Can movies set in 2020 be COVID-free?

I saw what may be my favorite new 2021 horror on Wednesday night. It's the latest in the Welcome to the Blumhouse series on Amazon that began last October with four entries, and has another four this October. I don't know that I'll get around to seeing and reviewing all four like I did last year, but Black as Night encourages me that maybe I should give the others a chance.

I won't go into too much detail about it since I plan to review it and link my review to the right as I always do. However, I'll tell you that it's a vampire movie set in New Orleans, but with a welcome twist: Unlike the vampire Lestat and his cohorts in Interview With the Vampire, almost all the characters are Black.

What I do want to discuss is that the film is quite clearly set in 2020, yet COVID is nowhere to be seen.

Of the new movies that appear to have been conceived in toto since the pandemic began, they tend to fall into two categories: they're either set in an indeterminate time period, or they are about COVID itself. Now, I can't say for sure that the origins of Black as Night don't go back further than the start of 2020, though I can say that parts of 2020 make their way into the plot.

The movie has a lot to do with race, more than you might expect, but also carried out without a particularly heavy hand. And Maritte Lee Go's film knows its history, as Hurricane Katrina is a touchpoint discussed a couple times, particularly the effect it had on the local Black population.

Another reference to race, albeit brief, is by one of the more powerful vampires, though I won't tell you which in order to keep the surprise and because it's not necessary for the current discussion. In rattling off a list of years in which racial intolerance reared its ugly head, this character finishes with the year 2020. He doesn't go into specifics, but we in the audience know this was the year that several deaths of Black Americans at the hands of police galvanized the Black Lives Matter protest, most prominently the death of George Floyd.

We in the audience also know that this was in the thick of the COVID-19 pandemic, an improbable but powerful diversion of our attentions from the thing you would have thought would be the only thing anyone was talking about in 2020. 

The New Orleans in this film, though, is not one where anyone is wearing masks. There's no social distancing. And the only people who are sick are those who have been bitten in the neck.

If you want to know when in 2020 it takes place, it's the summer, because our main character, who also narrates -- Shawna, played by Asjha Cooper -- talks about it as if she's looking back on it from a future date, referring to it as "the summer I killed vampires." We also know that she visits the tombstone of a character who dies early in the movie, and the tombstone lists the date of death as late July of that year.

No COVID though.

Does this matter?

I'm thinking no. That may especially be the case a few years from now, when we'll still obviously remember that 2020 was the first year of COVID-19, but when maybe we'll be lucky enough not to have that fact be the first thing that jumps to our minds.

It's an interesting question though. The other surrounding years may blend into each other, and we may have difficulty remembering whether something occurred in 2017 or 2018. At the very least, those years were not defined by the most radical change to our daily lives probably since September 11th. But filmmakers will always have to consider how they choose to portray 2020 on film, and whether they acknowledge the elephant in the room if they do.

Of course, there's always the argument to be made that vampirism itself is a metaphor for COVID. Like COVID, it's contagious, though unlike COVID, it does require actual physical contact. 

I think this might be a stretch though. If Black as Night is about anything from 2020, it's about social justice, and far be it from me to suggest that COVID has to worm its way in there to get an equivalent level of the viewer's attention, even if only for the sake of "realism." If you are making a movie about vampires, "realism" is probably not your first consideration anyway. 

It may be that this is only a "problem" right now, when movies are being set in "present day," and that encompasses the year 2020. A few years from now, a movie will only be set in 2020 if someone specifically wants to evoke that year -- which would probably be because their subject is either COVID, Black Lives Matter or the presidential election.

I suppose if Shawna is remembering 2020 in a future year, the fact that she spent it fighting off vampires will certainly be the most memorable part to her. 

Difficult to resist

Well, we have that rare kind of news event that crosses over the semi-permeable membrane between the news and my movie blog: Donald Trump has coronavirus.

Because I'm a dutiful editor, I can easily find a movie tie-in.

I'll get to that in a moment.

First, though, I want to say it is has been hard not to go on social media and gloat about this, given the man he is and the science he has disregarded with maximum disdain. I did actually post something on Facebook about Trump's potential exposure to COVID, only a few hours before he confirmed his positive test, based only on the Hope Hicks positive test. But the main reason I posted it was that I was out with my kids on an elevator that afternoon, where I saw a shape that could not help but remind me of a caricature of Trump's head in profile. See if you agree:

Worried that it was too obscure, I included this text to try to help people: "The man on the left did not. (Looks like DT doesn't it?)"

After he actually announced that he and Melania Trump had tested positive, I considered taking the post down, worried it would be viewed as insensitive. Or at the very least, I thought I should include a comment that contextualized the post. But I did neither. Trump would not have done that, and the tones of many other posts on social media were worse than my apparent flippancy. They can check the time stamp if they really want to know whether I was mocking the leader of the free world who suddenly might be very sick, but as I said, Trump would not care about such an appearance of insensitivity himself. You gotta fight fire with fire.

