Movies that have our favorite movies in them

I watched a lovely little indie film shot in Sri Lanka last night, called Ben and Suzanne, a Reunion in 4 Parts. 

Why this movie? It showed up in a list of new additions on Kanopy, and I liked what both this poster and the title itself promised about its content. So for the first time in a very long time, I watched a movie I knew nothing about, that wasn't a new release on one of the streamers. (Plus, as I've written previously, the end of the month is the perfect time to use up your Kanopy credits because you can't take them with you.)

So glad I did. What a good movie.

One of my favorite things about Ben and Suzanne was its specificity. The title characters are an American couple in a long-distance relationship, because she has taken a job in Sri Lanka and they don't want to break up. She works for an NGO that gives small loans to female-run businesses, which is usually a fulfilling calling, except when she has to go try to collect on the loans, which is what she's doing now. In fact, she did not expect to be doing it because she thought the ten days over Christmas and New Year's were going to be a proper vacation for her and her partner, who is visiting from parts unspecified in the U.S., only her boss had other ideas. He's Indian by heritage and can understand a little Tamal, which might help in collecting the debts, which he reluctantly agrees to do even though this was supposed to be a holiday. As is usually the case with long-distance relationships, each new time together is a mini referendum on the relationship, because things have changed in the intervening time and you have to suss each other out to see if the other one is still committed. And of course there are awkwardnesses over physical intimacy and differing needs, plus the usual logistical nightmares involved in any trip through a third world country. Ben and Suzanne are played excellently by Sathya Sridharan and Anastasia Olowin.

But you know my favorite specific thing about this movie?

There is a running plot point about Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers, my #55 on Flickchart.

How unexpected was that?

Ben and Suzanne spoilers to follow. 

Early in the film, Ben asks Suzanne what the insect threat is like here, and whether we're talking Starship Trooper level. Just that single name drop would have been fun enough, but not worthy of a blog post. 

But Suzanne says she hasn't seen it, and Ben responds with incredulity -- especially since he thought they watched it together that time in that hotel in Maine. (Another great bit of specificity in the script.) That's one of the other things that happens during these "reunions," where it becomes clear that something has gone out of synch and that the two don't remember the same things about the relationship, almost as though one is gaslighting the other -- and it's usually a portent of worse things to come, which it is here.

So Ben goes on a quest to find Starship Troopers in rural Sri Lanka, and he actually succeeds on the first attempt, which they both find to be a bit of a miracle. They don't actually have a DVD player, though I don't think this is mentioned at the time.

Lo and behold, a few days later it's Christmas, and Suzanne has acquired a DVD player as a gift to Ben. He's chuffed, to use the Australian term. They're finally going to get to watch Starship Troopers.

Only there's a region mismatch. The DVD is region 1 while the DVD player would be (checks internet) region 5. They both luxuriate in exquisite but funny disappointment.

You'd think that would be it for Starship Troopers in the story, but of course you wouldn't actually, because if you are familiar with even the basic elements of screenwriting -- especially romcom screenwriting, which this broadly is -- you know the final callback is still coming.

So a few days and an apparent breakup later, the two are staying in separate rooms at their final destination on the trip, and Ben notices that Starship Troopers is playing on TV that night. Perhaps unusual New Year's Eve programming, but not the craziest you've ever seen. He goes over to her hotel room to tell her, but she's not there. Back in his own room, he faints.

Later when the movie is actually starting, she's had the TV on in the background, and hears it announced. Even though she's mad at Ben, that resolve is already crumbling and of course she gets a delighted look on her face -- and it helps that she's broken a choice to go dry, having gotten silly on wine. (Don't worry, she's not an alcoholic, she was just going dry for unspecified reasons.) She's interested enough to leave the movie on but not to contact Ben about it. 

When it ends and she's loved it, she goes to find Ben, only to learn he had to be taken to the hospital. (He had terrible food poisoning a few days earlier, and this might be part of that.) That's when she (drunkenly) rushes to the hospital, kind of the equivalent of the rushing through the airport scene at the end of most romcoms. (This movie will have its airport scene, but it has a decidedly different flavor, which is just one of this film's strengths.)

When they're reunited and Ben is, in fact, okay -- which we the viewers didn't know until this point either -- Suzanne gushes that she saw and loved the movie, and they go through about a minute's worth of rapid-fire sharing of the movie's best parts, not to mention a sophisticated overall take by Suzanne on the larger movie and what it's doing. And when I say a minute, I mean a minute -- not the 15 seconds that would have been enough. They get it -- Starship Troopers is awesome both on the macro level of its themes and the micro level of its gore and action scenes. They've finally reconnected, even if it might be for the last time. 

