Utkarsh Ambudkar is not Siddharth Dhananjay

Is it racist if I say I confused the two American actors of Indian descent who can both rap?

The incredible performance by Utkarsh Ambudkar at the Oscars – he not only wrote his rap as the show was running, but also memorized it – reminded me of the other times I have enjoyed Ambudkar on screen, including Brittany Runs a Marathon and Patti Cake$. (Not so much Game Over, Man!, which was my least favorite movie of 2018.)

Only Ambudkar is not in Patti Cake$. That’s Siddharth Dhananjay.

My confusion came when I watched Brittany, actually. I was trying to place Ambudkar and I thought “Ah yes, that’s the guy in Patti Cake$.” When in fact I was probably remembering him from Game Over, Man!, if from anything at all.

Plus, they both rap, so there’s that. I didn’t know that when I saw Brittany, as rapping is not part of the character Ambudkar plays in that film. It is, however, the central part of Dhananjay’s character in Patti Cake$, so when I saw Ambudkar rapping at the Oscars, it only increased my certainty that they were the same person.

Before you go saying “What, all people of Indian descent look the same?”, let me show you a picture of them side by side. You have to admit the physical similarity. That’s Ambudkar on the left and Dhananjay on the right.

Okay, they’re not identical twins or anything. But they have a similar build and I do think there are similarities in their faces.

The scarcity of American actors of Indian descent also helps with the confusion. You’ve got Aziz Ansari, Kal Penn and (no, not Kumail Nanjiani, he’s of Pakistani descent). Internationally, you’ve got Dev Patel. In other words, there are few enough guys out there that if two of them look similar and they both have the ability to rap, it’s easy enough to assume they are probably the same guy, without committing a hate crime or anything. (Plus, Dhananjay wears a durag for most of Cake$) 

I really enjoyed Dhananjay in Patti Cake$ so I’m kind of disappointed his career hasn’t really taken off. Then again, I guess that’s not fair to say – he’s continued working, it’s just I haven’t seen anything else he’s done.

Maybe after the Oscars, Ambudkar’s career will take off.

In either case, now that I’ve done this little exercise, I won’t confuse them again.

By the end of the night, I could speak Korean

Surprises really can come true.

I wrote an entire post yesterday about the obstacles Parasite had to overcome to win best picture, but sometimes, Hollywood does the right thing.

Instead of celebrating itself, sometimes Hollywood just chooses the best damn movie that got made. And this may be the first ever that had zero to do with Hollywood.

Yeah, Bong Joon-ho has made films that were primarily in English with big Hollywood stars, and he also had a deal with Netflix, though I guess that was just for one movie. But the movie that won him not one golden statue, but four, was the one exclusively in his native tongue, starring exclusively actors with his own skin color.

And it became the first ever best picture winner in a language other than English.

It's really astonishing.

For me, it marks only the third time my #1 movie of the year has been named best picture, as Parasite follows on the heels of Titanic (1997) and Birdman (2014).

As Bong kept getting up again, and again, and again, and kept finding ever more charming ways to express himself, I wondered if his translator was ever going to get stressed out about him going on too long for her to be able to reproduce all the words he'd said. And who knows if she did or not. The subject of this post notwithstanding, I don't actually speak Korean.

But for one night, Hollywood did. Hollywood said "Screw all these try-hards who are producing the type of movie they think we want to recognize. What we want to recognize is quality."

And for one night, they did.

As I like to do every year after I finish the Oscars, watched on delay here in Australia, I'm going to throw in some general thoughts and bullet points about the show, having not read any recap stories and having no idea if these thoughts are original to me or if I'm just the 403rd person in your Twitter feed to release them into the world. Of course, I'm not in your Twitter feed, but you get what I'm saying.

So, here goes ...

- At first I didn't think I knew who either of the singers were in the opening number, which made me feel old. But after a few moments I said to my wife (who was still watching at this point, and continued to do so for exactly two awards), "I think that's Janelle Monae." Whew! Less old. But I still didn't know who the other guy was. (His name is Billy Porter, which I might have known if I watched the TV show Pose.)

- Why did Brad Pitt and Al Pacino both decide to wear their hair like lion manes? There were other options.

- I thought it was kind of a weird decision to present the Oscar for best animated feature before best animated short. But they did the same thing with the documentaries so at least they were consistent.

- I thought the Frozen II song with all the foreign language singers was a good choice, especially with how the evening ended up winding down. And that all the jokes about Idina Menzel landed.

- Parasite wins best original screenplay! There's something happening here ... what it is ain't exactly clear.

- What the hell was Timothee Chalamet wearing? If it was a non-binary outfit, then I rescind my befuddlement.

- Taika Waititi wins best adapted screenplay? That could actually be the biggest surprise of the night.

- The show was pretty flat, I thought, before Maya Rudolph and Kristen Wiig came out. I thought they loosened things up.

- I thought the best documentary winners might thank the Obamas. They did not.

- For some reason I thought that Laura Dern had already won an Oscar. When I realized she hadn't, it made me even less worried that my girl Florence Pugh did not take home the statue. She will take home at least three in the future.

- I don't really get the reason for the Eminem song but at least it was well performed. I imagine it took a lot of good directing to get people on camera who had the right reaction to it. Unfortunately, at one point they also got Martin Scorsese.

- I figured Eminem might be the one to drop an f-bomb, but instead, it was Ray Romano. Ray Romano??

- Randy Newman looks old. But he can still perform.

- The recap rap by Utkarsh Ambudkar was tight, and probably my favorite segment in the whole show.

- Will Ferrell and Julia Louis Dreyfus were the best comedy duo. Everything they did worked, including the confusion over whether they were wearing earpieces or not.

- Was Cynthia Erivo dressed as an Oscar? I knew she could sing from Bad Times at the El Royale, but I didn't know she was also a songwriter. Talent.

- I groaned when James Corden and Rebel Wilson came out dressed as cats, but it was appropriately self-deprecating, and the bit with them playing with microphone was great, though I suspect unrehearsed -- it looked like Wilson was planning to get on with reading the winner and had even started speaking when Corden had a moment of inspiration.

- Bong said he was ready to get drinking, which was great, but he still had two more awards to accept.

- Kellie Marie Tran wins good sport of the evening by showing up to introduce a presenter and seeming like she was genuinely having a great time and not burdened by great psychological baggage over the way she's been treated. The producers returned the favor by including her multiple times in the clips that played over John Williams' nominated score. I hope she has a terrific life, whether in front of the cameras or not.

- I thought it was very strange that Joker was scored by a woman. Maybe Todd Phillips doesn't hate them after all?

