Our very own School of Rock

We're not the only parents out there who've had to get creative.

There are x number of hours in a child's weekday that need to be filled, and if your experience is anything like mine, the school is not cutting the mustard. Oh, I believe they're trying -- but this is a new experience for all of us, and even three weeks of planning (most of which were the school holiday period between term 1 and term 2) have not resulted in a finely honed remote learning curriculum.

But the problem really doesn't have that much to do with what the schools are doing or not doing. Even during school holidays, we had to find ways for the kids to pass the day that didn't just involve us surrendering to the temptation to give them whatever device they wanted from sunup to sundown.

Well, every little bit helps.

Which is why, for the past two weeks, I have become a professor from 4 to 4:30 most weekday afternoons, giving them rock lessons.

Not lessons on how to play, mind you. I have no clue about that. But history lessons, talking about the best bands in rock history and playing about four to five of their songs, finishing with a live performance on YouTube.

We call it School of Rock, and that's no coincidence, as it was two Saturdays ago that we watched the Richard Linklater film. That's how I got the idea.

It had actually been my wife's idea to show them School of Rock, and it had been percolating for some time. We were going to watch it on a weekend out of town back in February, but it took until quarantine for the DVD to actually make it into the player. (Actually, it was on Netflix.)

Me, I was never a huge fan of the film. I remember seeing it in the theater in 2003 and thinking it was good, but maybe ten to 20 percent less good than I thought it would be. To be fair, my expectations were pretty high. I was on a Jack Black high and I also had a great fondness for Linklater.

My kids are also on a Jack Black high, which was what made it such a natural fit for them. He's probably the actor they have encountered most in their cinematic travels so far, maybe saving only Dwayne Johnson. Both are in the two new Jumanji movies, both of which they've seen, but Black is also in the two Goosebumps movies, favorites around our house, and at least one other thing I know they've seen. Gulliver's Travels maybe? If so, they saw that one without me.

Anyway, they like Black, my wife likes the movie, so it was an easy choice for a Saturday afternoon quarantine viewing.

As it turned out, I liked the movie a lot better coming in with slightly lower expectations. It really is quite good. It's no surprise it's been an enduring modern classic in our culture, culminating in the recent stage musical with book by Andrew Lloyd Weber of all people. (Then again, you don't have to be a classic to find your way to stage these days.)

It was such a success with both me and the kids -- my wife got to sit back and say "Told you so," though she didn't -- that I decided to launch my own School of Rock for the boys, weekdays at 4 p.m. Why 4 o'clock? Well, it's late enough in the workday that I thought I could shift my attention elsewhere for a half-hour and no one would notice. Hopefully that's been true.

The marker erase board you see above gives you an idea of what we've been up to, but I'll go band by band to tell you how it's worked out.

We started with Tenacious D, probably for obvious reasons. If it's not obvious, well, Jack Black is actually in this band. Nothing like starting out with a dose of obvious relevance to get them to buy in to the new idea.

Tenacious D is a duo of Jack and character actor Kyle Gass, and they rock. They have genuine musical ability but are also predictably strong about keeping humor at the forefront of their lyrics and the handful of sketches that punctuate the album I own. I had to really be careful with the songs I selected to play them, as there's an f-bomb in at least half the songs (plus songs actually titled "Hard Fucking" and "Fuck Her Gently"), but fortunately that still allowed me to play the song "Tribute" to them, which is kind of their own version of "Devil Went Down to Georgia." (It has a "motherfucker" in it but it's sung very quickly and is hard to hear.) I also played them a skit that involves Jack ordering way too much at a drive thru which is hilarious, though I did have to edit out one f-bomb, which I did successfully.

Anyway, this has been the biggest hit of the school so far, entirely due to "Tribute." I played them the video for this (preferring it to a live show) to close out the class, and particularly my younger son loved it, as it features Jack and Kyle encountering a horned demon on a lonely highway and having a jam battle against him. (The whole video is pretty funny; the premise is that they're recording the song in one of those mall karaoke booths where you're supposed to shovel in quarters to sing "My Sharona.") They've actually made me play the video again at the end of other classes, when I'd hoped to be blowing their minds with the band du jour. Oh well, I'll take what I can get.

To immediately give them a flavor of the variability that's baked into rock 'n roll, I focused on Elton John on day two. My older son looked over my shoulder at the iTunes playlist and noted, quite pedantically (he takes after his old man), that the genre for John's songs was listed as pop, not rock. I tried to explain that the lines were blurry between these things, but then I also had "Crocodile Rock" come along to save me, when "Rocket Man" and "I Guess That's Why They Call it the Blues" did not. But they weren't really convinced until an energetic live performance in Central Park of "Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting," which made them Elton believers. As visual accompaniment to the music -- the need for which I was rapidly realizing -- we looked at a slide show of great John outfits from over the years.

They had a conflict on Wednesday of week 1 (a conflict! during coronavirus!) so we didn't get back to the syllabus until Thursday, at which point, I felt it was time for an unquestioned, traditional rock 'n roll giant. The Rolling Stones are not a personal favorite -- I have only a single album that I copied when I borrowed it from the library -- but I of course love any number of their famous songs. I played them "Sympathy for the Devil" and "Paint it Black," without making much of a connection, before leading up to what I thought was a surefire hit, "You Can't Always Get What You Want." But they didn't have patience for a 7:29 song, predictably. They did show some interest in looking at pictures of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, as well as a raucous live performance of "Satisfaction" with a massive quantity of balloons filling the arena. I also showed them the famous clip of "Let's Spend the Night Together (Some Time Together)" on Ed Sullivan. Still, in all, the Stones were a miss for them.

Week 2 (not doing the class on Fridays) began on Tuesday after a long holiday weekend. Here it was time to introduce them to one of my top five bands of all time, Pink Floyd. The visual accompaniment this time was their album covers. I had lots to choose from when it came to Floyd -- 12 albums and 104 songs, according to iTunes -- but I started with "Another Brick in the Wall Part 2" because it's used in the theme song to a dystopian kids show the older one watched for a bit. He also likes the dance version of it I put on an electronica mix for him. It didn't seem to make a huge impression this time, nor did "Time" and the little bit of "Money" I played them. I had others lined up, but in scanning through their albums, the older one noticed the 23-minute song that kicks off Atom Heart Mother and wanted to listen to that -- presumably just for the novelty of its length. This he said he liked, even though it doesn't resemble a traditional song in any shape or form. I couldn't really pause to appreciate that because the younger one was getting cranky, plus I had to close with a live YouTube version of "Wish You Were Here" from the last time the band played together (including Roger Waters) some six or seven years ago. Ultimately I'd say Floyd also went over their heads, but maybe that's not a huge surprise for a six- and nine-year-old.

We got back into the hit column Wednesday with Queen. I needed to steer things back in a more populist direction and did. They knew Queen as the artist of "We Will Rock You/We Are the Champions" and wanted to get to those right away. Instead I started out with "Under Pressure," as I'd recently played them "Ice Ice Baby" back-to-back with this song and they thought it was funny. "Bohemian Rhapsody" was queued up next, and that allowed me to also show them the clip from Wayne's World. I had "You're My Best Friend" set next, but I skipped over that to "Bicycle" as I thought they would find it funny. It was all a prelude to the YouTube video of WWRY/WATC at Live-Aid, which we all sung along with -- even my wife, who had wandered down to the kitchen classroom space to make a coffee. They were interested in Freddy Mercury and asked a lot of questions about his death.

The most recent class to date brought us finally to our home turf with AC/DC -- a conscious parochial choice and not a recognition of the prominence of the band within rock 'n roll history. It allowed me to play both "Thunderstruck" (which I love way out of scope with how good a song it probably is) plus the mashup of "Thunderstruck" and "Shipping Up to Boston" I created for our wedding (each song representing a home city for one of the two of us, you see). I also played "You Shook Me All Night Long" and "Back in Black," plus pictures of the band and the street sign for the street in Melbourne named after them. I think I managed to convince them that Angus Young is a pretty interesting figure. Musically, they may have been least into Accadacca (as they are sometimes called here), but both got into the video I showed at the end, which was a concert performance of "Hell's Bells" from 2009 in which Brian Johnson swings on the ringer of a large bell bearing the band's name. "I gotta admit, that was great," said the older one.