I'm just sitting here watching this with a big dopey grin on my face.

You might have thought from the title of this post that I was going to come up with a sort of listicle of other times movies I've loved have factored into the plots of other movies I might like or even love, but the truth is, I really just wanted to talk about this movie. I hope you'll see it, even though I've spoiled it. 

The only information in the credits you can't trust

I was fishing around for something to watch on Sunday night and I saw on Kanopy, in a promotional section on Oscar-nominated or -winning films, the film The Teachers' Lounge from 2023, directed by Ilker Catak. It was nominated for best international feature last year, but I remember hearing it come up in 2024 conversations about the best of the year, possibly due to its 2024 American release. Actually, it had a limited U.S. release -- which likely describes the full ultimate size of that release, given that this is not the type of film that plays multiplexes -- on Christmas 2023. But in many countries, it only debuted in 2024, and some people who discuss their best of the year don't use the same rules I do in determining what qualifies where. 

So why, then, was the release date on Kanopy listed as 2022?

While I was watching, I got curious enough to indeed check these release dates. IMDB always lists the earliest one first, and in this case, that was a February 18, 2023 debut at the Berlin International Film Festival. 

You'll see on various streaming services, especially Australian ones, a later release year than the generally accepted release year for a movie, if they are giving the year it first appeared in Australia. (One example having been discussed here.) 

But an earlier release year? A movie cannot meaningfully be said to exist prior to its first festival screening.

"Must be a misprint," I thought, and was set to write a post with that as the thrust.

Then for some unknown reason, while I was putting things away and preparing to go to bed, I paid attention to the credits down to the very last words on screen, even though I was not expecting a Marvel-style post credits sequence. And then I saw the year listed as MMXXII.

So that's where Kanopy got it.

Which, if you think about it, makes sense. I have argued in the past that a movie's title should be listed as it appears in the movie, and for sure, you are meant to take every other credit listed anywhere at face value.

But the year that appears in the credits is the one piece of information you should look upon skeptically.

I'm not sure if the same rule of thumb would be followed in every instance, but I have to think the year you put in here is whatever year it currently happens to be at the time you are making the credits. That may not be true with a big Hollywood blockbuster, whose credits may be finished in one year even though they know for sure the film's release date is the following year. I suspect they would definitively forward-date it in that case.

But with a smaller movie about a conflict among staff and students at a school, whose exact debut is uncertain at the time the credits are completed, you would put in whatever year it was and then let the rest take care of itself, knowing only pedants like me would ever notice and take issue with any of the decisions they've made.

Of course, I don't take issue with anyone involved with The Teachers' Lounge putting in 2022 (or MMXXII) in the credits, because that made the most sense in the moment. I take issue, only slightly, with a streaming service like Kanopy using that as the release year on their site, when consulting any other source (such as IMDB) would have disabused them of any confusion.

That's it, I'm never using Kanopy again. 

Kanopy makes free even better

I've taken a machete to my emails in the past 24 hours and whacked 400+ unread down to a mere 47. And those 47 are mostly reminders of things I have to do.

The newest one that came in after that was one of Kanopy's weekly emails about what I should watch this weekend. I noticed Broker was a new addition, and it's just about the only Hirokazu Kore-eda movie made in the last ten years that I haven't seen. 

Now, sending me emails to further partake of a free service is already pretty nice. The new credits system is even nicer.

Clicking in to add Broker to my watchlist wasn't the first time I had seen the new credits system, but it was a reminder that came in at a time I was actually in a position to sit down and write about it.

If you aren't familiar with Kanopy's old system for allowing you a certain allotment of monthly viewings, you used to get five credits per month to spend however you wanted. Anyone who griped about this -- I'm not saying there were, but human beings being who they are, there probably were -- was an idiot. You don't pay a single cent to receive the full benefits of Kanopy, all you have to do is have a library card and have your local library participate.

And yet I have also griped. As you will recall in this post, I was attached enough to my five free credits that I did (politely) report the issue when I tried to watch Things to Come but the subtitles were too blurry to read. They happily refunded me my credit, and also explained why the issue occurred, and also explained the steps they were taking to rectify it in the future.

They didn't have to do any of that.

