That Sing 1 viewing really paid off

A couple months ago, when my younger son was watching YouTube and I was half-listening from the other room, a trailer came on for the sequel to 2016's Sing. This wouldn't ordinarily have gotten my attention, but it was scored to U2's "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For." There are not a lot of songs out there with this song's Pavlovian ability to give me chills. Whether you consider it a favorite or not -- and I don't, particularly -- I think you get a sense of what I'm talking about.

I wandered into the living room to check out the images that accompanied it, and they showed a large theatrical space with an audience of adoring animals, some of who might have been flicking lighters to light up the darkness around them. There were animals on stage too of course, clearly fighting whatever demons the sequel's narrative had asked them to fight, and singing the iconic lyrics to that iconic song. 

There was no other dialogue of any kind in the trailer, just a few other equally promising snippets of footage.

Then and there, I thought to myself, "Could Sing 2 contain multitudes of unexpected greatness?"

It didn't seem likely, but I've heard of stranger things.

Our subsequent viewing of Sing seem to further discourage the possibility. 

When my son was equally taken in by the trailer and said he wanted to see the movie with me, and I felt hopeful enough by the trailer to instantly agree with this request, I knew then that we first had to watch the original. I mean, we didn't have to -- you can usually piece together what you need to know about these movies -- but it felt right to. I had never purposely ignored the original Sing, but it landed at an age when the younger one was too young to see it (he would have been almost three) and the older one was already growing out of it (age six, although it seems strange to say that now that I'm typing it). I suspect the bigger hindrance to seeing it was its December 21st release date, meaning I would have needed to prioritize watching it in among all the other end-of-year content I'd have been trying to consume.

So a few weekends later we did sit down to watch the original, renting it from iTunes when it was surprisingly not available on any of our streaming services. I thought it was fine, but certainly not remarkable. My son seemed to like it more than that, but he may have been trying to stay polite and positive, just as I was. Later on -- as in, yesterday -- I'd discover that he hadn't thought the original was all that.

Our lukewarm reactions to Sing did nothing to derail our intentions to see the sequel in the theater, and that opportunity finally arose -- as the movie's showtimes were quickly dwindling -- yesterday. His brother was off at a four-day summer camp, so now was the time.

Wow.

That's all I can say: Wow.

I'm not going to go on at length about Sing 2, but it's a major step forward for Illumination, bursting with color and imagination and even some ideas. It's leaps and bounds more satisfying than the original and at times it put me in mind of Zootopia, which made my best of the last decade list. A world populated by peacefully coexisting animals would obviously put you in mind of that, and Sing would have probably been accused of ripping off Zootopia had they not been released in the same year. What I'm really talking about, though, is the creativity that has gone into building the city where much of the Sing 2 action takes place, which is modeled after Las Vegas but has oodles of outstanding flourishes that are all its own. The level of depth and detail that has gone into conceiving and realizing this world is just astonishing.

And yes, I think having seen the first Sing really helped, for a number of reasons.

Had we not watched that movie, I think both my son and myself would have forgotten how taken we'd been with the Sing 2 trailer. I would have reminded myself that mainstream animation not made by Disney or Pixar is usually a disappointment, and I might have seen it five years from now if ever -- the same amount of time it took me to watch the original Sing. That would have deprived me of what could well be my favorite animated movie of the year.

Having watched that movie, though, created a sort of fallacy of sunk costs. Like, we've already seen the original so if we don't see the sequel, that original viewing would have been preparing us for nothing. 

But also, getting to know these characters in the first movie was, I think, key to appreciating their journeys in the second movie as much as I did. The most emotional moments may relate to a reclusive singing great, with the body of a lion and the voice of Bono, who was not a character in the original movie. Still, it was another character's relationship to that lion -- Ash, the porcupine, voice of Scarlett Johannson -- that drew out the poignancy of that new character. And the tight script found satisfying narrative arcs for all the other characters we met the first time around.

Plus this movie has a really good sense of humor. There's a batty old lizard voiced by the director himself, Garth Jennings, though the character is female, kind of like an eccentric secretary to the main character (the koala, Buster Moon, voice of Matthew McConaughey). When she drives a rented Ferrari convertible along back roads to seek out the reclusive musician -- who has been promised by Moon to appear in his space-themed musical -- she is singing and bopping along with System of a Down's "Chop Suey." ("Wake up! [indistinguishable indistinguishable] "make up!" etc.) It's been a while since I've laughed that hard.

And then when the staging of that space musical finishes off the movie -- containing most of the footage we saw in that trailer -- it was like the exact realization of that trailer's original promise. Have you ever heard of the phrase "spectacle tears"? As in, something in a movie is so filled with spectacle that you can't help but get a little verklemt? 

Yeah well, Sing 2 did that for me too.

It's just another reminder that you shouldn't blow off any movie out there. Until you see it, you never know whether its praises might be worth singing. 

Settling the Scorsese in 2022

For the first time ever in 2021, I did two intertwined bi-monthly series -- I'm Thinking of Kaufman Things and All's Well That Ends Welles -- the former running every other month starting in January, the latter every other month starting in February. Although this sounds funny to say about six additional movies over the course of a whole year, it was too much. I decided I needed at least every other month off from a specific obligation to this blog, even if it was a self-imposed obligation.

But one of the two formats for my 2021 bi-monthly series was something I really enjoyed and want to continue in 2022, starting in February, even if it was a bit misconceived from the start. (Credit where credit is due, though: It was actually a format I first did in 2019 with Spike Lee.)

In All's Well That Ends Welles, I wanted to use the six bi-monthly slots to finish the films Orson Welles directed that I hadn't seen. Unfortunately, that wasn't six films, but eight -- and that's not including some stuff that I decided didn't quite qualify as a directorial feature. So I had to double up in two different months, and I still don't know, given the wonky career he had, whether I can rightly say I've watched every "film" where Welles was the primary creative force.

Things will be a lot cleaner in 2022 when I shift focus to Martin Scorsese, leading up to the release of his new film, Killers of the Flower Moon, currently planned for late 2022.

