The realities of modern movie consumption

I probably don't need to write a lot about the screen shot I took when I was on our Australian streaming service Stan on Monday night, because it's pretty self-eplanatory. I was looking for something that -- yes -- did not require very much of my proactive mental engagement or my stamina, considering that it was actually my fourth movie of the day and I was starting it after 10 p.m. (Don't worry, I also got to the beach and went into the pool with my son, as well as made a mix and wrote a blog post. So it was a very productive day despite also featuring four movies.) And even though I selected only the 82-minute New Zealand film The Breaker Upperers, which I'd already seen and really liked, I did not make it through and still needed to finish it yesterday. 

But I didn't go specifically looking for such movies. This category presented itself to me within Stan's comedy section without me having to do anything.

It did make me wonder which movies they saw it fit not to include in this category. I'd like to know what their idea is of a sophisticated, requires-all-your-mental-acuity comedy. I suppose if Stan carried the Knives Out movies, and classified them as comedies, they might qualify.

As it was, the movies I saw while scanning were very similar to those in the categories "classic comedies," "frat pack comedies" and the humorously broad "funny films" -- which you'd hope would encompass any film in the comedy section. They did have a number of more useful categories like "indie comedies," "dark comedies," "rom-coms" and "bloody funny," that last being horror comedies. 

Even though I am, of course, disdainful of the idea of a movie you can watch while being on your phone throughout, I have to admit that I am not always avoiding the temptation to be on my phone during all the movies I watch. One movie I watched on Monday, I watched during the morning time slot, and I think being on my phone for part of it was an indication of my guilt and my sense that I should be doing something else at that time of the day. 

The expensive time of my movie year

Movies are expensive these days -- but not usually for me.

Yes, I did have to pay something like $160 for me and my two sons to watch Avatar: Fire and Ash last week, which is in AUD, and which also includes snacks. That was going to happen in a 3D viewing anyway, but adding to that, we were out of town, so my critics card would not have worked. (And it's not really fair to count money spent on the tickets for other people.)

Normally, though, theater tickets are "cheap as" -- to use the Australian phrasing -- due to the aforementioned critics card, which allows me free entry. It's hard to get cheaper than free. 

But when a bunch of must-see rentals get stacked up and all have to be watched within a short period of time? That's when things get expensive.

And because I've already watched most of the movies that I want to see that are available for me on streaming -- we'll see if I fit in an F1 viewing before next Thursday -- it's gotten expensive since the start of the year. 

Let's go back to Christmas. Since Christmas, I've watched and spent the following, with the currency listed afterward. (I buy things both through U.S. iTunes and through Australian Amazon, so two different currencies. AUD is usually about 60% of the value of USD.) I've watched these:

12/26 - The Long Walk - $6.99 AUD
1/1 - Him - $6.99 AUD
1/5 - Sorry, Baby - $6.99 AUD
1/7 - The Smashing Machine - $6.99 AUD
1/8 - It Was Just an Accident - $9.99 USD
1/9 - The Naked Gun - $6.99 AUD
1/10 - On Becoming a Guinea Fowl - $5.99 USD
1/10 - One Battle After Another (second viewing) - $6.99 AUD
1/10 - Splitsville - $6.99 AUD
1/12 - Twinless - $5.99 USD

And yes I finally saw Twinless! (See here.) 

The one thing I haven't had to do -- yet, anyway -- is splurge for the $19.99 USD premium rental. That usually happens in my final few days, when I've waited as long as I can wait for the rental price to go down but I just have to have the movie -- usually a movie released late in the year in the U.S. that has not yet been released in Australia.

The most expensive I've gone so far is the $9.99 USD rental of It Was Just an Accident, which is why that movie gets the art for this post. That was my "best get" of the season so far and best reminder why my U.S. iTunes subscription has such value to me. The movie doesn't even come out here until January 29th. And that viewing certainly paid off, as the movie became an instant contender.

Just because I have been shelling out so much money, by my standards, I'm looking to find a way to add some movies without money. And hey! I can do that by going to the theater! There are a number of things that came out on Boxing Day here that interest me, such as The Housemaid, Song Sung Blue and Rental Family, and I might see one of them today after work.

Then there are also a few lesser priorities available on streamers. For some reason, though, I just can't seem to pull the trigger on F1. 

From feast to famine to Friends

In just under two weeks, I've gone from finishing a streak of 65 straight days posting something new on my blog, to having to force up a post just to break a five-day streak without a post.

When it rains, it pours -- or maybe I should say when it doesn't rain, it doesn't pour. Both, either, could be true in this case.

Actually, I'm not forcing this post as it's something I've been wanting to mention for a while.

Sometime last year -- it might be as long as a year ago -- I decided to undertake a rewatch of Friends. It isn't the most novel idea in the world, as it's something people who could be my -- grandchildren? yes I could technically have teenage grandchildren -- have already been doing for years now. In case you didn't get the memo, young people love Friends these days. I don't know that they've caught onto old sitcoms generally, but they've definitely caught onto this one specifically. 

My inspiration really came, though, from another cinephile, a guy only four months younger than me who I have known my whole life. He undertook this sort of rewatch maybe five years ago? ten years ago?

I couldn't believe it at the time, because this guy is also the most prolific watcher of movies I know. How could he fit in both and still be a dad, a mover and shaker in his career, and also as big a fan of baseball as I am? Especially since he has to watch baseball at night, whereas here in Australia, it's on for me during the day?

The answer: You have more 20-minute pockets of availability in your day than you might think. It's much easier to fit a Friends into the rest of your routine than it is to fit in a movie. It's only when you string four or five of them together that it actually begins to take up the same amount of time, but neither is it as onerous a commitment as a movie can be, because you are always re-upping for one more at your pleasure, and you can "quit any time." I suspect the snackability of the show is what makes it appeal to today's young people.

For the remaining ten days of this month, I'm going to test exactly how snackable.

See, a few weeks ago, I was greeted by a disappointing discovery: Friends is leaving Netflix on March 31st. I think it may already be gone in other parts of the world, but in Australia, it had still been here. I'm not sure if I subscribe to its new home, or even know what that new home is.

If I were almost done with that rewatch, this might be okay. But I was in the comparative infancy of the rewatch. I discovered the imminent departure near the beginning of the month, when I was only on the first episode of Season 3. 

There are ten seasons.

It seemed like folly to still pursue the full rewatch. And I'm quite sure it still is. After all, my intention with this rewatch was to slow-walk it, to fit it into my schedule, not to fit myself into the dwindling weeks of its availability. In fact, I was slow-walking it so much that there were months when I might watch only a single episode or two.

Now it looks like I'm going to try to watch all the episodes in one month.

To be clear, I'm not really trying to get through Friends before March 31st. Even with increasing the pace after learning the news, I still only just finished episode 14 of Season 4. We're right in the thick of Chandler's relationship with Kathy (Paget Brewster), and he and Joey just switched apartments with Monica and Rachel. There's still a loooooot of Friends to go.

But sometimes I string together four or five in a single day -- and realize I've got a grin from ear to ear as I do it -- and I think "May-be ..."

So I just looked it up, and there are 236 episodes of Friends. I've watched 87 of them. The math really doesn't work out in my favor. 

If I want to try to watch the whole series, I will need to watch an average of 14.9 episodes per day, from now until the end of the month, which is basically between five and six hours of Friends each day. Not gonna happen. 

Or is it?

I mean, it's probably not going to happen. But my wife and I have already talked about how we need to have a really quiet day this Sunday, especially as we are going out to a concert on Saturday night. I can watch waaaaay more than five to six hours of Friends on a really quiet day.

I don't need to watch the whole series before Friends leaves Netflix. I can just put a pause on my viewing and pick back up the next time it materializes on a streaming service I have. It's not like I'm never going to subscribe to a streaming service that has Friends on it again. I even considered how I could buy it, if I really wanted to. With that much content, there comes a certain point where you get a price break, and it's probably not even that expensive on a per-episode basis. 

