The perils of the long-delayed review

Welcome to my second straight post in which I express my anxieties about a film I appreciated less than most people, while also getting at a larger issue within film criticism.

Although I give away many of my advanced screenings to other writers for my site, I make sure to hoard the ones that will serve a purpose for me personally. In the past six weeks I've had a large quantity of those, three in total, which are movies whose Australian debuts are scheduled for much later in the film year and closer to my ranking deadline. That makes three films I don't have to worry about while catching other important end-of-year films, to say nothing of the blockbusters that also get released in late December.

Those three films are Sentimental Value, Nouvelle Vague and No Other Choice, and given how they've done in this week's Golden Globe nominations, they were good films on which to concentrate. Each of those films was nominated as best feature in one of the two best feature categories.

I've already written some about the last two, but it's the first one that I saw longest ago, all the way back on October 29th. And it's the first of these that has succumbed to some of the perils of not writing about it right away.

Normally when I see a film I'm planning to review, I write the review within 24 hours, and that's usually out of necessity. In many cases I'm planning to post the review the very next day, so writing it immediately is essential. In fact, in the review I wrote of Jay Kelly this week -- see here if you want to read it -- I finished the movie at about 1 a.m. on Tuesday night, and had a review up by 10 past 10 on Wednesday morning. That isn't maybe a typical turnaround, and in this case required some finishing touches during my first hour of work. It also helps that I am consistently waking up just after 6 a.m. when the sun rises. But it just gives you some idea of the sort of timeframe I'm usually working with.

In the case of Sentimental Value, which does not release in Australia for another two weeks, my timeframe for writing the review was almost two months. 

Before I get into the particulars of what's happened with it, I want to say I'm not sure I understand why it's a benefit to screen a movie so far in advance of its actual release. Surely the publicists don't want you to post your review until your readers have a chance to go purchase a ticket within the next few days, right? Yes you could write about it early, but that only contributes to the general buzz without having something concrete readers can convert into action. In our short attention span times, you don't want to let the iron cool down for two months. 

On the publicist's side, there are also logistical headaches because they have to remember who they invited to the screening, and check over the course of those two months to see if the critics have written their review -- because hey, they theoretically could post it at any time. 

Because I had a take on Sentimental Value and a clear way to open the review, I wrote my opening few paragraphs almost straight away. In fact, it was one of those reviews where I couldn't wait to get to a computer, because the words were already spilling out in my brain and I wanted to make sure I didn't lose the ideal phrasing I was concocting in my head.

But what then happens that is that in about the third paragraph, I start to give a couple paragraphs of plot synopsis, and this is where the urgency to continue writing dissipates. I usually know how I'm going to start my view, but I don't always know how the final four or five paragraphs of analysis are going to play out. With a movie not coming out for almost two months, I've got plenty of time to work that out.

So it was another ten days? two weeks? before I continued my Sentimental Value review, and then ultimately finished it in that same sitting. 

During that time, I became fuzzy on details. Points I thought I might have wanted to make at the time have gotten hazier. And more to the point, I'm hazier on my defenses for why this film didn't work like gangbusters on me, despite its win of the Grand Prix at Cannes (which is actually the festival's second most prestigious award, contrary to its name). 

So I did finish the review, and thought to myself it was okay I didn't love it, ultimately issuing it a 7/10 in our ReelGood rating system. Although Cannes is often totally in sync with the zeitgeist -- Oscar best picture winner Anora last year also won the festival's Palme d'Or -- there are times when Cannes' top prizes are awarded to very polarizing films, some of which people actually hate. Don't forget, this is the festival where people either give a film a ten-minute standing ovation or walk out. It's okay if I don't love one of the films honored here.

But over the last month in particular, I've learned just how much most people think of Sentimental Value. My first surprise was the realization that it was very likely to get a best picture nomination at the Oscars, which we won't actually find out until the 22nd of January, but which surprised me because foreign language films have historically had a steeper hill to climb on this front. (There's also some English in this movie, considering that Elle Fanning is one of its stars.) The Oscar bias against foreign language films is falling away a bit in recent years with the expansion of nominees from five to ten, and now each year we seem to get at least one foreign film nominated for best picture. I guess I just didn't know Sentimental Value would be this year's example of that. (And while we're at it, Nouvelle Vague and No Other Choice are also primarily in foreign languages, and they also have realistic Oscar ambitions.)

So now I'm looking at what I've written for Sentimental Value and trying to figure out ways of softening my criticisms. Clearly this film came together better for others than it did for me, but am I wrong or are they?

If I had just been writing about and posting my review of Sentimental Value in late October, this wouldn't have been a problem. If history proves me wrong on a movie, so be it -- it's happened plenty of times before. The problem comes when the review is in a state of unpublished limbo, meaning I can have second thoughts, I can tweak it, I could even change the entire thrust of my review if I wanted, contradicting my initial impression of the movie only on the basis of a fear of looking stupid and being wrong.

At least with Sentimental Value, the writing portion is out of the way. Correct or incorrect -- as if you can ever really say that when aesthetic judgments are involved -- at least I have something that is based confidently on things that actually happened in the movie. It's a little different with the other two.

I saw Nouvelle Vague on November 27th, so not nearly as long ago. It comes out on January 8th. As with Sentimental Value, I had a good couple opening paragraphs and I wrote them right away. And as with Sentimental Value, I lost the sense of urgency at the point of doing my plot synopsis. 

I've only just picked up the writing again this morning, and I did force myself to finish it. The last 600 words of my review are reasonable and I'm reasonably proud of them. But there was a delay of 16 days in there and I'm not sure what things I thought I wanted to say were lost in the interim. And though Nouvelle Vague is my favorite of these three, with an 8/10 score, I'm still wondering if my knowledge of its subsequent accolades are informing what I've written in some way.

Then you've got No Other Choice. This I saw only ten days ago, making it relatively fresh. But in this case, I have not even written the opening yet. I have an idea of how I'm going to open it, but maybe knowing that the review before it, Nouvelle Vague, was not even in the can yet prevented me from getting started. This comes out latest on the calendar, January 15th. By which point I will have endured another six weeks of accolades about it since the time that I saw it.

When I start to fret about this a bit, I have to remember that I once had a whole gig reviewing movies where I wrote the review years after both the movie had come out and after I had seen it. How does that even work, you ask?

