If Raising Arizona starred Ryan Gosling

So I finally did it last night: I showed my younger son my favorite movie of all time.

If you read this post, you'll remember I showed the whole family the first ten minutes of Raising Arizona on my birthday last year, almost exactly six months ago, though of course my wife had already seen it multiple times. (And congratulations to RA on its tenth tagging on my blog. Double digits baby!) 

The only one out of the two kids who showed any interest in a full viewing was my younger son, then 11, now 12. In fact, he had mentioned it again when the movie came up for other reasons, without me prodding him or forcing the issue for my own benefit. 

And in truth, maybe there was a little trepidation on my part about completing the full viewing. When you show someone your favorite of anything, you are exposing yourself to their ridicule if they inevitably don't like it as much as you do, though even if he hadn't liked it, my son is sensitive enough that he surely would have cushioned the blow. 

In fact, his response might have been a cushioning. I have no reason to think he didn't like it, but during the credits I did have to ask what he thought, without him volunteering it. He said he thought it was good, with that little uplift in your voice that suggests the statement is genuine, but maybe only to a certain extent. He did make some interesting follow-up comments, even an analysis about whether Leonard Smalls is supposed to be H.I. McDunnough in the future, given that they have the same tattoo. This led to a discussion of symbolism vs. realism in films, which is the sort of conversation I want to have with my kids about film, if they'll have it.

The other thing that caused me a little trepidation about the viewing is stupid. In linking back to one of the other times I tagged RA on this blog, I had been on a coincidental streak of watching my favorite movie almost exactly every four years, which had been pretty organic to that point. Left to my own devices, I might not have watched it again until 2028, as those four year stretches were aligned with presidential election and summer Olympics years. This viewing caused me to deviate from that, but really, I want any of my viewings to be organic and not to think too much about them. There was no point to wait another two years to show my son Raising Arizona, not when he had already asked about it more than once. 

The thing I thought was interesting enough to write about today, though, was what he asked me about Nicolas Cage very early in the movie, during the opening ten minutes he'd already seen, in one of the shots when H.I. is lying on his prison bunk, thinking about Ed. 

"Is that Ryan Gosling?" he asked.

At first I thought this was pretty funny, though my response did not illustrate that. Although I knew my son didn't know the exact year Raising Arizona was released, he had to know, just by looking at it, that it was not a recent movie. I said "No, Ryan Gosling would have been about five when this came out." (Actual age: six.) 

"Oh right because it came out in like 1980," he responded.

"1987," I said. Gosling himself was born in 1980.

But then I got to thinking how interesting it was that he had seen Gosling in a then 23-year-old Nicolas Cage. (And how weird it was, in retrospect, that the Coen brothers had seen it appropriate to case a 23-year-old in this role, considering H.I. has already served a half-dozen sentences and been paroled a half-dozen times. Wouldn't they at least want someone over 30? Holly Hunter is about six years older than him, so I guess they're both playing her age in this movie.)

Especially since he has become primarily a comedic actor, there's something about Gosling's physicality that indeed does recall a young Cage. Thinking particularly about films that required considerable physical comedy from him, such as The Nice Guys. 

Since my son had asked this question early enough in the movie, I started seeing Cage's performance through the lens of decisions I could see Gosling making as an actor. And this little bit in particular seemed like a perfect Gosling moment:

Can't you just see Gosling doing that?

I was, of course, inclined to do a modern recasting of Raising Arizona, though I suppose it wouldn't really be "modern." Although Cage seemed too young to play H.I., I don't think we want him being played by a 45-year-old Gosling either. 

But actually, if you look at Gosling in Project Hail Mary, he's still wiry and physical. And I think maybe the themes of Raising Arizona are more resonant with actors who are at least in their mid- to late-30s, who really are staring a childless existence in the face, and really can't afford to wait for any hypothetical medical breakthroughs that will allow them to conceive. At 45, Gosling can certainly play 37.

So let's do this. "Let's go get Nathan Jr.!"

Sorry. Let's recast Raising Arizona with Gosling in the lead. And let's be a little flexible with the ages. There's going to be a little "first thought best thought" here too. I can't sit here all day and think about this. 

So we start with H.I. obviously. I think these pictures are an even better indication of just how Gosling fits in this role. They both wear the Hawaiin shirt well, of course, even though my favorite clothing worn by Cage in RA is the shirt he wears during the lunch with Glen and Dot. I realize I've got to filibuster a bit here so that I can align the photos with the text. So this is me doing that. I think I've got it now. 

Ed could be played by Kathryn Hahn. She's actually a couple months older than I am, which means she's 52. But let's not tell Kathryn Hahn she can't play 37. She can do anything, so playing 37 certainly qualifies. These photos are not particularly flattering to either Hahn or Hunter, but I've chosen them to illustrate why I've cast Hahn here. We need an actress who can go big but is also capable of a genuine emotional connection with the audience, and I think that's Hahn. 

If looking for bounty hunter Leonard Smalls, our mind should automatically go to the physically largest presences we have out there. And so in this case I thought of Jason Momoa. I think the thing that makes Randall "Tex" Cobb so scary in this role is that we don't get even a whiff of sympathy from him as an actor; he makes a great evil incarnate. I do think it would be hard to ignore the jovial associations we have with Momoa, who has almost always played a good guy. But I think Momoa can do it. Let's not typecast him and limit what he can bring to the screen. 

Next up is Nathan Arizona. The huckster furniture salesman and bereft father is one of the movie's true comedic highlights, so we need someone pretty funny here too. I struggled with this one, and have no idea if I came up with the right answer. For some reason, Shea Whigham popped into my head and wouldn't leave. I don't actually know how well Whigham does comedy, because that's not how he's usually cast. But looking at how Trey Wilson was cast before RA, I'm not seeing comedies in there either. It could be a Leslie Nielsen thing, that once they discovered he could do comedy, there was no turning back. I can see that path for Whigham. 

The final four characters of note come in pairs, so let's look at them that way.

For jailbirds and bad influences Gale and Evelle Snoats, I'm thinking David Harbour and Michael Pitt. These are based on physical matches, of course, but I also think Harbour has the expansive personality necessary to step into John Goodman's shoes -- or rather, his muddy boots fresh from cutting into the sewer line. With Michael Pitt, I'm seeing the same baby face as William Forsythe, though I really have no idea if Pitt can be funny -- and I should say, traditionally he has not been a favorite of mine. Fortunately, he has less work to do in that regard than Harbour. Although my friends and I have some Evelle Snoats quotes we love -- "You hear that? We usin' code names" is one example -- the heavy lifting here is from the older brother, the alpha, Gale. So Harbour can carry the load and Pitt can follow his lead. Forsythe is the least essential of these actors in establishing RA's tone, and so I think Pitt can fill that role here. 

Lastly we get to Dot and Glen, the swingers, absentee parents and crass idiots played by future three-time Oscar winner and Joel Coen wife, Frances McDormand, and the lesser heralded Sam McMurray. And let's just finish off with a couple of SNL alums. We already know Kristen Wiig can do the high volume and wild gesticulations of McDormand's Dot. Jason Sudeikis hasn't in his career played as zany, generally, as McMurray is here, but there's something about the eminently more sympathetic Ted Lasso that shares DNA with Glen. Ted is obviously more intelligent and less selfish than Glen, but they both have a sort of bumpkin gregariousness that makes them appear less intelligent than they really are. (Yes, I think there's intelligence to Glen, in that he sees through H.I. and Ed's lies about how they acquired their infant boy.)

If you're curious about a previous time I did this exercise, check out this post on Glengarry Glen Ross. (Speaking of Glens.) 

And I only just now realized something truly astonishing:

That recasting post was also inspired by Ryan Gosling.

What the hell? I swear I didn't know.

But yes indeed, that post was inspired by seeing a similarity between Gosling and another actor about Nicolas Cage's age, Alec Baldwin. (Baldwin is six years older. I said "about.") Truly astonishing coincidence there.

Does this mean Ryan Gosling is the greatest cinematic chameleon of our era? Because I don't think of Cage and Baldwin as very similar at all. 

Probably not, but does it mean I love watching him?

Hells yes. 

The first 10 minutes of Raising Arizona on my new projector screen

It was my birthday yesterday, and given the fact that we've just returned from a long (and expensive) European sojourn, it's not surprising it was a pretty unremarkable birthday.

