HRAFF: Flocking

When choosing which sessions of the 2016 HRAFF festival -- which I helped curate -- I would like to actually attend, I focused mostly on films I hadn't already seen.

Oddly, especially for a festival in which I was one of the programmers, I haven't seen more than a third of the 30 films ultimately chosen. In fact, a better way to describe it would be that I've only seen just over half. Thirteen of the 30 films were unseen by me, which gives you some indication of exactly how many contenders we had.

So that left me no shortage of choices. And having become a bit warn out by all the documentaries I watched, I naturally gravitated toward one of the two narrative films I hadn't seen.

That was Beata Garleder's Flocking, which I watched on Wednesday night in what felt like ages after I attended opening night. In reality, it was six nights later. My HRAFF schedule gets a bit more packed from here on out, as I will see four more films between Sunday and closing night next Thursday.

I wish I could say it was a movie I would recommend that others should flock to.

It's not the subject matter that ended up turning me off. I knew it was about a town who turns against a high school girl after she accuses one of her classmates of raping her. No, it was the total lack of charisma of the actors that did it. And the total lack of surprises in the way the movie investigates victim blaming. I knew the people would be assholes, but I thought at least they would be assholes in interesting ways.

I think I was probably also comparing it to a similar film that I had championed that we didn't end up programming. I'm probably not supposed to say the title, but I will because it could help other people eventually get to watch it. (As opposed to me mentioning a rejected title in a catty light, which would have no positive byproducts for that film.) That film was/is called Three Windows a Hanging, and instead of being Scandinavian, it takes place in Kosovo. In that case, a woman is shunned by the others in her village, especially the men, when she tells an international journalist that she and other women in their village were raped during the Serbian conflict back in the late 1990s. Not only did that film have acting that was far superior to the performances in Flocking, but it's also shot and framed beautifully. If I'm going to struggle with the darkness of sexual violence, I at least want it to be aesthetically and dramatically pleasing.

So while Flocking wasn't a hit for me, it was nice to return to the festival after nearly a week without screenings.

And it was also nice that I was able to avoid making eye contact with the festival director on the way out, so I wouldn't have to give him my thoughts on the movie.

A great reason to pay full price

Something unusual happened at Cinema Nova on Tuesday night:

I walked up to the counter and paid $19.50 to see a movie.

As you probably know, I never have to do this anymore. My AFCA card gets me into movies for free most nights of the week, and if it's not one of those nights, I just wait until it is one of those nights.

Tuesday night was, in fact, one of those nights at Cinema Nova. My card entitled me to free entry. But I paid anyway.

Why?

Well, the director of A Month of Sundays is one Matthew Saville, and he's a friend of mine. His wife and mine grew up together, and they live just down the street from us. In fact, she composed the film's score, as she does with most of Matt's projects. (Her name is Bryony Marks, by the way.)

In short, I want to give his movie as much help at the box office as I can. Not only for Matt's sake, but for the sake of small comic dramas (dramatic comedies?) like A Month of Sundays.

I was just glad it wasn't one of the clerks I recognized who took my $19.50. It would seem weird to be paying for a movie when I could get in for free, and that might make them wonder if there was something fraudulent about the other times I'd used the card. Was it a fake card? Did they need to check me out more thoroughly the next time I tried to use it? If asked, of course, I'd give the reason. But they wouldn't ask. And even though my AFCA card is legit, it's such a good deal that I worry about anything coming along and messing it up.

Fortunately, it was a woman I'd never seen before.

Well, I was glad to pay for this movie, and not just because I'm supporting my friend and the types of movies he makes. It was my favorite of the three films of his I've seen, which is saying something, since I gave both of the others four stars. This one also got four stars from me ... but it was a higher four stars. Like maybe 4.2 stars. Almost high enough to be rounded up to four-and-a-half.

A Month of Sundays -- which may never get released outside of Australia, but I'll tell you about it anyway -- stars Anthony LaPaglia as a real estate agent going through bit of a mid-life crisis. His mother has just died the year before, and he's wading through a recent breakup with his wife, the mother of his teenage son. And although he instinctively paces out the size of rooms even in houses that are not for sale, he's lost his lust for his chosen career, and is seeing the ugly side of an industry that frequently leaves hopeful buyers without any hope. A wrong number dialed by a woman about his mother's age, who sounds enough like his mother and thinks she's talking to her son, unexpectedly thrusts him into a new relationship with a perfect stranger, and steadily changes his perspective on what life may still have in store for him.

Not The Avengers, right?

It's true that movies like this have less and less of a claim on the available spots at the multiplex. But A Month of Sundays is a great reminder of how valid they can still be to the experience of moviegoers just looking for a human-scale story that helps give them a new view on the very real issues they deal with on a day-to-day basis. Yeah, sometimes we go to the movies to escape those issues. But it's probably even more useful to gain some kind of wisdom about them, an actionable kind of wisdom, and A Month of Sundays gives us just that.

A free critics screening card is designed to lessen the financial burden of paying for a bunch of sub-par movies that we are duty bound to review as part of our role as critics. I'm not formally reviewing A Month of Sundays, because I think it would constitute a conflict of interest. But I can tell you without a doubt that paying for this movie felt like no financial burden at all.

Three weeks late for Blah Blah Blay Day

There was something on the calendar on April 17th called "Blah Blah Blah Day."

I know this because my DC Comics calendar told me so.

But I care about it because of Hotel Transylvania 2.

Let me explain.

For Christmas 2014, my wife gave me or my son -- can't remember which -- a 2015 calendar comprised of covers of classic DC comic books. It was entertaining enough, but we didn't really need my sister-in-law to buy us the 2016 edition as well. I'm concerned it may become an annual thing, so that we may never have anyone other than Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman or the Flash looking down at us from the calendar spot on our kitchen wall.

But I digress.

The calendar recognizes a bunch of holidays beyond the traditional ones, though "holidays" may be a strong word for what some of these things are. Case in point: Blah Blah Blah Day, which landed on Sunday, April 17th.