Well when I was writing for AllMovie in the early part of the 2000s, I was actually trying to make a living at it for a short period of time. They were only paying me $20 for each 300-word review, so this endeavor was always doomed to failure. However, the thing that made it marginally possible was that I could write a review for any film that currently didn't have a review on the site, as long as I was approved to do so. I'd go hunting and I'd send them lists of 20 movies I wanted to review, of which they would usually approve all 20, or sometimes denying me on one or two token films. Oh those blessed times when there was a financial incentive for them to have me do this.

In any case, those reviews have to be considered highly compromised in that a) I had not seen the film in many years in most cases, meaning I was reviewing it based on a general impression and a plausible take, and b) I already knew what everyone else thought of the movie, so I was factoring that in to what I was writing, either leaning into the popular take or defining my thoughts in opposition to it.

So I do suspect there is some imperfection in the way these things go. Critics see movies all the time with huge advanced buzz, and they have to clear that noise out of their heads if they want to write about those movies purely and without bias. And because of the way life works, sometimes you can't write that review straight away, especially if you don't have that deadline.

I guess I'm just glad, at this point, that I am not likely to have any more of these, at least this year. I'm scheduled to see another movie with awards buzz, The Secret Agent, on January 15th, which will also help me get it in before my deadline. But at least in that case the movie comes out only one week later. 

My battle with One Battle

I think One Battle After Another is a very enjoyable movie.

It's funny, it's entertaining, it's full of spark, it's made incredibly well, it has good performances and it has a definite resonance within the cultural and political moment in which we currently find ourselves.

But ... 

... it's only barely in my top half of Paul Thomas Anderson's films. That's saying more about the man and his filmography than it's saying about the movie, but it's worth noting.

And ... 

... I can't help feeling that there was something about it that I didn't fully, all the way, 100% connect with.

And also ... 

... I did watch it jet-lagged, on the day I got back from Europe, though it's really saying something about the movie's excitement level that I never fell asleep.

And yet it seems to be the consensus best film of 2025, with a few other contenders potentially staking a claim, but most of those being movies that fewer people have seen or in some cases have not really fully been released yet. 

At the moment, it doesn't have a place in my top ten of the year, and if I'm not careful it will fall out of my top 20.

How concerned should I be about this?

When I got together last Friday night for a gathering with three other ReelGood writers for what we call the ReelGood Christmas Party -- usually just drinks out somewhere, though last year I did host it at my house -- I asked them to come up with top fives, hearkening back to our days when we used to podcast and when that would be part of our year-end show. No one else prepared a list, but I told them they didn't really have to, so I don't feel unsupported or anything.

But I told them my top five of 2025 nonetheless, a work very much in progress as you know, since I will not be finalizing it until January 22nd. And of course, One Battle After Another was not in that top five. It wouldn't have made the top ten, as I've said, and it's only just barely in my top 20.

When one of the other guys thought about his own answers to this question extemporaneously, he said One Battle would definitely be in it ... and had a hard time thinking of many/any others. 

This doesn't surprise me of course, and I mention it as just the most recent example of the overwhelming love directed at OBAA this year. Another example is the many Golden Globe nominations it just received, nine all told, with five acting nominations among those. (All deserved, I should say.)

Am I doing this wrong by not loving it more than I do?

And does OBAA still stand head and shoulders above the other contenders in a year with more genuinely beloved films? Or is this so good that it's just one of the best films of any year?

Suffice it to say that all the love is definitely rubbing off on me, in both positive and negative ways. On the positive side, it's forcing me to reassess and remind myself of the many things I did love about the movie. On the negative side, it's getting my hackles up a bit.

I have nits to pick with the movie, but I do, for sure, find it entertaining, provocative, exciting and fun. It's all the things you want a movie to be.

Except for me that translates to a solid four stars, not the 4.5 or five stars usually attained by my best movies of the year.

Well, this battle will have one more skirmish before all is said and done. I've determined to watch it again before I finalize my list, which will be good because I know my wife wants to watch it too. It'll have one more day in the sun. 

And we'll have to see, then, if I do love it enough to promote it ... or whether I promote it just out of the insecurity of being so obviously wrong in not loving it as much as everyone else does.

Audient Zeitgeist: Jack

This is the final in my bi-monthly 2025 series watching movies I haven't seen that are in the zeitgeist.

How do you finish a six-movie series with a theoretically unlimited number of viable options, when you've got just one left and your last movie could be almost anything?

A legendary flop is one way to go, but even one better than that, how about a movie legendary for bearing no relationship to the rest of the director's filmography, which he made in order to keep financing his weirder and more personal projects?

The funny thing is, when I read more about Francis Ford Coppola's 1996 film Jack on Wikipedia, there's no mention of the "one for them, one for me" mentality that we know drives someone like Steven Soderbergh. In fact, it looks like Jack may have been a "one for me" movie more than we ever thought, and not one of Coppola's "paycheck movies" (like The Rainmaker). 

And also, it wasn't a flop -- it made $78 million on a $45 million budget.

And also, I did not hate it.

Yes friends, I'm giving Jack 3 stars out of 5. 

When you come in negatively predisposed toward something, and you find it tolerable when you watch it, you feel even more positively toward it than if you'd had no expectations whatsoever. I suppose that's an obvious statement.

The problem with Jack is, it's a sentimental film, the sort that Robin Williams made one too many times. But it's nowhere near as mawkish as something like Patch Adams. And I found what it was trying to do touching enough, especially when I learned some of Coppola's motivations behind making it.

But first, some plot.

Williams plays the title character, who is born at a normal size and weight after only ten weeks of gestation in his mother's womb. This, we learn, is because Jack has a condition that makes him age at four times the rate of other people. I don't think this is a real condition. 

So by the time he's ten years old, he can be played by Williams, who was actually 45 at the time, though Jack is supposed to look 40. It's just the kind of role you know Williams would want to play. He gets to act like a ten-year-old, and if there's one complaint I have about the film -- there's probably more than one -- it's that I thought Williams was acting a bit more like he was six than like he was ten. I have an 11-year-old, and just a year ago he didn't act like Williams does in this movie. Then again, that's got an explanation in the plot -- Jack has not been attending school because it was thought a person in his condition could not properly blend into a school environment, and fair enough.

But it's eventually decided with some encouragement from his tutor, played by Bill Cosby (!), that it might be a good idea for Jack to try this environment, and his attempts at socialization with the rest of the children make up the bulk of the movie -- with of course the specter hanging over his head that his accelerated growth means he likely won't live until he's 25. 

