When critics are the filmmakers' co-conspirators

Reviewing films while not revealing spoilers, but while still discussing what fundamentally makes a film good (or not so good), is one of the trickiest tasks a critic faces. In fact, a really good critic tries to speak only in a sort of dog whistle code about whether a film even contains spoilers, because the knowledge that the film might contain spoilers can be a spoiler in itself.

So I've already failed in that regard for Apex. But then again, issuing a SPOILER WARNING about Apex would have created that failure, if I had not already created it. (In case you missed it, this is an actual SPOILER WARNING for Apex, so heed it accordingly.)

I just wrote my review of Apex. It'll be last night by the time I post this, but as I write this, I just finished writing it.

And in this review, I was so careful to protect the spoilers that I essentially lied to my readers. 

It's not quite how it sounds. Let me explain.

Apex, Baltasar Kormakur's new movie on Netflix that stars Charlize Theron and Taron Egerton, has a setup that should be quite familiar to most moviegoers. It's such a familiar setup that I needn't cite another recent example, but the movie Fall from a couple years ago, about the two women who get themselves stranded at the top of an impossibly tall radio tower they've climbed to seek thrills, is a good example. It's the sort of film where the main character has an opening tragedy in which they lose a loved one in some disaster related to extreme sports -- climbing is usually the culprit, as it is in both these films -- before having to address the main, second nightmare scenario, also involving some sort of extreme sports. Cliffhanger was this movie also, and I believe there have been 782 others in the history of cinema.

Apex has a second template for the sort of movie it is, though, and that template is one I name-checked in the review. It profiles as the sort of exploitation movie where a character (usually a woman) is wronged, and then goes about systematically killing all the people who wronged her. And that movie I name-checked was I Spit On Your Grave.

The thing is, Apex only wants you to think it is a version of I Spit On Your Grave. It isn't. 

Oh yes, it introduces us to a bunch of malevolent toxic males who would be Theron's tormentors in a movie like that. They're Australian outback hunters who pay too much attention to her and whose threats toward her person are palpable. 

The thing is, these hunters are red herrings, and they disappear from the narrative after the first 15 minutes. This film's apex predator is actually Taron Egerton, who is introduced to us as the only nice guy in the outback who might have Charlize's back if the hunters overstep. Only he's the psycho killer who psychs himself up for hunting Theron down by listening to the Chemical Brothers' song "Go," in what was a terrific scene.

Baltasar Kormakur and company don't want me to reveal this in my review. So of course I didn't. 

But that means I had to set up those poor, unrefined and definitely misogynistic hunters, who are all bark and no bite, as the straw men villains for my entire review.

Witness lines like this:

"It may be that Ben [Egerton's character] is the only one who will help stand in the way of the predators who are hunting her."

And this:

"This means that we want her to emerge victorious on her own terms, not due to her adversaries flubbing some kind of advantage they had. Yet flub they do, such that there are a number of times when she would have been dead if their only goal were to kill her, thereby ending the equal threat she poses to them. That she gets to live through these moments of her tormentors’ advantage is not quite the same as villain grandstanding and speechifying, but it’s close enough to leave a sour taste in your mouth. Our ideal Sasha emerges from this because she outsmarted adversaries who were doing their damnedest to kill her at their earliest opportunity."

Theron has only one adversary in this film, but if I told my readers that, they wouldn't be surprised when "nice guy Taron Egerton" turns out to be a cannibalistic psychopath. (Sorry, probably didn't need to reveal the cannibalism part, but I'm assuming you've only read this far if you've seen the movie or if you don't care if I spoil it.) 

Oh, and while we're at it, here was my one "dog whistle" that suggested the possible spoilers:

"The fundamental setup of Apex is too obvious by half, but without getting into too many details, let’s just say it doesn’t stay that way."

The full review will be linked to the right if you check back later, or possibly now, depending on when you are reading this.

My whole approach in this review is, in a way, an abdication of the unspoken pact I have with my readers. I theory, a critic is on the side of the readers, cutting through the ways the filmmaker is trying to manipulate you into having a certain experience, if we think that experience isn't worthy or if there is a sort of deception in what they are trying to accomplish. 

But we also want to help a filmmaker succeed when they are manipulating the viewer in a positive way, in other words, in a way that will deepen your overall experience, possibly/probably by surprising you. And that's what Kormkaur and company are doing here. 

I did believe, as they wanted me to, that Egerton would be the guy who helped Theron survive the lethal ambitions of the scuzzy outback hunters, and even when he was revealed to be a creep, I thought he'd at least be in league with those hunters. As it turns out, the scuzzy hunters are just a bunch of blowhards who don't like having a woman throw their attentions back in their faces. But they aren't going to do anything about it, and in fact, they disappear from the narrative entirely. (I did think it might have been a smart move if, at the end, when Theron inevitably needs a ride back to civilization, she gets one from one of these hunters, thereby proving that you can't always judge a book by its cover. Instead she gets picked up by a couple of nice young women, which is definitely safer, both in terms of her personal safety and the message of the movie, but probably less interesting overall.)

In any case, I was happy to keep Apex's secrets, even if it meant I had to write my review in such a way as to conspire with the filmmakers on their red herring. When they've earned it, I want to be there to help. 

They didn't earn it big time in the case of Apex. I'm still only giving the movie three out of five stars, or 6/10 on the ReelGood scale. But it definitely got my pulse pounding on occasion, and was a worthy genre exercise. 

The thing is, even if Apex didn't earn a marginally positive review from me, I still think I'd do my best not to blow up the filmmakers' attempt to fool us with a red herring.

I just wouldn't be as willing of a conspirator. 

The spoiler that made Together my first Australian #1

Here we are on my final post that puts a bow on 2025 by taking a deeper dive into my #1 and how it came to reach that height. Some years my #1 inspires me to write about a larger, related topic that delves into my ranking history, but this year, the movie itself contains a ton of things I still want to write about. So I'll use this space to do so.

Up front, though: Because I mentioned spoilers in the subject of this post, I should tell you that I won't be properly spoiling Together until the fourth of these four segments. Things get progressively more spoiler-y through the segments, so if you haven't seen the movie and you sense yourself starting to get exposed to things you don't want to be exposed to, you can bow out then. 

My first Australian #1

Usually when I get the email that contains the nominees for this year's Australian Film Critics Association awards, which mostly focus on films with a strong Australian connection (they do have one "international" category so they can include something like One Battle After Another), it's a bunch of fringe nominees indeed. Yes an Elvis sometimes sneaks its way in there, but this list is usually comprised of films made by, but also only seen by, Australians. I've heard of these movies because I live in Australia, but most outside Australia won't know them from a hole in the ground.

That email has not yet come out this year, but it when it does, I suspect it will include my #1 movie of the year. 

You wouldn't know Michael Shanks' Together was Australian on the surface of it. The stars, Alison Brie and Dave Franco, are both American, and though the film never specifies its location, everyone else in the movie speaks with an American accent. The only real settings are an urban area (for a very short time at the beginning) and a rural area (for the rest of the movie).

But the keen observer will note Australian actor Damon Herriman as essentially the only other prominent actor in the cast. While him being Australian does not, of course, limit him to appearing in Australian movies -- Herriman was also Charles Manson in Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood -- it does make you wonder if, indeed, it might have been shot in his home country.

Well Shanks is also Australian, and I would assume most of the crew are as well, because it doesn't make sense to import Americans to do jobs Australians can do perfectly well. So it's also shot here, and I discovered recently that one of the producers is a neighbor of mine in the town where I live, and also friends on Facebook with some of my friends. (Hi Mike Cowap, if you're reading this. I don't know you but I hope to meet you sometime soon.)

Needless to say, I've never had an Australian #1 before. While this movie is not "Australian" in the sense of being set in Australia within its own world, it's a full-on Australian production, and that definintely counts. 

Because I've got a lot of other things to write about here, I won't go through and figure out how high an Australian movie has gotten previously in my rankings, but another one that was produced here but set in America -- the aforementioned Elvis -- did make my top ten a few years ago. In terms of movies actually set in Australia, Sweet Country was a top 20 movie for me in 2017. 

Does this mean I'm finally embracing the country that has been my home for going on 13 years now? That wouldn't really be an accurate conclusion. I mean, the fact that this movie hails from Australia is very much extra-textual to the movie. But I do appreciate the symbolic value of it, and hopefully my next Australian #1 will even take place here. 