This caught my eye because the words "blah blah blah" are part of a quote from Hotel Transylvania 2 that my younger son loves, even though he had never actually seen the movie. It's also an apocryphal quote, but more on that in a minute.

So my older son and I saw this back at the end of November when it hit theaters here. When we came home, I shared one of the quotes from it that both kids originally loved, but my younger one has held on to much longer. It comes from Adam Sandler's Count Dracula, most often referred to as "Drac." There is a running joke throughout both Hotel Transylvanias in which characters find it an astute impersonation of the most famous of all vampires to speak in a stereotypical Transylvanian accent and say "Blah blah blah." Or really, "Blah blahblah," if you want to get the meter of the line down.

So in the second one, which centers on Dracula's grandchild, the grandchild's first words are "Blah blahblah." When Drac hears this, he can only assume it's because someone has been impersonating him so regularly that the kid has gotten it engraved into his consciousness. He then of course defends himself against such a narrow and by definition inaccurate impression of him. (Inaccurate because no one actually says "blah blah blah.")

So my version of the line was "I don't say 'blah blah blah!' The only time I say 'blah blah blah' is when I'm talking about how I don't say 'blah blah blah!'" My kids are their father's children, so they loved the little bit of linguistic wordplay in this quote. I think they also liked the Transylvanian accent.

So I'd bust out this quote now and again when the situation seemed to call for it. And because my older son is his mother's son, he eventually got tired of the repetition. But the younger one didn't. Maybe he's more my son than hers.

I was eventually reminded of the fact that the younger one hadn't seen the movie yet -- which makes sense, as he's not even two-and-a-half yet -- and I found the perfect occasion to show it to him. My wife and I had spent the night of Saturday April 16th away in a hotel room to celebrate our anniversary, while the aforementioned sister-in-law stayed overnight at our house with our kids. My wife was going to also spend the day on Sunday working on a script she's writing, leaving me home with them. And I noticed it was Blah Blah Blah Day.

At this point it would probably be good to tell you what Blah Blah Blah Day actually is.

According to the internet, it's a day when you are supposed to get done all the boring things you've been putting off. All the tedious tasks that might be denoted by the phrase "blah blah blah." Jerry Seinfeld might have called it Yada Yada Yada Day instead.

For my family, though, it would be the day we'd watch Hotel Transylvania 2, which I rented from iTunes just for the occasion.

But it was my older son -- the one who has moved on just enough from things like Hotel Transylvania 2, even though he's still big into Scooby Doo -- who put the kibosh on the viewing. I slumped my shoulders in disappointment, but unless I have his buy-in on a particular movie, we're not going to sit there for 90 minutes and watch it.

Accepting his preference not to watch it on one particular occasion is one thing. Letting the 30-day rental window elapse without watching it is quite another.

So Mother's Day became the next best occasion to watch it. My wife was going out to treat herself to a 4 p.m. showing of Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, and since I'd already taken the kids out for about four hours in the morning, unwinding with a movie in the afternoon seemed like the perfect thing to do. With a little prodding, the older one acquiesced.

As we were watching, I sat there, excited, anticipating that moment when my younger son would have his mind blown by finally hearing "I don't say 'blah blah blah!' The only time I say 'blah blah blah' is when I'm talking about how I don't say 'blah blah blah!'"

So here is what the line actually is:

Mavis (baby's mother): Come on honey, say it again.
Baby: Blah blah blah.
Dracula: I don't say 'blah blah blah.'
Mavis: We didn't say you did.
Dracula: Then where did he get that?
Baby: Blah blah blah.
Mavis: Well, maybe sometimes you say it.
Dracula: I only say it when I say I don't say it!
Baby: Blah blah blah.

And ... scene.

So I slumped my shoulders in disappointment a second time.

It's too early to tell whether the misquote will continue to live on among our family's private jokes. An appropriate situation hasn't arisen in the three days since Sunday, but even if it had, I suspect I would have been too deflated to try it out again. However, when my younger son next needs perking up, I know I can go to that well and very likely get a smile, as well as his own hilariously broken version of trying to imitate the misquoted line.

I liked Hotel Transylvania 2 pretty well when I saw it, ranking it comfortably in the top half of films I saw in 2015, but realizing I'd been quoting the line wrong was kind of a microcosm of a general sense of deflation I felt on my second viewing. I suppose you just can't replicate the unique circumstances of watching a movie you know your son's been looking forward to in a classic old theater (the Sun in Yarraville), knowing that he's really enjoying it, and feeling pleasantly surprised by it yourself.

I guess maybe we've all moved on from "blah blah blah."

Still working out the kinks

The lesser of two Australian streaming services we subscribe to is called Presto, and it's a bit of an odd duck.

Oh, it walks like a streaming service and it quacks like a streaming service, but around the edges that duck is a bit ... daffy.

One example: When you are done watching a particular piece of content, it doesn't offer you up any additional suggestions, or as in the case of Netflix, actually start playing you the next thing it thinks you're most interested in watching.

Instead, it offers the following option:

In case you can't read what that says, it's "Replay."

We thought it was weird enough when we were watching episodes of Mr. Robot, the availability of which was the reason we subscribed to Presto in the first place. (Too bad we didn't end up liking the show very much.) I mean, who would come to the end of a television program and then decide they're just going to watch the same program all over again, immediately?

But it's even weirder with feature length content, such as Black Dynamite, which I watched last night. I could see watching the same TV show twice in a row if you think you missed a nuance or something. The time commitment would be comparatively minimal. But the same movie twice in a row? I can only think of two times in my whole life that I've done that, and they were unusual circumstances.

