Sting weekend

You know how I like reporting movie-related coincidences I experience. Well, here's another.

I hadn't been thinking much about Sting recently. In fact, I can't remember the last time I devoted some portion of my brain to him, but it could have been more than a year ago. That's how long it's been since I had a Sting-related incident of any kind.

This past weekend, I had three.

The first was when the former Police lead singer did a handful of songs before the AFL (Australian Football League) grand final. I didn't know what Sting's connection to Australia was, but then again, Bryan Adams had no connection to Australia when he fulfilled a similar role last year. It's a big enough event to woo A-list talent, albeit A-list talent past their prime.

But is Sting really past his prime?

I marveled not only at how fit he looked, but how good his voice sounded. The high notes are not a problem for him or anything, and he's still trim with impressive muscles. Looks more like a 45-year-old than a 65-year-old (his milestone birthday was also this past weekend). I'll hope to look that good when I turn 45 in two years, and will surely fail.

The second Sting event was not really an event at all, but pondered me to first consider the coincidence. It was seeing his name among my trending topics on Facebook. The reason he was trending had to do with some viral video on Jimmy Fallon. I didn't watch the video, but I did wonder how he managed to get to Jimmy Fallon so soon after being in Melbourne on Saturday. (He must have been in New York first and come to Melbourne after that, unless maybe he did it remotely.)

It was by Sunday night that I started to wonder if someone was punking me.

Sting has something a bit larger than a cameo in Zoolander 2, which I watched Sunday night. It's important to emphasize this because there are about 173 others who have what would more legitimately be described as a cameo. Sting appears in the movie twice, in a consequential role, so he almost reaches the level of, like, a co-star. It was nice to see him on screen again. He was funny.

And you know what? Zoolander 2 was funny. I may have just lost all credibility with you, but the movie was so much funnier than I had any reason to believe it would be. The word of mouth about this movie has been awful, and even as a fan of most Ben Stiller movies, I figured I'd be in synch with those opinions.

But after 15 amusing minutes in which I didn't laugh much but appreciated what they were going for, I started bursting out laughing periodically, maybe once per five minutes. That's not bad at all in a 100-minute movie. It all started with the hilariously unexpected appearance of Benedict Cumberbatch as the androgynous transgender supermodel called "All" and it just went from there. (The only person I didn't really like, in fact, was a usual favorite, Kristen Wiig.)

Where will I see Sting next?

Wherever it is, it will be welcome.

Over-praised action movies

I like John Wick. John Wick is fine.

BUT MY GOD, IT IS NOT THE SECOND COMING, PEOPLE!

There is a second coming of John Wick, though. John Wick: Chapter Two is scheduled for release next February 10th, and people in my Flickcharters Facebook group can't stop jerking themselves off about it.

There are at least three or four people in the group who seem to define themselves cinematically by their love for John Wick. One guy who never shuts up about it listed movies he'd watch during a recent marathon weekend. John Wick made the list, and afterwards in parentheses he included the clarification "(Because of course I did.)"

Why of course? What's so great about this film?

Oh, it's definitely good. I'll give it that. But I think that's why people think it's great -- because it's good. Good action films are harder to come by these days than they once were, so people are eager to rally around any good action film and call it great.

I think this also explains the love for Jack Reacher, another favorite in that group that is getting a sequel, though that one's ready to hit theaters this month. Jack Reacher: Never Go Back (terrible title) is coming out in the U.S. on October 21st, and in Australia a day before that, on my birthday.

Jack Reacher is not good. At least, I don't think it is. I was singularly disappointed by that film, especially since I usually like Tom Cruise movies. The best thing about it was an entertaining villain turn by Werner Herzog. Everything else was pretty much tied for the second best thing about it, which was also the worst thing about it. There might have been a clever set piece or two in there, I don't remember. Jack Reacher was not worth remembering.

Yet it comes up regularly in my Facebook group, and that must be a fairly mainstream opinion, else they wouldn't have consider the movie sequel worthy. "JACK REACHER YEAH!!!" Really? "YEAH"?!?

The consequence of Jack Reacher being considered a hit by individuals who are not very discerning is that its director, Christopher McQuarrie, was borrowed to make another over-praised action movie starring Tom Cruise: Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation. In this case I was more conscious of tight set pieces and polished filmmaking. But I thought the movie overall was just lackluster. Maybe I've finally had enough of Ethan Hunt.

I wonder if this whole thing first started when other people saw a brilliant series of action movies in the Jason Bourne movies and I just didn't. I found them diverting, but nothing more. There have now been three in a row that I haven't seen, as discussed here.

There are two things I can conclude about being out of synch with the level of enthusiasm other people have about these movies:

1) I am just not as young as they are, or as in touch with my inner testosterone-infused teenager as they are;

2) I'm an old grump, which may be the same thing.

But I don't think I'm an old grump. One of Tom Cruise's other most recent action movies, Edge of Tomorrow, was in my top ten for the year it came out, and I gave it five stars. And I've got an action movie in this year's top ten as well: Captain America: Civil War. I don't expect it will finish the year in my top ten, but it's there now, and I've ranked more than 80 movies so far this year.

I think the real difference is that my need for action movies to be good differs from theirs, and differs from that of the average movie fan. The average movie fan earns the adjective "average" before his title (an "average movie fan" also seems to be a he) because action movies are part of his DNA. When all else is equal, he'd rather watch an action movie by a margin of two to one over any other type of movie. That's because even though he says he is, he is not really a cinephile. He is a fan of being entertained, and even though I'm making it sound like that's a bad thing, it's a totally fine reason to watch movies. One of the primary reasons, to be certain.

Well, that's not me, at least not anymore. That might have been me when I was an actual teenager, and not just channeling teenage desires as many of these people with whom I differ on John Wick, Jack Reacher and the latest Mission: Impossible movie seem to be doing. But the reason I know I'm really a cinephile is that I want any type of movie to be good, be it an action movie, a costume drama, a hard-hitting documentary or an abstract art film. The people who think John Wick is the best movie of the past five years are not even seeing those last three types of film.

Which is okay. I'm not here today to tell you how much better I am than they are, even though I know it sounds like I'm doing that.

Really, I'm here today to try to stop scratching my head about why these people love the movies they love, and I don't.

And through the writing of this, I've decided it's the opposite of someone who tries to break up with you gently:

It's not me, it's them.

The novelty of streaming The Force Awakens

It wasn't too long ago that I thought Star Wars and Netflix streaming were a very unlikely match.

In this post almost exactly five years ago, entitled "Searching for Star Wars on Netflix" and written on the occasion of the announced division of the company into a streaming service and a DVD-through-the-mail service called Qwikster (a plan that was quickly scuttled after a resounding public backlash), I wrote: "I don't expect a movie like Star Wars ever to be available on streaming. 'Ever' is a long time, but let's just put it this way: it's not going to happen anytime soon."

I guess five years was fairly soon after all.

No, the original Star Wars is not available for streaming. But a movie "like" Star Wars -- that's what I said, anyway -- is. In fact, it's so much "like" Star Wars that this was one of the reasons the people who didn't like it didn't like it. The new Star Wars movie is available on Netflix, as will every subsequent Star Wars that gets released, according to the recent (not that recent now) distribution deal between Disney and Netflix.

