Audient One-Timers: Greed

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interesting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Audient One-Timers: Malcolm X

Audient One-Timers is a 2026 monthly series in which I'm rewatching my 12 highest ranked films on Flickchart that I had seen only once. 

Malcolm X is the textbook example of a one-timer that falls into that category merely for its daunting length.

Spike Lee's 1992 opus is three hours and 21 minutes long. When, in this busy world of ours, does it ever seem convenient to sit down and watch a 201-minute movie?

Oh, and this isn't a 201-minute movie like Lord of the Rings: Return of the King is a 201-minute movie. That's 201 minutes of magic, battles and apocalyptic madness. This is 201 minutes of racism, by both Blacks and whites.

But it's also 201 minutes of the most glorious filmmaking you will ever see.

But before I get to that, let me tell you how I did, indeed, set aside 201 minutes to watch Malcolm X: I watched it in about five sittings over three days. 

This was not my intention. I intended to watch it all on Wednesday. My wife was in the city for the evening, so when I got home from work, I thought I could watch an hour of it before dinner and two hours and 21 minutes of it after. She'd be home by then, but she'd have already eaten and she wouldn't need to interface with me other than a quick "hello, how was your day."

But the thing that happens when your wife is in the city is that you have to do all the things related to your kids' dinner. Plus clean up some of the place that she didn't get to during the day, because that's only right. 

So even in two sittings, if you want to call it that, before and after dinner, I was barely past the hour mark on the first day.

The second day wasn't much better. We went out for dinner for my sister-in-law's birthday, and she came over and hung out well before that. I might have only watched another 15 minutes all up that day.

Friday was when I knocked out the rest of it. For some reason I awoke at the ungodly hour of 5:45, so I got X down to less than an hour remaining before going to work that day. The last 40 minutes or so, I'm not ashamed to admit, I watched during my last two hours of the workday. It was a bit slow so I didn't feel too guilty about this. (I was working from home.)

And here was where purchasing the movie really came in handy. Having not found it on any of my streamers, I went to Apple to rent it, but the rental price ($5.99) was actually a dollar more than the purchase price. There are worse movies to own than my 97th ranked film on Flickchart, and this way, I didn't have to worry about how long it took me to finish it. I wasn't running up against a 48-hour expiration date for a rental. 

But I was running up against the practical reality that I wouldn't allow myself to start another movie until I finished this one, and not a moment too soon, as I left work a few minutes early to see the movie I wrote about yesterday, I Want Your Sex. (Don't go checking that post if you actually want to learn anything about I Want Your Sex. I only wrote about a near disaster involving a can of Pepsi Max.)

I think one of the reasons I had put off seeing Malcolm X, which I loved when I saw it in the theater in 1992, before now was precisely what I alluded to with my comparison to Lord of the Rings: It wouldn't be "fun." 

But you know what? When a movie is made with a sense of vigor, a sense of exploding cinematic conventions, a sense of letting the camera do whatever it wants to do -- like the senses with which Lee made X -- it is fun. 

I don't really know where to start talking about the things I noted from this second viewing of Malcolm X, but let's at least start macro before going micro. 

Is it possible this is the best biopic ever made?

I guess you'd have to ask what qualifies as a biopic in this discussion. Is Raging Bull a biopic? I guess it is. Personally, I'm not a huge Raging Bull fan, so it's no contest for me. But some biopics are more obviously biopicky than others, and I think among films you consider to be obvious biopics, Malcolm X is king.

That's not actually what my Flickchart says. Flickchart has five biopics ranked higher than this for me, but I would take issue with the categorization of any of these as pure biopics: The Passion of Joan of Arc, Bonnie and Clyde, The Social Network, Schindler's List and Goodfellas. Just because a movie is about a real person, I don't think that necessarily makes it a biopic. Especially if it's about someone who wouldn't otherwise be famous, as is the case in Goodfellas. 

But among movies that are clearly about one particular person, especially by being named after them, and they consider this person from very early in their life until their death? Yeah, Malcolm X kicks any of those movies' asses.

One of the things I think this does so well is chart the changes in this man over time. It starts with the young Malcolm Little wearing zoot suits and swinging his arm in an affected way as he walks, alongside his director, which is one of my most lasting images of the film. During this time, the later proponent of racial segregation has an appetite for white women. It then continues with his life of crime and stint in prison, from which he emerges as a key figurehead in the Nation of Islam, in fact, such a key figure with so much press that he ends up alienating his fellow brothers. And by then it's too late too avoid his own assassination. 

I skipped ahead there. But this is at least three different Malcolms we get in this movie, and Denzel Washington plays each as a distinct part of a recognizable whole. It's a masterful performance that might have won Washington an Oscar if he hadn't already gotten one for Glory (which is still due up in this series) just three years earlier, and if Al Pacino hadn't needed one that year for Scent of a Woman. (As if.) 

But as much as this is Washington's film, and you can't imagine another person playing this role, you really can't imagine another person directing it than Lee. Which was a real possibility as this was originally a project for director Norman Jewison. 

I had thought of this being an immediate successor to Do the Right Thing, my favorite Lee film that's on the outskirts of my top 20 on Flickchart. It isn't. He made both Mo' Better Blues and Jungle Fever in between. (Which I also liked and which I have also seen only once, Fever better than Blues though.)

But whether his last film was the masterful but insular DTRT, or the noble failure JF, in either case Malcolm X was a major step forward in terms of size and scope for its director. "Major" tends to understate the case. Probably no one had any idea if Lee would be capable of overseeing such a sprawling epic, one that had the audacity to shoot on location in Mecca for greater verisimilitude, one that covered several periods in U.S. history that were distinct even though they were only separated by two decades. No one had any idea until Lee did it and until he knocked everyone's socks off. 

His indispensable collaborator in this effort was Ernest Dickerson, his cinematographer for each of his previous five features and then never again after this, I'm sorry to say. For the things I made note of during this viewing, I don't know whether to credit Lee or Dickerson, but I'm sure it was a combination of the two that's responsible for what ends up on screen. 

I'll mention a couple scenes that particularly grabbed me in terms of the camerawork.

The first is also a showcase for Washington. When Malcolm is serving a term in solitary confinement -- or "the hole," in the parlance of The Shawshank Redemption -- there's a shot where a small shaft of light opens at both the bottom and top of the frame. I guess this is the foot of the door and the top of the door, but the room is completely dark so we have no bearings at all. Washington lets out a howl of agony to the very depth of his soul, and then both shafts of light close again. It's abstract in terms of meaning within the actual plot, but perfect as a metaphor.

Dickerson's active camera shines throughout, but one scene in particular I love is a conversation taking place in the street between a handful of Malcolm's followers, who flank him on either side. The camera whips back and forth between the speakers, who, for a higher degree of difficulty, keep replacing each other, meaning Dickerson has to whip to a slightly different spot in real time and land there just as the speaker is starting his or her line of dialogue. Then at the end after about 30 seconds, the shot rests on Malcolm in the middle. (Not the TV show.)

Then there's the crazy shot where Malcolm, during one of the times that he is being assaulted by incoming harassing phone calls that refuse to stop, is staring straight at the camera, his chin held up by a thumb and forefinger. The camera steadily turns 360 degrees so that he's upside down in the shot and then right side up again. What a way to depict a henpecked mind. 

Two other quick thoughts before I leave off on the specifics about the movie. 

Another thing I don't think a lot of other directors would do is give us the kind of overlapping dialogue that Lee gives us at the end. The scenes where Malcolm is reading aloud the words of the letter he's written Betty, and she is also reading them to a gathered group of friends and associates, contain an unusual amount of dialogue spoken in unison, or almost in unison. In the background are scenes of Mecca. It's profound. 

