A couple hiccups in Remembering Rob Reiner

If you've been following my bi-monthly Remembering Rob Reiner series -- yes there are two of them in alternating months, one concentrating on favorites and one on unseen movies -- you'll know that I've continued to shuffle the order of the favorites version due to things like availability, recency of viewings and themes like the month of Halloween. Thus far, the unseen Reiner movies have proceeded exactly as I expected them to.

Well that all ends now.

September is when Albert Brooks: Defending My Life was due up. This is the finally Reiner movie I hadn't seen that's already been released. 

A documentary about a guy I love, made by a guy I love, the two being lifelong friends? I can't believe I didn't watch it in the year of its release, 2023. 

I felt sure it was available on one of my streamers, because I remember seeing it advertised at the time. Or at least thought I did. But I checked AppleTV -- nope. I checked Amazon Prime -- nope. I checked Disney+ -- nope. And I knew it wasn't Netflix or Stan. 

As you'll note from the poster above, it turns out it was an HBO original, which means it would have streamed on Binge here. My wife actually has a subscription to Binge, but it only works on her computer, it doesn't work through our TV. I won't get into trying to explain why.

But that hardly matters anyway because the internet tells me it is not currently streaming on Binge here either. In fact, AI tells me the following:

"While it briefly appeared on Australian subscription services around its late 2023 release, current streaming aggregators like Flicks Australia show that there are no active streaming providers offering the documentary in the country."

Darn. 

Not only was I not going to watch it last night, as I had envisioned doing, I might not be able to watch it at all. 

If I want to keep this series from going off the rails, there may be a hail Mary option. It's possible it is available on DVD or BluRay, and although we don't have an active DVD or BluRay player going on our TV, I do have an external drive that I can attach to my computer. They'd be selling it for some outrageous price like $29.99 because that, it seems, is what they have decided the market will pay for DVDs these days. But I just don't know if I can do it.

Besides, this series might be irrevocably off the rails anyway.

The sixth and final entry in this series in November is supposed to be a movie that has yet to be released: Spinal Tap at Stonehenge: The Final Finale.

When I was first scouting for this series back in late December/early January, and determined I would have exactly the right number of unseen Reiner movies for a bi-monthly series, that determination relied on the availability of this now definitively final Spinal Tap project. It was envisioned as the final Tap project even before Reiner died, and his loss as a creative spark has certainly scuttled any notion of blowing past that resolve to do other final Final FINAL Tap movies. 

At that time, it seemed as though the project had already been completed and was just waiting for someone to fix on a release date. Well, that release date has not been announced yet. IMDB still lists it as completed and expected in 2026. But 2026 has less than four months remaining, and if they haven't chosen a release date by now, it raises the question of whether this movie will materialize at all. It's possible it is not actually completed, or it's possible everyone just thought it was too sad after Reiner died. (Reiner is not actually listed as an actor in this film, so maybe that makes it less sad and gives it a little bit more of a chance of eventually debuting.)

If this movie might not come out at all, is it even worth trying to track down some version of the Albert Brooks movie? Just a reminder that I am opposed to piracy in all but the most desperate and unavoidable circumstances, and really, there's no viewing of any movie that is that direly needed. 

I guess I'll have to think about this one. And I'll certainly check my local JB HiFi to see if they even have the movie as a DVD, whether it's even a possibility.

If this series had to finish two movies shy of its expected completion, I guess that would be appropriate. After all, the loss of Reiner was equally sudden. No he wasn't cut down in the prime of his life, but he probably would have made more films, whether they would have been any good or not. We lost him before we were ready, so maybe a series that finishes prematurely is a fitting way to honor that, however inadvertently. 

Remembering Rob Reiner: The American President

This is the fourth in my bi-monthly series Remembering Rob Reiner, where I'm rewatching my six approximate* favorites (see more below) from his career. Not to be confused with Remembering Rob Reiner, my other bi-monthly series that runs in alternate months, where I watch the six remaining films of his I haven't yet seen. 

While the other Remembering Rob Reiner series I'm doing in 2026 has been straightforward in terms of both content and order, I've been playing havoc with the content and order of this version. 

First it was excluding my actual favorite Reiner film, This Is Spinal Tap, from the series, because I watched it a few weeks before the series started in conjunction with Spinal Tap: The End Continues. That left this series to feature favorites two through seven, watched chronologically.

Then it was having to drop the intended chronological approach when I couldn't get my hands on The Sure Thing in February. Still haven't gotten my hands on it. I have until December to figure that one out. So I shifted to the order I rank these favorites on Flickchart, meaning I started with my #2 Reiner film, The Princess Bride.

The last two changes have both come since the most recent iteration of this series in June, when I watched Stand by Me. 

The first of those was deciding to break the sequence of Flickchart ranking by not watching Misery next. I decided Misery was a better fit for the month of October, being Reiner's only horror movie. So I'd watch The Story of Us in August instead.

And finally it was deciding not to watch The Story of Us at all. That's no shade on that movie, which I like more every time I see it. It's that I just watched it in February of 2025, and wrote two different posts about it. In fact I've already tagged that movie six times on my blog, more than The Princess Bride (four) and the same number of times as When Harry Met Sally (which I watched in April). I decided I don't need another viewing and a fresh set of observations about The Story of Us only 18 months later.

That left me what is now my eighth favorite Rob Reiner movie, and one I haven't rewatched in ages, The American President. (I wasn't sure I'd ever rewatched it, but my records show it as a movie I've seen more than once, so I guess I have to go with that.) And in fact it's the last Reiner movie that I would say I have strong positive feelings about, before you get into stuff like A Few Good Men, which I respect but which has only a middling impact on me. 

So just so you understand the schedule:

The American President - now
Misery - October
The Sure Thing - December (if I can find it)

Caught up?

For the record, The American President is my #698 on Flickchart. So clearly a film I like, but not one I would describe as a personal favorite. At the time it came out in 1995, it was a great bounceback for Reiner from the 1994 disaster North, which ended one of the greatest imperial periods (to borrow the pop chart term) for any director in Hollywood history.

Reiner decided he needed to get back on track with something Capra-esque. Not only is the word "Capra-esque" used in the movie to describe Sydney Ellen Wade's first arrival at the White House -- when Wendy Malick's character tells Sydney the security guard won't know what the word means, and he corrects her by instantly name-dropping several Capra films -- but Frank Capra III, who would appear to be the grandson of the original Frank Capra, serves as a first AD on this film. (This is why it's good to pay attention to closing credits.) Though to be fair, Capra III actually worked with Reiner on  each of his nine films from A Few Good Men in 1992 to Flipped in 2010.

It was interesting to watch this film in relation to Dave, an even more Capra-esque film, if we're going only on an outsider's experience in Washington (Mr. Smith Goes to Washington). I think of Dave and The American President as of a piece, knowing of course that I like Dave a lot better (currently #86 on my Flickchart). I watched Dave as a way of celebrating Joe Biden's presidential victory in 2020, confirming how much I loved it. My rewatch of The American President confirms that the gap between the movies is a bit greater than I thought.

I did enjoy my American President viewing, but I was definitely conscious of Reiner's political leanings as I watched it. See the thing that this movie does that Dave doesn't do is it uses the D word and the R word. Michael Douglas' Andrew Shepherd is a president from the Democratic party, and his most vocal critic, and potential challenger in an upcoming election, is the very Republican senator Bob Rumson, played by Richard Dreyfuss. The internet tells me Rumson is meant to be an amalgam of well-known Republican figures, though he looks most like Dick Cheney, which is interesting because Dreyfuss actually played Dick Cheney in Oliver Stone's W. Certainly Rumson is meant to exceed Cheney in his ability to give rousing speeches. 

Of course Shepherd being a good guy and Rumson being a bad guy aligns with my own perspective on the world. Democrats are my heroes, generally speaking, and Republicans are my villains, generally speaking. There are some exceptions. 

But on this viewing I did feel a bit put off by it on behalf of conservatives -- just a bit. Although I do appreciate Reiner wearing his heart on his sleeve and leaving no ambiguity about his political affiliations, I also subscribe to the old-fashioned notion that a movie should be made with enough finesse that any viewer can see themselves in the protagonist. I can imagine that Republicans who might have been inclined to see The American President in 1995 would have been turned off by having their world view aligned with that of the villain, in no uncertain terms.