There are, indeed, exactly six films Scorsese has directed that I have not yet seen, though none from the past 25 years. Chronologically, they are as follows:

Who's That Knocking at My Door? (1967)
New York, New York (1977)
The Color of Money (1986)
New York Stories (1989)
The Age of Innocence (1993)
Kundun (1997)

The fact of having exactly six titles pleases me -- even though Scorsese directed only one third of New York Stories -- but that doesn't mean there aren't challenges ahead in this series. Or at least one challenge, which was that at the time I originally checked a few months back, I could not find a good way to see New York, New York. Given that it is a Scorsese film, I have to imagine a method will be revealed to me that does not involve piracy, but for now I don't know what that method is. As currently scheduled, I've got until April to figure that out.

And if for some reason I can't find it -- thereby fatally undermining the inspiration for the series -- at least I can slot in Killers of the Flower Moon as the last movie, if the timing works out for that.

Some other notes on the films on the docket:

I have not seen The Hustler, so I should probably watch that before I get to The Color of Money in June.

I can't believe I haven't yet watched The Age of Innocence, as I listened to Edith Wharton's novel on audio book a full ten years ago and loved it. 

Killers of the Flower Moon was not actually part of the inspiration for this series. I don't know all that much about it, except that it involves Native American subject matter. It was more of a retroactive justification for the series that created a bit more news worthiness.

To be honest, the way I settled on Scorsese -- so to speak -- was that I tried to think of another great director whose filmography might require only a few more viewings from me to complete, and Scorsese jumps to mind in any conversation that starts with brainstorming great directors.

The clincher? I knew that Settling the Scorsese would make a great name for the series.

So indeed, I will start settling the score with Marty in February with Who's That Knocking at My Door?, another movie I know almost nothing about.  

Spider-Man and his many verses, and other No Way Home thoughts

We finally contributed to the massive -- and still growing in leaps and bounds -- box office of Spider-Man: No Way Home over the weekend. 

The viewing prompted many different thoughts -- you know, the type I'd write about in separate posts if I wanted to have a week's worth of Spider-Man posts. Since I don't, I'll fit them all here, making use of subheadings. 

And of course, there will be SPOILERS. 

The first was one that had occurred to me previously, but one I've never written about:

Why is Spider-Man the hero who is always trifling with the multiverse?

It's a shame Spider-Man: No Way Home is so many times more successful than the already successful Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, which is getting a sequel in 2022. I wouldn't say it's a remake of that movie, though it does deal with multiple versions of Spider-Man from different universes coming together to fight a threat to the very space-time continuum. At the very least, it owes something to it.

Into the Spider-Verse is an adaptation of a 2014-2015 comic book series conceived and written by Dan Slott. So he was the one who may have taken Spidey down this path to begin with. 

As an MCU movie, I think No Way Home does its best not to be directly indebted to any particular source, since these plot turns are supposed to take even comic book nerds by surprise. However, I'm reading that the basic story arc comes from a 2007 comic story arc called "One More Day," and Wikipedia credits Slott's Spider-Verse story with inspiration for the film.

Because I don't have a huge breadth to my comic book knowledge, I cannot say this for certain, but I have to figure that other superheroes have had multiverse type storylines, if only because they have been around so long that the writers need to get creative (or ridiculous, take your pick). But Spider-Man is the only one whose multiverse dalliances have received the cinematic treatment -- twice now.

Why is that? I'll leave that one dangling as we get to our other topics for today ...

Covering our eyes for different reasons

I noticed while buying tickets that Spider-Man was rated M, meaning it is appropriate for children over 15. My younger son is eight, and only just turned eight last week. That's not even close.

But we were already at the cinema, and if I mentioned it to my wife, it could only derail a day I had carefully planned through two viewings of the previous two MCU Spider-Man movies -- presumably also rated M. So I just bought the tickets and moved on.

So it was with some surprise that my wife groaned over the intensity of the trailers before the movie, which included The Batman and Morbius. (She was less shocked by The 355, maybe just because it stars women?)

And so while I was closing my eyes to avoid seeing footage I didn't want to see, part of my ongoing prevention of having all the images from a movie spoiled by familiarity, my eight-year-old was closing his eyes to avoid traumatizing images -- and my wife was providing an additional layer of protection by using her hand as a second shield.

I can't tell you how traumatizing those images actually were, since I didn't watch them. I suspect it was just the tone, since the 15-year-olds who were officially approved to watch these movies wouldn't want something that my eight-year-old would be perfectly comfortable with. I'm sure my 11-year-old was plenty awed and excited in an aspirational way. I suspect more than anything, the eight-year-old had that sense you get when you've shown up in the wrong place and are suddenly subjected to something that wasn't intended for you.

Then again, superhero movies are sort of intended for everybody, and it was clear from the trailers that we are not winding down on them anytime soon. Speaking of which ...

A reminder of when I didn't see every superhero movie

You'd figure someone like me would be perfectly prepared for the fan service in No Way Home, perhaps even its ideal target. You'd be wrong.

As I was watching the film and piecing together who was who by process of elimination, I was reminded that I did not go to the theater to see three consecutive Spider-Man movies ... and still to this day have not seen them.

It's a weird sequence of events considering that I really liked Spider-Man 2, the second Sam Raimi movie, the one with Doc Oc as the villain. I guess I heard bad things about Spider-Man 3, though, because I never bothered with it.

Then I recall finding it absurd that they were rebooting the character so quickly, which means I didn't see either of the films starring Andrew Garfield. 

By the first Tom Holland movie, every superhero was being rebooted constantly, and I'd also adjusted my perspective such that I felt like I had to see every significant film released in a given year before I closed my rankings each January. Perhaps especially superhero movies, even if they didn't have a realistic shot at my #1 for the year. (Though Wonder Woman was actually my #2 in 2017, the year of the first Holland movie.)

In hindsight, it seems really weird that I just blew these movies off, especially given the character's prominence within the pantheon of superheroes. (I once had a theory that Spider-Man was one of the most famous five superheroes of all time, joining Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and the Incredible Hulk.)