Dave Franco equals his big brother

James Franco has fallen on hard times, to put it mildly, but he'll always have a place in my personal cinematic history in that he was the star of one of my past #1 movies, 2010's 127 Hours. That means I've got his name in a spreadsheet where I track people to see if they might eventually appear in more than one. 

Fifteen years later, Dave Franco has now achieved the same thing. Barring a big comeback from James that might only result from a very sincere apology tour, Dave seems like the only one who will have the chance to ever appear in another.

I don't specifically have a lot to say about this, but I did think it was worth making a quick mention in a post where I am touting Together's feats.

Body dysmorphia goes back-to-back

I don't know if you remember when I wrote this post last year after naming The Substance my #1 of 2024, but the premise of that post was that a horror movie had gone back-to-back with my #1 of 2023, Skinamarink, which was quite a surprise since I had never previously named a horror movie as my #1. I then went on to try to explore if The Substance was "really" a horror movie or if it was just body horror. Yes I considered that distinction pretty carefully. 

Well now, in the space of just a little more than two years, if you count January of 2024 and January of 2026 as bracketing that period, horror has gone from a #1 underdog to a #1 favorite. This is the third straight year you could describe my #1 as horror. I mean, Together is more definitely a horror than The Substance.

But even more so, it is a body horror, and even more so, it is a body horror in which body dysmorphia is a prominent theme. 

Some of the discussions of the body dysmorphia get into my next section where the real spoilers start, so let me get into the other similarities I noticed with The Substance that suggest I am definitely predisposed to this sort of movie:

1) Both movies have essentially three actors, with all other parts barely even being speaking roles.

2) In both movies, there is a central dynamic between two characters, and a third supporting character who acts on them as a catalyst. 

3) In both movies, those two characters are concerned about things that are happening physically to their bodies. 

4) Both movies feature some sort of physical monstrosity, but that's all I'll say about that at the moment. 

Let's stop dancing around it and go on to the next and final section ...

The final shot of Together that blew my mind

SPOILER ALERT.

So when anyone asks me why this seemingly ordinary horror movie became my #1 of the year, and they don't care about having it spoiled, the experience I'm about to recount with the movie is what I'll point them to. Hello, you, if you are reading now and this describes you. 

So just to clearly establish where we are in the story ... 

Millie (Brie) and Tim (Franco), who have been dating for years and living in the city, move to the country so she can take up a teaching job. His attempts to succeed as a musician have basically failed, and he's belatedly accepted her proposal, made in front of all their friends, to live together? get married? it's not entirely clear. What's clear is he did initially botch the acceptance of the proposal, leading to considerable awkwardness in the moment. Obviously there's something about taking his relationship with Millie any further that is scaring him. 

After moving to the country, Tim and Millie are on a hike and they fall into a hole in the ground where they come into contact with a mysterious force that causes their bodies to start to fuse together. We already know this force is pretty dangerous as we see what happened to two dogs who drank the same water that Tim and Millie drank. We also know there are some other hikers who were reported missing in this area. We'll meet them later.

Tim has shown commitment jitters the whole time, and won't have sex with Millie, which makes her somewhat more receptive to the friendliness/flitrations of a senior teacher at the school, Jamie (Herriman), who we later learn is gay so Tim actually didn't have anything to worry about. But Tim gets jealous anyway. 

The worse problem, though, is the steady attempts of their biology to fuse together, which once happens while they're having sex, and other times when they're sleeping. It gets so bad that their bodies are literally pulled together as if by unseen forces. The force is so powerful that it sends them into a bit of a trance, leading to a memorable scene of Tim in the shower and Millie against a frosted glass door. 

Eventually it seems like one of them will have to sacrifice themselves to save the other. They both try to do it, which is a touching indication of how much they actually do love each other. But then, to prevent Millie from dying of what should be a fatal knife wound, Tim decides to just let their bodies merge. This is accompanied by the great needle drop of "2 Become 1" by the Spice Girls, which we earlier learned was Millie's favorite band. Yes, this movie has a sense of humor, and we start to see the bodies fuse beyond the point of no return. We already saw this happen earlier with the hikers, so we know it doesn't end well. 

What seems like it will just be a button is Millie's parents later arriving at the house for a Sunday lunch, one she's mentioned twice previously in the narrative. I think we're meant to assume it's the first time they've been to the couple's new country home. After they've rung the bell, we're bracing ourselves for what deformed freak is going to answer the door. After all, we saw both the dogs and the hikers that previously fused together into an unspeakable monstrosity.

The person who answers the door is:

A non-binary person, who says to their parents, casually, "Hey."

Roll credits. 

This is not Alison Brie. This is not Dave Franco. This is a different actor, and a different person entirely. 

Suddenly I realized that this movie was operating as an allegory for coming out as a trans person. 

And then I started to backtrack.

If I rewound 30 seconds -- in my mind only, since I saw this in the theater -- I realized that when Millie's parents got out of the car, they looked a little nervous but cautiously optimistic. It was not a look they'd have on their faces just from visiting their daughter's new home for the first time. It might be a look they'd have if they had been quarreling with her and this was an olive branch by both parties, but that's not something that was mentoned in the narrative. 

No, this is a look the parents would have if they were meeting their daughter for the first time after the daughter had come out either as non-binary or as a trans man. 

And this is what probably got me about that: One of my big emotional triggers is when a parent accepts their gay, trans or non-binary child. I can't explain exactly why this is an emotional trigger for me, because I don't have anyone in my family who can be described that way. But maybe it's just that as a parent, I hope I would do the same thing in their position, even if I were scared and even if I didn't fully understand. I would hope I would just love them unconditionally.

And it's unconditional love we see on the faces of Millie's parents, mixed in with their nervousness and cautious optimism.

So then I rewound a little further and remembered a line of dialogue earlier that told us what we were supposed to think about this visit by Millie's parents. It's the second time she mentioned it. In an argument with Tim, she said, "My parents are coming for lunch this weekend, and I don't think you should be here for that."

In other words, this alternate version of her should not be there. She was doubting she was ready to come out to them yet. 

We know she did eventually change her mind, and maybe "she" became a "they" when "two became one." Otherwise, Millie's parents would not have that look of nervousness and cautious optimism on their faces as they approached the house, ready to meet their daughter as a trans man or a non-binary person for the first time. 

On my second viewing, I couldn't map out everything perfectly. There's a subplot about Tim's recently deceased parents that seems like a red herring in terms of this interpretation of the movie. Unless ... unless you see this as a projection of the fact that Millie's parents might be "dead to her," in a sense, if they do not accept her new publicly presented identity. 

But I think that's because Together doesn't want this to be the only interpretation of the movie. On Filmspotting when talking about Weapons, Josh Larsen recently said that a school shooting metaphor was an "available" interpretation of the movie. I think Shanks and company also wanted the trans allegory to be an "available" interpretation of their movie, not the only one -- but with plenty of Easter eggs for those wanting to follow that interpretation to its logical ends. Such as:

1) There's a scene earlier in the film when a slightly possessed Tim, who is basically becoming sickened by his compulsion to be near Millie, arrives at her school to finally have sex with her. They run into a nearby available bathroom to do this, but of course, this is a school bathroom used by students, and we see a pair of young feet appear outside the cubicle, wondering what's going on inside there. When Millie emerges by herself, leaving Tim to remain hiding, we realize that this is a boys bathroom, and the senior teacher, Jamie, says to her, trying to put her transgression in context, "Miss Wilson, this is a bathroom for little boys." On the surface, yes, this is a problem because it suggests an inappropriate relationship between an adult and a child. But if you are already looking at this as a trans allegory, it's a moment of shame for Millie because she is trying to use a different bathroom from her biological gender assignment. 

2) Then there's Jamie. Is it a coincidence that Jamie has a name that could belong equally well to a man or a woman? I think it isn't. Part of the character's function in the story can be interpreted as trying to draw Millie out and show her it's okay to come out as trans. We are very much meant to believe this is a journey Jamie already went through, which is hidden within a plot about the cult that used to operate out of the cave where Tim and Millie drank that poisonous water.

3) In this allegory, Millie is the "real" character and Tim is an embodiment of the potential future version of herself. She's trying to get Tim to "commit" to being the forward-facing personality, and Tim's refusal to do so is the thing that saddens her so much. But it's really Millie who can't commit, and Tim is just the symbol of her struggle. Although Tim is not portrayed effeminately in any clear way -- remember, this is a Trojan horse interpretation built into this otherwise mainstream movie -- some of his costume choices and hairstyle choices read as androgynous, if you are looking for this. 

