MIFF clean-up: Just 6.5 and La Llorona

Blame it on the Democratic National Convention, blame it on baseball, blame it on writing three actual reviews of MIFF films, but I just haven't been very motivated this week to keep you updated on all my MIFF happenings as they happened. There's also a bit of burnout when you're coming to the end of a MIFF, even if you never even had to leave your house to participate.

So I'll just jam together two mentions of my mid-week MIFF films and link you to their corresponding reviews if you want more.

On Tuesday night I kept alive a tradition of watching Iranian films at MIFF that is not actually as extensive as I had thought. In fact, I have seen exactly one previous Iranian film at MIFF, that being Asghar Farhadi's The Salesman in 2016, which I didn't even like all that much. There seemed like more. (Maybe it's because I saw Everybody Knows at MIFF 2018, which was directed by Farhadi, but set in Spain and in Spanish.)

This year's Iranian film makes it a tradition now, at least. It's called Just 6.5, and it stars Farhadi's lead actor in A Separation, Payman Maadi. I really enjoy this actor from several other exposures (he's crossed over into English language films), so adding this one to my schedule was a no-brainer.

It's a The Wire-type look into the war on drugs in Iran, Tehran specifically, and it was surprising for a number of reasons. For one, I didn't expect this type of movie from Iran, essentially a genre movie, as the movies that are allowed to be made have always been very closely monitored by censors, leaving a relative paucity of permissible subjects -- family drama, usually. All of Farhadi's movies basically qualify as that. But director Saeed Roustayi, with whom I was unfamiliar, managed to get this idea of cops and mules and drug dealers the green light from his government. I tried to find out online how he did it, but the internet was not very forthcoming on the topic.

The second thing that surprised me is that I didn't realize Iran was a country that had a big, visible drug problem. The film depicts slums and shanty towns where literally hundreds of addicts lie around smoking crack and heroin, only to scatter like ants when the police come to clear out the joint -- the punishment for some drug offenses is death, after all. 

I really enjoyed the movie. It does have the grit, determination and moral complexity of a show like The Wire, though the execution is also at sort of a TV level -- before the days of prestige TV, I should say. I gave it only 3.5 stars out of 5 on Letterboxd, but it obviously stuck with me, as I had boosted its rating up to the equivalent of four -- 8 out of 10 on my site's scale -- by the time I reviewed it. (You can read that review here.)

The second was the second movie in the themed "dark dramas" package my wife had picked up, the first being The Killing of Two Lovers, which I loved so much. Well, this package was clearly the MIFF winning move in 2020 as La Llorona immediately became my second favorite of the ten films I've seen. 

I did carry a small bias into the movie, which was that there was just a schlocky horror movie, an extension of the Conjuring universe, made on this subject last year. That was The Curse of La Llorona, or The Curse of the Weeping Woman, as it is known in Australia. Fortunately, this had only the bare minimum to do with that, as both were inspired by the same Latin American folklore. This, though, was groundbreaking new prestige horror that had me in its spell straight away.

The technique itself was groundbreaking -- I was entranced by director Jayro Bustamante pulling his camera away from the subjects in the frame one centimeter at a time -- but I'd have to say the primary new elements for me were the subject matter itself, and the country of origin. I'll take the second first. I am not sure if I've ever seen a film about Guatemala, let alone made by a Guatemalan director and technically a production of the Guatemalan film industry. As a matter of fact, I was not even sure such a thing existed. It's a French co-production almost by necessity, one would imagine, but if this is what Guatemalan film has to offer us, why have they been hiding it from us?

Then there's the subject, which is, yes, more or less a haunted house movie where the main ghoul is this physical embodiment of folklore about a weeping woman who drowned her children. But it's set in and around the trial of a Guatemalan general who has been accused of genocide for giving orders, back in the 1980s, to exterminate large swaths of the native Mayan population. That the haunted house is a palatial estate barricaded by protestors gives it a very #2020 feel, as it mixes in a social justice message that is very in keeping with the world events of our year.

Plus, it's super scary.

But I say pretty much all this stuff in my review, which can be found here.

MIFF ends this weekend, as all streams must be complete by the end of the day on Sunday. Though I'm tempted to fit a few more in, remember what I said about burnout, and you'll know why I am content to finish with 11 films when I watch the closing night film on Saturday, Pablo Larrain's Ema. 

MIFF weekend wrap-up: A prayer for two lovers named Wendy

Although a movie about religious lesbian lovers with the same first name would be great, and would be right up MIFF's alley, this is actually three movie titles combined into one, covering the MIFF movies I watched on Saturday and Sunday nights.

Saturday was supposed to be a MIFF marathon of sorts for my wife and me, as it was our fourth Anything Day during the pandemic -- Anything Day being that pandemic invention where everyone gets to do what they want all day, including the kids. Or, I should say, including the adults.

But we didn't get to our first movie until 6, rather than mid-afternoon as we might have envisioned, and then my wife ended up bailing on the second movie, with good reason. So it was more of a MIFF trickle than a stream, though it was of course all a "stream," since this year's festival is entirely online.

That movie we didn't start until 6 was by far the best of the bunch. It's called The Killing of Two Lovers, and it's set in Utah, where a husband and wife are undergoing a trial separation while trying to figure out if the only reason they're together is because they married young and had four kids before they were 30. It is deceptively part of what was billed as a "thriller package," or something along those lines, that my wife bought -- part of a concerted effort to take some of the guesswork out of picking MIFF films this year. But without giving anything away, I'll just say there's more to that title than there may seem.

