Quarantine Battles: Frankenstein vs. Bride of Frankenstein

I probably didn't need to sew -- pun intended -- two pictures together for my second quarantine battle, because there are perfectly good pictures of the monster and his intended bride in the same shot from Bride of Frankenstein. But my edited picture gives them a more oppositional quality, so I'm going with it.

So I'd never seen Bride of Frankenstein before, but then neither had I seen Frankenstein. I know, I know. I only just saw Tod Browning's Dracula within the last decade or so and still have not seen the original King Kong. I'm behind. I had nearly 5,600 other films I needed to watch first.

The reason for me finally watching it is that I drew Bride of Frankenstein as my monthly pick in Flickchart Friends Favorites Fiesta, which is a Facebook group in which people randomly draw the highest ranked film they haven't seen from each others' charts, and watch it that month. I've mentioned it before.

You're allowed to reject sequels where you haven't seen the original, but instead of doing that for my May viewing, I decided just to use it as an excuse to finally watch James Whale's Frankenstein. I've seen so many iconic images from it that I feel like I've seen it, not to mention having also watched Gods and Monsters, which is about Whale. But actually sitting down to watch the movie hadn't happened yet.

I changed that on Tuesday night, and then followed it on Wednesday with Bride -- a double feature with the Michelle Obama documentary Becoming. (And partial apologies to Netflix for the previous post -- the movie became available for viewing by primetime, so I got to watch it that night after all.) The short running time of both movies allowed me to fit them both in easily, as neither surpasses the 75-minute mark. That was even with having to prepare a beef bourguignon on Tuesday night to cook in the slow cooker all day Wednesday.

Now, you might not automatically consider these two movies to be in battle with each other, since they are sequels and even made by the same man. And in most instances, the second movie after a successful first would be at a big disadvantage in any such duel. Not here, though. I've read that many people consider Bride of Frankenstein the superior work, and indeed, Whale's masterpiece. So, I thought it made a good opportunity to find out.

First I'll say that while most of the iconic scenes I was already aware of are in the first movie, the one that I was waiting for most didn't come until the second. That's the "She's alive! Alive!" quote from Colin Clive as Henry Frankenstein (why Henry and not Victor??), which was familiar to me from a childhood favorite, Weird Science, and namely its titular theme song by Oingo Boingo. If I had remembered the gender pronoun there, I wouldn't have been looking for it in the first film, which does have a very similar quote, but one that I could tell was not exactly the same.

Frankenstein the original clearly tells a much more straightforward story, one whose details were familiar to me: The birth of the monster, the monster's fateful interaction with the young girl, etc. I did wonder how, when they found their daughter drowned, her parents somehow knew it was the monster to blame. No one witnessed their interaction; couldn't she have just fallen in? They were the ones who left her unattended. Oh well, not important.

I realized also that a lot of what I "know" about Frankenstein is from Young Frankenstein, which borrows liberally, of course, being a parody of it and all. When the henchman -- he's only called Igor in the Mel Brooks movie, I guess -- has to take the second brain after dropping the first one on the ground, I thought "That's Abby Normal's brain!" Yes, I'm due for another viewing of that movie too.

The 1931 movie I found very satisfying, and quite atmospheric at times -- the opening scene when they rob the grave was almost haunting. Colin Clive is quite the charismatic presence, and I was sorry to hear he died only two years after the sequel, drowning himself in booze I guess.

At the start of Bride of Frankenstein, I was tickled to learn that this was going to be a movie I did not know so much about -- from the opening cast listing, I could see that the movie was going to break the fourth wall in a way by having Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley and Lord Byron appearing as characters. I'm not sure if I understand the function of that opening scene other than establishing a tone of humor, a tone that is continued as the story unfolds with Una O'Connor giving a pretty hilarious performance. But I liked that it was unexpected.

Another unexpected element is the appearance of a second mad scientist in the second movie, Doctor Pretorius, as Henry Frankenstein (WHY HENRY AND NOT VICTOR???) gets to play a more traditionally heroic role this time. I thought the movie was going full comedy when it reveals that Doctor Pretorius has created miniature people -- a king, a queen, an archbishop, a mermaid. Other than showcasing some quite good special effects, I'm not sure if I understood the value of this -- not if it's supposed to be a horror movie, anyway. Though I'm starting to think that one of its pioneering elements was as horror comedy.

But what ultimately disappointed me about the movie is that when Elsa Lanchester -- playing a double role with that of Mary Shelley -- finally shows up in the end, with those great jerky head movements and streaks of white in her hair, it's only for ten minutes or so. She shrieks a couple times, the monster (who now can talk) considers her to have rejected him, and he decides to destroy the laboratory and everyone in it, except for Henry and his wife, whom he tells to "Go live!"

I think it may be worth a second watch of Bride of Frankenstein sometime soon when I have a better idea what to have been expecting from it, because for me, for right now, Whale's masterpiece is the original. Though I enjoyed watching them both very much.

Will there be more quarantine battles? I don't know -- could quarantine be ending here in Australia? The prime minister announced that restaurants would be opening soon. Could movie theaters be long after them? (They're saying July, actually. Boo.)

But maybe soon, at least, it won't be possible to call this a "quarantine" anymore. Stay tuned.

The vicious lies told by Netflix

Earlier this week, I realized there was a Michelle Obama documentary coming out on Wednesday. I immediately planned my viewing schedule for the week around it, so I could watch Becoming on Wednesday night and have my review ready for posting on Thursday, hot off the presses.

Except Netflix lied to me about what "Wednesday" means.

Today is Wednesday, as I write this, and yet, as you can see to the right, the site still advertises it as "Coming Wednesday."

Wednesday is already here, motherfucker.

Now of course I know what is going on here. The only "Wednesday" that matters in Netflix-land is the North American Wednesday.

But I ask you: What would be so damn wrong if I, here in Australia, got to watch this movie 12 hours before anyone else did?

Would the earth start to spin off its access or shatter in two?

I think it would not. I think it would just allow Netflix to be truthful about its own advertising.

Or, they could just change the wording on the Australian version of the site. Come up with a "Coming Thursday" banner and slap it up on the Australian interface. The guy who made the "Coming Wednesday" banner could make it in two seconds.

No? He doesn't want to do that? Well then just release the damn thing on Wednesday.

Because right now, they're trying to tell me I don't know what day Wednesday is. And even if it's the coronavirus, I do know it -- sort of. Actually, I kind of super know it, because I'm counting the days until I get two days off from wondering if my kids are actually doing their assignments or just goofing around on the iPad.

I wants to see me some Michelle Obama. And now I can't do it until tomorrow night.

It's not the first time this has happened. I've tried to jump on new Netflix releases in the past and had to wait for the designated time to pass in the U.S. For no good reason other than some general paranoia about needing to maintain a review embargo.