Women and minorities have been highly underrepresented in the first two weeks of the class, as have they in rock 'n roll history unfortunately. I intend to correct that next week, our first full four-day week, in which I may introduce them to the likes of Heart and Prince. Let's just hope my older son doesn't see the "pop" designation next to Prince's name on iTunes.

Hey, if this quarantine goes on long enough, this could turn into School of Pop, School of Rap, School of Reggae, School of Classical, and School of Yodelling before all is said and done.

A with without an and

I know that the order names appear in the credits is not random. In fact, it's a negotiated part of the contract in some cases, maybe all cases. A particular actor -- or, more likely, that actor's agent -- will get it in writing that he or she gets top billing. I suspect the next few spots are also up for grabs, and then comes everyone else who doesn't have an agent, or at least not a top dollar one.

But proximity to the start of the credits is not always the most sought after condition. Sometimes, you negotiate for the "and" credit, which means you are the last listed in the opening credits before the casting director or the costume designer or whoever comes next.

Before I knew how it worked, though -- and I'm still really only going on what people tell me -- I figured the credits were ordered purely by decreasing importance of the actor in question to the cast of the movie, and in many cases, they end up being one in the same. With one caveat -- there's always an actor at the end with the "and" credit, who comes as a surprise and reshapes our preconceived notions of what we expect from the cast of this movie. His or her name makes you say "Aha!," like "I didn't know this person was going to be in this movie!"

For a long time I have always considered Danny DeVito to be the ultimate example of this. I have no idea why. Maybe twice in my history, maybe close in time to each other, I saw movies where at the end of the credits, it said "And Danny DeVito," which made me say "Aha! I didn't know this person was going to be in this movie!" Or maybe it never happened at all, and DeVito just seemed like he would be that kind of person, who puts an ironic spin on the fairly straightfoward listing of cast members that had come before.

But what if there are two such people?

In my understanding of that, the first gets a "with" and the next gets an "and." Or if there are more than one, however many extra all get a "with" before the last person comes in as the ultimate punchline, as it were, with their "and." Everyone who has ever listed something knows that you can only have one "and," after the penultimate item on the list and before the final item.

This is a long setup for a fairly minor point, but stick with me.

It always strikes me as weird, then, when you get a "with" without an "and," which is what happened in The Hitman's Bodyguard, which I watched on Monday night. It's probably actually the umpteenth time I've seen that phenomenon, but the first where I actually decided to write about it on the blog.

The credits finished up with "with Richard E. Grant" -- a perfect with/and candidate, by the way -- and I thought with an internal squeal of glee, "Who is going to be the 'and'?" My personal guess, out of nowhere, was Glenn Close.

But then it just went on to the casting director or costume designer or whoever comes next.

A with without an and? Unheard of!

Okay, heard of at least umpteen times before. But each time I see it, it offends me, as a grammarian if nothing else.

That's all I wanted to explain, really. This post was 90% setup, as it turns out.

Except that halfway through writing it, I realized the "and" had already been expended earlier in the credits. That's right, they observed the "only one and" rule, they just frontloaded it.

The order of the names in the credits was "Ryan Reynolds, Samuel L. Jackson, Gary Oldman, and Salma Hayek." And then all the flotsam and jetsam who made up the rest of the cast before getting to Grant.

Salma Hayek is a good candidate for an "and" credit, given that her role in the film is pretty inessential, and though she appears throughout, she has very little to do. Plus she fits the other description, in that she's a famous name who you wouldn't have necessarily expected to appear in the credits for this movie.

But having her as the fourth name -- negotiated for vanity reasons to be sure, to get her up close to the big boys -- fails in the sense of finishing as a "punchline," as an ironic twist to the succession of no-name actors you've been enduring for the last 30 seconds. In truth, she would have worked better as an "end and" and Grant would have worked better as just a cameo, as he's truly inessential, in just one scene at the start that shows us how Reynolds does his bodyguarding.

Then again, this whole movie is pretty inessential. It's not terrible -- I gave it two stars -- but if I were involved with it, maybe I would have negotiated to have my name removed from it entirely. (Who am I kidding; if I ever made a movie, I'd be thrilled as hell to see my name up there.)

But Hitman's Bodyguard was a huge success, which is why I finally saw it, and which is why there's a sequel due out in August, The Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard, if coronavirus ever ends.

I guess Hayek will be upgraded from an "and" in that one, given that she's in the actual title.

Maybe Morgan Freeman can pick up the "and" credit, as I really wouldn't have expected to see him in this particular movie.

"Anything Day" Movie Marathon

Run out of things to do around your house with your kids/yourself that have any semblance of structure?

Well, have you tried nothing? Or, should I say, anything?

Easter Saturday was a day like that for us.

I wanted to call it Do Whatever You Want Day, but my wife, who came up with the idea, insisted on the branding Anything Day. (To be fair, though, I would have come up with the idea myself had I not thought there was a 100% chance she would reject it.)

And on Anything Day, what you did was this: whatever you want.

That went for both the fortysomething adults and the, um, first-decade-of-their-lives-something kids.

No one could tell you to get off your device. No one could tell you to get out of your pajamas. You could raid the pantry, within reason, especially if no one say you doing it, which they weren't likely to do.

The only rules were that you had to eat meals, brush your teeth at the end of the day and go to bed at close to the time you usually did. And that you could not compel anyone else to do anything they did not want to do (we'll see how well that worked out in a minute). Oh, you could ask someone if they wanted to do something, like play a game. But the other person could just say no.

It was a masterstroke, I think, and now that it's happened once, I daresay it'll be likely to happen again sometime during the indefinite duration of this quarantine.

I, of course, chose a movie marathon.

The way it ended up working out was that we basically each resided primarily in one room. Going from the front of our house back, my wife was mostly in our bedroom, my older son was mostly in the kids' room with his various devices, my younger son was mostly in our living room with our TV, and I was mostly in the garage with my movie marathon, as I will explain in more detail in just a moment. The kitchen/dining room was neutral territory for all intents and purposes.

Now, I had three main guiding principles to my marathon, none of which worked out quite the way I'd hoped.

1) The movies would all be kid-friendly in nature, so people could pop in and not be shocked by a beheading, an outrageous sex act or an ill-timed f-bomb.

2) The kids would be expected to watch something with me at some point, if not through actual compulsion than through suggestion, and because #3 would make it so much fun.

3) The movies would be watched on our projector.

Now, if you remember from my birthday trips to the hotel for my hotel movie marathons, I use this projector to project on the wall at the hotel. But it's a cheap projector. It cost me less than $80 on Gumtree, the Australian equivalent of Craigslist, and I knew it would really only serve the purpose of the unique scenario for which I was buying it, and possibly rarely a scenario like the one that arose yesterday.

The image quality is not particularly good, as I think this projector was designed for stationary content at a meeting, and maybe only a meeting at a company that was just barely scraping buy. In truth, I don't really know who is the market for a cheap projector like this. Me, I guess.

But the mere idea of watching something projected on a wall (or in this case, a sheet affixed by thumbtacks to our garage door) sort of gives the act an air of festivity, and that's what I was hoping to create yesterday.

Again, we'll see how well that worked out, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

And just so this post is not too gargantuan in length, maybe I should get to the actual films in my Anything Day Marathon right now.

How much blackface is too much blackface?

I got everything all set up, including my coffee and toast, by about 8:30, missing my 8 a.m. scheduled start time due to sleeping later than I usually do. (Which, in itself, was a good start to Anything Day.)

First up was something decidedly inoffensive as a start to the day -- or so I thought.

The Astaire-Rogers musical/dance-fest Swing Time has gotten a lot of love on Filmspotting, most recently on an episode in which they gave us a top five movies of the 1930s as a "starter pack" on watching movies from that decade. I'd been feeling a distinct lack of classic Hollywood on my viewing schedule lately, so when I struck out on a couple other things I looked up first, I landed on Swing Time, rented from iTunes.

It was inoffensive in that it did not include a beheading, an outrageous sex act or an ill-timed f-bomb. But that's to say nothing about the offense caused by an unexpected blackface scene.

I say "unexpected" not because you ever expect a blackface scene, but there are some pretty famous ones, like the one in The Jazz Singer. In that case, I was expecting it. I wasn't here because it hadn't come up at all in the Filmspotting discussion of Swing Time, nor in any other I had casually heard over the years.

