Quarantine Battles: 2019 rematch

Did I need to watch Parasite for a third time within the first year that I'd seen it? That anyone had seen it, since the 2019 Cannes Film Festival, at which it debuted and claimed top prize, didn't start until last May 14th, with Parasite's first showing coming a week after that?

Probably not. But it sure was fun.

Even though Parasite is no longer "my movie" -- an honor I could claim for a while, as I was the first person I knew who had seen it, back at the end of last June, three months before it debuted in the U.S. -- it's still my #1 of last year, and will always, therefore, by one of "my" movies. In that year's time, Parasite has taken the world by storm, most recently (but probably least consequentially) capping off its award win streak by taking home top honors in the 64-movie Filmspotting Madness best of the 2010s tournament, where it beat Mad Max: Fury Road as the best of the decade according to the podcast's listeners.

Even with all that, though, recently I haven't been sure if it was even my best of last year. Which makes a good segue into the three reasons I watched Parasite with my wife on Sunday night:

1) It was for free on our Australian streaming service Stan, which was too much to resist;

2) My second viewing was on a plane, and I had to miss the last ten minutes due to the fact that we were disembarking; and

3) I thought it was time to decide whether or not it was actually better than Portrait of a Lady on Fire.

And so, welcome to my first (and possibly last) installment in Quarantine Battles, where I watch two movies in close succession that have an equal claim to some particular honor, to see which one comes out on top.

Parasite may have bested Mad Max: Fury Road in the Filmspotting tournament, but in my own personal rankings for 2019, it bested Portrait of a Lady on Fire. My #2 was in a tricky position, though, having been seen by me only two weeks before I closed my list. If it hadn't had such stiff competition on the top, it might have been my #1 -- and might have deserved to scale the heights even with such a formidable opponent.

I actually intended to watch Parasite the previous Sunday, as it would have given me back-to-back viewings on consecutive nights, creating the type of proximity that would have made the movies' merits, both independently and in relation to each other, abundantly clear. That was more or less how I handled the final showdown of my own best of the decade, watching Tangled and Spring Breakers as a double feature on the second-to-last night of last year. But my wife, noticing that I was about to start watching, asked me not to leave her out of the Parasite viewing, which would be her second. I agreed to postpone to her proposed alternative time the following Sunday night.

Whether separated by one night or eight, I think I would have reached the same conclusion, which is:

It's still Parasite.

The last time I watched a movie three times within the first year I'd seen it -- the third time also with my wife -- it was Creed in 2015/2016. In that case I saw it twice a week apart in the theater, my affection still holding strong after the second viewing -- strong enough that it came in only behind Inside Out as my favorite of the year. The third viewing, though, knocked it down a peg. It was once too many in such a short amount of time.

I worried the same might be true of Parasite, even with the compromised second plane viewing. The fact that it wasn't, and that I watched it in a state of perpetual thrills at the wonder of Bong's filmmaking, left little doubt that it was still just a hair better than Portrait.

You should have no doubt that Portrait was still worthy of that #2 spot. I loved watching it again and I think I may have actually cried in one additional spot than I did the first time. C'est magnifique.

I've seen all three of my top three of 2019 in the past month, in fact, with #3 Vivairum in there as well. All still maintain their relative rankings, which I guess is an unsurprising outcome given that it's only been three-and-a-half months since I placed them in their respective spots.

But Parasite ... well, there's the reason it's the most agreed upon best film of the year in as long as I can remember.

I guess I should think of my next possible Quarantine Battle, as it's not cool to introduce a possible recurring feature and then never do it again.

But we got a number of new high-profile cases of coronavirus just in the past few days in Victoria -- some from a school, some from a meat-packing plant -- so something tells me I don't need to hurry.

Going for the Nova endurance record

I saw Parasite at Cinema Nova in Carlton on June 27^th, 2019, on the first night of its release.

That was 237 days ago. It’s still playing.

On two screens.

This isn’t 1977, when Star Wars played in cinemas for a full year (actually, 44 weeks) because there was no other way to see it. No, it’s 2020, when some movies debut on streaming services the same day as their theatrical release, and even when they don’t, they sometimes have less than two months between their theatrical release date and video premiere.

Parasite was an exception to that rule in Australia. Because the movie was not released in the U.S. until September, its Australian debut on physical media was delayed until just two weeks ago – a week later than it debuted on physical media in the U.S., in fact. I watched it on the plane (for second time) back in November, but unless you were taking a flight somewhere, you were out of luck.

Fortunately, Cinema Nova has been there to oblige.

I’m pretty sure it dropped at some point down to 1-2 screenings a day, but after the Academy Awards, Parasite has come back in full force, finally prompting the few people who haven’t seen it to go ahead and do so. Even though it is now available for purchase, and presumably, for rental. And even though there is now also a black and white version to watch in some cinemas.

I can’t say whether this is actually a modern-day record for Nova, because there’s no easy way to research how long they’ve held certain films playing. I can say that having something like 16 screens (which is gigantic for an arthouse theater) has allowed them to continue allocating one screen to Parasite long after other cinemas had stopped doing so. It’s not unprecedented for a popular film to still be playing at Nova four or five months after its initial release, but eight months is a different story. If the ticket sales support it, I suppose Nova will do it.

Even if it's not a record, you’ve got a unique case with Parasite that would create the conditions for possibly setting one. First, it a word-of-mouth hit that slowly built support and viewers over the duration of its initial several months at Nova. Just at the moment that you’d expect that phenomenon to start petering out, Parasite was released in the U.S., leading to a renewed round of critical attention that of course makes its way over here, generating more interest and more viewers. At the time you might expect that bump to peter out, critics released their best-of-the-year lists, many of which were topped by Parasite. Cue more viewers. Finally you have its Oscar nominations and Oscar wins. Who knows how much longer the film will float along on the current wave.

