Lockdown DVD Fest: Closing Night (for reals)

If you've selected the best remaining DVD that you borrowed from the library for what may be the closing night of your lockdown DVD festival, when that festival extends a night, all you have left are the leftovers.

Fortunately, Honey Boy placed a close second to Wild Rose as my original selection for a closing night film. 

And Thursday night's viewing really would be the closing night, as Rose's win for DVDs pushed the availability competition between DVDs and streaming to a 5-5 tie that had to be broken on night #11. You'll recall that DVDs were getting a point if the DVD I watched was only available for free to me that way, but streaming got a point if I discovered afterward that I didn't need to watch it on DVD because it was already available on one of my streaming services.

Honey Boy was for all the marbles.

But first, Alma Har'el's film.

As you probably know, it's Shia LaBeouf's script based on his own life experiences, taking place in two time periods: one when he's a 12-year-old just starting to make waves in the industry, and one when he's a young adult not handling the pressures of fame and needing to check into rehab. He's played by the fantastic Noah Jupe in the first set of scenes, and by the equally fantastic Lucas Hedges in the second. In fact, Hedges does such a good impersonation of LaBeouf that it was almost uncanny.

Of course, it's best to keep a small layer of artifice in place here, though I don't know if I've ever found the end credits disclaimer, about any resemblance to real people being unintentional, to be more disingenuous. This is of course based on his life and his own father -- who LaBeouf himself plays -- but in order to keep up the "inspired by" pretense, LaBeouf calls his character Otis. And though it's not called a Transformers movie that we see Otis shooting in the opening scene, the familiar off-screen sound of whirring robot parts makes as much of a connection as we need.

I was on board with LaBeouf's script from the very start, when we also get a montage of all the movies Otis is shooting, but I wasn't sure about his performance as Otis' dad. Or not the performance so much, but the makeup/costuming used to make the 32-year-old actor look like someone maybe ten years older than he is. He's been given a pot belly and this hair style where he's balding at the top but long-haired in the back, like a mullet gone bad -- excuse me, like a mullet gone worse. Here:

At first I was distracted by this. I was like "This is a guy who is essentially still a boy, playing dress-up as a man." But it didn't last. Since starting out as an impossibly charismatic child actor turned young adult actor who was always a good guy, LaBeouf has carved out a far more eccentric place in the film landscape in recent years, and he's capable of real menace. He can really discomfit you. This abusive, white trash father is menacing indeed, and also pathetic, and also possibly someone you can pity, while still being a monster.

By the end I thought it was a really good performance, made all the more impressive by the fact that it's his own father. That may have made the emotions easier to conjure, but also makes it extremely personal and triggering for him. I really appreciated the vulnerability, especially since one of the things that become off-putting about LaBeouf was his cocksure and ultimately aggressive persona -- which Hedges nails. Jupe also does his part showing the far more sensitive child he once was, though one who obviously had to grow up too fast, as his own father was giving him cigarettes at age 12. Because one of LaBeouf's biggest fears was that he would become his father, him actually playing the role makes that all the more profound.

As Otis and his dad live in a seedy motel in what must be one of the worst parts of the San Fernando Valley, I also got a bit of a Florida Project vibe from this film. There's a lot of parental neglect and some sense of the dynamics of a small itinerant community like this. The filmmaking was reminiscent of that film in parts as well. 

Overall the film really worked for me. I'm not familiar with the work of the director, Ha'rel, but she brings a real perspective and skill to the filmmaking. Ultimately, of course, this is LaBeouf's movie. I was glad never to find it self-indulgent, as that's a criticism that has also dogged the actor. With a few more right choices like this one, he seems poised to be the kind of guy who could make a full comeback as a proper adult and become something of a Matthew McConaughey. Maybe that's shooting too high, but I think LaBeouf may be transitioning from pariah into someone we can root for.

It's no secret I was rooting for DVDs to win this competition. Not that the results of this competition would ever be binding -- I'm free to watch DVDs whenever I want, regardless of whether those movies are available on streaming. Often, borrowing a DVD is an excuse to watch something that might be available on streaming, though you'd never have a specific occasion to choose it. Having it on DVD gives you that occasion. 

Still, I wanted DVDs to win.

Did they?

Yes. Yes they did.

Honey Boy was not available for streaming on Amazon, Netflix, Kanopy, Stan or Disney+, meaning if I wanted to watch it right now, it had to be through my local library.

6-5, DVDs take it.

Satisfying result, especially as DVDs had to come from behind to win. It was a back-and-forth affair, actually, as DVDs at one point had a seemingly insurmountable 4-1 lead before squandering the entirety of that lead by losing four in a row. Then it finished with two wins in a row to take it. Exciting stuff.

Now I wonder: Would the results have been different if I'd chosen one of my other remaining films as the closing night film?

I'll exclude rewatches as candidates. One of the movies I borrowed from the library was Crimson Tide, but I already rewatched that on streaming a couple weeks ago, which was one of the things that prompted me to do this festival. Then there was The Lighthouse, and any suspense related to that was ruined when I saw it available for streaming before I even considered watching it. The only other possible rewatch was Zulu, which I've seen only once and really loved, ten years ago when my older son was an infant. But we'll just leave that to the side.

The Testament of Orpheus (1960, Jean Cocteau) - I'd first gotten to know Cocteau as part of my Audient Auteurs series a couple years back, and I really liked what I saw. However, I never seriously considered watching this movie for this series as it's the third part in a trilogy that stretches 30 years, the other two parts of which I haven't seen. I think they are only loosely related and it's not necessary to watch them in order, but the uncertainty surrounding that left this on the sidelines.

Availability on streaming: None.

A Hidden Life (2019, Terrence Malick) - I'm (unfortunately) a Malick completist and this is certainly a "film festival type film," but the 174-minute running time was, and continues to be, a stumbling block for me. Plus, I'm sick of Malick's shit. 

Availability on streaming: Disney+ (weirdly)

Little Women (1994, Gillian Armstrong) - This could have been a strong contender given how much I loved Greta Gerwig's version of this film, my first exposure to the story, two years ago. But any time I looked at the spine of the DVD in my stack, I passed over it.

Availability on streaming: None.

So if I'd chosen A Hidden Life, the results would have skewed the other way. Thank goodness I am almost never in a position to watch a three-hour movie -- even during lockdown. (And my God, if Malick is self-indulgent in a 100-minute film, I can only imagine how tedious I would find this.)

So what are my takeaways from this?

