Not quite memorable

Not quite Orlando Bloom yet not quite James McAvoy, Luke Evans brings his unique but entirely unremarkable brand of not-quiteness to the movie Dracula Untold this week.

Evans is also not quite famous, but he is being cast as though he is -- in part because there are so many actors he is almost like.

He's not quite Dominic West, but he's also not quite Robert Pattinson. He won't quite make you swoon, but you know, almost.

I haven't seen all of Luke Evans' movies -- in fact, I've seen only one or two. But all of them are not quite reputable, not quite original. Here's a quick list:

Clash of the Titans
Robin Hood
The Three Musketeers
The Immortals
The Raven
Fast & Furious 6

A bunch of sequels, remakes, and other questionable properties, without an ounce of soul among them. (Says the guy who has only seen The Raven.) I have no doubt -- like, zero -- that Dracula Untold will be more of the same.

I am intentionally omitting the films that don't fit the pattern, such as the Hobbit trilogy, the first of which I loved. But even though these movies are "better" than the ones I've listed above (again noting that I've only seen one of them), they don't do anything to disprove the notion that Luke Evans is a generically handsome hack who shows up primarily when you need someone who is not quite Michael Fassbender yet not quite Johnny Depp,

Now I'm talking crazy -- Evans hasn't the charisma to even momentarily be confused for those two. However, casting directors clearly believe they are getting a leading man type when they cast him. Why else would he keep on showing up with significant roles in properties that are expected to make studios a lot of money?

Here is a good metaphor for Luke Evans. He's like a movie that has had shoddy 3D effects added to it in post production, but in person form.

What do I have against Luke Evans? Nothing, really. He's passable. He's competent.

But it's this pattern he has of showing up in movies that are not quite blockbusters that makes him seem like this slightly embarrassing figure, a "poor man's" Bloom or McAvoy or West or Pattinson or Fassbender or Depp.

And so what if he's not quite Dominic Cooper? You aren't, either, and I don't see you in any movies.

And Luke Evans may have not quite those people's bank accounts, but he will keep on laughing his way to the bank nonetheless.

A disappointing way to go through a career?

Not quite.

Whole Lotta Bergman: Cries and Whispers

More like Cries and Whimpers, as this series is definitely going out with one.

Perhaps something about the milquetoast title of this 1972 film caused me to drag my feet on viewing the last film in my mini five-film Bergman series, as it took a whole month after my last movie to watch it, whereas each of the others had taken about two weeks. Whatever the reason, finally watching the movie made me realize that my foot-dragging was justified.

Put simply, with greater elaboration to follow, Cries and Whispers became the only movie in the series that I actively disliked. And I kind of actively disliked it a lot.

Which is strange, in a way, because the film is probably most closely related in theme and overall tone to The Silence, which I think of as my favorite film I watched for this series (yes, even more than Persona). Both The Silence and Cries and Whispers contain estranged sisters, one of whom is very sick, who tell each other they hate each other. And both movies rely so heavily on silence on the soundtrack that each one makes a kind of reference to it in the title.

But that's where the comparison ends.

Cries is set in a palatial mansion sometime in the 19th century. A cancer-stricken woman, Agnes (Harriet Andersson), is in the last days of her life. Her two sisters, Maria (Liv Ullmann) and Karin (Ingrid Thulin), are at her deathbed, but they have not been close to Agnes in life for many years now. Only her dutiful and devout servant, Anna (Kari Sylwan), can provide her a modicum of comfort as her physical pain becomes increasingly agonizing. While they are waiting for the inevitable to arrive, the characters indulge in remembrances of their earlier lives in this mansion, when they were younger and comparatively healthier (both physically and mentally). One recalls an affair with a handsome doctor. Another recalls her husband's possible infidelity. A third thinks fondly of her mother, now two decades dead. When Agnes finally passes, the nature of these remembrances grows more surreal, and the women appear as though they may be losing some grasp on their tenuous sanity.

I should probably highlight two crucial differences between Cries and all four of the other films I watched, all of which were made in the 1960s, and three of them within a three-year window:

1) Cries is the only film not set in or close to present day, and

2) Cries is the only film shot in color.

I suspect the second was more a problem for me than the first, considering that two of my most cherished Bergman films -- The Seventh Seal and The Virgin Spring -- are set in the very distant past, much longer ago than the 19th century. But the second was kind of a big problem. To make another generalization, I just don't think I like color Bergman films very much. That's a very broad statement and one that is easy to poke holes in, considering that the only other color Bergman film I've seen -- Fanny and Alexander -- was a movie I ended up liking quite a bit. Still, when I was watching Fanny and Alexander, and especially as I was struggling to get into it, I noted that it didn't feel like a Bergman film. Seeing Bergman in color was kind of like hearing Charlie Chaplin talk -- there was just something off about it. I like my Bergman in black and white, and that's all there is to it.

What's funny is that this film was actually lauded for its cinematography to the point of winning an Oscar for it. Its deeply saturated red tones were considered by 1972 audiences to be something truly sublime, whereas I found them actively displeasing to look at. But that isn't where this movie's Oscar love ended. I find it quite difficult to believe, since a movie like this wouldn't stand a chance today, but Cries and Whispers was actually nominated for best director and best picture as well. In fact, it was hurried into U.S. theaters in 1972 -- before its Swedish release date -- just to capitalize on its warm festival reception and its potential to garner the numerous Oscar nominations it ended up garnering.

I just don't see it, and it makes me wonder if I am really so out of sync with other people on Ingmar Bergman. I found this film to be a painfully protracted, even torturous exercise. It is so determinedly slow-paced that I could only watch a half-hour of it the first night before falling asleep, but then just to be sure I gave myself plenty of opportunity to fall in line with its rhythms, I watched it again from the start the next night. I didn't get into those first 30 minutes any more on a second viewing, and the movie probably only got worse from there.

