Fifty years and a couple days

It would have been really clever if I’d managed to see Apollo 11 on Sunday night as I’d originally intended. While that would not have been July 20^th here in Australia, it would have barely qualified as the waning hours of July 20^th in the U.S. – well, in Hawaii anyway. But I could only find showings that fell smack in the middle of the kids’ dinnertime, a period of high parental activity in which I try not to schedule conflicts.

It wasn’t until yesterday that I cast my net a little wider and found two theaters about 25 minutes from my house showing the documentary at 8:35. So it was 50 years and a couple days after the moon landing that I got to see the blow-by-blow recreation of it.

It’s nice that at least Australia released the film in conjunction with the anniversary, having debuted it back on July 11^th. In the U.S. it hit theaters on March 1^st, which, just … why? I mean, I know why, which is that documentaries don’t gain a lot of traction during the summer movie season, even one as limp as this one. (Limp summer movie season, not limp documentary.)

But it’s just the latest in a failure to correctly synchronize movies about July of 1969 with July of 2019. Last year saw two such movies, the Ted Kennedy movie Chappaquiddick and Damien Chazelle’s First Man. Why either of these movies couldn’t have delayed production just a little longer and come out this year, I may never know. (Maybe it was again a seasonal thing for both movies, only one of which should have ever realistically been considered an Oscar contender. If they’d waited for this year’s Oscar season for First Man, it would have missed the anniversary.)

Anyway, wow.

I’m not reviewing the movie for my website – too bad, because my editor gave it only a 7/10. But that allows me to be a bit more free-form in my thoughts, which is nice. (And to include both of the preambles I’ve already included.)

I would have given it a 10/10, and did give it five stars on Letterboxd. Which isn’t to say that it’s going to be my favorite film of the year, or even that it’s currently my favorite (it’s parked at #2 right now, but a couple movies behind it may ultimately leapfrog it). The perfect score is rather a gobsmacked appreciation of how perfectly this movie is conceived and made.

I’ve never been one to gobble up information/histories/available video footage of the moon landing, even though I often refer to Neil Armstrong jokingly as “Uncle Neil” (we share a last name). But I never would have guessed that enough footage existed of all aspects of this mission as to make a nearly complete video diary of it, with only a few reliances on still photography, and as many scenes as a narrative filmmaker (say, Damien Chazelle) would have made if making such a movie. The problem with a documentary recreation of any event is that video cameras wouldn’t have captured most of it, and even though this was probably the most watched event in the history of television – perhaps maybe even to this day (well, 9/11 would give it a run for its money) – there figured to be inevitable holes in the coverage where we’d need to jump forward in time if we wanted anything like a complete dramatization of the events.

Well, the reason why the film is such a revelation is that much of this footage was, actually, recently revealed to us when we didn’t know it existed. Maybe we did know and they just never released it. In any case, much of what we’re seeing here is stuff that’s never been seen before by the general public. Which is the enthralling thing about the movie. You’re seeing 50-year-old footage that should have been in the public record but never was, and because it has been cleaned up and digitally remastered (I imagine), it looks as though it was just shot yesterday. There’s a weird and glorious feeling of time travel while watching this movie.

I won’t say that every moment held my attention. That’s not a criticism of the film, but more an indication of the state of mind it places you in. Because there is no narration – the significant quantity of dialogue comes from available audio clips from the time – there’s no single guiding voice keeping you on track. Therefore, your mind can wander a bit, and mine did. Never for more than a minute or so, and never in a way I found displeasing. It was an experience I was immersed in, and though the narrative is strong and clear, it’s perhaps not of paramount importance to be engaged in every moment. It should just flow through you and wash over you, and if you start thinking about the things you have to do tomorrow for a minute or two, that’s okay.

It goes without saying that the images we haven’t seen before – the specificity of them, the unlikelihood that they would have ever been captured in the first place – are the most astonishing takeaway of the film. But let me pause to acknowledge the only way that modernity encroaches on the film, and how spectacular I found it. The score is the modern creation of a man named Matt Morton, and it’s no mere high-minded orchestral accompaniment. No, it uses all the rumblings and discordant sounds of a Mica Levi to increase the tension in particular moments, and my does it do that well.

The other thing I want to say is how much this makes me actually understand what was involved in a trip to the moon, beyond what I’d ever bothered to understand in the past. I understand which parts of the craft were jettisoned at which stages, and why they were no longer needed. (Though I’m not sure what happened to the Eagle when it was jettisoned near the moon – did it crash into the moon or did it just become space junk?) I understand how long everything took. I understand what speeds were reached. I learned, for the first time I think, that the rocket that launched from earth actually orbited around the earth at least once before slingshotting itself toward the moon. Dummy that I am, I thought it had just headed directly out from earth and reached the critical acceleration necessary to break free from the atmosphere in a single direct shot. Up and out are, of course, not the same thing in aeronautical terms.

And I also learned that things I thought were bullshit in Damien Chazelle’s movie actually were not. Like, I had no idea why, and thought it extremely unlikely that, the Eagle was running out of fuel as it approached its landing, and had only 16 seconds of fuel left when it touch down. (Nor do I understand why fuel is measured in seconds.) Apollo 11 does not necessarily explain the why, but it confirms the that, which I had thought was a liberty taken in First Man in order to increase the tension. I guess it must have to do with exactly how little room the Eagle had for inessentials, and could only fit the amount of fuel necessary to land the craft, without much margin for error based on needing to change landing spots or the like. (And I guess it used different fuel to take off again? Or could that just be accomplished through one of the “burns” they keep talking about?) Anyway, even though I found this vastly superior to First Man as a cinematic experience, it did increase my appreciation of that movie as well.