We had been planning anyway to watch the movie Irresistible on Friday night, without any knowledge of the events that were about to transpire on Friday during the day (Australia time). This is of course Jon Stewart's timely movie about a Democratic and a Republican operative at the national level who are both trying to win a mayoral election in a small Wisconsin town. We only had about five days left on the iTunes rental so now was the time.

The movie has a very pointed passage on what is supposed to separate Democrats (whom Stewart supports) from Republicans (whom he vehemently opposes). To his credit, Stewart relentlessly roasts both sides in this movie in the hopes of reaching a larger, greater good. The passage discusses the beloved Democratic adage "When they go low, we go high."

The smarmy Democratic campaign manager, Gary Zimmer (played by Steve Carell), approaches his mayoral candidate and the candidate's daughter, Jack and Diana Hastings (Chris Cooper and Mackenzie Davis), with an idea to reveal a scandal about his opponent, involving oxycontin and nepotism. The following exchange ensues about their morals:

Diana: "Come on, Gary. We're the good guys, right?"

Gary: "Yeah, we're the good guys."

Diana: "When they go low ..."

Gary: "... we go high."

Diana: "Unless we also need to go low, apparently."

Gary: "Only to keep those who would go lower out of power."

Diana: "So, when they go low, we go high ... -er, incrementally, in relation to how low they went."

Gary: "Regrettably, yes."

Diana: "When they go low, we go almost as low, but we feel worse doing it."

The conversation gets at the heart of political strategy. Or where strategy butts up against idealism.

They are both right, effectively. It's what I said earlier. You have to fight fire with fire.

But at what point are you just sacrificing the integrity of your own ideological position? The 2016 election taught Hillary Clinton -- and actually taught this character, specifically, as he is supposed to have worked on Clinton's campaign -- that she didn't fight dirty enough to win. He doesn't want to make that mistake again. After a few more backs and forths in the verbal exchange, Gary concludes, "I'm sorry, but sometimes good people have to do shitty things for the greater good."

But Diana is the idealist American needs right now. She knows that when you go lower and lower and lower, there is no bottom to how low you will go. And when you are deciding to go that low, often you cannot even tell if you will end up going lower than your opponent until after it's all over. In fact, going less low could, in this political philosophy, be a sign of weakness. If you go not as low, not as quickly, you are just creating another recipe for failure. 

The only way to really win -- even if you don't actually win a particular election -- is to relentlessly go high.

Do you know who did resist an impulse to gloat over Trump's diagnosis on social media, when he may have had more reason than anyone to do so?

Joe Biden.

Not only did he tweet wishes for "swift recovery" to Trump and Melania, without any "but" attached, but the campaign is also planning to pull all its negative advertising against Trump, at least temporarily.

Going high is not always the winning strategy, but I'm hoping in this case it will be. 

Tenet-pole

As goes Tenet, so goes the entire film industry.

Christopher Nolan's latest has been pushed back a second time. Whereas once it was set to debut on July 17th, then that dropped two weeks later to July 31st. Now it is has fallen again, another 12 days, to August 12th.

This matters not because I am dying to see Tenet, though I guess I am -- really, I'm just dying to see anything that does not look like it was made for Netflix, or seemed like a perfectly logical candidate to end up there.

No, it's because no one else seems ready to do a damn thing until Tenet figures out what it's doing.

This is not entirely true -- the most recent plan was to have Disney bring out Mulan a week earlier than that, on July 24th. I have not heard that this has been postponed yet, but in the wake of Tenet's decision, it may now be.

The theory for some time now is that Tenet, with its massive girth, length and Christopher Nolan-ness, would point the way for every other movie with aspirations to open while it's still summer in the U.S. It was fashioned -- if not by official assignation, then by group consensus -- as a kind of tentpole for the whole summer movie season. A Tenet-pole, if you will.

But as the film continues to recede toward autumn, I'm wondering if movie theaters can take it.

We've got some open here. And even though they are not the ones with the biggest screens -- those seem to be waiting for a steady flow of Hollywood releases -- you get the sense that they, too, are hanging on in anticipation; waiting, if not for Tenet itself, then at least for Tenet's run-off.

But instead of providing run-off, Tenet has just run off.

I'm not saying it's the wrong decision. We're second-waving it even here in Australia. In fact, whereas things looked pretty optimistic a couple weeks ago, now I'm actually hearing that there are runs on the grocery stores again. Seriously? That's so fucking March, people.

But I feel like, in a very real sense, whole giant swaths of the economy are wrapped up in Tenet's giant, gangly legs, and as it trips, so does everything else. I feel like there are theaters that may have targeted Tenet's opening weekend as a time to finally throw open their doors, to put Tenet on all ten damn screens in the place at once, so they can reduce available capacity in each screening space by two-thirds.

If that was their plan, now they will have to wait 12 days longer, and that's 12 further days that hungry theater staff won't be working, and that their employers will not be making any revenue in order to pay them. How long can it continue?

You know what, I'm pretty much jack of all this COVID-19 shit.