I think this might have bothered my wife more than it bothered me. When she asked how I'd spent the late afternoon on Saturday, when she was out for drinks with some of her friends, she was surprised to hear the answer, mostly because she doesn't know I've been watching Rob Reiner movies in 2026. (She doesn't need to be briefed on all this, and in fact, it's probably for the better that she isn't.) She then told me that she had actively disliked The American President, and she described its talky earnestness as one of the reasons, though I think she might have also hinted at its political stridency being an issue as well. (She's also coming at this from the perspective of making movies for all audiences. She's even more of a lefty than I am.)

So let's look at that talkiness. This movie is of course written by Aaron Sorkin, and you hear it in every single line of dialogue. This film was a prelude of sorts to Sorkin's The West Wing, which ran from 1999 to 2006 and also featured Martin Sheen -- though this time as the president, not the president's chief of staff. 

There are benefits and drawbacks to the Sorkin approach. I think it works like gangbusters in The Social Network, in part because that film just feels so propulsive, when you take into consideration David Fincher's directing style and the Trent Reznor-Atticus Ross score. It doesn't not work in The American President, which might be considered one of the progenitors of Sorkin's walk-and-talk style. But there was one particular part where I noticed one of these drawbacks.

Annette Bening's Sydney finds herself in a moment of intense emotion when she wants to convey how important the president has become to her, and she asks him not to say anything until she's finished, because she's going to stumble through it. Then she proceeds to make a statement that lasts no longer than 15 seconds and expresses a relatively uncomplicated thought without even a hesitation. 

Simply put, Sorkin is incapable of writing someone stumbling through a line of dialogue. Of course, a director can do what they want with his words, and Reiner could have directed Bening to stumble during that speech. But given the sort of co-auteur status of Sorkin in a typical project, I'm sure Reiner did not want to counter his style in that way, even if this was relatively early in Sorkin's career and level of influence. (I'll just mention that the pair also worked together on A Few Good Men.)

The Sorkin approach suffuses this movie and ultimately starts to erode some of our good will toward it. I think it's more a Sorkin movie than a Reiner movie, which doesn't mean it's bad, it just means it doesn't provide for me what I like most about a Reiner movie: its sense of human-scale warmth. That's at least the case in the three Reiner movies I've rewatched so far this year, but will naturally exit stage left in Misery.

This is starting to run long, but I did want to close out with some clear praise for the movie.

I continue to love the idea of a widower president trying to figure out how to have a romantic life while being in office. There are a lot of really charming occurrences related to this, to match the charm brought to this project by both Douglas and Bening. Presidential logistics take center stage here, and I always enjoyed seeing them in action. 

One thing I found funny, though, was the notion that a president would lose more than 20 points on his approval rating just because he started a relationship with someone. There's a lot of talk about morality in this movie, and it doesn't seem to relate to the fact that the lobbyist is trying to get his buy-in on a bill while also sleeping with him. It relates more to the mere notion that he would be having a sexual relationship out of wedlock, while his 12-year-old daughter sleeps down the hallway. Maybe this was actually cause for scandal in 1995, and don't forget, this was before Monica Lewinsky. But a single president dating an adorable lobbyist, who make a very photogenic couple, causing a scandal that threatens his very reelection? Well that's just laughable in the age of Donald Trump.

As mentioned previously, I'll return to this series in October with Misery. 

Remembering Rob Reiner: Shock and Awe

This is the fourth in my bi-monthly series Remembering Rob Reiner, in which I watch the six remaining films I hadn't yet seen by the slain director. Not to be confused with my other bi-monthly series, Remembering Rob Reiner, in which I rewatch my six favorite of his films.

Usually, a film being shorter than you expect it to be is a good thing. It's a contradiction built until loving movies: The more you love them, the more you want them to be over sooner. (Or maybe love doesn't have to do with it. Maybe it's the more of them you watch, the more you want them to be over sooner. There are probably people out there who love movies but for whatever reason can only see one a month, and in their case, they probably wish they were double the length.)

Where was I?

Oh yes -- I usually like it when a movie is shorter than I expect it to be. Get out of there faster. Get on to doing something else. Or more likely, get to sleep at a reasonable hour.

But a short movie can also have a lack of weight to it, and that's what I felt when watching Shock and Awe, the third-to-last movie directed by Rob Reiner that I hadn't seen, which had its festival premiere in 2017 and briefly hit theaters the following year. 

Oh that's not to say Reiner doesn't take this movie seriously. He takes it very seriously. It's about the George W. Bush administration's fabrication of evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in order to justify a military campaign and remove Saddam Hussein from power. It's the kind of thing we liberals were most aghast about, politically, before we knew the extraordinary depths of disgusting governance of which Donald Trump was capable.

But the movie is only 90 minutes long, which seems strange for that sort of film.

In the moment, I was very glad of its shorter length, mostly because I didn't think it was very good. But also for the reason stated previously, that I wanted to get out of there at a reasonable hour and go to bed. As it was, I fell asleep near the beginning, and didn't finish until 1 a.m. 

But part of the reason I didn't think it was very good was that I knew it was going through these events in a cursory way. Or maybe just that these events didn't require more than a 90-minute movie, and perhaps devoting more than that to the journalistic efforts of some courageous Knight Ridder reporters and editors wasn't warranted. One wonders if their efforts were even worth memorializing in this fashion. 

I have to say, part of my impression of Shock and Awe was formed by my sense of it as a technical failure. The lighting was terrible. But before I went off all half-cocked in blaming the director of lighting (a title that does not exist, and in fact, when looking this person up just now on IMDB, I couldn't figure out who was the best person to, um, not blame), I thought I should check to make sure there wasn't something wrong with the actual picture on my TV. And indeed, at some point since the last time we watched something on this HDMI port, someone seems to have dimmed the lighting, a surely inadvertent adjustment that I quickly corrected. I went back and watched a few moments of Shock and Awe and they all looked fine now.

But poor technique would have been true to my experience of the decline phase of Reiner's career. Although I don't recall having any technical issues with the last new Reiner movie I watched -- LBJ, which also starred Woody Harrelson -- I thought Being Charlie really looked like crap, and it wasn't a setting on my TV in that case. 

It isn't a given that a director loses their visual instincts as they entered their 70s, which Reiner would have been doing when he made Shock and Awe. You can name numerous examples (Ridley Scott, Martin Scorsese) of directors who haven't lost a step in that regard as they've aged. But Reiner in particular seemed to care less about how a movie looked and more about how it sounded, if you follow me, the older he'd gotten. I've noticed that even the opening credits seem a little bit tossed off in these most recent efforts.

He certainly has a good cast on hand. Harrelson is joined by the likes of James Marsden, Tommy Lee Jones and himself, in one of his final prominent acting roles where he didn't play himself or Marty DeBirgi. There's name value in the characters' wives and girlfriends, who include Jessica Biel and Milla Jovovich, who do a particularly poor job of rising above the level of the heroes' wives and girlfriends. 

But the experience of watching this movie is kind of like watching a single political essay play out over 90 minutes, in which actors hand the baton from one to the other and speak a continuous stream of Reiner's thoughts. (Reiner did not write the film; that credit goes to Joey Hartstone.) That includes a lot of exposition and a lot of opinion. Opinion I agree with, of course, and that the facts have retroactively borne out. But nonetheless, something that's a bit dramatically inert, even though it's told in an efficient enough package that obviously moves from one point to the next with good momentum. 

I think there's a real struggle to make us care about and recognize these people as individual characters. There are scenes of each of the leads, save Tommy Lee Jones, at home with a wife or significant other, reading in bed or having a beer, which are meant to humanize these men. See? They have lives outside the office, outside of trying to hold the administration's feet to the fire. 

But these scenes feel really perfunctory, and they lack the instinct to add nuance to the portrayal of characters who are walking ideas. There's a moment that seems deliberately designed to give Jovovich's character more agency, in which she gets paranoid about Harrelson's character talking over their phone about the leads he's following regarding the government potentially lying to the public. She starts talking, without evidence and in a way that is never followed up in the plot, about phones being bugged and mysterious government figures who could come and harm their family. If you are going to introduce this sort of thing, you have to pay it off in some way, but Shock and Awe doesn't.

Obviously Reiner thinks of this as his All the President's Men, and perhaps because it was unavoidable, Harrelson and Marsden -- the Woodward and Bernstein stand-ins -- even evoke Woodward and Bernstein at one point in their discussion of what they're doing. That would make Reiner's character the courageous Ben Bradlee character. (I don't know who it makes Tommy Lee Jones, since I never totally figured out his character's role in the whole thing.)

Let's just say it's a pale, pale imitation of that Alan J. Pakula classic, which I am now evoking for the second straight day on this blog. 

