Audient Zeitgeist: Jack

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

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

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

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

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

And also, I did not hate it.

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

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

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

But first, some plot.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Audient Zeitgeist and first themed October horror: Psycho

This is the fifth and penultimate entry in my 2025 bi-monthly series Audient Zeitgeist, in which I'm watching six movies that had some significance in the zeitgeist but which I had not previously watched.

The latest Audient Zeitgeist movie is doing double duty, just as the one from June did double duty. That viewing of Shoah was my 7,000th movie of all time as well as being an entry in this series, and this one also serves the function of announcing what my horror theme will be for the month of October.

But first, the zeitgeist bit.

The term "shot-by-shot remake" might not have existed before Gus Van Sant made his version of Psycho in 1998. 

Oh, the concept behind it might have been intuitive enough. You restage a piece of filmed material, whatever it may be, using the same camera setups that run the same amount of time as in the original work. So that also implies that the editing is the same. Usually, that would also mean the same dialogue, or at least dialogue that runs for the same amount of time so the shots can be the same length. 

Film people would know what it meant, as many of them spent a lot of time aping their icons in their formative years as filmmakers, even maybe doing their own shot-by-shot remakes of parts of their favorite films. (Certainly no more than parts, in most cases.) 

But in 1998, casual people became familiar with the term. It was impossible not to know that Psycho was not only a remake of Alfred Hitchcock's most iconic film, but, like, an exact remake.

And given the box office and critical response, we also immediately learned that this was a bad idea. 

How exact of a remake?

Well that was a challenge for me as I watched the movie. But I'll get into that in just a moment. 

Now, the tie-in to the films I'll be watching this October in honor of Halloween.

To bring you up to speed, I've done themed October viewings for three previous Octobers now. I skipped 2022, not knowing at that point that I would ultimately intend to make it an annual tradition. But 2021, 2023 and 2024 have all featured these month-long themes.

In 2021, I started with 1970s horror movies. When I got back to it in 2023, it was horror comedies. Then last year, you may remember that I slogged through all the previous Halloween movies that I hadn't seen. And when you consider that I also rewatched the original, that made for 11 total movies, and exhausted me terribly.

I don't think I will be so ambitious this October, but Psycho has given me my first movie in the new theme: horror remakes. In fact, some of the Halloween movies I watched last October would have qualified here as well.

I set out on this task with the foreknowledge that it may not be a great month for being scared. Remakes of horror movies have a pretty checkered cinematic history, and in some cases, even the originals were not that scary.

But, I think I knew the previous two Octobers would not be very scaery when I chose my previous two themes, comedies and a bunch of Halloween movies that I knew were probably bad. If my only goal were to be scared, I don't know what theme I'd choose, because over the years I have already tried to get my hands on as many movies that I thought would scare the shit out of me as I possibly could. If you were to give me one suggestion of such a movie, right now, I'd probably try to watch it by the weekend.

So there have been a lot of horror remakes over the years, and I have already seen many of them. However, aside from Psycho, at least the following others have so far gone unseen by me, and I hope to rectify that this month, pending their availability:

Carrie (2013)
Friday the 13th (2009)
I Know What You Did Last Summer (2025)
I Spit On Your Grave (2010)

And at least one of those will also be doing double duty, giving me a movie to rank for 2025.

There will surely be one or two more, especially if I can't find some of these, but these are the only ones I've thought of already. (I might be able to watch Macon Blair's new version of The Toxic Avenger, but only if it comes down from its current $19.99 rental price on iTunes before the end of October.)

The key is I'm trying to see movies where I've already seen the original (which rules out the Australian film Patrick and its remake, which I really should see because my wife's ex-boyfriend directed it), and I'd like to focus only on movies where there aren't a bunch of other movies in the franchise to muddy the water on what's a remake and what's a reboot and what's a reheat. Friday the 13th does that a little bit, but I believe the 2009 version was conceived as a straight remake of the original, much like Rob Zombie had recently done with Halloween. (Watching all the Friday the 13th movies I haven't watched would be a way to spend an October, but it's too soon after I did that same thing last year.)

Anyway, back to the project at hand: Psycho.

One of the things I of course wanted to know was how much Van Sant et al had stayed true to Hitchcock's original movie. It has been more than 30 years since I've seen Psycho, and though there would have been value to watching it again in order to prep for the Audient Zeitgeist piece, I decided not to. Whether the movie is successful or not is not a matter of whether it exactly copies Hitchcock. A successful execution of the exercise is not the same thing as a successful movie, and I decided that for the purposes of the assessment of Psycho as a legendary bomb that would qualify it for this series, I was more concerned with why it failed as a movie, if it indeed it did fail, than whether it failed as a successful execution of the concept. 

However, it wasn't possible for me to shrug off this curiosity. What I really needed was what my friend did for the first few minutes of the version of Jurassic Park he directed in which I appeared as an extra -- check out this post if you want to learn about that -- in which the real movie plays in a picture-in-picture box down in the lower left-hand corner, just to show you how closely they followed their assignment. The JP filmmakers correctly dropped this after the opening scene, having given us a flavor and proven the standards to which they held themselves. There is likely a side-by-side version out there, somewhere, given the general infinitude of the internet. But Van Sant and company did not see fit to include it in the final film, which of course makes sense. 

After a while I forced myself to give up thinking about it. This was partly made possible by the fact that I could tell there were deviations. For example, you can clearly see that Vince Vaughn's Norman Bates is masturbating while he spies on Anne Heche's Marion Crane, which would not have been possible in 1960. Then, because the film is updated to 1998, the dialogue is not 100% the same, especially during the moment when Julian Moore's character says she needs to go get her Walkman. (Unintentionally funny or just funny? You be the judge.) Then there's the fact that a movie made in 1998 needs to show page after page of end credits, whereas Hitchcock's movie just goes to THE END after you see the car containing Marion's body pulled out of the swamp. To accommodate for this, Van Sant's version pulls out of the scene and lingers on it for another three or four minutes as all the credits dutifully run past. 

I had thought it was possible that Van Sant would try to make a movie set in 1960, and really stick as closely to it as he could. That would have felt like a more worthwhile effort. The changes he does make feel arbitrary, and in some cases, lazy. In reading up on the movie afterward, I found that they couldn't figure out how to recreate all the shots, so in the cases where they couldn't get the blocking right, they just did a different shot. How different? I don't know, but I can tell you that the guys making the Jurassic Park I was in did not settle for such a shoddy standard.