Thus ends my life's longest theater drought

The last time I went to the movies, things were heading Downhill. My return to the cinema was met with Resistance, but then ultimately, I got to have the Hearts and Bones of the theatrical moviegoing experience I had been missing.

Or here's another way I could have started:

Okay, smart guy, I know what you're going to say. "What, you really never had a drought this long without going to a movie theater, even when you were a baby?"

Yes, sure, when I was a baby. But I think it's possible that ever since Star Wars was my first movie back in 1977, when I was not yet four years old, I may never have gone this long without going to the movies -- be it a new release, a Disney re-release, or even Star Wars again.

How long, exactly?

That would be 104 days.

Yes indeed, I saw the Force Majeure Hollywood remake Downhill back on March 10th, and did not see my next movie in the theater, the Australian film Hearts and Bones, until last night, June 22nd.

It needn't have been quite that long, as the theaters didn't close in Australia for nearly two weeks after I saw Downhill. But there was nothing I really wanted to see at that time -- I hemmed and hawed on Bloodshot, as I wrote about here -- and then the doors were closed and locked at most theaters.

For the next three months.

Finally, as restrictions have started to loosen, a couple of the arthouse theaters announced they would open their doors again on June 22nd, the first day the government permitted it, a couple weeks ahead of their multiplex counterparts.

You better bet that I was there on opening night.

The stuff that's playing now is a weird mixture of movies that had not quite finished their theatrical run when COVID hit (like The Invisible Man), movies being brought back out just to excite people who missed them the first time (like Parasite), and movies that had a VOD release during the lockdown.

That last category includes the movie I ended up seeing, Hearts and Bones, as well as the movie I was supposed to see, Resistance. Resistance is the story of Marcel Marceau before his miming days, when he was a resistance fighter in World War II, and he's played by Jessie Eisenberg. I had the offer of a free screener of this movie in order to review it, but I set it aside as my big "return-to-the-theater" movie.

But now I'll need that free screener, as Resistance was sold out when I got there. And while that might seem like a really encouraging sign for the health of theater-going as an experience with ongoing relevance in our society, "sold out" in this case means that the maximum 20 tickets per screening room were sold. I had considered booking online -- my critics card is not being accepted in the short run anyway, and Cinema Lido in Hawthorn is doing $10 tickets all week -- but I ultimately did not.

So Hearts and Bones it was. It's a story of a war photographer (Hugo Weaving) whose work is about to be exhibited as a sort of career retrospective, until a South Sudanese Sydneysider (that being the name for people who live in Sydney) asks him to spare the world the pain of revisiting the traumas of a massacre in his village. I liked it.

Because my intention in this post is not really to write about either of those movies, the one I saw and the one I didn't, I'll just tell you what it was like to finally return to a movie theater.

For one, their ticket kiosk at street level was not open. As that hermetically sealed space actually has a built-in protection against the spread of disease, that may have been an unrelated operational decision. I bought my tickets from the candy bar, as it is called here in Australia, after squirting hand sanitizer on my hands at the entrance. A similar hand sanitation station greeted us at the ticket taker's spot.

I had thought there might be seats blocked off, ensuring that social distancing was preserved. But blocking off particular seats might prevent full groups from sitting together, and that ended up being the mandate -- leave 1.5 meters distance between yourself and another group, though you can sit consecutively with members of your own group. I guess the theory is, if you decided to come to the movies with them, you probably either shared a car or a domestic space anyway.

Oh, and I almost forgot to mention -- or rather, did forget, and am now updating the post several hours later -- that I had to give my name and phone number, in case they need to call me to tell me I have gotten coronavirus from their seats. But that's been standard practice most of the public places I've gone recently.

People seemed happy to be back. I mean, I didn't specifically hear anyone say "It's so good to be back at the movies!", but there was enough of a general buzz that this can be inferred.

Still, I had to wonder what kind of model this could be for a theater going forward. Not a profitable one, to be sure. Selling a maximum of twenty $10 tickets per theater per viewing block limits how much money you can legitimately make, especially since there seemed to be as many as seven or eight staff working. I made sure to buy some candy, just to help that little extra bit.

I don't suppose the theaters are in it for the money, at least not right now. They'd have to be doing it out of the goodness of providing this service to the people ... and perhaps building in some customer loyalty for the future, when times are better.

If that future ever gets here. As we have started opening things up lately here in Victoria, we have also created the conditions for a second wave. There are something like 20 new cases of coronavirus per day being announced in this state, and some people are worried that could bring us right back into lockdown -- perhaps even a more severe version of the lockdown than the one we had previously.

This has all happened in the last week, and the suddenness of it has probably prevented the government from scuttling the reopening of movie theaters. Still, I'm glad I went last night, because if momentum toward another lockdown gains steam this week, I could be looking at another 100 days away from movie theaters.

What we all need right now are some surrogates

My self-proclaimed outside-the-box quarantine-themed viewings continued last night, as I saw my second Bruce Willis quarantine movie. And by that I mean not only was it my second Bruce Willis movie during quarantine, but it was my second Bruce Willis quarantine-themed movie during quarantine.