Side note to mention it was funny/fun seeing a young Johnny Carson watching the launch from Cape Canaveral.

I’m really glad I did my best to see this in the theater and wasn’t defeated by the disadvantageous showing time at the local cinemas. The screen I saw it on wasn’t huge, but it was big enough to inspire awe. Though I’m sure such a thorough and wonderfully realized film would inspire awe even on an iPhone.

What does a 68-minute movie look like?

I've seen a number of films over the years that were less than an hour long that I have reluctantly characterized as movies. At first I didn't want to because I feared that it was an apples-to-oranges comparison, but ultimately I became convinced that the 45-minute Buster Keaton film Sherlock Jr., for example, belongs in all my lists alongside other films of proper feature length. It could have been because I loved Sherlock Jr. so much.

But I can't remember the last time -- maybe never -- that I saw a modern movie, with a cast of name actors and from an acclaimed director, that failed to even cross the 70-minute mark.

Until, that is, Saturday night, when my wife and I watched Sally Potter's 2017 film The Party.

We thought there was at least a chance that it was made for the BBC or something, but nope, it competed at Berlin and actually won some prize called the Guild Film Prize. (Forgive me if I am unfamiliar with the lesser prizes at the Berlin International Film Festival.)

If you wanted to try to dismiss it on other grounds, you can't, because it stars Kristin Scott Thomas, Patricia Clarkson, Bruno Ganz, Cillian Murphy, Timothy Spall, Cherry Jones and Emily Mortimer. Each and every one of them a household name, at least in houses that know a thing or two about movies.

Well, I can't tell you what "a" 68-minute movie looks like, but I can tell you what this particular 68-minute movie looks like. It's about a party to celebrate the appointment (election?) of Thomas' character as a shadow minister for the British opposition party, which includes some of her closest friends, though how much they can truly call themselves friends is made manifest over the course of a chaotic evening in which secrets and betrayals are revealed. It takes place in just a single house and is more or less in real time. You'd swear it was adapted from a play if you didn't know that the filmmaker herself wrote it. Oh, and it's also in black and white.

And you know what?

Sixty-eight minutes is the perfect length for this film.

As I was watching I thought of the Roman Polanski film Carnage, also very short but an epic compared to this, clocking in at 80 minutes. I can tell you it feels a lot more than 12 minutes longer. That's because this actual play adaptation -- which features Jodie Foster, Kate Winslet, John C. Reilly and Christoph Waltz -- is confined to its single location in ways that feel trying and artificial. As these two sets of parents argue with one another over what their children might have done to each other on a playground, one set continually gestures toward leaving the apartment but never does. Now, I'm a person who hates false starts and false departures in all arenas of life -- once you've said goodbye, get lost. A whole movie full of them started to drain me from about the first false departure, which couldn't have been more than 15 minutes in. (I see now that I already wrote about Carnage a few years ago, if you want to read more of my ranting and raving on the topic.)

The problem with a movie like Carnage is that it seems to contain excessive amounts of filler just to get it up to a barely respectable feature length -- or, I suppose, long enough to make theatergoers feel satisfied about parting with their 90 bucks.

The Party doesn't worry about that. It just stops at 68 minutes. It leaves you wanting more, and what happens in it is tantalizing enough that you do, indeed, want more. (I won't spoil the movie, but I will tell you that it ends on a perfect moment of uncertainty.)

Now, Wikipedia is ruining part of my argument -- or at least the title of this post -- by claiming that The Party is 71 minutes long. Well, Wikipedia can go fuck itself. The DVD case says 68 minutes and that's what I'm going with.

It certainly did feel short, but it didn't feel stillborn. It felt like a complete movie, albeit a bit like a stage adaptation. And I respected that Sally Potter didn't care about what length a movie needs to be in order to meet our conventional expectations of it. Just tell the story you want to tell and not an ounce more of inessential fat.

I'm not going to say I loved The Party -- the three stars I gave it on Letterboxd may have been a half-star too low, but it more or less encapsulates my feelings accurately. But I loved The Party's brevity, which I won't even call brevity because it was exactly as long as it needed to be. Okay, let's call it brevity, if only to say "Brevity is the soul of wit." The Party is witty, and because it doesn't artificially distend itself, it didn't leave me crawling up the walls either.

Which is a good standard for a successful Saturday night viewing experience.

A Wilde Wilde Friday

You're getting sick of me telling you about the coincidences on my viewing schedule. Even I'm getting sick of me telling you about the coincidences on my viewing schedule.

But this one was too good to pass up.

I really like Olivia Wilde, and have since I watched her on a couple seasons of House back in the day. I think she's really talented.

But for some reason, she never became a big star. She's got the looks, she's got the skills, but she hasn't had the results, assuming that becoming a star was actually what she wanted, which it may not have been. She hasn't necessarily made the choices you would expect to earn greater exposure, but when she did make those choices, such as Tron: Legacy and Cowboys & Aliens in back to back years at the start of the decade, they were massive flops. But she's been terrific in more modest fare -- see her hilarious performance as a stripper in Butter -- and every time I see her, I'm saddened that I don't see her more.

Well, on Friday, for one day at least, I couldn't escape her. And, true to the requirements of a viewing coincidence actually being a coincidence, neither of two Wilde viewings might have actually happened that day.