4) When both Tim and Millie try to save each other at the end, it could be interpreted as the character's flirtation with suicide. We know that a person with this sort of body dysmorphia, who does not believe they can come out as another gender becaue of how their loved ones will react, often considers suicide. So the decision to finally come out is akin to the choice not to go through with the suicide. So in a way, the new half of the personality has saved the original one from extinction. The character's journey is to realize that selecting to present yourself as a different gender, or no gender at all, does not mean that the world will view you as an unspeakable monstrosity. 

I could go on, but you get the idea. 

If you've seen the movie, and you either didn't see this, or saw it but didn't think it worked, or saw it and thought it worked within the context of the movie but you don't care about this as a mission for a movie, that's fine. You do you. I'll just say that for me, this was a revelatory way of sneaking in a hidden intepretation of a movie that doesn't demand to be dealt with, but is "available" if you want it.

It doesn't even matter that the hidden interpretation was about a trans person considering coming out. I know that could make it divisive to some viewers. What matters, to me, is that it's got a hidden interpretation at all. The fact that this hidden interpretation also has a socially forward function that I embrace, and that this can therefore be seen as an extremely happy ending, just makes it all the better in terms of my appreciation. 

And you know what? Maybe it isn't even the only hidden interpretation in Together. It's just the only one I happened to excavate. 

Movies that operate on multiple levels, with multiple available interpretations to different viewers, are always the best uses of the unique tool that is cinema. 

The fact that I didn't even realize it was doing it until the very final shot?

Well for me, that's something worth celebrating by making it my #1 of the year.

To spoil or not to spoil?

As you would know from this post, I have recently begun reading Quentin Tarantino's Cinema Speculation, a sort-of memoir in which he mostly just talks about a dozen films from the 1970s that he saw when he was too young and loved, though more as he would analyze them now than much of the experience of seeing them then. Okay I guess there was one from 1968, as he starts with Bullitt.

The first three of these I had seen. After Bullitt he talks about Dirty Harry and Deliverance. 

But then the next was Sam Peckinpah's The Getaway, another Steve McQueen movie and a blind spot for me. I decided to watch it before I read the chapter on it, in a way similar to how you watch a movie when you know it's going to be discussed on a film podcast. I'd certainly get a lot more out of the chapter if the text were known to me, like it was with the other three, but even more than that if it were fresh. Dirty Harry is the most recent of those other three I've seen, and it's been seven years.

The viewing of The Getaway, which I liked but which has some parts about it that have aged very poorly -- Sally Struthers' whole character is incredibly problematic -- did give me a lot more than the previous three chapters. But I quickly realized that movies I had not seen would be the norm for the rest of the book, and I don't know if it's sustainable to keep watching these 1970s movies I haven't seen in order to keep getting the most out of Tarantino's book.

Then again, if I read his soup-to-nuts discussion without seeing the movie, I'll spoil any future attempt to see the movie, assuming I remember any of what he talked about.

I'll give you an idea of what I'm up against. The next chapter -- which I am now ready to start -- is about John Flynn's 1973 film The Outfit, previously unseen by me. After that I get a little break for some mid-book essays, but when those essays are over, we resume with a bunch of others I haven't seen: Sisters (1973), Rolling Thunder (1977), Paradise Alley (1978), Escape from Alcatraz (1979) and The Funhouse (1981). (Okay so there's one from the 1980s too.) In fact, the only remaining film in the book I've actually seen is Taxi Driver (1976), which I've seen twice. 

So my choices seem to be:

1) Watch a half-dozen film from the 1970s (and one from the 1980s) during a time of year that I am usually focused on collecting up films to rank from the current year, jammed together in a short period of time if I want to keep reading the book at a decent clip, or

2) Find out who lives and dies and who gets killed in creative ways that made an impression of Quentin Tarantino when he was a kid in a half-dozen movies I might like to see one day under friendlier circumstances.

Tough choice.

Some people would solve the problem by reading a second book alongside Cinema Speculation, but that's not how I roll. I like to dedicate myself to one book at a time. I guess you can call me a literary serial monogamist. (With apologies to Richard Curtis for borrowing his line from Four Weddings and a Funeral.) 

The decision on The Outfit, of course, will be due first. 

One way to think about it is that I can buy myself a little time by skipping The Outfit, knowing I then have another couple chapters that are extended essays rather than focuses on a single film. So when I resume with Sisters, at least it won't have just been a few days earlier that I watched The Getaway. Then again, I could think of that the reverse way as well -- all I have to do is see The Outfit and then I'll have earned myself a break, and I can keep alive the possibility of taking a completist approach to the films discussed in Cinema Speculation.

Of course, the freewheeling nature of Tarantinto's writing -- which sounds basically exactly like you've heard him talking in interviews, abundant with enthusiasm -- means that he's already touched on plenty of other films, possibly even revealing spoilers about them. And there was no warning for those discussions in the form of chapter headings.

Then there's the fact that memory is poor. Even if I hear Tarantino spoil the shit out of The Outfit, what are the chances I remember what he says when I get to the movie organically, maybe 15 years from now, or maybe never? 

Well, I won't have to make the decision tonight. I've already decided I'm going to watch a Greek film, She Loved Blossoms More, that I was eyeballing at MIFF 2024 but didn't get a chance to catch then. Since it was only released in the U.S. in 2025, it counts for this year.

So I'll kick the can down the road on the great Cinema Speculation spoiler debate by at least one more day.

Sinners spoiler alert

As you would know from yesterday's post and four others this year, I've been considering zeitgeist movies in the year 2025.

Loosely, I'm defining these as movies where so many of the salient details are known by people, even those who haven't seen the movie, that they've entered the cultural lexicon. That includes major spoilers. (Thinking things like The Sixth Sense, The Crying Game and one of the movies I actually watched for my Audient Zeitgeist series, Old Yeller.)

Can a movie released only earlier this year already have reached that point?

I say this as something of a prelude to discussing Sinners, whose second half was dutifully hidden by people like me when they reviewed it, not so much by others. The prelude is necessary so I can be sure you've seen my SPOILER ALERT before I reveal the images from Sinners I'm about to reveal. 

Have you left yet, if you need to?

Good.

I just received an email from Cinespia, the organization that holds movie screenings in the famous Hollywood Forever Cemetery, two of which we attended when we lived there. Only two? Yes, I guess only two. Lolita and The Philadelphia Story. They no longer show movies that obscure -- I guess really I mean old, not obscure -- but that's a topic for another time, one I've actually been dying to write about. But not today.

Anyway, the latest movie they've announced showing is Sinners, and they've advertised it thus:

You can read the text or not as you choose. It openly mentions vampires. I'm more concerned about the images.

The first, of Jack O'Connell's character, is not much of a spoiler, if you are already discussing vampires in the text. This character is introduced as a malicious entity and if there are any vampires in the movie, he makes a logical first candidate to guess if you were guessing. 

But as you go clockwise, three more images over you get to Hailee Steinfeld's character, who is presented sympathetically for the most part, after an introduction to her character where you're not sure that will be so. And maybe you only know that's Hailee Steinfeld's character if you've seen the movie -- Vampire Steinfeld looks different from regular Steinfeld -- but I think it's quite the spoiler to reveal that one of your supposed protagonists ends up turned to the undead, even though of course you know that some characters you like will turn in any vampire movie.

So there are three options here:

1) It's sloppy work, and they should have thought about it more before producing these promotional materials.

2) They just didn't care.

3) They think Sinners has already entered the zeitgeist, and the only people attending this screening will be people who are seeing the movie for the second time anyway.

That last may be a reasonable assumption. Sinners is one of the most praised and talked about movies of the year. If you haven't seen it already, what's wrong with you?

And I guess you face a dilemma here. If you don't talk about the second half of the movie -- which I guess is not a surprise at this point -- then you aren't revealing why this particular movie makes a good showing in a cemetery. It would be like if you were trying to say "Oh, From Dusk Till Dawn is just about a couple criminals on the run." 

So I get it. It's just that any time people with the sacred responsibility of protecting us from spoilers play fast and loose with that responsibility, it gets my hackles up a bit. Next time, it could be a movie I haven't seen that gets spoiled. 