Until then, though, it could be fun to give it a go, and see how far I get -- as long as it doesn't start to feel like a chore and ruin my experience of the show. But that's what bingeing it has taught me: I don't burn out on consecutive Friends ad infinitum. Which is one of the proofs of its greatness. Yes, I can binge Bing until the cows come home.

But not without a toll on movies, and that's the part that's really relevant to this blog, and also explains my sudden drop in my usual viewing vigor. There are a couple viewing obligations I still have for the remainder of this month, and there's always keeping up with new releases. But until March 31st comes and goes and Friends just goes, I might as well lift my foot off the pedal of my usual frenetic movie pace. It'll be there for me to resume in April.

So random weekend nights when I'd usually find something appropriately weekendy on one of my streamers? Random weekday nights when I'd usually stream something less weekendy? A short time slot in the morning when I'm drinking my coffee and eating my breakfast?

Friends will get those time slots for the next ten days, and we'll just see how far we get.

I will post here as the time and the inclination allows. 

Not looking beyond this week

Usually at this time of the year, I get visions of old movies or beloved rewatches dancing in my head, just as little children in "The Night Before Christmas" get visions of sugar plums doing the same. In other words, I cannot wait to be done with movies from the current year so I can again start watching whatever movies I damn please.

For some reason, that's not happening this year.

And from this I draw two possible conclusions:

1) I am not sick of ranking movies this year. I could go on ranking them for another month and see more than 200 movies and be perfectly fine with that. That speaks well to my overall engagement with movies at this point in time, early in the year of our lord, 2025.

2) I may be sick of ranking movies this year, but I am not particularly starved for some sort of alternative of watching old movies or movies I've already seen. In fact, I could be ready for some sort of long break. That does not speak well to my overall engagement with movies at this point in time, early in the year of our lord, 2025. 

I guess I won't know which one is the case until after I finish this up on Friday. 

The earlier deadline this year could have something to do with it. The Oscar nominations are being announced nearly a week earlier than they were last year, when they were revealed on Thursday, January 23rd. That meant I was basically already up against it in terms of the approaching end of January, having to watch a movie for two different monthly series, as well as my annual movie in celebration of Australia Day, right quick. That also meant I couldn't take more than a single night off from watching movies after I posted my list. 

This year, the amount of remaining January time is closer to two weeks. So I don't have to think ahead. 

But there should still be movies clambering their way to the top of my list of wants and needs, whether that is revisiting an old favorite or finally seeing some movie from the year 2023 or earlier that I have never seen. Events in our normal lives conspire to bring these movies to the front of our cerebral cortex. 

In 2025, there are no movies in that spot, meaning that when I do watch my first movie after Friday, the thing I watch may result from something so arbitrary as going to one of my streamers and seeing what's on.

So really, it was a bit of a straw man argument to suggest I might not be engaged with movies anymore and might be ready for a long break. I think I prefer to interpret it that I'm enjoying movies enough right now that I am not impatient to get on to the next thing, and am just appreciating the thing that's happening as it's happening.

Now, if you had asked me after I finished a sleepless night of watching five mediocre movies on one of my recent plane rides, I might have told you a different story.

The traditional mid-point of my movie year

July 31st does not mean a lot on most people's calendars. For major league baseball, it's the deadline for completing trades -- in a usual season, anyway. This year, it's only a week into the season, and could be one of the last days of the season if COVID-19 has anything to say about it.

For me, July 31st usually represents a turning point in the focus of my viewing year.

A couple years ago I informally realized that I have two halves of my movie year, though the movie year doesn't follow the traditional calendar. Because I finalize my year-end rankings in mid to late January, that represents the end of the second half of the year, if we want to reverse engineer it. So the first half of the year begins in February, and includes the months March, April, May, June and July. That's six if you're counting. During this half of the year, I focus more on older movies and not as much on new releases, though for sure I keep pace on new releases as well.

The start of August marks a shift in those priorities, and it is ushered in by the Melbourne International Film Festival, which starts the last few days of July or the first few days of August. It's doing that this year as well, in online form, starting on Thursday. They're calling it "MIFF 68 1/2," because it's not the full 69th year of the festival. Fair enough. Anyway, this shift means that in August, September, October, November, December and January -- that is also six months -- I make new movies much more my focus as I try to see most of the titles people will be talking about at year end. I still see older movies, to be sure, but they are fewer and farther between.

As we hit this pivot date in the weird movie year of 2020, I thought it would be interesting to see how I have thus far conformed to my usual rhythms.

For starters I can tell you that there has been a big change to my ordinary viewing habits this year, and it has only tangentinally to do with not being able to see movies in the theater. The change does, though, almost perfectly coincide with the pandemic.

You may remember that back in early March, my former editor at ReelGood basically retired, leaving me the reins to the site. (Not for age reasons -- he's like 14 years younger than I am -- but for reasons of shifting priorities.) I say "basically" because he does intend to continue reviewing, but the shutdown of movie theaters and new releases coming out of Hollywood has left him disinclined to write anything yet.

For a while, that left me as the only critic writing for the site. Eager to keep up appearances as much as I could, a proposition complicated by COVID-19, I started reviewing more than half of the new movies released to Netflix. Before this year, I had only ever reviewed one Netflix release, that I recall. This year alone, I've reviewed ... 22.

Add to that the 11 movies I've reviewed during this period that were available from other sources, either in the theater (during the brief time they were open) or on VOD, and I've reviewed 33 new movies since the pandemic began. During a similar period in previous years, I might have reviewed 20 to 25, since my editor also would have been reviewing about that many.

In the past two months, at least, I've had a little help. I've brought a former ReelGood critic back into the fold, and thus far he has reviewed four movies for me. That has theoretically freed up some time on my viewing schedule for other viewings, but the net effect has still been that my first half of the year has felt unbalanced toward new releases.

Interestingly, though, this is more a perception in my mind than a reality. Because I keep track of such things, I can tell you that The Hater, which I watched on Thursday night as the last movie in the first half of my year, was the 56th movie from 2020 I had seen. A pretty impressive total, I guess, given the dearth of new releases in the theater.

I'm a little ahead of my 2019 pace, but not significantly. My 56th 2019 release was a film I saw at MIFF, Baby. I saw that one on August 10th of last year. So I guess my increased viewing pace of streaming releases has been balanced out by the fewer movies I've seen in the cinema (only three since I watched Downhill on March 10th).

But another thing has cut into viewings of older movies -- older movies that were new to me, that is. This year I've been on an increased pace of watching movies I've already seen, part a comfort food response to the pandemic, and part a nostalgic response to the passing of my mother. So far in 2020 I have seen exactly 50 movies I had seen previously, which seems like it could be a record to this point for any year. (That includes January, a lot of which fell into the first half of the viewing year because my 2019 list was finalized on January 13th.)

Well, I picked the wrong year to compare that with, because by this time in 2019, the total number of movies I had already seen was ... 63. But that's because I was working on the project of rewatching movies from the 2010s for my best of the decade list, at least one per week, in addition to other movies I was rewatching for other reasons. So 2019 was, in that sense, as unusual a viewing year for me as 2020.

But if you compare it to 2018, which was more of a typical year, I had rewatched only ... 42. Okay, eight more than that is not significant.

So why does 2020 feel so light on older movies I'm seeing for the first time?

I guess one reason for that is that while I'm in this comfort movie mindset, it feels easier to watch unseen movies from the last few years, rather than digging back into cinema history. This year I've seen only 24 new-to-me movies whose release year starts with a 1, and a full seven of those are a result of my monthly classic documentary viewing series, Audient Authentic. That's compared to 52 non-2020 movies whose release year begins with 2.

Anyway. This analysis probably is useful to nobody but me. It is useful to me, though, because it helps me re-set my priorities.

Given the small number of times I've dipped into cinema history with my choices in the first half of my movie year, I think I will be slower this year to shift my focus to the current year's releases. The start of MIFF later this week complicates that somewhat, though I'm certain to watch fewer films overall when I'm doing it from my own living room, when there are fewer choices overall, and when many of the films playing the festival are not from the same caliber of director as in the past.