It’s one of the things I love about Nova, and what it says about independent movie fans and cinephiles in this area, possibly even in Australia in general. It says, or certainly implies, that such people recognize the value of seeing movies on the big screen, even when they have small screen alternatives. It suggests that while they might not get to a movie on its first or second weekend, they certainly have the intention of doing so eventually. It also suggests a fair number of repeat viewers.

And as for the theater itself, it shows that there is a certain patience to their approach, a hesitation to jettison something for the next shiny new thing, just because some model might forecast an expected downturn in the movie’s profitability. There were probably times in, say, late November, when its ticket sales were flagging, when somebody thought about removing it. But ultimately no one did, and lo and behold, here it still is the following February – going stronger than ever, if we are to believe that the people allocating the screening spaces are doing it based on actual ticket sales and not just expected demand. I’m not sure if Parasite was ever playing on two screens at Nova before now.

As a sign of how they're doubling down, I noticed last night that the Parasite poster had again assumed a place of prominence among those you see as you take the escalator up to the lobby. Usually these are reserved for brand spanking new releases or movies that have not even come out yet. 

Maybe it would have been smarter to hold this post until I can tell how long Parasite will ultimately last. But I likely would have forgotten to pay attention to that. If I remember, I’ll update you with the final tally once I notice Parasite falling off the slate on an upcoming Thursday.

Until then, it continues to set records -- both officially, at the Oscars, and unofficially, at the arthouse theaters who adore it.

By the end of the night, I could speak Korean

Surprises really can come true.

I wrote an entire post yesterday about the obstacles Parasite had to overcome to win best picture, but sometimes, Hollywood does the right thing.

Instead of celebrating itself, sometimes Hollywood just chooses the best damn movie that got made. And this may be the first ever that had zero to do with Hollywood.

Yeah, Bong Joon-ho has made films that were primarily in English with big Hollywood stars, and he also had a deal with Netflix, though I guess that was just for one movie. But the movie that won him not one golden statue, but four, was the one exclusively in his native tongue, starring exclusively actors with his own skin color.

And it became the first ever best picture winner in a language other than English.

It's really astonishing.

For me, it marks only the third time my #1 movie of the year has been named best picture, as Parasite follows on the heels of Titanic (1997) and Birdman (2014).

As Bong kept getting up again, and again, and again, and kept finding ever more charming ways to express himself, I wondered if his translator was ever going to get stressed out about him going on too long for her to be able to reproduce all the words he'd said. And who knows if she did or not. The subject of this post notwithstanding, I don't actually speak Korean.

But for one night, Hollywood did. Hollywood said "Screw all these try-hards who are producing the type of movie they think we want to recognize. What we want to recognize is quality."

And for one night, they did.

As I like to do every year after I finish the Oscars, watched on delay here in Australia, I'm going to throw in some general thoughts and bullet points about the show, having not read any recap stories and having no idea if these thoughts are original to me or if I'm just the 403rd person in your Twitter feed to release them into the world. Of course, I'm not in your Twitter feed, but you get what I'm saying.

So, here goes ...

- At first I didn't think I knew who either of the singers were in the opening number, which made me feel old. But after a few moments I said to my wife (who was still watching at this point, and continued to do so for exactly two awards), "I think that's Janelle Monae." Whew! Less old. But I still didn't know who the other guy was. (His name is Billy Porter, which I might have known if I watched the TV show Pose.)

- Why did Brad Pitt and Al Pacino both decide to wear their hair like lion manes? There were other options.

- I thought it was kind of a weird decision to present the Oscar for best animated feature before best animated short. But they did the same thing with the documentaries so at least they were consistent.

- I thought the Frozen II song with all the foreign language singers was a good choice, especially with how the evening ended up winding down. And that all the jokes about Idina Menzel landed.

- Parasite wins best original screenplay! There's something happening here ... what it is ain't exactly clear.

- What the hell was Timothee Chalamet wearing? If it was a non-binary outfit, then I rescind my befuddlement.

- Taika Waititi wins best adapted screenplay? That could actually be the biggest surprise of the night.

- The show was pretty flat, I thought, before Maya Rudolph and Kristen Wiig came out. I thought they loosened things up.

- I thought the best documentary winners might thank the Obamas. They did not.

- For some reason I thought that Laura Dern had already won an Oscar. When I realized she hadn't, it made me even less worried that my girl Florence Pugh did not take home the statue. She will take home at least three in the future.

- I don't really get the reason for the Eminem song but at least it was well performed. I imagine it took a lot of good directing to get people on camera who had the right reaction to it. Unfortunately, at one point they also got Martin Scorsese.

- I figured Eminem might be the one to drop an f-bomb, but instead, it was Ray Romano. Ray Romano??

- Randy Newman looks old. But he can still perform.

- The recap rap by Utkarsh Ambudkar was tight, and probably my favorite segment in the whole show.

- Will Ferrell and Julia Louis Dreyfus were the best comedy duo. Everything they did worked, including the confusion over whether they were wearing earpieces or not.

- Was Cynthia Erivo dressed as an Oscar? I knew she could sing from Bad Times at the El Royale, but I didn't know she was also a songwriter. Talent.

- I groaned when James Corden and Rebel Wilson came out dressed as cats, but it was appropriately self-deprecating, and the bit with them playing with microphone was great, though I suspect unrehearsed -- it looked like Wilson was planning to get on with reading the winner and had even started speaking when Corden had a moment of inspiration.

- Bong said he was ready to get drinking, which was great, but he still had two more awards to accept.

- Kellie Marie Tran wins good sport of the evening by showing up to introduce a presenter and seeming like she was genuinely having a great time and not burdened by great psychological baggage over the way she's been treated. The producers returned the favor by including her multiple times in the clips that played over John Williams' nominated score. I hope she has a terrific life, whether in front of the cameras or not.