Should trigger warnings contain spoiler warnings?

The other day I was watching the new Netflix movie The Sand Castle, whose dialogue is in Arabic but whose director (Matty Brown) certainly does not seem to be from that part of the world. It's part of a smart trend of directors shooting in other countries, even outside the language they comprehend, to get to make a movie they might not be able to make at home. (Who knows, maybe Matty Brown does speak Arabic.)

I noticed the usual trigger warnings we get at the starts of films these days, and one of those for The Sand Castle was "injury detail."

I should say "Spoiler alert! One of those was 'injury detail.'"

Now, you can't ordinarily glean much from these trigger warnings. Just knowing that a movie contains "violence, crude language, sexual situations, etc." is not enough to really tell you what's ahead. Though I suppose if you think a movie is one kind of movie, and the fact that it contains violence means it's another kind of movie, that too could be construed as a spoiler.

Injury detail, though, is a little different. It means a character in this movie is going to lose an arm or a leg, or at the very least get a very bloody wound. It turned out to be the latter in this case.

And though I can't say that actually felt like a true spoiler, it did put me on the lookout for a gruesome injury occurring in the story, which was not necessarily going to be the case just from knowing that the family in question is stranded on a deserted island with only a lighthouse to shelter them. 

It made me wonder: Should we get spoiler warnings for the trigger warnings? Or even be able to opt out of them altogether?

I think of myself as a person who does not get triggered by much. If you tell me that I'm going to see something in a movie I've never seen before, I will rush to it all the more quickly. In fact, this was one of the reasons The Coffee Table, which felt out of sync with all the other films in my top ten in terms of size and scope, was my #5 movie of 2024. It's a stance that benefits me as a critic, meaning I can watch truly anything that someone is happy to make, only turning my nose up at it in advance if I think it is going to be lame or tired.

So for me, the trigger warning does nothing, except possibly spoil what's to come.

I'd like an option on Netflix where I could choose "turn off trigger warnings." To be sure that this option does not already exist, I just googled it, and it does not.

If someone is going to lose an arm or a leg, or just get a very bloody wound, I'd really like to be surprised by that detail, not just wait to see in what form it's going to transpire. 

Don't read the Wikipedia page for Antebellum

And, please, don't read this post if you haven't yet seen the movie. I beg you. This is your SPOILER WARNING for Antebellum.

I had a cinematic experience on Saturday night that is, regrettably, increasingly rare these days:

My mind was blown. 

I'm not talking about the kind of blown mind you get when you sit there in shock after finishing a movie, as the totality of how good it was overwhelms you. I got a little bit of that experience with Antebellum, though that's not what I'm talking about.

I'm talking about a film's actual twists and turns catching you off guard, and paying off in a really satisfying way. 

Twists and turns -- once a comparative rarity in movies -- are now the driving force behind even the shittiest movies. As viewers, we are conditioned to expect them, even look for them, well before the filmmaker actually wants us to know they are going to happen.

So it is, indeed, very rare that a filmmaker -- or filmmakers, in this case (debut directors Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz) -- can actually play it just right either so I don't expect it, or so I have really misread the movie entirely, meaning that their reveal has the effect they intend it to have.

An intended effect that is entirely ruined if you read the opening paragraph of the film's page on Wikipedia. 

Now the SPOILERS.

Because I was so enthralled by the way the narrative played out -- a narrative I was greeting with some skepticism for its first half -- I went to Wikipedia after finishing Antebellum to kind of take it all in again in word form.

And this is how the film is described in that opening paragraph: 

"The film stars Janelle Monae, Eric Lange, Jena Malone, Jack Huston, Kiersey Clemons and Gabourey Sidibe, and follows a modern-day African American woman who finds herself in a Southern slave plantation and must escape."

Uh, no. Major disservice here. 

Bush and Renz probably cringe when they read a reductive description like that. Yes, that's what the film is about, but it's a long time before that grand design is revealed. It is not something a viewer should know before going in. 

Other places the film is briefly synopsized -- such as Metacritic and Letterboxd -- do better, but still give away information I wouldn't want to have given away. Here's what they say:

"Successful author Veronica finds herself trapped in a horrifying reality and must uncover the mind-bending mystery before it's too late."

That respects the desire not to disclose certain twists, though it also points to the fact that there are twists, which is not ideal. Also, as the character perceives it herself, it's not a "mind-bending mystery" -- that's the audience's perspective on the material.

Where both of these loglines fall down is they reveal that Janelle Monae's character lives in the modern world. Antebellum itself doesn't reveal this for its first 40 minutes.

The movie begins with a long, unbroken take through a plantation circa the Civil War, the kind of cinematic technique that leaves me putty in the filmmakers' hands. I may have to watch that again before my rental expires, if I don't watch the entire movie again.

I expected this to be a prologue before we shifted to 21st century Janelle Monae, as I thought I did know that the movie was set in present day. I think I'd heard it compared to Lovecraft Country, which I haven't seen, but which also explores racism using genre elements. That show is set in the 1950s, but using the obviously older beasties from the stories of H.P. Lovecraft. I figured this would be the same.

It's not a prologue. The Civil War setting lasts for the film's first 40 minutes or thereabouts. It stayed in that setting long enough for me to assume I'd gotten the movie wrong, and what little I knew about it was not accurate. All sorts of unpleasant slave-related atrocities occur during these 40 minutes: whippings, brandings, lynchings, suicides, the burning of corpses in crematoria. If the movie hadn't gone somewhere useful, they would have just been unpleasant. Given where it does go, I found them incredibly powerful -- at least in retrospect.

But then, Monae awakens in her bed, today, next to her sleeping husband, as a coworker awakens her by phone to ensure she has enough time to get ready for her flight to New Orleans, where she will be speaking at a conference to other Black women of industry. It turns out she's actually Veronica Henley, a sociologist with a PhD who often appears as a guest on news programs to discuss the quest for racial equality in modern society. 

Okay, so this antebellum south stuff was all just a dream, right? An exploration of the film's opening quotation from William Faulkner? That would be "The past is never dead. It is not even past." And she just imagined herself as a slave named Eden as an unconscious projection of her fears of being marginalized in her daily life? 

So for the next 25-30 minutes, we get Veronica as she makes her way through her next two days, receiving racist microaggressions from hotel concierges, and macroaggressions from Jena Malone, first on a Zoom call and then in a series of stalking episodes -- sending her flowers, breaking into her hotel room, that sort of thing. So this is what the movie is going to be about, how the deranged views of 19th century southerners have never actually gone away, and they will result in something really unpleasant for modern-day Janelle.

In this section there are a handful of great moments with Gabourey Sidibe, of Precious fame, who I have always loved. She calls one white girl who has marginalized them "Becky" -- humorously, her name tag reads "Rebecca" -- and tells off another guy for sending a drink over to their table at dinner. You go, girl.

This section ends with Malone kidnapping Monae when posing as her Uber driver ... and then we're back on the plantation again. 

So the movie shifted my expectations again. I figured we'd revisit the plantation in some form, but I didn't know what. And the next thing that happened made me understand this even less. 

Eden -- or is it Veronica? -- awakens to the ringing of a cell phone. The confederate general who has been raping her awakens and goes out to a pouch on his horse, where he talks to an unheard person on the other end of the line, saying he'll "take care of it." Monae's character hears and senses an opportunity.

At this point I'm thinking "How come a character living in the 1860s does not wonder what the sound of a cell phone ringing is?" And "How come a cell phone is ringing in the 1860s?"

So for the next little bit, I thought this was just her dream again, with modern elements breaking into her personalized Civil War nightmare, as apparently unrelated dream elements are wont to do. Another such anachronism is when slaves picking cotton in the fields see a plane flying overhead, again apparently unsurprised about such a development. I began to feel a little disappointed that this movie was going to contain so much content that existed only within the dream space, but I was going with it.

And then, a few minutes later, I realized it was all real. 

So the middle part of the story is actually the first thing that happens, chronologically, followed by the first part and then the third part. Veronica was really kidnapped, and where she was brought was a modern-day attempt by racist sociopaths to create a sort of plantation theme park -- you know, like Westworld, except for the American south. And except with real people taking the abuse as opposed to androids.

Brilliant.

