5,000 good movies

Milestone alert!

Olivier Assayas' The Wizard of the Kremlin -- which I saw on Wednesday via a screener for its Thursday release in Australia, in order to review it (see here) -- is the 5,000th film that I've ever liked.

To put that in a better context, it's the 7,311th film that I've seen at least once, according to my carefully manicured list, meaning there are 2,311 movies that I don't like. Or, that I don't like enough to give them a thumbs up in my spreadsheet, which is usually equivalent to three stars. Of course, only half or so were movies I saw when I was even giving out star ratings. 

If you want to go by percentages, it means I like 68.39% of the movies I've ever seen. It's been hovering at just over 68% for some time now, and this is about the highest it's ever gotten. Considering that I am probably a little easier, if anything, on movies the older I get, this number will probably continue to go up slowly, but likely will never get over 69%. (Never say never. Maybe the movie industry will just become unfathomably brilliant in the coming years.)

I'm not sure what to make of the milestone, and I should say that The Wizard of Kremlin only just barely qualified. I started out liking it at about a 7/10, 3.5 star level, before eventually tiring of it and landing it at only 6/10 and 3 stars. Although there is at least one Assayas movie I love (Personal Shopper), I find myself disappointed by his movies a lot more than I am ... um, appointed by them. And perhaps unsurprisingly, Personal Shopper might be the movie he's made that's most unlike him. 

I know it's hard to tell from the poster, but that's Paul Dano next to Jude Law's Vladimir Putin -- an uncanny casting choice if ever there was one. (Law, not Dano.) Even being the star of two of my former #1 movies of the year, Dano could not elevate this one above middling. 

For the sake of fairness, I should say I am not uniquely qualified to discuss what is or isn't like Assayas. This is his 20th feature over 40 years, and I've seen only six of them, and all but one of those since 2012. So it may be that there are hidden Assayas gems that would be exactly what I wanted from him. Among those I've seen, I like Kremlin better than The Wasp Network, Something in the Air and Clouds of Sils Maria, in any case. One of his most famous works is probably Carlos, a TV mini-series that I also haven't seen, but which I suspect to be very similar in structure to this newest one. 

But back to the milestone. I suppose it's more of a milestone of total movies seen, though I wouldn't be celebrating #7,311 on its own. It just so happens that I once decided to mark every movie I'd seen as either good or bad and then keep a running percentage as I went. 

It did take a little while to finally arrive. I noticed when I got to 4,999 thumbs up (it was The Odyssey, which would have been thematically perfect for the milestone), and then the next three movies were all close but no cigar, coming in at 2.5 stars each. I might have even been a little harder on them than I would have ordinarily been -- I said I was close to giving Crossroads three stars in a post earlier this week -- except I wanted #5,000 to be, I don't know, distinctive. But I finally gave in and decided that The Wizard of the Kremlin was slightly more good than bad, rather than slightly more bad than good. 

And so I release you. Nothing more to see here today. 

A seemingly unnecessary defense of The Odyssey

Neither of the first two people I spoke to about The Odyssey actually liked it.

One of those impressions was more middling. I know on Letterboxd he gave it three stars, but the words he wrote in his Letterboxd review were more indicative of his true dissatisfaction with the film.

The other guy? He quoted me two stars, but his words, in our Facebook chat, read more like a one. 

So does this make them the only two who didn't like it?

Surely not, but the overwhelming general consensus on The Odyssey is that it's great. Still, having those be the first two opinions I encountered personally tended to shake my own feelings of love for the film. 

I've since spoken personally to one other guy who loved it, though maybe not as much as I did. Many of the others with whom I regularly discuss film haven't yet seen it for one reason or another. 

A Christopher Nolan film is usually a safe film to like. The last one won best picture, the one from 2017 was praised through the roof, the one from 2014 is considered a modern sci-fi classic in some groups, and before that you get to Inception and the Batman movies. Only the one from 2020 (Tenet) is a bit of a head scratcher and enjoys less general appreciation among critics and fans alike. 

So why do I feel as though liking The Odyssey makes me a less discerning cinephile? Maybe even a bit of a bimbo?

It's because the way I like it reminds me of another film that I and a lot of people cherish, but that true film snobs trashed from the start: Titanic.

I think if you told Nolan he'd made a film that operates on a person in a similar way to Titanic, he'd respond by saying "Fuck you." But I think it's true, and I mean it as a compliment. Titanic was, after all, my #1 movie of 1997, and it remains in my top 100 on Flickchart. 

But I don't think Nolan would want to have his work compared to anything made by James Cameron, just because I imagine Nolan was one of those snobs who didn't like Titanic either. (And if you, dear reader, are also one of those "snobs," please don't take my phrasing personally. My own wife does not like Titanic and I obviously think quite highly of her.)

But wait, maybe I shouldn't be so quick to assume I know what Nolan thinks of Titanic. Here is what AI tells me about Nolan's thoughts on the movie:

Christopher Nolan deeply respects Titanic and frequently praises director James Cameron's ability to pull audiences into a different world, even when the audience's foreknowledge of the ending (the ship sinking) is absolute. [1, 2, 3, 4]

Nolan has pointed to Titanic as a masterclass in how a film can build emotional suspense and create a powerful sense of wonder within its own narrative text, contrasting it with his own approach to historical suspense in movies like Dunkirk. [1]

If I am to believe this -- and we know AI is never wrong -- then maybe he did set out to make The Odyssey have a similar emotional impact on a viewer as Titanic. 

It occurs to me that I haven't even told you yet why The Odyssey gives me Titanic vibes.

Aside from them both being high-budget epic period pieces, I actually think the drawing of characters as good or evil has a sort of epic quality on the level of myth. And that may be a strange thing to say about a lead character (Odysseus) who demonstrates numerous flawed moments and moments of poor judgment. But I think where we land with Odysseus is to feel great investment in his journey home and to love him, warts and all. That's especially the case when contrasted with Penelope's suitors, who are so nasty that you might even say the portrayal approaches camp. 

And I think that might be where I get my most notable similarity to Titanic. Robert Pattinson's lead suitor is such a hissable villain, such a poor match for our leading lady, that it put me in mind of the campy but great performance of Billy Zane in Titanic. 

The people who don't like The Odyssey seem to focus on nitpicks about the story (the sacking of Troy is barely mentioned in the poem, and yet it's a primary focus here!) or the accuracy of the costumes (those uniforms are from the wrong century!). They seem to want a purely intellectual Odyssey, the kind designed as a History Channel series rather than a rousing cinematic epic.

Me? I want the rousing epic. Always have. Always will.

And it's not that I don't want good verisimilitude, or moral complexity, or knotty storytelling that doesn't easily resolve itself. I do want those things, sometimes. 

But if a filmmaker sets out to make a movie that will leave me quivering with adrenaline in the finale, and near tears on several occasions -- maybe even more than near -- then that is more valuable to me than a perfectly historically accurate Odyssey as a professor of antiquity would have commissioned it. 

We go to movies to feel, I say. And people who lose their love of movies over time often do so because the movies cease to accomplish that for them. 

Because it is increasingly unusual to really feel scared in a horror movie, or really laugh at a comedy, we really remember and appreciate new movies that makes us do those things.

And so it is with sitting in a movie theater, watching a giant epic play out on the biggest screen possible, and feeling your fists unconsciously ball with rage, your heart unconsciously increase to a fever pitch in time with the score, and your eyes start to press tears through the ducts that usually keep them dammed up in reserve. 