And so Friday night, almost purely for the sake of its seeming lack of likelihood, I watched Star Wars: The Force Awakens on Netflix.

There was really no need for me to see this movie for the third time in its first ten months of existence. In fact, you might argue that intense initial exposure to a movie has the chance to turn you against it. I mean, I still love Creed, but my third viewing of that back in June was probably too soon.

But there was no denying that every time I scrolled past it on Netflix, my salivary glands activated just a little bit. It was a physical reaction I couldn't deny. I wanted to see this movie again.

And, I'm glad to report, pretty much no change in my feeling about it after a third viewing. I still love it.

But it occurred to me that it does represent a bit of a watershed moment in our relationship with various delivery systems for our movies.

Five years ago, I discounted the possibility of Star Wars being available for streaming because it seemed to me, even if I didn't state it aloud or even consciously define my own perspective, that making something available for streaming reduces its sense of glamour. If you can just watch a movie any old time with a click of a button, its value takes a hit. It's no longer some elite commodity that you will want to buy in order to have it in your collection. By it streaming, it's in your collection without you even having to do anything.

Star Wars seemed unlikely to cross that line. As it has perennial resale value as a physical disc, Lucasfilm seemed likely to remain content to milk every last cent out of it in that format. Giving it to us for free -- with our monthly streaming subscription, that is -- seemed an admission of defeat for that particular revenue stream.

Has that defeat now been admitted? Or does Disney just have a different way of doing things?

Maybe a little from Column A and a little from Column B.

One of the ways I knew I was excited to see The Force Awakens again, beyond the mere likelihood of watching Star Wars movies multiple times, was that I recently looked for it on the shelf at Target. Not to buy it -- DVD prices here are still outrageous. No, I just wanted to look at it. I just wanted to marvel over the fact that I could purchase this on DVD or BluRay, this Star Wars movie we had all been anticipating for so long. I still get a little excited by the possibility of owning a new movie that had excited me, even if I do it less and less these days.

But you know what? I couldn't find it.

I figured I had just been looking in the wrong place. There was a Lego version of The Force Awakens, but not the one starring actual people. I shrugged and gave up, not thinking much more about it.

Until now.

Now I wonder if we've reached a point in the devaluation of physical media that they actually didn't have The Force Awakens at Target. Available on Netflix? Who needs a disc?

Because now the assumption is that we all have Netflix, and really, don't we?

I guess I'll take the glass is half full approach, though. The glass is half full approach meant that I got to watch this movie I wanted to see on Friday night without lifting a finger.

Correction: I lifted the finger necessary to press play on my remote.

Funny coincidences of Jersey Girl

No part of me intended to catch up with Jersey Girl anytime soon.

I've seen most of Kevin Smith's movies, so it was a movie I expected I'd see "one of these days." But the occasion would really have to present itself, and there would have to be no other better options.

Apparently, those circumstances arose when I saw it at the library recently, borrowed it with a shrug, then decided not to return it yesterday when I brought back a bunch of other items that were due back sooner. Jersey Girl wasn't due back until the 17th, so I held onto it, not realizing that my opportunity to watch it would occur just a few hours later on Friday -- a holiday here in the great state of Victoria. (It's a new public holiday, actually, to coincide with today's Aussie rules football grand final.)

And because my wife took my older son out Pokemon hunting while my younger son took a nap, leaving me with a block of time, I did indeed watch Jersey Girl on Friday afternoon. Or, 45 minutes of it, finishing up the remainder that night before going to bed. You know, seemed like a good afternoon movie, one I could pause when I drifted off into my own nap.

I'm glad I did watch it, not because I liked the movie -- though I did, more than I expected I would -- but because it presented a truly funny set of coincidences, both with my own life and with the careers of those involved in the movie. Watching it 12 years after its release, when the movie is not having a moment of any kind and has largely been forgotten, I was in a position to identify coincidences that probably no one else is -- especially since some of those relate only to me and my timing for watching the movie.

Such as:

1) Kevin Smith seems to have been inspired to make this movie by the birth of his own daughter, Harley Quinn, which occurred in June of 1999. (She actually makes an uncredited cameo in the movie as well, I later discovered, though I didn't catch it.) That's more than five years before Jersey Girl came out, but it stands to reason that his own experiences as a father played a big role in his decision to write such a movie. This year, he's made the second movie that seems to have been inspired, in a way, by Harley Quinn -- Yoga Hosers, which I saw just two weeks ago.

2) Jersey Girl stars Liv Tyler, who, like Harley Quinn Smith, became famous largely because she had a famous dad. (If you want to call Harley Quinn Smith "famous." She does have her own wikipedia page.) It remains to be seen whether Kevin Smith's daughter will have the same type of career as Steven Tyler's daughter, though it certainly seems unlikely.

3) Smith named his daughter Harley Quinn because he's a huge Batman fan. That's probably also why he included a throwaway line in Jersey Girl in which Affleck, driving a street sweeper, says to his now seven-year-old daughter "Welcome to the Batmobile." He calls back to it later on as well, making it not totally a throwaway, I guess. Smith couldn't have known, of course, that 12 years later, in 2016, Affleck would first appear as Batman, giving this line a wholly unintended additional resonance. (Reminds me a bit of that moment in Midnight Special when Michael Shannon talks about kryptonite, except he'd already appeared as Zod when that movie was made.)

4) In Jersey Girl, Affleck's character loses his job working in PR for musicians when he has a stressful moment in which he curses out Will Smith in front of a hot mic. (It's actually less accidental than that -- he just loses his cool and makes snarky comments about Smith to a room full of reporters at a press conference, as he considers Smith's attempt to start a movie career dubious at best, continually deriding him by calling him "The Fresh Prince." That part of the story takes place in the mid-1990s.) Again, Kevin Smith couldn't have known when writing this bit that Affleck would later appear as Batman opposite Will Smith in this year's Suicide Squad. When they have that confrontation in the alley, you might think that Deadshot has a whole different sort of vendetta against Batman than just the normal conflict between superhero and supervillain. Of course, Smith actually makes a completely charming cameo at the end of the movie in which he is totally awesome, ruling out any possibility of lingering bad blood (though he never does discover Affleck's character's identity when sitting and chatting with him in the waiting area of a publicity company).

5) I noticed in the opening credits that the movie was shot by the great Hungarian cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, who was voted one of the ten most influential DPs of all time in a 2003 poll. I then immediately noticed how terrible the film looked. He was over 70 when he shot it, but come on. I couldn't immediately recall Zsigmond's other credits, but looking him up, I was reminded that he just died earlier this year -- the first day of this year, to be exact. Another coincidence is that he also shot McCabe & Mrs. Miller -- a film renowned for its distinct look, and also a film that I just returned to the library in the batch of films that did not end up including Jersey Girl. I'd seen it (and loved it) already but wanted to schedule a second viewing. I actually did find the time, but on that Sunday night I was particularly tired and made it through only 30 minutes before I had to stop and go to sleep. I tried to renew it yesterday so I could complete the viewing on a week-plus delay, but had to return it because someone had reserved it. So to summarize: I got to watch all of Jersey Girl, but not all of McCabe & Mrs. Miller. Not an even trade there.

