Understanding my numbers

Europe sure seems to like The Audient.

What other way to explain the huge spike in my readership while I was on my trip?

Of course, there are likely other ways to explain it. But you should know that I am not a blogger who uses any sort of the analytical tools made available to bloggers, tries to increase readership. I don't ever talk about my posts on social media, with two lone exceptions per year, which are my year-end rankings and my annual portmanteaus posts. I kind of hope that anyone who checks in on those might stay for the other content, but I don't do anything the other 363 days to build that or promote the blog in any way. 

But I do like looking at the number of page hits I've gotten on my posts, just as a casual thing. 

My readership has been down since I got back. Way down. My first post after returning, written on October 4th, has 34 views. (As a side note, I'm not sure exactly what registers a view. Do they have to click directly on a link? I would think so, but what about those who come to the top of the page and then scroll down?) My next post has 48, which is my high since returning, and all the subsequent posts have 31 or fewer. Yesterday's has only ten so far. 

This wouldn't alarm me in normal times, and is keeping with a general pattern. I have some loyal readers who check in on me no matter what, and who I suspect get notified when I have a new post up. Thank you. I appreciate you, big time.

Over time, the numbers on each post tend to go up so they come in at somewhere under 100. Consider the posts in the first half of August before I left, which all have between 65 and 106 views. I'm very happy with that, it's more than enough people looking at my words to keep doing it. (In fact, much as I love you, I don't really write this for you anyway. I'd probably write it even if no one was reading it.)

When I say my readership since returning is "way down," I mean only compared to the phenomenon I'm about to describe to you. 

After my post of August 17th, we start to see an interesting pattern. The numbers go up significantly for the final two posts I wrote before I left.

The first is "Paying $20 for multiple Eddington gains," which has 142 page views. I can reason out that one. Eddington was a film that a lot of people talked about at the time it came out. Maybe people who still had a little room in their stomach for more discussion gravitated toward it when they saw I had written about it. (Though they may have been disappointed, as the post was mostly about why I was willing to shell out the premium rental price: so I could review it the first week of my trip as well as catch up on podcasts where it was being discussed.)

The really notable spike, though, came in the post I wrote on the day I departed, announcing the trip. That was "Holiday ro-OOOO-oooo-ooo ... um, uh, OOOO ... ooooooo ... oooooad." and it has a staggering 316 views. (Staggering by my standards, of course, not objectively staggering.) 

This one I can't reason out. The poster was for National Lampoon's European Vacation, not a movie anyone should have any reason to be talking about or even thinking about in 2025. The title was an SEO unfriendly gobbledegook meant to approximate Kenny Loggins singing. And the content was just an announcement about a six-week trip to Europe. 

316 views?

The boost continued in Europe. I won't continue to link the posts, but I'll list the dates, post titles and page views:

8/30 - 8,000 channels and nuthin' on - 135 views
8/31 - Why do movie characters where college shirts to bed? - 124 views
9/3 - A vacation movie intersecting with my personal film/music history - 115 views
9/4 - Something Bri-ish to watch in London - 110 views
9/5 - Feast or famine in holiday review posting - 168 views
9/6 - A quick survey of French movie posters - 467 views (!!!)
9/14 - Squeezing in a Barcelona movie - 228 views
9/16 - A quarter baked - 145 views
9/17 - R.I.P. Robert Redford - 121 views
9/18 - Flirtations with Italian cinema history - 114 views
9/19 - Late deliveries to Italy - 209 views
9/22 - I finally saw: She's All That (sort of) - 40 views
9/24 - From Paris (Texas) to Cairo (Illinois) to Athens (Georgia) - 111 views
9/25 - Non-documentary colons - 190 views
9/28 - Understanding Editing: The Right Stuff - 92 views
9/30 - Slim pickings for Greek cinema - 144 views

Sixteen posts in about 42 days away, not too shabby, especially when it took me a while to figure out how to properly download photos on my tablet. 

I considered the idea that having a city or country name in the title of the post increased its prominence within search engines, but that doesn't explain all of what we're seeing. Several of the posts with geography in their titles are only slightly higher than the high end of where the rest of my posts eventually end up. 

The one with nearly 500 views, about the French movie posters, must have attracted readers who are into movie posters, particularly French ones. This may have also disappointed them a little bit, since I wasn't talking about the posters for Jules and Jim or Breathless. I was talking about French language versions of posters for current Hollywood releases.

And then the fourth most views in this period is for a post about the colon in the title of Please Don't Destroy: The Treasure of Foggy Mountain? Nothing to do with any country. 

Also it's not just that my readership was generally elevated while I was gone. The post about She's All That still has, rightly, only 40 views. But the posts around it are all higher than my average. The poor performance of that post rules out notions like I was publishing posts at more optimal times on this trip, times that lined up more with the times my actual or potential readers want to read my posts. That theory especially doesn't hold water because my posting was not consistent in terms of times of day or days of the week. Some of these undoubtedly aligned with times people were ready to read The Audient, some of them clearly didn't. Just like when I'm posting from Australia.

So ... I don't know. 

If any of you have an explanation, I'd love to hear it. But as of now, I don't think there's anything actionable from this data. 

I could test it by intentionally including a country name in the title of a post, but that's not really what I'm about. Baiting and switching people is certainly not a good way to build readership. I do that often enough, unintentionally, without going out of my way to do it. 

As with many things in this world, I think the answer is "Shrug?" 

Horror remakes: I Spit on Your Grave

A few minutes into watching I Spit on Your Grave, the third horror remake I've watched as part of this year's themed October viewing, I thought to myself "Shit, is this even a horror movie?"

Oh sure, there's no doubt that what's happening in this movie is horrifying. But a terrorist attack is also horrifying. And most movies about terrorist attacks are not considered horror movies.

I wouldn't have had any doubt at all -- if it looks like a horror movie, walks like a horror movie and talks like a horror movie, it's a horror movie -- except that I remembered seeing something on its Wikipedia page, or actually the Wikipedia page of the original, that made me think twice. The entry starts out "I Spit on Your Grave (originally titled Day of the Woman) is a rape and revenge film written by Meir Zarchi." No mention of it being a horror movie at all.

Of course, the words "rape and revenge" are hyperlinked. And if you click in there, you get the following:

"Rape and revenge, or rape-revenge, is a horror film subgenre characterized by an individual enacting revenge for rape or other sexual acts committed against them or others." 

Whew. In the clear.

Certainly, I always thought of the original as a horror movie, but not all rape and revenge movies are, in fact, horror movies as I would define them. Do you consider Gaspar Noe's Irreversible a horror movie? No more than you consider every other of Noe's films horror movies, though an argument can be made that every movie he's ever made has actually functioned as a horror movie on some level.

I think the thing you have to recognize is that while many if not most horror movies are out to scare you, some are just out to disturb you. And I guess you can be scared -- about the world, about human nature -- by the things that disturb you. 

And wouldn't you know it, I actually watched it on Halloween of 2009, further establishing its bonafides for this themed viewing month. 

The thing that was most famous about the original I Spit on Your Grave, which drew me to watch it back in 2009, was what a lurid form of exploitation it was considered to be at the time of its release. How I knew about it was that I believe it was one of Roger Ebert's zero star reviews, along with Caligula and Mother's Day (1980) (which is on Kanopy right now so I should watch it). Here is a choice excerpt of what Ebert said about it:

This movie is an expression of the most diseased and perverted darker human natures. Because it is made artlessly, it flaunts its motives: There is no reason to see this movie except to be entertained by the sight of sadism and suffering.

Of course, when I saw it in 2009 I gave it three stars. It had to have some merit, right? Or else they wouldn't have remade the movie, and then made two more sequels to the remake?

I won't be watching those, but I did watch the original 2010 remake directed by Steven R. Munroe. 

I couldn't quite get to three stars on this one, but I do think it has some merit. 

It's been 16 years since I saw the original, but I have to think this was slightly less graphic than the original. It's also slightly more conventional in some of the revenge stuff. 

If you don't know the story, it's a fairly simple one of a writer (Sarah Butler) who goes to a remote cabin to work, but not without having to stop in at the gas station to fill up, where she has a brief interaction with some of the locals. They don't forget her and they work themselves up to going to attack her, where things get worse and worse, including them forcing a mentally challenged man to lose his virginity by raping her. Each ultimately has their turn with her, after which she escapes into the woods, where they catch her again and have their way with her some more.

Yes, vile stuff, Roger, I agree. But not vile stuff with no purpose at all.

True to the second half of the "rape and revenge" subgenre, she makes them all pay in horrible ways. Which, I think, is the justification for subjecting her to such atrocities before that. Not everyone buys that justification, but it works for me well enough because it concludes in a morally upright way. (Ebert would actually wrestle with these same issues in his complicated review of the aforementioned Irreversible.) 