That kind of movie is worth celebrating. 

And if your mileage varies on The Odyssey, well, maybe you didn't like Titanic either. 

You snob. 

Mixed reviews on verifying yesterday's post

After writing about the Netflix screen saver mode yesterday, I naturally found myself on the couch in front of a series of loops of this screen saver that very night. 

So naturally, I thought I should test the things I said in yesterday's post with actual numbers. 

I was pretty spot on with the timings and quantity. Here is what I said yesterday about the duration each slide spends on screen:

"It puts single images from other Netflix shows and movies on the screen for about 15 seconds before switching to the next one."

Actual time? A little more than 14 seconds. I tested it consistently and the only differences were natural margins of error in how long it took me to press stop on the stopwatch app on my phone. Why 14 and not 15? I don't know, seems like they would just round up. 

And here is what I said about how long it takes for the title to come up, giving my son and me the chance to guess the title before it comes up:

"The image appears about two seconds before the title."

Actual time? Two seconds! I'm glad I opted for two, because I originally considered writing "one or two seconds," before realizing that one was too quick.

And here is what I said about the quantity of slides in the loop before it starts over again:

"They go in a loop of maybe 40 titles before repeating."

Actual quantity? Forty-five titles. That might be the one I'm most impressed with, given that I have never counted and only ever estimated. Forty-five still seems like a bit of a random number, just like the 14 seconds rather than 15 seconds. I probably would have either rounded down to 40 or up to 50, but that's why they're doing that job and I'm not.

So that was all pretty good. I am pretty good with numbers. I have a weird ability with them that I sometimes think verges on freakish. 

But the actual premise of the post? A bit flimsy.

I said it was weird for Netflix to be advertising a random old movie, even if it was new to their service, rather than concentrating on newer movies or TV shows, the kind you'd think they'd be more invested in if trying to figure out how to spend their money on future original programming.

Well, do you want to know some other movies that were featured among these 45 titles, in addition to the subject of yesterday's post, Cleaner?

Lost in Translation
Crazy Stupid Love
The Truman Show
American Psycho
Fight Club
Take Shelter
Wieners
Zoolander
The Devil's Advocate
Go
The 40 Year Old Virgin

If you include Cleaner, that's 12 of the 45 titles expended on advertising old movies, at least in this incarnation of the screen saver, which I believe only lasts a couple days before changing. So that's 27 percent. 

Now, I would argue that only one of those besides Cleaner is truly "random," that being the movie Wieners, which I had to look up. It's from 2008 and it stars Kenan Thompson and Zachary Levi. Unlike Cleaner, I don't think I need to watch this one. 

The rest, at least, are considered classics from between the mid-90s and the early-10s. 

I do think it's funny how much this content changed since I last watched the screen saver and was inspired to watch Cleaner and then write about it. I may be wrong, but I don't think any of those titles were in the loop the last time I watched, other than Cleaner. It's almost like they changed the content in response to what I wrote yesterday, doubling down just to prove me wrong. 

I also wanted to mention that in two instances, the movie was being advertised because it was leaving the streamer soon. I believe those two titles were Lost in Translation and Zoolander. 

I won't talk about all 45 titles in the loop, but I do have a couple other observations:

1) There were only two new Netflix movies in the loop, only one of which has actually come out already, that being Voicemails for Isabelle. The other is the Kevin Hart vehicle 72 Hours, which I believe is due out in the next week to ten days. Given that I've probably already seen a dozen movies that debuted on Netflix in 2026, if I were them, I would include more of those. Especially something like Enola Holmes 3. 

2) The tendency to advertise old content is not limited to movies. Also in this loop were the TV shows The Office (American version), Community, The Mentalist and Dr. House. Yes, you read that correctly. The show known as House was listed as Dr. House here. I don't know, maybe it's an Australian thing. 

3) There were a number of movies that are not "new" but are not "old" either. These were primarily horror movies: Tarot, Final Destination: Bloodlines and Heretic. Final Destination is actually coming to the service at the start of August (which will give me the chance to revisit it, especially the brilliant opening). Companion isn't a horror, but it can generally be thought of in the same category of "high-concept genre film." Interestingly, both Heretic and Companion feature actress Sophie Thatcher. (And Heretic also features actress Chloe East, star of one of those 2026 Netflix original films I've seen, Roommates.)

Okay it's time for you stop reading this and for me to go do something else.

New to Netflix, ancient history to everyone else

If you're like me and you have Netflix available as an app on your TV, I'm sure you sometimes let it go into screen saver mode, where it puts single images from other Netflix shows and movies on the screen for about 15 seconds before switching to the next one. 

If this mode is on while we're sitting in the living room doing other things, my younger son and I will play a game where we see who can be first to guess the title of the new image, since the image appears about two seconds before the title. We get so we know these titles just from this screen saver mode, and since they go in a loop of maybe 40 titles before repeating, sometimes you develop a sense of what's going to come next because you remember it from last time. I'm glad I have one person in my family who enjoys playing this game, because the older son and his mother certainly do not.

I also use this mode to identify movies that may be new to Netflix that I need to see. I try to keep up on release dates for new Netflix movies, but sometimes I get behind and use this as a nice refresher.

However, not all the movies (or TV shows) that appear here are actually new. Though I can't figure out a rhyme nor reason to why they're promoting certain old ones. 

Take Cleaner, for example. When I saw a single image of Samuel L. Jackson from Renny Harlin's 2007 film, for half a second I thought "Oh, what's this new Samuel L. Jackson movie?" In the remaining half of that second, I realized that this is not at all what Samuel L. Jackson looks like in 2026. So concluded it was an old movie.

Now I'd say it's obvious that this is new to Netflix. At least that much must be true. In fact, Google via its AI confirms that it started streaming on the platform in late May. 

But surely Netflix is adding old movies all the time, isn't it? Why was this random 19-year-old movie, which I don't remember from the time even though it also stars such big names as Eva Mendes, Ed Harris and Luis Guzman, given place of prominence within those 40 titles on the screen saver, which also include a bunch of genuinely new Netflix movies and TV shows?

I guess I don't know why Netflix is trying to "make Cleaner happen." Is there an incentive for them that this title in particular does well? And if so, what is that incentive?

Even AI is a bit confused about the logical sequence of events here. When I googled "when did cleaner start playing on Netflix," the answer was "The 2007 crime thriller Cleaner (starring Samuel L. Jackson and Eva Mendes) saw a major resurgence on the platform, and was notably added to the platform in the United States in late May 2026."

That almost makes it sound like being added to the platform was a response to its resurgence on the platform, which doesn't make a lick of sense.

Well, it worked. I watched it last night. 

And found it to be utterly middling. 2.5 stars. The kind of borderline competent but otherwise completely forgettable movie that I wouldn't have remembered the first time around because no one did very much to promote it even back then. 

And that would change 19 years later why, exactly?

If you figure it out, let me know. 

Britney Spears is not a terrible actress

Over the years I've conflated the critical response to the Britney Spears vehicle Crossroads with the critical response to the Kelly Clarkson-Justin Guarini vehicle From Justin to Kelly. 

I think there are four reasons for this:

1) Both movies star a singer or singers who are trying their hand at acting;

2) Spears famously dated a different guy named Justin;

3) Both movies are (sort of) road trip movies; 

4) Neither movie propelled the stars on to other acting roles. 

And so I assumed both were bad, and that the stars were a big reason why they were bad.

