You're so Money, baby

I have two little rules of doing business on The Audient, and I adhere to them even if I'm the only one who cares about them.

1) I never use the same poster art to top a post more than once. If I'm going to write a second or third post about a particular movie, I'll find a different poster (or sometimes a still) from that movie as my artwork. I may reuse a poster at some point in the future, but it can only appear once on the top of the post. It can appear again somewhere in the body of the post, but not at the top. (The logic has something to do with being able to distinguish one post from another at a glance, but beyond that it's basically irrational.)

2) I never use the same title for a post twice.

I'm breaking rule #2 today -- sort of. You see, it was almost exactly a year ago that I used the title "You're so money, baby" for a post, and in fact, I'm only comfortable repeating the title this time because of the capitalization and italicization of the word "money," which technically makes it a different title. (Or so I'm telling myself.)

There are two reasons I'm willing to (sort of) break this rule:

1) Swingers quotes never go out of style.

2) I'm intentionally drawing a comparison to the post from a year ago -- triggering a sense of deja vu, if you will. That's because I'm getting a sense of deja vu from Trouble With the Curve.

The "You're so money, baby" post from September 23, 2011 was to herald the arrival of Bennett Miller's Moneyball, which went on to become a critical favorite, a (modest) hit with audiences and a best picture nominee. The producers of Trouble With the Curve would simply love it if those three outcomes followed from the arrival of their film.

The movies have more than a release date in the September 20s in common. On the most obvious level, they're both about baseball. More specifically, they're both about the side of baseball we don't see on the field. Even more specifically, they deal with scouting. In fact, you could say that Clint Eastwood's character in this film might have walked out of an Oakland A's scouting meeting after bristling at some idea espoused by that young whippernsapper Billy Beane.

Even more specifically than all that, the posters for both movies feature a talent evaluator whose body is pictured leaning forward at about the same angle. Consider Brad Pitt's posture in this Moneyball poster:

Must really chap Eastwood's ass to be forced by the marketing department to so closely imitate an unwashed hippie like Brad Pitt.

(If you're looking for more comparisons, one of the central focuses of both films is the lead character's relationship with his daughter.)

Outside of direct imitation, though, what we're seeing here is the notion that late September is the perfect time, psychologically, for a viewer to consume a contemplative meditation on baseball. Late in the baseball season is the new season for prestige baseball movies, and I wouldn't be surprised if we saw another one hit theaters on September 20th of 2013.

And if the marketers have done their jobs right, this movie will catch audiences in the moment of their greatest readiness for Trouble With the Curve, meaning at least one of those three desired outcomes -- the modest hit with the audience part -- will come true.

If they've done their jobs right, Clint Eastwood won't have to spend this weekend talking to a bunch of empty chairs.

Now lying at Blockbuster

I got an email just now from Blockbuster, a residual effect of having been a former subscriber to their DVD-through-the-mail service. (Which I actually really liked, and only abandoned so my wife and I could consolidate to one account -- her Netflix account. Oh, and because Blockbuster is going out of business.)

I get an email from them maybe once a week, but the subject of this one caught my attention:

"Now Showing at Blockbuster: Cabin in the Woods & End of Watch."

And I thought to myself, "Isn't End of Watch that movie whose trailer I just saw on Monday, that's coming out this Friday? You know, with Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Pena?"

Yep, that End of Watch.

Now, I know Blockbuster has, in the past, boasted exclusives -- movies (usually movies you've never heard of, with B-list stars) that can only be rented from Blockbuster for some finite window of time. But these movies have been of the straight-to-video variety. Certainly not theatrical releases, and certainly not theatrical releases that have not even been theatrically released yet.

So I dug into the email. The first section was about Cabin in the Woods. Then came a section of featured moves, flanked by a section of featured games. Then a bit about saving 50% off all previously viewed movies. Then an advertisement for EA Sports' FIFA 13 video game. Then a section about getting recommendations from Blockbuster's "real-life movie experts."

And then finally a bit that says "End of Watch, in theaters September 21." And next to that: "Bring Jake Home Tonight," and a shot of Gyllenhaal from the movie next to three of his previous starring vehicles: Love & Other Drugs, Source Code and Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. Then a button that says "Rent One Tonight."

Really?

Has it gotten so bad for Blockbuster that they are now trying to trick us into thinking they have exclusive access to movies that have not even hit theaters yet?

Given that some movies are now available on VOD even before they hit theaters, this isn't an entirely ridiculous strategy. The ridiculous part is that anyone who cared (such as yours truly) could easily unmask the strategy and identify it as a blatant case of false advertising. It's promising something you can't deliver, which is a really, really bad idea in business. And it's almost as though Blockbuster knew this, which is why the reference to End of Watch is buried deep enough in the email to discourage casual investigation. I guess the very short-sighted idea is to excite you enough to get you to open the email, but then immediately make you forget why you were originally excited.

It pains me to write such an "exposé" about Blockbuster, because I always liked their customer service and always rooted for their business model to succeed. But a lack of success has reduced them to cheap bait-and-switch tactics. Almost better to just bow out gracefully, methinks.

The timing of this email couldn't be worse in terms of my own impression of the chain. One advantage Blockbuster continues to have over Netflix and Redbox is that it gets certain new releases up to 28 days before the two healthier DVD rental outlets. This came into play on Saturday, when I was trying to find a new release for us to watch that night (as you remember, we ended up with The Dictator from Redbox).

So I determined to swing by Blockbuster and see what they had. I know I'm still in their records, even though I don't even know where my rental card is anymore. The last time I rented from them, all I had to do was give them my driver's license. Fortunately, I do know where that is.

The problem? Not only was the Blockbuster closest to my house no longer in operation, but the second closest Blockbuster had also shuttered. I swear, the last time I checked, both of these locations were still afloat. Not anymore, I guess. Not remembering where the third closest one was -- and not being sure it would be open, even if I found it -- I abandoned this course of action and just settled on Redbox.

For Blockbuster, the title End of Watch has a real metaphorical significance.

Treading water

Yesterday, I saw my 36th film released in 2012. (John Hillcoat's Lawless).

If I want to get to last year's total of 121 before my late January ranking deadline, I'll have to see 85 more films from 2012 in just over four months. That's more than 20 per month -- a high total even if I were to forgo watching my usual complement of older films.

So yeah, I ain't gonna be seeing another 121 films before the morning the Oscar nominations are announced. But at this point it's looking like even 100 films is pretty unrealistic.

Which is why it was sort of disappointing I ended up watching The Dictator a second time on Saturday night. 