Loved this. It's shot in the 4:3 aspect ratio that Kelly Reichardt favors, and I now get what she was talking about in a recent interview I heard on Filmspotting, where she said close-ups never look right in widescreen. There's one scene between the two main characters in the front of a pickup truck where it is basically trading off close-ups of both of their faces, and I really appreciated the more square close-ups that Reichardt was talking about in that interview. There are a number of other distinct but unobtrusive filmmaking choices that make Robert Machoian's film really memorable and actually quite difficult to execute, while remaining very low-key. It gets at its themes really smartly while not cluttering things up by being too on the nose.

The movie my wife bailed on, and rightly so, was the MIFF Showcase Centerpiece, Benh Zeitlin's Peter Pan movie Wendy. To be fair, she had one foot out the door before the movie even started. She had forgotten that the movie had to be watched within the hours of 7 p.m. to 11:59 p.m. on Saturday, and was no longer sure she wanted her Anything Day evening to be hijacked by this movie. And we both admitted we didn't much care for the Peter Pan story in general. I can think of two really bad adaptations right off the bat in Hook and Pan.

Wendy is better than those, but not by the margin one would hope, nor is it significantly different from the director's breakthrough feature, Beasts of the Southern Wild. It even has the same kind of driving bombastic score as that other film. I liked Beasts of the Southern Wild quite a lot, but even that film slips into self-parody pretty easily, while this one is there right from the start. And though I didn't consider this to be a problem with Beasts, or at least I didn't identify it as such as the time, Wendy indulges in a fair bit of what I would call "poverty porn." Perhaps my biggest issue with it, though, was how it renders the Peter Pan character as essentially hopeless, always making the wrong choice and barely redeeming himself, if he does so at all. Isn't Peter Pan supposed to be more of a manic pixie dream boy, whose wrong-seeming ideas all end up being the right ones?

Sunday night concluded the weekend with my only documentary of this year's MIFF, if my current schedule holds, which is the Quebecois film Prayer for a Lost Mitten. And yes, I was taken in by that title.

From the description in the MIFF catalogue, I thought the film was going to focus on the deceptively profound experience of watching a wide selection of Canadians haunt the public lost and found as they search hopefully for some insignificant lost item. Say, a mitten. In reality, that is a pretty small part of the film, and the loss discussed by the majority of the interview subjects is less material in nature -- the loss of a child's love, the loss of a romantic love, the loss of the use of part of one's body, etc. Although that seems possibly deeper subject matter for a film, and is certainly worth exploring, I was expecting something a bit more eccentric, and that just isn't what this movie is.

It is gorgeous to look at, though, as Jean-Francois Lesage's film is shot in black and white, and during a Montreal winter, with lots of scenes of swirling snow looking ever so beautiful on that particular film stock.

Only one night off from MIFF this time -- tonight, as I write this -- before I return Tuesday with this year's Iranian entry, Just 6.5.

The waters came quickly

There are a lot of takeaways a person could have from his first viewing of A.I. Artificial Intelligence in 19 years, and only second overall.

Mine was what the humans did, or did not do, as they saved themselves from the ocean levels rising.

As we know from the opening narration, the movie takes place in an unspecified future time when the polar ice caps have melted and have left Earth with a lot more water than it had before. Most if not all climate change theories, though, posit a steady increase over time, a steady loss of the shorelines and, eventually, the cities situated close to them.

Given how much water engulfs Manhattan -- like, up to maybe the 20th floor of the skyscrapers -- A.I. must take place in a very distant future indeed if we are going to go with this idea of a slow encroachment.

But even if there was a sudden increase in temperature that made the water levels rise more rapidly over a shorter period of time, they still wouldn't flood the cities in some gush of unexpected water. Humans would have time to get their affairs in order, wouldn't they?

And so it was that I became a bit fixated on why the makers of the Pinocchio-themed section of Coney Island did not have time to disassemble their creations and move them inland.

Now, if you lose your house to a fire, you take only a handful of beloved belongings with you, if that. Kind of depends how quickly it all happens. But if you lose your house to the equivalent of creeping damp -- something that will destroy it, but over a long period of time -- you take everything that isn't bolted down, and even some things that are.

I argue that those who made this wondrous Pinocchio land would have enough love for what they had made -- the same love that Geppetto has for his own creation -- that they would uproot it from its moorings in Coney Island and move it to -- I don't know -- Davenport, Iowa. Or wherever they planned to create New Manhattan -- because that's what humans do, what they have always done. Make new versions of old places they had to leave.

It's certainly nice for the story that the blue fairy is still down there, able to endure 2,000 years of the hopeful stare of our robot boy David -- which remained one of my most profound moments of melancholy during this viewing. But in reality, she'd probably be somewhere inland, enduring that version of the death of the human race.

Is it a major plot point? Worth writing a blog post about?

Nope.

But those are my thoughts on a Saturday morning in August in the great pandemic of 2020.

MIFF: Approximating the MIFF "matinee"

One of my favorite MIFF traditions is the days, usually two or three times per festival, when I go
straight from work to my first movie. No going home and having to wrangle the kids or their dinner. I only need to worry about my own dinner as I stay in the city after work and eat something yummy before the 6:40 start.