6) Affleck's character's daughter is fixated on seeing the musical Cats. I hadn't been thinking much about Cats at all in the past, say, ten years. But then a week or so ago, while half-watching an episode of Pokemon my son was watching, I heard the part where they go "Who's that Pokemon?" And then "It's Charmander!" (Or whoever.) As if from nowhere I was struck by the idea that Pokemon names are about equally nonsensical to the names of the characters in Cats. So I posted on Facebook that it would be fun to substitute one for the other. "Who's that Pokemon?" "It's Rum Tum Tugger!" "Who's that Pokemon?" "It's Skimbleshanks!" So having this movie bring up Cats as well was another coincidence.

7) Because Cats has closed on Broadway, Affleck and his daughter go to Sweeney Todd instead. Twice in the past week Tim Burton's movie version of that show has come up in conversations I've had, with the other person defending it as a quality film and me disagreeing with them. Maybe not entirely coincidental but worthy of note anyway, Burton's new movie, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, had just opened here in Melbourne the day before.

8) Although she's in it only at the beginning, Jennifer Lopez made flops with Affleck in consecutive years, first Gigli and then this. As it happens, I like both of these flops a fair bit more than most people seem to.

9) Mike Starr is in this movie, and I just thought about Dumb and Dumber, in which he also appears, the other day.

Okay, that last one was a joke to let you know I'm out of legitimate coincidences.

Palette cleanser

I don't have anything to write today.

Really. Nothing.

I haven't seen a new movie in the past couple days that I want to tell you about. I haven't put my finger on a cinematic trend that I want to explore further. I don't even have something snarky to say about the misguided advertising campaign for this movie, or the unlikable star of that one.

No, I really just want to get Salo off the top of my blog.

So what you are reading right now is a palette cleanser.

Doesn't it taste nice?

In fact, let me write just one more paragraph so the subject of the previous post sinks below the horizon of my computer monitor.

There, that should do it.

Back in a day or two with something real to say.

Salo salvaged, savaged

Never let it be said that I don't try to expose myself to all the extremities of gruesomeness that cinema has to offer.

I have never yet refused to watch a film because I imagined it would be too grotesque. In fact, it's kind of the opposite. If I hear something is unimaginably grotesque, I want to see just how far it has pushed the bounds of what we would consider respectable cinema. I want to see just how far something can go and still be considered a film with artistic merit worthy of intelligent discussion, and not just a snuff film or pornography.

And so I definitely wanted to get my hands on a copy of Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom, a film that had been banned in several countries (and remains so to this day in some of them; the actual country I live in was one of the ones where it was once banned, but is not any longer). This is Pier Paolo Pasolini's 1975 film that is basically two hours of rape, murder, torture, forced eating of human feces and just about anything else you can think of, short of bestiality and pedophilia (though it gets close on that latter front -- the victims seem only just barely of age). The actual plot relates to post-WW II fascist libertines capturing a bunch of teenagers and forcing them through four months of obscenity, humiliation, and physical and mental abuse.

It's something I've been aware of for maybe ten years now, maybe less -- not sure entirely. When I went for my Father's Day overnight hotel movie marathon, I made a conscious attempt to acquire it, as it felt like something I should watch without my wife or children around -- even in the same house, really. It was on that same hotel overnight the previous year that I had watched the film Martyrs, which is in a similar vein of incessant violence and torture but looks like a Care Bears movie compared to Salo.

So I went to the one remaining indie video store in downtown Melbourne, a place I thought might sell it. Yes, I was considering actually buying this movie, having no better idea how I might come into possession of it. Even though this is not the kind of place that would judge you for the depravity of your tastes -- it has an adult video area in the back -- I still felt embarrassed asking about it. It turns out they did once carry it, but they can no longer get their hands on it, or not with any regularity. It might not even be available in this DVD region. The woman did also mention the ban. It's not banned anymore, but I guess she thought she needed to give me more context because she heard my accent and she knows I'm not from here.

I figured I'd have to do something I never do -- pirate the movie on the internet -- if I really wanted to see it. But as I said, I never do that. So I let it fade back into the background again.

Imagine my surprise when I was at the library two weeks ago and found it there, of all places.

Not one copy, but two.

This is actually one of the least safeguarded places it could possibly be. The libraries are progressive enough here that you don't even need to interact with a librarian when you check your materials out. You just wave your card under a scanner and then your books/CDs/movies under that same scanner. It prints a receipt and you are on your way. So theoretically, my six-year-old son (who was with me at the time) could have picked Salo off the shelf and borrowed it, if he'd known how to check it out.

Funny thing is, I almost still didn't get a chance to watch it.

I threw it in the DVD player on Saturday night. I'd failed the standard of watching it with my wife and children under another roof, but as my wife has still been hanging on to the frustrating last vestiges of a chest infection, it was as close as I was going to get. She had been retiring to the bedroom after dinner for nearly two weeks now, so I figured it was then or never.

And it was almost never.

The movie was going along fine for 25 minutes, and had not even really shocked me yet -- or not much, anyway. But then the scratches on the surface of the DVD started to make themselves known, first in terms of pauses the disc had to fight through, and finally, through a fatal unwillingness to play a whole nine-minute stretch of the movie. It refused to play anything between minute 25 and minute 34.

If I was going to watch this damn thing, I was going to watch every last little bit of it.

But I knew I didn't have to give up. There was, improbably, that second copy of Salo on the shelf at the library. And when I got there on Sunday -- I had a whole mess of movies due back anyway -- it was still there, its playing surface as unmarked and shiny as a mirror. Guess I'm glad I'm not interacting with a librarian, because they would have seen me borrowing this movie not once, but twice. (And hopefully nobody will scrutinize my online rental history.)

So last night, I did indeed salvage the Salo viewing.

My my.

The tone may have been a bit different than what I was expecting. I guess I did envision it being more like Martyrs, with its near constant brutality and a numbing sense of relentlessness. In fact, Salo is quite a bit more jaunty, frequently playing more like an absurd farce than a non-stop horror show. Some people apparently even consider it a comedy. The tone seems to more closely resemble something like Caligula, though in the aftermath of Salo I've learned that the version I saw of Caligula was probably not the original. It was an R-rated version and more bad than shocking.

The other thing that tends to reduce some of Salo's shock value is that there seems to have been a conscious decision to keep us at arm's length from the victims, many of whom never speak, most of whom are not properly introduced, and some of whom seem not to react to all this terribleness in the way a normal human would. Certainly there are some moments where a victim is absolutely terrified or reduced to desperate pleading, but there are more moments when the victims just kind of go along with it. They are given no choice, of course, but often they go about this debasement with a strange sort of stoicism.

But when Salo does indeed dive into the depths of its depravity, it really dives.

I won't go into the details of all the things you see. It's not the images themselves that are probably quite so awful. They're awful alright, but I didn't see anything in Salo that I haven't seen in another movie before or since. (Movies made before or since Salo, I should say. John Waters' Pink Flamingos, another movie I greatly dislike, predates this by three years.)