I'll start to wrap up here, but I did want to leave with one final look at a narrative choice that doesn't totally work. Even though the movie does largely get wrapped up in analyzing what the politicians said, when -- and they all appear as themselves in archival footage from the time -- it recognizes there needs to be a human face on this, and that human face is a soldier, played by Luke Tennie, who got paralyzed from shrapnel that severed his spinal cord after his convoy ran over an IED in Iraq. 

Because so much time has to be devoted to chasing leads and speaking to sources who are surprisingly (and conveniently, and unbelievably) liberal with how much they reveal to the reporters -- liberal as in generous, not as in progressive -- this soldier can't really get visited with during the narrative. So it's really just a bookend, with the soldier testifying before a committee at the start, and finally, near the end, with us following him through training and into Iraq, where his accident occurs. 

I guess maybe I'm just too jaded by the last two Trump administrations these days, but I found myself thinking "Is this all you got? A wounded soldier?" 

Indeed it was wrong for the Bush administration to cook up evidence of WMDs that were not there in order to finish the job of removing Hussein from power. Whether it was actually Bush's intention to do right by his father, or whether it was just supervillain-style, moustache-twirling scheming for oil by Dick Cheney, is besides the point. 

But through no fault of its own, Shock and Awe ends up feeling quaint if viewed in 2026. It feels like a luxury of a comparatively enlightened society that a phantom war was the only thing we liberals only had on Bush. (I'm sure there were other things, but I'm conveniently not remembering them right now.) By today's standards, George W. Bush was a model president. 

As for Reiner himself, I do feel sort of sad knowing that this was his last truly political film that I hadn't yet seen. His staunch liberalism was something I always loved and respected about him, even if it didn't always make for the best movies. Even when he didn't hit the sweet spot between entertainment and politics, I appreciate that his voice was out there and that he was always trying. 

Remembering Rob Reiner: Stand by Me

This is the third in one of two 2026 bi-monthly series with the same name, Remembering Rob Reiner, but different focuses. In February, April, June, August, October and December, I'm rewatching my second through seventh favorite Reiner movies, having already rewatched my favorite, This is Spinal Tap, before the series began. 

Stand by Me, my #149 on Flickchart, was considered one of the great coming-of-age movies of the 1980s, possibly of all time. That means that, of course, a wide range of people in a wide range of age groups related to its observations on growing up, especially at the characters' fragile age of 12. 

But I bet there were two groups of people for whom this effect was particularly profound:

1) Those who were 12 years old in 1959, when the movie is set;

2) Those who were 12 years old in 1986, when the movie came out.

That second group was me. 

Stand by Me was released on August 22, 1986, and I did not turn 13 for another two months. And I definitely saw it in the theater, surely before my birthday, though it would have been possible not to since movies stayed in cinemas a lot longer back then. 

It's hard to believe they didn't know what they had on their hands with this movie, and released it in the doldrums of summer. August has never been a great release date for a movie, even early August. And even though the summer blockbuster era was not, back then, what it is today, surely that logic still applied.

But the release date did also have a certain timeliness, as this movie also takes place at the end of the summer of 1959, just before its four 12-year-olds are going to junior high school and expecting their friend dynamic to change irrevocably. Labor Day, when the movie takes place, is about a week after the film's August 22nd release date. 

Whether this was canny timing or just an accident, I'm sure the end-of-summer melancholy, combined with my age, meant that everything about the themes of Stand by Me really hit home with me. Because of the way my schools were set up, it was not actually a summer of transitions between schools for me, as I still had one more year of middle school left before going to high school. But perhaps, having already undergone this transition once, I was better capable of understanding what the characters were going through. 

As I was rewatching this movie for the first time this century -- and I can't be absolutely certain I even watched it in the 1990s -- it occurred to me that this film has a similarity to the first film I wrote about back in February, The Princess Bride, which wouldn't come out until the next year. 

On the surface? Nothing in common. But when I was writing about Bride, I was inclined to list just a bunch of great, memorable quotes, which I jotted down as I was watching -- reaching a total of 42 before all was said and done. 

I don't think of Stand by Me in terms of memorable quotes, though there are those. The concept for the advertising campaign, as exemplified in the poster above, was based on quotes, which had a certain currency to them even if you hadn't seen the movie yet. 

No, I think of it in terms of memorable scenes, which is sort of the same thing -- and which is also something we would credit to the screenwriter more than we would necessarily credit to the director. (To name names: Stand by Me was written by Raynold Gideon and Bruce A. Evans. I've never heard of them either, unlike Princess Bride scribe William Goldman.)

The common element between the two movies is obviously Reiner, and I think he excelled at making these things memorable through his approach to filmmaking. Coming in at only a scant 89 minutes, Stand by Me is nonetheless chockablock with three- to four-minute scenes where something happened that had quite a strong impression on me. 

A list? Okay. Though it's not going to be in order.

1) The scene where the boys get leeches while going in the water. 

2) The scene where the junkyard dog is sicced on their balls. 

3) The scene where they have to outrun an approaching train.

4) The scene where Lardass prompts a contagious vomiting episode among those watching a pie-eating contest.

5) The scene where Kiefer Sutherland threatens to kill River Phoenix and you really believe he will, like killing somebody doesn't make a damn bit of difference to him.

I'm actually going to stop there, though I could continue. I'm going to stop there because I want to transition to a related point. 

The thing that (almost) all of those scenes have in common is that they involve real danger for the characters. When I'd seen bands of kids together in the movies -- like, say, The Goonies the previous year, which also starred Corey Feldman -- I never felt like they were actually in danger. Don't get me wrong, I love The Goonies. But there's a difference between the peril in which those kids find themselves, and the danger that befalls the Stand by Me crew. There's a reason I use the word "peril" for one and "danger" for the other. Peril has no bite to it. 

Watching Stand by Me, in 1986, was an experience of wondering if these kids would actually make it out of this movie alive. And there was good reason in the story for that fear, because there's death all over this movie. Wil Wheaton's Gordie has already lost his brother (The Sure Thing veteran John Cusack!) to a car accident, just four months before the events of this movie, and the actual point of their journey is to go see the dead body of a young man hit by a train -- who provides the title of the original Stephen King novella, The Body.

(I don't want to get sidetracked, but I will include a parenthetical thought here, one of my only reservations about Stand by Me. In what world do multiple people know about the existence of a dead body that has not even been found by the police yet? And in what world do they clash over who's going to find and report the dead body? That part of is a bit strange, though it does provide good thematic heft.)

So with death hanging over this movie at all points -- and one death that occurs later that we don't learn about until the end -- it was easy to worry about whether our characters would actually survive their interactions with rambunctious golden retrievers, leeches, trains, guns, knives, and even cigarettes. (Yep, it was definitely a grown-up thing for me to see other 12-year-olds smoking cigarettes, which was no part of my personal experience, and would never appear in a movie nowadays except maybe the most grungy indie movie you can imagine.)

But these fears of death are as much about the impending change in our lives -- both the characters and mine -- than any actual fears of death. In my privileged suburb of Boston, we didn't know anyone who had died, not even including any of my friends' parents. Heck, most of us even had all our grandparents. Death was very remote for us in August of 1986.

But change? We already sensed it was coming. We already knew that we weren't going to be friends with the same people in a few years that we were now. It was right around this time that I had a falling out with one of my friends who had been among my best friends to this point, and I'm ashamed to tell you that it wasn't him, it was me. I was the one who decided he wasn't cool anymore, and I actually ended up punching him in the forehead at one point.

It was a volatile emotional time, 12 years old, and that's another impression you get from Stand by Me. Every kid except Jerry O'Connell's Vern has an episode of crying in this movie, and it's not over something like getting hurt. It's over genuine emotional trauma from big, existential things. Gordie lost a brother. Chris is thought of by everyone as a criminal. Teddy's father is crazy and held his ear to a hot stove, permanently mangling it. Even the relatively stable Vern gets shit for being fat. 

So it wasn't only the physical dangers that Stand by Me perfectly encapsulated, it was the emotional dangers. And they all got wrapped up into one intense viewing experience, the sort I'd never had before at age 12, the sort that played a role in maturing me beyond where I had been when I entered that theater.

So even though it may have been more than 35 years since I saw Stand by Me, and there was reason for me to wonder if it still belonged in my top 200 on Flickchart, I can confirm that this viewing brought back all the formative experiences I had when I first watched it. It brought back that feeling that the world was not, in fact, safe, and probably never had been. 