The first was Wilde's acclaimed directorial debut, Booksmart, which only just opened here last week. I only had the chance to see the 3 p.m. screening if my 2 p.m. doctor's appointment proceeded expeditiously, which is no guarantee in a country with socialized medicine. In fact, as a result of checking in early, I finished at about 2:10 and actually had to kill some time before the movie started.

Then that night, when it came to my movie for a Friday night, I had planned to rewatch Under the Skin, which would be my fourth viewing of it overall (I guess I like this movie). However, when my wife heard that was on tap, she asked if we could delay the viewing until Saturday night and she'd watch it with me. So instead I turned to a movie I had downloaded for 99 cents from iTunes: A Vigilante, starring Olivia Wilde and directed by Sarah Daggar-Nickson.

I just wish the double dip of Olivia ended up showcasing her a bit better.

The better of the two is clearly Booksmart, but the margin of its superiority is not what I had hoped. I had hoped to love Booksmart, because it seemed like a good thing for a critic in 2019 to do. You always want to be on the right side of a movie that is earning raves for how it fares in terms of issues of representation, so I had hoped to go four stars or higher on my rating of it. I stalled out at 3.5, but I must say, that was a significant improvement from how I felt about it in the first half.

The other thing I'd heard about Booksmart, other than that people liked it, was that some people didn't see what was so special about it. I didn't want to be one of those people, but for a while I was. This walks and talks like a lot of teen comedies of recent years, with a lot of tropes like the slow-mo strutting of its main characters in scenes where they are either wearing special outfits or owning the moment, scored to hip hop that feels like a slightly self-conscious attempt to compensate for the fact that its main characters are white. There's accidental drug ingestion, there's the characters nobody likes because they try too hard, there's some kind of unclear commentary on social media. It wasn't anything particularly unexpected.

Then at some point in the second half -- at a number of points, actually -- an emotional intelligence that I really associate with Wilde as an actress rose up and asserted itself. In fact, I found myself surprised at how floored I was by certain moments between the two main characters, played by Beanie Feldstein (who I have always liked) and Kaitlyn Dever (who got a rough start with me but who I have started to like more lately). The soundtrack has some perfectly used songs -- I hurried to turn on my phone just so I could Shazam the song playing when Dever is swimming underwater at that party, but was too late -- and a number of other moments that really rise above some of the movie's cliches. These touches brought Booksmart into a territory where I could solidly recommend it, and for that I'm glad. (Oh, and the song was "Slip Away" by Perfume Genius. Check it out.)

Wilde doesn't even cameo in Booksmart, but she's almost never off the screen in A Vigilante, where she plays a woman who's fueling the pain of a trauma she suffered into helping women get out of bad relationships by roughing up their men a bit. It's got its heart in the right place, to be sure, and it's always nice to see some real dickheads get their comeuppance. But in terms of its filmmaking, it was just lacking a bit, and I'm sorry to say that Wilde's performance was one of its weaker aspects. She does subtle moments well in this movie, but she does not come off well in bigger moments, of which there are several, as we see her in full-on post-traumatic breakdown mode on a couple occasions. These always rung false to me, I'm sorry to say.

Which doesn't mean I wouldn't like to get another Wilde double feature on my schedule -- probably intentionally this time -- at my next available opportunity. I'm a big fan, even when she isn't at the top of her game.

A useful, under-utilized service

One of the worst things about running late for a movie is that you don’t know how late you actually are. You can tell the number of minutes you’re late on your watch (or really, your phone), but you don’t know how those number of minutes translate to a countdown to the movie’s starting time. Oh, if you’ve been to this theater before, you usually have a good idea how many trailers they play, how much buffer you have between the listed start time of the movie and its actual start. In fact, if the theater is really consistent, you can time it down to the minute.

But what if they aren’t, and what if you can’t?

You never know when some zealous theater employee might start the ads and trailers a few minutes early, or if this is the time when not all the advertisers paid their monthly fees, leading to fewer ads. There are always going to be uncertainties.

Well, my local arthouse theater has removed the uncertainties.

Cinema Nova in Carlton has installed a feature next to the snack bar line – which is also where they sell most of the tickets these days – that shows you a running feed of the upcoming movies and their start times, with a countdown in minutes to when the ads start, and to when the feature itself starts. As in the picture I’ve included above.

It's the perfect way to calm the nerves of a prospective audient, to let them know they do, in fact, have time to buy that popcorn and that drink. That makes it a particularly shrewd movie by the theater, one that benefits both parties. The prospective audient can stay in that line without missing the start of the movie, and the theater can get the money the prospective audient might not have spent on that popcorn and that drink if they thought they were going to be late.

The part that didn’t maybe seem necessary, and therefore is just a mensch move on the part of the theater, is the countdown to when the ads start. (Or, “session,” in the language of this particular screen.) If you happen to be a theatergoer who does not believe your experience is complete if you’ve missed the ads, now you don’t have to. If you’d rather see an ad for a cell phone company and a car commercial than get a bag of M&M’s, Cinema Nova respects that choice.

It came in especially handy on Wednesday night when I went to see Hail Satan?, one of my favorite movies of the year so far, which I may write about at length on another day (and will certainly be reviewing, so check to the right to see if that link is already up). I got to the top of the escalator and was frankly shocked to see about 15 people in line in front of me, with my session time only one minute from starting. Usually there are two or three people at most.

For the health of the theater, I rejoiced, but for my own prospects of getting in to Hail Satan? on time, I fretted. For about three seconds, until I remembered this screen, which tells you exactly how long you have to get that popcorn or drink – or, in my case, my actual ticket. By the time I got to the front of the line, there were still at least five minutes left before the feature started.

