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. 

A Statham exception

Jason Statham has made about 37 copies of the same movie, and I have seen almost none of them.

Not totally true. I have likely seen at least a dozen Statham movies and I like him as a screen presence. But fully half of those would be collaborations with Guy Ritchie or Fast and Furious movies. The movies where he is the lone wolf traditional action hero, I traditionally give a miss.

A Working Man was an exception, and I'll tell you why:

1) It's available for free on Amazon Prime.

2) Amazon Prime is spruiking it heavily so there's no way I can miss that it's on Amazon Prime.

3) It counts toward the current year. 

4) Not only does it count toward the current year, but it's come along early enough that it feels like a good get, to have access to it at a time of the year when current year movies usually either have to be rented for a steeper price tag or are the typical Netflix swill. This one actually played in theaters. Later in the year, there would nothing novel about it and I definitely would not prioritize it.

So no, I don't usually see Statham movies, and it felt mildly disorienting to be sitting down to one. Pretty quickly I realized that prejudging them in the past has probably not been a short-sighted perspective on my part. I thought this was pretty bad. David Ayer, a director of action movies who momentarily flirted with prestige in the 2010s, is pretty much a hack.

But I'm not here today to analyze the finer points of David Ayer's career or this particular movie. Really, I want to see how many of these cookie cutter Jason Statham movies I have not seen.

In looking at this, I will skip movies that are what I would have once thought of as "straight to video" -- in other words, movies I never heard of. This needs to be a list of movies that I knew about but chose not to watch.

First, the Statham movies I had seen prior to A Working Man, in order:

Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels
Snatch
The One
Collateral
Cellular
London
Revolver
Crank
The Bank Job
Crank High Voltage
The Expendables
Gomeo & Juliet
Parker
Fast & Furious 6
Spy
Furious 7
The Fate of the Furious
The Meg
Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbes and Shaw
F9: The Fast Saga (I don't think that's how I used to write this title)

Okay so when I said more than a dozen, I meant 20. A Working Man makes 21.

But I bet the list of those I've heard of but haven't seen is even longer. Let's see:

Mean Machine
The Transporter
The Italian Job (and yes, I had to check my records that it was The Bank Job, and not The Italian Job, that I'd seen)
Transporter 2
The Pink Panther
In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale
War
Death Race
Transporter 3
The Mechanic
The Expendables 2
Homefront
Mechanic: Resurrection
Wrath of Man
Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre
Meg 2: The Trench
The Expendables 4
The Beekeeper

That's 18. Just a few less.

"Big deal, Vance," you say. "You saw some of the guy's movies and not others."

I think the point I'm trying to make is that for an actor of Statham's prominence, who is as bankable a star as he is, a person like me, who sees so much, should have seen more than 54% of his movies I was aware of. I don't usually punish actors for appearing in what seems to me like it will be inferior material. Heck, sometimes I want to see inferior material just to help fill out the lower end of my rankings or my Flickchart.

I suppose it's not Statham per se, as much as it is his absolute fealty to making a certain type of movie, that's caused me to skip so many of his movies. When thinking about other actors about whom the same post might be written, the names that came immediately to mind were people like Gerard Butler and Liam Neeson. This exercise would work particularly well for Neeson. It could even work for a guy like Nicolas Cage, given how much of his career he's devoted to paying the bills via schlock, or especially for someone like poor Bruce Willis.

Statham might actually be better off than any of those mentioned in the previous paragraph. A big chunk of my Statham misses were due to being out on two of his series -- Transporter and The Mechanic -- such that not seeing the first also means I have not seen the sequels. And I bailed after the first Expendables so I also didn't see the two others he was in. 

Now that I've written almost all this post, I have another observation about myself as a blogger: After a total quantity of posts closing in on 3,500, I'm bound to repeat myself. 

I just went to add the "jason statham" tag to this post, and found it already existed. So naturally I wanted to see when I tagged him previously and what I wrote about him. And found this. 

If you don't want to follow that link, I'll tell you what you'd find if you did: basically a shorter version of this very post, timed to the release of Parker, when I talked about Statham movies basically going in one of my ears and out the other.

I won't scrap this post, like I did when I recently started to write a second post talking about the surprising feminism of Starship Troopers, a topic I'd already covered. There may be some nuanced differences to the way I'm writing about Statham now from how I wrote about him a dozen years ago. A third post in another dozen years, though, can be avoided I think.

And I have little doubt that Statham will still be making, and still be capable of making, movies like A Working Man in another 12 years, when he's 69 instead of 57. (I guessed he was 58, so not far off.)

And because I like this guy's screen persona, I did hope the Statham exception I'm writing about today would be that A Working Man would actually be good. Alas, it was not, and for that I blame David Ayer rather than his star. 

Learning the names of the directing pairs

I don't really know if it's possible to do a quiz on a blog, but I can at least try, right?

As I've been doing some list work recently -- getting my movie spreadsheet up to date, which has now been done for a couple months, and a new project that I'll reveal within a few weeks -- I've gotten reacquainted with who directed what. 

And I've come to notice how many directing pairs there are out there -- and how many are not just brothers or sisters or maybe husband and wife, which tend to be easier for us to remember.  

In the names I'm about to go through, there may be a husband and wife represented -- no clues -- but if there are, they don't have the same last name, so you'd only know it by checking their Wikipedia page. And therefore the task of learning both names takes on a bit of added complexity, so you only do it if they've really broken through for you.

And in many of these cases, these people do share a Wikipedia page, because their professional personas have become intertwined. 

Your task today: See one name in a directing pair, and supply the other.

