Audient Outliers: Great Expectations

This is the fourth in my 2024 bi-monthly series in which I revisit the one film I don't care for in the filmography of a director I love.

Until his productivity kind of dwindled away there -- how else to describe just a single feature film in a ten-year period? -- Alfonso Cuaron was just about my gold standard for visionary directors who take big swings, and almost always hit.

Children of Men is, of course, the gold standard of that gold standard, having taken my #1 movie of 2006 and, perhaps more tellingly, my #2 movie of that entire decade. 

Harry Potter and the Prisoner Azkaban, Y Tu Mama Tambien and Gravity are all excellent movies, and even when I'm not totally sold on something Cuaron makes -- such as the only movie we've gotten from him since 2013, Roma -- I recognize its artistry, and probably think it's a "me thing" and that I should take another look.

I went back this month for another look at his 1998 film, Great Expectations, even though I never thought not liking it was a "me thing." (And to clarify more fully, I think Roma is a very good movie, I just don't think it quite warranted all the praise it got.)

I'm pretty sure I saw Great Expectations before I saw Y Tu Mama Tambien in Cuaron's filmography, but it would be hard to confirm that because I didn't keep track of the order in which I watched films until early 2002, the year after Y Tu Mama came out. And I definitely don't remember watching it as a result of loving Y Tu Mama, though I suppose that could have happened. So let's just say Great Expectations was my first introduction to Cuaron.

If so, it didn't leave me with very great expectations.

Now I should say it's possible I wouldn't particularly care for any film version of Charles Dickens' novel, which I haven't read, and which I have never seen adapted into a period appropriate film. This rewatch confirms that this story is not of particular interest to me, even though I consider myself a romantic who is ready and eager to swoon over such material, if it is presented just so.

In fact, I couldn't help but think of Titanic, which came out the year before Great Expectations, as I watched this. I went in hook, line and sinker for Titanic -- if you'll allow the marine metaphor -- so you'd think that would leave me particularly susceptible to the way Cuaron et al try to conjure a similarly intoxicating romance between Ethan Hawke's Finn and Gwyneth Paltrow's Stella. I'm sure this is straight from the novel so I'm not trying to accuse Cuaron of ripping Titanic off, but there's even a scene where the young man draws/paints the young woman in the nude.

Suffice it to say I was not intoxicated.

And there are materials here with which to intoxicate a person. Specifically, Paltrow. I'll confess that Gwyneth Paltrow of this period does make me swoon just a bit with that perfectly coquettish partial parting of her lips. Both the actress and the character are keenly aware of the power they may have over men, and use it mercilessly. 

The problem is, I don't feel any energy between her and Hawke, an actor I have always liked very much, but perhaps slightly more so in the 21st century than the 20th. I feel there is a lot of play-acting of an almost fairytale style romance, what with the mouldering Florida mansion where the young versions of the characters first meet and share that ten-year-old kiss at the fountain they are both drinking from -- a moment I do admit works, and that I remembered well from my previous viewing. I just don't feel like the film gets beyond play-acting.

I suppose this is a logical progression for Cuaron after his debut English language feature, 1995's A Little Princess, which is one of those movies I went back and watched after I'd already been floored by his work. I really liked that one and it does indicate the sort of fantasy world where Cuaron finds himself in Great Expectations. (I should note here that I thought myself a Cuaron completist, but it turns out I haven't seen 1991's Love in the Time of Hysteria, a Spanish language film, so I probably ought to rectify that at some point.)

But I think it's pretty telling how Cuaron thought Great Expectations went that he immediately scrambled back to something smaller and more culturally specific to his experiences, with a cast of no-names, two of whom went on to become big stars. Y Tu Mama Tambien feels like a reaction to having "sold out" to make a big movie starring big movie stars and not having it go well, and I think we can say pretty definitively that it enabled him to have this legendary career.

So what's actually wrong with Great Expectations?

It's hard to encapsulate it through concrete examples. It just doesn't feel very true. As I was watching it Wednesday night, I was initially critical of how I didn't think it was very visually inventive, even with long-time collaborator Emmanuel Lubezki serving as the DP. But I did notice, as the movie went on, things that I thought were at least attempts by Cuaron to showcase that sort of creativity. They just lack impact.

One thing I felt is that it hasn't aged very well, or probably more accurately, it was not made at the time with an eye for how it would age. A moment that particularly stood out to me is that an early romantic scene between our leads, which is meant to take place in the late 1980s, is scored to a Soundgarden song. Chris Cornell's voice feels like it situates this very exactly in the early 1990s, which is neither the era that is being depicted in this movie -- there was definitely no grunge before 1991 -- nor the era that the film was actually made, when grunge was already on its way out. (Not all the music had this effect on me, as I was pleased to hear the voice of personal favorite Tori Amos at one point, in a song I didn't previously know -- though I think her music transcends the specific period of its creation a lot more than Cornell's does.)

To show you how little I remembered the details of this movie, I was surprised to see Robert De Niro's role as the criminal Finn helps escape, back when he's still a child, who is ultimately revealed to be his benefactor. I sort of remembered it as I saw it happening, but if you had asked me beforehand if Robert De Niro was in this movie, I would have told you surely not. 

Without a real acquaintance with the original novel, I couldn't get a grasp on what themes were meant to be explored here, specifically through that character but just generally. What is it supposed to mean that Finn saved this gruff character -- albeit very much against his will -- from certain capture by the police, and that this man secretly funded his rise in the art world over the next 20 years? Is that supposed to mean Finn didn't really make it on his own? And is this supposed to be a defeat for the character? If that's the idea, it isn't explored very conclusively.

Rather, it seems that what this movie is really "about" is that Finn falls in love with a coquettish woman who parts her lips just so, and she basically toys with his emotions, and that's mean. The false way these characters have been developed really reveals itself in a scene after a big art opening Finn has in New York, where he's swigging a bottle of booze and walking through the rain to (what he believes is) Estella's apartment. He then shouts up at her window about how he has attained fame and fortune and success in the art world and it's still not enough for her. The fact that this moment feels so abrupt within the narrative is a sure sign that the proper work hasn't been done. Why is he so mad? Is it such an epic betrayal to tease someone?

Then when he realizes it's not Estella obscured up in that window, but rather, the eccentric old woman who owned the mouldering Florida mansion -- Mrs. Dinsmoor, played by Anne Bancroft -- he has to have it out with her as though she bears a significant responsibility for Estella breaking his heart. It's not at all convincing that this might be the case -- she even told him the girl would break his heart, many years ago -- and yet the scene culminates in tortured grandeur as Dinsmoor cries in agony "What have I done???" while Finn storms down the stairs and out of the building.

I think in the end I have to say that this is like the Calvin Klein jeans ad version of Great Expectations. There's a lot of shots of people looking sort of pretty and sort of tortured and generally dressed in dynamite clothing. There's scenes of wild rain and leaves blowing around as if staged by a set designer. And then of course there is the grand mansion, overgrown with ivy and other plant life, sort of like Gatsby's mansion if it had been left to seed.

In fact, the evocation of Gatsby got me thinking about what Baz Luhrmann would have done with this material. Not only would he have made it grander by making it more of an obvious caricature, by outsizing its romance until it blew off the canvas entirely, but he would have made it fun. There isn't a single thing fun about Great Expectations, and that could be why it's so hard to care about any of its characters.

I wouldn't say that a sense of humor ever became Cuaron's strong suit. But he didn't need one in the movies he would make later. (And you're wrong if you think Children of Men doesn't have any funny moments.) All he needed was the vision he found along the way, which may not conform to the sorts of commonalities between works we ascribe to an auteur, but was consistently characterized by being ambitious -- ambitious in a way that failed him in Great Expectations.