- I thought it was very strange that Joker was scored by a woman. Maybe Todd Phillips doesn't hate them after all?

- As the show neared the end, it became more and more clear: The Irishman is the only best picture nominee that is not going to win anything.

- Bong honoring the other directors was touching and lovely, and I didn't envy him that he had to figure out how to say something nice about Todd Phillips.

- Wait, Joaquin Phoenix didn't win an Oscar for Gladiator? How have I thought he did for the past 20 years? (Benicio del Toro did for Traffic that year.) Okay, not so upset about that one either. Especially after he gave one of the most interesting and impassioned Oscar speeches I've ever heard, even though I was prepared to cringe at any moment if he went off the rails into insanity.

- The only thing that tainted the win by Parasite, and only ever so slightly, was the fact that the final set of speeches was pretty discombobulated in comparison to what Bong had given us before then. Jane Fonda seemed unsure what she was supposed to do. And by the way, how the hell is Jane Fonda 82 years old? She looks 62.

- This BP winner gets us back to rhyming following two years in which the streak was broken. You had Spotlight, then Moonlight, now Parasite.

- Was there not a single winner played off the stage by the orchestra this year?

After this triumph, the Oscars can give top honors to five Green Books in a row and they'll still have this to fall back on.

Well done, Academy. Pat yourself on the back.

For your consideration: Parasite

Tonight the Oscars will televise -- about halfway through my workday, so around lunchtime I will stop paying attention to the interwebs and then watch them when I get home.

I don't expect a lot of surprises, but then again, can you actually expect a surprise?

A surprise I think could happen is that Parasite could win best picture. I don't expect it to happen, but then again, can you actually expect a surprise?

Maybe it won't have been such a surprise if it does happen. It feels like the consensus among critics, and even maybe among audiences, as the best and most interesting film of the year. I've written that this is the closest my tastes have aligned to the larger critical community since There Will Be Blood in 2007, though even that year, many critics felt that No Country for Old Men was the worthier selection. I don't know that Parasite has a direct competitor in the best picture nominees as far as the critics are concerned.

This, however, does not mean it has that good of a shot at winning. The critical favorite is usually the bridesmaid, not the bride, with countless examples dating as far back as Citizen Kane. More recently, films like L.A. Confidential, The Social Network and Roma are prominent instances of this, and Parasite certainly seems poised to become just the latest.

But Parasite shares something in common with Roma, and now that it has happened two years in a row, maybe the necessary critical mass is building to push it over the top.

For the second straight year, a film entirely in a foreign language has been nominated for best picture. If Academy voters were testing the waters last year with how they felt about the proposition, with Roma presumably falling just short of Green Book, maybe this year they are ready to take the plunge.

It would be an extraordinary feat if it happened. A film entirely in a foreign language has never won best picture, and looking at the list of past winners, only The Last Emperor has any significant portion of the film that's not in English. That also marks one of the few best picture nominees, and certainly winners, that has significantly Asian subject matter, a trait it also has in common with Parasite.

To get a sense of how rare both of these things are, I went back and reviewed the entire history of nominees in the best picture category. As far as I could tell, these were the only best picture nominees that did either of these things, if you don't include films that had some English, and films about Americans in Asia:

Foreign language:
The Emigrants (1972) - Swedish
Cries and Whispers (1973) - Swedish
Il Postino (1995) - Italian
Life is Beautiful (1998) - Italian
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) - Mandarin
Letters from Iwo Jima (2006) - Japanese
Amour (2012) - French
Roma (2018) - Spanish

Asian subject matter:
The Last Emperor (1987)
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)
Letters from Iwo Jima (2005)

I'm not familiar at a glance with all the movies nominated for best picture over the years -- like, really not familiar with some of them -- but I think it's a safe assumption that there were few, if any, foreign language nominees or nominees about Asia in the vast wasteland of mediocre studio pictures that were nominated prior to 1944, when the Oscars moved to only five nominees per year. But even if I did miss one or two, you get the idea about the relative scarcity of such nominees.

And even in the nominees above, some should get asterisks, such as Letters from Iwo Jima. I love that film, and I continue to think of it as having an incredibly high degree of difficulty for director Clint Eastwood, as it was not in his native language. Still, it had an American imprint on it, which certainly made it easier for Oscar voters to recognize.

Given what Parasite is up against, historically, it does make it a tall order to think of it walking away with the evening's top statue tonight. But maybe that just means it's time. Maybe these other films have reached the brink of winning top honors in order to pave the way for Parasite.

You'll notice this post has spent no time on Parasite's actual qualities as a film, the things it does that earns its status as the best film of the year. That's because I've done that elsewhere on this blog. You know I consider it worthy as I named it my #1 movie of 2019. And you've probably seen it for yourself, so you are familiar with its many strengths.

No, today I am talking directly to the Academy -- very belatedly, of course, and entirely in a rhetorical way. That best picture winner is already in that envelope ready to hand to whoever is going to read it (um, let's say that's ... Barbra Streisand. Sure, why not?). Not that my wee little blog would ever play much of a role in changing any of the minds of these people, many of whom are set in their ways, leading to predictable winners year in and year out.

But as I've said in the past few days, there are surprises, like when Moonlight upset presumed favorite La La Land to win, just a few short years ago, with many of these same voters voting.

I don't expect it to happen, but then again, can you actually expect a surprise?

Consuming 2019's final resources

Another year, another 146 movies through my eyeballs and into my brain.

The Oscar nominations have just been announced -- or are about to be, depending on when I actually click the "Publish" button on this post -- so that means, per a tradition that dates back more than 20 years, it's time for me to come clean about what I loved and what I didn't love in 2019.