In any random selection of movies from the library, I can expect about half not to be available on streaming. Of course, that only relates to this particular sample, but if I'm including Crimson Tide and The Lighthouse in the above computations, that's eight of 16 movies available on streaming, and eight not. I guess at this point we might as well do another tiebreaker with the 17th movie. Zulu is, in fact, available on Amazon Prime.

So streaming might have the slight advantage, but it's only slight. And because most of us have no idea what's actually available on streaming when we're browsing through the library options, unless we happen to have recently made note of a particular title, that activity is likely to bear at least some fruit, depending on how good the library collection is.

And let's turn our attention to that topic of "good" for a second. 

Here, let me provide you a list of the 11 films I watched again, in the order that I watched them:

The Wife
Papillon
The Secret of Roan Inish
The New Mutants
First Reformed
Free Solo
At Eternity's Gate
The Other Side of Hope
On the Beach
Wild Rose
Honey Boy

Not a single one of those films did I give lower than three stars on Letterboxd. And only two of them were as low as three stars. So that means I liked all of them enough to recommend them. 

And it's reasonable to say that this may be the longest stretch of seeing films I liked in my own personal history. Since I also gave a positive review to the last streaming movie I watched before I started all this -- Cruella on Disney+ -- that makes 12 straight movies I gave a thumbs up. Tellingly, the last film I gave a thumbs down -- Army of the Dead, though it was a marginal thumbs down -- was on Netflix.

So it occurs to me that a good library collection is also curated to include mostly films of some worth. I'm sure there's plenty of schlock you can get from a typical library collection, but you're never going to find the dregs of the internet that you can get on streaming, and that you'll watch just because it's funny to watch something terrible. Viewings like that can be fun -- in fact, I can't wait to get to one tonight -- but if you're hungry for a cinematic meal rather than a fatty snack, borrowing DVDs gives you a better chance of getting one.

Ultimately, as I said earlier, the results of this little experiment are mostly academic. I'm sure I'll continue to borrow movies from the library as long as they keep providing them and as long as they continue replenishing them with titles I haven't seen. Fortunately, there will always be titles I haven't seen. And I probably would have kept borrowing from the library even if streaming had won this competition 10-1. 

In the end, it's good to know that streaming is not yet covering such a percentage of the landscape of films you'd want to watch that it feels like it could be your only solution.

I mean, it could be, but then you'd be missing out on some of history's great films.

Lockdown DVD Fest: Closing Night - or is it?

When trying to select what would be -- or might be -- a good closing night film for this little festival I'm doing, I had no obvious candidates that would seem specially curated to work as a closing night film. Then again, The Wife was not specifically an "opening night film" either.

So I just chose the film I was most certain not to want to leave unwatched when I return my DVDs to the library, which turned out to be Tom Harper's Wild Rose.

It only might be the closing night film, because if you read yesterday's post, you'll know that I've declared this a best-of-11 series, in sporting terms. I've been keeping a running tally of whether each film could only be seen for free by me on a DVD from the library, or whether I could also see it on one of my streaming services, checking on the latter only after I'd finished watching so as not to spoil the fun. If the former, DVD got a point. If the latter, streaming got a point.

Streaming led 5-4 going into night #10 of the festival, so that meant that if last night's film was also available on streaming, streaming would clinch the win, as it would no longer be possible for DVD to retake the lead on night #11. So night #11 would not be necessary at all and would be cancelled, as occurs in the professional baseball, basketball and hockey playoffs.

At one point I was considering watching all of the remaining DVDs I borrowed, which totals about four or five more. But lockdown officially ends in Melbourne on Thursday night, plus we may be let out of our close-contact isolation if/once our COVID tests come back negative today. So if this is truly a "lockdown" fest, it should end no later than Thursday's night #11.

Whether we'll have night #11 or not is something we won't find out until the end of this post.

In the meantime, let's talk Wild Rose.

I had sort of dismissed this film when it came out a couple years ago. Don't know why, really, but I can tell you that I was initially skeptical of actress Jessie Buckley. Don't know why on that front either. I know she didn't win any points with me by appearing in Dolittle, but this was before that. Sometimes when you get just a small taste of an actor from clips or a trailer or what have you, you don't "get" them yet. I definitely didn't "get" Jessie Buckley at first.

Boy has that changed since then.

I could swear I'm Thinking of Ending Things was not my only recent exposure to Buckley -- she's in the most recent season of Fargo, but I'm actually two seasons behind on Fargo. But I'm Thinking of Ending Things was enough. Simply put, I was floored by her performance in my #1 movie of last year. Figured it was time to circle back to the film where I'd first heard her name. 

She plays an aspiring Scottish country singer named Rose-Lynn Harlan, and we meet her when she's getting released from prison. She's that type, as you might guess from the adjective in the film's title. Her voice is about the only thing she has going for her, as she's neglecting two children under the age of ten (can't help but neglect children when you're in prison) and she rubs people the wrong way with her crude manner. Holding a job would seem to be a problem, but at least she's got a forgiving new employer in the person of Sophie Okonedo, who hires her as a housekeeper as Rose-Lynn tries to make the money she needs to go to Nashville to try to hit it big. 

Wild Rose does not deviate significantly from what you would expect -- the moments of optimism, the arguments, the big fall from grace, the redemption. It's all there and it's not particularly surprising. But the film is really solidly crafted, and Buckley is terrific. I looked up to see if Buckley is actually Scottish, and it turns out she's Irish -- which just feeds into my whole eternal confusion of whether something is a Scottish accent or an Irish accent when I hear it with no other reference point. Since this is set in Glasgow, obviously I have the reference point. But I've loved Buckley in two roles, and neither of them featured her native accent. That's talent.

I will say, there were certain points where I more got the gist of what was going on than followed it perfectly. English-born Julie Walters plays her mother, and she also does a very good Scottish accent. So when they're arguing with each other, I can really only pick out every third word, and there were whole passages I just sort of had to wave off as something I didn't fully understand. That's where the plot benefits from being fairly predictable.

Still, I want the lingering impression of this film to be only praise. It really got to me, especially in a powerhouse final song that nearly had me in tears. 

Now: the important business. Will we be having one final night of this festival?

Yes. Yes we will.

Wild Rose is not currently available on Netflix, Stan, Amazon, Kanopy or Disney+, so indeed, the decisive Game 11 will be Thursday night, when this tie is 5-5 tie is broken once and for all, and this 11-day festival comes to its end. 