In fact, as if to underscore how intentionally mid I expected it to be, I actually made a dentist appointment for yesterday morning. While we were in Europe, I lost a filling the dentist had given me previous December, designed to prevent so much food from getting lodged in the space where a tooth had broken away. When that filling broke out, it returned me to where I'd been the year before, going through several toothpicks a day. I finally got around to making the appointment on Friday, and I hadn't realized that "Monday" was also my birthday until she repeated the date back to me. I had the opportunity to set the appointment for a different day, but I just shrugged and kept it.

Oh and let's not forget where I was on my last two birthdays. Two years ago, I was in Sydney on a surprise trip to celebrate my 50th. And last year I was in Singapore. So, a low-level birthday was several years in the making. 

But one remarkable thing did happen yesterday: I'm back in the projector game in our garage.

Yes that's right, my wife got me a new projector screen that can be assembled on collapsible poles, meaning not only can it provide a viewing surface in our garage, it can be taken on trips and the like if need be. (Road trips, I'm thinking. It wouldn't make sense to take my projector on the plane.)

Our garage has been through various incarnations of various junk pushed up against various walls, and it hasn't felt like the right space to watch anything for some time now. The wall that used to be clear for projecting -- clear, other than the grooves between the white-painted cinder blocks, which you stop noticing after about a minute -- but in the last year it has had other responsibilities. You can clear out a spot, but it's work, and then you have to find a spot for the stuff you've cleared out. The last time we used the projector in the garage, just about exactly six months ago, we oriented things entirely differently and hung a sheet from the ceiling, with the couch in the middle of the room instead of against the wall. That was meant just for that one weekend and was not sustainable. 

But with my birthday present, I may have entered into a new era of projecting frequency and versatility. 

Since the screen can go anywhere in the garage, that means I can set up anywhere, and even if it temporarily scrambles the direction of the furniture, it isn't such a difficult thing to put it back. It's not an insurmountable problem even on a random evening when I decide I want to watch a movie this way.

The more difficult problem is, I would say, the positioning of the projector. In order to get it the ideal distance from the screen, so the image is small enough to fit within the screen's parameters, you have to place it obtrusively in the middle of where everyone would like to sit. I'm pretty sure there's a solution for this, and now I just need to make it my business to find out what it is.

Anyway, the kids were -- or at least one kid was -- excited about it, as was the giver of the gift, as was the receiver of the gift, so we went to work assembling it quickly so we could all watch something brief together, and I could watch a proper movie myself, at least to give my birthday a bit better of a send-off. (Why it needed that better send-off: My older son's basketball team also lost their game by one point, blowing their lead with less than a minute remaining, and he didn't play well. Because of the need to get to that game on time, and because of the slow service at the Mexican restaurant, we had to rush out of my birthday dinner before our food could be delivered, and take it in takeaway containers. My son didn't end up eating his until after the game. Yep, it was one challenge after another.)

At first my wife was concerned about what she called the "Made in China" aspects of the projector screen. She had no problem acknowledging that this was not the most expensive one she could have bought, and I wouldn't have had it any other way, given the money we've already spent in the past two months. And it looked like there'd be some challenges reaching both poles with the velcro loops, without which we couldn't pull it taut.

But after we lay it on the ground and took a second run at setting everything up properly, it did come together quite nicely, and then I went to work positioning the projector for optimal viewing. 

And finally that meant getting to watch the first ten minutes of my favorite movie of all time, Raising Arizona.

You may recall from this post and this post that I have been watching Raising Arizona at approximately four-year intervals, accidentally for a while and then sort of purposefully the last time. My most recent viewing was only the start of last year, so that means it wouldn't have been due up again until early 2028. But it seems likely that timeline will be accelerated.

It started with the fact that my 11-year-old drew H.I. McDunnough on my birthday card. Seriously! Don't believe me? Here he is:

Don't you just love it?

By the way, the inclusion of the Flash has to do with the fact that my son is watching the Flash TV show and finds it vastly superior to what he's seen of the movie, which is basically just the way the Flash runs, which they make fun of online. It's something about his arm movements of holding out two fingers and sweeping away from his face downward. Anyway, it became an inside joke for us in Europe.

When the new projector screen came out a few minutes after this card, Raising Arizona was fully on the brain, and I thought the 11-minute pre-credits prologue would make a perfect amuse bouche to a full-length viewing, which the 11-year-old has been saying recently he would like to do. He'd have liked to do it yesterday, in fact, but we were getting started around 9:30, so it just wasn't practical.

The reactions were generous by my wife, who of course has seen the movie multiple times and also appreciates it (though not like I do), and the 11-year-old. The 15-year-old sat in stony silence, but I wouldn't have expected anything different. She laughed several times and the 11-year-old laughed a couple times too, though that could have been merely because of his overdeveloped sense of empathy. He knew I hadn't been having an awesome birthday, and if a few courtesy laughs at my favorite movie would help improve that, he was more than willing to give them. Good egg.

I suppose the test will be to see how quickly he requests a complete viewing. That'll tell me whether he really liked what he saw or was just being polite.

So my next Raising Arizona viewing may not, indeed, come until 2028, when I'm ready for it again. Or it may come this weekend.

And if it comes this weekend, I know I'll have a pretty great new projector setup on which to watch it. 

As for the movie I did actually watch, it was Opus, which I told you earlier this month I didn't want to watch on the plane because I'd been saving it for a more optimal viewing environment. In fact, given that I also watched the last 30 minutes of the Netflix movie Steve earlier that afternoon, I almost called this post "A birthday of naming Bloom County characters." Yes, Opus and Steve Dallas are both in the comic strip Bloom County, which I read obsessively around the age my younger son is now. Here they are:

I haven't yet fully processed my feelings on Opus, and I think I need to go back to the Wikipedia plot synopsis to review a couple details. But let's just say I went from liking it a lot to not liking it nearly as much, to not being sure if I actually liked it. I'll give this one some more thought.

But watching a whole movie on my new projector screen reminded me of great times past and previewed great times ahead, so that was nice.

Hey, we movie people, we like our screens, the bigger the better. 

This time I knew about the four years

I knew my next viewing of my favorite movie of all time, Raising Arizona, couldn't be completely organic after I wrote this post back in 2020.

At that time I discovered that quite by coincidence, my previous viewing had been almost exactly four years earlier, and the one before that had been four years before that. These three viewings were all within a two-week span from the end of February. The one before them was closer to five years, but it was less than five years so it was still within that every-four-years pattern, for the most part.

Having written that post, I knew that when it came time for the next viewing, I would be too conscious by half of either continuing the streak or purposefully deviating from it.

However, the fact remains that when I started to get a Raising Arizona itch about a week ago, I did not specifically remember when I'd written the post linked to above. About four years ago seemed right, as I said that was the sweet spot for how often you should watch your #1 movie -- enough to maintain your high level of familiarity with it, but not enough to burn out on it. But I could only confirm the last date by looking it up, which I did only after I'd chosen Saturday night as the latest viewing of my highest ranked film on Flickchart.

Sure enough, this adds Saturday night into a viewing chain that now looks like this:

2/10/2024
2/29/2020
3/13/2016
3/3/2012
6/2007

(As I said in the previous post, I only started recording the dates of rewatches in 2006, and for the first 18 months I only recorded the month, not the actual day.)

I went a little early this time, according to the pattern -- but I guess that just contributes to whatever organic part of this there is. 

Probably next time I'll be one step more aware of all this, and I'll recall that I happen to watch this movie in leap (and presidential election, and Olympic) years. But maybe I'll forget that too and have another sort of organic desire to watch Raising Arizona in 2028.

About a third of the way in, I did wonder if I'd gone too early in a different way. I have recently thought about how it might be time to show my kids Raising Arizona, as the subject matter is mostly inoffensive and they might enjoy some of the wildness and physical humor. I'd be breaking my viewing schedule of Raising Arizona in a big way if I end up just sitting down to watch it within them again later this year.

But on this viewing, I noticed a funny thing -- which continues the notion that you have new takeaways from favorite films on each new viewing.

Namely, Raising Arizona uses the word "fuck" -- but only once.

Nowadays, unless you are doing it for effect -- as they did in the third Guardians of the Galaxy movie -- being in for a penny of "fucks" means you should be in for a pound. If you decide to introduce the F-word into your movie, thereby introducing the rating restrictions that will likely accompany it, you might as well make it one of the colors you come back to regularly on your painter's palette.

