Flickchart Friends Favorites Fiesta: A Woman Under the Influence

When I wrote this post back in September of 2022, I imagined I might regularly share with you the writing I do for Flickchart Friends Favorites Fiesta, a monthly viewing challenge I do on Facebook where we get assigned the highest movie on another person's Flickchart that we haven't seen. You're suppose to report back once you've watched it, and almost everyone does -- or, I should say, they all do, but they don't all get to the movies they were assigned in anything close to a timely manner. Believer in commitments that I am, I always watch my assigned movie in the month in which it was assigned.

In any case, after sharing that review I wrote of Fandango, I haven't shared one since.

But I was proud enough of what I wrote earlier today about John Cassavetes' A Woman Under the Influence, which I watched yesterday, that I decided to break the drought and share it. Without any further ado, here is that piece, with names redacted to protect the innocent:

                                                         ***********

The thing that’s frustrating on some level about watching A Woman Under the Influence (1974), which I got from [REDACTED]’s chart, is the thing that made John Cassavetes such a unique and vital voice in independent cinema. Those of us weaned on traditional movie narratives know that you are almost always going to get the “why” that explains a character’s behavior. In this case that would be the lead character, Mabel Longhetti, played by force of nature Gena Rowlands. A traditional treatment of the subject matter about a housewife cracking up would give a clear antecedent in the narrative about why she no longer has possession of her faculties.

Cassavetes is not interested in that. He gives us this mental breakdown already in full swing, and allows us to live with it for two and a third hours. We can glean, along the way, that perhaps Mabel’s shitty husband, played by Peter Falk, has left her unable to properly cope with her three young children, who are typical examples of the sorts of underdeveloped brains that lead them to run around in circles and remove their clothes. But then again, it’s not like this doesn’t describe half the children out there.

The truth is, we don’t really know why Mabel needs a spell in a mental institution, though there can be no doubting that she does need one. And that is the clean-film-narrative-defying nature of mental illness. There is not always a “reason” that a person is mentally ill, other than that their brain does not work properly, taking their low self-esteem, their past failures, their irrational fears of impending disaster, and elevating them to dangerous levels.

What I’ve written so far may indicate that this movie was a struggle for me at times, and it was. However, I like it infinitely more than what I consider to be the lesser versions of Cassavetes’ craft. One film of his that particularly gives me the shits, to use the Australian phrase, is Faces, which I dismissively refer to as people just yelling at each other for two hours. Though to be clear on the way Cassavetes can work for me, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie is my #249.

A Woman Under the Influence does not rise to that level, but it gets a lot closer to it than you might think based on what I’ve written so far. In truth, all you really need in this movie is Gena Rowlands, who commits to celluloid what is often considered one of the greatest acting performances of all time. The only thing – and I mean the only thing – that makes me hesitate to give the performance that level of praise is what I said earlier, that there is a nagging part of me that wonders WHY she is like this. But the actual technical brilliance of the performance has nothing to do with the screenplay decision not to explicate Mabel’s illness.

How to describe Rowlands’ performance in this movie? I’d say it’s like the famous subway station scene by Isabelle Adjani in Possession stretched out over a whole movie, except that this undersells the moments of quiet in Rowlands’ performance, where you just see her confusion, her alienation, wash over her face in a blank look propped up by an artificial smile that she thinks is a real smile. This almost seems like a method performance of mental illness, and I would not be surprised to learn that Rowlands spent time in an institution to research her role.

As for the script itself, I do find that there is a little something, I don’t know, arbitrary? about the scenes Cassavetes shows us and the scenes he does not show us. For example, I like the strange breakfast scene where Mabel feeds her husband and his 11 (!) coworkers a spaghetti meal after working an all-nighter fixing a burst water main. But I guess I just don’t know why this scene is the scene that’s best designed to dramatize her mental health issues. It’s almost like an inciting incident scene in the narrative, though if anything I think she just has an improperly modulated sense of gregariousness. The fact that this scene is supposed to be the dividing line between what was supposed to be a romantic, child-free evening with her husband, which was cancelled by the water main break, and multiple characters being severely concerned about her mental health, just feels like a scene was missing. But then again, I think this is the nature of Cassavetes’ filmmaking, and if you don’t go for it then maybe you are trying to make Cassavetes something he was not.

