Audient Classics: The Long Goodbye

This is the final entry in my 2023 monthly series rewatching movies from before I was born that I'd loved, but that I'd seen only once. 

Going into December, I'd had representatives in this series from every decade from the 1920s onward -- except the 1970s. 

There are only three years to draw from in the 1970s if you want to get something from before I was born, but that doesn't mean this decade should be excluded from all the fun.

So I finished with a film from the year I was born, 1973 -- which indeed feels appropriate, since I just celebrated my 50th birthday two months ago.

Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye came out exactly 227 days before I was born, on March 7th of that year. It took me until 2012 to see it, despite an obsession with the films of Robert Altman that was already more than 20 years old at that point, dating back to the release of The Player. I shouldn't suggest to you that I'm an Altman completist -- in fact, there are a staggering 25 films Altman has directed that I haven't seen, compared to 11 that I have seen. Still, The Long Goodbye seemed like my most notable Altman blind spot when I finally got to it 11 years ago.

And loved it. 

In fact, the film single-handledly made me question my assumptions about whether I liked noir or not. I am still trying to figure that out today, having just rewatched another instance of Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe on film, The Big Sleep, a few weeks ago, after finishing reading the book. You can read about that here if you want. 

Now that I've had a year of noir films in 2021, in which I identified probably my new favorite noir (Key Largo), as well as done the whole Big Sleep revisited project, it seemed like a good time to look at where noir's road to recovery began with The Long Goodbye.

Well ... 

I'd say that my holiday season exhaustion claims another cinematic victim, except that would be overstating the decrease in my affection for The Long Goodbye on this viewing. I still liked it, maybe even quite a bit, but I was fighting sleep and a tequila on the rocks I'd had before dinner. There were naps and I felt discombobulated for much of the film.

Then again, this is a discombobulated film, which is one of the things I loved about it the first time. It's shaggy as hell, personified by Elliot Gould as Marlowe, always confused about what decade he's in and how the present seems to have left him behind. Marlowe's actual heyday was three decades earlier in Chandler's original incarnation of the character, so Altman specifically confronts this Marlowe with things like beautiful nudist neighbors doing yoga and a cat that will only eat one sort of cat food. 

In fact, I'm pretty sure I fell in love with The Long Goodbye's first ten minutes, back in 2012, and never looked back. I was in love with this film's milieu, and once the film grabbed me at the start it would have taken quite a lot to loosen the hold.

The hold was looser this time, in part because I wasn't as surprised by this movie as I was the first time (though the ending is still pretty shocking, a total upending of our understanding of Marlowe as a character from the Chandler books, and completely different from the actual book). The film shambles along with not exactly a plot but a number of individual interludes, which do add up to something interesting, but maybe not something quite as interesting as I thought they did 11 years ago. 

One thing I did consider this time is how this film is in conversation with the first Altman film I ever saw. There's a lot of The Player here, in the way this film is directly in conversation with Hollywood. The Long Goodbye features a security guard to a gated Malibu community who does a different celebrity impersonation for each car that passes. Can't you imagine this guy trying to get a job on the same lot where Griffin Mill works as an executive? Then there's the fact that one of this film's suspects is a boozy screenwriter who has to spend his time in detox not to kill himself or someone else. 

As much as I do like Altman's films set in and around Los Angeles -- you can add Short Cuts to that list -- another great candidate for this series would have been McCabe & Mrs. Miller, which I also love, and which came out two years before this. I owe that film a second viewing, having started a second viewing sometime in the past five years and having had to abandon it before I finished. Either the movie was due back at the library or I just decided that I'd missed my original window once I didn't finish it that night. Maybe something for early in 2024.

There's probably more I should say about The Long Goodbye, but instead I'll say goodbye to this series. Here's a quick reminder of what I watched:

January: Sherlock Jr. (1924, Buster Keaton)
February: Roman Holiday (1953, William Wyler)
March: The Exterminating Angel (1962, Luis Bunuel)
April: The Wages of Fear (1953, Henri-Georges Clouzot)
May: The Women (1939, George Cukor)
June: Ace in the Hole (1951, Billy Wilder)
July: Harakiri (1962, Masaki Kobayashi)
August: The Great Dictator (1940, Charles Chaplin)
September: The Virgin Spring (1960, Ingmar Bergman)
October: The Birds (1963, Alfred Hitchcock)
November: The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928, Carl Theodor Dreyer)
December: The Long Goodbye (1973, Robert Altman)

The 1960s had the most representatives with four movies.

In addition to varying up the decades, I varied up the other demographic details, never repeating a director and selecting works from a variety of locations around the world, the U.S. being the only one that was repeated.

Of course I can't help but think of all the movies that were on my larger list that I couldn't fit in, as is inevitably the case in a series with only 12 spots. Here are the ten movies I most regret not getting to watch, in alphabetical order, which only means I may know how to direct my "just for pleasure" rewatches in 2024:

Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972, Werner Herzog)
Arsenic and Old Lace (1944, Frank Capra)
The Battle of Algiers (1967, Gillo Pontecorvo)
The Conformist (1970, Bernardo Bertolucci)
Key Largo (1948, John Huston)
Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936, Frank Capra)
Ordet (1955, Carl Theodor Dreyer)
Rope (1948, Alfred Hitchcock)
Solaris (1972, Andrei Tarkovsky)
Zulu (1964, Cy Endfield)

Even picking this list of ten was difficult, so I've got some great viewing ahead of me.

I'll tell you about my 2024 monthly series at some point soon after the calendar changes. 

Apple has dumb ideas about the name of Gran Turismo

Last night I got through a little more than half of Neill Blomkamp's Gran Turismo. That's been a bit of a pattern the last few weekends. Exhausted from the day, start watching a movie at close to ten o'clock and then take a loooong nap in the middle. Then wake up around 1 and have the good sense not to try to watch the remaining hour of the movie before going to bed. I mean, the next day is going to involve more buying of presents.

I haven't watched enough of the movie to tell you what I ultimately thought of it, but I have watched enough of the movie to laugh about what Apple thinks this movie is called.

On my iTunes rental, I noticed the full title was Gran Turismo: Based on a True Story.

Oh brother.

Is this an Apple thing? The last time I wrote a post about the silly titles Apple gives movies was when I told you I refused to call the Michael J. Fox documentary by its complete title Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie. I'm still at Still on that one.

Not all instances of title lengthening are ones I disregard. I was all in on Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire. It was just weird enough that I allowed it.

But the Based on a True Story part of Gran Turismo is come by dishonestly.

When the title flashes up on screen, it's only Gran Turismo. About five seconds later, you get in block letters: "BASED ON A TRUE STORY." Which is a pretty standard disclaimer -- is disclaimer the right word? -- at the start of a movie.

Why someone decided to incorporate this into the proper title, I have no idea. To distinguish the movie from the Playstation game on which it was based, I guess? But even in the poster above, you can see it is a tagline more than part of the title. 

As usual in these cases, I go to IMDB and Letterboxd to get a final ruling. Fortunately, they're both with me on this one. No Based on a True Story to be found in either title. 

They do both go with the longer title of Still, so I guess maybe I need to re-think that one.

Knee deep in a Maestro takedown before I even knew it

The coverage of prestige end-of-year releases and my access to watch them has been way out of sync this year, such that I've left several episodes of my favorite movie podcast, Filmspotting, unplayed. Usually in this situation I try to "listen loosely," letting the words go by in order to get to the parts of the podcast that don't relate to the movie in question, without really taking in what's being said. But this failed so stupendously when I tried to do this for Anatomy of a Fall -- one of those movies that may slip by me after I missed seeing it at MIFF -- that I gave up the endeavor entirely for the next few that were up.

It's not necessarily that I think the two opinions on these movies will either alter my anticipation of the movies, letting me know in advance whether I should actually be looking forward to them, or even that they will spoil the movie, since Filmspotting in particular takes care to advise us if they are going into spoiler territory -- usually handling such material in its own separate segment at the end of the show. It's that I will potentially be reviewing many of these movies and I don't want them putting ideas into my head about what I might say.

Maestro seemed likely to escape this fate, as it doesn't appear as a discussion topic in any of the waiting Filmspotting podcasts, and releases on Netflix on Wednesday I believe. A good chance for me to pop up a review next week, at a time of year when I'm generally too busy to get out to the theater with any regularity and I need something I can watch at home, my opinions unmolested by outside influence.

Imagine my surprise when another favorite podcast, A Typical Disgusting Display, hit me right up front with a surprise broadside of Bradley Cooper's new movie. 