I'll start tonight, watching something with a 1 beginning its release year, though as of right now I don't know what.

The tease of working above a movie theater

Almost exactly a year ago, my job moved into a shopping plaza that has a movie theater in it. No, I don’t work at a women’s haute couture clothing store. The shopping plaza has twin skyscrapers set into it, and I’m in one of them. (Only third floor, though, so don’t get too jealous of my view.)

The year since then has been a sustained tease.

I’ve got this movie theater within about a minute’s walk from my desk, depending on how quickly the elevator or “lift” arrives. Yet I haven’t once seen a movie there.

Okay, that’s not entirely true. I’d say I have probably seen five to ten movies at Cinema Kino in the past year. But I’ve only seen those movies by going home, and then later that night, in the 9 to 9:30 range, coming all the way back in to work to attend that particular theater.

Most of the blame for this is quite obvious and nothing I can do anything about. When I leave work each day, my time is not my own. I need to go pick up children from school, or if my wife has picked them up, I need to go right home anyway so I can help make dinner. A two-hour sojourn to the movies isn’t usually in the cards.

But you figure it might have happened at least once, on a special occasion. It hasn’t, and it won’t happen later today either, even though I’ve got a very special occasion right in front of me. That special occasion is my wife and my kids going to Tasmania for five days, and leaving me behind in Melbourne, for a rare chance to do what I please, when I please.

If for no other reason than that it had never happened before, I decided I was going to go see a movie after work on Friday. Just for the novelty of it. Just for the convenience of it. Goddammit, I’ve got to use my proximity to the theater as an excuse for seeing a movie at least once.

But I’ll tell you why I can’t, or rather, why I won’t: They don’t program the damn movies for the end of my workday.

I get off at 5. The movies at Cinema Kino don’t have any interest in that. Here’s when they start today:

Shazam – 3:40 p.m., 6:30 p.m.

Dumbo – 6:00 p.m.

Sometimes Always Never – 6:10 p.m.

The Happy Prince – 4:20 p.m., 6:50 p.m.

And then a couple of other movies I’ve already seen that are not conveniently timed even if I hadn’t seen them.

This may represent a difference between Australia and the U.S., but what happened to all those 5:35 time slots you usually get for a movie? I feel like movies in the U.S. play at 1:10, 3:20, 5:35, 7:25 and 9:40. Don’t they?

I thought about figuring out a way to slip out early and see the 3:40 showing of Shazam, but it defeats the purpose of having a theater conveniently located near my work if going to see a movie there requires feats of great inconvenience. If I’m going to leave work 90 minutes early, I could go to any theater anywhere, and besides, I’d want to do it for a reason better than Shazam.

Oh, so I suppose you want me to wait around for a whole hour and see Dumbo? See the previous paragraph. Sure, I could eat something, drink something, wait it out. But by about 5:40 I’d probably be saying “All this for *$%@! Dumbo?” Besides, I want to get this movie out of the way so I can get home and start enjoying my house with no one in it. This weekend, the novelties will abound.

The fantasy I really have about having a theater so close is being able to duck out for a long lunch and see an 11:30 movie or a 1:00 movie. But I’m not an executive, so I don’t have the liberty to do something like that. And that would be a really long lunch, considering that I only get 30 minutes.

It hardly seems sporting that I’m annoyed about Cinema Kino being so near yet so far, considering that when I do see movies there, I see them for free as part of my critic association membership. That should be novelty enough.

But I want it all, dammit.

Or at the very least, one single 5:25 start time of some movie, any movie.

Please?

The mouse is away

Remember all those times the cat (my wife) was away, leaving the mouse (me) home to watch over the kids, and as many movies as humanly possible?

Well, as a thank you from the cat to the mouse, the mouse is now going away as well.

And an already strained metaphor is being stretched to its breaking point.

This weekend I am checking in to a hotel not far outside of town for a little R&R, as a reward for my selfless parenting and support of my wife's far-flung endeavors on two ten-day trips to North America. (And as a bit of an early birthday present).

At this hotel, I will watch movies.

Pretty much non-stop.

It's something I do about once a year anyway, but the difference this time?

Two nights instead of one.

That's a lot of movies.

My wife and I both take these nights away from time to time, about once a year each, to have a little time away from parenting and theoretically to recharge our batteries. However, we have both lamented that not long after you reach your destination, you start to think about how the weekend is almost over. It's almost like the anticipation of the event held more value for you than its actual arrival.

But that's because we would arrive on Saturday, in order to come home on Sunday.

This time, I'm arriving on Friday. Friday afternoon, at that, as I plan to work only a half day.

That's a lot of movies.

Exactly how many I'm not sure. I figure to get in at least three on Friday, at least five on Saturday and one Sunday morning for good measure before checkout time. Any more than that is probably a bonus.

But I will try to get in more than that, if the number I'm bringing is any indication.

I have a duffel bag that has almost nothing but movies checked out from the library, and though I haven't counted, there could be 25 in there. I probably should count, as if I fail to come home with any of them I will owe the library money. But they're already packed, and at this point I'm not unpacking them.

I also have two rented from iTunes for good measure.

You can, of course, expect a full recap on this blog after I return.

I told a friend last night that if I had any balls, I would use this unusually luxurious amount of time to do a 24-hour movie marathon. It's something I've always wanted to do.

But the way I figure this would work is by starting at 7 a.m. one morning and managing to stay awake until 7 a.m. the next day, using some combination of caffeine, sugar, and shots of tabasco sauce directly to the tongue. But I can't finish the marathon three hours before I'm supposed to check out, then be a useless lump for my family once I return to them.

He suggested I arrive at the hotel, sleep for a few hours, start at midnight, finish at the following midnight, and then sleep again. But he's crazy.

The thing is, having two nights means I can do things other than watch movies, and probably will need to in order to give myself a change of pace. This particular hotel is not in an interesting location -- that's not the point of the excursion -- but I can get out to some of the local eateries to actually sit at their tables (rather than ordering to my room), and there's a park nearby I can and probably should walk in.

If you'd like to make the argument that it's a waste of money to spend two nights on a hotel room just to watch movies, well, you lost that argument three decades ago when I became a cinephile.

So wish me luck, or whatever the version of luck is involved in showing up at a hotel and watching movies for the parts of 44 hours I'm not sleeping. Wish me no technical difficulties, I guess. I'm trying out a new projector I bought on the cheap. I know it's cheap, but I also know it will give the occasion a bit of an extra air of festivity.

More than anything, wish me luck not arriving at the hotel and starting to immediately stress how it's almost over.

Because this time, it's two nights, not one.

The mouse will play.

Small movies, small theaters

I saw Tangerine last night, and due to the miracle of the internet (and having written my review between 12 and 1 a.m. last night), I don't have to tell you what I thought about one of my favorite movies of the year, because my thoughts already appear online. You can read my review here.

So instead, I'll spare a few words on watching a movie in perhaps the smallest commercial screening room I've ever sat in. Which is appropriate for a film shot entirely on the iPhone 5.

Back in its early days -- I won't say "its heyday" because the cinema is still going strong -- Cinema Nova in Carlton was a much more typical arthouse multiplex. It had probably six to eight screens (the interwebs would probably tell me if I did a cursory check), and presumably did quite nicely for itself. However, at some point in the last 15 years, the economics shifted in such a way that it seemed prudent to double the number of screens -- without increasing the footprint. As I understand it, the cinema was shut down for some lengthy period of renovation and emerged with a full 15 screens, the number it still has today.

What I didn't know until yesterday was that the higher the screen number, the smaller the screening room.

I sat for I believe the first time in "Cinema 15" last night, and I'm lucky I didn't bring a few friends because there wouldn't have been enough room for all of us.

In actual fact, I could have brought 21 friends with me, but that's it.