Lastly, the chaos after Malcolm's assassination reminds me of the intense climax of Do the Right Thing, with bodies on the ground, screaming, and general bedlam, a perfect encapsulation of how it has all gone south. 

This may not have been a cogent, holistic consideration of what makes Malcolm X so great, and why I'm so happy I own it now, so it won't be another 34 years before I watch it again. But I think my enthusiasm is clear. 

I did want to finish with one final thought. 

One fairly brief scene had stayed with me for its succinctness and potency, and especially how it spoke to me personally as a white person.

I'm sure you remember the scene where a young white woman approaches Malcolm and a couple of his cohorts, certain in her progressive bonafides, knowing she doesn't have a racist bone in her body and only wishing to lend some small amount to Malcolm's cause. She says she has nothing to do with the sins of her ancestors and wonders what she, a good white person, can do to help. 

"Nothing," he says, and walks away.

He doesn't try to explain his answer. I'm sure he considers the answer self-explanatory, but perhaps of greater pertinence is that he just doesn't consider this woman worthy of more than a curt brush-off. It's not an impolite brush-off -- even being impolite would suggest more emotional investment in this moment than he wants to give. It's just direct and to the point, and it ends the conversation immediately.

Malcolm X would later repudiate his notion that all whites are devils. In trying to forge a new way separate from the Nation of Islam, which had forsaken him, he revisited his idea of judging a person absolutely by the color of their skin. In the final year or so of his life, he tried to be a bit more like Martin Luther King Jr.

But that scene does and should resonate with white audiences, and it's felt especially apt in the racial discourse that has consumed the country, nay the world, in the ten years since Donald Trump's first presidency began.

Progressive-minded people can and should do whatever they can to make the world better, but it's not the responsibility of Black people to endorse their progressive mindedness. I don't think anyone would say now that "nothing" can and should be done in this fight, but there are altogether too many people out there who want to be congratulated merely for thinking and saying the right things. Do, or do not; there is no try. And whatever you do, don't make it the responsibility of a Black person to guide you through it and tell you you are good at every step of the way.

If I thought Malcolm X was long, in September I have Erich von Stroheim's Greed. I saw the four-hour version the first time, so between now and then I'll have to figure out if I want to watch this version again or if I'll opt for the two hour and 10 minute version available on Kanopy. 

Audient One-Timers: Ordet

In 2026 I am rewatching my 12 favorite films on Flickchart that I've seen only once, and writing about them each month.

Carl Theodor Dreyer's Ordet, my #121 on Flickchart, could have, maybe should have, been the first film in this series I could not get my hands on, therefore forcing me to go and rewatch my 13th highest ranked film, which was my stated back-up plan at the start of this series. In fact, due to an error I made along the way that required one double-up, it would have been my 14th.

But I did finally source a copy of the movie that was watchable -- only just.

The usual suspects were all out as places to possibly find Ordet, which I first watched back in April of 2012, when I was still in America. (It was actually for a series on this blog, getting to know Dreyer.) My best bet was Kanopy, but it was not there. I thought YouTube might have a version, but it did not. It actually had the original Swedish film from 1943, of which Dreyer's version is a Danish remake, and though that might be interesting to watch at some point, it's not part of the exercise at hand.

But as you'll know if you read my post on Murmur of the Heart, there are some slightly sketchy places a person can go, which aren't pirating but sure feel like it, to find movies that are otherwise inaccessible. And indeed the Russian streaming site I used in that post did have it, but it only had it with subtitles in Arabic, which was obviously of no use to me.

But the Internet Archive -- which I've used maybe a dozen times before and certainly feels safer than this Russian site -- did have it. Two versions, actually.

One version was out. No subtitles at all.

The second version had a little CC icon for closed captioning, and indeed, I could turn on English subtitles here. But there was a problem with these English subtitles: they were very poorly synched to the Danish. The thing that was also a problem with Murmur of the Heart, where the subtitles preceded the dialogue by about seven seconds, was even more of a problem here. The subtitles were out in front by more than twice that length. In the first ten minutes I watched this way, I did eventually time it, and the delay was 45 seconds, though it didn't feel that long when I first started watching. In any case, this was the point where I decided I had to give up on this viewing method.

I started to look deeper into possible YouTube copies, totally without good reason, before going back to the Internet Archive copy and noticing that there was a second version of the closed caption titles. I had tried "En," but there was also "Eng."

And "Eng" saved the viewing, but not without a cost. 

Here the subtitles were behind the dialogue, rather than ahead of it, but only by a couple seconds. Very manageable. I should say that this started to get worse as the movie was going, and by the end, there was about an eight-second delay between the dialogue and the subtitles. Even more distracting, the dialogue was not in sync with the mouths either, though I think it did start that way. So there were, in effect, three different moments of the dialogue being spoken: when the mouths moved, when the words were heard, and when the words were translated.

It's no way to watch a movie. But is it better than not watching it at all? That's hard to say.

And making the whole thing more problematic is the fact that I did, demonstrably, like Ordet worse than when I first saw it. I don't know if that was the circumstances of the viewing or whether I just overrated it the first time.

I've come this far without giving you a plot synopsis at all. And that's not hard to do because this is a movie where not a lot happens, and it takes more than two hours to not happen. I'm not sure how acquainted I was with the concept of slow cinema when I first saw this back in 2012, but if I didn't recognize this as an example of slow cinema back then, I surely do now.

Which, to be clear, is not a problem for me. My #1 movie of 2018, First Reformed, is considered slow cinema. Slow cinema has a big place in film in general, and in my heart specifically. But it can also try a person if they aren't quite in the mood for it. 

In any case, this is the story of a Danish farm family in 1925, the Borgens, who have three generations living in the same house. The oldest generation features the patriarch Morten, who is in the last years of his life. His three sons are Mikkel, an atheist who is happily married to Inger; Anders, who longs for the hand in marriage of a girl on a neighboring farmstead; and Johannes, who might be touched in the head, who is going around talking about how he is the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The youngest generation is the two daughters of Mikkel and Inger, who will soon be joined by a third sibling, whom Inger believes to be a boy, and who is due any day.

The core of the story is their attempt to figure out what to do with this son, Johannes, and their attempt to get the other son, Anders, the approval of the father of his love interest, Anne. Anne's father rejects Anders' petition because the two families believe in two different denominations of Christianity. I won't really talk about the role the resurrected Christ character plays in the outcome of the story, because it isn't necessary to spoil it, even though the movie is 71 years old. But let's just say there is something quite significant that occurs at the end of the story that falls into the category of a miracle.

The first time I watched Ordet, I was haunted by it, given the awesome spiritual themes and the uncanny way the son Johannes seems to be in a trance. For most of the movie, there is no other soundtrack than the whistling wind, and indeed, this feels like a lonely and desolate world, a world that could almost be removed from a literal existence and just represent a spiritual one.

Those feelings about Ordet were still there. But I started to nitpick the reverence I felt for it, pun sort of intended, in relation to another master of slow cinema who Dreyer undoubtedly influenced, which is Ingmar Bergman. 

When I first saw Ordet, it reminded me of a Bergman film, maybe specifically something like Winter Light. (Oops, that's not possible; I didn't see Winter Light until two years later.) And though I know I like Ordet better than Winter Light, I found myself wondering if it's correct that I should rank Ordet above all the Bergman films I've seen. I've seen 11 Bergman films, and the highest ranked of them, Wild Strawberries, is only #268 on my chart. There are two Dreyer films that beat this highest ranked Bergman film, the other being The Passion of Joan of Arc, which is in my top 100. And before I get to my second Bergman film, The Seventh Seal at #343, you get to one other Dreyer film, which is Vampyr at #330. 