- As the show neared the end, it became more and more clear: The Irishman is the only best picture nominee that is not going to win anything.

- Bong honoring the other directors was touching and lovely, and I didn't envy him that he had to figure out how to say something nice about Todd Phillips.

- Wait, Joaquin Phoenix didn't win an Oscar for Gladiator? How have I thought he did for the past 20 years? (Benicio del Toro did for Traffic that year.) Okay, not so upset about that one either. Especially after he gave one of the most interesting and impassioned Oscar speeches I've ever heard, even though I was prepared to cringe at any moment if he went off the rails into insanity.

- The only thing that tainted the win by Parasite, and only ever so slightly, was the fact that the final set of speeches was pretty discombobulated in comparison to what Bong had given us before then. Jane Fonda seemed unsure what she was supposed to do. And by the way, how the hell is Jane Fonda 82 years old? She looks 62.

- This BP winner gets us back to rhyming following two years in which the streak was broken. You had Spotlight, then Moonlight, now Parasite.

- Was there not a single winner played off the stage by the orchestra this year?

After this triumph, the Oscars can give top honors to five Green Books in a row and they'll still have this to fall back on.

Well done, Academy. Pat yourself on the back.

For your consideration: Parasite

Tonight the Oscars will televise -- about halfway through my workday, so around lunchtime I will stop paying attention to the interwebs and then watch them when I get home.

I don't expect a lot of surprises, but then again, can you actually expect a surprise?

A surprise I think could happen is that Parasite could win best picture. I don't expect it to happen, but then again, can you actually expect a surprise?

Maybe it won't have been such a surprise if it does happen. It feels like the consensus among critics, and even maybe among audiences, as the best and most interesting film of the year. I've written that this is the closest my tastes have aligned to the larger critical community since There Will Be Blood in 2007, though even that year, many critics felt that No Country for Old Men was the worthier selection. I don't know that Parasite has a direct competitor in the best picture nominees as far as the critics are concerned.

This, however, does not mean it has that good of a shot at winning. The critical favorite is usually the bridesmaid, not the bride, with countless examples dating as far back as Citizen Kane. More recently, films like L.A. Confidential, The Social Network and Roma are prominent instances of this, and Parasite certainly seems poised to become just the latest.

But Parasite shares something in common with Roma, and now that it has happened two years in a row, maybe the necessary critical mass is building to push it over the top.

For the second straight year, a film entirely in a foreign language has been nominated for best picture. If Academy voters were testing the waters last year with how they felt about the proposition, with Roma presumably falling just short of Green Book, maybe this year they are ready to take the plunge.

It would be an extraordinary feat if it happened. A film entirely in a foreign language has never won best picture, and looking at the list of past winners, only The Last Emperor has any significant portion of the film that's not in English. That also marks one of the few best picture nominees, and certainly winners, that has significantly Asian subject matter, a trait it also has in common with Parasite.

To get a sense of how rare both of these things are, I went back and reviewed the entire history of nominees in the best picture category. As far as I could tell, these were the only best picture nominees that did either of these things, if you don't include films that had some English, and films about Americans in Asia:

Foreign language:
The Emigrants (1972) - Swedish
Cries and Whispers (1973) - Swedish
Il Postino (1995) - Italian
Life is Beautiful (1998) - Italian
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) - Mandarin
Letters from Iwo Jima (2006) - Japanese
Amour (2012) - French
Roma (2018) - Spanish

Asian subject matter:
The Last Emperor (1987)
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)
Letters from Iwo Jima (2005)

I'm not familiar at a glance with all the movies nominated for best picture over the years -- like, really not familiar with some of them -- but I think it's a safe assumption that there were few, if any, foreign language nominees or nominees about Asia in the vast wasteland of mediocre studio pictures that were nominated prior to 1944, when the Oscars moved to only five nominees per year. But even if I did miss one or two, you get the idea about the relative scarcity of such nominees.

And even in the nominees above, some should get asterisks, such as Letters from Iwo Jima. I love that film, and I continue to think of it as having an incredibly high degree of difficulty for director Clint Eastwood, as it was not in his native language. Still, it had an American imprint on it, which certainly made it easier for Oscar voters to recognize.

Given what Parasite is up against, historically, it does make it a tall order to think of it walking away with the evening's top statue tonight. But maybe that just means it's time. Maybe these other films have reached the brink of winning top honors in order to pave the way for Parasite.

You'll notice this post has spent no time on Parasite's actual qualities as a film, the things it does that earns its status as the best film of the year. That's because I've done that elsewhere on this blog. You know I consider it worthy as I named it my #1 movie of 2019. And you've probably seen it for yourself, so you are familiar with its many strengths.

No, today I am talking directly to the Academy -- very belatedly, of course, and entirely in a rhetorical way. That best picture winner is already in that envelope ready to hand to whoever is going to read it (um, let's say that's ... Barbra Streisand. Sure, why not?). Not that my wee little blog would ever play much of a role in changing any of the minds of these people, many of whom are set in their ways, leading to predictable winners year in and year out.

But as I've said in the past few days, there are surprises, like when Moonlight upset presumed favorite La La Land to win, just a few short years ago, with many of these same voters voting.

I don't expect it to happen, but then again, can you actually expect a surprise?

How a technical innovator became the boring establishment pick

If you had told me that a movie that seems to take place all in one shot and is set in World War I was going to be the frontrunner for best picture, I'd say "Wow, what an outside-the-box choice!"

But if you told me 1917 was going to be the frontrunner for best picture, I'd say "Boring, typical Hollywood."

How on the earth did the former become the latter? And how on earth did I become convinced of that along with everyone else?

I should start by saying I know a number of people who think 1917 is the best movie of the year, including my esteemed ReelGood colleague John Roebuck. (Until he saw The Lighthouse and amended his choice, that is.) It's not some Green Book, which a decent number of people thought was reasonably good, enough to vault it above the other favorites that burned brightly and passionately for a more select few. No one thought Green Book was the best movie of 2018, but there are some who think that way about 1917 in 2019.

But the right people, the people who dominate the cultural conversation about the Oscars, seem to think it's just the latest example of Hollywood's well-documented myopia.

Who are the "right" people? I'll engage in some argument shorthand by referring to them only as "snooty critics." I'm not always a man of the people, but I do embrace my low culture, and when I want to see "snooty critics" as them, it's easy enough for me to do so.

"Snooty critics" have a number of problems with 1917, though I haven't heard them explained all that convincingly. The phrase "video game" gets thrown around, as in, it is one. But I'm not all that sold on that take. Yes, it's a series of obstacles to overcome that have a first person quality to them by the very nature of the single-take aesthetic. But how else are you meant to make a movie like this and not have a number of challenging set pieces break up the story at approximately eight-minute intervals? If you're attacking 1917 as a video game then you are also attacking the core conventions of screenwriting.