Nope, Raising Arizona uses it just once: "So he's got his sandwich in one hand, and the fucking HEAD in the other." Thank you, M. Emmet Walsh.

This didn't offend my delicate sensibilities, but it did remind me that we try to prevent at least the younger of my sons from a knowing exposure to f-bombs. Which in turn reminded me that Raising Arizona is not, at its core, designed for kids who are only ten and 13. (Though interestingly, 13 was the exact age I was when Raising Arizona came out, and I know I did see it in the theater. That said, it was certainly not my favorite movie when I first saw it, and I was probably a little perplexed by it.)

When you've got something good, it makes sense not to go too early on it. When you've got a wine that will reach its peak taste in 2028, don't drink it in 2024. Wait until 2028.

So maybe that will be the best time to show Raising Arizona to kids who will then be 17 and 14. Or maybe I need to wait further still, to see if they consciously embrace cinema as an art form, which will mean they have a specific hunger for all the wonderful examples they haven't yet stumbled over in their array of age-appropriate fare. The stakes are too high to get this wrong. If I show it to them at just the right time, maybe they'll get exactly what it's doing and it will become a personal favorite for them too.

Hey, I know I'll be watching it every four years, and one of those chances will probably line up just perfectly with their specific stage of maturity as young viewers.

It occurs to me also what an interesting stretch of time it has been since I last watched Raising Arizona.

During my last viewing, COVID fears were just starting to dominate the news and nothing had been shut down yet. March 2020 was when everyone started locking themselves into their homes, so the last day of February was right on the eve of that. This was followed by all the racial strife in the U.S. as well as the blessed defeat of Donald Trump in the presidential election. Another year of significant COVID restrictions followed, and we have spent the last two years finally working our way back to normal. I guess I'm hoping the next four years will be a bit less fraught -- and will also not feature Donald Trump in any significant way.

Before I leave you, I did want to touch briefly on the artwork I've chosen for this post. 

As this is now the eighth time I've specifically tagged Raising Arizona on my blog -- only eight? -- I've previously used variations on its poster enough times to run out of good options. (In addition to never repeating a subject for any of my posts, I also never repeat artwork.) So I wanted to choose a picture of H.I. McDunnough in that awesome shirt.

If anyone knows where I can get this exact shirt, please let me know, because I would wear it often enough that everyone would whisper about whether it was the only piece of clothing I owned, like what happened to Marge Simpson that one time. 

By the way, if you go only on mentions of my favorite film and not on official tags, the number jumps up from eight to 47. That's more like it, and represents an average of three times a year in the 15-year history of this blog -- a frequency far more befitting of a #1 movie.

So I may only watch Raising Arizona once every four years, but it's always in my thoughts.

About every four years, also

How often should a person watch his/her favorite movie of all time?

I guess my own answer to that is “about every four years.”

While writing about another every-four-year tradition this past weekend – watching a terrible movie on February 29^th – I noticed that there’s something else I’ve been doing every four years, namely, watching Raising Arizona.

Raising Arizona is my #1 movie on Flickchart, and has been for some time … well, at least four years, but I think more like six or even eight.

I watched it on Saturday night for a couple reasons:

1. When I was away the night before with a friend, he had a playlist going that had the song “Down in the Willow Garden” on it. If that title does not immediately ring a bell, it’s the lullaby Ed sings to Nathan Jr., with the lyrics “For I did murder that dear little girl/whose name was Rose Connelly.” Not only is the song used hauntingly there, but it returns in the score at the very end, and possibly one other time. Hearing the song was enough to get the juices flowing for another viewing.

2. When I decided not to try to watch another terrible movie on Saturday, having liked the terrible movie I watched that morning, I thought “If not the worst, why not watch the best?"

It wasn’t until later that I realized there was possibly something cosmic informing this decision, a natural return in a cycle of rewatches of my favorite movie.

When I added it to my rewatches list on Letterboxd, I noticed the last three dates I had seen Raising Arizona. I’ll include this rewatch in that date list as well, so it’s all the more obvious what kind of machine-like regularity I’m on with this film:

2/29/2020

3/13/2016

3/3/2012

6/2007

And before that, I did not keep track of rewatches. (And don’t have the specific date in 2007 because at that time, I only kept track of the month.)

The last three are remarkable in their consistency, all within a two-week period from the end of February, two of which were only four days apart. And exactly four years apart in each case. What are the odds of that, without being premeditated?

The psychology of late February/early March seems clear. At that point I’m still in the immediate afterglow of finalizing my year-end rankings, after which point I can return to the types of viewings I had been neglecting when I was cramming in movies from the previous year. Watching a favorite movie, just because you can, is a good way for a person to celebrate their new viewing freedom.

I don’t recall the circumstances of watching the movie in June of 2007, though I suppose it was another “it’s just time” viewing, and that perhaps it was about four years after the viewing before that.

Now, you might think that a person should watch their favorite movie more frequently than once every four years. Is it really your favorite movie if you watch it only as often as we elect a new president? There are movies I like less that I watch on average maybe every two years. (And it’s not lost on me that the viewings came during presidential election years, not to mention years of Summer Olympics, not to mention leap years, though I do think all those things are just coincidences.)

I’d argue “yes,” because a favorite movie should also be special. You don’t want to spoil it by watching it too much. It’s one of the reasons I pumped the brakes on my Tangled viewings as the last decade went along. I didn’t want to give Tangled the chance of being something my kids watched on repeat, creating the conditions where it could annoy me rather than charm me. (Alas, my kids don’t watch any movies on repeat anymore – it’s all YouTube, all the time.)

But you don’t want to let too much time elapse between viewings, because then you feel like your relationship with the movie is suffering. You want to maintain that relationship, your ability to quote it with ease, your memory of exact gestures and moments that vaulted it to #1 in the first place. Of which there are many in Raising Arizona. In fact, it’s a movie comprised of quotes, gestures and moments, perhaps more so that most.

I’m sure there’s been critical study of this idea, but it makes me wonder if there is something ideal about that four-year span that also helps determine how often we should elect presidents and how often we should watch Usain Bolt sprint. The leap day gives us an astronomical explanation, but is there something also in the human psyche that responds to four-year intervals? Or – to blow your mind even more – is whatever is in the human psyche that responds to four-year intervals also impacted by the cosmos?

Either way, I’m a Raising Arizona recidivist – “repeat offender.” I endure four-year sentences without it and then allow myself another little taste of the sublime.

It’s a system that works for me.

On lyricism and the poetic simpleton

A friend of mine who shall remain nameless (he'll probably call himself out in the comments section anyway) gave me a sort of challenge when he learned that I was finally going to see Ain't Them Bodies Saints, which he'd recommended to me several months ago.

(In my defense, the movie only came out in Australia this past Thursday.)

"So tomorrow we find out if it's lyrical filmmaking or Malick you object to," he wrote in an email to me.

He actually wrote "languid filmmaking" rather than "lyrical filmmaking," but I remembered it as "lyrical" in my head as I was watching the movie.

He's right to characterize my tastes that way, but I guess I took some umbrage at the fairly neutral and thoroughly accurate comment. I have objected to some of Terrence Malick's films, in some cases vociferously (The Thin Red Line) and in some cases bemusedly with moderate affection (The Tree of Life). I'm not a Malick champion, that's for sure.

Yet I do feel like it's not just a personal preference thing, like there's something lacking in me that makes me like Malickian movies less than most people -- most discerning people, who are the only ones I really care about when comparing my movie tastes to theirs. Why don't I like Malick's brand of visual poetry a little more than I do?

Ain't Them Bodies Saints was possibly going to provide some kind of answer to this, though I didn't even know that it warranted the comparison to Malick until my friend wrote the email in question.

Of course, I should have known. The title is like something William Faulkner might have come up with, establishing it pretty well as Southern Gothic. And most Southern Gothic is lyrical or languid or whatever term you might use.

Then there's the fact that Casey Affleck spends the trailer talking just above a whisper about his vows to find his love (Rooney Mara) again. It's actually his regular speaking voice, but the "just above a whisper" comment is meant to make the comparison to the work of Malick, whose everpresent voiceovers are marked by their whispery quality.

It's Affleck's work that made me realize what it is I don't really care for in movies like this:

Uneducated low-level criminals from the South who speak in a string of childlike platitudes about love and destiny, whose simplistic construction gives them a wisdom and authenticity that could never be managed by a skilled wordsmith.

Since you might guess from the previous sentence that I am, or consider myself to be, such a wordsmith, you might not be surprised that I find myself in opposition to such characters.