Just because I'm doing MIFF from home this year doesn't mean I couldn't do something sort of like that.

And so it was that yesterday afternoon I watched Emma Seligman's Shiva Baby in the late afternoon, even starting my stream before I had technically finished work. (As Shiva Baby has not had proper releases anywhere and does not yet have a poster that I could find, I'm including the poster for the 2018 short.)

The 71-minute film would have been easy to sneak in before dinner even without starting at 4:30 rather than 5, but starting a little early also allowed me to take an impromptu snooze in the beanbags in the garage, where I have been afternoon-napping throughout quarantine. That's where I moved my computer once I was officially clocked off for the day.

The reason I needed to see it then was that I was overdue for my next MIFF review on ReelGood, having posted my review of Marona's Fantastic Tale on Monday. I needed to get another one up by Thursday, no doubt, and watching it in the afternoon on Wednesday was my only hope of doing that. (If not for the sake of the site, then to make good on my implicit promise to cover the festival for those who have given me my free passes.)

That's because the second MIFF movie I was watching on Wednesday -- the second half of a true MIFF double feature, unlike Saturday's partial double feature that I billed as a true double feature on this blog -- would prevent me from watching Shiva Baby in the evening. Lawrence Michael Levine's Black Bear, starring Aubrey Plaza, is a so-called "spotlight film," meaning it could only be watched between the hours of 7 p.m. and 11:59 p.m. on Wednesday night, unlike most of the rest of the films, which can be streamed throughout the festival.

As that's the higher profile film, for sure, I might have reviewed that instead of Shiva Baby. However, there's limited utility to reviewing a film that my readers are not actually going to be able to see. So, Shiva it was.

I liked both films a fair bit. The first is certainly more traditional than the second, though I won't go into any detail about what makes Black Bear unusual, because it's best not to know. I will say that Black Bear reminded me a bit of the other movie that was part of my first MIFF/not-MIFF double feature on Saturday, The Rental, in terms of its core dynamics. Until it doesn't.

And Shiva Baby is just a nice little independent cringe movie, but with heart. The logline tells it all: A confused college senior is stuck at a shiva while trying to avoid both her ex-girlfriend and her sugar daddy. It's an expansion of Seligman's eight-minute short from 2018, also starring Rachel Sennott, and it's really enjoyable. You can read my full review to the right.

Okay, another two days off and then more MIFF on Saturday.

Aristocratic dickhead typecasting

My wife and I are two episodes into The Great, the TV show about Catherine the Great that seems like an attempt to give us The Favourite: The Series. Both this series and Yorgos Lanthimos' best picture nominee are about 18th century aristocracies where the aristocrats are cruel, crass and lascivious.

It also helps that they both feature Nicholas Hoult.

It almost seems like they cast him just to be sure to cement the comparison for us. But it's not like there aren't other signs that Hoult has been trending in the direction of this sort of typecasting. In fact, the guy you once knew primarily as one of the X-men is more commonly found in much different type of material nowadays.

Not only is there The Great and The Favourite, but Hoult can be seen as a dickhead of antiquity in this year's True History of the Kelly Gang as well -- though the antiquity in this case is not qute as ancient, only late 19th century Australia, and the constables of that period only act like aristocrats.

I say, let's keep it going.

I have long appreciated Hoult as an actor, dating back to the year (2013) I named him as one of my three who had a good year in my year-end wrap-up post. He was in two genre movies that I liked rather more than I probably should have, in retrospect, those being Warm Bodies and Jack the Giant Slayer (which both made my top 20 of the year). Those performances were clearly just scratching the surface of what he can do.

The reason he is so good at malicious aristocratic twits is that he has an effortless supercilious quality to him. He'd just as soon dismiss somebody, both literally and figuratively, as breathe. His characters ooze cruelty.

Although The Great, a TV show, is prompting this post -- scandalous on a movie blog -- I do think this could be his crowning achievement in that regard. Now granted, we are just two episodes in, but almost every time Hoult opens his mouth as Peter III, I laugh -- sometimes even when it is awful to do so. It's not that I always think the things he says are funny, though I frequently do. It's that it's funny that someone would say the things he says in the first place, because they're just so damn wrong.

In fact, I'm sure I would have included an image from The Great rather than this still from The Favourite, except I couldn't find an image from The Great that encapsulates what I wanted to talk about today as well as this.

Although I am specifically not going back and checking my history to find out what happens to Peter III -- though I know it can't be good -- I am kind of hoping he sticks around long enough to entertain me for a while longer.

Nicholas Hoult has been entertaining me throughout his career. As he is only 30 years old, I look forward to all the great aristocratic dickheads he will play in the future.

MIFF: More dead animals

I'm not sure I'm going to write about every MIFF movie I watch from my living room this August, but as of right now, I'm 3-for-3.

And it's a pretty #2020 year so far at MIFF, if you are keen to dwell on ideas of mortality, as I have now watched my second straight movie about dead animals, after Marona's Fantastic Tale on Saturday night.

Sunday night brought the Greek film Kala Azar, which was advertised as being in the style of Yorgos Lanthimos (they probably say that about every movie from Greece). The MIFF program also explained that it focuses on a couple who perform animal cremations and collect roadkill. So it's not like I didn't know what I was getting into.