This post was not a lot about Rob Reiner. But Reiner was definitely a key ingredient in bringing this all together, getting incredible performances from child actors, effortlessly blending the comedy and the drama, and giving the whole thing the necessary epic sense to entrench it in all of our minds and hearts -- and not just those of us who were 12 in the summer of 1986. 

Remembering Rob Reiner: LBJ

This is the third in my 2026 bi-monthly series Remembering Rob Reiner, in which I'm watching the six movies of the director's I haven't seen. Not to be confused with the other bi-monthly 2026 series, also called Remembering Rob Reiner, which runs in the other bi-monthly months and involves revisiting six Reiner favorites.

The thing that made Rob Reiner so interesting as a dominant force in Hollywood, at least for a good 15 to 20 years there, was that you couldn't really pin him down to one kind of movie. Even when you thought his thing was comedies, he'd make complicated comedies, or comedies that crossed over with other genres. But then sometimes he wouldn't make comedies at all. Sometimes he would make horrors, or thrillers, or love stories.

So there was not really a pattern, but there were sometimes familiar interests revisited. His 2016 film LBJ is kind of like the revisitation of two movies he made back-to-back in the mid-1990s, which otherwise will not appear in either of my bi-monthly series, and it reflects an interest on Reiner's part in both presidential politics and civil rights. 

The first of those films is 1995's The American President, the fully fictitious story of a widower president (Michael Douglas) who begins dating an environmental lobbyist (Annette Bening). I think of it in the same category as Ivan Reitman's Dave, a film I can very easily see Reiner having directed, though I hold that film in higher esteem. 

The second came the very next year in 1996, Ghosts of Mississippi, which was sort of the beginning of the end of Reiner's charmed existence as a director. (North in 1994 ended his run of great films, but he got back on track for at least one more with The American President. Though I personally love 1999's The Story of Us, some people think Reiner never made a really good film again after The American President.) Sorry for the tangent. Anyway, this is the true story of the trial of a white supremacist accused of assassinating civil rights activist Medgar Evers. James Woods plays the white supremacist, and at the time we probably had no idea how good of a fit that was for the right-wing Woods. 

In LBJ you kind of get both things coming together. You get a peek behind the closed doors of the highest corridors of power in the U.S., and you also get the civil rights struggle in the form of the 1964 bill that new president Lyndon Baines Johnson reluctantly championed after John F. Kennedy was assassinated. (So I guess you also get an assassination in this film, another connection with Mississippi.)

And you know what? I thought it was really good.

I was almost tempted to go all the way up to four stars on LBJ, but cooler heads prevailed and I settled on a 3.5. But it was a generous 3.5, the kind that makes me remind you: this too is a good star rating. 

I did end up paying for the movie on AppleTV -- just a rental, not a purchase -- when I forgot I'd written this post, which talked about its availability on Kanopy. Lo and behold, eight years later, it was still available on Kanopy, if only I'd done the usual search of all my streamers before renting it. Fortunately, I'm glad to say that I don't mind having spent my hard-earned cash on LBJ, because I liked it.

The first thing that relieved me was to see a presidential biopic come in at only 98 minutes. Make all the jokes you want about what that says about Johnson and his presidency, but I think it just reflects a different time when the flab was cut from a movie rather than left in. Now granted, this man was president for three years longer than Johnson, but the Ronald Reagan biopic from a couple years ago, which I haven't seen yet, was 141 minutes. At this rate, I can't imagine how long the eventual biopic of Donald Trump will be. 

The second thing was that Woody Harrelson did not, in fact, seem ridiculous in all his LBJ makeup. I can see now, having discovered the previous post linked above, that I thought this makeup was quite bad and that it would make the whole movie laughable. Maybe I'm more grown up now than I was eight years ago, because I didn't balk at the makeup at all. (I did wonder if it was necessary to give Jennifer Jason Leigh's Ladybird Johnson a bigger nose, but she's not in it all that much anyway.)

No, this is just a tight little movie that intercuts the day of John F. Kennedy's assassination with events that came before and after it in the life of Johnson, focusing mostly on the civil rights act Kennedy wanted to push through before he was killed, but also dealing with issues like Johnson's own political ambitions, and his desire to create a legacy that was not tarnished by his previous opposition to civil rights measures in his capacity as a congressman and senator. 

The casting is good here, with a pair of good actors doing impersonations of Kennedy brothers (Jeffrey Donovan and Michael Stahl-David) and Bill Pullman and Richard Jenkins playing other senators. 

One of the things I liked about this was that Reiner was committed to showing the complications in Johnson the man. Even though it's clear Reiner greatly respects the man and what he both accomplished and tried to accomplish, he has no illusions about Johnson being an easy man to get along with, or always on the right side of history. A lot of the moments we see here of Johnson are profane, with the man dropping f-bombs and hanging up the phone on people, both before and after he became president. Ultimately, though, Reiner appears to have believed that Johnson became clear-eyed in his support of the civil rights movement, and there are some really good lines of dialogue and speeches reflecting the man's late-arriving sense of empathy. 

It was wise of the film not really to delve into Vietnam, which was Johnson's undoing as president, and the thing that prevented him from running for the presidency a second time in 1968. (You're allowed to complete the term where you started as the vice president and then still run again twice more, as long as you served less than two years as president, I believe. So although he was reelected by a landslide in 1964, he opted out of 1968.) Reiner never really made a war movie, and he wasn't going to start with getting into that part of LBJ's presidency and life. 

Reiner did not of course write LBJ, so some of the credit I'm about to give should go to screenwriter Joey Hartstone. But Reiner at his best didn't need a huge amount of celluloid to tell a story that feels pretty in depth. I learned a lot I didn't know about LBJ in this film, and that's a credit to the sort of filmmaker Reiner was at his best. 

One final comment about the final thing in LBJ, and this was the second straight movie I watched where watching to the end of the credits revealed something funny I wanted to mention here.

At the end of the credits there was something you see regularly in films, but it was not a message I expected to see in this film:

"The persons and events in this motion picture are fictitious. Any similarity to actual persons or events is unintentional."

Really? Fictitious? In a film based on historical events and people?

I assume this is one of those situations where you include such a disclaimer because it costs you nothing to do so and because it protects you from the frivolous litigiousness of any wronged party. No one can say "Lyndon Johnson never said that!" because you can just say "It's not Lyndon Johnson. I already told you that. If you think it is, that was unintentional."

But on the face of it, it seems very silly, and on the most basic level seems to suggest that the history being presented here is a lie. I would probably favor:

"Although the people and events in this film are based on real historical people and events, some dramatic license has been taken with the depiction of these people and events." Though the lawyers probably wouldn't be happy with that one. 

Reiner's last overtly political film, 2017's Shock and Awe, will be on tap for me in July. 

Remembering Rob Reiner: When Harry Met Sally ...

This is the second in one of two intertwining bi-monthly 2026 series with the same name. The movies in February, April, June, August, October and December involve revisiting my six favorite Rob Reiner films, except for my favorite, This is Spinal Tap, which I rewatched in conjunction with Spinal Tap II: The End Continues before the series started. 

When I was considering the Rob Reiner movies I'd be revisiting in 2026, I of course came to When Harry Met Sally and thought "Yeah, might as well. I've seen it fairly recently, but it's been a minute so I should see it again."

Nope. It's been more than a minute. In fact, it has been more than 20 years.

I had to double check both of the places I keep track of rewatches, on Letterboxd and in a Microsoft Word document, and true enough, I could not find it in either. I started keeping track of rewatches in July of 2006, so that means that unless I watched this in the immediate few months before I started keeping track, it's been more than 20 years since my last viewing of When Harry Met Sally.

It could not be. It simply could not be.

I feel like I definitely watched it with my wife, and we only started dating at the start of 2005. So probably in that first year together we watched it. But it clearly has not come up for viewing again since then, unless I'm derelict in my records, and I'm rarely derelict. 

I'm reminded again that certain movies are so familiar to you -- this would definitely be double digit viewings for the movie overall -- that you feel like you've seen them recently, even when you haven't. Maybe I just couldn't believe that I feel like I clearly remember my last viewing, or at least that such a viewing had taken place, and yet that was at least two decades ago now. Nor could I believe that I wouldn't have been inspired to watch it again in those two decades, just for old times sake.

Well, high time for a viewing of my #26 movie on Flickchart, which has spent a significant amount of time within my top 20. It's crazy to think that I haven't even seen When Harry Met Sally since I started using Flickchart in 2009. 