Obviously I’m very glad to have seen this film and I’m genuinely curious to see where it will land. And this will be my first film ranked for this series on v. 2, though I think I can still list the duels the way I normally would.

A Woman Under the Influence > The White Crow
A Woman Under the Influence < Magic in the Moonlight
A Woman Under the Influence > The Old Oak
A Woman Under the Influence > Professor Marston and the Wonder Women
A Woman Under the Influence > Easy A
A Woman Under the Influence < Bottoms
A Woman Under the Influence > Hatching
A Woman Under the Influence > The Hangover
A Woman Under the Influence > My Girl
A Woman Under the Influence > The Measure of a Man
A Woman Under the Influence > Willow
A Woman Under the Influence > 12 Years a Slave

1793/6720 (73%)

Thanks [REDACTED]!

                                                        ***********

Okay, back to me. Or, back to the post, I should say, since it's all me. 

Oh, that mention of Flickhart v.2? Stayed tuned, I'm going to write a long piece about that in the near future. 

Stilled voice

Earlier this week I lost a true mentor from my teenage years. He was a coach but he was not my coach. He was the group leader for the high school aged kids at a place I went during the summers, and under his leadership we laughed, we cried, we played games, we participated in trust activities. It was the most growth a 14- through 17-year-old could ever expect to glean from a single week's vacation, repeatedly annually. 

The man was an incredible physical specimen -- he once worked out with Arnold Schwarzenegger -- which just makes his passing at age 74 all the more incomprehensible. Sure, most people aren't a spring chicken at 74, but this guy was. He was still running road races. He was kayaking when he had the shocking heart episode that left him effectively brain dead. He was removed from life support five days later and still, somehow, lived another five days in his bed at home, with his loved ones around him.

I'm not here to give him another complete eulogy that highlights everything he did and everything he was, and how he could see right into your soul and express to you, both wordlessly and with words, that you were loved. I've written a couple of those on social media and I also wrote a handwritten six-page letter to his widow, who was just as important to me.

But I did want to relate how I happened to have watched Terence Davies' Distant Voices, Still Lives the same night I found out. 

Or rather, copy and paste what I wrote about the film in Flickchart Friends' Favorites Fiesta, since it depicts my melancholic state when I watched it in a way I can't convey any better by changing a few words here and there. 

Here's what I wrote:

I went on quite the journey trying to find a film of [Redacted]'s I could watch in February. The hand I was dealt was his #1, Terence Davies' The Long Day Closes, but as anyone who has been following posts on this page learned, I couldn't find it in any form without purchasing it for about $60, which I was not willing to do. Then I shifted to Rosetta, his #12, having first made certain I could see it. But the YouTube copy I'd selected was -- you guessed it -- only in French with no subtitles. French is the language I know best other than English, but after one minute I just knew it would not be possible.

The next two I tried to find were also unavailable, though my searches for them started to feel increasingly cursory. Those were Come and See (#28) and Yi Yi (#32), both of which have been on my list to see -- I've been looking for Yi Yi for 20 years it feels like.

Finally, appropriately, I landed sort of back where I started, with a film by Terence Davies. Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) is Mike's #36, and there it was, sitting easily available on Kanopy.

It was a good place to end up for a number of reasons.

It caught me in a very contemplative mood. Earlier that day I had learned that an old mentor of mine from when I was a teenager had unexpectedly died of a heart attack, which is crazy because he was super fit, even though was 74 at the time. The melancholy of learning this blended directly into Distant Voices, Still Lives, which is like a treatise to memory, particularly the most melancholic sorts of it.

