A questionable association with the year 2011

Last night I finished a rewatch of The Cabin in the Woods. I should really say this morning, because I finished around 1:30.

I did watch it again from the start, but it was the continuation of an attempted rewatch from a couple months ago. When I got in no more than 25 minutes on that attempt, instead of finishing it the next day, I abandoned the viewing. That's how I'll usually handle an interrupted rewatch, though first-time viewings always get completed the next day.

I thought it might have been my first rewatch, but no. My records tell me I watched it for the second time back in 2014. That makes sense. It's a movie I really liked and continue to really like.

But something bothers me about it just a little bit, and it has nothing to do with the movie itself, which I already discussed in detail in this post if you've read into this post for that sort of analysis of the film.

When you look up The Cabin in the Woods on either IMDB or Letterboxd, it is listed as a 2011 film. Which we all know is wrong. It's easy for me to remember that the film belongs with 2012. I saw it in the theater in April of 2012, just after its release, and one of the reasons I easily remember it's from that year is because of this post, which is still the only post on this blog ever written by a guest writer, in which he talked about the feat of watching and ranking 212 movies in the year 2012. (Which is a laughable thing to be impressed at nowadays, since the same guy has subsequent watched nearly 500 films during the same period.) Anyway, as you can see, The Cabin in the Woods is responsible for the art for this post. 

So why, then, the 2011 year?

Well of course it is the usual suspect in cases like this: a film festival from the year prior to its release. The moment a film debuts in any public venue, it gets slapped with that release year on places like IMDB and Letterboxd, never to relinquish it. And though that annoys us, we can accept the reasoning and we just move on with our lives.

So where did The Cabin in the Woods play in 2011, you ask? Was it TIFF maybe? That's a September festival, and might have given in the necessary thrust for an early 2012 release. The Cabin in the Woods is not the sort of film you necessarily debut during Oscar season. Which isn't to say it's not good -- of course it's quite good -- it's just that you'd correctly assume it could help prop up the otherwise weak start of a release year. October would also be a good time to debut it, for Halloween, but that would be too soon after TIFF to build any sort of marketing campaign.

So I looked it up on IMDB, and there was exactly one festival in which it appeared, in December of 2011. On December 11 of 2011, in fact. It was:

The Butt-Numb-a-Thon Film Festival.

I will allow a moment's pause for you to finish laughing like Beavis and/or Butthead.

Oh my.

What exactly is this festival, you ask?

It's cooler than it sounds, it turns out. It was a secret 24-hour film marathon held at the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin from 1999 to 2016. It was the brainchild of Ain't It Cool News founder Harry Knowles. That's a name I haven't heard in a while. In fact, when I just looked him up, I discovered the festival appears to have ended as a result of his expulsion from the Austin Film Critics Association in September of 2017 following credible accusations of sexual assault. So that's why I haven't heard about him lately. 

Ever helpful despite its impending takeover of the world -- not inappropriate for a discussion of this movie -- AI tells me that the festival was in celebration of Knowles' birthday (December 11th) and that it contained "a lineup of films kept completely secret from the audience ahead of time. It featured a mix of rare vintage prints, cult classics, and surprise high-profile studio premieres."

So that last is where The Cabin in the Woods comes in.

But is the fact that an estimated 200 people (according to AI) saw it with three weeks remaining in 2011 enough to associate it in all public documents with the year 2011?

I say it is not. And so when I list the movie in places like my Most Recently Seen area on the right, I will continue to write 2012 as the release year. Because that was the real release year for this movie.

But what happens when I'm old and no longer remember that The Cabin in the Woods came out in 2012 and that a friend of mine wrote a blog post about the 212 films he ranked in 2012? What will I do then?

I guess I will just pop in my dentures and my bionic eyes and enjoy the viewing. And if I've forgotten some of the film's twists and turns, all the better. 

This year's release date asterisk

It Ends was a movie I looked for last year, when it was recommended to me by a friend who saw it and ranked it as part of his own year-end rankings. (Which means it could only be one friend. There's only one other person who would be willing to go on this crazy mission with me each year.)

So why will it be a part of my own 2026 rankings?

I have fairly hard-and-fast rules about release years and when I count a movie toward the current year. And it usually has to do with the film's U.S. release date. Even though I've lived in Australia for 13 years now, Australian release dates are sometimes way out of whack and I just don't consider them to be a reliable gauge of the current film year, not when I'm comparing my own list to those from people who live in other parts of the world. 

If a film has a release in the U.S. in a particular year, it's part of that year for ranking purposes. That allows foreign films, which were often released in their home country in the previous year, to qualify for ranking in that second year.

But if you go to IMDB for Alexander Ullom's head-trippy road movie -- in that it is literally about a road that seems to go on forever -- you'll see the following under the U.S. release:

"United States - December 10, 2025 (internet)"

And then on the very next line:

"United States - August 21, 2026"

Huh? 

A film may get only an internet release, or it may get an internet release after a theatrical release. In fact, I believe this second describes every movie that's been made in the internet era -- though to be fair, IMDB does not usually note the date a movie becomes available for streaming.

But an internet release and then a theatrical release? You don't usually see that.

What happened was that Letterboxd, for a limited time, had exclusive access to the movie as part of its Unreleased Gems series. I noticed in a recent email from Letterboxd that they're doing it again this year. 

In fact, the time was so limited that when I went to look for it a month later, in order to make It Ends one of my final half-dozen viewings of 2025, it was no longer available. I wrote it off as never rankable on one of my year-end rankings, a fate that befalls a large number of releases each year.

But most of those other movies burn their eligibility in that first year. Because of its unusual release schedule, I've now decided It Ends did not. 

It took another eight months to finally get a proper release, but It Ends came out in the U.S. last month, and washed up on our shows last week. I watched it Sunday night as a second movie after the family went to see Terminator 2, as discussed previously. 

I liked but did not love it. Not top 20 like my friend ranked it last year. To each his own. But that isn't really the point of writing this post.

No, the point is to talk about a sort of stretching of the rules that actually sort of pains me a little bit.

I know these are my rules and I can do whatever I want with them, but I also feel like it's good to be consistent. And the way it works out, only foreign films, not English language films like this one, usually get that "second chance" -- which is really just a first chance, since I literally could not have seen those movies in the year of their proper release, unless I'd flown to the country where they were released, or maybe caught them at a festival. 

If I had been a bit faster, I could have seen It Ends last year.

But then again I might not have even noticed it was a Letterboxd exclusive, might not have even had it recommended to me by my friend. And then it would have been like any other film that has a different release year on IMDB than the year of its actual release, a result of debuting at a film festival one year and getting a theatrical release the next. That's especially likely if the festival debut was a later festival, like TIFF. You can't expect all those films to get distribution in that first year, so you rank them in the second year.

And so I am treating the Letterboxd exclusive window on It Ends kind of like an online film festival. 

Hey, it works for me, and these are my rules anyway. Which doesn't mean I am always flexible enough to bend them. 

A significant release year miss

When I started watching the movie F on Thursday night, the "latest" from 47 Meters Down director Johannes Roberts, I thought it had quite a strange look to it. 

There was an out-of-time quality to it that I couldn't place, that I attributed to it looking like TV rather than looking like a movie. This was streaming on Amazon, but it's the same feeling I remember having about a Netflix straight-to-streaming movie I saw a couple years ago, Blood Red Sky. I didn't think either movie was bad -- not by this point of F, anyway -- but I do think there's something uniquely unsavory about a film that looks like a TV show. We all know that we love TV shows that look like movies, but the reverse is not true.

It was only when I got to the very end of the credits, which I watched despite not liking the movie by its very strange ending, that I realized why this 2026 film looked so odd:

It was made in 2010.