Still, I suppose Black Dynamite is fun enough that I might have watched it twice in a row. Unlike most parodies, it doesn't wink. This is a loving lampoon of blaxploitation films that doesn't only look like a genuine film from the 1970s, but its absurdities are all within the realm of what a cheap blaxploitation film might actually contain. There are no Zucker-Abrahams style cutaways or instances of breaking the fourth wall. It's just an awesomely bad and incredibly fun movie with bad acting and bad dialogue that are intentional, but so subtly intentional that you really could mistake it for the genuine article. Knowing that it isn't just makes you admire the skill that went into it all the more.

I plucked Black Dynamite out of a kind of mind-boggling array of films that Presto has on offer. It's a lot more films than Netflix has these days, and possibly even more than the generous quantity on Stan. So I kind of hope Presto does work out the kinks in its presentation in time to really compete with those services, because right now, it's running a very distant third in Australia. And services that run a distant third either reimagine themselves as a niche product with lower overhead, or just cease to exist altogether.

It may not matter whether Presto gets its act together or not because my wife and I have already decided to cancel it. In fact, only because of Mr. Robot and one or two other shows my wife has now almost finished watching did we even add a third streaming service in the first place. Two is more than enough, and we don't want to just be throwing money away. In fact, the experience of subscribing to Presto has really been little more than a very expensive way to slowly wade through Mr. Robot. It took us like two months to finally watch the finale.

Suffice it to say that we definitely didn't care to replay any of those episodes.

Celebrating Mother's Day through a current movie poster

Happy Mother's Day to all the moms and/or mums out there.

That's all.

What's the big deal about Alden Ehrenreich?

If you're having to learn a new name today, you shouldn't be.

Sure, Alden Ehrenreich has just been cast as Han Solo in the upcoming Star Wars universe prequel slated for 2018. But even before that, it seemed as though he was all anyone could talk about after they saw Hail, Caesar! (No, that sentence is not punctuated by enthusiasm -- the title has an exclamation point in it.)

I was not a big fan of Hail, Caesar!, as we already covered in this post. But when discussing it afterward with my equally disenchanted viewing companion, I did mention a few scenes I thought were really entertaining. I mentioned the Scarlett Johansson mermaid number and the Channing Tatum sailor number.

I did not mention Alden Ehrenreich, but not just because I didn't know his name. He simply didn't make an impression on me. I didn't think he had much charisma, and only part of that was the fact that he was playing a character without much charisma. He just simply didn't register. Or rather, the only reason he registered was that he was the only cast member I didn't recognize.

So it was with some amount of surprise that I noticed people whose movie views I respect stumbling over themselves to praise Ehrenreich, and the movie around him. In fact, even those who were a bit more lukewarm on the movie couldn't stop talking about the star-making performance Ehrenreich gave.

Did I miss something?

Oh, he's handsome enough. But that alone won't take you very far in Hollywood. You have to have a star quality, and I just didn't see it in Ehrenreich. Clearly, everyone else did, including Disney, who just made him Han Solo.

I suppose part of the reason I'm disappointed in this development is that I still had hopes for one Anthony Ingruber, the guy known as "that guy who does a dead-on Harrison Ford impersonation." Not only are Ingruber's Youtube videos incredible, but he actually gave quite a charismatic performance as a young version of Ford's character in last year's The Age of Adaline. In short, I'm in the bag for this guy.

I can see why Disney didn't consider Ingruber famous enough or probably talented enough to play the role, and in fact, I don't even think he was one of the finalists. But it's not like Ehrenreich is significantly more experienced, or as far as I can tell, more talented. You try to grab these guys on the way up, so by the time your movie comes out, they are famous and they function as a box office draw in and of themselves. And I suppose Ehrenreich is more likely to be that guy than Ingruber.

And sure, Ingruber's Ford impersonation is probably more of a party trick than something you can bank on. Besides, in movies like this, you want the actor to make the character their own, rather than just use an impersonation as a crutch. But even in terms of straight charisma, I give Ingruber the edge over Ehrenreich.

I didn't get Hail, Caesar! and I don't get Alden Ehrenreich.

Hopefully, I'll be on the same page as the rest of you by the time Han Solo comes out.

HRAFF Opening Night - I made it

For those of you on pins and needles about whether I got to go to HRAFF Opening Night after initially turning down my free ticket, well, the subject of this post has already spoiled the suspense for you.

I did indeed get to see Eva Orner's Chasing Asylum, a film so new it does not yet have a proper poster available on Google Images. It just had its world premiere last week at a documentary festival in Canada, and the screening last night was its third to the public overall.

When I emailed the HRAFF marketing person to ask if there were perhaps one more "secret" ticket that had been held back to the sold-out performance, she told me that indeed there was -- exactly one extra ticket. Whether it was really the only extra ticket or not, I'll probably never know, but I do know that it was waiting for me when I showed up at the box office Thursday night at around 6:25.

I thought I'd be burnt out on this stuff after five solid months of it from September through early February, but as it turned out, a good film can still speak to me, no matter how many similar ones I may have seen. The plight of refugees trying to enter Australia by boat -- who are instead diverted to detention centers on the small islands of Manus in Papua New Guinea, and the island nation of Nauru -- struck me freshly. So not only was it worth going just to swan about and enjoy the fruits of my labors, but also to see a movie that really moved me.

I ended up running into two fellow programmers in the lobby, one from my team and one from the team that selected the shorts program, but who I'd met before. The three of us sat together for the movie and the Q&A session with the director that followed. Two screening rooms at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) were filled for opening night, and since we were in the second theater, we had to watch the speeches on live video from the other one. But that hardly mattered, and if anything, gave us the freedom not to be as well-behaved an audience. (Not that we behaved poorly, but there were some people checking their phones during the Q&A who probably wouldn't have been doing so otherwise.)

Listening to about four speeches that kicked off the ceremony, I felt really glad that my wife had encouraged me to go to this. When you watch 80 movies over five months in putting together a film festival, the least you can do is show up and be feted on opening night. I wasn't thanked by name, of course, but our progamming team was thanked, and I did feel a bit of a rush of pride as this happened.

