Two years too early/late

If there's even been a movie that's cried out for a gimmicky release date, it's Leap Year.

Yet when the film came out last Friday -- making only $9.2 million while fighting for air among the big year-end releases -- it was either two years too early, or two years too late.

With such an apparently interchangeable romantic comedy/travelogue plot, couldn't it have afforded to sit on the shelf for two more years? Or, I should say, wait two years to start filming?

If the production had begun two years earlier, that would have really been something. February 29th was a Friday in 2008. The last time that happened was in 1980, and the next won't be until 2036. Leap Year missed a golden opportunity to come out on Friday, February 29, 2008. The horror, the horror.

But even 2012 would have been okay for it. The 29th falls on a Wednesday that year, and that's the second most popular day of the week for releasing a film.

I contend that not only was the marketing not helped, but actually crippled by this film coming out in 2010. There's a mental disconnect, I think, about a movie called Leap Year coming out in a non-leap year. People just aren't thinking about February 29th in the year 2010. It would be kind of like Disney's A Christmas Carol coming out in June, or the Gary Marshall rom-com Valentine's Day hitting theaters in October instead of next month.

Somehow, we will all get past this and move on.

A shortened screener season

On Monday, I bemoaned the fact that if you want to see movies released in December in time for your year-end list, you have to pay theatrical prices.

There's actually a second way: Go visit your friend who's in the Writers Guild, and cadge as many of his screeners as you can.

Last year was particularly fruitful in this regard, setting me up with some unrealistic hopes for this year. Not only did I watch Doubt with my friend Phil at his place, but I came away with The Wrestler, Burn After Reading and Changeling, all of which he'd already seen. I also took home Doubt so my wife could watch it, which meant I left the premises four screeners richer. Since sharing screeners is strictly prohibited -- you are actually supposed to destroy them after you watch them -- I have changed Phil's name to protect his identity, though they'll have to figure out my identity first if they want to get to him. (The Wrestler ended up being my favorite film of last year, making it only my second top-ranked film that I didn't see in the theater, the first since Run Lola Run in 1999.)

What happened last year, however, was a fortuitous set of circumstances made possible by the fact that I hung out with Phil a week before Christmas. It was soon enough after he started receiving his screeners that he wasn't yet ready to send them in bulk to his cinephile mother, but not so soon that he hadn't already gone through a good number of them, leaving some available to borrow.

But when you get together almost a month later on the calendar, and the cinematic care package to Phil's mother is just days away from being shipped, you have to adjust your expectations a bit. And so it was last night that I reverted to the conditions established in 2007, when I first watched one of Phil's screeners (The Savages) and then just went on my merry way. That's probably just as well, because I don't want my desire to see movies to outweigh my sense of propriety, and put Phil in a situation of stress. Loaning things to people is always a bit stressful -- not only do you have to worry about when you'll get them back, but you also have to worry about them coming back in one piece. (I should know -- he still has two favorite movies I loaned him, and he says they're packed away in boxes somewhere after their move.)

When it comes to screeners, "I'm just happy to be here," as ballplayers up from the minors are fond of saying. I'll take whatever I can get. And last night, whatever I can get was Scott Cooper's Crazy Heart, which has won kudos for Jeff Bridges' lead performance as a broken down country singer. Phil and his fiancee had not yet seen it, so my wife and I joined them on their couch for a viewing over Thai noodles.

And just let me say: I'm glad I didn't pay theatrical prices for this one. Especially since a theatrical viewing would have prevented the snide commentary we established upon realizing it wasn't working for any of us. You know, it's that moment when one person makes a snarky remark, and everyone else laughs a bit too heartily, relieved that the others are similarly displeased. Then you're home free.

Crazy Heart falls into a distinct category of films, of which we've seen quite a few over the last decade, in which a lead performance gets resoundingly praised, and either the performance or the praise itself dwarfs the rest of the movie. With many of these films, the actor in question ended up winning an Oscar. I'm thinking of films like Monster's Ball (Halle Berry), Monster (Charlize Theron) and Boys Don't Cry (Hilary Swank). Lest you think I can only think of examples involving actresses, The Wrestler might have been thought of as a movie like that if a) Mickey Rourke had won the Oscar like he should have, and b) the movie weren't half as good as it is.

Crazy Heart actually has a number of other surface similarities to The Wrestler -- past-his-prime performer tries to make an undignified buck or two while fighting health issues -- but there's no comparison between the two in terms of quality. Bridges' performance is not even all that good, or at least not compared to his own usually high standards. Whatever you think of Bridges -- a friend of mine alternately calls him "Old Mush Mouth" and "Old Marble Mouth" because of the way he tends to garble his dialogue -- there's no doubt that he usually presents as real, even when playing a fantastical character like his peace-loving military zen master in The Men Who Stare at Goats. So if you're using the standard of how good a performer is compared to that performer's usual work, then Bridges' work here is nothing special. In fact, he sometimes seems to be relying on some showy actorly crutches, one of which I described here in the specific context of smoking cigarettes. Not only does Bridges smoke ostentatiously in Crazy Heart, but he loves any opportunity to eat while speaking his lines, or leave his mouth agape, as both of these seem to him to penetrate to the core of his character. It's a pretty good performance, but any time you notice the tricks an actor is using to manipulate you, it's hard to un-notice them.

The biggest problem with Crazy Heart -- and this post was not meant to be an actual review of Crazy Heart, so I'll wrap up -- is that the narrative is surprisingly light on conflict. His supposed rival (played by Colin Farrel in an unusual casting choice) seems to be an eminently nice guy, and there are few consequences to the bad behavior by the aptly named Bad Blake. That was one of the primary sources of disbelief discussed during our running commentary, how things for this "sad sack" were not nearly as sad as they seemed like they were supposed to be. Add in a patently false performance from Maggie Gyllenhaal, in which she can't decide from scene to scene whether she loves or hates Blake (but without anything in the script dictating these emotional fluctuations), and you have a movie that left us laughing -- often at our own jokes and comments -- rather than feeling Blake's pain.

I say there was no cost to watching Crazy Heart, but I did pay for it slightly -- in personal guilt. I know Phil doesn't care if we watch his screeners with him, and probably would have let me borrow a couple of them had I gotten there a couple weeks earlier. And the four of us had been intending to get together for months, so it's not like this was an inorganic gathering that I'd forced on the schedule. However, I did make a joke in an email last week about this being the time of year I needed to "use him for his screeners," and the get-together did spring more or less directly out of that comment. We like them very much and wanted to see them anyway, but I didn't like my own motivations behind scheduling the gathering for when I did.

And so I did the noble thing, leaving on the table a chance to grab one additional screener. In discussing the titles they had seen and would soon be shipping to his mother -- some of which I'd seen, some of which struck me as golden opportunities sadly missed -- I noticed him mentioning the Coen brothers' A Serious Man. He said in this case his mother had actually recommended it to him, and later the screener arrived. I doubted he'd be sending it to her to watch again. So I probably could have left with it, had I asked.

But I let it go. My 2009 rankings will close without that particular title, and no one will be the wiser.