The thing that extra bugs me? It is actually Wednesday in most time zones in America as I write this. I'm writing these words at 11:23 p.m. Tuesday on the west coast, which means it's already Wednesday everywhere east of Denver.

If what you really mean is "Coming Wednesday at 4:37 a.m. in the Eastern Time Zone," then damn say that.

Quarantine Battles: 2019 rematch

Did I need to watch Parasite for a third time within the first year that I'd seen it? That anyone had seen it, since the 2019 Cannes Film Festival, at which it debuted and claimed top prize, didn't start until last May 14th, with Parasite's first showing coming a week after that?

Probably not. But it sure was fun.

Even though Parasite is no longer "my movie" -- an honor I could claim for a while, as I was the first person I knew who had seen it, back at the end of last June, three months before it debuted in the U.S. -- it's still my #1 of last year, and will always, therefore, by one of "my" movies. In that year's time, Parasite has taken the world by storm, most recently (but probably least consequentially) capping off its award win streak by taking home top honors in the 64-movie Filmspotting Madness best of the 2010s tournament, where it beat Mad Max: Fury Road as the best of the decade according to the podcast's listeners.

Even with all that, though, recently I haven't been sure if it was even my best of last year. Which makes a good segue into the three reasons I watched Parasite with my wife on Sunday night:

1) It was for free on our Australian streaming service Stan, which was too much to resist;

2) My second viewing was on a plane, and I had to miss the last ten minutes due to the fact that we were disembarking; and

3) I thought it was time to decide whether or not it was actually better than Portrait of a Lady on Fire.

And so, welcome to my first (and possibly last) installment in Quarantine Battles, where I watch two movies in close succession that have an equal claim to some particular honor, to see which one comes out on top.

Parasite may have bested Mad Max: Fury Road in the Filmspotting tournament, but in my own personal rankings for 2019, it bested Portrait of a Lady on Fire. My #2 was in a tricky position, though, having been seen by me only two weeks before I closed my list. If it hadn't had such stiff competition on the top, it might have been my #1 -- and might have deserved to scale the heights even with such a formidable opponent.

I actually intended to watch Parasite the previous Sunday, as it would have given me back-to-back viewings on consecutive nights, creating the type of proximity that would have made the movies' merits, both independently and in relation to each other, abundantly clear. That was more or less how I handled the final showdown of my own best of the decade, watching Tangled and Spring Breakers as a double feature on the second-to-last night of last year. But my wife, noticing that I was about to start watching, asked me not to leave her out of the Parasite viewing, which would be her second. I agreed to postpone to her proposed alternative time the following Sunday night.

Whether separated by one night or eight, I think I would have reached the same conclusion, which is:

It's still Parasite.

The last time I watched a movie three times within the first year I'd seen it -- the third time also with my wife -- it was Creed in 2015/2016. In that case I saw it twice a week apart in the theater, my affection still holding strong after the second viewing -- strong enough that it came in only behind Inside Out as my favorite of the year. The third viewing, though, knocked it down a peg. It was once too many in such a short amount of time.

I worried the same might be true of Parasite, even with the compromised second plane viewing. The fact that it wasn't, and that I watched it in a state of perpetual thrills at the wonder of Bong's filmmaking, left little doubt that it was still just a hair better than Portrait.

You should have no doubt that Portrait was still worthy of that #2 spot. I loved watching it again and I think I may have actually cried in one additional spot than I did the first time. C'est magnifique.

I've seen all three of my top three of 2019 in the past month, in fact, with #3 Vivairum in there as well. All still maintain their relative rankings, which I guess is an unsurprising outcome given that it's only been three-and-a-half months since I placed them in their respective spots.

But Parasite ... well, there's the reason it's the most agreed upon best film of the year in as long as I can remember.

I guess I should think of my next possible Quarantine Battle, as it's not cool to introduce a possible recurring feature and then never do it again.

But we got a number of new high-profile cases of coronavirus just in the past few days in Victoria -- some from a school, some from a meat-packing plant -- so something tells me I don't need to hurry.

An Anything Day without movies

Is the pandemic still going on? Yes.

So was it time for another Anything Day in our household yesterday? Yes.

If you recall from this post, "Anything Day" was a coping strategy we devised to allow ourselves to blow off a little steam while also staying here at home. All four members of our family were allowed to do whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted, as long as they also ate meals and brushed their teeth, and their definition of "anything" wasn't outside the bounds of what they're normally allowed to do, or conflicted with anyone else's idea of "anything." The first installment was three weekends ago.

You might ask "Do you need an Anything Day again so soon, Vance?" The answer is, probably not. But, the week is a grind with the kids schooling from home and needing a lot of hand-holding. The deciding factor, though, is that May 11th has been floated as a possible date for lifting some restrictions here in Victoria. Given that my wife is getting her own sort of Anything Day next Sunday for Mother's Day, this could be the last chance for a while for my kids and me.

Last time, I watched five movies. Two of them were hijacked by my kids. That's not really fair; I invited them to watch movies with me. But when they took me up on the offer, I realized it wasn't exactly what I thought I'd wanted.

So this time, I was going to do something different. Maybe one movie in the afternoon and one in the evening. I wanted Anything Day to truly take me wherever it naturally took me.

And that was: no movies at all.

See, I've had a steady diet of movies during the pandemic. To be honest, it's not all that different from my normal pace. When I go out at night during normal times, it's more often to see a movie than to get together with friends. That's because I'd see at least one movie a week, and for a 46-year-old dad, seeing friends that often is just not that common a thing. (At least, I assume it isn't; I have only my own experience to go on.) So instead of seeing my movie out, I'm seeing my movie at home, and then still seeing a movie on most other nights of the week as well.

So seeing movies is not "doing anything" in the most creative, the most truly different interpretation of that theme.

What did I do instead? Well, I'm about to tell you. And my accompanying artwork has already shown you. And indeed, it was perhaps the purest definition of Anything Day one could possibly imagine.

Playing Lexulous is not exactly a unique experience for me either. I've about doubled my normal number of games during the pandemic, but probably really more than that, since one of the two people I hadn't been playing previously is playing me in three games at once.

But playing Lexulous against myself? That's new.

See, I discovered -- because they advertised it with a banner above one of my games -- that Lexulous has a new practice area where you can play either against the computer, or against yourself. How do you play against yourself, you ask? Well, you just play all the letters in the game, dumped into your rack successively until they are all gone. Which means you also get all the points.

Your opponent? The clock.

That's right, you can set your game to last a certain amount of time, or leave it untimed if you want. I tried three minutes and that was way too short. I tried 15 minutes and that was too long. But ten minutes was just about perfect. It's long enough to be forced to make up your mind quickly, but to allow yourself a little time to think if you've budgeted your time well and have a promising rack.

If you run out of time, you lose.

Of course, you still lose any time you don't beat your own personal record. Which I started keeping track of sometime after about 10:30 a.m. yesterday morning.