But yes indeed, about two-thirds of the way through, there's a dance number called "Bojangles of Harlem" in which Astaire appears in blackface as a "tribute" to dancer Bill Robinson. And because it's a loving "tribute" and there's no racism implied (though that doesn't mean there wasn't any received), I expect it escapes mention in discussions of infamous blackface scenes. And in truth, it did not offend me particularly either. The greater offense probably had to do with its non-existent story function, which is a problem I have with musicals from that era, that they go off on these long performance-related tangents that don't have anything to do with the story, and come late enough in the story that they delay a conclusion you are already beginning to anticipate.

Still, it was weird to see, and I suspect it helped knock this classic down a notch for me.

Even setting aside "Bojangles of Harlem" entirely, I found the movie a bit scattershot. And even as charming and talented as Astaire and Rogers are, and as breathtaking as their moves are, those factors alone did not elevate the movie to classic status for me. I ended up at 3.5 stars on Letterboxd.

I got a preview of the rest of my day when my six-year-old came out to plop down with me for about ten minutes of the movie, eager for his own part in the experience to start. "Could it be more ... clear?" he asked, referring to the image. I could tell then that the projector might not be sustainable.

The movie I actually rented for $19.99

I told you a couple days ago first that I was shocked to see the movie Never Rarely Sometimes Always available for rent for iTunes for $19.99, and then that I was considering the rental as a way of supporting the film industry on the whole.

Never did I imagine that if I did take the $19.99 rental plunge, it would be for the sequel to the Trolls movie, which I didn't even see.

But that's what happened when my six-year-old came across my computer open to the iTunes store on Friday night, where he saw Trolls World Tour listed under the New & Noteworthy category. "Why are you looking up Trolls?" he asked. I wasn't, of course, but he doesn't understand how things like iTunes work.

I thought my denial in that moment had put the subject to rest, but during his ten-minute cameo in Swing Time, my son said "You know, I might actually be interested in Trolls." I saw where this was going.

The reason I wanted to start the marathon at 8 was that it gave me a shot at watching two movies that I wanted to watch before I had to throw my kids a bone. But the way it worked out, at noon, I was only starting my second movie, not my third. That was due in part to an hour-long trip out of the house that included two separate trips to the grocery store. I won't get into it, but that certainly didn't feel very Anything Day to me.

Nor did watching Trolls World Tour, but that's what happened at 12 o'clock for the next 90 minutes.

At least I'll say this for my six-year-old -- he was willing to go with me on the projector idea. He didn't even mention that the image quality was inferior, at least at the start, and made all the right comments and rejoinders that served as de facto proof that there was nothing insufficient about our viewing experience. Good kid. We cuddled together on our beanbags and watched.

About 30 minutes in, though, he ventured that maybe it was time to try our old TV, which I'd brought out to the garage as a back-up.

At first I reacted with a heavy sigh, but I knew he was right. The projector was just not good enough for an animated movie, especially not one we'd paid an arm and a leg to rent.

So without striking the projector setup, we did a kind of 90 degree rotation to the right to watch the TV, and my was the difference significant. I realized I had had only a vague idea what this Trolls world really looked like, and that there were details in the set and the characters that contributed to both the humor and meaning of the movie. Secretly, I was relieved by the death of my projector dream -- a death so definitive, in fact, that I didn't get back to it even when I was solo again.

Trolls World Tour started to improve for me after we made the switch. Before that, I was thinking it might not be much better than the animated sequel I saw last year without first seeing the original, The Angry Birds Movie 2, which ended up near the bottom of my year-end rankings. But once I was able to appreciate more of the nuance -- a funny statement for a Trolls movie -- I was able to enjoy the movie pretty well. Not enough to reach the minimum three stars for a recommendation, but close enough at 2.5.

My first Dance in three decades

At just after 2 I was on my own again, and after a short nap in the beanbag pile, I started on a very different type of movie indeed.

I didn't see Dances With Wolves in the theater, though having just turned 17 when it came out, I might have. But I was suspicious of it for some reason, which means I was annoyed to see it clean up at the Oscars the following March, especially when it was up against contenders I adored, like Goodfellas and Ghost. Then I rented it soon after it was released on video, and found myself completely swept up in its scope and emotion.

That one viewing has been enough for me to consistently keep the movie near my top 100 on Flickchart over the years. (It currently sits at #102.) But its massive 181-minute girth has prevented me from ever confirming that high opinion.

Simply put, I needed an Anything Day to correct that.

So from a little after 2 to a little after 5 I did indeed soak in the beautiful cinematography of the Nebraska prairie without watching it late at night and falling asleep. I considered for a moment switching back to the projector, but that would have diminished that beautiful landscape. Plus there was the little issue of the subtitles, which are notoriously hard to read on this projector.

In short, I was pretty much as engaged as I was the first time, though probably inevitably not as moved. I remembered quite well the moment that really got me the first time, when Wind in His Hair shouts down from an elevated perch to the valley below, where Costner's title character is departing at the end. He proclaims their eternal friendship. As this was the Lakota who had most doubted the befriending of John Dunbar at the beginning, it felt like a moving testament to how much Dunbar had become a member of the Lakota family. And though the tear ducts didn't flood like they had the first time, there were damp eyes this time too.

As I was watching Dances With Wolves, I felt conscious of how its white savior narrative might play 30 years later. Fortunately, watching helped convince me that it may not actually be a white savior narrative. Sure, Costner's film pats Dunbar on the back for being an enlightened humanist who was more eager to befriend the Lakota than slaughter them, and he does indeed provide some valuable services to them. But I think in the end, they probably save him more than he saves them.

My older son provided a bit of a distraction during this movie, as he came out once saying "I want to book my movie!," having had enough Fortnite (if that's possible) by then. He was brushed off pretty easily the first time, but on the second one, I knew I'd have to act. Having given him the task of deciding on a movie he wanted, he came up with Scoob!, the new Scooby Doo reboot that as far as I know hadn't been released yet, and sounded like a (gulp!) second $19.99 rental.

When I found (to my relief) that it has, indeed, had a coronavirus-postponed release, he didn't have any other ideas, and was starting to look more glum. He had initially told me he might want to watch two movies with me, and that was now looking seriously in doubt, especially if he didn't have any idea what even the first one would be. (That said, he did reject participating in Trolls, and that was on him.) Fortunately, I decided it was time to switch away from iTunes rentals and actually landed on something that would work for both the kids.

Subtitles on, subtitles off

The original Karate Kid was a beloved childhood classic for me, and I was only a year older than my nine-year-old is now when it hit theaters in 1984. So seeing the 2010 remake, starring Jackie Chan and Jaden Smith, available on Netflix, it gave me the idea that the new one might work for him like the original did for me -- but would probably not do for him, just because it would seem "old." Plus, I thought the six-year-old -- who had started to stagnate in the living room, the only one still in his pajamas -- could probably watch as well.

I had a couple backups -- Next Gen or a Studio Ghibli movie -- but I was relieved to see that my son accepted The Karate Kid. I was a bit bummed, not to mention surprised, that it was two hours and twenty minutes long, but my wife had agreed to make us a macaroni and cheese dinner to supplement our microwave popcorn, so as long as the movie ended sometime in the vicinity of their bedtime, it would work.

And you know what? This is a pretty charming remake. Three-point-five stars.

The 140 minutes passed faster than I thought they would, and I could not even identify any parts that clearly seemed like fat. The action is updated well while keeping the same core narrative details. For example, instead of "wax on, wax off," young Dre learns defensive movies by repeatedly hanging his jacket on a hook. My kids thought Jackie Chan's Mr. Miyagi -- er, Mr. Han -- was crazy, but the reveal of the method to his madness worked for them just as it did for Dre. (Incidentally, the title Karate Kid is kept for brand awareness reasons only; as the movie is set in China, it's really kung fu that he's learning. I felt it was an acceptable sacrifice, and probably necessary in a cinematic environment that was already turning its eyes toward China a decade ago.)

The 140 minutes didn't prove a challenge for my kids either, who both stuck with it. The younger one threatened to fade at one point, but I think this was more an act of rebellion about having to eat his dinner than any loss of interest in the movie.

One minor annoyance, though, was that the movie didn't have an effective default subtitle setting. There is not a lot of Chinese spoken in this movie, but there's enough that you feel like you're missing something if you don't have the subtitles on. Sometimes the context is enough, but there was a scene about halfway through where Chan and the evil sensei (not really a sensei) have a conversation of a minute or so where you just don't know what they're saying.

