What if Birdman hadn't won best picture?

There are only three of my 26 #1 movies that I have to look at through the lens of having won best picture -- an honor that occurred after I anointed them as my personal favorite. And winning best picture always creates the possibility, if not the likelihood, of backlash.

With Parasite, there's no backlash. It's either too soon, or most people just agree it's an incredible movie. Yeah I have one friend who thinks it's overrated, but I actually think he's the only person I've ever heard say that. "Backlash" is a word that has no practical meaning in relation to Parasite.

With Titanic, it's all backlash, all the time. But I don't care because I still love it, and always will.

Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) falls somewhere in the middle. Many people still respect it, but there's a vocal quantity who always thought it was a fatuous critique of show business with ostentatious technique that was always designed to call attention to its own brilliance.

Or so they say. See, if Birdman hadn't won best picture, I suspect it would occupy a far less problematic space in their minds.

I finally got to Birdman on Friday night in my 2022 rewatch of all my former #1s. That gets me down to only seven more of the 26 that I need to watch before the end of the year, when I will duel them all in a special Flickchart account to arrive at a definitive ranking.

Although I ultimately wouldn't need four viewings of it by this point -- the second was for pleasure, the third for considering it for the best of the 2010s -- I continue to really like Birdman. 

I should probably say "love" -- after all, it did end up as my #21 of that decade. Then again, only one of my #1s from the 2010s (Ruby Sparks) didn't make the top 25, and Birdman was the next closest to missing out -- my lowest ranked #1 in my top 25. (The #1s were bunched up in the middle, as it turned out, as my highest ranked #1, Inside Out, was all the way down at #7.)

In fact, as an indication of how things have shifted, it was bested by two other films I ranked in 2014: #10 Under the Skin, and #14 Boyhood, which was its primary competition for the Oscar that year.

Boyhood has always been a big problem for Birdman in terms of gaining greater popular love, or at least love among cinephiles. Indeed, the former film holds up better on rewatches for me too (just three total viewings for that one, in part because of its ungainly length).

What I fully expected to happen with Birdman was that it would be a critical favorite, but too eccentric to make the Oscar shortlist. Then when it did make that shortlist, I never expected it to become a frontrunner. Even as Oscar night approached and the buzz that it would win became deafening, it seemed more likely to me on some level that Boyhood would pull it out. It had been 17 years since my #1 movie had been named best picture, and I just wasn't used to it.

If Birdman had indeed gone quietly into the night, I think others would like it more today -- including myself.

I can't help but have internalized some of the criticisms of the movie, even if I can't name them for you as readily as I can with other problematic best picture winners (such as Crash and Green Book). I sometime think it's just a vibe people get from Birdman that they don't like, maybe a bit of a "try hard" mentality from director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu -- who in some ways tried even harder the next year with The Revenant. And since has not been heard from again in terms of feature films, though that will change in December, when Netflix streams Bardo (False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths). (Hey, the parenthetical title worked for him the first time.)

They certainly can't complain about the cast. I think everyone agreed that welcoming Michael Keaton back into the spotlight was a long-overdue revelation (pun intended, as he won best picture again the following year with Spotlight). Birdman showed us that there was never any reason Keaton should have stopped making films we'd heard of for more than a decade. The rest of the cast is filled with actors we all like or love, like Emma Stone, Naomi Watts and Edward Norton. (I think people love Norton even if they've heard rumors that he's difficult.)

As for the storytelling gimmick itself, the appearance that the film takes place all in one shot, I think people were lying if they didn't admit this impressed them. If the Oscars aren't a good time to reward daring uses of the form and methods of creating movie magic in front of our eyes, I don't know when would be a better time.

The fears of the increasing irrelevance of a washed up white man? At the time we hadn't yet rightly concluded that this was a narrative perspective that needed to be retired, or at least sent on a long vacation. So you can hold that against Birdman in retrospect, but not so much in early 2015.

The "film industry sucks its own dick" aspect of the film can probably never be removed from it. We know the academy loves films that consider the plight of its own members, as movies about show biz, even if they are not directly about Hollywood, have always done well with voters. And I suppose Birdman really is about Hollywood, even though it's "about" Broadway, since its critique of superhero films is built right in. Then again, you could argue that Birdman has only increased in resonance in that respect, considering how much more superhero movies dominate the box office even than they did eight years ago. 

And movies about making movies shouldn't automatically carry a black mark against them. As just one example, Adaptation, another #1 of mine, has never really lost any of its luster -- among those who thought it had luster in the first place -- just because it's so much about itself. 

But we'll never know a world where Birdman didn't win best picture, so we can only hypothesize what sort of post-2014 stature it would otherwise have. 

For me, four viewings have not been enough to sour me on it, so I doubt an eventual fifth will either. That probably won't come for another ten years now. The technique of Birdman means there has always been a moment while watching it where I felt its length -- only two hours, but with this technique that feels like a lot. Four times in one decade is enough for now.

Life in a day, Linklater style

When you have the house to yourself for a couple days, and you're a cinephile, you don't only watch movies. You do movie projects.

Hence this past weekend, when I watched the entire Before trilogy and Boyhood in one day.

I love the trilogy – with an asterisk that I’ll get to in a minute – but Before Sunrise was the only one of the three films I’d seen more than once, even though Before Midnight was my #2 movie of 2013. Seeing the characters age 18 years in one day was the main impetus behind my Linklater Day, but I wanted a fourth movie, and Boyhood was an obvious candidate to keep the theme going – making it, suppose, a Linklater/Hawke Day. I’d already seen Boyhood twice, but it’s a movie whose pleasures grow with each viewing, and it had been about four years since that second viewing.

But it was also my last full day at home before the family returns, so I couldn’t just watch movies. There were piles of undifferentiated crap I needed to clean up before they got home, to disguise the fact that I’d let their home become a hovel while they were gone.

So I created, and stuck to, the following schedule:

8 a.m. – Before Sunrise

12 p.m. – Before Sunset

4 p.m. – Before Midnight

8 p.m. – Boyhood

I suppose if it hadn’t been for Boyhood I could have tried to actually match the movies to their times of day, maybe watching Sunrise at some ridiculously early hour, Sunset in the late afternoon and Midnight at night. And though I’d been sleeping poorly with the family gone (always happens, not sure why) and I actually could have watched Sunrise at an ungodly hour, knowing I could take a nap later on, I liked the neatness of starting one of these movies every four and hours, and washing dishes/doing laundry in between.

I considered taking notes, to make sure I didn’t forget any little observations I might make about something Jesse said in the third movie that contradicted something he said in the first, that kind of thing. And I did notice a few such things that I’ll try to reproduce here. But I didn’t end up taking those notes, because I didn’t watch these movies to geek out on their minutiae or pick apart their internal consistency. I watched them to have the experience of life, of lives, wash over me, two lives in three movies and four lives in the fourth.

As such, I suppose my thoughts on the day will be a bit stream-of-consciousness. Which is appropriate for four movies that dwell on the vagaries of time and memory.

Since I need some place to start, I thought I’d share a couple technical challenges that impacted my viewings of two of the four movies.

