Serenity resurrected

This gives the term “zombie movie” a whole new meaning.

About ten days ago, I watched one of the worst movies of the year, Serenity, on a 99-cent iTunes rental. About eight days ago, its 48-hour rental window expired.

About five days ago, it appeared among my iTunes rentals again, giving me another ten days to potentially watch it again before the original 30-day window expires.

It’s not the first time I’ve had a movie exist for my viewing beyond the 48-hour rental window. Last year, when I watched Mom and Dad, it simply never started counting down the 48-hour rental window, so I got to watch it again before the 30 days were up. It landed in my top ten for the year, so that was fortuitous.

But this is the first time I’ve had a movie start and finish that 48-hour window, disappear from my iTunes entirely, and then reappear for reasons unknown, sometime later within that 30-day window.

Probably speaks to my iTunes being several versions out of date, I would guess. 

In this case I have no desire to watch it again, as it was, as I said, one of the worst movies of the year. However, it might almost be worth watching again just for the “so bad it’s good” factor, if only there weren’t so many other demands on my viewing schedule at this time of the year.

Just for curiosity’s sake, I’m tempted to press play to see if it would, indeed, play again, or if it would realize its own paradoxical existence and burst into flames or something. Because I don’t want my computer to burst into flames, I haven’t done this yet.

Or maybe a zombified version of the characters would start to crawl out of the screen at me, The Ring-style.

If you haven’t seen or read any details on Steven Knight’s bizarre follow-up to Locke, you should. The story is wackadoodle, and so are the performances.

Portraits of little women on fire

I've seen both Portrait of a Lady Fire and Little Women in the past week, the latter just last night, and I couldn't help but notice some funny similarities.

Some of them are just based on the period of time in which they occur, which is separated by eight decades or so, but still reflects some of the same overriding principles for gender roles in society.

Some of them, though, are just weird.

In reverse order of their weirdness:

1) Both films feature women being encouraged to marry for the purposes of their own upward mobility, and rebelling against that.

2) Both films feature a woman who is working as, or aspires to be, a painter.

Those ones are not that weird. But:

3) Both films feature a woman whose dress catches on fire. It happens to Heloise in Portrait and it happens to Jo in Women. That's not something I've seen in a movie in, I don't know, a long time, and I saw it twice in the same week. And in both instances, the woman whose dress is on fire does not at first notice it, having to be alerted to the fact by other characters.

And the weirdest one:

4) When I was watching Portrait of a Lady on Fire, I observed that the actress Noemie Merlant bears a striking resemblance to Emma Watson -- who is in Little Women. If only Watson also played the painter in Women, it would be even weirder, but alas, that role goes to Florence Pugh.

Hey, just because it's a new decade doesn't mean I don't still love pointing out coincidences.

Do both acclaimed films also appear in my top ten for the year?

You'll have to wait another week to find out.

The ongoing adventures of Johnson, Chewbacca illustrator

It is almost never advisable to try to translate an inside joke to someone who wasn't present for it. The thing you found so funny about it makes no sense out of the specific context in which it originated. But today on my blog, I'm going to discard that wisdom and try anyway.

A couple weeks ago I bemoaned the fact that I haven't properly been able to get my children ensnared in the Star Wars phenomenon. They saw and liked A New Hope, but have never clamored to see the rest of the movies. So we haven't forced it on them, much as I might have liked to.

The same has not been the case for Star Wars-related storybooks, specifically, the ones that function as something of an activity book, and even more specifically, the ones that function as a Star Wars version of Where's Waldo?, known in British Empire countries as Where's Wally?

The first one we had was popular enough, featuring a two-page spread from each of the six Star Wars movies before The Force Awakens, and then three spreads from The Force Awakens itself. You had to find about eight items per spread, from Sebulba the pod racer to specific ships in a space battle to little trinkets in a junk shop on Jakku. It provided enough enjoyment for my younger son to request reading it at least a half-dozen times.

The quantity hasn't been there for Where's the Wookiee and its sequel, Where's the Wookiee 2, the latter of which we just got this Christmas. But the quality of enjoyment has been much higher, a fact confirmed by the fact that his older brother has gotten involved in these ones. They may not have the same longevity as a repeatable experience -- once you've found Chewbacca in a thicket of frenzied Star Wars activity, you develop a memory of where he was the next time you try. But the initial task is far more satisfying.

In fact, sometimes finding Chewbacca is so difficult that I developed a narrative around the man who did the drawings, a narrative that involved him getting chewed out (no pun intended) by his boss for failing to include a Chewbacca in one particular spread.

But first, a little about these books. They involve familiar settings from as many Star Wars movies as existed at the time -- The Force Awakens and Rogue One have been added into the second, which has been on the shelves since November of 2017. But instead of a relative scarcity of characters as in the movies, they are overflowing with aliens and activity, almost Hieronymus Bosch style. The characters don't have to be from the planet in question -- I think I saw Jabba the Hutt on Endor -- and as there is in Where's Waldo?, there are a ton of what we call "fake baccas" to try to fool you into thinking you've found the real Chewy. It's a lot of fun.