So we turned the subtitles on for that, but we quickly realized that with the subtitles on, that meant that everything would be subtitled -- even the English. I thought this could actually help the one of the two of my kids who could read the subtitles, since I don't suspect he understood everything Chan was saying, even when he was speaking English. But he quickly became annoyed by it, so we had to turn them off again, only to turn them back on again twice more during the rest of the movie to understand certain scenes better. So instead of wax on, wax off, it was subtitles on, subtitles off.

He got annoyed when I wanted to read the subtitles to my younger son, so he too would understand what was going on, but we got through it.

By the end, the kids were so pumped up that the nine-year-old was throwing actual punches in our hallway while getting ready for bed. A couple landed on my leg, and one hit my six-year-old in the solar plexus, prompting tears.

No good idea/deed goes unpunished I guess.

Subtitles off

The final movie of the night was supposed to be Timur Bekmambetov's Night Watch, which I bought some four years ago when trying to prevent a local used video store from going out of business. Now that the kids were packed away for the night, I could relax my earlier content standards.

But here we had a subtitle problem again.

I don't know if you've seen Night Watch, or if you did, whether you saw the version of this vampire movie that I did. But in the version I saw -- twice, in fact, within a couple years of its release -- the subtitles themselves were these great pictorial interpretations of the movie's themes. Like, the English words might drip blood or get blown off the screen. I daresay it was a significant factor in my enjoyment of the film.

This DVD did not have that.

In fact, the language settings were all screwed up. First of all the languages themselves. There were two languages, both of which were English, except both of which were actually Russian. There was no dubbing, as I'd feared when the opening narration was in English, but both language options seemed to be exactly the same, with English narration and Russian dialogue.

This would have been fine except for the subtitles. Again, there were two subtitle options, one of which simply contained no subtitles at all, even though it said it was supposed to have them. The other subtitle option? Just plain text written out on the screen. The stylized subtitles have not been preserved on this DVD, and maybe have just vanished into history.

So instead I watched Event Horizon.

This was a random choice from perusing Netflix. I'd remembered really disliking it, but had also questioned that dislike over the years, as I know this movie disturbs some people. So I decided to give it another shot to disturb me.

It did, a little bit, in that it gave me chills a couple times. I do think there are parts of the execution that are just too broad by half, which I think is what I latched onto when I first saw it back in 2007 and gave it, I was surprised to see, only 1.5 stars. (Though I should say this was a retroactive star rating given in 2012 or 2013, when I added all my previous viewings to Letterboxd.)

Although there's some indelible imagery in this movie and some cool ideas, I guess I don't respond that much to space horror in which the images people see are of things from their own past/memory. Though my own thoughts on that are inconsistent, as this is what happens in Tarkovsky's Solaris, which I love.

Anyway, Event Horizon is better than I remembered, and that was good enough to end the night.

Some funny coincidences

Any time I do a marathon I like to note some funny coincidences between the movies, and there were some here too. So, to finish off this post, here they are.

1) The first two movies both feature a character named Penny.

2) Dances With Wolves and The Karate Kid both feature people trying to learn each others' languages.

3) Karate Kid and Trolls World Tour both have characters who do a "pinky swear."

4) Subtitles were a consideration in the way I watched, or whether I watched, three of the candidates for this marathon.

5) Kevin Costner is the director and star of Dances With Wolves. He also appeared in the movie Swing Vote, which is, along with Swing Time, one of only three movies I've seen that start with the word Swing. (Okay, that's pretty flimsy.)

6) Both Event Horizon and Swing Time feature characters who gouge out their own eyes after travelling to another dimension.

Okay, I think that's about enough for today.

Inexplicable things

You've noticed Netflix's new Top 10 feature, haven't you?

Of course you have. Whenever something new happens with Netflix, you notice it, because you're always on Netflix. Especially right now.

When Netflix finally allowed you the ability to keep trailers from playing automatically when you were scrolling through the titles, boy did you notice it. That was annoying as hell. So of course you'd notice when they started telling you the ten most popular things people are watching -- today, this week, whatever it is -- on Netflix. How else would you know that Tiger King is still king?

To be honest, though, I don't usually scan the list. It's mostly TV shows that, in truth, I don't have that much interest in watching. They might be good, or they might just be something new that Netflix is promoting the shit out of. I've got other TV shows I need to catch up on.

Right now, in Australia, there's only one movie on there, Coffee & Kareem. See above note about promoting the shit out of something. Or, it's a sign of just how desperate people are to watch some new movie, any new movie. And this is the newest Netflix has released.

Wait, that's not right. Coffee & Kareem is not the only movie on that list. There's one other movie on there. What's that right at the end of the list?

Is that the 2003 flop Cat in the Hat?

It is. And for this I have no explanation.

I didn't doctor up the above image. I promise. Sometimes I don't have things to talk about on this blog -- not lately, but sometimes. But I would never stoop to doctoring images just to give myself material.

But it's so damn odd to see this movie there that my doctoring the image would be one of the real explanations you'd have to consider.

Now, I should tell you right away that I just happened to watch Cat in the Hat for the first time back in February, when I was away at a holiday house for the weekend and that was one of the movies they had. I should also tell you that I actually enjoyed it. It was so much better than I expected it to be, and it looked great, thanks in part to future great cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, who was probably already great then except I hadn't heard of him yet.

But just because I enjoyed a movie most people thought was a travesty, a movie that would have been destined for the cinematic scrap heap except that people still reference it as an epic flop, doesn't make me any less surprised to see it embraced by any statistically significant population of people as measured on Netflix, especially 17 years after it was released in theaters.

It's possible it's a new release on Netflix, but that wouldn't even begin to account for this phenomenon.

You might say that it's all the parents desperate to find something for their kids, who are unexpectedly trapped inside all the time now. That might explain it if, you know, Cat in the Hat were the only child-centric movie on Netflix. But the Netflix children's area is just as bursting with content as any other part of the site.

If I were forced at gunpoint to produce some flimsy explanation, I guess I would venture this: There was recently that Green Eggs & Ham show on Netflix, and critics were really fond of it, so I assume a fair number of Netflix subscribers watched it. This would, I guess, be an attempt to find similar material, as Cat in the Hat would be one of Dr. Seuss' other most recognizable titles. But it's not like Cat in the Hat is even the only other Dr. Seuss property available out there, not by a long shot. It does, at the moment, appear to be the only other one available on Netflix.

I did a little googling to see if I could find anything in the news that would explain it, but I gave up pretty quickly upon getting no relevant results. Netflix is notoriously tight-lipped about the way it does things. A listing of the top ten was pretty unlike them in the first place; an explanation for that listing, almost certainly a bridge too far.

Then again, Netflix may be just as flummoxed as I am. They are just reporting their actual statistics, one would assume.

I mean, I'd be surprised if Cat in the Hat were even in the top ten of children's entertainment, but this is all of Netflix. Like, Tiger King is on one end of that list, and Cat in the Hat is on the other. People that desperate for more content about big cats after finishing the adventures of Joe Exotic?

Maybe the simplest explanation is the one that's actually true. In all times -- pandemic or otherwise -- people are interested in content that, in some way, relates to what they are going through. Maybe a movie where kids are cooped up in a house, trying to find ways to entertain themselves and squelch their boredom, is really speaking to people right now.

I sure as hell know it's speaking to me.

Watching Watchmen, watching Watchmen, watching Watchmen, reading Watchmen, watching Watchmen

Alan Moore's Watchmen comic series (illustrated by Dave Gibbons) was released as 12 issues in 1986 and 1987, before being collected in its more familiar form as a graphic novel, whose cover you see here to your right. It was fairly immediately hailed as one of the greatest accomplishments in comic book history, and is still thought of as such today.

I didn't read it until COVID-19 quarantine, finishing earlier this week. Which was after I'd already seen Zack Snyder's film version, which I love, three times, most recently back in 2017. (The first two were both within six months of its release.)

What finally prompted me to get this from the library -- and I'll have it out until at least May 18th, as they keeping changing the due date in expectation of a long-term closure of the library system -- was my wife and my intention to watch the popular Watchmen TV series from last year. The friend who first told me about Watchmen loves that series, a reaction he shares with many others of course, but he suggested that it was a sequel to the graphic novel, not the movie.

A subtle distinction, I figured, but there are some small differences between the two versions, which he'd already summarized for me years ago. And if he felt it was worth recognizing the distinction between the two in terms of my preparedness for the TV show, I figured it was time to finally correct this oversight in my comic-reading history and read the graphic novel. (In truth, there are many oversights in my comic-reading history, as I have not read many comic books at all in my day.)