And I think that's really the thing about this Psycho: It feels shoddy. It doesn't necessarily feel poorly acted in any way that bothered me (though I know some howled about Heche's performance at the time). It doesn't necessarily feel like it should have had a better DP. (It had Christopher Doyle, who worked with Wong Kar-Wai and was one of the best going.) The editing doesn't feel off. The settings don't feel off, as they are the same part of the Universal lot used in the original, which is still a highlight of the backlot studio tour. 

It's just the whole thing is a bit ... shoddy. 

And also, pointless, which was the biggest complaint people had at the time.

I think the reason people don't make shot-by-shot remakes very often is that an important thing has changed between when the movie was first made and when you're making it now: Us. The audience. 

What scared us in 1960 when Psycho came out does not scare us 38 years later in the same way. Even with the gestures toward modernism that Van Sant included, whether unintentionally funny or not, he was regrettably married to an old-fashioned form of filmmaking by sticking to Hitchcock's shots. When Hitchcock used those shots, they were the cutting edge, and they feel so fresh in his hands that I think even modern audiences can watch his Psycho and still be scared by it. But I think it does depend on how many horror movies they've already seen, and I think that appreciation comes with a knowledge that it was a different time.

Anyone who had already seen Hitchcock's version -- which likely describes much of the audience for Van Sant's version -- was not going to be scared by Van Sant's version without him giving us something new. Something old worked for Hitchcock, and the fact that it can't work the same way for Van Sant is no shade on what Hitchcock accomplished in 1960.  

And if Van Sant's version was some people's first exposure to horror, well, that was a great shame for them. 

At the very least, I think the movie did make a significant contribution to the zeitgeist, as a cautionary tale (both for studios and audiences), and as a way to acquaint us with something you could do, but probably shouldn't. 

Heck, without this version of Psycho, my version of Jurassic Park might not even exist. 

Audient Zeitgeist: Zyzzyx Road

This is the latest in my 2025 bi-monthly series catching up with movies I hadn't seen that are in the zeitgeist for one reason or another.

If you haven't heard of Zyzzyx Road, and you're a cinephile, you might not be as in tune with the cinematic zeitgeist as you think you are.

Okay okay ... perhaps a true cinephile, in the snobbiest sense of that word, prefers to spend their energies thinking about Ingmar Bergman and only the very best of what deigns to be made after 1978. But that sort of cinephile doesn't interest me. I vibe better with the cinephile omnivores, who see the good and the bad, the well-known and the obscure, the big box office achievers and ... the Zyzzyx Roads.

Yes, John Penney's 2006 film is known to us for box office reasons, which I'll get into in just a moment. It also should well and truly fall into the "the bad" end of the above listed duality, but ... I kind of liked it actually. In the end I chickened out on a positive star rating and ended up at 2.5, but that's far, far better than I expected it would be, given the unique box office feat it achieved.

Zyzzyx Road has the distinction of being considered, by most metrics, the worst performer of all time at the U.S. box office. 

Due to the desire by star Leo Grillo (who?) to open the film in foreign markets before it was opened domestically, but also his need to fulfill a requirement by the Screen Actors Guild for U.S. releases of low-budget independent films, the film played for one week, every day at noon, at the Highland Park Village Theater in Dallas, Texas, straddling the end of February and beginning of March, 2006.

Where it made $30. 

The actual net gross was $20, because Grillo refunded two tickets purchased by the film's makeup artist and her friend. So only four disinterested audience members, if my math is correct, paid to see the film on its theatrical release. 

Maybe they're the true cinephiles.

This made Zyzzyx Road the lowest grossing film in U.S. history, with all sorts of asterisks that have subsequently cropped up that I don't want to get into here. (The 2011 movie The Worst Movie Ever Made also has some dubious claim to this title.)

Lest we shed a tear for Grillo, Penney, and the only two other actors in the film, the far better known Tom Sizemore and Katherine Heigl, the film ultimately made $368,000 by the end of 2006 on DVD releases in 23 other countries -- and some person with a wicked sense of humor saw it fit to make a collector's edition, whose poster I just had to include above.

It's a tight little setup for a movie, and the execution is not bad either.

We open on Grillo's Grant and Heigl's Marissa driving in a car out in the desert with a body in their trunk. At least they think it's merely a body. Grant believes he killed Marissa's abusive (ex?) boyfriend, Joey (Sizemore), when he knocked him over the head after Joey stormed into the motel room where they were having a tryst. But if this were just a movie about burying a body in the desert, that would probably not sustain the relatively brief 85-minute running time. (IMDB says it's 90, but I think this is just a case of hand-wavey rounding up -- the version on YouTube, which was the only place I could find it, is surely complete, and it was only 85 minutes.)

When they pull off onto obscure Zyzzyx Road -- a real road that serves as a landmark on the drive between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, which anyone who has done that drive knows about, making this a zeitgeist movie in a second way -- and open the trunk to start their business, a few minutes later they notice that Joey is no longer there. Thus begins a cat and mouse game in which Joey's lifelessness or lack thereof is not the only assumption we should question.

We should also make no mistake about the cinematic tools used to make Zyzzyx Road. "Low budget" is certainly an accurate way to describe this movie, as it looks skuzzy for reasons that don't just have to do with the quality of the copy I watched on YouTube. This was always a movie made for dirt cheap, requiring only a single patch of desert to film it (and mostly at night), and a crew that needn't have comprised more than a few people. The presence of Sizemore and Heigl, who were already established actors at this point (of course Sizemore was, but Heigl also had credits dating all the way back to 1992), indicates some sort of pull that Grillo or Penney must have had. (It doesn't say Grillo was also a producer on IMDB, but what else explains the fact that he had a say in its distribution?) 

But in starting to praise the movie a bit, the performances are all good, and I especially liked Grillo, who looks like just the everyman this story calls for. His normal-sizedness would not play in all roles -- and he is, in a way, the opposite of the man whose last name is literally Size More -- but here it is just the ticket. We do imagine that this is what we might be forced to do if we had a wife and kids but were just caught by a jealous boyfriend having sex with a woman who might actually just be a teenaged girl.

The writing is all fine, no lines of dialogue stand out for being amateurish, and the logical moments that would occur in a scenario like this are all reasonably explored and played out as they might actually occur. Then there are some illogical moments, narrative flights of fancy, just to mix things up. Let's just say that there are moments when Penney defies his small budget with a few techniques that you wouldn't see coming. It starts not to be possible to take what's happening purely at face value, and that actually happens more than once in this relatively brief narrative. Instead of playing as gimmicky misfires, these play as interesting choices. Maybe not super interesting, but interesting.

I think the thing is, when you watch a movie renowned for its complete failure at the box office -- albeit in conditions that were stacked against it from the start -- you expect it to be far, far worse than Zyzzyx Road. And to be sure, movies with a much higher box office, but which comprises a much lower percentage of their budget, are much bigger failures in a proper consideration of that term.