Since I've never written at length about this movie on the blog, I should tell you that I've long considered it to be the greatest romantic comedy of all time. Actually, in the couple times I've written about Reiner himself, I have expressed that opinion. So I don't need to go on at length about it now. (And each time I do express this opinion, I also mention that I understand I am excluding many of the romantic comedies from earlier golden ages of cinema. What can I say, I grew up with When Harry Met Sally -- it came out when I was 15 -- and I didn't grow up with those other movies.)

The other thing I should put on record is that it is also one of my favorite New York movies. I had already been to New York at least once, maybe exactly once, before the movie came out, but this was the movie that likely cemented my impression of Manhattan as an idealized, romantic locale. Actually living there disabused me of some of that notion, but there's still a perfect version of the city that exists within the tight 96 minutes of When Harry Met Sally. 

I don't need to spend a lot of time on why the movie works so well, but it's a mixture of the sharp dialogue, the witty performers, the funny scenarios, the keen and sometimes uncompromising wisdoms about relationships between men and women, and the mood-setting jazz piano and crooner music that serves as wallpaper.

I'm willing to bet, though, that the little detail that had the greatest impact on my affection for the movie is the interviews with the old married couples placed sporadically throughout the runtime. I doubt this was actually an innovation by Reiner or by screenwriter Nora Ephron, but it could have been, and it is certainly something that's been imitated since. If I'm connecting Reiner movies, it's a bit of a documentary touch that points back to This Is Spinal Tap, and lends an extra bit of authenticity to everything we're seeing. (And looking forward, Reiner used this tactic in the most recent Reiner movie that I've added to my favorites, The Story of Us.)

Because I know this film so well, I was worried I wouldn't have a lot of new observations on this viewing, so I forced myself to jot down some notes. And as it turned out, there were a handful of things I wanted to mention when writing this post:

1) Did you know this was shot by Barry Sonnenfeld? I did not. 

2) I noticed that this movie uses an Ella Fitzgerald song, just as another favorite New York romantic comedy, Kissing Jessica Stein, would do in what I assume was a fairly explicit attempt to remind us of its forbear. Incidentally, I have seen Kissing Jessica Stein three times since the last time I saw When Harry Met Sally. 

3) When Billy Crysal is alone, depressed, sitting on the floor in his empty apartment, he's playing a little game of tossing playing cards into a bowl that's about five feet away from him. I never remember noticing this previously, but at one point he lands about five in a row -- a pretty impressive feat.

4) I know that some of Meg Ryan's reactions to Crystal's antics are genuine, and you can really tell when they occur. When he's speaking in his funny voice ("pecan piiiieee"), she gives a real laugh at one point and utters "Oh no." Such a genuine reaction because, well, it was.

5) I really like the scene where Harry and Sally are dancing cheek to cheek on New Year's Eve, and they are spinning around. It's a very clever way for the camera to capture what they are both thinking in that moment, at a moment when they know the other person cannot see their face, and in this case it's a moment of fear about the physical contact prompting them to do something they fear they will regret. The movie is full of these little mirrored moments, such as when they both make an awkward expression during the social gathering where they play Pictionary, upon seeing the other kiss their current paramour. 

6) I noticed there's a scene where Sally puts on a pith helmet, I believe it's while they're at the Sharper Image, about to be encountered by Helen and Ira. Reiner would also use a pith helmet for Michelle Pfeiffer's character in The Story of Us.

7) Speaking of the Pictionary scene, there are a lot of great lines in that scene, including anything related to the phrase "baby fish mouth." However, I was reminded how much I love Bruno Kirby's frustrated line "Draw something resembling anything!"

8) Speaking of mirrored moments, what I will call the "duelling telephone calls" scene is a masterpiece of execution. It's when Kirby's Jess and Carrie Fisher's Marie are asleep, and for some reason each has their own distinct telephone line on their bedside tables. (Will share a house but not a phone number?) Harry calls Jess at the same time Sally calls Marie, and it's the morning after Harry and Sally slept together. The overlapping dialogue in this scene is terrific, as both conversations go forward naturally while being able to interact with each other, as Jess and Marie realize they are having the same call about the same thing, and that they both invited the other to come over for breakfast at the same time -- an invitation they are relieved to find the other has rejected. It's some real Robert Altman stuff in terms of complexity of dialogue.

9) I always remember, when thinking about moments of romantic bliss in my own life -- when you are most keenly aware of its potential opposite -- the lovely exchange afterward between Jess and Marie: "Tell me I will never have to be out there again," she says. "You will never have to be out there again," he returns. It feels especially touching when you consider that both Kirby and Fisher are now gone. 

10) Random: I noticed the telephone number on the awning where Sally struggles to buy the Christmas tree by herself, without Harry's help. It's 662-4402. Why is this notable? They almost never put phone numbers in movies that didn't begin with 555. Just another touch of this film's effortless sense of realism.

11) If I want to make a really strange connection, between the great Reiner movie I saw this month and the not-great Reiner movie I saw last month for the other bi-monthly Reiner series, it's the ending lines that are meant to serve as a form of reconciliation between characters. When I wrote last month about Being Charlie, the drug addiction movie about and written by Nick Reiner, I noted that one of the few choices I really liked was the character's decision to end by saying to his father "I don't hate you, Dad" -- the closest that character could come to saying "I love you." Well, this movie ends in a somewhat similar fashion, with Sally saying to Harry "I hate you, I really hate you." Which is also a substitute for "I love you."

12) I noticed in the credits there are songs both by Rodgers and Hart (several) and Rodgers and Hammerstein ("Surrey with the Fringe On Top," from Oklahoma!, which Harry and Sally sing in the Sharper Image). I thought that was an interesting thing to see, fresh off last year's movie that featured all three of these characters, Blue Moon. 

These were the only notes I took in the movie, but afterward, when I was looking up other times I mentioned When Harry Met Sally on this blog, I came across this post, and I need to correct the record from it. 

In case you don't want to click, it was a post about the poor realism of the way batting cages are depicted in the Pete Davidson movie Big Time Adolescence. In that post I drew a contrast to how batting cages are depicted in When Harry Met Sally, but I didn't get it completely right.

While it's true that there is nothing that occurs in WHMS that is an actual defiance of the way batting cages work, in that post I stated that the pitching machine continues to pitch balls to Jess and Harry even after they have turned to speak to each other. On this viewing, I noted that's not the case. 

However, it doesn't necessarily undermine the realism of the movie. In fact, it just means that Jess and Harry took the opportunity of no longer being pitched to to turn and talk to each other. These guys are not cheapskates, but they do value a quarter, and they need to keep shovelling them in to get more pitches. (As Harry says to the young kid when they argue about whose turn it is.) They'd hardly let a bunch of pitches go by just to talk face to face about that time Harry made a woman meow.

Okay, if there could ever be enough When Harry Met Sally, we've reached that point for today. 

Next up in this bi-monthly series in June is the current #132 on my Flickchart, Stand by Me -- and it's been a lot more like 30 or even 35 years since I've seen this one. 

Remembering Rob Reiner: Being Charlie

My two 2026 bi-monthly series have the same name but different focuses. On the other alternating months, I'm watching six favorite Rob Reiner films. On these alternating months, I'm watching the six I haven't seen.

Being Charlie is not a good movie. Let's get that out of the way at the start.

But it is a fascinating document of Rob Reiner's relationship with the son who murdered him.

I was anticipating with some trepidation the viewing of the film that Reiner directed in what would seem like a favor to his son, Nick, who co-wrote this screenplay as a reflection on his own struggles in and out of rehab and living on the street. I mean, it's possible Reiner himself wanted to tell Nick's story, but without delving into the details, I'm assuming he thought having a screenwriting credit could help launch Nick in some unspecified way -- which was never going to happen in any other way. Plus perhaps unburdening himself might be therapeutic.

But you can tell this film did not get the A version of Reiner, or of anyone else. Let's start with the cast.

Nick Robinson is a legitimate actor. In the same year Being Charlie came out, he was also in Jurassic World. He's since been in such films as Love, Simon and Damsel. They got a credible lead to play the Nick Reiner character. That's not to say Robinson is great in this role, but he's credible.

The rest of the cast? Common acquits himself best, but Cary Elwes -- undoubtedly doing Reiner a favor from their Princess Bride days, and in need of some juice in his career in 2015 -- never seems any better than uncomfortable in the role of a California gubernatorial candidate who is also Charlie's father. (He's an actor who became famous for a series of pirate movies -- think if Johnny Depp had run for governor but had been a lot more straight-laced than he is -- which is an interesting nod to Elwes' own career, since he was technically a pirate in Princess Bride.)