I scored 721 combined points in the first game. The first game I started keeping track of, anyway, which was probably about the third game overall.

Do you know how long it took me to score more than 721 points?

Sixteen more games.

And since each game is ten minutes long, that meant I spent the next two hours and forty minutes trying to beat my score. And it was actually more like three+ hours, because there were a couple games in there where I didn't finish in time, so I didn't enter them into the special Excel spreadsheet I had created just for the occasion.

Including lunch and the like, it was 3 in the afternoon the next time I looked up.

Was beating my score once enough? Oh no. Oh no it was not.

Before I went to bed last night, over the course of the rest of the day, I played another -- and how's this for symmetry -- 16 games.

The funny thing was, I beat my new high score of 752 with a new high score of 785 in the very next game after I got the 752. I got over 700 a number of other times, but the closest I came to beating it again was in the very next game after that, when I got 776. (Until this morning, when I got 778 on my first, and so far only, try.)

I thought the rest of my family -- or, I should say, my wife, who was the only one paying attention to what I was doing -- would think I was crazy. But she didn't, not at all. In fact, she thought it was great. The point of Anything Day is to go down a rabbit hole if you want, because you have the time. You just do you. For one day.

I did have moments when I wondered if I were frittering away my Anything Day. Hadn't I wanted to watch that one movie in the afternoon and that one in the evening?

But movies were the easy thing to give up. There were other things I imagined myself doing more of. Like, I read only about ten pages in my book.

Still, on Anything Day I also:

- Worked on our 1000-piece Sherlock Holmes puzzle for at least an hour
- Watched five (30-minute) episodes of the Christina Applegate-Linda Cardellini Netflix show Dead to Me, in order to be ready for season 2 to drop on Friday
- Watched this week's episode of Survivor
- Wrote yesterday's blog post
- Did a fair bit of Facebooking
- Ate some meals
- Took a very short nap in our garage

A movie did get watched in our house actually. My older son couldn't be taken away from his Fortnite, but the younger one and my wife started watching Smallfoot at about 6:30, eating the pizza we ordered in front of the TV. And as much as I would have liked to watch the movie that inspired the Zendaya is Meechee meme, I was happily in the adjoining room, eating my own share of the pizza and trying to solve our Sherlock Holmes puzzle.

After all, sometimes Anything Day means no movies at all.

My first actual virus movie during the pandemic

While cinephiles, or just regular people, were flocking to the likes of Contagion and Outbreak way back in the early days of the pandemic -- remember March? -- I apparently preferred my cinematic considerations of our current situation to be more metaphorical, like The Platform and Vivarium.

Well, on day whatever-it-is, I've finally gotten to an actual virus movie.

Twelve Monkeys started percolating around in my brain for reasons I can't remember a week or two ago. It has been 11 years since I'd seen it, and it's also a movie that's lodged in my top 100 on Flickchart (currently #86), so with all the Flickcharting I've been doing lately, I've seen its poster come up a bunch of times. I'd never actually watched the DVD copy I bought a couple years ago, and I decided it was time to see if it really deserves to hold such a lofty position in my personal rankings.

Plus, you know, the whole virus thing.

Twelve Monkeys is not your typical virus movie. There's nary a moment when you see someone succumbing to the effects of the virus, which makes it quite unusual among virus movies you would actually tag with that label. But the virus is one of the first things you hear about in the movie in the opening text. Even if it's more like a background to the movie and an eventuality the heroes are trying to prevent -- even if they kind of know they can't -- it's still essential to what Twelve Monkeys is.

But because the virus is always something either in the characters' past or in their future, Twelve Monkeys didn't specifically scratch a virus itch for me. I enjoyed watching it, though I was a bit in and out, a consequence of it being Friday night after a long week working from home (ha) and, probably more pertinently, of having done a 46-minute run after work ended.

As much as I still like the movie, though, it does seem clear that it's probably not my 86th favorite movie of all time. Somewhere in the top 100 to 200 range -- maybe closer to 200 -- is probably more accurate. And that's another reason revisiting movies like this is useful, as in my future Flickcharting, it might lose to some movies it was previously beating, which will get it closer to that proper spot.

I think part of the reason it scaled to those heights was that it was that particular catnip for a particular type of cinephile: the perfectly timed head trip movie. Everyone has some. For millennials, maybe it was when Inception came out in 2010. For me, at the ripe old age of 46, it was when Twelve Monkeys came out in 1995, not long after I'd turned 22. It was one of them, anyway.

My 2009 viewing probably chilled a little of my affection for the movie, though obviously not enough to knock it down significantly in Flickchart. (I think it may have been as high as the 40s at one point.) My 2020 viewing will probably further contextualize it for me in terms of my actual all-time favorites.

Another reason I'd been interested in revisiting Twelve Monkeys is that I saw the source material from which it was adapted, Chris Marker's La Jetee, two years ago. I probably really needed to watch them back-to-back, though, as now I have forgotten enough about La Jetee to have it significantly inform last night's Twelve Monkeys viewing, just as I had forgotten enough about Twelve Monkeys for it to have meaningfully spoken to La Jetee two years ago. Oh well, opportunity missed.

One thing I did gain from this most recent viewing, in addition to all the things that had given me pleasure previously, was to note how many actors appear in it that I didn't know at the time, though know much better now. For one, two members of the Army of the 12 Monkeys are Lisa Gay Hamilton and Matt Ross, she of any number of films and he of Silicon Valley. Then you've got a young Christopher Meloni as a detective. These people had careers before I was aware of them? How rude!

It was interesting to watch this with an awareness of the cancel culture that has come to surround Terry Gilliam, who has made any number of unfortunate statements in recent years. I won't dredge those up to see if any of them were racially unfortunate, but I couldn't help feel a bit icky about the portrayal of the black characters in this movie. I don't think these were the only black characters, but suffice it to say that there were at least three whose portrayal is problematic by today's standards. For one there is the asylum orderly, who seems to be the Nurse Ratched of this place. He has a ringleader quality to him and seems a bit sadistic, handling Bruce Willis' James Cole very roughly. Then there's the ex-con Cole beats to death, who had been trying to rape Madeleine Stowe's Katherine Railly. Finally Cole has an intense argument with a black female airport worker, who won't let him past. While that's her job, the film makes clear to show how much attitude she gives him. These may have just been accidents, and in 1995 we certainly weren't looking for those things the way we do today, but they don't play so hot 25 years later.

One last thing to report is that this viewing has inspired me to change how I refer to the movie. I had always written the title as 12 Monkeys, and that is indeed how it appears on most of the posters. (You will see I specifically selected a poster where that is not the case.) In the actual movie, though, the title appears as Twelve Monkeys, which must be said to represent the truest interpretation of the intentions of Terry Gilliam et al. It's the same argument as in the case of David Fincher's Se7en, and I finally gave in on that one as well. So I've gone in and changed how I spell it in my various lists. I've even changed the spelling on the tag you see below, which had one previous usage (back when I wrote about La Jetee two years ago).