There's a real warmth to Jack, in among the goofiness and the type of Williams performance that sometimes made us impatient with him. But really, it's not so much Williams' actual performance, but our wariness of what his performance might be, that puts us on guard. Although the performance is always on the verge of going the wrong direction, it never does, and it makes for an interesting exercise for an actor -- one Williams completes with charm and likeability. 

The ultimate message of the film, that we have to live our lives as long as we get the chance to live them, is not nearly as heavy handed as it could have been, either. The movie is schmaltzy in parts, but never as much as you fear it will be, and never even really enough to fully annoy you.

The reason for this warmth is that this story actually really resonated with Coppola. Wikipedia describes his interest in the script as stemming from two things, both related to his children:

1) The character of Jack reminded him of his own son, Gio, to whom the film is dedicated and who died in childhood;

2) He wanted to make a movie that his daughter, Gia, could actually watch -- unlike, say, Apocalypse Now. 

It was even a story with which he personally identified, since Coppola was sickened by polio in his youth. 

And speaking of youth, there's a good reminder that this film isn't as different from the other films in Coppola's filmography as you would expect. Okay, I just read the plot synopsis of Youth Without Youth to remind myself what it was about, and it doesn't appear it's as close of a thematic match to Jack as you would think from that title. But I'll leave this paragraph in anyway. 

Still, in his defense of Jack, Coppola said something that I found sort of interesting:

"It was considered that I had made Apocalypse Now and I'm like a Marty Scorsese type of director, and here I am making this dumb Disney film with Robin Williams. But I was always happy to do any type of film."

And I think the remainder of Coppola's career has really borne that out, often in ways that may have been true artistic failures, but represented this desire not to be pigeon-holed. I don't think Jack is a true artistic failure, it's just an example of the type of film that the right audience would find heartwarming, and the snob cinephile finds cloying. I guess that's why I don't think of myself as a snob cinephile, because hatred was not what I was feeling as I watched Jack.

Films involving the unusual growth of children have a bit of a tough row to hoe. For every The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, there's three Simon Birches. Jack is more Birch than Button, but it's a lot closer to the middle of those two poles than you might think. 

There are some other noteworthy things about the film. One of which is that it's one of Jennifer Lopez' first film roles. It was interesting to see her up there at all of age 27, playing Jack's teacher. She was about to really blow up with Out of Sight, but what is probably her actual breakthrough, Selena, was not until the following year. 

Look I'm not going to go out recommending Jack to everyone I see. I do think, though, that if it had been directed by someone like Tom Shadyac or Chris Columbus, both of whom made sentimental films with Williams in the 1990s, it would have gotten less flak. It's just that no one could believe that this was the movie Francis Ford Coppola wanted to make as a follow-up to The Godfather Part III and Bram Stoker's Dracula. 

And while I adore BSD, which is in my top 100 on Flickchart, I have to say that Jack is waaaay better than Godfather Part III. 

A violation of animation's sacred rivalry

I don't know a lot of things these days about the behind-the-scenes movements in the film industry -- in part because I don't try to keep up with/understand all the various takeovers and new conglomerates -- but I thought I knew this:

Disney is Disney and Dreamworks is Dreamworks and never the twain shall meet.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I logged into Disney+ yesterday, and one of the first things greeting me was an image of Shrek in the eponymous film.

Shrek, the movie, is in many ways the flagship product of Dreamworks Animation. It was only the sixth of an eventual 53 feature features (and counting), but it's got the most direct sequels of any Dreamworks series (three, with one more on the way) and it represents the moment the studio really announced itself as a player, not having quite gotten there with films like Antz, The Road to El Dorado and The Prince of Egypt. 

Since then, Dreamworks has positioned itself as the primary alternative to Disney in the animation realm. If for some reason you didn't like Disney -- and yes, I suppose there are people out there who do prefer Dreamworks, including, so he says, my younger son -- then Dreamworks would be giving you movies that looked almost as good with almost as good voice talent and, well, far worse writing if you ask me. 

As you will see in any good rivalry, Dreamworks heavily borrows from Disney when it can, and the reverse is sometimes true. I'm sorry to say that Disney has begun more often using the sickly pinks and purples I railed about in this post, which I considered a Dreamworks staple. 

So why the hell is the Dreamworks flagship product now available on the streaming service of its chief rival? What gives?

I tried to see if this was a general availability of Dreamworks stuff on Disney, but as I searched for a number of the other high-profile Dreamworks properties -- such as Kung Fu Panda and Madagascar -- I found nary a trace of them. I tried a handful of other titles just for good measure before stopping. I'm not going to try 53 titles.

There is clearly some kind of licensing exception going on here, and that's another thing I don't pretend to understand, nor do I really want to understand any better. Because it's not actually all the Shrek movies that are available on Disney+, just the first three. Shrek Forever After (2010) is not there.

AI slop to the rescue!

Here's what AI tells me about this, in an unusual brief answer to the question:

Shrek, Shrek 2 and Shrek the Third are now streaming on Disney+. To all who are confused, this is because of a licensing deal between Hulu and DreamWorks. But Shrek is from Dreamworks? David Frantsen licensing deal.

I love that this answer just loses all pretenses to grammar at the end.

So that was actually my thought, that it had something to do with Hulu, which is part of Disney+ at least here in Australia, and maybe only here in Australia. Like I said, I don't try to understand these things.

I do still find it very weird, and it also seems like we're one step closer to everything just being owned by one company. I'm finding this whole Netflix/Warner Brothers situation fairly ominous in that regard, again without really digging into it. I just know it was very expensive and there's a lot of hand wringing about it.

For now, at least I have easy access to finally watch the second and third Shrek movie if I want. That's right! I've only seen the original! 

At the time Shrek came out, I thought I liked it quite a bit. It was very early on in the new age of animation and I had a basic awe of what it accomplished. But by the time I saw part of it again later on that year on the plane, I had turned against it. The whole five-minute argument about whether onions had layers or not -- really, listen to that scene, it goes on forever -- may have been the thing that did it, but it was really just emblemetic of larger issues. I never thought it was necessary to watch another one, which tells you something about what I think of Dreamworks in general: I never even wanted to watch any of the sequels to their flagship product.

I just checked back in my rankings for 2001 and I had it ranked 53rd out of 73. Not great. 

However, now that Disney has brought it into the fold, maybe I need to reconsider! 

Asian racquet sports double feature

I was going to possibly choose Lurker as the second half of my double feature at the cinema on Wednesday, since I've heard great things about it and I don't know that I'll have access to it through rental or steaming before my ranking deadline next month. 