The first, Twelve Monkeys, dealt with an actual virus. The second, Surrogates, deals with how we cope with threats from the outside world, a virus being only one possible example.

So all you peons out there, watching your "obvious" quarantine movies, need to check out the movie where people put artificial simulacra of themselves into the world to avoid getting killed. It's got loads of current relevance.

I was actually a fan of this comparatively under-the-radar 2009 sci fi flick back from the start, but given how far under the radar it flew, I hadn't really considered watching it again in the intervening 11 years. Then the other night it jumped into my mind for reasons I can't remember, and then stuck there to the point that I paid good money to rent it after not finding it on any of my streaming services. (It's just the kind of movie that should have been hiding away somewhere among Netflix's offerings, much as its characters are hiding away, but no.)

If you aren't familiar with the basic premise, it looks at a world in the not-too-distant future where people (known pejoratively as "meat bags") stay at home all the time, and instead of going out themselves, they pilot around androids that do all their real-world interfacing for them. Some look like their hosts, some look 100% different -- which makes sense, as they are, in a way, walking and talking chat room avatars. That 47-year-old man pretending he's a 22-year-old coed is entirely possible, maybe even encouraged, in this world.

The technology allows the actual humans, the people susceptible to violence and accident and disease, to stay at home in the protection of their apartments, where they sit in comfortable dentist chairs and connect up to a rig that allows them to see the world through the eyes of their robot surrogates. They can get into fist fights or jump off buildings or have sex with whoever they want, all while their increasingly fragile bodies stay at home, safe against everything except the ruination caused by lack of exposure to fresh air and lack of the use of one's muscles.

As I watched these "meat bags" walking around their apartments, unshaven, in bathrobes and slippers, squinting painfully against the stray beams of sunlight that reach them, I saw ourselves in the time of quarantine.

For the more enterprising of us, it's not that bad. We venture out for exercise and grocery shopping, using masks as the technologically viable alternative to having our own personal robots. We do get out and we do move around.

But some of us have probably gained an additional ten percent of our previous body weight, have lost any real inclination toward personal hygiene, and are the willing prisoners of devices and other virtual experiences that help us escape from the drudgery our lives have become.

And how good would it be, right now, to actually have a surrogate? The surrogate can go to the store, go to the movies, ride in a packed subway, even do your job -- and if your job is a dangerous one, your surrogate can do it without even wearing a helmet. In short, surrogates can keep the economy going in times of pandemic.

Alas, no one thought it fit to invent surrogates, even though Jonathan Mostow's film came out 11 years ago, even though the film series that helped inspire it -- The Terminator and The Matrix -- predated Surrogates by even longer than that. Why did they spend so much time on other things, like Tik Tok and chicken sandwiches with Krispy Kreme buns?

Of course, having your surrogate live your life for you is no way to live life, the movie is sure to let us know. Nor would we want to, I hope, in the long run, though this movie has interesting ideas to explore about how virtual reality could increasingly be a replacement for real life experience. During a pandemic, though -- when a vaccine is still probably more than a year away -- it could be handy.

Until then, we'll probably all be slightly hairier and more bathrobed versions of ourselves, squinting at the sunlight.

A pandemic is a pandemic is a pandemic

This past weekend I watched only my second proper virus movie of the pandemic, but it was not one I was expecting. Or, I should say, I was expecting it, but I couldn't have guessed how closely it would resemble our current situation.

The movie in question was Jezebel, the 1938 Bette Davis-Henry Fonda vehicle from director William Wyler. I knew from its recent discussion on Filmspotting that the movie dealt with yellow fever, though that was just a coincidence for them when they chose to watch it as part of a Bette Davis marathon during quarantine. For me it was less of a coincidence, as I chose to watch it because I heard them talking about it, particularly because they gave it the highest marks of any of the four films they watched during the marathon.

The first half of the film deals very little with this sort of thing, as it establishes the characters and gives us a chance to understand why Davis' character would receive the titular assignation. She's a bit of a troublemaker -- a protofeminist, I guess you'd say, even in 1852 New Orleans. She's the type of rebel who refuses to wear a white dress to a ball just because she's an unmarried woman, preferring a more scandalous red that will get the gums flapping. Oh the horror! (They get the gums flapping alright, but they also drive away Fonda. Guess that was a bit too much protofeminism.)

The second half of the film, though, is in the midst of the southern U.S. outbreaks of 1853 and 1854, which appear to have been historically accurate. Was it also historically accurate that they dumped fever victims on a nearby leper island to live out their days or, less likely, to get better? Not going to look that one up.

What interested me was how much the reactions of others to possible infection were similar to ours today. This is in a movie made more than 80 years ago about a period of time more than 80 years before that.

First there's the scene where Fonda's character starts to show symptoms of the sickness, fainting in the middle of a crowded hotel bar. (Oops, spoiler alert.) The crowd backs away from him instantly, avoiding him like the ... well, you know. More tellingly, they all raise kerchiefs to their mouths to protect themselves from transmission. Oh how much better we'd get along these days if we all carried kerchiefs.