Now that we are past the initial coronavirus panic -- and have flattened the curve quite well here in Australia, with still fewer than 100 dead in the whole country -- I may no longer feel as compelled to watch a proper virus movie. And with a possible easing of local restrictions as soon as May 11th, the future depicted in Twelve Monkeys seems a little less closer to becoming reality.

A Tour I wish I'd never taken

When I rented Trolls World Tour for the princely sum of $19.99 three weekends ago, I merely thought I was providing something my six-year-old wanted during times of pandemic deprivation. I didn't realize I was also casting a vote on the future of film distribution.

But that appears to be what happened, as I contributed to the $95 million Universal has made by releasing the movie on VOD instead of theaters, which is obviously not an option right now. Instead of waiting until it is an option, like most studios are doing with most of their films, Universal decided to roll the dice on a rental release with a premium price associated with it.

And in doing so, seriously angered one of America's biggest theater chains.

AMC initially did not raise a fuss over the decision, which is similar to decisions being made by Disney in its release of Artemis Fowl and Warner Brothers in its release of Scoob!, given their recognition of the unprecedented situation and the creative solutions it is engendering. But it was the crowing over the success of Trolls World Tour, and Universal's announcement that it would consider both theatrical and VOD release platforms in the future regardless of the presence or absence of a pandemic, that spurred AMC into action.

Now, AMC has written a letter to Universal, advising them that AMC will no longer host any Universal film releases in any of its theaters.

AMC specifically cited Universal's lack of any "good faith negotiations" in terms of how the company might go forward to explore its greatest avenues to profitability. Citing the companies' years of partnership, AMC CEO Adam Aron says they were left out in the cold on Universal's decision to pursue the strategy it announced this week. The suggestion is that Universal should have given AMC the chance to counterpropose, but instead, they were treated like a red-headed stepchild, irrelevant to the company's fortunes.

Okay, so now they will show just how relevant they are to the success of Universal.

Or maybe they won't, which is the biggest gamble in this whole thing.

On the one hand, I am heartened that AMC feels confident enough in its standing that it can issue threats to one of the world's largest film companies. Maybe that means they are less likely to file for bankruptcy than has recently been rumored.

Or, maybe it means they are closer to bankruptcy, more desperate, and more rash. And maybe that's a bad thing for movie theaters on the whole.

See, this may just be the first salvo in a war that could eventually be won by studios. If audiences -- myself included, unfortunately -- tell the studios with their hard-earned dollars that they are just as happy to watch Trolls World Tour on the increasingly larger screens in their living rooms, it will embolden the studios to continue leaving theaters out of the loop. Those theaters are already running on fumes, and this could be the end of them.

And I could have played a small but meaningful role -- just as small but just as meaningful as the role played by any other single audient.

I hope I can sleep tonight.

The optimist in me never could have imagined that we might be near the beginning of the end. Sure, that optimist had seen the increasingly smaller numbers of people going to the movies. That optimist had noticed that being the only person in the audience was once an anomaly worth writing about, but had now become more commonplace. That optimist had heard that this year's box office was worse than the one before, which was worse than the one before that, which was worse than the one before that.

But that optimist also felt that going to the movies was such a bedrock part of our culture, of our very psyches, that it would never truly go away altogether. And that is, on some level, probably true.

But it's now clear that we are getting to the point where a moviehouse could become more of a novelty, the way the grand old single-screen theaters are a novelty to us now. A multiplex could be that kind of novelty, rather than one of the tentpole businesses in your local shopping mall.

And Trolls World Tour could have started it all.

Oh, if only my six-year-old son hadn't seen it being advertised on the screen while iTunes was up on my laptop, maybe none of this would have ever happened.

Steadily progressing through my library rentals

The Melbourne Public Library system is the most generous I have ever patronized. Whereas Los Angeles allowed you a maximum of three movies for a maximum of two days -- at least when I lived there seven years ago -- Melbourne is a comparative embarrassment of riches. You can total up to 50 items that can be taken out for three weeks at a time -- and then renewed, and then renewed one more time. Unless there's a reservation for one of them, in which case you have to return it at the end of your current rental period. A near perfect system.

And in the past, I've come close to those 50 items. With a combination of books, CDs and DVDs for myself and my kids, I've probably flown well past 30 items, maybe even up to 40. I've never been cut off, but that kind of makes me happy, because that sort of profligate behavior would seem to be taking advantage of the library's good will.

Unfortunately, when the libraries shut down back in March, I had nowhere near 50 books, movies and CDs out. In fact, I had ten. Four of which were books for my older son.

They're the same ten books and movies I still have out. Every time I check, their due date has been pushed forward, in recognition of the uncertainty of when the library will open again. The last time I checked before writing this post, they were not due back until May 17th. Comically, checking again just now, I see that that due date has been moved forward by exactly one day. However, we would all agree that at the moment, the due date doesn't mean much.

Now under ordinary circumstances, I pick up whatever movie catches my fancy, as I am unconcerned whether I watch it or not. That's both new-to-me movies and those I want to revisit. I like having the choices around. Under ordinary circumstances, I return more than half of them unwatched, not because I run out of time per se, but because I face the reality that the situation to watch them just never arose. As there was no cost to borrowing them, there's no consequence to not watching them.

All Quiet on the Western Front, which I believe is the first best picture winner I ever saw when I watched it during history class back in high school, would ordinarily have been one of those that got returned unwatched. But during the pandemic, it's been easy enough to decide I will, indeed, watch 100% of those I borrowed.

I just wish that number were higher than five.

The three I've watched previously are:

Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (for the second time)
Fahrenheit 451 (the new one directed by Ramin Bahrani, which was not good)
Careful, He Might Hear You (an Australian movie from the 1980s, which was also not good)

Which leaves only my second viewing of Life is Beautiful -- intended as a recontextualization of the movie in its recent comparisons to Jojo Rabbit. I have until May 18th, or in reality, probably a lot later.

My tenth item, if you are doing the math, is the graphic novel Watchmen, which I finished about a month ago.

Now, I think I did have more movies out prior to this, but returned some of them that I'd watched, and possibly some I had determined I would not watch. It's starting to feel like ancient history now so I can't really remember. But if I'd known the libraries were about to close their doors -- something I probably could have figured if everything hadn't been so strange at that time -- I would have gone in and started indiscriminately sweeping armloads of DVDs off the shelves.

So as not to squander all of your attention span, let's switch now to discussing All Quiet on the Western Front in particular.

Boredom. That was my memory of watching this film. I remember wondering when this movie would ever end, a reaction that was probably exacerbated by the fact that it likely took nearly a week's worth of high school history classes to watch it all. (It's only 128 minutes, but I doubt we would have watched more than 35 minutes per day.)