I probably should have rewarded them by buying a popcorn and a drink.

I’m now wondering why more theaters don’t do this – or, in fact, any other theaters. I believe this is the first time I’ve seen this type of thing, but it’s so simple that any theater should consider it as a way to improve its customer service. And if there is not one single focal point like there is at Cinema Nova, they could easily post it on a big board somewhere in the lobby, almost like one of those old train schedules at Grand Central Station, apprising you of where you stand vis-a-vis the train's departure.

We’re all late sometimes. Cinema Nova allows us not to suffer the consequences by converting the hypothetical to the actual.

Is context everything?

Five years ago on a trip to the U.S., my wife and I watched the Lake Bell film In a World … while sitting in a cabana next to the heated pool in the place we were staying. It wasn’t a resort or anything; it was a small room in an Air BNB with a really big backyard. It was November, but November is actually usually pretty nice in LA, and the pool was heated anyway. Next to the heated pool there was an even more heated hot tub. It was like being at a resort without paying for being at a resort.

I loved the movie and gave it five stars on Letterboxd. That’s a ridiculously high rating for a small and unassuming independent comedy, but such was my enthusiasm for In a World (ellipses omitted).

When I watched it for the second time last night, I thought 3.5 stars was a more appropriate rating, and might have gone as low as three. It’s a nice little movie and a nice accomplishment for its neophyte director, who is also the star, but it’s pretty disjointed.

How could I have had such a different impression of the core merits of this film now than I did then?

Sure, you experience small fluctuations in how you feel about a movie between viewings. But I’d venture that it’s usually up or down a half-star. Not a jump of a full two stars in either direction.

My conclusion? It was the cabana. It was the hot tub. It was the heated pool.

Our viewing of In a World (ellipses omitted) was in such an idyllic context that I believe I fell in love with the viewing experience as much as the movie. I was in such the right place at such the right time that I overlooked the fact that this is not a great, but merely a good, movie. I was giving that moment five stars, not that movie.

Of course, the evidence of this theory is not as plentiful as the counterarguments against it. In the very same trip, we also watched 22 Jump Street, the sequel to the very satisfying 21 Jump Street. 22 Jump Street is not as satisfying, and accordingly, I gave it the three stars on Letterboxd that I said I’d give In a World (ellipses omitted) if rating it today.

If you want a more extreme example of the potential impact of setting on viewing, and a more extreme example of that setting we had in LA, last year my wife and I went to Bali to celebrate our ten-year anniversary. We watched a movie nearly every night, sitting in a much bigger cabana, next to a private pool. No heat was needed as it was Bali, but I think it may have been slightly heated anyway. We didn’t have our kids with us, and it was probably a week we were looking forward to more than any other in the entire ten years of our marriage.

Yet on that trip, of the three new movies we watched together, we didn’t like I, Tonya, we hated Game Over, Man! and the best of the bunch, Murder on the Orient Express, was meh at best. I watched one movie by myself in bed, which was also meh, and we saw a couple movies I’d already seen, which means they don’t qualify for a discussion of first impressions. Instead of our private villa artificially inflating our perception of the quality of these films, perhaps it actually hurt that perception, as anything that wasn’t up to snuff was a bit of a waste of this precious time away from children and responsibilities. As a matter of fact, I ended up ranking Game Over, Man! as the worst film I saw in 2018.

And then there are all the examples of films I loved despite being in no condition to watch them. The examples likely abound, but the one I’m thinking of is Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Like Father, Like Son, which I watched in bed while convalescing from having a tooth pulled. There was no way I should have watched a drama, a foreign language drama at that, in those circumstances. Yet I teared up on multiple occasions, and not because of any physical pain I was in. I ranked it as my #2 movie of that year.

Seeing and enjoying Aladdin on a mountaintop, as we did over the weekend, and then seeing In a World (ellipses omitted) on my couch on an ordinary Tuesday night, and not enjoying it as much, got me thinking about this. But I don’t think I have any definitive conclusions to draw about the influence of context on one’s perception of a film’s quality, except that there is obviously some correlation, except when there isn’t. The context can never make you hate a movie you would have loved or love a movie you would have hated, but it can push a mildly negative or mildly positive impression toward either extreme.

Which is probably about the conclusion you would have guessed even before I went and wrote a thousand words on the subject.

Cut it out

I noticed that another version of Apocalypse Now is releasing in theaters next month.

And rolled my eyes.

Oh, I'd be okay with a big screen re-release of the original Apocalypse Now. I probably wouldn't grouse about it, either, if they released the director's cut, even though I am not a fan of multiple cuts of the same movie being in existence, in general. It's existed for quite a long time so at least I wouldn't have anything new to grouse about.

But do we have to get another new cut, a third cut, of this classic movie?

This uncertainty about what movie you're talking about when you're talking about the movie is a thing that has plagued Blade Runner. I must say that I have lost a little of my love for Blade Runner just because there are so many damn versions of this movie floating around out there.

Will I have to do the same with Apocalypse Now?

Yeah, it'll be available on IMAX. That's cool. But really, it could have been the original version and still been on IMAX. When I watched Titanic on IMAX in conjunction with its 15th anniversary in 2012, that was cool and I enjoyed the experience. But at least it wasn't with 20 minutes' worth of new scenes that weren't good enough to be in the original movie.

To directors and studios who keep toying with the "ultimate, final, be-all-and-end-all" versions of their movies, I say:

Enough.

Cut it out.

Please. For all our sakes.

