Review #500

It seems like only five years, seven months and 30 days ago that I was writing this post, which I considered a landmark at the time, in which I notified you that I had reached the august heights of 100 reviews written for ReelGood -- and which remains a repository for all the reviews I had written before or have written since, updated every time a new one publishes. 

Five years, seven months and 30 days later, I have added another 400 to that total.

That's right, yesterday's review of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania -- which you can find here -- took me to half millennium's worth of reviews, a much more impressive benchmark.

Spoiler alert: I didn't really care for it.

Four hundred reviews in 2070 days means on average one every 5.175 days.

And during that time it has sometimes just felt like a perfunctory instance of feeding the beast. The beast is hungry. The beast demands more.

Up until very recently, I haven't examined the analytics for ReelGood, and even after doing so I don't really understand half of what they mean. So I don't really know if the beast is also an audience that demands new reviews at such regular intervals.

But I do have a sort of professional commitment to uphold, as I am a member of the Australian Film Critics Association based on a certain frequency of output that I've told them I have been making, which has mostly been true. 

I've got other writers for the site, but they are strictly volunteers who write or not at their pleasure. I mean, we're all volunteers in that nobody gets paid, but at least I do get to see movies for free, whereas they only see them for free when I send them to a screening. In any case, I'm not getting the volume from them so my own reviews must make up the substantial difference.

And most of the time I still like this. When I do finally sit down to write a review, I write it quickly and energetically. In extreme examples the writing process can take as little as 20 minutes, which is interesting because I don't actually plan out what I'm going to say before I start. I have a way to open the review in mind, and as I'm writing I pluck loose threads and impressions from my brain to fill out the rest. Of course, knowing that I'm going to synopsize the plot in about three paragraphs about two paragraphs in -- followed by another three to five paragraphs of substantive analysis -- means I can do this all quickly and efficiently in getting to a word count in the neighborhood of 1,000. Having written 500 of anything means you've got the process down pretty well.

And yet I sometimes wonder if reaching a milestone like this should be the occasion for introspection, for reconsidering what you're doing and whether it's all heading somewhere satisfying.

I'll be 50 in October, and I know I won't be writing reviews forever. But right now is a particular time of introspection for a handful of reasons:

1) There's some weird issue going on with trying to transfer the registration of my site to me. It has to do with the fact that I'm a new registrant but I use the same email address as the old registrant. I tried to get the registration transferred something like a year ago, and it obviously didn't work properly, and I made a couple calls to the company that hosts the domain and it was all getting very complicated. The fact that the registration hadn't properly changed hands seemed like it didn't matter for ages, and then for the past couple months they have been sending me a reminder email about every three days that action is required on it. With all else that's been going on in my life, I've been blowing it off and just hoping that one day I don't wake up and have no website.

2) The ReelGood Film Festival has been off for a year but is returning in April, or is it May? There's been some chatter about the fact that my site and this festival nowadays have very little to do with one another, and whether there wasn't some brand confusion resulting from this. I don't actually know where this discussion is going to go at the moment. Could be somewhere positive, could be somewhere not so positive.

3) I'm kind of just tired. It's become increasingly clear that reviewing the latest releases plays a significant role in what movies I watch, when, which may be a rather obvious statement. But it's always been clear -- as in, always since I started writing for ReelGood in 2014 -- that there are certain movies my wife might like to watch with me, only I've already watched them because I had to "feed the beast." In fact, it's very possible that part of the reason she has gravitated toward TV rather than movies is that she doesn't want to be forced to watch a movie when I need to see it, but she would ultimately like to watch it with me, but by then all the good movies are gone because I've already watched them.

So as recently as about 20 reviews ago I thought "What if I just review 20 more movies and then call it quits?" I don't know how seriously I was thinking it, but the thought did cross my mind.

There are two big reasons I don't:

1) If I am no longer writing reviews, I can no longer legitimately renew my membership with AFCA, which means I would go back to paying for all my movies like any other schlub. To be honest, I've gotten used to strolling into a movie theater and only having to pull out my wallet because that's where I keep my critics card.

2) If I stop being a reviewer for ReelGood, I may never review films again.

It's the last one that sends a blast of cold to the pit of my stomach. This thing that has defined me for more than 25 years -- at least in my own mind if not other people's minds -- could be ending, never to resume again.

I'm not ready.

And though I have not yet figured out what my 501st review will be, I did just watch the new Netflix movie Your Place or Mine last night -- also didn't care for that -- and if I put up a review on Monday, it would still be within the two-week window since its release, which is my typical guide for whether a movie is still fresh enough for a review.

There would be a certain beauty to stopping at 500, but certain beauties are overrated. When I wrote my last review for AllMovie after more than a decade of writing for them from 2000 to 2011, it was my 1218th -- not a round number at all. (A lot of that was backfilling their database with reviews of old movies that didn't yet have one, and the reviews were only about 300 words, so it doesn't make for a particularly useful comparison to my current run.)

Of course, AllMovie was the one that told me they could no longer use me when they stopped using freelancers and brought all their reviews in house.

I'd have the chance to go out on my own terms with ReelGood, if I wanted to, and the way things are structured right now, I'm my own boss so nobody can tell me to get lost. There are other potential pressures that could "force" me out, but nothing quite like serving at the pleasure of a higher power that decides whether or not to pay me or publish me. I don't get paid at all so that makes those sorts of factors pretty much moot.

But I guess I'm not ready to go out yet. I'm not even 50. Don't put this film critic out to pasture when he can still write quickly and energetically and tell you that the latest Ant-Man movie isn't very good because the quantum realm is a shitty digital environment that fails to make use of the series' tendency to show small things and big things in opposition to each other.

They'll still be 30 more Marvel movies to review before they have to probably pull the plug on the MCU, and I'd like to be here to tell you whether you should see them or not. 

Audient Classics: Roman Holiday

This is the second in my 2023 monthly series watching classic movies I loved but have seen only once.

I chose Roman Holiday for February in conjunction with Valentine's Day, but I should have questioned the wisdom of that when it was 10 o'clock on Tuesday night and I hadn't yet started it.

My first port of call was to have my wife watch it with me -- it being the holiday that celebrates romance and all -- but it's hard to pin her down to watch any movies these days, let alone a 70-year-old one that she's probably already seen more than once. (I've only seen it once, hence its inclusion in this series.)

When she didn't want to, I was thinking of watching it Wednesday, in conjunction with American Valentine's Day.

But then it turned out that we decided not to do anything for Valentine's Day at all. Our lives have been busier than we can handle lately, and her birthday is this weekend, so February 14th doesn't have much of a presence in our household even in a year when we're less busy. When we decided to treat it as a normal night rather than faking it, it was actually a huge relief.