The podcast bills itself as "a podcast for writers, by writers who hate writing," and true enough, the two co-hosts, Alec Sulkin and Julius Sharpe, are Family Guy writers and former or current showrunners. (I also went to high school with Julius, though that's his stage name.) They do sometimes talk about movies, but they're more likely to talk about something that's been in the culture for years, sometimes giving humorous re-appraisals of the plot's core components.

Alec likes to joke about his big nose (as Julius likes to joke about being bald), so his point of entry was faux outrage about the fake nose Cooper dons to play Leonard Bernstein. But then he proceeded to just rip the movie to shreds, using observations I can now no longer make in my own review. 

I thought of turning it off, but it was into the deep end of the diss so quickly that it hardly seemed worth it at that point. (And his rant was funny.)

It puts me in mind of an issue I'm sure I've discussed here before, which is how to remain unbiased in the wake of a cultural conversation that crops up almost immediately about these entertainment products as they are released. And unfortunately, Maestro is already out for its brief theatrical run, which means I'm not really getting it at its first availability to me if I wait until Netflix to see it.

I guess it's another reminder of how real critics -- I mean, those who write reviews as part of their paid full-time job -- get to the first pre-release screenings, before anyone knows what we will all think about the movie once it comes out. I do sometimes go to these -- I've already seen Ferrari, and I don't think that comes out in any country for a few weeks -- but most of the rest of the time, it's catch as catch can.

I will still review Maestro, I think, but there's no doubt the words of a funny podcaster will be ringing in my ears as I do. 

Rest in police, Captain Holt

My wife and I are slowly making our way through the last season of Brooklyn Nine-Nine on Netflix. Our gradual pace is so we can draw out the inevitable arrival of Andre Braugher's final, hilarious utterance as Captain Raymond Holt.

Little did I know it would be Andre Braugher's final utterance himself. Braugher died this week at 61 after a short illness.

I'm devastated. 

This assessment of my feelings naturally occurred to me to type in a Facebook chat with some friends after I found out of his passing in that chat. One of them came back with a gif of Holt saying "I'm devastated." I hadn't realized this was an actual line of his dialogue, spoken in a total deadpan, as consistent with the apparently narrow emotional range of this dedicated career police officer. Of course, we all knew Holt for the softie he really was.

Like most people, I became aware of Braugher through his great work in Homicide: Life on the Street. But it was another TV show that ingratiated me to a different version of Braugher, one with a little more levity, which paved the way for his Brooklyn Nine-Nine work. That show was the sadly short-lived Men of a Certain Age with Ray Romano and Scott Bakula. My wife and I loved it. No one else seemed to have heard of it.

Because this is a movie blog, of course I should talk about Braugher's movie work, of which there was less, but still, some important and good examples.

Most recently he appeared in She Said, my #11 movie of 2022, where he played the uncompromising newspaper editor Dean Baquet, who went toe-to-toe on phone calls with Harvey Weinstein, and didn't blink even in the presence of implied and actual threats from the powerful Hollywood mogul. That movie belongs to its two female newspaper reporters, of course, but the extra support provided by Baquet is invaluable, and Braugher's performance of it steady and true.

It's surprising how few others there were. One I hated, which was Stephen King's The Mist. One I loved but haven't seen in ages, that being Edward Zwick's Glory. I'm due for a rewatch, and Braugher's presence in the cast might make me prioritize that early in the new year.

When it comes to the death of a beloved favorite like Braugher, though, I don't need to sit here and justify to you why I'm writing a memoriam piece about a TV star on a movie blog. Braugher was a lovely presence on my screen, no matter what form of viewing entertainment it was. He was intense on Homicide, establishing himself as an incendiary dramatic actor. He steadily took the path toward becoming an even better comic actor, the most compelling presence on an enduring sitcom that was characterized by the strength of its ensemble. Everyone probably had a non-Holt favorite character on Brooklyn Nine-Nine, but I can't imagine anyone wouldn't have selected Holt as their favorite overall.

And consider the character he played. A Black precinct captain who worked his way up through the ranks due to his impeccable demeanor and policing skills, but who met roadblocks at every step of the way due to his race. Brooklyn Nine-Nine did not shy away from discussing matters of race, and in fact, it was the real-world race-related police brutality in 2020 that caused the whole show to consider whether it was still funny to make a show about police officers. Eventually they decided it wasn't, and are so far going out gracefully, while also being topical about the reality of a show about police officers.

But oh wait. Holt was also gay. For the entire series, through some ups and downs, he was in a loving relationship with Kevin, played by Marc Evan Jackson, who put a photo of them posing in a loving embrace on Instagram as a tribute. Holt was Black and gay and still a police captain with aspirations for even more senior positions within the NYPD. Every part of that was in Braugher's performance, but it never defined his performance. His performance was defined by incredible comedic timing and an even-keeled delivery that prompted jokes about him being a robot. That only made his occasionally bouts of succumbing to one emotion or another all the more hilarious.

I would have missed Andre Braugher at the end of Brooklyn Nine-Nine, which we will get to in another four episodes or so. But I would have assumed he'd rise again, and in fact had heard he had already been cast in a new Netflix show, though not a comedy in this case.

Now he'll only rise again in content I haven't seen, but should probably seek out, because if Braugher was in it, it was probably great.

Rest in peace. 

Sarah Silverman: the ultimate temptation for excitable movie nerds

As part of posting my reviews on ReelGood, I regularly go to YouTube to get the film's trailer for embedding in the post.

Almost every time, the first search result I get is the image you see to the right.

The title of the video being pushed on me is "50 Most Paused Movie Moments."

There are a couple things about this I find strange.

One is that the advertiser has apparently paid to have this come up in every YouTube search that contains the word "trailer." I have only a simplistic understanding of how the money works at YouTube, but I do know that to have something like this come up so regularly, in contexts that are so unrelated to it, there has to be money exchanging hands.

What I find strange is that it comes up with the word "trailer." If you are seeking to be titillated on YouTube, how likely is it that the word "trailer" is going to be one of your search terms? A trailer would actually, in most cases, be pretty clean, because most of them are going to be viewed by audiences of potentially all ages. 

Yes there are redband trailers, and you can see those on YouTube too. But the advertiser is overpaying for an algorithm that is not doing what it wants it to do, especially when the most recent trailer I searched for -- getting this result yet again -- was for the Eddie Murphy family Christmas movie Candy Cane Lane. (You can read my review here if you like.)

Then there's the poster girl they've chosen to try to titillate us.

Now, I have no idea which Sarah Silverman movie this is, but the image is barely suggestive of anything naughty. Silverman is in a pool and appears to be wearing a rather modest bathing suit. Is she bottomless? Maybe, but the image certainly isn't implying that. You have to really stretch to get there.

And then there is Silverman herself. I have always found her to be attractive, but never has she presented herself, or been really considered by anyone in the public discourse, to be a traditional beauty or to be traditionally sexy in any way. She's also now 53 years old. You'd be much more likely to use a picture of, I don't know, Megan Fox in an advertisement like this, or maybe Sydney Sweeney if you are trying to stay current -- which for this advertiser, it would really make sense to do to accomplish their goal.

Maybe they got a lifetime contract with YouTube for a relatively small fee, and I will continue to see a picture of Sarah Silverman in a pool wearing a modest bathing suit every time I search for a trailer on YouTube, from now until the end of time. 

Baz Jazz Hands: Christmas cards with Elvis

This is the final in my 2023 bi-monthly series rewatching the films of Baz Luhrmann.

We ordered our Christmas cards late this year, but they arrived early. I think it might be part of a ploy by Snapfish to create the impression of excellent customer service, to tell you your order is expected on Friday and then deliver it on Tuesday.

Having been out all day Wednesday at work followed by Ferrari and Saltburn, though, I couldn't start stuffing them in envelopes until Thursday after work, and because of my younger son's school holiday concert, couldn't actually start until that night. When I wanted to watch a movie.

I figured, what better accompaniment to the task than the last entry of Baz Jazz Hands, Baz Luhrmann being a filmmaker whose strengths (some would say weaknesses) come across through an overall impression of what he's doing, not a minute attention to every detail on screen? Especially if you've already seen the movie once?

If I actually wrote in my Christmas cards, it probably wouldn't have worked, but I gave that up ages ago. The only writing I do is the address and the return address on the envelope, and all I was really doing at this stage was writing my return address and the recipient's name on each envelope, kind of like a machine completing a task in parts. I'd look up their addresses later on when I wasn't watching a movie.