Lockdown DVD Fest: From Hope to hopelessness

So I'm combining Monday and Tuesday because writing a post every day for this series is wearing on me. I haven't been blogging this regularly, or with this many words, in several months. And even in lockdown I have other things that consume my time.

Think I'll finish up Wednesday night regardless of whether this lockdown continues past Thursday, which it probably will -- but we have a good chance of being out of self-isolation, at least. They're sending us for another COVID test tomorrow, and if we pass that test, we may be able to walk down our front steps and onto the street again.

Oh, I'll probably keep watching about a movie a day, but it's nice not to have artificial parameters on what I watch, as enriching as this experience has been for me. Need to get back to watching some dumb horror I unearth on Amazon. 

I've watched a documentary, a prison break drama, an intimate marital drama, a children's fantasy, a comic book movie and several others, but no "film festival" is complete without a foreign film, now is it?

So due up Monday night was Aki Kaurismaki's The Other Side of Hope from 2017. It's my second Kaurismaki film after Le Havre. Michael Phillips put the Finnish director on my radar on one of his Filmspotting appearances nearly a decade ago now, but I've still only waded this far into his filmography. I think knowing that Le Havre was a bit of a shrug for me -- a good shrug, but still a shrug nonetheless -- made me slow to seek out a second film, but The Other Side of Hope made its way into my library DVD borrowings and into my DVD player on Monday night.

It was a bit of a shrug. A good shrug, but a shrug nonetheless.

Kaurismaki's films have kind of a dry humor that almost only registers as humor if you squint. To be sure, there were some moments that almost made me chuckle, but more because they were mildly absurd than out-and-out funny. He reminds me a little of fellow Scandinavian director Roy Andersson, though Andersson's films are far more absurd and far less tethered to an identifiable narrative. 

The narrative is clear enough here, or at least a narrative framework with a recurring set of characters. The film takes place in and around Helsinki, bringing a couple main characters into contact with each other. One is a Syrian refugee trying to get work in Helsinki while also trying to stay legally in the country, as he conducts a long-distance search for his sister, who was separated from him at a border crossing. His story can hardly be considered humorous, as we learn in an interview with immigrant officials that the entire rest of his family, totalling eight or nine people, were killed in bomb blast in Aleppo while they were lunching together. A laugh a minute, you will agree, but Kaurismaki presents it in a way that steers clear of the maudlin. He's not the sentimental type.

Then the other sort of main character is a man who leaves his wife, wins a lot of money on an improbable straight flush in an underground gambling establishment, and buys a restaurant. The workers at the restaurant are a quirky bunch and provide most of what is considered humorous about this film. 

That's pretty much the whole thing. However, it takes stabs at some real humanism toward the end, and it's one of those movies whose fullness only strikes you as it is winding down. That may not be a ringing endorsement but it's enough for a positive assessment of the movie. Kaurismaki may not really be my bag, but I'm glad I've seen both of his films that I've seen. 

The title is interesting, as "the other side of hope" would be, I guess, despair. Certainly, there's a lot for the characters in this movie to despair about, but that's not the feeling you get from this movie, and I think that is its greatest strength. Maybe "the other side of hope" is more optimistic than I'm suggesting -- like, maybe hope actually pays off when you come out the other side.

Hope was a lot more absent in my Tuesday night film. 

I'd wanted to watch On the Beach, the 1959 Stanley Kramer film, for several years now, as it is set in Melbourne. That wasn't the only draw about the film, though. No, this is a movie about the immediate days after most of the world is destroyed by "the atomic war" and the radiation that kills those who aren't in immediate blast zones. Due to its isolation and general distance from the conflict -- though the primary combatants are never named -- Australia is the last area of the planet to still be waiting for its dose of radiation on the wind. But oh, it's coming.

The film stars lots of big names from the time: Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Fred Astaire and Anthony Perkins. As I suggested, though, the main draws were not the stars. I was really curious to see what Melbourne looked like in 1959, and the film did not disappoint, giving us (my wife watched with me) a lot of familiar street views as they looked 62 years ago. We got all the expected highs such an experience might provide. (I thought she'd seen it before, but she hadn't.)

But what may have interested me more than that was what a cautionary tale about nuclear (or atomic) war would look like in 1959. This was years before I figured they started making movies like this in earnest. And in truth, a lot of the time it doesn't feel like that kind of movie, having more of the trappings of a romance than anything else, or a nautical adventure. (Peck and his crew pilot a submarine when they aren't in Melbourne.) There are some chilling shots of abandoned cities, but really, the way this movie is post-apocalyptic has more to do with the question of what people will do with the little time they have left.

At the start of the narrative, the radiation is projected to hit Australia in five months' time -- I don't know if that's scientifically accurate, and I suppose it would depend on the closest blast site to the country. But what this does is it sets up this uneasy tension between people trying to live their lives -- which they mostly can, though they're going through privations like a petrol shortage -- and preparing for the inevitable. In fact, we see much of this fragility of life through Perkins' character and that of his wife, played by Donna Anderson, who have a baby girl. There's a whole plot point about how Perkins is trying to acquire suicide pills to give to his wife, which she will give to their daughter and herself, if she gets sick before he returns from what is expected to be a two-month submarine mission. If that's not chilling, I don't know what is.

And so this film exists in sort of a suspended state of ennui, as Peck's and Gardner's characters consider the possibility of new love, as well as its futility. (In fact, Peck has a wife and two sons of his own who are back in America and presumed dead, a reality he at first denies before ultimately coming to grips with it in a powerful scene.) The whole thing is suffused with melancholy and I really got caught up in it. As a neat trick, there's also a fair bit of humor, which somehow does not seem out of sync with the rest of what's going on.

A few other unrelated thoughts. One was that dispiritingly few characters in this film even attempted Australian accents, as only a few side characters were played by actual Australian actors, though almost all of them outside Peck and his crew are supposed to be Aussies. Another funny detail was that "Waltzing Matilda" plays on the score about two dozen times, so much so that the only other thing I could liken it to was the frequency of "Moon River" in Breakfast at Tiffany's. 

I also wanted to say that I don't think I've ever seen an Ava Gardner film before. I suppose I did find her somewhat fetching -- she's supposed to be fetching, right? -- but the one who really turned my head was Donna Anderson. She's a real beauty. Yes, is -- she's still going strong today at 81, only five days younger than my dad. 

Okay, cannot leave behind the discussion of these films without telling you whether I could have watched them on streaming.