For people to be included in this quiz, they have to have directed more than one feature together. Just a one-off collaboration is not enough for them to get mentioned here. But rarely in these situations is there only one collaboration, if they're successful, which is why we cinephiles have even come to learn their names in the first place. 

Also, I'm sticking only to directors today, though it doesn't mean some of them aren't also writers and/or producers. It's just that they have to also be directors or else they're not in this. 

Simple enough?

It'll be 22 questions, but don't worry, you can move through them quickly. I'll start easy and get progressively harder. Depending on your level of casual vs. serious movie fandom, though, they might all be fairly hard. (Why 22? That was the number of pairs I saw that I wanted to include.)

Before we start, I should tell you the reason I'm writing this post today. Thursday night I watched Novocaine, which was okay to pretty good, and I noticed it was directed by guys named Dan Berk and Robert Olsen. This is actually the sixth film (including one short) directed by the pair, but since I hadn't seen (or even heard of) the other five, they wouldn't have made it into this quiz. However, I'd say they have enough ability that I might have the occasion to memorize their names in the future. 

Okay here we go. At the end, after a giant blank space, I will reveal the answers, as well as the films you would know them from -- using only the ones I've seen from my big movie spreadsheet, which was my source for finding these names. Give yourself half credit on an answer if you get the first or last name of their partner but not both. 

1) Phil Lord and ... ?

2) Seth Rogen and ... ?

3) Jean-Pierre Jeunet and ... ? 

4) Ron Clements and ... ?

5) Michael Powell and ... ?

6) Daniel Kwan and ... ?

7) Anna Boden and ... ? 

8) Mark Neveldine and ... ?

9) Jason Friedberg and ... ?

10) Brett Morgen and ... ?

11) John Francis Daley and ... ?

12) Nat Faxon and ... ?

13) Justin Benson and ... ?

14) Jonathan Dayton and ... ?

15) Glenn Ficarra and ... ? 

16) Josh Gordon and ... ?

17) Shari Springer Berman and ... ?

18) David Siegel and ... ?

19) Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and ... ?

20) Danielle Krudy and ... ?

21) Jimmy Chin and ... ? 

22) Severin Fiala and ... ?

NO CHEATING!!

SERIOUSLY!!

Okay here are the answers:

1) Phil Lord and ... Christopher Miller. Of course. "Lord and Miller" has become a brand name that indicates the sort of pop culture aware approach we've gotten familiar with in such movies as The Lego Movie, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, and both Jump Street movies. They also had an initial take on Solo: A Star Wars Story but were ultimately canned from that project. However, they remain a creative force in the industry with a whole lot of producing credits as well. 

2) Seth Rogen and ... Evan Goldberg. I don't know if this is really second easiest, but it's easy (for me anyway) to remember that Rogen has worked regularly with his best friend from childhood on both writing and directing projects. Their directing credits include The Interview and This is the End. (Note: I usually list first the person in the pair whose last name comes first alphabetically, but I thought this might make it easier, and besides, Rogen is waaaay more famous than Goldberg.)

3) Jean-Pierre Jeunet and ... Marc Caro. I should say "et" rather than "and." You have to be just a little bit older to get this one because they don't work together anymore, but if you are my age and you really liked movies around the turn of the century, you knew these guys well. The French directing pair were the minds behind Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children. It's funny though ... I'm not going to change the order of these questions or anything, but now that I look at it, "Jeunet et Caro" became a brand name to a certain type of cinephile, indicating their unique production design and slightly dystopian world view, even though they only actually directed these two movies together -- that I've seen, anyway. Jeunet has a much longer career working by himself. 

4) Ron Clements and ... John Musker. This one is very familiar to me because I've been seeing it for a long time. Although many Disney movies are directed by multiple people and they tend to work in different combinations depending on the project, Clements and Musker were the two listed directors on a surprising number of films: Hercules, The Princess and the Frog, Treasure Planet, Aladdin and The Little Mermaid. They are also the listed directors for Moana but are credited alongside fellow Disney company man Chris Williams there. 

5) Michael Powell and ... Emeric Pressburger. This is the easiest one for classic cinephiles, as the British pair known as the Archers represented one of the earliest examples of a creative team working together regularly, that weren't part of some studio system contract. Their list of highly regarded films that always have good showings on the Sight and Sound list includes The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, A Matter of Life and Death and I Know Where I'm Going! (It's not that I'm a huge fan of that last one. The exclamation point is in the title.) When Powell did work by himself he made one of the crazier films of that vintage you are likely to see, Peeping Tom.

6) Daniel Kwan and ... Daniel Scheinert. This could be harder for some people except for the fact that the two directors have the same first name, causing them to be nicknamed "the Daniels," and their most recent collaboration won best picture. The directors of Everything Everywhere All at Once also directed Swiss Army Man, firmly establishing their absurdist world view. Because of their big success we tend to think of them as more established, but their third feature isn't set to debut until 2026 (though Wikipedia also says it was booted from its expected release date by Steven Spielberg to make way for his own movie on that date). Scheinert did also direct The Death of Dick Long, which I also really liked. 

7) Anna Boden and ... Ryan Fleck. This pairing might be more obscure for some people except they did recently direct a Marvel movie. Their career prior to Captain Marvel was a lot more independent in spirit. Sugar, It's Kind of a Funny Story and Mississippi Grind are the movies where they are both credited as director, as I'm surprised to learn that Boden was actually not credited as director on the movie I know them from most: Half Nelson, their debut, where she only got a writing credit while Fleck got both. Damn film industry letting men take all the credit. They did date once but they are not married. 