So it's not the lyrical, languid world of a Terrence Malick film that really bothers me. It's the characters who populate it.

Since some plot description of David Lowery's acclaimed new(ish) film is probably now warranted, I'll tell you that it's set a bit in the Bonnie & Clyde world of Malick's masterpiece Badlands. (See, I do think some Malick films are masterpieces.) Affleck and Mara are young lovers or spouses (it's not quite clear) who have just discovered they're expecting a child. They're trying to make a life for themselves and their child through armed robbery, but that career is cut abruptly short during a shootout with police where their accomplice is killed and an officer is wounded. Although Mara's Ruth took the shot that wounded the officer, Affleck's Bob claims responsibility and is sent away for a long prison sentence. It's at this point when he starts doing VO of the letters he writes to Ruth, promising such things as "Each day I will awaken thinking it's the day I will see you again, and one day that will be true."

Puh-leeze.

Okay, it's a nice thought. I wish I'd come up with it. But the thing is, I can't come up with a thought like that because I'm an Ivy League graduate who would write it and re-write it until all its enviable sense of spontaneity was gone. I'd obsess over it until I killed it.

Not Bob Muldoon. Because Bob is an uneducated low-level criminal from the South (Texas in this case), his emotions are simple and pure and vivid. When adults try to draw children's drawings, they can't make it look right. But Bob's heart and his words of love for Ruth are a child's drawing that comes naturally to him, because he's at that state of emotional evolution.

I'm not picking on Ain't Them Bodies Saints in particular. I'm only picking on it because we've seen this so many times before. The first few times, it felt sort of fresh. This tragic fellow has a quick temper and he hurts people accidentally and he does the wrong things, but his quivering words of love are as pure as a baby's tears. He loves his girl and would do anything to be with her, and that's all there is to that. But by time number, I don't know, 47, I felt I'd seen this story before.

I could never be such a romantic hero in such a Faulknerian, Malickian story. As me, Vance, I'd be overthinking everything, so I'd never have the quick temper, nor hurt people accidentally, nor do the wrong things to begin with. (Oh, I'd do wrong things, but it'd be like plagiarizing a paper in school, not robbing a liquor store.) The romance of the situation is dependent on how little is calculated and calibrated about the thoughts and speech. Everything is "from the heart," not "from the brain."

It occurs to me that these sentiments are similar to some I expressed when I was struggling with why I didn't connect with Drive the way some people do/did. Here's a link to that piece if you want to read it. In that case it was more the strong silent type than the child-poet, but in both cases, it's characters who are essentially different than I am.

I wonder why we, as an audience, get so much more out of love stories between simple folk than love stories between university professors. At this point, we don't even get the opportunity to see love stories between university professors, so uninteresting is their love. Those eggheads aren't spontaneous or reckless or dangerous. Therefore, they're not romantic.

There must also be some kind of sense of superiority going on here. I think we need to look down on Bob and Ruth as children, of a sort -- our intellectual inferiors. We can examine their love as though it were the love of two lemurs in a zoo. There's something feral and elemental and basic about it. Advanced love is too hard for us to process in a pastime designed as escapism, since most likely we're dealing with some fucked up version of advanced love in our own lives, where people give each other the silent treatment for reasons they don't even remember, and no one gets involved in shootouts.

But back to this issue of the lyrical or languid style of filmmaking that Malick and David Lowery have in common. (You'd say Lowery is ripping Malick off, except that it's too well-made to really deliver that kind of indictment.) Another 2013 film disabused me of the notion that I couldn't wholeheartedly endorse the style of filmmaking Malick has made his calling card at least since The Thin Red Line. It has the photographic beauty of a Malick film, and if anything, it makes even less sense.

That film is Upstream Color, and I've already seen it twice.

I wasn't a fan of Shane Carruth's debut feature, Primer, but I ate up his sophomore film with a big spoon. Even though most of the time I had to rely on flimsy half theories of what was even going on.

Could it be a coincidence that these characters are modern, intellectual northerners?

I mean, we're not talking about brainiacs or anything, but Kris and Jeff are both denizens of a large, bustling city. No one talks about how close they are to seeing or touching each other. If they talk about anything at all, it's weird conspiracy theory shit that doesn't even make sense to them.

And I discovered while watching Upstream Color that I didn't need to know what was going on at all, as long as I felt like I dug how it was going on. In fact, I simply luxuriated in being immersed in an experience that was unlike any I had ever had.

Unlike in Ain't Them Bodies Saints, a tale as old as William Faulkner.

I can't leave this topic behind without acknowledging a certain hypocrisy in what I've just written. I say that these characters ring a little false to me, but the fact of the matter is, one of my very favorite movies of all time features a tragic relationship between two poetic simpletons. That movie is Raising Arizona, and Nicolas Cage's voiceover is just about the shining example of everything I'm railing against here.

But that just adds strength to my claim that it's all about the timing. That was 1987, when I hadn't already seen these characters so many times before. And, that was a comedy, in addition to the tragic romance. There was barely any languidness or lyricism to be seen.

So I can answer my friend as follows: It's not languid filmmaking, nor lyrical filmmaking, nor Terrence Malick I object to.

I object to these characters who can't find the words, who always find the perfect words. 

A fondness for inept criminals

Each week on the Filmspotting podcast, the hosts (Adam Kempenaar and Josh Larsen) end the show with a top five in some category -- top five movies about redemption, top five movies set in Los Angeles, even top five movie scenes involving bicycles. The top five is usually a tie-in to the new movie they're reviewing that week.

I'm always excited for the top five, but rarely satisfied once I've listened to it. The movies I would choose rarely seem to show up on their lists. Which I don't think is any reflection of my taste in movies vs. theirs. It's just an indication of how many movies there are out there to choose from.

This past week was an exception.

I first heard about it from my friend Don, who texted me on Saturday "Listening to this week's Filmspotting as I tend to laundry, and now I know that you like movies with well-done inept criminals."

The tie-in this week was Killing Them Softly, which I was a mere half hour away from seeing at the time I received the text. As soon as I saw the movie, I'd be free to listen to the podcast, which would reveal to me Adam and Josh's top five inept movie criminals.

And Don sure was right.

For starters, they called this alternately the "H.I. McDunnough Memorial List" and the "I'll Be Taking Those Huggies and Whatever Cash You've Got Memorial List." The purpose of "naming" the list is to acknowledge the one choice they consider most obvious, which they would theoretically both pick as their #1 if they didn't exclude it from consideration. Past examples include "The Overlook Hotel Memorial List" for the top five movies about hotels.

Right off the bat I knew they had "gotten" me, since Raising Arizona is currently listed as my #3 movie on Flickchart. Even though I secretly think it may be my favorite movie of all time.

And then:

Josh's top 5:

5. Jasper and Horace, 101 Dalmatians
4. Jacob, A Simple Plan
3. Professor Marcus, The Ladykillers
2. Jerry Lundegaard, Fargo
1. Dignan, Bottle Rocket

Adam's top 5:

5. Sam and Eddie, Safe Men
4. Holland and Pendlebury, The Lavender Hill Mob
3. Virgil Starkwell, Take the Money and Run
2. Ken Pile, A Fish Called Wanda
1. Jerry Lundegaard, Fargo

Of the nine different movies mentioned here (Fargo was mentioned by both), I've seen six. Of those six, four are among my top 300 movies of all time (A Fish Called Wanda, Fargo, A Simple Plan and Bottle Rocket), three in my top 100 (Plan, Fargo and Wanda) and two (Fargo and Wanda) in my top ten.

So yeah, I'd say I was pretty satisfied by this week's top five.

But as these things do, it also got me thinking: Am I drawn to movies about inept criminals?

If you had asked me that question without providing any of the evidence why you were asking, I'd have said "No, I don't think so. No more than anyone else, that's for sure."

But I wonder. Because those aren't the only favorites of mine that feature hapless hoods.

(And watch out for spoilers. If you see a name of a movie you haven't seen in bold, skip on to the next -- I may be spoiling something about it.)

Looking only at my current Flickchart top 20, you could make arguments for the following:

Pulp Fiction (#4). The guys eating their Big Kahuna burgers are pretty inept, considering that they got caught with their pants down, gunned down while eating burgers for breakfast. But then there's also the ineptitude of Vincent Vega blowing off Marvin's head because of a pothole -- this after he and his friend Jules forgot to check the back room for a gunman who should have killed them. And never mind the singular bone-headedness of Butch, whose unusual plan to screw over and subsequently escape the mob involves returning to his house when they're looking for him.