But it wasn't totally uncommon either. I didn't see either of the Iron Man sequels in the year of their release, and that character is, nowadays, the most prominent challenger for that top five. 

I suppose it's not completely unprecedented even today. I'll be wrapping up my rankings next week without seeing the latest Venom movie. There was one Friday night when I was going to see it, but I couldn't find a parking space at the mall (it was Black Friday) so I just bailed and never got back to it.

Having missed three of the existing seven Spider-Man movies -- or eight if you count Into the Spider-Verse -- was not ultimately a problem. I knew Jamie Foxx was the villain in the second Garfield movie. I didn't remember who was the villain in the first Garfield movie -- a lizard? -- but by then it was obvious because I knew Thomas Haden Church's Sandman was the villain in the final Tobey Maguire movie. When the lizard finally transforms back into Rhys Ifans at the end, I remembered Ifans' announced casting in that movie.

I do think it would now be worth going back and seeing what I missed, and I can watch it in a manner that gives appropriate nods to the multiverse. Having watched the two Holland movies with my kids leading up to the viewing, maybe I will boomerang back outward and watch the Garfrield movies in reverse order before getting to Spider-Man 3. Hey, why not. 

Which leads me to ...

The surprise ongoing effectiveness of Tobey Maguire

Tobey Maguire has become an absolute pariah in Hollywood. Everyone thinks he's an asshole -- we all know the stories of his behavior as a poker player, as documented in that Aaron Sorkin movie -- and he really hasn't been working at all.

Since Garfield was the first one to appear here, I wondered if maybe Maguire wouldn't even be in the movie. After all, they could have but didn't include James Franco in the cast.

When he did show up, I was surprised at a) how youthful he still seems at age 46, and b) how he's still able, more or less, to do the thing that ingratiated us to him in the first place.

Most actors who see a dimming of their fame -- say, Orlando Bloom -- seem awkward when we see them again. Like all the sudden they just can't do what they used to do anymore. Whereas once they were charming, now they aren't. Now their awareness of their own downfall actually diminishes their craft, and they just can't pull it off anymore. 

That wasn't the case for Maguire. He's actually sort of the heart and soul of this movie in a weird way. He factors into a key moment in the climax when he gets Holland's Peter Parker to control his rage and resist doing something he would have regretted. 

I'll be curious to see where he goes from here. Is this the comeback role Maguire needed?

Or will he fritter it away and still act like an asshole to everybody?

Dr. Strange's carelessness with magic

After all he'd been through with Thanos, I never really believed Dr. Strange would conjure a spell to "brainwash the entire world" -- to use his own words -- on a whim.

So while we might blame Peter Parker for the space-time endangering events of this movie, that's like saying you blame the child for asking to play with a gun, rather than the adult who gave him the gun to play with.

I guess Strange didn't see any of the other Spider-Man movies, because he's unfamiliar with the phrase "With great power comes great responsibility."

Sure, one of the film's funniest scenes is the one where Strange has to keep changing his spell in progress due to last-minute edits by Peter. But again, do we blame Peter for remembering one more person he doesn't want to forget him, or do we blame Strange for not reviewing all the parameters of the spell with Peter before he even started?

It's not like Strange is the genie here. It's not like he's trying to use the exact semantics of Peter's request against him in order to deny him a wish on a technicality. Since he's on Peter's side, you'd think they'd want to sit down and hash out the spell over a couple of hours. 

Not so much.

Mysterio's unbelievable credibility

Another thing I didn't believe was that the world would believe Mysterio -- a "superhero" who had been famous for like a week -- over Spider-Man, an Avenger who had demonstrably saved the world, or at least his small part of it, on multiple occasions.

I tried to consider whether Mysterio had been known to the world longer than his three or four fights with the elementals, but I decided he had not been. Peter wasn't even aware of him until his school trip to Europe. In fact, Peter names him. Mysterio dies at the end of that school trip.

In this case, I think you can view it as a criticism of our sociopolitical landscape, not something that's supposed to be realistic. The conspiracy theorist talk show host played by J.K. Simmons is supposed to be a riff on Alex Jones. The things he says are not supposed to make sense, which makes it all the more of a sharp satire that so many millions of people believe him.

Still, as the core conflict for an entire movie, I didn't totally buy it.

Plus, aren't there schools other than M.I.T.?

Cool but not clever

Although I liked this movie quite a bit, it doesn't approach the rarefied air of the Marvel movies I have really loved in the past five years, such as the final two Avengers movies, the most recent Thor movie and the most recent Ant-Man movie.

My ultimate assessment is that all the multiverse stuff was cool, but not particularly clever.

When you look at any individual detail of this movie, it doesn't care much about explaining itself. Villains just appear, Spider-Men just appear. There's no rhyme or reason to where they appear or when they appear. They appear at the time the plot needs them to, and only because the plot needs them to appear.

I think the key to a head-trippy film involving paradoxes is that the paradoxes themselves should be clever. The guiding principle behind the making of Back to the Future was the unanticipated repercussions of traveling through time. Everything that happens is an offshoot of a paradox or an attempt to avoid one.

No Way Home doesn't care about paradoxes. All it really wants to do is assemble a bunch of different characters from three different cinematic threads and figure out a way for them to coexist. 

And it does that in a cool way. Just not a clever one.

                                                             ******************

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

That's one way to market a movie

I checked my ReelGood email today to find a promotional email about a new straight-to-video Bruce Willis special, Midnight in the Switchgrass. It also stars Megan Fox, who could be joining Willis on his fast track to paycheck movie hell. 

It also stars some person named Machine Gun Kelly -- I know who he is, I just think he's stupid -- and that's what I'm writing about today. (Actually I don't know if he's stupid, but his name makes him stupid enough for my purposes.)

The big promotional hook this publicist was selling was that this is the movie where Fox and Kelly started a relationship.

The email subject reads:

"MEGAN FOX and MACHINE GUN KELLY hookup film lands on #1 spot on iTunes within 24 hours - starring Bruce Willis"

Don't worry Bruce, we didn't forget you.