Having seen the movie, I do get the Lanthimos comparison. I was also reminded of last year's beekeeper documentary Honeyland, though that was not as positive an association.

Overall I was pretty mixed on the movie. It's one of those semi-experimental films where there isn't a lot of dialogue, and you are supposed to glean your ideas from it only by getting a general sense of what's going on. You observe and draw some conclusions, but there isn't much of a narrative. Now that I think of it I also got a bit of a Carlos Reygadas vibe from it.

The typical scene is as follows: The two humans, usually in some state of semi-nudity, go about their their cryptic and enigmatic tasks (why are they cremating animals? why do they have to collect the roadkill?) as various dogs (there are always dogs around) pant and slobber in their vicinity. I feel like a few additional lines of dialogue here and there would have served to clarify a few things, but this movie is not interested in that. Which makes the developing fissure between this man and this woman as cryptic as anything else.

The final scene salvaged it from a mildly negative to a mildly positive review for me, and though I won't go into much detail, I will say that in this scene, I got a third fond comparision from the movie: the Swedish director Roy Andersson. There's a poignant absurdism to how the film closes, and that was enough to win me over. (Three fond comparisons and one not-so-fond comparison is a net gain of two fond comparisons, you see.)

Think I'll take a couple nights off and resume my MIFF on Wednesday.

MIFF double feature: The dog doesn't die, the dog dies

Warning: The following post contains spoilers about The Rental and Marona's Fantastic Tale.

I saw my first proper MIFF movie of 2020 on Saturday night, after watching the opening night film on iTunes as discussed here.

It was an instant reminder of the routine of being involved with a film festival. Unlike most films you stream, the movie doesn't start right away. There are nearly two minutes of short ads and thanking different sponsors, during which you cannot fast forward or even expand the player to full screen, which is all I wanted to do. And in fact, I had to start the whole thing over again when I accidentally clicked on the Chromecast button and the words "Failed to cast to Chromecast" appeared at the bottom of the screen even after the movie started. Refreshing was the only way to get rid of it, at which point the whole rigmarole started from the beginning.

With this first non-opening night film of 2020, I managed to continue two MIFF traditions in one fell swoop:

1) For the fifth year in a row, I saw an outsider animation movie at MIFF. Dating back to 2016, the first year I went from a handful of MIFF screenings to close to a dozen per year, I've seen one such movie each year. Those previous choices were Seoul Station (2016), My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea (2017), Chris the Swiss (2018) and I Lost My Body (2019).

2) The MIFF double feature. And I don't, by that, mean two MIFF movies in one evening, though I have done that plenty. I mean the double feature where I watch one MIFF movie and one non-MIFF movie, since I never want to get behind on my new theatrical releases just because there's a film festival going on. This year I continued that, even when there are no new theatrical releases.

I just never guessed that both ends of the double feature would prominently feature dogs.

The actual MIFF film, the French language Marona's Fantastic Tale, does of course center on a dog. From just reading the premise on the MIFF website I knew the movie involves this dog seeing her life flash before her eyes as she lies dying by the side of the road after a traffic accident. In fact, the poignant mortality of the dog was what drew me to the movie and let me know it was this year's outsider animation choice for me.

It was The Rental, the new thriller/horror from director Dave Franco, that I didn't expect to be about a dog, or, I should say more accurately, feature a dog prominently. Once I knew there was a dog in it, though, I knew that dog was dead meat.

Well, I like being wrong about things.

(And don't forget, I already gave you a SPOILER ALERT.)

The dog emerges unharmed at the end of The Rental. You can't say the same for his humans. He went missing earlier on, and it was presumed that the psycho killer filming and tormenting our main characters had made him into so much doggie stew.

Well, as a sign of this movie's possible misanthropy -- a misanthropy 2020 has made it easier for us to understand -- this psycho killer spares the dog but not the humans. In fact, most psycho killers probably don't want to kill a poor little doggie. But the killing of a pet is an "easy" escalation favored by screenwriters to show that things are getting more serious, without actually killing off one of your humans ... yet. In The Rental, the dog being missing accomplishes that same escalation, without having to actually show us a dog hanging from a tree or returned on the doorstep inside a bag.

And when the dog comes ambling back in at the end, it was a nice surprise -- one of many in a film I liked quite a lot.

Well, there's no surprise at the end of Marona's Fantastic Tale. The dog, who has been dying the whole movie, does die, or so you assume when the camera pulls back out to satellite view from that Parisian street.

This movie has its own delightful surprises, though, which include the imaginative use of all sorts of 2D animation to tell a subjective story from the perspective of its title character. And though I was pretty sleepy by the end of the second movie -- it's been a while since I watched two in one night, even though neither of them was longer than 90 minutes -- I did really enjoy this one too. (Review will be up on Monday morning.)

More importantly, as I was settling into MIFF proper and starting to feel that MIFF vibe -- even from my own living room -- I decided I didn't need to limit myself to the five free passes I have for this year's festival. I made a shortlist of 11 films from the festival that interest me, and Marona's Fantastic Tale is just the first.

I've got two more weeks to watch many more.

Revolori family resemblance

I had it on good authority that the 2020 remake of Valley Girl might actually be good. Two things made me suspicious of this:

1) The last time I saw it, I decided I don't actually like the original. It totally fell flat for me.