But we should also be incredibly thankful for Great Expectations.

Let's say his vision for this movie had been very well received, had even resulted in Oscar nominations -- hell, for the sake of argument, let's even say it won best picture. Those things happen and there's almost a zero percent chance we get Y Tu Mama Tambien, or the best Harry Potter movie, or the craziest post-apocalyptic movie about mass sterility that contains some of the most technically challenging scenes ever filmed, or an absolute game-changer in the making of outer space films.

And how much poorer would we be for that. 

Blaxploitaudient: Lord Shango

This is the eighth in my 2024 monthly series watching blaxploitation movies I haven't seen before.

My August selection in Blaxploitaudient, Lord Shango, got me asking the question: 

Just because a movie features primarily Black people -- in this case all Black people -- and is set in the 1970s, does that necessarily make it a blaxploitation film?

Ray Marsh's 1975 film came on my radar by doing a search of the word "blaxploitation" on Kanopy, earlier on the very night that I watched it. See, I had only 11 films in my Blaxploitaudient list of potential candidates for this series on Letterboxd, meaning I'd need at least one that wasn't on the list. I considered watching Coffy, one of the remaining four I had not yet watched, but I get the sense that this is another film fronted by a female badass, and I've watched a film that profiles like that in two of the past three months with Foxy Brown and Cleopatra Jones. I'm saving Ganja & Hess, which I understand is a horror movie, for October, and I'm questionable on whether I am going to ultimately watch either Dolemite or Shaft in Africa, since I've already watched a Rudy Ray Moore movie and a Shaft movie.

And I actually did welcome the change in subject matter with Lord Shango, which deals more with the occult than the traditional blaxploitation elements of drugs, crime, guns and groovy music. Whether or not that makes it a blaxploitation film, well, I may leave that up to wiser people than me, and in any case, with MIFF on this month, I'm definitely not going to fit in another one.

I was concerned at the start that this might be extremely low budge, and that the film's technical limitations might make it even more of a B movie than usual in a series comprised of essentially B movies. It did pick up in its confidence a bit as it went, though it likely still remains the most anonymous movie that I've watched, considering that I wasn't familiar with a single cast member -- a first for this series.

And here's an interesting indication of the obscurity of Lord Shango -- it does not have its own Wikipedia page. It's mentioned in the Wikipedia pages of some of the actors who appear in it, but it never got its own. Which is a shame, because I watched this last week and wanted a refresher on the plot. So I've just got to do my best on that one. 

Let's start with the logline on IMDB: "A tribal priest returns from the dead to take revenge on non-believers." News to me, ha ha.

So the movie opens with a woman Billie (Avis McCarther) being taken for her christening in a lake ceremony. Her fiancee Femi (Bill Overton) arrives to try to break this up, I believe since he is pagan. (Is he the tribal priest? I did not get that.) In the struggle to remove him from the ceremony, though, Femi accidentally drowns, sending Billie into a pit of despair.

The main character then becomes Billie's mother, Jenny (Marlene Clark), who knows that a mysterious bystander to this ceremony named Jabo (Lawrence Cook) has a connection to the occult. The movie takes on the thrust of summoning the spiritual leader Lord Shango to save and protect Billie, though of course this has unintended consequences, and certain people who wronged the pregnant Billie are likely to get quite the comeuppance.

I ultimately gave this film three stars on Letterboxd, but my only memory of it now is hazy, and I can't say it did a great job keeping its audience up to speed with the plot points. This is becoming a theme in my posts, but I watched it on a night I was really tired, and there were naps involved. Cognizant of how busy I would be during August because of MIFF, I watched it before the festival started, but you could rightly say I was sort of jamming it in just to tick it off the list. There were ultimately things about the film that I thought worked enough to give it this narrowest of recommendations, but since I can't fully recall what they were now, it feels a little empty. I think just best to move on.

One realization I had during the movie, when retroactively pondering my August choice, is that although this series was inspired by watching Elvis Mitchell's Is That Black Enough for You? at the end of my 2022 ranking period, I don't believe I've watched many, if any, films that I learned about from that movie. There were a lot of blaxploitation movies I already knew about that I hadn't seen, and those have made up the bulk of the series so far.

So I have now vowed to check the inevitable online list of all the movies mentioned in Is That Black Enough for You?, and choose two of them to go along with Coffy and Ganja & Hess for the final four movies in this series. September seems like a good time to do the first one. 

MIFF: My old ass ran, and Shakespeare profound

For the second night in a row on Saturday, I trained into the city for MIFF, though this time it wasn't a workday. That might have been a key factor in why I casually took the 5:42 train, for a movie that started at 6:30, when I clearly should have taken the 5:22.

Forty-eight minutes might seem like plenty of time to get there, if you didn't know where "there" was. I take a 7:42 am. train on the mornings I go into work to get there at 8:30, but I'm usually walking in the door right at 8:30 -- or was, before my office moved. Now it's more like 8:37.

And getting to Hoyts Melbourne Central requires as much hoofing, if not more, than getting to my old office. What the hell was I thinking?

So instead of enjoying a casual trip into the city, I anxiously watched the minutes count down and stressed over every perceived delay in service. When we finally arrived at Flinders Street around 6:12, I knew I would probably make it, but I also knew that the next decision was key. Do I take a tram up Elizabeth Street to Melbourne Central, or do I just walk? The former held the promise of a (potentially) faster arrival time, but the latter left the speed I got there within my own control, and the control of the traffic lights.

Well, I chose to ride the tram for those three stops -- and immediately regretted my decision. Because the intersection of Flinders Street and Elizabeth Street is a terminus point for all trams travelling down Elizabeth Street, that also means the tram operator can take an indeterminate amount of time -- up to a schedule or up to his or her own whims? -- before deciding that as many people who intended to board had boarded before leaving. And in this case, that was an interminable three minutes or so. 

When we were only at the second stop by about 6:24, I decided to bail. I got out and raced the tram up Elizabeth Street, now at a full run -- or at least a full jog. 

I did beat the tram there, but only just, or should I say, it was a tie, except I was already on the correct side of the road and didn't have to wait for others disembarking the tram with a lot less deliberation that I would have intended. In short, it was the right decision, but an even better decision would have been to walk the whole way. (But considering that this day already included the steps from the end of my MIFF outing the night before, several thousand of which occurred after midnight, I ended up with more than 19,000 steps for the day, so the short break on the tram was welcome in some respects.)

Scampering around people and up escalators, I actually made it before the MIFF pre-show advertising even began. I guess I was more worried about not scoring a decent seat than actually missing the start of the movie, but that turned out fine as well. 

Oh, the movie was called My Old Ass, hence the subject of this post.

And it was a charmer. The premise is pretty delightful: Aubrey Plaza plays the 39-year-old version of approximately 19-year-old Maisy Stella, an actress I'd never seen before who I found radiant with charisma. Both play Elliott, but we're in the younger one's current time. She's a lesbian -- or so she thinks, more on that in a moment -- who is meant to inherit the Canadian cranberry farm that has been in her family for generations, but would rather leave that to her keen brother and move to the big city (Toronto). She's enjoying a final three weeks of summer before this move with some friends around the lake, and when they take mushrooms one night, she is visited by, or possibly conjures, the version of herself 20 years in the future.