Is it right that there should be three Dreyer films that beat all but my highest ranked Bergman film? In fact that's three of the four Dreyer films I've seen in total, the other being Day of Wrath down at #2761. 

And then I wondered, and am still wondering: What is the point of comparing the entire body of their works? Does loving three Dreyer films mean my love for Bergman is in any less?

But I can't deny that these thoughts were in my head as I was watching -- and still appreciating, mind you -- Ordet. 

I can't say that I was bored during Ordet -- sleepy, due to the circumstances of my day and watching it in my bed when I should have been having an afternoon nap, but not bored. But I do kind of marvel at how long it takes for so little to happen. And that also means that there is quite a lot of dialogue that spells out what each character is thinking, in a way that almost made me think of the modern Netflix mandate to repeat the core issues of the story in dialogue every five minutes in order to make sure that people doom scrolling on their phones won't miss anything. 

Now that I've used the phrase "doom scrolling" sort of arbitrarily in the last paragraph, let me use it to a purpose here. There's something about Ordet that is sort of like a long, drawn-out doom scroll, but I mean that as a compliment. There is something ominous and frightening about the existential issues at play here, as they point ever more inexorably toward some real dour turns of events in the plot. And I do, ultimately, think that the time Dreyer takes for this "doom scroll" does increase the way that it chills us and discomfits us. 

But Ordet does not end on such a note, and I won't spoil what does happen at the end, or the events leading up to it, because that's the part that transcends and turns this into a real wonder. One other word for "slow cinema" is "transcendental style," and indeed there is something transcendent about Ordet.

It's still possible I am ranking it too high. One of the reasons for this year-long exercise is to make those sorts of determinations, though not necessarily to re-rank any such movie down to a more appropriate position in my chart. 

And some of the position it has attained is the result of randomness. Because I keep track of such things, I can tell you that Ordet would be a bit lower if it hadn't won a duel against Planes, Trains & Automobiles, which jumped it from #351 to #156, and then later a duel against The Great Dictator, which jumped it to its peak position of #106. It has since fallen 15 spots to its current position. However, when I did first rank it into my chart, it was only in the mid-300s -- and in fact behind the current position of the other two Dreyer films and the two Bregman films I've mentioned in this post.

In any case, still quite a good film, and maybe next time I see it, everything will be properly synched.

My August viewing will finally jump us into my top 100 movies, when I make time for Malcolm X, my current #97. It'll be a busy month with MIFF, but I'll have to fit in those three hours and 22 minutes because the series demands it. (And there's still a movie ahead that's even longer than that.)

Audient One-Timers: Das Boot

This is the sixth month (but seventh movie) in my 2026 series Audient One-Timers, in which I'm watching the 12 (it turned out to be 13) highest ranked movies on my Flickchart that I'd seen only once. 

Of the six previous movies I'd watched in this series, each was the same version of the movie I'd seen previously.

That streak was broken with Das Boot, my #124 on Flickchart. (Or The Boat, as it was called on Amazon, where I ended up renting it. Way to make a movie sound less interesting than it actually is.)

When I first saw Wolfgang Petersen's 1981 film in April of 2019, I was worried about its notorious length. And then I found that the notorious length was only the director's cut of the movie. The regular cut was only a reasonable two hours and 30 minutes. And given its ranking, obviously I loved it. 

The director's cut adds another hour to that, and the director's cut was the only version I could find today when I wanted to watch it again. 

I don't mean literally today, I mean "today" in the general sense. I actually watched it across Friday and Saturday.

I thought I had started early enough to watch the whole thing on Friday. It was the last day of school before winter holidays, and considering that my job involves communicating with schools, there wasn't a huge amount to do after about 2. Everyone at the schools is just trying to get the hell out of there for two weeks.

So I threw on the movie about 3:30, figuring I could remain at my post for the last hour of my workday and watch the first hour of the movie, even with its subtitles, while keeping one eye on my emails. Then I'd have enough time before dinner to finish watching. 

Well, it didn't quite work out that way. My older son had his first school formal on Friday night, and I needed to deliver him there by 6. That kind of threw me off the pace, and then it was dinner, and then I watched Stranger Things and Pizza Movie as I told you about in a blog post a few days ago. 

I finally finished Das Boot on Saturday afternoon between 4 and 5 o'clock.

The piecemeal way I watched it didn't help, but the real thing that made me like Das Boot less this time -- not a huge amount less, but definitely less -- was the extra hour of material. Which I probably could have predicted, considering that I rarely prefer a director's cut of a movie I already love, and in most cases try not to watch them at all. 

Das Boot's director's cut is particularly problematic, though, in terms of separating it from the original. And to illustrate this, I'll use the example of another director's cut that I actually haven't seen.

The thing I've heard about the director's cut of Apocalypse Now -- one of them, since I guess there are two -- is that there's this long sequence on a plantation. It's 20 minutes of footage that otherwise does not exist in the version we're most familiar with. As such, it's easy to note when you've come across that footage and assess whether it strengthens or weakens the rest of the movie. Perhaps more importantly, it's easier to pull that section out entirely and sort of ignore it in making an assessment about the film on the whole. 

There was no way for me, me personally, to tell what made up the extra hour of footage in Das Boot. The whole movie takes place on a submarine, save three shorter sections, one each at the start, middle and end. And I feel quite certain those three sections are all in the version I saw in 2019. So that meant that the hour's worth of extra material just blended into a general indistinct stew of claustrophobic sub scenes.

Was it extra content in set pieces that were already in the shorter version? Was it new set pieces? Having seen the movie only once, I didn't know, but there being no obvious lines of demarcation, like the plantation scene in Apocalypse Now, made it impossible to tell. 

The effect, though, was quite clear. The whole thing felt like reduced stakes to me. There were any number of scenes where the boat is getting shaken around by depth charges that break lightbulbs, such that the significance of any scene individually was totally lost. It made me wonder why they'd even bothered to shoot different scenes where essentially the same thing happens.

However, watching a director's cut does have a clear benefit: It makes you appreciate the original movie, and particularly that movie's editing, even more. 

Now that I know that these superfluous scenes existed, and that someone deemed them unnecessary to the film most people saw at the time, I have a renewed respect for those decisions made. And sometimes, a renewed skepticism about the director, though that's a minor complaint. 

Indeed, the idea of a director's cut suggests that the director felt hard done by the original cut, and wanted to show his "true vision." That makes sense in a situation like the Apocalypse Now plantation sequence, which is a truly different element in the film. It doesn't make sense with yet another scene of the sub emerging intact after taking another fusillade of depth charges. Rather, it kind of makes you wonder if those people delivering the depth charges on the surface were just really bad at their jobs.

I've spent most of this post throwing mild shade at Das Boot. It's not really deserved. These are still great underlying materials, and I will still look forward to my next viewing of the abbreviated, theatrical version. I just don't need to see this version again. 

And the set pieces that do distinguish themselves -- the opening debauchery at the nightclub that leads to everyone getting sick, the initial tense testing of the submarine's dive capabilities, the middle sequence where they go ashore and are reluctantly feted by other German military, the bailing of the boat and desperate hope to get it surfaced after it gets grounded on the ocean floor, and finally, the gut punch ending -- are all just as good as they ever were. 