There are a couple reasons why this remake didn't work for me quite as well -- if that's the right way to put it -- as the original:

1) There's something about the movements of the lead character, as she exacts her revenge, that gives her something in common with a serial killer in a slasher film. While I feel like Zarchi's film constrained itself more by a nominal sense of realism, the character Jennifer here starts operating in ways that defy natural description and verge on the supernatural. For one, she escapes their attempt to kill her by jumping into a river from a bridge and swimming off. Although the men look down from above, and it's not a very far distance down to the water, she never pokes her head back up for air, leading them to reluctantly conclude that she must have drowned, because otherwise they would have seen her emerge. Of course, she didn't drown, but we don't see any part of her journal to safety, so there's no plausible explanation for how she pulled it off. Neither is there a plausible explanation for the complicated kills she sets up for the rapists, which give her something in common with John "Jigsaw" Kramer. She dispatches each of the men in a way that mirrors the specific indignity they visited upon her, involving a gun in various orifices, a video camera, what have you. To set some of these up, though, she'd have to become something of an expert trap setter in the few weeks she took to rest and recover, and you just don't believe it. Like a serial killer, she shows up when she wants to, and disappears when she wants to, and then reemerges somewhere else really far away. I don't recall how the original handled this, but I like to think that, as a normal person, she was subject to imperfections in her vengeance tour that put her in danger, even as she exacted her sweet, sweet revenge.

2) Just because you can "like" one movie like this, doesn't mean that Roger Ebert is not essentially right on some level. The original I Spit on Your Grave is not a "good" or well made movie by most standards, but there's no doubt that it occupies a unique place in the history of exploitation cinema. It earns its reputation for poor taste and brazenness honestly, by being something of a watershed moment in the depiction of brutality and rape on screen. You can argue until you're blue in the face about whether this is a "good" thing to put into the world, but some people -- myself usually included -- think that one of the ideal roles of cinema is to shock us. An original I Spit on Your Grave can do this in a way that a remake cannot, and therefore, the original gets latitude that the remake does not. I'm mindful, also, that there are really awful versions of this sort of movie out there. One of my bottom five movies of all time is a terrible rape and revenge movie called Chaos, which is sort of a remake of Last House on the Left, which itself inspired I Spit on Your Grave. (And certainly got there ahead of Spit, I should add.) 

Still, I felt that this movie -- even if a lesser experience overall for me -- may have been made more sensitively and with more nuance. For one, this Jennifer does not have to engage in actual sexual acts in her attempt to seek revenge on the men, which I think does happen with the version of Jennifer Hills (same name) from the original. That alone makes it a little less unclean, a little less problematic.

But one thing I found interesting, and I can't recall if there's an equivalent in the original, is how this film shows the home life of the dirty cop who appears to be helping the escaped Jennifer, but instead is just delivering her back into the lion's den. This character, who I don't believe exists in the original, is the most foul of the five, but they give him a twist you might not have seen coming. They break away from Jennifer's story to show this man at home with his wife, who seems perfectly lovely, and an even lovelier young daughter. That this man would live this dual life -- being possibly even a good family man, and also anally raping women in the woods -- reminds us that evil lurks even within men who appear normal, as banal as Hannah Arendt once said.

R.I.P. Diane Keaton

Diane Keaton never seemed to get any older.

She may have aged, but she didn't get any older. Even in recent performances, she showed the same sort of plucky youthfulness she showed when we first met her. She was a bit like Sally Field in that way. 

I didn't first meet her in The Godfather, as some people would have, or in Annie Hall, as some other people would have. I wasn't born when The Godfather came out and was only four when Annie Hall came out.

No, my first Keaton was likely Father of the Bride in 1991, considering that a quick scan of her 1980s output shows only movies I would have caught up with later as well. And though I don't remember Father of the Bride very well -- and I certainly don't remember loving it -- I can tell you that Diane Keaton likely played scenes of high comedy very well in it. She was a gifted physical comedian, one who could instantly show her exasperation with an outrageous situation in only a few gestures. The same charming loopiness that I now know was really perfected in Annie Hall was something she kept giving us throughout her career, as she became the best thing about Nancy Meyers movies and their ilk. 

There were times I didn't think it was particularly appropriate, but that wasn't due to Keaton's abilities in that mode fading in the slightest. I remember feeling frustrated, on behalf of the character, that in 2003's Something's Gotta Give, she had to act klutzy and discombobulated over a man (Jack Nicholson) who was not treating her very nicely. (Again, not another movie I remember particularly well. I just remember this feeling.) But that Keaton could still do this so convincingly, at age 57, was beyond question -- I just wish her character didn't have to do it because I always thought a Keaton character deserved better. Keaton characters won our sympathy, always, effortlessly.

Of course, I now know, 22 years later, that 57 is not "old." I'll turn 57 myself in five years.

But maybe Keaton seemed older than 57 only because of how long she'd been around, how regular a presence she was in the lives of cinephiles. She was also old in Hollywood years, because she was able to keep doing what she was doing, cast in roles where she was the romantic lead, for far longer than the industry suggests she should have been able to. Sure, maybe the audience for Something's Gotta Give wasn't the same as for some of her earlier films -- I'm talking in terms of demographics -- but it was still a high-profile release playing on all the screens. And don't tell me Keaton's ability to knock over a lamp while fumbling through some bit of chatty nervous dialogue wasn't key to why they thought they could sell it to us.

I didn't know I was seeing Keaton's last role at the time I watched the movie Summer Camp on the plane earlier this year. Not a great movie to end on, but what actor really does go out on a high? But I would have had no reason to think I was seeing her last at the time, because she looked as youthful and spry as ever in it, and won us over just as easily. 

But Keaton's health took a turn recently, and she passed this weekend at age 79.

I'll close my thoughts on Diane Keaton with a movie she made 20 years ago, that I think not a lot of people appreciate, but more should. The movie is called The Family Stone, and it showcases kind of an ideal Keaton that seems like an amalgam of what I liked best about her.

Keaton plays the matriarch of a fiercely liberal Connecticut family, and the cast is an all-star one: Craig T. Nelson, Rachel McAdams, Luke Wilson, Sarah Jessica Parker, Claire Danes and Dermot Mulroney. Although the movie certainly has some fun with her eccentricities and moments of big personality -- it wouldn't be a Keaton role if it didn't -- Keaton's Sybil Stone is a true bohemian wonder, tirelessly supportive of the marginalized, and eager to wrap everyone in a clumsy hug of her acceptance, even when it's the uptight conservative (Parker) who's dating her son. In fact, she's so accepting that she says about her one gay son that she wishes she had more gay children. From someone else, this line might read as overcompensating for decidedly mixed feelings about having a gay son. From Sybil Stone, you do really believe she wishes all her children were gay. 

We wish we had more Diane Keatons, because the one we had has left us now.

Rest in peace. 

Horror remakes: Carrie

Last weekend I got off to a predictably inauspicious start watching horror remakes I hadn't seen with Gus Van Sant's Psycho, which was also part of my Audient Zeitgeist project. But there wasn't a lot of real disappointment there because, as I said, this famous flop being bad was easy to predict.

I didn't remember what any of the buzz had been about 2013's Carrie, Kimberly Peirce's remake of Brian DePalma's 1976 adaptation of the Stephen King novel, at the time it was released. I guess there wouldn't have been a lot of disappointment here either, because the fact that I don't remember anyone saying anything good about it means that it probably wasn't good.

Instead of either disappointed or being not disappointed based only on low expectations, I spent the majority of the time watching this on Thursday night wondering if it would be worth giving five stars.

"That's crazy," you say.

You're probably right, and I didn't end up going five stars, in part because some parts of the movie's climax lost me a little bit. 

But I argue that giving a movie a five-star rating doesn't always mean "It's as good as Citizen Kane." Sometimes it just means "It is the very best version of itself it could possibly be." And Carrie is that. 

As is often the case with a movie you really like, it's difficult to figure out where to start praising it. But let's just start at the top with the actress chosen for the title role.

I've gone on a bit of a rollercoaster with Chloe Grace Moretz. Her introduction to us with the duo of Kick-Ass and Let Me In -- though, to be clear, she already had 25 credits before that year of 2010 -- carried with it (no pun intended) the immense promise of a preternaturally gifted young actress. Both of those roles, by the way, paved the way for her to appear in the sort of mature subject matter of Carrie, playing the sort of freak she plays here. But somewhere in the mid-teens (and I guess her mid-teens), I lost some steam on the actress, and have started to think of myself as not really liking her. That feeling has been with me for the better part of ten years. It's not that she can't act anymore, but I think it's some combination of unworthiness of the roles she's gotten and something undefinable about her that bothers me. (I have a pet theory that she's added too much collagen to her lips, but I don't actually know if that's really it, or if she's even done that.)