2) Although it isn't her, the girl in this poster reminds me a lot of Chloe Grace Moretz, so I had a subliminal negative reaction. (It's actually Jessica Rothe from Happy Death Day, who looks nothing like Moretz in real life.)

But when my friend who reported on the qualities of the movie reminded me, or maybe told me for the first time, that it's a jukebox musical, I became a lot more curious. The fact that it has already come to my streaming service Stan sealed the deal, and on Friday night I watched it.

He was right. It's good. It's not great, but it is light and fun and very enjoyable. I was particularly impressed by Rothe, who I had sort of written off after HDD (which I didn't like), thinking of her as merely a Blake Lively clone. She's a lot more than that.

But I'm not really here to talk about Rothe or even the movie. In fact, the thing I'm here to talk about probably doesn't even warrant its own post, but then again, it's quarantine and I can write about whatever I damn please.

As I was watching Rothe's character intermingle with the "punks," I recognized this guy:

I was doing a lot of looking up of actors during this movie, and I decided to look him up, pretty sure it was Tony Revolori of The Grand Budapest Hotel and Spider-Man: Homecoming fame.

It wasn't Tony Revolori, but it was a Revolori alright: Tony's brother Mario.

"A brother looks like his brother, Vance. What's the big deal?"

Well for one, I didn't even know Tony Revolori had a brother, and I definitely didn't know he was also an actor. It was much more likely that it was just some other actor and didn't share Tony Revolori's DNA.

I guess there's no #2.

See, I told you it wasn't worth its own post.

MIFF: Not really MIFF (really not really MIFF)

MIFF started last night. Sort of.

When I say it was "not really MIFF," that's no direspect to the Melbourne International Film Festival. MIFF itself would say that an online film festival is only a small fraction of what they usually offer, but they've chosen a reasonably large fraction, officially, labeling this MIFF 68 1/2 -- not quite the 69th annual version of the festival I have been attending religiously since moving to Melbourne seven years ago. (It's only my seventh rather than eighth MIFF, though, because I missed the 2013 festival by mere days.)

When I say it's "really not really MIFF," though, that's because we had to cheat to even watch the opening night film.

I'll explain.

Kelly Reichardt's First Cow was chosen as the opening night film of the festival, and as luck would have it, I haven't seen it yet, even though it's been available for rental from U.S. iTunes for a good three weeks now. And I was given codes to watch five free MIFF films as part of my role with ReelGood, so all good there.

What I didn't realize was that First Cow would actually sell out.

How does an online film sell out, you ask? Shouldn't the "seating capacity" be unlimited?

Well, you would think so. But my wife explained it to me this way. If they let everyone who wanted to see First Cow actually see it, it would cannibalize the film's eventual performance at the Australian box office, once it does one day open. So the "seating capacity" is a limitation placed by the distributor, not by MIFF itself. Plus, having a limited number of seats creates a sense of urgency to help sell the other seats -- which worked, apparently.

At first I thought I'd blown it, since my wife and I had talked about using one of my passes to purchase First Cow. It would be our second straight opening night MIFF film, though last year we attended in person.

But then I realized: I'll just rent it from iTunes and it'll be basically the same thing.

So yeah, on the opening night of MIFF, we watching the MIFF opening night film, just not actually through MIFF.

"Basically the same thing" is not the same as the same thing. We had multiple technical difficulties during the viewing. I will list them in order of their annoyance.

1) We noticed that the lighting was flickering during the night scenes. At first we didn't realize it was only the night scenes, and actually, it was only some of the night scenes. But my wife attributed it to a failure of the image to project the correct number of megahertz, which sounds like a real thing. Restarting iTunes and restarting my computer did not fix the issue, though it did seem to happen less as the movie went on.

2) There was something weird going on with the way my computer screen was displaying when connected through the HDMI cable. The outermost ten percent of the screen on all sides was missing, like it was blown up too close. This didn't impact our ability to perceive the content of the movie, but any time you are not seeing the exact aspect ratio intended by the director, you are not getting the full experience of the movie. We thought it was something going on with my display setting and I checked that, to no avail. Only after the movie did we discover that it was a problem with this particular HDMI cable. Never seen that before.

3) My computer crashed at one point. It does that. When it crashes, the screen freezes and you can't see the cursor anywhere, and the only choice is to restart. Unfortunately, when it crashes while hooked up to HDMI, it also makes this incredibly obnoxious buzzing sound. So another five minutes while I restarted and got us back to where we were (becaue the abrupt nature of the closure prevented iTunes from marking where we had left off in the movie).

4) Lastly, there was a little bit of drag on the streaming, even though I had no other programs open on my computer. This seems to happen with my iTunes but only for the first five or so minutes of the movie. In this case, it happened like 30 minutes in, for no apparent reason, before sorting itself out. So yes, it happened after we had already had the other three technical problems, pushing us just a little bit closer to deciding that the universe was trying to tell us something about this viewing. Were we somehow "stealing" this viewing the way the main character steals milk from the titular cow?

We never gave up on it. But you can see where the "really not really MIFF" comes in.

As for the movie itself, well, it left me a bit disappointed too. I've seen Reichardt's last two features, Certain Women and Night Moves, at MIFF, so seeing First Cow felt like a very good start to making this year feel MIFFier than it otherwise would.