Of course, if I'd already seen the poster above -- a poster from the movie's DVD release -- then of course I would have known its vintage. But I had only this to go on:

Huh? In what way, shape or form is this a 2026 film?

Even if Amazon had newly acquired this film, which it seems like they must have, that is not the same as a release year. 

I checked the Wikipedia page to see if it mentioned anything about some new release agreement, some kind of streaming debut, that would, in any conceivable way, qualify this as a movie released in the current year. But I found mention of nothing like that.

You may recall that Amazon has biffed this sort of thing before. I wrote here about watching the movie Corner Office, thinking it was being released in 2024 but then finding out that the actual release year was 2022.

I get that. Release years are slippery things. A festival debut here, a theatrical release there, and then a streaming release, and you could conceivably have a three-year range of ambiguous possible release dates.

There is no way to miss a release year by 16 years. 

So now Amazon is requiring me to do all my homework before watching one of their "new" releases, which takes away some of the spontaneity of just finding it on the streamer and pressing play. 

I guess a movie that looks like a TV show, supposedly released today, is the kind of thing that should give you pause. 

A long wait for The Dry 2

I'm going to be in Broome in Western Australia next week on vacation. Naturally, I did some advanced scouting of the movie theater there. (It's pretty small so I assume there's only one.)

I was hoping The Blue Beetle, which opens today, might be playing, because that's something I can see with the kids. But it doesn't look like it at this particular theater.

Just to be sure, I checked out the coming soon movies, and followed it to the end of the listings, which is where I found something really funny.

Now, Force of Nature: The Dry 2 was supposed to already be out. But cascading consequences of the writer's strike -- something I need to write about at some point -- has pushed forward the release date.

But I didn't think it would be pushing it out this far:

In case you're having trouble reading that, I thought I would blow it up for you:

I think they might have gotten the release year of The Dry 2 confused with the year in which its neighbor, Dune 2, takes place. 

Something weird going on with the Mission: Impossible release date

Something I have never seen before is happening with the Australian release of Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One, and the damned internet refuses to explain it to me.

When I was wrapping up my ski holiday, I remembered that two of my writers were supposed to attend an advanced screening of the seventh Mission: Impossible movie on Monday night and write me a review. I try to remind them they've agreed to these things, since they're younger than I am and in my experience, millennials don't have the same notion of remembering things and remaining committed to things that we sturdy Gen Xers have. I reminded them about a week beforehand but forgot to remind them a day beforehand, so I thought the next best thing was to check in with them after the fact. I didn't figure they could turn back time, but at least I'd know sooner rather than later whether I was expecting a review from them.

Well, I shouldn't besmirch their names because my fears were unfounded. They did indeed go. They didn't need some person who is (almost) old enough to be their father to provide them a paternalistic reminder.

They wouldn't, however, be ready with a review before the week was out, which I expected. They lead busy lives, or at least they perceive them to be busy, which amounts to the same thing. 

This didn't matter, though, because I knew the movie was not coming out until next Thursday, and indeed reviews were actually embargoed up until today. 

That's when one of the guys told me they'd said at the premiere that the movie was opening on Saturday.

If we had been in the same room they would have heard me scoff. Instead I wrote in our Facebook chat, hoping the scoffing tone was only in my head and not my words, "I don't think it would come out on a Saturday but I also don't think the release date is until next Thursday."

I mean, of course a movie would not come out on a Saturday. When have you ever heard of a movie coming out on a Saturday? Unless of course that Saturday falls on Christmas. 

The response came "Yeah I agree but that's what they said at the premiere and that's what flicks.com.au is reporting."

Lo and behold, it was true.

I didn't go to that website, but I did go to Hoyts. No shows Thursday, no shows Friday, but then lo and behold, shows Saturday, Sunday, Monday, and I pretty much stopped at that point.

What?

Just to establish our default terms here, movies release on Thursdays in Australia. Full stop. The only exception I can think of is Boxing Day, which is, for some odd reason, the biggest release date on the whole calendar. If Boxing Day is a Sunday, then one time a year movies come out on a Sunday.

They don't even especially seem to come out early, like you sometimes see in America when a movie jumps the standard Friday release date and comes out on a Wednesday or Thursday. See, Australian Thursday is already early. It's how I got to see Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny before anyone else, as well as every one of the new Star Wars movies. And since Australian Thursday night is actually only Thursday morning in the U.S., I might be seeing these movies 36 to 48 hours before my American counterparts. Not only is the release day a day earlier, but the day of the week arrives a day earlier because of the time zones. 

A Saturday? A Saturday is unheard of. It's two days late for the Thursday release date and five days early for the next Thursday.

The first thing I could think of was that Tom Cruise had mandated that this movie must screen in the United States of America before it screens anywhere else. That was the only thing I could think of to explain the odd release day. By our Saturday, the U.S. Friday would have passed and now the movie would be safe for pirates the world over.

But as far as I can tell, the movie doesn't actually release in the U.S. until next Wednesday, the 12th. So yes, Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One is going early for the Friday release date in the U.S., opening on a Wednesday, but it'll be four days later than Australia.

And Hong Kong, it would seem. On IMDB, Australia and Hong Kong are the two countries that have a July 8th release date. Perhaps even stranger, though since it's not in a Christian part of the world it may not matter, the movie opens on Sunday the 9th in the United Arab Emirates.

But if Tom Cruise's paranoia over piracy is not a factor in any of this, what explains it?

Dunno. The internet won't tell me.

Either I'm not googling the right search words or no one thinks it's nearly as interesting as I do.

There is one more release date for Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One that we have to discuss, and that's the actual release date on this poster: July 14th. That's the Friday and that would be when you'd see this movie if all else were equal and nobody were jumping any guns to try to boost the hype. And this is the release date for countries ranging from Bangladesh to Ireland to Taiwan.

Did I say one more? Thursday the 13th -- the day that it says it's releasing in Australia from a May 25th blurb that google picks up -- has countries like Argentina, Hungary and the Netherlands.

A wide array of slightly disparate release dates is nothing new, and I only mention it because it's something we're already discussing.

The weird thing -- in this particular case, and at least from an Australian movie industry perspective -- is definitely the Saturday. You're missing anyone who might want to go to the movies on Friday night, hamstringing the opening weekend box office by excising one of the two biggest time windows for making money on that weekend.

But maybe this is just a sign of how much things have changed within the industry, and how big of a hit they know this movie is going to be. If this movie does anything like the box office for Top Gun: Maverick, they could limit the movie to weekdays before noon and it would probably still make a billion worldwide.

Christopher Nolan bombs, and other Dunkirk thoughts

There are plenty of times I have been out of sync with the Metascore for a movie. That probably goes without saying. I'll come home, go to the site, and think "Huh." Baby Driver is one very recent example, as 86 seems extraordinarily generous for a film that is entertaining but quite flawed. Then again, I knew its Metascore before I even entered the theater.

I can't remember a time feeling as shocked by this disconnect, though, as when I came home from Dunkirk last night.

Dunkirk has a 94 on Metacritic. I think it deserves less than half that.

In fact, the one score of 38 on there -- and I sighed in relief that at least one person agrees with me -- might even be too generous.

I ended up giving the movie two stars on Letterboxd, but I wanted to give it 1.5.

What's wrong with Dunkirk? Where to start. This is one of the most dramatically inert films in recent memory. For all the somber energy invested in meticulously recreating a famous World War II battle -- is it even a battle? -- Nolan couldn't give a whip about character development or even mounting tension. Hans Zimmer's bludgeoning score -- seriously, it's even worse than the one for Interstellar -- tells us that every moment is overloaded with dread, but otherwise we'd have no idea that anything was at stake. Images are disconnected from consequences, things are happening for apparently no reason, and the little character arcs that are meant to occur make no impression whatsoever. Oh, it's not that Nolan disregards the notion of human drama altogether in opting for something more abstract and expressionistic -- it's that the dramas he chooses are utterly uncompelling.