Imagine my surprise, then, when the opening scene of Elvis actually features Christmas cards. Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks) is putting away a box of Christmas cards on a high shelf when he suffers the stroke that sent him to a hospital bed from which he would never emerge. I almost did a double take, my own Christmas cards right there in my lap. 

It's not the only Christmas element in this movie. In fact, there's a whole to do that feels like it takes up 20 minutes about whether Elvis will wear his Christmas sweater and sing "Here Comes Santa Claus" on a television broadcast designed specifically for those two purposes. (Spoiler alert: He does not.)

The salient facts about Parker's death seem mostly accurate -- he died on January 20, 1997, so indeed he could have been putting away Christmas cards, though Wikipedia does not say anything about that. He also did not die until the next morning, so in theory, his deathbed narration of this story, by the light of a night in Vegas, could have also occurred. 

That isn't, however, the impression one gets from the Christmas special episode, which bothered me more than it should. But more on that in the moment.

My ranking of Elvis as my #7 film of 2022 was, in part, the thing that inspired me to do this Baz Jazz Hands series. At that time I had seen only two of Luhrmann's six films more than once, and I thought this made a good excuse to revisit the others, to note how Luhrmann's style has developed and solidified over the years. Now that I've done this, I feel I can confidently say he is the only filmmaker -- or for sure, the only filmmaker who has made multiple films -- where I've seen his entire output more than once.

The first 45 minutes of Elvis were an absolute confirmation of the affection I'd felt for it the first time. The colors, the editing, the performance of Austin Butler as the green Elvis, the absolute joy emanating from anything and everything ... it was intoxicating. As Elvis is driving his pink Cadillac, I thought to myself that I had never seen the color pink look quite like that on screen, and I was enthralled by it.

An interesting thing about this film is to watch its color palette become more muted as Elvis sinks deeper into the drug and health problems that would ultimately claim him. You aren't supposed to have as much fun with the second half, or even the final two-thirds, of this film, and that doesn't lessen it as a film -- it just presents the reality of a man's life.

One thing did lessen it, though, and I'd say it probably came about the halfway mark.

I mentioned the whole donnybrook over whether Elvis would meekly accept his commitment of playing a family-friendly Christmas special. In order to draw further thematic resonance from this, Luhrmann chooses to group it together with an event that did not occur, that could not have occurred, at the same time, making it seem as though they were contemporaneous. Two events, actually.

The first in the narrative of these three total events is the assassination of Martin Luther King. We see Elvis receive the news and feel heartbroken. 

Not straight away in the narrative, but within maybe ten more minutes of screen time, we start to get into the Christmas special and whether Elvis will behave. Then as they are preparing the Christmas special and there is excessive discussion of Santa Claus coming or not coming to town, and whether he will be reaching town via the lane that bears his name, Robert Kennedy is shot and killed, creating yet more perspective in Elvis regarding what is and what is not important. 

Here's the thing: King was shot in April of 1968. Kennedy was shot in June of 1968. There was no Christmas season between those events, or especially at the time of either event.

I said in my review of Elvis (which you can read here if you like) that the movie has a strong sense of emotional truth, if not literal truth at every juncture. I was effectively granting Luhrmann license to take liberties with the truth as long as it was furthering the effective portrait of this man.

However, I do take issue with combining events that were so transparently not related to one another, where it is easily verifiable that they weren't. I first came to this by thinking "Wow, I didn't know Bobby Kennedy was assassinated right around Christmastime." Of course, he wasn't. Luhrmann thought that Elvis' commitment to the Christmas show made an effective metaphor for his selling out of his original persona, a slow-moving compromise that had been going on for some time at this point. And that the death of a political leader he admired would demonstrate just how vacuous were the others things he was doing.

If this were the desire -- and if the movie wants to grapple with Presley's uneasy relationship to Black culture and the debts he owes it -- why not have it be King's death he's struggling with at the same time as the Christmas show? Did Luhrmann just figure people would better remember the time of year King was killed than the time of year Kennedy was killed, so it would make his mild subterfuge less noticeable?

I can't say that this really impacted my enjoyment of the film the second time, but it ate away at me for the rest of the movie, so it obviously stuck in my craw. 

Overall, though, this Elvis viewing confirmed the thing I have been steadily realizing all year, or putting into words at least: Luhrmann is a maker of myths. If his characters lack in nuance, it's because he's giving us archetypes, not finely detailed and complicated human beings. If his biopic adheres to the standard components of a biopic, just exploded outward in his unique style, then that's because he wants to make the ultimate biopic, the biopic that might go in the dictionary next to the definition, not something that surprises us by only examining a small part of the subject's life, or examining him by having five different actors play him.

In short, the things Luhrmann does are things I appreciate. The scope of the big screen is strong with this one. He understands that movies are made on a large canvas and that the subject matter should match. 

In thinking about filmmakers with a signature style, I think Luhrmann is one as much as Wes Anderson is one. You know you're watching a Luhrmann movie when you're watching it. He comes back to the same sorts of shots, the same sorts of editing techniques, the same anachronistic use of music. There's one shot in Elvis where the casino owner is writing out the terms of Elvis' contract at the International Hotel -- or more specifically, the benefits Parker will get from this commitment -- and I swear there is another shot just like that, focusing ominously on the letters as they are being written, in another Luhrmann film. At this stage I can't remember which one it was. But the moment marked this as a Luhrmann film as much as anything else.

There are differences between a filmmaker like Luhrmann and one like Anderson, though. These differences don't make one better or worse than the other, but I do think they help explain why Anderson gets so much backlash from his haters while Luhrmann gets relatively little, even though he too has plenty of haters.

For one, Luhrmann has made about half the number of films as Anderson in the same period of time. His style has had less opportunity to grate on us for its repetitious nature, especially when he goes nine years between making films, as he did between The Great Gatsby and Elvis.

But I also think the "same style, different subject matter" approach they share befits the sorts of projects Luhrmann tackles better than the sorts of projects Anderson tackles. Again, no slight on Anderson as I really like two-thirds of his movies. But on the ones I don't like, I smack my forehead about how Anderson seems to be going back to the same well, again and again. 

With Luhrmann -- especially with the scarcity of movies he gives us -- I feel like this well will never run dry.

Thus concludes the series. I will conclude King Darren before the end of the month, which will make Darren Aronofsky the second director whose every film I have seen more than once, and which will bring all three of my 2023 bi-monthly series to a close.

Ursa Major on my movie screen

Short one today.

Last night I saw Saltburn, the second of two movies at the Village Cinemas in the increasingly moribund Jam Factory in South Yarra. I had arrived at 6:30 for an advanced screening of Ferrari, which doesn't open here for another month. To get this out of the way at the start, I liked both movies.

Writing about the Jam Factory today was one option, if I really wanted to depress myself. Might as well fit in some quick thoughts.

Indeed this was once a jam factory, and from the looks of it, they are trying to turn it into one again. When I first went there, the cinema -- which was always the centerpiece of the space -- was surrounded by clothing stores, restaurants and a Big W or KMart or Target, I can't remember which.

Now, all the restaurants and the Big Target Mart have closed, and the one remaining clothing store has its main entrance from the street. The entrance from the interior courtyard doesn't even open.

Here's a photo of the video screen on the way out. You can see behind it where some of the food court style restaurants used to be. This is what we call a "blue screen of death" in IT circles, when your computer has a fatal error that takes it out of the operating system entirely, and you have to reboot. I thought it was a good metaphor for the Jam Factory, only the reboot may never happen.

But instead of spending the lion's share of this post on what COVID hath wrought, I wanted to go slightly more optimistic and just talk about a possible sign of decline of the cinema ... or maybe just a maintenance issue that needs to be addressed.

My Saltburn screen had a mini big dipper on it.

Not the handle, just the dipping part.

What I mean by that is four small pricks in the surface of the screen that emitted a faint blue light from each. 

The small pricks were exactly in the shape of the four main parts of that most famous of constellations.

It's almost like it had to be intentional. How do you get four small pin pricks of equal size on your movie screen, spaced exactly perfectly to approximate Ursa Major? (If I'd been thinking of it, that's what I should have taken a picture of.) Sure, one pin prick could be an accident (if this is actually a physical hole) or screen degradation, but four spaced perfectly like this? Highly suss.

In any case, it did not sufficiently impact my viewing of Saltburn. I only really noticed it when the action on screen was particularly dark. (Which it always was in this movie, though in that case I'm using the word metaphorically rather than literally.) 

I'll have to try to go see something on screen 4 sometime early next year, to see if this is a recently occurring maintenance issue that will be fixed, or a precursor to the closing of the theater. If things are as depressing for Village Cinemas in this location as they are for the rest of the Jam Factory, they might just be letting themselves go in antiticaption of their own blue screen of death.