Maybe Cries and Whispers was the first time I have been willing to admit to myself that Bergman really may have been the kind of arthouse director you make fun of when exaggerating the pretensions of arthouse directors. Maybe after seeing some of that in his other films, but finding plenty else to redeem them, I truly felt the accumulation overwhelm me by the time he made Cries and Whispers. I mean, even the title is almost self-parody for an arthouse film. A cry and a whisper can each be viewed as excessively dramatic methods of expression, and to intimate that this film is filled to the brim with such excessive expression is almost to point out one's own absurdity.

I've talked around what I didn't like about this movie, so perhaps I should give you a few specifics before I cut out and take an extended Bergman break. What frustrated me so much was this movie's lack of specificity. Although you would never accuse Bergman's dialogue of being purely expository, never before this movie have I found that entire passages of dialogue exist only to be completely abstruse. Bergman may have trafficked in abstractions in other films, but that was the exception rather than the rule, as each of those films have a tangible reality and a definite plot from which they may stray -- which they may come close to entirely abandoning. A movie like Persona may be more explicitly an arthouse film in numerous things about its construction, especially as it calls attention to its own status as a piece of artifice, and includes some imagery that has no textual connection to anything going on in the story. But even Persona has more of a plot than what we get in Cries and Whispers, and when it does go off the rails, it does so with conviction. Cries and Whispers, meanwhile, feels like just an amorphous collection of disconnected dysfunction, punctuated by a few superficially shocking moments and images. It just spins and spins and spins its wheels.

Perhaps the problem is that I never felt that the characters had a relationship with each other, a history that had gotten twisted up into the current version of their reality. Significant chemistry passes between the two women blending identities in Persona, or the family struggling to understand mental illness in Through a Glass Darkly, or the spiritually exhausted pastor and his flock in Winter Light, or the toxic pair of sisters and their son/nephew in The Silence. Not so here. These felt like characters in a Samuel Beckett play, butting up against each other in order to explore existential angst, displaying none of the shared history that makes us care what becomes of them.

One thing I will say about Cries and Whispers, however, is that it makes a fitting final film for this series. Back when I first started, one of my readers suggested that it was useful to consume a lot of Bergman films at once -- not only because you could clearly see the themes that straddled the movies, but because it's interesting to appreciate the troupe of actors with whom Bergman associated himself. And true enough, this movie allowed me to easily look back on the movies I'd seen and view this as kind of a reunion of those performers. Liv Ullman appeared in Persona, the first movie I watched. Harriet Anderson was the star of Through a Glass Darkly, which came next. Then Ingrid Thulin appeared in both Winter Light and The Silence, though I must say I had to go back and check because she seems to have a bit of a chamelon-like ability to alter her appearance. The fact that they all convened for a movie that disappointed me is kind of beside the point.

Okay! This has been a great education on Bergman. Just as a way of wrapping things up, I will list the films in order of my preference, and the star ratings I gave them on Letterboxd:

1. The Silence (1963) - 4 stars
2. Persona (1966) - 4 stars
3. Through a Glass Darkly (1961) - 3.5 stars
4. Winter Light (1962) - 3 stars
5. Cries and Whispers (1972) - 2 stars

Now ... who should I do next?

Mistakes were made

Remember how I planned out my viewing schedule to watch something special as my landmark 4,000th movie, even going so far as to have a guy I've never met loan me some of the movies from his collection to enable this special viewing?

Yeah, that was all for naught.

Due to the inherently fallible process of keeping lists, F.W. Murnau's Sunrise was not actually the 4,000th movie I'd ever seen. I now realize it was actually the 4,007th.

I'll explain.

Among the many movie lists I keep, which include year-by-year breakdowns in their own Word documents and a movie order document I've been keeping since 2002, are two master lists. One of these is the original Word document I have been updating for nearly 25 years, which is just a flat list of all the movies I've ever seen. The other is an Excel document that I introduced within the past 15 years, which is essentially an exact duplicate of the Word document, but with a bunch of supplemental information (director, year, whether I liked it or didn't) included to take advantage of the greater database-type capabilities of Excel. Because the Excel document is a duplicate and it's a more useful document overall, there's no real need for me to keep updating the Word document. But I continue to do it out of habit, and because I find it funny that this same document has followed me around for well over half my life.

Rather, it's supposed to be an exact duplicate -- and herein lies the problem.

In the lead-up to our move to Australia last summer, I got out of the habit of updating the Excel spreadsheet. Some of the numbers were off -- the total I'd seen in the theater vs. on video did not match the total of good movies vs. bad movies, and the total breakdown of movies by the first letter in their title did not match either of those. Instead of stopping to figure out which numbers were wrong and get it all sorted out, I backburnered the whole thing. In the meantime, I continued updating my other lists, including the master list on Microsoft Word. A simple list involving no formulas is much easier to stay on top of.

However, it also makes it a lot more difficult to tell when you're making mistakes. Like, forgetting to add certain movies to the master list.

I didn't realize this was happening at the time, of course, and therefore used the running total that I manually update at the bottom of this list as my indicator of how close I was to 4,000. But a running total updated manually is highly fallible, especially since you can't just consult the row number on the left side of the document like you can in Excel. If you think you've seen 3,999 movies and there are 3,999 rows in your spreadsheet, that's a nice a quick check of your math.

So how did I eventually realize I was off? Well, I've gotten some free cycles at work during school holidays, and don't mind telling you that I've been spending the time to finally get the Excel document caught up -- which means adding more than a year's worth of movies. I've had my Letterboxd diary up on one monitor and the spreadsheet up on the other, and have steadily caught up.