Then there are those who say it glamorizes war, but Francois Truffaut said that he's never seen an anti-war movie, as every war movie, by the very dramatization of what it depicts, glamorizes war to some degree. You can't make a movie with trenches and mortars and people being shot through the helmet without making a movie that "glamorizes" war in somebody's opinion. It would be fair to say that on the spectrum of glamorizing war that goes from "not very much" to "Michael Bay," 1917 is much closer to the "not very much" side.

An argument that would probably convince me a bit is that it's a very male movie, as the only female character -- at all? -- is a woman hiding in the shadows, nursing a baby. But I haven't even heard this argument much. While true, I gotta say, that's World War I for you. Maybe in this day and age, that movie shouldn't win best picture, but Sam Mendes probably couldn't have made it all that differently.

I can poke holes in both the good and bad arguments against 1917, so why is it that these criticisms have gotten under my skin and made me a convert? Why are there at least three other movies I'd rather see take home the trophy?

That last question is easy -- there were three or four, actually exactly three, best picture nominees ahead of it on my year-end list. So yeah, it's not my first choice. But it's also not my last choice, the choice I dread. It's not Joker, for Christ's sake, and its frontrunner status will help deny Joker any shred of a possibility it has of winning.

I did turn on 1917 somewhat quickly, though, from ranking it #15 for the year with a near-perfect 4.5 star rating, to only a few days later, openly contrasting it with a movie I ranked #24 for the year (The Last Black Man in San Francisco) in a conversation with a friend, and saying the latter was the better film. Its status as the second-to-last film I saw before closing my list meant that I didn't really have the time to chew it over before I was sure it belonged as high as I placed it.

But I think there's another recent best picture winner, which I adored, that played as much of a role in my souring on it ever so slightly.

Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) did two things that sort of do this film a disservice, and make it seem more conventional and "establishment-like" than it might initially seem. Not only did Birdman do the one-shot concept already, five years ago, in ways that may have been more technically challenging than 1917 in certain ways, but it also broke the glass ceiling for high-concept films such as itself. When I saw Birdman and immediately boosted it into my top spot for the year, a spot it never relinquished, I didn't for a minute think of it as an Oscar film. When it became not only a nominee but a frontrunner, the same eye-rolling by "snooty critics" that is now attending 1917 made it seem significantly less ground-breaking than I had every reason to think it was. Because of Birdman, Mendes' film can't say the same thing about breaking ground, even as technically accomplished as it is.

And yet it is accomplished enough that one might rightly call it a wonder. Can you figure out where those edits are? I sure can't. CGI is getting pretty damn amazing, but even within that, Mendes and company are using it virtuosically. They're doing Birdman without some of the crutches, daring you to point out the cracks that you could probably point out fairly easily in Birdman -- though I don't think Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu would care because he's not pretending it's one two-hour block of time like Mendes is (sort of).

But maybe this is the thing that makes it the most establishment. There's nothing Hollywood loves more than celebrating itself, and in a way, 1917 represents the "magic of the movies" more than any other nominee. Parasite and Little Women may be better, but neither is literally tricking your eyes the way 1917 is.

I think the most establishment thing about 1917, actually, is that we've seen it before. We've seen war movies before. We've seen World War I movies before. We've seen World War I movies win best picture before. We've seen movies that pretend to be one continuous take win best picture before. We've seen movies directed by Sam Mendes win best picture before. We may not have seen this exact movie before, but a lot of its ingredients are familiar, and there are a lot of best picture nominees with far more unfamiliar ingredients.

And maybe one of those will win. I've got my fingers crossed for Parasite, the one movie I think is capable of pulling off a shock upset, which would be even more shocking because a movie that's entirely in a foreign language has never won best picture.

But the Oscars really only shock you rarely, like when Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty had the wrong envelope, or, in the same moment, when Moonlight beat presumed favorite La La Land.

I hope Parasite is this year's Moonlight, because 1917 is definitely this year's La La Land.

Those darn ellipses

It's the day before the Oscars (two days, but I live in Australia) and I still haven't written much, or maybe anything, related to the upcoming telecast. Today is not going to change that. What can I say, I'll try to crap out some thoughts on them tomorrow.

I can, however, at least talk about one of the nominated films, however superficially. And it's something I've been meaning to get off my chest for some time.

It's this: I hate the stupid ellipses.

I usually try to honor a movie's chosen way of presenting its own title, even finally coming around on Se7en as the preferred way to spell the David Fincher film (as discussed in this post). But for some reason I just haven't been able to adopt the way Quentin Tarantino wants me to write the name of his latest, which also stars Brad Pitt.

I think he wants us to write Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood, because that's how it appears in the movie, but I just can't. The ellipses have got to go.

I say "I think" because the jury is out on the matter, as embodied in the contradictory image above.

Look closely, and you'll see two distinct ways of writing this title, smashed right up next to each other. It's from the iTunes rental page, if you can't tell.

The text has the "right" way, the way I've written above. The poster, though, puts the ellipses one word later: Once Upon a Time in ... Hollywood.

Now, I don't know if that's an authorized poster or just some mock-up the guys at Apple threw together without running it by the copy editor. But you'd think that if anything, the poster would get it "right" and the accompanying text would contain the error.

I don't like either of those titles, but the former is definitely preferable. The ellipses have the effect of preparing you for a surprise, something ironic, something unexpected. They also separate the familiar phrase ("Once Upon a Time") from the "punchline" ("in Hollywood.") The latter works well enough in the surprise department, but no better than the former, and the former is the only one that meets the standard of separating the familiar phrase from the punchline. The familiar phrase is not "Once Upon a Time in." So yeah, it's probably just a fuckup by the guys at Apple.

But wouldn't Once Upon a Time in Hollywood just be a lot easier?

IMDB thinks so. I'm glad I can rely on it to be a successful arbiter in this case. It lists Once Upon a Time in Hollywood as the title and Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood only as an "original tile."

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood does a third thing that I think this film is definitely trying to do: It reminds you of a couple of cinematic greats directed by Sergio Leone. That's no coincidence, as the very text of the film grapples with one man's decision to start doing spaghetti westerns. The title should then be faithful to Leone's best spaghetti western (Once Upon a Time in the West) and also to his gangster masterpiece (Once Upon a Time in America). A couple other films have already paid homage to these films, those being Once Upon a Time in Mexico and Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, and certainly others that I haven't seen or aren't thinking of right now.