Coming into these two movies, DVDs had been holding a shaky lead, 4-3, over streaming. By that I mean, of the seven movies I had watched in this festival so far, four of them could not be found on any of the streaming services I subscribe to, while three of them could.

I'm sorry to say that DVDs have lost that lead.

The Other Side of Hope is available on Kanopy, and On the Beach is available on Stan. 

Now that DVDs have fallen behind, 5-4, I'm questioning the wisdom of having only one more night of this series. If it ended in a tie that would be kind of a disappointment.

So let's say this. I'll watch a movie Wednesday night. If that movie is also available on streaming, the series will be over -- streaming wins 6-4 in a best-of-11 scenario. However, if it's only on DVD, it'll necessitate a tiebreak on Thursday night.

I started out this post weary, but now I'm kind of excited again.

Lockdown DVD Fest: A 2018-themed weekend

I decided to keep the DVD Fest going over the weekend, though not to devote an individual post to each movie. There's only so much value to that, and it gets tedious, even or perhaps especially for me, the one doing it. (I don't presume to know what you find tedious, and I suppose you have a high tolerance for tedium if you spend any amount of time reading my posts.) 

At this point I don't think I will watch all the DVDs I have out from the library, which I had once stated as an ambition, after all. That's in part because for one particular title, I already inadvertently spoiled the little supplemental exercise I've been doing, which is checking if they're available on streaming after I've watched them. While I was doing some light browsing on Netflix, I believe it was, The Lighthouse appeared on one of the landing pages. I've already seen this movie, of course, and when I was at the library a few weeks back, I thought it might be worth a second viewing to see if I responded to it a bit more strongly this time. Now I think I'll just kick that can down the road, especially since I know I can find it online. 

But I did watch one DVD each of the three nights -- or days, as you will see -- and not until I reached the end did I realize that an accidental theme had emerged: They were all released in 2018, even if one of them had a festival debut the year before that. 

Friday

First Reformed (2018, Paul Schrader)

I know my #1 movie of 2018 played at film festivals in 2017, and it actually first came on my radar from a "best of 2017" podcast where the podcaster admitted he was honoring it a year before anyone else would have a chance to see it. Since I usually try to disregard the year a movie started playing festivals, I continue to think of this as a 2018 movie. 

It's actually the fourth time I've watched it in total, making it only the second movie (after Tangled and Parasite) that I've watched again since rewatching all my best of the decade contenders in 2019. First Reformed landed at #9 on that list of my 25 best of the 2010s, so I guess it isn't surprising that I'm seeing it for the fourth time in less than three years since my original viewing. 

It may have been my first time watching on DVD, though. The first viewing was MIFF in 2018, the second was an iTunes rental (I'm pretty sure) and I believe the third was on a streaming service, though I'm going to wait on that portion until the end of this little write-up (and even if I saw it on streaming then, it might not still be available that way now). In any case, I did not recognize the DVD menu, which was a nice little repeating sequence involving a particularly memorable swath of the score, playing over an unmoving image of Ethan Hawke, his body split between his pastor's vestments and a suicide vest, with a peaceful external of his church over one shoulder and a toxic waste dump over the other. The clouds move in both images and there are some birds over the church. It's inspired by one of the posters, but it also has a metaphorical value, kind of like the angel and devil on your shoulder, as Reverend Ernst Toller is torn between hope and despair.

One thing I did not specifically remember about First Reformed, despite all my repeat viewings, was that it was shot in the squarish 1.33:1 aspect ratio. I mean, I had to have noted it previously, but the 20 months since my last viewing in October of 2019 were enough for me to forget it. This interested me this time around because it made me realize that at the time, it was my second straight best movie of the year that was shot in 1.33:1 after A Ghost Story in 2017. So in this case watching it on DVD was useful, as the DVD included a disclaimer that this aspect ratio was intended by the filmmaker and did not represent something being broken. 

As with any film you love, you have new takeaways each time out, but since I'm talking about three films in this post I will be brief. These also involve SPOILERS, so you may not wish to read any further if you haven't seen this film.

The ending of First Reformed has always been problematic for people, myself included, though only for about the first two minutes after I finished watching it for the first time, after which I loved it. The apparently "happy" ending of Toller ending up in the arms of Amanda Seyfried's Mary is always something that had multiple interpretations, and people have correctly pointed out it that it may not be "real," as Cedric Kyle's megachurch pastor had previously pulled on the locked doors of the rectory and had been unable to get inside to reach Toller. Magically, Mary appears inside his domicile moments before he's going to drink Drano, materializing almost like a spirit. If Kyle's character could not open the door, why could she?

So this time around, it occurred to me -- though again, I might have had this thought previously and just forgotten it -- that maybe he did actually drink the Drano that the film shows him dropping to the ground when he sees Mary. When they embrace and kiss and the camera swirls around them, this could be his "last thought" before dying -- a concept he considers earlier when pondering what Mary's deceased husband Michael thought in the last moments before he shot himself. So in a way, it's a thing of beauty that his last thought his one of hope, of embracing a woman/spirit, even in the darkest hour when he's dying of cancer and dying more immediately of poisoning by household chemicals. When the image of them kissing abruptly cuts off, it could be like that moment the camera abruptly cuts from Tony Soprano at the end of that series -- the lights going out for the last time, in a snap, as he takes two in the back of the head. Of course, that's not the only way to interpret the ending of either of these works of art, but I like that it is one of them.

Free availability on my streaming services: None

Running total: 4-1, DVDs lead

Saturday

Free Solo (2018, Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi & Jimmy Chin) 

Because of an expected streaming viewing of Nobody on Saturday night, I crammed in my DVD viewing in the late afternoon on Saturday. Second use of my USB DVD player on my laptop as I watched in the bedroom. We had to postpone the Nobody viewing and I considered a DVD double feature, but I wasn't in a great mood so I just stuck with the one.

Free Solo was not the reason I wasn't in a great mood. It was terrific.

I watched the previous movie a friend of mine raved about by Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and her husband/cameraman/daredevil, Jimmy Chin, last year. That was Meru, and it was really good. My friend prefers Meru but I'm a Free Solo man myself, just because climbing a rock like El Capitan in Yosemite without a rope is batshit crazy. 

Spoilers to follow.

Although Alex Honnold was the first person to do a free solo climb of El Capitan in June of 2017 -- I guess that's not a spoiler unless you think you might be watching a snuff film -- the feat actually has a cinematic precedent. Yes, all you Trekkies out there will know that none other than James T. Kirk was free-soloing El Capitan at the start of Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, even though William Shatner was 58 years old at the time, and more than a little bit pudgy. In the real world, it takes an exceptionally fit young man of 32, who has practiced the climb with ropes dozens if not hundreds of times, to complete the feat.