My Old Ass is not meant to be super high concept, as it toys with some of the possible conundrums of whether this is real or not and if so, how learning about things that happen in the future will affect the space-time continuum. Megan Park's movie is more of a coming-of-age story than anything else, and Plaza is not in that much of it -- only three scenes by my count. Which makes sense for an in-demand actress who was likely doing a favor for this small production. (There are actually a couple other recognizable actors, one being Maria Dizzia -- who I often confuse with Elizabeth Reaser -- and one being Maddie Zeigler, apparently still able to get work after her performance in Sia's Music was widely panned because she was playing a character with intellectual disabilities.) 

The movie has a light spirit, a lot of humor and some touching moments, but I have to say there was one thing about it that bothered me. I suppose this qualifies as a mild spoiler, but the central romantic relationship in the movie is not between Elliott and a woman. It turns out she is discovering she might not be gay, or that at least she might be bi. While I suppose that would certainly be some people's journey, I had to wonder if there was something about it that was a step in the wrong direction.

After My Old Ass I got a sort-of disappointing chicken burger from Oporto and made my way back to my favorite MIFF venue, The Capitol, for the second night in a row. This was a much shorter and much more easily travelled distance, and I arrived in plenty of time.

And here was where I had my first major MIFF discovery of 2024, my first of those moments that I've managed to find every year, even when I don't feel like the program is particularly great: The reminder of why I love MIFF to begin with.

I don't know what kind of exposure or release Grand Theft Hamlet is going to get, and in fact, there is a good chance I would never have come across it if not for MIFF. And it has quickly jumped to become among my handful of favorite films so far in 2024. 

In the subject of this post I teased "Shakespeare profound," which may seem like an obvious statement. I mean, it's Shakespeare, so of course it's profound, right? (Or whoever wrote the works attributed to Shakespeare. A discussion for another time.)

But those of us who have lived to a certain age have seen so much Shakespeare that after a while, it might feel more banal than profound.

Enter Grand Theft Hamlet, which places the staging of Shakespeare's most famous? (maybe Romeo & Juliet is more famous) play within the world of one of the most popular and enduring online gaming communities.

I won't go into too much detail here, but rather, link my already-posted review here. But in case you don't want to follow that link, I'll briefly say that two out-of-work British actors (Sam Crane and Mark Oosterveen) were playing too much Grand Theft Auto at the beginning of 2021, during Britain's third lockdown, when they got the idea that they could try to put on a performance of Hamlet within the game space, using other interested gamers who happen to have an interest in Shakespeare. (There's a funny moment when they acknowledge that the Venn diagram of online gamers and Shakespeare enthusiasts yields a fairly small result.) Without conventional stages being available, all this world could be their stage.

And in a similar mix of the funny and the poignant to what I experienced at MIFF with my #1 film of 2016, Toni Erdmann, Grand Theft Hamlet knocks this concept out of the park. The game mechanics themselves result in moments that left our audience screaming with laughter, but underlying the obvious humor was the profound undercurrent of sadness and dislocation -- both of the GTA world itself, where people are constantly killing each other, and of the real world at that time, when COVID and racial strife were tearing us apart. And then there is the profound of seeing these famous speeches from Hamlet set against this immaculately designed game space.

But now I'm starting to repeat my review, so I will just leave off there. Simply put: Seek this one out.

The holiday-themed towns of Massachusetts

I'm such a sucker for themed viewings that I likely would have waited until this Thanksgiving to see Thanksgiving, which I missed last Thanksgiving. 

However, sometimes I surprise myself, and I ended up watching it this past Thursday night.

(At least it was on a Thursday, if we're looking for themes -- though that was unintentional.)

And as I was watching, I realized there was something familiar about it.

No, it wasn't that I had seen an abbreviated version of it back when I saw Grindhouse, back when Planet Terror and Death Proof were considered to be one movie, the two halves separated by fake trailers. One of which was Machete, which has already been made into a movie (a movie that got a sequel), and one of which was Eli Roth's initial pass at Thanksgiving. Without watching that fake trailer again, I don't know if his fake trailer had anything to do with the direction Roth ultimately decided to go with his movie.

Rather, it was familiar because I have seen other movies set in a small Massachusetts town that's famous for being associated with a particular holiday. 

That's right, Plymouth is the setting for Thanksgiving, as it contains Plymouth Rock, the location the Mayflower landed in 1620, disgorging pilgrims everywhere and ultimately destroying the future for Native Americans. Appropriately, it is a celebrated with all sorts of Thanksgiving-related hoopla, at least according to this movie. (I didn't check to see if the real Plymouth has a Thanksgiving parade and is lousy with oversized turkeys and people dressed as pilgrims, but it is easy to imagine that they do and are.)

The commercialization and celebration of Thanksgiving in Plymouth, whether it is real or imagined, gives it something in common with nearby Salem, which has the same sort of relationship with Halloween. 

As you would know if you have visited -- or if you have watched movies like Hocus Pocus and its sequel, or The Lords of Salem -- Salem, Massachusetts is all about selling the occult to tourists. There is a regionally famous witch trials museum that has a sort of "show" about the trials that uses light animatronics, and every second shop will sell you potions or Harry Potter stuff. At Halloween, this town goes crazy.

The fact that Massachusetts would have two towns that are closely associated with major holidays that fall during the second half of the year seems rather unlikely, and is nothing I had ever thought of before. It's not just that the towns are closely associated with the holiday, but rather, that no other town -- in the entire U.S. -- has more of a claim to either of these holidays than these two towns have. 

They're only about 60 miles apart from each other, at that.

Burying the lede here -- about halfway between these two towns is the town where I grew up, Lexington, which makes it all the more interesting for me personally. 

The funny thing is, while I know where Salem is because I've been there twice in the past 15 years, I actually had to look on a map just now to remind myself that Plymouth was actually south of Lexington, not north. Some Massachussetsan I am. (I think it should "Massachuten," but that does not appear to mean anything.)

Guess it's been a while since I've been there, or maybe it's just an indication of which of these two holidays I like more. I can tell you that while my Australian wife is always interested in stopping in Salem -- my not-yet-14-year-old son has been there twice, and we don't even live in that country -- she has never expressed any interest in seeing where the pilgrims landed, directly or indirectly leading to centuries of European imperialism and mass murder on that continent. 

As for the movie, a few inventive Thanksgiving-themed kills aside, I found it to be a fairly generic slasher flick where a serial killer wears a mask, and it is ultimately the last person you think it's going to be. Too bad Roth couldn't lean more into the silliness of the opening Black Friday riot at a big box store in which people are trampled to death in outrageously bloody ways. Or better still, have given us the grindhouse version of a serial killer movie set in the 17th century -- like, historically ambitious and deeply pulpy, all at once. 

MIFF: I saw the IMAX screen glow, and sparkler cake double feature

There were a couple of firsts in my first two MIFF movies of 2024, other than obviously being the first of the year:

1) The first time I had ever gone into the city on a weekday to see MIFF movies, rather than working in the city and then staying for my movies;

2) The first time I had ever seen a MIFF movie on an IMAX screen.

That second isn't so surprising, given that I don't believe MIFF has ever had a partnership, before this year, with the Melbourne Museum, where one of the world's largest IMAX screens is housed. 

And because all my past IMAX experiences have involved $200 million blockbusters, that makes I Saw the TV Glow definitely the lowest budgeted film I've ever seen on an IMAX screen.

Jane Schoenbrun's film was actually the second I watched on Friday, so let's start at the beginning.

Which was that morning, when I toured the campus of a high school where my son might want to transfer. That was the reason I couldn't go into work on Friday, though I'd already worked three days in the office this week while backfilling for my manager, so I can't say I minded. He wouldn't be transferring there until the start of 2026, but I kind of hope he never does as it is really too expensive for us, and I wasn't all that impressed by the facilities. (And I promise that was not just my wallet talking.)