But that meant that once we had had a cocktail and started our newest puzzle -- which I guess means we were, sort of, celebrating it -- I did have time to watch the movie, after we were all cocktailed and puzzled out.

Whether I should have started a nearly two-hour movie after 10 p.m., when I'd already had cocktails, if I wanted to fully appreciate it, is another matter. Welcome to my last week of movie decisions.

Although I was never bored, I did find the movie a bit slow, as in, it seemed like relatively little was happening to fill a whole two hours. It takes nearly the whole first hour for Gregory Peck's Joe Bradley and Audrey Hepburn's Princess Anne to even finish up their first night together.

Now, that makes a certain sense as the whole movie covers only about 48 hours in these characters' lives. And I didn't make this observation out of boredom, as suggested previously. I was just amazed that William Wyler's film had been entertaining me relatively well on so relatively little for so relatively long.

I'm not sure if any movie can keep me from falling asleep on my couch nowadays, as lately I'm too tired to watch basically any movie uninterrupted. So yes, I did fall asleep a couple times (always and forever pausing when I do this) and didn't finish until 1 a.m.

Basically I was very charmed by the movie, but I didn't swoon for it like I did the first time. You wouldn't recall this, I'm sure, but I included it as one of five movies I would watch on a blimp in this post, based on a silly ad they were playing at MIFF, and I chose it specifically for its swoony romantic qualities. Those registered this time but they didn't overwhelm me or anything.

I was, as I always am, reminded of how much I like Peck as a romantic lead, and how darling Aubrey Hepburn was in the right role. (Unfortunately, the role that is probably her most iconic, Holly Golightly, also appears in a movie remembered for its awfully racist impersonation of a Japanese man by Mickey Rooney.) There's a lightness to this movie, even at the times it feels slow, and Eddie Albert makes the perfect third wheel for part of their adventures, playing the cameraman who secretly snaps all the shots of Princess Anne on her "day off."

Shots that he turns over to her at the end, unpublished. The ending of Roman Holiday certainly makes use of conventional Hollywood narrative arcs, as Joe Bradley stops short of his betrayal of Anne, reforming himself before it's too late in a fairly standard case of character redemption. But Dalton Trumbo's script doesn't insult our intelligence by having Anne drop everything and run off with a reporter who has been interacting with her on false pretenses. They had a lovely adventure together but they both have real lives to return to, and hers is just a little bit sad, since we know its many routines and proprieties are suffocating to her. We hope, of course, that a taste of freedom might mean she can learn how to incorporate similar adventures into her future, so that her whole life feels a bit less stultifying. And I suppose if you are a true romantic, you might believe that even she and Joe may find each other again, outside of the bright heat of the spotlight.

The sort of romantic who comes out on Valentine's Day, and watches a romantic movie on February 14th even if it kills him.

Bruce Willis already wasn't usable in Glass

Spoilers for Split and Glass.

I watched the first two movies of my informal M. Night Shyamalan weekend, The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable, to examine Shyamalan's filmmaking choices in two of his most highly regarded films.

I ended up thinking about a different one of his choices in my Sunday night film, Glass -- the choice to use Bruce Willis. And yes, my own choice of the word "use" has two meanings there. 

Glass was the only post-Sixth Sense Shyamalan movie I hadn't seen, and by seeing it now instead of 2019, I have an entirely different perspective on it than its initial viewers would have had.

It was less than a year ago that we learned that Willis has aphasia, a language disorder that affects people's ability to speak, read, listen and write -- which also provided a sad explanation for the Willis we were getting in a dozen cheap-o genre movies a year. This news was immediately followed by concerns that an obviously compromised Willis had been exploited by filmmakers eager to cash in on his name, though I think it's more complicated than that as it was revealed that Willis himself also wanted to keep earning money while he still could, to provide for those who depended on him.

Was M. Night Shyamalan one of those filmmakers?

Given Willis' usage in Glass, you'd have to think so.

I wasn't counting, but I don't think Willis' David Dunn has more than ten lines of dialogue in the whole movie. Given that his was the character who launched the whole eventual surprise trilogy that started with Unbreakable and includes Split as a middle film, you'd really expect him to factor in to the final movie more than he does. I'm only exaggerating a little bit when I say he almost has more screen time in his cameo at the end of Split than he does here.

You don't do that with a star of Willis' caliber unless you know something is wrong. And it seems Shyamalan had to have known. 

Now, this is not me accusing Shyamalan of anything, except possibly entering into an agreement with his friend Bruce to appear in the movie even though he couldn't remember more dialogue than about seven words in a row. I do think it's interesting to have this perspective on Glass, though, because it reveals a lot about what Willis was dealing with even back then.

For example -- and here comes the spoiler I warned you about -- his death scene. In fact, in the film's climax, all three of the characters you see on the poster above die within about a minute of each other outside the institution where they were being held for scientific study and/or simple detention. 

Pointedly, James McAvoy's Horde (is that the right character name?) and Samuel L. Jackson's Mr. Glass both get sentimental, old school Hollywood death scenes, where they are closely attended by a loved one and they speak poignant words, through tears, that put a bow on their characters as they are expiring.

David Dunn? He gets unceremoniously drowned in a small puddle in a pothole.

In addition to that being a rather ridiculous way to kill a character that the audience presumably loves, it points up the limitations that Shyamlan may have felt he was dealing with. He may not have felt it was possible for Willis to deliver anything approaching a dramatic death speech.

Then again, when you drown, you don't get to give a death speech. So it worked out that the manner of his death did not require a speech, which I suppose was always going to be the manner of his death since it was revealed that water is David Dunn's weakness.

But really, Willis is barely in this film otherwise. There are a couple fight scenes but it is obviously someone else doing the fighting, another detail made logistically easier by the fact that Dunn wears a black rain slicker that shrouds his face. Though maybe a fight scene was something Willis would have been capable of doing.

I started this long movie too late, after two beers, so I wouldn't say I had the most uninterrupted viewing of Glass. But I could swear there was a good half hour in there when Willis doesn't appear on screen at all, which is strange indeed -- unless you know what was happening with him.

Again there is a potential justification for this. It's certainly arguable that Willis is the least essential of the three characters, at least as far as this particular film is concerned. It's an immediate continuation of the story of the Horde, who we just spent an entire film with two years earlier. But it's also named after its other main character. David Dunn -- who I guess is called the Overseer (who knew?) -- is a distant third in terms of importance, especially as Glass is executed.

Overall, with my maybe eight (!) short naps during the movie and finishing at 1:42 a.m., I'm probably not the most qualified person to tell you how good Glass was or was not. But I did find that it was really too long for the little amount that happens in the story, and that it didn't end up in what I considered a satisfying place.