One time, we had so much difficulty finding the correct Chewbacca that I came up with a character name Johnson, an illustrator working on these books, who is taken to task by his gruff boss for forgetting to include a wookiee in one particular spread. As in "You had one job, Johnson! To put Chewbacca on this page!" (The actual illustrator is someone named Ulises Farinas, but that just doesn't roll off the tongue.)

The kids love it. They can't get enough of it. I want something like this to come up organically, but anytime we read one of the Wookiee books, they say "Do Johnson!"

So I do.

Usually it doesn't take more than three minutes to find Chewbacca, and sometimes you spot him in the first 15 seconds, which is a little unsatisfying. But we really got our money's worth on one spread earlier this week, when we searched for a combined total of more than a half-hour, which included going on to the next spread and going back to it, and even my wife giving a cursory look for a minute. For anyone who has Where's the Wookiee 2 and is curious, it was the scene in the droid factory on Geonosis.

Johnson, it seemed, really did require a dressing down in this case. It was time for me to shine.

"Okay Johnson," I said in my most supercilious version of the boss' voice. "You say you drew a Chewbacca on this page. So I ask you: Where's the wookiee?"

Hysterics.

Then it was time, for the first time, for me to actually play Johnson.

"Yeah sure boss," I said. "He's right there." I dragged my finger across the page in a way that purposefully failed to identify any actual quadrant where the wookiee might be.

"I don't see him, Johnson! Show me exactly where!"

"He's in the top-bottom. He's on the left-right side of the page."

"Where, Johnson? WHERE?!?"

"He's near the [unintelligible word]."

It went on like this. The kids were loving it. I was loving it too.

The thing that made it all the more funny was that we still couldn't actually find Chewbacca.

What if they had actually forgotten to put Chewbacca in one of the spreads?

I was on the verge of googling it to see if it was some kind of internet scuttlebutt, that indeed the makers of the book had failed in their "one job," when finally I did locate him, really not that hidden at all. It must have been some kind of collective mind control that kept us from finding him before then. Or maybe Johnson quickly scribbled him in when we weren't looking.

I tell you this story not because I expect you to find it as funny as we did. I tell you it because I now have "a new hope" about my kids' interest in Star Wars. Maybe I just needed to find the right entry point, and maybe that entry point was a bumbling illustrator who couldn't do his one job.

Now that we've looked at these books as much as we have, maybe when they see the actual movies and see these locations on screen, it'll give them an ever-renewing sense of engagement as they go through and continue to see more.

I can't promise them Jabba the Hutt on Endor, but maybe the rest of it will be enough.

The Hustle has been giving me the hard sell

A couple weeks back I wrote about how I’ve missed seeing and ranking Glass, because everywhere I’ve looked to see a reasonably priced version of it, I haven’t found it.

It’s been the opposite with The Hustle, the female remake of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. I kind of decided I wasn’t going to watch it, but it’s been throwing itself at me.

I could have seen it for free, of course, when it was in the theater, as my critics card allows me to do that. But, like Glass, it didn’t rise to a sufficient level of importance for me back then, possibly because Rebel Wilson is hit or miss for me, and I’d just missed bigtime with her with Isn’t it Romantic? I’m sure there were also two other films released that week that I wanted to see.

But I got another free opportunity on the plane, or possibly on multiple plane trips, as I made two trips to America this year. I know it was definitely available on the second trip, because I swiped past it. “Nah,” I thought in dismissing it.

The point where I really had to stick to my guns about not seeing it was when it came up on iTunes as the 99 cent rental the beginning of last week. Usually I’ll just automatically click to rent most films that are available for 99 cents and count toward the current ranking year. However, in late December, the available viewing time slots are more important than just seeing whatever I can get my hands on. Pass, again.

Fast forward to New Year’s Day in the evening, when my wife and I were looking for something lighter to watch after the previous night’s Midsommar. I thought maybe it was finally time to yield to The Hustle, and noticed that it was still available for 99 cents on iTunes, even though the 99 cent rental of the week had moved on to Anna (which I am also shunning).

When I floated the idea to her, though, I was secretly sort of glad that she rejected it, citing similar concerns about Rebel Wilson. I’d decided I wasn’t going to watch this movie, and it feels good to honor your original instinct.

But then a half-dozen other ideas were tossed out and kind of mutually rejected as not quite the right way to wrap up a day at the beach for my youngest son’s birthday, when we wanted something that was just easy on the mind. And when we went on to Stan, our Australian streaming service, The Hustle delivered its final pitch, showing up there for free.

The universe was telling us to watch The Hustle, so we did.

And I’m glad we did. I got a lot of laughs out of it, most of which were provided by Wilson, and most of those through line deliveries rather than pratfalls, upending our biases against her in multiple ways. My wife felt similarly. My only issue was that it petered out into what felt like an anticlimax, such that seeing the words “THE END” on the screen caused me to sit up in surprise.

As it turns out, The Hustle hustled me. It made me forget some of the key plot details of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, whose structure it follows almost to a T, only with the genders reversed. Not only should that have prepared me for that ending, but it also should have prepared me for the reversal that immediately precedes that ending, which I somehow forgot.