And here I thought this second point might be less depressing.

Ranking all 25 Bond films

As promised, my rankings of all 25 Eon Bond films. (I hate that you have to keep sticking in the qualifier "Eon" just because of two others that weren't part of this chronology, one that was intended as a parody.)

I've written enough Bond in the past two weeks to make your eyes bleed, so I will dispense with the preamble on this one.

I did, however, want to say that I didn't agonize too much over the exact order of these, going mostly by feel, and in some cases with a lack of recency that meant I was ranking them on an impression that was formed 40 years ago. I might at some point become more familiar with them and consider this exercise again, but more on that later.

For now, my rankings from 25 to 1, with 50 words or so of explanation about each.

25. The World is Not Enough (1999, Michael Apted) - The worst of any thing you might rank is probably hurt by the conditions in which you experienced it. But either I was having a really bad day when I saw this, or I did really think Denise Richards was that terrible.

24. Die Another Day (2002, Lee Tamahori) - Two Pierce Brosnan films as my worst -- really? Perhaps not, but I do remember hoping DAD would bring me back into the Bond fold after the disappointment of TWINE and being sorely disappointed in that hope. 

23. License to Kill (1989, John Glen) - There was a reason Timothy Dalton was shown the exit after only two Bond films, and License to Kill was it. All I really remember about this is Robert Davi and some sharks. Incidentally, this is only the seventh title that comes up when you search "License to Kill" on IMDB, which is crazy for a Bond movie and indicates how little people remember and/or think about this movie.

22. Quantum of Solace (2008, Marc Forster) - This is actually one of the most recent films I've seen in that I only got to it in 2015, just before seeing Spectre. But I don't remember much about it at all and feel like it was a pretty anonymous entry in the series, the one that temporarily gave them pause about whether to continue onward with new movies.

21. Moonraker (1979, Lewis Gilbert) - "James Bond in space" is the four-word phrase that will continue to hamper my memory of this movie even though it is probably just fine. This is where I first met Jaws, who did scare me quite a bit, but I feel like I ended up laughing at this movie -- even though it may have been the first Bond I ever saw. (There's a debate about whether it was this or For Your Eyes Only, or if I only saw both of those after I saw Octopussy.) 

20. A View to a Kill (1985, John Glen) - "Nope, they couldn't keep up the Octopussy magic" was mostly my reaction to Roger Moore's final Bond movie, though I do remember liking the Duran Duran song and finding Grace Jones a very interesting, confronting Bond girl. I think also the cultural conversation about how he was too old to play Bond (two years shy of his 60th birthday) had seeped into the brain of even the 11-year-old me. It was the first Bond I saw in the theater though. (A friend of mine on social media the other day suggested we saw Octopussy in the theater, but I don't think so.)

19. Casino Royale (2006, Martin Campbell) - There's an argument to be made that this belongs in the 20s since when I saw this, I actually disliked it. However, being in such a minority in that opinion, and the fact that I've always liked Daniel Craig in the role, tempers my feelings about Casino Royale and suggests I should probably watch it again sometime. I remember I was really annoyed by the ridiculous hands in the poker game they play in the movie. 

18. The Living Daylights (1987, John Glen) - I remember being pleasantly surprised by Dalton's first appearance as Bond, and the discussion at the time that they were trying to make Bond less of a lothario. So my only enduring memory of this movie is Dalton quaintly holding hands with Maryam d'Abo as they board the London Eye. 

17. Dr. No (1962, Terence Young) - I hate to not give more love to the original, but the fact remains that I was perplexed about the sedentary nature of the action of this movie. Clearly, in a first movie of anything you have no idea what it's going to be, but my interest in this movie was largely an academic interest in discovering where it all began. (I also still think Dr. No is a funny name for the first movie in a Bond series. Shouldn't the first movie have been called James Bond or something?) Incidentally this is my lowest ranked Sean Connery film. 

16. Spectre (2015, Sam Mendes) - When we all thought this was Craig's last Bond movie, I thought it was a decently satisfying way for him to go out, and met the high filmmaking standard that Mendes had brought to Skyfall. Bonus points for Christoph Waltz as Blofeld. 

15. Thunderball (1965, Terence Young) - This is one of the two movies I'd seen in the last decade before I got restarted with On Your Majesty's Secret Service two weeks ago, and even though I've seen both of them within the past three years, I have trouble remembering what happens in Thunderball and what happens in You Only Live Twice. I do remember that Thunderball was the silly one with an excessive number of boobs, and that it earns it #15. 

14. You Only Live Twice (1967, Lewis Gilbert) - I originally had this movie two spots higher, but considering what I just said about not remembering what happened in which movie, and that I gave both of these movies three stars on Letterboxd, I think I have to movie this one down to just before Thunderball -- though it probably could have also gone just after. 

13. For Your Eyes Only (1981, John Glen) - I don't remember a lot about this movie other than there's skiing in it. However, I do have some memory of it relative to how I felt about Moonraker, which was something along the lines of "This restores order after the fiasco known as 'James Bond in space.'" Incidentally, this was the movie they were supposed to make directly after The Spy Who Loved Me, except that the success of Star Wars prompted them to jump the queue with Moonraker.

12. The Spy Who Loved Me (1976, Lewis Gilbert) - And here we get to another pairing where the plots blend together -- even though I just saw these two movies last week. So I'm not going to use this space to argue for the merits of TSWLM over ... 

11. The Man With the Golden Gun (1974, Guy Hamilton) - ... this movie, which gets a higher ranking because I think Guy Hamilton brought something special to this franchise in terms of goofy humor, whereas if Gilbert was doing that also, it didn't land in quite the same way. (I'm inclined to think I'd view Gilbert's Moonraker differently if I saw it today, potentially making him the equal of Hamilton.) All I know is I had fun during both of these movies on Friday but I don't remember what happened in what movie. 

10. No Time to Die (2021, Cary Joji Fukunaga) - Okay so the top ten is when we start getting serious about really "good" Bond films. Perhaps because of the [unprecedented thing] that occurs in this movie, it holds a really distinctive place within the Bond chronology, and because it's Fukunaga, the filmmaking is also quite good. 

9. Skyfall (2012, Sam Mendes) - After I had not liked Casino Royale and not even seen Quantum of Solace, I was surprised to enjoy this as much as I did. The first time I remember a Bond film seeming "arty," but in all the right ways. Still a little shocked by the way Craig blows off the cold-blooded murder of his apparent love interest right in front of him, though.

8. Goldeneye (1995, Martin Campbell) - The debut of Brosnan felt like a breath of fresh air after the series had been petering out for an entire decade beforehand ... but his reign would require another reboot 11 years later. Goldeneye was one of two good films, the other of which we haven't gotten to yet.

7. From Russia With Love (1963, Terence Young) - Although the Bond series had not yet found its defining traits in only this, its second movie, I was pleasantly surprised by it being a confident step in that direction, after being generally unimpressed by Dr. No. In order to stay in sequence, I watched this the day before watching Goldfinger, which I needed to do for other reasons. The urgency of the viewing didn't make me like it any less. 

6. On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969, Peter R. Hunt) - The only film starring George Lazenby and the only film directed by Peter Hunt obviously made an impression on me when I saw it last month, though I think this might be a little inflated by recency bias, plus by being impressed with where the story goes in the last minute before the credits. 

5. Live and Let Die (1973, Guy Hamilton) - Possibly more recency bias at play here, but this movie is silly and funny and Yaphet Kotto gets blown up like a balloon at the end. What more do you need? 

4. Diamonds Are Forever (1971, Guy Hamilton) - I think I just really like Hamilton's films. Although this movie, which I watched the night before I went to the Bondathon, also loses some of its distinctiveness in my memory because I watched it in the same 24-hour period as three other Bond films, it primed me plenty for those three films and was a lot of fun.

3. Tomorrow Never Dies (1997, Roger Spotiswoode) - Well hello there Pierce Brosnan up in this rarefied air. This is one of three Bond films that I "love" where that affection has also stood the test of time, though I have to say, I can't fully remember why Brosnan's second time as Bond was such a win for me. I'll definitely have to put this ranking to the test at some point in the future.

2. Goldfinger (1964, Guy Hamilton) - And here's Hamilton again, meaning three of my top five were directed by him. This is, by most people's assessment, the "gold standard" of Bond films, the time when Connery and the screenwriters both started really having fun with the role, in terms of both colorful villains and Bond girls, particularly their names. Don't forget, this film features Pussy Galore, Auric Goldfinger and a henchman with a killer hat named Oddjob. 