Everyone else in the cast? A few faces I'd seen here and there, but otherwise, unknowns. No one willing to add any star wattage to the project. Any potential stars probably looked at this and said "Thanks, but no thanks."

On the surface, you'd think the worst this movie could be is generic. The sad reality of addiction is that addiction stories follow a series of very predictable patterns, because the character arc of an addict is very predictable. And Nick Reiner was an especially predictable version of an addict. Still is, other than the killing his father part, though that is just an extreme version of the familiar addict spiral.

You'd figure that with a successful veteran like Reiner at the helm, this movie would at least look professional. It does not. The lighting is shoddy. The editing is questionable. The cinematography is indifferent. Even the credits look like they were made on the machine my friend bought from the store back when we made a short film in 1990, and returned after we were done. (A story for another time.)

Before I get into the interesting part of the film, I'll give you a little bit of the plot.

So Charlie is an aspiring stand-up comedian who has sobriety issues. I mean, major sobriety issues. He's been sent to rehab multiple times (like Nick) and released himself of his own recognisance (like Nick, I'm sure). And he has a contentious relationship with his famous father, like Nick. 

Let me stop here for a minute to talk about the dimensions of Rob Reiner's generosity in making this film. I watched part of an interview with the two Reiner men that occurred around the release of this film. You probably know which one I'm talking about, it was making the rounds.

You can call it the polish of a man who has spent 40 years in the spotlight if you want to, but Rob Reiner seems sincere as he discusses this project and the struggles their family had had. And what I found really interesting is that the film makes zero attempts to let the father, David Mills, off the hook for prioritizing the wrong things in his relationship with his son -- his career and perceptions in the media rather than what's best for his son. I don't know that Reiner would have been in a similarly vulnerable period of his own career where he thought Nick's troubles would have a measurable impact on him, because Reiner's biggest run of success was before Nick was born. But Reiner's willingness to let the Elwes character look like a shit -- for most of the movie, anyway -- was quite generous.

And then there's the tragedy of Michele Reiner. If you consider the mother character here, played by Susan Misner, to be an accurate stand-in for Nick's mother, then that just makes his decision to kill her all the more heartbreaking. As you might expect from a mother, especially compared to a father, Charlie's mother repeatedly takes the approach that is more directly focused on showing her son love. Charlie's father claims also to love him, but he says it's tough love and he says that was a conscious choice. His mother is more about nurturing love, and if that was Nick's impression of her, one wonders how far gone he must have been to have killed her.

I said I was giving a plot synopsis, but the components of Being Charlie are so standard that I needn't even provide much more on that front. Charlie meets people in rehab. Charlie has a friend who has a negative influence on him. Charlie falls for a girl in rehab who also has a negative influence on him. Charlie has short-term successes and falls off the wagon. There is some sort of tragedy along the way, but I won't tell you what. The film ends on a positive note.

So I think I can now transition into the ways the film is interesting, both in and of itself and as a reflection of a relationship that turned fatal.

In the inevitable reconciliation scene at the end between father and son, it's crucial how Charlie characterizes the nature of that reconciliation. There are three words you might expect Charlie to speak to his father in that scene: "I love you." Instead, this is what Charlie says:

"I don't hate you, Dad. I don't hate you."

That's a really smart way to say "I love you" without being trite, but it also reveals their true dynamic that never got resolved by the time Nick killed Rob ten years later. 

Maybe the most Nick could ever say about his father was that he didn't hate him. But maybe he really did.

Certainly that's what's been alleged, that he hated his father despite what we would think of as olive branches offered by his father, such as Being Charlie. However, you can also imagine a version of this from Nick's perspective in which his dad really is some version of an ogre.

We have a tendency to think generally about how it's hard to grow up in the shadow of a famous person, but Rob Reiner in particular makes a strange version of that narrative. As discussed earlier, his biggest career successes were long before Nick was sentient, and although he was certainly a recognizable public figure, it's not like there were paparazzi snapping pictures of him wherever he went. Yes, Rob's success could have engendered an overdeveloped sense in Nick of needing to measure up, but how much of that was inspired by pressure coming directly from Rob, we don't know.

Still, you can imagine a version where Rob Reiner is that ogre. Where he talks to his son while poking him in the chest with an index finger. "You're doing this movie, you're getting yourself back up on your feet, and I don't want to hear another word about it." After all, we know that at least that character played by Cary Elwes was envisioned as a practitioner of tough love.

There are a lot of interesting insights buried in the generic surface of Being Charlie, insights that would not have been interesting ten years ago -- just another Hollywood rehab story -- but have become a lot more interesting in the past four months. Does that make this a good movie?

Well, no. I said at the start it wasn't. 

But I was thinking about giving it one or 1.5 stars on Letterboxd for most of the time. By the end, I landed on two stars. Which is just shy of what I think of for 2.5 star movies, which is "interesting failure."

And even though this is not any sort of example of the craft of Rob Reiner as a filmmaker, I do remain touched by his decision to make the movie, and of course think about that decision in its best possible light. I don't really believe in the above image of Rob pointing his finger into Nick's sternum and telling him to shape up or ship out, though I'm sure some version of that conversation happened between them on more occasions than they could count. (And also that Rob poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into rehab, which might understandably raise a person's frustration level -- especially when the person in that rehab had all the advantages any child could ever hope for.)

And even if Rob was a bad parent to Nick, didn't manage those responsibilities as well as he could have, was learning on the job like we all are, I do think the olive branch of Being Charlie means something, if only that he continued trying to fix his son in any way he could. 

Remembering Rob Reiner: The Princess Bride

This is the first installment of the second of two bi-monthly 2026 series that have the same name. Every other month starting with January, I'm watching the six Rob Reiner films I haven't seen yet. Every other month starting with February, I'm watching my six favorite Reiner films other than This Is Spinal Tap, which I watched before the series started. I know, it's a little bit complicated.

My intention with this version of my 2026 intertwining bi-monthly series, the one where I watch six Rob Reiner favorites, was to go chronologically. I had a special viewing of This is Spinal Tap (1984), my favorite Reiner film, before we even started, watching it as a double feature with Spinal Tap II: The End Continues last month. Next up would have been The Sure Thing (1985), technically my seventh favorite Reiner film, but we're excluding my favorite for the purposes of this series since I already just watched it. And I was really looking forward to this one, because my records say I have not watched The Sure Thing at any point since I started keeping track of my rewatches, nearly 20 years ago. 

But you know what? I can't find The Sure Thing anywhere.

This surprised me, especially in the wake of the loss of Reiner. I know that the passing of a beloved personality does not necessarily change the availability of his or her films, because that has to do with contracts and rights and all that stuff. But you do sometimes see films surface because there is a hunger for watching them at a particular time.

Not The Sure Thing. Not where I've looked, anyway. 

I won't get into where I looked and whether I missed somewhere obvious. I don't think I did, because Google AI tells me:

As of early 2026, The Sure Thing (1985) is generally not available on major subscription streaming services, but it is available to rent or purchase. It can be found on digital platforms such as Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV, and sometimes YouTube.

Yeah, well, I looked in all three of those areas, and no go.

I'm not giving up on watching The Sure Thing. I'll find it somewhere this year even if I have to buy it online as a DVD and have it shipped to me from America. But I will have to give up on ordering this bi-monthly series chronologically, so instead I'll use the order these films are ranked on my Flickchart. (And I can't build toward a climax by going in reverse order, in case you were wondering, because reverse order would also dictate that The Sure Thing was up next.)

That means that after #9 This is Spinal Tap, up next is #11 The Princess Bride (1987), which is actually skipping over two movies in the chronology after Tap. 

It had been almost eight years since my last Bride viewing, which was when I showed it to my kids one time when my wife wasn't there -- a decision that I regretted when she told me how much she would have liked to be present for their first Princess Bride viewing. There has not been one since, and though my younger son might still be into it, the 15-year-old definitely would not be. Like the boat boarded by Vizzini, Inigo, Fezzik and Buttercup, that ship has sailed.

The 2018 viewing, my first since before 2006 (as far back as my rewatch records go), also reminded me how much I cherish the movie. The next time it came up in a Flickchart duel, it jumped from 29th to 11th (yes, I keep a record of these things as well), which is where it has stayed to this day. 

Although this series is designed to sing the praises of Reiner, we also know that Reiner was not a director with a signature style. He had signature touches and collaborators -- watching this reminded me that he re-teamed with Christopher Guest after Tap, and would use Billy Crystal again in When Harry Met Sally -- but otherwise none of these three films is directly comparable to one another. Reiner presided over them, but as I was watching The Princess Bride this time, it made me realize that the person I probably really wanted to praise in this post is William Goldman, who wrote the screenplay based on his own book. We lost Goldman in 2018, only a few months after my last Bride viewing.