8) Mark Neveldine and ... Brian Taylor. These two have gone their separate ways, but "Neveldine andTaylor" became a brand for their particular frenetic brand of action movie, seen in such titles as Crank, Crank High Voltage and Gamer. Although I really like the Crank movies (not so much Gamer), my favorite of their collective creative output might by Brian's equally gonzo solo effort Mom and Dad. Taylor has not been able to follow that up as his most recent effort was the truly terrible Hellboy: The Crooked Man last year. 

9) Jason Friedberg and ... Aaron Seltzer. The names on this list who should be most ashamed of themselves. If you know these names, and many of you would have the misfortune of knowing them, you know them from their awful movie parodies. Although their writing of the original Scary Movie was a promising(ish) start -- I enjoyed that movie back when I first saw it -- it got a lot worse from there, quickly. In terms of actual directing credits, we can blame them for Epic Movie, Meet the Spartans and Vampires Suck. I never subjected myself to Disaster Movie. 

10) Brett Morgen and ... Nanette Burstein. Might be starting to get a bit more obscure now, but again, this is a pairing I've known about for a long time. They now work separately and have both made some really good films by themselves. But together, the first documentarians on this list were the names behind On the Ropes and The Kid Stays in the Picture. Wait, those are really the only joint efforts I know them from? Funny which things stay with you, as On the Ropes was not even very memorable. (I also noticed I listed their names in reverse alphabetical order, because that's the order I've always thought of. Damn patriarchy.)

11) John Francis Daley and ... Jonathan Goldstein. These are the new power players on the block. They've made a trio of recent comedies that I consider reasonably successful, those being Vacation (which I like more than most people), Game Night (which most people like more than I do) and Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (see comment about Game Night). They also had writing credits on Spider-Man: Homecoming and The Flash, and hey, Daley was on Freaks and Geeks! 

12) Nat Faxon and ... Jim Rash. While we are on the topic of people who act. You'd know Rash from Community and Faxon from ... well, a lot of things, no signature roles really. Together, you'd know them from directing The Way, Way Back and Downhill, the American remake of Ruben Ostlund's Force Majeure. I guess they don't have a significant directing career as such, but since they are both actors, they seemed like the 12th "easiest" in this quiz. (I learn actor names even more quickly than I learn director names.) 

13) Justin Benson and ... Aaron Moorhead. In among more independent-minded movies underpinned by science fiction and/or mind-blowing ideas, Benson and Moorhead are considered to be low-level visionaries. They've directed The Endless and Something in the Dirt, in which they also both appeared as actors, and finally decided to side-step the starring role in favor of the more established Jamie Dornan and Anthony Mackie in the bigger budgeted (but less successful) Synchronic. 

14) Jonathan Dayton and ... Valerie Faris. This one is especially known to me because they are the only directing pair to direct one of my #1 movies of the year. Dayton and Faris got there with Ruby Sparks in 2012, but the other good films they've made are Little Miss Sunshine (perhaps more universally praised/known than Sparks) and Battle of the Sexes. And yes, this is the first of three pairings on this list who are actually married. They have three children together. 

15) Glenn Ficarra and ... John Requa. The standout for this duo is the surprisingly likable Crazy Stupid Love (I refuse to put in the commas, as discussed here), but they're also responsible for a trio of okay to good other movies I've seen: I Love You Phillip Morris, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot and Focus. I don't have a lot more to say about them so I will just continue to filibuster for a moment here to get in enough text to properly format the text and the photograph together. They're good! (There, have I filibustered long enough?) 

16) Josh Gordon and ... Will Speck. As another group of more recent comers, these might have been listed higher in the quiz for newer cinephiles. However, for me they are more obscure because although I remember their names, I can't off the top of my head remember what they directed. As it turns out, it was Blades of Glory, Office Christmas Party, The Switch and Lyle Lyle Crocodile. Okay then! Blades of Glory was from 2007 so maybe they aren't quite as "new" as I think. 

17) Shari Springer Berman and ... Robert Pulcini. These two have a similar middling output to Gordon and Speck, with higher highs and lower lows. In fact, if not for the film where I first heard of them -- American Splendor -- I might not have bothered to learn their names at all. Nanny Diaries and Girl Most Likely are definitely much worse, with the former managing to squander a young Scarlett Johansson. This pair are also married and have been so since 1994. 

18) David Siegel and ... Scott McGehee. This one is pretty obscure -- what do you expect for #18 on a list of 22? But my love of one of their films -- 2013's What Maisie Knew, which made my top 25 of last decade -- really incentivized me to put them on my radar. The Deep End (2001) is also really good, though I'm more uncertain on Uncertainty and Bee Season. Because I need to filibuster a moment longer, I noticed they have a new movie this year starring Bill Murry and Naomi Watts, The Friend, which I will probably see. 

19) Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and ... Tyler Gillett. This could be much higher as this pair has stormed on the scene in recent years, but I contend that Bettinelli-Olpin's extremely complicated last name (there's a lot going on there) makes it much more difficult to learn. I always have to check how many T's and L's there are. After getting our attention in 2019 with Ready or Not, the pair directed the first two Scream reboots as well as last year's horror movie Abigail, which I just saw a few weeks ago. I haven't liked any of those movies as much as I felt I should have, but they're definitely a pair to watch.

20) Danielle Krudy and ... Bridget Savage Cole. You really might not know them because they are just starting out, but I expect a fruitful future from sadly the only pair of women to make this list. I was quite taken with their 2019 film Blow the Man Down, and I thought they followed it up reasonably well last year with House of Spoils. I can't easily find out anything else about them because they are the first pair to have no presence on Wikipedia other than being listed as the director of their films. They'll get there I think. 