And none of those films has a damn ellipses.

Now, I am not opposed to ellipses in titles as a general rule. I somewhat reluctantly will include the ellipses in Say Anything ... or When Harry Met Sally ..., both films that are in my top 50 of all time. I'm not even necessarily opposed to ellipses in the middle of the title, and there's even one film I've seen whose title starts with "Once Upon a Time" and has ellipses in the middle. That's Once Upon a Time ... When We Were Colored. Something tells me, though, that Tarantino is not paying homage to that particular film.

Trying to dissect what I don't like about Tarantino's usage, I'm landing on the fact that it's patting itself on the back for being clever. "Get it? It's a story about a place where they make stories! What could be more meta?" Look man, I don't care. I don't get to the end of that title and feel like congratulating you on how brilliant you are. Just can the ellipses and get on with the show.

And it's a good show, I've decided after my second viewing back in November. It's only the seventh best nominee for best picture in an unusually good year for the Academy with regards to honoring the year's best films, but it's a lot better than the two stars I gave it on first viewing. Pitt should pick up an Oscar for his efforts and there's an outside chance Tarantino will too for his writing, though Parasite oughtta win that category.

But it would be every so slightly better without those superfluous three dots.

Stroke kills Kirk Douglas - 24 years later

If that seems like a pretty flippant title for a post about someone who has just passed, I actually mean it as the ultimate sign of respect. I'll explain more a minute.

But first ...

I've had occasion to write about a number of senior citizens lately on this blog, and on the same night that Kirk Douglas died, I happened to watch a 95-year-old Cicely Tyson in Tyler Perry's A Fall From Grace, still going strong in a small role. I've also, unfortunately, had the occasion to memorialize some people who were taken before their time.

But hanging in the background of the elder statesmen and women I've talked about, there was always the eldest statesman: Kirk Douglas. He was the last remnant of a golden age of Hollywood that has mostly passed into history. (The last male remnant, perhaps -- this is the second straight day I've had occasion to mention 103-year-old Olivia de Haviland.)

Every time I thought of how old someone was, and how surprised I was that they were still alive, I thought of Douglas, now well past his 100th birthday, not acting anymore of course, but still around. Still able to walk and wave and smile and exist.

There was a time when it seemed all but certain that he would outlive his son, Michael Douglas, who was thought to be a goner when he was diagnosed with advanced cancer some years back. Somehow, the younger Douglas (now 75 years old) fought his way back from that prognosis and seems poised to make the type of run at 100 that his dad made. Those Danielovitch genes are pretty darn good. (Kirk was born Issur Danielovitch, way back in December of 1916. Michael never got a Danielovitch name, but he did get his father's stage name as a middle name.)

However, there was an earlier time when it seemed like Kirk Douglas could die before he even hit his 80s.

In late January of 1996, Douglas had a stroke, and it was a doozy. He was expected never to regain his ability to speak, but he bucked those odds. Still, he looked incredibly frail from that time onward, like it was just a matter of time before he would succumb.

It was, in the end, a matter of time ... a matter of 24 years.

In 2016, for the celebration of his 100th birthday, he was jovial and jaunty and able to walk into his birthday party under his own power. He had three more birthday parties after that, the last one just two months ago.

It's impressive to see a person in Douglas' shoes just keep going and going after there was every reason for him no longer to be around. And keep going he did, until Wednesday.

On a blog like mine, this should almost certainly be a remembrance of Douglas' contributions to cinema, but in that regard, he did not hold a special place in my heart. Oh, I always thought he was a very charismatic presence, but if we're doing the math, I only actually saw five films he ever made, if you can believe it, and one of those (It Runs in the Family) was after he had already had his stroke. Of the four others, Ace in the Hole was far and away my favorite.

No, Douglas was most interesting to me as a survivor, a determined bastard whose body failed him nearly a quarter century ago and yet he kept going. He kept living, because maybe life is all there is, and he didn't want to miss any of it.

Rest in peace, old lion.

Sixty years of old age

Some people were just never young I guess.

Angela Lansbury is still alive – she’s ticking along at 94. In fact, she appeared in a movie as recently as two years ago, with a short cameo (that included singing!) in Mary Poppins Returns. IMDB also lists her as involved with a project that’s only just now in pre-production. She’s not done, and soon she will start to rival Betty White (98) in terms of longevity. (Though they both still have a ways to go if they want to catch Olivia de Haviland, who is 103.)

But Angela Lansbury has been an “old woman” for nearly 60 years.

You’d know from some of my recent writing on this blog that I’m fascinated by actors who play significantly older than their actual age, the examples I cited being Ian McDiarmid in Return of the Jedi and Max von Sydow in The Exorcist. Lansbury may have them both beat, though.

Tuesday night I rewatched The Manchurian Candidate, only my second-ever viewing of the classic. (I’ve also seen the remake, which I think is pretty good.) It crackled for me just as much as the first time, even though I was feeling under the weather and watched it in bed on my iPad.

I was struck by the fact that Lansbury plays the mother of the brainwashed soldier played by Lawrence Harvey, even though she was only 37 at the time it was released on October 24, 1962, and had only just turned 37 a week beforehand. That means she was 36 or even 35 during filming – probably 36 as production schedules tended to be shorter back then.

That means – are you ready for this? – she was less than three years older than Harvey. He was born on October 1, 1928, meaning that Lansbury was only just about to turn three when he was born. That could be the lowest age differential I’ve ever seen between actors who are supposed to be playing parent and child. (Harvey, I think, is supposed to be playing significantly younger than he actually was.)

The thing is, this was standard practice for Lansbury. I remembered having this observation about her once before, and went back to check my blog for when that might have been. It turns out it was while watching Elvis movies for my Getting Acquainted series back in the day. Just a year before The Manchurian Candidate she played Elvis’ mother in Blue Hawaii, though at least there, he had the decency to be almost a full decade younger than she was. (She’s also a bit of an antagonist in that film, if memory serves.)

I’m not sure why Lansbury struck casting directors as prematurely old back then, except that her face always had a certain maturity to it, and she was certainly talented enough to play those ages. Also, she’d already been around for nearly 20 years in the early 1960s, as she debuted at age 18 in 1944’s Gaslight.

Now, just because she plays the mother of a grown adult who has returned from fighting in a war does not necessarily make her character “old.” A 37-year-old could indeed be the parent of a war veteran. But Harvey himself looks nothing like some fresh-faced 18-year-old, and is not supposed to be, either. He’s supposed to be a contemporary of Frank Sinatra, who was actually nearly a decade older than Lansbury. Plus, Lansbury is the wife of a powerful senator played by James Gregory, 14 years her senior, but not supposed to be, I don’t think. Wives of powerful senators should be at least in their 40s, and more likely in their 50s.

