Chopping a franchise off at the knees

Warning: This post contains major spoilers about Avengers: Infinity War.

I'll even include a line or two more of wasted space so that those of you who came here without having seen this movie can get out.

So ... get out.

Now!

Okay?

Did you ever wonder if the rollicking good time known as Thor: Ragnarok would mean that they’d consider a fourth film in the Thor franchise?

Well you can forget about that. Avengers: Infinity War has seen to that right quick.

The opening of Marvel’s latest behemoth success story is all about stopping the Thor bloodline dead in its tracks. Not only does it kill off basically any remaining character from the Thor world – quite a sad outcome after they escaped as refugees at the end of Ragnarok – but for maybe 20 minutes, the movie tries to convince you it killed Thor, too.

What a way for the laughter we enjoyed in Thor: Ragnarok to die in our throats.

As you know if you keep up with the blog, my wife and I tried to watch this on our recent holiday, but the rental from iTunes was caught in some kind of no man’s land between iTunes stores from different countries. It’ll finally expire in a few days, at which point we can wipe the whole chapter from our memories.

But if we did somehow get a chance to watch it before the rental period expired, I don’t know how I’d be able to watch it with the same sense of unbridled joy it gave me the first time, knowing that the Asgardians were marching toward their deaths at the hands of Thanos and his minions.

A year ago, I wouldn’t have cared.

A year ago, I had only seen one Thor movie and found it a middling entertainment at best. I had not deigned to watch Thor: The Dark World because I considered it a probable waste of my time. I did eventually watch it as a precursor to the release of Thor: Ragnarok, which did excite me, just in case there was some important information I’d need to glean from the second movie in the trilogy. Didn’t want my anticipated viewing of Taika Waititi’s first MCU film to be compromised by a failure to grasp the nuances of the story.

I liked The Dark World better than I would have ever expected to, but it was Ragnarok that made me fall in love with the Asgardians, their place in the MCU and their heretofore unexplored great senses of humor. Having initial rejected Thor as “that Marvel series set in outer space,” I had found a deliriously fun spectacle that just missed my top ten of last year.

And now? Well, now they’re all dead.

Okay, not all of them. Although I’d thought that Thor and his people were all on one ship when they left the wreckage of Asgard, apparently, in a line of dialogue from the man himself, only “half his people” were killed by Thanos in the opening of Infinity War. The others? I guess they’re somewhere else. In another ship? We didn’t see Sif or Valkyrie, after all. Smart to keep Valkyrie around, as she was one of the best parts of Ragnarok.

But Loki? Heimdall? All your other rank-and-file Asgardians?

Dead, dead and dead.

Of course, the body count of characters we know and care about in Infinity War is in the double digits by the end. Everyone knows that the ones who turned into dust aren’t gone for good. But the ones who died deaths earlier in the film – like Loki, Heimdall, Gamora and Vision – could be irretrievably dead.

Then again, Thanos has an infinity stone that allows him to control time, so that will allow the writers to do pretty much anything they want.

But the death of Loki hit me particularly hard, in part because I feel that one, for sure, will not be reversed. Thor even prepares us for the possibility he'll come back by saying Loki’s been dead before, but I don’t think so. Tom Hiddleston is probably ready to do other things after playing Loki in five different movies, considering that he was always more of a thespian type and never figured to build his career on the backs of comic books.

But a year ago, I wouldn’t have given two shits. Loki? Thor? Their dad? The other characters, whose names I did not know at the time? You could have thrown them in the fire for all I cared.

This movie did throw them in the fire, and it made me sad.

But it also made me love this movie. Or it was one of the things, anyway.

I know there’s nothing that occurs here that’s truly irreversible, when you’ve got infinity stones that allow both time and reality to be warped, and when Dr. Strange can look forward to 14 million different outcomes for a battle that has yet to occur. These people are so powerful – too powerful, some would say – that death is not a permanent impediment to their character arcs.