Really, Zyzzyx Road is just a movie that always probably should have been straight to video, in which case it would have been a perfectly fine way to spend an evening, especially if you were sick or something.

Because it reached the zeitgeist in the way it did, though, it has ultimately been seen by a lot more people, who saw it for the same reasons I just saw it. And that is a far better -- and more deserving, as it turns out -- fate for it in the end. 

One final thought about Zyzzyx Road, which makes it of particular significance to a list maker like me. There is now almost no possibility -- short of a ZZ Top biopic -- that I will ever see a movie with a title that can be alphabetized after this one. For almost 15 years, Cy Endfield's Zulu has been the last movie on my big movie list, but now it's Zyzzyx Road -- and will likely continue be so, forever and ever amen. 

I'll be back in October with the penultimate one of these. 

Audient Zeitgeist and 7,000th movie: Shoah

This is the third in my 2025 bi-monthly series Audient Zeitgeist, in which I'm watching previously unseen movies that have an ongoing role in our zeitgeist.

With my 7,000th movie on the horizon -- that's 7,000 distinct titles, not 7,000 total viewings -- I had been scouting movies with the number 7,000 in their title, but I wasn't liking the choices too much. 

Red Line 7000? 7000 Miles? Paris 7000? Tallahassee 7000?

I hadn't heard of any of them, and this was starting to feel like The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T all over again. (Which was not a good way to celebrate the milestone of 5,000 films watched. Especially not that particular milestone.)

So a couple months ago I started to take a different tack, and I came up with a title that would also work with my Audient Zeitgeist series.

Which is how I came to watch the longest movie I've ever seen on the longest day of the year, though of course June 21st is actually the shortest day of the year in the southern hemisphere, making the task all the more challenging.

(It's the same number of hours, of course. And less daylight is probably more rather than less conducive to watching a movie all day.)

Did I say all day? I meant it. 

The reasons Claude Lanzmann's 1985 documentary Shoah makes for a good 7,000th movie, and why 2025 is a particularly good time to watch it:

1) The movie is listed on IMDB as 9 hours and 26 minutes long. I say "listed," because the four-disc DVD set I picked up off Amazon contained what appeared to be "only" 9 hours and 4 minutes of movie. At that point, what's another 22 minutes? But I'm sure I did not need it.

2) When this movie came out in 1985, it had been 40 years since the end of World War II, a period of time the film remembers as it interviews survivors and witnesses of the Third Reich's attempt to exterminate the Jewish people through their concentration camps in Poland. It has now been 40 years since the movie came out, and 80 years since the end of World War II. So that makes for an interesting perspective, both on how far we had come (or not come) by then, and how far we have come (or not come) now.

The reasons Shoah is a good Audient Zeitgeist movie:

1) The word "zeitgeist" is German.

2) Number two takes a little more explanation and introduces you to my personal history with the movie, such as it is.

I first became aware of Shoah sometime in the late 1980s, and if memory serves me correctly, I discovered it while poring over one of Roger Ebert's books of great movies. Actually I think it was a book of his capsule reviews, but I'm not finding the exact thing listed in his bibliography. In any case, it was some Ebert-related book, and I must have been going through it with a fine-toothed comb in order to learn that this movie called Shoah was 9 hours and 26 minutes long (or maybe just 9:04). 

I immediately told my friends about this. Or they discovered it and they told me. This was nearly 40 years ago so forgive me if my memory is hazy. 

In any case, we were intensely fascinated by a movie that utterly exploded our notion of the viable length for a feature film. I mean, how would you even watch a nine-hour movie? Would there be bathroom breaks? 

Shoah became a go-to example I would use in scenarios where a long movie was required. Today I am more likely to talk about Lord of the Rings: Return of the King -- like, "It's only 1 a.m., it's not too late to start watching Lord of the Rings: Return of the King" -- but back at that time, Shoah would have been my example. Maybe over the years, I prefer my jokes to be a little less exaggerated.

Because solemn subject matter aside, which we will discuss in detail later in this piece, there had to be something exaggerated, something avant garde, something intentionally button-pushing about a movie that so blithely disregarded existing cinematic conventions for length?

I guess I don't know the extent to which Shoah holds this role for people in the population at large, which is what makes me unsure if this truly qualifies as a zeitgeist movie. Maybe for other people, Bela Tarr's 7 hour and 19 minute Satantango is their Shoah. But my friends and I seemed to talk about Shoah a lot, and therefore, I'm happy enough to extrapolate this fascination to other people as well.

I always distantly imagined I might see Shoah, but I never knew what circumstances those would be. A little internet research tells me that the first people to see Shoah saw it in October of 1985, when it debuted at New York's Cinema Studio, but that most people saw it two years later across four nights on PBS. 

I knew I didn't want to watch it across four nights. That felt like cheating. 

If they made Shoah today, it would not be considered a single feature, but a limited documentary series, like O.J.: Made in America. What fascinates me so much about it is that it existed outside of such streaming era conventions, making it an absolute anomaly for its time, and giving it a different feeling than the long-form documentaries we would get today. 

Getting my hands on it at all was the first problem I had to tackle.

I couldn't find it streaming anywhere, for possibly obvious reasons, though they might slice it up if they didn't want to load one giant file lasting over nine hours. But I did find it available on DVD through Amazon.

If I wanted to get it in Australia, it would cost me something like $150, and that was not an amount I was willing to spend, even for a landmark 7,000th movie. In the U.S., though, there was a copy available for only $30. I would solve the DVD region incompatibility issue with the fact that I still have a computer set to the correct DVD region and it still works, for just such occasions. I just needed to send it to my friend Don in Chicago, who would send it to me and I would pay him back for the shipping. Turns out, he shipped it from work so I didn't need to pay him back at all.

When I received the DVD, more than a month ago, the writing on the DVD case was in German. This momentarily made me wonder if a) it was actual Region 1, which is how I have my old laptop set, or b) if the option to watch with English subtitles would even be available. And though I had to navigate a DVD title menu in German, indeed the "Sprach" menu allowed me to pick English for the subtitles, and indeed I was off and rolling.

But I'm getting a little ahead of myself. I have to tell you how I got to picking this past Saturday.

When I made the decision to do this as part of Audient Zeitgeist, which had a bi-monthly post due in June, it was mid-May and I still had something like 35 movies to watch before 7,000. That would be faster than my usual pace at this time of year, but I knew that if I put my mind to it and I didn't schedule any rewatches, I could time it out to hit 7,000 by the last weekend in June.