I’d like to be more familiar with the other movies Lansbury made around this time, to see how commonplace this was for her, but somehow, I haven’t seen a single Lansbury performance for nearly 20 years on either side of these two. Blind spots everywhere, I’m ashamed to say.

Well, cinema needs its menacing matrons, and Lansbury did it very well, whether she was old enough to do so or not.

The best and worst annoyingly long movie titles

You’d think that there would not be any good “annoyingly long movie titles.” The very name discounts the possibility of them being good.

But I think it’s possible for something to be annoyingly long and still good, or at least, still funny.

Today I hope to throw some words at the topic of annoyingly long movie titles, inspired by the upcoming release of Birds of Prey: And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn, which is decidedly an example of the latter. As in, the worst.

Come on, it’s just Birds of Prey, screw all that other noise. And most movie marquees around the country and the world will, indeed, be screwing all that other noise. You will not see the full title of this movie on any movie marquee in the world. But you will see it on every poster for the movie, albeit in significantly smaller type, which means some idiot in the marketing department at the studio is still trying to make And the Fantabulous Emancipation (breath) of One Harley Quinn happen.

But not every annoyingly long title is And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn. Maybe it’s only because I really liked the movie, naming it my #1 movie of 2014 and one of the top 25 of the last decade, but this new title reminds me most of Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), a title for which I developed a limited fondness. As they are both, broadly, superhero movies, I even feel like Harley Quinn (I’m not writing that damn thing out again) is borrowing inspiration from Birdman. Both also seem to have pretentious ambitions, which again, I accept because the movie really worked for me in Birdman’s case.

Of course, probably the best example of the annoyingly long movie title is the one that does so specifically for the purposes of humor. Well, you might argue that most annoyingly long movie titles are done for humor, as otherwise you’d just switch to something more palatable. But there are certainly degrees to which the humor does or does not work.

Take, for example, Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. Borat’s broken, some might say strangled, English was one of the biggest jokes about the character, so a title that is grammatically awkward, unduly worshipful of the man’s home country, and also gets at an obsession with America and its pop culture, is like killing three birds with one stone. I’ve made it a point of pride that I can roll off this title without any errors, when asked. (Because that particular scenario arrives just about every day.)

But long character-based titles don’t work just because it’s a somewhat beloved character. Sometimes they just try our patience. A couple years ago, the movie with the longest title on my whole movie list came out. It was called Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond – Featuring a Very Special, Contractually Obligated Mention of Tony Clifton. So Tony Clifton may not be beloved, but Jim Carrey and Andy Kaufman may both be, to varying degrees. But this title pretty much just made me smack my forehead. Suffice it to say that I definitely had to look up the correct wording just now.

The movie whose title is long just to make fun of the idea of long titles is also usually a bust. The first movie I’m discussing today that I haven’t seen is a prime example of that. That would be Don’t be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood. Now that I’ve written it out, I think the title is not trying to make fun of the idea of long titles so much as it is being silly by trying to literally string together about four different titles. At least it’s better than Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13^th. There’s one more of these titles that is like twice this length but I’m having trouble tracking it down.

My favorite purely innocent long title is The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain. I suppose there is something cheeky about this – they could have figured out a simpler title if they’d wanted to – but the title does do an admirable job of describing what the movie is about, as it is about a provincial debate in the Welsh countryside about whether a local elevated surface is better described as a hill or a mountain. For a while, this was my favorite movie title to bring up in joke circumstances, when I was looking for something awkward to encapsulate a small, idiosyncratic non-blockbuster.

Supplanting The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain as my go-to random long title was Jeanne Dielmann, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, which is not an easy choice as I always have to look up the exact wording, but is fun anyway. As this is an arthouse film with a very serious demeanor, this title exists to capture the everyday humdrum quality of a person’s life by naming the movie after her street address, not to be whimsical in any way, shape or form.

It’s probably worth including a subsection in this post about earnest documentaries with long subtitles, like Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief or If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front or Magic Trip: Ken Kesey’s Search for a Kool Place, but I don’t know that their length is “annoying.” Or if it is, it’s only annoying because it sounds more like the name of a graduate thesis than a movie.

I’m sure I’m only scratching the surface of movies whose titles test our patience and don’t always reward us, but I can’t end this discussion without mentioning probably the actual best movie to be guilty of a thing like this, which is Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. If Stanley Kubrick did it, there has to be some merit there, right?

As for this new movie coming out, I think the main things that annoy me about the title are that it a) makes up a word, b) uses the word “one” as though pretending we don’t know who Harley Quinn is, and c) suggests that the movie is entirely about the fact that she has been “emancipated” from her relationship with the Joker, or at least so it would appear.

I think I’ve had enough references to the Joker for a couple years, thank you very much.

And I want monkey butlers and a swimming pool filled with vodka

There are endless examples of headlines that should not pass for headlines in 2020 as journalism continues to die a slow and painful death. But that doesn't mean they are all without value, or that we really even need to count them as journalism. Sometimes a headline is just a headline.

There's enough of the old school in me, though, that I feel like the existence of a headline itself confers additional importance, not to mention parts of the story beyond what is conveyed in the headline. You should not be able to read the headline and know the whole story.

And so it is that the website MovieWeb provides a considerable challenge for me.

On the one hand, I like movie news (though don't consume as much as I once did) and I like the way MovieWeb presents its information. I get an email from them a couple times a week that contains about eight headlines, probably one or two of which I will actually click into. These are unabashedly geek oriented, with minor cast announcements in upcoming superhero films and sometimes speculations about remakes or adaptations being in the works. I've got my complaints about these and I feel like I've made them before on this blog, though I can't remember exactly when. But at least these things qualify as news in the broadest definition of that word.

What I'm about to discuss does not, I think, qualify as news in any sense.

Here was a headline from this week's email:

Where to start with this?

Let's start small with my journalistic hangups and click maximization concerns. The headline tells the whole "story," such as it is, and the subhead provides additional context. There's really no reason to click into this "story." If I were one of the advertisers on the subsequent page, I'd be pissed.

But I wouldn't have written the post just for that. No, it's the utter non-newsworthiness of the story that has inspired me to put fingers to keyboard today.

Why do I care if Finn Wolfhard wants to play a part that, as far as I know, does not exist, in a movie that, as far as I know, does not exist?

Sure, making a movie about a young Ben Solo is certainly one way Disney could take their property, but I haven't heard anything about it. And if it's not even at the script stage, it doesn't seem particularly likely that Wolfhard would be the right age to play the character when a movie actually went into production. He's already 17 now, though he did just turn 17 in December. I guess it depends how young they want this young Kylo Ren to be.