Besides, I have to keep hidden some of the inner workings of my film-obsessed mind, because there will be more screeners to watch at the end of 2010. (And I'm glad on a day like today that Phil never reads my blog.) I have to avoid suspicion when conveniently setting up a time to see Phil next December ...

... maybe a week or so before Christmas.

Why I root for James Cameron

Avatar shattered the $400 million threshold at the U.S. box office this past weekend, having already become the all-time second-biggest international grosser at well over $1 billion.

At first I didn't think it would be such a box office force. When it made "only" $77 million in its domestic opening weekend -- a pittance compared to Twilight: New Moon's $142 million -- I thought it might end up being the kind of flop everyone thought Titanic would be.

And surprisingly, this filled me with disappointment. I actually felt bad for James Cameron, albeit very prematurely.

I should feel the need to deny that reality publicly -- or, at least, not write a blog post specifically calling attention to it. But I try to be as honest as I can with you, so I'm telling you: I had a moment's feeling of melancholy about the prospective box office failure of Avatar.

Of course, we all know what happened. Like Titanic, Avatar had legs. Where Titanic settled in and started making $25 million per weekend for ten weekends in a row, and then dropped to a still-healthy $10-$15 million for a few more weekends, Avatar has not made less than $48 million in any of its four weekends. It could actually challenge Titanic's $600 million domestic record, albeit with the help of 12 years of inflation, plus the higher cost of IMAX and 3-D tickets. (Whereas New Moon dropped off significantly after opening weekend and eventually topped off around $280 million).

I'll ask my international readers to forgive me for discussing box office in domestic terms only -- they're the terms I'm more comfortable with.

So now I've got a different problem: I have to worry about this inferior film toppling my beloved Titanic, the reason I root for Cameron in the first place.

And in order to contextualize that even more controversial statement, I suppose I should tell you about the first time I saw Titanic, which helped me embrace that movie as my own.

It was Thursday, December 18, 1997. Titanic was set to open the next day, and I was the reporter for a weekly newspaper in Rhode Island. I would later wear a second hat as their film critic, but that was a few months off, so it was in my capacity as a reporter that I was invited to the grand opening of a glistening new multiplex in nearby Seekonk, Massachusetts. Truth be told, this story would never be covered in the pages of The Barrington Times, where I worked -- we only covered issues directly related to the town. But an invitation to this gala event had fallen into my hands, so not only did I attend, I also invited a friend, who drove down from Boston for the occasion.

When we showed up at the theater, we knew it would be a big deal. There were people walking around in tuxedos, and the lobby was lined with tables full of champagne and shrimp cocktail. There were masses of important people gathering, many of them better dressed than we were. But we weren't concerned with any impression we might or might not be making. We were like kids in a candy store -- literally, more on that in a minute -- and felt kind of like we'd won Wonka's golden ticket. After my press credentials were verified, no one else would be checking in on us for the rest of the night. In fact, conveniently, I didn't know another soul there.

The dozen screens were all playing one of two movies, both scheduled for release the next day: Titanic and Tomorrow Never Dies, Pierce Brosnan's second turn as James Bond. Ordinarily we would have both been jazzed for the Bond movie, and as it turned out, that's my favorite Bond movie of the last 20 years. But Titanic at least figured to be a spectacle, and we didn't have anywhere else we needed to be for the next three hours and 14 minutes, so there was never any question which one we'd select.

But there was still plenty more consumption of free stuff before we got to that point. In addition to the flutes of champagne and endless supply of shrimp, there were various other crudities and hors d'oeuvres, some of which were actually being delivered around by those men in tuxedos. My friend and I would look at each other and laugh, like we were getting away with something. This feeling only intensified -- as did the laughter -- when it came time to stock up on concessions. And I don't choose the words "stock up" casually. The guys standing at the concession counters encouraged us to take multiple boxes of Goobers, Raisinets and Snow Caps. One wasn't enough. Two wasn't enough. They knew these were all going to the same customer, and yet they kept offering them. Still only a couple years out of our teens, my friend and I made the most of this, filling our pockets with candy and then returning to my car to empty them, to make room for more. We each came away with at least ten boxes of movie theater candy, and stomachs that hurt from laughing so hard. Popcorn and drinks had considerably less shelf life/portability, so with those, we took only what we could carry into the theater.

The capper to this gala evening was when some local politician -- a state senator, a congressman, someone like that -- gave a short speech and cut the ribbon on the new state-of-the-art complex. The room filled with applause, and with balloons, which fell from the ceiling right on cue.

Of course, the real capper was Titanic. Picture me 12 years less jaded than I am today, and you will understand why the movie hit me as hard as it did. I teared up several times and left the theater proclaiming that it was one of the best movies I'd ever seen. In fact, I emailed several friends upon arriving home, telling them to drop what they were doing and go RIGHT NOW to see it.

And because I had this highly special screening of Titanic, one night before the rest of the world had a chance to see it, I felt like Titanic was my movie -- a movie where I helped create the hype, rather than just responding to it, even if my role in the hype machine was limited to my friends and acquaintances. Because of that special night, I will always cherish my first screening of Titanic, even long after its flaws have been amply documented by people who were as jaded then as I probably am now. I like remembering that version of me, the version that was swept off his feet by James Cameron's epic. I prefer that memory to whatever hollow credibility I might gain by making snide remarks about Titanic today. And I do consider it hollow when a person goes for credibility by selling out what they honestly think and feel about a movie. I say it to people all the time: I will never throw Titanic under the bus, will never disown the memory of December 18, 1997, when I felt like I was walking on air.

As I was following Titanic's bravura box office performance from then until Oscar night and beyond, I cheered James Cameron, as I felt like his crowning achievement was being appreciated by others just as I had appreciated it. Even when he declared himself "king of the world" at the Oscars, I found it charming rather than smug.

Somehow, that feeling toward Cameron -- that desire to see him succeed beyond any shadow of a doubt -- has stuck with me. Not only did I want Avatar to be good for its own sake, but I wanted it to provide validation to James Cameron, a man who needs no validation from me or anyone else. In part because it's just one more endorsement of my enthralling experience of a little film called Titanic.

Unfortunately, I don't like Avatar as much as Titanic -- not nearly. My take on the film isn't much different from the standard one: Breathtaking visuals, totally unoriginal story. Cameron wrote both movies, so my conclusion is that Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet sold that one to us better by being better actors than those in Avatar. They had something magical that grabbed the zeitgeist in just such a way. Avatar is impressive, a film I would certainly describe as "very good" -- it just didn't have that certain spark.

So given what I've told you, am I still rooting for James Cameron? Or am I rooting against a new version of James Cameron in favor of an older model? Or would Avatar outgrossing Titanic still be an endorsement of Titanic in some strange way?

Well, one thing that's always easy to do is root for quality. And even though the 24-year-old Vance may have been more naive and idealistic than the 36-year-old Vance, I think either version would have liked Titanic better. With or without being hopped up on Goobers and Raisinets.

What can I say, I've got a soft spot for sweaty palms slapped against car windows.

A depressing pursuit

As I was driving down Ventura Blvd. toward the Arclight theater in Sherman Oaks yesterday, I was thinking, "Do I really want to see Nine?"