So when the workday did come to a close, blissfully ending two weeks in which I was doing two different jobs, I took the train in to the city in time for my 6 p.m. showing of La Cocina at my favorite MIFF venue, The Capitol. 

The 139-minute black and white film by director Alonzo Ruizpalacios was welcome in at least one regard. In my previous post, I bemoaned the fact that none of the first four films I'd picked for MIFF 2024 was a foreign film. Set in New York City, La Cocina certainly isn't "foreign" in that sense, but I'd say that more than half the dialogue is in Spanish, so that's something at least. 

In most other regards, this movie did not work for me. It reminded me of a mode of independent film we haven't seen much of in the past 20 years, the one that invites the word "pretentious" with a capital P. Not only is there the black and white photography, but there are a lot of off-center shots and dialogue that is ten to 20 percent more poetic than it should be. Plus everybody is smoking in nearly ever scene, though I suppose it's possible this film is set in the past. (It isn't specified, and the production design is timeless enough that you wouldn't know for sure, though it does appear to be at a time where touch-screen point-of-sales might be relatively new technology, since we see characters perplexed by trying to work them.)

It follows a day in the kitchen and front of house of what appears to be a touristy restaurant in Times Square, a bit in an upstairs-downstairs mode, though mostly downstairs. A manager is conducting a series of interviews with staff because more than $800 went missing from the till. It's one of those movies where so much happens in a single day that it beggars belief, from a broken water main that floods the kitchen, to a beef between two workers escalating into violence, to a new starter being shown the ropes, to a particular hothead exhausting all three of the strikes the chef gives him in one day. Its origins as a play are pretty obvious, and somehow in among all this, the characters seem to have more time when they are on a break than anything else.

I had been hopeful about the movie because Rooney Mara is the one recognizable star, but I guess Mara isn't quite the guarantee of quality she once was for me. I guess that's not quite saying it right. This movie is "quality" in the sense that it is made with a high level of technical competence and has good artistic instincts, even if they are the instincts of a slightly different era. The conception and execution are both heavy-handed to the point of rolling the eyeballs, though. Since the action is restricted to the restaurant, La Cocina reminds me a bit of how those who didn't like Birdman must have felt about it.

Incidentally, now that I have seen La Cocina, my 2024 movie list contains both movies called La Cocina and The Kitchen. 

After La Cocina, I picked up some not-very-good Asian fast food and meandered my way over to the Melbourne Museum, a walk of about 20 minutes. I arrived with ten minutes to spare, which I quickly discovered was the wrong tack when you're talking about an IMAX screen.

I sit closer to the screen than your average person, subscribing to the notion that a movie screen should fill as much of your field of vision as possible. Forced to sit in the fourth row, I think it was, of an IMAX screen is taking that a bit to an extreme. So while this was a good sort of movie to be overwhelmed by, I would have preferred to be overwhelmed from about two rows back from where I was.

I had purposely prevented myself from learning too much about I Saw the TV Glow before coming in, even going so far as to avoid its discussion entirely on two of my regular podcasts. So I didn't know it was a Buffy-like TV show the characters were obsessed with. I was expecting something more inherently supernatural in nature like the central conceit of Schoenbrun's We're All Going to the World's Fair. 

Although this is a better movie than that, my core assessment of the film's strengths and weaknesses is very similar. Both movies have some excellent visual moments that chill you to the bone, and the overall mood is hard to beat. And both movies come in at only a percentage as successful as I thought they could have been, in part because both fail to stick the ending -- or even really have much of an ending to speak of.

But rest assured, I do feel quite positively about I Saw the TV Glow. Because of how it fizzles out -- pretty much the entire final 10 to 15 minutes didn't work for me -- I can't give it any higher than a 3.5 out of 5, though interestingly, I've slotted it in higher on my year-end rankings in progress than some films I've given a four. I Saw the TV Glow is better than those films in most ways, though still leaves me fundamentally unsatisfied in a manner that prevents me from going to four stars. A film that is a better version of itself than I Saw the TV Glow might get four stars, and still not be the film that I Saw the TV Glow is.

I did appreciate a lot of the thoughts by Schoenbrun, who I believe considers themselves a trans woman with they/them pronouns, on gender fluidity. Much of the movie operates as a metaphor for feeling trapped inside a body that doesn't feel like yours, and not being understood by anybody so seeking to dream yourself away into the popular culture that becomes more of a family to you than your own. And some of those images -- man, I won't soon forget them. Those strange dancing twins whose hair and chin gives them the appearance of crescent moons, and the moon monster himself, Mr. Melancholy, lasciviously licking the face of one of the characters in one of the film's haunting signature images ... I'll rewatch I Saw the TV Glow for them alone.

I promised you a sparkler cake double feature. And true enough, both of these films contains a scene where somebody carries out a birthday cake with a sparkler on top of it, and all the restaurant workers gather to sing happy birthday to a customer. Doesn't get a lot more specific than that.

As I write this I have already attended my second MIFF double feature on Saturday night, but it's too much to cover in this one post so I'll get to it as soon as I can.

Iffy MIFF

Tickets to the 2024 Melbourne International Film Festival, which runs August 8th to 25th, have been open to the general public for about a week now, yet I have yet to purchase any.

If you want to see the movies you want to see, you have to get in early. They do sell out. Some good ones already have.

The thing is, I don't want to see the movies I want to see, because there aren't really any movies I want to see.

Of course that's an exaggeration. Out of more than 300 movies, which includes shorts and VR and other special events, there are always going to be some movies with an intriguing enough concept, a stellar enough cast or an accomplished enough director that I would go and see them, and even look forward to seeing them.

But in 2024, there are no big tentpole movies that feel like they might define the MIFF experience for me.

My past MIFFs have been characterized by this sort of thing. One prime example was Toni Erdmann, whose Cannes buzz had preceded it and 

And that's where I left off on July 23rd. 

Usually when I abandon a post, it stays abandoned. I have a sort of graveyard of drafts that I sometimes like to look through to remember what I wanted to say, and also possibly why I wasn't motivated enough to continue saying it. (A couple times, it was because I wasn't sure I should be saying it at all.)

This time, though, I'm picking up where I left off -- without changing any of what I've already written -- because MIFF is starting in a few days now, and it's still iffy.

I was about to launch into a list of high-profile movies that had underpinned past MIFFs for me, and maybe that's why I got interrupted and didn't get back to it. It isn't usually too much work to look through my past MIFF viewings -- especially because (surprise surprise) I have a list of them -- but since it's been two weeks, I don't actually remember if that was the reason I stopped writing mid-sentence.

Then there's also going through this year's offerings to show you why they don't fill me with glee. That also requires work. I'll do some of both types of work to quickly catch you up on that.

In past MIFFs, I have been particularly excited by known commodities on the director side, especially international directors -- your Asghar Farhadis, your Hirokazu Kore-edas, your Gaspar Noes. There has always been someone who got me excited about their latest offering, someone who works outside what I think of as the most obvious avenues of cinematic expression.

This is the first place MIFF 2024 comes up very short. If I consult my list of MIFF movies I put in a spreadsheet -- which, oddly, is the most organized I have ever been about it, in the year I am least enthused -- these are the only directors I saw it fit to single out as possibly swaying my choice of one movie over another:

David Cronenberg
Michel Hazanavicius
Larry Fessenden
Guy Maddin
Francis Ford Coppola

The noteworthy thing about these names is that I have not actually seen a film by either Fessenden or Maddin, they're just people I've heard of so it felt like I should make a note that they directed the movies in question.