As it turns out, I really put my mind to it, and also spent a weekend being sick, so I got there with time to spare, and on track to watch it even a weekend earlier than that final weekend. In fact, I had to slow down my usual pace this week, scheduling rewatches for Tuesday and Friday nights and not watching anything on Wednesday, so that 28 Years Later on Thursday night would be #6,999, and I'd be ready to start Shoah on Saturday morning. 

Because one thing I was sure of: It would be cheating if I did not watch this all within the same day. Yes, I've watched movies over multiple days before -- in fact I think I intentionally took four nights to watch Ben-Hur -- but it was a point of pride, for this landmark movie, to have something close to a real-time, consecutive viewing of those nine hours, all in one day, like the first audiences in October of 1985 presumably had. I arranged Saturday June 21st with my wife, and she gave me one of her bemused "you're crazy" looks and said "Sure."

Because the interesting thing to note about Shoah is, it's not naturally divisible into four parts, which is what they had to do to show it on PBS. The movie really does run like one long feature, and the divisions they've put in to change discs seem largely just that: instructions to change discs. Technically the film is divided into two parts, but each is more than four hours, and again, I could not tell if this was in the film at the time or put in later for our easier consumption. Either way, each part is way longer than most movies you've ever seen. 

I don't want to keep you here reading this for as long as it took me to watch Shoah, but the rest of this post will be divided into two parts: 1) A timeline of my viewing of Shoah. Come on, you're dying to know how a person watches a nine-hour movie in one day, and who am I to deny you this? 2) My thoughts on the movie based on the notes I took. 

Let's start the first part with a general strategy. 

Obviously I can't just sit there for nine hours in a row and watch a movie. Even if I could handle it from a stamina perspective, which I could not, there were a few things required of me during the day. So I decided I would try to follow a system of taking a break every hour, as well as another break any time I had to change discs. Breaking the viewing up into manageable bites would make the whole thing more manageable, hopefully. 

I should also fess up to something: I didn't only watch the movie. I did check baseball scores and that sort of thing. When you have something as long as this to watch, you have to use whatever strategy gets you through it without unduly compromising the experience of watching the movie. 

Okay let's get to that timeline. 

Timeline

7:29 a.m. Started movie. I had hoped to start closer to 7 a.m., but after checking the morning's baseball news and sleeping a few minutes later than I intended, this is when I actually started. My first viewing spot was in my office, on the old computer I mentioned previously, with a coffee and a mini chocolate chip muffin, the kind my younger son loves. 

8:30 a.m. First break. Washed dishes from the night before, and took my son to his soccer practice, which was set to start at 9 a.m.

9:13 a.m. Started second hour in my car outside the soccer practice. I was going to take this hour off to take a walk during practice, which is my custom, but after only an hour of watching Shoah and getting a little later start than I intended, I knew I couldn't afford to fool around. You'll see later on that this was a good decision. 

10:13 a.m. Finished second hour just about a minute before my son returned to the car at the end of practice. 

10:32 a.m. Started remainder of Disc 1 back in my office at home.

10:59 a.m. Finished the 2:26 Disc 1. A quarter of the way there.

11:05 a.m. Started Disc 2. 

11:15 a.m. Man came to the door to deliver four heavy boxes of rabbit food. (We have rabbits.) Had to pause for a few minutes.

12:08 p.m. Broke for lunch.

12:18 p.m. Resumed in my office, with my leftover meatloaf, broccoli and mashed potatoes all warmed up.

1:13 p.m. Disc 2 finished. Message says "Fin de le premiere epoque." I think this may refer to the fact that the movie was made over 11 years. (I couldn't really tell if things were being shown chronologically or not because there are no dates on screen.) 

I also took this break to shower and restart my computer, which went into a mode where I couldn't call the screen back up. I worried that this foreshadowed technical problems that could prevent me from finishing the viewing, but it was the last thing for the day that was any sort of technical issue. 

However, since I'd restarted my computer, I wasn't able to get my external DVD drive, which is attached by USB, to be recognized at first. While I was clicking through the various choices in My Computer, I remembered/realized that I actually have an internal DVD player on this computer, which is what I used for Discs 3 and 4.

1:48 p.m. Started Disc 3 and the "second period (epoque)" of the movie. Now I'm relocated to the couch in our garage, to give my back a bit of a rest.

2:53 p.m. Next scheduled hourly break. 

3:04 p.m. Resumed on the living room couch. Both of my sons were now out of the house -- my younger one for a sleepover at his auntie's, the older one on a bike ride with his friends -- so my wife invited me out of the dungeon-like gloom of our garage and into the sunny living room. Note: This is the fourth and final viewing venue for the movie. 

4:08 p.m. Next hourly stoppage for the longest break of the day. My older son had a 5 p.m. basketball game that's like a 20-minute drive from our house. They had a big comeback and won the game.

6:22 p.m. Resumed on the living room couch for the final 20 minutes of Disc 3.

6:42 p.m. Finished Disc 3.

6:54 p.m. Start of Disc 4.

7:37 p.m. Our Chinese delivery arrived. Ate dinner with my wife and watched an episode of The Studio.

8:18 p.m. Resumed.

8:44 p.m. Hourly break. With 1:20 left on Disc 4, decided I would skip my final break, which would come with only 20 minutes remaining, and just get it done.

8:50 p.m. Resumed. 

10:10 p.m. FINISHED.

So in all, it took me 14 hours and 41 minutes to watch 9 hours and 4 minutes. That would have been a lot shorter, of course, if not for the 2 hour and 14 minute break to go to my son's basketball game. Which did probably help me with the necessary stamina to finish the viewing.

My thoughts

Well this is pretty much a masterpiece. Let me get that out of the way at the start before I present some reservations.

I think it makes sense to look at this in a chronological overview and then go into general thoughts.

I was a bit worried at the start. The very first thing that happens in Shoah is some expository text about one of the characters the film will follow -- pages and pages of it, in fact. I thought "What, nine hours is not long enough to actually tell this person's story on screen?"

Of course, that's not the sort of movie Shoah is. It has no voiceover, only interviews with the interview subjects, and of course questions from Lanzmann as their interviewer. (More on him in a moment.) 

But at the very start I thought I was in for a long haul, and not just because the movie is about the length of three baseball games. The material in the very first portion of this film is mostly survivors visiting these areas where they came so close to death, four decades earlier. That's poignant, but not particularly distinctive, especially in terms of the way the Holocaust has subsequently been covered in our culture. I have seen quite a lot of films that have Holocaust subject matter, and though that's not Shoah's fault, because it undoubtedly got there first, it does mean that this material specifically was less likely to blow my mind and wrench my heart than it would have been if I'd seen it in 1985. (I think we also have to acknowledge that the very first part of this movie, like its first 15 minutes, were always going to be the hardest, since the enormity of how much remains is foremost in your thoughts.)