The problem arose when I noticed myself approaching 4,000 on the spreadsheet, but not approaching what I knew was my 4,000th movie on Letterboxd.

Oops.

So once I did fully catch up on the Excel spreadsheet, I copied the list from the Word document and pasted it next to the list from Excel. Scanning down the list, I was able to find seven titles that I had failed to include on the Word document but had added correctly on Excel, thanks to my pretty infallible Letterboxd diary.

Seven? How could I be off by that much?

Well, each time I see a movie, I update either four or five lists, depending on whether the movie is from the current year or not. Forget any one of these lists -- like the master list -- and something has slipped through the cracks that may not be detected for months, or even years.

But seven? Really? That much?

So -- if you are still reading this -- you are probably now curious: What was my 4,000th movie, after all?

It was:

That's right, the second film I saw for the Melbourne International Film Festival, a Chinese modern-day noir called Black Coal, Thin Ice. Which I gave a middling 2.5 stars out of 5.

Oh well.

Here's the thing, though -- it doesn't really matter.

In updating this list over the decades -- funny how I can say that now -- I have found various movies here and there that were simply not on my list. This is so obviously the case that I probably not need even say it. In fact, if I'm really being frank, I'd say that even the list I have now probably has 15 to 20 movies that are not on it. They'd be mostly movies I saw when I was a kid, and could not be sure I actually saw, or may not even remember seeing. Then there are also movies I do include on the list that I'm not sure I've seen start to finish. This is an inexact process at best.

Within the past two years alone I realized that Showgirls was not on my list. I definitely saw Showgirls, no doubt about it. But for whatever reason, it never made it on to the list. And since I saw Showgirls at the time it was released, it would have been among the first thousand movies I ever saw. Go back and retroactively add it, and it throws off not only the 1,000th movie I saw, but also the 2,000th and the 3,000th.

That's why it's best to see milestones as symbolic. Even when I thought Sunrise was my 4,000th movie, I knew in my heart of hearts that it was almost certainly not exactly the 4,000th. The most it could have ever been was an approximation of my 4,000th movie, a ceremonial viewing designed to celebrate the fact that I am reaching 4,000 movies sometime between the months of June and October in 2014.

And as such, it will remain, "officially," #4,000.

If Black Coal, Thin Ice has a problem with that, it can lodge a complaint with the front office.

In the name of the father

McG is trying. I will give him that.

McG is trying to make a movie that will somehow garner him some respect, but it ain't happening with 3 Days to Kill. (Too bad he diverted off the path to respect he was on with the wonderful We Are Marshall.)

3 Days is actually a slightly older version -- as in, skewing toward an older audience -- of his most recent movie, This Means War. In both films, jolly spy antics are interspersed with jolly domestic antics -- something that's supposed to be ironic, even on the 20th anniversary of True Lies. And to be honest, it wasn't that good back when the overrated True Lies did it.

But if I wanted to pinpoint the mustiest story element in this overblown, all-over-the-place action-comedy-drama, it would be this:

It's yet another movie where a neglected child refers to his or her father by his first name for the entire movie, only finally switching to calling him "Dad" in the supposedly emotional finale.

That's an incredibly reductive way of signposting the improvements in a strained relationship between estranged parent and offspring, but just think of the number of movies that do it. (You'll have to do the thinking, in fact, because I actually can't conjure another example as I sit here, since it's not a plot detail that tends to stand out in the memory after you've finished watching the movie.)

And it seems to always be the dad getting this treatment. It could be either a son or a daughter, but it's always the distant dad who is called by his first name. Maybe that's because mothers don't tend to run out on their children, I don't know.

3 Days to Kill is so all about this, in fact, that Halee Steinfeld's character uses Kevin Costner's character's first name -- Ethan -- in practically every sentence she speaks to him. "Ethan, you were never there for me." "Ethan, why were you always traveling?" "You can't buy my love with a bike, Ethan." That kind of thing.

And though I was falling asleep as I watched the last 15 minutes of the movie the other night, the next night I went back and watched them again, just to be sure that Steinfeld does indeed deliver the goods on the second half of the transaction.

Yep: "Come inside, Dad's going to make us hot chocolate."

Moment of pleased surprise from Costner. Moment of acknowledgment and recognition from Steinfeld.

But because this movie in particular, and its director in general, are so unsubtle, we have to immediately get two more "Dad"s in consecutive sentences, just to drive the point home: "Is Dad a badass?" she asks her mother as they sit around inside, apparently waiting for him to make this hot chocolate. "Is Dad going to stick around this time?"

Oh sorry, did I just spoil the ending of 3 Days to Kill for you?

Just thank me that you now don't have to pay for a rental.

Australian Audient: A Cry in the Dark

This is the latest in my series involving movies made in Australia, watched monthly and considered in word format on this weblog.

"The dingo ate my baby!"

This may be the most famous quotation in all of Australian cinema. And like most famous quotations, it is also quoted incorrectly.

As of this week, I have now finally seen the movie that produces this misquotation.

The actual correct quote, though it's certainly less effective as a standalone line, is "The dingo's got my baby!" or possibly "A dingo's got my baby!" -- I must say I paid less attention to the definitive nature of the article that opens the quotation than its predicate. And the movie is A Cry in the Dark, the 1988 Fred Schepisi film that considers the plight of Lindy and Michael Chamberlain, whose baby disappeared on a camping trip to Ayers Rock in 1980. What actually happened became one of the most famous legal trials in Australian history.