A bit later on, Fonda has gotten worse and some medical types/hired goons come with a stretcher to take him away to Leper Island. These guys are fitted with actual, proper surgical masks, something I might not have been sure even existed in the pre-Civil War era. Watching them ascend the stairs to fetch Fonda gave me a chill of recognition.

I don't suppose there was anything earth-shattering about this realization, but it reminded me that pandemics have always been and will always continue to be, and that there is still something elementally similar about how humans respond in the face of potentially contracting such a virus.

Damn good movie, too -- it's a bit like Gone With the Wind before Gone With the Wind, and about half the length.

I'd love this virus to be gone with the wind, but we're still wearing our masks -- metaphorically or otherwise.

My first actual virus movie during the pandemic

While cinephiles, or just regular people, were flocking to the likes of Contagion and Outbreak way back in the early days of the pandemic -- remember March? -- I apparently preferred my cinematic considerations of our current situation to be more metaphorical, like The Platform and Vivarium.

Well, on day whatever-it-is, I've finally gotten to an actual virus movie.

Twelve Monkeys started percolating around in my brain for reasons I can't remember a week or two ago. It has been 11 years since I'd seen it, and it's also a movie that's lodged in my top 100 on Flickchart (currently #86), so with all the Flickcharting I've been doing lately, I've seen its poster come up a bunch of times. I'd never actually watched the DVD copy I bought a couple years ago, and I decided it was time to see if it really deserves to hold such a lofty position in my personal rankings.

Plus, you know, the whole virus thing.

Twelve Monkeys is not your typical virus movie. There's nary a moment when you see someone succumbing to the effects of the virus, which makes it quite unusual among virus movies you would actually tag with that label. But the virus is one of the first things you hear about in the movie in the opening text. Even if it's more like a background to the movie and an eventuality the heroes are trying to prevent -- even if they kind of know they can't -- it's still essential to what Twelve Monkeys is.

But because the virus is always something either in the characters' past or in their future, Twelve Monkeys didn't specifically scratch a virus itch for me. I enjoyed watching it, though I was a bit in and out, a consequence of it being Friday night after a long week working from home (ha) and, probably more pertinently, of having done a 46-minute run after work ended.

As much as I still like the movie, though, it does seem clear that it's probably not my 86th favorite movie of all time. Somewhere in the top 100 to 200 range -- maybe closer to 200 -- is probably more accurate. And that's another reason revisiting movies like this is useful, as in my future Flickcharting, it might lose to some movies it was previously beating, which will get it closer to that proper spot.

I think part of the reason it scaled to those heights was that it was that particular catnip for a particular type of cinephile: the perfectly timed head trip movie. Everyone has some. For millennials, maybe it was when Inception came out in 2010. For me, at the ripe old age of 46, it was when Twelve Monkeys came out in 1995, not long after I'd turned 22. It was one of them, anyway.

My 2009 viewing probably chilled a little of my affection for the movie, though obviously not enough to knock it down significantly in Flickchart. (I think it may have been as high as the 40s at one point.) My 2020 viewing will probably further contextualize it for me in terms of my actual all-time favorites.

Another reason I'd been interested in revisiting Twelve Monkeys is that I saw the source material from which it was adapted, Chris Marker's La Jetee, two years ago. I probably really needed to watch them back-to-back, though, as now I have forgotten enough about La Jetee to have it significantly inform last night's Twelve Monkeys viewing, just as I had forgotten enough about Twelve Monkeys for it to have meaningfully spoken to La Jetee two years ago. Oh well, opportunity missed.

One thing I did gain from this most recent viewing, in addition to all the things that had given me pleasure previously, was to note how many actors appear in it that I didn't know at the time, though know much better now. For one, two members of the Army of the 12 Monkeys are Lisa Gay Hamilton and Matt Ross, she of any number of films and he of Silicon Valley. Then you've got a young Christopher Meloni as a detective. These people had careers before I was aware of them? How rude!

It was interesting to watch this with an awareness of the cancel culture that has come to surround Terry Gilliam, who has made any number of unfortunate statements in recent years. I won't dredge those up to see if any of them were racially unfortunate, but I couldn't help feel a bit icky about the portrayal of the black characters in this movie. I don't think these were the only black characters, but suffice it to say that there were at least three whose portrayal is problematic by today's standards. For one there is the asylum orderly, who seems to be the Nurse Ratched of this place. He has a ringleader quality to him and seems a bit sadistic, handling Bruce Willis' James Cole very roughly. Then there's the ex-con Cole beats to death, who had been trying to rape Madeleine Stowe's Katherine Railly. Finally Cole has an intense argument with a black female airport worker, who won't let him past. While that's her job, the film makes clear to show how much attitude she gives him. These may have just been accidents, and in 1995 we certainly weren't looking for those things the way we do today, but they don't play so hot 25 years later.