So I did have Star Trek on the brain from the start of the viewing, which is all the more reason I found it funny when someone refers to Honnold as "Spock" at one point. This has nothing to do with Star Trek V, mind you -- it's because Honnold is emotionally withdrawn almost to the point of pathology. I thought it was funny, though, that there was this accidental connection. In that scene where Kirk is climbing El Capitan, Spock actually flies up next to him on a jetpack. Talk about your climbing distractions. 

Despite his shortcomings as an empathic creature, and his unwillingness to "maximize his lifespan" as he puts it at one point, Honnold has gotten himself a serious girlfriend. She lets him do what he needs to do -- he wouldn't be partnered up with her if she didn't -- but it's interesting to see how the film explores the danger of what he's doing and its emotional effects on her. 

The wonder of the feat itself is obviously the reason you watch this movie -- the beautiful cinematography, the sheer impossibility of what this man is trying to do -- but the film probably wouldn't be as special as it is if it didn't turn the lens inward on itself. A number of the crew discuss whether they want to be witness to the possible death of this man they have come to love and respect, and yet further, whether something they do in the course of filmmaking -- accidentally knocking rocks loose, crossing his path with one of their ropes -- might be the actual cause of his fatal plummet. Alex himself discusses his own ambivalence of being filmed, whether he wants it at all, or whether being filmed might cause him to take a risk he might not otherwise take. 

Anyway, this is the complete package, and we should all be thankful it had the happy ending it did. Because the movie also tells us how many of history's great free solo climbers have died doing what they love, I couldn't resist checking Wikipedia afterward to see if Alex Honnold had succumbed to that same fate since the film wrapped. Nope, still in one piece -- and now married to his girlfriend in the film, as of last year.

Free availability on my streaming services: Disney+

Running total: 4-2, DVDs lead

Sunday

At Eternity's Gate (2018, Julian Schnabel)

I wrapped up the weekend on Sunday night watching a film about an artist whose story has been a part of two films I've loved in the past few years. 

The first of those chronologically, in my own viewing sequence anyway, was 2017's Loving Vincent, the impossible labor of love that gives us a story shot on film, whose every frame was painted over by individual artists. That gives the final product a lovely watercolor vitality and sense of movement, something that Vincent Van Gogh himself would have dreamed up if he'd been alive today. I've seen it twice now actually, most recently last year.

Then there's Akira Kurosawa's Dreams, which I watched last year, and which features a vignette starring Martin Scorsese as Van Gogh.

Loving Vincent was probably in my mind most as I watched, as a number of the same events and characters appear in both. Ultimately, I think I preferred that film's plot structure of unraveling the mystery of the last few weeks of Van Gogh's life, to this approach of trying to get inside his head and see the world more as the painter did. That speaks more to the strengths of director Julian Schnabel, who made the great The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, which features two of the same actors we see here (Mathieu Amalric and Emmanuelle Seigner). I could tell this was the same director as that film.

And while I found the camerawork, the use of color, and the use of filters to distort that color all to be quite engrossing, the film on the whole did not land for me nearly as strongly, ending up as a 3.5-star experience on Letterboxd. Willem Dafoe is great as Van Gogh -- he robbed an Oscar nomination from someone who got famously snubbed that year, but maybe it wasn't such robbery after all. I also enjoyed that Mads Mikkelsen and Oscar Isaac appeared here, basically in cameos. 

Still, maybe it was being Sunday night after a weekend in self-isolation on top of lockdown, but I found my thoughts drifting during the movie a fair bit. I think it's the type of movie that encourages drifting away into your own thoughts at the best of times -- it's designed to be felt and ruminated on -- but it's not a movie I suspect I will watch a second time.

One thing I found interesting was extratextual. As I was watching Dafoe I took at guess at how old he is, and decided that he was maybe 60. The internet told me he's 65, though he would have been closer to 60 at the time this was filmed. Given the age he is now, it was almost exactly half his lifetime ago when he played Jesus Christ, appropriately at age 33, just as Christ was when he died. That became relevant as I was watching At Eternity's Gate, because Van Gogh mentions Jesus multiple times throughout to multiple characters, and you get the sense he may have been a bit of a Christ figure himself. After all, the location of his gunshot is very similar to that of Christ's abdomen wound, and when he's laid out at the end in his coffin among his works of art, finally being appreciated by the public, the sense of him almost being crucified is impossible to ignore.

Maybe Dafoe is just typecast.

Free availability on my streaming services: Kanopy

Running total: 4-3, DVDs lead

So I think I'll do at least three more nights of this ... there's a chance we'll be out of both lockdown and self-isolation on Thursday, and if that's the case, I need to get out to the theater! A Quiet Place II awaits, among others.

Lockdown DVD Fest: The New Mutants

The New Mutants, my Thursday night viewing in my Lockdown DVD Fest, may not have done a lot for me -- it got better as it went along -- but there was something it definitely did, which aids the goals of this series.

Namely, it proved that the DVD collection at the library is not going to wither away and die, but is still being replenished with new titles.

You may recall that I recently expressed a worry that on my most recent visit to the library, the titles all looked very familiar -- like, they hadn't gotten in anything new in the past year. Which makes a certain amount of sense, as the library spent about half that time closed. 

But The New Mutants gives definitive lie to that concern, as the film was not even released yet a year ago. The theatrical release, or the pandemic equivalent thereof, was last August 28th -- which was already more than two-and-a-half years delayed from its possible original release date given bumps in the road that I won't go into now. It didn't hit home video until November. 

So this is all to the good, in terms of the ongoing viability of DVDs, which I am celebrating during the current extended viewing marathon.

As this is a pretty new DVD, there were no scratches leading to no technical flaws, and one thing that was nice about this DVD compared to the others I've watched this week is that it had a title menu montage of images from the film. That had been standard practice during DVD's heydey, but cheaper DVDs -- like the ones I watched this week, I guess -- usually just have a still image, and would be lucky if they even got any music. The New Mutants had both moving images and a little 30-second clip of ominous score that played on repeat along with the images. I appreciated that.

There were some things I appreciated about the movie as well, including the cast, which features teen and post-teen actors from a lot of popular TV shows, such as Stranger Things (Charlie Heaton) and Game of Thrones (Maisie Williams). Then of course it has Anya Taylor Joy, one of our most watchable young actresses, who is also the star of a popular TV limited series (Queen's Gambit), but that would have only been a twinkle in her eye back when the movie was made. 