Well, I think I'm back on board now. She's perfectly cast as Carrie. And it's interesting to watch this movie in the wake of just having seen She's All That for the first time while I was in Europe. This is a similar sort of makeover story, where a handsome popular guy enters into a relationship of sorts with an "ugly" girl as a result of a wager of sorts, though in both cases with essentially benevolent intentions. The thing everybody knows about She's All That is that the removal of Rachel Leigh Cook's glasses is a flimsy reason to transform her from an "ugly" girl to a beautiful potential prom queen, since the actress herself is quite pretty. Moretz is also quite pretty, but her initial incarnation as the previously home-schooled and otherwise sheltered Carrie White is far more believable as a "before" photo for someone with the potential to be transformed. Her eyes have an alien look of fear and withdrawal, one that makes us believe she's really a wallflower with a crazy religious mother who has prevented her from assimilating with her classmates in any meaningful way. This is accentuated in a scene near the beginning where all the girls are playing volleyball in a swimming pool, and though they're all wearing swim caps, Carrie's makes her look especially alien. 

I kept watching Moretz for signs of her failing in any given moment, because I'd spent the last decade feeling dubious about her talents. I never detected even a moment of artificiality, and I found very specific choices to be profound. I don't know why this stood out to me, but there's a moment she's standing up to her mother -- more on her in a minute -- where she just finishes by saying, in a matter-of-fact and non-threatening way, "And I just don't want to talk about it anymore." You believe that Carrie White is a real teenager with real complexity to how she processes stimuli, not a demon -- or witch, in the parlance of her mother -- just waiting to come out and fuck shit up. But when that time comes, she's equal to that task as well, having already played both a miniature vampire and a ten-year-old assassin/would-be superhero.

As good as Moretz is at replicating the terminal shyness of Sissy Spacek from the original, Julianne Moore may be even better at capturing Piper Laurie's insanity and psychopathy. What really drew me in to Carrie was the opening scene of Margaret White giving birth. We can't at first tell that this is what's happening, so it just appears that this woman is writhing around in bed, releasing shrieks of agony that correspond to the exact torment of her soul. As she always does, Moore really commits here. At the exact moment this performance reaches its crescendo, Moore dials it down to near utter stillness -- so still, in fact, that for a moment we think she might have died, except that we know she's in the whole movie. For maybe ten seconds she has this fixed, dead stare at the ceiling. Then she looks down between her legs to see a child emerged. When she goes to get a particularly menacing pair of scissors from her bedside table, we don't know if it's to cut the umbilical cord or to extinguish the new life -- and in fact it was the latter, though she stops herself just in time. She believes this baby is the product of sin, and therefore, to return it to God is the best action possible. She doesn't, or else we wouldn't have a movie.

Anyway, her performance carries on like this (again, no pun intended). It's big in certain points but that's not mostly what makes it great. The character is most terrifying when she assumes this dead-eyed look, especially because it is often accompanied by things like robotically banging her head against a wall. 

I should pause here to acknowledge the use of that word "terrifying." Because some amount of the impact of horror is due to not knowing what will happen, we would expect not to be as scared by movies that are remakes of other movies we've already seen. That's one reason I wasn't expecting to be very scared in this month of horror remakes. The reason I stated I wouldn't be scared is that I'd heard many of the movies I'm planning to see were bad. But the more compelling reason is that by already knowing what will happen, it limits the number of avenues my mind can have for imagining what will happen next, and being scared by those potential outcomes.

During Carrie, though, I felt that tingle of fear on multiple occasions. I only saw the original for the first time in 2017 (after reading the book back in the 1980s), but the eight years since then have been enough for me not to remember everything about what happens, so I'm glad to say I felt myself scared by the details within an overall story arc that I remembered. 

I feel like my praise of Carrie is starting to carry on (there I go again) longer than I intended, so I'll try to speed things up a bit here. 

Aside from these two great performances, you also get great work from Judy Greer as the gym teacher, a complicated character who is clearly in Carrie's corner but also resorts to unorthodox behavior like slapping the girl during her hysterics in the shower tampon scene. That's only one of two actions she takes in this movie that cause her to be reported to the befuddled principal, another well drawn character in only a few scenes, which I felt was a good way Carrie had been updated to our more sensitive modern era. Then I also want to call out the compassionate portrayals of Gabriella Wilde and Ansel Elgort as the repentant bully Sue and her always-on-the-right-side popular boyfriend Tommy. 

One of the things I liked about this movie was the complex portrayals of the bullies. Not only is there Sue going a lot farther than a character in her position would to atone for the scene where they pelt Carrie with tampons, sacrificing her own prom attendance, but even the main bully, Chris (Portia Doubleday), is a lot more like an accidental bully than someone who tortures Carrie for sport. Her failing is not that she's sadistic by nature but that she has too little consideration for the feelings of others, and this escalates into greater sadism when she starts to suffer the consequences of her actions and therefore begins to truly blame and hate Carrie. Overall I just got a good sense of nuance from how these characters are drawn.

For that we may be able to thank writers Lawrence D. Cohen and Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, but I think it's time to start talking about the director now. You may recognize Kimberly Peirce as the director of the acclaimed film Boys Don't Cry in 1999. You know, the Brandon Teena story, which won Hilary Swank her first Oscar. I don't remember that film having any specific technical merits, but at every stage of Carrie I was thinking about a thoughtful camera placement or other choice that just heightened the experience of the story. It's a shame that this movie was not a hit, because although Peirce has worked in television consistently since Carrie, she has yet to make another feature. Granted, Carrie was only her third feature after 2008's Stop-Loss, so it took her nine years to make another even after Boys Don't Cry was a hit. Maybe that means the current 12-year layoff is not a permanent one either. 

Lastly I wanted to make mention of both the soundtrack and the score. Marco Beltrami really brings a sinister note to the score, and I Shazamed exactly four songs while watching the movie -- which is pretty crazy for a film that's 12 years old. 

I think I've made my point that Carrie is well worth seeing, if you've never seen it. In fact, it's done something that I don't expect another film this month will do: It's gotten a higher star rating from me on Letterboxd than the original version of the film. 

If my next horror remake this month can come within even a star on the lower end of the original movie, I'll count myself lucky. 

Is Spike Lee for real, or just taking the piss out of himself?

This post is not going to comment on the merits of Spike Lee's remake of Akira Kurosawa's High and Low as a movie. I'm still trying to sort out how much I like Highest 2 Lowest, but the answer is "at least somewhat." 

No, this post is about how the movie has an excessive axe to grind with Boston sports.

If you pay even half attention to the NBA, you know Spike Lee is a diehard New York Knicks fan. The camera always goes to him on the sidelines, raising his arms in disbelief if a call goes against his team, and looking vaguely delirious when the Knicks are on a run. In fact, Lee almost saw his dream of the Knicks doing -- well, anything -- come true this year, but they were KO'd by the Pacers in the conference finals. (After beating my Boston Celtics.)

Lee clearly had Highest 2 Lowest in the can before the Celtics and Knicks met in May. In fact, H2L debuted at Cannes that same month, with Lee decked out in Knicks colors as part of his red carpet tuxedo. 

But he was sure to put some Celtics hate into this movie before he wrapped it. (The Celtics had already won last year's championship by then, I would guess.) 

So one of the first plot points involves Denzel Washington's character telling his son to take off his green headband because he doesn't want him to wear those colors in his house. It's a headband his son wears to a basketball practice, and then exchanges with his friend, leading the wrong kid to get kidnapped and the plot mechanics to get moving. 

But that scene is not enough. Coaching the practice -- actually a basketball camp, I'm reading -- is former NBA player Rick Fox, playing himself. If you are not familiar with Rick Fox, he was drafted by the Celtics in 1991 and played with them until 1997. At which point he moved to the Lakers and played with them for almost exactly the second half of his career before retiring in 2004. In a fairly clear instance of "right place, right time," Fox -- a decent NBA player but not a difference maker -- was on the Lakers for their run of three straight championships in the teams led by Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O'Neal. So of course, "former Laker" is the identity Fox adopts most, and I get that. 

Lee, though, is not satisfied with the fact that Fox switched from the Celtics to the Lakers -- who are actually the Celtics' rivals, not the Knicks -- and has to get Fox to throw some shade the Celtics' way. 

Before that there's a little self-deprecation on Lee's part. The son character is mixing it up with Coach Fox a bit, with Fox telling him not to talk trash when the Lakers (who aren't mentioned by name) have 17 championship and his Knicks only have two. But the Celtics part comes in later.

When the son goes missing -- at this point, they think Washington's actual son has been kidnapped, and not his driver's son -- detectives show up to ask Fox questions. One asks Fox for an autograph. Fox offers an autograph to the other, who says "No thanks." The first detective explains of his partner: "Celtics fan." Fox rejoins: "It figures."

It figures? It figures this cretin would like the team that drafted him and gave him his earliest opportunities in the NBA? It figures?