But at least with all three characters dead, Shyamalan won't be tempted to make a fourth movie directly in this universe ... another element related to this film that Willis' condition has rendered fairly convenient.

Okay, back to non-Shyamalan movies. 

Excessively explanatory from the start

In my review for Knock at the Cabin I said that "Shyamalan characters have become excessive explainers recently."

It would appear that "recently" was the wrong adverb to use there, as was the verb "become."

I did keep my informal and unpremeditated M. Night Shyamalan weekend going last night by rewatching Unbreakable for the first time since I saw it in the theater in 2000, and I couldn't help notice about how Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson) is constantly spelling out every single one of his thoughts on a) who he is, b) who Bruce Willis' David Dunn is, and c) what their relationship might be to one another.

The thing I found particularly funny about this is that in another bout of excessive explanation of their respective roles vis-a-vis comic book characters, Elijah tells us -- or is it his mother? -- how there are two sorts of villains, the one who can physically fight the hero and the one who can mentally fight him. Elijah would obviously not be a case of the former given his brittle bone density, but I'm not sure how he could even be a case of the latter given that he's always telling David exactly what he thinks and rarely committing anything that feels like a subterfuge emanating from superior intellect. 

And I didn't realize until this viewing that this movie, which I'd always assumed didn't have a twist, does sort of have one when it reveals that Elijah Price was responsible for all sorts of different mass murder events in trying to find the man who was his opposite. Maybe it didn't register as a twist at the time because it seemed so dumb to me. And dumb is, again, not what Elijah Price is supposed to be.

Okay so Price (I guess I prefer a last name for a villain?) has decided that there must be someone out there who is his opposite, and he needs to find him. Fine. But I don't get why he a) has this certainty, and b) thinks that by crashing random planes and derailing random trains he will uncover this person in any reasonably short amount of time. First off, this unknown person needs to be living somewhere within his own sphere of easy access or influence, as in either the greater Philadelphia area or somewhere close by that a physically limited person can reach fairly easily. Secondly, Price has to believe that he'll be lucky enough to choose just the right plane to crash or just the right train to derail that will happen to be carrying this person at that time. The odds against this are astronomical, of course -- unless the future Mr. Glass believes that people like David Dunn are actually prevalent enough in society that if he doesn't uncover one, he'll uncover another.

The whole thing just doesn't make a lot of sense and it indicates to me that Shyamlan was in decline a lot earlier than we might have originally thought.

I do think there are some cool moments and camera tricks in Unbreakable, but I was reminded why I didn't glom onto this film at the time it came out, which is that there isn't a lot there. The plot is notably slack and there is indeed way too much talk of comic books and superheroes. 

In fact I certainly had a false memory that this movie was a lot more subtle than it is. I had a memory that only finally by the end of the movie, when he tracks the janitor to the house where he's keeping two children hostage (having already killed their parents), do we even get the idea that this is a superhero origin movie. In fact, the movie has an opening text that thinks it's really profound, about comic books and how many gets sold in each year (um, who cares about that?). This movie is way more on the nose than I originally remembered. 

Also, I found it a bit strange that the movie starts out being about David Dunn's imperviousness to illness and physical damage -- it's all there in the title -- but then ultimately shifts to the fact that he has extra sensory perception that helps him figure out who in the general public is committing crimes just by touching them. For one, I thought about how that same thing was already done much better in the Stephen King novel The Dead Zone and its excellent movie adaptation starring Christopher Walken. But I was also critical of how it needlessly moves off of the core thing about David that makes him interesting, which is his heretofore undiagnosed physical attributes. Sure, no superhero usually only has one thing about them that makes them distinctive, but having both an unusual physical gift and an unusual mental gift seems to be going a bit too far, and confusing the themes Shyamalan labors to unveil to us through copious amounts of thuddingly expository dialogue.

Lastly, why did both the parents of the kids David saves have to die? Sure it's good that the kids didn't also die, but it makes it a pretty downbeat act of heroism. I'd have thought that only the father dying -- which was necessary since it helped identify this janitor for him -- would have been enough. 

Both times I've watched Unbreakable I've watched it too late at night for its slow and deliberate pacing. I still retain the memory of struggling with it in the theater that night in late 2000. And last night I also did have to take a nap during the movie, though that's increasingly common these days with any movie that I start watching after 10 p.m.

But I don't think a third viewing of Unbreakable one day in the middle of the afternoon after a ten-hour night's sleep will make me appreciate it significantly more. I still consider it one of Shyamalan's best three films -- those being the first three that most of us saw, excluding the first two he made -- but that's more an indication of just how weak the rest of his output has really been. 

I haven't decided if I am concluding this weekend with a third movie tonight. If I do, it'll probably be either the third of those three best films -- Signs, which has always been my second favorite of his after The Sixth Sense, and which I have already seen multiple times -- or it will be picking up after Unbreakable with Glass, which I have not yet seen. I know Split fits into that chronology as well, but I don't feel the need to revisit that one before Glass, though I did like it. 

I guess I was disenchanted enough with Unbreakable that I now have to consider if I might like something like The Visit or the aforementioned Split -- or even something like The Village, which is when I thought Shyamalan really turned the corner toward becoming a hack -- better than it. But I may not put that question to the test, because I really have no intention of going down some Shyamalan rabbit hole at the exclusion of all the other projects I've already started in 2023. 

The sweet relief of sudden belief

It's rather incredible that M. Night Shyamlan made one of the best horror movies of the 1990s -- some might argue of all time -- and that the thing many of us cherish about it most is a climactic scene that makes us cry.

On Friday night I watched The Sixth Sense for the first time since before 2006 -- that's how far back my written record of rewatches goes, in any case. I want to say it was probably even five years before that, remembering a specific scenario where I watched it shortly after my arrival in Los Angeles in 2001, which may have been my last viewing. 

I didn't watch it because I've just watched (and reviewed) Knock at the Cabin, or at least not directly because of that. There have been about 10 other Shyamalan movies I've seen since my last Sixth Sense viewing, and none of them prompted a rewatch. I did name-check it in my Knock review, but that wasn't the reason either. 

The actual impetus for the viewing was a segment they did on Filmspotting in conjunction with their review of Knock at the Cabin, which was "top five M. Night Shyamalan moments." Both hosts approached their individual top fives in very similar ways, each granting the fifth and fourth spot to an outlier moment from one of Shyamalan's "lesser" films, each selecting a moment from Unbreakable or Signs for their third and second spots ... and both choosing the same scene from The Sixth Sense as their joint #1.

The moment when Bruce Willis learns he's a ghost? No. The moment when Mischa Barton suddenly comes into view in Haley Joel's sheet fort and is already vomiting up some kind of gray liquid the first time we see her? No, that's just a personal favorite of mine. And it's not even the "I see dead people" scene.