My wife and I had talked about watching something new for our Saturday night movie, and I was all excited to add to my paltry total of 2012 films. But the Redbox options were pretty thin. The most interesting choices I scouted at a kiosk on Saturday afternoon were The Woman in Black, Lockout, Mirror Mirror and Man on a Ledge. Really, I'm not even interested in Man on a Ledge, but I took it down as a possibility because both my wife and the movie's star (Sam Worthington) are Australian. (Similar logic held for Guy Pearce and Lockout, though I am interested in seeing Lockout.)

She did some of her own research online, and mentioned two titles: The Dictator and Bernie.

Both of which I'd already seen.

Both of which I'd really liked, but both of which I'd already seen.

She knew I'd seen them -- actually, she'd forgotten I'd seen Bernie -- but her response to my four movies was less than listless. Which I certainly understand. If you don't watch that many movies these days, you want the ones you do watch to be good. Most people aren't just checking things off lists, like I am. (And toward that end, at least now I know I'm clear to watch those four movies on my own.)

She wouldn't have forced me into The Dictator or Bernie, but I was in an agreeable mood, so I gave her the choice of which one she wanted to see more. She chose The Dictator. And so it was written, and so it was done.

And so I got another large helping of Sacha Baron Cohen offending all races, religions and people of refined tastes in equal measure.

As it happens, this stuff plays a lot better on a first viewing.

But I didn't go into the viewing feeling pessimistic about it. After all, there's a precedent for this kind of thing. It was around this time last year that I watched Greg Mottola's Paul for the second time, under similar circumstances. I had already seen and loved it, and I wanted my wife to do the same.

The big difference? I felt the active desire to see Paul a second time, while I suspected that The Dictator would not survive another viewing in my good graces.

Indeed.

But another big difference is where I find myself within the ranking year. Right now, I'm staring at my lowest total of movies in a year since I started writing this blog back in 2009, and probably for a couple years before that. Which shouldn't be a huge surprise. With each passing year, my responsibilities increase, and my free time to fritter away on movies grows less and less. Even if I know it's probably inevitable, it's still depressing.

I'm choosing to look at my second viewing of The Dictator as a blessing in disguise, though. Since watching it the first time -- the night before it came out, if you remember this post -- I've heard several people say they utterly detested it. Which got me wondering if it was just my release-eve screening and the vibe people had going that made me like The Dictator so much -- that made me, in fact, declare it the best of Cohen's three star vehicles.

My second viewing disabused me of some, though not all, of those notions. The four stars I had deliriously given it on Letterboxd should clearly be revised down to at least a 3.5, possibly even a 3. And some of the things that made me laugh the first time just made me groan this time.

But even as I treaded more water on assembling my 2012 list, I did gain a benefit from seeing The Dictator a second time. Now I won't go and do something foolish like put it in my top 10 for the year. In fact, I came very close to putting last year's Hall Pass in my top 10, until I watched that again before my deadline. It only went down to #12, but that felt better than at #8, where it had been previously. (Out of 121 movies. Yes, I know how that looks.)

In an ideal world, you'd see all the movies you could possibly see in a given year -- and then before you finished your rankings, you'd see them again. Only then could you really have a good sense of what belongs where.

The reason for this is pretty simple: context. Our feelings toward movies are so dependent on context that a single viewing of a movie can often be skewed in one direction or another by a very good or a very bad viewing scenario. Over two viewings, the context averages out a bit and becomes less important. You could say that The Dictator desperately needed a second viewing, to offset the unusual circumstances of watching it in a packed theater with a game crowd on the night before it opened. You could say that for me to assess it in a way that more accurately represented my true feelings toward it, The Dictator desperately needed a second viewing at home on the couch, one where I was cringing with the sense of personal responsibility for every offensive thing Cohen's character said or did. (You see, a certain ownership comes with recommending a movie.) My wife has a good sense of humor and laughs at many of the same things I do, and to be honest, this kind of cringing is key to the bite of Cohen's comedy. But I still felt embarrassed a couple times at the enthusiasm of my prior endorsement, given the true comedic quotient of what was up on screen.

The true quality of The Dictator probably lies somewhere between the two.

Maybe I'll discover that on my third viewing next month.

Cinematic good samaritan, or just selfish?

One of my favorite films of the last few years is John Cameron Mitchell's Rabbit Hole. With a lesser script and lesser talented involved, the story of parents grieving the death of their young son could have become a maudlin, treacly affair. But with director Mitchell, screenwriter David Lindsay-Abaire (adapting his own play) and actors Nicole Kidman, Aaron Eckhart, Dianne Wiest, Sandra Oh and Miles Teller giving great performances, it's an understated masterpiece that hits all the right notes and packs an emotional wallop.

I've seen it twice already. Which is two times more than my wife -- until yesterday.

Although I've told her it's great, I had not been pressuring her to see it. You see, we have a two-year-old son, and I thought Rabbit Hole's death of a four-year-old boy -- off-screen and in the past though it is -- might be too intense for her. So with it waiting patiently for her in our Netflix instant queue, I thought I'd let her come to it at her own speed -- which she did yesterday afternoon, while I was at a 1:45 show of The Master at the Arclight in Hollywood.

Our son had a very long nap yesterday -- so long, in fact, that she was prompted to go check on him during the movie, for reasons that are quite understandable given its subject matter. That woke him up, so she didn't get to finish the viewing. When I started feeding him dinner in the other room at around 6, she decided to put on the last 20 minutes.

But we don't have a door you can close to separate where he eats from the living room. It's around a corner, but that does nothing for the noise pollution. And with this close proximity, and the fact that she usually feeds him dinner, she couldn't help reacting to the typical ebbs and flows of his eating experience -- him shouting that he wanted to get down, him throwing food on the floor, that kind of thing. (I'm surprised he doesn't starve himself, since he barely eats anything these days.)

Having this racket going on while she tried to absorb the emotional climax of the movie? That just wouldn't do.

At first I suggested to her that she wait until after he was asleep. She emphatically told me that she wanted to continue now, and that she would not be distracted.

Fat chance.

Remembering how I'd gotten misty-eyed during the final scene -- both times I've watched it -- I decided I had to take matters into my own hands.

My son rejected half of the cheese I gave him and almost all of the tamalitos (a small Mexican dish that sort of resembles ravioli), so it was on to the yogurt phase of dinner. And I decided he could sit and eat yogurt outside just as well as he could sit and eat yogurt in his high chair.

So we relocated to some lawn furniture outside, where he ate a few more bites of the yogurt, while letting most of the rest of it dribble down both of our clothing. Seriously, I don't know how this kid isn't starving.

Then he wandered up to the back door and shouted "OPEN THE DOOR!"

