Each new movie is better than the one before

When you don't start out with a really solid contender early on in the viewing year -- at least a likely candidate for your eventual top ten -- you'll find that your favorite movie of the year keeps changing, at a sort of comical rate that calls into question the honor bestowed on each of the previous temporary holders of the #1 spot.

Without a Turning Red (my eventual #3 of 2022) or an Everything Everywhere All at Once (my eventual #4 of 2022) there to stabilize the early rankings, things end up kind of like they have so far this year.

My longest reigning #1 of 2023, as you would know from this post, was Shotgun Wedding, which was my #1 from when I saw it on the 2nd of February until April 1st, a reign of 58 days. 

The very same night I posted that, though, I saw M3GAN, which easily supplanted it. M3GAN held on to the top slot for exactly 11 days.

That's when I saw The Magician's Elephant on vacation in Vietnam, and though at the time I liked it more than M3GAN, I'm suspecting they will ultimately swap relative positions by year's end. M3GAN has stuck with me, The Magician's Elephant hasn't -- though of course I do still think it's quite good.

The Magician's Elephant had a bit longer to get used to its throne, wearing the crown from April 12th to May 20th, a span of 38 days. That's when I saw Ben Affleck's Air, and really enjoyed it, easily naming it my new favorite of a so-far fairly disappointing year.

Air barely had time to blink in the top spot, though, because I was taken aback by the German language World War II western Blood & Gold on Netflix, which I saw just nine days later. This was also the first film of 2023 that I gave 4.5 stars on Letterboxd, and considering that it took until May 29th to do it, that's very long by my standards. 

Now finally we have the latest occupant of the penthouse, BlackBerry, which I saw Thursday night -- drawing the curtain on Blood & Gold's 17-day reign.

It occurred to me that something additionally interesting/significant is that since M3GAN first dethroned Shotgun Wedding, I have not see a film that was better than Shotgun Wedding but worse than whatever the current #1 was. So it's either the best I've seen, or middling. So that means my current rankings are:

1. BlackBerry
2. Blood & Gold
3. Air
4. The Magician's Elephant
5. M3GAN
6. Shotgun Wedding

I don't expect this to continue and it certainly can't continue forever, but it's an interesting pattern that has two-and-a-half months of history in its favor. 

So just what was so good about BlackBerry, the second film this year to dramatize the technical and legal challenges involved in a new techie obsession?

Well for starters, it's what the first film, AppleTV's Tetris, should have been. Have a look here if you want to get into the weeds of why I think that film is ultimately a failure, However, if you'd like the simplified version, I'll say that Tetris got the era and its associated nostalgia right, but it completely lost us with a serpentine plot that involved as many reversals as five episodes of Silicon Valley but without our ability to grasp the stakes of those reversals from moment to moment.

BlackBerry, which charts the rise and fall of the first phone where you could send email, effortlessly explains what's going on from moment to moment, focusing on only a small handful of characters and a small handful of narrative developments at a time. It's amazing how much easier it is to appreciate era-specific nostalgia if you are oriented within the plot. 

Matt Johnson may quickly be becoming one of my favorite unheralded directors. If you don't recognize the name, he's also an actor in his films The Dirties and Operation Avalanche. I liked both of those movies waaaay more than I ever guessed I would, slapping 4.5 stars on the former and four on the latter. BlackBerry gets him back up into the 4.5-star range, and it might have been higher if Johnson had sustained the crack-me-up humor from the film's first 45 minutes. The story wouldn't have allowed it, and that's not the film's fault, but let's just say that in this cinematic desert where we're parched for good comedy, this film's first half delivered like few films have for me in recent years.

Johnson's got a DIY style that kind of looks like he's trying to make a mockumentary, and if memory serves, both of the previous films are technically in that genre. This isn't meant to be a mockumentary but it maintains the same half-grainy look of something being done on the cheap. If you think that's an insult, think again. Johnson's style actually requires a high degree of veracity from his actors to match its apparent authenticity, and Johnson's cast complies.

This is the first film where Johnson has worked with actors you actually recognize, who include Jay Baruchel, Saul Rubinek, Cary Elwes and Michael Ironside. But it was another actor I didn't recognize who really blew me away: Glenn Howerton as Jim Balsillie, the co-CEO brought in by the nerds at Research in Motion to kick the ass that they couldn't kick. If I watched It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia I would know who this is, and when I see other pictures of him I do recognize him from other places I've seen him. Playing bald in this film, though, made the actor totally disappear into the role, and his performance as a shark who gets results was by far the film's most memorable and interesting character.

I should not say "by far" because Baruchel and Johnson are both great and both key to much of the film's opening humor. Baruchel, reminding me a bit of Justin Long here, has some great line deliveries as Mike Lazaridis, the genius programmer who invented the BlackBerry and formed the company with his best friend Doug Fremin (Johnson). A man whose confidence is no match for his intellect, he's Jim Balsillie's spiritual opposite -- and eventually someone corrupted by his proximity to his fellow co-CEO. Johnson, meanwhile, wears a variety of different t-shirts celebrating nerd culture throughout, the one who doesn't want to lose his personality and will fight to keep things as they were, while also to grow the company according to their principles -- but is also the most disposable of the three in terms of the company's future trajectory, which becomes a sticking point.

Speaking of nerd culture, there's some great shout-outs here. The room full of genius programmers at Research in Motion -- who will remind you of similar groups of guys in movies like The Social Network -- have a movie night ritual, and we see them all quoting the best lines from Raiders of the Lost Ark and They Live.