I have to say, though, that by Discs 2 and 3, I was fully in the thrall of this movie. The interviews started to give me material I hadn't gotten before in movies about the Holocaust, and make me consider things I hadn't considered before. By some point during Disc 3, I decided I was going to give Shoah five stars on Letterboxd as an absolutely vital document, the likes of which do not exist anywhere else out there in the cinematic landscape in general, and in Holocaust filmmaking in particular.

After Disc 4, I'm not so sure about that five stars. (I have not yet logged this on Letterboxd.) I may still go five stars, but I thought the momentum of the movie lost some steam in its final two hours, as it shifted to discussions of possible uprisings at the camps and in the Warsaw ghetto. This is not something I find as engaging, intellectually, as the descriptions of camp life and logistics that took up much of the middle 50 percent of this movie, and I did not find the interview subjects as compelling. For whatever reason -- and I really don't think it was exhaustion because I never felt too tired or like taking a nap -- Shoah diminished a little in its last quarter.

Who am I kidding, I will probably still give it five stars.

If you want to get an idea how the movie feels on the whole, it's a bit like 25 different interviews with survivors, participants or other related people, some of which run for a generous 20 to 25 minutes. Sometimes we see their talking heads, sometimes you are just getting the camera running over the landscape as it is in 1985 -- or, I suppose, anywhere from 1974 to when the film was finally finished in either 1984 or 1985.

Although most of what we see feels like it's taking place in the same period, we do also see some earlier interviews, particularly with a former SS soldier, that are black and white videos involving a clearly younger Lanzmann. To draw attention to the fact that these occurred at a different time, Lanzmann introduces a bit of artifice by having himself and some of his crew watch these on a video in the back of a van that functions as a mobile production studio for them, rather than just showing the video itself. 

Though they would have every reason to be, very few of these people are an emotional mess. They speak about the events with some degree of matter-of-factness, and due to an interesting choice by the filmmaker, sometimes we don't know who we're hearing from and what this person's role was until the interview has been going on for ten minutes or even reached its conclusion. It's certainly a profound way of contextualizing what they've been saying.

I also want to talk a bit about Lanzmann and how impressive he clearly was. (He only just died in 2018.) Because many of the earlier presented interviews are with Poles, and he doesn't speak Polish, it takes a little while to get a sense of how many languages he truly does speak. In fact, the translations by his translator are something that contribute to some of the early pacing issues, because we'll hear a whole story in Polish without seeing any translation, then get subtitles only when the translator is explaining it to Lanzmann. (The right choice, I think, but it means these interviews take a lot more screen time.) And how impressive, by the way, is she, for having to remember and present as much as a minute of consecutive storytelling in Polish? (I'd be curious how close her translations are to what was actually said.)

But Lanzmann proves his linguistic prowess with interviews in both English and German, only using his native French with his own translator, and we see how important it is for him to have the ability to go back and forth with an interview subject in real time, given how he can coax things out of them or hold their feet to the fire. In the former case, it's getting truly wrenching testimony from victims or survivors. In the latter case, it's forcing people involved to admit some amount of culpability, pressing that "We have to do this," or refusing to let them dodge questions. This was obviously a consuming passion for the director, requiring nearly a dozen years of his life.

Because the length of this post is already well past ungainly, I wanted to finish with a few isolated takeaways from the subject matter, things that struck me as profound or otherwise noteworthy.

1) I was really absorbed by one particular interview in English with a man talking about how the Nazis' evil deeds where almost never spelled out literally and always referred to with euphemisms, such as "the final solution." He talks about how it was a sort of "nod and wink" scenario that led to "creativity" in how to implement "the final solution." 

2) I read after the fact that Shoah was not received well in Poland, and I can see why. One interview subject, a Christian Pole, gives a pretty bad answer when asked about a distinction she makes in her comments between the word "Pole" and the word "Jew." We then get Lanzmann asking Christian Poles who observed what was happening in the ghettos if they miss the Jews or if they think their lives are better now than they were then, and the answers are disturbing. I found it fascinating to note how these people in the late 1970s/early 1980s had not yet developed today's sense of shrewdness about political correctness. Perhaps their understanding of the Holocaust and questions of complicity were just very unsophisticated at that time, but you get the sense they answer honestly without being able to hear how anything they're saying is actually sounding. They all talk about how many of the "Jewesses" were beautiful but that generally the people are "dishonest." Yikes.

During this whole section, the survivor we open on -- who was forced to sing for the Nazis along the river when he was a teenager -- has returned to the ghetto and is welcomed back enthusiastically by the locals who remember him. These same locals are saying these same ignorant things, directly in his presence, while he just continues to give an unbroken smile with only a hint of sadness, and only if you really look for it. 

3) Something I had not yet learned, in my exposure to the history from this period, was how the Nazis would kill people in so-called "extermination vans," but piling them into the back of enclosed trucks and pumping exhaust from the vehicle into the enclosed space. The description of this was horrifying. They couldn't drive too quickly from one destination to the other or else the Jews in the back of the van would not be dead yet by the time they got there. 

4) Speaking of horrifying, one interviewee talks about the "death panic" involved in the last few moments of life in the gas chamber. He talks about bodies spilling out of an opened chamber door like wood, and that they always have a pattern -- the stronger, bigger people on top, where they were climbing to get more air in the dark chamber, and the weaker, smaller, younger people on the bottom, their skulls smashed in the panic that ensued. I'm not sure if this person actually witnessed this or was just listing it as a "for example," but he makes mention of a father crushing the body of his own son -- because none of them could see anything and were fighting for their own lives.

5) Particularly interesting is one interview with a man who was forced to work as a barber in the gas chamber, cutting the hair that the Nazis would then reuse -- whose role was also designed to reduce panic amount the impending victims. I mean, why would they give you a haircut if you're about to die? Surely it'll all be alright? Although this man falls into the category of people who had no ideological role in anything related to Nazism and were essentially forced to do the things they did, and the things they did had no direct relationship with murder, he's clearly complicit in something, and it's this man who has a hard time continuing without Lanzmann pressing him and requiring him to continue. Interestingly, he's actually involved with cutting someone's hair during this interview.

There are plenty of other moments I could pluck out from over nine hours of movie an absorbing footage, but let's just say you and I have both been here long enough today. 

I'll conclude with this thought:

The impulse to watch Shoah as my 7,000th movie may have had something of the gimmick behind it. A movie about the Holocaust should never be a gimmick in any way, shape or form. 