My first mountaintop movie

As I've told you on a number of occasions, I love seeing movies when I'm out of town. I love the experience of seeing familiar movies -- familiar in the sense that I've seen ads for them and been anticipating them -- in unfamiliar locations. I prefer tucked away little single-screen theaters, but multiplexes will do in a pinch. My mere lack of acquaintance with them makes them exotic.

You might say that I like these movies in these cinemas to "show me the world," so to speak.

Aladdin may have done that in a way more exotic than all the others.

It's not because Aladdin, set in Arabia, is exotic in and of itself. It's because I saw it on top of a mountain.

See, this past weekend my sons and I went to Mt. Buller, about a three-hour drive from our home in Melbourne. Most people ski there, but my kids have never done that before and I'm still recovering from my dislocated shoulder, so we just frolicked. It's what Melburnians call "going to the snow." It doesn't snow in Melbourne of course, but during the winter months -- June, July and August -- it snows close enough by that you could actually make a day trip of it if you wanted. We made a three-day trip of it, starting Thursday night and returning Sunday afternoon.

At first I thought "going to the snow" would be the name of a hypothetical activity only, and not an actual description of what we were doing. See, Mt. Buller has not gotten much snow this winter. A co-worker who pays more attention to these things than I do told me, as I was departing on Thursday, that I'd be lucky to see much at all. So that's kind of what I prepared for.

Boy was she wrong.

There was a base of snow there already, and the rain on Friday made it wet and easily packable for snowballs and snowmen. That would have been enough to say we'd really had the experience. But then on Saturday the experienced kicked into high gear. Fluffy snow fell all day long, necessitating the chains for our tires we had rented ("hired," as they say here), never expecting to actually need them. There's plenty of drama I could tell you about the installation of the chains, whether they were on the right wheels or not, and my removal of them at 10:30 at night by the side of the road, but I'll spare you the horror. Let's just say that all's well that ended well.

We were still up on the mountain, and not back to our Air BNB about 20 minutes from its base, because we decided to take in Aladdin at the little Mt. Buller theater on Saturday night, starting at 6. Given what I've told you, how could we not?

Here's a picture:

I'd like to tell you the building resembled a small Swiss ski chalet, but as you can probably tell from the picture, it did not. It was actually in a six-story building set into the side of the hill that also includes the post office, a place with a bunch of trampolines and climbing equipment, and even the Mt. Buller campus of the local primary school. The auditorium where the movies are shown functions as a lecture hall and meeting location in addition to Mt. Buller's ticket to the silver screen.

But what the theater lacked in quaintness it made up for in remoteness. This is a theater that cannot even be reached by ordinary car. The village that surrounds Mt. Buller has as many as 50 different restaurants, according to the promotional materials, as well as accommodations, a little grocery store and a bunch of places you can buy and rent ski-related necessities. What it does not have, though, is parking for more than the most essential vehicles, those being the ones used to make and clear snow, and ferry guests up and down the mountain. The rest of the vehicles park five minutes' drive further down the mountain, accessing the peak via free shuttle.

The theater plays two movies per night, and Aladdin fit the bill perfectly, since none of us have seen it and it started at 6. Given how people had cleared out of the village square after it got out, having returned to their rooms or down the mountain already, I realized how much it was really intended for the people who are actually staying on the mountain, and can just walk back to their rooms. Given the events that delayed our return home until almost 11, I'm really glad we didn't see the 8:30 Godzilla: King of the Monsters. But I already said I was not going to horrify you with that.

Anyway, it was a really fun experience. The popcorn wasn't very warm and all up I spent about $70, which is a far cry from the zero money I usually pay to see movies. But we all liked the movie -- I was surprised at how much it overcame the initial shortcomings I perceived it to have -- and my older son declared it "either his second or third favorite movie." Then again, he's said that about each of the past five movies we've seen together.

I'd like to think watching it on the top of a mountain, as an escape from a cold but beautiful winter wonderland, had something to do with it.

Excess exposition or faulty translation?

I consider Hirokazu Kore-eda to be the greatest Japanese filmmaker working today, the modern Ozu. I say this on the basis of seeing only four of his films, but they are four really good films. (And yes, this poster lists his name with the family name first, Kore-eda Hirokazu. I blame Akira Kurosawa for making me unwilling to invert the order of Japanese names when I will gladly do so for Korean and Chinese names.)

But that doesn't mean Kore-eda sometimes doesn't have the golden touch. Or does he?

Today I'm trying to puzzle out whether foreign language films -- specifically Kore-eda's -- don't sometimes contain translations of dialogue that are more expository than they would be in their native tongue.

The film that prompted this question is Our Little Sister, a film he made in a typically prolific period between Like Father, Like Son (2013) and After the Storm (2015), which seems all the more prolific because I actually saw and ranked LFLS with my 2014 films. (Ranked it #2 of the year at that.) I'd always wanted to see Little Sister but it eluded me until this weekend.

Now I should say, Kore-eda's films are expository by nature. By that I mean there is no attempt to be elliptical with the audience. His films, which usually focus on the dynamics of family in modern Japanese society, are straightforward and easy to follow. As it can be difficult to keep track of everyone's relationship to everyone else where extended families are concerned, Kore-eda will go out of his way to remind us of this in the dialogue, and the effort is appreciated.

Even by his standards, though, the dialogue in Our Little Sister seemed unusually expository. I noticed a frequent substitution of a relationship title ("my sister," "your mother") for a character name, even when I thought who was related to who, and how, had been firmly established. For the first time in watching a Kore-eda film, I almost felt like my intelligence was being insulted, ever so marginally. Almost. I respect this filmmaker so much that I can't go any further than "almost."