And as I circled the parking garage looking for a parking space, I was thinking, "Do I really want to see Nine?"

And as I boarded the escalator bound for the theater, I was thinking, "Do I really want to see Nine?"

And as I shelled out $14.50 via credit card on an automated ticket-buying station, I was thinking, "Do I really want to see Nine?"

And as the movie was starting, and here I was, seeing Nine, I thought, "What am I doing here?"

It was a depressing feeling. And I don't think I ever recovered from the funk over the course of the rest of the day.

Stuffing your rankings to get in as many movies as possible from the previous year can be a depressing pursuit.

It's like this every January. On Oscar nomination morning, which is February 2nd this year, I finalize my entire list of films seen in the previous calendar year, from favorite to least favorite. That morning arrives three weeks from tomorrow -- about ten days later than last year -- so it's officially "crunch time." Which means a lot of half-hearted trips to the theater and perfunctory rentals from the video store.

Yesterday, I had a little of both.

First off there was Nine. Nine was fine. The general argument by critics is that it's hard to identify exactly what's wrong with it, but there's nothing about it that argues strongly for its existence. (Oh, and that the songs are not the least bit hummable -- I agree, with one exception: the song "Be Italian," which plays during the trailer.)

Still, there were good reasons why I wanted to see Nine, maybe more so than the average moviegoer. The main one was that I loved Chicago, which was also directed by Rob Marshall. Nine looked quite similar to Chicago -- musical number fantasies interspersed with realistic scenes of plot development -- so I thought there was a decent chance I'd find it similarly charming. Plus I thought the material from Federico Fellini's 8 1/2, on which the original Broadway musical was based, is fruitful subject matter: A film director catalogs the influences the various women in his life have had on him, while vainly trying to come up with a script for his ninth movie, which will begin shooting any day now.

I also tried to tell myself that the main reason I didn't want to see it -- that it had gotten middling to poor reviews -- was not a very good reason. I have a personal creed of staying true to my initial interest in seeing a movie, regardless of what other critics have said about it. I am trying to recreate the conditions that would exist if I had been assigned to review the film as a new release, without the benefit of any previous reviews to influence me.

But as much as I have that shining ideal in mind, I'm a pragmatist as well. And as I was electronically feeding $14.50 into the coffers of the Arclight yesterday afternoon, all I could think about was all the other ways I might have spent that $14.50. It was easy for me to see the exact cost associated with adding one movie to my year-end list. And it didn't seem there was any way it was as valuable to me as the amount I was spending on it.

See, what I'm really going for with this list is a good representation of the films that were released in 2009, from January through December. The ones from January through September are easy -- you can get them on DVD. However, you have to pay theatrical prices for films released between October and December. So every year there is a film for which I half-heartedly shell out $14.50, just for that intangible value of ranking it. Last year, it was Revolutionary Road, which I believe my wife and I also saw in this theater -- I guess we were randomly up in the San Fernando Valley that time as well.

Yesterday itself probably had something to do with my mood, with making it a bad day to see a movie about which I was less than enthused. I was tired from staying up too late on Saturday night, and drinking too much wine, then getting up before 9 on Sunday morning to get ready for the morning playoff football game, which I watched at a friend's house in the Valley. The Baltimore Ravens slaughtered my New England Patriots -- it was 24-0 after one quarter -- so that kind of set the mood for the day. But if Nine had been a movie I really felt like I was seeing for the right reasons, I wouldn't have cared -- I didn't watch much football this season, and losses don't linger with me for very long these days. But combine all the factors -- tired, lost football game, pointless movie, then it almost being dark when I finally got home -- and it left me in quite the funk.

Of course, the trip to the Blockbuster didn't make things any easier.

I also wanted to pick up a 2009 movie on my way home, even though we already had one store rental -- the dolphin-clubbing documentary The Cove -- unwatched at home. But I had an in-store exchange burning a hole in my pocket, so I stopped at a Blockbuster I used to visit more when I lived in my old apartment. It was here that I became yet more dispirited.

I could tell right away that something was different. There were fewer rental aisles than I ever remembered there being, and in their place were bargain bins of previously viewed movies, a display selling a random assortment of books, and just plain unused real estate. I guess they were probably in the midst of moving things around, or had just done so, as there was a guy affixing category cards reading "DRAMA" to the top of one of the aisles.

Maybe that explained the denuded quality of this particular Blockbuster, but I suspected that the changing face of the rental industry also had something to do with it. I still like the spontaneity of going to a brick-and-mortar store and just picking out a movie, but that's no longer a supportable business model. It doesn't make sense for them to have any but the most frequently rented titles, or the newest releases, stocked in the store. And in fact, because of the poor returns on much of what is offered at the physical Blockbuster stores, Blockbuster has revealed that it will close a number of its locations. Yesterday seemed to be my first preview of that inevitability.

While this made me glum -- I'm an old-school guy who mourns every such change (the closing of the music stores hit me particularly hard) -- my inability to find the first two movies I was looking for made it all the worse.

The other thing I am trying to accomplish this month is to re-watch some favorites from the last decade, in order to come up with a best-of-the-decade list. Toward that end I wanted to bring home Hustle & Flow, my favorite film of 2005, which my wife had just endorsed watching again with me. Needless to say, I could not find it yesterday at Blockbuster, and their new method for stacking the DVDs made it difficult to tell whether they even carried it anymore. This seemed strange -- Hustle & Flow struck me as a highly mainstream title, which won the Oscar for best original song only four years ago (and had a best actor nominee that year for Terrence Howard as well). But here it wasn't, unavailable at this Blockbuster. I scoured the drama section multiple times before giving up. Seeming to anticipate this very moment of customer dissatisfaction, there were signs throughout the drama section that read "Can't find the drama title you're looking for? Don't be sad. We can mail it to you. Over 95,000 titles available." So there they are, openly acknowledging that it no longer makes sense to stockpile inventory. The times, they're always a-changin'.

It was looking for my second movie, Big Fan, that made things even worse. I had seen Patton Oswalt appear on Conan O'Brien almost a week ago, last Monday, to promote the upcoming DVD release. So I had assumed it was coming out the next day -- DVDs almost always release on a Tuesday. Yet it was nowhere to be found among Blockbuster's new releases, and it was also not advertised up on their Upcoming Releases board. I took this as a really bad sign -- that Blockbuster wasn't even ordering all the new releases anymore, even ones that feature a performance that may receive an Oscar nomination. (Upon getting home, I discovered that the movie wasn't actually being released until tomorrow, so Oswalt just went on Conan's show unusually early. Maybe he needed to get on before Conan started becoming surly about his future at NBC.)

So instead of Hustle & Flow, instead of Big Fan, I rented Woody Allen's Whatever Works, starring Larry David. Another film I have not heard great things about. Another perfunctory rental.

I guess what really bothers me is that I don't know any other way to be. I love movies and I love making my list. I wouldn't trade it. Of course, if either one started really troubling me I could just stop doing it. I wouldn't stop going to the movies, but I could do what most people do -- only see the ones they really want to see. The list of yearly rankings could just fall by the wayside if I really started to find my own standards too tedious to meet.