I had Sunrise, Sunset and Boyhood as DVDs borrowed from the library, but my library reservation of Before Midnight didn’t come through in time. So I rented and streamed that off iTunes, which presented me with a few technical difficulties – though not, as it turned out, as significant a difficulty as one of the DVDs.

I got through Sunrise and Sunset with nary an issue, but the streaming of Before Midnight was imperfect. I have any number of possible candidates to blame, from the fact that I haven’t updated iTunes for a while, to the general slowness of my rapidly aging computer, to the crap internet we have. The good news, though, was that the way the viewing was sometimes compromised amplified the film’s themes. I’ll explain.

Though it didn’t happen throughout, the way the streaming issue manifested itself was in terms of the image lagging, and then going in fast forward for however long it took to catch up. The key to this not being that annoying was that the audio was totally unaffected. There wasn’t a single hiccup in Linklater’s dialogue (also written by Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy), which is really what you come to a Linklater movie to experience. So while the mouths were sometimes out of sync and occasionally it played like a sped up movie from the early 20^th century, there was no interruption to the audio flow. I allowed this to function as an extension of Linklater’s familiar concerns regarding our inability to grasp moments and hold onto them. Time is always speeding away out of our control. Or sometimes it does seem to stand still. But either way, it is not something we can control.

The problem with Boyhood was more annoying, but I did also manage to fit in with Linklater’s themes. Although I could not see much in the way of scratches on the disc’s surface, the Boyhood DVD did have glitches that in this case affected both the sound and the image. I wiped it clean with a tissue, to no avail. There were a couple times when I worried I’d have to abandon the viewing, and looked to see if it was available on any of my streaming services (it wasn’t). I could have rented it from iTunes, but fortunately, it never got annoying enough to resort to that measure. The worst that happened is that I missed a couple short chunks of the movie, four minutes on one occasion and eight minutes on another, which wasn’t fatal as I’d already seen the movie twice. All the other continuity blips were ten seconds or less. It was infrequent enough that I was able to persevere.

When I thought about the moments I’d missed – including, quite poignantly, the end of Patricia Arquette’s final speech about the next event on her schedule being her funeral – at first I regretted missing them. But then I thought “How perfectly Linklater.” Boyhood is a movie that, by design, lurches forward, missing moments in life that we might think should be a part of any highlight reel. But that’s kind of the point, isn’t it? Again it feels like life is speeding away from us, and we look up one day and our child is graduating high school. Missing little bits of Boyhood only made the loss the movie is exploring all the more profound.

But back to the main impetus for this viewing day. What would I think of the growth, or lack thereof, of Jesse and Celine over the course of 18 years of their lives, consumed by me within the space of ten hours?

I did indeed notice those small inconsistencies, which I would not say resulted from a lack of care by the three central filmmakers, but rather, functioned as an intentional point about the way human beings are inconsistent, or how their viewpoints change over time. In Before Sunrise, for example, Jesse asks Celine if she believes in reincarnation as part of his hypothesizing on how a million reincarnated souls from the beginnings of human existence have splintered themselves into the billions of people inhabiting the planet today. She responds, definitively, that she does believe in reincarnation. In one of the later movies – Before Midnight I think – he asks her that question again, and she says she doesn’t.

Jesse regularly says that he “remembers everything” – including the type of condom they used in Vienna – but he doesn’t remember asking her whether she believes in reincarnation, and therefore can’t hold her to her original response. This is just the nature of human experience. It was a relatively insignificant moment in their day, and maybe he didn’t even remember positing his “million souls for a billion lives” theory with her – maybe he used that one on all the girls at that time. But neither is her inconsistency an issue. She may have once believed in reincarnation, but as the practicalities of the world crushed her, she stopped believing in it. Or maybe she never believed in it, but saying she did was part of the self she wanted to present to Jesse when she first met him, when she thought that’s what he wanted her to say. Now that they’re married and there’s no wooing left to be done, she can drop the charade.

One thing I noticed, though, was that watching these movies back-to-back-to-back did not give me some grand unifying theory of Jesse or Celine. I have ideas about each of them, which the actors worked on and consciously toyed with over the course of the three films. But what struck me was just how much these did indeed seem like the same characters, matured in some ways and still stunted in others, over the course of nearly two decades. I’m not sure if Hawke and Delpy made specific choices to achieve this, or it was a function of them playing only small variations on their actual selves, but there’s a remarkable overarching consistency to their characters, which is probably only enhanced by the type of inconsistencies mentioned above.

Rather than talking about Jesse and Celine as such, though, I want to talk a bit about myself. When Linklater is at his best, he gets you interfacing with yourself, examining the way his themes touch on your own life.

And as it happens, these movies line up with my own life pretty significantly. I’m one of those viewers who can say that he’s taken similar steps to Jesse and Celine as they’ve taken them, as both Hawke and Delpy are within four years of me in age. However, they’re playing about two years younger than they actually are, as they were supposed to be 23, 32 and 41 in these movies, when they were actually more like 25, 34 and 43. Anyway, the point is, I was doing some of the things they were doing, when they were doing them, in my real life.

Only I didn’t see Before Sunrise when it first came out. In fact, I didn’t see it until 2001. Who knows how my first viewing might have been different in 1995, a year I was melancholy about graduating from college, but in 2001 I was swept up in the romanticism of it. Which is interesting because that was a bit of a tumultuous year for me. I moved from New York to Los Angeles in May, and had a really difficult transitional summer there, complicated by a relationship that didn’t pan out the way I hoped it would. However, I saw it in November that year, and by then, I’d settled in and had new romantic irons in the fire, though I was not dating anyone just yet. I guess my new sense of optimism was enough for me to dive right into Before Sunrise.

I did see Before Sunset in the theater, and now we get to the asterisk I teased you with earlier. Although this is the favorite movie in the series for a lot of people I know, I was in no condition to appreciate it when I saw it. The summer of 2004 was another time of great tumult for me, except instead of just having emerged from it, as was the case with Before Sunrise, I was still right in the thick of it when I watched Before Sunset. At the time, I was mourning the end of/trying to rekindle a nearly two-year relationship, while also desperately flinging myself at a long distance rebound relationship with the intensity of an addict. The optimistic ending of Before Sunset didn’t land for me as I felt a particular pessimism about my own prospects.

The interesting thing now, in watching Before Sunset for the second time, is to realize how soon things were going to look up for me – and in a way that feels specifically related to this movie. At the end of 2004 I met my wife, and our first big trip together was to go to my friend’s wedding in Spain in June of 2005. We combined that trip with four days in Paris. So only a year after I watched Jesse and Celine walk around Paris, feeling hopeless even as they felt hopeful, I myself was walking around Paris with my future wife. It was something I hadn’t ever considered until I watched this movie again, and it hit me like a ton of bricks. I still think it’s only my third favorite of these movies, but that is now a very strong third favorite. (And I had additional appreciation for it in the context of this marathon, as a result of its sub-80-minute running time.)