Of course I am leading up to talking about the moment in the car between Cole -- let's use character names rather than actor names -- and his mother, Lynn (Toni Collette), in their joint last scene on screen. 

As you will remember, traffic is stopped because there's been a fatal collision between a car and a bicyclist about six cars ahead of Lynn's. Cole knows it's fatal because he can see all the blood coming from the head of the cyclist as she stands outside his window ... and of course because otherwise she wouldn't be standing there at all.

I should pause here to acknowledge Shyamalan's brilliant mixing of tones. Even though I think we know this scene is headed for a moment of reconciliation between Cole and Lynn -- enough of the movie has gone by that we imagine it has to be wrapping up, and he's already said goodbye to Willis' Malcolm Crowe -- we still get a chill from the way Shyamalan suddenly shows us the ghost of the bicyclist outside the car. But we know that this ghost is different, because Cole has looked at her and then looked away. Pointedly, he's not looking at her when we see her.

Instead he's looking at his mother, finally having decided to reveal his big secret to her. 

At first she is skeptical, as you would be. When Cole says that Grandma comes to visit him sometimes, her eyes sharpen and she says "Cole that is very wrong. You know Grandma is gone." As in, "Whatever direction you want to stage these delusions of yours, Cole, leave my mother out of it. That's crossing a line."

But then of course Cole does the thing that characters always do in movies where they offer inarguable proof of what they're saying, which is that he provides information he could only know if what he were saying was true. He describes both the fight Lynn had with her mother before her dance performance when she was young, and a question she asked her mother at her mother's grave.

Of course, the emotional brilliance of this moment is that Cole's grandma didn't tell him what her question was. That's something private between mother and daughter, which is Lynn's to reveal if she wants to. It also allows Collette to perform the emotional peak of the scene that always gets the waterworks going, when she repeats to Cole what her question was:

"Do I make her proud."

I'm getting a little verklempt. Talk amongst yourselves.

The thing that's so great about this moment is that it is accomplishing two things. I'll start with the most obvious:

1) Lynn is getting a catharsis with her mother that she desperately needed. Although it is certainly implied that they had a good relationship, as Cole knew her well and Lynn misses her desperately, obviously there was something unresolved about that relationship for Lynn, as there likely is any time a parent is lost. So a grief at her mother's passing is allowed to pour out at that moment, but this is a different, more nourishing brand of grief, because it allows Lynn to let herself off the hook for whatever shortcomings she imagined she had as a daughter.

But I think equally crucially:

2) It is the sweet relief of realizing her son is not crazy, and that what he is saying has to be true. All this time she has been trying to figure out a way to cure her son of whatever ails him -- and at this point we still think that includes hiring Malcolm as a child psychologist. Now she realizes both that it may not be curable but that it may be okay, since Cole has seemed to learn how to incorporate the wild, sometimes destructive desires of these ghosts into something positive, or at least something he can handle. Her son is going to be okay. 

And then even a third thing:

3) It is indisputable proof that there is some sort of afterlife, and death is not the final stop on our journey.

Any one of these things happening would be enough to overwhelm someone. All three at once? That's something else. 

And Collette gives a performance equal to that moment, starting to first tear up as the realization is hitting her, then climaxing in one of the most satisfying demonstrations of the emotional impact of a moment that I've ever seen on film. These aren't just the tears an actress can train herself to produce. This is the full body experience of being suddenly overwhelmed, including pauses in her speech to summon up the courage to speak a word that's pregnant with significance, even momentary displays of embarrassment about having this sort of reaction. 

I'm obviously not the first person to diagram the effectiveness of Lynn and Cole's final moment -- in fact, what I've written here is probably rather banal to someone who has done a lot of reading and thinking about The Sixth Sense.

But it is the first time I've written about it myself -- that I recall, anyway -- and whether others got there first hardly matters. The brilliance about cinema is that when you are in that moment and having it yourself, you feel like the first person to have that moment -- even if it's a moment you had for the first time more than 23 years earlier.

A few isolated other thoughts about The Sixth Sense:

1) As we are always inclined to do on a second (or third, or fourth) viewing of The Sixth Sense, you watch to make sure that Shyamalan did indeed play by his own rules, never showing anyone interacting with Malcolm other than Cole (and his wife in the opening scene before he dies). The only moment that doesn't fully satisfy me is the quick flick of the eyes in Malcolm's direction that Lynn gives when Malcolm first comes to their house. Since they are sitting across from each other when Cole arrives home, you feel like this is an instance of cheating by Shyamalan -- until you realize that they don't actually interact in that moment, though Malcolm may imagine they are interacting. As she's leaving Cole alone with Malcolm -- or just alone, which is what she would have perceived -- she does quickly look in Malcolm's direction as she's leaving the room.

While this is not proof of anything definitive, I do wonder whether it was a shrewd piece of directing by Shyamalan, or just an accident, or just Collette's instincts as an actress to give another actor in the scene a glancing look as she leaves the room. I don't think it could be option 2 or option 3 so I am going with the fact that it was intentional by Shyamalan, and that it may indicate that Cole's affliction is in some way inherited. She may feel Malcolm's presence in the room even if she can't see it, enough just to make her look quickly as she leaves the room, but not enough to even slow her pace.

2) The scene where Lynn confronts Cole over the butterfly pendant strikes me as interesting, because Cole could have made it so much easier on his mother and himself if he just admitted to moving it -- even if he did not. Instead, he gives her the honest truth, that he didn't move it, without saying who did. This isn't his unfailing honesty toward his mother rearing its head. In the earlier scene where all the kitchen cabinets and drawers were suddenly open moments after Lynn left the room, he willingly engages in the fabrication that he was looking for Pop Tarts. But I think this just shows that his journey is progressing toward coming clean to her. He can no longer engage in simple half-lies as he becomes more and more desperate to reveal the truth of what's happening to him. Osment expresses this wonderfully in his intense look of fear and indecision as to how he should handle this moment.  

3) I caught myself wondering, since Shyamalan has notably revisited Unbreakable in his later films, if he ever considered making a delayed sequel to The Sixth Sense in which Haley Joel Osment plays an adult version of Cole who continues to commune with the dead, and what form that takes for him when he's in his 30s. Especially with the version of Shyamalan we are getting today, this movie would almost certainly be laughable, but I have to admit there is a small part of me that wonders whether it would have the chance to be profound in the same way the original was profound, since it involves the same character and actor. Maybe this is just me wishing that Osment could get meatier roles as a 34-year-old. I did like seeing him show up in The Kominsky Method, but let's just say he is fully a character actor and never gets anything really juicy.