That's definitely true of From Justin to Kelly. This movie's reputation was so bad that I saved it for a special February 29th viewing back in 2024. If you don't know, I try to watch the worst movie I can find every February 29th, though sometimes it backfires, as I actually sort of liked the movie I saw on February 29, 2020 (Christian Mingle).

It didn't backfire with From Justin to Kelly. It wouldn't be exaggerating very much to say that this is one of the worst movies I've ever seen, though there are currently 22 movies ranked lower than it on my Flickchart. I guess that's still "one of the worst." And the poor craft of Clarkson and Guarini was certainly part of the problem, but by no means the biggest part. 

Crossroads is different. I wouldn't say this is a "good" movie, but it flirted with goodness enough for me to consider going with a three-star rating on Letterboxd, the minimum star rating for a movie to have been judged as "good." I opted for 2.5 stars instead. And though I don't do this myself, I know some people indicate the kind of "close but no cigar" feeling I have toward Crossroads by giving it 2.5 stars but also a heart. Me, I don't use the heart feature on Letterboxd.

And Spears? She ranges from perfectly adequate to actually quite touching. I was specifically watching her microexpressions to see how she was reacting to new information and other dialogue in the scene, and I really found them quite acceptable. Then there's a part where she has a big emotional breakdown that I thought was credible too. 

Of course, the caliber of the supporting cast has something to do with why this film is better than it might otherwise be. While From Justin and Kelly had essentially no known actors propping it up, Crossroads has future Oscar winner Zoe Saldana, as well as Taryn Manning, Justin Long, Kim Cattrall and Dan Aykroyd. But I also found the writing to be pretty decent and the direction to be, again, perfectly adequate.

While Spears never starred in a movie again after Crossroads -- she actually did appear in one earlier film, Longshot, as "flight attendant" -- she did have a couple appearances on TV shows, playing someone other than herself. But more often than not when she did appear again, she was playing Britney Spears, the role she was born to play.

I hope critics weren't too hard on her at the time, because a) we know she had a bit of a mental break in the long run, and that wouldn't have helped, and b) it wasn't deserved. She could have been a more than competent actress for a couple years if things had worked out differently. As is, I'm glad there's a little showcase for what could have been in Crossroads. 

Alluding to two titles from the 1970s (or close enough)

On Friday night, Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice became the first 2026 film I've seen twice. It's a lot easier when a new movie you like is on a streamer, which this is -- Hulu to be exact, but we get it through Disney+ in Australia. You just throw it on whenever you like. Feels a bit luxurious.

Three months seems to be about how long you should wait within the current year, at a minimum, before rewatching a movie. Another favorite of the year so far crossed that threshold a few weeks ago, was also available on a streamer, and seemed like the perfect thing to watch that Friday or Saturday night, whichever one it was. But my wife got wind of the fact that I was going to watch it, got a little synopsis of the movie from me, and said "Well what if I want to watch that?" Meaning not tonight but some other time. So it might be another three months or more before I get to that one for the second time.

It's too early in the year to begin confirming movies that are placed highly on your in-progress ranked list, because even if something is currently well within your top ten, there's a good chance that ten or more movies will displace it before you get to January. Which means a confirmation rewatch isn't really necessary because by that point the movie will be your #17 of the year, and any movie can be your #17 of the year. You don't have to confirm it to be sure. 

But on Friday night I didn't know what new movie to watch or what old movie to watch -- as in, what movie from either this year or from any other year -- so I decided to throw on a rewatch, which starts to happen a lot less in the second half of the year as I start ramping up toward finalizing my list. (My line of demarcation between watching a mix of old movies, new movies and rewatches, and watching mostly movies from the current year, comes with the start of MIFF, which is about three weeks off.)

So Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice it was. 

I would say I liked this time travel/comedy/organized crime movie just about as much the second time as the first. I did notice a little bit of wobbly technique here and there -- a couple of the fight scenes have quite bad choreography, and the director, BenDavid Grabinski, uses a dated "partial slowmo" effect here and there that I can't really describe in words -- but this movie sings on the strength of its screenplay and performances, which were just as strong the second time. There's a moment in this film involving Vince Vaughn that I find quite profound, and that's all I'll say about it. Some great needle drops too. 

What I do want to say, today, is that I didn't even really realize it as I was watching it the first time, but this movie -- in title specifically, but even in some of its themes -- is an homage to two movies from the 1970s. 

Here's the first one:

And already I'm breaking the rules because Paul Mazursky's film Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice is from 1969. There's where the "or close enough" in the title of this post comes in.

Having a title consisting only of four names separated by three ampersands would be reason enough to conclude an allusion, but the fact that the final name is Alice in both scenarios pretty much cements it. 

Thematic similarities? This could also be a stretch, because one movie is about people experimenting with affairs and processing the aftermath of those affairs, while the other is about time travel and organized crime. But there's also an affair between Alice and either Mike or Nick (it's not a spoiler -- okay it's Mike) in this movie, so that's enough to grasp onto if you're desperate.

The thematic similarities are perhaps more clear in the second movie:

Elaine May's Mikey & Nicky -- which is not always presented with an ampersand though that certainly helps in this situation -- is more directly appropriate for this exercise, having come out in 1976, and also being in the same general genre as Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice. The fact that the names of the two male characters are the same, albeit with Y's on the end, does not feel like a coincidence, especially when you have all the male names in the world to choose from when writing these characters.

There are quite a few similarities in the plot as well, in that one man is though to be a rat and becomes the target of a contract killer (though only a "cannibal assassin" in M & N & N & A), and the other tries to help him escape. 

This is the best kind of allusion, because it establishes your cinematic bonafides -- I love Mikey & Nicky, have less of a memory of Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice -- while actually not having all that much to do with the story you're currently telling. In other words, BenDavid Grabinski cannot be accused of ripping anyone off, because the meat and potatoes of his story really have nothing to do with the two previous movies. He just wants us to know he likes them, and that's fun. 

And Grabinski's movie, in my humble opinion, is good enough, clever enough and memorable enough that perhaps someday, someone will allude to it too.

The Odyssey in LieMAX

This is the subject I thought of for this post before watching The Odyssey. That is to say, before The Odyssey leapt to the front of the line among my favorite films of 2026, meaning a different sort of subject might be warranted. 

But I'm going to go with it anyway because I love this new term a friend introduced to me yesterday.

"LieMAX" of course refers to a screening auditorium that calls itself IMAX but isn't really. 

I'm by no means an expert on what makes an IMAX screen an IMAX screen, though I do know that the aspect ratio is significantly taller than your normal theater. And I also know that the entire space is usually custom built with a much taller seating area and higher ceiling overall, to accommodate the massive size of the screen.

Which means you should not be able to just convert an auditorium that had previously not been an IMAX auditorium into an IMAX auditorium, even if you do change the dimensions of the screen.

At least I'm assuming the screen dimensions were changed for the new "IMAX" screen at Melbourne Central, which has just become the second option for IMAX movies in the Melbourne central business district. I don't know how recently it's happened, but since I've last been there, anyway. (That's not saying much. They don't take my critics card there so I don't usually go there.) Without changing the screen size well then you really aren't doing anything but changing the name. 

The first and best option remains the Melbourne Museum, which houses what was once the third largest IMAX screen in the world. I was aware of this designation back when I saw Gravity in 2013, so I'm sure that at least three IMAX screens in Dubai alone have since surpassed it. But a different friend of mine told me yesterday that this is the only screen in the southern hemisphere -- could that really be? -- capable of showing the full height of what Christopher Nolan filmed with The Odyssey.