But then I thought, why pass up an opportunity for an Asian-themed double feature, especially since my rankings are light on foreign language films? And because it might spur me to write a post on this blog, which I have been neglecting lately?

See the first movie was Park Chan-wook's latest, No Other Choice, which is one of a couple movies I've seen at advanced screenings that won't be coming out in Australia until January, when I will be quite busy trying to cram in all my other "must haves" before my list closes. It's a bit of a black comic riff on Parasite, and I think I'd be saying that even if the directors of both films weren't Korean. 

And besides, Elizabeth Lo's Chinese documentary Mistress Dispeller was starting 20 minutes earlier.

I knew both movies were from Asia, but I didn't realize they would both feature racquet sports -- and that they would both spell the word "racquet" differently in their English translations.

Tennis is a very small part of No Other Choice. It's a pastime enjoyed by the wife of the main character, one she decides to give up when he loses his job and their family falls on hard times. It isn't integral to the plot, but it comes up enough in conversation that her hopeful husband talks about buying her a new "racket" when he gets back up on his feet.

In Mistress Dispeller, a documentary about a woman who helps break up extramarital affairs, the couple she's trying to save are badminton aficionados. We see them playing this multiple times, and at one point someone talks about the correct way to hold the "racquet."

I'd say "racquet" is correct, yet I'm sure for many years in my life I thought it was "racket." 

Though looking at it just now, I'm not so sure. AI tells me that "racket" is the "older spelling, preferred in American English." Which would have been why I wrote it that way for so long. "Racquet," AI explains, is preferred in other countries. 

But I'm pretty sure I would have stopped writing "racquet" long before I moved to Australia. See, "racket" already means something else. It wouldn't be the first word to be spelled the same way and have two different meanings, but "racquet" clearly tells you what it's talking about without any ambiguity. I mean, a "tennis racket" could technically be a corrupt enterprise around the sport of tennis -- you know, point shaving or something. 

Both movies in this double feature also got 3.5 stars from me, which qualifies as a mild disappointment. (It's funny how I've come to think of this is a "disappointing" rating, when some people would use it as a signifier of great affection.)

This is actually a step up for Park, since his last film, Decision to Leave, was such a disappointment to me that I could not even give it a positive star rating (2.5). I've never seen another Elizabeth Lo movie, but I guess I hoped this one would blow my mind. I did really like it, but I spent entirely too much time questioning how someone makes a documentary about a cheating husband and his mistress, with tons of footage of them, without them understanding that this documentary is about someone trying to break them up. 

So I guess I won't be raising a racket for either of them when I review them (har har). 

A change of projector locale

I didn't originally think I would "take advantage" of my wife being out of town in any way, except maybe leaving some dishes unwashed for longer than I ordinarily would, or never making the bed.

Then I realized that our bedroom would make a perfect location for the new portable projector screen she got me for my birthday, and that shelf that runs along the length of our bed, above the pillows but under the windows, would be the perfect height to hold the projector.

And so it is that I set up the screen in front of our bureau, which she accesses more than I do, and that's where it's been since Friday evening, with a few more days expected since she's had to extend her trip. 

This is a picture from the first film I watched, After the Hunt, which I didn't particularly care for. I've subsequently watched Until Dawn, Yi Yi, First Blood, Rolling Thunder and Freakier Friday. Quite the mix of films there. 

It's fun, and unusual, for me to watch movies from bed. I usually take the living room, and my wife winds down her night in bed with her device, on nights we aren't watching something together. 

However, I have to admit it is not as comfortable as I might have thought. I need one of those pillows with the arms that used to be all over the place when I was growing up, so instead I'm kind of slumped over, scrunching up as many normal pillows as I can to try to recreate the same effect. Suffice it to say, I won't miss it when I have to take it down when my wife gets back on Wednesday, but it's been a fun novelty. Change is as good as a holiday, or so they say. 

Not a lot more to say today, just wanted to let you know I'm still here, and already feeling a bit snowed under -- though not in Australia, where today is the first day of summer -- by end-of-year obligations at work and with Christmas coming up.

The annual Netflix movie I'm blocked from streaming

Tonight I am going to an advanced screening of Nouvelle Vague.

Why, you ask, should I have to go to an advanced screening of a movie that's already available on Netflix? In fact, why should I be seeing a movie that's going to be available on Netflix in the theater at all, given the other priority decisions I must make for theater viewings at this time of year?

Ah, because Richard Linklater's latest movie is not available on Netflix -- in Australia.

We tend to get a "one world" idea of Netflix, like if a movie is available in any location, it's available in all locations. I may not have taken the time out of my schedule to complain about it in past years, but I know this not to be true.

Oh it might be true for their small buys, or the films that are fully branded as Netflix from the ground up, like Rian Johnson's Knives Out sequels -- one of which I could see tonight in the theater after Nouvelle Vague, which would be quite the unusual double feature considering that I've only ever seen one other movie that would soon be available to me on Netflix (David Fincher's The Killer) in the theater. 

But each of the past three years, there has been a prestige release that simply wasn't going to be available on Netflix in Australia -- possibly ever. In fact, I'm still not sure if the other two have ever made their Australian Netflix streaming debuts.

In 2023 it was May December, which made my top ten that year, but only because I got wind of its imminent lack of availability on Netflix and went to an advanced screening like this one. 

Last year it was Emilia Perez, which also made my top ten even higher than May December, which I was able to see in that case because I was in the U.S. at Christmas, making it available to me. In fact, I think there were two like this last year, as Maria was also available there, but I did not prioritize seeing it and still have not seen it. 

I'd be able to get Nouvelle Vague on my list this year because it's coming to Australian theaters on January 8th. But I'd rather spend those January theater hours on movies I can only get in the theater, in any part of the world, than be reminded that I can't see this movie otherwise because of Netflix's capricious distribution strategies.

Look, I know this whole thing is more complicated than I'm making it out to be. I'd rather just whinge (Australian word) about the unfairness of it than to look into why it's done this way. There are different deals for different markets. I know this.

But maybe I'm just feeling a bit sensitive to these exclusive arrangements these days. Just this morning I was reminded of the fact that Jim Jarmusch's Father Mother Sister Brother, which is getting some of the year's best notices, is a MUBI exclusive -- but that even if I were subscribed to MUBI, I still probably wouldn't get it in Australia, because that's what happened a few years ago when I was subscribed, but I still had to find another way to watch Ira Sachs' Passages.