4) Speaking of actors who couldn't capitalize fully on what they demonstrated here, I still can't believe Donnie Wahlberg didn't/couldn't parlay this chilling single-scene appearance into a better subsequent career. He appeared in four Saw movies (maybe that was his first mistake) and then a couple other bad movies that at least you've heard of (Annapolis, Dreamcatcher), but he hasn't acted in a movie since 2011, when he would have been only 41.

I may keep an informal Shyamalan weekend going tonight with only my second-ever viewing of Unbreakable, which will gear me toward finally seeing Glass -- the only Shyamalan movie since The Sixth Sense that I still haven't seen. (And though I'm certainly not watching Shyamalan this year as a viewing series -- I've got enough of those -- it does occur to me that it's probably a good idea to watch the two films before Sixth Sense that I haven't seen.) 

If I do watch Unbreakable, I'm sure I'll have something to say about it here tomorrow.

Hello ... MUBI Tuesdays

I know better than to start another new initiative in 2023. 

However, I couldn't resist the play on words in the title of this post.

With apologies to the Rolling Stones, Tuesdays are indeed a good day to go deep diving into MUBI, to see what weird and wonderful thing I might be able to uncover. You may recall, I previously considered Tuesday to be the ideal night to watch a new documentary every two weeks, an exercise I did for a full year ending last July. 

I eventually felt a bit imprisoned by the regularity of that commitment, breathing a sigh of relief on every alternate Tuesday and then feeling like I had to sit down and figure out which movie I was going to watch on the following one to meet my self-imposed commitment.

So I won't watch a MUBI movie every other Tuesday, or God forbid, every Tuesday. But I do think Tuesday is a good day to periodically sample my new subscription, with no commitment to write about it here. 

Since many of the movies on MUBI will not fit my description of relaxing weekend viewing, that pretty much takes out Thursday through Sunday, since I often do consider Thursday night to be weekend adjacent enough to watch something less taxing on my brain. (For example, last night I watched The Forever Purge.)

That leaves Monday through Wednesday for more challenging, cerebral material, and Monday I often still feel like I'm recovering a bit from the weekend. Tuesday and Wednesday both work for MUBI but then with Wednesday you don't get the Rolling Stones reference.

I started this past Tuesday night with a French movie from 2011 called The Red and the Black, or more easy to find on sites like IMDB, La Rouge et La Noir. It was the film of the day about a week ago. In fact I've also seen it as Red & Black. And it's so obscure that the image you see above was the only thing I could get in terms of a proper poster.

This, I tell you, was the full MUBI experience.

I'm currently reading a book where I never really got my bearings in the story and am now just looking at all the words until it's over. It's a 280-page book and I've been reading it since November. I should just stop. Instead, I have a hundred pages to go.

The Red and the Black was like that experience except writ small. Writ very small, as in only 74 minutes.

But what the hell was going on in this movie? I could not really tell you.

Here's what I can tell you:

French director Isabelle Prim presents a variety of images that appear to include documentary footage of a real French camera designer at several periods of his life, scenes of a hybrid cat and dinosaur being rendered by a 3D printer, and POV angles of two thieves trying to steal a camera. The language is not actually French. The two thieves -- never seen, but ultimately revealed as a mother and daughter -- speak a made-up language that is, fortunately, subtitled. There are also shapes on the screen in a kind of old school digital animation. 

I really don't know what happened in this movie but I did watch all 74 minutes.

And I can't say there wasn't an odd sort of hypnotizing quality to the experience. I did not hate watching it, not by any stretch. But I never from one moment to the next had a single idea what was going on. 

It really did show me what kind of doors have been opened to me now that I'm subscribed to MUBI.

I'll try to get something more coherent my next time around ... which will be on some upcoming Tuesday no doubt. 

Selling Brendan Fraser without showing Brendan Fraser

The marketing for The Whale has been a challenge, which is probably not unexpected.

When you're advertising, you usually want to cater to your reader's/viewer's most basic needs and desires. It's why they choose video stills from the trailer that are the most likely to show something vaguely erotic, even in a movie that is not sexy in the slightest. I wrote about that tendency here. 

I don't think there's probably a single image in The Whale that has the chance to get a heterosexual male all hot and bothered, even when taken totally out of context. But if you can't show anything sexy, at least try to show something that isn't sexy's exact opposite. At least that's the computation the marketing department for a studio -- or in this case, a movie theater chain -- would make.

I get why advertisers don't want to show a picture of Brendan Fraser's Charlie in this film. Charlie weighs about 600 pounds, and there's no angle that doesn't reveal that fact about him. Never mind that Darren Aronofsky's whole movie is designed to make us sympathize with Charlie, challenging our regrettable instincts toward fatphobia to show us the depths of this person's soul, rather than just the surface of this person's body. If the marketing department thinks a picture of Charlie's face -- which, you would agree, is the image you'd extract from the film if you wanted to truly demonstrate what it's about -- will inhibit ticket sales, they won't include it.

Which is why this still, in an advertisement for the movie playing at Hoyts, includes an image of ... Ty Simpkins.

Was Ty Simpkins considered the sexiest thing in The Whale? If you were going sheerly by normal advertising logic, you'd probably go with Sadie Sink, who is young and is generally considered to be conventionally attractive. She's also arguably the film's second most important character, though Charlie has dynamics with a couple characters that are central to the story depending on the angle from which you're analyzing it.

So on the one hand, I guess it's a win that they didn't just go with the most obvious approach of weaponizing the apparent sex appeal of Sadie Sink. On the other, Ty Simpkins? Least essential character in the film, I would argue, though of course all five characters we spend time with make the film exactly the emotional powerhouse it is.

The really troubling inconsistency here is that the ad's copy is specifically selling Brendan Fraser. It starts out with the words "The Brenaissance is upon us!" Which I think is a pretty lively way to market the movie. It rolls off the tongue better than "McConaissance," or however they spelled it when Matthew McConaughey stopped doing romantic comedies. 

But it creates quite a disconnect with the image we see. Yes Fraser undergoes quite the transformation in The Whale, but not even the best actor in the world can play 33 years younger without some sort of significant digital assistance. (Could they really be trying to convince readers this is Fraser? Certainly not.)

And I just don't think The Whale is really a bait-and-switch movie. The title itself is not going to attract anyone outside of marine biologists and Moby Dick enthusiasts, and certainly most people with any inkling to see it must know the premise of the movie. Or at least the sort of person at its center.

And it's not Ty Simpkins.

King Darren: Pi

This is the first in a 2023 bi-monthly series rewatching six of Darren Aronofsky's eight movies, to appreciate him in the year after he became the first director to score two of my year-end #1s.