So why didn't I go to that one, if I wanted to see it yesterday in time to get up a review today? 

Well I was naive enough to rock up to their website earlier this week and try to get tickets, only to see all the sessions reading SOLD OUT for Thursday. That's not entirely true. I could have gotten one at 12:01 a.m., but yeah, I'm not going to ruin my next four days with something like that. The movie is 172 minutes long, after all.

When I told the original other friend, an American (the second is Australian), that I was going to see The Odyssey in three hours, I said the good one was sold out so I was going to the one that was probably IMAX in name only.

"Ah ... the LieMAX!" he responded.

Well, it didn't make a goddamn bit of difference.

I was plenty floored by what I saw even on this smaller IMAX screen, and whatever they don't have in size of screen, the Hoyts at Melbourne Central is compensating for in size of sound. That theater shook, rattled and rolled for nearly three hours of the ominous rumbling and up-tempo chaos of Ludwig Goransson's score, and feeling it in my bones was combining with the sense of adrenaline that increases as this movie reaches its fever pitch. This movie builds from a very good film to a great film as it enters its final section, and I don't think I could have loved it any more, even if I'd been seeing it on the best screen for it in the southern hemisphere.

Which I may still do. When I texted my wife how much I loved it, she said she couldn't wait to see it as she had read the original poem more than once. I guess I never had that discussion with her to determine exactly how important it was to her. As usual, my film critic's schedule won out, as I even left work a little early to catch this showing, just so I could write the review last night before I went to bed. (I ended up writing the whole thing on the train ride home and only just tweaking it a bit this morning before posting it. Link here.)

So yeah, when I said I would see it again with her, she suggested bringing my older son as well. Heck I think it would be fine for the younger one too, especially since he loves Tom Holland. 

You don't get a second chance to make a first impression, but my first impression was pretty damn great even on a less than ideal screen, so the second one can only be better.

And that's no Lie. 

The production code title that sounds like it inspired the production code

Certainly when W. Somerset Maugham wrote Of Human Bondage in 1915, he wasn't thinking about whips and ball gags and dominatrixes. (Dominatrices?) Still, that title is enough to make a person blush in 2026.

Given that the film version of Maughram's novel, directed by John Cromwell, came out in 1934, and that's also when the production code (otherwise known as the Hays Code) came into use in Hollywood to police the morality of images in movies, there might be every reason to assume that Of Human Bondage was one of the films that inspired this code. 

In fact, Cromwell's film is exactly the 53rd -- of an eventual 52,000 -- film to receive a Certificate of Approval number from the Production Code Administration (PCA) during the 34 years the code was in place. I know this because I noted its number when the movie started. The internet tells me John Ford's The World Moves On was the first. The code was finally retired in 1968, leading directly to the New Hollywood movement. 

The bondage in question is actually the relationship that exists between people with power disparities in the amounts they love one another, which create life-long obligations borne of this unresolved obsession. The obsession doesn't seem to resolve itself even if the obsessor arrives at a new condition of comparative happiness.

Pretty heady subject matter for a movie made in 1934, but then again, heady subject matter was what caused them to institute the production code in the first place.

In fact this film seems very much to have been conceived with pre-Code standards in mind. The character played by Bette Davis in this movie is downright awful -- though it was a star-making performance for Davis -- and it is even implied that she becomes a prostitute as her story nears its grim end. (Sorry, I guess I didn't think it was necessary to issue a spoiler alert for a 92-year-old movie.)

But I was most fascinated by how it gets inside the head of people who just can't quit other people, and how almost every character in this movie gives too much love to someone who is unworthy of them, and too little to a worthier person. 

If you are a human being living in the world, this should be something familiar to you. Assuming you aren't at either end of the spectrum -- the most beautiful, most amazing person who has ever lived or a repugnant cretin -- you have likely performed both of these roles at some point in your life. You've given too much of yourself to a person who either ignores, or worse, teases your affections for their own entertainment, ultimately discarding you and rejecting you in cruel ways, or you have been the person to do that to someone else, even if you didn't mean to, or didn't think that's what you were doing at the time. 

Although this applies to a number of characters in the story, the center of it all is Leslie Howard's Philip Carey, a failed artist and distracted medical student who also has a clubbed foot, but is handsome enough and kind enough to have attracted the attentions of several appropriate matches over the course of the narrative. But he can't be happy with any of them, because he still pines for Davis' Mildred Rogers, who encouraged his affections only to gleefully squash them, but then keeps throwing herself in his path and preventing him from achieving happiness with these other suitors.

Anyway, I found the whole thing pretty astute, and at only 83 minutes, perfectly brief for a Wednesday night movie starting after 10 p.m.

I also thought I should comment on Davis, whose eyes I always notice (thanks, Kim Carnes) any time I see her in a movie. Seeing this one Wednesday night made an interesting complement to having watched Goldie Hawn in Cactus Flower on Tuesday night, because both actresses were in their mid-20s when they made these movies, both had only debuted a few years earlier, and both broke out big time after these performances. The deviation occurs with their Academy Awards fates. Though we know from yesterday's post that Hawn actually won for Cactus Flower, in the supporting category, it was felt at the time that Davis would have been an Oscar frontrunner for Bondage, in the lead actress category, but she didn't even end up getting nominated. 

Goldie Hawn's surprising paucity of credits

I watched the latest in my Flickchart Favorites Friends Fiesta series last night, which was Gene Saks' 1969 romantic comedy Cactus Flower.

And let me tell you, it was super fun to see Goldie Hawn in one of her earliest roles, when she was only 23 or 24, depending on when the filming occurred relative to her birthday. I didn't know it at the time, but found out later that she won an Academy Award for this role. Charming as Hawn is -- she was a favorite of mine in the 80s and 90s -- I had no idea she had won an Oscar, and would not have thought her capable of giving a performance that would be received that way. I guess that was that era's equivalent of Marisa Tomei in My Cousin Vinny.

Before I focus exclusively on Hawn for the rest of this piece, I want to make the aside that I thought this was a very strange mode in which to find Ingrid Bergman. This icon of sophistication, playing an assistant to a dentist in a goofy comedy? It was quite the disconnect. 

I went on IMDB to see if Cactus Flower was Hawn's debut -- it wasn't, she had appeared in two TV shows and two other movies -- but that didn't end up being my big takeaway about her IMDB page. No, that was saved for her total number of credits.

How many credits would you assume Goldie Hawn had? 75? 100? Even more than that?

Nope. She had 37.

Huh?

Now granted, she did effectively stop working in the early 2000s, around the age of 55. (She's 80 now.) After The Banger Sisters in 2002, she didn't appear in another movie for 15 more years, when she co-starred in the Amy Schumer vehicle Snatched. That same year she was the narrator in a movie I've never heard of called SPF-18, which has only a 3.2 on IMDB so it must be terrible. Other than that, just The Christmas Chronicles and its 2020 sequel. (There was also a random episode of Phineas & Ferb in there.)

Hawn seemed ubiquitous in the 1980s and 1990s. Starting with her iconic role in 1980's Private Benjamin, she had a succession of really popular films, such as Overboard, Bird on a Wire, Housesitter and The First Wives Club. You know, when I started out that sentence, I thought I'd really be offering up more genuine bangers, if you will. Because by then she already starts to wind down, with Everyone Says I Love You, The Out-of-Towners and Town & Country before that period of presumably self-imposed exile.

Could I have missed so badly in my memory of Goldie Hawn and what she meant to those of us growing up in the 1980s?