My second viewing of Before Midnight also involved the realization of something I could never have known would have been related to me when I first watched the movie. I watched Before Midnight about three months before I moved to Australia, but since that move came together so quickly, it wasn’t even a twinkle in our eye when I saw the movie. (In fact, we’d just bought a house the year before, so moving was probably the furthest thing from our minds.) One of the trepidations about being married to someone from another country is you never know which country you’re going to live in, and whether you may need to move to that other country for the good of your marriage/family, leaving behind the country you know. This is a major point of argument between Celine and Jesse in Before Midnight, as Jesse is feeling the acute loss of not being there as his teenage son grows up. He tries to sell Celine on moving to Chicago. Only a few months after I saw this transpire on screen, I moved to Australia for the good of my wife’s career prospects. Nearly six years later, we still live here.

Some other things about the movie really ring true that I couldn’t have known at the time, either. In 2013 I had only one child, who was not yet three years old. As my second was born on the first of January in 2014, I must have already known he was coming when I saw the movie in May, but only just. So at the time, Celine and Jesse’s argument about who did what in the marriage, vis-à-vis the children, was probably just a bit abstract. Now that I have two, I’m even more conscious of the truth that the man (me) packs only his clothes when the family goes on vacation, while the woman (my wife) packs everything else. I saw in myself some of Jesse’s blithe lack of awareness of just how much Celine does for their family, I’m ashamed to say. However, I’m glad to say I think it’s something both Jesse and I are working on.

As I said, this was a bit stream-of-consciousness and it has probably gone on longer than you care to read, unless you are Nick Prigge and eat up new Before talk in perpetuity.

I’ll close by saying that this was an enthralling day of movie viewing, with built-in breaks where menial tasks allowed me to ponder the significance of what I’d watched. It was a day where memories from my own romantic and family life swam in and out of the front of my mind, reacquainting me with people I hadn’t thought of in years, and how we’d done right by each other, or failed in that regard.

But neither was it a melancholy day. Even when movies are about melancholy things, they invigorate your spirit when they are as good as these four.  

A warm rush of sentimentality

Cinema Paradiso has long held a spot in my top 100 on Flickchart -- it's currently #87 -- but it's also been among the most long-neglected of the films with that hallowed ranking. It's joined some others I haven't seen in ages, like Stand by Me (#91), Schindler's List (#23), Field of Dreams (#20) and Do the Right Thing (#10). It had been since the 1990s since I'd seen all of them, and the others still remain on my list to rectify.

Unlike those others, I have seen Cinema Paradiso since then -- just not the right version.

That's right, in 2002 they released a director's cut of this beloved 1988 film, one which added nearly an hour to the running time. I had the opportunity of reviewing it at the time, as I was writing for AllMovie and they wanted some words on what was called Cinema Paradiso: The New Version. Well, as with most altered versions of beloved films, it was highly disappointing and richly deserved every bit of cutting its editor did to reduce a one-time 155-minute version down to the 122-minute version that has endured since 1988. However, this version was 18 minutes even longer than that original cut. Well, it sapped all the mystery out of the movie, and made everything unsaid said. The things that are unsaid in Cinema Paradiso are some of its finest elements.

Anyway, here's what I said at the time:

Like Star Wars, E.T., and other movies that have been trifled with at their peril, a very different kind of film gets "corrected" with the arrival of Cinema Paradiso: The New Version, an update of Miramax's Cannes darling and Best Foreign Film winner. Unfortunately, the same motive of squeezing out a few extra dollars applies here as well, even if it's disguised as a restoration of the director's vision, rather than what it actually is: a compromise of the film's effectiveness. If this was Giuseppe Tornatore's original cut, it seriously calls into question the director's judgments as an artist. The importance of a judicious editor comes into sharp relief during this new three-hour version, which leaves the repeat viewer longing for the brisk pace of the original, and the first-timer grappling with why the film is so revered. The extra 51 minutes of footage bloat the previously poignant third act, drawing it out interminably and deadening its wonder. What made the ending of Cinema Paradiso so bittersweet is that it did not attempt to solve the riddles of lost love, which rarely get sorted out in real life. By providing an unjust and unwarranted explanation of the lovers' tragic separation, as well as a new epilogue, Tornatore brings his tale of nostalgic history thudding into the present tense. He also reverses the understanding of key characters, their motivations, and the ultimate vindication of their actions. The mostly untouched first two acts still burst with the joie de vivre of a small town invigorated and transformed by its communal love of cinema. But the last hour squanders the contagious momentum of the previous two, doing crucial damage to the emotional closing scene, a defining moment that has rightly assumed classic status. Instead of catharsis, the end now elicits a sensation that's regrettably contrary to that: relief. The date of 2002 on this film (which pertains only to the release of the extended version) explains the presence of actress Pupella Maggio, who acted in the picture in the late '80s but died in 1999.

Strangely enough, I did not write that last sentence and do not know who included it, or even if it was included at the time it was originally published. Pupella Maggio? I don't even know who that is, or why a long-delayed director's cut would require or even benefit from a clarification of who was living and who was dead.

So it was a relief on Tuesday night to get back to the movie I knew and loved, and had seen two or three times prior to 2002. It was a surprise how much of it I readily remembered. But it wasn't only the lines of dialogue, or the little character moments, or whatever else that makes a great movie great that I remembered -- it was the warm rush of sentimentality that the movie confers upon the viewer. In fact, I almost called this post "A warm rush of sentimentality," which come to think of it, is probably a more deserving name for a post about a movie I love. And, you know what, I am going to change it. (Old title: "Twenty years and one bad version later.")

One moment in particular I love underscores the missed connections that are part of the wistfulness of a movie like this. It's not the big missed connection, that young Toto doesn't get together with the love of his life and in fact, decades later, has still not settled with a soul mate. Rather, it's a little missed connection that stands in for the bigger ones that make up our lives.

Toto -- now properly called Salvatore -- is leaving Giancaldo, the town of his birth and entire upbringing to this point, for Rome. Never to return, if his mentor, the blind projectionist Alfredo, has anything to say about it. The train is leaving the station as a few well wishers watch him recede into the distance. One last one arrives out of breath, hollering his farewells. It's the priest for whom a young Salvatore once worked as an altar boy -- not the most important person in his life lately, but a familiar face who wants to send him off properly nonetheless. Salvatore seems unmoved by his belated appearance, his thoughts on other types of loss, but the priest seems truly disappointed to have missed the moment. "I was too late," he says to the remaining bystanders on the platform. "What a pity."

I can't say this for certain, but I believe he never sees that man again.

It reminded me of one of my favorite moments in Boyhood, when the youngest incarnation of Mason is pulling out of town in his mom's car, packed with all their earthly belongings. It's the first of many moves Mason makes, and in that moment, at that young age, he is unmoved by its significance in a way similar to Salvatore near the end of Paradiso. But next to his car as it rides out of town, he is followed a short ways by the kid who had been his best friend to that point, pedaling on his bike in an attempt to keep up with the car that everyone knows is vain and short-lived. Although Mason doesn't seem to realize it, the other boy recognizes that this is the end of an era. And indeed, that he will never see Mason again.

Boyhood and Cinema Paradiso both have significant quantities of sentimentality, without that seeming like the insult it invariably often is. Paradiso lays it on a bit thicker as a kind of emotional manipulation, relying heavily on music cues, while the sentimentality of Boyhood is more embedded into its unique structure, which allows us to feel like we are watching the passage of our own lives.

