm, I guess.)

In November of '05 I had only just, two months earlier, visited the beach where "The Scene" was shot, when we were in Hawaii for a wedding. It's funny now to think that I didn't actually know that beach from having seen the movie, but just from seeing "The Scene" in so many Oscar clips.

I wanted to finish by noting that this is my second straight Montgomery Clift movie in this series, after A Place in the Sun last month. He's not an actor I was really tracking until the past few years, and I definitely would not have remembered he was in this. He may steadily be becoming a favorite of mine.

I'm back in July with the next previously unseen movie in this series, jumping forward nearly a decade to 1962's How the West Was Won. 

The Four Lads (Not They Might Be Giants)

Here's a bit of a leftover from when I watched Mona Lisa Smile on Thursday night.

I had always thought -- had no reason not to think -- that the band They Might Be Giants were responsible for the humorous novelty song "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)."

You know the one:

Istanbul was Constantinople
Now it's Istanbul not Constantinople
Been a long time gone from Constantinople
Why did Constantinople get the works?
That's nobody's business but the Turks

The ditty was perfectly in keeping with the wordplay-heavy cuteness of TMBG's work. That's not a backhand compliment. I always really liked their work, particularly the 1990 album Flood, on which "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)" can be found.

Alas, it's not their song, a truth I figured out pretty quickly when it played in the 1953-set Mona Lisa Smile.

In fact, the song dates back exactly to 1953. The lyrics are by Jimmy Kennedy and music by Nat Simon, and the song was first recorded by a band called The Four Lads, whose years active on Wikipedia are listed as "1950 to present." (Yeah, somehow I doubt that, unless some of those lads are still performing in their nineties.)

Although it's always useful to learn the truth of the matter on things like this, I can't help but be a little disappointed. I would not call "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)" my favorite track on Flood, or maybe even one of my top three, but it had always served as sort of a proof of concept for me. Like if I wanted to quickly explain to someone the essence of They Might Be Giants and what made them great, this song would be a good Exhibit A, a proof of concept. Whereas "Birdhouse in Your Soul" and the 47-second "Minimum Wage" don't accomplish this as succinctly.

At least no one better tell me that "Particle Man" is not a Giants original. 

As a bit of a side note, the use of "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)" in Mona Lisa Smile was a good case of the movie being accurate with its history. By far the worst movie I saw over the weekend, the aforementioned Fear Street: Prom Queen, played fast and loose with the year Roxette's "The Look" came out, and don't think I didn't notice. 

I enjoyed the sequence where all the prom queen contenders participate in a choreographed dance to the song -- it was literally the only thing I liked in the movie -- but I couldn't escape the feeling that 1988 was a bit early for Roxette. True enough, when I looked it up later, I found that the song was not released as a single until January of 1989, three months after the album came out. So while somebody did enough research to figure out that the song existed, just barely, in the latter part of 1988, they didn't consider that of course May is prom season, and so in May of 1988, it was still just a twinkle in Roxette's eye. 

Accelerated parenting coincidences

Sick day #3. 

Or is it #4? Does Thursday night count?

Anyway, yesterday was the day I got tried of long form content. I watched as much baseball as I possibly could, and then three more movies. My cold (not COVID) has progressed from nose to throat today, in terms of the location of the phlegm, and some coughing. I'm pretty sick of it and it remains to be seen how many movies I feel like I can watch today. I'd really like to get out -- I'm rubbing Ben Gay on my lower back, which hurts from lying all day on, and then sleeping on, the couch in our garage -- but I'm just not up to it.

And of course there were more coincidences.

The one I'm going to tell you about today stretched from my last movie on Friday night to my first movie on Saturday afternoon.

"But Vance," you ask, "Certainly with that kind of gap, you must have had the themes of Friday night's movie in your head when you chose the first movie to watch on Saturday afternoon, at like 3:30 after all the day's baseball was done?"

No. 

And besides, one of the worst movies I've seen this year -- Netflix's Fear Street: Prom Queen -- was jammed between these two, watched partially on Friday night and finished Saturday morning. 

There are no coincidences involving Fear Street: Prom Queen. 

Fleur Fortune's The Assessment and Sean Anders' Instant Family were on two different streaming services, Amazon and Netflix respectively. The first had been on my radar for more than a week as a promising option to add to my 2025 in-progress rankings, and it turned out to be. The second was just from what has been my go-to for this sick period, selecting from "comedy movies" on Netflix.

But both movies were about a couple needing to rapidly develop parenting skills, due to being responsible for kids they didn't have just a few days earlier.