Next up in July? Carl Theodor Dreyer's Ordet from 1955. 

Audient One-Timers: Two times the one-timers

This is the fifth entry in my 2026 series Audient One-Timers, in which I'm watching the 12* highest ranked movies on my Flickchart that I've seen only once. (*see below)

If you know me by now, after reading thousands of my posts on The Audient, you know I don't like deviating from the rules of my monthly series. (Or this could be your first time here, so you're hearing this for the first time.)

However, you should also know that I don't like failing the stated goals of my monthly series just because I made a mistake. 

That mistake was to have miscalculated the 12th highest ranked movie on my Flickchart. Smoke Signals, which I watched back in January, was actually my 13th highest ranked one-timer. 

The issue arose because I listed the top 15 movies in a Letterboxd list. Why 15? I wanted some extra titles in there in case I couldn't locate all 12, so I could then dig into my reserves.

But I discovered last month that I'd listed them in the wrong order on that list, so a higher ranked movie was below Smoke Signals, requiring me to fit 13 movies into a 12-month schedule. 

So I handled that in a way that seemed appropriate: I put the one that was up next, and the one that I had missed, into a double feature to write about this month, which was fitting because they are both about Nazis.

And so it was that on Sunday I watched a "day-night double feature" -- borrowing that term from baseball's "day-night double header" -- of my #167, Oliver Hirshbiegel's Downfall (2004), and my #141, Stanley Kramer's Judgment at Nuremberg (1961). 

If you think that's a lot of movie for a double feature, you're right -- 335 minutes worth. However, Downfall's 156 minutes actually made it the shortest of four movies I rewatched this weekend, which also involved the rewatch of Caligula I wrote about in my last post, as well as Avengers: Endgame with my son, as the conclusion of our series of about eight Marvel movies leading up to it. I should probably write about that, but to be honest, my conclusions from the final film were not very interesting, and I already sort of covered that topic in this post. 

I thought it would be good to watch Downfall and Judgment at Nuremberg exactly in that order, for maximum possible schadenfreude, to use the appropriate German term. These are two films that never for a moment depict the Nazis in anything but their very worst hour. Most movies you watch about Nazis feature some moment when they are defiant, victorious, and in the midst of carrying out cruelties toward Jews, the mentally handicapped, homosexuals, and others. In these two movies, they are only paying the price for those cruelties.

I first watched Downfall almost exactly ten years ago, in June of 2016. I raced to Letterboxd to give it an immediate five stars, and when I ranked it on Flickchart, which was likely not immediate because I've been behind on my rankings for some time (maybe even a decade), it placed comfortably within my top 200. Even more comfortably than its current spot of 167 -- my records show that its initial entry in my chart was at #138. 

Many people know Downfall because Bruno Ganz ranting as Hitler became a meme, and rightly so -- it's a great rant. (He has several, but there is one that's most famous.) But I hope that doesn't mean Downfall is accorded any less prestige in the public sphere than it deserves. 

My impression of the movie on this watch is that its like a procedural for the end of a regime. Hirschbiegel has spared no detail on the downward spiral of the movements of key Nazi officials in a Berlin bunker, and to a lesser extent, their diminishing armies on the ground level. We know much of this comes from the memory of a real person -- Traudl Junge, played by Alexandra Maria Lara -- so we know Hirschbiegel and a trio of screenwriters (including Junge) did not have to just imagine what likely would have happened. But the accuracy of these details still has a sort of brilliant exactness to it, a combination of what did happen, and what must have happened, based on our general knowledge of these true believers specifically, and any cornered, doomed human beings generally.

Even though all the characters we meet are Nazis, the film does a good job giving us some characters we can root for. We know from opening footage of the real Traudl Junge that she regrets her inability or unwillingness to understand what was going on right in front of her face, but that doesn't mean the film goes out of its way to depict her doubts. In fact, her loyalty to Hitler is such that she even appears ready to stay and potentially commit suicide with the rest of them. Maybe it's just Lara's sympathetic eyes, but to the extent that we can excuse any of these people of any of their actions, we feel like maybe she really didn't know just how evil the Fuhrer was. The other truly sympathetic character is a doctor played by Christian Berkel.

Nearly every big name in the Third Reich makes some sort of appearance or other here, and we get a sense of the nuances in their differing personalities as well. All are damnable, of course, but we feel a slight surge of support for the characters we see defy Hitler -- and even feel a weird sort of respect for those who didn't abandon him, as they at least show a strange courage in knowing they are marching to their deaths. 

Although the rant is the scene most people know from Downfall, easily the most chilling scene is the one where Magda and Joseph Goebbels (Ulrich Matthes and Corinna Harfouch) sentence their own children to death. First they make them drink a bitter liquid that is pitched to them as preventing them from getting sick in the "humid" bunker (though the youngest child points out, poignantly, that it's not humid). The oldest daughter, fearing a nameless sort of doom but surely not understanding what is actually going on, resists this with all her strength, leading a doctor on hand to force it down her throat. Then there's the impossibly awful scene where Magda goes through the bunks of the anesthetized, sleeping children and one by one helps them bite down on a cyanide capsule. The movies lingers in this moment, showing us each child individually meeting their doom, just so there's no chance we can mistake how monstrous this was. In a film in which actual acts of Nazi barbarism are not otherwise emphasized, this is the key scene of the film.

I didn't re-read my previous post on Downfall before writing the above, but it does cover a lot of the same topics, even using some of the same language. I mean, ten years ago me is still me. If you want to read that piece, it's here. 

Judgment at Nuremberg is the newest film in my top 12 favorite films on Flickchart that I'd seen only once -- not in terms of its release date, but in terms of when I saw it. The film is 65 years old this year, making it actually one of the oldest of my one-timers, but I only saw it for the first time three years ago, in July of 2023. And of course immediately wondered where Judgment at Nuremberg had been all my life. I didn't actually write about Nuremberg on the blog previously, having written about if for Flickchart Friends Favorites Fiesta at the time. So I only have memories of what I wrote in that piece, though I could probably look it up on Facebook if I really wanted to. 

Like Downfall, this too is a procedural, only in the courtroom rather than in a Nazi bunker. One of the things I found most interesting about that process is the realistic portrayal of the way people of different spoken languages understood what each other were saying in that Nuremberg courtroom. They did this by wearing headphones, into which were being piped real-time translations of the others' words. The movie does eventually put everything in English so an English-speaking audience can understand it all, but the film makes it clear that this is a narrative device, and it never stops using the headphones, even when all the actors are speaking English. 

There is no actual connection between Downfall and Judgment at Nuremberg in terms of the characters, though I did learn from my earlier Downfall piece on The Audient that Albert Speer, the character who defies Hitler's orders, actually apologized for the Nazi atrocities at the Nuremberg trials. He's not a character here, though, as this trial focuses only on four judges who sentenced innocent people to death, with many of their crimes even coming before the war started. 

One of the things that compels me the most about this movie is the convincing portrayals of American actors playing Germans. These include Burt Lancaster, Judy Garland, and most touchingly, Montgomery Clift, who plays a mental simpleton who was rendered sterile by the Nazis' unforgivable medical policies toward people who were anything less than pure, undamaged specimens of their Aryan ideal. 