But let's be clear: sentimentality should not be something to disdain. When done effectively, as it is in these movies, it penetrates to the very core of our souls, the very thing that makes us human. Unearned sentimentality can quickly take you out of a movie, can in fact draw more attention to a film's shortcomings -- making us wonder why we're not feeling the things the film wants us to feel. But when done right, it's the very cathartic experience that makes us love cinema.

Love it as much as a little boy in a ramshackle theater in a small Italian town, eyes wide with the world's possibilities.

Don't go changin'

You never know what you're going to get out of a second viewing of a film. It's sort of a dangerous proposition, because you could lose love for a movie you once loved. (That's happened to me recently -- twice in the past month, in fact -- but I won't elaborate on which films.) You could also, however, discover that you love a movie you thought you only liked.

When I rewatched Boyhood on Saturday night with my wife (her first time), I figured the needle wasn't likely to move a lot. I expected to like it a little bit more or a little bit less, but nothing radical.

What I didn't expect was that I would come out thinking it should have been longer.

See, although I was enjoying myself quite a bit when I saw Boyhood in theaters, I definitely felt a fatigue setting in around age 15 or 16. I attributed my less-than-perfect rating for Boyhood (I gave it "only" 4.5 stars on Letterboxd) to the inescapable awareness of that fatigue. (I had also had a beer with lunch beforehand, which could have been a contributor.)

Having watched all two hours and 45 minutes of Boyhood a second time, I realize there was an additional component that was discomfiting me during that first viewing:

Stress.

See, I felt an actual sense of anxiety as Mason (Ellar Coltrane) would go from one age to the next. I thought "No! Wait! I want more time with that Mason! I WANT MORE TIME!"

Certainly I am not the first one to make this counterintuitive observation -- that a 165-minute movie might need to be longer -- but it's hitting me as kind of a revelation, since I originally considered its length a mild deterrent to the overall effectiveness of the film.

Instead, it's that each version of Mason is so appealing that I wanted five or ten minutes more with each one.

Of course, I don't really think that the movie should be, or even could be, longer. If it had crossed the three-hour mark, it would have also crossed that imaginary line that separates Richard Linklater from his own self-indulgence. At the length that it is, you can argue that Boyhood is basically free from self-indulgence. If it had gone too much longer, those worries might start to creep in.

Strangely, Linklater actually takes a less-is-more approach to this film. It can sometime be hard to believe that Mason's ages will evenly space out to fill a whole movie, given that some of them seem to have fewer than five minutes of screen time. I'm sure none of them actually do -- just as I'm sure someone out there has taken the time to break down Mason's screen minutes by age, and if I did a web search I'd find it -- but each Mason does seem to come and go so quickly within the overall scope of the film.

That's a testament to Linklater's smart pacing, but also to the overall effectiveness of what he's trying to do. Of course each age is supposed to seem fleeting, because that's supposed to be our overall takeaway from the film -- that life moves by in a flash, and the next time you look up, your child is a year older. Then three years older. Then ten.

Having been able to acknowledge this phenomenon more concretely this time around, I'm inclined to wonder whether the feeling has a basis in my own life. Oddly, it doesn't, really. My own children grow, and it's natural to make such remarks as "Can you believe only six months ago ..." But then there's the part of me that feels like I have been a parent for an eternity. It's hard to imagine that my older son is only four-and-a-half years old, because I feel like I've been his father much longer than that.

And yet I suspect that on my next Boyhood viewing -- which this viewing has assured me will definitely be forthcoming -- I will probably feel this stress even more acutely. I will be more desperate for Mason not to change, because I will feel myself approaching my own "I thought there would be more" moment when my own kids are out the door.

Kramer

Speaking of that, one thing my wife and I did conclude -- and I think I felt it more strongly this time myself -- is that there's an unfortunate imbalance between Mason's parents in this film.

Although clearly both are culpable for the way their lives turned out, and Mason Sr. is sometimes taken to task for being absent, I recognized more clearly this time that Boyhood really wants to forgive Mason Sr. his shortcomings, and not so much Olivia.

The straight reading is that the parent who stays has the thankless job. Olivia is the legal guardian of her two children, so it's she who does the hard miles, makes the tough choices and lives with the consequences. Mason Sr. just parachutes in whenever he feels like it (or really, whenever their custodial arrangement dictates it). Because Olivia is doing the harder job, it seems like there should be some rewards built in for her.

But there aren't. Not only do her kids never really appreciate her -- she has to have a Mexican immigrant give her the thanks her kids should be offering -- but they do seem to appreciate their father. At the very least, Mason Sr. gets a series of "fun" scenes with his kids, whereas Olivia's are all business. And it's telling that Mason Sr.'s final moment with his son is one of sharing and introspection that seems satisfying for them both, while Olivia's final moment leaves her in tears.

The thing I really noted this time is that the film rather unambiguously relates these two scenes and concludes that Olivia is to blame for breaking up with Mason Sr. In that final scene with his son, when he says that things might have turned out differently if only Olivia had been more patient with him, Mason Jr. then offers that he could have been spared the succession of drunken assholes. Mason Sr. seals up his lips and throws away the key: "I didn't say it, you did."

But it is the movie that's saying it, through Mason Jr. The movie is saying that Olivia kind of "deserves" to be unhappy because she never gave this loveable, directonless rascal a chance to be a better partner and father. Because I love Olivia's character and I'd like to think things turn out well for her in the end, I'm optimistic that her tears are just an isolated moment, and once she's freed from the burdens of children her life will develop the sense of purpose it may not have had before that. We should also note that her career is an unambiguous success, and that Mason Sr. thanks her for doing such a great job with their children. Olivia is, in most regards, a success.

But because the movie chooses to leave her with her head in her hands, we must conclude that that is the only reality we can trust. Anything else is just a flight of fancy, wish fulfillment on our part.

I voiced to my wife that the movie put me in mind of Kramer vs. Kramer, the 1979 best picture winner about a divorce between a young boy's mother and father. I often quip that the movie should have just been called Kramer, because Dustin Hoffman's Ted Kramer gets the vast majority of screen time, and his wife Joanna (Meryl Streep) is the one who walked out on the family. The movie's title posits a balance between the two warring parties, but the movie itself does not give us one. It's so unambiguously in Ted's corner that it's simply not a fair fight.

Boyhood, which did not quite win best picture, is not in that same category of imbalance. But it's in the same conversation. I do wonder if Richard Linklater's personal affection for the type of character played by Ethan Hawke -- which Hawke has actually played for him on numerous occasions -- interfered with his ability to give the movie better balance. Or whether it was consciously imbalanced against Olivia, and if so, what that says about his own biases. Interestingly, it's the woman who is punished in both films -- even though she's the one who leaves to find herself in Kramer vs. Kramer, and she's the one who stays in Boyhood.

Still, one of the great things about Boyhood is that this is one particular family, and it is very explicitly constructed as that. It's not meant to be the perfect encapsulation of any person's childhood -- it's this one particular character's childhood, and this is how it played out. I am more than okay with that.

So even with these mild concerns about the imbalance, I'm glad to say that the needle did movie somewhat radically when I saw Boyhood a second time.