As we see Veronica and another fellow "slave" (actually a kidnapped racial studies professor) attempt to escape, I became more and more enthralled and sat up straighter and straighter in my seat. And the final section of the film is just filled with terrific "a-ha!" moments, which I don't need to recount here, since you implicitly agreed not to read this until you'd actually seen the movie. I will say, however, that the final reveal -- that this is the secret back section of an otherwise "legitimate" Civil War reenactment park -- called Antebellum -- was the perfect capper on an excellently executed mind-blower.

Within the details of the narrative, there are other great things that you don't understand at all until the director's grand design is revealed. For example, a number of times you see "Eden" doing this tricky routine when she walks to the door of the cabin where she lives, which involves these giant yet careful movements where she's landing on every fourth board of the wooden floor. At first I thought this was how she was walking because she was still in pain over being branded. (Yes, that happens.) Ultimately, you realize it's her practicing for her eventual escape -- these are the only boards that don't creak when you step on them.

If I had read the film's Wikipedia page, or even its Letterboxd or Metacritic page, I would have known, or at least suspected, many of these things long before the film revealed them to me. And that's a damn shame. Not for me, since I did it right, but for all the others who didn't. I'm sure watching a trailer, which I also did not do, would have just made it ten times worse.

And so we have a truly strange phenomenon with people's perceptions of this film. And that brings us to the other reason you shouldn't read the film's Wikipedia page, which is that later on, it reveals that Antebellum has only a 28 on Rotten Tomatoes, and a 45 on Metacritic.

Huh?

To be sure, there are some outliers there. Scrambling over to Metacritic as I immediately did, I found that Peter Debruge of Variety gave the film a 90, which is about what I would give it. But the eight positive reviews were overwhelmed by the combined 28 mixed or negative reviews, 18 of the former and ten of the latter.

Huh?

I have to wonder what percentage of these people came in with the blank slate I did. In this day and age, it's likely most of them did not. I have no idea what percentage of critics avoid trailers like I do, or refrain from even a cursory researching of the films they are planning to review. In some quarters we still receive digital press materials for upcoming movies, and it's only logical that some or even most critics peruse them.

But the blank slate should be the condition we strive for. It's not the fault of Gerard Bush or Christopher Renz that we know things about their movie we should not know before we sit down to watch it. They constructed their film in the precise sequence it needed to be structured in order to blow our minds -- multiple times, actually. It's not their fault if those charged with the responsibility of bringing it to the public have not handled it as carefully.

Because I just don't see how a completely unbiased viewer comes away from this without feeling enthralled -- not only by the reveals, but by the technique (remember that great tracking shot to start the film) and by the acting (Monae is amazing throughout). 

If the tepid reaction to the film prevents Bush and Renz from getting another opportunity to make another great film -- realizing it's fraught with peril to throw around the word "great" -- I think that's a damn shame.

Not only a great film, but one that speaks to this particular moment. There are a number of emotional crescendos in this film, but one involves Veronica's climactic discovery of a statue of Robert E. Lee on horseback. I don't imagine Bush and Renz could have known, when making their film, that the toppling of confederate statues would have been a primary narrative in 2020. But great art tends to have an intuitive relevance to the era in which it is produced, an unconscious knack for speaking to an exact moment in our culture -- even anticipating that moment.

This is certainly not a popular opinion, but I think Antebellum is great art. I hope a significant number of people can consume it under the necessary conditions to recognize that. 

That cameo from that movie

Spoilers are traditionally thought of as major story twists that, if revealed, would ruin the emotional or intellectual trajectory of your viewing experience. You’re supposed to only know what you’re supposed to know when the filmmaker wants you to know it.

But spoilers can also be cameos. In that case, you’re not usually trying to avoid ruining someone’s experience of the film’s plot. You’re trying to preserve their sense of delightful surprise.

Take the Tropic Thunder cameo. Since I don’t think there are likely to be many people reading this who have not seen Tropic Thunder (but get out of this paragraph now if you haven’t), I will ruin that “surprise” by alluding to Tom Cruise’s amazing turn as the bald, corpulent producer who megomaniacally shouts into a phone for a couple scenes. It’s priceless, and you would surely agree that a large part of that is because you didn’t know it was coming.

And so it is I recommend to you the new(ish) Netflix romantic comedy Always Be My Maybe, telling you there is a terrific cameo … but not who it is.

You may already know who it is, as this person has been particularly hot over the past few years after experiencing a career resurgence. Plus, you know, social media.

But if you don’t … well, I’m not going to be the one who tells you.

I will tell you about the movie. It stars Randall Park and comedienne Ali Wong as San Franciscans who have been friends since childhood, when their best friend relationship turned “will they-won’t they” after an awkward sexual experience in the back seat of his car. Flash forward 16 years, when Park and Wong no longer need to play themselves at 17 (which, granted, is funny). They’re adults navigating success (she’s a celebrity chef) and failure (he can’t get his band off the ground), living in different cities, but reunited when she has to return home to open a new restaurant. They haven’t spoken since they were teens.

Typical fodder for a romantic comedy, just like my favorite romantic comedy (and one of my favorite films, period) of last year, Crazy Rich Asians. I’m not sure if it’s the fact that both films star Asians that I liked the movies better, which would be strange because I’m not inherently pro- or anti-Asian. (I mean, I’m “pro-Asian,” but in a neutral, not a fetishistic, way.) But aside from their casting, both films reminded me that it’s really simple to make a satisfying romantic comedy, and we should attempt more than we currently do. You don't have to reinvent the wheel. All you have to do is do it well. (Ha, easier said than done.)

The cameo, which comes about midway through, is certainly the movie’s funniest part, but I don’t know how significantly it contributes to my overall assessment of the film. Surely the cameo will be the reason why many people want to see it, and if so, it’s done its job, which is to expose people to superior material that they will, indeed, find very satisfying on its own terms. Which is also the aim of this blog post, I should say.

You could say that even knowing there is a cameo is a sort of spoiler, because the best cameo is probably when you didn’t know there was a cameo coming at all. But Always Be My Maybe is probably not enough of an inherent draw to enough people for me to just say “See it, I promise you won’t be disappointed, there’s something great in it” and expect you to run out and do that. The revelation that there’s a cameo is the carrot I need to entice you.

So hopefully you’ve been enticed. And you have Netflix, so you know, run out and do that.

One last recommendation: Don’t google the title. If you do, Google will autofill this person’s name and ruin the surprise for you.

And all my tiptoeing will have been for nothing! 

Real love and spoiling what can't be spoiled

If you started reading this for a substantive analysis of the themes or filmmaking techniques of Olivia Wilde’s Booksmart, I’m sorry to disappoint you. I haven’t seen it yet. It doesn’t come out for another couple weeks in Australia.

But even without having seen it, I can tell you that it doesn’t seem like the type of movie that would be discussed on something referred to as a “spoiler special.”

That would be The Slate Spoiler Special, a recurring Slate podcast in which a roundtable of hosts (often featuring film critic Dana Stevens) goes through a recent film or TV show without worrying about keeping its secrets. I hate-listen to this podcast. Every once in a while it yields something I find genuinely useful, but more often than not, it inspires snark in me.

I won’t dredge all that up now because I’ve written about it before, but I often think the show is more appropriately referred to as Slate Plot Synopsis. That’s because the roundtable usually passes around the conch in a kind of tag team recitation of the plot, blow by blow, rarely providing what I would consider to be true analysis.

But the thing that’s annoying me in this case is that rarely does it actually involve spoilers. Oh, they tell you what happens in the plot, but more often than not, the plot is not particularly “spoilery.”

As in, it would seem, Booksmart. Now I understand that they have chosen to call the show this and they aren’t going to adjust the name of the show based on what movie they’re talking about, but I might suggest that it’s not that interesting to talk about a film on this show if it does NOT contain what we would traditionally think of as spoilers. As in, it would seem, Booksmart.

It just makes me laugh when they have this dramatic intro with lines of dialogue from the spoileriffic films The Sixth Sense, Soylent Green, Chinatown, Citizen Kane and Seven, then someone straightforwardly tells you that they’re going to be spoiling a teen romantic comedy that I understand has queer elements to it. (Maybe that’s the spoiler?)

If you’re wondering about the second half of my subject line, well, I’ll get to that now.

I didn’t listen to the Spoiler Special episode on Booksmart because I of course have not seen it yet. I did, however, listen to the segment they did on it on The Slate Culture Gabfest, on which Dana Stevens also serves as a co-host. And in a true case of the two shows cannibalizing each other, making the choice to cover it on Spoiler Special all the more ridiculous, Dana started by saying she thought she was all talked out on the movie after talking about it on the other show.