SPOILERS

I think the reason the ending struck me as surprising is that the gender reversal fails in its adherence to modern gender politics. Whereas Glenne Headley gets the last laugh in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, making it a little slice of feminism even back in the late 1980s, it’s Alex Sharp’s would be mark (who is actually a con man himself) who gets the last laugh here, making fools of Wilson and Anne Hathaway. The three do join forces at the end, which is the same ending as Scoundrels, but our current era usually requires women to ultimately leave the men as fools, rather than vice versa. I guess you can’t really have your cake and eat it too, with the women both co-starring in a Scoundrels remake and being the ultimate “winners” of such a remake.

It’s no Hustlers, but I’m glad I saw The Hustle, and am in the position to give Rebel Wilson the benefit of the doubt next time. That’s probably just as well, given that she’s Australian, and I want to support the people who are on “our team.”

Mid(night)sommar

My second viewing of Midsommar not only spanned two evenings and two years, it spanned two decades.

That's right, it was our chosen New Year's Eve viewing after returning from a surprisingly large family festival in neighboring Footscray, which was attended by multiple thousands of people and capped off by fireworks at 9:30.

Fortunately the kids were tuckered out after the 20-minute walk to and from our car, meaning they were asleep less than 15 minutes after we got home, no wild aspirations of making it to midnight.

My wife and I made it to midnight and beyond, staying up past 2 a.m. Most of that was to accommodate the two-hour-and-twenty-eight-minute running time of Ari Aster's latest film.

If you're curious, the alarm on my phone went off right after the point where (SPOILER ALERT) the old people jump off that cliff to their deaths. In fact, we had to be sure we paused it on a reaction shot, rather than a shot of a Harga bringing a large wooden mallet down on the face of the guy with the badly manged leg.

At that point, we turned our attention to the decidedly different task of celebrating the last five minutes of the decade.

We pulled up a live countdown clock on YouTube and ticked off the seconds as you usually do. Goodbye, last decade. Hello, 2020s.

The movie released us from its grip at around 1:40.

It was an appropriate viewing not only for the "mid" in the title on an evening focused around a midnight celebration, but for the fact that it's actually midsummer here, as we live in a bit of a land of the midnight sun, though obviously not to the same extent as they do in Sweden.

As an example, my kids were able to play on the playground adjacent to the festival until just before the fireworks started, as 9:30 was chosen as a time when we could finally be sure it would be dark enough to have the intended effect.

It was an inappropriate viewing to the extent that we usually like to watch something lighter and more fun when we have a New Year's Eve viewing. Past examples include Paul Feig's Spy and, just last year, Holmes & Watson at the drive-in.

But a 99 cent iTunes rental of Midsommar, which had only 12 days left before it expired, convinced my wife that it made for a good candidate, particularly as she had been meaning to see it for some time. It also worked for me, not only because I wanted to see it again, but because this time of year, leading up to the closure of my annual list, usually features a rewatch with my wife of something I really liked from the previous year, to help fix its ultimate position on my list.

At first she admitted she was having doubts about her decision, as the tone of the opening scene -- my favorite segment of the movie -- was too heavy for her, or at least, for this particular scenario. But I told her that was the worst part, not entirely sure if that would be the case for her. As it turns out, it was, as the intensity level stays but is probably leavened by the fact that the rest of the film takes place in daylight. She ended up really liking it, talking only about the things she liked, a difference from our viewing of Hereditary earlier this year.

As you might remember from this post, I had concerns about the rest of the movie, labeling the film (and both of Aster's films, really) a "masterpiece tease." This time I just kind of let myself marvel at the filmmaking, giving Aster a pass on some of the excess running time and diminishing narrative returns as the movie moves along.

Plus it was nice to see that two old people -- not jumping-off-a-cliff old, but feeling old enough -- can stay up well past midnight watching a movie, without even any caffeine in my case. That's a tribute to the quality of the filmmaking for sure.

Happy 2020 to those who have gotten there, and to those gearing up for your own midnight festivities, whether they take place in the midsummer or midwinter, whether they involve pubic hair pies or just your standard champagne and party hats.

The year of endings

Given that 2019 is the last year of the 2010s, it seems only natural that we’d be thinking about endings.

What doesn’t necessarily follow, though, is that so many popular franchises would have been geared toward a natural 2019 endpoint in their own chronologies.

No popular cultural commodity can be packed away for good, so in many cases, what we’re talking about here is a pause in the action. But it’s a big pause with a big symbolic value, even if it ends up proving to be a short one.

That this should coincide with the end of a decade is, to be certain, a coincidence. It must be. No franchise starts with the idea of wrapping it up by a certain symbolic date, if only because most franchises can’t be sure they will endure long enough to get there. The point it starts is entirely a function of when its perceived viability has reached a critical threshold in order to make it into a film (or a TV show, as we shall see). The point it finishes, then, is usually a function of x number of consecutive production schedules until the entirety of the story has been told.

For whatever reason, that entirety really descended on us in 2019.