The intriguing concept of The Assessment is that a future couple, living on an isolated island that may not be on planet Earth, has to undergo a week-long assessment by an external assessor if they want the government's okay for them to have children. The couple are played by Elizabeth Olsen and Himesh Patel, their assessor by Alicia Vikander.

They think this is going to be a standard series of questions about their fitness for parenting, checking of their house for safety hazards, that sort of thing. But that sort of thing doesn't take a week.

Instead, on day 2, Vikander's Virginia begins acting like a child. She doesn't tell them that this is what she's doing, but they catch on pretty quick when suddenly she's no longer a prim and proper bureaucrat who seems like she might have stepped out of the world of The Handmaid's Tale, but instead a screaming, crying child who pushes every boundary they can imagine to see how they will handle it. It's a great concept and it plays out in satisfying form.

The circumstances of Instant Family are a little different, but they also involve a previously childless couple being thrust into the intense rigors of parenting to see how they will handle it. And it is essentially also a timed trial period.

Mark Wahlberg and Rose Byrne play a couple who had never had children, by choice, but have started wondering if something is missing from their lives. Instead of going through the standard process of conceiving children, he makes a joke about adopting a couple kids in order for them to move into a house they want to renovate but that is too big for them. Something lodges in her mind, though, and before long they've accepted foster parenting responsibilities for a 15-year-old girl (Isabela Merced) and her two younger siblings (Gustavo Escobar and Julianna Gamiz).

Instead of needing an external assessor to simulate the overwhelming experience of children and the variety of types of problems they present at different ages, the pair gets three children with built-in damage from the fact that they never had a known father and that their drug addicted mother went to prison. And many of the same sorts of disasters result as in The Assessment ... though the different genres of the two movies suggest that the outcomes might be a bit different. 

Just so I don't have to write it as a different post, I thought I would leave you with one bonus coincidence that also comes from Instant Family and from the next movie I watched, La Dolce Villa. (This last, though not bad, might have been the one that finally wore me out.)

When I started watching La Dolce Villa, I thought I might have a bigger coincidence on my hands than the one I'm going to tell you about. In addition to Felicity alum Scott Foley, who was good to see again, the movie stars a young actress who I thought was also Isabela Merced. It's actually a young actress by the name of Maia Reficco, but if you look at them side by side, I think you can see where the sense of deja vu came from. (They are about exactly a year apart in age, and Google does autocomplete their names together, so obviously this has been searched before by others.)

This is Isabela, followed by Maia:

The bonus coincidence would still be a coincidence even if they did not look alike.

In both Instant Family and La Dolce Villa, their characters don safety glasses and are invited to participate in the demolishing of a house, which they do with gusto, using a sledgehammer. 

The circumstances are a bit different. For Merced's character, it's a way to get out a life's worth of frustrations, an alternative to the previously unproductive ways she's been acting out. For Reficco's character, it's beginning the renovation of the house she's bought in a small Italian town for one euro, in hopes of turning it into a cooking school. 

But the image of both of these doppelgangers wearing safety glasses and taking out chunks of walls and cabinetry with sledgehammers, not an hour apart, was pretty surreal for me, I must say. 

Incidentally, this was not the only identity confusion I had about Isabela Merced. When this actress first came on my radar, it was in Transformers: The Last Knight, a year before Instant Family came out, and there she was referred to as Isabela Moner. When I looked her up now, she's in IMDB as Isabela Merced. I thought I'd made a mistake in my Transformers review and was even going to go so far as to fix it, but then I noticed she's undergone a change in the way she's professionally credited -- which I hope is not the result of any real-world issues with her real-world biological parents. 

Seattle Mariners coincidences

If I wrote a blog that was just about movie-related coincidences, would you still read it?

Well anyway, here's one more.

Yesterday I got my sick day started with two movies that were some of the first I came across on Netflix when browsing through what they described as "comedy movies." I don't feel like either fits that description particularly well, but they definitely both fit the description of "sick day movie."

And both also involved the Seattle Mariners baseball team.

The first was Rob Burnett's The Fundamentals of Caring, a title I'd been familiar with for a while. Paul Rudd was the easy clincher on this one. If Paul Rudd can't get you through a sick day, who can?

The story involves Rudd's character caring for a young adult with muscular dystrophy, played by Craig Roberts, who I recognized but who I couldn't place as the star of the movie Submarine until checking his other credits later on. 