Glengarry Glen Ross (#11). When their priggish boss denies them the new Glengarry leads, Dave and Shelly decide to knock over their own office to steal them, planning to sell them to the competition. That plan is destined to fail in numerous ways, even if you remove the last part about selling the spoils of your theft in the same small industry where you already work -- where the police are most likely to look for it. 

Goodfellas (#12). Although you can't be inept and last in the mafia very long, in the end, everyone has a slip-up that results in their eventual whacking. Particular to this movie, however, most of the crew that pulled off the Lufthansa robbery gets whacked because they can't follow the simple instruction not to spend their newfound wealthy in showy ways that will attract attention.

Run Lola Run (#16). Mani blows an otherwise smooth and simple job to transport a bag of money when he leaves it on the subway, obeying an instinctive reaction to elude a pair of cops who aren't even looking for him. Later he walks into a grocery store to rob it without wearing anything that would conceal his identity. Meanwhile, Lola tries to rob a bank by holding her own father at gunpoint.

Unforgiven (#20). An old gunslinger goes on a mission to claim a bounty on a pair of thugs who beat and cut up a couple of prostitutes, but nearly dies from the flu because he got wet in the rain (and then beaten by the sheriff, but you kind of feel like the rain is what did him in). One of the two thugs is then shot to death on the toilet, a pathetic way to go even if it might not have been helped.

You could even argue that #19 The Shawshank Redemption contains a hapless criminal, because the actual killer of Andy Dufresne's wife boastfully confesses to the crime while in prison.

I guess you could say that almost any movie that has an element of crime in it has someone who isn't that good at it. So I don't want to stretch this too far.

But I can't help but notice all the titles of movies featuring hapless criminals as you continue down my list. Time Bandits (#21) might qualify. The Bicycle Thief (#26) definitely does. Though it does drop off after that. Maybe that's because #27 is Bound, and Bound contains a group of the smartest criminal types you've ever seen in a movie.

What to make of this concentration near the top of my list of movies about backfired criminal exploits?

I don't really know. Though it could mean I have a fascination with the best laid plans gone awry. Or maybe I just like watching people who have truly made a mess, comical or otherwise, of their lives, to remind myself that I needn't get too down on myself just because I don't know where I want to be in my career in ten years.

I'll have to think on it some more.

But this realization does partly explain why I'm so in love with Killing Them Softly, a film I seem to like more than anyone else on the planet other than Entertainment Weekly's Owen Gleiberman (who also rhapsodized over it). More than the criminal ineptitude that inspired this week's top five, though, Softly really demonstrates how all crime is destined to have consequences, even if the criminals carry it off with a decent amount of panache.

That and a bunch of stuff about Obama and the financial crisis, but we won't get into that right now.

Projecting again, posting about it again

So is this impressive collection of films a shelf at the local video store? With that many films lined up so impressively and so neatly, it could only be, right?

Nope. That's just what I brought with me to the hotel on Friday night.

Yep, I made another trip to a dumpy hotel near my work, armed with clothes, snacks, a laptop and a projector. Oh, and lots of movies. Twenty-one physical DVD cases, one of which contained three separate DVDs. So that's 23 movies total.

You may recall that I first did this last fall, the day after my birthday. It was designed as a birthday present, to get a night off from parenting at a hotel. My wife had done such things previously, and I followed suit. Projecting movies on the wall was my own personal innovation, my idea how to get the most out of time that I could spend exactly as I wanted.

Well, since my wife went out of town for three nights for her own birthday a couple weeks back, she insisted that I take another one of these nights for myself. Initially I was not all that pumped for it, because this would be my third time borrowing the projector from work, and I was already feeling sheepish about the prospect of asking my boss. In fact, I even devised various plans to steal it (he probably wouldn't notice), or rent or even buy my own (some people were selling them really cheaply on craigslist). Ultimately I just asked him again, and again he had no problem loaning it out to me.

That's when I started getting excited.

My goal this time was to watch six movies, which would be a one-movie improvement on my previous total. Having done this once already, I figured to lose less time to the logistics of making it work. For example, this time I didn't have to go to the store to buy a box of pushpins, so I could put a sheet up on the wall to cover the patterned wallpaper. But I did forget to bring the power strip I brought last time, so I watched my first movie with the laptop running on batteries. After that finished, I headed back to the office just after the last person left for the day, and corrected that situation. Time lost: 13 minutes.

And yep, I did get in those six movies - just barely.

I didn't want to write a massive post about my experiences watching these movies, but then as I was watching them, ideas of things to write about came up for each movie. So it will in fact be a sort of massive post, but it'll be broken up by subheadings, so you can pick through it that way if it makes it easier for you.

Laurie Holden's twin sister

My first movie up was Ron Underwood's Tremors, which made its way to the top of my Netflix queue without a specific plan for me to watch it. This seemed as good a time as any. When the sunlight is still coming in the hotel window (I checked in just before 3 p.m.), it's nice to have a movie that has lots of exterior shots. Otherwise it's difficult to see anything.

One of the first things I noticed was that Laurie Holden, of X-Files and Walking Dead fame, was in it. But this struck me as very strange. The movie is 22 years old, which would mean that Holden is now in her mid-40s -- at the very youngest. And the woman in this movie didn't seem to be only in her early 20s, in part because she is playing a seismologist doing research on plate tectonics.

So I took a break from the movie to satisfy my curiosity on the internet, and in fact, the woman in the movie is Finn Carter, who I saw last fall in How I Got Into College. I didn't mistake her for Holden then. But here, look at them side by side and tell me what you think:



Uncanny, right?

Well, maybe it would seem more so if I'd been able to find better pictures to use as my examples ...

(For the record, Holden is 39 and Carter is 51.)

That strange subplot with the Japanese guy

When I got back with the power strip, I excitedly put on Fargo. The movie is one of my top ten films of all time, but I have not seen it in at least five years. This needed to be remedied.

As I was watching it, I was marveling over the perfection of the script. It's such a tight script. Except ...

... there's an otherwise totally unnecessary subplot about a former classmate of Marge Gunderson's who is trying to romantically woo her, despite the fact that she's married and seven months pregnant.

I got to wondering what the purpose of this subplot is. It never dovetails into the main plot. I was talking about it with my wife later on, and we determined that the primary function of the subplot is to show that even in a contented marriage on the verge of motherhood, Marge has doubts about her place in the world. After all, she dresses up nicely to meet her former classmate while out of town in the big city, and even chooses a fancy restaurant for their meeting -- before eventually seeing how weird the guy has become and realizing how good she has it back at home with Norm. I guess the doubting of contented marriage is a theme in this movie, as Jerry Lundegaard is also shaking up a seemingly stable family life through the choices he makes.

Still, Fargo could easily exist without the Mike Yanagita subplot. Especially if you go by the basic screenwriting guideline that every scene in a movie should move the story forward in some identifiable way.

So why did the Coens include it? Especially when the movie otherwise exists as a master class in screenwriting?

My ultimate conclusion: It was a deliberate imperfection introduced to showcase how brilliant the rest of the script was. I admit that this is something of a stretch, and basically accuses the Coens of patting themselves on the back. (But let's be honest, it wouldn't be the first or last time they had patted themselves on the back.) But it got me thinking about how Muslims are supposedly known for leaving deliberate imperfections in their work, because only Allah is capable of perfection. Not that the Coens are Muslims, but that there's something about an imperfection that tends to accentuate how great everything else is.

And since Fargo is perfect as it is, I would definitely miss Mike Yanagita if he weren't there.

The unintended benefits of Heath Ledger's death

At around 8 o'clock I started what I guess you would call the main course. Anyway, I'll call it the main course because my pizza arrived about 20 minutes in.

The most famous thing about The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is, of course, the fact that Heath Ledger was working on it when he died. Since he had not completed all his scenes, Terry Gilliam pulled the unorthodox trick of recruiting three other actors -- Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell -- to complete the parts Ledger had not completed.

To me, this sounded like a doomed decision that would just add confusion to what was probably already a very confusing movie, it being from the mind of Gilliam.

Then I saw the movie.

It was amazing to me how cleanly Gilliam incorporated these other actors. If Ledger had to die while making this movie, it seems he chose an opportune time to do it. He seems to have filmed all of his real-world scenes before dying, leaving those within the fantasy word of the imaginarium unfilmed. It's in this fantasy world where those other actors take over, and it makes perfect sense in terms of the logic of that fantasy world. And it's not at all confusing.