Michael Chamberlain (Sam Neill) is a Seventh Day Adventist pastor on holiday at Ayers Rock with his wife Lindy (Meryl Streep), their two young boys and an infant daughter, Azaria. At a campsite and in full view of dozens of witnesses, Azaria goes missing after Lindy heard her cry out. Approaching the tent where she was sleeping, Lindy claims to have seen a dingo wrestling with something inside the tent and then running off into the underbrush. A massive manhunt turns up only the bloodied sleepwear of the baby as the Chamberlains give up all hope that their youngest could still be alive. No one doubts Lindy's account in the first hours after the tragedy, but extensive media coverage of the incident fuels suspicion that her story could be a fabrication -- especially given the generally tame proclivities of dingoes, as well as the likely physical difficulty of carrying out the theft of the child as described. Although an initial inquest finds the Chamberlains innocent of wrongdoing, subsequent evidence that Lindy may have murdered her child puts them on trial, with a life sentence in prison on the line.

One of the reasons public sentiment turned against Lindy was that she didn't seem to display the emotion involved with having lost a child to a dingo attack. Although Schepisi's film depicts her as quite emotional at the time of Azaria's disappearance, it takes the true-to-life approach of documenting Lindy's detachment during subsequent interviews with the media, etc. Bizarrely, Lindy (and to a lesser extent Michael) actually seemed to enjoy being in the spotlight, almost forgetting the tragic reason they were giving interviews to the media. If I were an Australian observing her demeanor in the early 1980s, I imagine I might have turned against her as well.

While Streep plays Lindy in a way that's every inch deserving of one of her many Oscar nominations, it does leave Lindy a bit problematic as a protagonist. She makes these acerbic comments about their media circus lives that sound a lot more like a perturbed sociopath than a grieving mother, and the blank expressions she displays upon hearing various accusations against her seem to belie the possibility of grief. As it is presumed that a mother's bond with her infant child, especially an infant daughter, must be one of the strongest a person can find, it is indeed puzzling why she is not more overwhelmed by outrage at being accused of slitting her daughter's throat -- in fact, at actually decapitating her, as forensic evidence indicates likely happened. While the sequence of events that could have enabled her to carry out the murder seems ridiculous indeed -- it involves her changing outfits and running over to her car to kill the baby, then returning as if nothing had happened -- her mysterious affect leads any number of logical, rational thinkers to this absurd conclusion. Naturally, certain forensic evidence and frustrating gaps in the narrative also contribute to Lindy's possible guilt, but it seems likely they never would have gotten to that point if she had just displayed her grief in a bit more of a customary fashion.

As this case is 35 years old and the outcome is likely known to many if not most people, I will SPOIL a bit here as I describe the problem with the film -- so you can duck out now if you don't know what became of the Chamberlains. The previously alluded to problem with Lindy as a protagonist is that we aren't really rooting for her -- we grow to be as suspicious of her as her fellow Australians. That in itself is not a problem, but it becomes one when the film is structured as an emotional build-up to the Chamberlains' ultimate exoneration. Although I found myself relieved that Lindy's version of events was ultimately endorsed as the official version, it's more because the world is a slightly better place if a mother didn't decide to behead her child on a camping trip. As the parent of a nine-month-old, I can't imagine such a monstrous impulse being possible. But for the purposes of this narrative, I need to feel actual joy that this character is vindicated, because of who she is and how she's personally convinced me of her innocence in the face of an uncaring legal system. Lindy never does that, so her ultimate vindication is a bit hollow.

This is no deterrent to the overall quality of the film, however, which benefits from a tight script that throws us straight into the tragic events and logically strings together the sequence of scenes that followed from them. Schepisi keeps the pace lively, as this does not feel like a two-hour film. I suppose it's not structured all that differently from any legal thriller, but the interspersed scenes of average Australians discussing the case in various public gathering spots add more to the proceedings than such scene often do. It's these frank discussions that most effectively plant the seeds of doubt in a viewer's mind, as all manner of no-bullshit Aussies engage in lively banter about the likelihood of this and the possibility of that. That the case brought some of them to fisticuffs indicates just how central it was to Australian life at the time it was happening, and also speaks charmingly of the earnest passions of this country's people.

One final interesting note about the film, which I didn't know until after I saw it: A Cry in the Dark was released in Australia as Evil Angels. While most title changes are essentially neutral in value, that cannot be said here, as the original title seems like much more of an indictment of Lindy Chamberlain. This poster also seems to find something sinister about her -- something that speaks to the rumors that her daughter was sacrificed as part of a cult ritual mandated by her marginalized Christian sect. Let's see what you think:

Kind of creepy, eh?

I'm wondering if this is why I haven't found the movie at the local video store -- I was looking under the wrong title.

Spring takes full hold of Australia in October, and I have lined up the 2014 film Tracks, about a woman who walks across the outback (!), as my next entry in this series.

Sick-day movie surprises

Forgive the misleading title, if you think I'm going to talk about how Akira Kurosawa's Kagemusha "surprised me" with how good it was. That's actually not what I want to talk about today.

Rather, I want to talk about how it is incumbent on you to watch something entirely random when you have an unexpected sick day.

First off, let me tell you about the sick day, which I hope will be just the one. On Monday night -- while I was sleeping, no less -- I threw my back out. That's what I'm calling it now after being disabused of several other theories. I woke up Tuesday feeling like I had slept on it wrong, and when the pain was still there Wednesday morning, I started going to more alarmist places. Appendicitis? Diverticulitis? Hernia? See, my groin was now involved in the pain, so I start moving away from the notion that I had just slept awkwardly.

So I called in sick today and hauled myself off to the doctor first thing in the morning. She ruled out some of my more creative self-diagnoses (slipped/herniated disc), which I thought might actually be on the mark because I self-diagnosed each of my prior two hernias (one in 2000 and one in 2008). But she did send me off to get an ultrasound to rule out the hernia, which the ultrasound actually did. So we're back to just "I slept on it wrong and it still hurts three days later," though I am officially skeptical that this is all it is.