But what galls me about the story is not that Wolfhard said he was interested, but that MovieWeb picked it up as a story. Wolfhard can say whatever he wants on Twitter, which is, indeed, where he said it. I don't need 1/8th of my twice-weekly MovieWeb email devoted to it, though.

Because I like to cover my bases, I did indeed click into the story, which gives me a bit more context for it. Wolfhard was replying to fans suggesting he would make a good younger version of Adam Driver, and in fact, there have been memes out there that imagine him as a young Ben/Kylo (before morphing into Alan Rickman's Severus Snape, or so I'm told). Almost as though he felt like he were forced to comment, Wolfhard suggests he would love to play the role.

The article does, then, dutifully acknowledge that no such project exists, several times. So it's not the actual writer of the story who is hyping something he knows does not exist. If anything he seems to gently chide Wolfhard for forcing him to write a story about him, which I suppose would also be a shot at his own editors who demanded such a story. However, he does also mention that Marvel is producing a comic book series about young Ben Solo, which, nowadays, is as sure a path to the cinema as any.

What I guess I'm saying is that this whole thing is not totally off base and no individual person deserves scorn for ushering it into my eyeballs. I guess I'm really criticizing the age we live in, in which random Twitter comments provide the basis for entire "news" stories, and where someone's idle thinking out loud about their wants and needs is considered "newsworthy" in some broad definition of the word. Especially when those thoughts are so obvious. I mean, who wouldn't want the fame that went along with joining the Star Wars universe? I'm sure Anthony Hopkins would want to play a young Kylo Ren if you asked him to.

The reason I wrote this piece is also due to the accumulation of such stories over the years at MovieWeb. Since I don't delete my emails and can easily filter my inbox by searching the word "MovieWeb," I've gathered together a number of other egregious examples of this phenomenon that got me to this point:

There are other examples that are more egregious, but I got tired of looking and besides, you get the idea.

Maybe it just bothers me that MovieWeb is trying to do the work that these actors' agents should be doing. Actually, if I were someone in the position to cast these people, I'd be annoyed that they "went to the media" about these things instead of directly to the studio. It would almost specifically make me not want to cast them. You do cast them, and you seem too predictable by half.

I suppose instead of isolating this phenomenon, I should lump it in with other things MovieWeb does that bother me, like writing stories about fan art that puts a familiar face on an iconic character, or advertising the existence of new Funko Pop action figures for famous movie characters. (Or, in one case, for Guy Fieri.) In my research for this post I was also reminded of the time they told us about a particular movie chain switching from Coke to Pepsi.

Then again, this is a collection of ephemera by geeks for geeks, and if I'm reading it, I guess it's an admission that I'm just the kind of geek they are writing for.

Snow in September and other Drunk idiocy

Describing what makes bad movies bad can be a pretty fruitless exercise. You may get a great negative energy going, but there's a "you had to be there" quality to bad movies, as the poor concept and execution can manifest themselves in ineffable details -- a bad line delivery here, a weird reaction shot there, an abrupt edit here, a shoddily delivered piece of exposition there. You know it when you see it but you can't always describe it to someone else. You find yourself using the word "bad" a lot and feeling sort of dissatisfied by how you've conveyed the movie's awfulness.

But sometimes there are details of a movie that are so disastrous that they speak for themselves and bust out of the limitations of context specificity.

Drunk Parents, a movie my wife and I thought would be fun to watch on Saturday night because it stars Alec Baldwin and Salma Hayek, starts out with the two main characters delivering their daughter to college. Unbeknownst to her, they are the fallen rich, destitute and indebted to creditors after the medical product they invented started getting bad headlines and draining them of all their profitability. Their return to an empty house -- soon literally as they put much of their furniture out on the lawn -- kicks off a seven-day binge of drinking and bad decisions that are supposed to be funny. They're not, but that doesn't have anything to do with my setup here.

To make sure we never lose track of the fact that this movie takes place only within a week, the words "Day 2" and "Day 3" and "Day 4" appear on screen at various intervals.

On "Day 6," I think it was, there is a snowstorm.

The snowstorm is as unnecessary to the plot as any other detail shoved into this story, including the waste of cameos by Will Ferrell and Colin Quinn as homeless people. So its inclusion is all the more careless and egregious because it occurs in September -- in early September, at that.

The latest you could possibly deposit your daughter at college would be about September 5th, with an August start date much more likely, especially for incoming freshmen, who sometimes get to campus before the older students return. I know at my college, I got there around August 20th to go on a pre-orientation canoeing trip. So conceivably, this snowstorm could actually be in August.

I'm not going to say there has never been a snowstorm in the U.S. in August or September, but if there had been, it would have to be in Alaska. And there's no indication whatsoever that these people live in Alaska. I'm not sure if the location was mentioned (though I have to admit that I stopped paying attention to every detail), but I imagined this movie to take place somewhere in New England. There's a guy with a Boston accent, anyway, though he's the only one.

If you want to convince me that the appearance of snow in September is meant to be another absurd improbability that adds comedic value to the whole enterprise, I'm not really buying that, or they needed to make more of the fact that the snow was unlikely, if that were the case. Instead, the only explanation seems to be that they had such a short shooting schedule that when it snowed, they just had to incorporate it into the action because they didn't have any other choice.

If you want to try to convince me that Baldwin and Hayek were dropping their daughter off after winter break, well, that doesn't make sense either. It's clear that their nest has only just been emptied, especially given the tenor of their departure from her (the big emotional hug, the proclamations of love, the listing of how far away they are by car or by plane if she needs anything).

Oh, and here's the definitive proof of when it takes place -- at the end the action jumps "two months later," to a Thanksgiving dinner.

So this really is just the continuity person being drunk, or maybe that hilarious shooting schedule compromise.

If trying to account for the utter disaster that is Drunk Parents, someone from the production might try to explain away a detail like this as an intentional bit of meta absurdity. The movie very unwisely tries to be meta on a couple of occasions, as when one character observes the fact that the parents are hard to keep track of because they're in a new location "every 16 minutes" -- which seems to be a description of movie screen time, based on the conventions of constructing a screenplay, rather than real-world time. Then there's the fact that the bums (Baldwin refers to them to their faces as "Bum" on multiple occasions) played by Quinn and Ferrell are named, um, Colin and Will. Someone must have thought that was hi-larious.