Darren Aronofsky was pushing the limitations of the human body in the very first moments of his very first film.

The first thing we learn about Max Cohen (Sean Gullette) is that when he was six years old, he challenged his mother's claim that he would go blind if he stared at the sun. He didn't go blind, eventually recovering from a temporary loss of vision. However, he also started getting headaches that still plague him as an adult and have basically ruined his life. Whether he'd have developed the same obsession with mathematics -- or a Rain Man-like ability to multiply two large numbers together and provide an immediate answer -- without the sun staring incident or not, we don't or can't know, because Max did stare at the sun and he did almost go blind.

From his very first film, Aronofsky wanted his characters to challenge assumptions because that's what he planned to do himself. He also wanted them to look at things that made them uncomfortable, and for us as viewers to do the same. It was an assault on our flesh -- or more properly our corneas -- from the very start.

There are certainly scruffy elements that remind us that this was Aronofsky's first film, like the decision to shoot in black and white -- almost nobody makes a black and white first film anymore, though it was pretty common back then. A decade or two earlier, it was guys like Spike Lee and Jim Jarmusch debuting in black and white, and in the very same year, a director who came of age at the exact same time as Aronofsky -- Christopher Nolan -- also debuted with his black and white feature Following. I don't want to get sidetracked, but an extended side-by-side comparison of these otherwise dissimilar filmmakers is warranted at some point, especially since they had moments of potential crossover, as both were once associated with the reboot of Batman.

Scruffy and first filmish or not, this film is possessed of a real certainty of what Aronofsky wanted and planned to do for the next 25 years of his career. (And yes, that makes this a particularly nice year to be doing this King Darren series, as it marks a quarter century of Aronofsky in our lives.) Some of his tricks, which would also become a bit of an Aronofsky trademark, may strike us as the try hard instincts of a film school student. But I gotta tell you, I miss that kind of try hard instinct, and Aronofsky didn't stop at trying hard. He tried and succeeded. 

(It did occur to me, though, whether we'll think back on newer filmmakers who have made their first films, and so easily be able to identify such film school techniques in those initial efforts. If new filmmakers don't use black and white anymore to break into the business, what will be the distinguishing marks of their earlier efforts?)

The repeating short montage of Max popping pills to control his headaches is of course something Aronofsky would expand on in horrific ways in his next film, Requiem for a Dream. We don't need to get ahead of ourselves discussing that one because it will be on the docket in April.

One film we won't discuss in this series, because I saw it again only two year ago and decided to skip it for King Darren, is The Fountain, and there's an interesting repurposing of imagery from this film in that one. It seems Aronofsky is particularly interested in the shaved head of Gullette at the end of this film -- shaving your head being another form of assaulting the body's natural form -- because the first thing I thought of when I saw it is the shaved head of the astral plane version of Hugh Jackman in The Fountain. The themes of The Fountain remain a little opaque for me even after that second viewing, but it seems to be a continuing journey down the philosophical/mathematical rabbit hole that Aronofsky started in Pi.

I think one of the reasons Pi is so tense and haunting is exactly because Aronofsky gets the math right here. Or rather, I should say, we don't know whether he gets the math right or not, but he's presented it in such a way as to make the numbers seem really eerie -- the irrational number that is this film's title, but also the 216-digit number that might both be key to predicting the stock market and may unlock something hidden in the Torah. The whole bit where the character played by Ben Shenkman explains how Hebrew words have corresponding mathematical values seems crazy, even though it is likely something scholars have discussed for centuries. 

This is no easy task. The challenge for Aronofsky here is similar to depicting the work of a brilliant artist or musician. If the paintings suck or the music is awful, it tends to undercut the brilliance of the artist or musician. So if the math that obsesses Max were just a bunch of mumbo jumbo that didn't chill us on some level, the movie would not be nearly so effective.

That said, the character played by the future Hector Salamanca (this is where I first became aware of Mark Margolis) cautions Max about the thin line between mathematics and numerology. In telling Max that he'll start seeing the number 216 everywhere he looks for it, which will seem like proof but really just be a confirmation bias, he's kind of answering the core question of Joel Schumacher's The Number 23, still nearly a decade off in the future.

The other thing Aronofsky really gets right here, which factors into all but his most realistic films, is the paranoia. Max's imagining of ghoulish things in subways -- such as a brain on a staircase -- has a visceral impact. In fact, in that moment when he's prodding the brain with a pen, and it lets out a high-pitched scream on the soundtrack every time the pen touches the surface, it reminded me of a technique Danny Boyle would use in a future #1 of mine. It's very similar to that bit in 127 Hours where Aron Ralston is twanging his nerves like the strings of a guitar. 

Of course, it's not actually paranoia if people are really coming after you, and Max's handling by both the Wall Street people interested in his algorithm, and the Rabbinical folks who are hoping to unlock the secrets of God, keep the unbearable tension close to peak levels. 

I didn't see Pi in time to rank it, and I may have only become aware of it after the fact, possibly in relationship to Requiem -- though I'm quite sure I saw Pi before I saw Requiem. Looking at the movies I did rank in 1998, though, I'm guessing I would have had this just inside my top 20. I really enjoyed revisiting it. 

There's probably more I could say about Pi, but there's also more I have to do in my day today. I might get that chance anyway in April, since Requiem will certainly be in direct conversation with this film. 

Off and running on MUBI

It seems like I've started a lot of new initiatives this year. Well, here's one more.

Welcome to my collection of streaming services, MUBI.

I recall being tantalized by MUBI when I first heard about it, which I roughly equate with when Paul Thomas Anderson released that documentary Junun back in 2015, a MUBI exclusive. If that movie had been feature length -- it's only 54 minutes -- I might have figured out that MUBI was available in Australia sooner than now in order to see it, either just to be a PTA completist or possibly even to have ranked it in the year it came out. I always assumed that like some other more boutiquey streaming services, such as the Criterion Channel and Filmstruck before it, the Australian market was out of bounds -- and back in 2015, it probably still was.

Well, a friend of mine did that work of sussing out MUBI's Australian availability for me and gifted me a subscription for Christmas, which I finally activated on February 1st. 

Now, as recently as Wednesday, I was still operating under the impression that MUBI had only 30 films available at any given time. The high concept that MUBI originally introduced to us was that it had a film of the day every day of the year, which existed on the site for 30 days and then was gone. It meant blissful relief from option overload, while always giving you a good slate of films to choose from, many of them rarities. 

I don't know if that was ever really the total business model, nor could it be a sustainable one in today's streaming environment with only those parameters. I suspect even back in 2015, that wouldn't have been the model because they wouldn't premiere a movie like Junun, which obviously has a cost associated with it, only for it to disappear a month later. 