I wasn't sure what would follow the film, whether a small contigent of programmers would go off to get drinks, or whether I might even sneak off and see a second film in a nearby theater. You can imagine my surprise, then, when the Q&A wrapped up with the moderator telling us to go enjoy some drinks downstairs. Some? I had about eight. Or it felt like that, anyway. I started with a beer, and then flowed on to wine. And flowed. And flowed. And flowed.

And thank God for the tray-passed hors d'eouvres, as I hadn't managed to grab dinner before the screening.

And as I talked to a second programmer -- my viewing partner -- as well as the two I'd been sitting with, not to mention about three of their friends, and then a fourth programmer and the festival's coordinator and director, getting steadily drunker over the next 90 minutes, I thought really seriously for the first time about doing this again this year. The party at the end is all worth it. Am I right?

I'm a big hungover today, but that's a small price to pay for months of toil culminating in an evening of drinking and celebration. And through my hungover haze, I'm still basking in that glow.

A bizarre corporate commitment to Smurfs 2

If you're one of those big box stores that sells TVs, meaning you have somewhere between 25 and 50 of them displaying images (usually the same images) at any given time, you have to figure out just the perfect images to showcase the desirability of those TVs.

JB HiFi here in Australia has chosen something great for those big TVs that curve -- these little looping travel promotions. If you aren't sure whether you want to shell out the ten grand or whatever for one of these TVs, seeing the Taj Mahal or Christ the Redeemer on it should help push you off the fence.

A lot of times, though, they just put it on a certain TV channel, something inoffensive that couldn't possible raise the hackles of even the most sensitive parent, or scare even the most milquetoast child. 

Our local Costco has tried to follow that logic, but instead of a TV station, they've chosen a movie.

And that movie is ... The Smurfs 2.

That's right, every single time I go to our local Costco, the TVs are playing The Smurfs 2. And I don't go all that often, which just means they've been doing this for even longer.

If you're going to go with a movie, presumably, you'd want to showcase something new, so you could sell people a BluRay in addition to a TV. But it has now been nearly three years since the theatrical release of Smurfs 2, meaning that it's been nearly three years minus three months since it came out on BluRay. I could see the promotion of this movie creeping into early 2014, but not mid-2016.

There's got to be some reason behind it. I mean, some reason that isn't just laziness.

If the idea is to put something on that's inoffensive -- in terms of subject matter, not quality -- but also not interesting enough for people to stop and watch for 25 minutes, I could see how Smurfs 2 would fit the bill. I didn't want to watch it for 25 minutes even when I was actually watching it with my son back in August of 2014. (Without actually having seen the original -- no wonder we didn't love it, ha ha.)

But if you're trying to show off what the TV can do in terms of visuals -- like the wise people at JB Hifi with their Taj Mahal -- then The Smurfs is a lousy choice. Oh, those digital blue creatures may look okay, but they hardly represent the pinnacle in cinematic visual achievement.

Wouldn't you prefer to go with something like Inside Out? Frozen? The Lego Movie? Or if live-action people interacting with digital creatures is for some reason the requirement, how about something like Paddington?

I've been to Costco twice this week -- once for a regular shop, once to exchange a pair of pants that I couldn't try on during that regular shop, which ended up being too small -- so my next visit is not likely to be all that soon. But if Gargamel, Smurfette and those other weird Smurfs Gargamel created are still adorning their TV screens on my next visit, I'm going to ask somebody about it.

I must get to the bottom of this. 

A big thing I never told you about

You probably think that I fill you in on every minor detail of my life as a cinephile, between either writing about what I've seen or simply recording it in list format to the right of these words. But I've been keeping a major aspect of my cinematic life a secret from you for about eight months now. It's finally time to tell all.

Starting in September, I began watching as many as six movies per week as one of the programmers for the Human Rights Arts & Film Festival (HRAFF), a Melbourne-based festival that also tours an abbreviated version of its schedule in other cities around Australia after its initial two-week Melbourne run. Here is the website if you are interested in taking a gander at the program or learning more about the organization. The viewings themselves ended in mid-February, and now opening night of the festival is tomorrow night.

I am probably not going to opening night, but I'll get to that in a moment.

Why was I keeping this a secret from you? Well, I'll tell you.

We weren't meant to tell anyone what we were watching for the festival, as it was supposed to be confidential. I guess that's to protect the people whose films were considered but ultimately rejected, or possibly something that has more of a legal basis than just being wary of hurt feelings. In any case, we were asked to keep our discussions of the films limited to weekly team meetings. (We'd also usually watch a film at these meetings.)

So I ran into a bit of a logistical problem. See, I'm nothing if not set in my ways, and my ways include always updating my Most Recently Seen For the First Time list on the right side of this page, without fail and without exception. I could continue to do that ... as long as I didn't tell you why I was watching these movies. Or so went my rationale.

Now that this list hasn't contained one of these movies for something like ten weeks, I figured it was finally safe to tell you about my experience. I hate holding out on you.

My wife saw that they were looking for volunteer programmers for HRAFF around the end of August, and encouraged me to apply. As a person who does not naturally gravitate to human rights films, I didn't consider myself a strong applicant for the role. But my wife persevered, pointing out that serving as a programmer for a film festival would look good on my resume if I were ever seeking paying work in this type of field. I could not argue with that logic.

After meeting with the festival coordinator and festival director, I got excited by the idea ... but was also wary. They told me up front that the role would include five additional films of "homework" per week, beyond the film we would watch once a week as a group. Given some of the commitments I already had on my schedule -- like, watching lots of movies for the film series on this blog and for my year-end list -- I doubted I'd be able to manage it. But they offered me a spot on the team, and again my wife said to just try it out -- I could always quit if it were too overwhelming.

Well, it was too overwhelming -- but the last thing I wanted to do was quit. I'm not a quitter, but more than that, I was loving being part of this team.