My 146 movies is five short of my all-time record, but I had nine fewer days to watch movies this year before the Oscar nominations were announced. Having not one, but two international flights to America this year got me within striking distance, but I was never going to realistically shoot for that record. I'm surprised I got even this close.

I have to admit, I thought 2019 was not shaping up to be a very strong year at the movies. When I recorded this podcast -- which I am now happy to promote as something you should listen to -- I said as much, and thought my top five did not include exclusively movies I loved unreservedly.

Well, since that recording, two new movies have entered my top five, and three my top ten. That's more like it. (And on a side note, darn it that the world demands end-of-year opinions before I'm fully ready to give them!)

It's no 2010 or 2013 -- great years whose praises you will see sung later this week on this blog -- but 2019 ended up being pretty darn cool in the end. Not a bad way for a decade to go out.

But before we get to my top ten, my bottom five and the whole darn list, here's the five movies I most regret not being able to see in time to rank them, because they were not yet accessible to me in Australia:

5) Bombshell
4) Harriet
3) A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood
2) Waves
1) Uncut Gems

Uncut Gems teased me because it is being distributed by Netflix internationally -- but not until the end of this month.

Okay!

10. Jojo Rabbit - There are two different types of people who dislike Jojo Rabbit: 1) The people who are offended by what it's trying to do, and 2) The people who just don't think it does it very well. Their criticisms were in my mind as I allowed this to eke into my top ten. But then I thought, "It only matters what I think." And I think Jojo Rabbit made me laugh more than almost any film this year, without cheapening its tricky agenda to criticize fascism while also making Adolf Hitler a figure of fun. If anyone could pull it off, it was Taika Waititi -- both as an actor and a director. He's fast becoming one of my favorite filmmakers after two films I cherish this past decade, What We Do in the Shadows and Thor: Ragnarok, and he finishes off the decade with his first entry into my top ten, in what I thought was supposed to be a modest palette cleanser between Thor movies. Instead Waititi offered a thoughtful and sometimes hilarious look at a time when German citizens made bad choices because they didn't understand they were following a monster, and the redemption of one of those citizens, the ten-year-old boy of the title. That he has Hitler as an imaginary friend is a good way of encapsulating the hero worship people, especially young people, can feel toward someone who has been wrongly introduced to them as worthy of that worship, which has a particularly powerful modern-day resonance. Jojo's maturation into a person who would not only help a Jewish girl survive in his crawlspace, but tell Hitler to go fuck himself, is a journey I want to watch any day. Waititi's sort of Wes Anderson stylings (a positive, not a negative for me) and engaging performances across the board, particularly Scarlett Johansson and Thomasin Mckenzie, just make this all the more top ten worthy. (Read my full review here.)

9. I Lost My Body - Animation keeps up its streak of five straight years with a movie in my top ten with this quirky yet profound French movie I saw at MIFF. Yes, it's about a severed hand trying to find its way back to its owner. Yes, that conceit is sometimes played for laughs, though of the extremely tasteful variety. (Who said the French only laugh at broad things like Jerry Lewis?) More often, this is an existential contemplation of the journeys we all go on in life, whether we are a severed hand or the owner of that hand. It's really a parallel story of the two of them, as that owner is an early twentysomething named Naoufel, a pizza deliveryman who was orphaned when he was younger and now lives with his uncle. He meets and falls in love with a girl entirely through a conversation he has with her over an intercom while stuck in her lobby, delivering her a pizza that's very late. The story covers a bunch of twists and turns and also contains flashbacks to his youth, before his parents died. It considers themes of fate vs. free will and also our need to connect with others. I watched Jeremy Clapin's film in a happy place that only non-traditional animated fare can deliver to us, as it's increasingly rare for the resources involved in animated movies to be earmarked for a story aimed at adults. Then again, my kids could watch this and I think they might really like it, though we'd have to get the (gasp!) English language dub.

8. Avengers: Endgame - And an MCU movie finally makes it into my top ten. After direct competitors (Wonder Woman) and tangential properties (Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse) found spots here the two previous years, the MCU gets a kind of "career achievement award" in 2019. That's not to say I don't love this movie -- I do -- but I may love Infinity War and Thor: Ragnarok just a little bit more, only they had to settle for spots just outside the top ten in more competitive years overall. Anyway, this was a fitting conclusion to all the movies since Iron Man, but what I love about it is not really the conclusion. I knew I was in the presence of something unique for its kind in the first hour of Avengers: Endgame, which takes the time to slow down and ponder just how glum a superhero would feel if he or she failed to prevent half of life in the universe from being extinguished. It's this quirky first hour, which includes an interaction with Thanos that has a truly surprising outcome, that ingratiated me to the crowning achievement of the best directing tandem to happen to the MCU (the Russo brothers). The middle portion involving time travel is also a gas, showcasing the film's great sense for comedy (Paul Rudd really shines as Ant-Man). And even though the final third is more typically a bombastic climax that we often feel like we need to decry -- with good reason -- it contains some really satisfying emotional moments that include permanent resolutions to certain character storylines. In sum, the three hours breeze by, and I think this is 2019's most impressive achievement purely from a logistical standpoint, as it gathers together a million unwieldy story threads and wraps them all up in reasonable ways. So Captain Marvel didn't have much to do. You take the bad with the good in a film like Avengers: Endgame, because there's just so much more good. (Read my full review here.)