Although I actually found myself out of the house quite a bit today (more than three hours, a lot for a sick day), I was determined to complete a daytime movie today as well. That's a true rarity in this day and age, and I definitely had a couple movies banging down my door. I need to watch both Cries and Whispers, my final Ingmar Bergman movie (so I can return them to the friend who loaned them to me), and A Cry in the Dark, my September movie in my Australian Audient series (because it's almost no longer September). 

But having two young children, perhaps I wasn't in much of a mood for crying, and ended up with Kagemusha.

I had been wanting to see a Kurosawa movie generally, and Kagemusha specifically, for some time now. Kurosawa is a bit like Bergman for me, actually, in that I count him as one of my favorite directors, yet have seen comparatively few of his films. In fact, I'm basing the "one of my favorite directors" designation off of just Seven Samurai, Yojimbo, Rashomon and Ran. I even considered, and perhaps am still considering, following up my Whole Lotta Bergman series with the far more awkwardly titled Whole Lotta 'Sawa, but the Bergman series was inspired by my direct and easy access to five of his films. I don't have that same access to Kurosawa's films, though with Kagemusha on Netflix, I should really check on some of the others.

Why Kagemusha, specifically? Well, because of that SNL skit where Chris Farley plays an American tourist on a Japanese game show, where he is expected to know all sorts of Japanese cultural trivial -- with the punishment of torture for wrong answers. Rather improbably, he actually manages one answer that is close to the right answer, and it's "Cage-moosh?" At the time I first saw the skit, I didn't know about Kagemusha, but years later when I discovered the film, I was all "That's from that SNL skit!!"

But I am wandering way off the path here.

Why Kagemusha, more generally? Because it's 160 minutes long, and I decided that was the way I really wanted to use my movie-viewing time during my sick day -- to watch something whose formidable length usually ruled it out as a contender to start at 9 or 9:30, when my wife branches off from our communal viewing for the night and catches up on some shows I don't care about.

Why Kagemusha, even more generally? Because just as I had very little idea when I started the day that I was going to call in sick -- I initially felt better when I first awoke -- I also had no idea that today would have a Kurosawa film in store. And there's something fun about that.

See, sick days are like borrowed time. You didn't really think you were going to have this time to begin with, so why use it just to tick off the next movie on your personal viewing list? I probably could have seen both Cry and Cries today, if I'd played my cards right. But sick days feel like a time to dive into the deep end of your Netflix pool, find some movie that's been in your queue for at least two years and tick that off the list instead.

So Kagemusha it was. I started around 10 a.m. and I finished at just after 5. As I said, it was a busy day for a sick day. 

Unfortunately, I didn't love it. It's an easy choice for my fifth ranked of five Kurosawa films. But that's beside the point as well. Even if a sick day is a time you are seeking out comfort, making a favorite film a valid choice as well, it's also a time when your malady might prevent you from loving whatever movie you end up seeing. Might as well take a chance on something you don't know if you'll like, but will be glad to say you saw.

Besides, if I ever find myself on a masochistic Japanese game show, maybe I can avoid getting dipped in that giant vat of soy sauce. 

Movies as horizon broadeners

One wonderful thing movies can do is take you around the world, even if you don't have a passport or the tens of thousands of dollars such a trip would require.

But today, I'm not so interested in vicariously seeing the Taj Mahal or the pyramids or the Great Wall of China. What interests me more is learning about some little pocket of the world I never knew existed, and the rules and routines of that world.

That's what The Lunchbox gave me over the weekend.

I thought there was a decent chance The Lunchbox could be mainstream adult romantic schlock (like The Hundred-Foot Journey) or the type of comedy that exaggerates its Indian characters' traits (like Bend it Like Beckham). In truth, it is a quiet, melancholy little movie that is bursting with a secret life and joy. 

Also, it taught me about the lunchbox system in Mumbai.

Turns out, there's a workplace tradition in Mumbai (falling out of favor, according to my Indian co-worker) that involves an elaborate system of bringing warm lunches to busy workers, usually made by their wives within the past hour or so, and sometimes from restaurants. These lunches are collected in a series of stacked metal tins and then thrown in cloth satchels, which are color-coded to help the oft-illiterate "dabbawalas" deliver them to the correct address. The system, which involves cycling through the rain from homes and restaurants to workplaces in rapid amounts of time, is so accurate -- generally speaking -- that a commission from Harvard University once came to study it. An unlikely flaw in the system is what gives rise to this rich and satisfying love story.

I couldn't decide which I loved more -- the food, its delivery container, or its method of delivery.

The food you have to just imagine. If you love Indian food like I do, you can imagine the kormas, the paneers, the rice and the naan. When done well, it's culinary heaven.

But I should probably show you this lunchbox. You can see it in the poster above, but this is what one looks like up close:

And here are the dabbawallas delivering the food:

I love this, and I'm sorry to hear it's going the way of the dodo. I wish someone would swing by my desk and deliver me a piping hot stack of Indian dishes protected by a cloth satchel.

Of course, this is just a backdrop for the story, which involves a chronic misdelivery of one lunch from a lonely housewife to a lonely office worker. The two strike up a correspondence via notes left in the containers, and it's really quite beautiful. 

But The Lunchbox is the kind of movie that has other delectable treats in its stack. Another way we get a sense of this movie's chockablock Mumbai is that the lonely housewife's only daytime companion is the woman who lives upstairs, known to her only as Auntie, who lowers spices down to the woman via a pulley system between their two apartments. Although the walls are thin enough that she can just shout up and have a conversation, Auntie is nonetheless distant in the following sense: We never see her, and neither does the woman. She's just a disembodied voice, an invisible confidant, tending after her husband, who's in a coma. It's this wonderful image of how people are kind of on top of each other in this city, but still hopelessly isolated.