Having worried that I'd be stuck in "really like" with Boyhood, I can now say with certainty:

I love it.

The unconventional 2014 best picture winner

Whatever else they've been, the recent best picture winners have been conventional choices.

That doesn't necessarily mean they've been the movies you initially expected to win. But it does mean that once they won, you could construct a short, simple, cynical, reductive explanation as to why Hollywood might have chosen them.

Let's consider the past five:

2013 - 12 Years a Slave (political correctness) 

2012 - Argo (Hollywood to the rescue!)

2011 - The Artist (classic Hollywood)

2010 - The King's Speech (classic Oscar bait)

2009 - The Hurt Locker (war movie)

You have to go back to Slumdog Millionaire in 2008 to find a movie that Oscar anointed simply because it was a "good movie." This isn't to say that Slumdog is better than those movies, just that you can't immediately summarize the thinking that made it the obvious choice to win, other than its quality. It has no other element that traditionally ensnares an awards body with a particular mindset and a particular tendency to congratulate itself. I'd argue that the two that came before are similarly unusual choices (No Country for Old Men and The Departed), and that you have to go back to Crash in 2005 to get another "typical" best picture winner (important social issue movie). 

Well, it's possible that this year will kick off another three years of Oscar iconoclasm. 

At this point in the season, you'd have to say that the race boils down to the two B's -- Boyhood and Birdman. The frontrunner had been Boyhood all along I think, but some recent significant wins have caused this website that devotes itself to handicapping the winners (http://www.ropeofsilicon.com/oscar-predictions/best-picture/) to anoint Birdman the new frontrunner. 

And either would be a "weird" best picture winner indeed. 

On the one hand you have a movie made over the course of 12 years, with virtually no input from Hollywood and featuring a handful of non-professional actors. It doesn't have a traditional narrative, narrative structure or catharsis, and on a technical level it is rather workmanlike. It is a contender primarily because it is believable, relatable and sneakily emotional. It created perhaps the year's most communally shared audience experience. But rarely do you see a movie that closely reproduces a realistic version of life in line for such accolades.

On the other hand you've got a movie that is cynically reducible to one crazy stylistic choice, which is to shoot the entire movie as though it were one shot. While this tends to get film geeks aflutter, it typically does not translate to the type of success with mainstream audiences that Birdman has enjoyed. It does have some classic Oscar credentials by being about the theater (which captures Oscar's desire to celebrate entertainment history) and by involving the redemption of a Hollywood actor (a little bit of the "Hollywood to the rescue" mentality of Argo). But canceling that out is the fact that it's about a guy who played a superhero, and has a title (an abbreviated title, anyway) that sounds like an actual superhero movie. No superhero movie has ever been nominated for best picture.

Either winner would be a celebration of some kind of landmark technical achievement. In fact, the way they were made has been an equal part of the conversation as what they are actually about. In Boyhood, the way it was made and its subject matter are intrinsically linked. In Birdman, they have nothing to do with each other. In both cases, you'd have to say that without the unusual technical approach to making them, they would not be nominated this year (though I do sometimes wonder how many of Birdman's viewers actually notice that there are no visible edits).

Like them or not, these are weird movies. They are made by filmmakers who were thinking way, way outside the box. In most years, both would be the consensus deserving choice that ended up losing to something like The Imitation Game. This year, one will win. 

Having had both in my top ten, and one at my #1 spot, I'd honestly be happy to have either carry off the win, which is an unusual position to find myself in. Most years I have a favorite I'm clearly rooting for over a rival I don't find deserving, but not this year. Unless some more conventional movie makes a last gasp at contention, it'll be one of these two -- and I don't see The Imitation Game suddenly coming out of nowhere to seize the zeitgeist. (The Grand Budapest Hotel would also be a good unconventional choice, but I'd have to say it's a longshot at this point, despite tying for the most nominations.)

So what will happen?

If we are to further psychoanalyze Hollywood -- which is the premise this entire post is based on -- I'd have to say that Birdman will emerge. As unconventional as it is, it is definitely more conventional than Boyhood, in the sense of celebrating Hollywood and featuring actors it is time to honor (Michael Keaton has a significant edge over Ethan Hawke in that regard, though Patricia Arquette should definitely win in the best supporting actress category). And if you believe the narrative that the most critically acclaimed film of the year is the one that never wins best picture -- see examples like The Social Network and L.A. Confidential -- then that same fate could easily befall Boyhood.

The thing is, I don't get the sense that Boyhood's most ardent supporters consider whether it wins best picture to be any necessary measure, or perhaps even a desirable measure, of its success. They don't need to have that external validation of the emotional experience they had watching this movie. And even if they do secretly crave that external validation despite being unwilling to admit it, they will be satisfied with Arquette's win. And Richard Linklater seems the best bet to win best director whether his movie wins or not. 

I said earlier that I didn't care which movie won, but I obviously did have one ranked higher than the other. Boyhood was only my #8 movie of the year, while Birdman took top honors. So I should be rooting for Birdman to win, right? I actually don't think I am, and here are three reasons:

1) A win for Boyhood would be a much-deserved recognition of the myriad ways Richard Linklater has been expanding our cinematic horizons over the course of his career. Boyhood is not an isolated experiment for Linklater. It is just the latest in a career defined by (mostly successful) experiments.

2) A win for Boyhood would celebrate the movie of the year. I would say Boyhood defined 2014 at the movies, whereas Birdman just happened to come out in 2014. 

3) But perhaps most importantly, a win for Boyhood would be the choice that gave me the greatest reassurance that the system is not broken. A win for Boyhood would teach me that just when I thought I had gotten the Oscars all figured out, I had to go back and reconsider all my assumptions. A win for Boyhood would condition me to expect the unexpected in Oscar's future.

Also, it's just a damn fine movie. 

The narrative conventionality backlash

If you had to choose one thing that the most number of people would say is wrong with the movies today, you'd get a lot of solid contenders. There are too many reboots and remakes. I'm sick of all the digital effects/3D. The tickets are too expensive.

But I think one almost everyone can agree on is:

Movies are too predictable.

Even the movies that are big successes -- say, the Marvel Universe movies -- have gotten complaints about how easy it is to telegraph the 20-minute battle sequence that will inevitably close the movie. Literally, almost every single one of them has that sequence -- the more characters involved, the better.

Of course, there are plenty of good reasons movies follow a conventional structure. Stories are more fundamentally satisfying to us if they contain a clear protagonist with a clear mission, joined by a clear set of cohorts and romantic interests, opposed by a clear antagonist. There's some flexibility about where these stories can go in the middle, but not so much about where they need to end up. It's the details, as well as a few allowable surprises, that separate the interesting movies from the soulless clones.

Well, this past weekend I saw three movies that defy some of this narrative conventionality we've come to expect. As it happens, one was great, one was middle-of-the-road, and one was a dud.

Is that enough to posit a genuine backlash against predictable movies? I'm not sure, but the concentration of those movies in one viewing weekend -- all intended as crowd-pleasers in their own way -- certainly gave me food for thought.

I'll go in neither the order I saw them nor the order of their quality.