My impression of it was that it was some sort of square John Wayne war movie -- well before John Wayne of course, but lacking in grit and realism. I say this without ever actually having seen a John Wayne war movie. But the point is, I remember it being a long slog in which men exchanged thoughts while holed up in a bunker or in the trenches. The 15- or 16-year-old me would have been thinking "Give me some action! I want some action!"

Well, AQOTWF is not at all like I remembered. If it's boring -- and my attention did wander from time to time -- it's not because nothing happens. In fact, quite the contrary. This is a very mobile movie, frequently changing locales and scenarios, such that it becomes a succession of wartime set pieces, each of which is kind of doing something different. Those different things are all a variation on the same thing, which is the theme that there's nothing glamorous about war and that it is not, as the poet Wilfred Owen once wrote (and as quoted here in this movie), dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. ("It is sweet and honorable to die for one's country.")

In fact, the movie was so different from my memory of it that it makes me wonder if I actually sat through the whole thing, or whether I was absent for part of the week and just watched one disconnected 35-minute segment of it. Or maybe the movie was on but I was doodling and making paper airplanes in the back of the room.

One thing I had clearly not remembered was that the characters we follow in this movie are German. I would have bet my bottom dollar that they were American, or maybe British, and I can see why the younger me would have remembered that, given that all the German characters speak with the actors' native American accents. (Not Native American accents -- important distinction.) Films intended for American audiences preferred accessibility to realism at that time. The poster above plays no small role in deemphasizing their problematic German identities, as the helmet you see this soldier wearing is not the very easily identifiable World War I helmets worn by German soldiers, called Stahlhelm ("steel helmet"). The characters in the movie wear that helmet, but the character on this poster does not.

In fact, I wonder if All Quiet would have been one of the movies that prompted a move toward greater realism in depictions of characters from other countries. Although the movie was obviously highly acclaimed, I can't help but feel like it makes the characters seem far less German, and far more hokey, that they speak in American accents. You could argue that the point is to make audiences better identify with the characters -- you know, all soldiers are human beings and the like -- but my guess is that the concession to realism was largely commercially inspired.

I was surprised at how intense this movie actually gets. It makes use of a highly sophisticated grasp of editing, especially at that time, to give us chaotic war scenes and scenes of panic among the soldiers. One particular sequence involving rows of attacking soldiers getting mowed down by a machine gun stuck out to me for being simultaneously expressionistic and realistic, a profound combo. You also get a lot of people with amputated limbs, one soldier who is blinded by shrapnel or some other warfare byproduct, and others who go stir crazy inside the bunker. As a matter of fact, it's kind of the opposite of the John Wayne stoicism I attributed to this movie. It gets under your skin.

I still found it distended at times, and with a few exceptions, it wasn't all that easy to always know who was who, even though director Lewis Milestone et al make an effort to differentiate them in the classroom scene that starts the movie, when they are eating up the propaganda fed to them by a military recruiter/teacher. As a few of the characters die off, though, the cast gets winnowed down and the narrative moves toward an affecting finish.

So now I can really say, with absolute certainty, that I have seen all the best picture winners.

Stay tuned for a post about Life is Beautiful, probably next week.

The impossibility of playing it cool

Two college friends of mine, who did not know each other very well, helped me out with a task back at school, and ended up riding back to campus together in the same car. (I don't remember where I was, but I was not with them.)

On that ride, the driver played the passenger a band he really liked, but whom the passenger had not heard. As the passenger tells it, while the first song was playing, the driver continually turned his head to the right to try to catch that ineffable moment when the passenger fell in love with the song/band. He checked in on the passenger an unnatural number of times, or at least enough that the passenger thought it was funny enough to mention to me.

Whether or not he actually gauged the other's reaction in words, a private joke between the passenger and me grew out of it, which is basically that the driver said "Do you like it? Do you like it? Do you like it?" When performing the joke, you say it quickly, like "Ja like it ja like it ja like it?"

It has lingered as a joke not because the driver's behavior was so unusual. In fact, it's probably because it identified a very real phenomenon:

It's so hard to be cool when trying to share something you love.

Since I am rarely introducing bands to people -- my current School of Rock lessons to my kids notwithstanding (see full discussion here) -- the corollary in my own life is movies. As a cinephile, it's understood that you are always recommending movies to people. It's what we do.

The more enlightened of us make the recommendation and leave it at that.

The more masochistic? We watch the film with them.

Using the "ja like it" story as a cautionary tale, I have learned over the years to try not to place so much pressure on a joint viewing, which is usually undertaken with my wife, as she is my most regular movie-watching companion. In fact, I clearly recall a few scenarios where I had her watch a recommendation without me present in the room, even though I was present in the house. My #3 movie of last decade, John Cameron Mitchell's Rabbit Hole, was one such example. And a good one, as my wife ended up loving the movie just as much as I did -- perhaps in part due to the fact that I was not there hovering over her and gauging her reaction.

More often than not, though, the occasion for me showing a movie to my wife is that I am dying to see it a second (or third, or fourth) time, and I don't want to waste the opportunity by leaving her out of the viewing. Such was the case with our Saturday night viewing of Portrait of a Lady on Fire.

If it is not clear that I love this film, well, it should be. Even though I saw it for the first time only two weeks before finalizing that best of the decade list referenced above, Portrait made it on to the list. Because of the ridiculously short turnaround, I installed it at #25, the last ranked spot before the honorable mentions, though it was clear to me that it should have been higher. I guess I thought #25 was a good compromise between its actual quality and the deleterious effects of recency bias. It may have been similar thinking that caused me to place it at #2 for 2019, behind only Parasite. Given another couple weeks to sit with it, I might have vaulted it over Parasite as well.

If you're looking for further evidence of my love -- as if telling you were not enough -- just look at my new banner at the top of this page, which I put up a couple weeks ago. If you haven't seen the movie, you might not recognize it, but this is indeed a shot from Portrait, with Adele Haenel as Heloise being an "audient." That scene is one of the best of last year -- of the last five years maybe.

Okay so you get it. I like this movie.

But ... I'm old enough and wise enough to show restraint during a viewing. I don't constantly turn my head to see how my wife is liking it. I've matured, as I'm sure my 22-year-old friend introducing that band to my other 22-year-old friend has also matured.

That said, my behavior still forced my wife to quip "Stop monitoring me!" at one point during the movie.

I'll explain.

When I rented Portrait of a Lady on Fire from iTunes, I knew my intention was to show it to my wife. But I err on the side of caution when putting forward movies for her consideration these days. Especially during quarantine, when we spend the week effectively home-schooling our kids in addition to working, everyone needs their free time to unwind. There's no better way to spoil a potential viewing than to make it seem like an obligation.