One last thing to report is that this viewing has inspired me to change how I refer to the movie. I had always written the title as 12 Monkeys, and that is indeed how it appears on most of the posters. (You will see I specifically selected a poster where that is not the case.) In the actual movie, though, the title appears as Twelve Monkeys, which must be said to represent the truest interpretation of the intentions of Terry Gilliam et al. It's the same argument as in the case of David Fincher's Se7en, and I finally gave in on that one as well. So I've gone in and changed how I spell it in my various lists. I've even changed the spelling on the tag you see below, which had one previous usage (back when I wrote about La Jetee two years ago).

Now that we are past the initial coronavirus panic -- and have flattened the curve quite well here in Australia, with still fewer than 100 dead in the whole country -- I may no longer feel as compelled to watch a proper virus movie. And with a possible easing of local restrictions as soon as May 11th, the future depicted in Twelve Monkeys seems a little less closer to becoming reality.

A year of not ranking the wrong movies in the wrong year

Every time I've got a Climax, or an Everybody Knows, or a Vivarium -- in other words, a film I rank
in a different year from everybody else because I've seen it at MIFF the year before it gets released to most of the world -- I kind of wish there were a way to avoid that, so I can be on the same page as all the other critics in assessing the year's best films.

Be careful what you wish for.

Sure, I could only see films at MIFF that I'm sure will come out before the calendar flips, though I don't know how I would know that, given that distribution deals sometimes come together late in the year.

Alternatively, they could just cancel MIFF.

Be careful what you wish for.

As the latest COVID-19 casualty, I've just received an email today that the Melbourne International Film Festival will not be happening this year for the first time in its 68-year history. I've only been a part of that history for the past six years, but it's a sad moment for me, even if it means all the 2020 films I rank this year will have actually been released in 2020.

Maybe the saddest thing about it is not that the festival will not be happening, but that they can already forecast ahead to the end of July and say that this thing will not be resolved by then.

Of course, with an event with as many moving parts as a film festival, you can't take a wait and see approach and give everyone the thumbs up to continue if things look good a few weeks before kickoff time. People have to buy plane tickets. DCPs have to be finished. Heck, films themselves have to be finished. And you have to potentially squander hours and hours of festival staff working time on something that may not actually happen.

So while it makes sense, it's just a sad reminder that we are not about to get over some hump and be almost out of the woods. Not by a longshot.

As it has been doing in most aspects related to this, the Australian government is getting out ahead of the situation. Even though the cases are fewer and the community spread is pretty minimal here, we started extreme distancing measures only a few days behind the U.S. And have already said that the entirety of term 2 of the school year -- which runs from next Tuesday to the end of June -- will be conducted remotely.

And though we have things in control far better here than other parts of the world, we're just heading into winter. In fact, I'm wearing a scarf as I write this, even though the proper start of winter is almost two months off. We could have the whole thing in good shape and then winter could wallop us with a new round of infections.

The MIFF cancellation is another thing that reminds us all how real it is. It's disappointing for the filmmakers. It's disappointing for the festival programmers. It's disappointing for the cinephiles.

But really, it's disappointing for the human race, who will have to be dealing with this whole thing a lot longer than we already have been.

The worst March

Some people love July. Height of summer, no school. Great month.

Some people love December, for similar reasons in Australia, though school runs until about the 20th. Then, you know, Christmas.

Some people love October because of Halloween and because the leaves turn.

Me, I've always been partial to March. It's not because of the arrival of spring, directly, though the warming of the weather in the U.S. was always pleasant. No, it's because it represented a confluence of the things I loved, all within a four-week span.

Since this is a movie blog, I'll start with the movies. From when I was young, March was always the month of the Academy Awards. And it used to be in late March, almost April. It was the crowning moment for the previous movie year, when you got to finally find out what was the best of the best.

Then about 25 years ago, two other things came along to surpass the Oscars, especially once the Oscars moved to February. For a couple sweet years there, though, they were all in the same month.

In 1993, I started playing fantasy baseball, and that love has come to define my love for baseball, especially now that the Red Sox have long since exorcised their curse and won four World Series. Each year in March, I would begin feverishly planning my strategy for drafting that year's team, a glorious day that usually would arrive sometime after the 20th of the month.

Then the very next year, 1994, I started following March Madness. Another obsession was born, though this one was limited to the three-week period in March and early April when the tournament was actually happening, as I never became a season-long college basketball fan. But that tournament ... well it was just about the best and most fun thing going, especially if you had five or ten bucks riding on it.

This year ... none of those things happened.

Oh, I got my Oscars, when my favorite movie of last year was crowned best picture. That was pretty cool.

But by the time the calendar flipped over to March, that was a distant memory, replaced by all coronavirus, all the time.

March Madness, on the other hand, was cancelled. And my fantasy baseball draft has been postponed indefinitely, vaguely planned now for the weekend before the start of the season. But no one knows when that might be. If it will be.

Of course, the loss of small pleasures such as a month of back-to-back awesome things pales in comparison to the deaths of what may end up being millions of people. But you know I know that without me having to say it. Today, I just want to mourn March for a minute.