21) Jimmy Chin and ... Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi. This is the first of the final two that I expect no one to get, and it has everything to do with the complexity of the names. Jimmy Chin? Easy to remember. Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi? Not so easy to remember. You'll know them from their documentaries about extreme sports, most likely climbing (Meru, Free Solo), but also the documentary they did on the rescue of the trapped Thai soccer team called, appropriately, The Rescue. They most recently moved into narrative filmmaking with Nyad. And yes, this is the last married couple.

22) Severin Fiala and ... Veronika Franz. The least likely pair for you to know is a pairing of what I thought was two women until I just looked at a picture of Severin Fiala. I've only seen two of their films, but their Goodnight Mommy made enough of an impression to get an American remake starring Naomi Watts, and I really like both films. (They didn't get to direct the remake.) They also made The Lodge, which I saw at MIFF but did not like. The pair are Austrian and they bonded over their love of horror movies. 

How many did you get? 

Here's how to judge your score:

0-5 - You don't pay attention to credits at all and I'm wondering if you really like movies.

5-10 - Very respectable, clap yourself on the back. 

10-15 - Superlative knowledge, you are not only a cinephile but you have a good memory. 

15-20 - Expert level knowledge, and you have also seen a lot of the same films I have.

21-22 - Me.

Netflix documentaries, mid and otherwise

Desperate to add a documentary to my in-progress 2025 rankings -- there was only one out of 32 movies seen, and that was a music documentary, which is in its own category -- I reluctantly threw on the Netflix documentary Con Mum on Tuesday night.

Reluctantly? Yes. I am wary of Netflix documentaries.

The ones with colons in the title, I pretty much universally avoid. You know what I'm talking about. Just taking two at random that are being spruiked when I go on Netflix right now, how about Sweet Bobby: My Catfish Nightmare and Into the Deep: The Submarine Murder Case. 

See, rather than Netflix creating a platform for documentaries that would otherwise have no outlet to our eyeballs, I feel like it is creating documentaries that would not otherwise exist. While this is also, on the surface, a good thing, it's not a good thing when they are Sweet Bobby: My Catfish Nightmare and Into the Deep: The Submarine Murder Case.

But Con Mum had no colon, so I went for it.

Mid.

I'm not going to say Nick Green's film is bad, but it's very mid, in a perfectly Netflix way.

What do I mean by that?

A lot of talking heads, shot straight on. A lot of archival footage, much of it repeated, sometimes more than once. A subject that is interesting enough to warrant a movie, only just, but might have just as easily never been filmed. 

Past examples of this? Sure, I've got 'em. And it doesn't mean I disliked these films. In fact, I was reasonably appreciative each of them:

Longest Third Date
The Tinder Swindler
Our Father
The Social Dilemma

Not a colon in there, but maybe there should be.

Speaking of colons, I am avoiding anything in this relatively recent Netflix Untold series, where everything is Untold:, and then something that, well, hasn't been told, and that I don't want to have told.

I get it. I am not your typical Netflix viewer. I don't gravitate toward true crime. Things that exist for purely salacious reasons don't particularly fascinate me (though don't get me wrong, I can get into the salacious when it's done correctly). I don't want what I'm watching to go in one of my ears and out the other.

But Con Mum did. 

Look it's an interesting enough story. A woman gets in touch with her son after 45 years and then starts to con him out of his money, claiming she is the illegitimate daughter of the Sultan of Brunei. She builds a convincing enough facade, as all good scammers are capable of doing, that he doesn't seem like an idiot for falling for a story that seems very much adjacent to the letters you get from a Nigerian price offering you a big financial inheritance if you just send some small amount of money for processing fees.

But I don't know, aren't these true crime stories a dime a dozen? And hasn't Netflix, with its relentless content fire hose approach, made us intimately aware of just how cheap and disposable and interchangeable they are?

The very next night, though, this perspective slightly shifted.

Perhaps wanting to get my lagging documentary content up overall, whether it helped me with my 2025 rankings or not, I put on another documentary that was playing on Netflix, from 2024, not perhaps realizing, when I first heard about it, that Netflix was also a distributor of this documentary, not just a service that happened to be streaming it.

Why didn't I make this connection, you ask, especially when I was so attuned to the mid quality of the Netflix documentary? And not just because there was no colon?

Maybe because I heard The Remarkable Life of Ibelin discussed briefly on Filmspotting, one of the oldest film podcasts and one I have been listening to and trusting since 2011. Their discussion of a film gives it a certain imprimatur, or at least distinctiveness beyond the sea of non-fiction content Netflix make available to us all. I think it's fair to say they have never mentioned a Netflix documentary that had a colon in it. 

What's more, I remembered that Ibelin was directed by Benjamin Ree, a filmmaker whose previous effort, 2020's The Painter and the Thief, was one of Filmspotting co-host Adam Kempenaar's favorite films of that year. Which seemed to remove it from the realm of the director-for-hire projects I am considering Netflix guilty of today. 

Well, it was a lot more than mid.

I'm not sure the subject matter of The Remarkable Life of Ibelin exceeds our most cynical expectations of a documentary, as it is quite sentimental in remembering a young man who succumbed to complications from muscular dystrophy. But the execution is what makes a film clearly surpass its own potential limitations, and Ree's film has that big time.

For one, it put me in mind of one of my favorite movies of last year, which wasn't available to most people until this year, though I got out ahead of them by seeing it at MIFF. That's Grand Theft Hamlet, the documentary that takes place entirely inside Grand Theft Auto as the avatars stage Hamlet during COVID. That movie mixes its comedy with profundity, while this one is much more skewed toward the profundity side. But like that movie, a lot of this takes place inside a video game, or at least, the animators' rendition of that video game, as Mats Steen, the young man at the center of the movie, escaped the limitations of his body by existing in a World of Warcraft game community that came to consist of very real friendships, even though they had not met IRL. There's something about watching video game characters engage in activities involving real pathos that really gets me.