When I first glanced at the email, I thought it was a "hookup film," in other words, a film where two characters hook up. But no, Midnight in the Switchgrass is just your standard detective v. serial killer movie, based on somebody called "the truck stop killer."

I guess the fact that two actors started bumping uglies while working together on a movie is a plausible way to sell it, especially in the tabloid/Kardashian/social media hell that is our world today. (If I were any younger I would have come up with a more current reference there than Kim Kardashian. Maybe at least Kylie Jenner.) I mean, I was always interested in Two Much because that's where Antonio Banderas and Melanie Griffith started dating. (No I wasn't.)

But maybe the fact that the other person is some person named Machine Gun Kelly makes me resent it all the more. 

Incidentally, this is a great picture of Willis. He looks confused and angry. I guess many an elderly gentleman find themselves in that situation. 

Carry on.

R.I.P Sidney Poitier

At a time of year when I'm inclined to write a lot about film, and the posts are already backing up for future publication, I haven't paused to acknowledge the passing of some recent greats, including Betty White and Peter Bogdanovich. I was going to write a post about David Gulpilil, the indigenous Australian actor, and even watched a documentary about him, but it got lost in the ether of moving and other end-of-year activities.

The passing of Sidney Poitier has finally forced me to pause from whatever else I was doing, in among however many posts are starting to back up, to acknowledge a great, even though as I'm typing this I don't know exactly what I'm going to say about him.

As an indication of the ways my head is still in the clouds a bit, I didn't hear about Poitier's passing through the normal channels of news or social media. It was actually going on to my old website, AllMovie, that exposed me to an article devoted to him on the landing page. That was only 15 minutes ago. Now I'm writing this.

Poitier was not "my guy," as such, in that I didn't see that many of his performances all told (only eight out of more than 50). But there was something about his presence that just seared into you, even when he was not playing a man of extreme intensity. I fondly remember his performance in Lillies of the Field, for example, where he plays a very affable character, one not burdened by the responsibility of trying to explode the prejudices of white society.

This last was indeed the form in which Poitier made his greatest mark. In the year 1967 alone, Poitier appeared in two of his most iconic roles, each of which was conceived as a way of directly addressing the racial divide between Blacks and whites in America. Those were Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? and In the Heat of the Night, the former of which found him as the boyfriend of a white girl trying to be excessively polite to win over her parents, the latter of which featured his Detective Tibbs working to pierce the racial preconceptions of a southern police force during a murder investigation. Both films were at the forefront of the discussions of social justice in 1967, flawed though they may have been in some respects, especially as viewed through a modern lens.

As the face of the attempt to truly integrate popular cinema, Poitier was, in many ways, the perfect candidate for this role, for better or worse. He could, in fact, be extremely "polite" -- and I use that word knowing it carries an insidious implication that "politeness" was something that did not occur naturally to Black people and had to be specifically striven for. However, "politeness" was a necessary first step with a white audience, when anything more radical would have been rejected out of hand.

To the credit of Poitier and the writers and directors who provided the content for him at that time, though, he rarely was forced -- in the roles I've seen anyway -- to just purely subjugate himself to the needs of this integrating venture. That's particularly the case in In the Heat of the Night, where he'd shrewdly toe the line in order to keep the peace, but only to a point -- and then he would stand up for himself in no uncertain terms, and by extension, anyone else who looked like him.

The usage of Poitier throughout his career was likely not perfect. Having seen only eight of his films, I can't really speak to that with authority. With any guinea pig, there would be teething issues, if that's not a mixing of metaphors.

But given the task he was saddled with, he accomplished it admirably, becoming a beloved figure both in the Black community and well beyond it. I know that every time I saw someone call his name at an awards ceremony, as he received some richly deserved career achievement award, I felt inclined to join the standing ovation along with the people who were actually there in the room with him.

At age 94, Poitier could not have been expected to live much longer. He's kind of like Betty White in that way. He lived a good long life that no one can reasonably say was too short. I hope he was happy for much of that life, even though I know it was not always easy for him.

That doesn't mean I'm not still a bit sad this morning as I contemplate the man's departure from this world. Great artists leave a mark, and even though we were never going to get another performance from Poitier, I'll miss seeing him stand at an awards ceremony, smile a smile of exquisite gratitude, and wave at his adoring fans, of which I was one. 

And a bag of popcorn for the ride home

I got to West Side Story on Thursday night for my second straight night at the movies, as I cross off titles from the remaining list of movies I need to see in theaters before my ranking deadline. (Literally, I am now working from a final list of about 20 movies I realistically expect to see before my deadline, jotted down in a spiral-bound notebook. I've already whittled it down a bit from the original 20.)

And for the second straight night, I enjoyed a bag of popcorn on the way home.

You can add that to the list of reasons I love the Sun Theatre in Yarraville.

I reckon every theater out there ends the night with a bunch of popped popcorn that nobody is going to buy. Most theaters would either throw that out, or if they were feeling generous, they would send it home with their staff -- if their staff is not already sick of everything having to do with popcorn.

The Sun is feeling more generous than that. In fact, they bag the remaining popcorn in the same bags in which they sell it, twist over the top of the bag, and leave it lined up along the counter for patrons to grab on their way home. 

Very nice.

I knew about this because one time, one of the staff personally offered me a bag on my departure. The last two nights, though, the popcorn was just lined up on the counter where anyone who wants to can grab it. I wasn't formally notified that this was for our consumption, but it was consistent with the theater's previous approach to the subject. 

And because this theater feels like a ghost town after the last showing lets out -- sometimes you can't even find any staff -- there was no one to witness me making off with the popcorn on my way out, if I had misinterpreted their intentions.

Did I really need a bag of popcorn at nearly midnight on my 20-minute drive back to my new house? No I did not. I had already consumed the remaining licorice wheel I didn't eat during Licorice Pizza, a small bag of gummy snakes purchased at the theater, and the remainder of a bag of fudge I had gotten for Christmas. Plus two Pepsi Maxes. Hey, it's a long movie.