No, what's so awful about Salo is that the images have no artistic justification behind them. Yes, this is a commentary on fascism, but it's so anarchic in its approach, and so disdfainful of conventional good taste, that it does not properly justify its existence. It feels like a movie made by a person for the sole reason of rubbing shit in the faces of prudes. Both literally, in terms of the characters, and figuratively, in terms of the people in the audience Pasolini imagines being horrified by this, whom he despises. Pasolini is the type of guy who, if he ever became president of a nuclear power, would launch nuclear weapons just because he could.

I guess I don't really know that much about Pasolini, never having seen another of his films. He may not deserve such an all-encompassing indictment of his artistic intentions. But I do think there are provocateurs who feel like their provocations are the only justification they need, and he seems like one of them. And that may just not be responsible, or if you want to entirely remove the notion of responsibility, it's morally reprehensible, and I don't have to stand for it.

Chillingly, Pasolini was murdered only a few months after this movie was released, and there's good reason to think that Salo had something to do with it. I've only scratched the surface of the issue as outlined in Wikipedia, but this is something I'd like to learn more about.

So I did indeed assign Salo the lowest available star rating on Letterboxd, a half star. It's not because I'm a prude. I gave Martyrs three-and-a-half stars, finding something extremely compelling about the reason behind all its brutality. One of the most horrifying images in Salo is of a woman being scalped, which you also see in the movie Maniac from a few years ago. The moment in Maniac seemed much more disturbing, and I gave that movie four stars.

I just don't buy Pasolini's motivations for making this movie, and I don't find a single thing about it to be enriching.

Now that I've finally conquered Salo, I feel like my next big fish is A Serbian Film. I pretty much know that there is no conventional means of watching this movie, but I do hope that I'll eventually have a chance.

If the library surprised me once, I suppose it could surprise me again.

I liked Blair Witch when it was The Woods

Blair Witch has been out for more than a week now, but I haven't seen it yet. This despite the fact that the original was one of my top ten movies of 1999 and top five movie scares of all time, so if there was anything like a legitimate sequel to it (I understand Book of Shadows was anything but legitimate), I should be all over that shit.

I actually had a good chance to go on Wednesday, but decided on Yoga Hosers instead (and if you read yesterday's post, you saw how that turned out).

My enthusiasm for this movie died on the vine as soon as they changed its title, and the 46 Metascore hasn't helped.

You see, this movie used to be called The Woods. For all anybody knew, it was just the latest horror from Adam Wingard, the hot commodity who won people over (other people, not me) with You're Next and The Guest.

But then, in a clever bit of surprise marketing that took a page from the book of the original and the Cloverfield movies, we were told only like a month ago that this was actually a sequel to The Blair Witch Project.

And that the movie had a new name: Blair Witch.

Thud.

I love the bit of marketing. I don't love the name change.

If you are trying to create viral hype around a movie and have presumably been successful in that goal, isn't it almost better to leave the title as it was? The Woods should not just have been a placeholder designed to fool us when it appeared on upcoming release schedules. The Woods actually makes a perfect abstract title for a Blair Witch Project sequel, with enviable simplicity.

Instead they made it simple in a bad way, in a dumb way. Just remove two of the words from the original title and voila! A new title. It's in keeping with a recent trend (see Fast & Furious, Jason Bourne, Rambo, etc.), but that only makes it all the more dispiriting.

If you want to know the truth, Blair Witch sounds like the placeholder. "We can't think of a great title for it, so let's just call it 'Blair Witch' for now. We'll get back to it."

They never got back to it. And now I'm not that interested in getting to it at all.

Sorry, Blair Witch. You're too much of a project for me.

That time I turned my phone on at the movies

It took a very special set of circumstances for me to turn my phone on during Wednesday night's showing of Yoga Hosers.

No, it wasn't some kind of medical emergency. There wasn't someone having a heart attack in the theater. In fact, there wasn't anyone in the theater at all. Other than me, that is.

That alone would not nearly have been enough reason for me to turn on my phone. I believe that the theatrical viewing experience is sacred, even if you are having the experience all by yourself.

No, it took the movie being goddamned godawful for me to turn the phone on just to try to survive it.

Rarely do you know from the opening seconds of a movie that it is terrible, but that was the case with Kevin Smith's latest, a misguided and ill-considered effort if ever there was one. I won't bother synposizing it for you, just as I barely bothered synopsizing it in my review, which you can find here.

I might still not have turned the phone on except that I had posted in my Flickcharters Facebook group, right before the movie started: "I'm the only one at Yoga Hosers. I think I will shout at the screen."

I did not shout, but I did turn the phone back on to see what people might have thought of that comment.

I guess I knew it would probably be terrible, hence the shouting at the screen comment. Although I hadn't read the thread very closely, another in that group stated that Yoga Hosers was probably going to end up as his worst movie of the year. After barely 20 minutes I was ready to agree. And I figured "How often do I get to check my phone in the movies anyway?"

I ended up being a good boy and not checking constantly, probably only every five or ten minutes. I mean, I was reviewing the movie and couldn't afford to lose track of too many of the atrocious things I wanted to point out. But having the phone also prevented me from falling asleep. That and the sense of seat-squirming physical discomfort I felt as I watched this movie.

So two really unusual things on Wednesday night:

1) Only guy in the theater.

2) On my phone.

I'm sure I've been the only one in the theater before, but I can't remember the last time and a specific title doesn't jump to mind. Sadly, it's probably a more common occurrence nowadays, as patrons are less and less likely to pay full price for a movie they think they might not like, when they can wait a few weeks and see it at home. Of course, neither would I, but I got in to Yoga Hosers for free with my critic card. So, there were no paying customers for my Wednesday night at 9:30 showing, which would have cost your average person $20.

Cinema Nova didn't pull Yoga Hosers for the start of its second week yesterday, though. They're going to give it one more red hot go, to borrow the Australian phrase. Though it is down to just two showings a day, plus an 11:15 showing on Friday and Saturday nights.

Maybe it looks better as a "midnight movie," but I doubt it. Some bad movies are destined to become cult classics. Others are just bad.

Remembering a skilled tradesman

Curtis Hanson made two films that I cherish in 1997's L.A. Confidential and 2000's Wonder Boys. But those aren't really the films I think of when I think of Hanson, and they aren't what I'm remembering today, the day after he died at 71 of what was believed to be a heart attack.

L.A. Confidential and Wonder Boys are auteur type projects, projects suggesting a particular vision on the part of their directors. The more interesting proof of his abilities -- to me, anyway -- was his two very above average director-for-hire projects, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle and The River Wild.

Conveniently, we adopt and abandon the auteur theory as we see fit, calling certain directors intrinsic parts of certain films while saying they had little to do with the creative spark behind others. In truth, Hanson was credited as at least co-writer on both good movies (L.A. Confidential) and bad ones (Lucky You). But when it comes to Cradle and River, neither of which featured his input on the screenplay, they seem like for-hire projects because they were, very clearly, genre pictures. They were made for comparatively little money to make a tidy profit, and they basically just needed someone to yell "Cut!"