First up chronologically was Cuban Fury, which I watched on Friday night. And SPOILERS lay in wait, so proceed with caution.

Cuban Fury is Nick Frost's big attempt (or, perhaps, small attempt) to branch out on his own, free from Simon Pegg or Edgar Wright. It's the story of a teen salsa-dancing sensation who loses his enthusiasm for his gift when a bunch of bullies beat him up and shove the sequins from his shirt down his throat. Deciding that salsa is for pussies, he slowly turns into a middle-aged schlub with nothing much to show for himself.

Learning that his pretty new American boss (Rashida Jones) is also into salsa dancing, the former prodigy (Bruce by name) determines to get himself back into shape and win her heart by showing off his once legendary moves. Opposing him in this effort is a jerk from his office, played by Chris O'Dowd, whose hobby of belittling Bruce only intensifies when O'Dowd realizes he also wants to make a play -- a more lascivious, misogynistic play -- for the new boss.

Cuban Fury seems pretty comfortable with most romantic comedy tropes, as it goes crazy introducing confidants for Bruce (I almost wrote a separate post about it) and includes a big dance competition as its finale. Where it deviates from the expected is this finale. In most movies, Bruce's rival for the girl would also be his rival on the dance floor. We'd know the girl preferred Bruce, but he'd have to symbolically win her by winning the final competition against his favored rival.

But in Cuban Fury, O'Dowd is a casual dancer only. He and Bruce do have a funny dance-off earlier, but it's a private, one-on-one affair (in a parking garage, no less), not the type of public shaming that would definitively declare Bruce his better. In fact, O'Dowd (Drew by name) is jettisoned from the plot, with prejudice, before this final dance number, when he makes an unwanted (and frankly, completely illogical) romantic pass at Jones (Julia by name). Bruce does win the dance competition (against unknown competition), but his partner is his sister (one of his many confidants), and what's even stranger is that Julia is not actually there at the time he wins. Cuban Fury wants to have its big finale, sort of, but it intends to tell us that even though Bruce was motivated to return to dancing by romantic love, he's really doing it for himself, not for a girl. She does show up afterward, but the fact that she's not there applauding with a sparkle in her eye is telling. This is Bruce's Bruce moment.

The result is that the movie feels a bit slight, but still quite enjoyable. I guess I'd say it works for the movie to end this way, but it definitely left me with a feeling like something was missing.

The movie that really doesn't work with its unconventional narrative is Chef, which I saw on Sunday night. And I'm going to SPOIL this one as well, like food left out overnight.

If Cuban Fury was about a man who's eaten a lot of sandwiches rediscovering his old self, Chef is about a furious man reinventing himself through Cuban sandwiches. Writer-director Jon Favreau plays Carl Casper, a once-hot celebrity chef who has gotten lambasted by an influential food blogger after being compelled to serve his "greatest hits" to the critic rather than the more adventuresome menu he had planned. Carl is shown how to join Twitter but not how to use it, and gets himself involved in a flame war that ends up blowing up on him in a very public and embarrassing way. Before you know it, Carl is out of a job.

The key to his salvation is to start a food truck. Let there be no doubt that this is a very good idea for a movie. It's the execution that's wanting.

In a conventional movie, the idea to start the food truck would be Carl's. He would sit up in bed at night, struck by inspiration. Or he'd be at his lowest moment and see a food truck across the street, and get that look in his eyes that Gregory House always got when he'd landed on the correct diagnosis -- the moment I always marked by saying "Wait a moment!" in a Holmesian British accent. Then he would begin this momentous uphill battle to establishing himself in the increasingly competitive food truck industry.

In Chef, though, the first mention of the food truck is some offhand reference to it as an idea that had already been considered and discarded. Something like "Don't bring up the food truck idea again." It's this lack of dramatic intensity that characterizes the whole movie.

So Carl flies from Los Angeles to Miami with his son (their relationship is another frustrating example of conventionality discarded) in order to take possession of some ramshackle old food truck, in a scene involving a truly puzzling cameo from Robert Downey Jr. They whip the food truck into shape and are almost immediately a hit. With Twitter working in his favor this time, the food truck is swamped by customers wherever it stops on its trip back to Los Angeles, as people throw wads of cash at them for Cuban sandwiches. Then, basically, the end.

Where is the conflict?

Favreau made this movie as a very thinly-veiled attempt to get back at the critics who have trashed some of his recent movies, most notably Cowboys & Aliens (which richly deserved that scorn). It's an intentional return to a more indie sensibility, but it casts him as a pretty unlikable creative talent (playing a version of himself, no doubt) whose only real misstep is that he did not understand the dangers of publicly tussling with a critic in the age of social media. His food is universally praised -- well, by everyone except that critic -- and never for a moment does he makes a misstep in the kitchen. It's basically a very self-indulgent project designed to show that Jon Favreau the person was hurt by criticisms that have been directed toward him, but at his core he's an exceptionally talented person whom everyone loves.

Blah.

The third movie -- the great one -- is the one that had no choice but to discard narrative conventionality. That movie is, of course, Boyhood, and I already wrote about it a little bit earlier this week. But this is a movie I suspect I will keep writing about, keep coming back to. I already like it significantly better than when I first got out of the theater, and I expect it will only continue to move upward from here.

There will be some small spoilers, but mostly related to structure.

Due to its design, Boyhood basically had no choice but to be structured as it was -- purely chronologically, without the beats that mark a traditional narrative. Or so we might be tempted to think.

See, just because Richard Linklater culled his footage from a dozen different years does not mean he was compelled to edit them together in that order. He could have included flashbacks. He could have shown the scenes non-sequentially for other artistic reasons. In short, he could have forced his raw materials into a more conventional package if he wanted to.

But Linklater realized that one of the keys to the power of his movie would be our sense of growing alongside the characters -- our sense of surprise as they abruptly age (and it is very abrupt at times), and our paradoxically contradictory sense of having been there with them every step of the way. If we got to see what Mason looked like at age 18 in the first 20 minutes, it's a very different movie. That movie might be interesting in its own right, but I don't think I want to see it.

When I first emerged from Boyhood, I loved it, but I was dragged down by the "yeah but"s. "Yeah, but because of the type of project it is, it doesn't have the necessary structure to pay off in as satisfying a way as it should." Was I really saying this? Am I really such a slave to structure to think that?

Again I return to the idea that narrative structure exists, and is slavishly adhered to, for good reasons -- reasons that don't make a filmmaker uninspired for following them. They go back to the very beginning of oral storytelling traditions with the early humans. They should not be discarded, entirely or even partially, without good reason.

But my initial instinct about Boyhood was wrong. The movie reaches a transcendent new level by employing structure in a way we've never seen before. Actually, we've seen it, I suppose -- we've seen it in biopics, which also tend to go chronologically without a traditional three acts. But we've never seen it with the same actors playing the characters at a wide variety of ages, and that effect itself is what delivers the movie's immense levels of satisfaction.

Because that's all we really want as viewers: satisfaction. Satisfaction and truth.

Whatever structure gets you there is the one to use.

Father's Days with Richard Linklater

Yesterday was Father's Day in Australia.