But I'm so glad that the "stunt" of watching a nine-hour movie in one day -- 9:26, 9:04, what have you -- resulted in me finally becoming acquainted with this absolutely vital document of world history, full of first-person source information, about a topic we can never revisit too many times, because we are always learning more about its horrors -- and we should always be reminded never to forget them or let them happen again.  

Audient Zeitgeist: Old Yeller

This is the second in my 2025 bi-monthly series in which I watch movies I haven't seen that have some prominent role in the zeitgeist.

If there was any doubt that Old Yeller, my April and second film of Audient Zeitgeist, is deserving of its spot in the series, that doubt was expelled in late February, long after I'd already queued it up as my second movie. But I'll get to that in a moment. 

First, spoiler alert for Old Yeller, if that is actually something you need.

And second, my personal history with Old Yeller.

I have no direct history, obviously, because I had never seen the movie. But on the playground back in elementary school, everyone knew what happened in the movie and it was mentioned a surprising number of times, especially for a movie that came out 20 to 25 years before that (in 1957). 

What happens, of course, is that the titular dog gets rabies and has to be shot. 

I knew this from at least age ten, probably younger, as it was something that seemed to get referenced at least once every couple months. Some of that may have been in other entertainment products, but I think most of it was by other kids, many of them having dogs and being worried such a fate might befall theirs. 

A worry, I should say, that Phoebe Buffay's mother was trying to prevent her from ever having.

As you know, I have been rewatching Friends, though that project is now over, as it left Netflix in Australia at the end of March. I gave it the old college try to get through the whole thing, but only finished six seasons. I could have watched a few more episodes but decided it was cleaner to finish one season completely, although that season ends on quite the cliffhanger. (Richard comes back to tell Monica he still loves her.) 

And in late February I watched episode 20 of season 2, called "The One Where Old Yeller Dies." You may remember it. Phoebe (Lisa Kudrow) walks in on the rest of the gang approaching the end of the classic Disney film and already ready to start shedding tears. She's confused because she thinks it's a happy movie. See, her mother always turned it off just after "Yeller saves the family from the wolf and everyone's happy," a moment I did not know about then because it did not rise to the level of narrative distinctiveness of him being shot. Phoebe's mother told her kids that was the end of the movie, and did this for a number of other movies in order to shield Phoebe and her siblings from the sadness of the world. Except it only delayed that, as now Phoebe experiences years' worth of accumulated sadness in one humorous existential crisis, as she finds out about the real endings of all those movies her mother turned off early. For 22 minutes, she becomes an embittered cynic. 

So this proves Old Yeller was still in the zeitgeist in 1996. It doesn't prove anything about the zeitgeist 29 years later, a time when I am not near any playgrounds and I don't discuss Old Yeller regularly with anyone. 

Or does it?

The thing about Friends is it is not just me rewatching it. Millions of young people now adore Friends, and many of them are rewatching it too. That's right, they already watched it once, and now they are rewatching it. Which means those who have gotten far enough have seen "The One Where Old Yeller Dies" at least twice (and had the movie spoiled for them, I suppose).

Despite Old Yeller having been spoiled for me personally for the past 40 years, it was time for me to finally see it and process all the concomitant doggie endangerment. 

The first thing that surprised me was that the word "rabies" is not mentioned once. 

Any time the groundwork is laid for the ultimate fate of Old Yeller -- and there is a lot of groundwork laid -- they refer to the sickness as "hydrophobia," which may be more consistent with how it was medically classified in the 19th century, when the film takes place. First there is the specter of a rabid cow that has to be put down. Then there are wild pigs that rough up both the dog and his child owner, Travis (Tommy Kirk), leaving us to worry that both might have gotten hydrophobia from them. However, it is ultimately a fight with the aforementioned wolf that definitely dooms the dog, though not until more than two weeks after the bite does he start showing symptoms.

And how many animals does this dog have to fight in one movie? He actively fights not only with the pigs and the wolf, but also with a mama bear coming after Travis' exhausting younger brother Arliss (Kevin Corcoran), one of whose obnoxious behaviors is to try to drag around the bear's cub by the leg. (This movie could not have been made the way it was in modern day, as the ASPCA would have been all over it.) Then Yeller also tussles with a cow that has gone off to give birth to a calf, though it is mostly to bring the cow in line, which Yeller is able to do in multiple different scenarios through some sort of canine mind control I guess.

Given how evidently superior Yeller is as a specimen of doghood, it's odd how much Travis hates him at first. He initially brands Yeller as a thief -- true, but what can you do, it's a dog -- and he himself makes menacing threats of shooting the dog, before ultimately only shooing him, and then accepting him into the family when Arliss takes to him. (The shooting threats being another form of foreshadowing of the dog's ultimate fate.) 

The movie is casually violent in how these characters think about animals, which certainly would have been more common 70 years ago in our world, and 160 years ago in theirs. For example, when trying to bring the cow in line -- just ornery at this point, not yet rabid -- Travis says he's going to milk that cow if he has to break every bone in its body. Yes, this is a Disney movie, but as discussed, it was a different time.

But even after Yeller has distinguished himself and Travis has become his biggest champion, Travis still seems extremely dismissive of most animals -- even the cute ones. A neighboring girl brings the mutt offspring of Yeller and her dog -- which basically looks just like a young Yeller rather than the combination of their breeds -- and Travis dismisses the pup with the words "I already got a dog." What, it's not possible to have two dogs, not even one as cute as this?

Of course the narrative arc here is that Travis is going to grow to love this dog also, and that this dog will be the replacement for its deceased dad, but I found it a bit of a stretch of Travis' traits as a character to get to that point. Almost as though he views the puppy as some rival to the not-yet-rabid Yeller, he describes him with some series of inappropriate adjectives along the lines of "mangy old," which is hilarious because this dog is as fresh as the newfallen snow, and far cuter. It's just one of the ways the script is simplistic.

I think it's difficult to watch Old Yeller in 2025 and not be overly distracted by the "gee whiz" nature of it all. This is earnest, hokey, broad family entertainment of the highest order, entirely lacking in nuance, and it does occasionally try a person's patience. Maybe more than occasionally.

But by the end, I got at least some of the way there toward bemoaning the ultimate fate of this extremely loyal dog. By no means was I tearing up, like the characters on Friends who watched it, but then again, I didn't have the personal history with it that they did. And since, unlike Phoebe Buffay, I'd had the ending spoiled for me more than 40 years ago, it was more a matter of seeing how they got there and how it was actually staged than what happens. 