I did emit surprise laughter on a couple occasions in the first 20 minutes of the movie, so you might think it wasn't a total loss. But really, it is, and by the end I was inspired to give this movie only a half-star, a Letterboxd rating that I reserve for the worst of the worst. That's Cats territory. If this were just a bad (there's that word) or inept comedy, it might have earned a full star, but it commits the dual sins of bad taste (there are a lot of questionable jokes about a sex offender played by Jim Gaffigan) and undignified slapstick (most of it performed by Hayek). It really is shit.

Because I can't resist discussing one technical gaffe, I'll say that I can't remember seeing a film where the mix between the sound and the dialogue and/or the narration was more unbalanced. For no reason I could discern, there is a bookend narration by Quinn's character, but especially with the end one, you can barely even hear what he's saying because the end music dominates it. So not only did no one watch this film before deciding it was finished, they didn't listen to it either.

Perhaps the film's most fundamental failure is that it cannot even see its premise through to the end. If this movie is designed to occur over a week's time, and it's called Drunk Parents, at the very least we should see them continuing to pickle themselves over the course of the running time, and the regular consumption of alcohol informing the increasingly unhinged choices they're making. Instead, if memory serves, they take their last drink on about Day 2.

Each February 29th I watch the worst movie I can find, a tradition I started back in 2008. I'll write more about that when the end of this month rolls around. But because I keep track of such things, I can tell you that each of my previous February 29th viewings was the worst movie I saw that month -- easily the worst, I would venture.

My 2020 February 29th viewing already has some early competition for that dishonor.

Unpausing the world's longest pause

For four of the past five years (I skipped 2016), my bi-monthly viewing series – not to be confused with my monthly viewing series – have been part of the lifeblood of this blog.

In 2015, I watched one of the six existing Star Wars movies every two months in anticipation of The Force Awakens. In 2017, it was anime films. In 2018, I revisited films by Joel & Ethan Coen that I hadn’t loved when I first saw them. In 2019, I filled in (most of) my blind spots in Spike Lee’s filmography.

In 2020, I am going to take a little pause from something quite that useful.

Starting in February and every two months thereafter, I will be finishing movies that I started, but was not able to finish at the time I started them for whatever reason. Think of it as kind of branching off of last year’s monthly series, Audient Audit. (In fact, I considered doing them both in the same year, but I decided I wanted to watch Lee’s films more.) Appropriately enough, the series will be entitled Finish What You Started.

So while this series has no grand thematic ambitions and it’s unlikely to be something you are going to “follow along with” – to the extent that you do that anyway – it’s a useful personal goal that helps tidy up my lists and scratch itches that were never fully scratched.

As I am working from a very specific list, I can already tell you the titles I plan to watch, assuming I can source them. Since I don’t know what order I’ll watch them, I’ll just list them alphabetically. They are:

The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976, Nicolas Roeg)

Paddington (2014, Paul King)

Sisters (2015, Jason Moore)

That Sugar Film (2014, Damon Gameau)

Withnail & I (1987, Bruce Robinson)

Coincidentally enough, the reason I could not finish That Sugar Film relates to The Force Awakens, indirectly, but I’ll wait until we get to that film to expand on that further.

You’ll notice that’s only five films. That’s because when I first started gathering titles for this series, I had not finished Sophie’s Choice. As I watched the entirety of that film in 2019, it now quite obviously cannot be watched for this series. I already finished what I started. So that means that sometime before December, I will have to remember one other film I prematurely aborted, or else prematurely abort this series.

Just so it’s not a completely dry series, I will try to add some humorous comments about why I did not watch the entire movie at the time I started watching it.

In any case, this series may not be supremely interesting to you, but what can I say, it’s my blog and I decide how to use it.

Hopefully you will derive some enjoyment from it from time to time.

Journalistic propriety, or mark of the patriarchy?

In the year 2020, I am constantly checking myself to see if what I put out into the world -- through this blog, through my reviews, through my podcast, even in my emails and social media posts and conversations with friends -- is sufficiently apologetic for the fact that I'm a privileged white male.

Oh, this is not some kind of sob story about what I can or cannot say or how the world no longer has room for me. Please do not mistake this for that.

What I mean is that as a person who engages with culture on a daily basis, I used to move through the world with a sort of blitheness of knowing that my essential demographic and sociopolitical perspective would not be challenged. I don't think I said much I'd be sorry for, because I think I've always been sensitive to how I present myself and who I give a fair shake. But now I worry about it juuust a bit more.

I want to neuter myself, just a bit, but it's a willing neutering. It's an attempt to be in conversation with people who have not traditionally had the advantages I have, rather than, as some shameful white men have done, being threatened by them. It's a desire to shift the tone and the tools of my discussion so they come out right to begin with, and don't have to be clarified or apologized for later. I want to move to their playing field, after they spent so many years on mine.

It's toward that end that I am examining a new trend -- probably not actually new -- that I have recently noticed that bothers me, though I'm not sure that it should.

Now, I should start by saying that most of these methods I have for engaging with the world are still governed by basic journalist principals. I have never liked the idea of finishing anything, even a text, without a period -- or a full stop, as it is called here in Australia. I don't like to begin sentences without capital letters. I don't like to string multiple sentences or thoughts together without distributing periods, commas, semi-colons, question marks or exclamation points at all the correct junctures. I think similar thoughts should be contained together in the same paragraphs and different ones should be segregated into separate paragraphs. I believe in beginnings, middles and ends. I do concede to certain "newer" styles of writing -- for example, as you will see right now, I love separating parenthetical expressions with dashes -- and one of those is starting sentences with conjunctions. I love starting a sentence with a good "But" or "And." But in most respects, I am a stodgy grammarian, which until now I have not found inconsistent with having an open mind toward new paradigms of critical discussion.

That last paragraph may have been a bit of a diversion, but it lays the groundwork for the annoyance I'm about to talk about.

One basically sacrosanct rule in journalism is that you refer to the person you are talking about by their last name on second reference. If I'm talking about Tom Cruise in a piece I'm writing, I will call him "Tom Cruise" on first reference and "Cruise" every time after that. I might throw in a "Tom Cruise" again if I am trying to make a sort of semantic flourish in my argument, and there was one newspaper I used to work for where the style was to refer to him as "Mr. Cruise" on subsequent references. I guess that newspaper wanted to be the New York Times or something.

Never, though, would I refer to him as "Tom."

I am wondering if this is one of the old-fashioned parts of me that puts me at odds with the people I am hoping to relate to on an even playing field. And unfortunately, in this case, that seems disproportionately to be women.

I have now gotten to the thing I am actually going to talk about.

I was listening this past weekend to The Slate Spoiler Special, a sort-of spinoff of The Slate Culture Gabfest, probably because it is hosted by Gabfest host Dana Stevens. This podcast has been the repository for a number of my complaints in the past, and so, it must be again today.