I thought the idea would be to have the graphic novel be the version that was most recently in my head when I watched the TV show, but the truth of the matter was, reading it so whetted my appetite for another viewing of Snyder's movie that I had to program it for the very first weekend night after I finished reading. (We just started a four-day Easter weekend last night, not that weekends mean all that much right now in terms of our mobility.)

In only two years and eight months since my last viewing, somehow I'd already forgotten that my only option on my Watchmen BluRay was to watch the full three-hour director's cut. Looking back to the last time I wrote about it in 2017, that was apparently my experience then as well. Well, as I wrote then, it didn't bother me as a) Snyder was still a good director in 2009, and b) the extra scenes did not stick out like sore thumbs. Anyway, I didn't finish until 1:15 a.m., so good thing for that long recovery weekend.

Actually, the director's cut this time was instructive as it allowed me to see even more scenes from the graphic novel, some of which I knew had been cut to make the original theatrical release at least marginally digestible by a mainstream audience. In fact, as far as I could tell, almost the entirety of the first two hours was untouched, with only a few later gestures here and there to things like the death of Hollis Mason (Stephen McHattie), the man who preceded Dan Dreiberg (Patrick Wilson) as Nite Owl. I'm also pretty sure the original theatrical release contained no passing shots of the character reading the in-comic pirate comic Tales of the Black Freighter, an annoyingly disproportionate section of the graphic novel.

As sometimes happens when you consume the source material after you've already consumed the cinematic adaptation, reading Watchmen was a good opportunity to marvel at the skills of the adapter. As it turns out, writers David Hayter and Alex Tse had a really good sense of what parts of Watchmen would not translate into a movie version. The pirate comic is a good example of that. For, I assume, purely world-building and atmospheric reasons, Moore intersperses scenes of this pirate comic with action that is actually taking place, mostly around this newsstand that is a regular spot for us to experience the lives of regular people -- dispiritingly regular people, with all their crassness, self-interest and casual bigotry. It makes for difficult reading as the panels frequently feature the pirate comic character's internal monologue, as well as the conversation among characters at the newsstand, so you have to read the narratives in parallel. Since the pirate comic ultimately had little payoff for me, I can see why it was never included in the theatrical version and only appears in the director's cut as a kind of Easter egg for fans of the graphic novel. (As to why it was included in the graphic novel at all, my friend argues that it's part of fleshing out this world -- in a world where superheroes are a part of mainstream society, you would not read comic books about superheroes, but maybe, pirates.)

Another benefit of reading the graphic novel was to appreciate the talents of the casting director. Patrick Wilson, an actor I have come to adore after not thinking much of him when I first met him, is like perfect physical embodiment of Dan Dreiberg, though of course he had to put on a few pounds to look like a middle-aged schlub, or at least the Hollywood movie version thereof. Similarly great casting choices were made with Jeffrey Dean Morgan as Eddie Blake/The Comedian and Jackie Earle Haley as Walter Kovacs/Rorschach. I have frequently described Haley as my favorite part of the movie, and that's probably still true. Actually, I don't think there's a bad casting choice in the bunch, though my friend was a bit down on Malin Akerman as Laurie Jupiter. I disagree with that. Though, as with Wilson, I started out lukewarm on Akerman when I was first introduced to her, I've really come around on her. You should watch her in Wanderlust, if you haven't. Even Matthew Goode, who my friend also dislikes as Adrian Veidt/Ozymandias, works for me as I think the character is supposed to be a bit of a cipher, and Goode really communicates that. Just so we're sure to cover off all the main characters, I should say that Billy Crudup as Jon Osterman/Dr. Manhattan is a cipher in a different way as a post-human all-powerful being, and perfect in the role.

I enjoyed reading Watchmen quite a bit, but because I knew the story and because this adaptation is quite faithful to that in general, at times I was impatient for it to move along faster. I ended up reading it in less than three weeks, so that's pretty quick, especially by my standards. But maybe it felt like a long time to read a comic book. You can tell I don't have a lot of experience with this.

I did think it was worth commenting on the big difference between the book and the novel, which is the attack on New York that ends the novel and ends up purging the threat of impending nuclear war from this world. I had always known it as the equivalent of a nuclear blast, only with Dr. Manhattan's energy signature so the world could blame him for the calamity, and unite against him as a common enemy. In the comic, though, it's weirder -- or seems weirder to me, anyway, given that I've lived with the other version for 11 years. In the comic, Ozymandias causes a giant tentacled alien to materialize in the middle of the city, as though the common enemy the world needs to unite against is an alien species invading Earth. This was the difference my friend presented me with years ago, though I didn't remember the specifics until reading.

Even though he was initially down on the movie version (he's since decided he's quite fond of it), he had always described the movie's ending as possibly better, given that it gives a reason for Manhattan to exile himself from Earth. In the comic version, he's not intrinsically linked to the supposed alien invasion, so his "fatal flaw" of being an all-powerful being who has lost his sense of human empathy does not figure into the climax the way it should. The movie gets that right. The movie gets a lot of things right.

Do I have any more takeaways or is it time to let you get on with your day?

I guess the one final thing I should mention is that the graphic novel includes pieces of first-hand source material that helps build out the world, like excerpts from Hollis Mason's autobiography, memos to and from Veidt about his toy line and other various commercial enterprises, newspaper interviews with Sally Jupiter (Laurie's mother), even part of a novel about owls written by Dan Dreiberg. At first I thought I was going to be annoyed to wade through these in order to get to the next comic book material, but I enjoyed them without exception, particularly as they are relatively brief, usually about four pages each.

Okay, so I guess now it's on to tackle the TV show. How soon, though, I'm not certain.

We do have access to it as it is available to purchase directly through our TV, so it couldn't be easier. The difficulty lies in our collective motivation.

See, as I mentioned at the top, I prepared for watching the TV show by reading this graphic novel. But so did my wife. And she was not, is not, as favorably disposed toward the property as I am.

She actually watched the movie with me during my second viewing back in 2009, though she does not remember that. But she heard the TV show was great, and as TV is a bit more her medium nowadays than movies, she was eager to get up to speed in order to watch it.

Unfortunately, she found the novel unremittingly dark, feeling particularly disturbed by Rorschach's at times right-wing perspective on the world. I mean yes, the novel is supposed to be unremittingly dark, but I guess she found it a bit misogynist, which is the bigger problem. And yes, it's true, Moore probably does not portray the female characters -- there are really only four -- in a particularly flattering light. Laurie Jupiter is a bit of a mixed bag I feel, but her mother, Sally, does come across as quite crass and unredeemable, even as the victim of an attempted rape by the Comedian. Janey Slater, Jon Osterman's original girlfriend, is portrayed as a bit vindictive (even considering that she thinks she got cancer from him), and even the psychiatrist's wife, a character who does not appear in the film, is a bit of a nag in that she tries to forbid him from helping the mentally disturbed people he's tasked with helping and focus more time on her.

Here, I think, is something that Snyder et al get right. Although Snyder is thought of as a bit of a low-level misogynist himself -- whether that's deserving or not -- he benefits from the 20-year span between publishing the comics and releasing the movie to have become more woke. The movie portrayal of all the female characters seems a bit more charitable, without sanding off their rough edges that firmly entrench them as part of this misanthropic and dyspeptic world. I no longer think you can say, if you ever could, that Synder is a misogynist just because he chooses to show Akerman's breasts in her sex scene aboard the airship Archimedes. I feel like this is a decently complex portrayal, at least when compared to the source material.

But that source material -- since she has no memory of the movie -- may have put my wife off of the upcoming TV series a bit. We'll have to see how it goes.

Me? I want to see how they picked up the pieces of this world and went forward, especially since everyone says the show does such a good job of continuing the material's world view. It's already a world I knew I loved, not because it was lovable, but because there was something honest about the way it peers into the dark soul of humanity.

Now I feel like I know that world even better, and am ready for more.

Something I've Never seen before

I was listening to the most recent episode of Filmspotting and I heard something that was music to my ears: scenes from a trailer that was unmistakably a new movie.

I then found that indeed, my two favorite podcasters, stranded now without anything new to talk about for more than a month, would indeed be discussing a new film on their next podcast.

The Sundance favorite Never Rarely Sometimes Always had been moved from an expected theatrical release to a digital release in light of COVID-19. And because it's fun to have listened to the thing they talk about, I immediately went to iTunes to investigate.