What went so wrong? Nothing, according to most of you. When I went on Letterboxd to log my two-star rating, I saw a five-star rating from a person I trust on the landing page. Of the film's 50 positive reviews on Metacritic, 29 are grades of a perfect 100, including three critics whose opinions I've held dear throughout my career: Joe Morgenstern, Dana Stevens and Richard Roeper, all three of whom I've spoken to, and the last two of whom I've had my picture taken with (including Dana Stevens just in May).

Why did I see such a different movie than most of these people? It's hard to say. When you are in the minority on a film, the inclination is of course to view it as a "you problem." You figure you must lack some essential component of your critical faculties that allows you to appreciate what the film is doing. Or, you demand a film to fit into a certain conventional box, the inability to fit into that box being what makes it great. Maybe that is indeed the case with me and Dunkirk.

But I don't think so. This film is a fucking bore. Christopher Nolan is so impressed with his ability to film fighter planes moving in space -- an undeniable strength of the film -- that he doesn't seem to care whether he gave us any characters to relate to. I don't mind that we don't know their names, as there are some great films out there where we never learn any names. I mind the fact that they don't have names or personalities. They are just pawns in Nolan's desire to mount a moving Life magazine photograph. And that's all he's done.

And that's not enough.

I look forward to engaging with other people on this, figuring out the deficits in my character that led me to have so totally missed the boat, so to speak, on this film. But I can't do that for now. In fact, I can't even read Dunkirk's one mixed review -- thank you, Rex Reed -- or Dunkirk's one negative review -- thank you, Jake Cole -- for now. The reason for this is that I'm recording a podcast about this tomorrow night, and I want my bile to be untainted by the bile a few others have already spewed on the topic.

A very few others.

Drunk-kirk

On this podcast, my fellow podcaster will insist that the reason I didn't like it was that I was drunk when I saw it. And the reason he will say this is that I told him I was drunk in a text message about 20 minutes before the movie started. And the reason I know he liked it, even though we don't usually share our opinions on the films before we meet for the recording, is because he pleaded with me to go the next day to an IMAX screening when I was sober, rather than seeing it on Friday night with four glasses of wine in me, at a theater that has no really big screens.

The four glasses of wine -- and a beer -- were courtesy of a volunteer thank you party for my contributions to the Human Rights Arts & Film Festival (HRAFF) earlier this year (though mostly last year, when most of the heavy screening occurred). I had expected this to be a tame little affair that I could quickly skip out of -- it had been held in the organization's tiny office the year before -- and I planned to stay no longer than 30 minutes, leaving in time to watch a 6:40 showing of The Beguiled before my 9:20 Dunkirk.

But this year the party was held in a private room at a pretty cool bar, and when 6:30 rolled around and I was still enjoying myself, I gave Sofia Coppola's film with the middling reviews (at least among my friends) a pass. And got into one of those rambling, animated cinephile discussions with two women about films we love and hate, using the thinnest of connective tissue to jump from one film to the next -- the kind of discussions that are especially well lubricated by wine. I became so engrossed that I nearly didn't leave in time for Dunkirk.

Given my thoughts on the film, I am immensely glad I did not sacrifice that experience for the movie, and also that I did not shift around a Saturday with my family in order to see Dunkirk on IMAX (and pay for it out of my own pocket, something I wasn't having to do on Friday night on the smaller screen).

But the question is, did being "drunk" -- how far along on that spectrum I was is debatable -- impact my enjoyment of the film?

As I am biased here and predisposed to endorse my own decision making, I'm going to say "no." But I guess I can't really say for sure, because I can't see it for the first time sober as a point of comparison.

What I can say is that falling asleep was not a problem as I watched the film, which I always figure to be the biggest danger in a film starting at 9:20, whether you're drunk or not. As I said, I was bored, but it was not because the alcohol was making me distractable. It's because Christopher Nolan made a boring film.

I don't even think IMAX would have helped. I was able to appreciate this film's visual accomplishments just fine on the screen where I saw it, and I honestly don't think this is a case where those accomplishments, given a proper showcase, would have rendered some of the film's shortcomings less important. In fact, even in a state of somewhat compromised perceptions, I was glad to feel clear-headed enough not to be swayed by the sweet persuasions of impressive visuals. A film needs to either have a compelling story to be a success, or if not that, then just be a straight art film with no story whatsoever. Nolan's middle ground in Dunkirk is a bad place to be.

July 20th -- again

Methinks Christopher Nolan needs to concentrate more on making a good movie and less on making sure that movie comes out on July 20th.

And incidentally, how can July 20th fall on a Friday every single year?

July 20th was of course a Thursday this year, but movies get released on Thursdays in Australia, so the 20th was its release date indeed.

It may be a Warner Brothers thing, but Nolan's movies have long been perceived as a late-summer sort of counterprogramming, or maybe just a delayed infusion of prestige to a season that has already included its share of Pirates of the Caribbeans and Transformerses.

The July 20th trend got started in 2008 -- on July 18th. That's when The Dark Knight hit theaters. Its predecessor, Batman Begins, was a June release, but I guess The Dark Knight felt right in late July.

So right, in fact, that they duplicated the release strategy for Inception in 2010. It being two years later and without the benefit of any leap years in between, Inception could not land exactly on July 20th either. So July 16th was the chosen release date.

We finally get to an exact July 20th release date, with the benefit of a leap year, two years later for The Dark Knight Rises in 2012. That date may of course be etched into your memory for being the night of the horrific theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado.

Warner Brothers deviated from the strategy with a November 2014 release for Interstellar, but it's back with Dunkirk -- a film whose awards aspirations might have more logically dictated a November release date than Interstellar. Though I suppose some of these things have to do with when a film is actually ready to go to print.

What relationship does the release date have to the quality of the film?

None, of course. And I'm sure my criticisms of Dunkirk don't seem very substantive, since I haven't delved in to why I dislike it so much.

I could. Believe me, I could. But I guess I already feel like enough of a grinch for raining on the parades of readers who may have already bought their tickets for a screening at some point later in the weekend, but happened to do their Friday check-in with my blog before then.

But as a wise friend told me last night when I texted him my initial reactions and then apologized for shitting on a movie he was excited to see, "Maybe I will love it, maybe not. It will have nothing to do with you. When any movie comes out, there will be people who don't like it."

In the case of Dunkirk, just not very many of us.

May-December release

You've heard of a May-December romance. How about a May-December movie release?

There is indeed a considerable age difference between the release of Jason Bateman's The Family Fang in the U.S. and in Australia.

The movie came out on May 6th in the U.S. It came out on April 29th in New York, actually, but that ruins my title for this post.

In Australia, it comes out on Thursday, which is the first of December.

The Australian release date of The Family Fang is something I've been tracking for a while, because I needed to remind myself to send the review I wrote of it to my editor at ReelGood.

Why had I already reviewed this movie if it hasn't even come out in Australia? Well that's the other funny way to measure the delay between its U.S. and Australian release dates.

The Family Fang had been out for so long in the U.S. that it had already popped up as the 99-cent rental on the U.S. iTunes store, where I still have access to pick up rentals. That means that it had already been available for rent at the normal $5.99, and then probably $3.99, before dropping down to 99 cents (though just for that one week). I may be wrong about this, but I think of Apple as using its 99-centals as a last ditch effort to capture some of the remaining buzz about a movie and move a few more units of it before it becomes just an old release like everything else in their library.

We watched it a month ago, and The Family Fang was actually on the verge of its 30-day window expiring when we got to it.