This is not to say there will be no Reiner in this post. But as I was watching, I decided to start jotting down quotes, and those quotes can be attributed to Goldman, not Reiner.

You see, when I got to the Princess Bride portion of my in memoriam post to Reiner in December, I wrote "You can quote 30 lines from this movie and there would still be 30 more honorable mentions."

Impulsively, I decided to see whether that was hyperbole or really true. 

So the following is a list of quotes I wrote down, mostly as they occurred, but a few out of order because I only realized I wanted to do this about ten minutes into the movie. So I went back and added a few I knew I had missed. I'll write them here in the order I wrote them down. 

Did I stack the deck in favor of getting as close to 60 as I could, to prove my previous casual hypothesis correct? You can be the judge of that. I had a hard time drawing distinctions between lines that I thought might actually be repeated by people -- repurposed for use in their daily lives, as we do with the movie lines we love the most -- and just good lines of dialogue that I remembered because I've seen the movie a half-dozen times. It may not have been perfect, but I will tell you that there were some where I decided they definitnely did not belong as quotable lines -- so I was not always erring in my own favor.

Also, although most of them are jokes or funny lines, a few aren't. 

Okay, presented mostly without context, because quotable lines should allow you to bring up the context in your head automatically:

1) "Unemployed! In Greenland!"

2) "As you wish."

3) "No more rhymes, and I mean it! Anybody want a peanut?"

4) "The Cliffs of Insanity!"

5) "Is this a kissing book?" (Incidentally, the only quote from the Fred Savage-Peter Falk portion of the film.)

6) "Inconceivable!"

7) "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

8) "Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die."

9) "I am not left-handed."

10) "No one of consequence."

11) "Plato? Aristotle? Socrates? Morons."

12) "And find out who is right, and who is dead."

13) "You'd like to think that wouldn't you!"

14) "Never get involved in a land war in Asia!"

15) "Never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line!"

16) "I am no one to be trifled with."

17) "I spent the last few years building up an immunity to Iocane."

18) "Life is pain highness. Anyone who says different is selling something."

19) "I died that day!"

20) "Death cannot stop true love."

21) "Good night Westley. Good work. Sleep well. I'll most likely kill you in the morning."

22) "Rodents of Unusual Size? I don't think they exist."

23) "The Pit of Despair. Don't even -- (clears throat) -- Don't even think of trying to escape."

24) "Boo! Boo!"

25) " ... my wife to murder, and Guilder to frame for it. I'm swamped."

26) "If you haven't got your health, you haven't got anything."

27) "There will be blood tonight!"

28) "I would not say such things if I were you!"

29) "You are the brute squad."

30) "I've seen worse."

31) "Your friend here is only mostly dead."

32) "I'm not a witch, I'm your wife! But after what you just said, I'm not even sure I want to be that anymore!"

33) "Have fun storming the castle!"

34) "Mawage. Mawage is what brings us together today."

35) "Wuv. Twoo wuv."

36) "Oh you mean this gate key."

37) "I think that's the worst thing I've ever heard."

38) "Stop saying that!"

39) "I want my father back you son of a bitch."

40) "I killed you too quickly last time."

41) "Hello lady!"

42) "Don't worry, I won't let it go to my head."

A few stretches there maybe, but I got to 30 pretty easily even if you take out a dozen stretches. And the stretches and the ones I didn't write down can certainly qualify as the "30 honorable mentions."

So yeah, this script is amazing -- incredibly paced in addition to the priceless writing of dialogue. Goldman was a true master, except when he wasn't. (Did you see Year of the Comet? Yeah, don't.)

But without the actors, scripts are just words on a page. And that's where Reiner comes in. Without the line deliveries of these actors -- for which I think we can credit them and him equally -- Goldman's great lines don't stand a chance of committing themselves to permanence. 

Just think of the performance of Wallace Shawn, instantly iconic, but who before this was primarily known for stuff like My Dinner With Andre. Not the same sort of material at all, but Reiner found the comedic genius within him and brought it out.

Or -- speaking of Andre -- there was Andre the Giant, who was not an actor at all. Even with his heavily accented English, the wrestler is responsible for -- *stops to count* -- well, only three of those lines. But he is also responsible for inserting himself forever into our hearts, such that on this viewing, when he'd already been gone for more than 32 years, I got a little choked up on his line "Hello lady!"

To say nothing of how this made stars of Cary Elwes and Robin Wright, though Wright famously turned down a half-dozen ensuing rules that would have made her a lot more famous than she ever became. 

The script is great, but Reiner's touch with actors and with material -- whether we can fully quantify it or not -- makes The Princess Bride what it is. Which is my 11th favorite movie of all time.

I could probably dig for a number of other things I got out of this viewing, but The Princess Bride is not exactly new territory in terms of movies about which to rhapsodize. So I won't even bother.

But I did want to ask one thing: What's with all the weird Christmas stuff in the grandson's bedroom? (I only just now realized Savage's character doesn't have a name.)

What weird Christmas stuff, you ask? You never noticed it either?

Well I'll show you.

How about this crazy, angry homemade Santa?

Or the snowman over his shoulder here?

Or the long-bearded, European-style Santa whose long beard and red coat you can see in the middle of the picture here?

There's absolutely zero indication that this movie is supposed to be set at Christmas. Nor was it released at Christmas, having come out in September of 1987.

I'm not looking on the internet. I know the internet will have an explanation. I don't want it. I'd rather just speculate. 

More than anything I like how it gives this kid's bedroom a real, lived in quality. No, you might not actually decorate your own room with Christmas stuff, but I like that there is nothing remotely choreographed about the items in his bedroom. (I keep wanting to call him Kevin after his Wonder Years character.) Our bedrooms -- I would have been 13 when this came out, so maybe a little older than this kid -- defied a set dresser's perfect idea of what a bedroom should look like, and whoever dressed this set honored that truth and then some.

Going by order on Flickchart, my April viewing will be my #3 Reiner film, at #26 on my Flickchart, When Harry Met Sally. And that one should not be hard to find. 

Remembering Rob Reiner: The Magic of Belle Isle

This is the first in intertwining 2026 bi-monthly series with the same name but slightly different focuses. Starting bi-monthly in January, I'll be watching the six Rob Reiner films I haven't previously seen. The other bi-monthly slot, starting in February, will focus on revisiting six of my Reiner favorites.

Focusing on previously unseen films by Rob Reiner that he directed entirely after 2012 always promised to be rough at times. But at least we've started off with a film that is merely innocuous.

From what I remember of Flipped, The Magic of Belle Isle is probably most similar in Reiner's filmography to that 2010 film, in that both films feature a young girl as their protagonist, and both are set in a summery setting that prompts a nostalgia in viewers for simpler times, even if they never actually experienced that setting or those simpler times in their own lives. Both films also feature the young actress Madeline Carroll -- or, she was young then -- even though in only two years she's aged out of being the protagonist to being the protagonist's older sister. 

Knowing what I now know about Reiner's family, I wonder if these movies weren't both made as love letters to his (biological) daughter Romy, who would have been 13 and 15 at the time those two movies were released. 

The protagonist, Finnegan, is played by newcomer Emma Fuhrmann, and I list her as a newcomer because the film gives her the "and introducing" credit at the beginning. She didn't ultimately stick, not having a credit on IMDB in the last five years, but she did appear in the Adam Sandler movie Blended and in Avengers: Endgame, so there was a little juice there for a while -- and she gives a really good performance here.

But don't get side-tracked, Vance, because this is the plot synopsis portion of this post. 

I'd say she's really the co-protagonist, because the movie's biggest name is Morgan Freeman, who plays Finnegan's cantankerous neighbor in the titular lakeside town in some unspecified location of what I would guess is the Atlantic coast. (The interwebs tell me it was filmed in Greenwood Lake, New York. But I here I am getting sidetracked again.) He's only temporarily housesitting for a rock musician on tour, looking after the dog and trying to drink his way into an early grave. He's in a wheelchair and is a writer who no longer writes due to sorrow over the loss of his wife, some six years in the past. 