7. Hail Satan? - At last, the first documentary in my top ten since Stories We Tell in 2013. That's a crazy stretch of time without any representation from non-fiction films, one that, perhaps not coincidentally, also coincides with my time vetting human rights documentaries for the Human Rights and Arts Film Festival. The one that broke the drought is also, strangely enough, about human rights, but you would never guess that from the title. As it turns out, people who describe themselves as Satanists -- a label that often prompts them to hide their identity, alas -- have a series of tenets of their belief system, which basically boil down to pragmatic ways to treat other people with respect and fairness. In fact, their politics most closely align with progressive politics, which is why Penny Lane's film explores as its narrative core the group's campaign against the displaying of the Ten Commandments on government property in various American states, mostly in the south. Or rather, in keeping consistent with their mischievous approach to political action, they are okay with the Ten Commandments appearing as long as they can also display a statue of their own religious idol, the goat-headed embodiment of Satan known as Baphomet. The sincerity of convictions that place them in the crosshairs of Christian extremists is moving at times. Given what they stand for and how closely it aligns with my own philosophies about the world, I left this movie ready to sign up. (Read my full review here.)

6. Her Smell - The combination of Alex Ross Perry and Elisabeth Moss produces toxic masterworks. They were the writer-director and actor who brought me my #10 movie of 2015, Queen of Earth, and they go even higher in 2019 with another movie of oppressive interiority. Her Smell follows the Hole-like band Something She and its Courtney Love-like lead singer, Becky Something, played by Moss in full-on bitch tornado mode. She rips through bandmates and well-wishers and ex-husbands and anyone who would dare look at her sideways in a series of scenes set in dingy backstage locales, as she and her band attempt to launch a comeback some ten to 20 years after their heyday. Even though I haven't seen this movie, I have to imagine Moss' performance is something like the way John Cassavetes directed Gena Rowlands in A Woman Under the Influence. She brings a kind of unhinged ferocity that is scary to watch, one fueled by drug addiction, paranoia, insecurity, megalomania, and a basic loathing of anyone and anything that gets in her way. To underscore this, Perry employs a sound design that is the audio equivalent of insanity, using hums and static and distant underwater noises to show us exactly how her mind is working, or failing to work. Fortunately, her deliverance from this hell is something as beautiful to behold as its lead-up is disturbing. May these two continue to make movies together for years to come.

5. Birds of Passage - I almost didn't go see Birds of Passage because it had played at MIFF more than a year before I actually saw it. But it didn't have its wide release until the following year, both in Australia and America, so it being on my radar forever didn't mean it didn't legitimately belong in this ranking year. I was also tossing up whether to see this or The Souvenir, I believe it was, knowing that the other might not get seen at all -- and indeed, I did not end up seeing The Souvenir. Well, obviously I'm glad it all fell into place because I was exposed to a five-star film about the corruption of native Colombians via their involvement in the drug trade, and the decades-spanning war with other cartels that resulted. This isn't normally the type of subject matter I gravitate toward -- I have yet to watch an episode of Narcos -- but when the filmmaking is this great, it almost doesn't matter what the subject matter is. Directors Cristina Gallego and Ciro Guerra wowed me a couple years ago with Embrace of the Serpent, but they blew that achievement out of the water with this one. It combines the spiritual of the native ways of the Wayuu people, as seen in the image above, with the very earthbound realities of moving product and claiming territory, often with bloodshed. Needless to say, none of it ends up in a happy place. But getting there is the kind of happiness that any cinephile strives for -- the one that springs from consuming cinema at its finest. (Read my full review here.)

4. Little Women - There may be no movie on my top ten that I thought would have any less business being there than Little Women. Lady Bird was only a four-star experience for me, and Greta Gerwig's screen persona has steadily begun to grate on me over the years. Then you have the fact that adaptations of classic novels tend to be fairly rote experiences with a high floor but also a low ceiling. All of those expectations were upended, not unlike a bowl of popcorn in this movie's most delightful spontaneous moment, by this scintillating cinematic experience, which reaps considerable fruit from Gerwig's bold decision to tell the story non-chronologically. Although it has been adapted for the screen 18 times in various forms, this was actually my first exposure to the story of the March family and its four precocious girls, and after seeing this one, I'm not sure I want to expose myself to any others. Every one of Gerwig's choices works, from revealing the climactic rejection of a marriage proposal at the very beginning of the story, to interweaving scenes of the girls' childhood in a way that mimics the experience of cataloguing the memories of our own lives. Then you've got maybe 2019's best acting ensemble, led (in my personal view) by Florence Pugh, who truly plays the different ages of the family's most problematic sister, Amy. And all the while Gerwig achieves her goal of extracting the story's feminist underpinnings without coming close to alienating viewers who don't agree with her (pretty much all the men are portrayed sympathetically). With a first two features that are the envy of any director out there, the next stop for Gerwig may be the stratosphere. (Read my full review here.)

3. Vivarium - Vivarium may be a victim of bad timing. It spent a couple months at the top of my cumulative rankings before a) I saw my #1 movie for a second time, and b) I decided I couldn’t justify having a #1 movie that almost no critics will be considering as part of 2019. I watched this glorious mind-bender at MIFF in August, certain or at least hopeful that others would get to appreciate it before the year was out, but even at this writing it still only has firm 2020 release dates in Russia, UK and Italy, between the months of March and May. (Plus only this one still photo available online.) But because I don’t push movies seen in one year ahead to the next ranking year except in very rare circumstances (like an advanced screening late in the year), Vivarium has to settle for being #3, having subsequently been surpassed by my #2. Which is probably just as well, because movies this viscerally thrilling and intellectually captivating may not work as well on the second viewing. Lorcan Finnegan’s two-hander is a fantastic jolt of weird as it serves up science fiction in the form of a satire of domesticity. Any laughs produced are of the grim variety, as this is a bleak look at what happens to two people when they … well, I won’t even get into what happens to them, or why, or how – in part because it’s best for you to find out for yourself, but in part because I don’t really know the answers to those questions myself. I will say that Jesse Eisenberg and Imogen Poots – who also starred together in the far-less-successful 2019 film The Art of Self-Defense – sell the frustration and desperation of their scenario with palpable commitment. Also that they are occasionally joined by a third person, whose identity and whose composite of tics and other traits are the weirdest of this film’s many weird elements. “Weird” is most assuredly a compliment in my book, and I can’t wait to see this movie again when it gets a proper release, so the thrill of its unique vision can wash over me again.