I don't know whether to call this a movie or an art installation, and please believe me when I say that's a compliment. These dreamy memories are hung on sort of a loose narrative framework, but the film does not even invite you to try to learn much of substance about its group of disparate characters seen in a working class British neighborhood in the 1940s and 1950s. Their substance is their very anonymity.

The first half of the movie ("Distant Voices") deals largely with the death of the paterfamilias, who was played by the one actor I recognized, Pete Postlethwaite. He's a miserable bastard alright, but his passing is still the occasion for a strange sort of sorrow among the family he so regularly shunned and abused. We see them contemplating him and engaging in activities related to his memorial, interspersed with these horrible things he did, but also these moments where it was clear he was trying the best he knew how, which are incredibly touching. The film seems to suggest that even when people are horrible, their passing is the occasion to consider mortality itself and extend them a sort of forgiveness and attempt at understanding.

I don't recall ever seeing such purposeful technique by Davies, though I should say I've only seen two or three of his other films. The film is so committed to immersing you in the collective memory of this neighborhood that it is quite literally a sepia-toned photograph come to life. There's one device where you're sure it's an actual photo until the people start moving, another photo of the departed father hanging on the wall behind them, and the camera sort of holds them in place and moves to each of them as it shows us some memory associated with that particular person. It was in these moments that I was really reminded of an art installation, and the sense of being in a fugue state of memory is palpable.

Another way this movie delves into a sorrowful kind of melancholy is that it has far less dialogue than it has groups of people singing pub songs, songs that are clearly central to the very fabric of both their larger culture and the immediate culture of this neighborhood. Everyone knows each song by heart, everyone understands the sorts of sentiments and pains bound up in each lyric. There are times when this film just travels from face to face as it captures each of these increasingly familiar faces, singing along with what might be a funeral dirge for an entire generation. An intentionally artificial construct has never felt so truthful and so insightful.

The second half ("Still Lives") moves ahead a few years and was actually shot a few years later. There is some progress as the family has moved past the long shadow of their deceased father, but they are clearly older, and the film makes it clear that you never steer clear of tragedy for long. The songs continue and so does the loss of life, but we also see weddings and births and the lifeblood of this community continuing to pump. It's thrilling in a way that seems to be entirely anathema to the subject matter.

Obviously I was pretty blown away by this, and I think being in the right mood to receive it helped immeasurably. I don't know if it will crack my top 500 but it might. Let's find out:

Distant Voices, Still Lives > Strike a Pose

Distant Voices, Still Lives > The People vs. Larry Flynt

Distant Voices, Still Lives > The Age of Innocence

Distant Voices, Still Lives < Ponyo

Distant Voices, Still Lives > Timecrimes

Distant Voices, Still Lives > Dirty Rotten Scoundrels

Distant Voices, Still Lives < Picnic at Hanging Rock

Distant Voices, Still Lives < Berberian Sound Studio

Distant Voices, Still Lives > Waking Ned Devine

Distant Voices, Still Lives < Apocalypto

Distant Voices, Still Lives < The Past

Distant Voices, Still Lives > Shane

469/6206 (92%)

Wow, pretty strong. In fact it beat three films ranked higher than 500.

Thanks [Redacted]!

Obviously my mentor was a better father than Pete Postlethwaite's, by so many orders of magnitude that you wouldn't talk about them in the same breath, in the same book, even in the same written language. But the fact that it dealt with the loss of a father -- my mentor's daughters were on either side of me in age -- just made the universe's choice of this film for me on this particular night seem even more profound. 

The songs in Davies' film only increase the sentimentality and solemnity of the experience. My mentor used to leave us entranced during campfire sing-a-longs of the song "All My Trials," popularized by Joan Baez. He was a maestro on the acoustic guitar just like he was a maestro in life, with a singing voice that was both gentle and clear.

And now that voice is still.

I saw him only once in the past 30 years but I will miss him terribly.

Rest in peace.