The movie really belongs to the solemn Maine judge played by Spencer Tracy, Dan Haywood, the film's moral center, who is the shining example of the jurisprudence that underpinned these trials. He receives this responsibility with enormous gravity, understanding the likely guilt of the men on trial, but unwilling to just make this the sort of empty show that these same men presided over when they sentenced innocent men to death. He's truly eager to understand the finer points of what happened, and you can see the struggle on his face the whole time, even as he is developing the closest thing this film has to a romantic relationship with the widow (Marlene Dietrich) of a man who had earlier been executed as the outcome of a similar trial. Even though as an empathetic human being -- and even possibly as a man attracted to Dietrich's character -- he might be inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt in that she didn't know anything, he never lets her off the hook. He knows these issues are thorny but he also knows that the earnest pleas of these people's innocence does not mean they were actually innocent. 

I'm sure there's a lot more I could say about Judgment at Nuremberg -- I wanted to mention also that Maximillian Schell, as the judges' lawyer, is magnificent -- but I've got a trip to prepare for (more on that in the coming days) so I will leave off there. I'll just finish by saying that these two five-star films gave me a lot to think about on Sunday, and I was never bored for a second of their combined 355 minutes. 

We'll be back to just a single movie in June, however, that movie could have been part of a triple feature of long movies about potentially sympathetic Nazis during World War II. That movie will be Wolfgang Petersen's 1981 film Das Boot, which I believe has multiple versions, but IMDB says it's "only" 149 minutes. I feel for sure that I saw a longer one back in 2019, but I'll take whatever version I can find of my #124 film on Flickchart. 

Audient One-Timers: Invasion of the Body Snatchers

My 2026 monthly series involves rewatching my 12 highest ranked films on Flickchart that I've seen only once. 

I've always found it to be a bit of a mystery that Don Siegel's original Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) is ranked so prominently on my Flickchart. 

To be sure, it was a movie I knew was great, in addition to being seminal, the moment I saw it, which I would guess was sometime in my early- to mid-20s. But a personal favorite? Its ranking as #151 on my Flickchart certainly seems to suggest it should be. There are a lot of movies I've seen five, six, seven times that are ranked below it.

But one truth about Flickchart is that a movie is only as good as the duels it's had. Sure there was a ground zero when I first added Invasion of the Body Snatchers to my chart, when it beat a lot of stalwarts to land where it landed. I must have been feeling pretty favorably toward it that day, though it was not the day I saw it, since, as I said, that was sometime in the late 1990s (I'm guessing), and Flickchart has only existed since 2009.

It would have held that spot, though, if it never randomly came up against any movies in the next 100 that I might like better. It's conceivable that this movie -- that any movie ranked a little too high on my chart -- might have only had "slam dunk duels." In other words, either it faces a top 100 movie, where it loses but does not lose any ground in the overall rankings, or it faces a movie outside my top 500, and is an obvious winner. I'm guessing that if Invasion of the Body Snatchers ever came up against my #178 -- I just chose that number randomly, but it happens to be Romancing the Stone -- then it might lose, and enough such losses would drive it steadily downward to a more appropriate spot. And yes, I'm pretty sure Romancing the Stone, specifically, would win that particular duel.

One indication that it is not a personal favorite should be that I've never seen it fit to watch it again. Yes for sure I am less likely to rewatch black and white films -- especially nowadays, when there are barely any streamers that carry them -- but this one in particular would have been an easy watch. It's only 80 minutes long, and it contains almost zero fat, meaning it feels more like an hour than an hour 20.

And that's really the first thing I want to talk about here: how frigging efficient this script is. No fuss, no muss. Every single occurrence on screen contributes to the thrust toward the inevitable, with nary a wasted moment. It gives the film an extraordinary momentum. In fact, I was even thinking that this could be a great black and white entry point for my kids, considering that I don't think they've ever seen a full-length black and white film. They saw The Wizard of Oz, but that's only about a third black and white. So maybe my third Invasion of the Body Snatchers viewing will come a lot sooner than the second. 

So yeah, there was no time to get bored, and this flew by in the darkening, daylight savings hours of a Sunday late afternoon. 

We all know the story here. It's a chilling parable about conformity, and specifically about McCarthyism. I don't need to delve into the themes. You've seen this subject matter reinterpreted multiple times, such as the also superlative 1978 version with the famous final shot of Donald Sutherland pointing. These Audient One-Timer posts are not about delving deep into the film itself.

So there are only two other things I want to write about it today:

1) I don't want to spoil an entertainment property you didn't even know I might be talking about today, so I'm going to be vague here. But it struck me, as I was watching, that one of the most popular new TV shows from the last year is essentially a version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I didn't think about that as I was watching that show, but when watching IOTBS, all I could think about was the show. It's funny that I didn't actually hear pod people evoked in any of the discourse around that show. The Borg from Star Trek was a more common reference point. I'm sure those comparisons are out there on the internet if I wanted to search for them. 

2) Although I find the rules to be generally as complete as needed to establish the chilling ideas we see here, there was one nitpick I had on this viewing that isn't sitting right with me. Okay so we know that one of the keys of replacing these people with pod versions of themselves is that an actual physical replacement has to be grown in a seed pod, a process that is faster than you might expect but still takes some time. What happens with Kevin McCarthy's love interest, played by Dana Wynter, is a bit problematic, then. Although we know these replacements occur while the person is sleeping, they do actually involve a physical swap-out of new organic material with the same weight, size and mass. So how is it that Becky Driscoll, unable to fight sleep any longer, dozes off for five seconds, and awakens as a pod person? Where is the seed pod that needs to be next to her body in order to assume her identity? 

The internet likely also has an explanation for this one, but I'm not going to go looking for it.

My May movie will be ... well I've just realized I've made a grievous error. 

I created a Letterboxd listing for the top 15 movies I'd seen only once on my Flickchart, since I might have to go beyond 12 if I can't source one of the top 12. I thought I'd put them in that order in the list. But when checking now, I can see that I somehow skipped over the great Hitler movie Downfall, my #171 on Flickchart. It should have come up in March after I'd watched Smoke Signals (#181) and Solars (#176). Instead I went straight ahead to Rain Man (#158). So obviously this means Smoke Signals was my #13 and should never have been included. 

There's no doubt that the eight films I have left in this series are all ranked higher than Downfall, so either I skip Downfall or I extend the series to a 13th month. Or I could just double up one month.

If I do double up, May will include both Downfall and my #141, Judgment at Nuremberg. If not, just the latter. But the felicitous thematic relationship between those two films makes it seem like a double feature would be just about the perfect solution. Who knows, maybe I'll even try to watch them on the same day.

Audient One-Timers: Rain Man

My 2026 monthly series involves rewatching my 12 highest ranked movies on Flickchart that I've seen only once, in reverse order of their ranking.

Barry Levinson's Rain Man, currently #157 on my Flickchart, occupies a very curious place in my personal viewing history. Forthwith:

1) It is almost definitely the first best picture winner I ever saw. My big movie spreadsheet says that I saw this movie in the theater -- which I think is correct -- so that means I would have been 15 when I saw it. I don't think I'd seen any of the other best picture winners when I was 15, with two possible exceptions: Chariots of Fire, though I would not have guessed I'd have actually sat down for a full viewing (I may have seen some of it on cable), and The Sound of Music, which I am pretty sure I was taken to see when I was young, but all I remember is that I found it incredibly long and I think I might not have watched the whole thing. It definitely would have been the first I made an intentional decision to see. 

2) I'd say it's certainly the first best picture winner I saw before it was named best picture, though there is some small chance that I went to see it as a result of learning that it had won best picture. That's not really a thing anymore, or at least not to the same extent, but back then, a best picture win would get a movie an extended theatrical run after the ceremony, because it was sure to make a buck at the box office with so few other ways for people to see it. 