I was one of eight programmers, which included two other men and five women. We were divided into groups of two, and your partner and you would watch the same films each week and include comments in a spreadsheet that we would all jointly update. You'd give each film one of four ratings: Lock, High Consider, Low Consider or Pass. Then include a sentence or two (or in my case, six or seven) singing the praises or bemoaning the shortcomings of each film. That way, every film that we were considering -- either because it had been submitted to us for a fee, or because it had been cherry-picked from other festivals -- would be seen by at least two people. If the film were really good, the director and the coordinator might also watch it, as might the other six programmers. If the film were really bad, it would never be spoken of again.

What tends to happen is that you give any film you are not really sure of a High, "to keep it in contention." In other words, to let someone else be the bad guy who ultimately passes on it. A Low or a Pass is basically a death sentence for a film, though I did give one film a Pass that ultimately ended up making it into the program. (I won't tell you which.) A Lock is meant to be reserved for films where you want others to prioritize watching them as soon as possible because you feel that there's no doubt this should be part of the festival. So you are not meant to be careless with your Locks. The result of this scoring system is that sometimes people will give a film a High/Lock or a High/Low, to try to suggest a subtler gradation to their feelings about a film. But since we are asked not to do that and since I was one of only two people who actually obeyed those rules, I ended up giving out a lot of Highs and significantly less of the other three grades.

I loved going to our weekly meetings and hobnobbing with the others who had been chosen, all of whom were interesting people with whom I could have seen myself striking up friendships. It's great to have your opinion on a film valued, and to be assembling your perfect lineup for a festival that intends to effect social change and call out tyranny. So there were societal benefits to what I was doing, it stroked my ego, it was rewarding socially, and it was also just plain fun.

But that's not to say it was not hard, and did not get incredibly tedious.

Fortunately, many of these films were only just over an hour long, and running times over 90 minutes were extremely rare. Perhaps unsurprisingly, 90% of them were also documentaries. So it was easier to squeeze them in than if I had been watching that many narrative features per week. But that was still at least five hours, and probably more like seven, of additional film programming per week, when I was also trying to maintain my regular viewing schedule and doing a side gig for a little extra pay. It was physically and mentally taxing, and I sometimes felt like Sisyphus pushing that boulder each time we got our list of links to five new online screeners each Monday. I had been hoping that there would be enough films of sufficiently low quality that I could turn them off after 20 minutes, and we were indeed allowed to do this. But I ended up doing that less than ten times out of an eventual 80 films I watched for the festival. (Eighty was actual the number I watched all the way through -- with the other ten or fewer, it was a total of around 90 that were assigned.)

So yeah, now you know why I set a record for most new films watched in 2015. And you also have an explanation for this post, which must have seemed pretty random at the time.

The cumulative effect of watching so many films about asylum seekers, repressed Muslim women, gay Israelis, people seeking voting rights and women being denied abortions is that you get kind of burnt out on films about asylum seekers, repressed Muslim women, gay Israelis, people seeking voting rights and women being denied abortions. I'm exaggerating a bit here to suggest that the content was limited to these five topics, as it certainly wasn't, and even if I saw a number of films about these topics, that's not to say they did not approach them differently and interestingly in most cases. But I wrote in this post from a year ago about struggling to summon enthusiasm for documentaries in general, even before my experience with HRAFF, and an influx of 70 more of them into my 2015/early 2016 viewing schedule probably drove me even further away from them, in the end. Even if I ultimately loved some of the ones I saw ("my baby," The Armor of Light, nearly made my top ten of 2015 -- I'll be seeing it again next week, this time on the big screen).

So yeah, it was a struggle at times. A lot of films were watched late at night between bouts of sleeping on the couch. Some of them are total blurs. Others were watched in 15-minute segments over the course of two days. When you are watching so many movies, you just fit them in as you can. It's an imperfect system and maybe we only should have watched three a week, but I also feel pretty sure that this method allowed us to choose the best of the relevant material out there at the time.

And this experience also opened my eyes to just how many films are being made each year that we never see/hear about. How many good films. How many good films just about human rights. It's kind of astounding. I didn't include many of them on my year-end list because films needed to fit certain release criteria in order to be included. A lot of these were films that had not yet been released theatrically, or at least not in the U.S. or Australia. Some of them were disqualified as 2014 films, or in a rare case or two even 2013. If I'd let them all in, I would have had nearly 200 films to rank from 2015 and my list wouldn't have been that relatable to the casual reader. So I let in about ten that had a U.S. or Australian release in 2015.

During the year, we had three special programmer meetings where we watched no films and only discussed our ten favorite so far, in trying to draft a preliminary list. These were my favorite meetings as they involved the most interaction between programmers and the most sharing of warm fuzzies about films we loved, and occasionally, bonding over the weaknesses of films we didn't. When the last one came and went in late January, ending the formal portion of my programmer assignment, it was not without some melancholy. The experiences that drain us the most can also be the most rewarding.

We've had one event since then, the program launch at the beginning of April. Here we got to enjoy free drinks with other industry types as the director announced which films had made the final cut. As I also wrote three blurbs about the films for the program, I also got to hear my own words quoted back to me as he announced the films with a slide show behind him. It was a nice reward to months of hard work.

Unfortunately, I disqualified myself from one of the other HRAFF spoils I should have enjoyed.

As an additional thank you for all our hard work, we were allowed one free ticket to any ten of the 30 sessions, as well as tickets to opening and closing night. In a decision I now regret, I released my right to my opening night tickets, in part because of the subject matter burnout alluded to earlier. Because there were more films being considered than any of us could possibly see, it turns out that as many as half of the films selected for the festival are ones you haven't seen. I'm correcting that with a couple films over the next few weeks, but one I chose not to watch was Chasing Asylum, the opening night film. Yet one more film about asylum seekers was just too much for me to handle at that point, so I decided to be magnanimous and let someone else attend the sold-out opening night.

I didn't give it a second thought until my wife said yesterday, "Aren't you going to HRAFF opening night?"