Maybe it's just that she was a celebrity more than she was an actress. She might have been "around" more than she consistently showed up on our screens. And her relationship with Kurt Russell was always very cute. And she had an enduring legacy in terms of her daughter, Kate Hudson, herself an Oscar nominee just this past year. 

The really hard circle for me to square is that I can't figure out what would have even been my iconic Goldie Hawn role back. I know I listed Private Benjamin as iconic just a minute ago, but I remember that I didn't see that until I lived in New York, which was already my mid-20s. Bird on the Wire was similarly a late entry for me, as I only saw that in 2016 -- and really didn't like it very much. And the one that might be my favorite Hawn film, though Cactus Flower is certainly a new contender in that regard? It's probably Overboard, but I only saw that for the first time in 2017. 

Is it possible Hawn was a good vibe more than she was a movie star?

But I felt so fondly toward her that I did, indeed, believe her departure from Hollywood was on her own terms, when she just got sick of it. How else to explain someone going out on top of her game, even if she may have been in her 50s at that point? Which might just as well have been her 80s in Hollywood years.

But I wouldn't even know if she'd started to stink at that point because I haven't even seen The Out-of-Towners, Town & Country or The Banger Sisters, so I can't attest to any period of decline that might have showed her the exit. 

I have seen two of her last three films, and no, I'm not counting SPF-18 in that group. The only one I didn't catch was the sequel to The Christmas Chronicles. I liked the first Christmas Chronicles and don't remember being either glad to see Hawn again or distracted by her diminished capabilities. I do think I felt she wasn't great in Snatched, but then again, that movie wasn't great. 

It's just a funny illustration of the gulf that sometimes exists between our perceptions and reality. To me, Goldie Hawn was a shining beacon of wacky physical comedy and delightful facial expressions. She was just a person who made me smile, wherever she showed up, or even maybe if I only saw her in trailers. Clearly, that wasn't from a boatload of classic movies. 

In any case, it was a real treat to fall in love with her all over again in Cactus Flower. Maybe I need to go back through and sweep up some of the titles I've missed. Their number is sadly manageable. 

The debut of someone who may be no one

I mentioned yesterday that I was on the page "2026 in film" on Wikipedia to look up recent movie industry deaths, and got more than I bargained for by learning that beloved actor Sam Neill had just died within the last couple hours. 

Well, that same page has an interesting section that I wanted to write about today, called "Film debuts."

I only recognized one of the names listed there, and that makes sense. A debut is only really a debut in retrospect, isn't it?

More importantly and more to the point, a debut is only a debut if the person went on to become somebody.

Otherwise, where do you draw the line? Hundreds of people make their film debuts every year. Halfway through the year, the good people who maintain Wikipedia are only interested in 11 of them.

Jaafar Jackson is the name I recognized, and that's because a) he's a relative of Michael Jackson and b) his role in the Michael Jackson biopic has been singled out as significant. 

What do the rest of the people have in common? Well, they're famous for some other reason, most of them, though they don't happen to be people I know about, and in some cases, they aren't likely to be film regulars. 

Take the two men from Disclosure Day. They're both wrestlers. They've been included here because they happen to be the men in the ring during the film's opening sequence, where Josh O'Connor is supposed to be handing over a backpack in a crowded location to avoid any shenanigans. But I don't think we're about to see Lance Archer and Brian Cage appear in a bunch of other movies just because they were used playing versions of themselves in this movie. Then again, wrestlers have a strong recent history of reimagining themselves as movie stars, so perhaps they will.

A couple of the others are musicians, including Amaia, Guitarricadelafuente (that's a mouthful), Ruslana Panchyshyna (that's also a mouthful) and Orville Peck. But most of them are in movies I haven't heard of, which also reduces the newsworthiness of officially declaring this a film debut. (I do know that Bitter Christmas is the new Pedro Almodovar film because I just bypassed the chance to see it at MIFF.) In the case of Street Fighter, the movie isn't even coming out until October.

Markiplier is a YouTuber. I guess YouTubers have earned their own special place in the celebrity landscape.

Then you have two people who, as far as I can tell, are "just" actors. Helen Shen is credited with originating a role on Broadway, so maybe that's somewhat newsworthy. Just because it's a Korean musical doesn't mean some other people haven't heard of it. But I can't tell what the supposed significance is of Carlos Gonzalez. He has some TV experience in Spain. 

The only one besides Jaafar Jackson I can really get behind is Owen Cooper. I didn't know him either, but he was the lead in the breakout show Adolescence, which I haven't seen yet, so certainly a lot of people would know who he was and might be interested in his film debut. He plays the young Heathcliff in "Wuthering Heights," though if I recall that role doesn't have more than about ten minutes of screen time. 

It's folly to try to figure out the whims of, and apply universal standards to, the ordinary human beings who are active on Wikipedia. They are not benefitting from the consistency of a single editorial voice that might include some things and exclude others. Though I do know that Wikipedia cracks down on entries for people who are not considered famous enough, and removes/cleans up content that is not up to the site's standards.

I guess to really see how this section is used, it helps to go back at least one year to "2025 in film." The one name I knew I would see there is Chase Infiniti, who seems to be the correct usage of this sort of section. She was known beforehand and I think we're all quite sure we are going to see her in three movies a year for the next ten years. A few other names stand out as having already had their place on this list confirmed, such as Sinners' Miles Caton, One of Them Days' SZA and Marty Supreme's Tyler, the Creator, the last two of whom also fits the bill of musician-turned-actor.

The other 20 names? A lot of speculation there, at least to this point.

Although I've got my issues with this -- obviously enough to have written about them here -- I wouldn't trade Wikipedia's tendency to err on the side of inclusivity. That's the reason, after all, that I know I can get a comprehensive listing of even minor film industry professionals who have died, since I know about a lot more minor film industry professionals than most people. It's even the reason my own name sometimes appears in Wikipedia, among the critical response section for movies I've reviewed. And yes, seeing that every once in a while -- though it's usually when I'm googling myself -- is as thrilling as it sounds.

I guess we'll follow these people to see where they go. The farther you look back in film history in the equivalent sections of other Wikipedia pages, the more likely you are to find people who really did blow up, whose debut in a certain year is certainly notable.

And then there will be a record of the duds who went nowhere -- whether they deserve that record or not. 

R.I.P. Sam Neill

I've gotten in the habit of checking the Wikipedia page "[Current Year] in film" if I want to catch up on any film industry deaths that I may have missed. A page otherwise devoted to release dates and box office feats also has a section at the bottom that comprehensively lists those who have passed and the dates of their deaths. It was this way that I recently learned of the sad passing of Daveigh Chase, who played Donnie Darko's little sister Samantha. I won't get into the grim details of the last decade of her life.

I went to check just now, as a way of killing some evening downtime (poor choice of words), and it was then that I saw the latest addition to the list, surely only a few hours old: Kiwi actor Sam Neill.

What to say about Neill, given that I don't worship at the altar of Jurassic Park like some people do?

I always loved his screen presence. He had a kind face, even though he did not always play kind characters. And there was something about that crocodile grin that could be both jovial and sinister, depending on how he wanted to use.

But I think what I really want to say in this memorial piece was that I felt a certain kinship toward him because of his roots in this part of the world. 

In the years after I first moved here, Neill turned up in a lot of local projects, Australian TV shows and movies that always seemed not strictly necessary for someone of his international talents. Granted those years have covered his mid-60s to his late-70s, when glorified character actors like him are seeing their roles reduced a bit. But I felt like he wanted to work in this part of the world, to lend his name to projects that otherwise might struggle without it. And I always enjoyed what he brought to them.