Obviously, the answer is that I would never do either of these things. I just have to understand that it isn't always a joyful pursuit -- sometimes it has a trudging, mechanical quality to it. Sometimes you just have to do "whatever works" to get the job done.

Three more weeks. Eyes on the prize, Vance. Eyes on the prize.

Best first?

The first release date of the calendar year has a special stigma attached to it. Films released on that date are the ones for which the studios have the lowest expectations. It's the earliest release date that doesn't qualify for the previous year's Oscars, and those movies are also expected to lose viewers to the ones that were specifically released with Oscar in mind. In that way, they're kind of like the ultimate anti-Oscar movies.

Well, I'm not saying Daybreakers is going to be nominated for any Oscars, much less win one. But I am saying it may be the first film released on the first Friday that I will actually see in the theater. (Last Friday doesn't count -- although it was the first Friday of 2010, it was also January 1st, and I'm not sure if there's ever been a film released on New Year's Day.)

Yep, I'm currently making plans to go with a friend, possibly one of the weeknights next week. And this is especially tough for a person like me, who tries to focus all his January viewing efforts on movies from the previous year, in time to close off his year-end list on Oscar nomination morning (February 2nd). My viewing time is even more limited this January, as I'm also trying to re-watch some favorites from the last decade in order to compile a definitive "best of the decade" list by the same deadline.

Daybreakers' prospective feat is more unusual in the fact that the entire month of January, let alone the first week, is usually a cinematic wasteland, at least in terms of my own interest in getting out to the theater for a newly released film. It's often not until February, in fact, that I see something released in the new calendar year. There was the famous exception of Cloverfield a couple years ago, which I believe I actually saw twice before the calendar switched to February. (That was kind of a fluke -- the same friend with whom I may see Daybreakers wanted to see a movie, and I told him I'd go to Cloverfield again even though it was only five days after I'd seen it the first time.) But Cloverfield wasn't released until January 18th, or the third Friday of the year.

So what is it about Daybreakers?

You've seen the trailers. You know that this seems like -- are you seated? -- an original idea for a vampire movie. You also know it stars Ethan Hawke, who has been heretofore quite selective in his film roles. Whether or not that translates to hope for you is another question. It does for me.

Like Zombieland last year, Daybreakers imagines a world where almost everybody on the planet is a monster -- there zombies, here vampires. (And for a discussion about the essential similarity between those two kinds of creatures, check here.) Unlike Zombieland, this is not a comedy, and the vampires are smart. Vampirism is simply the rule of the day -- almost everyone sucks blood, a logical end result of this kind of communicable disease, and because it's the norm, the blood supply is running dangerously low. The solution? To farm the remaining humans for their blood (see the above Matrix-inspired poster), while simultaneously trying to develop a sustainable form of synthetic blood. Go without blood for too long, and you turn into ... well, a worse kind of vampire.

There is a good possibility that this movie could suck. After all, January was also the month in which at least the last two Underworld movies came out. And though I did not see those two Underworld movies, in the first movie I saw enough blue and black hues, and enough gothic undead throwing enough doors open, for three movies. What's more, the fact that it is being released on January 8th demonstrates that Lionsgate doesn't have very much confidence in it. There's gotta be a fatal flaw, right?

Well, I may just get the chance to find out myself next week. And that alone is a significant accomplishment for Daybreakers.

Really putting yourself out there

Late December and early January are that time of year when film enthusiasts consume massive quantities of top ten lists. For me, they are like Lay's potato chips -- I can't eat just one. Once I've read one critic's top ten list, I want to find all the others in existence.

Usually, this is an exercise in trying to have my own viewpoints endorsed. As I have been compiling my own list throughout the year, I am eager to see how well I've done, as it were. I've talked about this at length previously. As much as many film critics like to be iconoclasts, we also want others to agree with us. It reminds us that we are actually qualified to do this job.

But I'm also looking for the weird exceptions -- the films that no one else liked that make it onto these lists. In a way, this also validates us, because every film critic I know has championed a film that no one else liked. It's a relief when you see other people making bold choices that could bring scorn heaping down upon them.

I still remember the guts it took in 2001, when I ranked Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within and Rush Hour 2 in my top ten. Even copping to this fact now puts my reputation in harm's way. But I knew full well what I was doing, knew that these choices might make me the object of great derision. I still say that Final Fantasy was a lush, technologically advanced and sometimes moving animated sci-fi epic, and though I haven't sat down for Rush Hour 2 a second time, I remember considering it one of the most enjoyable buddy action comedies I'd ever seen. I'm a firm believer that any film that's the best version of what it's trying to be might qualify for my top ten. Those spots are not reserved for the arthouse only.

Around this time, I also took a great interest in this website that had hundreds of critics' top ten lists compiled in one place. I submitted my own list in 2001. When it never appeared on the site, I couldn't help blaming my inclusion of Final Fantasy and Rush Hour 2 as the reason for its denial. Even though my top three were pretty conventional choices -- Gosford Park, Memento and Amelie -- and even though I also had some smartly unconventional choices -- Waking Life, The Anniversary Party and Amores Perros -- it was those two unusual picks that seemed to doom me. (Full disclosure: Now that I look at the list, I see that the Mark Wahlberg hair band movie Rock Star was also on there -- another film that I still champion to this day. And since I've now named the other nine in my top ten, I'll say that my #4 was Vanilla Sky, which I now like better than any of them, but which was probably also an unpopular decision. And in case you're wondering about an obvious omission, I didn't see my favorite film of 2001 -- Donnie Darko -- until 2003.)

There are, however, limits to this championing of unpopular movies. Including on your list movies that most people probably sort of liked, but certainly not as high as their top ten, is one thing. But putting a movie that almost everyone hated as high as #2 on your list, and then comparing that movie to one of the greatest horror-thrillers of all time, is quite another.

That's what Stephen King did in his top ten list, printed in this week's Entertainment Weekly.

Now, King is not a film critic, but he is one in the sense that everyone else is: All film fans know what they like and what they don't, and some non-critics take the time to make their own top ten lists. As they should. Even if I get sacked tomorrow, I will probably still make a top ten list every year until I die. And King does have a bully pulpit, as a columnist who appears in the News & Notes section about once a month (as does Juno scribe Diablo Cody).

King loves ranking things, be it books (which he did recently), music (which he seems to do several times a year) or TV. This may be the first movie list of his I've seen, but then again, he probably published one last year as well. I just may not remember it as well, because it was not nearly so outrageous as this year, when the remake of The Last House on the Left was his second-favorite film of the year.

Not only that, but he went on to call it "on par with Silence of the Lambs."

I'll let that sink in a moment.

Now, I haven't seen The Last House on the Left. Nor have I seen The Taking of Pelham 123 (another remake) or Law Abiding Citizen, two other films King at least had the decency to leave in the bottom half of his top ten. But what I heard about Last House on the Left was that it was not only torturous in subject matter -- the story is quite literally about the sadistic torture of two teenage girls -- but torturous in quality as well. In fact, EW critic Owen Gleiberman must have bristled when he read King's list. The Men Who Stare at Goats wasn't the only F grade Gleiberman gave out last year -- he also gave one to this movie.