I didn't work that out until I was actually in and browsing the choices, though, and had an initial reaction that was equal parts thrilling and frightening. That reaction was:

1) I've only ever even heard of two of these 30 movies!

Followed quickly by:

2) I've only ever even heard of two of these 30 movies.

The two movies I'd heard of, I'd also seen, which were the film Swallow from a few years ago (about Hayley Bennett swallowing household objects to dull her housewife boredom) and Jane Campion's Sweetie (which would have been a perfect choice for Campion Champion & Bigelow Pro, except I saw it about five years ago).

All the rest were from the definite margins of cinema, sometimes from countries I didn't even know had film industries.

Now, the main point of a service like MUBI is to challenge yourself and see movies you've never heard of. Just trying to find elusive films that are also critically acclaimed is not a great engagement with the site's core concept. Yes, you can find films you never knew you wanted to see on lots of streaming services -- Kanopy is a particularly good example -- but the films on MUBI feel somehow more cultivated and curated. You know some really academic cinephile has gone to the trouble of seeking these out and securing their streaming rights, to greater expand our understanding of the vastness of the cinematic landscape. 

But on the very first night, I just couldn't select one of those other 28 films to click play. They were all equally tantalizing, which is to say, none of them felt quite tantalizing enough to be my symbolic first MUBI viewing.

So it was with a little relief, though also some sense of defeat, that I found all the other movies that are part of MUBI's ongoing catalogue. At least I selected one that was listed as LEAVING SOON.

And through this first choice, I did immediately recognize the uniqueness and value of this new venture.

When I watched the films of Agnes Varda for my Audient Auteurs series in July of 2018, Cleo from 5 to 7 was meant to be one of the two films I watched -- in fact, it was the primary reason I had chosen Varda for one of the slots in this 12-month series. Aware of her many other respected contributions to cinema from a series they did on Filmspotting, I still went with Varda and loved both The Gleaners & I and Faces Places. But the reason I chose those films was that I just couldn't find Cleo.

Well, thanks for helping out with that, MUBI.

Just checking right now, the film still isn't available for rental from either Amazon or iTunes. That's a pretty sad outcome for a film that was #14 among critics in the recent Sight and Sound poll. So not only did watching this as my first MUBI movie scratch a five-year-old itch, it also removed the second highest ranked Sight and Sound film that was on my list of shame. Only Claire Denis' Beau Travail (#7) was higher ranked in that poll among films I haven't seen.

Alas, I wish I could say that Cleo was 100% a success story for me. I should have known it was a dumb choice for a day in which I'd gone into the office for the first time since mid-December -- office attendance is pretty scant during an Australian summer -- and was exhausted from a very busy and tiring last few months. As is increasingly the case when watching from my all-too-comfortable couch, I had to pause the movie multiple times for short/long naps, even though it's only a very manageable 90 minutes.

By the end I did work myself into a strong appreciation of it, finding it to be a thematic precursor to something like Before Sunset. Both films include a jaunt (mostly) on foot through Paris as the light starts to fade and as everything assumes the heightened significance of limited time -- in Jesse and Celine's case, because they may never see each other again and have to make a decision, and in Cleo's case, because she thinks she might have a fatal illness. In these two hours, Cleo's life literally flashes in front of her eyes, as she has impossibly short yet somehow elongated ten-minute windows doing different things that are gratifying to her soul in some way. (I know it's not fair to "compare" these two films, Cleo certainly being considered the more seminal of the two, but I can only go by the sequence in which I watched them.)

However, I do feel like this first Cleo viewing is only laying the groundwork for a second viewing, when I'm more awake and can be more finely tuned into its meditative wavelength. I supposed that may not be on MUBI since it's supposed to be leaving soon, but maybe it will pop up again on MUBI in the future.

Even if the movie was not a slam dunk win for me, due to issues with me and my viewing circumstances rather than the film, the experience MUBI provided me was a slam dunk win. The ability to see an all-timer at the click of a button, when none of my other streaming services have any significant focus on films that came out 60 years ago, was just grand. (Incidentally, I was pleased to see that Cleo is not nearly as "ancient history" as a person might think, as the actress who plays Cleo, Corinne Marchand, is still alive and well at 91 -- herself certainly not a victim of the imminent demise that hangs over her character.)

I'd certainly like to use MUBI more often than every 30 days, and the next time, I will definitely opt for one of those 30 movies of the day -- probably intentionally choosing one I haven't heard of, even if ones I have heard of are available. 

I don't really need a new streaming service, considering that we have also just added Binge -- which I haven't even started using, that's how new it is. (This carries HBO programming in Australia.) But I always need a new streaming service that is as different from the others as MUBI is, and I am psyched as hell to be off and running on this experience. 

When characters buy tickets for movies already in progress

Mild Babylon spoilers to follow.

I was totally believing everything that was happening in Babylon until the very end, when a character returns to Hollywood after a lengthy banishment and stumbles into a showing of Singin' in the Rain.

(Sorry, that's a joke -- the movie is frequently ridiculous, though I suppose nothing that happens in it is technically impossible.)

Despite the spoiler warning, I won't say who the character is, plus it's not relevant to the current discussion. All you need to know is that the character is in a daze of confusion and regret and nostalgia and he plunks down 50 cents (or whatever it cost at that time) to see the Gene Kelly classic in its initial release. 

There are a lot of dumb things about this scene, which sets up an ending I found totally on the nose and totally bogus at the same time, making it one of the year's worst ways to end a movie. Did this character really know nothing about Singin' in the Rain and that it mirrored some of his very own experiences, especially since he presided over a shoot where they were filming people singing this song, which (unbeknownst to me) predated the movie by a couple decades?

No, the thing that bothers me is that he walked into a movie that was already half over.

Before you go quoting William Goldman at me, yes, I'm sure this would be considered a screenwriting shortcut, equivalent to something like a person paying with correct change or a person driving up to the courthouse and finding a parking spot out front. There's no better way to sap the momentum of a scene that's meant to be poignant than to have the character stand in a long line at the start of the movie, wait to buy their popcorn, then sit through the ads before the movie starts. I know it's usually more poignant to see the lone character buying a solitary ticket from the ticket seller, with no one else in sight because they are all already inside the movie.

But who goes to a movie expecting to see half or less of that movie? I get it if it's a movie you've already seen, and maybe you're buying the ticket as a place to shut your eyes for a few minutes. But from the events of this scene it's clear this Babylon character had never seen the movie, and seemed to have no qualms entering at whatever point in its progress it happened to find itself. 

If it were just this one movie, well, that would be even more reason to criticize Babylon. But I had only just seen this very thing two weeks earlier. 