Then there's the little details about how to handle the rest of it. Instead of every talking head interview being shot at brightly lit medium depth -- the kind of setup that engendered the dismissive term "talking head" in the first place -- I noted that some of these interviews were ata  side angle, and halfway across the room. If that seems like a superficial change for misguided reasons of artistry, or just intentionally breaking the mold of the typical talking head interview, that is not how I perceived it. Or even if that was Ree's thinking, then I congratulate him for it rather than faulting him for the choice.

Even lathering it on a little thick about its central character and his impact on others in the world despite the lack of likelihood that he would ever be in a position to do that, it's a really good film. 

So I guess I can't really prejudge the problematic subgenre of the Netflix documentary, even as I might like to -- which is probably a good thing, considering that Netflix is our only consistent source of access to documentaries out there.

Who knows, maybe I'll even watch one with a colon in the title. 

Canonically, Patrick Bateman was killed by a little girl

I don't consider Patrick Bateman, the (very flawed) protagonist of Bret Easton Ellis' novel American Psycho, to be some classic character in literature, exempt from alternate interpretations within the culture.

But killed by a preteen girl?

That's how American Psycho 2, Morgan J. Freeman's truly terrible sequel to Mary Herron's terrific American Psycho, starts out. (Note the J. in the director's name. This is not the voice of Red and God making a random terrible movie.)

Before she's played by Mila Kunis, the young Rachael Newman was a kidnapping victim by Bateman, who was in the process of killing Rachael's babysitter at the time she got herself free from the shackles binding her to a chair. Because Bateman underestimated her and was not keeping an eye on her, she found a large kitchen knife and plunged it deep into his back. 

That's a pretty laughable idea in a pretty laughable movie, one that was widely panned, involvement in which Kunis herself publicly regretted. (Freeman's thoughts on the film are not known to me, either Morgan or Morgan J.)

To be clear, this has nothing to do with any notion Ellis put forth about the ultimate fate of his most famous character. Ellis never wrote anything else about him after the end of his novel, and in fact, he was one of those shouting from the rooftops his disavowal of this movie. The movie is actually based on a novel called The Girl Who Wouldn't Die, which has nothing to do with American Psycho and was tied in with the IP after the first movie was a hit.

So Bateman's death here is not actual canon, of course, because a movie like American Psycho 2 laughs in the face of a notion like canon. But it's funny to consider that if you are a person who considers everything in a movie to be a real and authorised part of the story of a famous character, you would have to accept that this is how Bateman meets his maker.

My concern with this has nothing to do with some idea that being stabbed by a preteen girl means Bateman "went out like a bitch" or some other toxic notion that loans Bateman any sense of greatness that he doesn't deserve. In fact, you could argue that it emasculates him in a way that is somehow righteous.

But the movie around it is so dumb in so many ways that it just feels like it doesn't earn the association with a character who was conceived with such sinister elan, and then portrayed in such a memorable way by Christian Bale. 

For one, the movie is narrated by Kunis' character, and in a typical example of the movie's many weaknesses, the sound mix is off, so her narration sounds too distant in the soundtrack. Never mind that she just doesn't sound like a psycho. The narration sounds more like a teenage girl who talks too quickly. 

If you are going to go this route with the story -- which involves Rachael trying to get to Quantico to work for the FBI, and hoping to become the TA of a criminology professor played by William Shatner -- then at least give her some real strange predilections, other than murder. We know Bateman was obsessed with Huey Lewis and the News, personal hygiene, designer suits and having the best business card on the block. If you are going to bother to associate unrelated material with a "franchise," if you want to call American Psycho that, at least try to make her feel like a spiritual successor to Bateman in some way, a girl we'd peg as not quite right if we saw her on the street. The character was not written that way, nor can Kunis -- who I liked a lot in general -- play her that way.

Anyway, this shit movie does not deserve any more of my time today. 

Understanding Editing: A Place in the Sun

This is the fifth in my 2025 monthly series Understanding Editing, in which I am alternating Oscar winners for best editing between those I've seen and those I haven't, chronologically, to get a better sense of what makes a superlative version of that craft.

Up until ten minutes before I started watching A Place in the Sun, I thought I was going to be watching King Solomon's Mines. 

Mines, the 1950 Oscar winner for best editing, had been the movie slotted in to take the May spot in Understanding Editing since the series started. I'd say the reason for that somewhat arbitrary decision was that I saw the remake of King Solomon's Mines from 1985, starring Richard Chamberlain, and it was one of the first movies I saw in the theater that I remember really hating. Of course, I couldn't in 2025 meaningfully compare the Oscar winner with a movie I saw 40 years ago, but it was a useful tiebreaker anyway.

I can't remember if I scouted it to check its availability for rental at the time I set the schedule for the series, but if I did, I didn't do a very good job. I tried a couple places to rent it on Tuesday night and couldn't find it, and obviously it was also not available on any of my streamers. (It came up on Amazon as a movie I could watch if I tried one of those sub-services they are always offering, but I never like to get myself involved in that sort of thing. I don't need any more streaming services, even if these smaller services end up being like four bucks a month.)

So in order to get another movie from between the release year of last month's already seen best editing winner (1946's The Best Years of Our Lives) and next month's already seen best editing winner (1953's From Here to Eternity), I just shifted one year ahead and there was 1951's A Place in the Sun, a movie I'd heard of but knew nothing about. 

In fact, throughout the entirety of my knowing about this title, I've confused it in my mind with A Raisin in the Sun, a Sidney Poitier movie from ten years later, which I also obviously have not seen. But A Place in the Sun is not A Raisin in the Sun.