But the movie?

Well ...

Look, I really loved the first half. The second just kind of ... petered out into a resolution that did not seem in keeping with the rest of the movie. My wife said it best afterward: "I don't know what she was trying to say in that movie." I'll have a review up shortly to the right, if I don't already by the time you read this.

Well, from here on out, things should get a bit more "really MIFF." I have tickets to the mid-festival centrepiece, Benh Zeitlin's Wendy, as well as the closing night film, Pablo Larrain's Ema. (Not to be confused with Emma from earlier this year.) Like First Cow, those two are available only at that one specific time. My other three passes will be used on movies that I haven't yet chosen, as those movies can be streamed at any time during the run of the festival, until August 22nd.

And considering that my wife may purchase a package as well, it'll leave us with close to my usual MIFF slate.

Onward and upward ... really.

Audient Authentic: Don't Look Back

This is the eighth in my 2020 series watching classic documentaries as yet unseen by me.

So far in this series I've covered a pretty wide range of topics, from war to politics to ethnography, with even a nature documentary thrown in for good measure. From here on out, though, my subject matter is going to become a bit more focused, as three of the last five movies I plan to watch are music documentaries.

The first is the Bob Dylan doco Don't Look Back, directed by D.A. Pennebaker, who first appeared in our year-long survey of important documentaries as a collaborator in last month's Primary. Pennebaker is fully the auteur on this one and seems to take some pleasure in reminding us of that, as his name appears rather more often and more prominently than I would have thought necessary.

Pennebaker's trademark fly-on-the-wall approach involves no talking head interviews, though that doesn't mean it doesn't involve any interviews. The setting is a 1965 trip Dylan took to London, where he performed a number of shows at the Royal Albert Hall, spent time with a number of contemporaries who would become lesser luminaries (lesser to him anyway), and was hectored by the press. That last is the interview part.

Surely, some of the press seems impressed, so to speak, with him. But others seem rather dubious in their pointed questioning, at times asking him such things as whether he thought that any of his fans had any idea what his lyrics meant. Dylan is, for the most part, gracious about such questioning, or at least, not openly rude in his responses, though he does engage in a fair bit of a bemused "turn the question back on you" approach in answering their questions. You can see his well-known personality being forged here, as he cheerfully says he doesn't believe he should be described as a folk singer and that he "doesn't believe in anything," when asked about his religious views.

I definitely appreciate the tack Pennebaker takes on Dylan, but I think I'd have been more engaged with the material if I were more of a Dylan fan. I don't dislike Dylan, certainly, but I felt my eyes rolling a bit when "Maggie's Farm" came on at one point. Not a big fan of that particular song, which I find as sort of an embodiment of the kind of bratty punkiness that I don't love about Dylan. (I'm not going to be able to describe in satisfying language what it is that bothers me about him, so I probably won't try.)

I found myself fading from time to time, but then something would happen that snapped me back to attention. Overall I am positive on the movie.

I found it interesting to note that I actually like both of the other luminaries who appear here, Joan Baez and Donovan, more than I like Dylan. Heresy, I know. But I quite enjoyed spending time with Baez, and I was surprised to discover how much Donovan actually sounded like Dylan -- something that has never occurred to me about his work. To the extent that it has any structure at all, the film is sort of set up as a collision course between himself and Donovan, who is proferred as a figure of contrast with Dylan until they finally meet near the end. When Donovan performs one of his songs, at first I wondered if it were a Dylan impersonation -- which is interesting because I have never previously gotten that impression from Donovan's work.

Another thing I was fascinated by was the extent to which Dylan's manager, Albert Grossman, reminded me of John C. Reilly. Not only could Reilly play him in a film, appearance-wise, but their voices are almost identical. I checked the internet and others have reached the same conclusions I have.

I know this is supposed to be some sort of landmark documentary, but I guess I needed to be around at that time to get a sense of how different it really was from other documentary portraits on offer. Certainly I am impressed by Pennebaker's ability to make everyone seem to "forget" that there is a camera there. This all feels very real and unvarnished, as no one appears to be playing to the camera or even really realizing it's there. Dylan comes off well despite the fact that it doesn't seem like he's trying to, though he's pretty ornery in certain moments as well.

In trying to get a sense of why the film is so respected, I went to Wikipedia, which doesn't give me very much. I mean, I myself respect it, but I don't think of it as the ninth best documentary of all time, which is how it was judged by a Sight & Sound documentary poll in 2014.

It'll be on to the 1970s in September as I watch another music documentary, the Maysles' Gimme Shelter.

Resumption of my quest for James Bond completism

About 14 years ago, I watched Dr. No, the first James Bond film I had ever seen starring Sean Connery, if you don't include Never Say Never Again. Which I don't.

About seven years ago, I watched the next two in the span of 24 hours, getting in From Russia With Love so I could go sequentially and see Goldfinger, which I was watching as part of the series I was writing at the time called Flickchart Road Trip, where I watched a movie at least partially set in each U.S. state for 50 weeks in a row. (Goldfinger goes to Kentucky.)

It's another seven years later and I've finally moved on to the next.

You may recall in yesterday's post that I vowed to watch a pre-2000 movie on streaming, and you know what? It's hard. At least 80 percent of the movies available on streaming have been released in the past two decades, and the ones that haven't are classics that I've already seen multiple times.