When I told her I had relinquished my right to my tickets, the fact that I didn't want to see the movie sounded like a particularly weak reason. I mean, this was my opportunity to swan about and enjoy the fruits of my labors, in addition to probably the only time I'll get a chance to see all the programmers together again. I immediately emailed the ticket woman to see if there were any "secret tickets" stashed away somewhere. As of this writing, I have yet to receive her response.

But whatever happens with that, I'll try not to be too disappointed. Instead, I'll hope to run into some of my programming colleagues when I go see Flocking next Wednesday, Ernest & Celestine next Sunday (as a part of a kids program -- I'll take my son), The Armor of Light the following Monday (I'll be bringing my wife), and then GTFO on Tuesday. Closing night is The Bad Kids, a film I've already seen, but you know what? I've decided I am going to that, because that will be the really last time I'll get a chance to be part of this experience.

Will I give myself the chance to be part of it again next year? Three of this year's eight programmers were returning from last year, after all.

It's hard to say at this point. I am probably leaning towards "No." After all, there were times that I thought it might kill me. And the cumulative effect has, indeed, been to numb me to the legitimate human rights concerns these people have, to dull some of the righteous indignation I should feel about their plights.

But maybe all I need is a rest. Maybe in August I'll feel differently.

And if I don't, well, this was an experience I'll never forget.

Now, off to enjoy the easy part of the experience ... to just sit back and enjoy the finished product.

The fine line between Captain America and The Avengers

The following post contains very minor spoilers about Captain America: Civil War, not much more than what the trailers already show you.

Captain America: Civil War is, for all intents and purposes, an Avengers movie.

Except it's good.

Like, really good.

Which makes no sense.

Marvel Studios and Disney so tightly control the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and therefore the look and feel of their films, that when a director wants to bring his own vision to one of these movies, they just push him out. Bye bye, Edgar Wright. We want Ant-Man to be less interesting than you want it to be.

But for some reason, the Captain America movies have stayed above the fray. Civil War is no exception.

Which makes no sense.

These movies should be of a piece, yet the Captain America movies -- be they directed by Joe Johnston (the first movie) or the Russo brothers (the last two) -- are consistently superior products.

I'm sure someone could figure out why, but it's not going to be me.

As Joss Whedon has gone from Marvel golden boy to Marvel whipping boy, it's easy to just suggest that Johnston or the Russos are better directors than he is. But that's a pretty weird conclusion. None of those guys has the track record Whedon has, and just because his last Avengers movie was a stinker, it doesn't taint his previous output -- both for Marvel with the original Avengers, or in general as a writer/director/creator. Can we really say that these other guys "get" Marvel more than Whedon does?

And yet this is basically an Avengers movie. The Avengers are called out by name constantly in Civil War. Like Superman before them (about a month before them), they are culpable for wanton destruction and accused of being indifferent to the resulting loss of life. Just because the Hulk, Thor, Nick Fury and, um, Cobie Smulders are missing from this, it doesn't mean it's not really an Avengers movie. They've just replaced those guys with Spider-Man, Ant-Man, Black Panther and Bucky Barnes. (And who knew, by the way, that Captain America's movies would be so much about Bucky, well beyond The Winter Soldier and probably on into the next three or four installments?)

What I thought I would object to in this movie is the fact that everybody needs to be in it. As the paragraph above indicates, it's about the same amount of everyone as in the overstuffed Age of Ultron, but what seemed like it would make it worse is that they kept on adding new people. The introductions of Ant-Man and Spider-Man particularly had me worried. There wouldn't seem to be enough for everyone to do.

Yet Civil War somehow figures that out, too. Ant-Man and Spider-Man are both basically comic relief, and boy are they fun. They are used just the right amount, sprinkled in for flavor, rather than relied on heavily to bear out complete narrative arcs. (And there's one awesome Ant-Man thing that I don't think any of the trailers have spoiled yet.)

I'm wondering if we just find the Captain America brand name a surefire indicator of quality -- if, in fact, that's why this story contains the Captain America banner rather than the Avengers one. I mean, it's never too late for a series to curdle, but something about Captain America just continues to hum along at a creative peak. What's strangest about this is that the original, The First Avenger, was something I wasn't looking forward to in the slightest. I was worried this character would be terminally square, jingoistic in a completely unironic and probably painful way. The First Avenger figured to make me embarrassed about my country of citizenship. Instead, the three Captain America movies may well be my favorite three movies from the MCU.

I don't know that I should question it. Maybe I just need to accept it and move on.

Some other thoughts on Civil War ...

America first

If you're wondering how I've already seen this movie, well, I'm kind of wondering that too.

As I came out of the theater yesterday, I asked myself, "Wait, wasn't it the first weekend in May that Captain America and Batman v. Superman were fighting about back in 2014 or something? As far as I can tell, it's not May yet -- even here in Australia."

And indeed, when I got home, I checked IMDB, and the movie doesn't open for another eight days in the U.S.

No such delay here. A week and a day before its U.S. release -- which is really one more additional day because of the time difference -- Captain America has hit Australian theaters. Except they don't call them theaters here, or even theatres. They call them cinemas.

When it comes to movies and their release dates, Australia often taketh away. But sometimes, Australia giveth.

Imperfect teeth

There's a moment in Civil War when Robert Downey Jr.'s Iron Man tells Chris Evans' Captain America that sometimes he wishes he could punch him in his perfect teeth.

This was only a few minutes after I realized he couldn't say the same thing to Black Widow.

No, not just because heroes don't usually threaten to punch women in the mouth. Rather, because Scarlett Johansson's teeth are not perfect.

When she's on the phone with Steve Rogers following [a particular incident that I won't spoil here], the camera goes close on Johansson's mouth, and that bottom row of pearly whites is anything but straight. In fact, the teeth in ScarJo's front middle are actually trying to crowd each other out, one in particular protruding crookedly in front of the others.