Hanson did a lot more than that. It's been at least 15 years since I've seen either of these movies, and probably closer to 20, but on my last viewing of Cradle in particular, I remembered what a tight little package it was, how it moved smoothly from to scene to scene in producing an intensely satisfying story about a psychotic nanny. Some of that credit likely goes to the lean script by Amanda Silver, but it takes a director with a particular understanding of the fundamentals of filmmaking to deliver a lean script into a lean film. In fact, I use Cradle as an unlikely go-to example of a movie where nary a scene is wasted.

But Cradle alone probably wouldn't have caused me to excessively ponder Hanson's merits as a genre filmmaker without being paired with The River Wild, a truly tense and harrowing spiritual successor to Deliverance in which Meryl Streep and David Straitharn play the parents in a family that gets kidnapped by Kevin Bacon and some of his redneck buddies on a rafting trip. I remember feeling a similar sense of the tightness of this film, the lack of fat, that kept things rolling along toward a satisfying conclusion. Again you might credit the screenwriter (this time Denis O'Neill), but taken in combination with Cradle, it really shows us what Hanson brought to that director's chair.

His very next film was Confidential, probably an unlikely successor, but the reward someone gets for doing a good job as a hired employee. He knocked it out of the park, and many think he should have won the best director Oscar in the year Titanic swept the Oscars. Instead he made another great film in 2000, Wonder Boys, which strayed further from his genre roots. 8 Mile was next, the returns diminishing only slightly.

Unfortunately, that was pretty much it for Hanson's time atop Hollywood. The returns started to noticeably diminish with In Her Shoes and especially Lucky You. It got so I didn't even see his final theatrical release, Chasing Mavericks, a project he had to leave halfway through for health reasons (ultimately being credited as a co-director with Michael Apted). It turns out Hanson also had Alzheimer's, a fact I did not know, and a possible/probable contributor to his death.

It's certainly the case that all directors have only a finite period at the top of their game, and almost anybody who makes five consecutive hits would have to be happy with that (if we are calling the two thrillers from the 1990s "hits"). And in truth, Hanson made some really good films before that, most notably the 1990 film Bad Influence, which I once loved but appreciated a lot less on my last viewing a couple years ago, else I might have featured it more prominently in this remembrance. Even the 1987 Steve Guttenberg film The Bedroom Window is a pretty solid technical achievement, if forgettable. (But let's not talk about the comedy he directed, the Tom Cruise vehicle Losin' It.)

But part of me thinks it's a shame that Hanson stopped making genre pictures. When people are really good at something that is considered less prestigious, they can get graduated out of it at their peril -- at our collective peril. Of course, never would I trade L.A. Confidential and Wonder Boys for more River Wilds. But Hanson may have been a victim of his own success, as those movies basically disqualified him from making another River Wild. The result was some really limp, uninspired "auteur movies" (In Her Shoes and Lucky You).

The loss of Hanson is meaningful enough to me that I may indeed watch something to remember him. But it won't be Wonder Boys (which I watched again only a couple months ago) and it won't be L.A. Confidential (which I do want to see again soon, having most recently caught it in 2012). No, I want to see one of those two for-hire thrillers, to remind myself what a skilled tradesman can do if just given the basic tools of the trade he loves.

No Audio Audient: The Big Parade

This is the ninth in my 2016 monthly series watching silent films.

I didn't intend to choose a three-hour-and-eight-minute movie as my September choice for No Audio Audient. But once again, the ineffable running times of silent films have come in to play. Wikipedia says King Vidor's 1925 film The Big Parade is supposed to run for 141 minutes. Unfortunately, the two different copies available on YouTube ran at lengths that were not that. The shorter, and therefore seemingly more palatable, was 116 minutes. The longer, and frankly unimaginable that I would actually sit through, was 188 minutes. The fact that there was a second on there that was 187 minutes seemed to lend legitimacy to this as the more standard version, but I started to watch the 116-minute version anyway. I'm just a working dad with other priorities, after all.

Fortunately, this working dad is also right in the middle of school holidays, a time of year in which there is far less to do at his job. So little to do that one can watch a bit of a movie here and there while at work, if one does not feel too guilty about it and if the movie is available through a site like YouTube. So when the 116-minute version was improperly framed, leaving an unviewable area around all sides of the image, and even preventing a complete reading of the title cards, I switched over to the three-hour version. I thought, maybe this is really the 141-minute version and there are some additional 45 minutes of tangentially related content tacked on to the end.

It wasn't the case, but in the end I didn't care. I damn near loved this movie.

I knew nothing about it going in. In fact, only from the YouTube description -- "A young American soldier witnesses the horrors of the Great War" -- did I even know it was a movie about World War I. Indeed, it now seems to be to be one of the great sweeping wartime romances I've ever seen.

But first let me tell you how I even came to the movie in the first place.

Its director, King Vidor, directed a movie that I loved, that I now feel like I might love in spite of myself. That's 1949's The Fountainhead, an adaptation of the Ayn Rand novel. When I watched it, I had only a dim sense of who Rand was, and nothing of her political proclivities. That's probably just as well, because if I love a movie, I don't want preconceived notions of its political intentions mucking it up. I'd like to think that a good movie is a good movie is a good movie. I'd like to think that even if Rush Limbaugh made a really great movie I would recognize it as such, without Limbaugh's idiocy tarnishing it before I even got a chance to judge it.

So when I heard Vidor's name come up in an episode of the podcast You Must Remember This that was dedicated to John Gilbert, I decided to throw the related movie on to my list of films to watch this year. The movie was, of course, The Big Parade, in which Gilbert stars. The episode was devoted to talk about Gilbert's uneasy transition to talkies, as Jean Dujardin's character in The Artist is often thought of as based on Gilbert. In truth, we learn, studio politics had more to due with his decline than his inability to work with his voice, and, poor guy, he was dead of a heart attack by 36.

In this movie, Gilbert plays a spoiled rich kid who learns about responsibility by deciding to enlist in the Great War. That decision seems a bit strange for his character -- he's accused by his parents of being a layabout, and really, he is -- but you should never discount the infectious power of a parade. It's during such a display of patriotism and American righteousness in its cause in the war that Gilbert's Jim Apperton feels his toe start tapping, and undergoes the realization that it's his duty to serve his country. Leaving behind a girl next door who is for all intents and purposes his fiancee, he ships off to France with two from his same city that he befriends, a bartender named Bull (Tom O'Brien) and a riveter named Slim (Karl Dane), and begin the long wait for action in a small town called Champillon. (And I mean long -- these sequences consume well over an hour of the movie.) There he falls for a local girl, Melisande (Renee Adoree), despite the fact that neither understand a word the other is saying. Their relationship develops through a number of cute set pieces before Jim and co. are finally called to the front.

Two things about The Big Parade immediately disarmed me and put me at ease. The first was the straightforward approach to the material. The silent movies I've seen this year can be divided into roughly two categories: comedies, and films directed by D.W. Griffith. There have been a few others of course, so I'm exaggerating, but the point is that the dramas I've watched have seemed represented by Griffith. Griffith, I now realize, is incapable of being straightforward, at least not in his title cards. One of the annoying things about the two Griffith movies I saw were the flowery title cards, which seemed written with abstraction in mind. I now realize that my mind started to wander a bit because Griffith was more interested in trying to be poetic than tell a story. These title cards, on the other hand, were all business. They establish the characters, move the plot, and deliver you where you need to be. I felt like I was in good hands.