I also feel like it should be possible to predict these things better. I understand all the cheapo buddy comedies going to Netflix simultaneously around the world, and would expect nothing less. But if the restriction is only on prestige films, why was I able to watch Train Dreams this week? (Speaking of Netflix movies that might make my top ten.) And what will happen with Noah Baumbach's Jay Kelly, which is also available in Australian cinemas right now? I haven't even looked into when/whether that one will be coming to my local Netflix.

As for Linklater, seeing Nouvelle Vague tonight will mean I get at least one of his 2025 films in my 2025 rankings. Blue Moon, which does not hit Australian cinemas until the end of January, may just go by the boards. 

Margot Kidder plays French Canadian

I've continued watching the movies Quentin Tarantino discusses in Cinema Speculation, and I haven't had to jam too many of them in to keep pace with my reading. It helps when you only budget 20 minutes of reading time a day on trains. Don't judge.

Last night it was Sisters, the third previously unseen movie I've watched after The Getaway and The Outfit.

As those two were more or less carbon copies of each other, crime capers with equivalent three-star ratings on Letterboxd, it was a nice change of pace to get to the Brian De Palma psychological thriller, which I gave a half-star more than that.

I don't know what Tarantino's take on it is because I haven't gotten there yet in the book, but I know what I'm going to talk about today: the decision to make Margot Kidder's character French Canadian.

Now, Kidder herself is Canadian, but she's not French Canadian. Big difference. One speaks English with a barely detectable accent you can only perceive when they say "house." The other speaks English like a Parisian playing around with the language and its grammatical conventions for the first time.

So yes, Kidder has to sound like the latter in this movie, even though she's the former. (And she probably doesn't even say "hoose.") 

It's a curious choice.

Normally when an actor speaks English with an accent in a movie, it's for one of three reasons:

1) They are actually not a native English speaker, and this is the best they can do;

2) They are making a movie in English where the characters are from a particular part of the world, so they speak with that sort of accent to give us some sense of authenticity, when for commercial and practical reasons they can't actually film in the local language;

3) They are making a movie set in the past, and a generic British accent makes it sound more old-fashioned than their normal "just stepped off Venice Beach" accent would make them sound.

So what I'm saying is, Margot Kidder speaks with a French Canadian accent even though there is no story reason, no geographical reason, nor any practical real-world reason she has to do it. The movie, you see, is set in New York. The choice to make her French Canadian is, it would seem, completely random.

Fortunately, this is a pretty helpful scenario for our friend AI to pop its head in and lend a hand. 

This is what AI has to say about De Palma's reasons:

Brian De Palma wanted to add to the film's "joyful fakery" and create a sense of vulnerability that a foreign accent would provide. Her accent contributes to the dramatic and thrilling tone of the film, making her seem more "adorable" to other characters. 

However, I read elsewhere -- having trouble finding it right now -- that a lot of people at the time thought the accent was poor, even laughable. For her part, Kidder said she could do the accent because she had lived in Quebec.

And hey, I did think she did a pretty good job with it. Though maybe I'm just happy to discover my Lois Lane in movies where I'd never seen her. 

The silent rebellion of trying to thwart the inevitable

I've become contemplative again about firstly the state of film criticism, and secondly my relationship to it.

Very contemplative. And maybe which is first and which is second is the other way around.

Since returning from Europe about seven weeks ago, and this has become a possibly coincidental benchmark for a lot of things I've been thinking about, I've been really going through the motions as a critic. I'm dutifully supplying between one and three reviews a week, and mostly covering the films I feel need to be covered. And it's not taking me any longer to write my reviews, with a notable exception that I'll mention in the next paragraph. I'm just quicker to accept that the tack I've started on is a satisfactory one, and I'll just keep spouting off various disconnected observations until I reach my word count.

But then I also had something that hasn't happened to me in a while: I started to write a review that I just totally abandoned. It was for Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein. I wrote two paragraphs that I decided were a dumb way to start the piece, and instead of starting over again, I just left it unfinished. When I searched my soul, I decided I didn't have a single goddamn thing to say about Frankenstein. 

This isn't usually a problem. I always power through it. There's a core standard of professionalism to which I hold myself, acting as though I were on deadline even if the only deadline is in my own head.

Sometimes there actually is a deadline. For any film where I've gotten a screener or attended a premiere, there's the expectation that you'll deliver your verdict by the opening Thursday, if you have enough time, or at least before the first weekend. I do always meet that deadline, and Frankenstein wasn't an example of that scenario, as I waited until it was available on Netflix.

But the Frankenstein episode did disturb me a little bit and it awakened a fear in me that I wasn't ready to confront, and am only forcing myself to confront in the piece I'm currently writing:

I don't know how long I want to keep on doing this.

There are lots of arguments why I wouldn't keep doing it:

1) It no longer brings me (enough) joy.

2) It is becoming less and less financially viable. I'm paying the monthly bills to run the website, and those costs are basically offset by the free tickets I get with my critics card. I'm not running the numbers right not to figure out if I'm coming out a little ahead or a little behind, but it could just as easily be the latter -- which is one of the reasons I'm not running those numbers, because I don't really want to know that. 

3) It is pretty exhausting. You're always rolling that ball up the hill. You're always trying to figure out when you need to see a movie in order to put up a review at an optimal time so that your theoretical audience -- and I think the audience is also becoming more and more theoretical -- can use your recommendations as a practical consideration in whether or not to see a movie. And you're making some decisions that might disrupt other areas of your life, such as time with family and friends. Last night I was going to go see If I Had Legs I'd Kick You, which came out on Thursday, which means I really want to review it this week before it becomes totally old hat. When my wife heard that was the movie I was going to see, she asked if I could wait until the weekend so she could see it with me. I didn't want to, from a reviewing standpoint, though fortunately, my commitment to my wife won out over my commitment to my work, and I went to see The Running Man instead. 

Sorry, this is becoming a bit stream of conscious. I'll get to my point.

There is one big reason I don't stop. Let's set aside the small reasons, like the fact that I'd have to start paying for movies again. The big reason is:

1) If I stop being a critic now, I will never be a critic again. 

I believe this is true even though it is technically not 100% true. I could worm my way back into something in the future, not likely an actual publication with a history or consistent readership, but my own equivalent of the site I currently run. Heck, by writing this blog I am still technically using the same muscles involved in film criticism. 

The scary thing is: Maybe I don't care if I'm not a critic anymore.