This all rings a little hollow because Knick fans' hatred of the Celtics is pretty much a one-way street. Knicks fans consider the Celtics their rivals, but the reverse is not true. The Celtics have been so much more consequential than the Knicks over the history of the two franchises that this year's loss in the playoffs is literally the only time I can remember the Knicks breaking our hearts. The Lakers are the Celtics' real rivals. (So the scene where Lee gets Fox to lord the Lakers' success over this character, a Knick fan, is kind of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" territory). 

It's kind of like what Yankee fans (say they) feel about the Red Sox as rivals -- you can't truly be rivals if one team just has so much more success than the other. The Yankees are on 27 world championships while the Red Sox are on only nine. Similarly, the Celtics have even one more championship than the Lakers, 18 to 17, but that makes 18 to 2 over the Knicks -- way more lopsided than the Yankee-Red Sox imbalance. (And that's what also makes the Celtics-Lakers rivalry so good.)

But wait there's a lot more to say about the Yankees-Red Sox within Highest 2 Lowest, which reveals how the Red Sox have indeed gotten under the skin of Yankee fans in the past 25 years, when the former has a 4-1 edge in championships. I think we can get to that now. 

Lee is less known as a Yankee fan, but he is that too. Actually, I feel like he has most of his affinity for the Brooklyn Dodgers, because Brooklyn is his hood, but the Brooklyn Dodgers haven't been a thing for about 65 years. So maybe he's subsequently adopted the Yankees as a team that is actually, you know, in New York.

After the Celtics stuff in Highest 2 Lowest is done, Lee shifts to a lot of loving shots of Yankee icons and Yankee Stadium, incorporated a little more smoothly than that sounds, in a way similar to how he incorporates images of Black musicians that he loves, in this and other films. But then the Boston sports hatred becomes textual again.

The mid-film centerpiece is a planned money drop from a New York subway -- the 4 train, I believe, since that's the one that goes from Manhattan to Yankee Stadium. Aboard this train are a bunch of people in Yankee caps (which include Denzel). You'd see this on an ordinary day in New York, but maybe not with quite this concentration, as these fans are on their way to the Bronx to see the Yankees. Presumably the Yankees are supposed to be playing the Red Sox, but you never know -- "Boston sucks" chants break out among Yankee fans when they get together, even when they're not playing the Red Sox. 

But just because these chants break out in real life does not necessarily mean you have to make them such a focal point of your movie.

Indeed, variations on the "Boston sucks" chant continue for more than five minutes of screen time during this scene of cross-cutting between the subway, a Puerto Rican pride festival, and at least one other location, possibly involving police assembling to intervene with the drop. At one point, the emergency brake is pulled on the train, and the chant -- led by John Turturro's brother Nicholas -- switches to:

"Boston pulled the motherfucking emergency break! Boston pulled the motherfucking emergency break!"

And here's where I'm wondering if Lee is just taking the piss.

My premise this whole post has been that Lee is myopic in some essential way, as all diehard sports fans are, and he believes that the Yankees and Knicks are fundamentally good and the Red Sox and Celtics are fundamentally evil. (If we're talking fundamental values, though, the Yankees were the fascists who did not allow their players to have facial hair other than moustaches until this year.) I mean, if you bleed for your team, I think you really are blind to the fact that the reasons to root for these uniforms are as arbitrary as where you happened to be born. 

But the emergency brake line makes me wonder. Clearly it's intentionally comedic -- you could never really get people on a subway to chant such a complicated and vulgar phrase in unison, especially when there would be all ages of people and all comfort levels with profanity present in that train car. But is he also having a little fun at the expense of Yankee fans? 

If you're going to blame the Boston Red Sox for something as obviously incorrect as a train stopping on the tracks, doesn't it undermine the validity of everything else you're chanting about?

One thing that's clear, though, is that Lee can't let his sports hangups go. 

Another thing that's clear is that this sort of shit talking still works on me, meaning I'm no better than he is.

Why else would I write a piece like this if this comparatively small part of Highest 2 Lowest hadn't actually bothered me on some level? 

And in that spirit, I proudly note this: I am writing this post on YED.

If you don't know what "YED" is, that would not surprise me, because this is a movie blog, not a sports blog. But even if you are a baseball fan, you might not know what this acronym means, unless you are embroiled within this bitter rivalry enough to have picked up on its finer details.

"YED" is an abbreviation of "Yankee Elimination Day." It is the day we celebrate each year -- well, most years, and every year since 2001 with the one exception of 2009 -- when the Yankees are officially eliminated from playoff contention, from their ability to win that 28th ring. (I had a brief "argument" on Facebook with a friend who said it should be Yankees, with an S, Elimination Day. He's wrong.)

So yes, earlier today Australian time, the Toronto Blue Jays punched their ticket to the American League Championship Series for the first time since 2016 by taking out the Yankees by a 5-2 score and winning the American League Division Series 3-1. This after, I should note, the Yankees beat the Red Sox 2 games to 1 in the Wild Card Series the previous round, the Yankees winning two in a row after the Red Sox won the first game to push them to the brink of elimination.

Given that the Yankees got spanked in the first two games against Toronto and their one win required a comeback from being down 6-1, I'd say sorry, Mr. Lee -- the Red Sox may suck, but if so, the Yankees do not suck less than by a margin that is statistically significant. 

Leo checks another off his list

Given that Leonardo DiCaprio has made six films with Martin Scorsese, and he doesn't exactly have the highest output among working actors, he doesn't seem like the kind of guy who might be steadily working his way through the A list of directors not named Scorsese.

But One Battle After Another marks the latest in that somewhat stealthy quest to cheat on Marty.

Now that he's added Paul Thomas Anderson to his war chest, it's time to really consider that war chest. Here are the other top-flight directors he's worked with over the years:

Baz Luhrmann (twice)
Quentin Tarantino (twice)
Christopher Nolan
Steven Spielberg
Ridley Scott
Danny Boyle
Woody Allen
James Cameron
Sam Raimi
Sam Mendes
Clint Eastwood
Adam McKay
Alejandro G. Innaritu

Seriously, is this a track record that can be matched by anyone else? Either working or retired? Or dead?  

I know not everyone thinks DiCaprio is a good actor, even though he's won an Oscar. I count myself among those who found his performance excessively mannered in Killers of the Flower Moon, just as one example.

But don't tell that to the 15 directors mentioned above, who account for some of the most beloved and acclaimed movies of the nearly three decades that DiCaprio has been a movie star. (He's been an actor for at least a decade longer than that. In fact, he has a credit going all the way back to 1979.) 

Still, he doesn't have everybody in his war chest -- not yet anyway. Here are ten more big directors he hasn't gotten to yet, but I could see it happening.

Wes Anderson - We know Leo can play a Character with a capital C, whether or not he always pulls it off. That could make him a natural to wind up in one of Anderson's ensembles. Hey, you didn't necessarily think Tom Hanks would show up in an Anderson movie either, but now he's been in two of them. 

Joel & Ethan Coen - Sort of the same logic there. George Clooney and Brad Pitt have both played the sorts of roles for the Coens that DiCaprio could also play for them. Whether they will actually make any movies again together, after a total of three solo projects in the past couple years, is a separate question.

Darren Aronofsky - Considering that a friend of mine likened One Battle After Another to an Aronofsky movie, and Aronofsky came of age pretty much exactly alongside both Andersons and Nolan, with Tarantino only a couple years ahead of them, this seems like a logical fit at some point in the future.  

David Fincher - Another guy who has come along in parallel with the guys above, though I think of his most similar rival as Nolan. Couldn't you see Leo throwing himself into the type of role that Jake Gyllenhaal played in Zodiac? 

Sofia Coppola - Have to get a woman in here, right? Even though it does not appear Leo has actually ever been directed by a woman. Although DiCaprio's performance style seems anathema to the sort of films Coppola makes, they do have the Italian thing in common. I think of her father as the main rival, at least back in the day, for Leo's mentor Scorsese. 

Spike Lee - This one might be a stretch, but go with me. Like Scorsese, Lee is a director who shows loyalty to certain actors. Lee's Highest 2 Lowest is his fifth collaboration with Denzel Washington, for example. And though Scorsese has never worked with Washington -- nor DiCaprio with Washington, for that matter -- perhaps these two could work out a "muse trade" and make two really interesting films from it. 

Bong Joon-ho - Bong has now worked with both Gyllenhaal and Robert Pattinson, both of whom can be thought of as heartthrobs who worked to be taken seriously as actors. Nothing could more perfectly describe DiCaprio, whom Titanic made into an instant worldwide heartthrob, after which it took him 18 years to finally win his Oscar. Gyllenhaal and Pattinson are still looking for theirs. 

Richard Linklater - If DiCaprio could list a career he might secretly want to emulate, it might be that of Linklater collaborator Ethan Hawke. Now, I think DiCaprio likes the spotlight too much to take the sort of lower profile roles that Hawke takes. But I think DiCaprio thinks he wants a quirky independent career like that, and Linklater could be the type to usher him in. 

Roman Polanski - DiCaprio already made a movie in which he prevented Polanski's wife, Sharon Tate, from being killed by the Manson family. Polanski is still making movies -- or at least he made one as recently as 2023. Why not? 