What it is is a melodrama starring Elizabeth Taylor, Montgomery Clift and Shelley Winters, far darker than I was expecting, which it took me a while to warm up to. Once I started warming up to it, though, I warmed up to it in a big way.

I could sense an auteur's sensibilities in the film's opening, which shows Clift's George Eastman trying to hitchhike his way on a dusty roadside to get to a job in his rich industrialist uncle's factory. This opening, plus the black and white filmmaking, put me more in mind of an independent film than a movie by the director (George Stevens) who would go on to make the large canvas color films Shane and Giant later in the decade. I'm not sure A Place in the Sun is at their level, but it's in the same conversation.

However, as I said, I couldn't tell where this film was going for its first half, and felt a bit frustrated with it. George takes up with another factory worker, Alice Tripp (Winters), against factory rules, so he has to keep their relationship a secret. Because it's a secret, that also leaves him, publicly, a free agent when he meets the beautiful socialite Angela Vickers (Taylor) and falls for her. Things get dark as he juggles the two women and bad decisions need to be made -- or get made, anyway. As nepotism allows George to get promoted well above Alice's station, themes of social class and moral responsibility get a workout. 

It's the shift out of neutral and into the dark, which occurs around the halfway point, that really got me on board, since it also gave the plot a definitive shove in some direction. I guess I'm going to get a bit spoilery from here, so if you care about having the details of a 74-year-old movie unspoiled, tread carefully.

Although I don't see any mention of this relationship on the internet (actually there's just one that I just founded when I expanded my search), I felt like A Place in the Sun has a moment in its second half that is a direct allusion to F.W. Murnau's Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans. And yes, it does make me feel like a successful cinephile when I can recognize an allusion in a 1951 film to a 1927 film. This is where things get spoilery.

In both movies, a man takes a woman out on a rowboat with the intention of pushing her off and killing her. I won't tell you how it goes in either movie, since you may also not want spoilers for a 98-year-old film. I will say that both characters have a major crisis of conscious as they get farther down a path from which there is no return, and we see the toll of it on their face. However, since I've already characterised the second half of this film as "dark," that will probably lead you to conclude a few things about what may or may not happen.

I suppose I should get to talking about why this film won best editing, and why it feels like a distinctive artistic achievement specifically for that fact.

For that frustrating first half, it felt a bit like a redux of last month's viewing of The Best Years of Our Lives -- not because my feelings about the movies were similar (I love Lives), but because in both of them, I could not see the movie's decisive edge in its editing that won it the Oscar. Then I started to really notice a technique being used by editor William Hornbeck, who had this one win out of four nominations (including It's a Wonderful Life). He also served as Stevens' editor on Giant. 

Dissolves have been around since the start of cinema, so I was out of luck if I hoped that Hornbeck had played any significant role in moving their usage forward. However, the way he uses them is distinct and purposeful.

Since I don't want to assume you know a lot about editing, I'll explain what a dissolve is. It's when the image from one scene slowly transitions into the image from the next scene, such that one image is "dissolving" and the other one is taking its place, and both are visible during the period of transition. There is also usually, though not always, the suggestion of the passage of time, so it works well in a montage of images that suggest time elapsing. 

With A Place in the Sun, its the duration of their simultaneous visibility that struck me as profound. There were a lot of instances of this in Hornbeck's dissolves, but I think specifically of one involving Taylor's face with a look of concern on it, lingering for an almost uncomfortably long amount of time over the next scene, which depicts the thing she's concerned about. It almost makes her a presence in that scene, hanging over it like an apparition. 

I say it's uncomfortably long not because Hornbeck misuses the technique, but because the extra three to five seconds is enough to make us notice this as a violation of the normal usage rules for dissolves. Editing techniques are almost designed to go unnoticed, as editing is most often the silent aide to good storytelling, not calling attention to itself. When it does call attention to itself, it's to a purpose, and of course there are both good and bad versions of it calling attention to itself. Here, it's very much good, and only calls attention to itself, I would argue, if you are looking for it, as I was. For most viewers, it would just be subconscious.

In A Place in the Sun, the dissolves had the effect of casting a slow pall of the inevitability of the unfolding tragedy. I didn't mention it before now, but A Place in the Sun is adapted from a 1925 novel which also became a play called An American Tragedy. The dissolves used here mostly show a slow crawl of one thing to another thing to another thing, changing scenes and passing a period of time for us, but also underscoring the preordained nature of the events that follow when you make one bad decision. You can't dissolve through things that are unpredictable, only through things that are playing out according to a tragic predetermination. And the use of this technique becomes ever more thought provoking as we see where the narrative is going.

In retrospect, the inability to get King Solomon's Mines seems like a very lucky stroke indeed. That might have gotten me more examples of editing in an action or adventure context, as I had in earlier series entries like The Adventures of Robin Hood and Sergeant York, but it likely wouldn't have deepened my appreciation of the narrative capabilities of editing like A Place in the Sun did.

Next month, as mentioned earlier, it will be my second viewing of From Here to Eternity, the 1953 best picture winner -- which I know for certain will be available to rent. 

Mission: Letterboxd submission gag

This post could have also been titled "I finally saw: Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning: Part 1," because indeed, I'd been one of the last holdouts. 

I wasn't opposed to seeing it in 2023, even though the entries in this series since my favorite, Ghost Protocol, have underwhelmed me. It seemed especially likely that I'd see it since I saw the mini featurette about the making of Tom Cruise's motorcycle cliff jump about six times before other movies. But I just never worked it out, and the lengthy two hour and 43-minute running time certainly didn't help, though that is of course a standard running time for a blockbuster these days.