2. Portrait of a Lady on Fire - The last film I saw in the previous decade was also nearly my favorite of that decade's last year. An early release on New Year's Eve enabled me to sneak out to the theater, and I was rewarded with a thunderbolt of romance, emotion and creative beauty. It's probably good I didn't see it at night, because it took me ten or 15 minutes to really get on this movie's wavelength, and at night, that could have led to premature grogginess and tuning out. But as I started to understand and appreciate what this film would be doing, it jumped forward for me in leaps and bounds, from thinking "This may be one of the best films of the year" to thinking "This may be one of the best films of the decade." Presumably drawing inspiration from her own relationship with star Adele Haenel, which ended amicably prior to filming, director Celine Sciamma has given us a truly gorgeous meditation on the impermanence of things and the paradoxical desire to freeze them in a moment, as one does with a painting. It is feminist in a way that is almost casual, as it contains nary a moment approaching a screed against men, who are in fact almost not present on screen at all. They are notable by their absence, as the film's two main characters (occasionally joined by a third) live in a sort of paradise of equality during this short time when they are without their patriarchal overlords, or the woman who is their proxy (Haenel's character's mother). In this splendid coastal Eden of late 18th century Brittany, love blossoms, but it, too, is necessarily impermanent, if only because that describes all things in this world. The film also has plenty of thoughts on the creative process and the relationship between the artist and her subject. Portrait of a Lady on Fire contains multitudes. (Read my full review here.)

1. Parasite - And here we have two firsts: 1) My first #1 movie from the continent of Asia, and 2) My first #1 movie that I did not give five stars on Letterboxd when I first saw it. Why I was not at first willing to go higher than 4.5 stars on the consensus best movie of the year, perhaps the first time I've aligned myself so totally with the larger critical community since There Will Be Blood in 2007, remains a bit of a mystery to me. Was seeing it in June too early in the year? Did I have my qualms about the denouement? All doubts were washed away on my second viewing -- on a plane, of all places -- in which I took in Parasite pretty much in a constant state of chills, just because it's so damn good. Rarely has a film so completely switched tone and genre at the midway point and still been as thrilling a success as this. When you do that, you're much more likely to end up with Hancock than with Parasite. From the heist opening to the Hitchcock-in-a-funhouse-mirror second half, the movie remains simultaneously fun and thought-provoking, leaving you in a constant state of surprise and readjustment, and forever unprepared for the ways its importance is creeping up on you. Maybe the niftiest trick Bong Joon-ho pulls off is constantly recalibrating who you are rooting for, or perhaps never letting you root for any of them, while also never failing to demonstrate the ways these characters display a humanity and a callousness that are both relatable. Not only has Bong clearly surpassed Park Chan-wook as South Korea's greatest cinematic export, he's surpassed most directors, period, in the type of unpredictable excitement he brings to any new film, with a craft to match. Through both its themes and its sheer entertainment value, Parasite is the best film of the year. (Read my full review here.)

The five worst

These are my five worst movies of the year, ranked #142 through 146 on the actual chart, but counted down from 5 to 1 to make them easier to read.

5. The Angry Birds Movie 2 - Maybe my problem was not seeing the first one. I'd say I sat there stone-faced throughout the running time of Angry Birds 2, but that would mean disregarding my heavy sighs and eye-rolling. I was astonished to hear the general critical consensus that this is "actually pretty good," because I had only one experience in the theater this year (we'll get to that in a minute) that was more torturous. The absolute waste of talents like Bill Hader, Tiffany Hadish, Awkwafina, Jason Sudeikis, Maya Rudolph, Sterling K. Brown and Peter Dinklage (and the list goes on from there) just deepened the disappointment.

4. Unicorn Store - I guess I don't really like movies where a community supports the delusions of a delusional person (see also Lars and the Real Girl, Brigsby Bear and Welcome to Marwen), because I thought this was pretty much a disaster. Brie Larson -- playing a person in a real world -- believes she's going to get a unicorn? It's as much of a twee misfire as it sounds, and Larson gets further points deducted for being the producer-director. It's also, strangely, a reunion of her and Captain Marvel co-star Samuel L. Jackson under far less fortuitous circumstances.

3. The Beach Bum - Spring Breakers and The Beach Bum share a director, a cinematographer, an approach to assembling a film and even a geographical location, so why is it that I love the former and loathe the latter? I suspect it has something to do with Matthew McConaughey as the most insufferable character I have met at the movies in a couple years, Moondog, a stoner poet who literally does nothing but float from one Florida location to another on a grinning wave of inebriation. That sounds like a fun life, but it's not a fun thing to watch.

2. Stuber - Stupid. No more words are really needed to describe this fiasco, except phrases like "waste of talent" and "waste of celluloid" also come to mind. Indeed I do like Kumail Nanjiani and Dave Bautista in most of their projects, and Betty Gilpin (in a smaller role) is the best part of Glow, but together this is just a trainwreck of a would-be buddy comedy that fails to deliver on a premise that seems promising from the trailers, but is idiotic when actually parsed out in the movie itself. You'll want to delete the Uber app from your phone.

1. Cats - "I laughed, I cried, it was better than Cats." That statement could describe any movie I saw in 2019, because every movie I saw in 2019 was better than Cats.