It actually reminded me most of another TV show, one whose second season is currently curling my toes. That's The Boys. Each of these "new mutants" discovered their powers in a scenario that was tragic for someone they loved, or maybe, someone they didn't love, but someone who was in close proximity to them. There's a lot of that collateral gore in The Boys. And though I feel like The Boys has the advantage by dealing with superheroes running through people -- sometimes literally -- rather than mutants doing the same, because we've all already seen about ten X-Men movies and don't necessarily find this stuff surprising anymore in that context, it's actually splitting hairs when you come right down to it. I mean, what's the real difference between a mutant and one of The Boys' supes, anyway?

And there's a bit of that great Boys gore here, too. Clearly The New Mutants is meant for a younger audience than The Boys, but that doesn't mean this movie is sanitized. There's a scene where one of the mutants transforms into a werewolf (that's her power) and scratches the hell out of her adversary. Instead of that person being completely fine, that person is totally fucked up, stumbling around while trying to cover serious wounds, and I really thought that was a good detail. 

Another thing I appreciated was that the central romance in the movie was between two women, or girls really, since they are supposed to be teenagers. That's Williams' character and the one played by Blu Hunt. Although studios are becoming more courageous about this nowadays, it really would have seemed extra daring when filming was completed four years ago, in 2017. 

Lastly I thought some of the visual effects were better than I expected them to be for a film that obviously didn't have a huge budget. I say that because it all takes place in one location, an institution where the mutants are housed to contain their powers until they are mature enough to master them. That part of the movie may have been done on the cheap, but the effects are not. There's a giant CGI bear in the finale that looks really cool. 

Given the litany of positive things I just listed about The New Mutants, I guess I liked this movie a little more than I originally thought -- as recently as when I started writing this about a half-hour agao.

Now, this is not a Marvel Studios movie, but it does have the Marvel logo at the beginning as being in association with Marvel, like most of the previous X-Men movies that Fox released. I think these companies are all one now anyway, so it doesn't really matter anymore. But this did lead me to believe I might find this movie on Disney+. Surprisingly, I did not.

Nor did I find it on any of my other streaming services, so that means DVDs now hold a 3-1 lead over streaming in this series in terms of their unique (free) availability to me. 

I haven't yet decided whether I'm going to continue this series unabated through the weekend nights. However, I may, as we found out that our COVID self-isolation may be able to end next Thursday if all goes well and we get a second negative test on Wednesday. (Oops, burying the lede -- all four of us tested negative yesterday.)

They've backdated our 14 days' isolation to the date of our possible exposure, when we had assumed it would be from the date we were told to self-isolate. So if it does end next Thursday, that might be a good ending point for this series, and it means I might want to watch more DVDs over the weekend and not take a break after all.

In any case, I might combine them all into one weekend post if I do. I have one other blog post pending and I can't just drop everything else for a full two weeks, now can I? 

Lockdown DVD Fest: The Secret of Roan Inish

On Night #3 of my Lockdown DVD Fest, "lockdown" became "self-isolation."

The difference? In the former, you can leave your house to go grocery shopping, for exercise, to go to the doctor's, or for essential work.

In the latter, you can't leave your house at all.

Don't worry, we're all fine in my family -- or think we are, at least. But on Wednesday night, we received a text from the department of health saying that we had been identified as close contacts of a positive COVID-19 case. That means we have to self-isolate for the next 14 days.

It didn't come as a huge surprise, given the announcement we'd received via email the day before: our kids' primary school would be closed until further notice due to a positive COVID-19 case. It was basically closed anyway because the kids are in remote learning this week, but now not even the children of essential workers or others with special exemptions are allowed to go there. The school has to be deep-cleaned before it can re-open.

We knew our local mall had been identified as a hotspot, so it's not a surprise someone in our neighborhood might have been exposed. Turns out, it was someone in my 10-year-old's fifth grade class -- or at least, in fifth grade. We learned that the families of all fifth graders, not to mention the families of all preps, received this same text from the department of health. Sounds like one family with a kid in both year levels. 

It's a big school. That's a lot of families. It really suggests that this statewide lockdown is not going to end in the near future (it's already been formally extended a week). For us, it's definitely not going to end for another 14 days.

I should say, there is exactly one reason we can leave the house: to go get our own COVID tests. Which we will do later today. Though we have reason to be optimistic there, as my wife was feeling unwell on Monday and went to get herself tested without even knowing about any of this. She was negative. 

All this means I can just keep doing this DVD Fest. I still have a good ten DVDs from the library I haven't watched, including a couple that would be repeat viewings. 

I had planned to stop after four nights initially, and shift into my more regular streaming viewing on the weekend. Then when I learned there was a good chance of extending the lockdown, I thought I'd incorporate the weeknights next week as well. Now ... well, I think I'll just keep going until I watch all the DVDs. 

I mean, there's no penalty for returning a DVD to the library unwatched, of course. That's so absurd that I probably didn't even need to write the previous sentence. 

But I was thinking that there has probably never been a time since I've been in Australia that I've watched all the DVDs I borrowed from the library in one visit. They let you take out up to 50 DVDs at one time, and I've sometimes taken more than 20. So it might be a fun little exercise.

Actually, I just realized the exception to that: last year. I had a half-dozen DVDs out from the library when the pandemic started, and their due date was basically stretched out to infinity as a result of the libraries being closed. So I did work through all of those eventually, before finally returning them in November or something.

But a large number of DVDs in a relatively short amount of time? Haven't done that yet. As far as I know these are still due back on June 15th, though of course I can renew them online, and of course that'll still be too soon for me to return them in person.

So for now, let's just keep on going.

And on Wednesday night I watched The Secret of Roan Inish, the John Sayles film from 1994. 

This is a movie I've heard praised on a number of occasions, and have been meaning to see for years. But I have to say, I got off to a bit of a bad start with it. I was at first distracted by what I thought of as some really murky cinematography, which came as a particular surprise since I'd seen the name Haskell Wexler in the opening credits. There's a lot of mood-setting mist/fog in this film, and though it does set the mood, it also reduces the crispness of the images -- at least compared to something like Days of Heaven, which may be Wexler's crowning achievement. Actually I see that he was not considered to be the lead cinematographer on that film, but rather an "additional cinematographer." In any case, my expectations were for something different.