Before you think I'm teeth-shaming Scarlett Johansson, I'll let you know why I'm bringing this up. It reminds us again why Johansson is awesome -- she's not perfect, but the combination of her appearance and her charisma often convinces us that she is.

In fact, in reality, she's just the girl next door with crooked teeth.

Okay, so that's being a bit disingenuous. She's a person of otherworldly beauty. But her beauty is not inaccessible, as you might think it were. There's a natural component to it, a regular component to it, nearly undetectable imperfections that ground her in our world. This despite the fact that someone actually made a "realistic" robot version of her. One with perfect teeth, I might add.

And sure, it could just be because she could never afford to take enough time off from acting to get braces. But I like to think that she just doesn't care. And that's cool.

A well-trained audience

People have figured out this Marvel thing by now.

Most of the time when you go to the movies, and the credits start to roll, you lose three-quarters of your audience right there. A hardy few will stay to look at the names of all the key grips and dolly grips, but most of them are gone -- to the bathroom, to the car, what have you.

Well, not in Marvel movies, at least not anymore. For a time, these people were leaving early and missing the now two extra sequences that appear -- one about a minute into the credits, and one after all the credits have rolled. But now everyone is hip to this. In my audience, we lost no more than ten percent, and even those who did leave, didn't do so until after the first installment of additional footage. The rest of us waited to the bitter end. It was really a rather unusual experience, a bunch of people looking at their phones with the lights up, still plastered to their seats.

And I'm proud to say I was able to figure out essentially what the final bit of footage would be. I won't tell you what it is, but I will say that I correctly guessed both characters that would appear in it and what the essential nature of their interaction would be.

Marvel may not contain all that many surprises these days, but Captain America continues to be the exception to that rule. He was the first avenger, and I'm increasingly convinced he's also the best.

No Audio Audient: Intolerance

This is the fourth in my 2016 monthly series in which I am catching up with classic silent films I haven't seen.

When I asked my Flickcharters Facebook group which of four versions of D.W. Griffith's 1916 film Intolerance available on YouTube I should watch, one of the first responses was "The longest one."

It's possible that was a sarcastic response designed to subject me to a lengthy endurance test, but I took it at face value as meaning "The longest one is the one that's truest to the director's original vision."

While that's probably correct, it was with some reluctance that I discarded the 2:42, 2:46 and 2:57 versions and opted for the one that ran 3:17. Which would make this one of the longest films I've ever seen, right up there with Seven Samurai and 2014's Winter Sleep, though trailing the Abraham Lincoln epic Gettysburg.

Well, I don't know if you can sit there and give your full attention to a three hour and 20 minute silent film, but if you can, you're a better man than I am. Or if you're a woman, you're a better woman than I am.

It's fair to wonder whether I really gave Intolerance a fair shake. Almost from the start I was put off by its poetic, flowery title cards, which prized abstraction over narrative exposition. The fact that the title cards were used to beautify what we were already seeing, rather than to explicate it, meant that I probably should have been paying more attention to the images, rather than less. But I decided pretty much from the start that I'd try to multi-task through Intolerance -- that it would be the only way I'd survive the experience. I'd be sure to look up every time there was a new title card, but I could not be expected to stare raptly at the screen the rest of the time. Once I realized that the title cards weren't helping much with the exposition, it was probably too late.

The movie is divided into four stories of supposed intolerance through the ages, and makes certain to continue to remind us of the theme, as the word "intolerance" appears a good 20 times in the title cards. One is a modern story of a worker's strike and the unfolding repercussions on a girl ("The Dear One") and a boy ("The Boy," which is a funny name for him because he has a moustache and is clearly an adult for much of the movie). One is a story in ancient Babylon, which is probably the most grandiose but is also the one I tried least hard to figure out. One takes place in 16th century France. And then one is, naturally, the crucifixion of Christ. Transitions occur between these scenes with the aid of a figure rocking a cradle, intended to represent "eternal motherhood" or some such nonsense. He also goes to pages of a book to indicate the transition.

The one that gets the most screen time -- and the one I made the greatest attempt to follow, beat by beat -- is the modern story. Which makes sense, as the other three were added to a movie Griffith was already making, which seems a bit strange as they are by far the most technically ambitious three stories. Griffith apparently added them as he reconceptualized Intolerance as a response to the NAACP and others who criticized the racism in The Birth of a Nation from the year before. The odd thing about that was that Intolerance was not, as is sometimes thought, an apology for Birth of a Nation. Rather, Griffith dug himself in deeper by presenting himself as a victim of intolerance by those who didn't understand Birth. Puh-leeze.

And so again it becomes difficult to separate the art of Griffith from what we know about him as a person. Intolerance was obviously the most ambitious film that had ever been made at that point, but it may also be the most ambitious film that has ever been made, relative to the prevailing standards of the medium. Of all the other films that we think of as great technical breakthroughs throughout the years -- from Citizen Kane to Avatar -- few are perhaps as off-the-charts, go-for-broke ridiculous in terms of sheer gumption. The number of extras alone made this an astounding logistical feat, and that's not taking into consideration sets and costumes that seem authentic and then some. It's as though Griffith got a taste of grandeur in Birth and decided he was going to make what might come to stand as the greatest movie of all time.

Yet despite all this ambition on display, Intolerance fails as basic storytelling, which is why I came very close to giving it a thumbs down rating of 2.5 stars. I ultimately chickened out and went with a three. Still, I feel like one's feelings about the man shouldn't affect one's perspective on this film any less than they affect one's perspective on Birth. Although he does not offend in the text of Intolerance, he offends in the subtext, especially once you learn more about what drove him to make it. All the artistic skill and ambition are therefore tainted.