Kathryn Bigelow - We need another woman. DiCaprio gets in there through the Cameron connection. Those two are still friendly, right? And hey, just when you thought you hadn't heard from Kathryn Bigelow in a while, she's got a new movie coming out on Netflix later this month: A House of Dynamite. 

If you see DiCaprio doggedly run through this list in the next 10-15 years, you'll have me to thank. 

Before I leave you, I thought I should check IMDB to see Leo's films in pre-production, to see if any of these last ten directors are covered. They aren't, but did you know that there are no fewer than five future Scorsese projects with DiCaprio attached? That's cute that he thinks he can get to them all, but hey, don't die any time soon Marty. One of those is a biography of Teddy Roosevelt, and then he's also supposed to be playing Ulysses S. Grant in Spielberg's Grant biopic. 

DiCaprio does, however, have one more big director picked out to add to his war chest, one I didn't consider: Damien Chazelle. He's currently set to star in Chazelle's Evel Knievel biopic. So while his future commitments mean DiCaprio may not be going after, may not have the time to go after, most of the people I mentioned, his quest to collect all the A list directors does continue. 

Sinners spoiler alert

As you would know from yesterday's post and four others this year, I've been considering zeitgeist movies in the year 2025.

Loosely, I'm defining these as movies where so many of the salient details are known by people, even those who haven't seen the movie, that they've entered the cultural lexicon. That includes major spoilers. (Thinking things like The Sixth Sense, The Crying Game and one of the movies I actually watched for my Audient Zeitgeist series, Old Yeller.)

Can a movie released only earlier this year already have reached that point?

I say this as something of a prelude to discussing Sinners, whose second half was dutifully hidden by people like me when they reviewed it, not so much by others. The prelude is necessary so I can be sure you've seen my SPOILER ALERT before I reveal the images from Sinners I'm about to reveal. 

Have you left yet, if you need to?

Good.

I just received an email from Cinespia, the organization that holds movie screenings in the famous Hollywood Forever Cemetery, two of which we attended when we lived there. Only two? Yes, I guess only two. Lolita and The Philadelphia Story. They no longer show movies that obscure -- I guess really I mean old, not obscure -- but that's a topic for another time, one I've actually been dying to write about. But not today.

Anyway, the latest movie they've announced showing is Sinners, and they've advertised it thus:

You can read the text or not as you choose. It openly mentions vampires. I'm more concerned about the images.

The first, of Jack O'Connell's character, is not much of a spoiler, if you are already discussing vampires in the text. This character is introduced as a malicious entity and if there are any vampires in the movie, he makes a logical first candidate to guess if you were guessing. 

But as you go clockwise, three more images over you get to Hailee Steinfeld's character, who is presented sympathetically for the most part, after an introduction to her character where you're not sure that will be so. And maybe you only know that's Hailee Steinfeld's character if you've seen the movie -- Vampire Steinfeld looks different from regular Steinfeld -- but I think it's quite the spoiler to reveal that one of your supposed protagonists ends up turned to the undead, even though of course you know that some characters you like will turn in any vampire movie.

So there are three options here:

1) It's sloppy work, and they should have thought about it more before producing these promotional materials.

2) They just didn't care.

3) They think Sinners has already entered the zeitgeist, and the only people attending this screening will be people who are seeing the movie for the second time anyway.

That last may be a reasonable assumption. Sinners is one of the most praised and talked about movies of the year. If you haven't seen it already, what's wrong with you?

And I guess you face a dilemma here. If you don't talk about the second half of the movie -- which I guess is not a surprise at this point -- then you aren't revealing why this particular movie makes a good showing in a cemetery. It would be like if you were trying to say "Oh, From Dusk Till Dawn is just about a couple criminals on the run." 

So I get it. It's just that any time people with the sacred responsibility of protecting us from spoilers play fast and loose with that responsibility, it gets my hackles up a bit. Next time, it could be a movie I haven't seen that gets spoiled. 

Audient Zeitgeist and first themed October horror: Psycho

This is the fifth and penultimate entry in my 2025 bi-monthly series Audient Zeitgeist, in which I'm watching six movies that had some significance in the zeitgeist but which I had not previously watched.

The latest Audient Zeitgeist movie is doing double duty, just as the one from June did double duty. That viewing of Shoah was my 7,000th movie of all time as well as being an entry in this series, and this one also serves the function of announcing what my horror theme will be for the month of October.

But first, the zeitgeist bit.

The term "shot-by-shot remake" might not have existed before Gus Van Sant made his version of Psycho in 1998. 

Oh, the concept behind it might have been intuitive enough. You restage a piece of filmed material, whatever it may be, using the same camera setups that run the same amount of time as in the original work. So that also implies that the editing is the same. Usually, that would also mean the same dialogue, or at least dialogue that runs for the same amount of time so the shots can be the same length. 

Film people would know what it meant, as many of them spent a lot of time aping their icons in their formative years as filmmakers, even maybe doing their own shot-by-shot remakes of parts of their favorite films. (Certainly no more than parts, in most cases.) 

But in 1998, casual people became familiar with the term. It was impossible not to know that Psycho was not only a remake of Alfred Hitchcock's most iconic film, but, like, an exact remake.

And given the box office and critical response, we also immediately learned that this was a bad idea. 

How exact of a remake?

Well that was a challenge for me as I watched the movie. But I'll get into that in just a moment. 

Now, the tie-in to the films I'll be watching this October in honor of Halloween.

To bring you up to speed, I've done themed October viewings for three previous Octobers now. I skipped 2022, not knowing at that point that I would ultimately intend to make it an annual tradition. But 2021, 2023 and 2024 have all featured these month-long themes.

In 2021, I started with 1970s horror movies. When I got back to it in 2023, it was horror comedies. Then last year, you may remember that I slogged through all the previous Halloween movies that I hadn't seen. And when you consider that I also rewatched the original, that made for 11 total movies, and exhausted me terribly.

I don't think I will be so ambitious this October, but Psycho has given me my first movie in the new theme: horror remakes. In fact, some of the Halloween movies I watched last October would have qualified here as well.

I set out on this task with the foreknowledge that it may not be a great month for being scared. Remakes of horror movies have a pretty checkered cinematic history, and in some cases, even the originals were not that scary.

But, I think I knew the previous two Octobers would not be very scaery when I chose my previous two themes, comedies and a bunch of Halloween movies that I knew were probably bad. If my only goal were to be scared, I don't know what theme I'd choose, because over the years I have already tried to get my hands on as many movies that I thought would scare the shit out of me as I possibly could. If you were to give me one suggestion of such a movie, right now, I'd probably try to watch it by the weekend.

So there have been a lot of horror remakes over the years, and I have already seen many of them. However, aside from Psycho, at least the following others have so far gone unseen by me, and I hope to rectify that this month, pending their availability:

Carrie (2013)
Friday the 13th (2009)
I Know What You Did Last Summer (2025)
I Spit On Your Grave (2010)

And at least one of those will also be doing double duty, giving me a movie to rank for 2025.

There will surely be one or two more, especially if I can't find some of these, but these are the only ones I've thought of already. (I might be able to watch Macon Blair's new version of The Toxic Avenger, but only if it comes down from its current $19.99 rental price on iTunes before the end of October.)

The key is I'm trying to see movies where I've already seen the original (which rules out the Australian film Patrick and its remake, which I really should see because my wife's ex-boyfriend directed it), and I'd like to focus only on movies where there aren't a bunch of other movies in the franchise to muddy the water on what's a remake and what's a reboot and what's a reheat. Friday the 13th does that a little bit, but I believe the 2009 version was conceived as a straight remake of the original, much like Rob Zombie had recently done with Halloween. (Watching all the Friday the 13th movies I haven't watched would be a way to spend an October, but it's too soon after I did that same thing last year.)

Anyway, back to the project at hand: Psycho.

One of the things I of course wanted to know was how much Van Sant et al had stayed true to Hitchcock's original movie. It has been more than 30 years since I've seen Psycho, and though there would have been value to watching it again in order to prep for the Audient Zeitgeist piece, I decided not to. Whether the movie is successful or not is not a matter of whether it exactly copies Hitchcock. A successful execution of the exercise is not the same thing as a successful movie, and I decided that for the purposes of the assessment of Psycho as a legendary bomb that would qualify it for this series, I was more concerned with why it failed as a movie, if it indeed it did fail, than whether it failed as a successful execution of the concept. 

However, it wasn't possible for me to shrug off this curiosity. What I really needed was what my friend did for the first few minutes of the version of Jurassic Park he directed in which I appeared as an extra -- check out this post if you want to learn about that -- in which the real movie plays in a picture-in-picture box down in the lower left-hand corner, just to show you how closely they followed their assignment. The JP filmmakers correctly dropped this after the opening scene, having given us a flavor and proven the standards to which they held themselves. There is likely a side-by-side version out there, somewhere, given the general infinitude of the internet. But Van Sant and company did not see fit to include it in the final film, which of course makes sense. 