On the occasions I've ever been prompted to count the number of seats in a theater, it has always exceeded 22. That's four rows of four on one side of the aisle, and three rows of two on the other. That's it.

As you can imagine, the screen itself was not a whole lot bigger than an iPhone 5, either.

In order to duplicate the effect of opening and closing the curtains, a little old-fashioned bit of flair this cinema still engages in, the two curtains actually had to be lowered inward like a drawbridge closing. That's how little room there was here.

At first I thought I might be the only audient present for this show, but at the tail end of the trailers, another three people joined me. Which meant that the room was now almost one-fifth full.

At least the seats were really comfy.

For most people, this would still cost them the premium price of $19.50. For me, it was merely a flash of my Australian Film Critics Association membership card, and I was in.

Still, Tangerine was so good that I probably would have spent $39 for a theater with only 11 seats just to see it.

You're either with me or you're against me

I had a little misunderstanding with my wife Thursday night about her, well, hovering while I was trying to watch a movie.

Feelings were only bruised, not fully hurt, but I basically told her -- nicely -- to shove off.

See, it's distracting to be starting up a movie while another person -- a person not watching the movie with you -- is doing things in the area that seem like they could be done at other times.

I made it through about five minutes of Francis Ford Coppola's Twixt before I disconnected my computer from the TV and decided to do some internetting until she cleared out. I wasn't actually going to say anything about it, but of course she said, "I'm sorry, am I bothering you?" Not in a sarcastic way, but in a genuine, nice way.

"It's just distracting to try to watch a movie while things are going on in the area," I told her.

I could have left it there and it probably would have been fine, but then I added (with some minimal kind of prompting from her that I could have easily ignored) that she was "fussing about." That got more at what I really felt, but it was also more hurtful. Or, bruiseful I guess, since no feelings were actually hurt during the making of this discussion. Or so she insists.

See, it comes down to this: I'm more than happy for you to watch the movie with me. In fact, I would love it. But if you aren't going to watch it with me -- if you're going to watch only about a single movie with me per week on average -- then you have to make it easier for me to watch the other four or five per week I need to watch.

My wife and I have a tradition of watching one, maybe two shows together after dinner. Then she goes off to the bedroom to watch a TV show that I have no interest in, and I stay in the living room to watch a movie she has no interest in. She's more TV and I'm more movies, so this works out well.

The problem comes with the difference in length between those two entities. Her TV show is at most an hour, but probably really more like 42 to 50 minutes. My movie is usually twice that, even when I choose something short, like Twixt (88 minutes). Which was really the only option for me Thursday night, as I'd unwittingly stayed up until 2 the night before but just had to feed that beast.

So because her show is shorter than my movie, she doesn't need to rush to get started on it, and might justifiably like to engage in various pre-bedtime routines, like a little rinsing of dishes or a little picking up of random odds and ends. I get that.

But me? I need to get started right away or I will be asleep halfway through. Even if something is short, like Twixt, but especially if it is longer than that.

And yeah, you can start watching a movie while your wife is still pottering around -- that's a bit less weighted of a phrase than "fussing about" -- but it's hard on a number of levels. There isn't only the distraction of the various noises that the person might make and the various visual interferences they may be creating by moving around in your peripheral vision. There's also the perception of needing to justify what I'm watching, even if that perception is only in my own head. "Yes, I have chosen this very night, July 23rd, 2015, to watch the Francis Ford Coppola gothic indie horror Twixt. I have no motivating factor in watching it tonight other than that it was on our Netflix queue and it is only 88 minutes long. What of it?" Again, that's my perception, not reality.

But the point is that it's all a type of distraction. Once she's settled in the bedroom, I'm not fussing about or pottering around or doing anything else in the bedroom. Because the bedroom has fewer things that can be done in it, it does not require my presence. But the living room connects the bedroom wing of the house and the kitchen area, so naturally it must be traversed for almost any household chore. And my wife should be able to do these before she goes to bed, especially since she's one of those people who sleeps better when certain basic tidying has been accomplished. If I make her feel guilty about doing those things then it's probably far worse than any disruption she is causing me.

So what I guess I really need is a den. I need some location where I can steal off alone to start playing my movie, where I won't be inhibiting anyone else's activities and they won't be inhibiting mine. But I guess the abruptness of that tends to underscore the idea that I'm just counting down to the minutes to my moment when I'm finally "free" to go watch what I need to watch. It feels a bit antisocial.

Like anything, it's a work in progress I guess.

The genesis of a new film-watching economy

Or, The most I have ever felt like a film critic

Or, "Guess I'll wait for the theater on that one"

Wait wait wait, Vance. Don't you mean "Guess I'll wait for video on that one"?

Not anymore.

It is now cheaper for me to watch a movie in the theaters than on video. Hold on, I'll explain.

Rarely do we experience a real sea change in the basic fundamentals of our movie-watching lives. You pay x amount to watch a movie in the theater, or maybe x minus 40% on a discount day. Or, you wait until video, at which point you pay 10 to 20% of x, maybe less if you get a deal. This is pretty much how we all go through our lives, prioritizing theatrical viewings based on the likelihood of it being worth the extra money to see it in the theater.

Well, for me, that whole equation has just changed.

Yesterday in the mail I received my membership card to the Australian Film Critics Association (AFCA). This is an organization that makes it easier for critics to do their jobs -- especially now that those jobs pay significantly less than they used to, and sometimes they pay nothing. If you are getting paid nothing to do a job, you should not also have to pay for the movies you see.

And now, as of last night, I no longer do.

For the annual membership fee -- which is $75, but I paid only a prorated $30 because the membership must be renewed each year on the 31st of January -- you get to go see any movie you want, in Australian cinemas, for zero dollars and zero cents.

Oh, there are restrictions. For example, the biggest chain, Hoyts, only allows you to go before 5 p.m. on weekdays, or any time on Monday and Wednesday. Another chain is supposed to limit the movies you can see to those in the first two weeks of their release -- a reflection of the fact that this card really is designed to help you do the job of reviewing the movie, if you miss the critics screening. Almost none of them allow you to use it after 5 p.m. on a Saturday or any time on a public holiday.

But these are fairly easy restrictions to get around, as long as you apply a little planning to your schedule. In the past, I restricted myself to seeing movies on one of two discount days, which were Monday and Tuesday. And even then it was $9 on Mondays and $13 on Tuesdays. Now I can go almost any day of the week to almost any theater, for nothing.

Zip-a-dee-doo-dah, zip-a-dee-a. My oh my, what a wonderful day.

Naturally, I was eager to test this out immediately. When I learned about a week ago that my card would be arriving in about a week, I immediately ceased all theatergoing activities and planned to finally catch up with Terminator Genisys once it arrived. And last night, that's what I did.

Oh, I'd heard the new Terminator movie was bad. Its 38 Metascore was anything but promising. But you know what? Now, that's all the more reason to see it in the theater. If I wait for a rental, it could cost me up to $4. As opposed to, you know, nothing.

So I made my way down to Cinema Kino, a half arthouse, half blockbuster theater that's just a stone's throw from my work (and an even shorter stone's throw from my wife's work). Learning from the guy who turned me on to this card that the clerks often cannot make heads nor tails of it, I made sure to carry with me the piece of paper I'd received from AFCA that explains the conditions of its use, explicitly outlining the policy of each participating cinema group. I actually hoped not to need it, because I was already planning on violating one of those conditions. See, Palace Cinemas, which operates Kino, has fairly broad allowances for the usage of this card, except for the fact that it must be a movie in the first two weeks of its release. Terminator Genisys is coming up on three weeks, so a smart knowledge of those restrictions could prompt them to reject me on my very first attempt. (I had a backup plan of seeing Ant-Man if that happened.) But the other thing I learned about this card is that when the clerks can't make head nor tails of it, they usually just give you the ticket as the only reasonable response to their befuddlement.