I knew I had about ten more minutes of the film still playing inside, so I used whatever was available to distract him. I got some good mileage out of the washing machine, even though I worry about him breaking it by pushing all the buttons, and even though the door smacked against the back door to our kitchen every time he opened it -- another sound I worried might summon her from the couch. I eventually took him away and played "Ready Set Go" with him a couple times -- a game that basically involves me saying "Ready ... Set ... Gooooooo!" and then running just behind him to some point maybe 30 feet away. And then repeating in the other direction.

When I heard my wife in the kitchen, and came into view just in time to see her going for the box of tissues, I knew that my maneuver had paid off.

But I started to wonder afterward whether I had done the thing that was best for her, or best for me. Clearly, I saw it as my responsibility to create for her the conditions necessary to appreciate the ending of Rabbit Hole with as few distractions as possible. But was this for her benefit, or mine?

In other words, did I care that she got a clean viewing of Rabbit Hole so that she could fully appreciate a great film that she may see only this one time, or did I want her to love it so that loving it would be something that we could share? Less magnanimously, the second point could be distilled as follows: Did I merely want my own recommendation of Rabbit Hole to be validated, to support the fact that my own recommendations can be trusted?

It's an interesting question. It makes me wonder how much of watching good movies is about just watching good movies, and how much is about validating tastes. As a critic (out of work though I may be), I clearly want other people to get the most out of movies I recommend to them. Watch enough movies I've recommended in a setting where you can't give them your full attention, and perhaps you start to trust my recommendations less. And if you start doubting a critic's recommendations, it's a bit like wondering whether your mechanic is really capable of replacing your transmission, whether your surgeon is actually capable of fixing your balky knees.

With my wife, the point is probably moot anyway. Even though she doesn't seek out movies the way she used to and the way I still do, one thing we've always had in common is our tastes about what makes a good movie. Even if Rabbit Hole hadn't been a slam dunk for her, she wouldn't have held it against me.

However, in the case of Rabbit Hole, I think my more magnanimous motivation for moving my son outdoors wins out. It's such a good movie that I simply didn't want the experience to be tainted for her. It's the kind of movie that puts a spring in your step, even though it's full of sadness -- just because it reminds you what a film can accomplish by taking a simple, no-fuss approach to good material. (In that sense, it is a sign of incredible maturity for Mitchell, whose previous films -- Hedwig and the Angry Inch and Shortbus -- are heavy on style and artifice, and still quite good.)

Oh, and having a cast of actors at the top of their game doesn't hurt.

A title that could describe its director

It would be an understatement to say I'm excited for the new Paul Thomas Anderson movie.

I'm so excited, and want to so little advanced footage to bias me one way or another, that I actually bowed my head while the trailer was playing before Celeste and Jesse Forever on Monday. So I heard the trailer, but didn't watch it, in keeping with my strict avoidance policy with regards to promotional material for The Master.

Reason: Few directors are as capable of surprising us as Anderson. When I go to see his movie this weekend, I want those surprises to flow over me like a tide of rushing water.

After all, The Master is the latest work from our current master of cinema.

Paul Thomas Anderson has made just five feature-length movies prior to this one, and I haven't wholeheartedly embraced all of them. But it's hard not to look back at those five films and see a creative talent of great vision and ambition. His stinginess -- after a relatively prolific start to his career, he's given us only two films in the past decade -- is part of his mystique.

The true greats -- like his collaborator in There Will Be Blood, Daniel Day Lewis -- take time to perfect their craft, even and perhaps especially if it means their fans have to wait. Perhaps I'm just used to this kind of thing, as my favorite band -- Nine Inch Nails -- used to routinely take five-and-a-half-years between new albums. When The Master hits theaters today -- at least in my market -- it will have been nearly five years since There Will Be Blood blew the doors off our expectations of what Anderson can accomplish.

Like many people given the privilege of directing a film, Anderson started modestly. His 1996 debut, Hard Eight, is perhaps the very definition of modesty. It concerns a downtrodden gambler (John C. Reilly) and the father figure (Philip Baker Hall) who takes him under his wing, in an attempt to turn the man's life around through perfecting the very endeavor at which he had failed (gambling). There's more to it than that, and the film also features such big names as Gwyneth Paltrow and Samuel L. Jackson. But it's essentially a small character study, painted in intimate strokes.

Anderson threw modesty out the window -- literally and figuratively -- the following year with the masterpiece Boogie Nights. Not only did it include porn, prosthetic penises and mounds of cocaine, but the movie was a stylistic tour-de-force, as grandiose and ambitious as Hard Eight was quiet and contemplative. The film also represented Anderson's first instance of expertly imitating the style of another master, which he has done several times during his career. (In fact, I almost called this post "The Master ... of disguise?," except that I could only come up with two convincing examples of Anderson aping another director's style). Boogie Nights could have just as easily been made by Martin Scorsese, and people would include it in the conversation when discussing Scorsese's best films.

The director confounded me personally with his next film, Magnolia, in 1999. It wasn't because I considered the film bad -- in fact, in many ways it was more ambitious than even Boogie Nights. Rather, it was because I thought Anderson's tendency toward imitation overwhelmed him this time. I found Magnolia to owe entirely too much to the films of Robert Altman, specifically Short Cuts, a favorite of mine. Both this film and Short Cuts deal with a dozen or so intersecting lives, take place in Los Angeles, have a ridiculously epic climax, and run three hours in length. However, my initial reaction to Magnolia soon subsided, and I decided that I felt confounded by it because it had discomfited me in some way -- which is almost always a good thing when watching a movie. One of the first things I learned about my wife is that she loves this movie, and as it happens, a discussion last week led to my renting it from Netflix so we'll have it available to watch again -- whenever we seem to unexpectedly have three hours at our disposal.

So as not to pigeonhole himself as an auteur only capable of painting on a large canvas, Anderson went intimate again with Punch-Drunk Love in 2002. And as a great indication of the many ways Anderson is capable of touching many different movie fans, I know a number of people who consider this his greatest achievement. As though intentionally trying to challenge himself, Anderson took Adam Sandler and said "I can make a great film with this guy, and show you a side of him you've never seen." He certainly did that. I may not love Punch-Drunk Love as much as its ardent fans, but it's another film that ages well in my mind, as ambitious with sound, framing and just plain eccentricity as his two previous films are ambitious with scope. It's a love story literally like no other.