If you read the post I wrote yesterday, you wouldn't think it was particularly likely I'd be seeing a 163-minute movie now either -- but then my son was invited over to his auntie's for a sleepover last night, meaning his usual informal claim to the living room was non-existent. So I started watching it at just after 7, and still didn't finish until after midnight -- though that was also because I stopped for dinner and to watch a show with my wife, as well as, yes, have a short nap.

There are any number of things about the movie itself I could write a whole post about, given my low bar for writing a post, but I'll just touch on a few quick ones before getting to what I'm actually writing about today. 

One thing I wanted to know is, why doesn't Ethan Hunt ever think about his wife anymore? You know, the one played Michelle Monaghan? I'm not sure if she left the franchise on bad terms, but any time Ethan has to think about his past, he thinks about another woman who died (did we see her in other movies?) as well as Ilse Faust. What happened to poor Michelle? Maybe she didn't die (I don't think she did) which is why he doesn't need to think about her.

Also, I found some of the execution in this movie really hammy. I was really distracted by a scene near the beginning when a bunch of government bigwigs are telling the CIA director about this new "entity" that's the MacGuffin for this movie and for the one coming out next week, and there's one full line of exposition about it that goes on for about two or three minutes, with cutaway images showing the "entity" in the background -- efficient screenwriting you will agree. The thing I thought was hammy was that the characters continue one long thought about it, but they trade off who's speaking at intervals of about every sentence. And there are like five characters participating in this exposition. I know that's supposed to be more interesting than if just a single person were doing the exposing, but it's artificial as hell.

The thing I'm writing about is what happens when you add Dead Reckoning on Letterboxd.

I went to add it this morning, and as soon as I clicked the submit button, the whole screen was taken over by a black computer screen with green writing on it, coming in little bursts, as green writing on computer screens does. For half a second I was like "Oh shit, what just happened," which was probably the point. I quickly realized it was a movie tie-in as it started talking about my review self-destructing in five seconds, and then a notification that Ethan Hunt had short-circuited the self-destruction sequence.

Cute. But since it went on for about 15 seconds, eventually, kind of annoying.

It made me wonder if there has been any other movie that has partnered with Letterboxd for this sort of promotional tie-in, which, when you think about it, is kind of unnecessary. I mean, I'm adding it because I've already seen the movie. I resented it a little bit, because I was able to conflate the promo with Tom Cruise's ego, and I imagined that Letterboxd isn't getting anything out it. In reality, they probably are, but maybe I'm still a little bit annoyed.

Anyway, if you haven't added Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning: Part One to your Letterboxd yet, you might do it just to see this little bit -- which I am now myself promoting, I guess. 

Losing my ability not to sleep through movies

The poster for Bumblebee accompanies this post, but if you are reading this within the first 12 hours or so after it's published, you won't see Bumblebee listed as my most recently watched movie in the area to the right.

That's because despite starting it two nights ago, I still haven't finished watching it.

I guess as you age a little bit, you lose a step on some of the things you used to do well. As a prime example, as I type this, I am wearing reading glasses, which I've had for maybe a year now, despite always seeing perfectly for my first half-century on the planet.

More pertinent to today's post, I appear to be losing my stamina for watching a movie at night -- and also, sometimes, my ability to pause it.

It's not that I never fall asleep during movies. I do frequently have a nap during a movie, which probably plays havoc with my actual sleep later on, but what are you going to do. However, in those situations, I have always, invariably, almost without fail, paused the movie for the entirety of my nap. Which I could often keep to a reasonable length of 15 to 20 minutes, leaving me slightly more refreshed for the home stretch.

I have, in fact, paused during the "nap" -- more like a prelude to my full night's rest -- that has gotten me each of the last two attempts on Bumblebee. It's just that after starting around 11:30 last night, it didn't end until 1:50 -- at which point I just decided to save the remaining 25 minutes of the movie for today.

However, there are some examples recently of movies I've finished the same night I watched them, with some pretty sketchy details of what happened in the second half of the movie.

On Tuesday night, for example, I watched and loved Paper Moon. However, there's a lot I don't remember about how the father and the daughter he refuses to acknowledge is his own -- played by real-life father and daughter Ryan and Tatum O'Neal -- went from scamming people on bible sales to the moonshine business. There's some stuff related to an exotic dancer played by the incomparable Madeleine Kahn that is also pretty fuzzy.

Across Sunday and Monday, I feel like I saw all of Abigail, but it did take me two nights to do it. 

Then last week it was Another Simple Favor, which I wasn't really liking anyway, so I didn't consider this such a loss. And though I was there for the very end, I couldn't remember what had happened with the movie's main villain, played by Alison Janney. I had to look it up online later on, and it wasn't that I couldn't remember what happened with her -- I'd never seen it. And I couldn't be sure if it was just a crucial 30 seconds of sleep or if there's a whole ten- to 15-minute chunk of that movie I didn't properly experience.

I suppose this is not going to get better anytime soon. My younger son, who says the internet doesn't work properly in his room, doesn't clear out of the living room until 10 o'clock most nights, and even if he did, my wife would still be doing household chores until at least that time, and I feel like a heel if I don't try to keep pace with her. Plus, I'm getting older and probably sleepier, though life is making my pretty damn sleepy these days due to my busiest period ever at work. 

So if I'm not going to start watching movies earlier, and if I'm already trying to watch shorter movies to compensate for my likely failure to finish them in one evening, then not only am I missing out on the longer movies that might be an organic part of my viewing schedule, we might start seeing a lot of weeks where I watch three movies rather than six movies. 