And The Last House on the Left has an additional significance to me, in the following sense: Before the film was offered to some director I've never heard of named Dennis Iliadis, it was offered to the one feature film director I know personally. In fact, when I saw him last September, we were thanking his lucky stars that he didn't take the project. Maybe he would have felt differently if he knew the world's most famous horror novelist was going to heap it with praise.

The point is not whether or not Stephen King is an idiot. He's not only the world's biggest purveyor of horror, he might also be its biggest fan. This can make a person either hypercritical of horror films, or much more accepting, and King seems to have chosen the latter route.

The point really is -- wow. That's really putting yourself out there. That's really bucking the trend.

And for me, it seems like in order to do something like this, you need to have accumulated years of cultural cachet and have plenty of tenure. Having Stephen King as a columnist is a boon to Entertainment Weekly, no matter what he says. It increases the magazine's profile, even if it does not in itself sell more copies. And I'm sure EW considers King to be kind of an Andy Rooney-type curmudgeon, a sixtysomething who can say whatever he wants because he's earned it. He'd have to do a lot worse than champion a universally reviled film to be kicked out of EW's pages.

But comparing it to Silence of the Lambs? Whaaa ...?

It again raises that issue of whether there is, or should be, a litmus test for a person to prove he/she has the ability to speak authoritatively about movies. King gets a pass, of course, specifically because he is not a critic. What's more, it's kind of understood that Stephen King did not see 150 movies last year. He's choosing his top ten from the 40 or 50 he did see.

But what if it were Gleiberman who decided to make Last House on the Left his #2 movie, and compare it to Silence of the Lambs? What then?

I'm just glad it wasn't me. I'm still trying to live down that whole Rush Hour 2 debacle.

Twentiers vs. thousandaires

In recent days I've had a number of lively discussions with friends about their preference for what to call the year 2010.

There are two obvious choices: "two thousand ten" and "twenty ten." Then there's the slightly less popular choice that's very similar to the first: "two thousand and ten," though I think that's said mostly by people who say "September the 11th."

I've got my own preference, and I contend that we had the decision collectively made for us by a movie that came out 26 years ago.

When a sequel to Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey was released 16 years later in 1984 -- and, in many minds, quite superfluously -- it was called 2010: The Year We Make Contact. You didn't hear anyone call it "Twenty Ten: The Year We Make Contact," and the reason was obvious: As a sequel to 2001, it should clearly bear the same naming properties. Even if, in a vacuum, you would have called that year "twenty ten," its very status as a follow-up to "two thousand one" meant it would be named "two thousand ten."

And since we had no other reason to make mention of that year before that point -- no more so than we would randomly talk about 2016, 2049 or 2742 -- it settled in our consciousness and stuck. 2010 would be "two thousand ten" when it actually arrived on the calendar.

Except now, there's been a serious "twenty movement." A lot of people I've talked to would really prefer "twenty ten." They think it sounds buoyant and whimsical and snappy. I'm inclined to agree, but I don't think that alone is a reason to determine how a year is referenced in speech.

They cite the precedent of the 1900s, when things were called "nineteen" and not "one thousand nine hundred." The statement "Well duh" should cover that pretty well. In that case it's clearly just a syllables issue. Not to mention the precedent set by the previous five or six hundred years of spoken language.

But rolling over to 2000 changed the rules, and gave us a new precedent that we've been using for ten years. Ten years is, I believe, long enough for a precedent, even when the previous precedent lasted the better part of a millennium. Clearly we weren't going to call those years "twenty one" or "twenty seven," for the obvious reason that those numbers already exist and mean something quite different. Never mind the fact that people would never know you were actually referring to a year unless you prefaced it with "the year." We could have, I suppose, called those years "twenty oh one" and "twenty oh seven," but that just sounds stupid.

I understand those people who want to restore the "twenty" naming structure, but I think our collective memory of a movie not very many of us saw should win out in this case. I have not even seen all of 2010: The Year We Make Contact, which is quite strange because I had it on VHS at one point and watched the opening ten minutes several times. If you've never seen 2010, it's worth a rental just for those eerie opening minutes, some of the eeriest I've ever seen. It's basically just a recap of some of the final events of 2001, but it's handled in the form of still images and a computer report typewriting over them, plus some damn scary music. And if you've never heard Keir Dullea's line "My God, it's full of stars" all twisted and warped by computer distortion, it'll give you nightmares. I'm getting chills right now -- maybe I need to add this movie to my queue and finally watch the whole thing.

And because of 2010, I think it was all the easier for me to call Roland Emmerich's recent disaster epic "two thousand twelve." The fact that it's a different year, however, could make a difference in how other people named the movie. Some people are now telling me they did call 2012 "twenty twelve," and I don't want to accuse them of lying. After all, 2012 is both an Olympic year and a presidential election year, so we'd been referring to it long before the movie was even a glint in Emmerich's eye. (Plus, 2012 has always been the end of the Mayan calendar, so a lot of us knew it in that context before the movie anyway). I guess it's quite possible that the International Olympic Committee has been calling them "twenty twelve" and "twenty sixteen" for years now. I can't rightly say that I remember. Or, it could be that just as in society at large, different members of the IOC have been saying it differently. It hardly makes sense to set an institutional policy, right?

And here's where I may shock you -- I agree with the twentiers once we reach 2020. Rather arbitrary, right? Perhaps I'm the worst offender out there, because I advocate different methods depending on where we are in the century. Then again, so do all the twentiers, who certainly didn't complain about saying "two thousand one." But at least their transition date makes some amount of sense. They say we should start using "twenty" as soon as it is semantically viable, in 2010.

Why 2020 for me? Again it has to do with the precedent set by a movie.

In 2004 I saw a Chinese language film called 2046, directed by Wong Kar Wai. (It actually says Kar Wai Wong on IMDB -- I must admit I am still flummoxed about how to correctly say Chinese names, which is another issue altogether, but I heard it as Wong Kar Wai at the time, which dovetails quite nicely with this discussion.)

When referencing this film to other people, it felt natural to me to call it "twenty forty-six." And that's how I alphabetized it in my movie list. Instead of taking all the numbered titles and putting them together, as they do at some video stores, I alphabetize as they would appear if you spelled the numbers out in words. So 2046 would actually appear before 2001 and 2010, as "twenty" comes before "two" in the alphabet.

So even though I was not consciously aware of it at the time, I was having this naming debate with myself as long as six years ago. I didn't acknowledge anything strange about the fact that I had automatically called this movie "twenty forty-six," even though the others began with "two thousand." It did not seem to require an intellectual explanation.

But obviously I don't advocate starting to call the years "twenty whatever" only in time for 2046. That would be ludicrous indeed.

So when, logically, should that start? Here's where the twentiers probably have a point. They think we should start it now. I think we should wait until 2020, when, paradoxically, everyone will confuse everyone else by having to explain whether they are talking about a year, or the name of a popular TV snow.