After a while I forced myself to give up thinking about it. This was partly made possible by the fact that I could tell there were deviations. For example, you can clearly see that Vince Vaughn's Norman Bates is masturbating while he spies on Anne Heche's Marion Crane, which would not have been possible in 1960. Then, because the film is updated to 1998, the dialogue is not 100% the same, especially during the moment when Julian Moore's character says she needs to go get her Walkman. (Unintentionally funny or just funny? You be the judge.) Then there's the fact that a movie made in 1998 needs to show page after page of end credits, whereas Hitchcock's movie just goes to THE END after you see the car containing Marion's body pulled out of the swamp. To accommodate for this, Van Sant's version pulls out of the scene and lingers on it for another three or four minutes as all the credits dutifully run past. 

I had thought it was possible that Van Sant would try to make a movie set in 1960, and really stick as closely to it as he could. That would have felt like a more worthwhile effort. The changes he does make feel arbitrary, and in some cases, lazy. In reading up on the movie afterward, I found that they couldn't figure out how to recreate all the shots, so in the cases where they couldn't get the blocking right, they just did a different shot. How different? I don't know, but I can tell you that the guys making the Jurassic Park I was in did not settle for such a shoddy standard.

And I think that's really the thing about this Psycho: It feels shoddy. It doesn't necessarily feel poorly acted in any way that bothered me (though I know some howled about Heche's performance at the time). It doesn't necessarily feel like it should have had a better DP. (It had Christopher Doyle, who worked with Wong Kar-Wai and was one of the best going.) The editing doesn't feel off. The settings don't feel off, as they are the same part of the Universal lot used in the original, which is still a highlight of the backlot studio tour. 

It's just the whole thing is a bit ... shoddy. 

And also, pointless, which was the biggest complaint people had at the time.

I think the reason people don't make shot-by-shot remakes very often is that an important thing has changed between when the movie was first made and when you're making it now: Us. The audience. 

What scared us in 1960 when Psycho came out does not scare us 38 years later in the same way. Even with the gestures toward modernism that Van Sant included, whether unintentionally funny or not, he was regrettably married to an old-fashioned form of filmmaking by sticking to Hitchcock's shots. When Hitchcock used those shots, they were the cutting edge, and they feel so fresh in his hands that I think even modern audiences can watch his Psycho and still be scared by it. But I think it does depend on how many horror movies they've already seen, and I think that appreciation comes with a knowledge that it was a different time.

Anyone who had already seen Hitchcock's version -- which likely describes much of the audience for Van Sant's version -- was not going to be scared by Van Sant's version without him giving us something new. Something old worked for Hitchcock, and the fact that it can't work the same way for Van Sant is no shade on what Hitchcock accomplished in 1960.  

And if Van Sant's version was some people's first exposure to horror, well, that was a great shame for them. 

At the very least, I think the movie did make a significant contribution to the zeitgeist, as a cautionary tale (both for studios and audiences), and as a way to acquaint us with something you could do, but probably shouldn't. 

Heck, without this version of Psycho, my version of Jurassic Park might not even exist. 

My top-ranked airplane movies

I watched four movies on the two plane flights to get me back to Australia that were long enough for a movie, the first from Athens to Dubai (not quite four hours) and the second from Dubai to Melbourne (just under 13 hours). One of these I told you about yesterday (Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning). The other three were Eephus (very good), The Salt Path (very good) and Karate Kid: Legends (fine). 

There were two movies on my current watchlist that were also available on my Emirates flights, at least two, that I wanted to see a lot more than any of these: Opus and Friendship. But I decided -- on the first leg of my trip, when Opus was already available but Friendship not yet -- that I wasn't going to watch Opus because I was saving it for a more clear-eyed viewing. 

I don't actually know that much about Opus and whether it's worth saving for a more opportune (Opus-tune?) time. Just a feeling I got that it might be a shame to waste it on the plane. With Friendship, I'm actually saving it for a very specific occasion. We tried to schedule a date with another couple to watch it in the cinema, but when that fell through I proposed the four of us watch it at our house after dinner, sometime this month after we returned from our trip. I'm not sure whether or not that will still happen, but it might. 

I'm really telling you this, though, because it illustrates that I divide movies into two categories: movies I want to give my best and fullest attention, and movies I don't care if I watch while succumbing to a dozen bouts of involuntary sleep. (Don't worry, I always pause. Even sleep cannot overcome that powereful instinct.)

That may go without saying. And it may explain why movies I watch on the plane don't end up ranking very high on my year-end list. I simply reserve that time for movies I don't think I'll care very much about, so I don't worry that I might have a compromised experience.

But one of the joys of watching movies is that you make discoveries. You see movies you didn't have much reason to anticipate, or in some cases had never even heard of, and they end up becoming personal favorites, making it into the upper echelon of the films you watched in that particular year. 

Given the number of trips I've made back and forth between the Australia and the U.S., and between Australia and other parts of the world, surely this should have happened a few times?

But just casually thinking back on movies I watched on planes, a lot more of them have plots I don't really remember than a special place on my mental shelf of all-time favorites. 

It's hard to develop a full causal relationship here. Because I don't know what films I'm going to end up loving until after I've already seen them, there's no way to intentionally hold back a potential favorite just so you can test the theory by watching it on the plane. Or rather, I just had the opportunity with Opus and Friendship but I refused to risk sacrificing them.

For one, most of us don't travel enough for that sort of testing to be practical. But also, you can't really tell, retrospectively, if you've just had and missed such an opportunity, because you can't know if you would have liked a particular movie significantly more outside of the plane viewing context. You'd only be asking this question about movies you didn't like, and you can't see a movie twice for the first time.

I do wonder if, for example, I would have had just as much affection for last year's #1 -- The Substance -- if I'd seen it on the plane. Maybe it's too gross to show on the plane, but let's say it had been available there. Would I still have loved it? Or would it just be another among a bunch of films I can't really remember?

I don't think there's really a way to test this. The best I can do is go back through my ranking years to see which plane movie ranked highest that year, out of what total number of movies I saw on a plane that year. That'll not only tell me how many plane viewings were middling experiences in those years, but also give me a total number of plane movies to help see if there is any possible statistical significance to raising up so few of them into the highest end of my rankings. 

I might be able to extrapolate something from this. I might not. But either way, I think it's an exercise worth doing.

I don't think it makes sense for me to consider every year I've ranked my films, which goes back to 1996. Many of those early years, I might have seen only one or two movies on a plane, some years none at all. Remember, back then, the movies didn't play in seatbacks, and often you even had to pay to opt in to the communal movie by renting headsets. That explains the famous case of 1997, my second ranking year, when I "saw" Speed 2: Cruise Control on a plane, and ranked it last that year. The thing is, I hadn't opted in. I'd only been watching the images. Without even listening to it, I have no idea how I thought it could legitimately be ranked. I've issued my mea culpa about this before. Anyway, obviously I wasn't really doing it right in those years, even if I was actually seeing movies that might otherwise be worth considering here. 

So I'll start with 2007, the first year I traveled to Australia, and then jump ahead to 2009 for my next Australian trip. I'll pick up again with 2013, because that's when I moved to Australia, and from that point on, most years have had enough plane movies to produce statistically significant results. 

Except I can't do 2007, because my plane flights that year were in March. Meaning only movies that belonged to a different ranking year were available to be watched. This exercise may be even more flawed or lacking in useful results than I thought. 

Well, my flights for the 2009 ranking year were in December of 2009 and January of 2010, so I know at least we can start there. So I'll just start there and list only the years where there are movies to list. 

2009
Rankable movies watched on plane: 9 
Highest ranked movie watched on a plane: The Proposal (50th out of 113, 56%)
Others: Duplicity (#67), Ghosts of Girlfriends Past (#76), Jennifer's Body (#72), Land of the Lost (#96), Michael Jackson's This Is It (#51), Paper Heart (#102), Post Grad (#98), The Time Traveler's Wife (#56) 
Notes: Yes, this is all from two flights -- and it should have been more, except I didn't totally have my airplane movie game established on the first flight, watching two movies (Last Chance Harvey and A Christmas Tale) that weren't rankable for 2009. So yes, that also means I watched seven movies on my trip back to Los Angeles, a record that will never be broken, and was likely only possible because my wife stayed back and returned separately a few days later. Had she been by my side, watching me get no sleep, I probably would not have been able to justify it. Although none of these films ranked particularly high in the year I saw them, I have actually gone on to watch The Proposal twice more, including once in the past year, meaning it has become a long-term favorite -- or at least a guilty pleasure -- from these meager origins.