Like many cantankerous neighbors in the movies, Freeman's Monte Wildhorn has something to teach young Finnegan, who wants to become a writer, and she has something to teach him about not giving up on life. The lesson sharing is also going to hit Finnegan's mother, played by Viriginia Madsen, who is currently divorcing Finnegan's absentee dad, and who gives Monte a figure on whom to have a chaste crush that is chastely reciprocated. (In other words, this movie is not actually going to give Morgan Freeman and Viriginia Madsen a romantic relationship, not a huge shock since they're separated in age by nearly a quarter century. Interestingly, though, I'm currently looking at a British poster for the movie in which it is called Once More, and the poster certainly seems to suggest more of a relationship movie than the American poster above. Sidetrack much?)

Just from this basic setup, you can probably tell that this is a pretty mid concept for a movie and that you've seen a hundred such "heartwarming" tales if you've seen one. The fact that it was made by Reiner means that it is competent and likeable enough, even if it is entirely lacking in what you would call originality. 

Indeed, it's possible to map out every single step of this script, a collaboration between Reiner, Guy Thomas and Andrew Scheinman. You know the early scenes where Freeman is in full-on cantankerous mode are going to be played for comedy, though Freeman's nephew, played by Kenan Thompson, is actually the straight man here, at least in the scenes where Monte is moving into the house. After Thompson goes back from whence he came, then the comedy comes in the form of interactions with the neighbors and the dog, all of which are grumpy, but in that superficial movie way that is obviously going to melt away the moment Monte is required to do the right thing.

Because the movie is so basic from a screenplay level and in terms of any compelling reason for its existence, I don't think I need to go on at length about it. Then again, there are a lot of movies that we find pass the time well enough even though they do not need to exist, and for me, The Magic of Belle Isle was one of those. It was the perfect sort of movie to watch in the morning, which I did this past weekend on Sunday. 

If I'm looking for hallmarks of the Reiner signature, which I probably should be doing in a series like this, I'm not finding them in terms of the movie being funny, unfortunately. It's pleasant, and Freeman has and delivers some good lines of dialogue, but actually funny in the way Reiner's earlier films are funny? Not really, though I suspect that wasn't at the forefront of his thoughts considering that he was seeing his daughter earnestly in the role played by Fuhrmann. When that kind of thing is close to your heart, you aren't thinking about great comedy set pieces.

Still, the supporting cast is a really nice group with which to spend this time, as it also includes our dearly departed treasure Fred Willard, and Kevin Pollack in one scene. 

The movie is trying to bite off a little more than it can chew, as it's not enough for Monte to have a special relationship with Finnegan. He's also got to have a special relationship with the mentally challenged son of another neighbor, that neighbor being played by Jessica Hecht of Friends fame. Because Monte's primary energies are directed on Finnegan, that plot ends up feeling just about as superfluous as it certainly is from a narrative perspective. It's almost as though Reiner just wanted to make sure there was no chance we'd see Monte as an actual misanthrope.

If looking for Reiner connections, we should also note that Freeman had worked with him previously on The Bucket List. 

If I'm going chronologically, which at this point I will assume I am, next up in March will be probably the most difficult to watch of these previously unseen films, the 2015 film Being Charlie, which Reiner wrote with the son who went on to murder him. 

Sorry to end on such a cheery note. 

Remembering Rob Reiner in 2026

After ten days of thinking intensely about the murder of Rob Reiner and his wife Michele, I've managed to suppress it from the forefront of my thoughts in the next ten days. My regular life has been intervening in a big way since then, requiring most of my attention. In fact, after being up on every minute development of the story in those first ten days, I don't even know if there have been any new developments since then, such as a motive for the killings, beyond the sad reality of the mental instability of their son. 

While many people spent parts of that first week after his death revisiting favorites from his filmography, I did not. The pain was too fresh. 

I'm planning to make up for that in 2026, as I plan to devote significant time to thinking about the man I've recently called my favorite director, hoping only to occasionally dwell on the exact circumstances of him departing this earth, if I can help it.

As you would know from previous experiences with my blog, early January is when I usually tell you about my blogging series for the new calendar year. It's that lull between Christmas/the actual end of the previous year, and ramping up to reveal my film rankings later in January. During this time I devote one post each to telling you about my new monthly series and my new bi-monthly series.

I haven't told you about the new monthly series yet, though will probably post about that within the next week to ten days. It's an idea I came up with a while back, and has yet again pushed back two other pending ideas, which have been patiently waiting their turn for several years now. 

It was the bi-monthly series for 2026 that I had been stalled on. I had a flimsy idea, but I wasn't super excited about it. I won't tell you about that one because I may come back to it in 2027. 

Initially, though, the idea had been to return to the format of watching the final six movies I had not yet seen by a prominent director, which I have done previously with Orson Welles, Martin Scorsese, and Kathryn Bigelow/Jane Campion (three each). I did it initially with Spike Lee, though I didn't really do it right in that case, because there were nine films I hadn't seen and I watched only six of them. (The remaining three remain unwatched to this day.)

I had Hirokazu Kore-eda in mind for this, since this is a director I love and there are a number of movies of his that remain unseen by me. However, that number was more than six, and I do like my round numbers. (Which is why I watched an extra Kathryn Bigelow film the year before I started watching her final three. I don't want to repeat the Spike Lee mistake.) So I was going to watch one or two Kore-eda films in 2025 so I'd get down to the final six unseen. Suffice it to say, that did not happen, and it's also a bit of a dangerous undertaking, considering that I haven't figured out whether I can even source all of his old movies. When I was supposed to watch his film After Life for a movie challenge a couple years ago, I had to order a DVD copy from the U.S. just to be able to see it. And that's one of his more prominent ones. 

Then Rob Reiner died on December 14th, and I got an idea for not only one 2026 bi-monthly series, but two. Confusingly, they will have the same name: Remembering Rob Reiner. 

"Isn't that just one monthly series, then, Vance?"

You might think so, and you might be right. But I'm thinking of it conceptually as two, and I'll explain what I mean by that. 

First off, though, I want to say that having two criss-crossing bi-monthly series on this blog is not unprecedented. I did it in 2023 when I criss-crossed Baz Jazz Hands, the series where I rewatched Baz Luhrmann's six feature films in the year after Elvis, and King Darren, the series where I rewatched six of Darren Aronofksy's films the year after The Whale made him my first director to direct two of my #1 films. It felt a bit hectic but it was really only six extra viewings over the entire year. 

This year will be a bit more focused, as it will be all about Reiner, but it will be about two different kinds of Reiner.

In one bi-monthly slot, I will be watching the six Reiner films that I haven't seen, all of which are from the past 14 years. This is imperfect because there will soon be a seventh film. Reiner's final feature as a director, Spinal Tap at Stonehenge: The Final Finale, will be released this year. When I first thought of this idea, I wasn't considering the fact that I wouldn't be up for watching Spinal Tap II: The End Continues in 2025. I'll still watch it within the next few weeks before my ranking deadline, with some trepidation, but I may not formally consider it a part of this series. 

This bi-monthly slot will include one movie that will be very hard to watch: Being Charlie. I will struggle with that one when I come to it. At this point I'm not sure if I will be going chronologically or not. 

However, a series devoted only to what are probably some of Reiner's worst films does not feel like a very good way of really celebrating him. And so this is where the other bi-monthly slot comes into play. 

During those other months I will be rewatching my six favorite Reiner films, many of which are from that acknoweldged stretch of dominance starting in 1984, and one of which is not. This corresponds perfectly with the fact that I have six Reiner films in my top 200 on Flickchart, which is the very thing that led me to conclude I can and probably should consider him my favorite director. 

Now, there is a wrinkle to this one as well. My seventh favorite Reiner film is The Sure Thing, which is "only" #396 on my Flickchart. It, along with A Few Good Men, are the two films from this pre-North Reiner imperial period that I have not seen since I started keeping track of my rewatches in 2006. But A Few Good Men is not a realistic consideration for me because it's around the middle of my Flickchart, and I don't feel like I have a lot new to glean from it. (I would kind of like to catch up with my eighth favorite Reiner film, The American President, but I have to draw the line somewhere.)

So what I will probably do is exclude both This is Spinal Tap, my favorite Reiner film, and its sequel, and watch them as part of a special double feature in the next few weeks. Then that will give me Reiner films #2 through #7 to join with what will be six unseen Reiner films by the time his last remaining film gets released. Does that math make sense?

In any case, it will be a fitting, and hopefully not too mournful, send-off for a director who meant so much to me when I was coming of age, like his characters in Stand by Me were coming of age. Actually, that's the other of these film #2 through #7, along with The Sure Thing, that I haven't seen in the last 20 years. 

And by the end of 2026, I will be a Reiner completist -- at which point maybe I'll go back and watch All in the Family if I haven't yet had my fill.