Of course there was a time when Neill really was a hot Hollywood commodity, in the years immediately after Jurassic Park, when he made movies like Event Horizon, The Horse Whisperer and Bicentennial Man. Okay so maybe "hot" was a strong word. And then of course there was also The Piano, contemporaneous with JP. 

And I think that's why I really gravitated toward the later part of his career, when he put his leading man ambitions behind him and made movies that helped give the Australian and New Zealand film industries additional credibility, like Hunt for the Wilderpeople, Sweet Country and the Australian remake of Rams. By the time of his passing, he'd seasoned into a regional legend, a beloved elder statesman who could play any sunburned outback type you wanted him to play.

But maybe the most fertile part of his career came even before Jurassic Park, in films I didn't discover until later, like Possession, or Dead Calm, or Death in Brunswick, or My Brilliant Career. He had, in a way, a brilliant career, one that probably never played out like either he or we expected. 

The height of my feelings of kinship probably came when he left a video message for my friend who made that guerrilla shot-by-shot remake of Jurassic Park a few years ago, the one where I had blink-and-you'll-miss-it appearances as an extra in a couple scenes. He needn't have done so, especially since the legality of the project was highly questionable, but he did film about a minute-long affable greeting to my friend that was on behalf of him and fellow Park stars Jeff Goldblum and Laura Dern. Their blessing probably meant a ton to my friend, who was certainly chuffed by the video, to use the local term. 

I had had occasion to contemplate Neill's age -- he was 78 when he died -- but I hadn't had any reason to worry, because he always seemed so fit and full of energy. He had been fighting cancer for a couple years, but Wikipedia says he was cancer free at the time of his death. Maybe 78 years was just enough for his body.

I'll miss him, and so will the film industries of three countries. 

Killing two hours before a movie

Hello.

I'm supposed to be in a movie right now, but instead I'm here, talking to you. 

Let me back up and explain.

You know how I've always loved the after work double feature? The one where I stay in the city after work, have dinner, and watch two movies, sometime at the same theater and sometimes at different theaters, finally returning home sometime around midnight or a little after?

Well I do. But I don't get to do it that much anymore.

My kids have games or practices on three of the weeknights -- Monday, Tuesday and Thursday -- and on the fourth night, Wednesday, I usually play tennis. Well, lately I haven't been, because my partner has an injured elbow, though we did resume yesterday after a two-month break. But even with Wednesdays nights "off," I haven't utilized any for double features, even though Wednesdays are in fact one of my two days in the office. And it's not like I couldn't go on another night, but then I'd be leaving my wife in the lurch for the games and practices and I feel bad about that. 

But this is the second week of school holidays, and -- at least I thought anyway -- there would be no training this week. Turns out my younger son's soccer team came back a week early -- they're mad for soccer, I swear -- but at least my older son wasn't also at basketball practice on Thursday, which is what makes Thursdays so hard, even when I'm at home. Anyway, I didn't even know about the soccer practice when I proposed to my wife last week that I should stay in the city for two movies after work on Thursday -- "like I used to do." She agreed without a second thought. 

The only thing was, a double feature wasn't really lining up. I realized that Olivia Wilde's The Invite was opening this week, which was very promising, but then I couldn't find anything that I really wanted to pair it with. I'm still not sure if I'm going to see the live-action Moana, ever, let alone in the theaters, so that wasn't it. At the theaters in the city that had this movie, the best options for double feature partners were things I had already seen, things I had no intention of seeing, or things that were so old that I felt like a real heel trying to use my critics card to see them. (You're supposed to only use it for movies in the first two weeks of their release.)

So I cast the net a bit wider, out to the Sun in Yarraville, which is my regular theater, and would be on my way home from work anyway. Not one of the city theaters, but there was no rule that said I had to go to this double feature at a city theater. It's just that I enjoy it as part of the novelty of the after-work double feature. The bottom line is the two movies and the yummy dinner. 

And the Sun, being a bit more independent (and just having more screens than these other places), had a movie I hadn't heard of called Saccharine, which had a sort of discomfiting poster. Here, see?

Aren't you glad I didn't put that at the start of the post? You would have never started reading. 

Without even knowing anything about it, I knew that it might be in a similar category to other gross-out movies I've seen and loved in the past few years, including my last two #1 movies, The Substance and Together. And once I did know something about it, the thing I newly knew was that it was directed by Natalie Erika James, the Australian director who made the films Relic and Apartment 7A. 

Now I should say my relationship with Natalie Erika James is somewhat complicated. James made a short film called Creswick that played at the ReelGood Film Festival about ten years ago, and I was on the committee of people who voted it to get the top award at the festival that year. I loved it, you should seek it out if you can find it. Unfortunately, the feature-length version of Creswick was Relic, and that movie really didn't work for me. It was enough worse than Creswick that I didn't even prioritize seeing Apartment 7A, though I probably would have seen it in time to rank it that year if it had been a bit more accessible online at the time I needed to watch it. 

But James would be a good filmmaker to wrestle with, even if I didn't like her film, especially on an Australian review site that's theoretically slightly more interested than average in Australian content. And the promise was always there. 

The only question was, would it be The Invite first or Saccharine first? Both options existed, with gaps in between them that were either too brief or too long, meaning neither option was the hands down choice. 

In theory, a movie like The Invite is what you watch first, when the evening is young, when ribald comedy (I don't actually know if this movie is ribald) and zingy dialogue are vastly improved by the drink you had at dinner. Saccharine is more the "midnight movie" selection, when you've added a bong hit to that drink from dinner. 

And so I first envisioned a 6:40 The Invite followed by a 9:30 Saccharine. This might leave as much as 50 minutes between the movies, but at least I wouldn't be rushing. I could go get a little something else to eat as a complement to my earlier than usual dinner. 

But then I got to thinking, "Do I really want to only be leaving the theater at 11:30?" I also newly knew that Saccarhine was nearly two hours long, and given the uncertain transportation prospects for getting home, I didn't want to leave it too late. (Make note of this. This comes back in to our story shortly.)

So then I more seriously considered the skin-of-my-teeth option of a 6:50 Saccharine and an 8:50 The Invite. That would get me out at more like 10:40, and it would also give me ten more minutes to get there from work. 

And though the turnaround would be tight, the movies would probably be showing just down the hallway from each other. This cinema plays only five minutes of combined ads, trailers and short films before a movie, so it would give me about seven minutes to go to the toilet etc. I could probably even pick up both tickets before I went in, even though I again feel like a bit of a heel when I ask a ticket clerk to give me not one but two free tickets. (Side note: It does not actually matter how many minutes of trailers they play before a movie in order to make my point. Assuming the pre-show is consistent across all movies, whatever the length, the difference in relative starting times would be the same whether they played five or 20 minutes worth of trailers.)

So I finished up my ramen dinner in the city by about 5:35, spooning and slurping up all the spicy goodness and then emerging into the coldness of the winter night. This gave me an hour and 15 minutes to walk to the train station at Melbourne Central and ride two stops to North Melbourne, where I would get a bus to Yarraville.

Ah well here is where our story gets interesting. Or maybe really boring. (Maybe it's been boring all this time. If so, don't tell me.)

Conveyed by train only, I should have gotten to Yarraville no later than about 6:20, leaving me a full half-hour to stretch my legs before sitting down for four hours. But I allowed extra time for the buses that were replacing trains along my usual train route, because they are doing track work. My wife had told me yesterday that this was going on, and then I experienced it myself on the way in. 