2013
Rankable movies watched on plane: 3
Highest ranked movie watched on a plane: Much Ado About Nothing (27th out of 128, 79%)
Others: The Call (#71), The Incredible Burt Wonderstone (#127)
Notes: With only a single flight in this year -- remember, this was the year I moved to Australia -- it hardly seems worth including it. And obviously I was exhausted after a frantic move out of my house in Los Angeles, meaning I only managed to watch three movies. But one of them fared pretty well at least. Then one of them was my second-to-worst of the year. 

2014
Rankable movies watched on plane: 11
Highest ranked movie watched on a plane: Begin Again (19th out of 136, 86%)
Others: Belle (#45), Earth to Echo (#103), The Fault in Our Stars (#61), How to Train Your Dragon 2 (#68), Magic in the Moonlight (#36), Maleficent (#83), Tammy (#107), These Final Hours (#72), What We Do in the Shadows (#41), Wish I Was Here (#101) 
Notes: The reason we're not talking about records in 2014 is that this is the first time we also took a trip with long internal domestic flights, from the west coast of the U.S. to the east coast, in which I squeezed in an additional three movies beyond the four each way I watched between Australia and the U.S. This was an extended Thanksgiving trip. Here again we have a movie I've watched about twice more since I originally saw it in What We Do in the Shadows. Obviously seeing it on the plane did not prevent me from finding it hilarious. But more notable is that I ranked one of these movies in my top 20, with many other very respectable rankings sprinkled in. Since Begin Again was John Carney's follow-up to Once, which had been a #2 movie for me, it was reasonable that I would have reserved this for a viewing outside the plane environment, except I think I'd already heard not great things about it. What We Do is the one that has gone on to be a personal favorite, and it's only the third highest of these. So by the third year we've looked at, already my initial premise about the negative effect of watching a movie on a plane is seeming pretty flawed. 

2016
Rankable movies watched on plane: 13
Highest ranked movie watched on a plane: Other People (7th out of 151, 95%)
Others: The Birth of a Nation (#49), The Boss (#59), Florence Foster Jenkins (#90), Lights Out (#135), Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World (#111), Love & Friendship (#78), Nerve (#46), Queen of Katwe (#67), The Secret Life of Pets (#129), Storks (#113), Sunset Song (#72), X-Men: Apocalypse (#105)
Notes: No trip to the U.S in 2015, and in fact, that was the first year of my life in which I never once set foot on American soil. But we were back at the end of 2016, for Christmas this time, fresh off the dispiriting election loss by Hilary Clinton to Donald Trump. I suspect these 13 will be a record that will stand* for the total number of movies watched on a plane and then ranked, as it involves not only an additional fifth movie on one of the two long flights, but two each on the two long coast-to-coast flights. And there's a notable asterisk here, though I don't know if it is a real asterisk or not so we will have to discuss. Other People will clearly be the highest ranked movie I've ever seen on a plane, making it into my top ten. However ... this is a movie I had downloaded to whatever device I was carrying at the time, likely a laptop, not one I picked from the seatback options. I had selected it as a possibility to watch at some point on the trip, not knowing whether it would get watched on the plane or at some other time. Does that make a difference for this exercise? I'm going to say no and include it because it did indeed get watched in the plane environment, which is what we're talking about here -- and I'm pretty sure it's the only time a movie I've watched on a plane has left me bawling like a baby**. This was even among my honorable mentions for the best of the decade, so obviously it was not just a reaction in the moment. However, because it was one of those I watched on one of our domestic flights, it likely did benefit from not being the middle of five movies in a row, nor coming in the middle of the night.

* - 2019, 2024 and 2025 will all beat it 
** - read on

2017
Rankable movies watched on plane: 2
Highest ranked movie watched on a plane: Going in Style (82nd out of 145, 43%)
Others: Paris Can Wait (#140)
Notes: No international flight this year, but a trip to the Northern Territory in August did allow me to fit in two rankable movies. (I sacrificed one viewing slot on a movie that came out the previous year, Masterminds.) With only two movies, it's hard to draw anything significant from this.

2018
Rankable movies watched on plane: 11
Highest ranked movie watched on a plane: The Death of Stalin (18th out of 149, 88%)
Others: American Animals (#78), Damsel (#113), The Death of Stalin (#18), Foxtrot (#23), The Insult (#89), Kings (#121), Life of the Party (#135), Love, Simon (#26), On Chesil Beach (#87), Swinging Safari (#77), Tag (#51) 
Notes: The occasion for this flight was to surprise my mother for her 75th birthday, which makes this also the shortest international flight I've ever taken, only seven days from departure to return. (In fact, I remember it being less than that, but it must not have been.) So ten movies on four flights within seven days ... that's a lot. (Swinging Safari was the only rankable film watched on a shorter trip when my wife and I went to Bali for a week for our tenth anniversary.) Anyway, the premise of this post, and even a premise established within this post just a moment ago, keeps getting dashed. Here we have another top 20 movie from my airplane viewings, one of two movies in this group (along with Tag) that I've now watched twice. And we also have a movie that made me cry, or at least brought me close to tears, in Love, Simon, on the heels of me just saying that I thought Other People was the only movie that had done that. Simon is just one of three airplane movies ranked in the top 30 this year. So yeah, my bias against an airplane as a place to watch movies is getting less and less credible as I go through this exercise. 

2019
Rankable movies watched on plane: 18
Highest ranked movie watched on a plane: Yesterday (41st out of 146, 72%)
Others: The Art of Self-Defense (#110), Cold Pursuit (#100), The Curse of La Llorona (#132), Dumbo (#141), Five Feet Apart (#76), Hellboy (#131), The Kid Who Would Be King (#47), Kursk (#64), Late Night (#67), Little (#98), Missing Link (#119), Stuber (#145), Sword of Trust (#42), Top End Wedding (#115), The White Crow (#82), Where'd You Go, Bernadette (#106), X-Men: Dark Phoenix (#128), Yesterday (#41)
Notes: And now we can see that I only find X-Men movies suitable to watch on planes, as the most recent one (to date) makes the second consecutive one I watched this way. The first trip was relatively unique in our trips to America as it included no east coast portion (my family met us in California) and it involved an uneven number of long flights, as our trip home was broken up by a trip to Hawaii. Then there was an unplanned trip later in the year to help move my mother into a retirement home, where I scored a bunch more viewings. (I laugh that I once thought the 13 from 2016 would be a record and I have since gone back and added an asterisk, which you have already read.) 

2022
Rankable movies watched on plane: 10
Highest ranked movie watched on a plane: Kimi (30th out of 175, 83%)
Others: Ambulance (#139), Asking for It (#162), Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore (#108), Father Stu (#144), Firestarter (#151), Kimi (#30), Marry Me (#149), Scream (#93), Sundown (#113), Umma (#150)
Notes: We returned to the air after a couple flightless COVID years. So this trip had five legs, each of which included at least one movie, as we went to a family reunion in Indiana, visited other family and friends in New England, and then spent some time in Los Angeles before heading back to Australia. There were actually two other movies watched on these flights, but one was for my Audient Bollywood series and not a 2022 release, and another I thought qualified for 2022, but later decided was actually a 2021 movie. Here we see my bias starting to take over and run, and we have to ask if it's starting to be self-fulfilling prophecies to watch movie I know I might not like. Only one of these ten movies has a decent showing and only two are in my top 100 for the year. 

2023
Rankable movies watched on plane: 3
Highest ranked movie watched on a plane: Carmen (53rd out of 168, 68%)
Others: Carmen (#53), Linoleum (#134), The Pope's Exorcist (#100)
Notes: Our international trip to Vietnam did not produce any rankable movies, since it was in April and there were no 2023 movies available yet, but a September trip to Broome in the other corner of Australia was happy to fill in the gap. The three movies basically yielded one final ranking from each of the three thirds of my chart, though I only barely got one in the top third. 

2024
Rankable movies watched on plane: 14
Highest ranked movie watched on a plane: Problemista (24th out of 177, 86%)
Others: Am I OK? (#132), Back to Black (#120), Bob Marley: One Love (#121), The Critic (#47), Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1 (#123), Janet Planet (#172), Kneecap (#34), Lee (#133), Mean Girls (#157), Mothers' Instinct (#167), Problemista (#24), Summer Camp (#162), Turtles All the Way Down (#87), We Grown Now (#75)
Notes: I guess flying in April of 2024 to the Northern Territory (going to some of the same places we went in 2017) did not provide me the same complication as flying to Vietnam in April of 2023, because I was able to squeak in January release Mean Girls. There were two others from a quick trip to Singapore in October, and then we capped an epic travel year with our second trip to New England for Christmas, first since 2016. And though there are a lot of bad movies in here, there are two in my top 40. 

If I were including 2025 in this -- which I obviously can't because I haven't ranked those films yet -- I'd be tying my record for 18 total rankable movies (from 2019), due to the most plane flying I've ever done in one year, by hours. Our July round trip to the U.S. and our various legs just now through Europe have produced those 18 titles, including one Netflix movie watched on a tablet, not to mention three from other years and one rewatch (a thing I rarely do, though I did also rewatch Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood on a plane in 2019, actually liking it much better on this second viewing -- which itself could be useful information). As I write this, I have not yet even included any of the movies I watched on the most recent trip to my in-progress 2025 rankings -- some of them will undoubtedly fare well.