But neither am I going to turn down free popcorn, because it's pretty rare that I actually order it at the movies anymore, though I still love the taste. 

I could have taken two, because there were about six, and I imagine most people don't want a bag of popcorn at the end of the night. But that would have been pushing it.

Besides, my new commute home from the theater is about twice the length of what it was before. I've got time to snack on it on the journey.

In fact, my love for the Sun is such that on both of those nights, I have also taken a precaution that was necessary only out of excess politeness.

One of my masks -- I've got four these days -- is a mask my wife got when she attended an event at Cinema Lido in Hawthorn, and either didn't have a mask or lost hers. The mask is branded with the theater's logo, and because it's a movie-themed mask, it's one of my favorites to wear.

Wearing the mask to the Sun, though, would have felt like rubbing the Sun's nose in my patronage of the competition. On previous instances, I have proactively chosen a different mask, but on both Wednesday and Thursday nights, I did not remember in time to do anything about it. 

So instead, I just turned the mask inside out.

As I said, this is an excessive level of politeness. The Sun and Cinema Lido are actually quite far away from each other, so they would not even reasonably be serving the same audience. In fact, I myself only ever go there on a really special occasion, or if I'm already in the area for some other reason. (It's a nice theater, though, so I do enjoy my opportunities to frequent it.)

Plus presumably the people who work for the Sun are also avowed cinephiles, and would respect other cool cinemas around Melbourne. I might even get additional points for it.

But this is a situation where I like to err on the side of politeness. The Sun Theatre has earned it.

For reasons that go well beyond giving me free popcorn. 

I ate licorice during Licorice Pizza

It wasn't intentional.

In fact, I would not intentionally have black licorice in my possession on any occasion. 

I do like a hint of black licorice. I used to enjoy the black licorice flavored Altoids -- not sure if they are still on the market -- and I think licorice also makes an excellent flavoring for tea.

But when you combine it with the texture of eating licorice itself, something about that curdles the experience for me. I think it's just too much licorice.

Still, someone in my extended family has gotten it into their head that I like licorice. This is not the first time I have received licorice in my stocking at Christmas, and because who gave what is anonymous with stockings, I still don't know who this misinformed little elf is. (It's not my wife, who considers licorice vile in all its forms, but it could be my father-in-law, his partner or my sister-in-law, likely one of the latter two.)

Here's what this misinformed little elf gave me:

That's right, that's two full meters of licorice. Or, 2 full metres of liquorice, if you want to use the local spellings. 

I don't like it but I will eat it. Especially when I can use it as theoretical sustenance during a long movie I'm watching at night, which is what Licorice Pizza was.

I swear, though, that when I threw it into my bag on Wednesday night, I didn't recognize the coincidence. And yes, if there's a coincidence to be had, I will certainly tell you about it on my blog.

In fact, it wasn't until digging into my backpack about 15 minutes into the movie that I thought "Ha, I'm eating licorice during Licorice Pizza."

Although I choked it down with only sort of a mild annoyance at each bite I was taking, you can be sure I limited myself to a single of the two available metres. 

The funny thing is, I never did figure out what the title referred to.

I know at one point the movie was called Soggy Bottom, a term that gets referenced a lot in the plot and relates to the marketing of the new invention of the water bed. But for I'm sure the same reasons that Alana considers "soggy bottom" to be a bad form of marketing, making you think of shitting your pants, the title was changed to Licorice Pizza.

I just googled it and apparently the movie is named after an iconic Southern California record shop from the era in which the film was set -- reluctantly, it would appear, after Paul Thomas Anderson was forced to change the title. "If there's two words that make me have kind of a Pavlovian response of being a child and running around," Anderson explained, "It's 'licorice' and 'pizza.'"

I'm only three years younger than Anderson, and it's true, licorice was around a bit back then. Perhaps not any more so than it is now, though I must admit I don't track the licorice market very closely.

I will tell you that I was very happy to eat red licorice, which is probably only described as such because Twizzlers made it in the same texture and shape as its black licorice. Licorice is really a flavor, though, not the shape of a confection. Still, if you are going to eat something that calls itself licorice, you are better off with the red. (You are also infinitely better off with the Twizzlers than the Red Vines. As a SoCal native, I'm sure Anderson would disagree.) 

If we're talking Twizzlers, though, I should tell you that my favorite Twizzler is one I only discovered in the year or two before I moved from California, which is this:

I can see from the packaging they no longer try to pass them off as licorice, only referring to them as "filled twists."

These things just burst with flavor, those flavors being "cherry kick" and "citrus punch." And yes they do have a kick. In fact, if I'd had some with me, these would have been an actively selected form of sustenance in any movie, for whenever I needed a kick to wake myself up a bit. 

I became so obsessed with these that I have actually had people send them to me from the U.S. to Australia. I can remember one instance of my likely befuddled aunt and uncle having done it, at least. Good sports they were. 

Not everyone shares my enthusiasm. In fact, when I convinced two friends to try them on a trip to Las Vegas in the year or two before I left, they reserved language related to cleaning products in their descriptions of the experience of grimacing through a bite or two.

What can I say, not everyone has a taste for licorice.

And that's all I have to say about licorice for today -- and all I'm going to say about Licorice Pizza, so close to revealing all in my 2021 rankings.

The Hall sisters and their Netflix directorial debut novella adaptations

You can find coincidences wherever you want in the cinematic landscape -- my blog documents as many of them as I myself can find -- but I thought this one was pretty funny even by those standards.

In listening to my year-end movie podcasts, I've heard a lot of praise for two directorial debuts by actresses. I saw Passing about three weeks ago, and The Lost Daughter Tuesday night.

They are the debuts of Rebecca Hall and Maggie Gyllenhaal, respectively, and though they are obviously not sisters, the similarities between their last names did not go unnoticed by me.

That's not the end of the similarities though. 

Let's list them all, even the ones we have already alluded to:

Both are actresses.

Both are making their feature directorial debut.

Both are also the writer of the film they're directing.

Both also adapted the script from a previously existing work.

In both instances, that previously existing work was a novella.