Anderson's first five-year layoff then followed, and the results were a spectacular return to epic form. There Will Be Blood was, for many critics, one of the most vital American films in a decade, the 2007 version of Oscar's annual failure to recognize the best film made that year. On the strength of the towering performance by Day-Lewis, Blood is a masterpiece of sound and vision, featuring such details as an anachronistic score by Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood, an opening 20 minutes that contain no dialogue, a grand American story of enterprise, greed, violence and corruption, and breathtaking cinematography of the plains that earned this film comparisons to the great westerns of old. Many critics listed it as the best film made in the first decade of the 21st century.

So now we wait to see what will be Anderson's encore after his masterpiece -- or perhaps, just the latest in a string of masterpieces. It's easy to imagine that our master may have made another Masterpiece, and a number of critics have already proclaimed it such.

I'll be finding out soon. Real soon.

These are the times when it makes me giddy to be a cinephile. 

I watched The Rookie before Christ was born

I haven't written about it much, but one of my new cinematic websessions is called Letterbox'd (www.letterboxd.com).

I'm sure it does the same things as a hundred other movie database websites. It allows you to rank and review movies, then use the reviews of a network of friends to determine which movies you might like. It also allows you to make lists and keep a running diary of the order you watch your movies, including day and date. Nothing earth-shattering -- but I like it for the simple reasons that it's got a nice design and it serves a need.

See, if I record the dates of all the movies I see, I don't have to worry about the many movie lists I keep on my computer at home, if my computer dies and I don't have a recent backup. The list I'm most directly duplicating through Letterbox'd is a Microsoft Word document called "movie order," which has the date of every movie I've seen since February 22, 2002.

I have a number of other lists I keep, such as an alphabetical listing of all the movies I've seen, lists of movies I've seen by release year, etc. But only the list of movies I've seen in order would be necessary to help me rebuild these other lists in the event of a catastrophic data loss. That's essentially the "list of record," where every movie I see is delineated in order -- reminding me both what I saw, and what secondary lists I therefore need to update.

And so for the past nine months I've been steadily adding the contents of "movie order.doc" into Letterbox'd, going in backwards chronological order from January of this year, when I first discovered the site. I made quick and steady progress back to the end of 2005, then took a break for a couple months. Just lately I've picked up again, and am now back to July of 2002, with only a couple dozen more titles to enter before I'm all caught up. At which point I will begin the process of adding the many titles I watched before I started keeping track of the dates I saw them -- just to be completist.

See, when you add a new movie, you are given the choice of whether to specify the date you saw it. Once you click that box, it defaults to the current date -- the most relevant date for most Letterbox'd users, who probably add new movies as soon as they've seen them. But to add older movies, you can drill down into the date field and move back in time -- a day, a month, a year, a decade. Which has all been very useful in my current project.

Only yesterday afternoon, when adding John Lee Hancock's The Rookie -- which I watched on July 8, 2002 -- did I realize how far back you can go.

For my purposes, I hadn't needed to go back beyond the page that includes the years from 1994 to 2005. But I assumed (correctly) that you could go back earlier than that. Don't forget about my list-obsessed, film-obsessed predecessors, who have been keeping movie lists for decades longer than I have. Letterbox'd would need to cater to them as well.

So I clicked back 12 years at a time and saw that indeed, the days and dates went back through the 1980s, 1970s, 1960s, 1950s, 1940s, 1930s and so on, all the way back to when the Lumiere brothers were first introducing us to a concept called "moving pictures." Never mind that this gives you the option of saying that you saw a movie decades before it was made. So what if you want to say you watched Inception in 1914? That's your business.

I did, however, find it funny to note that they've programmed calendar dates back to a time before movies even existed. It's one thing to say you watched a particular movie before it was made. It's another to say that you watched a particular movie before any movies were made.

Yet here was Letterbox'd, honoring my request to go back through the centuries. The 1800s went by in a flash, and then it was on to the 1700s, back to before the Revolutionary War. And soon, here was The Rookie, a movie about a baseball coach who gets to pitch in the major leagues for the first time after his 40th birthday, being watched by the pilgrims as they were landing on Plymouth Rock.

But it didn't stop there. Here was Columbus making his own North American landfall. Here was the Magna Carta being signed. Here was Lief Ericson sailing the seas and landing in North America 500 years before Columbus. (Incidentally, why does so much of the history I know have to do with who landed in North America, and when?)

And then came a thousand years where who knows what the hell was going on, and finally, back to the year zero: the birth of Christ. I tell you, The Rookie was a real hit with the shepherds and wisemen, who shared myrrh-flavored popcorn while watching the film projected on the side of the manger.

I decided to give this little exercise a rest around 350 B.C. Then I went forward and set my viewing of The Rookie as December 25, 0000. Which was a Monday, in case you were wondering.

The site wasn't entirely able to comply with my request. In my diary, it showed the viewing as occurring on December 25, 0001. Then when I clicked in to adjust the date, it assumed I must have been talking about 2001 and gave me dates from that year to adjust. Except, duh, The Rookie didn't even come out until the spring of 2002. Stupid website!

Okay, going back to when Christ was born was too much. So I decided on a more reasonable, yet still ridiculous, date: February 1, 1852. A good 40 years before anything like a movie was seen by anyone.

Yep. It took it that time. When I went in to edit the date, I did indeed have the option of admitting I'd made a mistake, and that I had in fact seen The Rookie on February 2nd, 1852, not February 1st.

Letterbox'd at least does have rules when it comes to the future. Although you can sail forward as many centuries into the future as you want -- I stopped at the year 3000 -- you don't have the ability to select any of the days. In computer parlance, they are "grayed out." So you can't actually say you watched a movie on a day that hasn't occurred yet.

So to summarize:

Time travel into the past? Entirely possible. We're withholding judgment pending further inquiry.

Time travel into the future?

Now that's absurd.

Tony Scott would roll over in his grave

I'm not saying that Tony Scott was some great master of the English language -- in fact, I have no idea whether he was or not.

But I do think he would have been troubled by this email that went out to those of us on the Cinespia distribution list this week.

Cinespia is an organization that hosts screenings of classic movies in the Hollywood Forever cemetery on Saturday nights in the summer. We haven't been in ages, but I did see The Philadelphia Story and Kubrick's Lolita there. Wine, cheese, bread, and probably something like olives were involved, if I remember correctly.

It's not really practical for us to go these days. Without the hermetically sealed environments we bring with us at the drive-in, our son could be quite the problem for the surrounding patrons if he couldn't get to sleep and insisted on making lots of noise. But I do still like to look at the emails, to imagine I might be going, to imagine I might be whittling pieces of pepperoni off a long stick and matching them with a slice of brie and a fancy cracker like I did those other two times. And of course watching a movie.