The factor I didn't properly consider: How much extra time to add to that journey for a bus weaving its way through rush-hour traffic. The usual buses replace trains scenario is only later at night, usually after 8, and I'm usually only confronted with it after one of these double features. Although it's pretty tedious relative to a train, at that time of night the buses move at a nice clip and get you where you're going with probably only an extra 25% of the time tacked on. 

During rush hour, these buses do not move at a nice clip.

And so I watched the clock steadily tick down as we crawled through the inner and immediately outer city traffic, as the conveyance took something like a full 35 minutes just to get to its first two stops, which would have taken about five minutes on train. It quickly became clear to me that there was no way I would make my 6:50 Saccharine, even with the extra ten minutes. In fact, at a certain point I actually willed the progress to slow down, since it would mean less time I had to kill in Yarraville.

But then suddenly, miraculously, it was like the bus found an opening in the defense. It was like a running back who hit the gap and then had an open sprint to the endzone. Suddenly, I was disgorged in Yarraville at 6:51 p.m. There was still hope.

Until I got there and the line was going out the door. And this is where the five minutes of pre-show material actually finds its relevance.

Usually there are two lines at the Sun, the one on the left for the suckers who have to buy popcorn and drinks, and the one on the right for people like me who just wanted a ticket. The second one is always way shorter than the first one (usually just me, or maybe one person ahead of me). But on this night, when a bus had taken 45 minutes for a 15 minute trip, the right cash register was also out of order, meaning suckers and film critics alike needed to wait in that line going out the door.

Some quick math in my head left only one conclusion: I had to bail on Saccharine and only see The Invite.

In two hours. 

Which means the math in my head changed to how many activities I could actually find to fill up two hours and whether any of them would prevent me from prematurely burning out my phone battery, which was already down to about 50% and needed to still have some juice in case of shenanigans trying to get home after the movie.

Which brings you to now, or rather, to the last 45 minutes or so. No, this post has not killed the full two hours, but right now I'm within 45 minutes of the start of The Invite, and I can always figure out a way to kill 45 minutes. (And after proof-reading, that's down to about 25.) 

Especially now that I've charged my phone battery up to 66% and counting. For a while there I thought it would be a fully zero sum game between my laptop and my phone in its current symbiotic relationship where the phone is receiving a charge from the laptop and the laptop is receiving internet from the phone. I figured the juice used by the phone's internet would be entirely offset by the power going into the phone, leading it to hover at that 48% of even lose some. But instead it went up nearly 20 percent, and now I'm sure it can withstand whatever shenanigans my night still might have ahead of me.

Other than writing this post, I've also:

1) Done my Duolingo for the day (yes I'm still learning Japanese, working on a streak of 67 straight days);

2) Done my Connections for the day (the streak there is at 28);

3) Updated some fantasy baseball stats, and

4) Sent out an email about a fantasy baseball competition centered around next week's home run derby. 

The only thing is, I've been sitting in this little park by the train station and it is ass cold out here, so my little fingers are starting to feel like little icicles. Maybe I need to use those 45 minutes to go find a hot chocolate.

So if it seems like this post was excessively long, shared details you didn't need, and ultimately was nowhere near as profound as such length and details would suggest it was, well, now you know why.

Then again, you always did. I put it right there in the title. 

Remembering Rob Reiner: Shock and Awe

This is the fourth in my bi-monthly series Remembering Rob Reiner, in which I watch the six remaining films I hadn't yet seen by the slain director. Not to be confused with my other bi-monthly series, Remembering Rob Reiner, in which I rewatch my six favorite of his films.

Usually, a film being shorter than you expect it to be is a good thing. It's a contradiction built until loving movies: The more you love them, the more you want them to be over sooner. (Or maybe love doesn't have to do with it. Maybe it's the more of them you watch, the more you want them to be over sooner. There are probably people out there who love movies but for whatever reason can only see one a month, and in their case, they probably wish they were double the length.)

Where was I?

Oh yes -- I usually like it when a movie is shorter than I expect it to be. Get out of there faster. Get on to doing something else. Or more likely, get to sleep at a reasonable hour.

But a short movie can also have a lack of weight to it, and that's what I felt when watching Shock and Awe, the third-to-last movie directed by Rob Reiner that I hadn't seen, which had its festival premiere in 2017 and briefly hit theaters the following year. 

Oh that's not to say Reiner doesn't take this movie seriously. He takes it very seriously. It's about the George W. Bush administration's fabrication of evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in order to justify a military campaign and remove Saddam Hussein from power. It's the kind of thing we liberals were most aghast about, politically, before we knew the extraordinary depths of disgusting governance of which Donald Trump was capable.

But the movie is only 90 minutes long, which seems strange for that sort of film.

In the moment, I was very glad of its shorter length, mostly because I didn't think it was very good. But also for the reason stated previously, that I wanted to get out of there at a reasonable hour and go to bed. As it was, I fell asleep near the beginning, and didn't finish until 1 a.m. 

But part of the reason I didn't think it was very good was that I knew it was going through these events in a cursory way. Or maybe just that these events didn't require more than a 90-minute movie, and perhaps devoting more than that to the journalistic efforts of some courageous Knight Ridder reporters and editors wasn't warranted. One wonders if their efforts were even worth memorializing in this fashion. 

I have to say, part of my impression of Shock and Awe was formed by my sense of it as a technical failure. The lighting was terrible. But before I went off all half-cocked in blaming the director of lighting (a title that does not exist, and in fact, when looking this person up just now on IMDB, I couldn't figure out who was the best person to, um, not blame), I thought I should check to make sure there wasn't something wrong with the actual picture on my TV. And indeed, at some point since the last time we watched something on this HDMI port, someone seems to have dimmed the lighting, a surely inadvertent adjustment that I quickly corrected. I went back and watched a few moments of Shock and Awe and they all looked fine now.

But poor technique would have been true to my experience of the decline phase of Reiner's career. Although I don't recall having any technical issues with the last new Reiner movie I watched -- LBJ, which also starred Woody Harrelson -- I thought Being Charlie really looked like crap, and it wasn't a setting on my TV in that case. 

It isn't a given that a director loses their visual instincts as they entered their 70s, which Reiner would have been doing when he made Shock and Awe. You can name numerous examples (Ridley Scott, Martin Scorsese) of directors who haven't lost a step in that regard as they've aged. But Reiner in particular seemed to care less about how a movie looked and more about how it sounded, if you follow me, the older he'd gotten. I've noticed that even the opening credits seem a little bit tossed off in these most recent efforts.

He certainly has a good cast on hand. Harrelson is joined by the likes of James Marsden, Tommy Lee Jones and himself, in one of his final prominent acting roles where he didn't play himself or Marty DeBirgi. There's name value in the characters' wives and girlfriends, who include Jessica Biel and Milla Jovovich, who do a particularly poor job of rising above the level of the heroes' wives and girlfriends. 

But the experience of watching this movie is kind of like watching a single political essay play out over 90 minutes, in which actors hand the baton from one to the other and speak a continuous stream of Reiner's thoughts. (Reiner did not write the film; that credit goes to Joey Hartstone.) That includes a lot of exposition and a lot of opinion. Opinion I agree with, of course, and that the facts have retroactively borne out. But nonetheless, something that's a bit dramatically inert, even though it's told in an efficient enough package that obviously moves from one point to the next with good momentum. 