The other thing I noticed was how well Vidor uses nascent film grammar. I may be giving him too much credit -- I mean, people had been making sophisticated narrative films for ten years by then -- but I really appreciated the editing, how nicely shots continued on action, how fluidly the narrative was conveyed. He made effective use of the rare zoom or tracking shot, close-ups were employed correctly, and overall, the film just flows.

After moving pretty quickly in its first 20 minutes, though, the movie slows waaaaaay down. It became easy to see how a 116-minute version of this movie could exist without basically losing anything. I began to wonder how much of the material I was watching was considered unnecessary for later cuts. Rather than losing individual scenes, though, I imagined it would have been easy to compress them, just by shorting shots that were 45 seconds to 25, by cutting scenes that lasted seven minutes to three. Or scenes that lasted 15 minutes to seven.

All this said, the fat was lovely. It meant I got to spend more time with the swoony romance between Jim and Melisande. In these scenes I felt like I was discovering both of these actors, because, well, I was. I'm not conscious of having seen a John Gilbert film before, and though Renee Adoree has a certain "1920s silent actress appearance" that in some ways makes her interchangeable with numerous others, something about her really distinguished herself to me. Appropriately for her last name, I simply adored her (and was sad later on to learn that she also died young, of complications from tuberculosis, at only 33). The two of them together made me pleased as pie, and by spending so long with them, their terrific parting scene surely had more emotional weight for me.

So let's talk about that scene. Jim and company are finally moved out to the front, though he and Melisande have already unwillingly parted because she finds out about his fiancee at home. (And I should pause to mention that for a moment -- as lovely as all their scenes are together, you can never forget that Jim is essentially cheating on a devoted love interest at home, one who has sent him multiple letters and a cake she baked. This does get resolved in satisfactory fashion by the end, but I was never comfortable with the idea that he was stepping out on her, and that detail surely would not have made it into the movie if it were being made today. Either that or the love interest at home would be an obvious harpy he was too decent to dump.)

Sorry, got distracted there. The convoys are shipping out of Champillon and Melisande rushes out to try to find Jim. It seems hopeless as troops and trucks are flowing by in impossible numbers, a barely controlled chaotic military sea in which it will be impossible to find her one fish. The look of stress and desperation on her face as she searches for him is priceless. When they do finally connect, they pour affection atop each other and have to be drawn apart by other soldiers. I'm getting chills just writing about it now, it's so damn romantic. She hangs on to his leg as the truck is pulling away, then on to a chain hanging off the back of the truck. I suppose something like that could almost be played for comedy, but in this moment it totally works. He blows kisses and tosses her two different trinkets to remember him by, promising to return. She finally stops and just looks after him. An hour later, she's still rooted to the spot, though slumped down on her knees now, as the streets are empty.

This kicked off my favorite section of the movie, which also includes an incredible first battle sequence while walking through the woods. I was really impressed by how well the battle sequences are filmed here, especially this first one. Unfortunately, the film does slow down again considerably in its last hour, particularly during one scene where the three buddies are tasked with the responsibility of trying to take out a German machine gun post. There's some nice stuff in these scenes -- the bonds between the three men are also conveyed wonderfully -- but it does slow things down again. I was impressed, though, by how a movie that had been largely amiable to this point took a genuinely darker turn in the end.

The movie really has it all, the horrors of war promised in the YouTube synopsis and plenty of light set pieces, some of which almost play like Chaplin or Keaton -- particularly the scene where Jim and Melisande meet, and he's peering at her through a hole in a bucket over his head. Three hours of Griffith were not a joy for me to watch, but I'll watch three hours of The Big Parade any day.

I should mention also the music. Although this was obviously not the same music that was used when the film was played in theaters, it became sort of an essential component to my viewing, as trumpets and cannon blasts and the like were incorporated into the score in time with the images. I had considered watching the movie without music because I was at work for part of it, and having an ear bud in your ear tends to draw attention, even if people can't see your screen. But I was really glad I listened to the music, because it helped sweep me up in scenes like Jim and Melisande's parting.

Okay! We've finally reached the one month in this series where I knew which film I'd be watching way back when I started. For Halloween I will be watching Victor Sjostrom's The Phantom Carriage from 1921. Not only does it make a good themed viewing for the month of October, but I think it's also the first foreign-made silent film I've watched for this series (Sweden).

Ryan Reynolds is out of his mind

Some of my favorite themed double features are the ones that materialize organically, as they are occurring.

Take Saturday night. I threw in Criminal, a movie whose generic title likely would have kept me far away from it if I hadn't caught a trailer for it before another movie I recently rented. It looked a lot more high concept than the title suggested, and the cast is just oozing with stars (not all of whom are still in their prime, but they're better than a straight-to-video cast). And it is a lot more high concept, though I suppose it's ultimately a bit hamstrung by its execution.

As I was watching it, I realized it had something in common with another movie I hadn't seen but had meant to, which was available on one of my streaming services. And as I was starting Criminal at about 8 (with my wife still sick in bed and not a factor in our viewing decisions), I did indeed have time to make it a double feature. That second movie was Tarsem Singh's Self/less, a flop that came out last year.

So what do these films have in common? Let me tell you. But there may be some spoilers if you really care. If the Rotten Tomatoes scores are any indication, you don't.

Both films involve an experimental transfer of memories/personality from one dead or dying subject to another live vessel, executed with lots of wires, tubes, rays, electrodes, mesh facial nets and hospital gurneys lined up side by side.

In both films, the subject who receives the transplant gets flashes of the life of the previous subject, either via implanted memories or attempts of the old personality to take control back of the flesh-and-blood body.

But here's the big one:

In both films, Ryan Reynolds is one of the guys.

In Criminal, he's a CIA agent who is killed while trying to broker a deal involving one of those gadgets that can remotely control missile systems -- you know, the MacGuffin that appears in every movie like this. Because he possesses a lot of classified information in that noggin of his, not to mention information that no one else knows, his CIA boss (a raving Gary Oldman) connects up his dead flesh with an experimental procedure pioneered by a Craggy Old Dude (Tommy Lee Jones) that will allow the transfer of his memories to take place. Those memories get put in Kevin Costner, a psychopath who qualifies as a subject because of a rare frontal lobe injury he suffered as a child (which also contributes to his psychopathy). So as Costner goes about (mostly on the loose because the CIA keeps allowing him to escape because they unwisely think they don't need him anymore and leave him in the hands of incompetent agents), he keeps getting flashes of Reynolds' memory, as well as his moral perspective, which allows this "criminal" to start distinguishing right from wrong.

Needless to say, Reynolds himself drops out of the movie pretty quickly, only seen in a mirror once (and in photographs on mantles) after the opening. In Self/less, he's the Costner, and it's Ben Kingsley who disappears. Kingsley plays a Donald Trump type (I wouldn't be surprised if the character was actually modeled after Trump) who has terminal cancer, and Walt Disney-style, wants to give himself life beyond the death of his body. He learns about a secret organization that will transfer his consciousness to a new body of a younger adult male they grew in a test tube. (It's a bit like the John Frankenheimer-directed Rock Hudson movie Seconds, if you've seen that.) Kingsley is given the new identity of Ryan Reynolds, which is a good body if you want to get back out and start banging babes again (which he does). However, he soon realizes by not taking the red pills he's supposed to take every day that he's remembering the life of the body's previous occupant. Not only was this guy not grown in a lab, but he may have had a family who thinks he died under tragic circumstance. As he has regrets about his own behavior toward a distant daughter, Kingsley's brain grows a conscience in time to try to help Reynolds' body get back to his family. He's a bit like Costner in that way, I guess.