3) It is definitely, beyond a shadow of a doubt, the one of these dozen movies I'm watching as part of Audient One-Timers whose single viewing was the longest ago. Whether I saw it in 1988 or 1989, it's clearly a longer ago single viewing than the rest of these movies. There are a couple I may not have seen since college, but college started for me in 1991.

4) Even though I've seen it all the way through only one time, I feel like I know Rain Man pretty well just because I've seen snippets of it on cable, because it was thoroughly entrenched in the zeitgeist of the time, and because it has a lot of single images that feel iconic, most of Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman in some unusual pairing, like walking that long road outside of Wallbrook, the institution where Raymond Babbitt lived, or coming down the Vegas escalator in their matching gray suits. This movie was fully central to the culture for a while, and I know a lot of us liked to quote lines like "Definitely time for Wapner," even though that is probably a blend of two lines, and even though today, doing an imitation of a character with autism might be pretty cringey. 

5) And speaking of winning Oscars, it's also the only of these 12 movies in Audient One-Timers that won the top statue, though there are some other nominees in there.

What I wanted to interrogate on this viewing was, how the heck did Rain Man make its way into the stratosphere of my Flickchart rankings, presumably continuing to win duels against films you might think I'd like better?

Let's dispense with the word "presumably." I have same data that might be useful here, that I've been keeping for no good reason, and can finally put to use. If I'd thought about it, I would have started using it when this series started, but better late than never.

I maintain my Flickchart rankings in a spreadsheet, as kind of an online backup to the website in case the website should ever go offline for any reason. And as I add new films and insert them in the correct spot in the list, I also record when a lower film beats a higher one. I've been keeping this for probably close to ten years, so I can tell you exactly when Rain Man has won or lost a duel in which one of the films switched places.

To be honest, I thought the results would be a bit more telling. It originally jumped inside the top 200 (from #204) when it beat The Untouchables and momentarily went as high as #125 in my rankings. Within only a month or two after that, it was beaten by Rabbit Hole, which went to #128 on its way up to its current lofty position of #55. (Yes I do love that movie, which was my #3 of last decade, while I have lost some of my original love for The Untouchables.)

With Rain Man dropping another 30 spots to its current ranking, that just means that 30 movies have catapulted it in the rankings, some of which are probably original entries from newly watched films. But since it does get a lot of duels, that means it has continued to hold off the films that were ranked lower, the data for which doesn't show in my spreadsheet because I only record the instances of films changing positions, not instances where the status quo is maintained.

Okay let's get back on track after that unscheduled diversion that was not as illuminating as I hoped it would be.

I think the thing about Rain Man is that it was one of the first "adult" movies I watched, around the same time that I saw movies like Broadcast News as well. I mean, it wasn't totally adult in the sense that it starred Tom Cruise, who was obviously appearing in movies that were geared toward me. At around age 26, he wasn't an "adult" in the same way that Broadcast News' William Hurt and Albert Brooks seemed like adults. But the subject matter was clearly adult, and that's the important distinction here.

I remember having a conversation with myself when I watched it, thinking that this was not a movie that I should love, and yet, by the end, I did love it. It was probably also one of the first movies I watched where a self-centered prick made himself over as a caring individual for whom material gains were less important than family, a message that I've had peddled to me a thousand times since -- though rarely as well as in Rain Man.

Watching it this time, there's a part of me that thinks yes, #157 is too high. Not having watched it again since the late 1980s, and not really having had a huge inclination to watch it again either, should tell me something about where this movie sits within my personal pantheon. 

But I did really appreciate what a competent version it is of the thing it's trying to be. The word "competent" is a bit backhanded as a compliment, but I was really noticing Levinson's visual sense here. That's not to say that Levinson was/is a director without a visual sense, but I think of a movie like Diner as first and foremost a movie about dialogue. Dialogue is important in Rain Man too -- Levinson's gifts for people talking over each other, that we would have seen in Diner and that we see in Robert Altman's movies, is fully on display. But the reason there are so many iconic shots in Rain Man is because Levinson conceived them visually. I mentioned the two above, but there are also shots of the characters and their car against various backdrops of the American landscape that really stood out to me. 

Other observations I appreciated as I went along:

1) Bonnie Hunt has a small role as a waitress in a diner, whose phone number Raymond memorized when he was reading the phone book the night before. 

2) Hans Zimmer was the composer here, which I thought was interesting because I was just discussing Zimmer's career recently with friends in the context of having watched Terminator 2, which a couple of us thought he had scored. Another friend clarified that Zimmer didn't really get big until the 2000s, but Rain Man shows that he was clearly working long before then. This score was actually Zimmer's first Oscar nomination, and I found it interesting to ponder how little it sounded like what I would come to think of as a Hans Zimmer score. He was barely 30 and would not yet have developed a signature style, though you can hear little notes of the bombast of a future Zimmer score -- though those future scores would have considerably less pan flute.

3) Speaking of the changes since then, I appreciated the fact that Raymond has a Sony Watchman portable TV set with an antenna that's longer the TV itself, and that Charlie, with the cell phone still a glimmer in our collective eye as a society, is wedded to pay phones for the regular succession of phone calls he must make. (I think Gordon Gekko had a car phone in Wall Street, which came out a year earlier, but Charlie, despite his flashy smile and bro attitude, is about to go out of business in his company leasing exotic cars, so a car phone would have been an unaffordable luxury.)

4) I like that the lower stakes option is consistently chosen in this story. When we see the pit bosses start to talk among themselves about Raymond and Charlie's card counting, which then moves to the security video room, we're preparing for violence to be done to the brothers, or at least a harrowing escape through the streets of Las Vegas accompanied by some sort of rambunctious score. Instead, Charlie's just told he needs to take his winnings and leave, which they do. The story realizes it doesn't need additional set pieces or anything like that. It just wants a way to explain why Charlie doesn't stay in Vegas and use Raymond as a cash cow to become a millionaire, and that's all we need. 

One big thing I of course considered was that they probably couldn't make Rain Man today. Even though autism is not a form of special needs in the same category as someone with Down's Syndrome, for example, there would be a debate about whether it was right to have a mainstream intellectual actor portray someone like Raymond Babbitt. What would probably happen is that the politics of it would seem like too much trouble and they just wouldn't make the movie at all. 

Okay next up on the schedule in April is the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers. That should be fun. 

Audient One-Timers: Solaris

This is the second in my 2026 monthly series in which I'm rewatching my 12 favorite films, according to Flickchart, that I've seen only once.

The second movie in this series, Andrei Tarkovksy's Solaris, a lot more closely conforms to what you'd think I mean by the term "one-timer" than the first movie, Chris Eyre's Smoke Signals. Both films do have in common the fact that I saw them for the first time in 2013 -- and that comparative recency probably explains more than any other factor why I haven't yet seen them again.

Solaris, as you would know if you've seen it or if you know Tarkovsky, is long, ponderous and slow-paced, the sort of film you would definitely only watch once if you didn't care for it, and might take a while to get back to even if you did. In fact, given that the other two Tarkovsky films I've seen in the years since then -- Stalker and The Sacrifice -- have not worked for me as well as the #172 ranked Solaris obviously did, I was definitely concerned about the possibility of this just going over my head and seeming as ponderous as the other two, on a second viewing. 

But I don't think "ponderous" always has to be a negative appraisal of something. Tarkovsky's film is ponderous, and I think that's the best thing about it. (And it made me want to revisit Stalker, which I didn't dislike but which definitely tried my patience more with fewer rewards, while actually bearing a lot of similarities to Solaris otherwise. Before I do that, it would probably be best to see the three Tarkovsky features I haven't seen: Ivan's Childhood, Andrei Rublev and Mirror, the latter of which also has a good copy on YouTube, which is where I saw Solaris. Not even any ad breaks!)