But I looked up on Friday and noticed that my rental window was down to just 13 days. It was time to at least mention it, so my wife had nearly two full weeks to put it on our schedule. As it turned out, she was pretty excited to see it, so she programmed it for the very next night. Okay, initial hurdle cleared.

But there was a second hurdle -- and third, and fourth -- still awaiting us. Because my kids had a Netflix movie party with their aunt, which didn't end until about 8:40, we got a late start on everything. Plus, we were all tired from having gotten out and exercised for a couple hours during the day. Plus, my wife found out at about 8 that her friend's son had broken his arm and was in "hospital" (you drop the definite article in Australia).

I should have probably called an audible on the viewing. I didn't.

So when we started the 122-minute movie at just after 9, my wife was not in her best shape to consume it. I shouldn't have been either, as I was already on my second glass of wine, but see many previous discussions of how being engaged in something you love keeps you plenty awake.

My wife did not yet love it, so she did not yet have the advantage I did. And the way it was going, she never would.

So yes, I was monitoring her -- not to make sure she loved the movie, but to make sure she was paying enough attention to it and not falling asleep. Which was, of course, for the purpose of giving  her the chance to love the movie, so maybe it amounts to the same thing.

Like a good friend should, she continued to participate in a message thread about the kid who'd had the bike accident. I get it. And it's possible this did not prevent her from missing anything, as she speaks French so did not need to read all the subtitles.

But I just couldn't prevent myself from looking over, from silently judging her failure to watch the movie. She finds it no end of a distraction if I am on a device during a joint viewing, and I felt it was my right to feel the same thing, even with her mitigating circumstances.

I think the problem is that I was not always silently judging. At one point I asked, "Are you following all this?" I think it was my way of confirming that she wasn't rusty enough on her French to catch all the dialogue, but as you might guess, it came out wrong.

Once she was conscious of the attention I was paying to how she was watching the movie, it became its own thing, even when that's not what I was doing. For example, once I looked over to gauge how much wine she had left in her glass, which would tell me how much of the remaining bottle I could pour in mine. I think that's actually when the "Stop monitoring me!" comment came. (Oh yeah, and having wine was probably the thing that pushed the three other hurdles -- the late start, the exhaustion, the broken arm -- over the edge into full impracticality.)

In the end, she never fell asleep (that she would admit to), though she did say "I've been struggling to stay awake for the past two hours," which means the entirety of the movie, and which is no way to watch any movie, let alone something subtle and sophisticated. She did say that she thought it was "really good," though as you can probably imagine, that was not the reaction I was really looking for. She also didn't want to discuss any details of the movie, even when I was going to tell her a simple thing like the fact that Haenel was also in Deerskin, the Quentin Dupieux movie we watched together last year at MIFF.

See, that's the problem with people who love things, and who lose their ability to play it cool when it comes to them. We aren't happy with something being "really good" and with a person not falling asleep while watching it. We want it to redefine this other person's existence, and it's just never likely to do that -- even with a movie as universally beloved as Portrait of a Lady on Fire.

My wife has a more "live and let live" approach to these things -- a more cool approach, to use the parlance of my current argument. Whether I like something she shows me or not, so what? It doesn't affect her love for that thing. I mean, she's not so enlightened that she doesn't recognize when it was a bad time to do a particular thing we were both invested in, and have her regrets about it. But when that thing is in progress, she's not likely to "monitor" me for my reaction.

What can I say? When it comes to my love of movies, I am not cool. 

Perfect pauses: Code 8

Perfect Pauses is probably not only my most infrequent recurring "series" on this blog, but also the most inconsequential.

And yet I'm back, undaunted, with my fourth in about four-and-a-half years, and my first in just over two.

Technically speaking I did my first back in 2011, when I wasn't anticipating a series and called the post "Great pauses in movie history." It took until 2016 to start recognizing it as "a thing."

Anyway, the idea is that if I'm pausing whatever I watch and the pause happens to time out just about perfectly, I'll write about it here. Deep, right?

So the latest was Code 8, a movie that got a blink-and-you'll-miss-it release last year in the U.S. before becoming a hit on Netflix upon its recent release there. I'm quite attuned to what's new on Netflix these days, as I'm reviewing whatever I can on what I can now call my sister site, Reelgood.com.au. (I'm running it now, hence the "sister" designation.) Code 8 had already piqued my interest when I realized it was not technically a "new" release (though it's probably new to Australia). So I watched it Friday night even though I don't expect to review it.

I'll get to a little bit of my thoughts on it in a minute, but first, the pause:

Given that the fire out of the muzzle of a gun is visible for only a split second, I thought it was pretty cool that I happened to catch this one in its brief moment of ephemeral existence.

Of course, I considered the fact that this is not the natural action of the gun and it could have been enhanced by special effects, but that doesn't really make it any less cool, as it's still on screen for only a split second.

And that's really just about all I have to say about the pause.

As for the movie, I thought it was a pretty good little low budget sci-fi action flick, with a nice premise. (I say "low budget" more because it has inexpensive stars than because it looks anything less than first rate.) The premise is that in a near future world, some statistically significant percentage of the population is discovered to have been born with super powers. Not all-powerful super powers like Superman, but one specific type of power per gifted person -- some can read minds, some can control electricity, some have telekinesis, some can heal. In no case does it make them immortal, so they can be taken down through ordinary gunfire or anything else that would usually kill a person. Their powers are heavily regulated by the government -- you have to have a permit to use them, and they're only intended to be used for work. (Which makes them good day laborers, as you can build a building faster if you can toss cinder blocks to each other like it was nothing.)

The world is approaching a total lockdown of these powers, as there are numerous incidents where a "power enabled" person has been guilty of a crime/caused a disaster/etc. There are Robocop-type police who can identify the power-enabled via facial recognition and fly around in the type of transports you see in the poster above. In any case, one particular construction worker (played by Robbie Amell) is trying to save his sick mom and falls in with a gang of criminals.

It's pretty entertaining stuff. It joins a small fraternity of recent lower-budget sci fi movies that I liked more than I was expecting to, which also includes Kin. I don't remember it particularly well the morning after, but it was a nice little diversion in the moment, and well made.

I did have a funny moment during the end credits as I had turned my attention to something else while they were rolling. I looked back up a minute or two later and thought "These credits are still on? What the hell?" Then of course I realized that minute upon minute of credit time was being devoted to the names of the people who had helped crowd source the film. (That's 30,810 contributors, according to Wikipedia.) And at first I'd thought it was just a really big visual effects department.

Back sometime in late 2021 with another perfect pause.

Finish What You Started: That Sugar Film

This is my second in a 2020 bi-monthly series of finishing movies I had to abort watching on my first attempt. (I still like the original usage of the word "abort," but this particular instance is, er, not ideal.)

There are discontinued viewings that you stop by choice, and then there are those that are just out of your hands.