SOME SPOILERS, TREAD CAREFULLY

Let’s look at the examples:

Star Wars – This is the big one, as a story dating back 42 years, with many of the same actors, finally reached its conclusion in 2019. Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is not, of course, the last Star Wars movie we will ever see. In fact, it’s almost certain that 20 years from now, we’ll already have as many more Star Wars movies as we’ve gotten in the last 42. But as the end of the Skywalker saga, or at least the end of the actual Skywalker bloodline, it’s a pretty big deal. Sure, Daisy Ridley may say now that she’s done with Star Wars, but I also read that she went and cried alone in her car after seeing the final cut. Emotionally, she’s susceptible to returning, and she adopted the name Skywalker after all. But there’s no doubt that for now, this is an ending, and it’s a big one.

Avengers – It’s hard to feel like a saga has come to an end when a new movie featuring some of the same characters comes out scarcely two months later. But there’s no arguing that Avengers: Endgame represented a real culmination of 11 years’ worth of movies that had preceded it, and that you definitively draw a line when you halve the total of six original Avengers in one fell swoop. Of course, in the perfect example of pop culture’s perennial self-rejuvenation, one of the deceased Avengers is actually getting her own movie just a couple short months from now, albeit a prequel (or so it would seem). Still, to measure just how much of an effect the MCU has had on us, many of us (myself included?) were sadder to see the end of this story than the end of Star Wars. And walking out of that theater back in April, it sure did feel like an ending.

Game of Thrones – Apologies if I switch to TV on a film blog, but GOT is one of the most cinematic TV shows we’ve ever gotten, and in the past decade, its cultural cachet came to rival the two mentioned above and the likes of Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings. That too came to an end in 2019, though I’m sure we’ll get The Further Adventures of Tyrion Lannister at some point in the next decade. The final season of Game of Thrones was heavily criticized in certain corners of the internet, as well as off it, as you didn’t have to be a geek to get involved in this epic of swords and dragons, breasts and beheadings. For me, the final season flashed moments of brilliance and moments of great disappointment, though more disappointment in the way our heroes can let us down than the way the writers botched the job of telling their story. And for me, it was another sentimental end to a saga I’d been living with for years.

Breaking Bad – While we're on TV ... Breaking Bad should have ended years ago, but since Vince Gilligan decided we needed a conclusion to the story of Jesse Pinkman, we got a movie that did that in 2019. Although the movie was received well in most circles (though not this circle), I suspect Gilligan won't decide he needs to wrap up any more characters, making this the final chapter in the story of these characters, in any case. Unless he gets the bad idea for Breaking Bad: Alaska, which, I hope not. 

Toy Story – So if Toy Story 3 wasn’t really the end, then Toy Story 4 surely is, isn’t it? Never say never, but for now, it does seem like Pixar is ready to move on from the story of Buzz, Woody, Bo Peep et al, delivering the final installment of their story in 2019. There’s nothing that states this has to be the end, except for the perceived catcalls of Pixar fans who thought a fourth movie was already a bridge too far. But at the very least, it’ll be hard to imagine how Woody will reunite with the legacy of Andy and his family friends, represented most distinctly by the gaggle of toys who do remain together at the end of this one.

X-Men – Not all conclusions had a sentimental quality to them. Given the general response of sheer exhaustion and disinterest by fans, they didn’t want to let the door hit X-Men on the ass on its way out. Dark Phoenix was always envisioned as the end point to this particular iteration of the X-Men franchise, but after the way the last two films were resoundingly rejected, it could be a stake to the heart of the franchise on the whole. If so, it’ll leave a bad taste.

It – Okay, so the first chapter of It was only two years ago. But this is definitely the last chapter, unless someone wants to pull some silly stunt like getting these actors together again in three decades, Before Sunrise style, to have them fight Pennywise as 70-year-olds. I include it here more for the way the poster added to the symbolic trend I’m exploring today. The tagline reads simply: “It ends.”

How to Train Your Dragon – Okay, I didn’t even see The Hidden World, which came out in early January in Australia (I was invited to a preview screening in 2018, as a matter of fact). I guess I tired of seeing these movies before they tired of making them. However, they have now tired of that, as producer Dean DeBlois confirmed they don’t intend to make any more. Right, and Sylvester Stallone didn’t intend to make any more Rocky movies after Rocky IV.

Rambo – Another one I didn’t see, but since the aforementioned Sylvester Stallone is now 73, it’s reasonable to believe the promise implicit in the title Last Blood. And since I didn’t see it, I have no idea if Last Blood puts a definitive ending to the story of John Rambo. But whether it does or not, this is actually a pretty big one, as the character has cinematic origins older than any other character on this list save Luke Skywalker.

And this is to say nothing of the franchises that may have practically ended due to poor box office, whether they intended to or not (Terminator, Charlie’s Angels), and the movies that felt like they were career summations based on the age of the director (The Irishman, Pain and Glory).

So yeah, it seems that 2019 was a year for us to look back on the past and kill it, to quote Rian Johnson’s version of Kylo Ren.