It was quite funny to watch these two movies back to back. I almost imagined a Ryan Reynolds-shaped mobius strip of death and life and rebirth and death again that would run through these two movies.

Oddly, I actually sort of liked both movies, while recognizing that they are both sort of failures. Tarsem Singh, who I just wrote about a week ago, does have at least one moment where he applies what I would consider to be a "Tarsem touch." It's not ornate costuming or anything of that nature -- though the Trump-like penthouse Kingsley lives in is pretty ornate -- but it's a sharply edited montage that documents the billionaire's first few weeks/months in Reynolds' body. I'd almost say it's worth watching the movie for that reason alone, though I probably wouldn't -- both because there are some other good things (a few, anyway) and because it's probably not really good enough if you weren't planning to watch the movie anyway.

As for Criminal, well ... it commits pretty well to its premise. It's shot pretty well and makes reasonably effective use of its actors. I'm kind of enjoying late-stage Kevin Costner, kind of in spite of myself. Though really ... if the CIA made one more dumb decision related to his character, I was going to climb into my TV and slap Gary Oldman.

My top five comedies of the 21st century

Laughing isn't something I've been very eager to do this past week. I missed an unprecedented (as far as I can remember) three days of work with a terrible hacking cough and related symptoms, which included chills, lack of energy, and rivers of phlegm. (Non-consecutive days, at that -- I went in Wednesday before relapsing Thursday.) This is also why you haven't seen a post from me since Tuesday.

You especially don't want to laugh when even small chuckles erupt into rib-bruising episodes that last 15 seconds. Fortunately, I watched plenty of movies not designed to make me laugh -- and one that was designed to make me laugh, but didn't.

But that's not what I'm here to talk about today. Today is project day. See, this week I also listened to Filmspotting's episode devoted to their top five comedies of the 21st century. That episode was inspired by BBC's recent critics poll of the top 100 movies since the year 2000, which is also something I'd like to tackle on my blog. But for now, I'll tackle it in a roundabout way, just as the Filmspotting guys did.

One of the responses to that BBC list was that it was almost totally devoid of pure comedy. Sure, it had films with comedy as one of their genres (The Grand Budapest Hotel, Ratatouille), but hardly anything whose sole purpose was to make you laugh from start to finish. The Filmspotting guys decided to do their show as a corrective.

The thing is, their choices really disappointed me. Obviously comedy is pretty subjective, perhaps the most subjective type of film taste. But that doesn't mean you have to abandon objective critical discussion tactics when discussing comedy. And on those grounds I was inspired to come up with my own top five, to balance the injustices I saw on their lists. (Wouldn't you know it, though -- I had failed to listen to their #1 picks until during this very writing, and one of the hosts picked a movie that appears in my top five, removing just a bit of my righteous indignation.)

Before revealing my choices, I'll give you a bit of a sense of what I'm up against:

Josh Larsen:

5. Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby
4. Mean Girls
3. Songs from the Second Floor
2. Cedar Rapids
1. Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazahkstan

Adam Kempenaar:

5. While We're Young
4. The Trip
3. Role Models
2. Shaun of the Dead
1. xxxxxx (I'll hold this one back for now)

Don't get me wrong -- this is not to say I don't like these films (all of which I've seen). Shaun of the Dead is one of my favorites. However, it being funny is not primarily the reason I like Shaun. Then there are those movies they chose that I am tepid to negative on, like Talladega Nights and Role Models.

To come up with my own choices, I went through my 17 individual Microsoft Word documents covering the years 2000 to 2016, which house a complete listing of movies I've seen in each year. To save time, I suppose I could have just reviewed my list of movies seen multiple times, since it's unlikely any of my choices would come from movies I've seen only once. But that might rule out something recent, and it would be interesting to know whether something I'd seen only once could still claim that kind of pull on me. In the end, all my choices were movies I'd seen more than once.

There were some other interesting patterns. For example, no year before 2004 yielded more than a single realistic contender, which means either comedy was going through a bad stretch around the turn of the century, or I just don't remember laughing very hard at the movies I saw back then because it was too long ago. In fact, I didn't shortlist a single film from 2002. The second half of the years in question were much more fruitful, with every year except for 2013 and 2016 yielding at least two contenders, and sometime as many as four. (Oddly, 2013 gave me zero contenders, wedged in between two other years that gave me at least three each. 2016 is still only half over, so its one contender was not such a surprise.)

One last bit of explanation. The five I chose were meant to represent a diversity of sensibilities, at least somewhat, though some clearly grew out of each others' sensibilities. I didn't repeat a director, in any case. This mostly occurred organically, anyway.

Okay, I think you've had enough preamble. I'll proceed with my top five, and then some honorable mentions in various categories.

5. What We Do in the Shadows (2014, Taika Waititi) - My #5 movie comes by its spot on this list rather unusually. It's a film I made the mistake of watching for the first time on the plane. Which doesn't mean I didn't find it funny, it just means it was not exactly a laughter-conducive environment. I ended up ranking it only 40th among my 2014 films. But my second viewing last year was with my wife, and it immediately primed me for my third viewing. This is just a delicious setup that consistently realizes its jokes, not to mention producing some actual blood and guts for horror enthusiasts and even some seamless special effects (made to seem all the more "real" by the mockumentary format). And part of why I wanted to get this on here was as a nod to the mockumentary as a form, though the 1980s and 1990s had far better examples of that form than anything worth honoring in the 21st century (other than this movie, that is). Favorite moment: When Waititi's main vampire Viago tiptoes down to the basement to wake up Petyr, the 8,000-year-old vampire who communicates only by bearing his teeth and making that "vampire hiss" that sounds basically like an exhalation of air. "Peeta! Peeeeeta!" he says in a sing-songy voice, as though calling forth a hiding infant.

4. The 40 Year Old Virgin (2005, Judd Apatow) - This was the one Adam chose as his #1. And I have to agree. (Well, not entirely -- it's my #4.) I have lately actually felt a bit of an aversion to this film that I can't really explain, which gives you some indication why I haven't seen it in nine years. But as I was coming up with this list, I just remembered the gales of laughter I unleashed in the theater as I was watching it. (And I also remembered that I ranked it my #3 film for the year.) It's no surprise the comedy pickings got better on my year-by-year lists after 2005, as Apatow's directorial debut put in place a new blueprint for comedy, one that has largely flourished (despite plenty of obvious examples of failures, and a likelihood that we'll totally burn out on it within the next five years). It was a grossout with heart, and it "went there" like few films I'd seen. I owe it a revisit, and at the very least I honor its role in our current comedy climate by including it here. Interestingly, this is the only film on this list I saw in a conventional theater environment. Favorite moment: As it's been nine years since I saw it, I'll just go with the one that came first to mind, that made me recognize I was watching something fresh and exciting: Seth Rogen's delivery of his story about seeing the woman have sex with the horse in Mexico. If the movie as a whole was an introduction of a new comedic voice, then within that, we were introduced to Rogen's distinct voice, which has arguably been nearly as influential as Apatow's.