In both novellas, mothers struggle with the terrible burden and sacrifices of motherhood. 

Both adaptations were distributed by, and can be streamed on, Netflix.

And here's a funny inversion:

Hall was born in England but her movie is about Americans. Gyllenhaal was born in America but her film is about the British. (Well, the lead is British, though the film features Americans, Greek, Irish, and all sorts of others who find themselves on holiday in Greece.)

I had hoped the two actresses turned directors were born in the same year, but alas, Gyllenhaal has got five years on Hall.

The other thing the two films have in common is that they are good. Really good. I've read Nella Larsen's Passing so I can attest to the success of Hall's adaptation of that material. I haven't read Elena Ferrante's The Lost Daughter, so I can only attest to the film being successful in its own right.

A little bit bothered by the term "novella" -- it suggests something slight -- I googled to confirm that both works of literature are actually described correctly as such. It looks like the term is used a little less frequently than "novel," which is good, as I prefer the heartier "novel" in most cases -- length be damned.

For the purposes of this coincidence, though, I'm going with "novella."

I mean, the coincidentier the better. 

"Children, what do you know about Avengers: Endgame?"

My plan to watch the first two Marvel Spider-Man movies with my kids before taking them to No Way Home on Saturday -- thereby fitting in a crucial end-of-year screening while also getting credit for a family activity -- hit an unanticipated snag. 

All was going fine until mid-way through our first viewing, 2017's Spider-Man: Homecoming, on Sunday afternoon. The kids were enjoying it, laughing in the right spots, providing the sort of commentary about the action that indicates full engagement.

Then I realized that our viewing of the Marvel movies out of sequence would finally have its first negative repercussions when we got to the next movie.

Spider-Man: Far From Home was the first movie released after Avengers: Endgame in 2019, the official beginning of the MCU's Phase Four. Where spoilers had never been a problem previously, they would immediately become so at this juncture. 

And though I'm sure you've seen Avengers: Endgame, now would be the correct time to issue a SPOILER ALERT.

Until now, the only things that could be "spoiled" from earlier Marvel movies were various plot-based twists and turns in the serpentine narrative, which is now 27 movies in length, and was already 21 at the time Endgame was released. Because these are superhero movies, the hero generally survives, leaving only weird references to Sokovia and the like as unexperienced events that could throw my kids for a loop, but only momentarily as they would just forget them and move on.

The death of Tony Stark, however, changed all that.

And while I heard my kids laughing and providing commentary, my mind raced ahead to how I was going to deal with the fact that they didn't know this had happened. It was like my worries of The Empire Strikes Back being prematurely spoiled all over again.

Watching the Avengers movies before Saturday was out of the question, even if I were inclined to do so. Even just watching Endgame was out of the question, as I would never dream of depriving someone of at least Infinity War as part one of the two-part story. I would also never dream of watching a three-hour movie with my kids, especially not this week. Then there's the fact that Infinity War contains what I consider the most shocking and potentially traumatizing moment in the entire MCU, the strangulation death of _____ by Thanos at the beginning. (I didn't give a spoiler warning for Infinity War, so I'll just leave out the name of that character.) It's that exact moment that caused me to wade into MCU viewings with my kids only very gingerly. It might be even more traumatizing considering that we only recently watched and quite enjoyed a show devoted entirely to this character. (Oops, so much for being vague.)

But I didn't want to abandon these viewings either. I need to get in Spider-Man: No Way Home on before I close off my 2021 rankings. With the hype it has received, not seeing it in time to rank it is just not an option. 

I thought of just skipping Spider-Man: Far From Home, which is like a non-stop Tony Stark memorial from start to finish. (Or from Stark to finish, you could say.) At least the kids would have one Tom Holland Spider-Man movie before seeing the newest one. But as I had already promised them both movies, I couldn't really renege now. Nor, as a proud film enthusiast and curator, did I consider it responsible to show them the third in a trilogy without showing them the second.

So I decided to put the issue to them and see what they wanted to do about it.

Tuesday afternoon I asked the older one, who is 11, the question you see in the title of this post. He was helping me put a shade cover on our new trampoline at the time.

"Something about Thanos gathering infinity stones to wipe out half the population."

"That's Avengers: Infinity War," I explained. "What do you know about Endgame?"

"Then nothing I guess," was the response.

The playground chatter that had given him the details of Thanos' master plan had not produced the end result from the second movie. I guess a bejeweled glove is more fascinating to the playground crowd than the death of Iron Man.

So I asked him what he thought of the fact that there would be spoilers from Endgame in the next Spider-Man movie. When he asked what kind of spoiler, I said it had to do with characters dying.

"No, I want to avoid that," he said.

Damn.

I punted for now and returned my focus to attaching the trampoline roof.

Because I had deemed Tuesday the best time to watch Far From Home before Saturday, and around 5:30 the best time to schedule the watch, I had to return to the topic later on, this time involving his brother.

I said we could either watch it and have the spoiler occur, or we could skip this movie and just go straight to third -- which a friend had told me did not include very much, if any, talk of Stark's death, if he remembered correctly.

The older one wanted to skip, the younger seemed horrified by that idea.

We settled on the compromise that I and my eight-year-old would watch Far From Home, and my 11-year-old would skip it. But almost immediately, he decided that if we were going to watch the movie he would just watch it as well.

As it turned out, I almost didn't need to worry.

One of the very first things that happens in the movie -- after the cold open featuring Michael Keaton's Vulture -- is a tribute on Peter Parker's high school news program to the fallen Avengers. Not just Stark, but also Captain America, Black Widow and Vision. I sat there their cringing at the enormity of the information being dumped on them. (After all, we'd watched Vision in Wandavision as well.)

You know what? Went right over their heads. 

Huh? 

Kids are funny sometimes.

I have to wonder if they didn't process it because they thought they knew how movies worked, and there was no way any of these characters could be dead. (Is Steve Rogers dead or is he just really, really old?) 

When I was able to exhale, I ventured a pause to make sure they understood what The Blip was and how it worked, how some characters were gone for five years and then came back.