This week's email promoting True Romance gave me pause, however. Why don't I type it out here for you and see what you think? My comments inserted in brackets.

"Director Tony Scott will always be remembered for his energetic action films, but True Romance proves he can deliver a genuine love story.

[Would you really call it a love story? I mean, it is, but is it?]

"The action is there, all right, in all its raw glory, like the now-legendary scene with Dennis Hopper and Christopher Walken, but the romance is there too in spades.

[Bad choice of word, "spades," if you consider the way Hopper baits Walken into killing him by saying that he and other Italians are descended from blacks. "You're part eggplant," Hopper tells Walken. Also, that scene is not "action" -- it's dialogue followed by a quick execution.]

New paragraph:

"Outlaw lovers Alabama and Clarence are on the run to Hollywood after they accidentally steal a suitcase from the mob.

[Since this is basically the only description of the plot, I'd like a little more detail please.]

"Patricia Arquette is compelling, adorable and ultimately, fierce as a she-lion as her and her soulmate are pursued by terrifying villains.

["Fierce as a she-lion"? The commas are a bit screwy in this sentence as well. "Her and her soulmate" -- take out "her soulmate" and it reads as "her [is] pursued by terrifying villains." Also, what a generic way to refer to the film's antagonists: "terrifying villains."]

New paragrah:

"The glib and cheeky script by Quentin Tarantino made him a household word, and the cast boasts over a dozen fantastic stars among them: Brad Pitt, Val Kilmer, Samuel Jackson, Gary Oldman, James Gandolphini, Mike Rappaport, Bronson Pinchot and the sly, wolfish Christian Slater.

[A person is a household name, not a household word. Also, Tarantino reached that status possibly from Reservoir Dogs, definitely from Pulp Fiction, but not from True Romance. Most people are not usually aware of a film's screenwriter. Also, is it really accurate to call his script "glib"? James Gandolfini does not spell his name with a ph, and I don't think anyone but his friends probably refer to Michael Rappaport as "Mike." Also, isn't it customary to include Samuel Jackson's middle initial? These "fantastic stars" should really be referred to properly. Lastly, "sly and wolfish"? This writer needs to work on his/her adjectives.]

"Join us under the stars to watch this modern Bonnie and Clyde and to celebrate the career and life of Tony Scott.

[Can't this weekend. Busy.]

I don't think being a grammar bully makes a person seem particularly magnanimous, though I do indeed do it from time to time. But come on, this is replete with errors and just plain misleading characterizations.

This grammar bully does need to see True Romance again, though. I've definitely warmed to it over the years to the point where I feel fondly toward it, but when I originally saw it, I thought it was a direct ripoff of Terence Malick's Badlands (perhaps because it uses the same exact steel drum theme song, Carl Orff's "Schulwerk: Musica Poetica"). I also found Christian Slater's Elvis obsession to seem a bit too faux cool, even back then.

Also, I think I found Slater a bit too sly and wolfish. 

Monday matinees

I wouldn't say I've been exactly killing it at work lately.

Oh, I'm not disappointing anyone -- I'm answering all my emails and fulfilling my requests in a timely fashion. But I haven't been striving a whole lot, and there are times I worry about that more often than others.

It was during one of these periods of worry last Friday that I volunteered to start coming in at 5 a.m. on Monday mornings.

You see, my company -- a party rental company -- has been rolling out a new version of the rental software. So far, the rollout has focused on locations on the West Coast. But now it's time to hit up our East Coast sites, and we don't have a technician in the Eastern time zone.

On Friday, I overheard a conference call between one of the trainers and a couple of my co-workers. There was frustration being expressed on both sides, with the trainers wanting us to do more prep work to minimize the possibility of technical problems on the go-live day, and my side explaining that certain problems were impossible to prepare for and would inevitably arise. At one point, I heard the trainer say "Are you going to come in at 5 a.m. to help them on Monday?"

Why, yes. Yes, perhaps I will.

The question wasn't directed at me, but I popped into my boss' office about 15 minutes later and volunteered to do it. He was incredibly pleased. "It'll just be for a month or so, right?" I asked. "Yeah, six weeks," he responded.

No problem.

Of course, I probably wouldn't have been so quick to volunteer if I didn't immediately sense the opportunity this schedule provided me.

On Mondays, my wife takes my son down to daycare, and I pick him up. I'm usually there to get him around 4, but we technically have until 5:30 before we're actually late to pick him up. Just lately I've realized that the traffic is not that much worse if I wait longer, so I've been trying to fit in errands or other time-killers, to get a little time to myself between my duties at work and my duties as a parent.

With my normal 7:00 to 3:30 schedule, I don't have time for anything more than a couple short errands.

Working 5:00 to 1:30, on the other hand, would allow me to see a movie before I have to pick him up.

As long as I can get to something that starts by 2:30, or even quarter to three (if it's short), I'm in the clear to hit a matinee ... and just hope that waking up at ten past four doesn't leave me comatose in the theater.

Yesterday's first installation of the new schedule was not a great way to start. Four friends and I had gone to the Los Angeles County Fair the previous evening, meaning I didn't get back to my house until just before 11, having indulged on too much food and too much beer. This after I'd gotten only four hours' sleep the night before (I started Silent House after midnight on Saturday, a kind of celebration after cleaning up in my poker game).

But Zombie Me made it into the office at 4:59 nonetheless, and good thing too -- my first two hours may have been my busiest of the day.

When 1:30 finally rolled around, I was still standing -- barely. And Celeste and Jesse Forever was still starting at 2:05 at the nearby Arclight. Hard to believe, since this little movie had been out for a month, and I had already flirted with seeing it several times. I figured it wouldn't last this Friday's new releases, and it was only 89 minutes -- a perfect length for a body on the verge of collapse.

I figured I should probably get the largest caffeinated soda the Arclight would sell me, but I was already reeling from the fact that there was no matinee price at this theater, meaning I was paying a full $12.50 to see a movie on a Monday afternoon. Besides, I'd drank two consecutive Diet Cokes just to keep me going in the past two hours. Since I didn't feel like taking on any more liquid, I'd have to hope that the lingering effects of that caffeine intake would sustain me.

And I did survive the whole movie without falling asleep. Even though I wasn't getting the small bursts of adrenaline that laughter provides.

Yeah, I didn't really dig this movie. While it's not a straight comedy -- there are times when it feels like a downright drama -- I figured that its comically talented stars (Rashida Jones and Andy Samberg) would be good for a few laughs. As it turns out, not really. The lack of laughs would have been alright if I'd found the movie poignant, but it failed me there as well.