As for Coppola, it was just a single showing of his new movie Megalopolis, on an inconveniently located screen, so it was never a serious consideration.

Actors? These are the names I wrote down as potentially reasons to watch the movie in question:

Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Demi Moore
Sebastian Stan
Rooney Mara 
Aubrey Plaza
Jessica Chastain
Peter Sarsgard

I am actually going to the Mara and Plaza movies, La Cocina and My Old Ass, respectively. The Louis-Dreyfus movie, Tuesday, sounds really promising, but it's already had a release in the U.S. and I'll likely be able to rent it within a few months. 

Speaking of things already released, I ended up pairing my Friday night showing of La Cocina, which will kick off MIFF for me at 6 p.m. that day, with a movie that is way already available in the U.S.: I Saw the TV Glow. In fact, I'd been stalking it for a couple months already on iTunes, and only recently has it gone down to the reasonable $5.99 rental price. In fact, if I hadn't already booked it in at MIFF, I probably would have watched it last weekend.

To be clear, this was never one of my MIFF priorities, much as I do want to see it, because it's so otherwise available to me. But I was left with no other good options after both of the movies I ideally wanted to see that Friday night -- the Chinese film Brief History of a Family (which was described in the vein of Saltburn or Parasite) and the English language comedy Timestalker -- sold out so quickly that it defied explanation. 

And missing out on the Chinese film raises another issue, which is: of the four movies I've already booked, none is in a language other than English. Oh, I expect there will be some Spanish sprinkled into La Cocina, but with Mara as the star, it will likely be primarily English. The I in MIFF figures to come up very short for me this year. (In addition to La Cocina, My Old Ass and I Saw the TV Glow, I am also seeing a movie called Grand Theft Hamlet, which is Hamlet done in the style of Grand Theft Auto. Might be a hoot, might suck.)

Why were my options so limited for these first four movies?

Well that gets into my obligation as a recipient of free passes to six MIFF films as part of the critical community. I need to pack movies into the first weekend so I can write reviews of them before their second and in some cases final screening, so readers can still theoretically buy tickets to them. An approach which totally backfires if the second screenings sell out.

There were actually some movies I really wanted to see on the second Saturday night. The aforementioned Demi Moore movie is a body horror called The Substance, and there's a Greek movie called She Loved Blossoms More that looks like it will have super trippy visuals. But I can't go to either of those because my mother-in-law is in town that night. 

Feeling a bit deflated, I have not yet booked anything for my final two tickets, and at this point will just take the dregs of whatever's remaining.

I'm sure it will all be fine, and not every MIFF needs to be great.

But at this point, this MIFF seems iffy indeed. 

Okay, now let me go publish this before the festival actually starts. 

An evening with monkey men

Coincidence alert! Coincidence alert!

I write so much about viewing coincidences here -- and so regularly consider that a valid reason to write a blog post, when otherwise there would be none -- that I have officially launched a new label for it. That's right, going forward you will be able to click on a label to read other posts about coincidences. Will I go back and retroactively add this to all my previous posts whose sole existence can be attributed to a viewing coincidence? Well surely not, but I'll definitely add it to some, over time, as I am reminded of them for other reasons.

The coincidence du jour is that on Saturday, I watched two movies that can be said to be about a monkey man, one of which was actually called Monkey Man.

I actually started Dev Patel's directorial debut on Friday night, but after two naps in the first 30 minutes, I could tell I was not going to make it through. If you want excuses for that, we were ending a week where a) I am backfilling for my manager and everything is a blur of meetings and cc'd emails, and b) we have just started a new walking challenge at work, so I've been doing at least 10,000 steps per day. The heavy Indian accents (mostly in the supporting cast, I can understand Patel just fine) and occasional subtitles were just too much for my little brain to compute on that particular occasion. Instead I finished off the night with two episodes of Friends (I'm rewatching the series) and pushed forward the remainder of Monkey Man to Saturday early evening.

Despite not being as oriented within the plot in the first 30 minutes as I would hope, I ended up really enjoying this movie. And part of that was: It's not a very complicated plot. Dev Patel wants vengeance against a corrupt police chief and a charlatan religious guru for having raped and killed his mother and then lit her on fire. That was just the police chief, but it was the guru who ordered the clearing of his village, which involved burning it. He's thought of as Monkey Man because he wears a monkey mask while engaged in his side hustle of rigged wrestling matches, presided over by a particularly oily Sharlto Copley. 

Anyway, Patel impressed me in multiple ways in this movie. He's got a keen eye as a director, as I found this a terrifically kinetic action movie with not only great fight scenes, but an innate understanding of how to capture details within the scene and to marry his images and editing to a killer soundtrack. It was akin to the feeling we got from certain "showy" directors -- maybe Guy Ritchie -- when they first came on the scene, but I'm not saying that as a backhanded compliment. Those feelings of excitement were real when we first saw those directors, and it was only because some of them couldn't overcome their core aesthetic that they ended up feeling a little hacky. We'll see if this is the only mode Patel has, but for now, I'm digging what he brings to a movie, and hoping he'll get opportunities to make more.

And then, he impressed me as an action star -- but more than that, a movie star. I'm sure I've realized this before, but Patel has "it," the thing that makes a personality rise above the level of mere actor -- a station that requires a certain amount of charisma to begin with -- to enter that stratospheric zone of star. He looks the part as a lean, mean fighting machine. He's got a smoldering intensity, and though there were likely stunt doubles used in a variety of his fighting scenes, some are clearly all him, and he pulls them off incredibly competently. Simply put, I could watch Patel in a dozen more of these John Wick-style outings, and in fact, I liked Monkey Man more than I've liked any of the four John Wick movies. (I'm not a huge fan of that series so the first one is the only one that would even challenge this.)

In any coincidence, we have to evaluate the second movie, the one that makes it a coincidence, to determine if the coincidence arose organically, or if it was engineered once a theme was identified. And I think I can pretty clearly make the case for the coincidence here.

The second movie was David and Nathan Zellner's Sasquatch Sunset, about sasquatches. And since the sasquatch is often thought of as the missing link between man and ape, obviously we are dealing with a monkey man here as well. (Or four of them, to be exact. Or actually three of them, since one is a monkey woman.)

But here's why I did not connect my own missing mental link between Monkey Man and Sasquatch Sunset when I chose it:

1) The reason for choosing the movie was that I am trying to watch two movies that will be playing at the upcoming Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF), which starts this Thursday, that are already available to me through U.S. iTunes, so I can write a MIFF preview post on ReelGood. Last year I started the tradition by watching Biosphere and BlackBerry, the latter of which I'd actually seen a couple months earlier, and I decided to continue it with two this year.

I was planning to watch the first of those, Pamela Adlon's Babes, on Saturday night. But in reviewing the MIFF films list on Saturday afternoon in order to find my second movie, I came across Sasquatch Sunset, and spontaneously decided to make that my first movie in the sense of watching it first. I'd watch Babes one of the next few nights. (I'm dragging my heels a bit on Babes because I don't like Ilana Glazer. We'll see if this movie helps change that impression.)

2) I didn't actually make the connection between a sasquatch and a monkey until I started watching the movie.

You see, we don't actually know how a sasquatch is supposed to sound, because they are, as far as we know, mythological creatures rather than actual ones. Maybe "mythological" is too strong. Maybe "unverified" is better. Anyway, we've never heard one before.

The Zellners choose to have them go "oo oo" like a monkey. 

Which, if they are indeed the missing evolutionary link, would make a certain sense.