Except not the James Bond movies. As the timeline above will tell you, there are plenty of Bond movies -- about three starring Sean Connery, about three starring Roger Moore, and the one starring George Lazenby -- that I hadn't seen yet. (There's also the one starring Woody Allen, if we're counting movies we don't count.)

And fortunately, my Australian streaming service Stan is carrying all of them.

As you can tell from the poster, Thunderball was next up for me, and I watched all 130 minutes of it -- at least half of which were underwater -- on Saturday night.

Although Goldfinger is definitely the movie where many of the James Bond tropes we still know first appeared, Thunderball seems like the movie where they became ripe for parody. And boy is this movie jam-packed full of James Bond silliness. Just a small overview of some of the things we see in this movie:

- James Bond uses a jet pack. For reasons that seem entirely superfluous to the scenario, he escapes some kind of compound with the help of a jet pack that, I guess, he had stashed in there. If you have the access to stash the jet pack in the first place, it certainly doesn't seem essential to your escape, now does it?

- James Bond punches out a woman. During that same opening scene with the jet pack. It's not actually a woman but a man dressed as a woman, though it does function quite symbolically in terms of the mild to heavy misogyny that characterized the franchise at the time.

- James Bond gets "stretched" on a device called "the rack," that is supposed to assist with rehabilitation from injury. This seems to clearly call back to the famous scene in Goldfinger where his manhood is threatened by a table saw. I was surprised that he doesn't actually figure his way out of it, but is saved by the returning nurse, whom he quickly beds.

- Spectre makes its first appearance. I believe, though it could have appeared in Goldfinger. You get the cat being petted and the room full of Spectre agents, one of whom is accused of embezzlement and summarily executed, his chair sinking into the floor and coming back empty. Classic fodder for an Austin Powers movie.

- You get a villain with an eye patch. Largo by name. Classic.

- James Bond is the target of an assassination attempt during a big parade/festival. The gun peaking from behind the curtain also seems classic Bond. Of course, he turns the duplicitous woman he's dancing with in the path of the gun shot, and she takes the shot to the back and dies instantly. In fact, numerous people are killed instantly from back wounds in this film, including, ultimately, Largo.

- In addition to the large meeting of Spectre agents, we get a large meeting of 00 agents. Not sure if we had seen that before either.

- Desmond Llewelyn appears as Q. Not for the first time, but he appears in a way that reminds me of all his subsequent appearances, completely rolling his eyes at everything Bond does.

- Doppelgangers. A villain gets cosmetic surgery to look like the NATO pilot with security clearance, so he can board and ultimately hijack a plane carrying nuclear weapons.

- The one-liners. Ugh! A typical example: Connery shoots an approaching villain with a spear gun, and says "I think he got the point."

- The shark tank. I almost forgot! Largo has a pool full of sharks he feeds with human beings who have crossed him, or merely let him down. Classic villain behavior.

Thunderball clearly has it all. However, the most ridiculous thing it has is literally 40 minutes of underwater footage.

Many a Bond movie might have a single underwater scene, but Thunderball really goes for it. It keeps returning, and returning, and returning to the underwater milieu, and I'll be damned if I could figure out what was supposed to be going on and what was at stake in half of those scenes.

But the most hilarious moment had to be the grand finale. You know well those scenes that have become ubiquitous in epic adventure movies, where the two armies run at each other on the battlefield and ultimately meet up for a ferocious clash where heads are bashed and blood flies.

Now imagine the same thing underwater.

That's right, there are no fewer than 200 scuba divers shooting each other with spear guns and engaging in hand to hand combat underwater as one group escorts a nuclear device and the other tries to stop them from doing so. (In an interesting failure to present an immediacy to the threat, the device is not about to be detonated, but is just being escorted in the finale.)

The scene goes on for so long, and includes so many people speared (how many spears does the average scuba diver carry?), that I spent most of the time laughing. The hand to hand combat was almost as funny, with combatants slashing each others' air hoses and removing each others' face masks. (This last was considered some kind of fatal move, almost like they were removing an astronaut's helmet rather than a diver's. I suppose it's disorienting not to have your mask underwater, but does it really limit your effectiveness as a combatant? When it happens to Bond himself, he just gets a mask from a floating corpse nearby. Never mind that if you put the mask on underwater your mask would be totally filled with water and would not function as intended anyway.)

Thunderball is so silly at some points -- including the crazy speed of the background in the climactic fight scene aboard a boat -- that I almost considered giving it less than the minimum three stars for a movie you would recommend to somebody else. But after judging that I had had a really good time watching it, I did give it those three stars.

One thing I didn't mention above is that this is also the movie where the Bond franchise just unapologetically goes for the T&A. I just quipped to someone that Thunderball features "enough beautiful babes to fill a Russ Meyer movie." Indeed that is true. The babes are buxom and frequently in bikinis, or baths, or Turkish baths. Hubba hubba.

I don't think it will be another seven years before I see You Only Live Twice, the next up for me, whose beginning I may actually have seen years ago. There's a Bond scene I remember where he appears to be shot in a folded up bed at the beginning, and I think that's this movie. I definitely didn't see the whole thing though.