So I wrote a review, and even then had to wait a month before it could post on the site in order to be timely for the release. Which it has just done last night.

Now you get some sense of the agony of seeing movies like Moonlight released in October in the U.S. and having to wait until Februrary for them here.

Sometimes, a 9-month delay is not a good thing

That's a joke, really. A nine-month delay is almost never a good thing.

But when that nine-month delay puts your release date "in the heart" of December, well then, that's a bit of a different story.

The conventional wisdom was that In the Heart of the Sea was being pushed back from March to December because it had a chance to factor into the Oscar talk. But maybe it's just because it wasn't all that good.

Ron Howard's new movie is not terrible, which I would argue describes all Ron Howard movies at a minimum. He's not always transcendent, though he does manage that on occasion. But rarely does he deliver a straight-up dud, either. And whatever your thoughts on movies like How the Grinch Stole Christmas and The Da Vinci Code, I wouldn't call them straight-up duds. (I have yet to see his most atypical film, the romantic comedy The Dilemma -- that could certainly be a dud.)

It's just ... kind of boring.

One part of that is an issue of structure. Because it's based on a true story and does differ from the famous novel that story ultimately inspired -- you may know it as Moby Dick -- it has different narrative rhythms, which tend to be less (slightly less) sensationalistic in nature. Without giving a ton away, though you could certainly look it up if you were inclined, let's just say that many of the big pyrotechnics come around the middle of the film, rather than at the end. We are especially accustomed to backloaded thrills in the Marvel era, when movies need to end with nothing less than a 39-minute action sequence that have nothing less 73 individual stories playing themselves out within that.

But the movie also just doesn't have much urgency. This particular story struggles to attain modern relevance, even in an era of economic challenges in which characters must make huge sacrifices to earn money for their families. It feels flat, even though you can tell the actors are trying really hard for it not to. No one's mailing this one in, but it just kind of flops about like a fish on the deck of a boat, gasping for breath.

Some shots are cool and some effects pop in 3D, but all in all, a bit of a snooze. (And not just because I literally fell asleep near the end.)

One interesting thing about the screening last night was that it was the first time in ages I can remember the playing of the film having a technical problem. It was actually the projection unit at fault, I believe, but the problem materialized in an interesting way I had never seen before.

It started with the trailer for the Will Smith movie Concussion. I noticed, to my surprise, that the trailer was entirely in pink and green hues. Not just that the images had pink and green highlights over ordinary colors, but that the entire images were comprised of blotchy pink and green. (I thought maybe I'd had a concussion when watching it.) Figuring it was just that one trailer, I rode it out.

When the second one was similarly afflicted, I grabbed my backpack and headed out to the lobby to notify the staff. The usher came in with me and told everyone that she'd get the manager and get it fixed. She did, but not until we'd watched about four minutes of In the Heart of the Sea under these, er, fishy circumstances. Fortunately, they started it over from the beginning.

It must have been something to do with the 3D, because the effect became markedly worse when you actually donned your glasses. Then it was like your eyes were being pelted by visual machine gun fire, making for a completely intolerable condition.

Then again, if you are seeing just blurry pink and green shapes, it doesn't really help if they have a third dimension.

Not an anomaly, unfortunately

It's that time of year again -- the time when the buzz is coming on strong for certain awards contenders and potential year-end critic faves.

It's also the time of year when I realize which ones I won't be able to see before my ranking deadline, because I live in Australia.

Tops on that list this year: Charlie Kaufman's Anomalisa.

It seems like barely a month ago, I was not even aware this movie existed. As you can see, it doesn't even have a proper poster yet. When I did learn about it, I heard that it would be popping up in a few film festivals here and there, but still seemed destined for a 2016 wide release. Now it's getting that New York and Los Angeles release before the end of the year, expanding wider not long after the start of the new year. A definite 2015 film.

And a real contender for the top spot in my 2015 rankings, if Kaufman's history is any indication. Two movies he's written (Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) have topped the years they were released in my personal rankings, and the one movie he's directed -- Synecdoche, New York -- would have been a contender for my favorite film of 2008 if I hadn't allowed some of the more befuddled reviews to scare me off. Now that I have seen it, something I finally accomplished back in 2011, it's in my top 100 movies of all time.

So it will be a gaping wound in my 2015 rankings indeed when I don't get to consider Anomalisa alongside all the others.

Up until a couple hours ago, I was hopeful that it not yet having an Australian release date meant that it could still end up coming out before January 14th, when I need to sign, seal and deliver my rankings. (That's the morning the Oscar nominations are announced.) Unfortunately, at that point I found a February 4th, 2016 Australian release date listed for the movie.

For my personal tastes, that's going to be my most regrettable miss this year, but there's one that would be more shocking to most people: The Hateful Eight.

That's right, Quentin Tarantino's ninth feature releases a week after my rankings close, marking the first time I won't have seen a Tarantino movie in its ranking year since Jackie Brown.

His recent history is a little more uncertain in terms of being a contender for my top slot. While Inglourious Basterds was in my top ten of 2009, Django Unchained came in at only 30th for me in 2012. Either way, it will be a bummer not to have it up for consideration.

Also not getting Thomas McCarthy's Spotlight or Lenny Abrahamson's Room, though maybe Room will be getting released early enough in the U.S. for me to rent it on iTunes before my deadline.

All this said, there's cause for some end-of-year optimism, as there are a couple of movies I was sure I'd miss that will indeed be accessible to me before the 14th of January.

One of these is The Revenant, directed by the director of my #1 film of 2014, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu. Inarritu will indeed get a chance to repeat the #1 showing he earned with Birdman, as The Revenant makes its Australian bow on January 7th. I'm excited enough about this one that I have been steadfastly refusing to watch the trailer.

Then there's David O. Russell's latest, Joy, which hits theaters on Boxing Day. Boxing Day is also when we get The Danish Girl (awards bait, but I'll still watch it) and The Good Dinosaur (delayed from the American Thanksgiving release date, as always happens with the big animated Thanksgiving release -- Big Hero 6 and Frozen in each of the past two years).

What may have surprised me the most was that it seems like I'll be able to squeeze in Todd Haynes' Carol, which releases here on the day my rankings are due -- in other words, some 12 hours before the actual Oscar nominations are announced, meaning I can squeak it in. I figured this one would be a definite February release, just because I don't know.

Goosebumps also, inexplicably, does not come out until that day, but I probably won't try to cram in a double feature. (Next issue to tackle is to get Australia to care about Halloween, so Halloween movies actually come out in October.) If Carol is to have a double feature partner, it probably has to be Steve Jobs, which I've learned only during the editing phase of this piece is also coming out on January 14th. Danny Boyle just so happens to be another guy who's directed a year-end chart topper (2010's 127 Hours).

As for The Hateful Eight and Anomalisa, I'll have to do a better job prioritizing an eventual viewing than I've done for some of the other late-release casualties since I've been in Australia. One year later and two years later, respectively, I still haven't seen either The Wolf of Wall Street or Inherent Vice. That's Martin Scorsese and Paul Thomas Anderson we're talking about there, people.

There is one ray of hope: the critics screening. In neither of my previous years in Australia was I regularly attending critics screenings, and it's very possible one or both of these movies will screen for critics well ahead of their theatrical releases.

Then I just have to convince the editor at my website to let me go to those screenings instead of him.

He just so happens to consider Adaptation his favorite movie of all time, so that's going to be a tall order indeed.

Straddling years

I was straddling quite a bit this late December-early January. In this post, I'll let you know about each instance of that -- and also exactly what I mean by "straddling." (Sounds pretty dirty.)

Paddington

I know the storybook Paddington has British origins and is big with British little boys and girls, but it was something that got read in my American household as well. I think there are a lot of other American households of the late 1970s and early 1980s who could say the same.