Dana did say she “really loved” the movie … which is not the same as loving it. (She went on to admit multiple problems with it.)

It made me realize that “really loving” something is kind of a ridiculous phrase.

When you say you “really love” a movie, that should be an instance of amplifying the degree to which you love it. But in reality, it’s a kind of backpedalling. If you really “really love” a movie, you just say you love it.

Which of these statements is stronger?

“I love Booksmart.”

“I really love Booksmart.”

Well, I guess the tone of voice factors in as well. And in Dana’s tone of voice, you could tell that “really loving” it meant being defensive about your affection for it and simultaneously acknowledging the reasons you might need to be defensive.

Love is love, someone wise once said.

The finite lifespan of spoiler bans

No spoilers for Endgame in this post.

Joe and Anthony Russo have announced that the spoiler ban on Avengers: Endgame ends on Monday.

Um, what?

I still give spoiler alerts before I talk about the details of The Crying Game, to the extent that I ever do that. The point is, you should always avoid giving away spoilers to movies people haven't yet seen.

Their argument is that part of the reason to make a movie is to promote conversation, and apparently, they think that the extent people can discuss Avengers: Endgame has been inhibited by their own request not to spoil it.

But shouldn't a request not to spoil a movie be implicit? I understand why they felt they needed to plant that awareness in people's consciousness for this movie, and maybe, that gives them an implied responsibility to revoke that ban at a certain point.

But now that the Russos have given people "permission" to spoil what happens in this movie, it seems like people will double down on it and indulge their natural instinct to gossip. People love to be bearers of news -- good, bad, juicy, whatever. Now a bunch of idiots will surely go and spill all the beans on as many platforms as they are able.

Should you really have your enjoyment of Avengers: Endgame ruined by the fact that you haven't been able to see it in its first two weekends? What if you're off the grid for two weeks? What if you're recuperating at home from breaking both your legs and can't get out to the theater, leaving social media as one of your few comforts? A comfort that will be absolutely spoiled by Endgame talk come Monday?

The cynical view is that the Russos are trying to goose attendance in the second weekend so that Endgame is even more of a record-breaking juggernaut than it already is. But Endgame doesn't need that help.

I know plenty of people who like a good Marvel movie but hate crowds. It would be eminently reasonable for them to wait until the third weekend to see Endgame. Now they won't have the chance. And I think that's pretty tough.

I suppose the reverse argument is that there are, indeed, elements of certain movies that enter the zeitgeist, that become so widely known that you become disinclined to worry about spoiling them. For example, I no longer give spoiler warnings about Star Wars: The Force Awakens. If you don't know that [REDACTED] died in that movie, well, you aren't living in modern society.

But that was nearly four years ago, and this isn't even four weeks ago. Sure, pretty soon everyone will know that [SOMETHING SOMETHING SOMETHING], but I don't think Monday is a fair expectation for that to occur.

Human beings are dumb enough and inconsiderate enough to do plenty of spoiling without being specifically invited to do so. The Russos should have just let it occur naturally and kept their mouths shut.

Should we protect our children from spoilers?

We live in an age of excessive spoiler awareness, whether it comes in the form of trying to avoid having things spoiled for you, or watching your own behavior to guard against the inadvertent perpetration of spoilers.

It's not surprising, then, that these tendencies spill over even into areas that sort of don't make sense, like the example I'm about to give you.

But that doesn't mean I'm even sure that my instincts shouldn't have kicked in to prevent spoilers from reaching their targets.

One of my very best and oldest friends (who will actually probably be reading this) sent us a late Christmas package that we only just opened, more than two weeks after it actually arrived at our house. This friend and I joked about how it was truly telling that it took me two weeks to open a box we'd received in the mail -- not because that reflected badly on me, but because it was in some way a realistic assessment of how busy we both consider our lives to be. (His share of that, I suppose, was sending us a Christmas package in late January.)

We finally set aside a Saturday morning to open the package, Saturday having been chosen as the best possible time for the contents of the package not to distract our kids from another imminent task, like going to school or going to bed. So after morning TV we finally turned our attentions to it.

It was a great and very generous package of five total gifts, only one of which I will focus on today: It was a six-book collection of Little Golden Books, that classic children's series with the distinctive gold spine, with a Star Wars theme. Upon removing the shrink wrap, I discovered that the number of books was no coincidence. Each book contained an encapsulation of the plot of one of the six Star Wars films prior to The Force Awakens.

Great present, right? Especially for little kids with an inborn interest in Darth Vader and stormtroopers?

Yes and no. Don't get me wrong, dear friend who is probably reading this, I love the present. But I can't deny that my first thought upon seeing it was:

"Well, there goes the surprise of the great 'No, I am your father' moment from The Empire Strikes Back."

See, my kids have not yet seen any of the Star Wars movies. It's a subject of some debate in our house. I myself saw the original in the theater when I was not yet 4, so I've got one son who is currently 18 months older than that and has yet to see it. This may tell you what side of this debate I come down on, but I'll admit that I myself was taken aback by The Force Awakens, particularly, you know, that part when that thing happens. You know, the thing. That thing seemed too traumatic for my son to handle -- it was nearly too traumatic for me to handle, and I'm 37 years older than he is. So in that moment I became glad I hadn't succeeded on my plan to binge watch those movies with him in time for us to see The Force Awakens in the theater. (I just binge watched them myself instead.)

But what this does mean is that although my son is quite familiar with the names of these characters and knows some basic traits about them, he still has no idea what actually happens to them. I have thus been preserving these films as surprises to be unleashed upon him when that moment finally does arrive.

That's where these Little Golden Books become problematic.

As they are Star Wars-related content actually aimed at him, he's sure to go through all six within our first 24 to 48 hours of owning them. He'll know that Darth Vader is Luke's father from a little book with a golden spine, not from having one of the late 20th century's great cinematic surprises revealed during an actual viewing.

What I'm trying to tell myself as I prepare for the now-inevitable is that the value of preserving a movie's secrets for a child is pretty minimal anyway.

For one, I'm not sure that he doesn't already know those secrets. We do have a Star Wars book in which characters like C3PO and Chewbacca are introduced, not in story format but with short descriptions and arrows pointing at various features and little infographic boxes that say things like "Did You Know?" That book doesn't spoil anything, I don't think, but what about that little Lego Star Wars video we borrowed from the library a few months back? It wasn't one of the Lego Star Wars movies, and now that I think about it I'm not even 100% sure it was Lego. I think it was a parody-style adventure of characters from the Star Wars universe aimed at children -- and by that I mean something meta and inside jokey, where Darth Vader might make wisecracks about the trials of being a parent. You know, the type of thing that might sail over a child's head but is basically a spoiler incarnate.

And oh yeah, then there was one of the other presents in the package:

Yeah, that pretty much takes care of it without even having to read the Little Golden Book of Episode V.

As you're reading this post, those of you who aren't my friend are probably thinking "Remind me never to get you a present, Vance, if this is how you thank a person," and those of you who are my friend are probably thinking "Oh shit, I really fucked up." Nonsense. I do love the presents, and what I'm really doing here is grappling with the notion of how we are expected to preserve the purity of our child's viewing experiences when society is basically conspiring to spoil things for them all the time. Darth Vader and Son is actually displayed prominently at a number of bookstores we visit, and I've had it in my hand and flipped through its pages a couple times (which is one of the reasons I was so glad to get it). But that also means that this bookstore has no regard for a child who may have already seen Star Wars but not yet Empire, and who can reasonably recognize that little tyke in the picture as a snowcone-eating Luke Skywalker. Society no longer considers it reasonable or even possible to preserve the "No, I am your father" moment. Even by writing this post I am assuming you don't need to have that secret kept from you.

And it's nothing new. Many spoilers have become so normalized in culture that it's just assumed that people now them by this point. I mean, surely many of us saw Citizen Kane already knowing that Rosebud was a sled, or saw Soylent Green already knowing that (yeah, I already didn't spoil that in a post earlier this week because I actually did spoil that for my wife before we both watched it for the first time). Interestingly, I'm noting right now that Citizen Kane came out almost exactly the same number of years before I was born (32) as Star Wars came out before my son was born (33). God, that really makes me feel old.