But what's prompting this post is not moments like that, but moments like this:

"I am in pediatrics, and we try to save lives."

That's a line of dialogue from one doctor to another doctor, and it so happens that these doctors know each other well -- they're dating. I should say, it's my best memory of the line of dialogue, though I'm sure about the first four words, and they are the only ones that matter for the purpose of my argument.

Kore-eda wants to inform us of the medical specialty of the speaker, and that's a fair goal when you are trying to keep the audience up to speed on multiple characters and what they do for a living. But wouldn't this have been much better?

"In pediatrics we try to save lives."

It accomplishes the expository goal but it also doesn't make it seem as though the first character needs to explain to the second character what he does for a living. She knows. She's his love interest. We don't know, which is why you need the line, but my phrasing accomplishes it without the awkwardness.

Since it doesn't seem like Kore-eda to be quite so on-the-nose and to fail to appreciate the dynamics that already exist between these characters, I'm wondering if it is a faulty translation.

I've discussed faulty translations before, but in that instance it was the person in charge of the translation not having a proper grasp of English spelling or grammar. This is different. This is based on an assumption only, and I have no way to prove it.

I'm wondering if the line of dialogue, as written/spoken in Japanese, is more along the lines of my version, but that the person who's translating it failed to grasp the nuance of how to translate it. Oh all the information is there, that's not the problem, but perhaps the sequence of the words makes it seem like the one doctor is telling the other something she already knows, when maybe that isn't what's really happening.

It could also be, I suppose, that this is a literal translation of how it's spoken, but that in the original Japanese, it doesn't come across as repeating information already known. It could be that linguistic custom states you present the information in this order, and the other person doesn't think "Duh, I already know this." Maybe then it requires someone to translate it somewhat less than literally so that the English translation flows as smoothly as the Japanese original.

Look, I really don't know. But I do think that a screenplay can be hurt by a faulty translation, and we would have no idea that it had happened. We would just ding the screenplay.

Our Little Sister is a really nice movie, one that continued to deepen my appreciation of its director, but it's the least essential of his four films I've seen. I note that I've given those four films very positive reviews, but a different star rating in each instance: 5 stars for Like Father, Like Son, 4.5 stars for Shoplifters, 4 stars for After the Storm and now 3.5 for Our Little Sister. I sure hope the trend of giving a different star rating to each film doesn't continue, because that means I will really dislike the rest of Kore-eda's filmography.

The one I should really see, especially as I am considering my favorite films of the decade in time to post my list in January, is I Wish, which I started to watch years and years ago on a night when I didn't have a two-hour movie in me. Realizing that, I stopped it after about one minute. If what I've heard about it is correct, that'll be another 4.5 star or 5 star movie for me.

The success or failure of the nuances of its translation? TBD.

Audient Audit: The Magnificent Seven

This is the sixth in my series Audient Audit, in which I’m checking my personal engraved-in-stone viewing records and seeing if they are truly accurate.

I suspect the reason I thought I saw The Magnificent Seven is because I love Seven Samurai, the movie it acknowledges being based on in the opening credits, so I would of course have prioritized such a viewing back in the day. (In a sign of how they did things differently in 1960 than they would now, they say it’s based on “the Japanese film The Seven Samurai.” Today the filmmakers would be more likely to credit the director or writer and not get hung up on the geographical origins of the film, which seems just a tad xenophobic, though I can’t really pinpoint why.)

Having watched it for this series, I don’t believe I did see it, because I think I would have remembered how shoddy I found it.

I’m not going to say John Sturges’ film is bad, as I gave it 2.5 stars on Letterboxd, which is almost a positive review. But it sure does feel slapdash. It has none of the grandeur of Akira Kurosawa’s original, feeling small and confined to a set, and the acting is as poor as poor can get. Sturges has made a heck of a lot of films, and in the only other one I’ve seen – The Great Escape, which I only just saw for the first time earlier this year – I didn’t notice that being a problem. (And yes, I am ashamed that I didn’t see my first Sturges film until 2019, although to be fair, up until this week I thought I might have seen The Magnificent Seven.)

So do we blame the actors or Sturges? The opening scene, in which we meet the village of Mexican farmers being terrorized by Eli Wallach’s Calvera, is particularly emblematic of their deficiencies. I was reminded of a hacky musical, where characters take turns shouting out (poorly written) lines so that everyone has something to say. I think it’s also just Hollywood at the time, which didn’t know/didn’t care about doing justice to non-white characters. That may be an oversimplification, but The Magnificent Seven gives evidence that it may be the case.

But it’s not just the supporting characters I thought were bad. I really didn’t like Yul Brynner in the central role. This is an Oscar-winning actor (The King and I), but I just didn’t get the ability, or the appeal. And here’s another guy to whom my exposure is minimal. Actually, if you can believe this, I may never have seen Brynner on screen before. His most famous roles (The King and I, The Ten Commandments, Westworld) had all eluded me so far, and I haven’t happened to see any of his more minor ones.

I should say that part of my concern with Brynner is the disconnect of having a guy whose native language is not English playing an American cowboy (named Chris Adams of all things, which is about as American as it gets). But I feel like I can get behind that more now than I would have been able to back then, as we make efforts to discount race or ethnic origin when casting roles nowadays, an initiative I fully support. So maybe the problem was more logistical. Because he uses a stoical clipped delivery in keeping with the character, rather than enunciating, I found it especially hard to understand what he was saying. That inevitably saps some of the profundity from the ending, particularly his line of dialogue that closes the film, which is so powerful in Kurosawa’s original.