And sure enough, that's what happened here. I flashed the guy my card, hoping that would be all that would be necessary to ring up my ticket. He did start to ring it up, but then he said, "Sixteen." Apparently he thought it was some other kind of discount card. When I explained that it was supposed to be free, he filled out some kind of media voucher and had me sign it. And then I was on my way.

And no, Terminator Genisys was not very good. And no, watching it on the "big screen" couldn't have helped much, as it was playing on one of the theater's smallest screens, which contained a mere 33 seats.

But I was just giddy anyway. I had just walked into a movie -- a regular movie, not a critics screening -- without paying a dime.

And this can now keeping happening for me in perpetuity.

One of the things that's most exciting about it to me was that they don't give this membership to just anybody. Oh yeah, the organization is a bit scruffy around the edges -- when the guy sent me the bank account to send my $30 payment, it turned out that that account was closed and he had to give me a different one. My colleague who turned me on to this told me that his own card had arrived with the guy's grocery list included in the envelope. But my card looks nice and shiny with a cool logo, and they did indeed approve me based on the fact that I am actually working as a critic -- though not for pay -- in Australia. I sent the a link to a couple of my recent reviews and to my staff profile on ReelGood, and that was it -- I had passed their test and was worthy of inclusion in their awesome, awesome club. Who knows if I could have passed a much lower threshold for membership, but I know that just being a film enthusiast with a desire for discount movie tickets wouldn't have been enough.

So yeah, it feels great to have that kind of external validation of the career path I've chosen, even if it has not chosen to pay me. This is, now, my payment. Now, all the money I'd spend on going to the theater can be spent on other things. If that's not payment, then it's pretty damn close to it.

So now the world is my oyster. I can see whatever I want, no matter how bad it will be, as long as I can spare my time. All it cost me last night was a round rip bike ride in the cold on a windy winter's night, because I didn't want to pay the $7+ round trip on the tram. If this night was going to be free, I wanted it to be totally free.

Terminator Genisys was likely something I was going to see in the theater, no matter how bad it ended up being, just based on my commitment to the franchise. But the next moment when I truly appreciate this card will be when I see something I otherwise wasn't planning to see -- something so outside my normal interests, or something so probably terrible, that the expenditure would never otherwise have been justified.

So now "waiting for video" will be if the movie looks good, or if I want to see it with my wife.

To quote some guy named Nux, "What a lovely day."

Hiding the evidence of my addiction

I spent parts of Sunday and Monday nights watching the Zoe Kazan vehicle The Pretty One, but I might as well have been watching hardcore pornography.

That's just how much I kept the viewing hidden from my wife.

It's not that I am ashamed of this movie in particular, or the quantity of movies I'm watching in general -- though my wife does give me shit about that last one, particularly this time of year. Rather, it's that I sometimes don't want my wife to know what lengths I've gone to in order to feed my addition. (Though she's finding out right now if she cares to read this.)

See, I only rented The Pretty One because I stopped by Video Ezy in Flemington on Saturday afternoon on my way back from the mall, where I was doing some last-minute Christmas shopping. And the only reason I stopped by Video Ezy was because I wanted to see what options they had physically sitting on their shelves, as I plan for the final stretch of my 2014 viewing season.

Not, probably, a reason to delay my return to help my wife with my older son, the bigger handful of the two, especially as they were involved in a cookie-making ordeal, the true magnitude of which I didn't know until I got home.

I did have my younger son with me, so I was doing my share of the babysitting in addition to some much-needed shopping that helped my wife as much as it did me (two key presents for her family were obtained on that trip, as well as a couple big ticket items for our older son). But as my one-year-old is far less demanding, especially when he can take in all the sights and sounds of the outside world, I felt a little bit like I was on a break, and extending that break by 15 minutes in order to hop off the tram and scan a shelf of new releases.

So, needless to say, The Pretty One had to be kept hidden like an illicit stash of dirty magazines.

I started by hiding it on my shelf in our bedroom, but then realized that I might want to start watching it at a time when I could not discreetly extract it without her noticing. So then I moved it to a higher shelf in our bathroom, where it stayed until I started to watch it on Sunday night -- making sure to give my wife a 20-minute buffer after she already said she was going to sleep. And when I couldn't finish it that night, I made sure to return it to that bathroom shelf, so that its existence would continue to go undocumented.

All a bit absurd, you will agree, but I need to maintain the fiction with my wife that I am only sort of movie crazy, not full on.

It's not the first time this fall that I've kept one of my rentals totally hush hush. I did the same for Life After Beth and Lucy, mostly because both of those were also situations where I had to go out of my way either to rent them, or to return them. Wanting only to avoid the momentary discomfort of my wife shaking her head and giving me one of those "you'll never change" expressions, I kept the movies secret.

The reason that's even more ridiculous is that my wife had already seen Lucy (on the plane) and was recommending I see it. So instead of actually notifying her at the time I watched it, we'll just fast-forward to a time when I will magically have already seen it, and the exact circumstances of my viewing will seem unimportant to her.

Oh, the things we do for ... love? Is that accurate? Or the things we do just to keep the peace?

Anyway, my wife is indeed supportive of this addiction, for the most part. She didn't even give me a hard time when I sent her an email with a list of titles I am trying to watch before January 15th, so she could select the ones she wants to watch with me. Perhaps that's only because I tried to steal her thunder by writing things like "low priority!" and "I know you will laugh at me, but ..."

In truth, doing this is just practical. There will be some remaining 2014 movies that she will really want to see with me, and it's useful for me to know which others I can just rent and watch after she goes to sleep.

I assumed The Pretty One was one of the latter, and that what she doesn't know I watched won't hurt her.

The funny thing is that even if she saw me watching it, her mind would not immediately go to "You rented this while you were supposed to be coming straight home from the mall, didn't you?" If she even cared to ask -- if she even bothered to make a comment about the fact that I was watching something -- where or when I got it would not be the kind of thing that would interest her. I'm hiding the movie from an imaginary clone of myself, not the actual person who is my wife.

Tonight I will mask its return to Video Ezy behind a trip to rent The Babadook, which she has already seen but which she is keen to rewatch with me. Shortly after renting The Pretty One I made sure to firm up our plans to watch The Babadook on Christmas Eve Eve, so I'd have reason to go to Video Ezy regardless.

Jeez, with this level of scheming, it's a waste that I'm not addicted to something that's actually harmful.

The return of nap movies

After starting his life as a very poor sleeper, my son (not pictured) has become a model of consistency in the past year or so. In fact, he's so consistent that when he has a night like last night -- when a cold kept him awake and moaning miserably -- we've forgotten any techniques we once knew about how to handle it.

Part of that consistent sleeping means that you can bank on a two-hour nap from him, usually from about 1 until about 3 -- and sometimes he gives us a bonus half-hour.

For most cinephiles, two hours immediate translates into "the length of even a pretty long movie."

In the first half of this consistent year we've enjoyed, we took advantage of his two-hour naps on Saturday and Sunday (the only days I'm there to witness them) in the form of firing up a quick movie on Netflix streaming. Not every weekend and usually not both days, but often enough that I got to expecting it and looking forward to it. Documentaries were the genre of choice by my wife, and in truth, what better time to watch a documentary than in the middle of the afternoon? Evenings should be saved for fiction films, for adventures and romances and other grand spectacles.

But since moving into our new house back in June, the tradition has all but died. I'm not going to point fingers here, but it seems that somebody thinks we should spend all our time working on the house. (I'm kidding -- it's to my great personal shame that I've seen so slow to adopt the responsibilities of a homeowner.) And there are many jobs around the house that simply can't be performed while a child is biting your ankles. Nap time is the perfect time for many such jobs.

Thank goodness for the onset of winter, and the holidays.

As it's gotten cold and rainy, and as the Christmas tree has taken its lovely place in our living room, the need to complete homeowner jobs has waned a bit among my wife's priorities. And this past weekend, nap movies came back with a vengeance -- one on each day. On Saturday we watched The Queen of Versailles, and when there was no suitable documentary on Netflix streaming to watch on Sunday (none that wouldn't depress us further after the shooting on Friday, anyway), we watched the Danish comedy Klown.