But Avengers: Infinity War did as much as it could do, within the overall requirements of keeping these characters around to make money off them for years to come, to give us something we hadn’t seen before – stakes that really resulted in the real deaths of at least some of them.

And that opening, in which Thanos uses his oversized hand to squeeze the life out of Loki by the neck, perfectly set the tone for future tragedies to come. Finally, this was a Marvel movie unafraid to make the stakes important.

That’s an odd thing to say when nearly every movie involves the possible end of the world. But none of them involve the possible end of one of the characters. Seriously, in 18 (or whatever) Marvel movies, has an important character, with any type of long history in the comic books, died, ever?

Marvel has at last woken up to the core mentality of peak TV, in which unexpected deaths keep us on our toes, and are in fact the very things that make us love the TV shows we watch. There are certain shows where we are worried that truly no one is safe, and that’s both an enthralling and chilling feeling to have while watching something whose characters you care about. Now, we can have that feeling when watching a Marvel movie, which is pretty great.

No matter what deaths are reversed in the sequel to Infinity War, Marvel has delivered at least one fatal blow, and that’s to the Thor franchise. It can’t come back from this. It just can’t.

And though I’ll miss it – I’m surprised to say – I’m grateful to Marvel for having the guts.

This poster for Unsane

I’m recording a podcast tonight on Unsane, at which point I can finally hear what some other people think of it.

That has been a protracted experience, because first I didn’t want to hear anything about it prior to seeing it, which led me to skip their coverage of it on Filmspotting. Then I didn’t want to hear anything about it prior to reviewing it, so I bypassed that episode of Filmspotting on my way in to work the next day, before I’d written my review. Then I didn’t want to hear anything about it before podcasting about it, lest I inadvertently adopt another’s viewpoint on it, as would have also happened if I’d listened to it before reviewing it. Tomorrow morning, maybe I’ll finally get to listen to that episode.

But I did want to say that you’ll have multiple ways to hear me talk about it once the podcast is released, as there is already a link to my review on the right.

And since those multiple ways will exist, all I wanted to say in this post is: I love that poster.

For some reason I didn’t notice it before now, but walking back from lunch today, when I saw it on the marquee for the theater in the basement of the building where I now work (moved office locations about three weeks ago), I was immediately enthralled by it.

There’s not a lot new you can do to really explore the themes of a film in its poster art, as there have been approximately 1.7 million movie posters and they’ve thought of pretty much everything there is to think of. This one does something slightly new, and new enough to really be captivating. I mean yeah – when you’re feeling a little unsane, it’s like your face being dislocated from the rest of your head and being moved six inches to the left. With a single-world encapsulation of how you feel – UNSANE – shoving it aside.

Plus Claire Foy is awesome in this movie, so I just like looking at her face to be reminded of that.

Unfortunately, the world will probably not care how many different ways I will finally have of giving you my impression of this film, as it has pretty much tanked. The U.S. box office of $7.7 million is actually better than I thought it was, but it’s still nowhere near great for a director with the stature of Steven Soderbergh. And it’s $20 million less than Logan Lucky, which was also considered quite the failure (though may have had more traditionally box office friendly stars, like Channing Tatum, Adam Driver and Daniel Craig). Going only on circumstantial evidence, I was the only one in the theater when I saw it on Thursday, which was only the second night of its release.

Pretty great poster though.

Re-coen-sidering: O Brother, Where Art Thou?

This is the second in a bi-monthly 2018 series in which I'm reexamining my feelings toward six movies made by Joel and Ethan Coen, five of which I did not care for the first time.

If I'm considering the matter as broadly as possible, I'd say that Joel and Ethan Coen have two tones they work in, both of which start with the letter M: madcap and melancholy. And that while both tones are present at some point or another in most of their work, I vastly prefer the films where melancholy predominates.