As I was tired on Wednesday night when I watched it, I appreciated it wasn’t three hours and 27 minutes long like the original. But I can definitely see what is gained from the extra roughly hour and 25 minutes of running time. Kurosawa really allowed himself the time to develop those characters, such that they achieved distinct personalities, and that you mourned them when they died. Sturges does okay on the distinct personalities, but since you don’t spend much time with these characters, either individually or collectively, their deaths cause almost no impact. Of course, Sturges also just doesn’t have Toshiro Mifune. I tried to figure out who was supposed to be playing the Mifune role, and the closest is this actor who gets the “introducing” credit at the start, Horst Buchholz, who’s the guy, like Mifune, who desperately wants to be part of the team but is not considered up to snuff. Not only is his acting not up to snuff – he was considered the German James Dean but never really took off in the U.S. – but the character itself has a very different outcome. This film desperately needed a character with the arc Mifune’s Kikuchiyo has.

As I did in The Great Escape, I enjoyed watching the collection of charismatic stars, which include guys I got to know when they were much older: James Coburn, Robert Vaughn, Charles Bronson and Steve McQueen. But they don’t seem to have much of a rapport with one another, just another reason this whole thing felt really flat to me. (Plus, where’s the action? There really isn’t any until the final shootout.)

I’m almost done dumping on The Magnificent Seven. But just one final thought. I didn’t think it was a great choice for us to get to know the lead bandito, played here by Eli Wallach. Perhaps it was an attempt to be progressive and give us a complex villain, but in a morality play like this, I think you need clear heroes and clear villains. If I remember correctly we don’t know much at all about the leader of the marauders in Seven Samurai, as they really are essentially faceless villains. Wallach’s character is given several scenes in which his motivations are revealed, and he’s allowed to show mercy, which he does most crucially toward the central seven near the end, just sending them away and giving them their guns back when they are presumed to be out of range of coming back to defend the village. Oops. I needed a more one-dimensional villain I guess. Also Wallach in particular does not strike me as very threatening, as I came to know him during his older years when he was always playing comic relief and always had a big smile on his face. In fact, it was a surprise to me that he would have been considered the right choice to play “the ugly” in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, another film I watched for this series. This predates that by six years, but I saw that one first. 

I don’t have my movie for August picked out yet. Care to make a suggestion? (Kidding; you have no idea what I’m selecting from.)

The eccentric geniality of Rip Torn

Rip Torn made his name as a dramatic actor. I didn’t know many, or possibly any, of those roles.

No, I knew Rip Torn as a genial and eccentric afterlife attorney in Albert Brooks’ 1991 comedy Defending Your Life, one of my top 30 films of all time.

Whether that was his typical role or not, it became my model for the charismatic actor who left us at age 88 on Tuesday.

There’s something so adorably odd in the way Torn first greets Brooks’ Daniel Miller, who’s fresh off the boat, as it were, in the afterlife after dying in a car accident. Because of the way Bob Diamond (Torn) has progressed past his earthly incarnation to use 52% of his brain (most humans use only three), he has no way to interact with Daniel that isn’t grinningly condescending. But he doesn’t mean it to be; he just thinks that life (or, afterlife) is a hoot.

Daniel has a series of incredulous questions, but Bob answers them through frustrating non-answers, sometimes looking at him too long, sometimes pausing. It would be unnerving if you were Daniel. If you’re the audience, it’s hilarious, and it’s inimitable. I don’t think I’ve ever seen another actor pull off quite the sort of affect that Torn gives us in this terrific first interview, and then throughout the rest of the movie. He’s just a blissful glad-hander who can’t really relate to a regular human, but he doesn’t mean any offense by it.

Torn brought a similar set of traits to his other most iconic role, at least as far as I am concerned, in Men in Black. As Zed, he treats Will Smith’s J with the same kind of back-clapping, condescending, paternalistic enthusiasm, which Smith finds so exasperating. There’s a whole running bit where he’s always calling J “champ” or “sport” or something of that nature. He might have used the same terms of endearment toward Daniel Miller.

Scanning his filmography, I noticed I happen to have been in Torn’s presence on screen a fair bit recently. Two of my last ten rewatches were Hercules and Marie Antoinette, in which he plays supporting roles. They’re actually similar roles as he plays King Louis XV and Zeus. Both paternalistic, both given to a fair bit of grinning and infectious enthusiasm.

In 2010 Torn took a public turn for the crazier when he was arrested after breaking into a bank after hours while carrying a gun and while extremely intoxicated. This saddened me, because it’s not what Bob Diamond or Zed would have done. I could see both guys enjoying a good drink, but they’d make merry with it. They’d wrap their arm around your shoulder and drop some kind of odd duck comment that made you laugh out loud.

Because he had such a paternalistic nature to him, and because he was already 60 years old when I first met him in Defending Your Life, I never really knew Torn as a young man. Yet I was still surprised to learn he was 88 when he died. Of course that age would make sense for him, but I think it speaks more to the fact that I hadn’t mentally prepared myself to be done with Rip Torn. Even though it had been a decade since I’d made note of any new film appearances from him, I think there was always a part of me that expected one more Bob Diamond or one more Zed to come forth from him before he left us.

R.I.P. Rip.

Oh the whimsical ways of movie searches

I'm not saying that when you search for a movie on some kind of movie website, you should always get results that are fully relevant. There's an algorithm at work there, and algorithms work in mysterious ways.