So the point is, there are certain movies that come pre-spoiled, and I think Star Wars (or more correctly, The Empire Strikes Back) is probably one of those. When my son does finally watch The Empire Strikes Back, maybe as a present for turning six in August, it won't matter to him that he already knows the film's big surprise. He'll just love that he's seeing lightsabers and blasters and ships and stormtroopers. A spoiler involving a moment of soap opera melodrama would probably be lost on him whether he knew it beforehand or not, and he certainly won't be sophisticated enough to perceive it as a moment of ruined surprise that should cause him disappointment. In fact, you really only deal with that being an issue when someone becomes a blase early teenager, and all they want to do is express disdain and contempt over the fact that they were supposed to be surprised by something but were not. "Yawn, boring, already knew that," this teenager might say.

Well, my son will not be a teenager when he sees these movies for the first time. And the dopey grin he will wear will probably be unchanged by knowing that Darth Vader's sperm created Luke Skywalker, or even that Darth Vader was once a shitty little pipsqueak running around on Tatooine a long time before that.

In a way these books might even pave the way for an earlier viewing. Once he has grappled with the deaths of Obi-Wan Kenobi, Qui-Gon Jinn and the likes in these books, the revelations of those plot elements in the actual movies will not shock him. It'll just be the glorious moving realization of that giant neon concept in his brain known as STAR WARS.

Maybe I'll convince my wife we don't even have to wait until he's six.

Without going into spoiler territory

It must be really difficult to talk about movies these days, especially since more plot information than ever tends to fall into "spoiler territory."

Unfortunately, what seems to happen is that the people charged with the sacred duty of protecting spoilers -- particularly podcasters, who converse off the cuff and don't generally edit out slips of the tongue -- simply give lip service to avoiding spoilers ... and then fail to avoid them. 

Which makes it even more difficult to listen to people talk about movies, if you haven't seen the movie. 

"Without going into spoiler territory," they'll say, "let's just say that a certain someone in The Crying Game doesn't have a certain type of genitalia that you would expect that certain someone to have."

Really? Did you just avoid that spoiler? I don't think you did. 

That's an exaggeration, of course -- the people on the podcasts I listen to have more smarts than that. The real problem is that any individual statement they make does not constitute a spoiler, but taken in combination, you get a pretty complete image of the thing you're trying not to find out about.

So now is the time that I will give my SPOILER ALERT about Tusk ... a movie I am in a position to be able to spoil, even though I have not actually seen it. (And therein lies the problem.) 

I was listening to the second-most-recent episode of Filmspotting on Saturday, having known it was about Kevin Smith's Tusk, and having dragged my feet on listening to it long enough to realize I was not going to be able to watch Tusk within a reasonable amount of time. (I believe it comes out here on October 16th.) 

I had heard the most general logline of the movie, which was "It's about a man who turns into a walrus." I might have not liked to know even that, but with a title like Tusk, I might have assumed it had something to do either with walruses or elephants. The 1979 Fleetwood Mac album was also a possible focus of the film. 

Now, when Filmspotting co-host Josh Larsen and guest host Michael Phillips launched into their review, it was clear from the start that they intended to avoid spoilers. But it was also clear that they wanted to have an in-depth discussion of the film, which required them to give us more context than a totally spoiler-free review would allow them to do.

So there came that phrase again -- "without going into spoiler territory" -- followed by three rather suggestive phrases sprinkled through the review: "unwanted surgery," "body horror" and "obsession with walruses."

Piece those together, and now I know that there is a crazy guy who surgically implants walrus anatomy into a human.

Of course, if there were any doubts about that conclusion, I need only listen to the parts they felt confident they could share -- which basically remove any of those doubts.

However, Josh and Michael were not content just to spoil the main parts of the story. They also spoiled what is supposed to be a surprise cameo by Johnny Depp. Not just that he's in the movie, but that he plays a Quebecois detective with a walrus mustache. It's like if someone told you that Tom Cruise was in Tropic Thunder before you saw it. (And who knows, maybe someone did.)

It's the second time in the space of a month I was worried about listening to Filmspotting because of potential spoilers. I was told I should know as little as possible about Charlie McDowell's The One I Love, so I delayed listening to that episode. I was actually at a near podcast standstill, in fact, as I was also avoiding the episode of the Slate Culture Gabfest in which The One I Love was on tap.  

Fortunately, in that case, The One I Love was already available for rental on iTunes, so I scooped it up for the princely sum of $6.99 and watched it on a Friday night with my wife. When I then turned to the podcasts, I found that Josh and regular co-host Adam Kempenaar had really talked around the spoilers in their review -- but that Culture Gabfest team blew them wide open. (At least they issued a spoiler warning before divulging.) 

I'm not really criticizing any particular podcasters or people here. What bothers me is the very nature of film-related discourse, and what bothers me most is that I don't know there is any way it can be avoided. I love listening to these podcasts from week to week, and I love them precisely because they are not satisfied with a cursory, surface-level review of a movie. Getting into the meat of the movie is what makes them great. I'm so into the podcasts, in fact, that I don't want to skip any or listen to them out of order, because there are certain other features on each episode that are enhanced by listening to the shows in the intended sequence.

But I'm never going to be able to keep up with their pace of watching new releases, especially when certain movies don't even come out in Australia until three months after they hit theaters in the U.S., and certain other movies may intrigue me but don't seem like an immediate priority.

So what do I do?

Listen with one ear closed, and beg those involved to exercise as much prudence as they can.

At least I figure to see Gone Girl before Filmspotting gets to it next Friday. The plan is to go tomorrow night. 

What information to reveal, when?

In watching Christopher Smith's movie Triangle on Saturday, there were (appropriately) three instances when I was inspired to reveal information about the film that maybe I shouldn't have. One was before the film and two were during. Two also (not the same two) were instances where I actually revealed the info, and in one instance I kept my mouth shut.

But let me start by telling you a thing or two about this film, which worked very well for me despite the fact that a close scrutiny of its narrative structure might uncover all sorts of logical flaws.

A group of six friends (three men, three women) leave a Florida harbor on a beautiful morning for a day of sailing. Included in these friends is a woman (Melissa George) who seems a bit shell-shocked, like she can't exactly remember the events leading up to this moment in time. As they get out on the water, some unusual changes in the weather -- which seem localized to exactly where they are on the water -- portend ominous things to come.

Which is all I really want to say about it until I've given you a spoiler warning. Here it is: Mild spoilers to follow, but only about the kind of movie it is, not about actual things that happen in the plot. So in other words, you won't be too disappointed if you keep reading, and it shouldn't affect your enjoyment -- especially if you realize that the triangle of the title is the Bermuda Triangle, where weird things are always afoot.

1.

Triangle had come up for discussion in the Flickchart group on Facebook sometime in the past year. The larger theme of the discussion was: mind-bender movies you may not have seen, which may or may not have to do with time travel. Also discussed were Timecrimes and Primer, the former of which I love and the latter of which I most certainly do not love.

It's rare enough these days that my wife and I watch movies together -- two a week at most -- that I feel like I need to sell each suggestion to her in order for her to agree to it. I probably don't; in fact, she loves not knowing anything about a particular film before she sees it. But when I've got a movie I want to watch, I immediately start planning out the sales pitch, to make the movie seem more enticing to her. So in this case I explained that the movie had come up in a discussion of Timecrimes and Primer.

My wife didn't balk at the information, or tell me she wished I hadn't revealed it. But as we started watching, I wished I hadn't revealed it. Knowing that other people had compared this movie to two time travel movies, I was immediately second guessing everything I saw on screen, instead of being lulled into a false sense of the movie's straightforwardness by what seemed like an ordinary boating trip on a beautiful Florida day. In fact, before the movie started, I hadn't even known that Triangle referred to the Bermuda Triangle. So if I hadn't known there was going to be a supernatural element at play, I mightn't have suspected anything from this innocent beginning.

Of course, I had to know something was up because I knew it was a thriller/horror. Clearly this was not going to be a movie about people taking a pleasant sail and then returning home unscathed.

So how much is too much? You need some information to get you in the door. Without movie websites telling you things like "People who liked this also liked this," you might not even know a particular movie existed. In fact, that may have been how those who recommended Triangle to me learned about it in the first place. Maybe they saw Timecrimes, and then Triangle was recommended as a similar movie. (Note: If you are worried that I have spoiled Triangle for you in some way, worry not -- calling it similar to Timecrimes and Primer is in many ways a red herring, and the very specific thing it has in common with Timecrimes is not what you would expect at all.)