I think there's a real struggle to make us care about and recognize these people as individual characters. There are scenes of each of the leads, save Tommy Lee Jones, at home with a wife or significant other, reading in bed or having a beer, which are meant to humanize these men. See? They have lives outside the office, outside of trying to hold the administration's feet to the fire. 

But these scenes feel really perfunctory, and they lack the instinct to add nuance to the portrayal of characters who are walking ideas. There's a moment that seems deliberately designed to give Jovovich's character more agency, in which she gets paranoid about Harrelson's character talking over their phone about the leads he's following regarding the government potentially lying to the public. She starts talking, without evidence and in a way that is never followed up in the plot, about phones being bugged and mysterious government figures who could come and harm their family. If you are going to introduce this sort of thing, you have to pay it off in some way, but Shock and Awe doesn't.

Obviously Reiner thinks of this as his All the President's Men, and perhaps because it was unavoidable, Harrelson and Marsden -- the Woodward and Bernstein stand-ins -- even evoke Woodward and Bernstein at one point in their discussion of what they're doing. That would make Reiner's character the courageous Ben Bradlee character. (I don't know who it makes Tommy Lee Jones, since I never totally figured out his character's role in the whole thing.)

Let's just say it's a pale, pale imitation of that Alan J. Pakula classic, which I am now evoking for the second straight day on this blog. 

I'll start to wrap up here, but I did want to leave with one final look at a narrative choice that doesn't totally work. Even though the movie does largely get wrapped up in analyzing what the politicians said, when -- and they all appear as themselves in archival footage from the time -- it recognizes there needs to be a human face on this, and that human face is a soldier, played by Luke Tennie, who got paralyzed from shrapnel that severed his spinal cord after his convoy ran over an IED in Iraq. 

Because so much time has to be devoted to chasing leads and speaking to sources who are surprisingly (and conveniently, and unbelievably) liberal with how much they reveal to the reporters -- liberal as in generous, not as in progressive -- this soldier can't really get visited with during the narrative. So it's really just a bookend, with the soldier testifying before a committee at the start, and finally, near the end, with us following him through training and into Iraq, where his accident occurs. 

I guess maybe I'm just too jaded by the last two Trump administrations these days, but I found myself thinking "Is this all you got? A wounded soldier?" 

Indeed it was wrong for the Bush administration to cook up evidence of WMDs that were not there in order to finish the job of removing Hussein from power. Whether it was actually Bush's intention to do right by his father, or whether it was just supervillain-style, moustache-twirling scheming for oil by Dick Cheney, is besides the point. 

But through no fault of its own, Shock and Awe ends up feeling quaint if viewed in 2026. It feels like a luxury of a comparatively enlightened society that a phantom war was the only thing we liberals only had on Bush. (I'm sure there were other things, but I'm conveniently not remembering them right now.) By today's standards, George W. Bush was a model president. 

As for Reiner himself, I do feel sort of sad knowing that this was his last truly political film that I hadn't yet seen. His staunch liberalism was something I always loved and respected about him, even if it didn't always make for the best movies. Even when he didn't hit the sweet spot between entertainment and politics, I appreciate that his voice was out there and that he was always trying. 

A split diopter extravaganza

Given the fascination I've developed with this technique in recent years, it's hard to believe there's only a single reference on my blog to the split diopter. And it wasn't even the focus of the post, it was just a random reference in a piece about Bride of Chucky. 

Well, I saw a movie last night that commanded me to bring this technique to the forefront of my discussions. 

The movie was Lee Cronin's The Mummy, which is, I think it's fair to say, lousy with split diopter shots.

What the heck is a split diopter, you might ask?

It's a shot in which both the extreme foreground and the extreme background are in focus at the same time. It isn't possible to achieve this effect with just a normal movie camera. Here's what Wikipedia says about how the effect is accomplished:

A split diopter is half convex glass that attaches in front of the camera's main lens to make half the lens nearsighted. The lens can focus on a plane in the background and the diopter on a foreground. A split diopter does not create real deep focus, only the illusion of this. What distinguishes it from traditional deep focus is that there is not continuous depth of field from foreground to background; the space between the two sharp objects is out of focus. Because split focus diopters only cover half the lens, shots in which they are used are characterized by a blurred line between the two planes in focus.

Okay, but what does it look like?

It's something you immediately notice and don't soon forget, because it looks so ... strange. The textbook example is probably the newsroom shots used by Alan J. Pakula in All the President's Men, including the following:

If you look closely at this shot, you'll notice that both Robert Redford and the gathering of journalists waaaay in the background are in focus. Which, in the context of this film, has thematic implications, though I won't go into those right now (possibly because it's been at least 15 years since I've seen this movie and I don't remember what those implications are). 

However, in many ways this is not the typical split diopter shot in the sense that it is naturalistic and does not draw attention to itself. This is a better example of the sort of uncanny appearance of a split diopter shot, from Brian De Palma's Carrie:

You notice this right away, and you wonder for a moment if something has happened to your sensory perception, like someone slipped a drug into your popcorn. Nope, that's just a split diopter.

These shots are not very common because I believe they are quite difficult to execute. I'm not going to go into why that is because this is not a technical movie blog, and without refreshing my memory on what makes them so difficult, I couldn't actually tell you why anyway. And so it is that I tend to notice them whenever I see them, and feel like I have been treated to something truly special.

The Mummy, then, was quite the treat.

In fact, we get so much split diopter in The Mummy that it almost becomes a signature part of the movie's style and overall look. 

I don't know Lee Cronin from a hole in the ground, but he obviously thinks he's pretty special because he's put his name above the title of this movie. Looking him up, I'm reminded that he wrote and directed the last movie in the Evil Dead series prior to this year's new entry, that being Evil Dead Rise in 2023. 

And I'm not surprised to find there's at least one split diopter shot in Evil Dead Rise. The image below combines one from that previous movie with one from the new movie that's composed similarly:

But there's definitely more than one split diopter in The Mummy. They just keep coming, and coming, and coming. Like this one:

And this one:

And this one:

(Sorry for the poor quality of that last one. I grabbed it off my computer during a replay of the movie, when the options available online ran out.)

Regarding the second one, it may not seem like a split diopter because the character in the foreground is not totally in focus. But I think that's because she's moving, not because she's actually out of focus. In any case, this was offered up as an example of split diopter shots in The Mummy, so I'm not questioning it. 

I didn't go in depth on the online reactions to all these split diopter shots, but I did see someone mention that by using so many of them, Cronin weakens the impact of any individual one, and they lose cumulative impact as well. (If there's an actual distinction to be made between those two things.)

That may be true to some degree. But I'll say that each time I saw a new one -- and there had to be at least a dozen in the film -- I felt freshly exhilarated, just because it is something rare in filmmaking. And after nearly 7,300 films, I need all the rare I can get. 

And I wouldn't necessarily say a split diopter shot even looks better than a normal shot that might use a rack focus to shift the focus between a foreground and a background object, or might leave one of them fuzzy for the duration of the shot. You might even argue that by looking "weird" it creates an unnecessary distraction, something that takes you out of the moment as you are forced to consider the filmmaking rather than the story being told by the filmmaking. It's a bit unnerving, kind of like watching a movie in high frame rate for the first time.

But there's something old school, film school try hard -- in the best possible way -- of what Cronin is doing here, and I will always reward that, even if it is overused by ten to 25 percent, even if it is more indulgent than it needs to be.

And hey, it finally gave me the occasion to write about one of my favorite nerdy film techniques.