1. Octopussy (1983, John Glen) - What else could it be? For most people, this was just a random late-period Moore film with a titillating name. (Yes, I just realized that both of my top two Bond films have a pussy in them.) For me, it was a beloved VHS tape that I watched about ten times between 1985 and when I graduated high school in 1991. However good it may or may not be, I cannot see past the role it had as cinematic comfort food for me in the 1980s, and so of course even when I watch it today (as I did most recently back in 2012), it still seems great. As I've mentioned several times while writing about Bond these past few weeks, it's the only Bond film I've seen more than once. 

I was curious to see how closely the list I made organically (with only one minor adjustment) matched the actual star ratings I've given these films on Letterboxd, and it's pretty close. Here you can see them in the reverse order with the star ratings listed afterward:

1. Octopussy - 4.5 stars
2. Goldfinger - 4 stars
3. Tomorrow Never Dies - 4 stars
4. Diamonds Are Forever - 4 stars
5. Live and Let Die - 4 stars
6. On Her Majesty's Secret Service - 3.5 stars
7. From Russia With Love - 4 stars
8. Goldeneye - 4 stars
9. Skyfall - 3.5 stars
10. No Time to Die - 3.5 stars
11. The Man With the Golden Gun - 3.5 stars
12. The Spy Who Loved Me - 3.5 stars
13. For Your Eyes Only - 3 stars
14. You Only Live Twice - 3 stars
15. Thunderball - 3 stars
16. Spectre - 3 stars
17. Dr. No - 3 stars
18. The Living Daylights - 3 stars
19. Casino Royale - 2.5 stars
20. A View to a Kill - 3 stars
21. Moonraker - 3 stars
22. Quantum of Solace - 2 stars
23. License to Kill - 2.5 stars
24. Die Another Day - 2.5 stars
25. The World is Not Enough - 1.5 stars

Pretty close to descending order in star ratings, with a few exceptions thrown in -- but never by more than a half-star out of sequence. Only five of these got less than three stars from me, meaning thumbs down rather than thumbs up, and even two of the last three were no worse than 2.5-star movies. 

So I guess I do like Bond pretty well overall, and have had a fun time immersing myself in the character recently.

Fun enough to consider doing my own elongated Bondathon, rewatching all the films in order?

Yes definitely, but not today, and not likely as soon as next year. However, I do note that at least as of right now, it breaks up pretty well as two annual monthly projects, maybe worth starting as soon as 2025 -- and not necessarily in place of a regular monthly viewing series. Maybe I'll need to run it in addition to that as I don't really want to sacrifice two years of good monthly viewing series projects for this, especially since I've already got two years' worth of ideas backed up.

I say "as of right now" because it's unclear how soon we'll get a 26th Bond movie. However, Barbara Broccoli has said that it could start filming in 2024, meaning a potential release as soon as 2025. Then again, they have to cast someone first.

And since I'm all caught up now, that's probably the next time you'll hear about Jimmy Bond on this blog -- when they've told us who's slipping into the tuxedo next. 

You know I'll have opinions. 

To re-MUBI or not to re-MUBI

I have been pretty disappointed with my 2023 subscription to MUBI.

Which is no shade on the person who gifted it to me last Christmas, should he be reading this.

I'd been considering subscribing to the service myself, as I was enamored with their unique model of making movies available for 30 days, with one new movie appearing on the service each day. Each day you could check in to be surprised by some long-lost gem, some elusive title you'd been meaning to watch for years, or just some weird thing you'd never heard of but looked like it was worth trying out. Having the choices pre-curated by MUBI takes out some of the randomness of choosing a single movie from a service that may make thousands of them available.

But during the year, MUBI abandoned its signature format.

I can't remember the reasons for this. I'm sure it presented challenges and I'm sure the cost associated with licensing films for 30 days of viewing was prohibitive, relative to the benefit of the format, when they'd be better off just having it for a year or however long. If they wanted to license 365 films -- and I'm not sure if they do have that many -- better to make them all available for the whole year.

In theory, that's no different of a service from having 30 at a time -- in fact, maybe it is better in some ways. But it means MUBI is not distinct from a dozen other streamers, at least at the fundamental level of its structure. It might offer more interesting titles ... or maybe it just offers a bunch of movies you've never heard of for good reason. 

Then early in the year I learned that they got exclusive distribution rights to the movie in this poster, Ira Sachs' Passages. I've seen most of Sachs' movies and his Love is Strange made my top ten of its year. So it gave me a little thrill that at some point during the year, I'd be able to watch this on MUBI.

Not so much. The distribution rights were for the U.S. I am in Australia. I cannot watch Passages on MUBI. In fact, now I'll probably have no way to watch it before my list closes at the end of January.

Then there were the emails I would get from MUBI telling me about the new availability of some title. Maybe they got my geography wrong -- it makes sense as I have some services set in the U.S. (like iTunes) and some set in Australia (all the others) -- but in these instances as well, almost without exception, I would go into MUBI to try to watch the movie in question, and get nothing. U.S. only, apparently.

If services are going to offer different titles in different countries, they should at least figure out what country you're in so you are not getting constantly teased about movies that you can't watch.

Then the offerings themselves.

Things started on a good note when I watched Cleo from 5 to 7. The Agnes Varda film was a regret for me when I watched Varda films a couple years ago for my Audient Auteurs series, because I couldn't locate it at that time. I hadn't specifically sought it out since, but having it handed to me here gave me a taste of the exclusivity MUBI promised. I was tickled pink by the MUBI possibilities.

But as I tried to delve into random movies I wouldn't hear about elsewhere, some of them were just too random, especially this one called The Red and the Black that I suffered through one night. 

Another MUBI highlight was watching The Balcony Movie, which I had meant to catch at a previous MIFF and really liked. But then there were also lows, as when I watched Trash Humpers, which is now my lowest ranked film on Flickchart. I can't blame MUBI for my poor choice in that respect, but it didn't help with my overall impression of the service, regardless of who was to blame.

Is it possible that these are the only four movies I've watched on MUBI this year?

It's possible. 

I went back through the movies I've watched this year and did discover at least two others: Where is the Friend's House, which I didn't love despite it being Abbas Kiarostami, and Actual People, a movie about as bland as its title. I thought I might have watched The Pez Outlaw on MUBI, but if so, it's no longer available. (Six is a better return on my friend's gift than four, and seven would be even better.)

I've tried to watch others. I've used MUBI as a possible last resort when there was a movie I couldn't find on any other service that I needed to watch during a particular period of time. None of the times I've checked has MUBI actually saved me.

Then the real tease is that MUBI has a page for almost any movie you can think of, even if it can't play the movie. So you get to the page and you get all hopeful, and then there is just no play button.

This past week, as I realized my renewal would be due in late January, I had another determined peruse through the various featured films, to be sure I wouldn't be struck by another sudden rush of optimism about MUBI's potential role in my viewing life. I was struck by more disappointment, namely:

1) There were so few featured titles that the same titles kept on popping up in different featured categories. I'm not sure how one movie can be a film noir, a superhero movie and a romantic comedy, but that's the sort of thing I was seeing. Not that any of the genre assignments were inaccurate, just that the categories themselves were written in such a way to allow the same movies to appear in multiple ones -- creating the impression of more titles than they actually had, an impression easily disproven by the most casual memory of the titles you had just seen featured in the other categories.

2) There was one particular category that focused on 1940s classics. This is the type of place I'd expect MUBI might help me out. There were exactly three movies listed here, all bonafide classics like Citizen Kane. I don't need MUBI to watch Citizen Kane.

3) There should be a three just for good list-making etiquette, but I'm disappointed enough by 1 and 2 that 3 is pretty much superfluous.

If MUBI can't offer me more elusive classics from the 1940s, if it can't offer me the movies it says in the emails it is going to offer me, and if it doesn't even have a unique structure as a streamer, what good is it to me?

And yet I am thinking of renewing.

The idea of MUBI is still powerful. The potential it has to be great is still exciting. It has a lovely layout that supports both this idea and this potential. Simply put, it looks like the sort of exclusive place I want to spent my streaming time, with the sorts of undiscovered gems I want to discover.

Do I have to give MUBI another year to try to realize this potential?

It's hard to say. 

I have almost two months until my subscription expires. It's enough time to give MUBI a red hot go, to use the Australian phrase.

The problem is, these two months are when I'm watching as many 2023 movies as I can before I close off my list. MUBI does not offer 2023 films, as a general rule.

And when it does, like Passages, I'm in the wrong country to even see them.