I won't go into too much of a review of Celeste and Jesse, except to say that it commits dual sins: it's way too formulaic in parts, but it's also way too scattershot and unconventional in others. It's basically a mixed bag of mediocre filmmaking, which is disappointing also because I realized afterward that it was directed by Lee Toland Krieger, whose The Vicious Kind really worked for me a couple years ago.

It pains me to say this, but it was Rashida Jones who kind of let me down here. Serving as a co-writer in addition to executive producer and star, Jones is probably the most dominant single creative force behind the film. And though I love her -- really, I've had a thing for her ever since she first appeared as Jim's new girlfriend on The Office -- I don't know if she's quite capable of carrying a film. (It ends up being her story much more than it is Samberg's.) There are some people who are simply delightful in a supporting role, but they just don't fly when someone makes them the lead. That could be the case with Jones, though I never would have guessed it coming in, given the ample charisma she's brought to everything she's done.

Of course, I can't discount the fact that it may just be a bad idea to see any movie after you've only had eight hours of sleep in the previous two nights.

Maybe I'll use next Monday's 1:30 release as an opportunity to go swimming in the nearby Pacific Ocean. That'll certainly wake me up.

After all, watching movies is not the only thing you don't get to do as much of when you're a husband, a father and a new homeowner.

But the pull of this unique Monday matinee opportunity will be strong enough on most weeks to bring me back to the theater.

I mean, I'm a guy who loves movies -- which, like Celeste and Jesse, is also forever.

The worst children's movies Netflix has to offer

Now that my son's second birthday is two weeks in the rearview mirror, it's open season on catching up on all the animated movies I've never seen.

I'm exaggerating a little here. If I think they might be good movies, I want to save them for a time when he'll appreciate them more. At least, that's what I'm thinking at the moment.

But we lifted our ban on letting our son watch television that's intended for him, and the way we're starting is with movies. When he gets old enough to start demanding particular TV shows, I imagine that's where this will go. But for the time being, I don't know those TV shows. I just know movies.

And I know my son likes dogs, so when I saw that Don Bluth's All Dogs Go to Heaven was among the family movies Netflix was recommending I watch on Sunday morning, I decided to give it a shot.

Oh lord, no.

Now, I should preface this by saying that I have a soft spot for Don Bluth, the former Disney animator who broke off from the Mouse House and started making his own movies in the early 1980s. The Secret of N.I.M.H was one of my favorite movies growing up -- and is also one of the aforementioned movies available for streaming that I want to show my son when he's older. I was also obsessed with the video game Dragon's Lair, which he animated. It would be no exaggeration to say that Dirk the Daring was one of my favorite heroes growing up, such that I even wrote a novel (what passes for a novel when you're 12) detailing the adventures of a very similar character. I also thought the first Land Before Time was fine, and think that An American Tail is probably a good movie (I haven't seen it).

But lesser Bluth? Avoid it all costs.

All Dogs Go to Heaven is a children's movie in name and animation style only. It involves two criminal dogs, voiced by Burt Reynolds and Dom Deluise, who are double-crossed by a gangster partner. The dog voiced by Reynolds is the victim of a mob hit in which a car runs over him while he's standing, drunk, at the end of a pier. This is off screen, but we're not off to a good start, are we? The low life dog ends up in heaven, but tries to cheat death by going back to earth. See, he finds the pocket watch that corresponds to his soul, and winds it so it starts ticking again -- this despite the loud protests from an angelic female dog, who warns him that by doing what he's doing, he won't be able to come back to heaven. But indeed "Charlie B. Barkin" does return to earth, where he "saves" an orphan girl from the clutches of the gangster dog who offed him. See, this gangster dog (Carface Carruthers by name) had the girl in his possession because this girl is skilled at picking the winner of races that occur between rats in an underground gambling ring. (You still with me? You planning to show your kids this?) It's not all that magnanimous of a gesture, though, because Charlie and his sidekick take the girl to a bunch of other tracks -- horse racing, etc. -- in order to make bets on those races. With the money they win on these bets, the dogs open their own speakeasy (this is New Orleans of the distant past), but the gangster dog is still out there, trying to kidnap the girl back and finish the job of killing Charlie.

Um, yes, this is the movie.

To make matters worse, there are a bunch of bad -- I mean really, really, bad and forgettable -- songs, which are about as perfunctory as you can imagine. Also, the animation is just terrible. The year 1989 was the same year that animation was kind of reborn when Disney released The Little Mermaid, and the difference between these two movies is about as extreme as you can get. It's obvious how little money Bluth had, which is why these scruffy characters -- in personality and design -- walk around against these washed-out backdrops, drab and colorless. It's as obvious as can be that the characters and their surroundings are on two different planes of the animation field, neither of which looks any good.

I felt that rather than introducing my son to something, I was subjecting him to something.

He did say "doggies!" a couple times. But these dogs are so un-cute and unwholesome and just plain dispiriting that he didn't pay attention for all that long. And there was a scary scene, involving a nightmare the dog was having featuring lightning bolts and other general unpleasantness, where he started saying "No" -- not in a freaked out way, but just "No, this is not enjoyable to watch, thank you very much."

We didn't watch much more.

Though I did finish the movie later during his nap.

I don't know that I've ever given an animated movie one star out of five before. I guess there's a first time for everything.

I can barely wait to see what we might have in store next Sunday morning ...

Getting acquainted with ... John Cassavetes

Welcome to yet another edition of Getting Acquainted, where I watch three films by a cinematic trailblazer whose work is unfamiliar to me, over the course of a month's time.

John Cassavetes has long been a figure of some fascination for me. From seeing only a single film he directed (Gloria) and a few more he appeared in as an actor (Whose Life Is It Anyway?, and later Edge of the City), I developed an interest in the type of filmmaker Cassavetes aspired to be -- a true iconoclast, who would sooner eat a bowl of rusty nails than make a conventional Hollywood movie.

In fact, I'd say that a large part of my impression of Cassavetes came from a movie his son made that tried to emulate the elder Cassavetes' style. On a trip to Atlanta for my cousin's wedding in 1997 -- almost exactly 15 years ago, in fact -- I saw She's So Lovely, a gritty drama directed by Nick Cassavetes and starring Sean Penn, Robin Wright Penn and John Travlota. I didn't like this movie very much; I didn't even like the type of movie it was trying to be. I just didn't care for Penn and Wright Penn playing glorified white trash who love each other and hate each in equal measure, with brutal fights, tearful apologies, inarticulate emoting and torrid makeup sex accounting for basically the entire dynamic of their relationship. But I wondered if I mainly didn't like it because I thought it was a simulacrum of something his father would have done better and with more authenticity.