That was The Fabelmans, and if this character in Babylon didn't know any better despite the fact that he should have, the characters in The Fabelmans really should have known better. 

Since this scene doesn't involve spoilers, no spoiler warning necessary.

Sammy Fabelman and his friends go to the movies probably somewhere around halfway through this movie. I believe it's just after they ride their bikes, wearing scout uniforms, in what seemed like a limp and perfunctory E.T. reference. (Remember, I don't like this movie.) 

They go to see The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence. Well, half of it anyway. They sit down to watch the movie and immediately begin talking over it, discussing what their own next film is going to be about. Eventually the other patrons shush them but it seems like it takes forever for them to do that. 

Multiple moviegoing sins in one trip to the theater, I tell you. Even as just a teenage version of Steven Spielberg, Sammy should have shuddered at the actions in which he participated. 

As is the case with most trends I discuss on this blog, these are only the examples I'm thinking of right now. There are countless others, meaning that neither Damien Chazelle nor Spielberg is really to blame. It's a hallowed tradition that might even go all the way back to Singin' in the Rain or The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, though in the latter case, there wouldn't have yet been any movies to attend. 

The question is, why? Is there so much value gained from having characters take their seats in the middle of a movie that it's worth sacrificing all realism? 

Maybe there is, and maybe it is. I mean, if it had really bothered me, I probably would have written about it one of my previous 2,945 posts. 

King Darren & Baz Jazz Hands

Busy January, busy February.

And busy April, June, August, October and December.

In 2022, I cut down to just one bi-monthly series so as not to have too many movies that were a recurring obligation. That worked out well in a year in which I also rewatched all 26 of my previous #1s.

Apparently I've got space on my schedule in 2023, because I'm not only going back to two bi-monthly series -- I'm going up to three. 

Three bi-monthly series, Vance? What do you think there are, 18 months in a calendar year?

Nope I don't. I'll just have to do two of them in the same six months.

When I saw Elvis last June, and enjoyed it as much as I did (ultimately naming it my #7 of the year), it occurred to me -- not for the first time -- that I just plain like Baz Luhrmann. None of his films are failures to me, even Australia. I owned it with pride: I'm a Baz Luhrmann fan.

And because he doesn't make movies all that often, it also occurred to me that he has exactly six features to his name.

Then and there I decided that in 2023, I would rewatch Strictly Ballroom, William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet, Moulin Rouge!, Australia, The Great Gatsby and Elvis, having seen only Moulin Rouge! and The Great Gatsby more than once.

Since it's been more than 20 years since I saw Romeo + Juliet, which I didn't love at the time, that one in particular is one I'm interested in revisiting through the prism of being a confirmed Luhrmann fan, to see my potentially differing perspective on it now. 

That would have been all done and dusted -- to use the appropriately Australian term in a discussion of Baz Luhrmann -- until Darren Aronofsky came along.

When Aronofsky became the first director to ever direct two films I named #1, I knew I had to appreciate him in some way the following year.

Now, Aronofsky does not have exactly six feature films. He has eight. 

But two of those are movies I've seen quite recently. I of course rewatched The Wrestler last June for the project of revisiting all my #1s -- only five days before Elvis, in fact. And The Fountain wasn't long before that in February of 2021.

So I'll skip those two and watch Pi, Requiem for a Dream, Black Swan, Noah, mother! and The Whale -- the latter of which finally opens in Australian cinemas today (you can read my review, at long last, here). 

There's a similarity with Luhrmann in that only two of the six I'm watching are films I've seen more than once, those being Requiem and mother! But I am pretty familiar with those, having seen mother! three times and Requiem at least three, probably four. 

My third mother! viewing was in late 2019, so after this series I will have seen all eight of Aronofsky's films in the 2020s, and will have a good up-to-the-moment grasp of his full filmography, to better assess just how much his work means to me. If two of his films have climbed all the way up the charts, it may be that there are things in the movies of his I appreciated less that I should be appreciating more. (Though given my love for the two #1s and the two I've seen at least three times, there's already a lot of love for Darren Aronofsky going around.)

I considered combining these two series into one monthly post, but I think I'll handle them separately, so I won't be forced to watch them in close proximity to give you my freshest possible thoughts. I'll call one series "King Darren," because Aronofsky has now proven himself through the stats, and I'll call the other series "Baz Jazz Hands," because there's no better metaphor for Luhrmann's filmmaking style than jazz hands.

Though of course there are things the men have in common, other than me liking their work. They're both men who make big choices that could be considered confrontational, whether that's on the aggressive side (rubbing your nose in the harrowing effects of drug addition) or the playful side (injecting modern pop songs into 1899 Paris). Neither is content to play it safe. 

Meanwhile, I will of course still be watching the films I haven't seen of Jane Campion and Kathryn Bigelow in my other bi-monthly series, Campion Champion & Bigelow Pro, which will be running as normally scheduled in January, March, May, July, September and November. 

So if you need anything from me in February, April, June, August, October and December, and I snap at you, just remember: I've got a lot of movies to watch. 

Starting with Pi and Strictly Ballroom this month. 

Lights out at Mission Tiki

I guess it wasn't the rain after all.

In my last -- and what now appears to be penultimate -- post about Mission Tiki Drive-In in Montclair, California, I surmised that two of the screens were likely closed due to flooding from recent rains in Los Angeles. My second theory was that the drive-in was going under.

The second theory proved to be correct.

Sixty plus years! What a shame. The drive-in survived COVID -- in fact, it was probably uniquely configured to survive COVID -- but it hasn't survived the return from COVID. Maybe those who patronized the theater during the pandemic didn't need to anymore, and that, combined with the big shift to watching movies at home, spelled doom for Mission Tiki.

It's a sad day for me. Mission Tiki was one of two drive-ins we attended, which actually were not very far away from each other (but both a 40-minute drive from my house), and I tend to forget which movies I saw at which one. In fact, I think I went to the other one more (and since I didn't get on their mailing list, I'm not even sure if I remember what it was called, let alone whether it's still open). Plus I believe it was Mission Tiki who were dicks to me the time I tried to switch screens between movies in my double feature, which is forbidden for reasons that are not entirely clear to me. 

It's probably not Mission Tiki specifically I'm mourning today, but the second death of drive-in culture. The first death was before I was born, of course, as a primary movie-going venue of the 1950s slowly disappeared from the landscape. Now the revival of that culture, which for a time was pretty successful, is ending too.

The good news? A drive-in that's near where I actually live is still open.

The Coburg drive-in -- which we have attended only once, I might add -- is within 20 miles of my house, and it's still showing movies. I just checked to be sure. 

The closing of Mission Tiki is a reminder not to take this for granted, though. We need to go with our kids soon, because we never know when it might suddenly be lights out for any of us.