In the good old days in the mid-1990s, I used to spend the month with a fantasy baseball magazine and a printed out March Madness bracket under my arm, catching exciting finishes of basketball games as I basked in a new spring warmth and talked with friends. And I was no casual participant in these activities. I ran March Madness pools and I commissioned fantasy baseball leagues. I was in neck deep in preparations and statistics and a general sense of joy.

I think specifically to the spring of 1995, my final in college -- and think, sadly, how lucky I was compared to this year's college seniors, who will end their college careers with remote learning and having drinks with friends over Zoom.

But anyway, that year two friends and I spent our two-week spring break in Florida to stay at one's parents' vacation house. It was Sanibel Island on the west coast of Florida, not one of the typical spring break hot spots you see in Spring Breakers. But there was another group of women from our school staying in the same neighborhood, who we got together with on a couple occasions (though not together with, unfortunately).

As much as I love and remember that experience for what it was -- beach, friends, drinking, the possibility of romance -- the things I really remember were waiting excitedly for Thursday through Sunday to roll around, so I could watch a new round of college basketball, as I was doing pretty well in the pool I was running, and researching which pitchers and hitters I wanted to draft later on that month. And then going over to watch the Oscars at the place where those girls were staying. It was David Letterman's lone year hosting. You know, the whole "Uma-Oprah" shtick. Forrest Gump won best picture.

That was exactly 25 years ago. It was my quintessential March. I've had many good ones since, but that was the best.

And this is the worst.

There's no baseball. There's no basketball. We've already celebrated the old movies, and there are no new ones.

And people are dying.

A lot of people.

I've got my fingers crossed for April, but, you know, not for any good reason. April will likely be worse.

But maybe, just maybe, we can flatten the curve, and May will be this year's March.

For a critic, the show must go on

I have taken, and continue to take, all the coronavirus changes in stride.

But one I didn't realize until it was quite late in the game was that I wouldn't be able to review new movies anymore.

Not so fast.

There are still new movies coming out, they just aren't coming to your local cineplex. Nothing is coming to your local cineplex, in fact, other than maybe a couple stray tumbleweeds.

But Netflix? That's a different story.

I've only reviewed a select few Netflix movies for ReelGood. It's not that I don't consider Netflix movies legitimate. I didn't once, but I gave that up some time ago.

Rather, it's that I don't usually notice exactly when something is dropping on Netflix, and I maintain the editor's old-school notion of having a "news peg" for a piece of writing. Although standards on this front have relaxed in recent years, I still consider movie reviews to consist of a first look at a hot new item -- or at least a first look in the country where I'm currently located. (Movies sometimes release here a full six months after they release in the U.S.)

But that's going to change. It's going to have to.

Not the reviewing a hot new item part, but the knowing when movies first release on Netflix part.

And so it was that last week I googled that article that'll tell you exactly what's releasing on the streaming service during a particular seven-day period. That's how I found The Platform, the Spanish language sci-fi horror satire whose poster you see above. You can read my review here.

And what a great find, as it turned out. I waited until its Friday night release to watch it, and gobbled that thing up right then and there. It's a cousin of the movies Cube and Circle, so if you liked those movies, here's another geometrically themed movie title for your consideration.

Anything else that came out last week? It's already ancient history. (I didn't really like the other choices, anyway.)

No one says I have to sacrifice my principles as a journalist just because it's coronavirus. Sure, I could go back and review Spenser Confidential or A Fall From Grace or Horse Girl, but those titles are already stale.

And that's okay, because if nothing else, Netflix will keep giving me the new and the fresh.

Films themselves are a bit like a virus, fighting to stay alive despite attempts to extinguish them. They want to be seen. And seen they will be. And reviewed they will be. By me.

No, I won't be able to see Mulan, or Wonder Woman 1984, or probably even Tenet, which is not scheduled to come out until July.

But the next Platform?

I'll be ready, my pen poised over the paper.

Metaphorically speaking, anyway.

The only thing anyone's talking about

I was considering writing a post today about Claire Foy, about how we finished watching her final season of The Crown this week and then the next night I watched her in a very different role in The Girl in the Spider's Web. I may still write that post.

But until I've written this post, the post I'm currently writing, there's no point to go back to engaging anything quite so frivolous.

Coronavirus is the only thing on anyone's mind, everywhere around the world, so I've got to talk about it here, whether the connections to the movies are anything more than flimsy or not.

We're a bit behind here in Australia, which is a good thing in this case -- not that many cases yet (though more announced by the day) and public gatherings larger than 500 people not yet banned (that won't happen until Monday). Because the ban doesn't take effect until Monday, I am apparently going to my New Order concert tonight, which will be weird.

But we're all about to go into lockdown here too. My work has been trying to prepare us to work from home for a couple weeks now. The fact that it hasn't totally worked is not a sign of our ineptitude, don't worry. It's a combination of the massive demand (I work in IT) and the fact that we've got to get this softphone technology working on our laptops, and for some reason, it isn't.

Of course the movies that this feels similar to are many, but I've chosen probably the lamest and most obvious as my art for this post. "Most obvious" for obvious reasons; "lamest" only as a synonym for "most obvious," as I remember being quite shaken by Outbreak when I saw it.