Of course, as soon as I said that I would immediately provide a staggering contradiction to that preference. My favorite Coen brothers movie, which is also my favorite movie of all time, is Raising Arizona, and most people would consider the madcap to far outweigh the melancholy in that movie. But then all you need to do is look at my next three favorite Coen movies to right the ship on my perspective. Fargo, Inside Llewyn Davis and Miller's Crossing contain almost no madcap. (Though one of their movies with zero madcap, No Country for Old Men, falls in the bottom half of my Coen movies, so the system is nothing if not unpredictable.)

O Brother, Where Art Thou? is a movie where the madcap fairly suffocates the melancholy. The movie makes gestures toward melancholy, to be sure, but they always fall flat, in part because the madcap has done such a powerful job preventing us from really being introduced to our three main characters.

I don't know that I would have been able to put my finger on this as a contributing factor to my middling response to the movie the first time, but when I watched it a second time on Friday night, 18 years later, it was easy to identify. We are meant to take an immediate liking to Ulysses Everett McGill (George Clooney), Pete Hogwallop (John Turturro) and Delmar O'Donnell (Tim Blake Nelson) -- all great names by the way -- but the manner of their introduction really keeps me at arm's length. In short, they never are really introduced. Their first handful of scenes are very set piece heavy, and their reactions are often the reactions of three staring faces operating as one, leaving us little opportunity to differentiate between them. Broadly you'd be able to say "Oh, Ulysses is the handsome one and the other two are the hicks," but that, you will agree, is not really characterization. Belatedly we are given an idea what drives them in a scene by a campfire where they talk about their hopes for how to use the money, but this does not actually reveal as much about their characters as the movie thinks it does, plus it's too little too late.

The movie doesn't really have time to develop these characters because it's too fixated on producing the next madcap scene. And these scenes are madcap all right, full of the kind of mugging expressions that always made me feel this movie was more condescending toward its characters than it was loving toward them. (Whereas I feel like a movie like Raising Arizona stays on the other side of that divide.) It was Clooney's performance in particular that made me feel that, though the others bug out their eyes plenty as well. Nelson is the most credible, I suppose because he is the closest to the type of character he's actually portraying. Clooney and Turturro are hopelessly northern by comparison, which is not to say they can't do reasonable southern accents or inhabit their characters in other ways. It's just that they seem to be mocking these characters more than is good for the movie.

If I liked the set pieces a little more, I probably wouldn't have as much of a problem with it. But each set piece is anywhere from ten to 30 percent less satisfying than I feel like it should be. As just one example that illustrates multiple points I've made so far, I don't get the appeal of the scene where John Goodman beats up Nelson and Clooney with a branch he pulls off a tree. It's not that I don't get why he attacks them -- he's trying to rob them -- but I don't get why Clooney entirely fails to take evasive action. In the Coens' interest in cooking up some good slapstick, they've robbed all credibility from the characters by having Clooney sit there, without defending himself, after Goodman has already gone upside Delmar O'Donnell's head about three times. He's still sitting there saying he doesn't understand -- in that oh-so funny, linguistically aspirational, southern hick way -- when Goodman finally gets to him and goes all Babe Ruth on him as well (get it, Goodman played Babe Ruth). Goodman's also at fault here by having taken his time getting to Clooney without any worries that Clooney would defend himself. When you have unbelievable reactions by two different characters in the same scene, you have an unbelievable scene -- even in a movie where most of the scenes are supposed to be heightened and unbelievable in some way.

Speaking of unbelievable, I just don't buy that these guys would just waltz into a recording studio and record the year's (decade's?) biggest hit as a lark. These don't strike me as guys who could perform a song like this off the cuff, and only two days later I can't remember if the movie actually provides an explanation for their golden pipes. I should say, I was a man of constant distractions while watching this movie, as I was going down some internet rabbit holes while watching it. Don't worry, I did give it a fair shake -- I was mostly pausing it when I'd do this -- but I could tell early on that my impression of the movie was not likely to improve significantly, so I considered some level of distraction acceptable.