Okay! Whole list time:

1. Parasite
2. Portrait of a Lady on Fire
3. Vivarium
4. Little Women
5. Birds of Passage
6. Her Smell
7. Hail Satan?
8. Avengers: Endgame
9. I Lost My Body
10. Jojo Rabbit
11. The Perfection
12. The Australian Dream
13. Apollo 11
14. Dolemite is My Name
15. 1917
16. Hustlers
17. Ford v. Ferrari
18. Diane
19. Fyre
20. Marriage Story
21. Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker
22. The Laundromat
23. Midsommar
24. The Last Black Man in San Francisco
25. Us
26. The Nightingale
27. Brightburn
28. Fighting With My Family
29. Always Be My Maybe
30. Terminator: Dark Fate
31. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
32. The Farewell
33. The King
34. Knock Down the House
35. Klaus
36. Mystify: Michael Hutchence
37. Deerskin
38. The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part
39. Jumanji: The Next Level
40. The Third Wife
41. Yesterday
42. Sword of Trust
43. The Lighthouse
44. The Upside
45. Good Boys
46. Rocketman
47. The Kid Who Would Be King
48. Toy Story 4
49. Velvet Buzzsaw
50. Homecoming: A Film by Beyonce
51. High Life
52. Brittany Runs a Marathon
53. Pain and Glory
54. The Day Shall Come
55. Paddleton
56. Between Two Ferns: The Movie
57. The Two Popes
58. American Factory
59. Shadow
60. Booksmart
61. It Chapter Two
62. The Irishman
63. Captain Marvel
64. Kursk
65. Extra Ordinary
66. Shazam!
67. Late Night
68. Ready or Not
69. Matthias & Maxime
70. Abominable
71. Child's Play
72. Aladdin
73. Atlantics
74. Arctic
75. Tolkien
76. Five Feet Apart
77. Doctor Sleep
78. Hotel Mumbai
79. Triple Frontier
80. All is True
81. Crawl
82. The White Crow
83. Murder Mystery
84. Knives Out
85. Ash is Purest White
86. Alita: Battle Angel
87. Downton Abbey
88. Under the Silver Lake
89. The Hustle
90. The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot
91. Burning Cane
92. Pokemon: Detective Pikachu
93. Fast Color
94. In the Tall Grass
95. A Dog's Way Home
96. Head Count
97. Spider-Man: Far From Home
98. Little
99. The Lion King
100. Cold Pursuit
101. In Fabric
102. Wonder Park
103. Gloria Bell
104. El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie
105. Maleficent: Mistress of Evil
106. Where'd You Go, Bernadette
107. The Lodge
108. Escape Room
109. What Men Want
110. The Art of Self-Defense
111. Abducted in Plain Sight
112. Wine Country
113. Honeyland
114. The Good Liar
115. Top End Wedding
116. The Man Who Killed Don Quixote
117. Joker
118. Long Shot
119. Missing Link
120. Ma
121. A Vigilante
122. Zombieland: Double Tap
123. Ophelia
124. Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbes & Shaw
125. Last Christmas
126. The Addams Family
127. John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum
128. X-Men: Dark Phoenix
129. Isn't It Romantic?
130. Baby
131. Hellboy
132. The Curse of La Llorona
133. After
134. Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile
135. High Flying Bird
136. Men in Black: International
137. The Dead Don't Die
138. Pet Sematary
139. Serenity
140. Ad Astra
141. Dumbo
142. The Angry Birds Movie 2
143. Unicorn Store
144. The Beach Bum
145. Stuber
146. Cats

And to continue a recent tradition, five titles I thought I needed to isolate for further explanation:

20. Marriage Story - If Noah Baumbach had found just a little bit more balance, this could have been a top ten contender.

62. The Irishman - Impressive aspects, but a slog overall.

84. Knives Out - Yes, you read that right.

117. Joker - After watching this movie, I wasn't sure if I liked it or not. I became sure one way or another pretty darn quick.

140. Ad Astra - Just no.

LET ME KNOW WHAT YOU THINK. I want comments.

Please?

Where'd you go, Vance?

Two weeks could be the longest hiatus I've ever taken from this blog, though I'd have to go back and check on that. It's certainly the longest unexplained hiatus; I think there was a Christmas trip to the U.S. a couple years back that might have left you without a new post for longer than that, but at least I told you about it in advance. (I chuckle a little saying "left you without a post," as if I take any more than marginal measures to ensure my ramblings are for you, the reader, rather than just myself.)

I didn't die, you'll be glad to know.

I didn't go to Antarctica either, like the title character in the poster above (that's not a spoiler as they show it in the first few minutes of the movie, which was one of 15 I saw while I was gone, mostly on various flights). But as with that other long hiatus referenced above, I did go to the U.S., somewhat unexpectedly. I won't get into why. Just know that it was a family issue, but that everybody's okay. Something inevitable has arrived faster than we were expecting it to, but even within that context, everyone is okay, and better yet, happy.

I left the morning after my last post, which was exactly two weeks ago, and arrived back on Thursday, jet-lagged after three consecutive flights over a 24-hour period. I'm still fighting the jet lag, though last night's sleep was mostly a normal one.

I actually thought I might keep this blog updated while I was gone, as I began composing a post based on movies I watched on my first flight, in Microsoft Word on the plane since I had no internet access. If I'd finished that post, I suppose I would have posted it and possibly written others. But once I hit the ground, I had a lot to do, and typing up my free associations about movies did not seem like the most urgent use of my time. Plus, I didn't actually tell anyone on social media I was going on this trip, since it made sense to use all my available time for the purpose of my trip rather than seeing friends. Posting to my blog would have defeated that purpose, or at least given me excess guilt.

Instead of landing back here with a regular post, though, I figured I would give you a little grab bag of some of those thoughts I had while I was gone, in little chapter subheadings. I'll get back into the flow of regular writing over the coming week.