A few weeks ago, they've implemented a new system, as seen here:

Instead of spending a single credit on something, you spend however many tickets they've determined it requires. 

Such a change in basic paradigm should rightly make a person raise their eyebrows, as if Kanopy were finally trying to close the loophole that had allowed us all these free viewings all these years. 

Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, though I don't know this for sure, it seems like yet another attempt to improve the experience we enjoy as non-paying customers.

I bet you dollars to donuts that some Kanopy user made a complaint -- hopefully as polite a complaint as I made about Things to Come -- that the current credits system was unfair because it priced everything equally. Watching a four-hour movie cost you a credit, but so did watching a seven-minute short film. I don't watch a lot of short films but I did discover this myself when I watched the short film How to Be Alone starring Maika Monroe earlier this year.

So Kanopy decided to respond to this person's complaint by setting up a tiered payment system. How to Be Alone -- which is actually 12 minutes -- now costs one ticket. Broker -- which is two hours and 9 minutes -- only costs two.

And you get a total of 15 tickets per month. 

So in case you are bad at math, this means that instead of watching five movies per month, you can now watch seven -- and still have one ticket left over for a short. Or 15 short films, if you're so inclined.

Look I know there is some business model behind all this that makes it a benefit for the people who run Kanopy to provide this service. Things that are totally unsustainable are not sustained.

But to the naked eye, they just seem generous as fuck, and in today's world, that is extremely rare.

The right day to choose Kanopy

In my last post I touched on the desired random factor in my viewing schedule in terms of what ends up being a landmark hundredth movie for me, the sort I inexplicably keep track of -- and wrote a whole post about on Saturday.

I have enough "viewing commitments" each month that most nights I have a good idea what movie I should be watching, or at least the sort of movie I should be watching.

Then there are other nights where I just go through my streaming services and say "Hmmm ... that one."

The choice of Lyle last night was dictated by two things:

1) It was short, and I was tired on a Sunday night. How short? It was 62 minutes. There's probably a longer post sometime about figuring out how to throw in 15 more minutes of material to make a 62-minute movie 77 minutes, but then again, considering that I gave Lyle four stars out of five, perhaps it shouldn't have been a single minute longer than it was.

2) It was the last day of the month, which meant that my Kanopy credits were about to refresh -- and that the previous month's three remaining credits would be "wasted."

Hey, it's as good a reason as any.

As far as I am aware, Kanopy is the only service that operates this way, and of course it only operates this way because it is a free service. You get a huge selection of movies, albeit sort of an odd selection, just for having intelligence enough to get yourself a library card, so they need to place some sort of restriction on it. Five viewing credits per month seems more than reasonable, especially since the lack of paying anything for it deprives you of your right to complain. (But be careful what you spend them on -- it takes a viewing credit just to watch a short, which I'd say I once learned "the hard way," except I almost never expend all five credits.)

But I was raised with a puritanical mindset about not wasting resources, so if it's month-end and I still have some Kanopy credits remaining -- and I don't know what else to watch -- might as well spend them there.

To me Kanopy seems a bit like MUBI, in that there's a lot of stuff on there you'd probably never heard of, and might be enriched to watch. However, sometimes it also feels like homework. But then again, the offerings on Kanopy are often surprising. If you are expecting just classic Hollywood or archaic foreign films you've never heard of, you haven't visited Kanopy lately. As just one example of a movie on there I found weird, you can stream Serenity on Kanopy right now. Not the feature-length movie of the TV show Firefly, but that Serenity from four years ago in which Matthew McConaughey is some kind of modern-day seafaring adventurer, who it eventually turns out is part of a video game. (Oops, spoiler alert.) In any case, I didn't expect to see it on there.

So if it's still the 30th of April where you are when you read this -- though you'd have to read it pretty soon -- don't forget about your Kanopy queue. No longer how long you've been away, it hasn't forgotten about you. 

Things to Come is no longer to come

I started watching Mia Hansen-Love's Things to Come in May of 2018. Kanopy still remembers how much of it I had watched, which was about ten minutes. (Come to think of it, this would have been a great choice in my bi-monthly Finish What You Started series from a few years ago, especially since there was one point where I was scrounging for a sixth title.)

The reason I stopped watching was that the image was going out of focus, and I could not read the subtitles. French is the language I know best other than English, but not well enough to follow a movie without the assistance of translation.

It's an interesting commentary on the change in our times in just those almost-four years. 