I'm so pleased that The Lunchbox didn't remind me of either Lasse Hallstrom or Gurinder Chadha, and I can't wait to get another taste of it.

In the meantime, I am totally pricing out those lunchboxes online. 

Serious threats to my viable use of Netflix

Dear readers, a frustrating thing is happening with my computer, and it has risen to the level of annoyance that I now need to tell you about it.

My damn wifi keeps dropping.

In an age when we require an uninterrupted internet connection to properly stream movies, this really sucks.

I don't know if it's my computer (age: 3 1/2 years) that's at fault, or the weaker internet in Australia (quote from my wife's colleague: "We don't do internet well here"), or simply that my favorite viewing locations are dead spots in our house (the kitchen table and the living room couch). But the symptoms are far more consistent than the access. And they are these:

The first time the internet drops, I get a red X over the wifi icon down in the system tray. This is what's considered a "good" problem, relatively speaking. I can just close the laptop, open it again, and the internet will restore.

The second time the internet drops, it's not a red X but a yellow exclamation point. When you get the yellow exclamation point, you have no choice but to reboot the whole computer, a process that takes three to five minutes.

On rare occasions you will get multiple red X's before the yellow exclamation point, but usually not.

This, my friends, is no way to watch a movie -- especially when the cycle occurs three times in the space of five minutes of the movie's running time.

That's what happened when I tried to watch Berberian Sound Studio last night. I came home from five beers out with co-workers after work, a rollicking time indeed, and was in perfect shape to do something that I endorsed earlier this week: watch a movie you've already seen (and love) when you're in a state of unreliable concentration and diminished stamina.

I got through about 20 minutes of Berberian without a problem, but once the internet dropped once, it was just off duty for the evening. My wifi, that cantankerous bastard, went through the full cycle a second time before I'd even gotten to resume the movie from the first reboot cycle. The news seemed a little better after the second reboot, as I got to watch about three more minutes of the movie. But on the third strike, I was out.

I've tried all sorts of things to reduce the likelihood of this occurrence, like close all other tabs on my browser and watch movies in SD rather than HD. But any fixes are only ephemeral, if not illusory.

The funny thing is that an attempt to watch Berberian Sound Studio was also thwarted the previous Friday night. This time, however, it was my VPN's inability to trick Netflix into thinking I was in the U.S. The Hola plug-in has been a godsend, single-handedly allowing us to remain subscribed to our Netflix streaming plan, but it sometimes involves a little tweaking, a little turning off and turning back on. Only rarely, like last Friday night, can it just not find an available VPN server at all. I worry that this is going to be a more regular trend.

I also worry about this: http://gizmodo.com/netflix-under-pressure-to-close-down-the-vpn-loophole-1636210923

Yes indeed, we learned this week that Australia, of all countries, is putting pressure on Netflix to prevent the some 200,000 people who watch Netflix "illegally" in Australia from being able to do so. But this wouldn't just be an Australia-wide ban -- it would force Netflix to block all VPNs. So our stupid corrupt television broadcasting companies (who are in such brutal competition with each other that they often fail to tell viewers when programs are airing until just before the air date, in order to theoretically keep you glued to that network) could be screwing over the whole world.

This would be cause for much doom and gloom except for two considerations: 1) Netflix might tell Australia to go fuck itself, and 2) Netflix is actually supposed to be coming to Australia "soon" (though we've been hearing that for about a year). It'd be great to have Netflix here, but it would both be significantly more expensive than in the U.S., and have a significantly poorer selection. Like everything in Australia, they price it right to the brink of it not being worth it.

I suppose it's no coincidence that these two turns of events coincide with an uptick in my rentals from iTunes. The beautiful thing about an iTunes rental is that once it's on your computer, it's there -- it doesn't require an ongoing internet connection. Apple is also offering an attractive slate of 99 cent rental options, highlighting one a week. In the past two weeks alone, I've downloaded both Joe and The Lunchbox for 99 cents apiece, and can start watching them any time over the next 30 days -- with full knowledge that it will be an uninterrupted viewing. I've also downloaded A Cry in the Dark for $2.99, having ironically been unable to source my September selection for Australian Audient anywhere locally.

"Downloaded" may be a bit of an optimistic term, though. And here's where my frigging internet connection comes in to play again. Even though Joe appears in my iTunes rentals as available to view, every time I open iTunes it attempts to download it, projecting three or four hours of remaining download time. And it never completes those three or four hours, because -- guess what -- the internet drops before it has the chance. I fully expect to sit down to watch Joe and then realize that only 20 minutes of it are actually on my computer.

In case you were wondering, I'm just not buying a new computer. Not right now, anyway. I waited two-and-a-half months to have this one fixed around this time last year (did I tell you about that? Jesus Christ.), and while this one still has breath in it, I will continue to use it. My wife and I have talked about a device to boost our internet signal, but I can only imagine what that will cost in Australia.

In the meantime, I plan to finish my second viewing of Berberian Sound Studio sometime in October.

Penis Week on The Audient

When you watch a documentary about penises on Netflix on a Tuesday night, and you know you have exactly one other documentary about penises remaining on Netflix, might as well watch it on Wednesday night and just get the two-night double feature out of the way.

So went the thinking that resulted in consecutive-night viewings of The Final Member and Unhung Hero -- both of which I liked quite a bit.