Maybe. I haven't fully worked that one out yet. 

If I think I'm having an existential crisis now, just imagine what it will be once I'm actually not doing the thing that gives me some sense of the validity of that existence. Professionally speaking of course. 

As I've gotten this far into this piece, it occurs to me that I've written pieces like this on this blog before. I think that was likely assumed in my opening, in which I talked about being contemplative "again." 

And indeed, in looking back, I found this post just over three years ago, in which I shared many of these same sentiments. If you want to go there, you can see how similar it is. I'm not checking it now.

There's a difference this time, and maybe a similar optimistic ending, but we have to get a bit darker first. 

On a walk this morning, I listened to the bonus segment of a recent Slate Culture Gabfest, the segment that is only available to subscribers, of which I am one. They were talking about a New York Times article about the death of criticism, broadly, which used the widely publicized elimination of a number of key critics jobs -- including the one held by Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune, which left that paper without a film critic -- as its jumping off point. 

The four podcast panelists came around to end on sort of a high note, as I think you are often compelled to do in such a discussion. You can't leave your audience on a note of pure doom and gloom as it is just too depressing. But before that they each said "Yes this sucks, and I don't know if there is anything that can be done about it." The media paradigm is just changing too much. They know where all the clicks are, and they just aren't on movie reviews. Or other types of review, of course, but the panel's movie bias put the focus there.

They also, though, mentioned the efforts of the secret intellectuals who kept alive Greek philosophy in medieval Christian Europe, when there was every bit the chance that the prevailing forces would snuff it out. Those people were heroes, we can appreciate that now.

There is obviously not a direct correlation with film criticism. Ten years from now, films may not even look like they do today, let alone criticism bearing any resemblance to the current form of criticism. Though I suppose it will bear some resemblance, considering that criticism is already on its way out.

The thing is, people like me -- struggling to decide whether it is even financially worthwhile to keep running a website -- can be the sorts of people who stand in the way of what the prevailing forces are trying to accomplish. Simply by not removing myself from the landscape, I allow that landscape to continue existing, in the same way that every vote counts in an election, and every movie ticket sold is an endorsement to keep making that movie.

I think of it as similar to my most beloved of cinematic entities, the single-screen cinema. I'm sure I've told you it is my dream to run a single-screen cinema in some semi-remote town, just far enough away from the multiplexes to serve the local population usefully, but not so far away that I myself can never get to those multiplexes. 

No one makes money on those cinemas. They are financial losers, pure and simple. You can't sell popcorn for a high enough price to recoup the costs of licensing films, paying your staff, keeping the lights on. Which is why only people who are already rich usually run them, as a labor of love.

If it were only about the financial, they wouldn't do it. But it's about something more than that. It's about the romantic notion of single-screen cinemas continuing to exist in the world, so we can show the young people what their history looked like, and so we can continue to live that history ourselves.

And I think there is a romantic notion to criticism itself that must be preserved. No, it may not be entirely consistent with the modern marketplace for people to come looking for a particular critic to tell them whether they should see a movie or not. But criticism is also a place where intellectual discussions are hosted, either actual discussion (through a comments section) or implied discussion in the form of the debate a reader silently has with the person they're reading. 

And surely there will someday come a time when even the notion of an intellectual discussion is outdated, a reality that AI may be hastening. But I'm not so cynical as to think that day is close.

And movies? There are a shit ton of them. Every time I think this industry might be truly contracting, I then look at my Letterboxd watchlist and am overwhelmed by how many movies from the current year are still out there that I haven't seen, that I want to see before the end of the year. 

While there are still movies, there should still be critics, and to the extent that I play any small role in that being true, I will continue to do it. 

For now ... 

Playdate but not Play Dirty

One of the easiest annual methods of goosing my movie count is to watch everything the streamers offer me. In fact, depending on how you want to stretch your definition of what counts as a movie -- there are a lot of quickie Netflix documentaries out there -- I could probably watch a similar number of movies to the total amount I rank each year, drawing only from Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+ and Stan. It would be a pretty sad year, though.

Because "free" and "easy to access" are both powerful motivators to me when watching movies, it takes will power not to watch all of these movies. But it's will power I take pride in exercising. 

And the easiest place to cut fat, in terms of return on the time I'm investing watching these movies, is with buddy action comedies. The streamers are lousy with those at the moment, probably beause they continue to make the algorithm happy.

But you can't skip all the buddy action comedies. So which do you watch and which don't you watch?

One easy opt-in is how early it comes out in the year. At the start of the year, I'm desperate for new content as long as it has that year's release date on it. In fact, the very first movie I watched in 2025 -- that counted for 2025, I should say -- was the Jamie Foxx-Cameron Diaz buddy action comedy Back in Action.

Had Back in Action come out in September, I might have skipped it. Though I find both Foxx and Diaz appealing, so it might have made the cut. 

But January? To get my 2025 list started? It was a no doubter.

A buddy action comedy released later in the year, when I have plenty to choose from, really has to hit all of my personal four quadrants in order to make it before my eyeballs. (I don't actually have a "personal four quadrants," I'm just trying to repurpose some industryspeak to make my point.) So last year, when the Mark Wahlberg-Halle Berry buddy action comedy The Union came out on August 16th, it didn't stand much of a chance. 

That said, my feelings toward the Foxx-Diaz duo and the Wahlberg-Berry duo are pretty similiar, so maybe The Union makes a real-life test case for the hypothetical later releasing of Back in Action. Anyway, yeah, I skipped The Union. And now that I didn't see it in the year it came out, where it at least had the justification of being rankings fodder, there's probably little reason for me to ever see it. 

But release date is not the only factor here. I'm also looking at whether the premise of these movies has a "certain something" that potentially makes them stand out from the pack. And it doesn't take a lot, just a whiff of what looks like inspiration. Which brings us to another Mark Wahlberg vehicle, which I am also skipping.

I've had the ability to watch Amazon Prime's Play Dirty for the entire time I've been back from Europe, as it was released only a few days before our trip ended. But I am snubbing it and expect to continue snubbing it, unless I find myself in some weird circumstance where it's the only thing available to me.

Why? Well perhaps it's this logline, courtesy of IMDB:

"A ruthless thief and his expert crew stumble onto the heist of a lifetime."

Yawn. Boring. 