In fact, I think I liked the movie better with these other three taking on the roles they did than if Ledger had done those roles himself.

You can't make an assessment like that in a vacuum, of course. We'll never see the movie as it would have been if Ledger hadn't died. But the work Ledger did contribute to this film is not some of his best. Which may have something to do with his physical condition in the weeks before he died -- I mean, he was taking all those medications that resulted in the cocktail that killed him for a reason. It's just like when I was watching Brad Renfro's last movie, The Informers, last weekend, and he seemed to be physically struggling to complete his scenes.

And so it was that Depp, Law and Farrell injected a much-needed playfulness into both this film and the character.

Anyway, the film does not entirely work on all levels, but it does enough right to have been well worth the watch.

Cybill Shepherd as [some character you don't know]

My second viewing of Taxi Driver, which began at about 10:45, was long overdue. I saw the movie for the first time probably in the mid 1990s, and not again since. It was also the one movie of the 23 that I knew I would watch, because my boss loaned it to me. In fact, as if I'd needed to lubricate my request to borrow the projector, I told my boss about my plan to watch Taxi Driver so as to snare him in a wave of enthusiasm. (It's one of his favorite films.) I'd actually been intending to pick it up at the library, but he brought in his copy on Friday to loan to me. That meant I was committed to watching it, even if I felt like passing on it at the 11th hour. (And it literally was almost the 11th hour when I started the nearly two hour movie.)

My main and only comment on Taxi Driver, beyond the fact that I really like but don't love the movie, has little to do with Taxi Driver itself, but a phenomenon that occurred to me while watching its opening credits.

Namely, that movies used to -- and some still do -- give the name of the character such-and-such actor is playing in the opening credits.

Taxi Driver did this twice. It says "Peter Boyle as Wizard" and "Cybill Shepherd as Betsy."

While I have a certain affection for this convention because it has a long history in cinema, I did wonder what it really gains you to know the name of the character an actor is playing. You don't know the names of any of the characters at this point, so knowing which actor plays which character is of limited value. These credits are basically asking you to store that name as information in your short-term memory, and then when the character appears on screen, you can say "Oh, that character is played by Cybill Shepherd."

But in a way, isn't that kind of "breaking the spell"? Don't you just want to concentrate on the character as a character, not as an actress playing that character? That's what the closing credits are for.

I think it's slightly different if it's a character that you might know before the movie even starts. Like, if Santa Claus were a character in Taxi Driver (which would be a pretty weird version of the movie), you might say "And Harvey Keitel as Santa Claus." But who is this "Betsy," anyway? Why is she singled out from the other characters?

The beauty of Derek Smalls

This is Spinal Tap is another of my all-time favorites, and another film I hadn't seen in at least five years. In fact, I can't even remember when I bought the DVD, and the packaging was still on it. (It was one of those DVDs that's taped shut along three edges, and the tape rips off in chunks. It took about five minutes for me to free the disc.) Anyway, since I know it so well, it made a perfect accompaniment to my morning coffee. The light streaming past the closed curtains wouldn't matter, because I didn't technically need to see everything that was happening.

This post is getting long, so I don't need to go on at length about This is Spinal Tap. You probably already know everything a person could say about it. But a couple quick comments nonetheless:

- I consciously noticed for the first time that Anjelica Huston is in this movie. She plays the woman who designed the 18-inch Stonehenge model. But what I found really interesting about her appearance is that her name appears twice in the closing credits, spelled two different ways. The first time they spell her first name wrong (Angelica), and the second time they spell it with the J. Funny.

- I love the "lukewarm water" that is Derek Smalls (Harry Shearer). I love how even-keeled this guy is. He's always using logic to interpret every situation in the most optimistic possible way, and nothing can really throw him. On this viewing, I especially appreciated the fact that he smokes a pipe. That seems to make him all the more wise. It also makes the scene where he goes through airport security with an aluminum foil-wrapped cucumber in his pants all the more funny, because you get the prankster side of the character there as well.

Watching Raising Arizona as a father

My personal favorite among the classics I rewatched is Raising Arizona, the final movie of the visit, which I finished just 15 minutes before checking out. I have it ranked as my third favorite movie of all time on Flickchart, yet I hadn't watched it since June of 2007.

I know this movie like the back of my hand, which made for a good movie to watch as I was cleaning up the room and dealing with a stronger quality of light coming through the window. What I'd never done previously, though, was watch it as a father.

And I found myself getting emotional several times.

Some of that was just the emotion I've owned up to feeling when I love a movie so much that it touches me on a deeper level. Like, when the opening credits finally kick in at something like the 11-minute mark, with the movie's classic theme song, I think I had a bit more than just the chills I'm getting even know as I write about it.

But the ending, always sentimental and poignant, really got me this time. HI and Ed having to return the baby. Nathan Arizona realizing that it was them who took Nathan Jr. Ed explaining that they can't have one of their own. Nathan describing how lost he would be if Florence left him -- "I do love her so." And finally, HI's dream where you see him from behind, an old man at a future family reunion, and a grown woman comes to touch him on his cheek, speaking to him a single, loving word:

"Dad."

Yep. Waterworks.

What makes a satisfying story?

This is the fifth in my Second Chances series, which runs on Tuesdays. For other entries, please see the corresponding label on the right.

I can tell you the exact moment when No Country for Old Men switches from a satisfying story to an unsatisfying story.

It's when the recently introduced character played by Woody Harrelson is snooping around the U.S.-Mexico border in Texas, near where the shootout occurred between Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) and Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem). Harrelson's character -- I'm not even going to name him, which is my comment on his narrative usefulness -- happens to walk out on the bridge leading up to the border, and happens to look down into the same grassy area where Moss tossed the case of money a night or two before. He immediately recognizes it for what it is, notes its location, and moves away, in order not to attract additional attention. Five minutes of screen time later, he's dead, and the money never makes an appearance in the movie again, as far as I could tell from my second viewing.

Huh?

This was my first indication that No Country was going south for me, and they just kept on piling up after that. I've always been a big believer in the idea that your script isn't tight enough unless everything happens for a reason. Harrelson's character is the perfect example of something that happens for no reason. He has one scene where he's hired to find Moss. He has another scene where he finds Moss and talks to him in his hospital bed. He has the scene described above, where he finds the money. And then he has the scene where he's held at gunpoint by Chigurh and ultimately executed.

Even after two viewings, I still can't figure out why his character even needed to be in the movie. He doesn't change the stakes for any character. He doesn't change the trajectory of the plot. He really only exists for a frustrating reason, which is to indicate that good detective work isn't even necessary to find what you're looking for -- sometimes you just stumble across it by dumb luck. Oh, and to provide yet more proof that Chigurh is a cold, heartless bastard, of which we already have ample evidence.

(Note: After finishing this piece I realized that without Harrelson's character, Chigurh and Moss would never get the chance to talk, because Moss calls the room where Harrelson's character is staying, and Chigurh picks up. In this conversation, Chigurh threatens Moss' wife, which has implications later on. However, I'm not sure if having Harrelson's character in the movie was the only way to accomplish these things.)

As you know, the story continues in this vein from there. Moss is killed off screen. Moss' mother-in-law is killed off screen. Moss' wife is killed off screen* (more on that later). Chigurh gets all effed up in a car accident that's so random and sudden that it's sort of like the opposite of a deus ex machina -- it's bad luck descended magically from the gods. And then the movie ends on Tommy Lee Jones talking about his foreboding dream.

Huh?

No Country for Old Men was never a thumbs down for me -- it was always a thumbs up with an asterisk. That asterisk was because the movie challenged our very idea of what makes a satisfying script. As does the Cormac McCarthy story on which it's based, No Country for Old Men leaves us feeling empty and unsatisfied if we are expecting clean, logical resolutions. The movie's motto, condensed to its most basic form, seems to be "Shit happens." And I don't find that to be a very good motto for a movie.

But is that my problem, or Joel and Ethan Coen's? Or McCarthy's? I'd like to think of myself as someone plenty capable of appreciating a non-traditional narrative. And I think there are numerous examples where I embrace such a narrative with open arms. Don't confuse this with me saying that there are certain people in each movie I think should live, and certain people I think should die, or else I won't be satisfied. That's not it either. I just need the explanations for their deaths to emerge logically from the story, and to be dramatized in some way.