When I first learned that Jesse Eisenberg stars in this -- you can barely make out that it's him if you know what his eyes look like -- I thought the sasquatches might speak English to each other, and make the sort of Woody Allen-lite observations about their world that Eisenberg would do particularly well. 

But I probably should have guessed that the Zellners wouldn't do something so broad. They're eccentric alright, as you can tell from the fact that they made a movie about a Japanese girl who thinks the movie Fargo is real and travels to Minnesota to find the money buried in the snow (Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter), but nebbishy sasquatches who discuss their anxieties is not the form their eccentricity takes. (Incidentally, because of the similarity of their last names, I tend to get these brothers confused with S. Craig Zahler, who made the very bloody films Bone Tomahawk and Brawl in Cell Block 99. Very different sorts of movies made by the two.)

So no, these sasquatches don't talk, they go "oo oo."

About 15 minutes in, I thought 88 minutes of this would exhaust me long before then. But watching these four characters (four at the start anyway) interact with their environment and face various challenges eventually became more profound, as well as being very funny in parts. I'm still settling on an exact star rating for the movie, but it'll be higher than I thought Sasquatch Sunset might be at the start.

What will my next viewing coincidence be? Only time will tell.

His mom is spaghetti

There seems to be some kind of rite of passage for young children of this generation to learn the lyrics to "Lose Yourself" by Eminem. I can't really explain it, since that song is 22 years old. But one of my older son's friends once showed us how quickly he could spew out the lyrics to the song, in such a way that it created a sort of meme in the family, at least from where I sat, of this kid half-closing his eyes in earnest bordering on autistic concentration, unleashing a stream of words indecipherable from one another but containing enough distinguishable moments to identify themselves as "Lose Yourself."

This couldn't have made much of an impression on my younger son, who would have probably been about seven at the time, but now this is a thing he can do and wants to do also.

It was just this week that he showed us his mastery of the lyrics, but the story of "Lose Yourself" goes a few weeks back. 

When he was first in the rough draft stages of reciting the lyrics, he was showing me what he could do and I noticed he was repeating the line "Whoa, there goes gravity" instead of coming back with the line "Whoa, there goes Rabbit he." I think he probably couldn't conceive of the fact that the rhyme came before the sentence ended in a complete thought, and also, he had no reason, not having any reference from the movie 8 Mile, to think that the character's name would be Rabbit.

It was one of those "conflicts" between a parent and child where the child has enough confidence in what they know that they entirely discount the possibility that their parent might be right -- but of course I was right. He soon incorporated the correct lyrics, and like an idiot I secretly feel proud about having pointed him toward them -- about being right. Yes, frail human being that I am, I must take satisfaction from knowing something that a ten-year-old did not.

Anyway, the other lyric I felt we weren't sure about, and maybe I was just substituting in a phrase that would go along with the rhyming scheme, was "his mom's spaghetti." That is actually the correct lyric, though I think it's just "mom's spaghetti." That being the thing that Rabbit had already vomited on his sweater in his nerves about the upcoming rap battle, "already" being the rhyme with "spaghetti."

To me, it was funnier if this was just a random comment among everything else: "his mom's spaghetti." And in my way of thinking about it, it was not a regurgitated spaghetti dinner he was describing, but the fact that his mother is a creature made of spaghetti. In order words, "his mom's spaghetti" could be translated as "his mom is spaghetti."

It just makes me laugh to think of this spaghetti monster mother doing all the things a mother would usually do, only she is made of a moving clump of slighting red-stained Italian pasta, with meatballs appearing in strategic locations to give her identifiable features.

The reason I'm telling you this today is that last night I caught up on CineNerdle, the game vaguely inspired in some way by Wordle, though it's only really related to Wordle in the most strained game of telephone you could ever imagine. I think it's just that every game that tries to be popular now wants to have a "dle" ending so that you will think it is in some way associated with Wordle.

Anyway, this game involves picking out the names of five movies in a 16-square grid based on words that give you clues to what movie it is, especially when paired with three other words in the grid. I get waaaay behind on CineNerdle during baseball season, which I guess is useful because it gives me more archived games to play during the offseason.

As luck would have it, last night I played this game:

For the record, the other answers were Straight Outta Compton, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit and Mother!, but it's the green column you're focusing on today.

Until we had had this dissection of the lyrics with my son a few weeks ago, I wouldn't have even considered "mom" and "spaghetti" to be key clues for the movie 8 Mile. And given that it had been a couple weeks since I'd played any of the archive CineNerdle games waiting for me, this was just pure coincidence -- not that it wouldn't also have been coincidence if this were today's game.

The other thing I think is funny is that this CineNerdle puzzle underscores my possible reading of the lyric, that Marshall Mathers' mother is a benevolent spaghetti monster.

Oh but the coincidences do not end there.

The very same night, when taking my older son back from his one-on-one basketball coaching -- which his little brother also attended because my wife was out at an industry drinks -- we got into a discussion of older rap, my older son being a rap fan.

He said he didn't know Ice Cube but had heard he was lame.

Au contraire, mon frere. Or, mon fils.

Rushing to Ice Cube's defense, as we pulled into our driveway, I called up NWA's "Straight Outta Compton" on Spotify.

Now, from various posts I've written on this blog, you know that I don't like to intentionally expose my children to excess profanity, especially since one of them is only ten. But I figured, if even my younger son is starting to think of "Lose Yourself" as a foundational text, he is certainly tangentially exposed to other things that are not as clean as that is. The older one is deep into songs with profanity already, and I don't really believe I have a meaningful role of standing in between them and this stuff for much longer.

So I played about 30 seconds of "Straight Out of Compton," which you know has the word "motherfucker" and the n-word within that first 30 seconds. The street cred of Ice Cube demanded it.

It allowed me to briefly recount the story of narrowly preventing my grandparents -- my highly traditional, highly conservative, very old grandparents -- from being exposed to this song back in college. 

They were on campus for their only campus visit of my college career during my freshman year, and we were walking back to my dorm room from dinner. For some reason I had the sixth sense that I needed to go ahead of them and my parents to make sure that there weren't shenanigans going on in my room with my other two roommates, not knowing what those shenanigans might be. (But the possibilities were endless, as these guys were drunken reprobates, in addition to being good guys.)

My advanced scout mission revealed that the title track to the NWA album Straight Outta Compton was playing at full blast, and would likely give both of my grandparents heart attacks in about 30 seconds if it weren't shut off. Which it was.

(Side note: I do owe a lot to this one roommate, Craig, in terms of my musical tastes. He was the first guy who ever exposed me to Nine Inch Nails, which to this day is my favorite band. I certainly would have been exposed to Nine Inch Nails at some point anyway, but who knows if I would have adopted them in the same way if he didn't have Pretty Hate Machine, which I could play whenever I wanted.)

So yes, it was funny also that Straight Outta Compton, the movie based on this group and that album, also came up in the random CineNerdle I happened to play last night.

I did wonder if maybe we could show my kids 8 Mile. I remember it is laden with f-bombs, but that might be about the only thing that's really preventing a child from watching it, since I think the violence is more implied than anything. Plus there is one more reason this movie is significant for me personally, which is that I am childhood friends with Evan Jones, who plays Cheddar Bob in the movie. We haven't kept in touch but I saw him as recently as 20 years ago -- I think just after 8 Mile came out, actually.

If I can play "Straight Outta Compton" for my kids -- even 30 seconds of it -- I can probably show them 8 Mile. 

Olympics = short movies, no movies

Our household has not been a particularly Olympics-focused household -- until this Olympics.