For one, I don't feel like the technology would still feature bugs like a streaming title going in and out of focus. This could have been my internet, since this may have been before we got the NBN (Nationwide Broadband Network), but I think even at the time I determined that the fault lay with Kanopy. I think I believed that internet issues would have caused lagging, as it did on other streaming prior to the NBN, but not the image itself going out of focus.

Secondly, I valued the currency of a Kanopy viewing credit a lot more back then. You get five per month, and I must have been watching enough on Kanopy to worry I was going to run through them that May. I actually emailed Kanopy to ask for my credit back given the focus issues.

This was an amazing response given that this is just one random title in a whole library of -- don't forget this part -- free titles.

"Thank you for your message. Our team is working to make a version of Things to Come available that does not have the subtitles burned into the video file so that they will still be visible if the image is out of focus. We will let you know once this is available. In the meantime, a play credit has been refunded to your account."

At the time, I thought this was great customer service. Now, I wonder why I even thought I was entitled to great customer service from a totally free resource, where the word "customer" does not have any real meaning. "Beggar not chooser" might have been more accurate.

I wasn't sure I was going to get through it on Monday night when I started watching it again.

I'm not sure if the memory of where I'd left off was the issue, but I of course started the movie over from the beginning, and only got about two minutes in before a timeout error occurred. The timeout error was so bad that I actually had to exit the entire app, something that was only possible by pressing random buttons on my AppleTV remote. (The button I usually use for such things was not working.) This happened twice more, and I was on the verge of giving up. But I decided to try one more time, and this time it passed the problematic point and I watched the rest of the film.

When I'd tried to start watching Things to Come in 2018, it was because I'd heard about this promising young director named Mia Hansen-Love and wanted to see what she was all about. I'd heard this title mentioned specifically. Since then, Hansen-Love seems to have made a name for herself on the international movie scene, her 2021 film Bergman Island (her first English language film) having won raves from critics. (This critic did not see it.)

I wasn't blown away by Things to Come. I don't know if I was expecting something more thematically bold or outside-the-box, but this is basically a standard French domestic drama starring the ageless Isabelle Huppert. Before you recoil at the word "standard" there, I should clarify that I consider a "standard" French domestic drama to implicitly have a high basic level of competence and watchability. The French do cinema pretty well. But I guess I thought that since Hansen-Love was positioned to me as this sort of breakout star to watch, I should expect something more distinctly cinematic, possessing some sort of original technique. What I got was an intermittently affecting consideration of a woman reaching a point in her life where the things she has counted on start to fall away, with the always effective Huppert delivering her usual strong work.

Now that I am reminded of Kanopy, what it has to offer and what good customer service it once gave me, maybe I'll start picking my way through my watchlist and go through those credits at a pace faster than one every six months. 

Assuming that my use of their service is in some way a measurable benefit to them, they deserve it. 

Horror schlock extraordinaire

Remember when I said I was looking for October horror options outside of my standard streaming services?

Kanopy to the rescue.

Kanopy, the free streaming service some people can access through their library membership, does not have what you would call a comprehensive collection, nor I suppose would you expect it to. It's free, so any damn thing it has is a bonus, and it does have a lot of useful stuff.

And in this case it blew open the doors of the possibilities of horror for October. In fact, I'm not sure if I'm going to fit in all the ones I want to watch, especially since I'm heading to the U.S. for the last week of the month and I have a lot of viewing priorities unrelated to horror that I also need to squeeze in.

Not only is there some of the good classic horror I've been looking for, such as the 1959 Vincent Price-starring House on Haunted Hill, but they've also got an essential 1980s horror text I have yet to experience from an essential horror director, David Cronenberg's Scanners. Then you've got something that just looks like great exploitation, Abel Ferrera's The Driller Killer. They've also got a couple movies I'd love to revisit this month, including Carnival of Souls and Beyond the Black Rainbow.

And, of course, they have Death Bed: The Bed That Eats.

That one I actually watched on Friday night, and boy.

I must say I spent a lot of the time asking myself how bad this 1977 low budget horror was. There were times that I thought it was Manos: The Hands of Fate bad, then there were other times I convinced myself that it's so bizarre it might be great, and that the various visual concepts were executed to the best of the ability of this minuscule budget. I ultimately went with a 1.5 star rating on Letterboxd as a compromise that erred on the Manos side of things.

Either way, you've got to see this movie.