Still, it wasn't just Penn and Wright Penn who had the love/hate relationship -- that seemed to be my relationship with Cassavetes as well. While on the one hand, I didn't really respond to Gloria, on the other, something essential about this man's persona intrigued me. Any time he would come up, I would feel this amorphous sense of respect for his work -- even though I didn't really like the things he made, or the things that were inspired by the things he made. I couldn't ignore that he seemed important in some way, and that I should see more of his films.

Apparently, I existed in this state of suspended animation with regards to his career until about a month ago, when I finally watched my second Cassavetes movie -- and then my third and fourth soon afterward.

Shadows (1959, John Cassavetes)
Watched: Wednesday, August 8th
One-sentence plot synopsis: A free-form look into the lives of a number of characters living on the fringe of society and the music scene, including an interracial would-be couple separated by society's prejudices.
My thoughts on the film: I try to do these plot synopses without actually consulting a written synopsis for the movie, and this was the best I could do for Shadows. This is independent cinema, pure and simple -- except in 1959, independent cinema didn't exist like it does today, making this a pretty groundbreaking film. Instead of seeing Shadows exactly on its own terms, I saw it in terms of future movies it reminded me of, such as the beginning section of Jim Jarmusch's Down by Law and the entirety of Damien Chazelle's Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench. (And look how impressive I am, name-dropping a Jarmusch film, and then an indie musical that most people reading this will have never heard of.) Cassavetes' first film introduced a future hallmark of his work, which can be seen in this poster: confronting, unflattering close-ups of characters, which is symbolic of the way he's using a microscope to peer into the very essence of their humanity. Although Shadows has some of the affectations that I didn't like about She's So Lovely, it mostly side-steps being ponderous and exists on a level that's fairly easy to digest. The little interludes that comprise this movie usually have a beginning, middle and end, and the central spine -- the relationship between the light-skinned black woman and a white man -- has some truly devastating moments. They're devastating without being the slightest bit manipulative or heavy-handed, which contributes to the sense of naturalism derived from using non-professionals and relying almost entirely on improvisation. For a movie that is mostly about people hanging out and talking -- about things that rarely string together concretely into a greater whole -- Shadows is pretty satisfying. And I can really see how people would have found it bracing and original at the time it was made.

Faces (1968, John Cassavetes)
Watched: Sunday, August 19th
One-sentence plot synopsis: In a state of marital impasse, a husband and a wife strike out to find love in the arms of others with painful, troubling results, which highlight the emptiness of their lives.
My thoughts on the film: Just because I can make a nice-sounding synopsis of this movie doesn't mean I found it the least bit rewarding. Have you ever watched a film where it felt like everybody was speaking a foreign language, even though it was filmed in your native tongue? That's how I felt throughout Faces, which is decidedly, exactly the kind of Cassavetes movie I fear. Which I guess puts me on the outs with most movie folks, because Faces actually appeared on the Sight & Sound 250 at #183. The crux of this movie is supposed to involve a middle-aged man (John Marley) and his slightly younger wife (Lynn Carlin), unhappily married after 14 years. Yet we don't meet her until the movie is 30 minutes old -- Cassavetes fritters away the first half-hour on an evening out involving Marley, his friend and a prostitute played by future Cassavetes wife Gena Rowlands. And when I say "fritter," I mean that this is where I felt like I was watching another language -- what they're talking about is this aimless, meandering mish-mash of anecdote and life philosophy, punctuated by frequent bouts of inexplicable singing and dancing. (The fact that they're drunk does not adequately explain it.) It's not that I found what they were talking about too difficult to grasp; I found it simultaneously banal and pretentious, containing so little content of interest that I literally could not focus on it. The movie then tries us further by essentially repeating this same dynamic again with Marley, Rowlands and some other people, and again with Carlin and a young swinger played by veteran character actor Seymour Cassel. Each of these scenes involves endless minutes of characters talking around things, and I suppose that Cassavetes intends us to deduce a lot from what they're not saying, from awkward exchanges and from uncomfortable pauses. Again, it's not that I'm incapable of meeting a film on these terms, I just didn't find it skillfully or engagingly done. Another problem was that I didn't find any of the characters the least bit sympathetic. Surprisingly, both Carlin and Cassel got Oscar nominations for their performances in this film, which is rather astonishing -- I can't imagine a time when this kind of film would have had any mainstream appeal, let alone enough to yield two Oscar nominations. The affection for this film indicated by its numerous Sight & Sound mentions left me with the feeling that Cassavetes may just not be my kind of filmmaker.

The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976, John Cassavetes)
Watched: Friday, August 31st
One-sentence plot synopsis: To clear a $23,000 gambling debt, the owner of a Los Angeles strip club (Ben Gazzara) allows himself to become the trigger man in a plot to kill a local Chinese bookie.
My thoughts on the film: And just when I think Cassavetes has defeated me, along comes The Killing of a Chinese Bookie. In a way, the Getting Acquainted on Cassavetes was an excuse for me to finally fulfill my long-gestating desire to see this film, which had always caught my attention because of the specificity of the title (especially specific, you might say, when compared to Cassavetes' two previous films that I watched). In fact, you could say that just knowing this title gave me some of my impression of the type of filmmaker Cassavetes was. However, by the time I got to watching it, I was sure that my Faces disappointment would only carry over here. Nothing could be further from the truth. Giving himself ever so slightly over the greater structural requirements for narrative in a genre film, Cassavetes made a masterpiece -- but one that clearly has his own stamp on it. And I'd say the difference in my interpretation of it has to come down to Ben Gazzara. With him as an unambiguous figure to root for, I found that Cassavetes' trademark meandering provided color and context rather than frustration; his long stretches of inessential dialogue, part of ordinary life rather than some kind of artistic affectation. Which is not to say that Gazzara's Cosmo Vittelli is a model citizen, nor even that different from other Cassavetes characters I've found repellent -- just that he is sympathetic enough for us to be on his side, which is key in my enjoyment of a film. There are long portions of this film -- especially at its 135-minute length, rather than the stripped down 108-minute length that was put back into theaters after the original's poor reception -- that are devoted simply to things like dance numbers at the strip club. But the main story, and Gazzara's understated yet charismatic performance, give a viewer reason to stay invested, and to accept these interludes as brief diversions rather than just incomplete ideas in Cassavetes' head. In fact, the interludes in the strip club, though technically inessential to the plot, are some of the most effective in terms of the type of subtle character development on which Cassavetes prides himself. The cadre of gangsters who bring Vittelli under their thumb is truly intimidating, and Bo Harwood's original score only deepens the sense of impending doom. I could probably go on and find a greater eloquence about why this film worked so well for me, but my self-imposed space limitations prevent me from doing so. Let's just say that this makes a welcome addition to a 1970s subgenre that also features the likes of Mean Streets and Taxi Driver.