And I guess the only reason I really think that is because of 2010: The Year We Make Contact, which has already claimed this entire decade for itself.

Strange but somehow sturdy reasoning, don't you think?

Or, what you could do is say that 2010 will be the final year we use "two thousand," instead of 2009. That could satisfy both camps: those who want to respect the precedent set by the movie, and those who want to switch over to "twenty" pretty damn soon. Because as I'm thinking about it, although "two thousand ten" doesn't sound unwieldy to me, "two thousand eleven" sort of does. Plus there's something appropriate about making the switch in 2011, as that is the actual beginning of the next decade, as we all know from the whole "when is it really the new millennium" debate that was regularly discussed in 1999, 2000 and 2001.

Who knows if a consensus will ever be reached. We're only on day five of this new frontier.

But me, I plan to pay pretty close attention to see which wins out.

Check back here in January of 2020 for my follow-up post.

Reflections on a year

Not on the year 2009 per se, but on my first year writing this blog.

That's right, it was January 3, 2009 that I wrote my first post on The Audient. Anal guy that I am, I really should have written this post yesterday, if I weren't bursting with information about my plane ride back from Australia.

During the first year of The Audient, I wrote 220 posts. So output most certainly wasn't my problem.

But I did have a couple problems, and in the interest of New Year's resolutions, let me cover them here:

1) Length. I tended to prattle on a bit. And I've already started to prattle on a bit in 2010, starting with yesterday's post. But I recognize that you, my readers, have limited time to be loyal to me. And if I constantly submit posts that take you 15 minutes to read, that loyalty will certainly be tested. So one resolution for year two of The Audient is to get to my point faster, and excise some of the parenthetical details. If I think of something interesting but unrelated that I want to squeeze in, why not save it for a later post? There will always be more.

2) Design. While design was not a problem as such, in the sense that I don't think The Audient looks bad, I also haven't advanced the look of the site since day one. This could be because I don't have any web design skills. Or it could be because I'm lazy, and haven't figured out the easy way to spice things up without becoming an expert in Dreamweaver, or whatever the current industry standard is. So here's a promise to look at that sometime in 2010.

3) Publicity. I was pretty shy about promoting The Audient this past year. I pimped it in my facebook profile and I sheepishly included reference to it in my year-end holiday letter, but reaching out to my acquaintances is probably not the best way to grow a blog. No, if I really want The Audient to break into the teens and onward in terms of its followers, I have to reach out to a preexisting audience of readers of other film blogs, people I don't already know. And again, this should just take a little effort and application on my part. If I haven't made myself a member of the film blogging community by going to other blogger's sites and commenting on their posts, I should hardly expect them to come to me. Here's to that in 2010 as well.

But there's one thing about The Audient I don't want to change, even though it was the biggest thing I talked about changing in 2009: My content.

In this post in particular, I talked about trying to steer the blog's content so that it got more at the meat and potatoes of movies, like their plots, themes and techniques, rather than the parsley sprig of movies, like their poster art or titles.

I've since backtracked a little on that stance. I've decided that I don't want to set content expectations at all. A blog is best when it's a free outpouring of whatever comes into the writer's head. It's my medium not to censor myself, but to write quickly and definitively about whatever interests me on a particular day. If I gave myself an hour or two each day to write a blog post, I could formulate hypotheses and see them through with repeated examples. And some days I will. Other days, I will just want to write a few sentences about why the music in a particular trailer annoys me. And that's ... okay.

I'll meet you halfway on the length. Heck, it'd be easier on me if I didn't need to write a novel each day.

But the content will continue to run the gamut, from the big to the small, from the interesting to the uninteresting, from the deep to the shallow. Every day I write, though, I promise I will try to entertain you.

Now, New Year's resolution #2: Stop eating everything in sight.

Outdone myself

This is it -- I've set a daily viewing record. (I should say "daily" viewing record -- it was, after all, a 43-hour day).

But I didn't just set it. I shattered it.

When I returned from Australia in 2007, I bragged to people -- not very many people, only when the subject came up naturally -- that I'd been able to watch four movies on the flight. That seemed to amply demonstrate my preference of watching movies over sleeping, didn't it?

Well, meet Vancetastic version 2010.

When I got back to my house yesterday morning a little after 7, I could add only the three most recent films to my Most Recently Seen list on The Audient.

Which left four movies completely undocumented.

For those bad at math (or maths, as they say in Australia), that means I watched seven movies on the flight.

Seven. One more than six, one less than eight. Add one more at home last night before going to bed, and that meant eight movies watched on January 2, 2010. The seven on the flight get credit for occurring in the same 24-hour period.

Those on the flight were, in order:

The Proposal
The Time Traveler's Wife
Paper Heart
Jennifer's Body
Duplicity
Michael Jackson's This Is It
Land of the Lost

And in the order that I preferred them:

1) Michael Jackson's This Is It
2) The Proposal
3) The Time Traveler's Wife
4) Duplicity
5) Jennifer's Body
6) Land of the Lost
7) Paper Heart

At home, I watched the smart little thriller First Snow, starring Guy Pearce -- long overdue since my wife knows its writer-directors.

So how the hell did I manage it? You'd say I didn't sleep, but I did probably sleep for 45 minutes. And it wasn't the 16-hour flight I'd advertised -- I don't know how I got that number into my head. It was more like 14 hours, as it was on the way over, though I thought one direction should take longer than the other, as it does east to west in the U.S. And we benefited from a strong headwind, allowing us to land about a half-hour earlier than expected -- even though we took off 15 minutes late. So it really may have been closer to 13 hours, though even seven short movies would be difficult to fit into that time -- so let's just say it was 14. (And one more correction from my previous post -- it's not 14 straight hours of daylight. Not sure how I got that into my head, either. Maybe it was the later-arriving flight I took in 2007 that made me think this, but if you are landing before 6 a.m., at least the last six to eight hours have to be in darkness, which is more than half the flight.)

So, um, how the hell did I manage it?

1) I watched only one movie over two hours long (Duplicity). A big change from 2007, when Oscar nominees Babel, Dreamgirls and Blood Diamond were each over two hours. Running time was one of my key determining factors in which films I watched, which is why the 2-hour-and-12-minute He's Just Not That Into You (which I said I was targeting in my last post) got left on the table.

2) Before the flight took off, I went through all the categories and scrawled a hit list on the back of an envelope. This would prevent me from having to spend the time reviewing all the categories later on, for films I wanted to see but had forgotten about. To give you some idea of the wonderful selection available on Delta (which gets nothing but kudos on its handling of its new Australia route), the titles I didn't watch were only a percentage of the ones I hadn't seen, only the ones I thought I might realistically watch during this flight. The following titles made that list but never got watched: Two Lovers, The Informant!, Dance Flick, It Might Get Loud, The September Issue, Public Enemies, State of Play, He's Just Not That Into You and Whiteout. Some of those were because they're available on DVD, and I wanted to see them enough to actually go to the trouble of renting them, where my wife will be able to watch, too. I blew it on The Informant!, though -- it's not coming to DVD until February 23rd, which means it will miss the February 2nd cutoff for my 2009 rankings. (That's the morning of the Oscar nominations, the traditional cutoff date.) The guitar documentary It Might Get Loud would have been my last film instead of Land of the Lost, but a message at the start said it had been "edited for content" -- unlike the other films I'd watched -- so I decided to skip this version and watch the real one. (And by the way, I love how an international flight totally disregards the possibility that a child will randomly view nudity or violence on someone else's screen. While none of the films I watched had any nudity (except for a bare bottom or two in Time Traveler's Wife), I watched a bit of an episode of Californication just to see if they would leave the nudity in -- and they did.)