I can now watch iTunes rentals on my projector - sort of*

You may recall that I met a weird outcome when I tried to watch an iTunes rental on my projector last year -- I wrote about it in this post.

Namely, there was something about the technology that kept movies played through iTunes from being visible when a projector was connected to that computer. Not all projectors, I think, just older ones -- or maybe cheaper ones. My projector was new at the end of 2020, but some projectors run in excess of $10,000 and mine was a mere fraction of that. It's much better than any projector I've owned previously, but apparently it does have its limitations.

Something has changed since September 2021, though, and now I can play them -- or maybe I misdiagnosed the problem in the first place. 

Now I can play them -- with an asterisk.

I made the discovery on Saturday night, when I had planned to use the projector in our garage to watch Kwaidan, the 1964 Japanese film by Masaki Kobayashi that presents four ghost stories over a three-hour running time. That's my draw in this month's Flickchart Friends Favorites Fiesta. The projector was still set up from when my 12-year-old and I watched a Celtics game earlier that afternoon, and my wife was going out for dinner, so I knew I'd get an early enough start to fit in all three hours. (I ended up finishing at 2:45 a.m. after multiple long "naps," which ended up leading to significant narrative confusion -- I thought there were only three stories, so I was having a really difficult time figuring out how the second half of the third story related to its first half.)

I knew as a backup I could watch this on our normal TV through AppleTV. In fact, I expected that's what would happen, given my previous difficulties with iTunes rentals on this projector. Try as I might, I could not find Kwaidan streaming through another source, not even for rental on Amazon, which makes a good option in cases like this because it's under no such technical limitations with regard to my projector.

Since I'd be starting the 48-hour viewing window regardless, on one device or the other, it made for a unique opportunity to test the iTunes problem on my projector one more time. Lo and behold, this time the movie played -- though it was clear straight away there were still weird software issues going on. 

The biggest issue was that I could not go full screen. I'd play the movie and then try various maximize options, but it never got bigger than most of the screen, always leaving a blank space on the bottom, not to mention my taskbar. I just can't watch a movie with the taskbar visible at the bottom. Too distracting.

I also tried to move the window to fill the screen better, pulling out its corners to actually alter its dimensions, but here was where the weirdest thing happened. Any attempt to move or adjust the window led to duplicating it, so there was one window playing the movie behind the other window -- and not even at the same spot in the movie. There was like a five-second difference between the two. 

There was one point where I thought I had the window in only one iteration, and it filled most of the screen in a tolerable way. But then iTunes sensed something unstable about that situation and automatically contracted it back to the original dimensions that were its preferred means of presentation. 

The solution I finally landed on was to block out part of the projector.

That's right, I got a viewing scenario that iTunes was happy with that filled the entire top of the screen, leaving a big white patch at the bottom that was the default white background of the iTunes software. Then of course the taskbar was visible at the bottom because I could never do anything about that. So I found a carboard box in my garage that was just tall enough so that if I fussed with it, I got it to sit in front of the lens in such a way as to block out all the white and the taskbar at the bottom. 

This created a small part on the lower left side of the screen that was a bit blotchy and fuzzy, but it was a very minor inconvenience and I pressed on forward through the rest of the viewing this way.

The consequence of this arrangement, though, was that the cardboard box was reflecting the projector's light onto the back wall and off to the side where I was sitting. I couldn't do anything about the back wall, but it basically just meant that the room was not as fully dark as it usually was. I got used to it pretty quickly.

I wasn't going to get used to the part reflecting out of the side and directly into my eyes. So what I did was place a ping pong paddle so it was leaning against the edge of the box and the side of my projector, blocking out the most piercing of the light.

Not ideal, but it worked in a pinch.