Both films, in very different ways, get at an obsession that is universal among men: size. You could say that almost all men are fixated on the size of their penis, or at least have been at one point or another. Unless you've been told you have a gargantuan member, there's likely a part of every man that wonders if he measures up, literally and figuratively. But even if you are grotesquely well-endowed, that might also create an obsession of sorts (as we shall see in the discussion of one of these two films).

Because it's also kind of embarrassing to be concerned about your own size, I had avoided watching the one I knew was more directly related to that -- even though Unhung Hero had been on my radar for almost a year. I just didn't really want it to show up among the recently viewed titles in the Netflix account I share with my wife. However, when I watched The Final Member the same day I added it to our queue (having heard about its existence on a podcast a few months ago), I figured the opportunity for a corresponding blog post was too good to pass up, and hit play on Unhung the next night.

The title The Final Member relates to the last necessary donation to complete a unique museum in Iceland: one devoted entirely to the penis. It's the brainchild of Sigurdur "Siggi" Hjartarson, who has turned his eccentric hobby of collecting samples of animal penises into a full-fledged tourist attraction. Although he's got specimens of nearly ever mammal known to mankind, the elephant in the room is that there's no human genitals to complete the collection. This becomes an obsession for Siggi, and the movie explores how he plans to get a willing donor -- perhaps one who will even part with his junk while still alive.

An odd conceit for a movie goes from strange to stranger when we learn that an American named Tom Mitchell is so proud of his unit -- which he has nicknamed Elmo -- that not only does he want the whole world to see it, he wants to see the whole world see it. Mitchell is that volunteer for the prehumous contribution to the museum, so enamored with what God gave him that he is willing to give it up entirely just so everyone can know how great he ... was. Especially if it will make him the first donor to the museum, getting ahead of a nonagenarian Icelandic celebrity known for numerous exploits, particularly having slept with around 300 women.

I shouldn't tell you too much more about the movie, except that it is a fascinating study of truly exotic forms of obsession that stem from the very mundane obsession we all experience. There's discussion in this film not only of the greatness of particular specimens, namely that put forth by Tom Mitchell, but the potential disappointments of others, like the increasingly shriveling sample offered by the 90-something Icelander whose impending death gives the film its strangely significant sense of stakes. There's even discussion of what qualifies as the historical definition of a "legal length" -- and whether the elderly man's penis will a) make the cut, and b) be something he remains interested in sharing with the world if it doesn't.

That probably makes for a good transition to Unhung Hero, which concerns a gentleman (the Mark Duplass lookalike you see in the poster above) who has already been told that his size doesn't measure up. Patrick Moote got the wrong answer on a Jumbotron marriage proposal, and his soon-to-be-ex callously gives the following explanation for her rejection: His penis is too small for a lifetime commitment. Reeling from his public humiliation (which quickly went viral on Youtube) and the private humiliation of being considered an inadequate lover, Patrick goes about making this latter humiliation extremely public as well, agreeing to explore the question "Does size matter?" in documentary format, with himself as the prime subject. In a bit of a paradox, Patrick embarks on a sequence of events that only someone with a lot more confidence and a lot less shame than he thinks he has would ever undertake: He seeks out exes to see if they considered him small, he consults experts to determine if he is small, and then he ventures out to find ways to make himself bigger -- from scientifically valid procedures to the suspect practices of witch doctors.

I certainly enjoyed this movie's playful presentation, which might remind a viewer of the films of Morgan Spurlock (without the knack for polemics that tends to divide people on Spurlock). Director Brian Spitz gets the tone of the graphics and the cutaways ("I was in the pool! I was in the pool!") down perfectly. But what kind of floored me about it was the courage displayed by Moote, who as far as I know is the only person in history who has told the entire world that he has a small penis. Oh, I'm sure Jerry Springer had a guest who said something like that once, but the audience for this documentary -- the prospective if not the actual audience -- is theoretically much greater. A television talk show is ephemeral, watched once and then discarded, but Patrick Moote has gone on record for all time as being "the guy with the small penis." Bravo for him.

This courage forgave some of the parts of the film that I thought seemed too convenient -- i.e., possibly staged. You have to wonder in a film like this if everything is perfectly legitimate, particularly one aspect of the plot that comes home in the final act (which I won't spoil, but which is kind of already spoiled by Netflix using it as the promotional still that hangs on the screen while the movie is loading). When you've got a guy willing to risk a lifetime of public ridicule and humiliation like this, I kind of don't care if a little bit of it is scripted. The fact that this guy actually has a small penis is something that I know is real, and the bravery of this kind of naked (pun intended) exhibition of our most fundamental masculine insecurities makes him, indeed, the very hero mentioned in the title.

I will admit that after this movie I went into the bathroom and looked at "myself" in the mirror. There was a part of me that hoped that we would have actually gotten to see Patrick Moote's offerings, so those of us who, you know, wondered a bit could compare and contrast ourselves.

But in the end I'm glad that it didn't, because what both of these movies really want a viewer to do is to love his penis -- no matter what shape, or size, or attachment to his body it may have.

A favorite's ability to rivet

Exhaustion is not absolute.

You'd be tempted to think that it was. You'd be tempted to think that once you reach a certain point of the evening, no matter what someone puts on the television, your eyelids will be just as heavy, will close just as involuntarily.

Uh uh.

Take Saturday night. It had been a bit of a trying day, with our older son working on everyone's last nerve, so thank goodness that my old friend Mr. Fermented Grape was there to help me unwind. However, a couple glasses of vino also made it next to impossible for me to concentrate on the first episode of True Detective, which we'd downloaded from iTunes. It's a very deliberate, gradually paced show. I was waging a desperate battle against sleep, and losing.

You might guess that I crawled right into bed as soon as it was over, but it turns out I still had a 107-minute movie -- and several more glasses of wine -- in me.