Conclusion: John Cassavetes is not my kind of guy ... except when he is.

Favorite of the three: The Killing of a Chinese Bookie

In September, I'm going to do something a little different. Actually, a couple things different. For starters, I won't focus on one person, but three, or even sometimes four: Mo, Larry and Curly, and sometimes Shemp. That's right, I'm going to acquaint myself with the sophisticated comedic stylings of the Three Stooges. Right now, I'm lined up to watch Soup to Nuts, Dancing Lady and The Three Stooges Meet Hercules. Here's hoping they'll all be short. And then the other different thing I'm doing is finishing the month with the Farrelly Brothers' The Three Stooges, which came out earlier this year. I figure I'll be uniquely qualified to assess the success or failure of the actors' impersonations, having just watched these other three films. I'll probably write a short bit about that as well.

Until then, expect another 15 to 20 posts on other matters.

Falling asleep? Spray yourself

If you're like me, you like to start a movie as late as 11:30 sometimes.

If you're like me, you also fight powerful hard not to fall asleep during movies you start watching this late.

There are a number of ways to do it. Caffeine is the most obvious. And indeed, during last night's 11:30 viewing of Paddy Considine's Tyrannosaur, I drank a Mexican Coke (made with real sugar) to help in that regard.

But a drink is pretty finite. No matter how many stimulants it may contain, if you're truly tired, its benefits are limited to the time you actually spend tipping the bottle up to your mouth. And that gets at the idea that more than anything else, it's the act of being physically occupied in a task that distracts you from your need to sleep.

Enter food. As with caffeine, the idea of eating something that gives you a sugar rush -- something that will affect your body chemistry -- seems like the way to go. But really, what you're looking for is some kind of repetitive eating activity that will keep you busy. In that sense, something like peanuts is a real help, as long as you're eating them one at a time rather than in handfuls. Keep putting one peanut in your mouth, and there's no way you'll doze off.

Even still, repetitive eating also has its limitations. There comes a point where you realize you've eaten 132 peanuts and only 10 minutes of the movie have passed. And there's that pull of gravity on your eyelids again.

So why not a little shock to the system?

And here is where our spray bottle comes in quite handy.

Back when I used to iron, I wanted a way to dampen the garment that wasn't reliant on the deficient water functions of my iron. So I picked up an empty spray bottle at Target. It ended up being a handy thing to have around the house for a number of tasks -- especially when I pretty much permanently lost my patience for ironing and started buying only clothes that were some percentage polyester.

One use that presented itself: Cooling us down on a hot day.

That's right, you'd be surprised at how far you can go toward heat relief just by spraying yourself (or others) with the fine mist the emanates from a spray bottle filled with water.

It's been a damn hot summer, and we've had the spray bottle out regularly. As that water on your face starts to evaporate, it both cools and refreshes.

But the initial burst is always something of a shock. Even if you're desperate for the relief and you know it will feel good, you close your eyes and brace for that blast of water in the moments immediately before it's unleashed. 

A shock like this is the perfect thing to "reset" yourself if you're on the verge of failing to outlast your movie. You open your eyes wider for a moment, blinking, as your various synapses take in this new stimulant. If I understood the chemistry of the human body a little better, I might be able to describe this phenomenon in better detail.

I do know that it helped me last night as the clock was heading past 1, and I still had the final 10-15 minutes of Tyrannosaur to watch. Not only did the spray bottle keep those last 15 minutes from being an effort, it also left me feeling quite refreshed.

Just a little trick for you to try, you delusional night-owl movie watcher you.

As for Tyrannosaur, it's not a particular great example for a post about falling asleep during a movie. It's pretty engaging stuff, if only to see what horror is going to unfold for these characters next. It's shot beautifully and it's got great performances by Peter Mullan, Olivia Colman and Eddie Marsan, but the circumstances I'd avoid when watching it are not being too tired. I'd avoid watching it when you're too depressed, because it'll only sink you deeper into that hole.

But if you like a tough story with a good grasp of fascinating cinematic tools, Tyrannosaur may be for you.

And you'll be glad when watching it that unlike those characters, getting sleepy is the worst problem you're dealing with at the moment.

How many anonymous devil possession movies can there be?

It seems we can't get through the dregs of the release schedule these days without them throwing another devil possession movie at us.

Early January and late August are generally considered the two weakest times of the year to release a movie in theaters, and each of those periods have featured an anonymous devil possession movie in 2012.

On January 4th, it was The Devil Inside. And on August 31st, it's The Possession. Even with Sam Raimi listed as a producer, this one seems pretty dubious. Plus, the fact that the last day of August falls on a Friday this year makes the extremity of the release date within this dregs period seem even greater. If there were an August 32nd, they would have released it that day instead.

Of course, the moment you make such a generalization, you can just as easily disprove it. August of 2011 had no devil possession movie, unless you want to consider the astronauts in last year's Apollo 18 to be "possessed" (and their behavior certainly indicates that, though it would be a lot more fair to blame aliens than the devil). But January of 2011 saw the release of The Rite, and The Last Exorcism came out on August 27th of 2010. (Though to be fair, I saw that one and can say it was effectively done.) You could even fit Legion (released in January of 2010) into that category, though the FX budget of that movie made it a little less forgettable all told. (In terms of quality, though, it was worse than forgettable -- it was memorably bad.)

How far back does this go? August 2009 didn't have anything, but January 2009 had The Unborn. At some point, though, you could start changing the generalization to this: Januarys and Augusts feature bad horror movies, period, not specifically devil possession movies.

Of course, you'd be foolish to discount the role of the Paranormal Activity films in the relentless churning out of these movies with similar titles and similar subject matters. The fourth one will be upon us this October, and unless people suddenly stop wanting to see them, there will undoubtedly be a fifth in October of 2013. And pretty soon we'll be in Saw territory, if we're not there already.

I'm wondering if there has been a handing off of the baton from torture porn movies to devil possession movies. You don't see all that much torture porn coming out anymore, but devil possession seems to be all the rage, even if most of the movies in this subgenre barely make a blip at the box office. Something about the world we live in today makes us more fearful for the eternal lives of our souls than for the loss of various limbs hacked off by ordinary, run-of-the-mill psychopaths who only have a devil on their shoulder, not working them like a puppet.

Bring on September. I haven't wanted to see anything in the theater in weeks now.

And have a terrific Labor Day weekend, everyone.