One thing I should say, though, is that one of the films from other years I watched back in July was I'm Still Here, which I wrote about here. In a way, this was actually the test that I talked about not being able to do earlier in this post, even though I won't have the result in terms of a current year ranking.

I'm Still Here was the only best picture nominee from last year that I had not seen by the time of the Oscar ceremony, and in July I took the opportunity to watch it so I could erase that blind spot as well as write the next entry in my Audient Bridesmaids series, which you noted if you followed the link above. So here we have a movie with a high pedigree, but one that maybe I would not have prioritized watching as soon as I watched it if I had not gotten that easy opportunity on the plane. Sing Sing is another movie available on my recent plane rides that would have fit that description, if I'd chosen to watch it. I think I was willing to test this on I'm Still Here because it wouldn't impact my current year rankings, which somehow seems of paramount importance. 

But you know what? I still gave I'm Still Here 4.5 stars on Letterboxd. It's a great movie, obviously, but I can say pretty confidently that I wouldn't have gone all the way to 5 stars, even if I'd first encountered it on the big screen. 

So what have I learned from all this?

I think the most important takeaway is that a good movie is a good movie. I should not be scared of "ruining" it by watching it on the plane. A plane cannot turn a good movie into bad one, though I suppose it's possible to affect the degree I would like or dislike it. That, I think, is not possible to test.

In the ten years I looked at, a movie I watched on the plane was in my top quarter of ranked movies in six of those years, so more than half. Three years produced a top 20 movie and one of those three produced a top ten movie. 

So I think there is no reasonable excuse to deny myself watching whatever movie I find on the plane that's escaped me for one reason or another. I might want to stack the deck in its favor by watching it first, especially on a flight where I may watch four others, before I'm burned out. But that's just good sense. 

And besides, the reality remains: If I'd really wanted to see the movie, badly, I would have already prioritized seeing it in the theater. And that may be the ultimate explanation for why movies I watch on the plane don't rank higher, when they don't: They weren't from a director I felt I needed to prioritize when his or her movie was available on the big screen. On each flight, I have already passively curated these movies into a subsection of also-rans. The fact that some of them do still rise up and become personal favorites reminds me why I try to go into each movie with an open mind and an open heart, and restores some of my faith in the ability of cinema to surprise me. 

Never say goodbye

If you are a person of a particular age, right now you are hearing one of Bon Jovi's lesser ballads playing in your head. Or maybe it's one of their greater ballads. I can't remember how many ballads Bon Jovi had. 

Today, though, I'm using it in reference to film franchises, even ones that say they are ending. 

My first movie on my final of three flights back to Australia -- the first of those less than an hour from the island of Crete to the Greek mainland -- was the final movie in the Mission: Impossible series, so final it actually has the word "final" in the title: Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning. In the end, I do agree that's better than Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part 2. 

And I suppose I am going to have to SPOIL this movie in order to talk about it today, so this is your fair warning of that.

I guess all we really know is that Tom Cruise does not intend to make any more Mission: Impossible movies. Or do we even know that? I think we know that. There could still be Mission: Impossible movies that don't involve Ethan Hunt, or involve a young, rebooted version of him. In fact, there will almost surely be that, eventually. 

The reason we might not know whether it's Cruise's final M:I is that this movie leaves him, and essentially all of his team, very much intact to just make another movie in another two years. 

I say "essentially" all of his team because there is, indeed, one "important" casualty from within that team. And I put that "important" in quotation marks because I would argue that Ving Rhames' Luther has been essentially an extra character for a couple movies now, showing up because Rhames is still alive (he's only 66, which puts him just three years older than Cruise) and because he is a likable screen presence, not because he is a crucial ingredient to Hunt's team. (And I'm not here to argue how crucial the tech whiz is, because I'm sure he's been a key component each time they've saved the world. I'm speaking narratively. To be honest, I can't properly remember/defend the narrative choices from what I'm calling the "Rebecca Ferguson years," which are also the years when Christopher McQuarrie made himself the final definitive auteur on a series whose first four entries were never directed by the same person twice.) 

This movie easily could have involved more of a dismantling of Ethan's team, as it seems at the very least that Ethan's own body parts should have been dismantled in a fall from a plane that involved the clear burning up of one parachute and the unclear existence of a backup parachute. But it does not.

Instead, the final scene shows Ethan in the busy Trafalgar Square, where he's flanked by team members, each symbolically appearing at some reasonable distance from him, where he can see them but they aren't right next to him, like secret service agents. It is a symbolic display rather than a moment of any narrative realism, meant to indicate that they still have Ethan's back. Having clocked their presence and shown his appreciation with a slight nod of his head, Ethan then disappears into the crowd, the final indication that he's back in the wind, as he has been for almost 30 years now. (You get the feeling this movie wishes it had come out a year later and just made it an even 30.) 

Essentially, then, not really any difference from the ending of any other M:I movie, unless that movie was clearly designed as a cliffhanger. (Which I think Dead Reckoning was? I don't remember.)

It's quite different, you will agree, from how they "ended" (again, only temporary) cinema's most enduring spy franchise, the James Bond franchise, a few years ago. 

When I saw this ending, I thought of how we as human beings -- and me specifically as one specific human being -- don't like to depart from a friend or family member without establishing, even vaguely, the next time we will see each other. 

When that exact moment of parting arrives, you become acutely acquainted with life's finalities. Some people you part from, you will never see again -- you just don't know who, or when. Surely, you expect to see all your close friends, and all your young enough family members, again, many times more depending on geographical proximity. But take my uncle, married to my dad's sister, who we saw this (American) summer at our family reunion in Georgia. I had not seen him since our wedding in 2008, and he had a stroke a couple years ago. There's a good chance I won't see him again, but of course I could not say or even suggest that when we parted. In fact, I think I said that now that we know a reunion like this is possible, we should do it again sooner rather than later. Always a prudent gesture, especially under these particular circumstances. 

To get out of the personal and go back to this movie, Tom Cruise can't seem to accept the symbolic death of Ethan Hunt as he completes what we understand to be the final of eight Mission: Impossible movies, so he just bows out with a "see you later," an indication this really could just land anywhere within the total continuity of the series. 

And that's fairly smart from the perspective of making movies. It's a good bet hedge. 

What if Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning is like the highest grossing movie of all time? It wasn't, for the record. In fact, it failed to even crack $200 million domestically, which is likely not how they'd hoped to go out at all. Maybe audiences finally said "Enough, already."

But let's say it had performed how they hoped. Wouldn't there be a part of Cruise -- who at 63 can still clearly do all the stunts -- who would want to come back and make Mission: Impossible - The Really Final Reckoning - Really? And wouldn't it also make good sense to leave that one open-ended?

On the subject of whether you should ever really say goodbye or not, let's not forget that the Friday the 13th franchise made what it called The Final Chapter more than 40 years ago, in 1984. There have since been eight more films in the franchise. Like I've said on many occasions before, franchises never end -- they only hibernate until it is opportune to come back out into the sun.

And who, at the start, would have thought that Mission: Impossible would be such a franchise?

At the start, it seemed little different in aspired longevity than something like 1998's The Avengers, which I happened to watch on my last international trip back in July, the one referenced earlier in this piece -- though I'm sure they would have loved it if that one could have turned into a 30-year franchise as well. Both were big screen versions of TV shows that peaked in the 1960s, though M:I spilled into the 1970s while The Avengers was contained almost perfectly within that decade. The Avengers ran for one year longer, actually, 1961 to 1969 vs. 1966 to 1973. 

Yet on the strength of Cruise's movie stardom and one memorable scene of dropping from the ceiling into a highly secure facility, a franchise was born to rival the all-time greats in terms of its endurance ... one we are pretty sure is not actually over, only just going into a temporary state of hibernation. 

And so it is that I'll not say goodbye, only "see you later," to Mission: Impossible, and honestly, not very wistfully. The McQuarrie films have not really done it for me -- and by that I don't mean they are not useful pieces of entertainment. They just never fully grabbed me, such that I can say this last one might actually be my favorite, even though I slapped it with the indignity of a plane watch when I was already delirious from lack of sleep. (The first one without Rebecca Ferguson? Funny, I do think of myself as liking her, but maybe her function specifically within this franchise never worked for me.)

No, I'm a Ghost Protocol guy. I think that had something to do with the mythology I built up over the Burj Khalifa, which finally got its proper outlet when I visited and went to the top of that building on this past trip. I also do like J.J. Abrams' Mission: Impossible III and have a limited fondness for the first, though John Woo's was pretty terrible.

Anyway, I think it's fair to say we have, indeed, seen the last of Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt. Ethan Hunt himself? Well, he'll probably outlive me.