Which most people would consider fine. I'm not most people. And especially in the short run, I am trying to watch as many movies as I can. For reasons I won't tell you now because they will become clear in another six weeks, I am trying to watch another 40 movies before the end of June in order to accomplish something, viewing-wise, that I "need" to accomplish by the end of that month. So yeah, I'll be trying to squeeze in as many cheeky afternoon movies as I can until then.

As for Bumblebee ... although it's unfair to make a final pronouncement on it, since I haven't finished watching it, I'll say I was hoping it would be a lot more different from a standard Transformers movie than it has been. I mean, it is different for sure ... but it still has Transformers in it, which is pretty damning to the prospects of any movie. 

Is this the career Dan Stevens thought he'd have?

Don't get me wrong, Dan Stevens has had plenty of work, especially compared to the other alumni of Downton Abbey. Possibly only Lily James has had a comparable level of post-Abbey success.

But is the career he's having now really why he left the green pastures of Julian Fellowes' show for the seemingly greener pastures of Hollywood?

Because he left a hit show at the height of its success, Stevens follows in the footsteps of cautionary tales like David Caruso, whose snubbing of NYPD Blue saw him out in the wilderness of middling movie success until he scurried back to television with CSI: Miami. 

Stevens has done better than that, but he'll still carry with him -- at least with me, and I'm sure other Abbey watchers -- the reminder of having bailed on the show at the height of our shipping of his Matthew Crawley and Michelle Dochery's Mary Crawley. (Don't worry, it's not as gross as it sounds. They were distant cousins, if memory serves.) It's probably not a spoiler at this point to say they killed him off in a car accident at the end of season 3, I believe it was, at the actor's request, in a way that always seemed sudden if you're being generous, abrupt if you're not. (The only reason we wouldn't say they Poochie'd him was because he requested it instead of being fired.)

The reason I'm considering this today is that last night I watched Abigail, the perfectly acceptable horror movie from last year in which Stevens stars. There's actually another reason thinking back on Downton Abbey is particularly appropriate with Abigail, but I'll get to that later on.

"Perfectly acceptable" describes Stevens' career in general. Let's look at some of the highlights, or maybe I should say, mid-lights:

The first movie I remember him being in after he left Abbey was The Guest, which is not anyone's idea of a big, "announce yourself to everyone else who doesn't watch Downton Abbey" role. It's a sort of home invasion thriller directed by Adam Wingard, who yes, was a name there for a bit and directed a couple Godzilla movies. But I don't really hear anyone talking about The Guest in any of my cinematic circles.

Also in 2014, among the movies I saw, were The Cobbler and Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb. The former, an Adam Sandler vehicle, was sort of a laughingstock, even though it was directed by a director with credibility (Win Win's Tom McCarthy), and I don't think he even had a particularly memorable role in the third Night at the Museum movie, though I don't really remember that movie so it's not surprising I don't remember his role in it.

I saw him in Colossal in 2016 -- don't remember him in that but he wasn't the star -- but probably his first really "big" showcase was as the titular beast in Beauty and the Beast in 2017. And while this is certainly a prominent showcase, it is also, notably, a showcase that does not put his real face on display for all but a very small percentage of the running time. 

I suppose the best movie I think he's made since leaving the show was Alex Ross Perry's Her Smell, which ranked in my top ten in 2018. This is not the sort of movie you make, though, if you are leaving a show because you want bigger and better things, because you want to see your name in lights. (More on that thought in a moment.)

His concentrated efforts in the year 2020 may be both the most sustained interesting period since he left the show, and also the most illustrative of where he finds himself at this point. I really liked both Dave Franco's The Rental and especially Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga, which was just outside my top ten for the year. However, in both films he's clearly the member of an ensemble, not the star. The same can also be said for Blithe Spirit, but the interesting thing about this film is that it is almost exactly back in the milieu of Downton Abbey -- which could be kind of interpreted as the equivalent of Caruso running back to TV with CSI: Miami. 

And TV really is where Stevens found himself the past four years, for the most part, until Abigail and Wingard's second Godzilla movie, both last year.

Look there are some good titles in there. I'm not saying there aren't.

But I think if you leave a show like Stevens left Abbey, when we had come to love him so much and felt like there was so much that could be done with his character that we would enjoy watching, he should expect us to scrutinize his choices, and to wonder if it was all worth it.

Then there's the other possibility: Dan Stevens just doesn't care.

There's the possibility -- and maybe reading just a little bit on the internet could confirm this, though you know how I don't like to do that -- that he just didn't think Downton Abbey was challenging him enough. We know David Caruso thought he could be a movie star. I'm only assuming Dan Stevens had the same goal, and maybe I'm wrong about that. So what seem to me like misses on his part, failures to take off in the way he surely wanted, might just be him trying to choose an interesting array of roles that didn't always require him to be a rich lord dressing in 1920s garb.

I said there was a Downton Abbey element about Abigail that I wanted to come back to.

A big reveal at the end of the movie -- and this only counts as a spoiler if you care about "surprises" in the cast, though this actor is not really big enough to qualify -- is that a Big Bad vampire, who is only referred to previously in hushed tones, is played by Matthew Goode.

And what is the significance of this, you ask?

Well, after Mary Crawley lost her new husband to a crash in one of those newfangled automobiles, she eventually took up with quite an ironic new partner in that regard: a race car driver. This is who she ended the series with, as her happily ever after.

And that race car driver was played, of course, by Matthew Goode.

I'm not sure if Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, the directors of Abigail, really cared about this connection or made the choice with any intentionality, though they do have Goode's character and Stevens' character do battle at the end. Whether that was fighting to decide the matter of Mary Crawley once and for all, I do not know.