That distraction led me to become a bit disoriented in the plot when I was not paying close enough attention to absorb all the dialogue, with its heavy Irish accents and its slightly antiquated turns of phrase (the film is set in 1946).

Oh, and then there was something else to distract me: A reminder of the shortcomings of the medium itself.

That's right, in the film's first ten minutes, I had two minor technical glitches, neither of which would have happened with streaming.

One was an issue that's unique to my DVD player, which has otherwise been a stalwart piece of equipment in the eight years that we've owned it. There's a funny quirk this DVD player has, every once in a great while, where if you pause the movie, the screen goes black. And when you unpause it, you can still hear the audio, but you can't see the picture. The only way to fix the issue is to restart the DVD player, which fixes it 100% of the time. However, you lose about a minute in the whole process, since you need to wait until you see the "No signal" sign on the screen before you can restart the player.

Then there was an occurrence of the defect that can affect any DVD, which is that it's scratched. At about the 9:50 mark of the movie, the image got stuck and would not unstick itself. The only way for me to fix it was to forward it about 30 seconds. Who knows if I missed anything really crucial in those 30 seconds. Fortunately, the issue did not recur. (I was thinking how it would make a funny component of this series if the only way to finish a viewing I started on DVD was to find it on streaming, but that hasn't been the case -- yet anyway.)

As I am already running pretty long here, I won't expend a lot of words on my feelings on the rest of the movie. I will say that after a slow start it did pick up for me, so that ultimately it landed as a solid 3.5 stars. Still, I think this is a five-star movie for some people. Who knows if it could have been for me under other circumstances. 

I think my favorite element of this bit of magical realism was the animal training. Seals factor heavily into this film's folklore, as the characters have selkies in their family. I have never seen such personality in a bunch of seals, looking at the characters with an eternal wisdom in their eyes, popping their heads out of the water in a sort of amusing syncopation, and undulating along the land to get back to the water. I could probably watch those seals ducking and darting out of the mist and water for a full 90 minutes themselves.

Before we go: Could I have watched The Secret of Roan Inish on streaming?

For the first time in this series, the answer is yes. In fact, it's not only yes, it's two times yes.

I could have watched the movie on either Amazon or Kanopy. And if I'd done so, I wouldn't have missed those glitched out 30 seconds. (Maybe the cinematography would have even looked better, who knows.)

So I guess, if you are keeping a running total for this series, DVD's lead has been trimmed to 2-1. 

Okay, night #4 is Thursday night, which is Weekend Adjacent Night, so I'll go for something -- well, I can't say more escapist, because The Secret of Roan Inish is pretty escapist. Something "easier" than the movies so far in this series, anyway. 

Lockdown DVD Fest: Papillon

I said I needed to reacquaint myself with my DVD player, but I didn't specify which one.

And I've got one that I have barely any acquaintance with at all.

If you're late to the party -- that would be one day late -- I've decided to use this (hopefully only) week of lockdown in Victoria to have a little festival of movies borrowed from the library on DVD, one per night, as a chance to appreciate DVDs again, before they stop being available at all.

On night #2 -- actually, afternoon #2 -- I decided to watch Franklin J. Schaffner's Papillon, a movie I knew only from hearing its title here and there. And because it's 145 minutes long, I knew I wouldn't get in the whole thing after dinner. My pattern is to fall asleep during 90-minute movies, so I had to get an early start.

Fortunately, one of my lockdown traditions from last year has returned, which is garage nap time after work. 

We've got a little beanbag setup in our garage, and that's a good place to go where I know I won't be bothered. I nestle in and close my eyes, with a sleeping bag to protect me from the encroaching cold. (June 1st is the first day of winter in Australia, after all -- they switch seasons on the first of the month down here.) The kids are watching TV (another lockdown allowance) so I know they won't come looking for me.

Now, whether I choose to actually spend that time napping or not is up to me. On Tuesday afternoon, I chose to use that time watching the first hour of Papillon, to leave me a far more easily digestible chunk for the evening hours.

This is where the second DVD player comes in.

It's actually a USB DVD drive I can connect to my computer, which I bought along with my new laptop back in October or thereabouts, because this is the first computer I've owned without a built-in CD/DVD drive since before that was a thing. But as you might expect, I've barely used it. I burned a CD or two on it, but then it's just sat among my other peripherals, waiting for its next chance to be of use. 

Of course, this also meant I had to install a DVD viewer. It annoys me that Windows no longer has a decent DVD viewer that comes as part of the package. You used to be able to play movies through Windows Media Player, but for some reason that no longer seems possible. Anyway, I couldn't figure it out.

I first installed Nero DVD Player, but I think this software is some kind of scam. It kept wanting me to pay for something, even though it was billed as free. It played the movie, but it played it with lags about every two seconds, which I suspected is some kind of built-in defect that you can only fix by paying the $11.99 or whatever they wanted from me. Screw that noise. 

So then I figured out what the DVD viewer I had on my last computer was, VLC Media Player, with the orange traffic cone as its icon for some reason. This worked great. 

I did have a little bit of a nap when the warmth and coziness of the beanbag-sleeping bag combo was too much to resist, but I got through that first hour before I had to start preparing dinner for the kids, and finished up the rest of it by 10:30 on my regular DVD player in the living room.

On to the movie itself.

It seems to me that they used to make movies about surviving the prison experience a lot more than they do now. They still make them, but they no longer feature the biggest stars, they no longer play on the highest number of screens, and they certainly no longer run for nearly two-and-a-half hours. I could speculate on the reasons for that change, but it would only be speculation. My suspicion is people are no longer as excited to watch people suffering through miserable conditions and solitary confinement as they were when movies like Stalag 17, The Great Escape and The Bridge on the River Kwai were our biggest entertainments.

Actually the prison movie I got the most vibes from in Papillon was Cool Hand Luke, which had already been out six years when Papillon was released in 1973, the year of my birth. That movie is about breaking down a cocksure prisoner into a shell of his former self, and so is this one. I still give Paul Newman the edge in the star wattage department over Steve McQueen, but McQueen did really surprise me here.

Namely, I had always thought McQueen was more of a movie star than an actor, but he does some tremendous acting here. There's a scene where McQueen, the title character, is coming to the end of two years of solitary confinement in a French Guiana penal colony, and he's just come fully untethered from his sanity. He's trying to tell the guards that he just can't remember the name of the person who sent him the coconuts early on -- that would be Dustin Hoffman's Louis Dega, and the guards are desperate to get this information in order to spread the punishment around (up to and including decapitation in the town square). It might be a ruse, or it might really be that Papillon has lost it -- McQueen seems to go full method in this scene, and is really living through his character's deprivation and loss of selfhood. I was really impressed.