My older son, turning 14 this month, doesn't care, unless it's about the USA basketball team. And he's got controversial views about that. (Don't get me started on his theories about why household favorite Jayson Tatum isn't playing.)

But my younger son? He'll watch anything and everything -- with a preference for the soccer highlights, of course.

My wife is interested in the soccer also, though only the Australian women (who lost today), and particularly interested in diving and gymnastics, specifically anything involving Simone Biles.

And though most sports in our household are on an American schedule, meaning there is no opportunity to watch them during the Australian nighttime, the local station 9Now has all sorts of highlights packages and full replays of every sport you could possibly want. Yes, underwater basket-weaving is now an Olympics sport and the Norwegians are particularly strong at it.

This means not many movies for me these two weeks.

Ordinarily, the members of our household under age 50 are squared away in their rooms by a little after 9, 9:30 at the latest. That doesn't mean they're asleep yet, but it does mean they are no longer our responsibility. 

During the Olympics, though, my younger son is allowed to keep watching clips with me -- the "with me" part is the part that's important to him -- until as late as 10 o'clock.

And then, if I've had a day where I spent 11 and a half hours away from home as I did yesterday, a movie is completely off the table. (Especially if you fall asleep with fencing highlights on in the background and don't wake up until 10:45.)

I did squeeze one in on Tuesday, having also squeezed one in on Sunday. Both were short. In fact, both Arcadian on Sunday and The Immaculate Room on Tuesday were exactly 92 minutes, though I did have to nap briefly during both.

But I'm accustomed to watching no fewer than four movies during any given seven-day period, and that would be an absolute minimum. Usually it's five to six and it could be as many as ten, though that last is more likely to happen during the end-of-year push when I'm on the verge of closing off my rankings for the previous year.

If you run this week from Saturday night to Friday night, though -- starting with a Saturday night where my wife and I went to a dinner party -- there's a decent chance I don't get to four. I'd have to watch one each tonight and tomorrow night, and since tomorrow night is a Friday night, there's some chance my son's bedtime will be extended even further.

Not that missing my four minimum really matters, it just shows you how accustomed I am to, and comforted by, a certain routine.

This is one situation where being in California would actually benefit me. Because the Olympics are in Europe, all the locals have long since gone to bed when it gets to be nighttime in California. Here in Australia, we actually have some events that are playing in the morning in Paris that are live for us. Fortunately, the things that my son is really interested in, like soccer games, don't fit that description.

What's a few missed movies, especially when it involves bonding with my son? When it involves snuggling on the couch in the bitter cold, and him telling me, without irony, that he loves watching with me? A sentiment that he surely will not still express at age 14 with the next Olympics in 2028?

You know what, a few missed movies is nothing.

July 26th is Crow Day

Because I happen to keep track of things that most people would consider useless -- like the dates when I rewatched movies -- I know that my last two viewings of Alex Proyas' The Crow were exactly 11 years apart.

To the day. 

When I watched the movie on July 26th, 2013, it was one of a handful I watched just after the rest of my family -- which was only two at that point -- left to go to Australia as the first stage of our move. I stayed back in Los Angeles for another three+ weeks to finish up at work, visit a friend in Chicago, say goodbye to LA friends and close up the house.

I don't specifically think the absence of others -- at that point it would have only been my wife who would be a meaningful factor, since my older so was not yet three -- was what gave me the go-ahead to watch The Crow, though I do think it's sort of a guilty pleasure. (And to confirm that notion, my wife actually sort of chuckled when she saw that I was watching it this past Friday night.) I think it just struck me as something I hadn't seen in a while and was eager to revisit, so I did, because I had no one else's viewing priorities to consider but my own.

Watching it Friday night -- July 26th, 2024 -- was an intended precursor to the release of the remake, which is scheduled for August 22nd here in Australia. 

The fact that both happened to come on July 26th was, of course, just one of those coincidences I love. 

The Crow was a movie I loved in my 20s. It was released in May 1994, so I would have seen it just a few months before I turned 21, when I was very susceptible to its angst and a couple other things we aren't so sold on these days (such as the woman who gets "fridged," thereby creating the seed for vengeance in our protagonist. It just so happens that in this case, he got fridged too, but was able to come back from that, at least temporarily.) I then watched it two or three more times in the 1990s. 

When I watched it in 2013, I started out feeling a bit wobbly toward it, then came around to the old feelings by the end.

I'd say it is continuing to hold up less and less well, as I found myself nitpicking this time. For example, how is it that Eric Draven returns from the dead a year after he was killed, and upon entering his old apartment, finds it in the exact same condition as it was on the night he was killed, including the yellow police tape? When both occupants of an apartment die, don't you clear out their stuff and rent it to someone else -- especially an awesome penthouse loft like this one?

Another undeniable factor in this viewing: Stan, the streaming service on which I watched it, was playing up. The copy wasn't very crisp to begin with, but the stream was also doing this thing -- not super often, but at least once every five minutes -- where it would loop back about a second of images on the screen to play them a second time, and then race forward to catch up with the dialogue. A minor but undeniable annoyance.

There's no doubt The Crow will always be a sentimental favorite, and will always carry extra poignancy for me due to the circumstances of Brandon Lee's death on the set, right at a time when he was coming into his own as a performer capable of some nuance. But my 2013 viewing had been a positive enough experience that it had crept all the way up to #156 on my Flickchart, and that is obviously too high for this movie.

Would I have been better off not having watched it at all and kept the feeling that it could be my 156th favorite movie of all time?

It's the age-old question, but I think the answer is no. In order to really be one of your favorites, a movie has to live and grow with you, and stand the test of time. If it's not going to, I suppose any day is as good a day to know that as any other.

Films held hostage by my wife

Yorgos Lanthimos' latest, Kinds of Kindness, has been playing in Australian cinemas for ten days now. It is the kind of film that should be a slam dunk to get reviewed on my site, ReelGood.

Reasons:

1) It's the newest release from one of today's top directors, whose new movies always get gums flapping.

2) It's just the kind of movie my young- and left-leaning readership would be interested in, since it's weird and wild and an antidote to a summer of mostly disappointing blockbusters.

3) It's my personal antidote to feeling like I haven't really seen many of the independent-minded releases of the current year, that I'm stuck in a rut of Hollywood movies and the newest marginal releases on streaming.

So why has Kinds of Kindness not yet been reviewed on ReelGood?

My wife is holding it hostage.

This is an intentionally inflammatory way of describing a nice thing she's doing for our relationship. But it's a nice thing that interferes with my mission statement for the site -- to the extent that I have one -- which is to review new movies, especially those that are challenging or confronting, within approximately two weeks of their release.

A little background is required here.

I have made passing mentions of the fact that my wife, at home on a Friday night, will see me starting a movie she is interested in seeing, and mention that it was something she thought we might watch together. Depending on how far in I am, either I'll stop watching it and save it for her -- knowing that it could be weeks before she sees it as fitting into her schedule -- or she'll relinquish her interest in watching it as a joint viewing, considering that we never actually discussed that viewing.

In the past year or so, she's supplemented this behavior by making more mentions of us going on dates to see movies. This is more possible than it used to be because my older son turns 14 in a month, and we are now comfortable with him staying home with the ten-year-old for periods of several hours, even at night. We won't do anything that gets us home after, say, 10 o'clock, but that means that a 7 p.m. movie is perfectly doable. (We aren't quite to the point where we want to give our older son the responsibility, or more like the burden, of having to tell his younger brother that it's time to go to bed.)