The timing of the return of nap movies couldn't be any more perfect, as just this past week I've become aware of the extra urgency in watching 2012 movies before the deadline to finalize my list -- which, as discussed here, is two weeks earlier this year. And part of the return of this tradition can probably be tied to the fact that I told my wife about my earlier list deadline. She's a good sport, and is eager to help me meet my year-end goals by allocating some of our shared TV-watching time to movies on my list.

Since watching these two movies made me think of two different observations to write about each movie, I thought I'd squeeze them all into this post and just be done with them.

Finishing the doco

When I'm watching a documentary that ends up portraying its subjects in a negative light, I sometimes wonder why they even bothered to let the filmmakers finish making their film.

Sure, some documentary subjects are too delusional to realize they are coming off poorly, while others are magnanimous enough not to interfere with a process they agreed to. But neither of these quite seems to describe the Siegels, the former billionaire owners of the world's largest timeshare company, who were building the largest home in America until the financial crisis pulled the rug out from under them and all their assumptions of how the world works.

Yeah, they're a little delusional, as their plans to build a home with 30 bathrooms probably suggests. But she has a degree in engineering (though you wouldn't know it from her current incarnation, seen in the poster above) and he built one of the world's most successful companies from the ground up. So they're not idiots.

Yet as their lives careened further out of control and they became increasingly surly in private moments that they knew were being captured on camera, you have to wonder why they didn't just stop playing nice with the filmmaker. Only in footage at the very end of the movie does David Siegel start to make comments to director Laureen Greenfield asking if we could "wrap this up."

Perhaps not too surprisingly, Siegel finally got wise to how they were going to look in this movie and sued to prevent this movie from being released, as well as Greenfield directly for defamation of character. As with most things in Siegel's life the past few years, he failed.

Although there are some things about this man that come across sympathetically, it's easy not to feel too sad for him that his life got portrayed this way (in other words, truthfully). Not only does he have to answer for the audacity of all the financial excesses in his life, but even while he was building this massive mansion in the Orlando area, he never found the generosity in his heart to send his Filipino nanny back home to see her son. A heartbreaking interview at one point reveals that the woman had not seen her son, now 26, since he was 7. Given her proximity to such unimaginable wealth, that is simply criminal.

And speaking of criminal ... Siegel also takes credit at one point for getting George W. Bush either elected or reelected, or perhaps both. And then admits that he can't elaborate on his role because it "may not have been strictly legal." That may just be the most shocking revelation of the whole film. 

Daddy's movie

Because we also squeezed a couple other things into my son's nap on Saturday, we weren't quite finished with the movie when he woke up. But since he wasn't likely to see anything on screen that was disturbing for a two-year-old, we let him sit with us on the couch for the final 11 minutes of the movie. He needs at least 11 minutes of grogginess after most naps anyway, before he starts tearing around the house again.

When we finished The Queen of Versailles, though, he wasn't finished with it yet.

My son said "I wanna watch Daddy's movie." Meaning the movie we had just finished.

Never mind that The Queen of Versailles should not have held much interest for a two-year-old. The funnier thing to me is that he called it "Daddy's movie." It's unclear how he decided he should associate this movie more with me than with his mother. Especially since I don't sit there and watch my own movies that wouldn't interest him while I'm his sole supervision. (Since that's the kind of thing you might imagine me doing, I thought I should tell you that I don't.)

Anyway, we let him watch the first 15 minutes of the movie again. It was pretty absurd to have my wife and me walking around the house, engaging in little household duties, while my son sat by himself on the couch, watching this movie.

Funny in any language

It's conventional wisdom that humor suffers if the movie is made in a different language than the one the viewer speaks. Which probably explains why action movies and other blockbusters fare better in foreign markets than comedies.

This can be attributed to the fact that cadence and line delivery play a big role in whether something makes us laugh. When we don't know the words being spoken, and we can't easily detect which word is being emphasized, we have only the subtitles to cue us in as to whether something is funny. Never mind the fact that senses of humor vary greatly from country to country, either being fundamentally different or relying on local cultural references that would be lost on a foreign viewer.

So I'm pleased to say that Klown is one of the funniest movies I've seen this year, and probably one of the funniest foreign films I've ever seen.

I'm sure part of that has to do with the physical nature of the comedy. The movie is about two Danish 30-somethings (possibly 40-somethings) who go on a canoeing trip where the horndog of the pair wants to get as much poon as possible, except that circumstances have thrust upon them a 12-year-old boy that the other guy is supposed to be watching. Booty on a canoe trip? Only in Denmark, I guess.

Anyway, the physical humor is indeed hilarious, but more than that, I found myself laughing out loud regularly at simple translations of jokes in the subtitles. For whatever reason, it worked. I'm not saying this has never happened to me before -- I found the French language OSS films starring Jean Dujardin absolutely hilarious -- but I thought it was worth pointing out anyway.

I guess it's such a surprise because the majority of foreign language films that gain traction in the U.S. are not comedies. Because of the sometimes provincial nature of comedy, many of those movies never make it out of their country of origin in the first place.

A Danish Sideways

I mentioned in the previous section that Klown is about two guys who go on a trip where the acquisition of pussy is the primary goal. This was just the first way that the movie started reminding me of Alexander Payne's Sideways, and it never stopped.

In Klown as in Sideways, you've got one handsome committed man (engaged there, married here) who ventures on a week-long trip with his friend, a considerably less attractive male whose prospects are less certain (he's single in Sideways, and here he's at a rocky point in his relationship with his girlfriend). The handsome guy is going to get laid come hell or high water, while the friend is going to reluctantly support him despite his moral misgivings about the whole thing.

In both films, the handsome guy gets involved in a couple outrageous sexual escapades that don't work out well for him, and the other guy has to clean up his mess. In both films, the handsome guy ends up breaking down emotionally near the end as he regrets the decisions he's made and the impact they will have on his significant other if she finds out, realizing only too late in the game that he couldn't live without her.

But here's the really funny similarity: In both movies, the handsome guy gets his nose broken after being hit in the face with a round object by a spurned woman. In Sideways, it's Sandra Oh's motorcycle helmet. Here, it's a round vase.

For the record, the similarities to Sideways don't make me like the film any less, nor do I even accuse the filmmakers of stealing from Payne's classic. And if I did accuse them of stealing, I'd have to throw in The Hangover as well, since this movie also features a hilarious photo montage at the end, showing us some of the outrageous events that had only previously been hinted at.

I guess the humor of Hollywood movies does sometimes translate into other languages.

Cut off at the knees

Note: I wrote this post, as well as the post for tomorrow, before I heard the news about the unimaginably horrific shooting in Connecticut. As a father and a human being, I find it hard right now to imagine engaging in the kind of triviality that a film blog has the luxury of being. I've decided to go ahead and post these anyway, largely because I have been so prolific lately that I can barely afford to let a day pass, else I won't write down everything I have to say. Inconsequential in the grand scheme of things as the things I have to say about film may be, this is what a writer does: write. While on the one hand that is sort of a selfish decision in the face of this tragedy, I also don't know what purpose is served, exactly, by imposing a silence on myself. However, I did not want you to think these events are not in my heart, tearing me apart, because they are. My defense mechanism has been to escape into the trivial, watching two movies last night and doing everything I can not to spiral downward into the depths of sorrow inspired by this tragic event.

Shocking realization yesterday:

I have two fewer weeks to watch 2012 movies than I had to watch 2011 movies.

And 2010 movies. And 2009 movies. And so on.

As you probably know, I have a tradition that dates back 17 years (you may not know that part) of ranking all the movies I see that were released in a given calendar year. Since you theoretically continue seeing movies from a given calendar year for the rest of your life, you need a cutoff date in order to publish your list of rankings. The cutoff date my friend Don and I (the two of us who unfailingly participate in this tradition) have always used has been the morning the Oscar nominations are announced.

Which is nearly two weeks earlier this year.