Meanwhile, a movie with a similar title and similar prospects of actually being good was released six weeks later into the year, also on Amazon Prime, meaning it was probably six weeks less likely for me to actually watch. Though watch Playdate I did this past weekend, on the second day of its availability, perhaps due to this logline, also courtesy of IMDB:

"Brian has just been fired from his job. He becomes a stay-at-home dad. He accepts a playdate invitation from another stay-at-home dad who turns out to be a loose cannon."

Although the actual writing in that logline leaves something to be desired -- and to be honest, I've only just now read it for the first time -- it does point to the fact that there's a sort of interesting idea here. The buddy action comedy stuff will grow out of a playdate gone pear-shaped, which is at least not a scenario I've ever seen in a movie, and has the potential to be funny. 

Now I should note that Kevin James and Alan Ritchson, the stars of Playdate, have a significant disadvantage next to Wahlberg and Lakeith Stanfield, the latter of whom I particularly like. If I were going only on the extent to which I find the stars compelling, Play Dirty would easily beat out Playdate. But the premise of one has that "certain something" while the premise of the other makes me yawn, so that is the deciding factor in this case. (And I've already gotten plenty of Lakeith Stanfield, who appears in both Roofman and Die My Love, in 2025.) 

While we're on the topic of James, I'm actually putting his other 2025 film in the "skip" category, though I don't know if it profiles as a buddy action comedy in the same way. It certainly profiles as streamer fodder that the algorithm has willed into existence. That film is Guns Up, which co-stars Christina Ricci, though it doesn't sound like a buddy action comedy in this case:

"On the brink of leaving 'The Family,' a mob henchman's final job goes off the rails. With the clock ticking, the ex-cop has one night to get his unsuspecting family out of the city before he gets snuffed out."

Yawn. Boring.

And that one's not even grammatically correct. The mob henchman's final job is on the bring of leaving The Family?

Unfortunately, the Playdate vs. Play Dirty choice, assuming the artificial scenario that I could choose only one of them, was made poorly. I can't comment on Play Dirty of course, but I can tell you that I thought Playdate was terrible, even though Ritchson tried pretty hard to make it better than that. James did not try very hard. 

But anyone who thinks there won't be enough buddy action comedies that debuted on streamers in my 2025 rankings, don't you worry your pretty little head. In addition to Back in Action and Playdate, we have:

• Heads of State, starring John Cena and Idris Elba, which debuted on Amazon Prime on July 2nd
• The Pickup, starring Eddie Murphy and Pete Davidson, which debuted on Amazon Prime on August 6th
• It would have been nice if there were a third one, but I guess that's it

Actually there is one other film worth mentioning, but it breaks the mold in one important way: There are three buddies instead of two, which takes it out of the realm of "buddy action comedy" as I've been defining it.

The best one of these movies -- and the only one that is currently in my top 40 movies of the year -- is called Deep Cover, and it stars the trio of Orlando Bloom, Bryce Dallas Howard and Nick Mohammed, the latter of whom you might know from Ted Lasso. This is also an Amazon Prime special, having debuted on June 12th, meaning that the only two movies in this whole piece that came from Netflix were The Union and Back in Action. 

Deep Cover definitely has the most promising of these loglines:

"Three improv actors are asked to go undercover by the police in London's criminal underworld."

See? Good ideas are not totally dead after all. 

I have regrets

There was simply no way I was going to like Wicked as much on the second viewing.

I watched it again last night, realizing only yesterday that the release date for Wicked: For Good was coming up already this week. If I were going to watch the first one, my #2 movie of 2024, as preparation for the concluding half of the story, Saturday night was the last weekend night I'd be able to do that, assuming I'm going to try to get on the sequel early in its release in order to review it. And you need a weekend night for a movie like this with its 160-minute running time.

I knew almost from the moment I started watching that Wicked was not going to do it for me the way it did it for me on the first viewing.

And I don't think it's just a year's worth of realizing what everyone else thinks of Wicked, of inevitable Wicked backlash, of other cinephiles you know and love -- and more to the point, respect -- thinking your aesthetic judgment is compromised if you have made this movie essentially your vice president of 2024 movies. That's right, if The Substance ever died, Wicked would become president of my 2024 movies. (Because I saw The Substance first, fortunately, Wicked was never in a position where it was actually ranked #1 in my rankings in progress.)

No, I think it's just that my first Wicked viewing occurred under circumstances that could never be duplicated, even if they were unremarkable circumstances in most respects.

When I saw the movie around this same time last year, it was as a weekend matinee, possibly even a pre-11 a.m. start time. I've been eyeballing movies with early start times like this this year as well. It's a way for me to get in a few extra screenings in the theater, especially since we're getting to the time when I'll have a harder time seeing these on video before my mid-January ranking deadline. 

Wicked I viewed as sort of an obligation. I put on my "ReelGood is a paper of record" hat and went to see it so we could get a review up. (If you don't know what that means, a "paper of record" is how journalists describe a newspaper that wants to in some way include all the news that's out there. If it happened, you'll find it somewhere in the pages of the newspaper.)

I was not expecting to hate Wicked, of course, but I had no attachment to the source material, never having seen it or really knowing much about it other than its obvious placement within the Wizard of Oz universe. I was expecting to find it middling with a possible high-end outcome of being sort of good. Crucially, I saw it early enough that I had not even heard what others thought, so I was able to go in with these low expectations. 

Then of course I was floored by it, and I cried during the scene at the dance. 

Tears go along way toward clouding my judgment about a movie. You may remember I have expressed some similar regrets at times about The Whale, which found me in a similar vulnerable spot emotionally (at a similar time of the day, wondering if that's related), and that elevated it all the way to my #1 of 2022. Tears are the purest expression we have that whatever sparks them is having a profound impact on us, and when that's a piece of art, it means there is something fundamentally good, or at least effective, about that art.

I never got to an equivalent place in the rest of Wicked as I did with that scene at the dance, but I was already a goner for this movie at that point. I had already computed the five stars in my head.

After last night's viewing, I'm thinking "Four? Three and a half?"

Because I've lived with my opinion of Wicked for a year and enshrined it in permanence when I published my rankings, I cannot comprehend nor abide such a drop in my feelings toward it. But let me try to delve into it:

1) This time I came in on guard. I had sort of convinced myself that my affection for Wicked gave me something in common not with the cinephiles I respect, but with a less discriminating form of moviegoer. I'm supposed to be above the more conventional movie tactics that speak to those sorts of moviegoers. And though I do know plenty of "respected critics" who felt strongly about the movie, it's the snobs' opinions we always remember, that eat away at some inner insecurity in us. 