Yep, fathers gotta be different over here. Mothers don't; they celebrate Mother's Day on the exact same date as in the U.S. (They just get to that date some 15 hours earlier.) I figure the reason behind moving Father's Day to September ("moving," because I assume the holiday was invented in the U.S. and then applied elsewhere) is to avoid having it fall in winter. Seasons technically begin on the 1st of the month here (rather than the 21st as in the northern hemisphere), so come June 1st, it's technically winter. This means that September 1st is technically spring, and September 7th is the first Sunday after September 1st.

I was in Australia last Australian Father's Day -- had been for about two weeks -- but I didn't celebrate it because I'd already celebrated American Father's Day in 2013. My wife gave me the option of which one I wanted to celebrate this year, and I went for the September date. I mean, who wants to celebrate Father's Day in winter?

A movie was obviously going to be involved in some capacity, and here's where I inadvertently established a Father's Day viewing pattern. You see, in 2012, I claimed a couple hours at home by myself as a Father's Day present, and used that time to watch Richard Linklater's Slacker (see post here). Two years later -- er, two years and three months later -- I again spent the time with Mr. Linklater by watching Boyhood, which only just (finally) opened here on Thursday.

I'm not sure if Dick Link will have another movie out by either Father's Day in 2015, so maybe I can watch, I don't know, The Newton Boys.

In all seriousness, though, there's something kind of appropriate about Mr. Linklater on a day in which you're considering family bonds between the generations, and deeply contemplating in general. Slacker gets the "deeply contemplating in general" part down, but I probably only had some vague sense going in how much Boyhood would be about the relationship between this boy and, well, both his parents, really.

Ellar Coltrane's Mason has three father figures in Boyhood, actually -- his biological father, Mason Sr. (played by Ethan Hawke), and his mother's two attempts to replace him (Bill, played by Marco Parella, and Jim, played by Brad Hawkins). In many respects, it's a story about how Mason is failed by all three of these men -- fortunately, to a lesser extent by his father than by the two surrogates, but in some ways to a greater extent, because this was the man who was originally assigned the role and whose failure necessitated the existence of the two inferior facsimiles.

But what I really appreciated this Father's Day was a reminder of just how much a mother does -- and never gets credit for. There's been some discussion about why the scenes in Boyhood were the specific scenes chosen for inclusion -- and I'm not simply talking about the most basic logical argument that "those are the scenes Linklater shot with his cast for the short time he had them available to him each year." Let's for a moment treat Boyhood as though it were a conventional film and that Linklater had a perfect idea of which scenes he planned to shoot, and why, way back when he started in 2002. Who knows, he may have.

One idea is that the scenes are the ones Mason himself considers important either as he looks back on the past dozen years of his life, or as he's going through them in real time. If this is the case, it becomes even more useful to look at the ways he values the scenes with Hawke, an absent father he kind of idolizes, and those with Patricia Arquette, a present mother who is taken for granted. Mason "remembers," as it were, going bowling with his dad, or going to a Houston Astros game, or going camping. With his mother, he only "remembers" boring, mundane, around-the-house stuff that is mired in "have to" rather than "want to." By flaking out, going off to Alaska to try to find himself, and even starting a new family, Hawke earned a kind of mythical status with his young son. By making sacrifices in her life to give him a healthy and stable childhood -- or trying her best to do so, anyway -- Arquette is remembered only as some kind of functional provider, one who never represented anything like fun to her son.

I suspect this is a role a mother has to play all too often. Even when fathers are physically present, like I am to my children, there's an essentially lazy part of us that tries to do "the easy work" -- goofing around with the kids, doing silly voices, etc. The true, hard work of parenting is something only the mother has the maturity to undertake, knowing she will never be rewarded for it -- knowing that if she doesn't do it, no one will.

So on (the day after) this Father's Day, I would like to thank Richard Linklater for reminding me of the ways I can truly earn a day in my own honor -- which is by doing the hard parts of parenting, in addition to the easy ones.

By, in essence, being more like a mother.

Metacritic's imperfect math

It's finally happened.

A movie on Metacritic has reached triple digits.

I'm sure Boyhood is not the only movie on Metactric with a perfect score of 100, and it's not likely that it will always have this score. But for at least long enough for me to take this screen shot, it had reached those ludicrous heights of critical adoration, the likes of which I have never seen when surfing to the site.

Except, it's totally bogus.

I talked to a friend, who has already seen the movie (jealous) and loves it, about the improbable 100 scored by Richard Linklater's universally acclaimed masterpiece. And he was the first one that got me doubting its authenticity.

In an email earlier this week to me he said "How could it be a 99 a week ago? Doesn't that mean that there was 1 mixed review at least? Did they discard the mixed review? Did the reviewer clarify the review, reclassifying it as a positive?"

Good questions.

So I looked at the numbers offered up on Boyhood's main landing page, and indeed, they were all 100s except for one glaring exception: a 75 (from Slant Magazine's Ed Gonzalez) gumming up the whole works.

But with only a single dissenter out of 40, that 75 might still not be enough to reduce the film's average below 100. So I did some quick math. Assuming all the other reviews were a 100, and Ed Gonzalez' review was a 75, that would be 3975 divided by 40, which equals a 99.375 Metascore. Rounding down, as you are compelled to do in this situation, you get a 99. Ed Gonzalez himself is able to keep this movie from having a perfect score.

But tonight I delved in a little deeper. On Metactric, you can go past the landing page and see all the reviews and all the scores that are currently being tabulated for this movie. And it was here that I found that the movie did not have 39 reviews of 100, but rather, "only" 32. That is still jaw-droppingly astonishing, but it also meant that even a Metascore of 99 was likely too high for Boyhood.

It turns out Boyhood also received scores of 95, 90, 90, 90, 88, 83 and 80, in addition to good old Ed Gonzalez' decidedly contrarian 75. Some more quick math: 3891 divided by 40 = 97.275. So not only does Boyhood not deserve a 100 or a 99, it doesn't deserve a 98 either. It deserves a 97.

Why the fuzzy math, Metracritic?

Scanning Metacritic's FAQ, I think I may have my answer in this dismissively pithy response:

Can you tell me how each of the different critics are weighted in your formula?

Absolutely not.

Simply put, not all critics are equal on Metacritic. And some -- many, in fact -- don't get any love at all. Take Armond White. He's a pretty prominent critic, albeit one whose contrarian views almost destroy his ability to be taken seriously. True to form, he has a negative take on Boyhood, an excerpt of which was recently posted in a group I frequent on Facebook:

"“Hipster Patriarchy” might be a better title for Richard Linklater’s Boyhood. Depicting a white American male from childhood to adolescence, it celebrates the emblematic figure of American social power."

Needless to say, White was not one of the 40 critics who passed muster for Metacritic.

I visit Metacritic almost daily and prefer it to its most similar rival, Rotten Tomatoes. But some of the opaqueness I'm seeing in the FAQ, particularly the flippant way it is expressed, makes me see Metacritic a bit more as something elitist and capricious than something open and honest. Why can't we know you're formula? What's so great about your formula, anyway?