So without any further you know what ...

Having the time to take the time

On my August trip to Los Angeles, I saw Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, cramming it into a busy schedule and starting it too late at night to fully appreciate it. After that viewing I placed myself squarely in the "I do not like Tarantino's latest" camp, defending that stance with scattered thoughts about there being a lack of "Tarantino scenes" (clever set pieces with surprising payoffs) and about the film ending with an explosion of violence that could be interpreted as misogynistic.

But I suspected I hadn't really given the movie its best chance to succeed, and over time, these arguments lost some of their vigor. Seeing the movie among my first flight's options, I decided I'd spend the proper time with it this time. Not only did I like it much better, I understood the connections between certain scenes that had evaded me when I watched it too late that one night. Just as one example, the scene with Brad Pitt's character and Bruce Lee was an extended flashback, something I hadn't properly understood when I first saw it, which therefore threw off my understanding of the continuity of the scenes. As I said, I was too tired to watch this movie back in August.

I could probably go into detail, but as this post is a collection of multiple thoughts, I'll just report that I doubled my original two-star rating to four. And am looking forward to my eventual third viewing.

Los Angeles plays itself

I didn't actually start the flight with Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, but rather, an episode of the Bill Hader-led HBO show Barry, which is also set in, and establishes a satirical perspective toward, Los Angeles. But it wasn't until my second movie, Stuber, was also set in LA -- and also tried to poke fun at the city's most risible traits -- that I realized I had a theme going. (I say "tried" because Stuber was awful, hands down the worst of the 15 I saw while I was gone.)

So to keep it going, I continued buttressing my various viewings with episodes of Barry (which had been my plan anyway) and made a hopeful choice of a third film on the docket, Yesterday. That's Danny Boyle's latest about a young musician who awakens from a head trauma in a world without the Beatles, and becomes famous by "writing" their songs into existence. (I never expected to be watching this movie on the plane, by the way; I missed it in the theater due to a busy viewing schedule at that time, but also because I thought it would be a good candidate to watch on video with my wife. When she turned her nose up at the suggestion a couple weeks back, I knew I was in the clear to watch it on my own.)

Sure enough, the largely British-set film does contain scenes in Los Angeles, and what's more, includes quite the parody of a Los Angeles type, in this case a record label executive played by Kate McKinnon, who lives in a fantastic beach house.

As I specifically allowed this flight to breathe -- doing some reading and other activities as well -- I didn't cram in a fourth viewing, so the entire flight consisted of LA-themed viewings. Which I thought was fun, even though this was my first trip to the U.S. where I didn't so much as leave the airport in Los Angeles on my way to the east coast.

A good get, gotten easily

Even though this trip was all business, I have to admit I had an eye toward catching a movie that had already been released in the U.S. but wouldn't be so before the end of the year in Australia, meaning I'd miss it for my year-end list. Could this time have been spent seeing friends? Shut up.

At least I reduced my guilt by catching this movie on my first full day in Boston, when my sleep was all screwed up and I would not have been a presentable social animal. And at least it was available at the movie theater in Burlington, the town right next to the one where I was staying, at the multiplex. Meaning I didn't have to drive in to an arthouse theater in Boston, and therefore take up an unjustifiable amount of my precious time in town, to see it.

What The Lighthouse -- which still does not have a release date in Australia that I can see -- was doing at the multiplexes is beyond me. I suppose Robert Eggers' previous film, The Witch, was enough of a crossover hit to have earned buzz and convinced some distributors of the commercial viability of its follow-up. But even that was a movie where much of the dialogue was hard to understand (I used the subtitles on my second viewing), so a follow-up about two lighthouse keepers, in black and white, with dialogue that's only marginally more intelligible, didn't seem like an automatic win. Who knows, maybe they just saw that it starred the former Edward Cullen and just rolled the dice. There were a decent number of people in my Tuesday night screening, in any case.

The movie has similar strengths and weaknesses to The Witch, ending in a similarly unsatisfying place for me. But I'm really glad I did indeed get it in before the end of the year.

How to watch a 135-minute movie on a one-hour flight

One of my top contenders on the aforementioned year-end list is Bong Joon-ho's Parasite, and to shore up exactly how much I liked it, I thought a second viewing was in order before the end of the year. Only problem is, it may not get released to U.S. iTunes before then, so I didn't know the likeliest way for me to get my hands on it, even with an Australian release date back in June.

Qantas took care of that problem for me by having it among its list of movies. But in part because I was following that LA movie theme, I decided to hold my second Parasite viewing for my return trip.

Only problem? My return flight was only a Qantas code share, meaning I took the domestic cross country flight and subsequent LA to Sydney leg on American Airlines. Which had quite the good movie selection, just not Parasite.

I did have one more Qantas flight, though, which was the hour-long Sydney to Melbourne final leg of my trip. It seemed foolish to start this viewing, knowing there was almost zero chance I could finish it, but already on this return trip I had spent an unexpected hour on the ground before leaving Boston (which fortunately did not cause me to miss my transfer in LA). With a handful of well-placed little delays that are part and parcel to the airline industry, I might get in close to an entire viewing.

Which is exactly what happened. I started Parasite the moment I got to my seat, and since I was one of the first groups to board, this was nearly a half-hour before the flight actually took off. With another hour in the air and delays on the ground in Melbourne due to needing to be towed to align with the air bridge, plus with me seated near the back of the plane anyway, I saw the entirety of the film's climactic scene, leaving only the postscript portion of the film unwatched. It was enough to confirm that indeed, with two months to go before my ranking deadline, Parasite will factor in very seriously to the top of my year-end rankings.

                                                               * * * * * * * *

Okay, there's a couple thousand words for my "starving" blog audience (ha). Back this week with shorter and more regular posts.