But 2020 is not only the start of a new year, it’s the start of a new decade. It seems likely that we’ll get more recycling of franchises that haven’t yet worn out their welcome. But don’t forget that when the last decade started, most of us hadn’t even heard of Game of Thrones or How to Train Your Dragon, and the MCU was in its comparative infancy at only two years old.

Ten years from now, we might be mourning the endings of things we haven’t yet imagined.

A movie theater on a boat? What'll they think of next!

Because I have yet to experience my personal white whale of a vacation -- a luxury cruise -- I have also yet to go to the movies at sea.

Well, now I can tick that particular item off my bucket list.

On our way back from Tasmania on Sunday, I did what I hadn't done the previous Saturday night on my trip over -- watch The Addams Family aboard the Spirit of Tasmania, one of two ships that does the ten-hour Bass Strait crossing between Victoria and Tasmania for people who want to bring their own cars on holiday in Tassie (or vice versa, I suppose).

It was very hard to skip the 11 p.m. showing last Saturday, because the sheer novelty of it all but propelled me through the door. But because I texted my wife that I was planning to do it, she gently chided me about whether I'd want to watch it again the following weekend when I had my kids in tow.

And I'm glad I waited, for a couple reasons. There was no kid-friendly alternative I hadn't already seen -- in fact, all five other movies on this daytime crossing (Abominable, Maleficent: Mistress of Evil, Ad Astra, Downton Abbey and Last Christmas) were movies I'd already seen. See, they actually have two movie theaters, if you want to get right down to it.

The second reason? Yeah, I wouldn't have wanted to watch this thing twice.

But first, the theater. The screen was the smallest thing about it, as the actual "auditorium" (if you want to call it that) came equipped with about 30 legitimately theater-style seats. I probably wouldn't have wanted to watch something like Ad Astra in such an environment (though I didn't like that film anyway), but The Addams Family turned out to be just fine.

My only complaint was the timing of the show, as I might have liked the movie to break up the ten hours a bit better. By playing at 9:30, only an hour after we'd set sail (so to speak), and by ending before 11 a.m., it did leave my kids wondering how soon we would be there way too soon after it ended.

But yeah, just doing it at all was really fun, and they liked the movie better than I did, so that was good.

Oh, I guess it was fine in the end. But even though the property it was based on came first, it did remind me rather too much of the Hotel Transylvania series, the first of which I loved, with diminishing returns on each subsequent installment.

Also, I've decided I can make a pretty solid prediction about an animated movie. The more characters appear like caricatures (the rotund really rotund, the tall and skinny really tall and skinny), the less likely the movie is to be any good. And, like, all the tall and skinny characters in this movie had pencil thin legs and arms, which tended to diminish the amount Wednesday Addams was supposed to stand out from them.

Co-director Conrad Vernon is also the veteran of multiple Madagascar movies, so there's that.

The one really unique aspect of the experience was the fact that you could feel the boat rocking from time to time, giving it almost its own natural 4DX experience.

Maybe Ad Astra would have been a good movie to see that way, after all. Don't astronauts sometimes simulate space flight in water?

Merry Christine to you

We've spent Christmas with Christine Baranski, but it hasn't been all egg nog and good cheer.

After being one of the best parts of The Ref, a movie we really liked, on the 23rd, she was one of the worst parts of A Bad Moms Christmas, our Christmas Eve viewing.

And we hated A Bad Moms Christmas.

Which is a shame, because I was wildly, irresponsibly, on the other side of the spectrum with the first movie, which I gave 4.5 stars and ranked in my top 15 of the year. This one I gave one star and was teetering on the verge of the dreaded half. (And Baranski looks nothing like the actress whose mother she is supposed to play, Mila Kunis.)

The first Bad Moms is probably not as good as I remember it, but this one is that bad.

But since I am writing these words on actual Christmas, I won't linger on the negative.

I did want to quickly mention that this is a funny movie to have watched on the heels of The Ref as it's a second straight Christmas movie that has an identity crisis on how to market itself.

We'd always planned to watch the Bad Moms sequel this Christmas season, and it was there for the streaming on Netflix. But as I could not be sure what kind of internet we'd have in our "holiday house" in Tasmania, I also picked up a DVD copy at the library, just in case.

Funnily enough, it was the DVD copy we couldn't use. The aspect ratio was too squished, and we just couldn't figure out how to correct that. Fortunately, it streamed just fine. (Or maybe unfortunately, as we probably would have enjoyed our Christmas Eve better had we not watched it.)

I noticed the DVD was titled Bad Moms 2, as the film was distributed in Australia, whereas Netflix bore the film's U.S. branding you see in the poster above.

Unlike with the aforementioned The Ref or The Ref's own predecessor in ambiguously branded holiday fare, Die Hard, A Bad Moms Christmas/Bad Moms 2 was not released at some other point of the year. And Australians are, if anything, even more Christmas crazy than Americans, even with the summer Christmas and everything.

Maybe they're wiser than Americans about protecting the sanctity of their favorite holiday. Maybe they didn't want to taint Christmas by affiliating the woebegone Bad Moms sequel with it.