Yesterday Don mentioned it casually in an email, not in the form of "Did you hear???" but more like "Since the Oscar nominations are on January 10th this year ..."

January 10th?

I felt an immediate pit in my stomach.

According to a statement by AMPAS back in September (I must have been snoozing), the shift was made "to provide members and the public a longer period of time to see the nominated films." That may be one of the benefits, but I'm betting that the bigger motivator was getting the nominations out there before the Golden Globes air. I've always thought it was strange that we learn both the nominees and the winners of the Golden Globes before the Oscar nominations are even revealed. Well, no more.

It may just be that only the Hollywood Foreign Press, Don and I actually care about this change.

The reason I care is that I have become more and more obsessed in recent years about watching as many of the available movies from that year as possible, both the good and the bad, so that the list I unveil in late January is as definitive as I can reasonably make it. When I look back on [whatever year it is] in the future, I want to know that the movie I crowned as #1 was truly my favorite movie that was released that year. There's always the possibility that I'll see some unheralded underdog five years later and like it better than the #1 I crowned, but at least I know I've given my best effort at being definitive by seeing as wide a swath as possible of the available movies.

When you remove two weeks (actually 12 days, since the nominations will be on a Thursday this year rather than a Tuesday) from that available viewing time, you're talking about eliminating a good 15 movies -- and maybe as many as 20, since that's the time of the year when I really press, when I force my wife to watch movies on nights we wouldn't ordinarily watch them, when I use my other available waking hours, however unlikely, to squeeze in 30 minutes of a movie here and 30 minutes of a movie there.

We could always change the admittedly arbitrary date we use for our cutoff, but have decided this just wouldn't be sporting of us. We have to play it as it lies.

I knew there was little chance that I would beat last year's record total of 121, so I wasn't even going for it. I sit at 84 now, so either way I would have stood a good chance of reaching 100 (which I always think of as a minimum acceptable total) but not much of a chance of reaching 121. The new date doesn't change those odds very much. I can easily watch 16 more movies from 2012 before January 10th.

But it does mean that I'll likely "waste" a lot fewer viewings. And by that I mean I should probably say bye bye to watching the movies I know will be bad.

See, nearly as important as fleshing out the top of my list is fleshing out the bottom. As much as I'm interested in crowning a 2012 champion, I'm also interest in reaching a definitive conclusion about the worst movie of the year. This is why my December and January viewings often alternate between prestige movies and total shlock.

If given the choice, though, I will probably want to concentrate on the good ones, the ones I think actually have some chance of cracking my top 10. And while that's good for me in terms of useful ways to spend my time, it means that my worst movie of the year will probably be a choice I can't really get behind. I won't tell you what's sitting in my bottom spot right now, because that would ruin the fun, but I can tell you that it's not the kind of bad movie that gets my juices flowing with how much I dislike it. If it does end up being the worst, it'll be the worst more by default than by truly earning the title.

All this said, there's a good chance that the earlier deadline will have a positive impact on my well-being. The period between New Year's and the 24th (the nominations date has always been in the early January 20s) always ends up feeling like a terrible grind. In fact, I usually get to the point where my top 10 is pretty solidified, my bottom 10 is pretty solidified, and everything I see has this middling quality that earns it a place somewhere in the 50s or 60s. Even if the movie is better than that or worse than that, I sometimes lose the ability to make those judgments and just see it all as some colorless gruel, neither particularly bad nor particularly good. Rounding out the middle of my list has never been one of my stated goals.

So those last two weeks in particular, the two weeks I will lose this year, usually find me submitting to a rote obedience to my own rules and deadlines, of "playing out the string." It's probably a good thing that I'll have to focus this year on some really solid contenders -- whether they be contenders for my best movie, or contenders for my worst.

And that phase where I work to squeeze in 30 minutes of a movie here and 30 minutes of a movie there? Maybe it'll just come before Christmas, rather than after. Maybe it'll just start this weekend.

I've already finished my Christmas shopping, so I've got that going for me.

The 10:30 rule

I haven't been sleeping well lately.

The last few nights have been good, but for ten days before that, I was waking up at weird hours of the night -- and sometimes, an hour before my alarm was set to go off, even if the rest of that night's sleep had already been terrible.

I'm sure it's most accurate to blame the fact that I've been waking up at ten past four for work on each of the past two Monday mornings. That's got to have its residual effects.

But it's also fair to blame my decision to start watching a movie at all hours of the night -- and nap my way through it (pausing it of course) until I finish.

The worst example of this was last Friday night. I started watching the Amanda Seyfried vehicle Gone at around 11 p.m., and didn't finish until 2. That included about four naps, but those naps couldn't replicate the sleep I would have gotten if I'd just gone to bed at midnight instead of wading my way through this shitty movie.

But I still have to carve out time to watch movies, and one of the best ways to do that is to start a movie after my wife goes to bed.

I just need to set up some ground rules if I want to keep my sanity. I mean, the price of watching a shitty movie like Gone was that I was in a foul mood all day last Saturday, and got into a stupid fight with my wife. That's no way to live, especially for a one-star movie.

So, new rule: I can only watch a late-night movie if I start it by 10:30. It also shouldn't be longer than about 1:45, but I won't be so strict about that.

The idea is not necessarily to finish it before midnight, but so that at least more of the movie gets watched before midnight than after.

My first test of the rule was Arbitrage on Thursday night, which I bought on VOD for $7.99. I actually started it around 10:35, but they're my rules, and I can stretch them however I want. I find it useful to adhere to the seven-minute grace period we get for clocking in at work. (Yes, my job requires me to clock in. At least it's on a computer rather than a punch clock.) As long as I clock in by seven minutes past the hour (or half-hour, or quarter hour), my time punch rounds down to the most recent quarter hour past. So my 10:30 rule is really a 10:37 rule.

Arbitrage was 100 minutes, and with pauses, I finished up at a very manageable 12:30. I was still tired during the day on Friday, but at least I didn't snap at anyone. Besides, Thursday night is the honorary first night of the weekend, since most people figure they can wade their way through a Friday at about 60%.

What remains to be seen is if I can stick to this rule, and how much I bend it. What if my wife turns in at 10:45? What about 10:40?

But any rule is only there to correct a perceived problem. If I can start a movie at 10:40 or 10:45 or even 11, and not spend the next day as a zombie, then maybe I'll be okay. I can test it and play with it and make it work for me. But it's nice to know it's there, to remind myself of the possible consequences of breaking it.

After all, you never know when being only 60% of who you want to be won't be good enough.

Acceptable circumstances for viewing a comedy

You may remember in this post I talked about some new rules I had for watching comedies. I was no longer going to watch them by myself -- as in, without anyone I know. Failing that, the theater I watched them in had to be packed.

Plan B came into effect last night.

It was once again $7 Tuesdays at the local theater, though I did not at first understand why my Tuesday choices included The Dictator, which does not officially release until today. However, I soon realized that it was already today on the east coast when I saw it, since the first showing at this theater was at precisely 9 p.m. Without even looking it up I can assume that as long as it's May 16th somewhere in the U.S., the movie can be played. I'm sure there was at least one Hawaiian theater playing it at 6.

I know the theater was at least 37% full. That's the percent sold it was when I showed up a half-hour early, just to be on the safe side. I guess opening night isn't what it once was, or maybe this surprise early showing of Sacha Baron Cohen's latest fooled other people as much as it fooled me.

But I'd say the theater was 70 to 75% full by the time the show started. Entering the screening room five minutes early was enough to get me a seat where I could put my feet up on the bar. Because that's how I roll.

We were a good crowd and we were ready to laugh. And SBC gave us plenty to laugh about. I won't review the details of the movie for you, since they are worth discovering on your own. But just wait for that sequence where Admiral General Aladeen discovers a certain ... pleasure that he never knew about previously.