My attempt to watch That Sugar Film in December of 2015, as discussed here, was the latter.

By waiting all the way until the end of my 30-day rental period on iTunes before starting to watch it, I had no time to recover when the viewing started glitching and buffering, and then just wouldn't play at all. It was a prelude to the end of my previous laptop -- actually, two laptops ago now -- which succumbed to a faulty hard drive (and was too old to be worth replacing), but I didn't know it at the time I wrote the post linked above.

The circumstances were rather unusual. I was watching the movie in a Starbucks prior to my midnight screening of The Force Awakens. That doesn't happen to be all that relevant to the story, I just thought it was worth sharing.

When my laptop did ultimately die, I was still able to get back the other rentals I had downloaded but not yet watched by just setting up iTunes on my new computer and downloading them again. Obviously there was no such option with That Sugar Film, as I had already kicked off my (then 24-hour) viewing window. It's not Apple's fault my laptop gave up the ghost.

I had only been liking the movie at a mid-range level before then, so I have not prioritized getting back to it before now. I should probably explain a little bit what this is, if you don't know. It's basically Australia's answer to Supersize Me, with director-star Damon Gameau in the Morgan Spurlock role. Instead of 30 days of only McDonald's, though, the experiment is 60 days on a high sugar diet, the kind Gameau had previously forsaken. That "high sugar" diet being, of course, a fairly average diet for most people in the world. Gameau made the experiment one step more difficult -- he would only eat foods that are considered to be "healthy," like non-sugar cereals, yogurt, fruit and smoothies. He quickly discovered he would have no difficulty getting to 40 teaspoons of sugar a day -- the average intake for an adult in the western (?) world -- even without a single bit of what's considered "junk food," and in fact might even have to "diet" for a part of each day not to exceed those 40 teaspoons. It's all in the interest of preparing for the arrival of his new daughter, who is in the belly of his pregnant girlfriend for the entirety of the narrative. (That last detail feels very Spurlock-ian.)

Interesting experiment. At the time I thought "The world already has one Morgan Spurlock -- does it need another?" Since then, though, I've softened on Gameau, who also released a documentary last year called 2040, which looks at where the environment will be 20 years from now if we do nothing about it, and what we can do. Again, not all that original, but it gives him a little more credibility than if he were trying to be "just another Morgan Spurlock."

The good news is, Gameau comes across positively, as Spurlock did in is early efforts, and not kind of self-indulgently, like later career Spurlock. I was fully with That Sugar Film this time around. It has a really lively presentation. There's a lot of use of fun and reasonably sophisticated graphics, like Gameau riding around on a fat cell travelling through the body. My favorite recurring technique that felt distinct was the way Gameau handles normal talking head interviews. Instead of just appearing in whatever environment in which they were interviewed, they appear on the side of a cereal box or in the ingredients section of a bag of candy, with their faces often color-adjusted to match the packaging. It's a small detail, but small details in a form as frequently tired as the documentary can make a big difference.

There is, of course, quite a lot of eye-opening information here, if it is all to be taken at face value. We know that there is some disagreement among experts whether sugar or fat is more harmful to humans, though maybe less so than there once was. But Gameau is quite clearly on the side of sugar = bad, and a lot of the information he provides compellingly makes that case. (Among them -- the one expert he talks to who seems to disagree with these findings is someone who openly admits receiving funding from Coca Cola.)

The one hesitation I had with the film, because I just did not believe it, despite the physical evidence presented, was the transformation to Gameau's body over the course of the 60 days. He gained something like 20 pounds, his bloodwork was terrible and the doctors were telling him he was on the way to getting a fatty liver. As this is a healthy early 30s guy, it just didn't really ring true, even with before and after video/pictures of how he looked. There just seemed something too far-fetched about the radical changes given only a change to drinking more juices, while maintaining the same level of exercise.

Then the fact that there's a lot that just seems like a self-fulfilling prophecy. He'd say he felt a lot less energy and had wild mood swings, then there's footage of him just being sacked out on the couch in a half-coma of exhaustion. I'm not saying Gameau would fake this to sell his case more convincingly, I'm just saying he could.

Overall, though, it's a really compelling and alarming documentary, while remaining very fun. Probably the best of all worlds when it comes to the aims of the types of documentary I tend to enjoy the most.

Full disclosure: I ate the remnants of a bag of chocolate chips while watching. Ha.

Okay, I'm whittling down my choices. I'll probably watch the original Paddington in June -- or finish watching it, I should say.

Audient Authentic: Why We Fight: Prelude to War

This is the fourth in my 2020 monthly series watching "classic" documentaries I have never seen.

When I watched Eugene Jarecki's 2005 documentary Why We Fight, I knew its name was a conscious reference to a series of documentaries dating back to World War II. I never had occasion to seek them out, though, until this series.

Why We Fight: Prelude to War is the first of seven such movies available on Kanopy. If it being the first weren't reason enough to select it as the next in this chronological series that has already made it through the 1920s and 1930s, then it being directed by Frank Capra certainly would have been. (It also won an Oscar for best documentary.)

I still haven't gotten up to the true feature length I'm seeking -- this is only 52 minutes long -- but I suspect I'll be there by the 1950s next month. At which point I will likely slow down and see a lot more movies from 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s.

Propaganda films come in all shapes and forms. We tend to think of them as negative, such as those made for the Third Reich by Leni Reifenstahl, but they can serve a positive function as well, and that's the case with this (and, I assume, the other six in the series, which I might watch if it weren't such a drain on my Kanopy credits, and if I didn't get a sense of what all of them are probably doing from this one). The U.S. had already made the decision to enter World War II, and these government-sponsored films wanted to retroactively make the case for it, as well as convince an American populace with non-interventionalist tendencies.

Noting Capra's involvement, I had assumed that the government had just gone to Hollywood and conscripted the most successful director at the time. In fact, Capra seems to have been a far more willing participant, as he took up the mantle of specifically answering the function of Reifenstahl's Triumph of the Will, which probably would have made a good selection for this series had I not already seen it. (Actually, I may have only seen select scenes from it, so it could have also been a good candidate for last year's Audient Audit.) According to Wikipedia, Capra was "daunted, yet impressed and challenged" by Reifentstahl's work.

As it turns out, Capra actually directed most of the films in the series, so I could have selected any of them if that had been my primary interest. It made sense to go chronologically, though, and this one -- released near the beginning of American involvement in the war -- gives the background for how the Axis dictators came into power. It intersperses actual footage and newspaper headlines with recreations of events where cameras could not have been present, but just as quick snippets of footage to provide context to the narration, nothing requiring any acting or potentially fictitious interpretations of events. We see/hear about political rivals assassinated and armies amassed. We see Hitler and Mussolini and the Japanese generals firing up brainwashed crowds.