What my second viewing of No Country gave me was a little more of an appreciation of what the Coens were trying to do. What I once thought was just messing around with us -- a theory that I considered confirmed when I witnessed the disdainful way they accepted their Oscars -- was, I'm pretty sure, an intentional artistic choice, not just anarchy.

Let's take Moss' death. It's what most people who don't love the film, including me, describe as its single most frustrating moment. Here you have the movie's protagonist, who you've been following almost from the start, through numerous smart decisions, some not-so-smart ones, and a handful of near misses. Then all the sudden he's just lying there, dead, in a doorway. And it wasn't even Chigurh who killed him. It was a truck of Mexican drug runners who were tipped off to Moss' location by his cranky and oblivious mother-in-law.

I now understand that this is the Coens trying to put us in the shoes of the film's real protagonist: Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, played by Tommy Lee Jones. Just as Bell has been a few steps behind with everything else in the plot -- an investigatory deficit that has been good for his health -- he's a few steps behind catching up to Moss. We don't see the shootout that killed Moss because he didn't see it. And in fact, when you come right down to it, we don't see that shootout because it might disappoint us even more than not seeing it. Sometimes in life, the "hero" -- or in this case, the guy who happened across a bag of money, didn't report it, and decided not to give a dying man water in time to help him -- doesn't go down in a heroic gun battle, with the soundtrack swelling to emotionally manipulate us. He just gets gunned down in the doorway of a seedy motel.

The question I'm asking myself now is this: Understanding what the Coens were doing with the benefit of time and distance, do I "forgive" them? Do they even need to be forgiven?

At the time I saw it, I was cursing the film's name on the drive home. Needless to say, I was expecting the resolutions of a film like their masterwork, Fargo, in which some people who didn't deserve to die ended up dying, but the film had a kind of bleak neatness to its resolution. When No Country didn't give me that, I considered it an act of sadism and spite by the writer-directors.

Now I'm not so sure. I still think some different choices in the film's last 30-45 minutes would have made it a stronger film. (Because, I think we can all agree, the first half of the film is near perfection.) But I no longer feel like they made mistakes, per se -- I just feel like their choices were not necessarily the ones I would have made. And even after the second viewing, I still would have done away with Woody Harrelson's character.

I said I'd get back to the death of Moss' wife, played by Kelly MacDonald. On this viewing, I've decided that I'm not 100% sure that Chigurh kills her. We see him leave her house, and we assume, based on the morality he's displayed to this point, that he does in fact kill her in cold blood. But now I'm not so sure. I kind of like that the Coens don't tell you for certain. You don't hear a telltale gunshot, and you don't hear anything about her again. She could have lived. Chigurh could have made some kind of 11th hour appeal to his own remaining shreds of humanity. I like films where certain aspects are left unresolved, for you the viewer to determine what happened.

This is already a long piece, but I can't leave behind my discussion of No Country without sharing a different observation I had during my second viewing.

When I wrote my piece ranking the Coens' movies (check it out here), a regular reader of mine commented regarding No Country: "I just felt like I had seen it all before." At the time I sort of embraced the comment, because it was a snide remark about a film that had bothered me (but bothers me less now). But I guess I didn't completely understand it, because a lack of originality was never a complaint I had about No Country. I thought it was the perfect blend of originality and homage to their own previous work. (Can you make an homage to yourself?)

Upon second viewing, I realized just how much No Country alludes to their own work -- and not even the work you'd think it would. Numerous critics observed that No Country reminded them of the Coens' first film, Blood Simple. And while that's true on a surface level, it actually has a lot more in common with ... Raising Arizona, my favorite Coen movie.

Don't believe me? I started taking notes, so check it out:

1) Anton Chigurh is basically another version of Leonard Smalls, the Harley-riding, cigar-chomping, heavily bearded, highly antisocial bounty hunter from Raising Arizona, played inimitably by Randall "Tex" Cobb. Both characters are highly lethal and operate by their own rules -- though because Arizona is a comedy, we don't see Smalls actually kill anyone. Both have an uneasy relationship with the person who hired them, proceeding to either act on their own agenda, or to appear ready to do so. But what tells me that the Coens intended the comparison is that each fires at innocent creatures by the side of the road while cruising by in their vehicle (a car for Chigurh, the aforementioned Harley for Smalls). This is where Smalls does Chigurh one better -- he blows up a rabbit with a grenade and sharp-shoots a lizard out of existence, whereas Chigurh just shoots at (but does not hit) a crow.

2) When visiting the abandoned Moss residence, Sheriff Bell squats down to investigate the hole that was left in the wall when Chigurh blasted the front door lock out of its casing. This is a visual echo of when Leonard Smalls squats down in the abandoned McDonough household to read the word "FART" written on the wall in crayon.

3) Just as Moss is undone by the tracking device in the bag of money, which leads Chigurh to him, so were Gale (John Goodman) and Evelle (William Forsythe) undone by the blue paint bomb that blows up in the bag of money in Raising Arizona (and sends their car careening out of control).

4) One of the funniest throwaway moments in Raising Arizona is when Gale and Evelle are robbing a convenience store and ask the aged clerk if he has any balloons that make funny shapes ("Not unless round's funny.") There are several moments in No Country that echo this, notably the ominous coin flip scene with the aged gas station owner ("Friend-o"), the scene in which Moss comes to buy clothes in a hospital gown and asks the clerk if he often gets people coming in in his state ("No sir, it's unusual," is the response), and the scene in which Moss requests a second room from the perplexed motel owner ("That room's got two double beds!").

And then a couple similarities to other films:

1) Sheriff Bell and his slowish partner (Garret Dillahunt) have basically the same dynamic as Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand) and her slowish partner in Fargo.

2) In another Fargo similarity, the Coens pan past the dead hotel clerk that Chigurh killed before confronting Moss the same way they pan past the dead parking lot clerk that Steve Buscemi's character shoots in Fargo.

3) In numerous Coen films, the hotel room is a major point of reckoning in the criminal world (Blood Simple, Fargo) and even in the non-criminal world (Barton Fink). It's clear the Coens see hotels/motels as kind of a waystation where major life events occur. Moss stays in four different hotel/motel rooms here, the last of which is where he's killed.

Okay, I've taken up enough of your time.

Second Chance Verdict, No Country for Old Men: My thumb is still up, and the asterisk is still there, but the asterisk is much smaller. This film has a ton of excellent stylistic details, bold decisions, and ominous moods. But I still would have given best picture to There Will Be Blood that year.

About time for a change

Greetings everyone. Time for the latest update in my regular series of posts discussing my utilization of Flickchart (www.flickchart.com) to rank all the films I've ever seen. To see how Flickchart does it, I refer you to this post -- and then to the six other FC-related posts I've written, which you can find by clicking on my Flickchart label to the right.

I've now made it through 60,000 duels on Flickchart. That's 60,000 head-to-head battles between any two of the 2735 movies I am currently ranking. But just to look at my top 20, which I've isolated for your edification in a special spot on the right, you wouldn't have thought I was making much progress. At 40,000 duels, I discussed my frustration that there had not been a single change in my top 20 during the previous 10,000 duels. The next 10,000 yielded a couple changes, restoring some of my equanimity. But then the 10,000 after that -- the period I just finished -- went back to the status quo. No changes.

The reason for this is pretty simple, when you think about it. When you're pulling randomly from a group of 2735 movies, you get a lot more meaningless duels between the films ranked #1042 and #1311 than you do between films ranked #1-#20 and any other film that has a reasonable chance of beating them. Those 20 films get maybe ten duels every 10,000, and most of the time, they hold serve against some pretender in the low 1700s.

Thus far, I haven't been willing to use one of Flickchart's many available methods for focusing only on higher ranked films. I had decided that I loved the purity of the randomness of the duels. I knew that eventually, over time, even if it took one million duels, all my films would have all the duels they needed in order to reach their proper place in the rankings.

But it takes a lot of patience to wait for one million duels to transpire. At the pace I'm currently going -- not that I can maintain this feverish intensity forever -- I won't hit one million duels until about 2018. There had to be something faster.

There is, but I'd have to sacrifice some of that "purity of randomness" I discussed a moment ago to get it. I'd have to decide I am willing to take control of my duels, make them less random than they've been. And I decided it was about time. I was getting just as sick of looking at those same 20 titles as you were.