Since I've got you, I thought I would share my review of Kwaidan in Flickchart Friends Favorites Fiesta, as I have been doing these past few months, especially since it also contains a short narrative of the confusion that resulted from not knowing the correct number of stories in the movie:

I had a funny experience watching [Redacted]'s #2, Kwaidan (1964), that stems entirely from getting it into my head that it was comprised of three horror stories over three hours rather than four. Yes, I'd actually asked Wade earlier in the month if I could watch the four stories over multiple nights, but sometime between then and now, my mind converted that to three. And then I found an occasion to watch the whole movie in one night, as is my preference.

I watched the first two stories, "The Black Hair" and "The Woman in the Snow," with great interest and affection. I loved the simplicity of the storytelling combined with a great visual design that blended real scenery with painted backdrops in a compelling way. The eye painted in the sky in "The Woman in the Snow" is chilling, and the titular black hair gave me a good indication of where later J-horror, such as The Grudge, was born. I was really digging this and it was really reminding me of Akira Kurosawa's Dreams, which surely also took inspiration from Masaki Kobayashi's film.

But when "The Woman in the Snow" ended and the intermission came up, I got worried. How would "Hoichi the Earless," what I understood to be the final story, possibly run for the remaining more than 90 minutes? If you are going to combine a couple different stories like this, I vastly prefer they all be about the same length. Helps considerably with the pacing.

Of course at this point it was also getting late at night, meaning my head was not as clear and I was starting to have the occasional small head rolls. Suffice it to say that I missed the moment when "Hoichi the Earless" transitioned into "In a Cup of Tea," probably in part because I was a bit out of it but in part because I had no expectation that there was a fourth story coming. So then I really had a hard time figuring out how the second half of "Hoichi the Earless" related to the first half, especially since "In a Cup of Tea" also contains a story within a story, making things all the more confusing. I blamed it on bad storytelling and began mentally preparing a review talking about how much I liked the first two stories but that the third was interminable.

Of course, this morning when I looked on Wikipedia to try to get a sense of why the plot had taken such a weird turn in "Hoichi the Earless," I realized there were actually four stories. So I rewatched "In a Cup of Tea" and now I feel a lot better about the movie on the whole.

Without getting into the plots of the individual stories, I found each a mysterious delight in its own way. While I don't think any of the four stories really hit me solidly with its conclusion, I enjoyed the experience of watching immensely. Maybe it's a bit too Twilight Zone or Alfred Hitchcock Presents or Amazing Stories to expect each story to hit you with a big ironic twist at the end, and at least one of these stories does try to do that. I guess none of them stuck the landing in exactly the way I wanted them to, but it's a pretty minor complaint, and this was a really interesting watch -- and clearly a big influencer on future Japanese cinema. However, for me it pales in comparison to Kobayashi's Harakiri, which is my #139 (and was also found in this group -- thanks [Redacted]).

Here's how it entered my chart:

Kwaidan > Strike a Pose

Kwaidan > A Good Old Fashioned Orgy

Kwaidan < Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

Kwaidan > Fantasia

Kwaidan > The Emperor's Club

Kwaidan < The Sea Beast

Kwaidan > Newlyweds

Kwaidan < Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events

Kwaidan < Topsy-Turvy

Kwaidan < Tomorrow Never Dies

Kwaidan < Gaslight

Kwaidan > The Terminator

891/6182 (86%)

Thanks [Redacted]! Despite some minor complaints and confusion, obviously I got a lot out of this.

Reviewing a purchase or reviewing a movie?

For a number of reasons, including slight differences in their offerings, I have started to rent more movies through Amazon than through my old standby, iTunes. One big issue with iTunes is that movies I rent there won't play through my projector, assuming I am using the iTunes software itself to view them, for some technical reason that I still don't understand. I watch a relatively small percentage of the movies I see through my projector, but it's definitely become a factor in my vendor preferences. I'm sure there's a way to watch them through the Apple TV website that circumvents this, but let's just say it's felt like a bridge too far.