3) I watched the first 20 minutes of The Proposal before the plane left the ground, and the last 10 minutes of Land of the Lost after the plane landed. I was pretty surprised to find the movies working before the plane took off, but when I saw the guy across the aisle from me playing Sudoku on his screen, I realized the entertainment systems were active. So I got to work. I should say that they cut off the entertainment systems before I was able to finish Land of the Lost, but it was after the climax, so I'm sure all I missed was some dumb final joke.

4) I just wasn't that sleepy. I had envisioned watching about three movies, then taking a Unisom and sleeping for five or six hours. But unlike the first flight, I had a girl setting next to me -- a rather big girl at that. So I didn't think I'd be able to get into a good sleeping position, even with the Unisom. Since I was a bit wary after the Unisom hangover I had after one poor night's sleep in Australia, I decided just to skip the drug and deal with the sleep issue when I got home. (Figuring rightly that my early arrival time would allow me to sleep for a couple hours without screwing up my sleep schedule). I did nod off a couple times -- pausing one of the movies (I think it was Duplicity) when the urge struck me -- but my body never had the powerful urge for a deep sleep, so I never had to yield to that urge, or wallow in frustration as I was unable to yield effectively.

5) I didn't set out to do it. In fact, I thought that if I watched five movies, it would be an exciting outcome of the trip. But when I saw the daunting list of titles I wanted to see (even for very flimsy reasons only a critic could appreciate), I didn't know how I could limit my list to just five. And when I never really felt that tired, I just went with it, and queued up a new movie only seconds after the last one finished. If I had set out to watch seven, the enormity of my own expectations might have crushed me.

6) I didn't do much else. I took one nap as a break between either the second and the third or the third and the fourth (it all blends together now, as do the finer details of these movies), and I played one game of Sudoku set at expert level that I couldn't summon the brainpower to finish. I didn't read anything or listen to anything, even with an ipod I had taken pains to charge at my sister-in-law's house in Melbourne. (Her computer somehow ran my ipod battery down to zilch before eventually charging it to full, so it was pretty touch and go, and I think I came close to accidentally synching her library to my ipod.)

So did watching all these movies in a dreamy stupor -- I'd slept less than three hours the night before as well -- make me less able to appreciate them individually? Who knows. I took an intentionally mediocre selection of films, ones I doubted would be in the upper echelon of films I'd see this year. If it's a really good film, I'd rather see it under more ideal circumstances. Would any of them have ranked higher than This Is It's current ranking of #31 on my 2009 list, if I'd seen them under those more ideal circumstances? Again, who knows.

But since I am a critic, here's a quick blurb on what I thought of each:

1) Michael Jackson's This Is It (2009, Kenny Ortega). It's unusual to see a documentary so essentially unstructured -- it's mostly just a straightforward trip through the numbers planned for Jackson's 50 concerts in London that were supposed to have taken place this fall, with a few interviews interspersed. But it turns out to be a wonderful window into Jackson the perfectionist, and just exactly what goes into a building a massive, Jackson-sized stage show. Unintentionally illuminating, and a fitting send-off to the King of Pop.

2) The Proposal (2009, Anne Fletcher). The enormous $164 million box office for The Proposal made me as interested to see it as I was to see Paul Blart: Mall Cop, a similarly gigantic box office force. This time, I agreed with The People. There's nothing really new in this movie, but I managed to be sort of delighted by it anyway. Maybe that's because I like Ryan Reynolds and Sandra Bullock, and they are used well here.

3) The Time Traveler's Wife (2009, Robert Schwentke). I have been anticipating the arrival of this film for years, as its gestation had been repeatedly delayed. I really liked the book, hence the anticipation. But enough bad buzz (and no interest from my wife) downgraded it to an airplane movie. There's something curiously cold about this film, but it also got to me at times. And for fans of time travel films, it presents a number of juicy new conundrums for you to chew over.

4) Duplicity (2009, Tony Gilroy). A respected colleague of mine loves this movie, so I became interested, even though it struck me as one of those overly clever and cutesy con movies. (I have recently decided I don't really like movies where everyone is conning everyone else -- I consider myself pretty smart, but these movies can be annoyingly tough to follow, and it's too difficult for me to work out whether I was just too slow to make all the connections, or whether the connections were never actually made in the script.) Well, Duplicity surprised me in a couple ways -- the tone is far more dour than I would have ever guessed (I don't think Julia Roberts smiles once in this movie), and its ending was totally unanticipated. Still not enough for a hearty recommendation.

5) Jennifer's Body (2009, Karyn Kusama). I once considered a theatrical screening of this as well ... enter bad buzz. As it was written by Juno's Diablo Cody, I expected a smartly written film and got one. It also has style to spare, and yeah, Megan Fox is pretty hot. But a movie I thought I was really liking petered out into a movie I sort of liked in the last act. Until then, though, it's quite fun.

6) Land of the Lost (2009, Brad Silberling). It's as dumb as you've heard. But that doesn't mean you won't laugh a couple times. Will Ferrell's delivery alone guarantees that. I mean, it's just funny when Ferrell calls an intelligent primate named Chaka "a little asshole."

7) Paper Heart (2009, Nicholas Jasenovec). Never has a movie sent the word "twee" through my head more times as I was watching. I expected it to be twee, but it was TWEE. I'm totally over Michael Cera and his (as brilliantly described by my co-worker) "stammering, you-can-borrow-my-hoodie sweetness," but I was even more annoyed by the stammering, you-can-borrow-my-hoodie sweetness of Charlyne Yi, the film's driving force as she tries to find out if love exists by interviewing a totally random selection of people, as though she were a four-year-old. That's supposed to be cute, but it's not. Then they create a totally artificial fiction film portion in which Yi, Cera and an actor playing the film's actual director debate the usefulness/intrusiveness of "filming" Yi and Cera as they are "dating." Paper Heart is a totally bogus contraption.

Oh, and the film I saw at home, which would actually outrank all the airplane movies:

1) First Snow (2007, Mark Fergus). Smart, compact and satisfying, until an ending that's just a little less so. Reminded me fondly of The Lookout and (probably because of the presence of Guy Pearce) Memento. Also has some good "can you control your fate" conundrums.

Yep, my diarrhea of the keyboard is back. You can tell I'm finally home, at my own computer again.

The longest day

I am about three hours away from "beginning" The Longest Day.

Naturally, I'm getting no sleep. We're supposed to be leaving for the airport around 6, which is why it's 3:03 and I am wide awake.