The recording studio scene does give the movie one of its two big ties to one of my favorite Coen movies, Inside Llewyn Davis. Probably the most obvious comparison between the movies is that they both make use of the structure of Homer's The Odyssey, this one explicitly (it credits Homer in the opening credits), the other a little less explicitly (the cat Llewyn loses is named Ulysses). But the more specific -- like, bizarrely specific -- thing they have in common is that both movies feature a musician or musicians recording a major radio hit, without having the foresight to profit from its success. Llewyn actually rejects the chance for long-term profit on "Please Mr. Kennedy" because he needs the quick influx of cash from doing a one-off job, and doesn't believe a song this vapid could have any legs. (Hence, engaging in his fatal flaw as he does repeatedly throughout the movie.) In another sign of the contrast in quality between the two movies, the Soggy Bottom Boys never even think to consider anything other than the $10 they get paid to record "A Man of Constant Sorrow" -- improbably record it, as I mentioned earlier. Although I suppose it's also part of their fatal flaws of being exaggerated, idiotic hicks.

I don't want to suggest to you there's nothing I like about O Brother, Where Art Thou? In fact, I had retroactively given in three stars on Letterboxd and would probably stick with that rating, or at least, bust it down no further than 2.5 stars. The things I enjoy most about it are its look -- the sepia tones were one of the earliest examples of digital color correction, and the Dapper Dan hair gel containers makes a great example of the production design -- and some of its small-scale visual gags. Like, I love the scene where Delmar looks over at Ulysses' body lying on the ground after their run-in with the sirens, and then looks over where we'd expect to see Pete's body, and there's just an empty shirt and pants. I like the way this establishes our expectations and then inverts them. The idea that Pete might have been turned into the toad is one of the ways I'll go along with their exaggerated hick-itude, even. Alas, the movie just doesn't have enough moments like this.

So now that I have re-coen-sidered O Brother, Where Art Thou?, I'd say that not only does my initial impression still hold, but I probably like it even a little bit less than I did then. It's still obviously the work of masters, and they're surely in command of the type of film they wanted to make. But that type of film is just not for me, in this case.

Next up in June: The Ladykillers.

Audient Auteurs: Robert Bresson

This is the third in my 2018 monthly series devoted to watching two films a month by revered directors whose work is not known to me.

If you’re a cinephile and also a reasonably intelligent person, it can be hard to admit that you just don’t “get” something. But I think I may indeed not “get” Robert Bresson. In this month’s Audient Auteurs, I hope to unpack why and explore what to do about that.

I have a bit more of a history with the French filmmaker than some of the other subjects I’ve chosen for this series, even though, like those others, I had yet to see any of his films. The reason is that they’d done a marathon of Bresson films a couple years back on Filmspotting, and though I was only “listening loosely” during those segments – a habit I’ve developed when listening to a discussion of a film I haven’t seen – the fact remains that I did expose myself to a discussion of about six of his films, including both films I watched in April. So I kind of knew what to expect: artsy miserabilism.  

And I guess I don’t think all that much of artsy miserabilism, perhaps especially artsy miserabilism from France. (Is there any other kind? Ha ha.) Although Bresson is often thought of more as a precursor to the French New Wave, he’s really contemporaneous with it, and both of the films I watched came out long after the movement was underway. Those films have put me a bit in mind of Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, whose 1959 release came seven years before either of these films. The 400 Blows is a film for which I have a massive amount of respect, and no love. I suppose not having seen it since I was a late teenager could have something to do with that, but given my general feeling toward artsy miserabilism, I wouldn’t think my 2018 perspective would be all that different.

French cinema has a distinct identity on the whole, and Bresson is considered central to it. Godard once wrote of him, “Robert Bresson is French cinema, as Dostoyevsky is the Russian novel and Mozart is German music." That’s high praise, but also prepares a viewer for a particular type of experience while watching Bresson’s films. While ennui and a tragic ending are almost a given, Bresson’s films in general do not seem to be the cinematic equivalent of a beret. In fact, both I watched are set in the country, or at least in a pastoral setting.