The episode in question was about Little Women -- a few weeks late, but I'm still trying to catch up with my podcasts after falling behind over the holidays. On this episode Dana was joined by a freelance journalist named Rachel Syme, with whom I don't believe I was familiar before this podcast, though she's been on this podcast before so maybe I just missed those episodes.

Syme launched the discussing of specifics about the movie, and I noticed something straight away. She didn't refer to Greta Gerwig as "Gerwig" on second reference, but as "Greta."

And then Florence Pugh as "Florence." And then Saoirse Ronan as "Saoirse." And then Meryl Streep as "Meryl."

No.

Just, no.

Do you know these people, Rachel? Are they your friends?

I can't remember if it's Dana's default position to do the same thing, but she definitely played along, even if only because Rachel set the standard. I'll use this moment to make an aside about another thing that Dana does do, however, that annoys me, which is to slavishly pronounce the names of French people correctly, due to her own background with the language. She refers to Timothee Chalamet as "Teem-o-tay," which, just, grrr.

I don't want to say I've never heard this casual usage of first names before, because I have. Slate writer Aisha Harris is also guilty of it.

But I do think I've never heard it from a man.

Now, there is not anything inherently "wrong" with calling an artist, or a musician, or a filmmaker, or an actor, by their first name. The only reason it's "wrong" is that we have developed a convention of treating these people with a certain professional distance, which we demonstrate by choosing an impersonal rather than personal way of talking about them. Which, you could argue, is a major part of retaining our impartiality as journalists.

It's the convention that I'm wondering about. Is this a convention established by, and perpetrated by, white men? And therefore, should it continue?

If I step entirely outside myself and all my preconceived notions, I can see the benefits of referring to Greta Gerwig by her first name. It's certainly a way of humanizing the person, of indicating that he or she is not some kind of remote, monolithic figure. For some artists, their very humanity is part and parcel to what their art is trying to accomplish. Some artists would hug you and immediately invite you to start calling them by the nickname that only their closest friends use for them.

Where this feels like a problem to me is that it prevents you from really criticizing the artist. Dana and Rachel -- I call podcasters by their first names -- were fulsome in their praise of Little Women, and rightly so. It was my #4 movie of 2019. I gave it five stars. It's great.

But what if they had not liked Little Women? Do you then shift to calling the artist by her last name? It's easy to imagine them saying "I love how Greta presented the events of the novel out of sequence," because I don't have to imagine it. It's not so easy to imagine them saying "Greta really screwed the pooch with that whole non-chronological narrative thing."

I really would be interested to know if they would change the way they refer to her -- consciously or subconsciously -- if their huzzahs curdled into guffaws. And I could certainly make the argument that any critical practice that invites you to alter its fundamental elements, depending on whether the scenario involves praise or scorn, is flawed indeed.

But then I think: Is there something inherently gendered about this paradigm that I am failing to connect with?

Or more generally, do I just have to take the pole out of my butt?

It's a pretty shitty and regressive type of stereotyping to say that women are more capable of intimacy and sensitivity than men, though in this case I feel like it's a fairly complimentary form of stereotyping. And if I'm talking about new critical paradigms introduced by critical voices that weren't once heard, I have no choice but to identify the defining traits of those paradigms. I mean, less than a decade ago you mightn't have been able to listen to a movie podcast featuring one female voice, let alone two.

If women podcasters want to refer to artists and musicians and filmmakers and actors by their first names, is it my role to begrudge them that?

And yet while I can ask myself this question with the best of intentions and the most hopeful senses of optimism, I still can't get past it. I still say YOU DON'T KNOW THESE PEOPLE. THEY ARE NOT YOUR FRIENDS.

I guess the thing I worry about most is coming down on something, and having others determine that it is a practice unique to a particular minority, be it racial or gender or related to sexuality, and then having them decide that I'm carrying a bias against that racial or gender or sexuality minority. And maybe not even telling me about it so I can't even do anything to address it.

It's a complicated age we live in.

It occurs to me that it's appropriate that Little Women is the film, quite coincidentally I think, prompting these thoughts. This very argument is addressed very literally in the text of the film, as it features a number of tete-a-tetes between a representative of the establishment (the publisher played by Tracy Letts, a man) and an up-and-coming, new and very different voice (Jo March, played by "Saoirse," a woman). These scenes state the themes Greta Gerwig is grappling with in unusually straightforward terms, in part because they are played as comedy. The publisher wants one thing because it's what he's always done and because he believes it's what the world expects and wants. The author presents another way of looking at things, and says, with an unkillable moral certainty, "What if this, instead?"

I'm with Jo -- I can also call literary characters by their first names -- in the argument she is making. But I just can't side with Dana and Rachel in their own implicit argument.

Over the course of this post I’ve listed two scenarios where I would refer to someone by their first name, albeit being a bit cheeky. But maybe it’s context dependent for Dana and Rachel as well. I have to consider that the medium of a podcast is inherently conversational, as opposed to writing, which is more formal. I don’t read a lot of Dana’s writing (something I should do more), but I can say with almost total certainty that she would not say “Greta” in a piece of writing, if only because until recently, she had a stodgy representative of old-world journalism editing her pieces. Julia Turner, late the editor of Slate but now with the LA Times, and still a member of her Slate podcast, would not stand for such a thing. (And ha, she’s a woman.) Maybe it’s podcasting itself that is the new paradigm, not the voices I’m hearing on it. Now granted, I’d never refer to her as “Greta” on my podcast, but I think maybe one of my (male) podcasting co-hosts has done such a thing in the past. And they’re 15 years younger than I am, so age may also be a factor here (though Dana is older than I am).

The majority of this post was written when I was halfway through the podcast on Little Women. I rarely get to listen to a whole podcast in one sitting, or in this case, one session of putting away the laundry. But two other noteworthy things happened before I ultimately finished it the next day: 1) Rachel adjusted her pronunciation of Timothee Chalamet’s first name from “Timothy” to “Timothay,” perhaps as a compromise between her own preferred pronunciation and Dana’s; 2) they both said “Gerwig” on second reference at least once (though never Pugh, Ronan or Streep, that I heard). And then another noteworthy thing a few days later, when I was listening to the male-hosted podcast Filmspotting, in which Adam Kempenaar (a male) referred to Spike Lee as "Spike."

I think it just goes to show that we are all feeling our way through formerly rock-solid ways of doing things into newer, murkier, more flexible alternatives. There’s a “When in Rome” quality to much of this. All communication is a kind of give and take, a meeting your fellow conversant on common grounds, a learning of something new.