My affection for Solaris was especially noteworthy given the baggage I brought in, which was seeing Steven Soderbergh's remake ten years earlier and not caring for it. I suppose that might have made me more receptive to a good version of Solaris, but it could have also made me wary about the possibility of any good version existing. Now that I've seen the original two times, and confirmed my affection for it with a rewatch, I'm wondering if I might be more open to what Soderbergh was doing, or just more critical of it. That's another rewatch to consider some day.

My first viewing of Solaris was around the same time that I decided I really loved Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, to which Solaris owes a few very small debts. My two twenty teens viewings of 2001 were what elevated it all the way up to #12 on my Flickchart, the first of which was only two weeks after I watched Solaris (and no doubt inspired by the fact that I'd just seen Solaris). 

Tarkovksy's film does capture the eerie and unnerving qualities of unexplained occurrences in outer space that Kubrick gave us in such a memorable way four years earlier, but it doesn't really use space the way you imagine it would. Although the sense of being on a space station is clear, especially with our views of the ocean planet below, we get almost none of the traditional space backgrounds you'd think you'd get in a movie like this, with stars twinkling against a sea of infinite blackness. I recall exactly one, and it serves more as a transition between the scenes set on Earth (which run longer than a half-hour to start the film) and those set in space. Once the characters are in space, Tarkovsky is not that interested in continually reminding us of that fact through shots of space or footage of anyone doing a space walk. Everything we see can be, and obviously was, shot on Tarkovksy's very earthbound sets in Russia. (2001 was not shot in space, of course, but when I was younger, I believed it was.)

So it's a credit to Tarkovsky's movie magic that we never doubt our location. The sets themselves look like we imagine a space station would look, or rather, a space station that was inhabited entirely by Alzheimer's patients, as it's been left in disarray with various objects strewn about and loose wiring letting off sparks. Then the images of the swirling surface of the ocean planet, whose swirls ebb and flow and change according to the mysteries that are unfolding for the characters, are chilling in their otherworldliness.

Though I think if there's one single key to why Solaris gets under our skin, it may be the sound design. Every sound is chosen for its maximum pscyhological impact on us, as it mirrors the mental dissolution the characters are experiencing as they walk this space station and see the physical embodiment of some person from their past, inexplicably walking the corridors next to them. I don't find the moment-to-moment experiences with these characters, one in particular (the dead wife of Chris Kelvin), always chilling, though individual moments are quite so. The scene where she's banging on the door to get out of it -- and then bursts through the metal as though it were wet cardboard, leaving jagged edges -- is quite effective in that regard.

Because of its length (2:42) and the practical necessities of my Sunday schedule, I split Solaris in half the way the movie itself splits itself in half after about 1:19. Although you'd think you'd be under the movie's spell more as it reaches its climax, I found myself more gripped during the first half, which include those establishing scenes on Earth and all the shots of nature around Chris Kelvin's home. This film definitely relies on anticipation of what's to come in creating its mood.

I really get a lot out of the portion of the film that you wouldn't think would really be eerie, which is the character Burton explaining his experiences while on a previous rescue mission to the surface of the planet to try to find two lost crewmen. We see an older version of Burton, alongside Kelvin and a few others, watching a hearing of a younger version in which Burton explains what he saw. A hearing does not seem like the sort of place we'd become entranced by the film introducing its concepts to us.

But here is where Burton talks about seeing a massive infant four meters long on the surface of the planet's oceans, and later reveals that the infant had the appearance of the orphaned son of one of the lost crew members, something Burton only realized later when he met that son. Even twice removed from the actual events -- a character watching his own verbal account of this experience -- it sets our imaginations alive. 

And here I think is part of the film's very small debt to 2001, only because the ending of 2001 also involves the image of an infant, the Star Child. It's such a small debt that I hesitate to even mention it, because Tarkovsky is clearly doing his own thing here and not ripping off Kubrick in any way. Maybe both of them realized that seeing images of small children in outer space, where they certainly should not be, is pretty eerie.

Okay I've used enough synonyms for "eerie" and "unnerving" and "chilling" for one day. 

Audient One-Timers: Smoke Signals

Welcome to the first in my 2026 monthly series in which I am rewatching my 12 favorite films, according to Flickchart, that I have seen only once.

So we start out this series with a very unassuming film to be among my 12 favorite movies of any kind, though I suppose the standard is a bit lower for what I'm calling "one-timers" -- films I've seen only once.

To call a film a "one-timer" implies that it is very difficult to sit through a second time, either for length (such as The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King) or for subject matter (such as Requiem for a Dream, which I have actually seen at least four times.) That's not the way I'm using it here. There's no judgment, it's just a literal fact: the 12 films in this series are the highest ranked on my Flickchart that I have seen only once. Yes some of them will be long and some will have difficult subject matter, but those are merely secondary factors in their inclusion in this series. (Though they may be primary factors in why I've seen the film only once.) 

And that 12th favorite, with a current ranking of #175, is Chris Eyre's Smoke Signals, which I watched for the first time just about 13 years ago, give or take a few weeks. 

The film was significant for me in that year of 2013, which ended up being the year I moved to Australia, though I didn't know it at the time I watched Smoke Signals. Eyre's film was the first in a weekly series I wrote for the Flickchart blog called Flickchart Road Trip, which involved me watching a movie set in each of the 50 states, driving along an imaginary path that started from where I lived in Los Angeles at the time. I'd then "duel" that movie, just in the blog post, against five other movies from that state that were already in my Flickchart, seeing where it landed among them. 

It was a very harrowing commitment because I'm the guy who refuses to miss posting deadlines on a project like this, even if real-world reasons gave me a good excuse to do so. Such as moving to a new country and not having internet at my house for a few weeks, meaning I'd have to go to the library or a nearby hospital to do everything I needed for each post, as well as continuing to source one new movie per week to watch from each new state -- which was far less easy back in those largely pre-streaming days. I got to the end of the year with a sigh of relief and a vow to never do anything like that again.

The first stop on the road trip, geographically after California, was Arizona, where the second half of Smoke Signals is set. So that's the film I chose. (I had already decided that I wasn't going to start with California, but save it for #50 -- though I can't remember now if I "flew" to Alaska and Hawaii before or after California, so it might have been #48.) 

And I was floored by Eyre's movie. In fact, it kicked off two straight five-star movies to begin the series, as Billy Wilder's Ace in the Hole would be up next in New Mexico. That movie might also be in this series because it's ranked high enough, but I've already seen that one a second time. After those two movies, the series never got close to reaching those heights again, but it was helpful in providing an immediate endorsement of this project I'd taken on. 

The thing I remembered most from the first viewing was how the ending absolutely socked me, leaving me in tears. You always remember the tears.

When I got to the ending this time, after the movie flew by (it's only 90 minutes), I could see the part that had made me cry, and I could feel some facisimile of the same emotions welling up maybe as a sense memory. But the ending of the movie is not really constructed as a big make-you-cry moment, so I feel like the tears may have been the result of an accumulation of subtle moments in the study of its two main characters. That speaks very well of the movie, its construction and its perfromances, but perhaps it made me a little less likely to cry this time around, and indeed I did not. 

Jeez, I haven't even really told you anything about the movie while already talking about its ending.