Here's hoping your holiday viewings are untainted by inferior fare, and if you've hung your Baranski by the chimney with care, you get a Ref rather than a Mom. Merry Christmas!

Qui-Gon Jinn reads The Polar Express

I've had Star Wars on the brain this holiday season, as you can tell from my last x number of posts.

So it was appropriate that none other than Qui-Gon Jinn read us The Polar Express on Christmas Eve.

Chris Van Allsburg's 1985 storybook is a Christmas tradition that I have brought from my own childhood into my children's childhoods. But there are specific rules around this tradition; the story gets read only once each year, that being Christmas Eve.

Except not this year, it appeared.

Despite reminding myself not to forget it when packing for our trip to Tasmania, I did indeed leave behind our weathered copy of the story -- the one from my childhood -- on our bookshelf at home.

I remembered it at dinner on Monday night, and immediately felt dismayed.

Then yesterday I got an idea. What if the internet could read it to us?

Of course the internet could do that. In fact, Liam Neeson could do it.

The first result when I searched "polar express storybook" on YouTube was, indeed, a 16-minute reading of the story by the world's most prominent Irish actor. And though there were some things he said earlier in the year that made me sort of want to cancel him, well, it's Christmastime, a time for forgiveness.

Plus, I'd just heard his voice -- twice now -- in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.

So we pulled up to the hearth of my laptop -- my wife, my kids, my mother-in-law and my sister-in-law -- and listened to Neeson's marvelous brogue read my beloved Christmas Eve story, the one that distills the magic of Christmas in a way that never quite extinguishes, no matter how old you get or how many stressors undermine your holiday season.

And even though there was music, which didn't always work, and even though some pages were lingered on longer than it seemed they needed to be, and even though the camera moved across the page rather than giving us a full still image of each glorious page in Van Allsburg's book, it was my traditional fulfilled, and Christmas is all about tradition.

What's more, the looks on the faces of my family seemed to involve genuine joy, both those who knew the story well and those who were hearing it for the first time.

Merry Christmas, and may the force be with you.

Audient Audit: The Ref

This is the final installment in my 2019 monthly series where I've been checking my lists twice to see whether I was naughty by adding films I'd never seen to them. 

So I'm finally getting around to seeing my first Christmas movie of the season (second if you count Last Christmas way back in November, third if you count the 40 minutes of Die Hard I watched last weekend), and thereby writing my first Christmas post of the season, and it's one that doesn't even have a Christmas-related poster.

In a thing it definitely has in common with Die Hard, which came out six years earlier, The Ref appears to have been marketed in such a way as to downplay/entirely disregard its Christmas setting. That would never happen today. If anything, they'd want to play up any little Christmas association they could find. At the very least, you'd have this same picture with a Christmas tree behind Kevin Spacey and Judy Davis.

But no, in 1994, apparently it was considered a bad thing that your movie might feature Christmas. And The Ref apparently was not successful enough to have generated even one alternate poster. When you google "The Ref movie poster," this is all you get.

But the reason there's no Christmas in this poster is the same reason there's no Christmas in the Die Hard posters: The Ref was not released at Christmastime. It was released on March 11, 1994, so putting a Christmas tree on the poster would have been a weird thing indeed. The big change today would be either it wouldn't have Christmas as a backdrop, or it would have been released at Christmastime. Gone are the days when movies that have a significant Christmas theme are released at any other time than mid-November.

The Ref had made it onto my various lists because I had seen at least a few scenes of it. I remembered the scene where Denis Leary tips Spacey and Davis over in their chairs, for example.

As it turns out, though, that was it. I didn't remember most of this film.Which means either my memory is bad, or I didn't see it.

Not remembering it is a good thing, because I came in with the impression that The Ref was a mediocre black comedy, one which others raved about but which hadn't worked for me at the time. I'm glad I'm remembering it wrong, probably from never having seen it at all, because I thought this thing was hysterical.

It's all about comic timing. The three leads are all masters of that, as the lines they spit out really sing because of their skill in this area. Then you've got legit comedy vet Christine Baranski, whose imperious and sarcastic line readings have always been her calling card. But some of the funniest lines come from Baranski's dopey husband, a "that guy" I recognized from numerous previous projects, whose name is Adam Lefevre. He's the straight man to all these sarcastic dynamos, asking in childlike naive surprise "Why?" when his brother and sister-in-law say they're getting a divorce. Despite a movie's worth of their bickering.

When all the performers are good, you have to credit the director. The late Ted Demme (I guess both Demme brothers are now "late," sadly) made a number of really solid films during his career, among them Beautiful Girls and Monument Ave., also with Leary. His career started early enough that he was still only 38 when he died eight years after this movie was released. We might have gotten a lot more great movies from him if a heart attack -- one likely fueled by cocaine use, an irony since his last movie was Blow -- didn't take him from us too early.

The thing that worried me about making this our Christmas Eve Eve viewing on our holiday to Tasmania was that it would be too acid, too dark. I liked the idea of watching something that wasn't soppy with holiday sentiment, but I was worried this would drive us to places we didn't want to go. (And as it happened, it was the second straight movie my wife and I watched involving marital strife, after Marriage Story.)