As I was searching it up, I wondered how high I'd go on a rental price. I had the naivete to hope that it might be a $3.99 rental, though of course that wasn't likely to be the case. It was more likely to be $6.99, which is what I paid for Vivarium over the weekend.

It was very unlikely to be $19.99, but as you will see on the snippet to the right, that's what it was.

For a rental.

That $19.99 is what you expect if you're planning to buy a new movie, to be sure. But that new movie you'd be buying has already had its chance to get your $19.99 in the theater. Never Rarely Sometimes Always never got that chance.

So I'm writing this post not because I'm balking at the outrageous chutzpah of iTunes to charge us $20 for a movie we can only watch for 30 days, and only for 48 hours once we've started on it. I'm writing to recognize the desperation that may soon become commonplace in the movie industry, as studios/production companies/distributors try to figure out any strategy they can to recoup production costs.

And you know, I may just rent this movie.

I have until Friday to think about it, but then really, until any time after that, until I get too desperate myself to listen to the next Filmspotting. There are a lot of other things I'm not spending money on right now, and I'm one of the fortunate ones who is still making the same amount of money I was making a month ago. Maybe this is one of my ways to give back and support an industry that brings me so much joy, since I can afford to do so. And if enough of us do it, maybe they'll keep giving us new 2020 movies.

It's not something I might normally do. But COVID-19 is a never rarely sometimes always type of situation.

A year of not ranking the wrong movies in the wrong year

Every time I've got a Climax, or an Everybody Knows, or a Vivarium -- in other words, a film I rank
in a different year from everybody else because I've seen it at MIFF the year before it gets released to most of the world -- I kind of wish there were a way to avoid that, so I can be on the same page as all the other critics in assessing the year's best films.

Be careful what you wish for.

Sure, I could only see films at MIFF that I'm sure will come out before the calendar flips, though I don't know how I would know that, given that distribution deals sometimes come together late in the year.

Alternatively, they could just cancel MIFF.

Be careful what you wish for.

As the latest COVID-19 casualty, I've just received an email today that the Melbourne International Film Festival will not be happening this year for the first time in its 68-year history. I've only been a part of that history for the past six years, but it's a sad moment for me, even if it means all the 2020 films I rank this year will have actually been released in 2020.

Maybe the saddest thing about it is not that the festival will not be happening, but that they can already forecast ahead to the end of July and say that this thing will not be resolved by then.

Of course, with an event with as many moving parts as a film festival, you can't take a wait and see approach and give everyone the thumbs up to continue if things look good a few weeks before kickoff time. People have to buy plane tickets. DCPs have to be finished. Heck, films themselves have to be finished. And you have to potentially squander hours and hours of festival staff working time on something that may not actually happen.

So while it makes sense, it's just a sad reminder that we are not about to get over some hump and be almost out of the woods. Not by a longshot.

As it has been doing in most aspects related to this, the Australian government is getting out ahead of the situation. Even though the cases are fewer and the community spread is pretty minimal here, we started extreme distancing measures only a few days behind the U.S. And have already said that the entirety of term 2 of the school year -- which runs from next Tuesday to the end of June -- will be conducted remotely.

And though we have things in control far better here than other parts of the world, we're just heading into winter. In fact, I'm wearing a scarf as I write this, even though the proper start of winter is almost two months off. We could have the whole thing in good shape and then winter could wallop us with a new round of infections.

The MIFF cancellation is another thing that reminds us all how real it is. It's disappointing for the filmmakers. It's disappointing for the festival programmers. It's disappointing for the cinephiles.

But really, it's disappointing for the human race, who will have to be dealing with this whole thing a lot longer than we already have been.

Vivarium arrives

I've been impatiently waiting for my next chance to see Vivarium, which I saw at MIFF and which
occupied my #1 spot last year for a couple months, and coronavirus finally delivered me that opportunity.

I don't know if it was destined for a proper theatrical release -- I think not, unfortunately -- but the pandemic certainly scuttled any chance of that. It's recently debuted for purchase and rental on iTunes, and other similar platforms I imagine.

It's movies like Vivarium that allow us cinephiles to keep going with our fresh new movie conquests, without hating ourselves in the morning -- even if, in my case, I already saw it and counted it last year.

I wrote about Lorcan Finnegan's film last year at MIFF time, but I was very hesitant to reveal any of its secrets. I'm still hesitant, but the poster is starting to force my hand. As you can see, it's got the tagline "You're home. Forever."

I'll just say something along the lines of what I said last time, except the difference is that this time, you can go right now to iTunes to rent it. I'm not going to check my actual wording from last August, but what I feel willing to convey, and what is probably similar to what I said then, is that this is a must-see for people who like their mindbenders with a little dose of social satire and black humor. Plot-wise, it involves Jesse Eisenberg and Imogen Poots as a young couple looking to buy a house, who are led by an odd salesman to a residential development where all the houses are eerie carbon copies of the one in the poster. And the clouds have a sort of fake look to them ...

The difference between then and now is also that I finally have some feedback from some other people I know who have seen it, one of whom is my wife from our viewing on Sunday night. She was actually supposed to be the one who saw it at MIFF, while I had to sacrifice my intended viewing two nights earlier to her scheduling conflict. But she ultimately couldn't go to her viewing so I went in her place. And couldn't have been more pleased with the turn of events.

If our roles had in fact been reversed, I doubt I would have sought it out now, as her response was considerably more measured than mine. She made the obligatory comments on its evident craft and moments of exquisite weirdness, but I was looking for her to be blown away, and she was not. I think that's in part because, like The Platform, it was a little too close to home in this time of quarantine and being stuck in a house with your own family members, at whom you're starting look sideways. In both instances she said felt her anxiety level increasing. For me, that's a good thing when watching a movie; her, maybe not so much.

Then I heard from a couple others on my Flickchart Facebook group today, after I posted about it. They both similarly praised it and were both similarly short of the full "go out and see this right now" endorsement I was hoping for. One said it was "a little on the nose" while the other said it was "not particularly original," and both criticized Eisenberg as miscast. I couldn't have disagreed more on all fronts, though I do think Poots gives the better performance.

So not everyone praises it as much as I do ... but who are you going to believe, them or me? I mean, you're not reading their blogs right now, are you?

I'm just glad it has arrived, that it's out there in the world and that I can now start to share it with everyone else, even if they don't all think it's the cat's pajamas.

Viva Vivarium.

Onward and upward

I had my first moment of 2020 cinematic normalcy in almost a month Sunday afternoon when the family watched a bonafide A-list 2020 movie that had not yet come out in Australia. Onward was scheduled to hit theaters a couple Thursdays ago, but, well, we know what happened.

Of course, had it actually represented normalcy, I would have seen this in the theater. I haven't missed a Pixar movie in the theater the entire time I've been in Australia. Since then I've seen two Pixar movies that I didn't catch when they were in the theater -- Cars 2 and Monsters University -- but any film that was released theatrically after my August 2013 arrival, I saw in the theater. Yes, even The Good Dinosaur.

In fact, I had two chances to see Onward in the theater, both of which I had to pass up. I was invited to a press screening on a Sunday afternoon about a month ago, but we were already scheduled to go to my father-in-law's for lunch that day. (Plus, the screening was a rare admit two, meaning only one other family member could have attended with me. Usually they are admit four.) Then Hoyts was showing advanced screenings of Onward a week before its release, but by then, we had already decided I should stop going to movie theaters, a few days before they properly closed up shop.

But it felt good not to rely only on Netflix for new release content in March and April of 2020, as U.S. iTunes had the movie available to rent only a week after it was supposed to debut here. And now that means I can also review something that isn't just the latest thing Netflix has crapped out. (Actually, the first two Netflix movies I reviewed, The Platform and Uncorked, were not that at all. But Coffee & Kareem changed all that.)

I don't know exactly how many more 2020 movies there are that I care about seeing but haven't already seen, though I suppose pretty soon I'll be able to see marginal candidates like Bad Boys for Life, Sonic the Hedgehog and Call of the Wild. There's some more normalcy for you, maybe an extreme sort of normalcy.

I had heard mixed things about Onward -- two podcasters placed it in the lower half of their Pixar chart -- but I ended up being charmed and moved by it in equal measure. It had maybe a few pacing issues in the middle, but by the climax, my wife and I were both sniffling.

And then something equal parts moving and alarming happened. My nine-year-old son started bawling.

Not sniffling like we were. But crying the way he'd cry if he fell off a skateboard and took all the skin off his palms and knees.