In the case of The Kid Detective, the movie I watched in October for Flickchart Friends Favorites Fiesta, it was a difference in what was available that was the deciding factor. These are pretty rare. While iTunes only has this movie available for $12.99 purchase, it was rentable via Amazon. Typically the availability is determined at a higher level and not customized on a vendor level, or so I have always assumed, but this was the exception.

I liked the movie. I'll include my FFFF review below. But what I'm writing about today is the follow-up emails Amazon has been sending me, asking me to rate my purchase. 

I find this strange, because I think Amazon wants me to tell them how much I liked the movie. But in most other cases, Amazon wants me to tell them whether I got the thing I bought in a timely manner, whether it came in the same condition they said it would come in, all that stuff. If I'd hated The Kid Detective and rated it one star, wouldn't that look the same as if I told them that a pair of headphones came damaged, or a book arrived two months late?

Books are probably the valid point of comparison here. I feel like when you receive a book from Amazon, you are clearly meant to tell them whether it was physically undamaged when it arrived. You aren't meant to read the whole book and then subject it to a rating of its quality from one to five stars. Especially since in this case, they ask you to rate the purchase only a few days later, and you can't have been expected to finish the book and assess its quality by that point. You might not even have started it.

With a digitally rented movie, there is no chance for it to come damaged, at least not physically. If for some reason you couldn't play the movie, you would contact customer support and they would either issue you a refund or get you to a link that actually worked. There would be no shipping involved in returning the faulty item. In fact, I don't think you'd necessarily even feel inclined to negatively rate the experience, unless customer service just totally dropped the ball. You'd always know it would be resolved easily enough.

So even though Amazon has asked me twice now to rate The Kid Detective, I have not complied. When it comes to other purchases I make online, I do usually do stuff like this and do not want to make them beg. I know that reviews are a big part of increasing consumer confidence in the thing in question.

But I'm not that interested in contributing to Amazon's dialogue surrounding The Kid Detective and whether someone else should rent it based on its merits as a movie. I don't rate movies I watch on Netflix. That seems like the most similar thing to what Amazon is asking me here.

Okay here's that write-up on FFFF:

I watched [Redacted]'s #50, The Kid Detective (2020), about a week ago, and unfortunately, failed to strike while the iron was hot to write this review. So this may not end up being my usual length, but I will give it the old college try.

I quite enjoyed the movie. The basic setup is that the main character, Abe Applebaum (Adam Brody), is a bit of a prodigy who successfully solved a missing persons case (if memory serves) when he was a kid, and was celebrated by the whole town. Instead of this just being a one-off thing, he continues as an underage detective, and has success solving crimes. Now at 32, though, the life has lost some of its luster and he's not so much celebrated as pitied by the townspeople. His parents still parent him like he's 13.

The story is about his new case, and what I really liked about this movie is that it follows the same structure as your typical noir but in this small-town setting and with largely younger characters, including a teenage femme fatale played by Sophie Nelisse. (She serves that function in the story but is a total innocent, unlike most fatales.) I expected it to be cutesy and sort of a comedy, but it's a lot more contemplative and adult-oriented than you might expect from a film with that title. There is humor in it but it's all deadpan. In fact, I don't think I laughed once, though I was consistently amused by everything that was happening on screen -- without that amusement crossing over into taking the project less seriously. It gets that balance just right.

In fact, it's plenty adult in its approach, with (again if memory serves) profanity in addition to drug use and violence. Abe might not get knocked around to the same extent as other noir heroes but he definitely exposes himself to danger and has the sort of narrative arc through the movie you would expect from a detective beaten down by time.

In a way this film is doing something similar to Rian Johnson's Brick, but I like this film better. I'm not a big fan of Brick because I think the dialogue is annoyingly stylized and Johnson is a bit too cutesy with all his camera tricks and other noise. I enjoyed the straightforward approach of director Evan Morgan and especially Brody's performance as Abe, which gets a really satisfying final moment on screen.