Well, lucky this film ends up having a lot of heart. Sure, Davis and Spacey bicker their way through the kidnapping/home invasion perpetrated by Leary's cat burglar, but there's no real violence in this film, and comeuppance is only waiting for characters who really deserve it. And, as it turns out, none of our three leads fall into that category. The issues Davis and Spacey argue about are not petty, but seem like real concerns of real married people -- while also managing to tickle our funny bones. And the fact that they both start to sympathize with Spacey, and vice versa, shows that decent people see the decency in each other even in a world that's marred by bitterness and betrayal.

A big win to end the series on.

I'd normally end this series with a kind of wrap-up along the lines of ranking the films from first to worst, but I'm not going to do that this time. Instead, I'll just give you a final count of the movies I saw, and which ones I had legitimately seen before. Here we go:

January - Roxanne (hadn't seen)
February - The Witches of Eastwick (had seen)
March - The Dollars Trilogy (hadn't seen)
April - Speed 2: Cruise Control (hadn't seen)
May - The Pink Panther (hadn't seen)
June - Modern Times (hadn't seen)
July - The Magnificent Seven (hadn't seen)
August - Breathless (hadn't seen)
September - Manon of the Spring (hadn't seen)
October - Heartbeeps (had seen)
November - Ran (had seen)
December - The Ref (hadn't seen)

So a pretty scant three titles I ended up pretty sure I'd seen before. Which makes me a pretty big liar ... but also pretty good at identifying when I might have lied.

I'm still weighing up two different options for my 2020 monthly series, but will decide in time to watch the first in January. Merry Christmas!

Second Skywalker is the charm

Can I start talking about Star Wars yet?

I'll give you a spoiler warning before I delve into anything really serious in this post, but I've got a few more paragraphs before that time rolls around.

One thing you know for sure, whether you've seen The Rise of Skywalker or not, is that it has been divisive. Some people do love it, but more seem to hate it -- or at least those who hate it have taken command of the narrative around this film.

One thing you may not know, though, is that it's better the second time.

The conventional wisdom should state that a film has its greatest impact on you the first time, as you are being freshly introduced to its winning elements and have the thrill of surprise in your corner as well. With a Star Wars movie, though, it may be a little different. You need one viewing just to comprehend the new information being fed to you, and to wrap your mind around the fact that what you're witnessing is essentially new threads in a sacred text.

But new anything does not always go down well the first time. Sometimes you have to see it a second time for the incorporation to be complete.

I got that chance yesterday morning in Devonport, Tasmania, scarcely an hour after disembarking from the ferry that brought my car and me over to this island from mainland Victoria. I camped out last night and have joined my wife and my sons (who flew down today), as well as my sister-in-law and my mother-in-law, in the southern part of the state on the Tasman Peninsula, where we will spend Christmas.

I knew I wanted to see something, and I thought that thing would be Frozen II at 9:30. (It was an all-night ferry ride.) But in killing some time before the start of the movie, I listened to the Filmspotting guys do their own discussion of The Rise of Skywalker, and that made me realize that I wanted to see it again. Not only that, but now was the time, or never. After Boxing Day, I'll have a half-dozen new releases to consider seeing to add them to my 2019 list. There'll be no time for Star Wars then.

The first showing of Rise of Skywalker of the day was starting just 15 minutes after that, and would leave me all afternoon to do some last-minute shopping before arriving at my campsite.

Upon completion, my 3.5 star rating of the film shot up at least a half-star, and I'm inclined to say it'd be a full star if that didn't seem to disregard some of the film's undeniable weaknesses. Four point five stars was what I gave The Force Awakens, still my favorite in this trilogy, but Rise of Skywalker ends up in the same ballpark of quality for me after that second viewing.

In a way I think this is crazy. My brief summary of this movie, which I gave a couple others who had also seen it, was along the lines of "Although it had basically everything I wanted it to have, my overall impression was that it was slightly 'less than.'" In fact, after initially convincing myself that it fell between The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi for me, I started to wonder if Last Jedi weren't the superior film.

So what exactly did that second viewing do for me?

For one, it allowed me to understand the connective tissue between scenes that had seemed way too hurried the first time, when I was failing to follow each movement in the quest narrative. It's not nearly as shoddy or poorly explained as I thought, it's just that each new wrinkle in the quest is quickly explained without being belabored. It's almost a model of narrative efficiency by J.J. Abrams, despite it seeming to some people like indulgence/inefficiency to have all those different scenes and planets in the first place. Those people are wrong, and my second viewing confirmed it for me.

My second viewing also allowed me to become emotional in scenes where I had not the first time. It was not that I didn't experience emotions the first time, but that they were intensified the second time, perhaps a result of knowing where things were going. There were actual tears at least once.

If I hadn't watched this movie again, I was ready to let it become mired in my 50s or 60s on my year-end list. Now I'm glad to say that it will be quite a bit higher than that ... and that I'm kind of plotting, though not very seriously, how I might even squeeze in a third viewing.