As a cinephile, I was, of course, looking to see if I could detect "the Capra touch" -- something that would remind me of the director of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, two of the hits Capra had already made at that time. Of course the film shares an earnestness and seriousness of political purpose with the former, and one could argue, the latter as well. And indeed, the underdog current to Capra's previous work helps with the thrust of these films, as America is characterized as an underdog under the oppressive heel of these European and Asian tyrants.

I suppose it wasn't likely that I'd find the kind of "escapist humanism" -- is that a good way to describe it? -- that I attribute to Capra's work on the whole. That's fundamentally inconsistent with this type of project. Though it does have Capra's plucky spirit, it does not necessarily seem like something Capra himself was uniquely qualified to bring to the film/these films. It's such a different type of project from Capra's feel-good Hollywood films that I don't feel like I really would detect hallmarks of the same director, and yet another director probably would have made them a lot less hopeful and more cynical, or simply never gravitated to the project in the first place.

As for the actual content of the film, it gives a showcase of some absolutely priceless historical footage -- not necessarily rare, but something that I don't generally see, or am less likely to find accumulated all in one place. Like footage of the bombings of various European cities and Pearl Harbor, the latter being the actual "inciting incident" (to use the screenwriting term) that got American into World War II. The footage of the marching armies of other countries shows quite well the type of determination the Allies were up against. I was also educated on parts of the lead-up to war that I didn't know about, or forgot. (The report I did on World War II in the sixth grade, or whenever it was, has mostly left me.) Also the film lays out the plans for world domination put forth by each of the Axis powers, the routes they planned to use on the map to invade adjacent and far-flung territories and turn them all an insidious color of black, meant to indicate their occupation. Chilling.

There was one particularly shocking image from the film that I'd never seen before, and it was about the idea of other countries breeding young brainwashed soldier from birth. The shot -- which could not have been recreated for fear of violating all sorts of morality standards -- shows a big "pile of babies" who appear to be accumulated together to receive some kind of innoculation or brain-washing agent. You can literally see like 40 babies stuck in the same ten foot by ten foot space, not actually smothering each other, but coming as close as you can, and all crying like the dickens for obvious reasons.

I tried to find an image online but ultimately failed. So I found the spot again in the movie and took this picture. Crazy, right?

I guess I didn't find Prelude to War "groundbreaking" in the form or anything like that, but it is certainly a vitally important historical document and I'm really glad I saw it. I reckon it played a significant role in turning public sentiment toward the war.

On to May and on to the 1950s, unless I find another thing in the 40s that screams out to be watched.

A statistical anomaly among movie theaters

I'm not sure what percentage of the world's movie theaters are closed right now, but it's something approaching 100. If not because the actual local restrictions demand it, then because there aren't any new releases flowing out of Hollywood right now. (Almost any, as we will see in a moment.)

Not every movie theater in the world relies on Hollywood releases, of course -- in a country like India, most theaters probably wouldn't -- but I have to assume most other countries are following the rest of the world in terms of isolating their people, and, consequently, holding back their new movies for times when they can actually make some money on them.

There's at least one exception, though, and that is the Mission Tiki drive-in in Montclair, California.

This used to be our drive-in when we lived in Los Angeles, though it was a 30-minute drive or so from where we lived -- that's 30 minutes without traffic, I should say. In LA it might have taken you 30 minutes just to make it from the 10 to the 101. Before these End Times, anyway.

And because it used to be our drive-in, I still get the emails telling me what's playing. And, despite this pandemic, those emails are still coming.

Only in this latest have I noticed them having to try to get creative, programming Raiders of the Lost Ark and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade on one of their four screens. (And what a fun double feature that would be.) (Two quick takeaways about that: 1) They skipped Temple of Doom, which I think was a good choice; 2) They spelled it Raiders of the Lost Arc, which is funny.)

So yes, this was also, presumably, one of the only ways for anyone, anywhere to see Trolls World Tour on the big screen, as the vast majority of us who have seen it (yes, that includes me) did so through digital rental.

The drive-in, of course, represents a perfect scenario for keeping open a movie theater in a pandemic. The isolation of its viewers in their own hermetically sealed environments is part and parcel to the experience. People have to rub elbows in the bathroom or at the snack bar, assuming it's still open, which it would not need to be as you can bring in any food you want. But a little common sense social distancing -- the type that isn't possible when you are seated in a movie theater -- could override some of those concerns as well.

Still, I can't imagine many drive-ins are remaining open, because of those chances of incidental mutual exposure, and because of the paucity of new releases to keep crowds coming. I know the ones here in Melbourne are not, because I checked -- believe me, I checked. If the goal really is to keep people apart by all reasonable means, the responsible solution is, indeed, to close any place that promotes social gathering, even one with the built-in advantages of this one.

That said, you still can't really stay away from everybody in the normal course of the things you have to do. I note that every time I go to the grocery store, it's like diving into and swimming around in a germ pool. Theoretically, anyway -- we've flattened the curve and had so relatively few cases here in Australia in the first place, that you don't tend to feel like coronavirus is out there in any actual way. But if it were, I feel like you'd get it on any trip to the grocery store. People are not very effectively social distancing, even when the store has put measures in place -- such as stickers on the floor that tell you were to stand, and plastic shields to separate clerk from customer -- to help enable it.

I feel like movie theaters could be entrusted to be the social distancing equivalent of a grocery store. Throw a plastic bag over every other seat, the way you do when the seat is broken, and you've got your 1.5 meters or six feet or however you want to measure it. Heck, throw the plastic bag over two out of every three seats and you still aren't cutting in to the necessary capacity for most theatrical releases these days, based on how many people are actually buying tickets to them.

But that would have only been possible if the film industry hadn't made a coordinated effort to prevent all new movies from getting released. What we needed was a coordinated effort a month ago to figure out how they could still be released, just by changing some seating plans.

But I don't want to sound like one of those people suggesting everything should be opened up. Eff those people. Their concern for our economy is commendable. Their lack of concern for our elderly, though, is decidedly not.

Still, when I hear that AMC is probably going to have to declare for bankruptcy, and shudder to think of the impact on smaller theaters who haven't specifically made the headlines, I wonder if it all couldn't have been done differently somehow.

The "new normal," when it does arrive, will take many shapes and forms. I just hope movie theaters will still be a part of them.

For now, residents of Los Angeles still have the Mission Tiki, to watch a handful of "new" releases that you figure everyone in the vicinity has already seen if they ever intended to, plus some genuine classics that I'm sure will win some eyeballs this weekend. And as they are the only shop in town, I wonder if that giant parking lot, with its various small slopes in the grade to maximize viewing angles, has been filled to the brim every night. It was a pretty popular activity even when there wasn't a pandemic on.

But pretty soon, all four of those screens will have to have Raiders of the Lost Ark or the equivalent if they want to get any eyeballs at all. And pretty soon, that last bastion of seeing movies on a big screen could close, to reopen lord knows when.