Understanding The Big Sleep better, not liking it much better

If you saw Howard Hawks' The Big Sleep on my viewing schedule this week, you'd have good reason to assume it was the last in my Audient Classics monthly series. (Except if you looked closely you'd notice I watched it in November, and I had already watched The Passion of Joan of Arc for that series in November.)

It meets two of the three criteria for inclusion in that series:

1) It was released before I was born;

2) I have seen it only once.

It's the crucial third criterion where The Big Sleep comes up way short:

3) I had really liked the movie.

So why was I watching a noir I hadn't liked very much, starring an actor whom I shun as often as I embrace, on Wednesday night?

Well that was also the day I finished reading Raymond Chandler's book.

I had selected it off the shelf in our house, which is how I get about half the books I read. My wife has a huge collection of books I've never read, so there's always something to read among possessions we already have under our own roof. 

Chandler's book presented me a unique opportunity. If I read this book, maybe I could make sense of why Hawks' movie was such a big miss for me when I saw it back in 2013 -- hey, exactly ten years ago this month, now that we're in December. Then of course I would watch the movie again, always with the blog post I'm currently writing in the back of my mind as additional motivation for the whole thing.

Grappling with my dislike of The Big Sleep has actually been a big motivator for me in the decade since I saw it. It was one of the driving factors for why I did a series on film noir in 2021 -- a series that brought me my favorite Humphrey Bogart movie of all time, Key Largo.

When I started reading the book, it felt like I was off to the races. I immediately took to Chandler's writing and his clipped yet evocative way of describing things, like he was Philip Marlowe himself, but also a gifted writer. (The book is written in first person singular, so the confluence of the writer and his character is not such a surprise.)

About 70 or 80 pages into a 217-page book, my progress stalled for a good three weeks. I was starting to succumb to the same character confusion that had plagued me during the entirety of my viewing of the movie ten years ago. I'd read only a page or two here and there, and was almost tempted to stop reading the book, except I never do that. Maybe noir really just isn't my thing. 

Then a week or two ago, I picked up the pace again and finished on a high note, getting back on track with the story and continuing to love Chandler's way of saying things. The story details became clearer and I could keep everyone straight, and I loved the way the book ended.

Loved it so much that I rented the movie again that very night.

Maybe starting it after 10 p.m. wasn't such a good idea, but I figured, I'd already seen it once, and the characters were fresh in my memory from the page. Fatigue would not be the same factor as if I were sitting through it the first time, with the same lack of bearings I had ten years ago.

I don't think the time of night was really the issue, but I didn't like the movie much better.

Here are the reasons why:

1) The impression of the film's excessive talkiness was still with me. In trying to streamline what is also considered to be a confusing book, the trio of screenwriters (who include William Faulkner) had removed some of the intervening scenes, scenes where Marlowe is alone with his thoughts and with a drink. Because much of his ruminating does, indeed, never escape his thoughts, in the movie he's left having to convey the same discoveries about the case via dialogue with another character. And since there is a lot of information to convey, there are a lot of characters he has to burden with a lot of exposition about the story, with few down scenes to breathe in between.

The next several will be changes from the book that were probably necessary to make a bleak novel more palatable to a wider movie audience. In other words, changes dictated by Hollywood. Some SPOILERS to follow. 

2) The character who is never seen but who drives much of the action is named Tom Regan in the novel, Sean Regan in the film. That alone is not noteworthy, but in the novel he is the husband of the femme fatale, Vivian Regan, whereas in the film he is just unconnected from the action except in terms of being a favorite associate of Vivian's father, General Sternwood. The more intimate connection of him being the general's son-in-law and his daughter's wayward husband works much better, especially since this character is otherwise a puzzling source of obsession threading through the whole story, even the parts that seem to have nothing to do with him. I suspect this was because they wanted to make Vivian a more traditional love interest for Marlowe and the morality of that was sketchy when she's already married, albeit it to someone who has theoretically run off with another woman. (We find out that's not what happened to Tom/Sean, but for most of the story we entertain that possibility.) She does have a failed marriage in her history but she is Vivian Rutledge, not Vivian Regan. She's played by Lauren Bacall.

3) The need to give our femme fatale a lot more screen time than she gets in the book. Vivian is certainly a central character in the novel, the (slightly) more sensible of the two Sternwood daughters, but she doesn't need to pop up in every scene. I counted at least two crucial scenes in the movie where she was present, where she wasn't in the novel, and her presence doesn't really make sense in either of them. Again this has to do with making her a more traditional love interest in the movie. I believe she and Marlowe do kiss in the book, but he views it as sort of a cheeky compensation for all the head games the Sternwoods are playing with him, not love or anything approaching it. I prefer my Marlowe in the novel's more detached mode. 

4) The ending is entirely different. The big bad has to get it in the end of the movie, where he doesn't in a novel, which can have a harsher ending and leave only hollow victories for the protagonist. As such, the Eddie Mars character (played by John Ridgely) is promoted to that role of big bad, whereas he overshadows the proceedings more than anything in the book, and is still decidedly on his feet and ready to get richer at the end. That is more of a noir ending and I vastly prefer it.

5) However, if the goal were to try to make the movie tighter and cleaner, to make sure all the characters get paid off properly, that goal is also fumbled. The novel notably revisits characters we met at the beginning, such as General Sternwood, while the movie doesn't bother with it. Neither is the younger sister, Carmen Sternwood, checked in on after about the movie's halfway point. She's a key player in the final pages of the novel but is basically just discarded in the screen version. 

The big complaint I had about this movie when I saw it -- and the complaint I understand even its fans are willing to level against it -- is that the plot doesn't make any sense. I don't have that problem anymore after reading the book. I find it all connects together well enough, but I also find that the plot does not adapt well to a movie template because it's a bit more sprawling, sort of with two distinct halves that have only a thin relationship to each other. The way they tried to finesse the screenplay to give it more sense actually makes the problem worse, though it's hard for me to see that as easily now because I did just read the book and I do freshly recognize most of the scenes.

Which I guess means I just need to trust the 2013 version of myself and the experience he had. 

I think I do like the movie more now -- more than a ranking of 3,973 out of 6,423 on Flickchart, in any case. But while I thought there was a chance I'd need to re-rank it straight away to upgrade my appreciation of it, and to make more accurate the results of duels between whatever film I'm ranking and the movie that is ranked at that spot on my chart, I now think I'll let it occur organically as it is not likely to jump more than a couple hundred spots. 

Finishing James Bond where I began

It's hard to believe it took me 40 years to watch all the Roger Moore James Bond movies.

This was my James Bond, after all.

And after my 9:25 p.m. showing of The Spy Who Loved Me last night, I have now seen 24 James Bond movies exactly one time -- and one about ten times. (Will get to that in a moment.)

I can't recall whether I saw Moonraker (1979) or For Your Eyes Only (1981) first, but I'm inclined to say Moonraker just because that keeps the chronological order. Both would have been on cable at a friend's house.

I know the next was Octopussy, because we recorded that off cable ourselves and I continued to watch it regularly, maybe once a year, for the rest of the 1980s. If it came out in 1983 it would have been on cable in '84 or '85, which was when we had The Movie Channel and when I recorded a bunch of other seminal films released about two years earlier that I watched about as often as Octopussy.

A View to a Kill would have been the first Bond movie I saw in the theater, followed by most of the rest yet to come (with exceptions for each of the men who would play Bond, even Timothy Dalton -- I think I didn't see Licence to Kill until it was on video). And that was also the last for Roger Moore, my Bond.

In between when Pierce Brosnan left the role and Daniel Craig started it, I went back to the beginning and watched Dr. No on January 2, 2006, intending to belatedly begin my chronology forward until I'd seen all the films.

Almost 18 years later, that task is finally complete, thanks to the Sun Theatre in Yarraville.

I shouldn't really credit the Sun with helping me finish. I could have done that any old time, considering that just about every, if not every, Bond film is available for streaming on Stan. Any that aren't could be easily rented.

But the Sun's four-day Bondathon, which began Thursday afternoon with Dr. No and ends Sunday night with No Time to Die (incidentally, the only two Bond films with "No" in the title), gave me the excuse I needed to watch the final three I hadn't seen. And really, it was actually the final five, because I had to watch On Her Majesty's Secret Service and Diamonds Are Forever just to get to the point in the chronology where the next film I hadn't seen (1973's Live and Let Die) would align with my first available time slot on Friday after work (5 p.m.).

I should also thank the Sun because the whole thing ended up being free.