What True Detective did for me more than anything else was put me in the mood to watch The Cell again. A girl is murdered in ritualistic fashion at the start of the show, and that sure as hell sounded like The Cell to me. Her body had that bleached-white appearance of the victims in The Cell as well.

As my last viewing of The Cell was barely 18 months ago, it is now becoming clear that this is one of my go-to movies. Since I've gotten so familiar with it -- this was probably my sixth viewing overall -- I figured, the worst that would happen was that I'd fall asleep on the couch 20 minutes in.

Nope. I was awake the whole time, reliving old pleasures, discovering new ones.

Riveted.

There's a good chance that The Cell's winning combination of engrossing police procedural and hallucinatory world building is just the perfect thing to keep a person's attention, but it may just be that being familiar with a movie makes you less likely to fall asleep than more likely. You'd think your mind would let go, free from the worry of missing a crucial plot detail, and happily succumb to sleep in that mentally restful state. Instead, I'd argue that the tension involved in assimilating an unfamiliar plot, especially while fighting sleep, serves only to further exhaust you. It compounds a difficult situation, rather than improving it.

I don't really have anything more profound to say on this topic, but I think it's worth writing about for this conclusion: The next time you aren't quite ready to wind down for the night but don't know if you can take on a whole movie, don't try something new -- just pop in something you know and love. More likely than not, you'll make it to the end -- and feel so enthralled by the experience that you might just be ready to cue up another one when you're done.

My Renton moment

Tough times will show you what a man is truly made of, how far a man will truly go.

For me, that was fishing a $2 coin out of the toilet on Saturday afternoon. A $2 coin that wasn't even mine.

Yes indeed, I was reminded a bit of Trainspotting this past weekend when I took my son to the potty at a cafe called Grub, on a beautiful spring afternoon in Melbourne. We selected a stall out of about four options, and lo and behold, shining brightly at the bottom of this particular toilet, was this:

Yes indeed, that coin is worth two whole dollars here in Australia. It's the smaller of two gold-colored coins, the other being the $1 coin, and it is in fact the most valuable of all Australian coins, there being none with greater street value.

I figured, "What's a little toilet water to keep that coin from being in my back pocket?"

So a quick splash of the hand later, it was.

You may recall that in Danny Boyle's seminal Trainspotting, the character Renton (Ewan McGregor) does his own toilet dive -- literally -- for a lost valuable, in this case a couple opium suppositories that get accidentally evacuated while he's doing his business. Of course, this is what Renton's so-called "worst toilet in Scotland" looks like:

While the porcelain monster I was staring down on Saturday was more like this:

Nonetheless, most people would be shocked by what I did. I know my wife was. Still, I probably would have done it even for the $1 coin.

It's not that we are really mired in "tough times," per se, as I teased in my opening line. But I feel like even a year into our Australian adventure, we are still financially recovering from the transition, a reality of the fact that we're only getting 60% of my wife's salary until January (when she goes back full time) and we're now paying for two children to attend daycare (one four days a week, one three). My own salary is lower than in the States (and I didn't start earning it until midway through March) and we had to buy a bunch of things over again here (though were fortunate to have a number of others gifted to us). We'd actually finally be back in positive territory, more or less, except we're likely to drop close to ten grand on a trip to the U.S. in November, which will plunge us right back into debt.

So yeah, I'm going to do an easy, painless, clean-water toilet dive for a $2 coin.

You could argue that it's hardly the most absurd thing I've ever done for a coin, especially since it took all of two seconds. There was the time earlier this year when I walked all over a mall to find the location of the Woolworth's grocery store, just so I could return the shopping cart I'd found that had a dollar coin stuck in it. (You rent your shopping cart at a lot of grocery stores here, by sticking in a $1 or $2 coin that releases the cart from the cart in front of it. If you never return the cart to its home, you forfeit the coin.)

My wife prefers the story back in the U.S., when I was crossing the street and went back into the middle to pick up a penny I'd passed, when there was a car coming. I wasn't close to being hit by the car, but for my wife, it was closer than a penny should have warranted. I have no choice but to agree with that.

But a penny saved is a penny earned, and so too is a $2 coin fished from a public toilet. 

As easy as ABC -- er, AAA

I was fascinated, though completely not surprised, by the revelations in this article at Flavorwire.

Because I know you'd much rather have me summarize the article than read it yourself, it discusses why a particular film coming out this fall was retitled Are You Here from the more definitive You Are Here.

The reason is simple: Alphabetization.

A is a lot closer to the beginning of the alphabet than Y, so when OnDemand providers list films alphabetically, you're much likelier to get to Are You Here than to wade all the way through to You Are Here before making your selection. 

I mean, the least they could have done is given it a question mark at the end.

The article discusses this phenomenon in relation to a number of other recent movies, many of which had the word American grafted on to the front to increase the movie's alphabetical visibility. The one I found most personally relevant was the film I'd actually seen, called Adore -- which, strangely enough, had a different changed title in its country of origin, Australia. When I saw the movie last fall in Australian theaters it was called Adoration. When it played at festivals, however, it was called Two Mothers. Not alphabetically opportune at all, so they changed it.

There are lot of other forms of cinematic chicanery that are probably more insidious, but for some reason, this one bothers me more than some of those others. Movie titles get changed for plenty of reasons, but most of them are about making a film more accessible in an entirely different definition of that word. In those title changes, we take "more accessible" to mean "more easily understandable and translatable." The trend discussed above is a more literal way of increasing a viewer's access to the movie, by physically positioning it more prominently in their list of options.

The big irony of this, for me personally, is that I have seen 41 movies released in 2014 -- and have yet to see one whose title begins with an A.