Essentially it's about a canopy bed in an abandoned mansion that has been possessed by a demon, and this means it can eat people. In my mind I imagined the mattress actually morphing into a kind of mouth and going chomp chomp on its victims, but that kind of thing is hard to do on a small budget without looking ridiculous -- and say what you will about George Barry's film, I don't think he wants it to be ridiculous.

Instead, the bed exudes this kind of foaming acid that causes its victims to sink down into the mattress and be dissolved by the equivalent of its stomach acid. Of course, it's not just human beings that might be eaten. The bed also eats an apple (amusingly, only down to the core), some fried chicken (amusingly, just the skin and meat) and even a full bottle of wine (the bed that drinks).

The fact that the bones are still left creates certain moments that do seem to be intentionally hilarious, and though the following picture constitutes a "spoiler," it may also entice you to see the movie:

To quote Chief Wiggum: "What're you going to use, skeleton powers?"

The acting is so incredibly bad as to defy explanation -- the woman in this picture, despite being in peril throughout, rarely sees her expression change from some small variation on the one you see here. The guy's reaction to having his hands dissolved by the bed is similarly detached.

One of the funniest things about the movie is that it is narrated by a man who has been cursed to live inside a painting on the wall of the room with the bed. We seem him from time to time, sitting in a small enclosed space that is meant to represent the inside of the painting. The funny thing is, this guy is a different actor who does not actually provide the narration himself. I suppose you need to actually see this character to understand that this is what's supposed to be going on, but it just kind of makes it all the more hilarious.

Thanks Kanopy. Now instead of despairing over the paucity of good horror streaming options, I'm licking my chops for Saturday night.

The streaming service I did nothing to deserve

We live in an era of ever more available streaming services, but they all have one thing in common: You have to pay for them.

Well, they did all have that in common, but not anymore.

The Melbourne Public Library Service, of which I am a proud and regular member, recently signed on to participate in Kanopy, the streaming service you get for free through your library membership. I'm sure a lot of Americans are already familiar with this, since I first learned of its existence at least six months ago on Filmspotting: Streaming Video Unit. Then I kind of forgot about it, until it materialized here.

Lord knows what the profit model is for this service, but it exists, and last night I partook in it for the first time.

And I'm one grateful bastard for its existence.

I haven't explored half of its offerings yet, but it has already given me a clear benefit over some of my other available sourcing options. The auteur whose films I'm watching in April for my Audient Auteurs series, Robert Bresson, has two films on Kanopy, neither of which I could find conveniently available elsewhere -- not even on iTunes, if memory serves, though I won't swear to that. I watched Au Hasard Balthazar last night, and will follow up with a viewing of Mouchette upon my return from an upcoming trip to Bali to celebrate my 10th anniversary.

You might expect a free service to be glitchy, difficult to navigate or in some other way deficient, but nothing could be further from the truth. It streamed perfectly, which is really saying something, given that my internet sucks and we probably need to consider replacing our router. And I had no trouble finding anything or interfacing with it in any way.

I had been in a hurry to watch Au Hasard before our trip, which starts on Tuesday, on the irrational fear that Kanopy was too good to be true and they would take it away from me. But it looks like it's here to stay.

And in looking only at the featured movies on the front page, there are other things I want to watch, including my #1 of 2016, Toni Erdmann, which I need to (and also want to) watch again before deciding on my favorite films of the decade just over 18 months from now.

What did I do to deserve Kanopy?

Not a damn thing.

And that's what makes it so miraculous. When monetizing and profiting are the key motivators to any internet venture, even the free ones, it's hard to know exactly what Kanopy is getting from me, except possibly the data of what I've chosen to watch. There are no ads in the middle of the movies or anything like that. It's just free, and it's glorious.

Which is a good complement to our library. Libraries everywhere are great, but the Melbourne ones are particularly first-rate in terms of their wealth of free offerings. Not only do you have a massive collection of movies, books and music to choose from, but you can keep those things for three weeks, and renew them multiple times. (You used to be stopped at two renewals, but recently I accidentally renewed something a third time and the system let me do it.) Then there are the in-building amenities, like all the video games you can (and my kids do) play, which include VR games -- my first-ever VR game experience was at a library. Oh, and did I mention that they have a 3D printer, and you can print things for free as long as you are willing to wait for them?

I may not deserve Kanopy, although maybe we all deserve something for free in this day and age when the world sucks us dry of our time, money and clicks.

And until the other shoe drops and they take this marvelous thing away from me, I'll be enjoying the hell out of it.