So I'm technically already three hours in to a day that will be 43 hours long before all is said and done. After flying from Melbourne to Sydney, I'll catch an 11-something flight to Los Angeles. And will arrive there a little before 7 a.m. local time -- the same day.

It won't surprise you to know that instead of worrying about the fact that I'm not asleep -- it never hurts to be over-tired when 16-hour flights are involved -- I'm wondering how my lack of sleep will affect my ability to watch a record number of movies on Saturday, January 2, 2010, a day on which I have nearly twice the usual number of available viewing hours.

In fact, I'm even sort of wishing I hadn't left my personal DVD player in the room where my wife is currently sleeping. I could be getting a head start on trying to set a record, whiling away a couple hours of insomnia watching one of the two movies I brought with me, which were emergency backups in case of a problem with my seat-back viewing system on the plane. Then again, I may still need them so it's just as well. (While I'm mentioning them, they are Waltz with Bashir and Quigley Down Under. I have to review Quigley, and thought it would be hilariously ironic to watch it in Australia. What was even funnier was that this movie from 1990 was actually available on my Delta flight here, under a "get to know Australia" category).

Informally, my record is something like five movies in a day. I could look it up if I had my materials in front of me.

I should be able to get 80 percent of the way there on the flight alone. I watched four movies on the way over, but that was over the course of three days. That's right, I watched Last Chance Harvey on my departure day, Friday, December 18th. Then I assigned Ghosts of Girlfriends Past to Saturday, December 19th, a day I would spend exactly zero minutes on terra firma. Who knows whether I had actually passed the international date line or not, but it seemed fair that that day should "exist" in some shape or form. A Christmas Tale and Post Grad more obviously belonged on my arrival day, Sunday, December 20th.

On the way back, it'll be all one day. I've already got a couple films targeted: He's Just Not That Into You, The Proposal and The Time Traveler's Wife, to name a few. Yeah, it's gonna be chick flick city.

.

Of course, the record is won or lost in how I spend my time after getting back to my apartment. It'll be tough to fight off sleep as it is, and watching movies won't really help. In fact, I'm not sure if I watched any on my return day in March of 2007, the last time I traveled east in such a radical, all-daylight-for-16-hours-and-many-more-after-you-land way. I watched Babel, Dreamgirls, Employee of the Month and all but the last five minutes of Blood Diamond on the plane, but may have been tapped with the full day still ahead of me back in the States.

.

What'll happen this time? All I can say is I won't be starting down under with Quigley Down Under. Blew that chance.

.

And in order to keep my other chances more intact, I think I'll go hit that sofa and see if I can't stockpile two hours of sleep in order to make my record push.

.

Talk to you on L.A. time to let you know how I did ...

Boxing Day box office bonanza

Boxing Day is better known as December 26th in the United States.

In other parts of the world -- namely Australia -- it's more like Christmas + The Fourth of July + the Friday after Thanksgiving. 

Yeah, there's a lot of shopping that goes on on December 26th in Australia, but it's also summer vacation, and pretty much everyone is out of work doing some kind of activity or other. It's a huge day for any number of events to be occurring, namely the famous yacht race from Syndey to Hobart. But there's also a very important cricket match today, and there are plenty of other modest-sized local events you might attend. We've been to the market here in Hobart (Tasmania), one of the best farmer's markets/crafts fairs I've ever attended (as my looted wallet will attest), and plan to go to a BBQ later on.

It's also a day when no less than a dozen major movies are released. Yes, this one day.

I've included the poster for Did You Hear About the Morgans? somewhat randomly, because I could have chosen numerous others. Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel. The Lovely Bones. Sherlock Holmes. And about ten others whose billboards I saw when we were walking the streets of Sydney earlier this week. Yes, I realize it would be more impressive in making my point if I could actually remember some of the other titles.

The thing that strikes me about this confluence of release dates of major films on a single day is that it demonstrates the opposite conventional wisdom that we see in America. In America, no matter how much confidence you have in your film, you don't want it to open against another strong film because its opening weekend box office will inevitably be siphoned. And it's all about opening weekend box office if you want your film to have legs and become a hit.

Not so in Australia, and probably, not so in most of the world. That's because the U.S. opening weekend does the heavy lifting. My guess is that it also aligns with a foreign mentality of not needing to see the film right when it opens. We didn't see Avatar the first day I arrived -- Sunday -- because it was sold out. But we didn't have too much trouble seeing it on Tuesday, even though "the world's biggest IMAX screen" (or so this proclaimed) wasn't even being saved exclusively for James Cameron's film -- it was also hosting screening of such films as A Christmas Carol and two other IMAX-only films, Under the Sea and something about Islam. We didn't walk right up and buy tickets or anything, but the fact that my wife got them online only two days earlier -- when many people were on vacation for the holidays already, and therefore might have more time in their schedule despite the added shopping -- was telling. It was a 6:15 showing as well.

Trying to write this post somewhat quickly, so I may not finish up with my usual cohesiveness (or so I like to think of it as that). And I'm still annoyed that in my post-nap state I can't remember the 37 other movies that were opening today. (It's December 26th where I sit, regardless of what the North American-centric date on blogger.com may tell you.) 

But at least now you have a little snapshot of how the movies work here Down Under. Next post, if I have time: the titles we've watched here that you can't get in the U.S., and whether they "count" just like the movies you can. 

Avatar in Australia

I can't believe I've had this blog for almost a whole year, and I have yet to write an in-depth Avatar post.

Well, this one won't be very in-depth either. Today is my last day in the western hemisphere for two weeks, and I'm tying up a million loose ends before jetting off to Australia tonight. Writing one last blog post before I leave is one of those loose ends.

Yeah, I'm pretty excited for Avatar. Even though my first impression, upon seeing footage, was "Oh, I didn't know this is what Avatar was about." Even though I'm still not a big fan of this poster, with its way-too-earnest blue dude gazing deeply into our eyes. Even though they've done their best to saturate us with footage and remove the thrill from finally getting to see the movie.

So excited, in fact, that I have been -- successfully, it would appear -- campaigning my wife to see the movie while we spend the next three days in Sydney.

Whether we can just walk up and get tickets is another matter, especially on IMAX. I understand many of those shows have been sold out for weeks here in Los Angeles. Australia has a smaller population, but it should hardly matter in the big cities. I do like to think of them as slightly less impressed with big spectacle, in their eagerness to "take the piss" out of blowhards like James Cameron. But they are a film-loving culture that has produced numerous great film icons (as I discussed only a few days ago). Plus, the lead (Sam Worthington) is an Aussie, and I believe some of it was shot (or at least post-produced) in Australia.

So seeing Avatar in Sydney may be a pipe dream. But I really don't want to wait two weeks to get back -- longer than that, actually, since my wife doesn't return until January 5th -- to see the movie. Maybe we'll have a better chance in Hobart, Tasmania, where we will spend the five days after that. Either way, if you read this post, you'll know I'm okay with "wasting" precious travel time on a movie -- in fact, I try to do it once a trip.

I will also try to make at least one Audient post from Australia. After all, won't you want to know which five movies I watched on the 16-hour plane ride?

But if I don't, have a happy holiday season, readers, and I'll see you back here in 2010!