They did manage to make the dog look a little bit vicious -- again, who knows what they had to do to get that to happen -- but the actual scenes of a rabid, or hydrophobic, Yeller are comparatively few. They've penned him up to monitor his symptoms, and they move fairly quickly from the confirmation that he's rabid to the realization that he must be shot, which occurs just a few minutes of their time later, a full ten to 15 minutes before the film ends.

I did like how they wrapped it up -- Travis and Arliss' father finally returns, having been gone the whole movie, and gives Travis a nice speech on the good and bad contained in life -- so I was ultimately on the film's side by the end.

I'll be back with more Audient Zeitgeist in June. 

Audient Zeitgeist: Eat Pray Love

This is the first in my 2025 bi-monthly series watching previously unseen movies who have some significant role in the zeitgeist.

Now I can tell you about the actual inspiration for my new bi-monthly series, which was not The Bucket List, that being my example of the phenomenon I'm considering when I first announced Audient Zeitgeist.

The actual inspiration was Eat Pray Love, which I seem to have encountered a lot in culture, even 15 years after it came out -- in fact, especially lately.

I can't count the number of times -- okay, it's probably only two or three -- that I've seen a character in some movie or TV show talk about an upcoming trip of self-discovery and say "I'm going to Eat Pray Love that shit." In fact, it's a line of dialogue I can imagine someone like Jonah Hill saying, because that's the kind of thing a Hill character would say -- at least back at the time that Eat Pray Love actually came out, if not the current version of Hill.

The idea being that while on this trip the character is discussing, they're going to eat a lot, pray a lot (or at least a little), and, if all goes well, love. 

Which means that like The Bucket List, Eat Pray Love has risen up in our culture beyond its potentially modest roots as an adaptation of self-help chic lit starring Julia Roberts, to become a thing everybody knows about and can easily understand the meaning of what you're talking about just from a reference to the title.

Of course, the really qualifying aspect of the movie for this series is that I had never seen it.

I corrected that on Tuesday night, perhaps choosing an inopportune night to do it since I'd played tennis that night and the movie is 2 hours and 20 minutes long. Of course, any opportunity may have been inopportune, because I didn't like it very much.

I don't think you need me to recap the plot, but I will anyway. Roberts plays a woman, Liz, who discovers sort of abruptly (at least as the film presents it) that she is not very happy in her marriage to a character played by Billy Crudup, and one day, after anachronistically praying to God (Liz is not religious), through tears she tells Crudup she doesn't want to be married anymore. She hasn't yet discovered what she does want, and has a fling with an actor played by James Franco. Because of the poor sense of pacing of Ryan Murphy's film, the passage of time in this fling is hard to chart, such that in no screen time at all, she also wants to escape Franco and it seems like they've had some sort of soulful relationship that she mourns in equal measure to her marriage.

The thing she does want, ultimately, is to travel around the world to three specific locations all starting with I -- could there be any better metaphor for her self-involvement -- which are Italy, India and Indonesia. (Though Indonesia is always referred to in the film as just "Bali," since perhaps that sounds more exotic than "Indonesia.") She couldn't know that this was how it would turn out, of course -- unless the script is lazy enough to posit that she does -- but these three legs of her journey will correspond to the three words in the film's title, in that order. The trip is planned to take a year.

First I want to talk about how shoddy this film looks, especially for a travelogue into which we are meant to dream ourselves away. And I don't think it was just the fact that Stan, my Australian streamer, makes everything look a bit shoddy, especially compared to watching the same movie on any of my other streamers. (I should have checked to see if it was on them. I just saw it was on Stan, because it's the kind of movie Stan would have, and stopped there.)

More specifically in its shoddy appearance, let's talk about the lighting. Which is way too dark, even in the majority outdoor scenes in these three locations, but especially where we start in New York. That may have been an intentional thematic choice by Murphy, but I don't feel inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. But on that topic of lighting, there are entirely too many scenes where Roberts has light shining on the back of her head, which made me think Murphy intended that as a halo effect. Yawn. 

It's hard to think of there being a halo around Liz' head because it's not very easy to like her. For being two and a third hours long, Murphy's script, which he co-wrote with Jennifer Salt and Elizabeth Gilbert, doesn't put in the time for us to understand where Liz' sense of ennui originated. Sure, a person can be unhappy just because they're unhappy, but Liz comes across as a privileged person who doesn't totally appreciate what she has. Even the presentation of Crudup's character is pretty mild as an inciting incident for her divorce, and I wonder if that was to flatter the character by not making her capable of marrying a true narcissist. Without having an obviously toxic male to run away from, though -- and the movie starts to portray him more cartoonishly after the fact as a sort of corrective measure -- we don't really get what's driving this sudden desire to leave. Ultimately the movie is going to posit the fact that she "doesn't love herself so how could she love anyone else," which may be a true phenomenon in the world but doesn't seem any less corny, especially in Murphy's hands. 

The journey gets better as it goes -- at least Murphy gets the momentum going in the right direction -- but I found Liz' experiences in Italy particularly insufferable. This is the section of the movie that bears the brunt of the "Eat" portion of the title -- only once do we even see her eat something again after this -- but it's not very good food porn. And there's the sort of ridiculous notion that Liz and her companion need to buy new jeans because they've gained too much weight while indulging in pizza and pasta. Because these are both professional actresses, one an icon of her generation, of course they did not gain a single pound while shooting the movie, so the notion that they now both have a "muffin top" -- Liz' term for the small roll of flab at her waist -- is totally unsupported by what we see on screen.

Plus this section is replete with cultural stereotypes of Italians and in all other ways unconvincing. There's this one attempted "joke" where a small Italian girl gives them the finger from the fire escape of her apartment building, based on nothing that they've done, only a desire by the screenwriters to add personality into the moment. It falls as flat as any of their other attempts at "jokes." At least, I should note, her handsome language teacher does not become a love interest for her, but rather, for her friend.  

The India portion is weighted down by Liz' interactions with an American named Richard (billed as "Richard from Texas" on IMDB), and he's played by an actual Richard, Richard Jenkins. He gloms onto her so mercilessly that it seems like a failure at both the performance level and the directing level. The failure at the writing level is that he takes to calling her "Groceries," because when she first gets to the ashram where she'll be staying, he sees her eating a particularly large plate of food. Guess the "Eat" portion of the film is taking its time to transition into the "Pray" portion. And poor Liz, I think this is the last time we see food touch her lips in this movie. You shouldn't call someone "Groceries" if they have as big of a "muffin top" as Liz has. (Wait, no, she doesn't have a muffin top at all.)