Yet the release of the Paddington movie is straddling a regrettable line between 2014 and 2015. In the U.K. and Australia, it was released as a holiday family movie, way back on December 11th. In the U.S., though, it won't come out for another two weeks, making it part of the studios' January dumping grounds.

It's unfortunate, because Paddington might have done well during the U.S. Christmas season -- from what I saw of the movie, anyway.

See, Paddington also straddles an unfortunate line between little kid movie and big kid movie. We went to it on December 30th when it was raining in Hobart (Tasmania), scuttling or at least delaying a bunch of our plans. The theater was not set up for the big crowds, apparently, as we barely made it in to the movie on time despite arriving a half-hour early.

My four-year-old sat rapt the entire time, never saying a word and only asking me for an atypically small amount of the Pods (chocolate cookie treat) we had purchased at the concession stand. Then, with no preview whatsoever of his mounting horror, he told me that the movie was too scary and that he wanted to go home. The big finale was already on and the movie would be over in ten more minutes, but he had to go now. And I knew that this is what parents sometimes had to do, so reluctantly, I left a movie before it was over for the first time in as long as I can remember. Is it possible it was the first time ever?

In truth, a pretty charming movie had started to sour on me by that point, and it didn't much matter that I missed the ending because by then it was easy to predict how it would finish. (What movie isn't, you could argue.)

Where it made its biggest mistake -- other than having Nicole Kidman as a murderous taxidermist, that is -- was the false advertising of the poster you see above. Paddington most definitely should have been set at Christmastime, in the snowy London on that poster. In fact, shouldn't every movie set in London be filmed in the winter, making everything look all the more magical? But it's not. In fact, this is how Paddington is being advertised in the U.S.:

What's oddest about this, when juxtaposed with the Australian poster, is that it looks like a summer movie to Americans and a winter movie to Australians. While it is actually summer in Australia and winter in America.

Had they actually set it at Christmas, the studio would have been compelled to release it in December in the U.S., positioning it as a prestige holiday family release and getting the tons of bucks that go along with that. Instead, it's coming out Martin Luther King Day weekend -- the best January release date, to be sure, but still a January release date. Maybe they thought the holiday season competition from Annie and Night at the Museum 3 would just be too stiff.

The real problem for me, with this release date, was that I was unsure whether I should even bother to see it in the theater. Based on interest alone, we'd see it, since we've read the Paddington book to my son upwards of 20 times. It's one of our only stories, in fact, where I've bothered to perfect voices for all the characters. But at a time of the year when I'm packing in viewings for my year-end list, I didn't know if I should properly count it for 2014, since most American critics (with whom I compare and contrast my year-end lists) will be counting it as a 2015 movie.

The decision was taken out of my hands, however, when my wife and mother-in-law worked up a momentum to have me take my son to the movie when the rains started falling. Big Hero 6 was also an available option, but before I knew it a showtime had been identified and a plan was in place. Maybe he would have actually sat through the entirety of that one.

The Trip to Italy

I engaged in a different kind of straddling on New Year's Eve. My wife had made it clear, earlier in the day, that she did not expect to still be up at midnight. This was certainly a first in our ten years of knowing each other ... but it was also the first New Year's we've had two children. (In fact, last New Year's Eve we spent in the hospital, ready to give birth to the second just hours later. Happy birthday, D!)

Having two children has taken its toll on my wife, and since we were out of town and none of our friends were around anyway, she saw it as just another opportunity to catch up on sleep. I'm glad to say that she did awaken for the midnight fireworks, having still been awake for the 9:30 edition, and we watched those together from my mother-in-law's porch, overlooking the harbor. It was pretty magnificent.

So if this were going to be just another night for her, I decided to make it just another night for me -- and queued up a movie on Netflix.

I didn't figure to finish The Trip to Italy before the clock struck midnight, but by starting it around 10:15, I would make it pretty close. Alas, two beers at dinner did their work on me, and I engaged in a nap of maybe 30-40 minutes when the movie was about 20 minutes old. Awakening at around 11:15, I knew that there was no chance I would finish the movie in 2014.

As my New Year's Eve plans have always been more lively than this, I had never previously faced a situation where I didn't know whether to credit a viewing for one year or another. That kind of thing doesn't matter in the slightest to your average person, but to listmakers and their ilk, it can take on greater significance. I keep track of the total number of movies I see each month and each year, and just for the purposes of record keeping, I needed to know whether to file Michael Winterbottom's film under 2014 or 2015.

I normally have a fairly straightforward system for determining on which day I've seen a movie. If I start it before midnight but finish it after, the movie will be credited to whichever day I watched more of the movie. If it's too close to tell, I give preference to the first day. The one clear exception to this is that if I start a movie one day, but then don't finish it until another day and have watched another complete movie in the interim, the movie is always credited to the day I finished it -- even if there are just five minutes remaining. It's not a perfect system but it's the one I'm comfortable with.

Because of checking Facebook and preparing for the countdown to midnight, to the extent that I did so (I watched the seconds tick off for the final minute), I ended up watching less than half of The Trip to Italy before midnight. Yet I wanted very definitely for it to become my 212th new movie of 2014, rather than my first new movie of 2015, because a) it would break the tie with 2005, which also featured 211 new movies, and b) it would tend to deemphasize the fact that, yes indeed, I spent my New Year's Eve watching a movie and doing little else.

But I ended up having more than an hour of the 108-minute movie remaining, and I ultimately had to acknowledge that I'd need to settle for 211 movies in 2014 and get myself going on 2015.

And this is now far, far more than you ever cared to know about how my mind works.

Christmas in July in December

One of the most unusual movies to come out this summer had to be Happy Christmas, which released in the U.S. on July 25th.

As a movie, there's nothing "unusual" about it at all. In fact, writer-director Joe Swanberg would probably wear its "usualness" as a badge of honor, as the ostensible goal of mumblecore films (he helped found that movement) is to depict everyday life.

The unusual part is that a movie with the word "Christmas" in the title came out nowhere near Christmastime. Though they did throw the marketing team a bone by releasing on the 25th of July, which is the informal date of "Christmas in July." (We held our Christmas party that night at my old summer job, I can tell you that much.) The fact that the 25th happened to be a Friday, the traditional release day for new movies, meant they didn't even have to bend over backwards to make it work.

Still, salvaging a gimmicky release date doesn't mean that the move makes a lot of sense from a marketing perspective.

However, it does go with the film's sensibility. Movies about Christmas actually released at Christmastime inevitably carry big expectations ... big expectations that a Joe Swanberg movie was never meant to satisfy. A Joe Swanberg movie was better off being consumed by most of us on Netflix ... and its July release date meant that it was perfectly situated to be watched by most of us at Christmastime.

So my wife and I watched it on Sunday night, December 21st, with our own tree twinkling just off to the left of the screen.

And darn it if I did not enjoy the hell out of this movie.

That wasn't a foregone conclusion. Even though I traditionally love mumblecore -- the Duplass brothers can do (almost) no wrong in my eyes -- I did not really dig Swanberg's last movie, Drinking Buddies, which was (quite surprisingly) the first Swanberg film I'd seen. The characters in that film may be raucous and playful with one another, but there was an essential off-putting quality to them and a lack of warmth in the film overall.

Not so with Happy Christmas. I felt Joe Swanberg's empathy seeping through every frame of this movie. And I wasn't necessarily sure Swanberg had empathy, having watched him as an actor this past year in movies like You're Next and The Sacrament -- both of which I liked (the latter a lot more than the former), but neither of which is what you would exactly call optimistic about humanity.

