When I’m within a week of my ranking deadline, I’ve narrowed
down the list of titles I plan to squeeze in before the end, and thereby also know
which ones I won’t.
One of those is a bit of a surprise this year.
Back before Fast &
Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw hit theaters, it was advertised pretty heavily
through trailers. I should have already seen every good bit in the movie, but I
stopped watching after the initial teaser trailer, in which the title characters
(played by Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham) have a sort of competition to see
who can beat up their own room of bad guys better. I thought this teaser was
hilarious, and it left me primed for the movie.
So primed, in fact, that when full-length trailers for the
movie started to come on, I closed my eyes and plugged up my ears. This is a
strategy I sometimes use to remain unspoiled on a big new movie, such as Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. Never
thought I’d use it on a Fast &
Furious movie, but there we were.
I heard that the movie was not so good, but the bigger problem
with getting to Hobbes & Shaw was
that it came out in the middle of MIFF, and I had other priorities for the few
available time slots when I wasn’t either watching a MIFF movie or at home with
my kids while my wife was. Those slots went to Midsommar and, strangely now in retrospect, Ophelia, which was not good. The ability to review Ophelia was likely a factor in that
choice, as was the comparative lengths of the two films.
Once MIFF ended, I was off to America, where my viewing
priority immediately shifted to Once Upon
a Time in Hollywood. When I finally got back to Australia, Hobbes & Shaw had been left in the
dust.
Still, there has been plenty of time over the rest of the
year for Hobbes & Shaw to become
available on video and for me to watch it. I have not done it so far, and
unless something really weird happens, I won’t before next Monday.
It’s not been an oversight, but rather, a conscious choice whose
logic I have only just come to understand.
Each year I see movies from every conceivable demographic, a
“demographic” in this case consisting of genre, budget size, and age/gender/race
of the intended audience. As a sort of zen balancing act, therefore, I also like to miss movies from every conceivable demographic.
I consider summer action blockbusters to be a demographic unto
themselves. Due to sheer availability and the desire to be part of the cultural conversation about them, it’s a demographic whose percentage of movies seen is usually pretty high for me. Unless, that is, I specifically choose
not to see some of them.
In 2019, I had a number of good candidates for blockbusters
to shun. But when I ended up seeing the likes of X-Men: Dark Phoenix and Hellboy
on various plane flights, the list narrowed to only a few.
Godzilla: King of the
Monsters was one. I haven’t seen it, and I won’t, for now anyway.
Hobbes & Shaw
was/is the other.
It was easy for me to continue shunning Godzilla, as you might surmise if you read this post. But now that
I’ve committed, I’m having second thoughts about the Hobbes & Shaw snub. As I write a piece like this, I think back
to the me of mid-July, who was so worried about the best things this film had
to offer (its ridiculous action set pieces) being ruined that I took
extraordinary measures to avoid ruining them. That me was also triggered
when I listened to the recent Filmspotting
top ten of the year podcast, in which two of the hosts mentioned their
shared love of one particularly awesome scene in the movie.
I’ll see Hobbes &
Shaw eventually, of course, but not getting it into my ranking year does
feel like something of a loss. And yet, though I have time to change that and
watch it before Monday, I’m not going to. I can’t let Godzilla be the only big summer blockbuster I don’t see.
They may be strange rules, but they’re mine.