I do sort of look forward to any period of home confinement, as long as it doesn't last too long. We're reasonably well stocked up on food (and toilet paper, thanks to our monthly subscription service to environmentally friendly TP that comes in large boxes in the mail), and it's heaven for a movie guy to be forced to stay home with his Netflix. Plus, as they say here in Australia, "change is as good as a holiday." It'll be different, I'll give it that.

Of course, the sooner it's over, the better, as the movie landscape is already being thrown into disarray this year (the latest Fast & Furious movie being the latest casualty I've noticed), and my precious baseball has just been thrown into an indefinite status.

Plus, you know, the health of all the senior citizens I know, which include my parents and my parent-in-laws.

Then there's the ongoing wonder if I myself have coronavirus. My wife assures me that there's no reasonable way I would have been exposed, nor am I showing the most alarming and telltale symptoms (sore throat and fever). Though I have had 1-2 of the other symptoms for close to two weeks now, which is at least annoying, because it's put me into a constant debate with myself about what my responsibilities are regarding getting tested. For a person with neurotic tendencies, that can be a kind of death spiral.

And on that subject of my possible exposure ... there's actually a path to it, and I can relate it to movies.

In googling new COVID-19 cases reported in Victoria, I came across a story about the people who had been diagnosed. It didn't name their names, but it did chart their movements since they had returned to the country (as all but one of them had recently returned from international travel). This section was quite interesting, as it talked about the actual cafes and supermarkets they visited, and approximately what time they visited. And in one case, one of the guys (I don't actually know if it's a guy or a woman) had gone to see a movie at Cinema Nova last Thursday night. (A movie called The Amber Light, the article even says -- though that must have been a special event screening as that movie is not currently playing at Nova.)

Nova is, of course, the cinema where I see approximately half of the new movies I see in the theater, including most indie releases that don't make it to the more mainstream cinemas. I wasn't there last Thursday night, but I was there this past Tuesday to see Downhill.

I'm not such an idiot that I think some coronavirus molecules were living on a movie theater seat for five days waiting to pounce on me. But it does create the greatest "close to home" threat related to the virus that I personally have experienced, if only symbolically.

So I'm wishing my best to Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson, vaguely feeling excited about upcoming movie marathons on Netflix, and more than anything, hoping that a virus with a 3% mortality rate does not mean that 3% of the people I know will die from it.

Stay safe out there everyone.

James Bond has coronavirus

Apparently, James Bond doesn't think April is a very good time to die.

November would be much better.

As you've surely heard by now, the release of Daniel Craig's "last" James Bond movie (didn't we hear that two movies ago?) has been postponed due to COVID-19. No Time to Die was supposed to come out in April, but now Cary Fukunaga's film will debut in November instead.

Maybe that would have been a better time anyway -- more consistent with the last few Bond releases -- but the reasons for it make me uncomfortable. It threatens to set a bad precedent and to screw up our whole movie year.

What if every studio thinks it's not going to make enough money on its movie by releasing it during a coronavirus panic? It'll be a pretty shit summer movie season, then. (Even more shit than it already appears to be, I should say.)

I get that financial considerations must be, er, considered when you are talking about a movie that has cost the studio at least $200 million in terms of both budget and advertising. Whether those are the actual figures for No Time to Die or not, they represent a good estimate for movies of that calibre, probably even on the conservative side.

But I kind of feel like earnings are relative, right? A movie studio has a lot of money, so in this day and age, a flop will rarely bankrupt it. The most important function of a flop, in practical terms, seems to be to determine whether this type of a movie is a hit with audiences, worth making again in the future. The actual box office total should be graded on a curve, relative to other movies released at the same time, not held out as some kind of absolute.

Which would work if all the studios just went ahead with their current release schedule.

But that's not going to happen, because UA/Universal/MGM have already balked. They've already messed up the playing field.

Let's talk about No Time to Die in comparison to April's other big action movie, which so far has not been postponed: Black Widow. If both movies came out in April and made $50 million less domestically than we might have expected, we'd still have a good idea of their success related to each other. We'd still be able to write think pieces, for example, on whether we're stuck in our old-world obsessions with male action heroes, or whether we can get behind female action heroes just as easily.

Now, though, the whole equation has been thrown off. If Black Widow flops, we won't know if it's because of coronavirus, or because audiences don't like female action heroes, or just because Cate Shortland is a bad filmmaker (my vote is for the last one).

No Time to Die, though, could be exchanging the devil it knows for the devil it doesn't know. What if we are even more afraid of each others' germs in November than we are now?

I hope studios don't start cancelling the movie season. And it won't just be the tentpole movies that get moved, in theory. Every movie is judged by its own expected success, and a movie that needs to earn $10 million at the U.S. box office to be considered a winner may be just as concerned about recouping its production costs as the latest James Bond -- just as concerned about proving to investors they have invested their money correctly.

I don't know how it's all going to shake out, but I don't like it.

Meanwhile, people in Melbourne are buying up all the available toilet paper. Seriously.