I haven't seen a ton of McQueen movies, but I always thought of him more as a gruff tough guy, a Clint Eastwood, who could (almost) never show any vulnerability. Not only does he show a lot of it here, but he's actually really soft-spoken, almost sounding a bit square in parts.

Papillon reminded me of some other movies than the ones already mentioned, including one that hadn't come out yet, making me wonder if that movie borrowed from this one. But when I googled Raiders of the Lost Ark and Papillon, I didn't get much in the way of results, even though there's a scene here where a fleeing companion of Papillon's get spiked through the chest by a booby trap in the Honduran jungle, one that reminded me very much of the one that gets Forrestal in Raiders. The fact that they are also pursued by natives whistling blow darts at them completed the comparison.

Speaking of natives, I even got a little bit of a Mutiny on the Bounty vibe here, as Papillon at one point spends some number of wonderful days in a Honduran paradise with a native woman, one he is loath to leave. The movie took me by surprise again in this spot as it goes a good ten minutes without dialogue.

I thought Papillon was solid but it's not a special favorite of mine. I was glad to see it though, as I have not been watching a lot of older movies this year outside of the ones I've watched for various viewing series where it has been assigned to me, or I've assigned it to myself.

Now, lest I forget the other component of this "series": Could I have gotten it on any of my streaming services?

I knew Netflix would be a no; they rarely have anything from before the year 2000 these days. But so too were Stan, Amazon, Kanopy, and just to be exhaustive, Disney+. So that makes us 2-for-2 on DVD movies I watched that I couldn't have gotten (for free) anywhere else.

Night #3 should be a proper night, as the movie I have in mind will be shorter, and will not require my computer in any way, shape or form. 

Lockdown DVD Fest: The Wife

If you've read my recent posts, you know that I've been struggling to reacquaint myself with my DVD player. I keep meaning to, then I keep watching the movies I've identified to watch on DVD on streaming instead.

You may not know, though I think I did mention it, that we are in another hard lockdown here in Melbourne. It's supposed to only last for a week, but the number of new COVID cases from unknown sources have made a projected Thursday night end to the restrictions an uncertainty.

Time to kill two birds with one stone.

I decided this week, while I can't go out and do anything else, I will hold a little festival where I watch only movies on DVD -- and only ones I took out from the library, since I've revisited enough movies recently that my own collection is not currently crying out to me.

Here's the catch: Afterward, and only afterward, I will check to see if I could have watched the same movie on streaming. I've got five services to choose from, if you count Kanopy. 

That'll help me at least determine how necessary these DVDs still are. Pretty necessary, I hope, but we'll see.

There won't be a theme to what I watch, other than having them in the house on DVD, but since I have set this down as its own distinct exercise, it seems worthwhile to write a little bit about each here on the blog. Without being able to go out, I should have the time to do that too, though I'll have to juggle my level of stamina after finishing each night with the likelihood that I won't have time to knock one of these out at work, like I once did years ago.

So far so good on the first night, as I watched the 100-minute The Wife, and have written as much as you've read so far before 11:30. It won't be as easy every night, especially on nights my own wife is not feeling under the weather as she is tonight, and watches something with me before I can get a chance to get to it.

The Wife is one of those movies you're supposed to never bother making time for. Although it did garner an Oscar nomination for Glenn Close a couple years back, word was that it was one of those movies we see quite often, especially in the best actress category: only worth seeing for the performance of the lead actress. (I haven't seen it so I can't attest to its quality, but Pieces of a Woman might be an example of that from this past year.)

That's not to say that seeing a movie that only has a great acting performance to vouch for it is a worthless exercise, and it would be particularly uncharitable to knock it down a notch because that performance was given by a woman. But I can only speak to personal historical trends, which is that movies like this have ceased to become a priority once I miss them in the year of their release. It's only more the case with actresses because it generally seems to be that men get nominated from the year's most celebrated films, and women often don't. 

And so browsing the DVD shelves at the local library is a good excuse to reintroduce a film like The Wife as a priority, and I'm really glad I did.

Simply put, this is not the film I was expecting it to be. I won't tell you exactly how it differed from my expectations because there are some surprises in this film that are worth keeping shrouded. I will say, however, that I did not expect the film to have much in the way of narrative flair, simply because of how it was dismissed as middling beyond Close's performance.

Her performance is quite good, but it's not nearly the only thing to recommend The Wife. In fact, it has profound themes to consider about the role of a spouse, of either gender, in the life of a creative genius, movie star or other celebrated artist. It has a lot of thoughts on the teamwork involved in this type of partnership, both metaphorical and literal, and on the diminishing effect of this person's genius on other family members -- children in addition to spouses. It also considers the appetites of a great artist, and even though I am only just becoming familiar with the works of Philip Roth from having read one of his novels last year, I could recognize that Jonathan Pryce's Nobel Prize winner for literature was in part inspired by Roth. In fact, getting a glimpse at the inner workings of the Nobel Prize, specifically its awards ceremony, might have been reason enough to see the film.

I won't go on at length about The Wife as it's now 11:37 and I want to go to bed. Besides, that's not the type of blog series, however brief, this is. Maybe I'll have a longer discussion about other films I watch this week, especially if they don't have parts I want to keep from you because I want you to consume them on your own for the first time when you see the film.

Plus, we have other business to get to: Whether this film would have been available to me in any other way, or whether I had to watch the DVD to see this.

Now, I'm not talking about digital rental. That's an option with most movies. I don't consider that a one-for-one swap out with watching a DVD I borrowed for free from the library, because there's a cost associated with it. And yes, I can see that I could have rented The Wife on iTunes, if I'd been keen to part with my hard-earned $3.99.

But I consider renting from iTunes to be something you do when you know for sure you want to see a particular film on a particular night and it is not available any other way. It's not great for watching something you choose to view opportunistically, like The Wife.

And I checked Netflix, I checked Stan, I checked Amazon, I checked Kanopy, and heck, I even checked Disney+, given my recent discovery of the unexpectedly wide array of content that's available on that particular service.

And I can tell you that DVDs do still matter. I could not find The Wife on any of them.

Here's hoping that night 2 has the same outcome, both in terms of availability and in terms of quality, though The Wife has given that film a tough act to follow.