Now, I'd fully intended to pay for these tickets. I watch a ton of movies at the Sun for free, because they accept my critics card and they are the closest theater to my house that does so (about a 15-minute drive). I thought this was my way of "giving back" -- to actually fork over money to them for once.

But when I first arrived and chatted up the ticket clerk about how the marathon had been going -- which I had planned to do from the start, in order to get more of a feel for the marathon on the whole -- I also broached the question about whether it made any sense for me to buy all three tickets I needed up front. Of course I fully intended to stay for The Man With the Golden Gun and The Spy Who Loved Me after Live and Let Die, but what if my wife called and one of my kids was sick or something? I didn't want to have already forked out an extra $40 for tickets I couldn't use. 

I could tell she was not a "company woman," as eager to roll her eyes at the whole thing as to hawk the product earnestly -- but that also meant she was looking out for me as the customer. Instead of trying to get my money up front, she said I could certainly buy them between sessions, although I had already calculated out that the window of time between the end of one movie and the beginning of the next would be very short, during which I might also need to use the toilet or buy another snack.

I had in fact decided to go ahead with all three -- if I had to leave for some reason, "giving back" to the Sun would take on a whole new meaning. But when she asked if I had any concessions, meaning something that would allow my tickets to be discounted, I did pull out my critics card, knowing that it usually means a couple bucks off even in a situation where the film would not be free, like this one.

Well, the woman said the movies weren't blocked out on her screen, meaning they were still eligible for free tickets, so she just printed three tickets and handed them to me. I actually tried to protest, double checking to be sure, but I wasn't going to argue with her about it.

Wow is the Sun awesome.

I wasn't sure how well the Bondathon might be going now seven movies into the event, but the woman assured me that "they've been here all day." I actually asked if anyone had come to all of them, but I realized she probably wouldn't have been there since 8 a.m. and so couldn't say for sure. 

But there were definitely some diehards there. While the others around me looked a bit more like geeks than aspiring international spies, there was an older man dressed in a tuxedo. Given the relative freshness of the tuxedo, he wouldn't have been there all day. 

One who had definitely been there all day was the programmer/owner of the Sun, not a man I know but he was the right age for it. I suspected this might be Bert Murphy, a name I know from these short films produced by the Sun about their community that play before features, which he directs. In any case, he was dressed a bit like the captain of the Titanic, and he was trying to make his staff wear similar hats. The woman taking my ticket as I went in -- who was the same woman who had sold me it, "sold" being used very loosely there -- removed her hat as soon as he turned his back.

The movies had gotten a little behind due to a small mishap earlier in the day, he told me while we were chatting briefly in the lobby, which is why I could see there was still about ten minutes left in Diamonds Are Forever at the expected start time of Live and Let Die. (I could easily estimate how much time was remaining from the events on screen, given that I'd just watched the movie myself for the first time the night before.) With the tight schedule they'd programmed, which included about five but no more than ten minutes between screenings, there wasn't a good opportunity to catch up once you'd gotten off track. He tried to do so by starting LALD about a minute after DAF ended, but fortunately I was there and ready for that exchange of films. Anyone who had been there longer than that was probably accustomed to the idea that they might miss a minute or two of a film if they required a longer bathroom break between them. (Any time credits rolled on one of these films, the beeline for the exit was noticeable.)

It was when he was standing in the auditorium itself -- the biggest one the Sun has, by the way -- that I got my best idea of whether anyone might have been at all the films. Before LALD started, he asked those gathered if anyone had been seen Dr. No last night, a question he proffered allegedly to see if anyone agreed how great the print looked. (I would certainly agree, all the movies looked great and it was really fun to see them on the big screen.) Informally, I suspect he was trying to do his own calculations about whether anyone else had been crazy enough to be there from the start.

I hadn't intended to get one of the passports they were giving out to people who were going to at least three movies. That was probably another thing the eyeball-rolling woman didn't care about foisting on me when I got my tickets, and since I got them for free I didn't dare ask. But in a conversation with the man I will say was Bert Murphy in the lobby, in which I told them these were the final three movies I needed to see to finish the Eon productions, he told me "Oh well you've gotta have a passport!" And quickly fetched me one.

The image you see above is what a typical page in the passport looks like. There's one for each movie and as you are going in -- or between movies if you're staying longer -- you go back and get a new page stamped. I did indeed get all three of mine stamped. Oh, here's what the cover looks like:

It may be obvious that the content of these three movies, watched in immediate succession and with the same Bond in each film, tended to bleed into one another. And since I've already used up most of my allotment of your attention span on details about the experience, I won't go on at length about each film. But I do think I should make a quick comment about each, especially since I can accompany that with a quick comment about what I ate during each.

To get that established up front, I'll tell you that I went in with two cans of Pepsi Max, a foot-long BMT from Subway, a bag of miniature Reese's peanut butter cups (even smaller than the individually wrapped ones), and a bag of gummy worms. These were all tucked away safely in my backpack. Don't worry, I did also buy some things from the Sun, as you will see. But unfortunately, going in with so much on hand meant that I didn't apportion them out the way I would have liked.

1) Live and Let Die - This was my favorite of the three, though it's impossible to say whether that's because the movie was the best or because my conditions for experiencing it were the best. It was the first so I hadn't yet started to get tired from more than six hours of James Bond movies. This is as close to a blaxploitation film as James Bond ever got, as Yaphet Kotto is the villain and the whole thing has the flavor of the occult to go with its Caribbean island setting for part of the film (in a fictitious island nation called San Monique). Jane Seymour plays a tarot card reader in one of her earliest films, and she's astonishingly good looking. There were some good set pieces here too, but I am having a little trouble remembering them. Oh yeah, there's a great speedboat chase that takes place partially on land.

What I ate: Well this was a rough start in terms of my food resources. I bought a small popcorn going in, both because I wanted to give the Sun some of my concession money and because I wanted to push the eating of my sandwich to the second movie, which more closely aligned with my normal dinner time. But then I ate the first half of the sandwich, thinking that would be it. And then I ate the second half of the sandwich. And then I ate the Reese's peanut butter cups. What are you going to do.

2) The Man With the Golden Gun - Now this was one I knew a little about because a friend's brother -- the same friend at whose house I had watched Moonraker and For Your Eyes Only -- used to talk about Scaramanga, its villain, played by Christopher Lee. As soon as I saw him shirtless I remembered that his thing was that he had an extra nipple. When my friend's brother used to talk about him I think he thought he was drawing on a mutual experience, and I'm sure the two brothers had seen this movie, but I hadn't. The other notable things about the movie are the villain's henchman, played by the erstwhile Tatoo (Herve Villechaize), and the two Bond girls, one international beauty Britt Ekland and the other Maud Adams, who was also a Bond girl (playing a different character) in Octopussy. In terms of the actual plot, I remember less about what happens in this one. Middle child syndrome I think.

What I ate: You'll notice I at least held off on my two Pepsi Maxes in the first film. I drank one of them here. I also ate the gummy worms.

3) The Spy Who Loved Me - I'd heard the named Barbara Bach and she is the Bond girl this time. By the way, all the Bond girls I've mentioned are still alive, I'm glad to see. (Bach is married to Ringo Starr.) Bach plays the titular spy, which I guess means Bond is the titular "me," though since they are both spies and since they both "love" (i.e. sleep with) the other, the perspective is not entirely clear. Here the villain is Curd Jurgens, who I was sure was the "diplomatic immunity" guy from Lethal Weapon 2, but it turns out Jurgens was already dead by then and that is actually Joss Ackland. Anyway, they look a lot alike. If it sounds like I'm not getting to the plot it's because I don't remember this one either. Oh yeah, it was about a device that can track nuclear submarines. And I almost forgot! This is the first appearance of Richard Kiel's Jaws, who would return in Moonraker.

What I ate: I came in a little late to the start of this movie -- just a minute or so -- in part because I needed a little fresh air, and in part because I wanted to buy something else at the snack bar. Was I hungry enough for another thing? Probably not. Was I concerned about needing a jolt of sugar to keep me awake for the whole movie? Yes I was, especially because a Pepsi Max does not contain any sugar. So I bought a bag of peanut M&M's, and finished it without any trouble I am somewhat ashamed to report. I also drank the second and final Pepsi Max. And failed to save them for when I really needed them, the last minutes of the last movie.

And even though I didn't have any more tickets, I did for a moment think about staying for Moonraker at 11:25. I was in a groove in some "movie marathon or die" sense if not in an actual "I can stay awake for one more movie" sense. But I came here to finish exactly the movies I hadn't seen, and staying for Moonraker would have destroyed the perfection of that mission. To say nothing of requiring me to buy yet one more food item and possibly a drink, after which I would probably throw up.