But I do think the results you get should be better than this.

When I recently searched Netflix in order to find He Never Died, which I watched last weekend, I got the following first page of search results, in this order. Following each title will be a word or two on what I think they could possibly have been thinking:

Fyre - Huh? Blatant hawking of their own film? "It never happened," I can see, but not "he never died." (Ah, "never" is in the alternative title.)

Dracula - Yes. Why this list is not full of vampire movies, I'll never know.

The Incredibles - Whoops, no. Superheroes don't die, usually, but ... no.

Blazing Saddles – Nothing about Mel Brooks’ 1975 western spoof has anything to do with the words “he” or “never” or “died.” I mean, the film has men in it, but that’s it.

Stoker – Okay, there’s murdering and stuff in this. There could be a tone match at least.

The Apartment – Melancholy film where someone does not commit suicide even though they were contemplating it? So they “never died”?

Pride and Prejudice (2005) – Search me. No seriously.

Videodrome – Another possible tone match, though beyond that, not sure. I mean, this is not “if you liked this, you might like this,” it’s an attempt to return an actual result from the search terms “he never died.”

Network – I can see the relationship to Videodrome.

Get Out – The people whose brains are transplanted don’t actually die … I suppose.

The Polar Express – And this is where my jaw hits the floor.

Good Will Hunting – No connection that I can see. How do you like them apples?

The Jungle Book (2016) – Stop fucking with me. Really.

Edge of Tomorrow – Okay, at last we’re getting somewhere. Tom Cruise plays a character who dies repeatedly and repeatedly starts his day over again. Always dying is the same as never dying when you come right down to it. But this should have been the first result, not the 14th.

Men in Black 3 – Okay you lost me again. Oh wait! Isn’t there some kind of time travel aspect in this movie? Josh Brolin plays a young Tommy Lee Jones? That’s something.

Interstellar – Third best option so far. Matthew McConaughey comes back at the end despite presumed death. I’m clutching at straws here, but at least I don’t have to clutch quite as far on this one.

The Fault in Our Stars – Not so good, because like, um, he does die. Spoiler alert.

Spirited Away – He never died, but he was turned into a pig.

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me – Yeah sure. Why not.

There were many other pages of results, but I think you get the idea.

Zenyatta Mondatta

... is the name of a 1980 studio album by The Police. It's the one that contains the songs "Don't Stand So Close to Me" and "De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da."

It's also all I can think of when I see the name of the actress who plays Peter Parker's love interest in the Spider-Man movies.

Her actual name is Zendaya, but you can appreciate why it would remind me of the album.

I'm also here to say that I'm not sure I understand why they are trying to make Zendaya happen.

I'll say it: She has no charisma.

Does she look the part? Yeah. She's cute and I could see that a person with her looks should be a star. Bonus points for the ethnic diversity she brings to a major tentpole franchise (her father is African-American and her mother is of German-Scottish ancestry).

But can she act? Not really. And does she have charisma? No, she does not have charisma.

It pains me to say it because I really like what Zendaya represents. But the actual Zendaya? She has all the presence of a dead flounder. She has no pizzazz.

I think there are expectations placed on her of a certain type of personality transcendence based on the fact that she uses only a single-name moniker. You feel like that kind of thing should be reserved only for people who are truly rising above and beyond, like Cher, Prince, Madonna and ... McG.

Of course, you have to choose your name before you know whether you will attain that type of success. You have to put the cart before the horse a bit. Sometimes you don't become Prince. Sometimes you become ... McG.

Zendaya is no McG, at least not yet. And I suppose the admittedly exotic Zendaya, her given birth name, comes back to earth a bit if she decides to go by her full birth name: Zendaya Coleman. Or her really full birth name: Zendaya Maree Stoermer Coleman.

But she's come nowhere near justifying the single-name moniker, and one wonders whether it was ever a logical way to go with her. She is not naturally an effusive performer, not naturally a big personality. She might be as a singer -- she does that too, which is probably in part why she chose the name. But it's not her acting style. And I really doubt it is her singing style either.

I'll pause to note that one of the reasons the "Zendaya is Meechee" meme caught on so fully is that it was a secret takedown of Zendaya and her moniker. The guy who made it would scarcely admit this, but Zendaya the name of an actress is just as silly as Meechee the name of a Smallfoot character. Put them together and bam! Comedy gold. You can and certainly should appreciate it on the level of surface silliness, but I think deep down there's a criticism of Zendaya's lack of a last name, like she hadn't earned it.

Maybe she could have gone the route of Beyonce. Everyone knows Beyonce only by a single name now, but everyone also knows Beyonce's last name (Knowles) because that's how she was credited for a good decade of her career. Once she transcended, she was ready for single-moniker status.

Zendaya's been pretty much a zero for me in both Spider-Man movies, though I will admit to a fondness for how she plays the best scene in The Greatest Showman, the one where she and Zac Efron swing around and serenade each other. It may not exactly be charisma she demonstrates in that scene, and the success of the scene may have more to do with the song and the choreography. But she certainly has more chemistry with Efron than she does with Tom Holland, wonderful though he is. It's enough to get swept up in that moment.

Other than that? Not so much.

I mean, she's only 22, and there are plenty of eventual good actresses/charismatic stars who have learned on the job. But if you are someone with a vaguely self-aggrandizing stage moniker who crosses over to the screen, better to really show us some spark, like Lady Gaga did in A Star is Born.

Either that or I'll never be able to distinguish you from a Police album.