Especially with the availability of all the movies on Stan, I think Thunderball has inspired me to keep making my way through the now six remaining Bond movies I haven't seen. It may be a tall, and unnecessary, order to see them all before No Time to Die finally does debut later this year, but neither would I be surprised if I ended up doing so.

The traditional mid-point of my movie year

July 31st does not mean a lot on most people's calendars. For major league baseball, it's the deadline for completing trades -- in a usual season, anyway. This year, it's only a week into the season, and could be one of the last days of the season if COVID-19 has anything to say about it.

For me, July 31st usually represents a turning point in the focus of my viewing year.

A couple years ago I informally realized that I have two halves of my movie year, though the movie year doesn't follow the traditional calendar. Because I finalize my year-end rankings in mid to late January, that represents the end of the second half of the year, if we want to reverse engineer it. So the first half of the year begins in February, and includes the months March, April, May, June and July. That's six if you're counting. During this half of the year, I focus more on older movies and not as much on new releases, though for sure I keep pace on new releases as well.

The start of August marks a shift in those priorities, and it is ushered in by the Melbourne International Film Festival, which starts the last few days of July or the first few days of August. It's doing that this year as well, in online form, starting on Thursday. They're calling it "MIFF 68 1/2," because it's not the full 69th year of the festival. Fair enough. Anyway, this shift means that in August, September, October, November, December and January -- that is also six months -- I make new movies much more my focus as I try to see most of the titles people will be talking about at year end. I still see older movies, to be sure, but they are fewer and farther between.

As we hit this pivot date in the weird movie year of 2020, I thought it would be interesting to see how I have thus far conformed to my usual rhythms.

For starters I can tell you that there has been a big change to my ordinary viewing habits this year, and it has only tangentinally to do with not being able to see movies in the theater. The change does, though, almost perfectly coincide with the pandemic.

You may remember that back in early March, my former editor at ReelGood basically retired, leaving me the reins to the site. (Not for age reasons -- he's like 14 years younger than I am -- but for reasons of shifting priorities.) I say "basically" because he does intend to continue reviewing, but the shutdown of movie theaters and new releases coming out of Hollywood has left him disinclined to write anything yet.

For a while, that left me as the only critic writing for the site. Eager to keep up appearances as much as I could, a proposition complicated by COVID-19, I started reviewing more than half of the new movies released to Netflix. Before this year, I had only ever reviewed one Netflix release, that I recall. This year alone, I've reviewed ... 22.

Add to that the 11 movies I've reviewed during this period that were available from other sources, either in the theater (during the brief time they were open) or on VOD, and I've reviewed 33 new movies since the pandemic began. During a similar period in previous years, I might have reviewed 20 to 25, since my editor also would have been reviewing about that many.

In the past two months, at least, I've had a little help. I've brought a former ReelGood critic back into the fold, and thus far he has reviewed four movies for me. That has theoretically freed up some time on my viewing schedule for other viewings, but the net effect has still been that my first half of the year has felt unbalanced toward new releases.

Interestingly, though, this is more a perception in my mind than a reality. Because I keep track of such things, I can tell you that The Hater, which I watched on Thursday night as the last movie in the first half of my year, was the 56th movie from 2020 I had seen. A pretty impressive total, I guess, given the dearth of new releases in the theater.

I'm a little ahead of my 2019 pace, but not significantly. My 56th 2019 release was a film I saw at MIFF, Baby. I saw that one on August 10th of last year. So I guess my increased viewing pace of streaming releases has been balanced out by the fewer movies I've seen in the cinema (only three since I watched Downhill on March 10th).

But another thing has cut into viewings of older movies -- older movies that were new to me, that is. This year I've been on an increased pace of watching movies I've already seen, part a comfort food response to the pandemic, and part a nostalgic response to the passing of my mother. So far in 2020 I have seen exactly 50 movies I had seen previously, which seems like it could be a record to this point for any year. (That includes January, a lot of which fell into the first half of the viewing year because my 2019 list was finalized on January 13th.)

Well, I picked the wrong year to compare that with, because by this time in 2019, the total number of movies I had already seen was ... 63. But that's because I was working on the project of rewatching movies from the 2010s for my best of the decade list, at least one per week, in addition to other movies I was rewatching for other reasons. So 2019 was, in that sense, as unusual a viewing year for me as 2020.

But if you compare it to 2018, which was more of a typical year, I had rewatched only ... 42. Okay, eight more than that is not significant.

So why does 2020 feel so light on older movies I'm seeing for the first time?

I guess one reason for that is that while I'm in this comfort movie mindset, it feels easier to watch unseen movies from the last few years, rather than digging back into cinema history. This year I've seen only 24 new-to-me movies whose release year starts with a 1, and a full seven of those are a result of my monthly classic documentary viewing series, Audient Authentic. That's compared to 52 non-2020 movies whose release year begins with 2.

Anyway. This analysis probably is useful to nobody but me. It is useful to me, though, because it helps me re-set my priorities.

Given the small number of times I've dipped into cinema history with my choices in the first half of my movie year, I think I will be slower this year to shift my focus to the current year's releases. The start of MIFF later this week complicates that somewhat, though I'm certain to watch fewer films overall when I'm doing it from my own living room, when there are fewer choices overall, and when many of the films playing the festival are not from the same caliber of director as in the past.

I'll start tonight, watching something with a 1 beginning its release year, though as of right now I don't know what.