I'm not sure if this was one of the intended themes but the film functions as an interesting analogy for child actors growing into adults, which is sort of a reality for Brody (he got started acting when he was 19, it would appear). Child actors are rarely able to convert the charm of their younger years into becoming appealing adult actors, with a few notable exceptions, and so we see the same is true for Abe as a young detective.

Let's see how it enters my chart:

The Kid Detective > Monty Python: Live at the Hollywood Bowl

The Kid Detective < In the Heat of the Night

The Kid Detective < Dave Made a Maze

The Kid Detective > The Brothers Grimsby

The Kid Detective > Cave of Forgotten Dreams

The Kid Detective < Tommy Boy

The Kid Detective > All the King's Men (1949)

The Kid Detective < Queen of Katwe

The Kid Detective < Incident at Oglala

The Kid Detective < City Island

The Kid Detective > Swing Vote

The Kid Detective > The X-Files: Fight the Future

The Kid Detective > Bronson

2449/6160 (60%)

Thanks [Redacted]!

Flickchart Friends Favorites Fiesta: Fandango

That's a lot of F's for a Friday.

I'm doing some film writing that I'm proud of each month that is getting lost to the ether of the internet, and I decided it was time to repost some of it here. As I've mentioned in passing from time to time, I'm involved in a Facebook group called Flickchart Friends Favorites Fiesta, in which each month you are matched with another person in the group and assigned to watch the highest ranked film on their Flickchart that you haven't seen. 

You are supposed to then report back to the group your thoughts, though not everyone does. In fact, some people stick their hand up every month to say they are participating, even though they have no realistic plan for watching the movie they get, or they have a plan but no follow through. There are some people who are like six months backed up. I will never understand this sort of flake.

Me, I have never missed a month where I said I was going to participate -- which I think is every month since I started doing this about five years ago. In fact, I can only think of one month where I had to wait until a few days into the next month to watch the movie, and there was a specific reason for this. Barry Levinson's Toys was becoming available for streaming only a few days into the new month, so instead of paying to rent it and watch it in time, I made the quite defensible decision to hold off a few extra days. (And boy am I glad I didn't pay for that movie because I hated it. Someone in the group has it in her top 20. There's no accounting for taste I guess. Then again, many have said this of me with regards to having The Cable Guy and Jesus Christ Superstar in my top 20. These movies have not done well for me when others have drawn them.)

There are no guidelines on how you're supposed to report back, and I think it's really a function of how good of a writer you are. Some people will just contribute a sentence or two. They're not writers and that's totally fine. Others will give detailed analyses even if they aren't great writers or if it might be too granular. More power to them too. As long as you are watching, telling everyone you watched and then telling them where the movie landed on your Flickchart -- the customary last step.

I take it pretty seriously, in that I like to write a mini review of maybe six paragraphs. I almost always write them in about ten minutes just to get it out ASAP, but that doesn't mean I'm not proud of them. 

I was pretty proud of this month's short review of Fandango, which I didn't know much about before watching it -- I'd only heard the title, and didn't realize it was the first collaboration between Kevin Costner and Kevin Reynolds. I ended up being blown away by it, eventually. 

I may not post what I write every month, but I thought I would post my September movie at least. I usually like to keep some record of things I've written, but in the case of the posts for FFFF, I've tended not to. Sure I can search the group history to find my past writings, but will I? Better to post it here so I know where to find it.

So here's what I wrote about Fandango, removing the name of the person whose chart it came from to protect his privacy -- if that sort of thing matters to him.

I didn't know where [REDACTED]'s #46, Fandango (1985), was going, or whether it was getting there, or what I thought of any of it, until it got to the parachute school scene. A group of recently graduated friends, now eligible for the draft in May of 1971 (and some of them already drafted), led by Kevin Costner and Judd Nelson, are driving through the Texas desert when they come across a dilapidated parachute school. I'm not talking rough around the edges -- I'm talking airfields strewn with the discarded parts of old planes, which appear to have crashed on landing, as well as others literally smashed into the side of the hangar, most of whose windows have also blown out.