So I decided I would utilize a feature on Flickchart that allows you to duel only your top 250 films. Ever flexible, Flickchart also lets you duel your top 100, your top 50 and your top 20, but let's not get crazy here. Baby steps. Baby steps.

I decided I'd devote the first 1,000 of every 10,000 new duels to just the top 250. That would allow for plenty of reshuffling among my favorite films, a faster push toward greater accuracy, a faster push toward permanently removing The Untouchables and Ferris Bueller's Day Off (great movies though they are) from my top 20. And then for the other 9,000 duels, it would be business as usual. Those 9,000 duels would give lower ranked films, films that might deserve to be in the top 250, an opportunity to move into the top 250 in time for duels 70,000 through 71,000. And there still might be changes to the top 20 during those 9,000 duels -- they would just come organically, like they used to.

Did it work? Hell yes. Maybe too well. (I'll explain what I mean by that in a minute).

Here is how my top 20 looked at 60,000:

1. Toy Story
2. Pulp Fiction
3. Donnie Darko
4. Schindler's List
5. Glengarry Glen Ross
6. Dumb and Dumber
7. Back to the Future
8. Lost in Translation
9. The Seven Samurai
10. Toy Story 2
11. The Empire Strikes Back
12. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
13. Dances With Wolves
14. The Princess Bride
15. Raiders of the Lost Ark
16. Children of Men
17. Unforgiven
18. Citizen Kane
19. Ferris Bueller's Day Off
20. The Untouchables

And here's how it looked at 61,000:

1. Raising Arizona
2. Toy Story
3. Pulp Fiction
4. Donnie Darko
5. Schindler's List
6. Glengarry Glen Ross
7. Dumb and Dumber
8. Back to the Future
9. Lost in Translation
10. The Seven Samurai
11. The Iron Giant
12. 12 Monkeys
13. Children of Men
14. When Harry Met Sally ...
15. Unforgiven
16. Toy Story 2
17. The Empire Strikes Back
18. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
19. Citizen Kane
20. Adaptation

Maybe those differences seem abstract to you, but they weren't for me. Those differences represented a whopping ten changes to the top 20 in just 1,000 duels. That's compared to zero changes in two different non-consecutive periods of 10,000.

How did it happen? Well, I'll tell you.

1. The Shawshank Redemption defeated The Princess Bride. This came within my first 25 duels under the new system, and brought a sigh of relief that the process was working as I intended. Plus, I love Shawshank -- it's one of two films (along with Dumb and Dumber) I've told people I must watch to the finish if I come across it on TV. As an added bonus, The Untouchables was finally banished from my top 20. (No offense, Untouchables, but you just aren't top 20 material.)

2. Citizen Kane defeated Dances With Wolves. Another clear victory. Citizen Kane may just be my favorite film of all time -- maybe "the best" is more accurate than "my favorite." Jumping up to #13 marked its high water mark on Flickchart. Plus, although I like Wolves very much, it's been something of a mystery why it's stayed in the top 20 for so long. This duel pushed it one closer to departing that hallowed ground. But because Citizen Kane was already in my top 20 (at #19), nothing was pushed out of the top 20 with this duel.

3. Raising Arizona defeated Toy Story. This is when it started to get real. This one hit me like a ton of bricks. Toy Story had been my #1 movie since my very first Flickchart duel. It was in the first duel, it won, and it had not lost since. Nevertheless, I had started to get tired of it sitting at #1. There's a possibility it could be my favorite film of all time, but then again, I don't actually own it on DVD, which should tell you something. And Raising Arizona felt like the right film to dethrone it, especially since I featured it in the post I wrote after 40,000 duels -- it was the example I gave of a movie I couldn't, for the life of me, get up to a decent ranking. Is #1 decent enough? But because it was such a significant change -- could there be a change any more significant? -- clicking that button in favor of Raising Arizona shook me to the core. With this duel, Ferris Bueller's Day Off also exited my top 20 -- I can safely say for good.

4. 12 Monkeys defeated Toy Story 2. And another Toy Story movie takes a hit. This win for 12 Monkeys might not have been possible if I hadn't seen it again about six months ago, and remembered how great it is. I have also started to mentally turn on Toy Story 2 a little bit. It's a great film, no doubt, but I no longer know if it belongs in my top 20. One sad byproduct of this duel was that Unforgiven was kicked out of my top 20.

5. WarGames defeated The Princess Bride. This change came very soon after the previous one, and started to make me wonder if I could mentally digest all these changes at once. I decided that the constant sense of foreboding that pervades WarGames is more cinematically effective on me than Princess Bride's constant sense of whimsy. Another thing that contributed to my mounting anxiety: The brilliant Children of Men dropped to #21 after this duel. Wait! Stop! Hold on there!

6. When Harry Met Sally ... defeated Toy Story 2. Another duel that came fast and furious on the heels of the previous one. I've stated my case against Toy Story 2 already, so I'll say this felt very right: When Harry Met Sally (I'll omit the ellipses) may just be my favorite romantic comedy of all time. But another unthinkable casualty: The towering Raiders of the Lost Ark was bounced from my top 20.

Here a funny thing happened. I was given a duel between Children of Men, which had just been evicted from the top 20, and The Empire Strikes Back, which was holding strong at #14. I can't tell you how much I love Children of Men, but come on ... it's The Empire Strikes Back. Then again, this would get Children back into the top 20. I agonized over it for about a minute, but then, a deus ex machina saved me: We had a power outage. Every once in awhile, it's nice to be saved from the recurring Sophie's Choices that make up the Flickchart experience.

7. Adaptation defeated Dances With Wolves. The respite was brief. After only another couple rankings, Dances With Wolves was defeated again. This duel also would not have transpired this way if I hadn't just watched Adaptation again in order to rank my favorite films of the 2000's, reacquainting me with its non-traditional brilliance, which I realize is an acquired taste for most people. So long, Princess Bride.

8. The Iron Giant defeated 12 Monkeys. The Iron Giant is one of my top five animated films of all time, so I'm okay with this. But this again came right on the heels of the last decision, making me paranoid indeed about what I'd gotten myself into. WarGames got bumped from the top 20, its taste of the good life ultimately short-lived.

9. Children of Men defeated When Harry Met Sally. Thereby restoring one film that was regrettably purged from the top 20 four duels ago. Of course, for every restoration, there's a counterbalancing loss: The Shawshank Redemption dropped down to #21, it too given only a short furlough in the top 20.

Thus ended an intense period of about six top 20 changes in the course of less than hour of ranking in front of the television. My my.

10. Unforgiven defeated Toy Story 2. I'm really ganging up on Toy Story 2, aren't I? The final change to my top 20 came a couple days later, after a busy weekend in which I didn't have much time to rank. It was a relief to be nearing the end of my self-imposed 1,000 duels among the top 250 films, and to have Unforgiven restored to the top 20. (Though, as I am coming to realize, there are more than 20 films I think should go in my top 20.) The final film booted from my top 20? Dances With Wolves. Which, as I've suggested, is justified.

So how do I feel at the end of all of this?

Exhausted. In fact, it took me longer to get through these 1,000 duels than any previous 1,000.

You'd think I'd be excited to forcibly reshape my rankings to more accurately reflect my tastes, and it's true, the top 20 I have now is certainly more accurate than the one I had before. But in truth, it was scary. Over the course of 60,000 rankings, I've become something of an old dog, wary of new tricks. There has been a certain comfort in plowing through a hundred or two hundred duels in the space of five minutes, knowing that you will have mostly inconsequential duels. And that when a really important duel does come up, it will seem like an exciting moment, a really big deal.

When all the duels are consequential, it's a different story. It's really too much of a mental burden to always be deciding between really good movies. You need a buffer comprised of low-stress decisions. I felt myself actually starting to fear the conditions that I had put in place. It was like I was walking a minefield of really important decisions, and at any moment I could be sent into a panic of indecisiveness. What's more, I found there to be a lot of movement within that top 250 -- every film always seemed to be winning a duel that would jump it 100 spots in the standings. I started to worry whether my decisions were even internally consistent anymore. How could Movie A be better than Movie B, Movie B be better than Movie C, but Movie C be better than Movie A? I don't know, but it was happening.

Logically, I should be excited just to get where I'm going -- accurate rankings -- all the more quickly. But I discovered something about myself during this process: Old dogs can accept changes, but they'd really like them to be gradual. Ease us into the changes -- don't smack us in the face with a two-by-four.

Maybe I'll scale back from 1,000 to 500 next time. I can't take the stress.