He's of course got a back story that will reveal itself over time, and in this ashram -- which is, in a bit of irony that is never resolved, missing its guru because she's in New York, effectively trading places with Liz -- Liz has to do menial labor tasks to earn her keep, in addition to her praying. She also has an underdeveloped relationship with an Indian girl who works there (I. Gusti Ayu Puspawati) and who is dreading her arranged marriage. 

I did eventually thaw on this section of the film a little bit, but I was pretty eager to get on to the Bali portion because that's the only of the three places I've actually been. (I was in Italy in college but it was the very far north and for a ski trip, which is very dissimilar to what we see here.)

Here, with the same level of abruptness that characterizes many of the other interactions in this movie, she meets Felipe (Javier Bardem), a Brazilian who I guess retired here (Bardem was only 41 in 2010) after his wife died ten years ealier. This is a homecoming of sorts for Liz because in an opening I didn't totally understand either, she had been there earlier to interview a local who can read your palm and tell your fortune, which is, I suppose, reason enough for her to have taken this trip in the first place, when the man told her she would be in one short marriage and one long one, but she didn't know which she was currently in. 

I say this relationship is abrupt because I have already forgotten how these characters actually meet, but like one scene later they are swimming in beautiful Bali bays and apparently already deliriously in love. I guess they didn't meet cute enough for me to remember that part.

I didn't hate this section of the film either, but the overall effect of the whole experience was pretty disappointing.

I don't know, I guess I thought this might be fun -- kind of in a similar way to another Bali-set movie starring Julia Roberts, Ticket to Paradise with George Clooney, was fun. At least I thought it would be lit better.

But actually, I don't think this movie really wants to be fun. It tries to be fun on a couple occasions, but I think that's more a concession to the fundamental components of filmmaking than it is an actual interest in being fun. I think we need to read more into Roberts' opening tearful speech to God -- which comes out of left field when the movie is barely five minutes old, her crying face seen in awkward profile -- if we want to understand what this movie really thinks its about. 

Now the real question is: Is its enduring spot in our zeitgeist justified?

I guess that's a different question than "do I understand it."

Yes I understand it, especially since few of the cultural references to the movie would be considered respectful. They're far more likely to be taking the piss out of the movie than suggesting a journey like this is actually a clear-eyed means of achieving self-actualization.

For one, such a journey is only available to someone who is pretty wealthy, or has been working all their life to save up for it. Roberts was only 43 in 2010, so she isn't the latter. She'd have to be the former even though, if memory serves, her character is only a journalist. And that's not me insulting journalists. That's me having been a journalist and knowing that the pay isn't great.

Then there's the inexcusable self-absorption of it. We are meant to be our own biggest supporters and all that, but there's a fine line between looking out for yourself and the "me me me" mentality that is only slightly softened here by Roberts' charm.

Plus there's the definite tourist's attitude to the hip trend of trying to know yourself better through eastern religion. I don't think Liz even articulates why it is that she wants to go to this ashram, considering that she doesn't seem to be that into the idea of the spiritual when she tries to pray to God. It's almost like it's shorthand that she's just a shallow rich lady who is susceptible to the ideas presented by the 2010 version of influencers without having any sincere knowledge of why she's doing the things she's doing.

Eat Pray Love is a myopic conceit that purports to be a real formula a real person could use to try to achieve a happier life. The cynical thing about it -- the book before it, I'm sure, and then the movie -- is that the people who are ready to receive this sort of message are rarely the ones who are in a position to enact what it is suggesting. I'm sure there were more than a few midwestern moms with mortgages -- MMMs, we might call them -- who dropped everything and took a plane somewhere in the hopes they would eat Italian food while still looking as good as Julia Roberts, and were quite sure there was a soulful Brazilian widower out there just waiting to fall head over heels for them. Three weeks later, maybe they came back with significantly less money to pay that mortgage.

I'll be back in April to chew over another zeitgeist movie I haven't seen.

Getting in touch with the zeitgeist in 2025

I tried to find some directors with exactly six films remaining in their filmography that I hadn't seen. I really did. 

If you don't know what I'm talking about, when I finished last year's bi-monthly viewing series Audient Outliers, I said that in 2025 I wanted to return to finishing off the final six films I hadn't seen by some great director, which I have now done, in some form, in four different years. (I say "in some form" because one year I split the task between two directors who each had three, Kathryn Bigelow and Jane Campion.) 

But I couldn't find the right candidate. Some people I thought would be great candidates had well over ten films I hadn't seen, and in some cases it was closer to 20. I got one person down to eight, and though I did do this sort of series for Spike Lee (the first time I did it) when he had eight films I hadn't seen at the time -- the last two of which I still haven't seen -- I feel I'm a bit more rigorous nowadays.

I may just sneak in two films by that filmmaker in 2025 in order to make them the focus of my bi-monthly series in 2026. We'll have to see about that.

In the meantime, another idea had to take its place.

To tell you how I got my inspiration would ruin one of my selections, and for some reason I don't want to do that at this juncture. I'll do it when the movie actually comes up for viewing. For now, I'll just tell you what the idea is:

Every other month starting in February, I'm going to watch movies that have a known role in the zeitgeist but which I haven't seen. 

I'll give an example of what I'm talking about from a movie I have seen: The Bucket List. Which you may have guessed from the poster above.

Rob Reiner's film came out 18 years ago, in 2007. Before that, none us knew what a bucket list was because the concept didn't exist. In the 18 years since, everyone knows -- and that movie was not even very good. (I thought it might have been adapted from a novel, but it turns out screenwriter Justin Zackham came up with the concept himself.)

In 2025, I'm going to watch movies like that. 

So yes, it will be six movies whose titles have a larger place in our cultural, for whatever reason. It could be because people talk about their central concept in the same way they talk about the central concept of The Bucket List. It could be because the plot has something famous about it, leading screenwriters in other films to have their characters talk about it, in addition to us talking about it in the real world. It could be because the movie itself accomplished some record feat as a flop or a hit, meaning it has become a cultural touchstone for that reason.

This is not to be confused with watching great movies that I should have seen before now, because everyone knows and talks about them for their greatness. In fact, I don't expect many of the movies in this series to be great, though some could be. 

The thing I really like about this idea is that I will let the culture I otherwise consume in 2025 give me options to flesh out the series as the year goes on. I already have three titles that are short-listed, but the third could actually drop out if it needs to, if other better options come along. (In fact, each of the three choices conforms to one of the three ways I characterized a zeitgeist film two paragraphs ago.)

So the idea will be to watch these, just to have watched them, but also to come up with thoughts on whether the reason these are in the zeitgeist is valid. Like, should we really still be talking about these films, in some cases all these years later?

The series will be called Audient Zeitgeist, and as it is now February, it could start any day now.