Happy Christmas gets the humanity just about perfect, and in turn becomes a perfect delivery on the promise of the non-ironic reading of its title. It's not like there's no conflict here, but the conflict is life-sized and believable, and deals with relatable human foibles. Everything is so low-key that you aren't bracing yourself for some operatic tragedy in the third act. It's just a small-scale human dramedy set against a Christmas backdrop, with delightfully intuitive improvised performances from its cast of seasoned pros. (I always love me some Anna Kendrick, and I don't always love me some Lena Dunham, but she worked very well here in a supporting role. Plus, how often do we get to see Melanie Lynskey speak in her native Kiwi accent? Meanwhile, Joe Swanberg is so cool that he doesn't even include his own name on the poster, though he's got about the same sized role as the people he does list.)

Then there's the fact that the movie operated on a very personal level for us, dealing as it does with how to maintain your sense of self and identity while having to adjust your working life following the birth of a child. Both my wife and I have had to deal with that before -- she initially, me more recently. To make matters yet more relatable, Lynskey's character is trying to find the time to get back to her writing -- something my wife has been struggling with, especially since the birth of our second, but even since the birth of our first. Then you've got a woman from New Zealand married to a guy from America, living in America ... well, that was us just 18 months ago, if you swap New Zealand for Australia. So yeah, this was "our movie."

And it made for quite the nice Christmas treat.

For most of you, this will post will publish on your Christmas Eve. That means you still have time to watch it on the 24th or the 25th, since you almost certainly have Netflix, and you may not have already figured out what your Christmas-themed viewing will be.

It would have been plenty delightful in July, but it's all the more so now.

Merry -- make that, Happy -- Christmas, everyone.

Something not Marvel-related for a change

There have been so many movie announcements and casting announcements from Marvel in the past couple months --

["How many have there been, Derek?"]

-- that basically nothing but these announcements has been filling up our movie-related news feeds.

So it's kind of a relief to see a movie called Nightcrawler hit theaters that has nothing to do with comic books.

One of the X-Men characters -- whose rights are split in some complicated way between Marvel and Fox -- is named Nightcrawler, and with the way these characters have been spun off into their own stand-alone movies or even franchises, it's remarkable that the rights owners would even allow a movie unrelated to this character to bear his name.

Yet Nightcrawler IS completely unrelated. It's a Jake Gyllenhaal vehicle about an ambitious journalist armed with a video camera, which is drawing more comparisons to Taxi Driver than to X-Men Origins: Wolverine.

And unfortunately, I'll have to wait a month more to see it, as it actually doesn't come out until November 27th in Australia. (Funny -- Halloween release date in the U.S., Thanksgiving release date in Australia.) So yes, what you are currently reading is that good old-fashioned American release date preview post, an endangered species on this blog since I've moved to Australia and never seem to know when anything is coming out anymore.

Actually, I could see it before then, as I'll actually be in the United States from November 13th to November 28th. So that's when you can prepare yourself for a little Audient sabbatical, or at least, only a few very brief updates.

But I'll have bigger movie fish to fry when I'm stateside. My biggest priority will be Foxcatcher, which I understand will open sometime while I'm there, but won't open here until after the cutoff for my 2014 rankings in mid-January. Then there's Birdman, which gets a release date on the final day of my 2014 list eligibility, just like Her and Inside Llewyn Davis did last year. I'll have to go see it on opening day if I want to include it.

So while I'm in the U.S., I'll be catching either a fox or a bird, or possibly both.

Delayed, delayed, delayed reaction

I often crow about how movies come out far too late in Australia relative to their release U.S. dates. But then I also get my reminders of when the roles are reversed, as when I saw Michel Gondry's Mood Indigo on video months before it was even released theatrically in the U.S. Even last night at the theater, I was choosing between two movies (Frank and Calvary) that don't have their U.S. release dates until August. I went with Frank.

It was on that same trip last night, though, that I was reminded how humorous the delay can be.

Wong Kar Wai's The Grandmaster was on my list of 2013 movies to try to catch up with, if at all possible, before the end of my ranking year. When I saw neither hide nor hair of it in Australia, though, I didn't think much of it. I was looking forward to it, but not as much as others I didn't get to see until February or later.

Now I know why I didn't see hide nor hair of it: The Grandmaster is not being released here until SEPTEMBER 4TH.

As advertised in its coming soon poster at Cinema Nova.

To give you some perspective on that delay, the movie almost qualified as a 2012 film in China. It received its Chinese release on January 8, 2013. It came out in the U.S. on August 30, 2013. That's a year and five days before its Australian release.

In fact, the Australian release is so late that it doesn't even make it on to the list of release dates on IMDB. The IMDB list leaves off with the April 17, 2014 Brazilian release date.

That's right, we had to go nearly five months longer than cinema-crazy Brazil to see this movie.

It's been a slow realization that I'm never going to be able to recreate the viewing experience of a person living in the United States when I make my year-end lists. I have to be reminded of it over and over again, as though I'm in some kind of denial. Even when I consciously know it, I try to imagine that this year will be the year when all of the great holiday releases somehow have the same international distribution schedule as last year's American Hustle, which actually hit Australian theaters in December.

However, this year at least, I think I do have a plan. To get a couple more, anyway.

As of right now, we are scheduled to go to the U.S. in November. We plan to be there for Thanksgiving and back to Australia by the start of December. We don't have our tickets yet, but that's the plan.

If I'd been able to make such a trip last year, I could have gotten in both 12 Years a Slave and Nebraska -- neither of which played in Australia before January 30th, meaning I couldn't rank them. I don't know which movies I'll be able to grab this way this year ... but you better bet I'll do the research necessary to figure it out.

I need to be the grandmaster of my own movie-viewing fate.

And if that means watching one or more movies on a rare trip home, well, apparently I am willing to do that.

Damn you, Lego Movie

But I should really say "Damn you, Australia."

Once February rolls around and I haven't seen anything from the new release year, I start really itching. Not just to see something, but to identify a film that's really worthwhile. A film that I'll want to see in the theater, not catch on video in May or June.

Given the way the buzz started to develop for The Lego Movie, and then the way everyone on Facebook suddenly seemed to have seen it (with even the rare negative review), I had found my movie.

But here's the problem: The Lego Movie doesn't open here until April 3rd.

And just when I finally thought I had figured out the logic behind Australian release dates.

What a cruel injustice! And I need movies now, when it's hottest, when we are otherwise trapped in our house, staring at the walls until the temperature drops. When we just need my son to pipe down for 90 minutes before he drives us all crazy. (I meant my older son, but my younger son is probably a lot louder. No helping that, but he does do us the courtesy of sleeping for large chunks of the day.)

I thought I had basically figured out that smaller movies are often delayed, but big movies come out around the same time as they do in the U.S., sometimes even a day earlier.

Ah, but a whole different set of rules applies to children's movies. Many of the big children's movies that came out in the U.S. summer months last year -- Turbo and Planes, for example -- didn't hit Australia until September. They figure they can't delay them forever, and September is closer to summer than June or July, when those movies had their U.S. debuts.

But The Lego Movie would come out in the heart of the Australian summer. What's wrong with that?

Well, there's a domino effect here. Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2, Frozen and Free Birds didn't come out until relatively recently, so the multiplexes have all the children's movies they need at the moment.

And though I don't have a calendar that would easily confirm this, I believe April is just in time for another school break. That's when Mr. Peabody and Sherman and Muppets Most Wanted also come out.

Damn you, Lego Movie. When you were just another bad kids movie, I didn't care. Now that you might be more, I want you now, not in two months.

Such is life.

Anniversaries missed

When we talk about missed anniversaries, we tend to think of clueless husbands who can't remember the day they got married, and therefore suffer sleepless nights on the couch as their wives stew over their neglectfulness, until they inevitably win their redemption through some grand gesture, because their wives obviously aren't going to stay mad at them forever. (Run-on sentence intentional.)