So the message to you is: If you love Star Wars, but you didn't love this movie, give yourself another chance to love it.

Well, I didn't get to any spoilers after all, and tomorrow I think I finally have to write my first Christmas post.

But you won't be sick of Star Wars talk yet after Christmas, will you? And then you really will all have seen it, and this tiptoeing around spoilers won't be necessary.

In the Driver's seat

NO STAR WARS SPOILERS.

In fact, I specifically chose a picture from The Last Jedi just so you don't have any photographic spoilers.

I figured it was finally time to write a post about Adam Driver, and I had a pretty good excuse, as the last four films I've watched (new and revisited) all feature Driver.

Three of those were, of course, Star Wars movies, as I revisited The Force Awakens (Saturday night) and The Last Jedi (Sunday night) in the lead-up to my midnight viewing of The Rise of Skywalker on Wednesday. Marriage Story was, as you know from my last two posts, the other film crammed in there on Tuesday night.

The only thing preventing this from being a complete Driver lovefest was hearing that he walked out of an interview with Terry Gross that had scarcely begun because a clip of himself singing from Marriage Story was going to be played as part of the package. Apparently, Adam Driver can't watch or even listen to himself perform, a quirk that sounds like false modesty until you back it up by storming out on one of America's most respected interviewers.

It's too bad, because I love watching and listening to Adam Driver perform.

It wasn't always this way. My first tastes of Driver were decidedly mixed. They were based on short experiences with him in Frances Ha, a film I really liked, though found his character a bit insufferable, and Girls, of which I only watched a handful of episodes. I recognized a kind of magnetism in his abilities, but got the impression of self-involvement, a kid of obnoxious sense of the privilege of the young Greenwich Village intellectual. That was surely the characters he was playing rather than the man himself, but if you play too many of that type of character, it becomes more difficult to distinguish the two.

I'm glad Driver wasn't pigeonholed, because he has gone on to impress me time and again throughout the rest of the decade. It probably all started halfway through the 2010s with The Force Awakens. When I first heard it, his casting struck me as odd, and then infinitely more so when I learned he was set to be The Big Bad. Actually seeing the film immediately convinced me that I had underestimated Driver -- vastly.

This isn't a spoiler for The Rise of Skywalker because you've surely seen enough images to know that he repairs his Kylo Ren mask in this film. J.J. Abrams liked that mask, and I kind of feel like its destruction was one of the "fuck you"s Rian Johnson gave him in The Last Jedi that rankled him the most.

But Johnson knew what he was doing, and I'll just say that Abrams acknowledges it in Rise of Skywalker as well. To have Adam Driver behind a mask is to not see Adam Driver act. And Adam Driver can act at a level few of his peers can achieve.

Even the still photo above contains more acting than certain performers in the prequel trilogy accomplished over the entire trilogy. Last night in talking to a friend, I characterized Driver as "Hayden Christensen, but good." By that I meant that both actors played young, emotionally immature, yet extremely powerful force users who were tempted by the dark side and confused by their negative thoughts. While Christensen received enough backlash for the petulance of his performance to have possibly poisoned the well for that character type in all future Star Wars movies, Driver made it immediately clear how that type of character is supposed to work, and thereby salvaged that character type. (Side note: I actually do think Christensen is frequently effective in those movies.)

Even if the mask is cool and the voice distortion is chilling, you don't get the real Ben Solo/Kylo Ren until he's unencumbered by the mask.

Driver carries the performance through to the finish line in Rise of Skywalker, which is all I'll say.

Then you have Marriage Story, one of two other Driver movies released in the past couple months, along with The Report, which I understand is kind of disappointing. If it is disappointing, I have no doubt it's not Driver's fault.

Driver has already received a Golden Globe nomination for Marriage Story, and an Oscar nomination is surely also forthcoming. In fact, I haven't handicapped the field, but it's possible he's even the favorite to take home the award.

And that's just. I may have some quibbles with the balance of the film between its two main characters, but I can understand Noah Baumbach being seduced by the notion of more screen time for this charismatic actor. (It helps, of course, that Driver is the Baumbach stand-in in the film.) His every instinct in this film is on point. He knows how to play someone who is generous, and he knows how to play someone who is shitty. He presents us with a character who has a continuum of selves, and in certain key emotional moments, he delivers the kind of performance you don't forget, which they use for Oscar clips. That's not a backhanded compliment in this case, because they are not staged as moments of Oscar bait. Driver would probably reject a moment that was staged like that, would find a way to use his peculiarities as a performer to render that moment utterly scaled and believable.

It ended up being a bit of an Adam Driver lovefest anyway.

If walking out on Terry Gross makes Driver a diva, then I guess that's something we can live with. Not everyone can be as ingratiating as Tom Hanks, and also be a really great actor. In fact, history is littered with actors who were absolute shitheads, but held the screen in a way you couldn't take your eyes off.

It's a bit bittersweet to know I (probably) won't be seeing Driver in any more Star Wars movies, but the timing of Marriage Story is a useful reminder that Kylo Ren was merely the breakout role for him.

And now that he's broken out, anything is possible.