Another thing that has changed is that my wife has started to come out of the wilderness a bit, that wilderness being the land of TV. Early on in our relationship, she loved films as much as I did -- well, almost as much. I don't know if anyone loves films as much as I do. But in the last ten to 15 years, possibly coinciding with having children, she's made television her primary focus. It's not that she doesn't want to watch 90 minutes to two hours worth of content on a given night, but that she wants it to be broken up into smaller chunks, after any of which she can stop watching. Many nights she'll watch a Lord of the Rings: Return of the King quantity of television, but it's the continued choice of one more episode that makes it feel different to her. But the time commitment is just one of the reasons that she has tired of movies as her primary, or even as a secondary, entertainment sustenance.

Lately, though, she has put forth the notion -- a notion I certainly agree with -- that we should do more date nights, and that it doesn't just have to be dinners. She is perhaps realizing an absence in her life of something she once loved, and is trying to make up for it. (That's both movies, and probably social time with me. If you aren't married with children, you may not have a good sense how difficult it can be to keep up things like socializing with your partner, if you don't put in a little effort.)

The only trouble is, she is not usually ready to watch a movie on its opening weekend -- or, more to the point, she does not want to have to watch it on its opening weekend if she doesn't happen to be feeling it that particular weekend. As soon as she feels the pressure, it ceases to seem like a fun activity.

Me, I pretty much have to watch it the first weekend or I can't review it.

So I had the chance to watch Kinds of Kindness last Thursday night, ten days ago now, on the night it was released. The family went to see a 6:30 show of Inside Out 2 -- another film I delayed so we could watch it together, as discussed here -- and I knew I was going to try to stay for a second movie. I didn't mention it until after Inside Out 2 was finished, because you don't want to pre-curdle the evening by making your wife suddenly think that seeing Inside Out 2 is merely a pretext for getting out to see another movie, or planting the seed that you're going to bail early on a family activity by not accompanying the family home. (The plan was executed well and my wife agreed that I should stay without any apparent annoyance about it, but then I ended up perturbing her about a different thing, so we parted ways less than ideally anyway.)

My choices were Twisters, MaXXXine and Kinds of Kindness, though the first two had the benefit of being nearly an hour shorter than the third. Left fully to my own devices, I probably would have chosen Kinds of Kindness, because a) it's the movie I wanted to see most, and b) it feels like the review my readers would most look forward to reading.

But when I mentioned the three I was considering to my wife, she put "claims" on both MaXXXine and Kinds of Kindness. By that I mean she mentioned she wanted to see them. Without her having to say it, I knew that was code for that she wanted to see them with me.

Husbands are dumb and we don't always get the code, but this time I got it and opted for Twisters, in which she had no interest. Secretly, I was just as glad on that particular night to be watching what promised to be the least challenging of the three.

Since I didn't get to it that weekend and since my wife was at a conference for the first three days of the new week, Kinds of Kindness missed out on a review in its first week in Australian cinemas. And as you would have seen from my post on Friday, my schedule worked out to fit in MaXXXine and Longlegs last Thursday, both of which I have now reviewed. (In choosing to watch MaXXXine even though my wife had "claimed" it, I decided it isn't fair for her to claim so many movies that I fall into a complete standstill.)

I still had a plan for Kinds of Kindness though.

I have a few days left if I want to meet that goal of reviewing the movie within its first two weeks in the theater, which, to be fair, is a restriction purely of my own making. (I have a newspaper background, and you have to write about it something while it's still hot. They call it news. They don't call it olds.)

So I asked my wife if she wanted to go to the 4:30 Sunday afternoon showing of Kinds of Kindness.

I could tell she wanted to, but she thought we shouldn't. You see, although the rest of us have tested negative, my younger son tested positive for COVID on Friday morning, and has been on screens on our couch ever since. He didn't need us around Sunday afternoon to minister to his needs, but it was probably correct that we aren't really in the clear despite continuing to test negative. It was not really responsible to wilfully choose to go to the theater when you can just as easily choose not to do that.

The logic was sound and I immediately dropped the subject.

I did get credit for thinking of the idea, though. I could tell she was chuffed, to use the Australian term. Even though we hadn't discussed it since the night I saw Twisters -- in fact, especially since we hadn't -- it showed that I had remembered that she had wanted to see it, and had tried to make a date out of it on something approaching the relaxed schedule she likes. Earning those points is obviously worth more to me in the long run than reviewing Kinds of Kindness, if you consider "points" in a relationship not to be the crass sort of currency that it sounds like they are, but rather, a sign that you are thinking about the other person rather than just yourself, and prioritizing the health of the relationship over your own needs.

This does, though, probably mean that Kinds of Kindness is done in terms of a potential review.

I still have a couple nights if I want to write a review before Thursday, though who knows how long we still consider ourselves potentially COVID contagious. But I will lose those hard-earned points if I then shift to the pragmatic mode of just trying to see it without her so I can review it. My next attempt to see it must also be with her, but it can't follow on the previous attempt after only a day or two, because then it starts to approach that pressure she doesn't like. 

If that one fails, maybe only then will I be free to see it myself. 

But if that one fails, by then it might be just as easy to wait and watch it on video. Which of course can occur with her at my side, meaning an eventual realization of our date, if only on our living room couch.

You can't expect to be both a film critic and a thoughtful husband at all times, not if you have a normal wife who isn't a crazy person who has to see all movies on their first weekend of release.

I'd rather be the thoughtful husband than the crazy person.

Reacquainted with Senator Leviathan

I had seen all of the Alien movies. I had seen almost all of the Predator movies. (Predators still eludes me. Actually so does The Predator. So I haven't seen almost all the Predator movies after all.)

But I had never seen an Alien vs. Predator movie, of which there are two, until Friday night.

It was a result of some random browsing on Disney+. On nights I don't know what I want to watch, I just pick a streaming service -- preferably one I have not used very recently -- and go until I find something. 

Disney+ was not necessarily consistent with the type of movie I wanted to watch on Friday night, but they carry plenty of adult-oriented films, as evidenced by my ultimate choice.

Instead of talking much about the movie -- which was fine -- I wanted to talk about how it reintroduced me to Senator Leviathan.

Who? you ask.

So it was maybe 20 years ago, and I had occasion to mention the actress Sanaa Lathan in a conversation with a group of friends. One of them didn't understand what I said and said back to me "Senator Leviathan?" And it all went from there.

But before we get into what "it" was, I should say that I was pronouncing Sanaa Lathan's name wrong. I said it as "suh-NIGH luh-THON." I don't know, that was just my interpretation. I know learn it's really more like "sah-nah LAY-thun." 

But my mispronunciation allowed one of my friends to come back with "Senator Leviathan?" And hence a character was born.

Senator Leviathan is some sort of politician who lives under the sea. His face is a bit like Davy Jones from the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, and he wears a robe and carries a trident. The only thing we know that he does is shout "urthrukgugle!" This is how my friend just spelled it in a Facebook chat, anyway. The actual noise is like a primal scream muted by the fact that it is underwater, and makes that gurgling sound you make when you speak underwater. In theory, I suppose this is a cry to object to some recent turn of events in parliamentary procedure.

When I initiated the chat just now, to remind the two friends most associated with the joke of our character, this was the best image I could find after doing a cursory search on the internet:

But more like Davy Jones. 

In any case, some laughter and reminiscences were shared by all.

As for Sanaa Lathan, here she is:

It had been some time since I'd seen her in something. Although she continues to work consistently, it does not appear I have seen anything she's made since Contagion in 2011. To be fair, I only saw three before that, but Love & Basketball was a movie I always meant to see, so maybe I will make that a priority.