Four takeaways about the experience on the whole:

1) The most fun thing about watching these movies with a crowd was to hear everyone produce gales of laughter whenever Moore dropped a particularly silly one-liner. I think the best was when he's just finished passing himself as Scaramanga in The Man With the Golden Gun, a feat he is able to accomplish by affixing a fake third nipple to his chest -- that being the only thing most people know about the man's appearance. Upon reporting back to, I think it was, the Bond girl Ekland, he quips "I think they found me titillating." Even when you see a movie with an appreciative crowd nowadays, you don't usually hear everyone howling at lines like this one, because baked into it is the idea that it's silly and dumb and exactly what we would hope for from a James Bond movie made nearly a half-century ago. And the great thing was that this happened at least three times, maybe closer to five, in every movie.

2) The other thing that got us laughing, though, was the hick cop played by Clifton James, described on Wikipedia as "an uncouth Louisiana sheriff." I recognized James from his similar role in Superman II, a role he almost certainly received as a nod to these Bond films. He's introduced in LALD and pops up again in TMWTGG, and he is turned up to 11 in his southern hick mannerisms, to hilarious effect. It's so off tone for a Bond film but it just reminds us how much fun these movies could be when they wanted to be, especially the ones directed by Guy Hamilton. (Which include Goldfinger, Diamonds Are Forever, Live and Let Die and The Man With the Golden Gun.) 

3) I was curious to see to what extent Blofeld, who does not die at the end of Diamonds Are Forever, remained as a villain for Moore's version of Bond. The answer is: not at all. They weren't necessarily making a totally clean break between George Lazenby and Sean Connery in the previous two films, as Blofeld appears in both, but he doesn't show up here. That said, in The Spy Who Loved Me, when Bach's Russian spy is giving Bond a little biographical run down on himself to prove she has done her homework, she says "Married once, wife killed --" before Bond cuts her off in no uncertain terms. So after two movies of making no overt or covert reference to anything related to the ending of On Her Majesty's Secret Service, we do get one quick mention here, keeping alive some small amount of continuity between the films. (And in terms of continuity, I believe we've gotten Bernard Lee as M, Desmond Llewellyn as Q and Lois Maxwell as Moneypenny in each of the five films I've watched in the past ten days.)

4) The songs! Hearing Paul McCartney and Wings sing "Live and Let Die" (and have its melody repeated throughout in orchestral form) and Carly Simon sing "Nobody Does It Better" (and have its melody repeated throughout in orchestral form) were both very nice. I didn't know the song from The Man With the Golden Gun but I can sort of remember it emerging from my six-hour James Bond blur. 

To end this long post where I started it off, it was indeed strange that it took me so long to see 3/7ths of the movies made by the guy who was the only James Bond I had ever seen on film until Timothy Dalton took on the role. 

But it occurred to me that these three movies were kind of like a Bond prequel trilogy for me, a primer on the man I'd watched so many times in Octopussy and once each in three other films. Except instead of as is the case with most prequel trilogies, I actually did want to find out where Roger Moore's James Bond had started out, how he had gotten to the place he was when I first met him -- even though these movies mostly have nothing to do with one another and generally make little of the character's past. 

And these three films in particular operated very much along the lines of prequel trilogy logic, especially as Jaws is introduced in the third one. The appearance of Jaws, the man who can tear metal (and kill people) with his bite, was the thing that gave me the greatest sense of finishing where I started off. I remember when I saw Moonraker way back in what was probably 1982, I was a bit terrified of this man, who occupies a bit of the same space in my mind as Non in Superman II (speaking of Superman II). Now I finally got to see how it all began.

This is a lot of talk for a guy who doesn't actually consider himself a huge Bond fan. Remember that Octopussy is the only Bond movie I've seen more than once. Don't worry, I'm almost done.

I do, however, want to finish this off with something that now seems obvious: a ranking of all 25 Bond films. So maybe after a breather of a few days to let the last five films settle into place, I'll wrap up this whole thing mid-week next week. 

Oh, and if you are reading this and are in the Melbourne area, my beloved Octopussy is just about to start as I publish this. While you'll be too late to jump in your car to go see Octopussy, there's still time to get in Moore's last movie (A View to a Kill) and watch all of Dalton, Brosnan and Craig.

One of our last bastions of such great customer service and such delightful programming spirit, The Sun most definitely deserves your money, even if they didn't get much of mine. 

Diamonds are for now, the rest of Bond for later

The Sun's Bondathon is in progress!

They started yesterday afternoon with Dr. No and squeezed in From Russia With Love and Goldfinger before the night was through. About 25 minutes from now as I am typing this, they will resume with Thunderball at 8 a.m. Friday and go from there.

I needn't get on board until 5 o'clock, when Roger Moore makes his Bond debut in Live and Let Die. I'll stay for The Man With the Golden Gun at 7:05 and The Spy Who Loved Me at 9:15, and then I will have seen every Eon James Bond release. (I've also seen Never Say Never Again, a non-Eon release, but have not yet seen the Casino Royale starring Woody Allen. I'll surely want to see that someday, but the canon films are the ones we're talking about here.)

I got in the position I needed to be in thanks to an 11th hour viewing last night of Diamonds Are Forever, Sean Connery's one-movie return to the role after George Lazenby's one movie. (Representing the only time in history where there were three different Bonds in three consecutive movies.) If I'd tried to see that as part of the marathon as well, a) I think four movies in one day might have broken me, and b) I'd have had to leave work early for a 2:40 start.

I won't go into too much detail about Diamonds Are Forever since I plan to write more Bond tomorrow, and since I need to get ready for work. But I did want to get in a few quick comments:

1) When I discussed the dour ending of On Her Majesty's Secret Service last week, I wondered where they would pick up the next movie after the (SPOILER ALERT) death of Bond's wife in literally the last minute of the film. The options seemed to be to completely ignore it and start fresh with a "new" James Bond (a.k.a. the return of the old James Bond) or to follow on directly from that incident and make the next movie all about revenge.

At the very start it seemed they were doing the latter. In the cold open of Diamonds, Bond is roughing up various low-level criminals to ascertain the location of Blofeld, whose drive by shooting was responsible for the death of his new bride. In short order -- in terms of screen time if not geographical locations -- Bond locates and seems to almost immediately dispatch this arch nemesis, though more with his usual whimsical dismissiveness than with a murderous instinct driven by fury. It would appear that the whole Blofeld character is done and dusted by the opening credits, making a clean break to let Connery get back into his familiar tuxedo and not be encumbered by the story of a different Bond.

Then (SPOILER ALERT) Blofeld returns later in the narrative, meaning the clean break was maybe never what they intended. However, until that point, the narrative had nothing to do with him and Bond just seemed to be on to a brand new adventure involving a fortune in diamonds and a satellite that can shoot laser beams at the earth.

Throughout Blofeld's involvement in the film, though, no mention is made of Bond's dead wife or any specific beef Bond has against Blofeld other than him being his arch nemesis. And he's grinning out of the side of his mouth, making wisecracks and bedding new women with the same non-monogamous lust he's always had. So ultimately, more of a clean break than a direct continuation of the events in the life of Lazenby's character.

2) They in fact don't make any cheeky references to Connery returning to the role, the way they make a cheeky reference at the start of OHMSS about Lazenby starting to inhabit it. Perhaps that would be saved for the non-Eon Never Say Never Again. What's more, there's no sign of Connery returning to the role with a gun to his head or with his tail between his legs. He's just his normal James Bond out there, and damn good at it.

3) This movie has a pair of gay assassins! The movie does not make a lot out of their sexuality, but when they dispatch their first victim, they walk off holding hands. I actually had to go back because I saw it only out of the corner of my eye and wanted to confirm what I had just seen. There's only one more overt mention, when one tells the other that a particular woman is "attractive ... for a woman." I can't figure out exactly what is being said through these characters and whether I should be offended on their behalf 50 years later, but the performances are particularly fun and not because they are played in a campy way -- they are not at all. They're just sinister and good at dropping one-liners in the manner of all the best villains. 

4) The whole movie is similarly fun. In fact, this might immediately become as high as my second-rated Connery film behind Goldfinger. I'd have to think about it because I was indeed a fan of From Russia With Love. But this movie is sprightly and goofy in all the right ways, with good set pieces and approaching a modern level of secret contraptions and the like. A really swell time at the movies. 

I think there was one more thing I wanted to say but work calls. Especially since I will need to duck out about 15 minutes early in order to keep my date with Roger Moore.