In fact, I'm going on record: The Dictator is my favorite of Cohen's three starring vehicles, if you are considering the other two to be Borat and Bruno. (My tendencies toward anal retention would ordinary require me to spell out the whole title of Borat, but not this morning.) I didn't like either of those movies as much as I wanted to, but they're still movies I like pretty well. Yes, even Bruno.

So what Cohen was bringing last night was in my wheelhouse.

But I can't deny that the crowd had something to do with it. There was probably a little extra buzz from it being opening night, though I'd be lying if I said it was tangible. We were just ready to laugh, and laugh we did. Pretty much every time Cohen wanted us to, with a couple minor exceptions.

So maybe I've got a new optimism about the idea of seeing a movie on opening night, as long as it's a comedy, and as long as it's only 37% full a half-hour before the movie.

And even if no one I knew was there, it's funny how much like a friend your neighbor feels when you are both laughing hysterically.

First DVD of the year

As you probably know, I am perpetually involved with ranking my favorite movies of the current calendar year. As soon as one year finishes, it's on to the next.

But the first half of the year is always pretty slow, since your only option for seeing new movies is the movie theater. And I tend to be pretty disincentivized from hitting the theaters unless a) the movie is likely to be really awesome (which often is not the case with early-year movies), or b) I'm just desperate to start working on the new year's list. B gets me out to probably five or six more movies in February, March and April than I'd otherwise see. The fact that they'll be available on DVD in plenty of time before my end-of-year ranking deadline further discourages me from seeing them in the theater just to get them ranked.

So that brings me to what I want to discuss today -- that magical moment when the first of the current year's titles hits DVD. It's usually late April or early May. The first one I noticed being available this year was Contraband. The first one I myself watched was Haywire, on Saturday afternoon.

From here, the list can really take off. In the first four months of the year, I saw a measly 11 titles. But I could see my next 11 in the next six weeks -- if I weren't moving in about three weeks, that is.

There has become something ceremonial enough about the first DVD I see from the current calendar year that I remember what it was last year, too. Actually, last year it was not technically a DVD but an itunes rental. Last year I watched No Strings Attached on my ipod on our trip back east for a wedding. (This year it was not technically a DVD either -- I rented Haywire on BluRay from Redbox.)

My No Strings Attached viewing was nearly a month later on the calendar than May 12th, when I watched Haywire (because I couldn't find Contraband at two different Redboxes). Does an earlier start this year mean that I might break my record for titles in a calendar year, which I set last year by watching a total of 121 before my late January deadline?

Probably not. See my previous comment about my life being thrown into chaos by moving houses in about three weeks' time. That'll set me behind again.

But I loved the passing of that ceremonial moment on Saturday, even if I did not love Haywire. I feel somewhat compelled to write a whole post about this, but let's just get it in here at the end of this one instead. I've been feeling this for awhile, but Haywire really brought it home for me: Steven Soderbergh is a cold, clinical filmmaker who will sacrifice character development for plotting and sleek visual presentation. I didn't give a flip about any of the characters in this contract killer thriller, and that doesn't have a lot to do with the fact that Gina Carano is a mixed marial arts fighter, not a trained actor per se. That's all on Soderbergh, for not caring if we care.

All I really cared about was that it was a 2012 movie, one I was planning to see no matter how good it was, and that I didn't have to go to the theater to see it.

From here on out, any early-year movies I wanted to see, whose quality might be highly suspect, will be only the price of a rental.

Let the good times roll.

Where have all the bad films gone?

I have this little ritual I perform at the end of each month, which helps me "close out" the month.

I look back at the new films I've seen during the previous month, and make note of which I liked most and which I liked least. Then I record them on the same document where I record the order I've watched them. I list the month and year, the number of movies I saw for the first time, then the best and worst afterward in parenthesis. Example: 4/09 = 20 (Best Movie, Worst Movie)

This often produces really funny pairings of movies, since they are at the extreme ends of the quality spectrum. Let's take June of 2008: 6/08 = 13 (The Godfather Part II, 10,000 B.C.). (And yes, that means I did not see The Godfather Part II for the first time until 2008.) Or March of 2004: 3/04 = 9 (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Battlefield Earth).

However, this exercise isn't as funny anymore, because it appears I am no longer seeing bad movies.

When I stopped reviewing movies for All Movie Guide last November, I suspected that the quality of the movies I watched would improve overall. But I didn't expect to basically stop seeing movies that stink. And movies that stink are an essential part of the many-splendored experience of watching movies.

The end of April rolled around earlier this week, so it was time for the ritual again. I saw only 12 new movies in April, in part because I watched nearly that many movies on repeat viewing (I've been binging a little lately) and in part because it's the beginning of the baseball season, so my attention is diverted.

The top movie was easy. As I discussed on Tuesday, I saw one of the first 5-star movies I've seen in a long time, The Passion of Joan of Arc. So that easily claimed the top spot for the month.

The bottom slot? It went to the Will Ferrell/Gael Garcia Bernal/Diego Luna mexploitation film Casa de Mi Padre, a film I gave only a marginal thumbs down. In fact, I had convinced myself to give it 3 stars out of 5 on Letterboxd, only to gain some toughness at the last moment and knock it down to 2.5. But there are a lot of things I respect about that movie, including the fact that the whole thing (excepting a few lines by Nick Offerman) is in Spanish, which means that Ferrell commits to speaking Spanish throughout.

Here, I'll show you the other contenders and the star ratings I gave them on Letterboxd:

4/3 - The Hunger Games - 3.5 stars
4/7 - OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies - 4 stars
4/14 - Marwencol - 4.5 stars
4/14 - The Big Year - 3 stars
4/17 - The Cabin in the Woods - 4 stars
4/19 - Day of Wrath - 4 stars
4/22 - The Tempest - 3 stars
4/25 - Bunny and the Bull - 4 stars
4/27 - 21 Jump Street - 4 stars
4/30 - Ordet - 4.5 stars

So maybe I just had a really good month. My Getting Acquainted series was with a director (Carl Theodor Dreyer) I ended up really loving. I saw a surprisingly good documentary (Marwencol) and a couple unexpectedly delightful comedies (OSS 117, 21 Jump Street). And I saw only 12 new films. It's not such a stretch to say you liked 11 of a given 12 films you see, especially since most people try to watch movies they think they'll like. And now that I'm not writing reviews, I'm more like "most people."

But in situations like this, especially given my prior and hopefully future job as a working critic, I always wonder if I'm going soft. Would I have ranked some of these films more harshly in the past? Let's take The Tempest. In many ways, it was not a very successful film. But I enjoyed a number of the performances and really dug the visual style that Julie Taymor brought to it. But Taymor always brings plenty of visual style. Does this mean that I have to give all of her movies that minimum 3-star "passing grade"?

Another thing that makes me worry about encroaching softness: My overall percentage of movies I liked, which I keep track of on a different spreadsheet. A few years ago, I liked around 64% of the movies I'd seen. Now it's around 67%, and growing. That's not an insignificant change, considering that I've seen over 3,500 films. And the higher it gets, the more I worry that I just don't lay into movies like I used to.

Of course, I can't ignore the fact that there is less incentive for me to see bad films nowadays. Back when I was reviewing for All Movie, a bad movie was almost as good as a good one, because either earned me $20 for the review, and reviews of bad movies are generally faster and more fun to write. Now, however, I have to kind of trick myself into seeing bad movies. I see fewer movies that I know will be bad, and with the ones I do, it's mostly for the ironic value of seeing it and being able to reference it (such as Howard the Duck, which I saw in February).

Nowadays, it seems like most of the bad movies I see will be movies I thought would be good, but didn't end up liking. It's these pure disappointments that seem to be increasingly rare. If it's a movie I'm excited about, I feel like I usually find enough about it to appreciate that I give it that minimum 3-star grade. And we can debate about where the cutoff should be on the five-star scale between movies you like and movies you don't like. I've probably given thumbs up here and there to a movie I would only give 2.5 stars out of 5.

I think I'm starting to ramble here. But the point is: I'm starved for something bad.

Come on, month of May. Bring it on.