It's the story of two teenagers on an Idaho reservation, who are siblings by adoption and who we see at multiple ages through flashbacks. I'll list the actors who play them as the teenage versions, who are Adam Beach as Victor, the biological son of Arnold (Gary Farmer), and Evan Adams as Thomas, the adoptive son of Arnold after Arnold saved the baby from a house fire that killed Thomas' parents. Thomas naturally views his adoptive father as a hero, but there's more to this story and Arnold is a complicated man living with demons. He eventually leaves the reservation, abandoning the boys' mother Arlene (Tantoo Cardinal) to relocate to Phoenix, which happens before the start of the narrative. In fact, the narrative starts with a report of Gary's death in the lonely spot outside Phoenix where he was living in a trailer and seems to have struck up a friendship with one younger woman, Suzy (Irene Bedard), but was otherwise living alone with those demons. Victor and Thomas need to road trip to Phoenix to take care of Gary's affairs, such as they are, and make peace with the memory of this absent father, whom they each see differently.

There isn't much more to the story on a plot level, but there's much more on the level of character and emotion. Still, watching the movie, you are struck by the intentional smallness of its scale. I should say, I was struck by it on this viewing, especially since I knew how highly I regarded the film. 

The relationship between Thomas and Victor is fertile. Thomas is a bit of a dork, a bespectacled kid who is given to great storytelling skills but is not cool in any respect that would be rewarded socially. Victor much more fits that profile as he's more traditionally handsome and is the star of the basketball team. However it's Thomas who is more at peace with his place in the world and it appears that Victor may be wrestling with the start of some of his father's demons. 

If I were to forcibly re-rank Smoke Signals on Flickchart -- which I am not going to do, even though that might be a logical accompanying action for this blog series -- it might fall a little bit. It would certainly end up outside my top 200. Instead, it will only slowly drop over time as it loses duels to certain films that are currently ranked in the next 100 spots behind it.

But that's not the same as saying I regret the ranking. The effect the movie had on me this time might only be 80% of what it was the first time, but it reminded me specifically of the value of a movie like this, which underplays most of its emotions in getting you to a very emotional spot by the end. I also really loved the look inside an American community that we don't see enough of on film. This week in particular, watching the film made it a good companion with the film I watched on Monday for Australia Day, Bran Nue Dae, since there's obviously a lot of overlap between the experience of indigenous Australians and indigenous Americans, particularly in terms of things like the way alcohol impacts their communities.

And to think, the first time I saw Smoke Signals, I wouldn't have even made that connection as I was still seven months away from moving to Australia. 

Seeing the one-timers twice in 2026

I've told you about my bi-monthly series in 2026 -- which is actually two intertwining bi-monthly series with the same name but slightly different functions -- but I have yet to reveal the details of my proper monthly series. 

Well friends, the wait is over.

(You weren't actually waiting.)

This one is about my Flickchart, or uses it to get the movies, in any case. (Actually, the bi-monthly series, at least one of them, sort of does as well.)

First I should say that I expect my experience with Flickchart to change at some point in 2026.

I'm a "Flickchart insider," which means I know personally (though not IRL) the Flickchart creators, and then all sorts of Flickchart superfans who communicate with each other in a Flickchart Facebook group, and do movie challenges. One of the two creators, who I know significantly better than the other, shares the same favorite band with me, Nine Inch Nails, so we chat about them from time to time. I also take pride in having recommended him one of his favorite movies of all time, also one of mine, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, in one of the aforementioned challenges.

Anyway, from chats in this group, I have been expecting a change in the core dueling mechanisms of Flickchart, for something like ten years now. It's been known as v. 2, and indeed, they've been working on it forever. Some users are currently beta testing it, though it has a lot of bugs at this point. Viewing this as an outsider in that sense that I'm not one of the ones on v. 2 yet, though I could be if I wanted to, I know it uses a strange, more counterintuitive algorithm for how films duel each other and how they move within your chart once they win or lose that duel. I suppose it's strange to me only because I don't understand it.

For now, I am happy to not yet be on this new version. Because as I've told you many times in the past, I like to keep an offline version of my Flickchart in an Excel spreadsheet. Which is easy to do, because a victorious movie just jumps one head of the movie it beats, which is easy to keep on top of in a spreadsheet. This new method may not be so easy.

I probably didn't need to give you this whole preamble, though I do think this prospective change in the ranking mechanism happens to lend additional urgency to doing this series this year, because I'm not sure what my chart will look like after I'm ported over to v. 2 along with all the other Flickchart users out there in the world. 

So what I want to do in 2026 is rewatch my 12 favorite movies, according to Flickchart, that I've seen only once. I am calling these "one-timers," and so the series will be called Audient One-Timers.

Now, the term "one-timer" usually connotates a movie with either subject matter you can't bear to sit through a second time, or gargantuan length. Both of those will likely apply here to some extent. In fact, I can think of one movie each in my top 100 that could potentially qualify for each.

But in my case, it's more literal, in that it's a movie I love, but I've only seen it once.

The purpose of this will be twofold:

1) If you love a movie, you should see it more than once. That's just being kind to yourself. It's always good to expose ourselves to things we love a second time. 

2) If you love a movie, you should prove to yourself that you actually love it by a second viewing, especially if you are committing that love to the "permanence" of something like Flickchart.

So yes it's possible that some of these will be movies I don't love as much on the second time -- in fact, I'm pretty sure that's inevitable. At the moment, I don't plan to forcibly re-rank them on Flickchart to a more appropriate position after each viewing, though there have been some instances in the past where a rewatch has revealed a Flickchart position so out of whack with my actual thoughts on the film, that I've been compelled to do this anyway. My most recent experience with Field of Dreams, for example -- as described here -- was one such case. 

The end result should be that I've seen every movie in my top 175 on Flickchart at least twice. That's right, my current 12th highest one-timer is exactly at #175 on my Flickchart. 

Now, it's possible I will end up having to watch some movies that are ranked lower a second time, because there may be some of these that I can't get my hands on for a second viewing. Their lack of availabililty may be why I've only watched them once. 

But I'd still like to start out with my 12th best one-timer first, and go forward from there. It's more exciting to build toward the best than starting off at the best. And then if there's a higher ranked movie I can't find, that month I will shift and watch the 13th best, or the 14th best if it happens twice, even though that means going out of order for at least that one month. 

I should note two other rules:

1) If, through the normal course of dueling movies on Flickchart, a movie that is not currently among my top 12 one-timers defeats a higher ranked film, and therefore becomes part of my top 12, I will do my best to include it. This is not particularly likely to happen, but it could happen.

2) Even less likely is that a brand new viewing will be so beloved by me that I will rank it within that top 175 just from a first viewing. I don't think it serves any point to just go immediately watch this movie a second time because it is now within my top 12, so if such a thing happens, I will exclude it from consideration for this series. (That's especially less likely because I remain very far behind in adding my new viewings to Flickchart.)

I'm including as the art of this post my current 15th best one-timer, because a) I think it's unlikely to be part of this series, and b) even if it were to come up as a potential replacement for a higher-ranked unavailable movie, I doubt I could find it. John Cameron Mitchell's 2006 film Shortbus, currently my #191 on Flickchart, contains scenes that can accurately be described as pornography, or pretty darn close to it. It's also beautiful and made me cry. However, the porn adjacent aspects are what made it very difficult for me to get my hands on originally, and potentially impossible to get now. 

One-timers, they come in all shapes and sizes. And in 2026, I will be engaging with a dozen of them, either deepening my appreciation of them, or potentially, at worst, sending them to a more appropriate place on my Flickchart than they've been occupying since I saw them, in many cases years in the past.

Seems like a worthwhile venture to me.