And I was really taken aback by his ego. There may be some logical expectation for this, but I kind of laughed to note that his initals -- D.G. -- appear in a little insignia at the bottom of most title cards. (I say "most" because the title cards are oddly inconsistent, with different fonts used and different formats presented -- I assume this was either to differentiate the stories, or perhaps as a later attempt to fix up the surviving cuts of the film with whatever materials were available at the time.) So while we would assume a massive ego based on what we know about Griffith, here we get actual evidence of a sort of narcissism that seems to have no functional explanation other than Griffith just liking the appearance of his own initials.

Before we just dismiss the movie as a bunch of impressive technique in service of empty and hypocritical platitudes, I should of course again reconsider the notion that I just didn't give Intolerance a chance. I was almost pre-checked out on it. There were baseball games I wanted to follow online as I was watching it, and follow them I did. During two of the three sittings it took to watch it. The other one, my shortest sitting, was at night, when I watched 23 minutes starting at hour two. And fell asleep about four times.

But I'm not watching this movie again. A little of it goes a long way. When you watch Intolerance, I think the point is to recognize it as a staggering cinematic achievement, to admire the commitment to grand spectacle, not to breathe in every nuance and really care much what happens in it one way or another. When you know the driving force behind it, you are even less interested in meeting it on its own terms.

So yeah, I've seen Intolerance once, or at least three-quarters of a time. I will never watch it again.

What will I watch in May? I think I need a light palette cleanser. How about a little Charlie Chaplin? The Kid it is.

Respecting the new distribution channels

It takes a lot for an old curmudgeon like me to change my ways/rules about something, especially when it comes to something as sacred as my year-end movie lists.

But even old fogeys sometimes have to wake up to the changing cinematic landscape and incorporate it into their manner of viewing the world.

Used to be -- in fact, it was up until now -- that I would only allow movies onto my year-end list if they played theatrically in the year in question. They didn't have to play theatrically in the United States -- that's a change I've also reluctantly made, since moving to Australia -- but they at least had to play theatrically somewhere. Festival environments don't count, unless it was me that saw it at that festival. Such as The Witch at last year's Melbourne International Film Festival. Even then, though, I knew The Witch would play theatrically, it just hadn't done so yet. So that made things easier.

So-called straight-to-video? It got left off my year-end list, if I even deigned to watch it at all.

But Netflix and other streaming services are changing how we think about the previously unbridgeable gap between cinematic releases and video releases. Twenty fifteen was a big year in that regard, as Netflix debuted its first film to which it had the exclusive distribution rights: Beasts of No Nation. Beasts threatened to cause me to have this internal discussion back then, but let me off the hook by actually getting a nominal theatrical release in order to qualify for awards consideration. (Which worked, as Idris Elba actually received a Golden Globe nomination.) But one of its next prominent exclusive releases, the Adam Sandler ensemble comedy The Ridiculous 6, received no such corresponding theatrical release (since, as might be assumed, no award nominations were expected for it, except possibly the Golden Raspberries). In large part because I didn't know what to do with that movie vis-a-vis my year-end list -- but also because I knew it probably sucked -- I just skipped it.

But it's a brand new year now, and Netflix figures to give us dozens of exclusive features this year, if its massive commitment to its own television shows is any indication. And Adam Sandler makes kind of an instructional case study in how we should start to consider this content, formerly stigmatized as merely straight-to-video. In the past there was the assumption that if something went straight to video, it was because there was not sufficient demand for it to get released theatrically, nor a sufficient assumed quality about it. Nowadays, though, big stars are committing to deals to have their movies released exclusively on the small screen. Not that Sandler is anyone's idea of a guy at the peak of his career, but his movies still generally make money at the box office, and you'd assume they'd continue to do so. Instead, Netflix snapped him up, meaning his next four movies would be exclusive to the streaming service, starting with Ridiculous 6 and continuing with The Do-Over, which is set to premiere a month from tomorrow.

So it seems useful to start thinking of Netflix as more than just a dumping ground for unwanted movies. I mean, I don't think anyone ever thought of it that way -- but they definitely thought of movies that didn't get theatrical releases as garbage looking for a dumping ground. Netflix has worked overtime to demonstrate that its content represents a certain level of prestige, even if Sandler himself has never had that word associated with him. He has been A-list, and that's what Netflix wants -- an A-list status.

That brings us to the movie I watched last night. Mike Flanagan's Hush played at this year's South by Southwest film festival, then was picked up by Netflix and debuted on the streaming service less than a month after its March 12th world premiere. It seems like this is going to be an increasingly common distribution model. The film has a 67 Metascore (though I didn't like it at all), so it's obviously not just somebody's trash being dumped as quickly as possible. In fact, the mere fact that it has a Metascore lends it a certain legitimacy in and of itself. Netflix looked at this movie and thought that it would work for their demographic (which is computed by all that metadata they get from their users), so they scooped it up and made it available to viewers as soon as possible.

In the olden days, I would have discounted this movie as straight-to-video and just never given it a second thought, much less a viewing. I mean, it definitely won't qualify for the Oscars this year, another loose determining factor in the films that qualify for my year-end list. But nowadays, I think I'm forced to accept it as just as legitimate as another trashy horror that plays in theaters for two weeks and slinks away with heaps of critical scorn and a 19 Metascore. Hush's director, Mike Flanagan, directed Oculus, a horror I loved from two years ago that definitely played theaters, and the film also features John Gallagher Jr., star of such mainstream films as Short Term 12 and 10 Cloverfield Lane. (He likes movies with numbers in the title, apparently.) If it walks like a duck, then gosh darn it, I guess it is one.

So you'll be seeing Hush on my 2016 year-end list. You won't see it very high on that list, but if you go down far enough, you'll find it.

I don't know that I'm swinging the gates open wide. Like, I still don't know if I'm going to watch any of Sandler's Netflix movies this year. But at least now I'm open to considering the applications of these movies for inclusion among the esteemed (or not so esteemed) ranks of the films I list from #1 to #whatever at the end of each year.

Whether that helps them or not is another question, but there's no such thing as bad publicity, right?

I guess when you're a blog that reaches as few readers as mine does, there's no such thing as bad anything.