The guy running the school, a stoner named Truman Sparks, stumbles out of one of these crashed planes, the milk from his cereal and actual chunks of cereal dribbling down his chin. He can't believe someone actually wants to avail him of his services, but sure, he'll give a quick tutorial on how to parachute that is accomplished through an insane series of scribbles on a chalkboard and one giant run-on sentence. Nelson's character is that unlucky guinea pig, having agreed to the dare on the condition that his friends don't dodge the draft. He's sick to his stomach -- he's also afraid of heights -- but he really wants his friends not to flee to Mexico and do their civic duty. As the plane lifts off the ground, the airfield is again sprayed by the array of nuts and bolts that are supposed to prevent the plane from blowing apart mid-flight.

It was at this point that I realized that Fandango was not some Animal House wannabe where the characters do cheeky and improbable things just to annoy me. It's actually a deeply poignant contemplation of what it means to leave childhood behind, to enter into an uncertain world full of war and big decisions, to leave your friends behind abruptly, with the possibility that you will never see them again -- metaphorically, to always be embarking in an airplane that's missing some of its nuts and bolts, having no idea if the man flying the plane has any knowledge of how to land it, or if your parachute will actually carry you safely to the ground.

Costner plays the main character, Gardner Barnes, who seems always to be riling somebody up or getting them to do something they don't want to do. I sometimes find this sort of character, necessary though they may be as a narrative catalyst, unrelatable at best, unbelievable at worst. But there's something solemn and wistful underneath Gardner's bluster, as despite his apparent lack of belief in rules or concern about consequences, he's a romantic who pines for a lost love. These moments sneak up in the middle of other adventures, like lighting off fireworks in a cemetery, and suddenly he's transported to a romantic cutaway with this woman (Suzie Amis), whose complete role in the narrative is smartly hidden until later in the story.

I can see why Kevin Reynolds would go on to direct Waterworld, as there is something truly apocalyptic about Fandango -- even as it remains a surface-level fun time in the vein of the aforementioned Animal House. If I had to categorize it, I'd call it an apocalyptic, absurdist comedy, which exists more as metaphor than reality. However, there's a heart within that absurdism, and you'll be surprised at how regularly the movie rises up and fully surprises you with how well it does that. In fact, I have kind of always known Reynolds as a laughingstock because in most quarters, neither Waterworld nor Robin Hood is particularly well thought of. But there's a reason why Costner was so loyal to him. He made this.

Oh yeah -- and there is a fifth participant in this odyssey who is passed out literally the entire time.

Let's see how it does on my chart:

Fandango > Lucy

Fandango > Jesus' Son

Fandango > Tropic Thunder

Fandango < The Seventh Seal

Fandango > La Veronica

Fandango > Dirty Rotten Scoundrels

Fandango < Zootopia

Fandango > Driving Miss Daisy

Fandango > Greenberg

Fandango > Pump Up the Volume

Fandango > Lethal Weapon 2

Fandango > A Beautiful Mind

425/6039 (93%)

I admit I pushed this thing a bit harder than I expected I would, giving it the victory over some films I never would have guessed it would beat. This is sort of why I wait to rank my films if I can, to allow the initial glow to wear off a bit. But the glow of Fandango was strong, and it may only get stronger with time.

Thanks [REDACTED]!

                                                                  *********.

I usually also like when that person -- [REDACTED] in this case -- comes back to me with some sort of useful comment that engages with something I wrote. It's what I always try to do when my movies get written about. There can even be dialogues that run on for a dozen comments, depending on the movie.

At first I thought the guy had just responded "Thanks for watching" without even a period at the end of the sentence. I was so annoyed by this lack of engagement that I didn't even like his comment and was ready to move on.

Well, I sure am glad I decided to write this post, because going back to it to confirm, I noted that "Thanks for watching" was actually his second comment. The first was indeed quite a substantive response to what I'd written, so now that I've seen that, I've written him an engaged rejoinder as well.