3. Idiocracy (2006, Mike Judge) - Given the reputation in comedy circles this has built in the past ten years, it's hard to believe it was basically dumped, its studio having no idea how to market it. Tellingly, I was looking up movies to see at local theaters the week it came out, and even in the screening times listed on the website it had a placeholder name: Untitled Mike Judge Comedy. And I wasn't going to be that one person to go see it in the theater -- I had to discover it later on video. Fortunately, Idiocracy has made itself known in the intervening years, especially in our house, where my wife might call it her favorite comedy, period. Judge is underappreciated in terms of not only what he's contributed to the comedy world, but the different types of things -- Beavis and Butthead and King of the Hill share more in common with their visual appearance than the actual content of their comedy, and Idiocracy is altogether different from both, though they all serve up satire in endlessly funny ways. Now that Trump is actually competitive in the presidential race, people are thinking of this movie as even more prescient than it already seemed even from the start. Favorite moment: When we see the changes to the outside of a Fuddruckers hamburger restaurant down through the centuries, as the name becomes increasingly more suggestive until finally landing on: Buttfuckers.

2. Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (2007, Jake Kasdan) - If Idiocracy is the best satire of the last 16+ years, Walk Hard is the best spoof. It was another one that caught me by surprise, as I didn't prioritize a theatrical viewing. Once we queued it up at home, though, I couldn't get enough. I've seen it only twice, but only because I haven't had a natural opportunity to buy the movie yet. A sort-of third viewing came when I actually went with a friend to see John C. Reilly perform as Dewey Cox in a small nightclub in Los Angeles -- one of my truly cherished live performance experiences of all time. Kasdan makes by far my unlikeliest director to appear on this list, as even his best other movie (Orange County) is pretty middling as comedies go. This movie pierces the heart of its subject matter, the music biopic (specifically Walk the Line), and finds its comedy in a combination of parodies of the typical tropes of a music biopic, a handful of great impersonations, and some of the funniest songs written for a movie since This is Spinal Tap. I just grin from ear to ear as I watch this movie. Favorite moment: When Tim Meadows, as Dewey's band mate, warns him of the dangers of marijuana via many emphatically stated traits of the drug that should scare him: "It's not habit forming! It makes sex even better! It's the cheapest drug there is!"

1. Step Brothers (2008, Adam McKay) - And John C. Reilly is the star of both of my top picks. Narrowly the funniest of McKay's many collaborations with Will Ferrell (edging out Anchorman and leading the others by a wide margin), Step Brothers had me simply screaming with laughter. As my wife looked over at me while we were at the drive-in, she thought perhaps I was possessed -- she had never seen me laugh like that. And this makes four of five films I watched with my wife for the first time, while the other was one I watched with her the second. If I wanted to come up with a thesis on what makes Step Brothers my #1, as I've done with some of the other movies on my list, I couldn't. It's just the movie that made me laugh the hardest. It's also the comedy I've seen the most since 2000, as our fifth viewing was about a year ago. I also have a Step Brothers t-shirt. It helps that with my curly hair, I also look kind of like both Ferrell and Reilly in this movie. Also, it made my top ten of the year. Favorite moment: There are so many I could choose from, so I will just choose a little one, maybe the one that told me I was in for a wonderful ride: At their first dinner together as a joined family, Reilly's Dale makes some crude remark about Ferrell's Brennan, and Ferrell just gets this pained look on his face for a moment, which is completely unexpected -- it's a combination of disgust and genuine hurt. I don't know why but it may be the funniest look I have ever seen Ferrell produce.

Honorable mentions 

As a liberal, I'm a little displeased that my list couldn't include a female-driven comedy or a minority-driven comedy, but there were these two very strong contenders:

Spy (2015, Paul Feig) - The movie that turned me around on Melissa McCarthy, though I unfortunately must admit that the single funniest moments belong to Jason Statham. Feig deserves a mention given that he's also come through with Bridesmaids and The Heat.

Black Dynamite (2009, Scott Sanders) - Just saw this this year, and was laughing throughout. Reminded me of one of my favorite comedies of last century, I'm Gonna Git You Sucka.

There were a couple movies I laughed at incredibly hard the first time, but they didn't hold up as well the second time. They are:

The Dictator (2012, Larry Charles) - Sacha Baron Cohen absolutely needs a mention.

The Interview (2014, Seth Rogen & Evan Goldberg) - The controversial film that many people hated the first time. I loved it the first time, but only liked it the second.

Zack and Miri Make a Porno (2008, Kevin Smith) - It took until the third viewing last week for me to turn on this one. Maybe Seth Rogen doesn't age well.

I also highlighted some movies that really surprised me, given what I expected from them. I had no idea these movies would be as funny as they were.

Date Night (2010, Shawn Levy) - I was openly disdainful when I saw the trailers. The opposite after I watched it. One of my favorite lines of the 21st century, delivered by Mila Kunis: "Those nipple clamps hurt me!"

Hot Rod (2007, Akiva Schaffer) - Seen it only once and don't remember the details, but I laughed a lot.

Wanderlust (2012, David Wain) - I had been down on Wain (see my thoughts on Wet Hot American Summer) so this one took me totally by surprise. Paul Rudd practicing and then delivering his dirty talk to Malin Akerman (and her response) is comedy classic material.

Stone Bros. (2009, Richard Frankland) - Comedy featuring Aboriginal actors that we watched mostly because my wife's boss was a producer. We laughed hysterically.

Hall Pass (2011, Peter & Bobby Farrelly) - As this is "late Farrelly" I didn't expect much, but this just missed my top ten for that year. Laughs throughout. Worried about a potential third viewing though.

And finally, funny movies from the period that in many cases I like better overall than the movies I've mentioned, but the reason I love them is not primarily because they are funny.

Tangled (2010, Nathan Greno & Byron Howard) - Has one of my funniest single lines of this century: As the hero, Flynn Rider, engages in a duel with a horse holding a knife in his teeth, while he uses a frying pan, and they move closer to the edge of a cliff, he shouts: "You should know, this is the strangest thing I've ever done!"

Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008, Nicholas Stoller) - Hilarious, but the heart is what I really remember about this one.

Elf (2003, Jon Favreau) - Take comment on Forgetting Sarah Marshall and apply here.

Toni Erdmann (2016, Maren Ade) - Perhaps the hardest laughter I've ever experienced in a movie sustained over a ten-minute stretch, but the movie's profundity is what left me sitting in my seat in a pensive fugue state until the credits ended. (Sadly, this is also the only choice in this whole post directed by a woman.)

Okay, I thought I was done but here are just a few more honorable mentions that have no other category:

Team America: World Police
Napoleon Dynamite
21 Jump Street
Klown
Tropic Thunder
Zoolander (thought Ben Stiller deserved some love with these last two)
Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (referenced but not actually singled out)

Okay! That was rather exhaustive. Turns out there have been some funny movies this century. Would love to hear your thoughts on the matter.