It may just be that my son discovered, for the first time today, what it feels like when a movie makes you really sad.

Without spoiling the movie at all, I don't think Onward is particularly sad for a Pixar movie. As usual, they get the mix about right. And my older son has seen pretty much all those Pixar movies since we moved here with me. He didn't see Finding Dory, but so what.

I'd say its ending is about as emotional as the endings of Inside Out and Coco, which is high praise. He saw those movies, but he never reacted like this.

I suspect the pandemic has something to do with it. We are trying to protect them from the worst of the information about it, and they don't dwell on it much, hiding their fears if they have them at all. But we know they hear figures about deaths and other information that is, shall we say, dismaying. Fortunately, they are lucky enough not to know anyone who is directly affected, as are we.

But the themes of Onward, combined with the pandemic, likely opened the floodgates for the older one. It took us a couple minutes to calm him down.

Twenty minutes after it was over, he was once again bouncing around like a kid who had eaten too much sugar. So no permanent damage done.

But the loss presented in this film, even leavened by a perfect Pixar ending, was just too much for him. I get it.

So I guess it's onward and upward for him as a cinephile. He's had his first good cry at the movies. It only gets better from here.

My wife says she remembers him being similarly concerned by the fate of Bing Bong in Inside Out. But I don't really remember that, and besides, he was only four. As a nine-year-old, you know a lot more about the world, for better or for worse.

And with continued physical distancing and curve-flattening disruptions, maybe it will end up being for the better, and we can limit the catastrophic effect this virus has on the world.

I'd watch my next five Pixar movies on my home TV if we could collectively accomplish that.

Netflix name-dropping Netflix

We see Netflix's name in enough places. Netflix's name was even in the Ben & Jerry's ice cream I ate last night ... while I was watching Netflix. That's right, the flavor is called Netflix & Chill'd, a play on a phrase that I guess has come to describe a good evening at home among the millennial set. (I don't usually buy Ben & Jerry's -- it costs $13 here -- but what can I say, you do different things during coronavirus. Besides, this flavor includes things other flavors that have made it to Australia have not, like brownies and swirled pretzel mush.)

But I don't know, I draw the line at Netflix mentioning Netflix in their own movies.

I saw it for at least the second time last night while watching the brand spanking new Netflix original film Coffee & Kareem, whose title could probably also be a Ben & Jerry's flavor. (But is otherwise quite a struggle; in order for the play on words to work, they had to give one of the characters the last name Coffee. Not even Coffey, but Coffee.)

There's a part near the start where the young kid, Kareem, tells Coffee, the cop, that there are "documentaries on Netflix" about a certain phenomenon -- I don't remember what the phenomenon was, but it was probably pedophilia, since a full half the jokes in this movie are about pedophilia.

It annoyed the hell out of me, but I didn't hold it against Coffee & Kareem at that point, because the jury was still out on the movie. As it moved along and I decided I hated it, it became emblematic of everything that's wrong with the movie.

It's not the first time I've seen it, but I only concretely remember one other instance. That was in High Flying Bird, which I also did not like, in which the characters talk about negotating with Netflix for the airing of some basketball-related content during an NBA lockout.

Is Netflix so intent on world domination that they simply can't resist this childish antic?

It would be like if Black Widow and Captain America saw something weird -- weird for their world, anyway -- and said "Wow, that's like something you would see in a Marvel comic!"

You might argue that acknowledging their own existence serves two purposes for Netflix: 1) It purports to be more realistic, as indeed, Netflix is a daily part of many people's lives. 2) It continues to normalize them into the mainstream fabric by suggesting they've become so eponymous, you can't make a movie without organically having reason to refer to them. I guess those might be variations on the same thing. In any case, Netflix wants to reach the same level as Xerox, Kleenex and (remember them?) Tivo, where they are so obviously the leader in the thing they do that people start to refer to their specific brand when referring to a generic phenomenon. Like, they want people to say "Let's watch Netflix" and have it refer to an activity itself, even if they are watching Hulu. Or even better, they want it to become a verb.

Me, it just takes me out of it.

Can't the characters in a Netflix movie live in a world where Netflix doesn't exist? Would that be so bad?

Other movies effortlessly make that stretch. As I discussed in one of my first posts ever for this blog, which is so old I will not even link it here, the characters in a zombie movie almost always exist in a world where zombies are not even a concept in literature or popular culture. When the first zombie appears, they don't call it a zombie because they don't even know that word. Compared to something like that, the convenient erasure of a streaming service is pretty simple. Really, in most instances it doesn't even come up unless you force it into the dialogue, as they did in Coffee & Kareem.

Of course, Netflix appears to think it's funny to do this. Maybe we'll start seeing it more. Maybe it's the one thing Netflix will start to require of their filmmakers, becoming a signature equivalent to the Alfred Hitchcock cameo. Maybe even in movies about knights and dragons they will require a reference in a line of dialogue. "Dost thou have Netflix?"

I suggested earlier that Disney, via Marvel, would never do something like this, but I guess that's not exactly correct. I can't remember if the word "Disney" was ever uttered here, but one of the things I disliked most about Ralph Breaks the Internet was its self-referential nature. Not only did we have to see stormtroopers and other Star Wars stuff, but we had to sit through that unendurable sequence involving the Disney princesses.

Look, there's a certain kind of winking self-awareness that works in a movie, particularly a movie conceived as a parody. Most other times, it's just obnoxious. And when a film is as hopeless as Coffee & Kareem, it can help sink it.

But that Netflix & Chill'd ice cream ... that was pretty good. I'll be getting that again, even though it cost $13.

And thereby doing my bit to further the Netflix agenda toward world domination.

Damn you Netflix.

Streaming savior

The calendar turned to April, and our fortunes changed.

But first some background.

For a long time -- years now -- we have been hearing about how the "NBN" was coming. "NBN" stands for Nationwide Broadband Network, and it meant an entire upgrade of the infrastructure for how we do internet here in Australia. I could get into the technical details but then I'd have to do a lot of googling, and besides, who cares.

It's been rolled out region by region, but not in the manner you might expect. Or I should say, not in the self-centered manner I might expect, as a city dweller. I kind of figured everyone in the most densely populated areas might get it first, and it would slowly roll out to the small country towns. It seems to have been the opposite. In fact, it started to be a joke that some areas had enjoyed the NBN for years, and a district like ours -- which actually has the world "Melbourne" in its name (North Melbourne) -- was still puttering along on inferior technology.

And boy was it inferior. I think the experience differed from household to household and provider to provider, but we have not been able to rely on our home internet at all lately. I've taken to using my phone's data whenever possible, made practicable by the fact that they randomly boosted my data from 10 GB/month to 40 GB/month without any additional cost to me. But that was no help when it came to our smart TV, where it's too tedious to change the internet setup depending on whether my phone is in range or not. And it's gotten worse -- perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not -- since they've done the necessary subterranean work, some of which was literally right outside our house.

But then we also heard that some people were not happy with their NBN, and that it actually represented a downgrade in service for them. This was a tad alarming. Now, you can't really go down from zero, so we didn't figure it would be a downgrade for us. But what if it was not demonstrably different? All our hopes and dreams, bundled up into these three little letters, might be shattered.

Our box came on Wednesday. It was supposed to just plug into the wall and be ready to go. But we had our trepidations, not only about the possible unchanged quality of our service, but also related to logistics. It requires an ordinary phone port to plug in, but our house is wired in such a way that we only have one of those way up in the kids' bedroom closet. And it involves a splitter, which is not supposed to be used in our NBN setup.

It all felt like too much of a hassle for me. This working from home is starting to exhaust me.

But my wife rolled up her sleeves, and last night, we flipped the switch.

Instant gratification.

All buffering stopped. All dropouts stopped. We watched the second episode of Tiger King (I know, we're behind) without a single hitch. It was a stark contrast to the other night, when we had to plow through the first episode on my computer, connected to my phone, and even then it had some issues.

Our grins could not have been wider.

I promptly connected my computer to the TV with an HDMI cable (I can't get to Kanopy without my computer) and streamed Roy Andersson's 2007 absurd film You, the Living, not for any particular reason other than that it was the movie I'd been planning to watch last night anyway. If the internet cooperated.

Well, now the internet was cooperating like a motherfucker.

Life was no longer a Roy Andersson film, an absurd war against technology waged by lunatics. We had returned to the land of the living.