"Don't spoil it!" the 11-year-old said. "Wait is that the spoiler?"

I hit play again without confirming or denying.

It went on this way, becoming more comical with each oblique reference to Tony's death. And by "oblique" I don't mean the references were indirect to any normal adult. My children apparently needed someone to say "Tony Stark is dead" for them to actually get that this happened.

Phrasing very close to that, which could not be mistaken for anything else, finally occurred during the "nightmare" that Mysterio creates for Spider-Man, one of several illusions Mysterio creates whose logistics are basically impossible to understand. At this point it took the eight-year-old to finally ask the question:

"Wait, did Tony Stark die?"

By way of confirmation, I put my hand on his back.

The revelation didn't derail anything. The laughter and the commentary continued. The kids loved the movie -- one or both of them called it their favorite of all time, which is something they say after basically every movie they see. (Most recently: Ghostbusters: Afterlife.) I myself liked the movie a lot better than I had the first time. I still find the Mysterio stuff kind of weak, but anything related to the high school students is gold, and I like Zendaya a lot more these days than I ever used to.

Some concern for Tony did finally arrive during the closing credits, at which point, the 11-year-old asked if Tony had come back to life yet in the ensuing Marvel movies. Maybe they get how these movies work after all.

"Not so far," I said, helpfully leaving the door open for his eventual resuscitation, if any emotional comfort was needed in that moment, if there had been any tainting of another recent first-time viewing -- the original Iron Man.

It doesn't seem that there was. They were screaming and bouncing on the trampoline a few minutes later.

"Not so far," my response to the prospect of Tony returning, was not a lie. I get how these movies work too. You telling me we're never going to see Iron Man in a movie again? Of course we are. He just won't be played by Robert Downey Jr. (Or maybe he even will be. Never rule anything out. The aforementioned Michael Keaton is playing Batman again, isn't he?)

So a tricky scenario tackled in the best way it could have been tackled: head on.

And at least now they'll have the context for all the ways I imagine their noodle is going to be fried in Spider-Man: No Way Home. I won't be able to pause this one to explain anything that's happening, including the Easter Eggs for the five live action Spider-Man movies that they haven't seen. 

My wife, who was expecting to be busy during that block of time, may actually join us for the viewing. She probably hasn't seen a Spider-Man movie since the Tobey Maguire original. Let's hope her adult brain can just go with it in the moment. 

Putting my rupees where my mouth is in 2022

It seems strange to consider the influence a little 2003 comedy called The Guru had on me. 

Daisy von Scherler Meyer's film was forgotten immediately by most people who saw it, even those who liked it, which was not everybody. Me, I adored it, bought it for my own collection, and have watched it about four times in total.

Not to be confused with the Mike Myers bomb The Love Guru, The Guru is about a young Indian man (Jimi Mistry) who comes to New York with the hopes of becoming a star, having loved American movies like Grease from when he was a kid. He ends up falling for a porn actress (Heather Graham) and becoming a fraud guru to rich Upper West Siders.

Doesn't sound like a winner? Oh but this description doesn't begin to quantify this film's sweetness and heart. 

It also features a memorable Bollywood dance number, in which Graham is one of the dancers. It arrives and delivers right near the emotional highpoint of the film. 

This dance number was apparently enough for me to think of myself as a Bollywood fan.

Crazy, right? Maybe it just planted a seed. Because any time I saw a snippet of Bollywood in some other movie -- such as, for example, Gurdiner Chadha's Bride & Prejudice -- I was reminded of my love for Bollywood movies.

The thing is, I don't believe I have actually seen a single proper Bollywood movie from start to finish.

I should clarify that. I'm sure I have seen films that were produced in Bollywood, because all sorts of Indian films fit that description, just as all sorts of American films can be said to originate in Hollywood (even if most of the studio lots are in Burbank or Culver City or somewhere adjacent to Hollywood). 

But Bollywood films the way we think of them? With colorful costumes and singing and dancing and huge quantities of contagious joy?

Not a one, as far as I know.

Well, that's going to change in 2022.

Allow me to introduce you to Audient Bollywood, my 2022 monthly viewing series in which I acquaint myself with the Bollywood greats.

This is by far the least I've known about one of my monthly viewing series going into it. As I type this, I don't know a single title that I am going to watch this year.

My initial prep work will be to cross-reference a number of internet lists of Bollywood classics, to see which titles appear in more than one of them. I assume this will produce a good working list of titles on Letterboxd, from which I can draw depending on my mood or their availability. I have to assume some will be available on streaming services I already subscribe to, and others through rental. But really, at this point I just don't know. It's a wee bit scary but mostly exhilarating. 

I also hope to get a good representation of time periods, as is probably obvious when you're talking about working from a list of classics. Though I don't think I'll be organized enough to go in chronological order or anything like that.

Will all the movies have to involve song and dance and costumes? Not necessarily. In fact, I'm sure my appreciation of what constitutes a consummate Bollywood film will expand as I go along. That's another benefit of not having a working list of movies at the start. It allows me to make the series up as I go, not have a rigid plan from which I must deviate. 

The goal?

Not only just to see 12 Bollywood films, of course. The goal will be to see if I want to become a guy who seeks out Bollywood films for his own random viewing pleasure, even when they are not part of a viewing series.

And if not, well, at least I will have gotten a good taste of what Bollywood is all about.

Speaking of tastes ... this would be a great opportunity for a monthly Indian feast, maybe even one I play a role in cooking as the year goes on. In moving to this house, we've left behind a truly great Indian restaurant, and are doubtful we can find one to fill its shoes here. Maybe that's where our own cooking comes in. Hey, I've always said I want to expand outward from the seven dishes I make.

Anyway, I expect 2022 to be filled with spices and curries, both on screen and off. I hope you will join me as I queue up my first title, which is completely and totally TBD, later this month.

The scary of the 151st

I saw my 151st movie released in 2021 last night, and I've still got two more weeks to watch movies before I release my 2021 rankings.

Record achieved. 