I probably shouldn't give you too more because I really want you to go see this. 

It's my #1 movie of the year ... at least until something better comes along.

In about 26.6 days, if the average holds. Or much sooner if we go only on recent trends.

Netflix on the big screen, with Vietnamese subtitles and mildly racist English audio description

When I watched The Magician's Elephant with my nine-year-old Wednesday at the resort in Vietnam, it involved about four different firsts:

1) First time I'd seen a movie released by Netflix on a screen bigger than a TV (or my own home projector).

2) First time I'd seen a movie with Vietnamese subtitles on screen.

3) First time I'd seen a movie at a movie theater in a resort.

4) First time I'd seen a movie with the audio description turned on for blind people.

I'm not even sure what order to discuss these things.

I can get 1 and 3 together in one, I think. Yes, the resort where we're staying has a small cinema. It seats about 50 and plays movies at 10 a.m. and 2 p.m., plus once at night on weekends. It's a pretty nice little cinema, all things considered.

You know how I like seeing movies on vacation, especially if it's a novel venue. This might not have been as novel as the time I saw Aladdin with my boys on the top of a mountain in one of Australia's few ski resort towns, but it was that sort of thing. 

I ideally wouldn't have seen a movie I can otherwise get on Netflix, but each movie on the schedule was only playing in one time slot during the week we're here, and this was the best combo of a movie I hadn't seen and a movie I actually wanted to see. Other kid-friendly candidates were Lightyear, which I hope to never see again, and DC's League of Super Pets, which my son had just watched half of on the plane -- his second viewing. Puss and Boots would have been the best option but it was playing the first morning we were there, and we hadn't gotten a hold of the schedule yet by that point. Rounding out the options were the latest Minions movie, a Tad the Explorer movie, And Wish Dragon, which we had both already seen and liked -- and which was also available on Netflix. (There were some random Asian movies playing in the afternoon slot that I could have gone to if I'd wanted to go solo, but it seemed better to make it an activity with my son.)

And in any case, The Magician's Elephant counts for 2023, which you know is a thing I care about.

It did occur to me that this is the first time I'd be seeing a Netflix movie on the big screen. I had remembered considering going to Roma and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs and Marriage Story, but in each case I ultimately caved to the ease of having them available in my living room. If I hadn't gone to this, who knows how long the streak of not seeing Netflix movies on the big screen would have continued. 

It should not be a huge surprise that there were Vietnamese subtitles on screen, but I think Chinese subtitles might have been more useful. Although I don't consider myself very good at determining the heritage of particular Asians from appearance alone, my wife surmised that many if not most of the other guests here are Chinese, given that China is only about a four-hour flight from here. The presence of all these Chinese made me feel less bad about our Vietnamese hosts having to communicate almost exclusively in English. It turns out it's as much for the Chinese as it is for westerners like us, since English is the language we have all sort of agreed to understand. 

The Vietnamese subtitles might have been distraction enough for my son, but there was one other element to the movie that was far more distracting:

Someone had accidentally turned on the English descriptive audio option, the one used by people who can't see very well or at all.

For half a second I thought this was some kind of odd narrative device, where an omniscient narrator is describing the events on screen as some kind of framing device. When it didn't stop, and when it interfered slightly with the words of the film's actual narrator, I thought back to moments earlier when this same slightly robotic female voice had told us that the movie's title was now appearing on screen, and knew we were in for a movie's worth of superfluous description.

My first thought was to notify the projectionist and explain what was going on. But then I thought about some of the communication challenges I'd had the past few days about far simpler things, like how to book the basketball court for my older son to play basketball, and I knew that even if I did manage to explain what was going on, and did manage to convince them to turn it off, I'd lose no less than five minutes of the story. And I hate to sacrifice any part of a movie, if I can help it. 

My second thought was to sacrifice the whole movie. It was clear my son was not excited to put up with this for the next 95 minutes. 

But then, remembering how much I enjoy a novel experience like this, and thinking how few other options on the schedule would work as chances to watch something in the cinema, I convinced my son to stick it out.

We did get used to it, and in fact, I found myself marveling at the task from a narrative and logistical perspective. You have to describe what's going on in a way that is descriptive enough but short and to the point, and entirely avoids the film's actual spoken dialogue. It does mean that there are few if any points in the movie where it was actually silent for a moment, but it didn't prevent us from getting absorbed in the movie.

I did want to mention its slight racism though -- or if not actual racism, then at least "racial awareness."

Like essentially every film made in the past five years, The Magician's Elephant is conscious of having a racially diverse cast. And the audio description sure let us know about it.

Sample: "The action shifts to the apartment below. A tall black man and a petite white woman are sitting at a table."

Now, the argument can be made that if you are trying to create as accurate a depiction as possible of what the person would be seeing on screen if he or she could, you know, see, then the skin color of the characters is something you should provide. But the whole idea behind our current progressive era of representation is that the casting is "race blind." A "blind blind" person might logically be able to envision the characters however they saw fit, and if they're good at identifying the race of a person by the sound of their voice, more power to them.

In the end, we both liked the movie a lot -- in fact, it might be my favorite of 2023 so far, in a very small sample size. My son, whose ability to fight these distractions I was more worried about than my own, actually gave it a 9 out of 10, he said.

I'd only go as high as 8, but that's still pretty great for a slim pickings option watched at a resort with Vietnamese subtitles and descriptive audio telling us the skin colors of all the characters.