But when it comes to movies, you can miss an anniversary not by letting it pass unnoticed, but by acknowledging it too soon. In this case, you "miss" it like you would miss a target.

As is the case with Texas Chainsaw 3D, releasing today, 39 years after the release of Tobe Hooper's original The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Why not just wait one more year and make it 40?

The answer: They want their cash grab, and they want it now.

Even considering these base motivations, I'd argue that you should just wait a year. You're still going to make the same amount of money in 2014 as you would in 2013, perhaps a little bit more due to increased ticket prices (which would probably cancel out increases in production costs). You're still going to find 3D about as popular as it is today. But you've got one thing going for you that you don't have in 2013: There may be some people out there who will find this cash grab slightly more legitimate because it comes on the 40th anniversary of the original movie.

Strangely, this series has a history of consummating prematurely. The first reboot of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was ten years ago in 2003 -- a year shy of the original's 30th anniversary. 

Look, you get an opportunity every five years to line up with some kind of anniversary. It needn't be something significant like the 25th or the 50th. The 15th or 35th will do in a pinch. Anyway, something to latch on to that seems to give the film an extra reason for being rebooted/re-released/unleashed on the world again in some form or another.

I understand not shooting for the anniversary if you are right in the middle of the five-year increments -- or will be once you finish the movie. If someone had thought up a 3D version of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (because it obviously took a brilliant mind to devise such high art) in 2010, clearly you don't want to wait another four years before capitalizing on your sublime inspiration. But if you're only going to be one year away? Just sit on it for six months, and then start principal photography. 

I should say that The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is not the only film series to blatantly miss an obvious anniversary date, and perhaps not even the most egregious example in the year 2013. Oz: The Great and Powerful, due out in March, will be coming out one year shy of the 75th anniversary of The Wizard of Oz. Just one year. Didn't anyone, anywhere, think of this? The 75th anniversary is also a pretty big deal, because at this point you can no longer get away with acknowledging anniversaries in increments of five years. No one talks about the 55th anniversary of something, or the 70th anniversary of something. That 75th anniversary would have been big.

Would have been.

I guess I have to admit that these things are imperfect. With both, or really all three, of the movies I've mentioned above, any delay in the production could have pushed the movie to that anniversary year. Perhaps they figured that they'd either go early, a pragmatic idea in any business venture, or experience delays and end up lining up with the anniversary, like they'd meant it all along. The worst would be to shoot for the anniversary year, but botch it and come out a year late.

Or most likely, they just didn't care about such things.

The only reason I care about such things, other than a general interest in numerology and a perverse desire to attach relevance to the financially-driven decision to reboot a movie series, is that there have been some examples of incomparable fortuitousness as it relates to the timing of these reboots/re-releases.

Let's take last year's 3D re-release of Titanic. Its release date was doubly fortuitous. Not only was it the centennial anniversary of the doomed ship's sinking, but it was also the 15-year anniversary of the film's initial release. And those anniversaries were even in a position to align in the first place because the movie came out 85 years after the ship sank.

Eighty-five is nobody's idea of some milestone anniversary, but it'll do in a pinch.

The year that filled up

Now that we're past Thanksgiving, it's time to get in that reflective mood as the year starts to close down.

Too early for year-end lists, mind you, but not too early to start assessing what kind of year 2012 has been.

I don't think this has been a great year for movies, but it certainly has been a full one.

When was the last time you can remember hearing about four major releases that had to be shifted to the following calendar year?

Most release years include one or two movies that must move their release dates forward for one reason or another. But in 2012, The Great Gatsby, Gravity, Gangster Squad and G.I. Joe: Retaliation all jumped to 2013.

Must have something to do with the letter G, though The Grey, Goon, Gone, Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, Good Deeds and God Bless America were all spared.

So the market is becoming more competitive but less good. What else is new?

Then again, the best part of the release schedule is still largely ahead of us. And it was from now until the end of the year that the first three of the four delayed titles were scheduled to come out.

With The Great Gatsby, the reason for the delay (to May 10, 2013) is listed on wikipedia as "delays in the production schedule." But conventional wisdom suggests that perhaps Warner Brothers didn't want to send Leonardo DiCaprio up against Leonardo DiCaprio. The Great Gatsby was supposed to come out at Christmas ... which is when Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained, starring one Leo DiCaprio, is also going to quench our Quentin thirst.

Gravity -- Alfonso Cuaron's long, long-awaited follow-up to 2006's Children of Men -- is cruelly having an entire year tacked on to that wait. Originally slated for the day before Thanksgiving this year, the movie now won't bow until next October 18th. It sounds like the reason for the delay is all the CG required in post. I'm reading that Cuaron is experimenting with all kinds of innovative technology, including an "uninterrupted" 17-minute take (though the article suggests that the take is done with digital assistance, unlike the long takes in Children of Men, which were au naturel).

Gangster Squad fell victim to that old problem of having a trailer containing subject matter that was rendered controversial by real-world events. The Gangster Squad trailer they were showing this summer had a bunch of baddies with tommy guns blowing away patrons in a movie theater from behind the screen. The shooting in Aurora, Colorado during The Dark Knight Rises pretty much killed that particular trailer. And not only is that scene now gone from the movie, but the whole movie was moved by four months from September to January 11th (a release date that would be a sign of very low confidence by the studio in most cases). Maybe it was reshoots, maybe it was just trying to keep a wide berth from those tragic events.

G.I. Joe: Retaliation has the most number of apparent reasons for its delay from this past June to next May. The "official" reasons are that 3G is being added in post-production and that Paramount is trying to boost interest in international markets. (Since when aren't international markets interested in Hollywood action movies?) However, the unofficial reasons include all of the following: reshoots to avoid the early death of Channing Tatum's character, after Tatum had officially become a star in 2012 (hey, it's not a spoiler if it isn't going to end up happening in the movie); a desire not to compete with Tatum's Magic Mike, which was set to open the same day (in a situation that echoes the potential Christmas Day DiCaprio double feature); and, um, that's it, but the rule of three dictates I list three things.

And come to think of it, it isn't only movies that start with G that have jumped ship from 2012. I just thought of a fifth movie that was supposed to come out this year, but didn't: World War Z. The adaptation of Max Brooks' popular zombie novel would have been part of that crowded late December release schedule had it not been for production delays and the seven weeks of reshoots that were required earlier this year. With or without those reshoots, the trailer tells me this movie might be a bigger disaster than an actual zombie apocalypse.

Of course, now that I've analyzed the reasons for the delays of five major would-be 2012 films, it seems pretty clear that none of them were delayed only because "too many movies are already coming out in 2012." In each case there seem to be other factors, even if they are as simple as too many movies by one of the movie's stars coming out during the expected release window -- not too many movies in general.

What I think this really illustrates is how over time, making movies is becoming an increasingly complicated proposition, with studios finding profit margins to be ever thinner, and the need seeming ever more paramount to fine-tune the movie until it's a perfect product released at a perfect time.

Or, maybe it's just a statistical blip. 

You're so Money, baby

I have two little rules of doing business on The Audient, and I adhere to them even if I'm the only one who cares about them.

1) I never use the same poster art to top a post more than once. If I'm going to write a second or third post about a particular movie, I'll find a different poster (or sometimes a still) from that movie as my artwork. I may reuse a poster at some point in the future, but it can only appear once on the top of the post. It can appear again somewhere in the body of the post, but not at the top. (The logic has something to do with being able to distinguish one post from another at a glance, but beyond that it's basically irrational.)

2) I never use the same title for a post twice.