There's some kind of snobbery or something going on here, a form of preferential treatment for some critics over others that requires the whole thing to be shrouded in mystery. Metacritic's role in taste-making, therefore, seems sneaky and underhanded, something for them to be ashamed of. Only if you are a certain kind of critic espousing a certain kind of view can your opinion carry its full value in our system. Seems more than a little bit fishy.

Consider the tone of this part of the FAQ:

Why don't you have 97 reviews for every movie like those other websites do?

Several other websites that provide links to movie reviews have weighed the quantity vs. quality issue and come out in favor of quantity. These sites typically include links to as many reviews as there are available on the net. And lately, with every Joe Schmo posting a movie review both before and after movie releases, there are quite a few reviews for each movie (we're talking 100's of reviews for the more popular titles). True, some of these Joe Schmos--or at least the Harry Knowles--do have quality sites with useful reviews and information. But the quality of many is inconsistent at best. In addition, there is such a thing as too much information, and statistically, once we include a certain number of reviews in our calculations, adding additional reviews will not change the overall METASCORE much in one direction or another.

It's funny that I can essentially agree with what they're saying here and still be appalled that they're saying it. The Joe Schmos they refer to -- and if they are so elitist, you'd think they'd opt for the spelling Joe Schmoe rather than Joe Schmo, in part because it pluralizes better -- are actually one of the groups most responsible for me no longer having the ability to achieve gainful employment as a critic. But I don't begrudge them their right to do what they're doing -- not out loud, anyway. It's the out loud snobbery of statements like the one above that I find kind of shocking.

The above bit seems to be a direct dig at Rotten Tomatoes, but I'm starting to wonder if Rotten Tomatoes isn't more likable than its snooty rival. Rotten Tomatoes does indeed have 156 critic reviews that "count" for Boyhood, only two of which are rotten. In a system based on actual math, and using simple thumbs up-thumbs down metrics, those two negative reviews still leave Boyhood shy of that perfect 100. It carries a 99 freshness rating. (Interestingly, neither of the negative reviews belongs to Armond White. The two lonely contrarians in this case are a woman named Rebecca Cusey and a guy named Matt Pais.)

One assumes that Metacritic's 40 hallowed critics must be chuffed (to use an Australian term) that Metacritic considers them useful members of the critical community. But at the same time, eight of them must feel like their opinions don't mean a squirt of piss. Because there's certainly one thing that a perfect score draws attention to: the insignificance of the opinions of the naysayers. If a movie has a 93 or a 96 or something close to perfection, people aren't running any numbers to determine what Metacritic is actually saying. But if Metacritic says something has a perfect score and there are eight people -- that we know of -- that don't think it's perfect, one has to wonder why they even bother to post the reviews of those people. I mean, this is all about displaying only the content that conforms to Metacritic's preconceived notion of itself in the first place, right?

I'm starting to wonder if I don't have the dumbest of reasons for preferring Metacritic over Rotten Tomatoes, which is also a factor in why I like going to Mobil more than I like frequenting other gas stations. Simply put, I like Metacritic's fonts. I find its design aesthetically pleasing, and I do not find the Rotten Tomatoes design pleasing. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that Rotten Tomatoes looks cheap. Then again, maybe that makes sense -- a crisp, clean appearance for a snobby website, and something less fussy for an egalitarian democracy like RT.

As I write this post and find more and more things about Metacritic I don't like, I'm starting to view it as the kind of secretive organization that Kirby Dick railed against in This Film Is Not Yet Rated when he excoriated the MPAA. The only difference is that Metacritic is flippant about its secretive decisions, almost rubbing our noses in them, while the MPAA is just plain secretive. Metacritic, while being superficially more open by admitting its own secrecy, actually comes off worse.

Of course, none of this has any impact on my anticipation for seeing Boyhood, which, regardless of source, figures to land somewhere between a simply great film and The Best Film I Have Ever Seen. All I know for sure is that it's probably not perfect, and I don't know why Metacritic is so hell bent on telling us it is -- especially when they refuse to even tell us what their logic is in reaching that conclusion.

You'd think after writing all this I'll be ready to delete Metacritic from my favorites, but you'd be wrong. Fact is, there's still something about its snooty judgments that I crave. It speaks to my own inner snob, I guess.

Or, maybe I just like the fonts.

Too much good stuff, part 2

Earlier this week I posited that the reason I'm seeing so many good movies could just be that 2014 is a really good year for movies.

Going to Metacritic yesterday, I seemed to have gained a certain of proof of that theory.

Just check this out. You may wish to click separately on it to see it better:

Have you ever seen the landing page of Metacritic so loaded with universal acclaim?

As some kind of indication that even the year 2014 is trying to find new ways to document its own awesomeness, Richard Linklater's Boyhood has an utterly ridiculous 99 rating. That's not a 99 that comes from just seven or eight adoring critics. Nope, that is the result of TWENTY-NINE glowing reviews.

Universal acclaim indeed.

But it hasn't just been independent films drawing the praise. Just think about how much critics have generally loved this year's summer tentpole movies. Consider these Metacritic scores for some of the summer's big releases. (Stretching the definition of "summer" back to April in this case.)

Captain America: The Winter Soldier - 70 (36 positive reviews, 7 mixed reviews, 1 negative review)
Godzilla - 62 (26 positive reviews, 21 mixed reviews, 1 negative review)
X-Men: Days of Future Past - 74 (37 positive reviews, 6 mixed reviews, 0 negative reviews)
Edge of Tomorrow - 71 (35 positive reviews, 8 mixed reviews, 0 negative reviews)
22 Jump Street - 71 (38 positive reviews, 8 mixed reviews, 0 negative reviews)

And then of course the just-opened Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, which I will likely be seeing tomorrow (despite not loving the first one), whose 79 score you see above is composed of 41 positive reviews, 4 mixed reviews and another 0 negative reviews).

That's just two negative reviews total between SIX major summer blockbusters.

Of course there are always going to be a couple duds -- Transformers: Age of Extinction at 32 (3 positive reviews, 13 mixed reviews, 21 negative reviews) and The Amazing Spider-Man 2 at 49 (1 positive reviews, 25 mixed reviews, 17 negative reviews). But in a typical summer, there are a lot more of these.

Given the overwhelming data -- which may only get stronger with late-summer releases like Guardians of the Galaxy and possibly Sin City: A Dame to Kill For -- I'm kind of surprised that I haven't heard a lot of chatter about how great this year is. Have you?

It's a heartening phenomenon, to be sure. I went into this summer thinking that there were only a couple movies I was optimistic about, but I've ended up wanting to make sure I saw most of the big releases in theaters, and genuinely regretting missing movies I thought I didn't care about, like Godzilla.

But part of me wonders if there's something artificial going on in the critical community. I'm not talking anything like payoffs from studios to say nice things. But I do wonder if critics find themselves adjusting their standards a little bit because they desire to have a positive perspective on these films they are forced to sit through. I don't have nearly enough evidence to posit this theory with any confidence, since I too have liked the movies listed above that I've seen. I just think it's logical at this point to try to figure out what's really going on, if it is indeed something other than just people learning how to make better movies.

And me, I expect my personal winning streak to continue when I get to see Snowpiercer later this month. As far as I can tell, though, Boyhood is still without an Australian release date (grumble grumble).