(The Scary of Sixty-First only tied the record, actually, but I couldn't resist the tie-in between the movie title and the accomplishment.)

People like breaking personal records, usually. It's the main reason we play Candy Crush and other similar games on our phones. It's the main reason I'm still playing a little game that's a variation on Tetris which came as an Easter Egg within the flash animation advent calendar I got for my kids this year. I'm obsessed with this game and I'll still be playing it in April, I imagine, as long as the advent calendar app hasn't succumbed to a pre-programmed obsolescence by that point.

I don't like breaking this record though. It suggests bad things.

I already explored the reasons why I might smash my personal viewing record this year in my year-end post, and I'm okay with the logic behind them. The record will fall, significantly, even though I don't feel as though I made a particular effort to accumulate new viewings in 2021. It felt like business as usual, even less so.

One thing I didn't touch on was that not only did a bunch of movies still come out in the theater -- when theaters were open in Australia, that is -- but movies are becoming even more of a competitive landscape among streaming services. Sure, every streaming service can have original TV shows -- but original movies? That's some sort of absolute proof of your prestige, isn't it?

Not all my viewings were strictly of my own choosing, either. I had to keep a review website going almost single-handedly in 2021. Had to keep feeding the beast, even when it involved watching movies I might have skipped in other years. 

So there are reasons. But I still don't like it.

It's times like this that we are confronted with how we are spending our lives.

I don't normally have occasion to doubt the choice I'm making. I have hobbies. I read. I run, in addition to playing a handful of sports. I listen to podcasts and I still make mixes of my favorite new music.

But I also watch an untold number of movies. That's a lot of our finite hours on this planet.

Could I be reading more? Undoubtedly. I'm still working on finishing Dune, which I started in October. 

Could I be doing more hobbies? Undoubtedly. It's been months since my wife and I did our last puzzle.

Could I be running more? It would be impossible to be running less. I've been on a break for a number of months, due to a conscious decision not to injure myself prior to our move. (Or that's what I've told myself, anyway.)

You get the idea.

I ultimately do consider my life to be in good balance. Don't forget, I also have kids, which means I do things with them, and when I'm done with them for the night, it can be the best way to unwind to watch a movie rather than something more strenuous.

But it's not just myself I have to convince. When I release my rankings on January 17th, or perhaps early in the hours of January 18th, I'll be telling the world that I watched 160-some movies in 2021 -- and those are just the movies that came out in 2021. If they already shook their head at my obsessiveness, they might need a chiropractor now.

Also I think the key to breaking records is not to break them by a lot. Even this record could be something satisfying to break, as long as I broke it narrowly. The cautionary tale of Lexulous practice mode applies here.

Before this Tetris-like game in the Jacquie Lawson Christmas in London advent calendar app, the last game I was this obsessed with was a timed ten-minute version of Lexulous, which is the Scrabble variant I play with friends. In this practice version, you play all the turns as your rack keeps getting filled with all the letters in the game. Your goal is to clear all the letters in ten minutes -- or whatever time limit you choose -- and see if your final score is a personal record. I become so obsessed with it that I recorded my scores in an Excel spreadsheet.

Then one day, after many repeated attempts to beat my previous record, I smashed it, getting a score that was so high, I had no reason to believe I could ever achieve it again. 

And so I stopped trying, then and there. Obsession over.

I don't think smashing my personal viewing record will end my obsession with movies. It'd take a lot more than that.

But it definitely will set a standard that I never want to beat again. 

After all, my life decisions are under scrutiny here.

It's a Dry heat

One of the adjustments of moving into our new house is to discover all the ways it captures and fails to dispel heat. It currently being summer, there's ample opportunity for that.

It's most noticeable upstairs, which has these large windows with no tree cover, allowing the upstairs to heat up good. That's a problem if you are my wife trying to take an afternoon nap to sleep off holiday indulgences. (Though she's being much better about holiday indulgences than I am.) We have both a fan and a portable cooling unit for that room, which help somewhat. (The garage, conversely, is quite cool, and I continue to nap there as I did in our old house.)

But it's not just parts of the house that are breathing hot air all over us. Our new oven is fan-forced, so every time we open it to retrieve some food, it feels like we've gotten too close to a sleeping dragon and only hope we don't wake him up.

This is my flimsy excuse for my first post of 2022, related to my second viewing of 2022, the Australian drama/murder mystery The Dry, which was released exactly a year to the day before I watched it. 

It takes place in a rural Victorian town that hasn't had rain in 324 days, where the main character (played by Eric Bana) returns for the funeral of a childhood friend. The dust and dryness are total, as even the lake where a different childhood friend drowned is now totally devoid of water.

One of the reasons this post is flimsy is that our situation does not actually resemble a drought-stricken regional town. We get relief from a cool ocean breeze, one that can be too strong for its own good when you get right up next to the water, and though it's now been 13 days in the house with no rain, that rain is expected this week.

I also kind of feel like my first post of 2022 should relate directly to New Year's, as it usually does, but there was no real cinematic connection for anything about New Year's Eve or New Year's Day this year, in and of themselves. We did see Ghostbusters: Afterlife with my son for his eighth birthday, which is January 1st, but other than being our first in the new local cinema, that viewing was unremarkable.

I also could have opened with a post honoring Betty White, but she wasn't really a movie actor, and besides, I don't really need to contribute my own thoughts to the outpouring on social media. It's a shame she didn't make it to 100 -- she missed the century mark by even fewer days than Prince Philip -- but I couldn't really get behind the common observation that this was the final proof of what a terrible year 2021 was. You can shake your fists at the sky over the death of a 99-year-old, but you may just be expending your energies in the wrong place.

So The Dry it is.

It's a solidly constructed film, especially for its first three-quarters before it gallops a bit too quickly toward its conclusion. I also enjoyed the really familiar setting of these small regional Victorian towns with their pokies halls that look more like converted rec centers than either a restaurant or a bar. I guess I've been to enough small regional Victorian towns to feel like a real Australian now, after eight years and four months in the country.

And after 178 posts in 2021, now I've got one in 2022. 

Happy New Year all.