The pair goes on a road trip to see some kitschy bits of Americana the young adult has seen on TV, and they pick up a hitchhiker played by Selena Gomez, on whom he has a crush. She's trying to get to Denver, and though it's not clear they've come from the same location -- their location is not specified -- she's come from Seattle. And her father, played by an uncredited Bobby Cannavale, is secretly following them because he's worried about her. When Rudd finally clocks him and confronts him, finding the latter's intentions to be benign, Cannavale's character is seen wearing a Seattle Mariners cap.

Fast forward to Life or Something Like It, the movie I'd first passed and labeled as a likely sick day movie, before (correctly) identifying a greater promise of quality in The Fundamentals of Caring. Life or Something Like It is not bad, as such, but it's mid enough that I went with only 2.5 stars to the 3.5 stars of Fundamentals.

We're hit straight away with the Mariners connection in this one. Angelina Jolie plays a local news reporter dreaming of a bigger gig in New York, and one of the first things we learn about her is that she's dating one of the Mariners players. (Not Edward Burns, her cameraman who is destined to be her love interest.) We see her reporting on the end of the Mariners season, getting her father season tickets to the Mariners, and even doing a little after hours hitting at what was then called Safeco Field, now T-Mobile Park.

That's a good coincidence, but it's not all of it.

Thursday in America, which was Friday for me, was a very light day on the Major League Baseball schedule, with only five games, but one of those held particular interest for me in terms of my fantasy baseball team. Not only do I have one Mariners hitter on my team, but my opponent had a hitter and the starting pitcher for their opponent, the Washington Nationals.

So I was also watching this game on my phone, which started at the end of the first movie and carried over into the second. 

And yes, it was being played in the aforementioned T-Mobile Park, once the slightly less obviously corporate Safeco Field.

I don't tell you about all my movie coincidences -- even if it sometimes seems like I do -- but this one was too good to pass up. 

They teed it up for me, if you will. 

Mo coincidences

Think of that "Mo" like in Spike Lee's Mo Better Blues, though as you will see there's a reason I chose those particular two letters.

Let me start by saying I'm sick. That's only been an explanation for the five-day gap between posts for the past day or so, though I'm ending the gap on a sick day from work, so it doesn't seem like much of an explanation at all. Really, a five-day gap between posts is fairly commonplace during the movie "low season." But, I'm telling you this to let you know this post will be short.

Finishing the movie I started but didn't finish on Wednesday night, then as the perfect viewing for when you're sick, I watched Molli and Max in the Future and Mona Lisa Smile yesterday.

When I added these to my big movie list that is now rapidly approaching 7,000 movies, and is likely to get there next month (these were #6,980 and #6,981), I noticed that they were only four titles away from each other alphabetically, which seems funny for a list that long. The only movies between them are Molly's Game, Mom and Dad and Mommy. 

Now, I can't totally hoodwink you there. There is likely an explanation for this.

Although I had never heard of Molli and Max in the Future until I came across it on Kanopy the other night, I think the reason I thought to watch Mona Lisa Smile next must be because it came up in the search results when I went to watch Molli and Max. However, I did add Molli and Max to my watchlist at the time I first noted it, meaning I wouldn't have had to search for it, so it may be a true coincidence and Mona Lisa came up on Kanopy some other way.

Here's the verifiable coincidence.

When I went to add these movies to my year-by-year lists this morning, they both came in adjacent to a movie called Monster. 

Molli and Max in the Future is from 2023, the same year personal favorite Hirokazu Kore-eda put out his most recent movie to establish him as an heir to Yasujiro Ozu, which I saw at MIFF and ranked my #4 of that year. 

Of course, when adding Kore-eda's Monster at that time, I was reminded of Patty Jenkins' Monster, the film that won an Oscar for Charlize Theron. That came out in 2003 -- the same year as Mona Lisa Smile.

While I have you, I should say that I liked both of these films quite a bit. Although Mona Lisa Smile is indeed the perfect "sick day movie" -- in that it is not very challenging in most respects, and I thought there was a fairly reliable ceiling to how much I could possibly like it -- Mike Newell's film did exceed my expectations by enough to nearly eclipse its designation as a "sick day movie." There are a lot of actresses I like in that cast and it was nice to see them doing their thing a full 22 years ago now.

And Molli and Max I liked even more. It's a real charmer, essentially a two-hander between Zosia Mamet and a guy I'd never heard of before, Aristotle Athari. Michael Lukk Litwak's debut is shot basically entirely against virtual backgrounds of various outer space locations, something I thought would seem cheap, but really grew on me. Especially since the two leads are giving such great romcom performances, and all the stuff about interstellar travel in the future is funny and light. I've always been interested in Mamet but I've never seen her cut loose and have fun like she does here.