I'm breaking rule #2 today -- sort of. You see, it was almost exactly a year ago that I used the title "You're so money, baby" for a post, and in fact, I'm only comfortable repeating the title this time because of the capitalization and italicization of the word "money," which technically makes it a different title. (Or so I'm telling myself.)

There are two reasons I'm willing to (sort of) break this rule:

1) Swingers quotes never go out of style.

2) I'm intentionally drawing a comparison to the post from a year ago -- triggering a sense of deja vu, if you will. That's because I'm getting a sense of deja vu from Trouble With the Curve.

The "You're so money, baby" post from September 23, 2011 was to herald the arrival of Bennett Miller's Moneyball, which went on to become a critical favorite, a (modest) hit with audiences and a best picture nominee. The producers of Trouble With the Curve would simply love it if those three outcomes followed from the arrival of their film.

The movies have more than a release date in the September 20s in common. On the most obvious level, they're both about baseball. More specifically, they're both about the side of baseball we don't see on the field. Even more specifically, they deal with scouting. In fact, you could say that Clint Eastwood's character in this film might have walked out of an Oakland A's scouting meeting after bristling at some idea espoused by that young whippernsapper Billy Beane.

Even more specifically than all that, the posters for both movies feature a talent evaluator whose body is pictured leaning forward at about the same angle. Consider Brad Pitt's posture in this Moneyball poster:

Must really chap Eastwood's ass to be forced by the marketing department to so closely imitate an unwashed hippie like Brad Pitt.

(If you're looking for more comparisons, one of the central focuses of both films is the lead character's relationship with his daughter.)

Outside of direct imitation, though, what we're seeing here is the notion that late September is the perfect time, psychologically, for a viewer to consume a contemplative meditation on baseball. Late in the baseball season is the new season for prestige baseball movies, and I wouldn't be surprised if we saw another one hit theaters on September 20th of 2013.

And if the marketers have done their jobs right, this movie will catch audiences in the moment of their greatest readiness for Trouble With the Curve, meaning at least one of those three desired outcomes -- the modest hit with the audience part -- will come true.

If they've done their jobs right, Clint Eastwood won't have to spend this weekend talking to a bunch of empty chairs.

Unlucky for summer movies?

You know how most Fridays during the summer, you've got a couple different new releases to choose from? Maybe not all in genres that speak to your demographic, but a couple significant new movies nonetheless?

Yeah, not this Friday the 13th.

Perhaps it's just the imposing, tectonic (if you will) box office muscle of Ice Age: Continental Drift, but that kiddie film is the only prominent new release opening this weekend.

Of course, some of that has to do with a shift in our definition of the term "prominent." Once upon a time, a new movie from Robert De Niro would be an occasion to stop and take notice. One hardly blames Mr. De Niro for this shift -- the man is, after all, a month from 69 years old -- but his new film Red Lights is hardly creating a ripple in the buzz machine (to mix metaphors).

Or perhaps it's just that no movie wants its second weekend to be utterly obliterated by the opening of The Dark Knight rises next Friday.

Anyway, not much dismissive or snarky to say about the umpteenth Ice Age movie, except that I still remember going to the first one and really enjoying it ... and then, by the second, already realizing that the series was headed down a perilous path toward lesser quality, and never subjecting myself to it.

Actually, there's one other reason I remember going to Ice Age, and this is as good a time to tell you about it as any. I was going to see it with a couple friends -- these were back in the innocent days when I still went to the movies with three or four other guys -- and a humorous exchange at the ticket counter became the stuff of legend in our group.

My friend Dan had been following the normal procedure of stating his preferred movie and showtime to the ticket seller. Except instead of "Ice Age, 3:40," he came out with "Ice 40?"

Immediately hearing his mistake, he laughed at himself and shook his head, either actually or metaphorically. "Ice 40 ..." he murmured with a big grin on his face.

Then, returning to the ticket seller with total earnestness, and no intention whatsoever of making the joke, he repeated the error: "Ice 40?"

If they continue to make Ice Age movies, I suppose Ice 40 would be due sometime in the 2060s.

Will Smith yields the Fourth

 
Men in Black 3 is poised to do pretty well. A bankable star (Will Smith). A reliable veteran (Tommy Lee Jones). A new addition who has hip indie cred (Josh Brolin). A franchise that retains its sense of good will despite a second installment that almost no one liked.

And a plum release date just before Memorial Day, the ceremonial start to summer.

However, it's this last part that probably chaps Will Smith's hide.

During his career Smith has been identified with the Fourth of July, an association he has worked hard to cultivate. In fact, he went so far as to anoint himself Mr. Fourth of July back in the late 1990s.

Can being shifted to Memorial Day seem like anything but a demotion to him?

Not because Memorial Day is intrinsically a worse time of the year for a movie to come out. In fact, I'd argue it's better. There have already been a couple major releases, so you're not the first big movie of the season. In fact, you're catching audiences right when their appetites are truly whetted for summer movies in all their shapes and forms. You could argue that by July, the summer movie season is already winding down.

No, it's because Smith calls himself Mr. Fourth of July. He doesn't call himself Mr. Memorial Day. And this earlier release means he can't haul out his old Independence Day branding, which started with Independence Day.

On July 3, 1996, Independence Day hit theaters and was a huge hit. A year later, on July 2, 1997, Men in Black followed and did almost as well at the box office, with greater appreciation from critics to boot.

Thus -- at least in Smith's mind -- a legend was born.

Even though Wild Wild West (released June 30, 1999) was a colossal failure, that didn't stop July 4th from belonging to Smith. His next summer blockbuster, Men in Black II, hit theaters on July 3, 2002.

It was only at this point that Smith's blockbusters stopped being synonymous with summer's midpoint three-day weekend. Bad Boys II was released July 18, 2003, and I, Robot was release July 16, 2004. That seems a bit punitive, as late July is really starting to be the back end of the summer movie season. (Just don't tell that to Christopher Nolan.) But Smith returned to his favored release date in 2008 with Hancock, which came out on July 2nd.

But then a funny thing happened to Will Smith: He disappeared.

He's such a big star that you may not have even noticed it, but did you realize that Smith hasn't made a movie since Seven Pounds in December of 2008? It really opened my eyes yesterday on NPR when I heard a reporter mention that Smith hadn't starred in a movie "since George Bush was still in office."

It's not like the Smith family brand went into complete hibernation, though. Will's son Jaden starred in The Karate Kid a couple summers ago. But daddy was nowhere to be seen.

Well, Smith ends his self-imposed exile today, when the apparently troubled third installment in the Men in Black series (they started shooting before the script was finished) invades the multiplexes. And we'll be seeing more of him in the next four years than we have in the last four, as IMDB lists five movies currently in his pipeline, though only a couple of them have progressed past the "rumored" phase. The one that's currently filming is After Earth, with Winter's Tale in pre-production. Then a bevy of seemingly ill-advised sequels: I, Robot 2, Hancock 2 and Bad Boys 3.

I for one am happy to see him back. Even though I made some snide remarks earlier that indicated I think Smith has a big ego, I actually think he has the right kind of big ego. (As it turns out, I Am Legend was not actually a biopic.) When he's boastful or proud, he's joyfully so, and it never comes off wrong.

Besides, he's a big, charismatic star who has made slightly more good choices than bad ones. That's a gamble I'm willing to take.

(Also, I really want to watch 90 minutes of Josh Brolin impersonating Tommy Lee Jones.)

And so what if it's "only" coming out on Memorial Day weekend (and not even the Wednesday before). At 43, Smith is still young enough to re-brand himself.

So what is coming out on Fourth of July weekend this year? That honor goes to The Amazing Spider-Man, starring the new Mr. Fourth of July ... Andrew Garfield.

Yeah, I'm betting I'll find Men in Black 3 more amazing.