2) I was a lot more distracted by the many digital effects in the film. Maybe that's just a year more in our collective shunning of digital effects weighing on me there. But I did really notice how much of this movie is not really there.

3) I started watching it at 10:30, after a handful of drinks. (Drinks also being a factor in my Friday night viewing of Friendship, as I wrote about yesterday. Okay, maybe drinks before movies is not a good idea.)

I think the last factor is the one that prevents me from having quite so much despair about liking Wicked so much less.

Whereas I suspected I might have missed some moments in Friendship, I know I missed some of Wicked's 160 minutes due to short bouts of sleep. It couldn't have been a lot, becaue I still finished around 2 after naps of indeterminate lengths in which I paused the film. But I definitely missed some. I usually pause a movie when I fall asleep, but that's only if I see it happen and I don't try to fight it. When I try to fight it, sometimes I lose.

I also was pretty sure it wouldn't matter if I slept during some of Wicked. I'd already seen it. This was basically just a refresher to put me in a Wicked: For Good mindset. 

So I don't think it really made a difference that I missed some of it. I think I just liked it less.

Ariana Grande's performance had been one of my favorite parts of my first viewing. It was here too, but I didn't remember as many moments where I felt so charmed and disarmed by a particular choice. There was definitely an element of surprise in that the first time, and obviously you don't get surprised by things on a second viewing.

My second Wicked experience reminds me even more of an underlying reality of ranking movies: You can't possibly know which will endure in your hearts. You can make educated guesses, but really, you are describing a moment in time, an exact set of circumstances that existed in both you, as the viewer, and the cinematic landscape at large. I saw Wicked a couple weeks after Trump was reelected. Did that have something to do with it, particuarly in the case of a Black actress playing an outcast in the person of Cynthia Erivo? Sure it could have. I may have even consciously acknowledged that to myself at the time. Now I'm just a year more dead inside due to the Trump presidency in progress, more resigned to cynicism with my emotions less on the surface.

The reason I'm writing this post is, well, because I post most days and I am usually writing about one of my most recent experiences as a movie lover. But there may be an extra boost of urgency here, because I think I do want you, my readers, to know that although I think Wicked is a very good film, I no longer feel the five-star enthusiasm that I felt this time last year.

Maybe now I can adopt a position that splits the difference between what the most serious cinephiles in my orbit, and what the lovers of big spectacle and musical theater in my orbit, think of this movie. 

Friendship is rare

Whenever I had thought about finally seeing the Andrew DeYoung-directed Tim Robinson vehicle Friendship, which has gone through a series of "about to occurs" based on a date we had with another couple to see it that was cancelled several times, I couldn't help but start singing the first few lines of the Tenacious D single "Friendship":

Friendship is rare
Do you know what I'm saying to you?
Friendship is rare
My derriere
When you find out much later that they don't really care

It's rare, to me

Can't you see

It's rare, to me

Can't you see?

I can stop there because I wouldn't usually get that far in the lyrics spontaneously appearing in my head. But I used to love that Tenacious D album, so I'm pretty familiar with the song.

When I finally saw the movie with my wife on Friday night -- a prelude to getting together with this same couple to see a different movie, Good Fortune -- I came to realize how rare the movie truly is.

It's rare because you don't usually see a movie this lacking in formal coventionality getting greenlit. If you're a fan of the Robinson show I Think You Should Leave, which I am, then you know Robinson's thing is to build these three- to five-minute vignettes off twisted versions of recognizable social interactions, usually where there's one insecure or petty party (usually played by Robinson) who violates normal social boundaries in trying to connect to other people. The ideas are wild but at least they are contained to within that short period of time, and you can usually remember them in order to tell your friends about them.

When you expand this to feature length, it's surprising how little you can remember and how little there is to talk about with people later on.

Now, it could be that I was fading in and out after having two beers, which I thought was probably a good way to watch this movie. But I know I didn't miss any significant portion of the film, I just missed the nuggets of crazy weirdness that have such a good showcase in short form. In this elongated form, I couldn't remember wanting to talk about anything afterward except what a slog it had been.

The movie is also rare in the sense that it is undercooked. There is a rigorous version of this material that keeps all the cringe, that goes on wild and fruitful tangents, that doesn't make a huge amount of sense from moment to moment, and yet that still feels like a cohesive whole that understands and incorporates the differing requirements between a feature-length film and a five-minute sketch. I searched in vain for that rigorous version of the material this whole movie. 

What was left to me was raw and limp and uninvolving, and also a poor return on what I hoped was going to be a consideration of male friendships with a fatal power imbalance, something in the vein of my beloved The Cable Guy. But even the title is a bit of a misnomer, because friendship is only a relatively small part of what is explored here, with the Paul Rudd character even disappearing from the movie for ten-minute stretches here and there. This shrimp needed a lot more time on the barbie.

The unfortunate thing about the rareness of this film? It does seem to put a damper on Robinson possibly making this more stringent version of his unique anti-comedy sensibilities at some point in the future.

Then again, maybe it won't. Friendship is a movie a lot of people have talked about this year, and that has obviously not just been, or even mostly been, people bashing it. In fact, although all the conversations I heard were in the context of people recommending it only with a large asterisk -- like, know what you're getting into -- I don't recall hearing anything fundamentally negative about it until my wife reported that her friend, the one we're seeing tonight to see Good Fortune, stopped watching it when she and her partner tried to watch it at home. He finished it but I won't know until tonight what he thought.

And then actually my wife had a different experience of it than I did. She agreed it was probably too odd for its own good, and lacking in a more sound construction that could have gotten more out of it, but she found herself charmed just to be watching something so strange and different. I would have thought this would have been my opinion and my opinion would have been hers, given that I feel like I'm the one who has to push I Think You Should Leave on her and she's a bit more resistant.

The other thing about rare movies, in whatever form they take, is that it can take some time to decide how indeed you do truly feel about them, because they are challenging you in ways where any predetermined potential reaction might be invalidated. Even though I thought I knew what to expect from this movie, and it did contain much of what I did expect from moment to moment, I may not have been prepared for how loosey goosey it would ultimately be from a structural perspective. And maybe that takes some time to sort through and figure out.

I think I'll have to go with my largely negative impression in terms of where Friendship slots in with my 2025 films. I'm not going to watch it again in the next two months. But it may be that I will confront it again some time down the road, meaning its long-term spot in my heart, as encapsulated by my Flickchart rankings, is still up in the air.