My wife, who didn't like the movie as much as I did, didn't scold me one bit for telling her that it was similar to these other movies. She didn't say it affected her expectations, or anything like that; in fact, she didn't mention this advanced knowledge whatsoever. She did, however, scold me about yet again taking her out of a movie by identifying one of the actors as someone who once appeared in something else.

2.

See, one of the compulsive things I do that pisses my wife off the most is to point out actors on screen as the movie is going. "Hey, it's so-and-so." Or "Hey, that's the guy who was in such-and-such."

Objectively, it's an annoying habit. I will own that. But certain viewing companions -- my wife not being one of them -- would actually benefit from something like this. If they are like me, they get something out of recognizing that this actor appeared in that other movie, and they want to know about it at the time so they can appreciate it. If they are like me, they like figuring out the way the cinematic universe fits together like a jigsaw puzzle, how many degrees people are removed from each other, and the twists and turns in people's careers.

My wife, however, represents the much more sizable majority of viewers who want to get lost in the movie, and see that person only as a character. The nerve.

I may be slow on the uptake, but believe me, by now I know that my wife doesn't countenance such interruptions. Especially since she gave me a pretty definitive tongue-lashing (with a half smile, of course) on the subject recently. However, Triangle represented what I considered to be an exception to the rule -- and I want to see if you agree with me.

One of the three men aboard the sailboat in Triangle is an actor named Henry Nixon. There is nothing exceptional about Mr. Nixon -- his is the smallest of the three male roles, and though he performs more than capably in the movie, no one is specifically going to remember him from his work in this film.

Except, there is one thing exceptional about him to us: We've met him.

Nixon is an Australian, like both Triangle's lead (Melissa George) and my wife. And not just any Australian, but an Australian who appeared in the movie Noise, which was directed by my wife's good friend Matthew Saville. Noise appeared at Sundance in 2007, and as such, so did Henry Nixon and my wife and me. Considering the despicable character he plays in Noise, we were glad to see that Henry (I think we can call him that) is a really affable guy without an ounce of ego about him. We spent the better part of an evening with him while we were there.

Because of this connection, I thought my wife would want to know the very moment I identified who he was, which came probably 30 minutes into the film. I figured she would want to know that this was a person we had met and liked, as that would allow her to see his performance through a slightly different lens. It was time sensitive, and even though she warned me as I was doing it, I overrode her warnings for what I thought was her own good.

Turns out, she still didn't want to know. When we discussed it afterward, she told me I could have just waited until the movie was over. But according to my thinking, she would have by then missed her opportunity to watch this guy as he was doing his thing. If she hadn't known she needed to pay special attention to him, she might have had a hard time going back and considering his performance in retrospect.

Okay, well, now I know for the next time we see a movie featuring someone we know.

3.

The third thing is kind of a silly thing, and this is the thing I did not mention to my wife.

At some point in the second act of the movie, I noticed that there had been an inordinate number of shots of Melissa George turning dramatically toward the camera. I think you can imagine what I'm talking about: You start on the back of her head, then she turns around and faces the camera, either to display a look of horror or to deliver a weighty line of dialogue.

I started to notice it so much that I almost thought it was worth pointing out. That way, if this shot then happened a half-dozen more times, we could laugh about it.

There were two main reasons I didn't: 1) I had already been scolded about the Henry Nixon incident; 2) I was enjoying this movie, and didn't want it to become the subject of ridicule.

However, let's say I did want it to become the subject of ridicule. Wouldn't I want to get everybody on the same page, so we could all have a fun time ridiculing it? That might turn the experience from a dull one to one we might remember years from now.

I think of when my wife and I watched Crazy Heart with another couple. Unbeknownst to each other for the first half of the movie, we were all suffering through the viewing, finding falsehood upon falsehood, one unintentionally hilarious moment after another. Then, fortuitously, someone ventured a snide remark, and everyone else chimed in with an equal passion for how little they were enjoying the film. This opened the flood gates, and allowed us to openly crack wise about the movie. I remember laughing and laughing and ultimately having a very fun time -- which doesn't make me feel any more fondly about the movie, only the experience of watching it.

But it can be a risk to take the movie into the MST3K realm. First off, you have to read the room. You have to pick up on the shifting bodies, the sighs, the mild scoffs, to be sure that others are in agreement. Then you've got to pick just the right moment to point out something absurd in the film, and see if your vocal interruption is welcomed or rebuffed.

With Triangle, I didn't want to take it to the level of ridicule, because I was really enjoying the movie. My wife might have actually taken it and ran with it, since she didn't get as much out of the movie as I did. But I didn't want the numerous shots of Melissa George doing a 180 to be our defining memory of the film.

So I did something that I can, surprisingly, do when I want to:

I kept my trap shut.

Pleasant surprises

Warning: The following post contains minor spoilers about The Town. You may choose not to paahhtake in this one if you haven't seen it.

I finally saw The Town on Sunday afternoon, and almost everything about it was a pleasant surprise. I mean, I knew it was supposed to be good, but I actually think it was better than I thought it was going to be.

But there was one thing in particular about it that really tickled me -- and I had no idea how I couldn't have known it was going to happen.

First things first. I'm a Boston Red Sox fan. Have been officially for 24 years, ever since I got anointed by fire during the 1986 playoff run, which ended in such crushing misery for Boston fans. After that, there was no going back. I was hooked.

The intensity of my feelings has died down some in recent years, which, when you're someone like me, is an inevitable part of your team winning two championships. I describe myself as a "sports socialist," which means I like to see different teams win championships, giving different fan bases something to cheer about. So when the Red Sox ended their famous 86-year drought without a championship in 2004, and especially when they won another in 2007, I hardly felt it was fair that I kept on requiring them to win championships. I'd had my share of good fortune. So inevitably, until my appetite really builds up again, I have been following the team with a little less urgency. Most sports fans would recognize a direct correlation between your hunger for a championship and the amount you parse the day-to-day fortunes of a baseball team.

This is my only explanation for how I couldn't have known that the final heist in The Town was going to take place in Fenway Park, the nearly hundred-year-old home to the Red Sox.

It's presented perfectly in the movie -- hinted at, then grandly revealed in the form of one of many glorious helicopter shots over the city of Boston, this one directly over Fenway Paahhk. That grand reveal gave me goosebumps -- is actually giving me goosebumps now as I write this.

But I don't think it should have, because I should have known that this was coming. It should have entered my consciousness through the Red Sox zeitgeist, either on Facebook through someone posting about it, or through a story on ESPN.com, or some other way. At the very least, one of my friends who's seen it should have leaked it to me.

But no one did. And so, when that helicopter shot swooped in on the park, and Doug (Ben Affleck) and Jem (Jeremy Renner) case the joint from one of Fenway's most elevated perches, during a game against the Toronto Blue Jays, I was hit with a rush of exhilaration.

I don't have any other point than to say that it's just nice to recognize moments when good secrets remain secrets in the movies. Especially when the secrets seem so unlikely to stay secret. Not only has this movie been out a month, and not only do I know a lot of people who have already seen it, but it also has to do with my favorite sports team, the Red Sox. The team who, because of a wonderful moment exactly six years ago today, in which they finished the unprecedented comeback from three games down to beat the New York Yankees in the ALCS, proceeding to sweep the St. Louis Cardinals in the World Series, has allowed me the luxury to not know every little detail about them, and therefore, to be surprised by this scene in The Town.

And how do I know it was exactly six years ago? Because today is my birthday, and six years ago, they gave me the best birthday present a fan could ever ask for.

It's the same birthday present I'm hoping to get today, when the Texas Rangers play these Yankees with a chance to move on to the World Series themselves. (See, it's almost as fun to root against the Yankees as it is to root for the Red Sox.) Texas had never won a playoff series in its 50-year history until last week, so winning the World Series this year would be aces in the book of a sports socialist like me. Let those Dallas-area fans, conservative though they may be, whoop it up a little bit. Especially if it's at the expense of the hated Yankees.

Besides, the Rangers also wear red. So if I squint, I can pretend it's my team out there, giving the Yankees the whupping they so richly deserve.

That's a sentiment with which The Town's director, Ben Affleck, who's making a quick ascent in the directorial ranks, can sympathize.