It's probably too soon to write a post like this -- people who believe in jinxes would be going crazy right now.

But you gotta write while the iron's hot, and for the first time in years, we've got a hot iron in our house, internet-wise, metaphorically speaking.

All hail the NBN.

A pedantic notion of decades, and other virtual movie fun

We had our first "virtual drinks" on Sunday afternoon with a couple friends. The husband of the other couple decided to use the Zoom meeting technology to prepare a little movie quiz for us. I didn't think it was necessary, but it ended up being fun. And besides, just because we could talk about coronavirus for 80 minutes, that doesn't mean it's what we should do -- what was any good for our mental health.

The premise of the game was that I was going to send him my favorite movie from each of the years featured in a movie book he had called Movies of the 80s, which you see to your right. He was going to record my answers and then his own answers, and then our wives were going to try to guess what the other husband had chosen -- not their own husband, but the other husband. That seemed counterintuitive to me, but then again, probably better to make a game of who knows the other husband better than who knows their own husband better. The latter is fraught with peril, especially at a time when we are probably already getting on each others' nerves anyway.

So he sent me the book's table of contents, as you will see in the pictures below, which included each movie year and then a list of movies that they had selected to discuss from that year -- or in some cases, not from that year, but again, more on that in a moment.

I'll include below what my options were and what I chose; I don't remember in every case what his choices were, but that's okay, because you don't know him anyway.

But I wanted to start by poking holes in this book's definition of what a decade is.

When I got the photo of the first page from him, the first movie year they discussed was 1981. I thought that it was weird that they had excluded 1980, but kind of brushed it off until I saw the last year they discussed: 1990.

I was honestly flummoxed how they could make such an egregious error -- though as you will see, it was not the only one. Then I realized what they were doing, which was defining the decade extremely pedantically.

As you may remember when the calendar rolled over to 2000, everyone had a handful of obnoxious people in their lives who insisted on telling them that it was not really the start of the 21st century. No, because there was never a year 0, that meant that the 21st century did not actually start until the year 2001.

However true that may have been, I found it annoying. In this case it behoved us to develop a more practical definition of a century, or a millennium, one which recognized the utility of putting like with like. If it had a 2 at the start of the year, it belonged with the third millennium, and if it had zeroes as the second and third digits, it belonged with the first decade and century of that millennium, not the last of the previous.

This book, apparently, is one of those obnoxious/annoying people.

Whether the 1980s really began in 1981 or not, that's not how we do things. Best of the decade lists comes out in years ending in 0, as we all know from the year we are currently in. Everyone whose anyone considers 2010 as part of the teens, not the aughts, though it might have interested me to have the academic debate with myself whether Tangled, a 2010 release, would have also been my favorite movie of last decade.

I think it should have struck someone who was related to this book as weird that a book about the movies of the 1980s contained the year 1990 in it. Sometimes you need to rely on the sniff test, and this should not have passed it.

Anyway. Let's move on.

Below I'll include the photos of each two-page spread (as proof, I guess) and my choice among the available movies. And just a comment on those movies. I'm not sure what kind of book this is supposed to be, but it contains some totally obvious choices (as you would expect) and some I've never heard of. The latter can be a perfectly fine way of doing things, but it just begs the question why they didn't include some of the choices you'd think would be slam dunks. (No Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1981?) My choice will be in bold, movies I haven't seen will be in italics.

1981

Escape from New York
Lola
Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid
Conan the Barbarian
Fitzcarraldo
Body Heat
Clean Slate
Das Boot
Blow Out
Time Bandits
Prince of the City

Time Bandits is #32 for me on Flickchart so this was a pretty easy choice, though Das Boot would give it a run for its money. The other guy chose Body Heat, which I thought was a funny choice, particularly for him. I know, I haven't seen Conan.

1982

Flashdance
Fanny and Alexander
E.T.
Tootsie
Scarface
Querelle
The King of Comedy
Blade Runner
Gandhi
The Draughtman's Contract
Monty Python's The Meaning of Life

What the hell is Querelle? This book has got a stiffy for Rainer Werner Fassbinder as Lola in 1981 was also directed by him. (And I actually could not find enough of his stuff easily accessible to even include him in Audient Auteurs a few years ago, as I'd wanted to.) No real competition for Blade Runner as E.T. has dropped in my estimation in recent years. I think he chose The King of Comedy.

1983

Rumble Fish
Once Upon a Time in America
Nostalghia
The Right Stuff

What, was 1983 a particularly shit year? Funny that they could not find a similar number of titles to discuss as other years, all of which have more than ten. At least of the two I've seen, there was an obvious favorite in Once Upon a Time in America. Though I do like Rumble Fish too.

1984

Desperately Seeking Susan
Paris, Texas
The Terminator
Ghostbusters
Blood Simple
Brazil
A Nightmare on Elm Street
Amadeus
Body Double
Beverly Hills Cop
A Passage to India

I was only a Passage to India away from seeing all of these, though I only just saw Paris, Texas last year. I believe we both chose Ghosbusters on this one, one of only two times we both selected the same movie.

1985

Back to the Future
To Live and Die in L.A.
The Fly
Blue Velvet
Prizzi's Honor
Hannah and Her Sisters
Out of Africa
Ran
Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome
Tea in the Harem
My Beautiful Laundrette

Back to the Future is my #2 movie of all time. 'Nuff said. He picked The Fly. Also a good choice. Never even heard of Tea in the Harem.

1986

A Room with a View
The Untouchables
Highlander
Tampopo
Platoon
The Green Ray
Aliens
Down by Law
She's Gotta Have It
Stand by Me

There was a little uncertainty here -- I chose Stand by Me because I know it's #74 on my Flickchart (I mean, I knew it was in the top 100, I looked it up just now to find out the exact number). But I have to figure that if I saw it again now it probably would drop out of the top 100. However, I still probably rank it ahead of Aliens and The Untouchables. He picked Platoon, which I only saw recently and found disappointing.

1987

Full Metal Jacket
A Fish Called Wanda
Fatal Attraction
Au Revoir Les Enfants
The Last Emperor
Frantic
A Chinese Ghost Story
Near Dark
RoboCop
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Lethal Weapon
House of Games
Wall Street

Now this is where things get screwy. My choice, A Fish Called Wanda, did not come out in 1987. Not in any country did it come out in 1987. Its world premiere was in New York in July of 1988. I think it's funny that the world premiere was not in England, but there you have it. Though, just as a reminder that people can be fallible, I always think of it as a 1989 movie, though obviously I'm wrong. I think he selected Lethal Weapon, though it might have been Full Metal Jacket. If I were forced to select a movie that actually came out in 1987, from these choices, I guess it would be Full Metal Jacket, though I only really love the first half.

1988

Die Hard
Rain Man
Dead Ringers
Working Girl
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
The Naked Gun
Mississippi Burning
Dead Poets Society
Batman
Who Framed Roger Rabbit
Dangerous Liaisons

*Game show buzzer* Uh uh. At least three more incorrect release years. What crack was the editor of this book smoking? The Last Crusade, Dead Poets Society and Batman all came out in 1989, and those were just the ones I checked to make sure I wasn't going crazy. Sloppy. Side note: First year where I had seen all the movies.

1989

sex, lies and videotape
Miller's Crossing
Pretty Woman
Time of the Gypsies
Crimes and Misdemeanors
When Harry Met Sally ...
My Left Foot
Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!
Born on the Fourth of July
Sweetie

The problem is becoming more profound the later we get in the decade. Miller's Crossing and Pretty Women came out in 1990, and therefore, should not even appear in this book (by my definition). I really wanted to go with Miller's Crossing (despite the incorrect year) but I just had to admit to myself that my favorite romantic comedy of all time had to be recognized. In its correct year at that.

1990*

*invalid year

Home Alone
Dances With Wolves
I Hired a Contract Killer
Total Recall
Wild at Heart
Edward Scissorhands
Misery
Bullet in the Head
Goodfellas

Really good year. Was tempted by Total Recall, Dances With Wolves, Edward Scissorhands and Misery (his selection), but how can you go against Goodfellas? You can't. The book seems to have gotten itself back on track as these all appear to be in the correct release year.

The other wife ended up beating my wife in the competition. But I guess his wife has known me longer than she's known his husband. Anyway.

Okay, not sure if the effort to put this together was borne out in the amount of pleasure you derived from reading it, if you did read the whole thing. But, I also don't think there's any better description of everything we do during Life Under Quarantine.