Initially a photographer and having been a prisoner of war, Bresson made his first short in 1934, and in fact made only 13 features in a 50-year career. He was also a Catholic, a spiritual association that makes it into many of his films. He was known for using something called the “actor-model technique,” which required repeated takes from actors until their tendency to over-emote was scrubbed out of their performances. This flatter affect was designed to allow audiences to internalize the intended emotions rather than having the actors or director feed them on a platter. You can definitely see this in both films I watched.

And those were …

1. Au Hasard Balthazar (1966)

 

This film wasn’t on my radar prior to the Filmspotting marathon, but it clearly should have been. The film must be considered Bresson’s masterpiece, because only a short while after that marathon, Au Hasard Balthazar ranked an impossibly lofty 16^th on the 2012 Sight & Sound critics poll of the greatest films of all time. In fact, I initially didn’t even have any idea how the film’s title was spelled, as Filmspotting co-host Josh Larsen seemed to say it as “O Hazar Bath Hazar.” Which is not that far off from its actual pronunciation, perhaps maybe with an Arabic flavor to it. But if you don’t know what words he’s saying, you kind think of the title as having the same second and fourth words, even if they only sound similar. (Most of Bresson's other titles get full translations into English, with the exception of my second film for reasons you will see, but I almost never hear anyone referring to this one by its English title, which is just Balthazar.)

If I'm beating around the bush with a lengthy introduction of this film, it's because I watched it three weeks ago. A lot has happened in those three weeks (including an international trip and a crisis I've had to deal with), so my talking points are already rusty to non-existent.

To give you a bit of the plot, it essentially follows the life of the titular donkey through various owners over the course of some 20 years or longer. The girl in the poster above loves him, but unfortunately, the twists and turns his life takes means that her ownership and influence over him is only fleeting. Far more often he's owned by someone who is whipping him and lighting his tail on fire for sport.

As a film that's not made by Disney cannot really be "about" a donkey, this is of course more a look at the humans who handle Balthazar and their capacity for kindness and cruelty. There are relationship dynamics between them, and the girl (named Marie, and played by Anne Wiazemsky) is loved and humiliated in equal measure by various men, the same men who victimize Balthazar. There's a clear and poignant parallel drawn between woman and animal, and let's just say nothing really goes well for either of them.

I was hoping to have more of the actual plot to latch onto, to refresh my memory, but the Wikipedia plot summary speaks in generalities that constitute only four sentences in total. That's not really the point of Au Hasard Balthazar anyway. The incredible eye Bresson has for image making and for setting a scene is the dominant takeaway of this movie, and that makes it a real art film in the best possible sense. Just as Bresson scrubbed the exaggerated emotion from his actors, you might imagine that he pre-scrubbed anything high concept from this film at the writing stage. His films are slices of life in which both the beauty and the pain are in the mundane. Though I suppose there is something you could describe as "high concept" about following a donkey for 90 minutes, and the use of coincidence breaks some of this film's reliance on the mundane, the plot is the least important element in a film that examines the way people hurt each other without providing any easy answers, or even any explanations why they do what they do. Consistent with his personal beliefs, Bresson turns Balthazar into a bit of a Christ figure, which is all well and good.

Overall I found this movie sufficiently profound to be clearly in the "pro" camp, but maybe concluded that it's not, like, among the top 20 movies ever made.

2. Mouchette (1967)

In a career that spanned 50 years, I managed to watch two movies that were made in consecutive years. If I'd had my druthers I would have made my second Bresson (or first, if we're going chronologically) either Diary of a Country Priest or Pickpocket, but my choices were made for me by Kanopy, as these were the only two Bresson films available. Don't think I'm complaining. I was overjoyed to have these movies available at all, since I don't pay a dime for Kanopy yet have already used it in the past month to watch both of the movies for this series and to rewatch my favorite movie of 2017 (A Ghost Story).

It's clear that the themes that preoccupied Bresson in Balthazar are still with him only a year later, as Mouchette has a similar pastoral setting and a title character who is abused, both physically and emotionally, by the men in her life. Although I watched this only a few days ago, I'm actually relying a bit on the (longer) Wikipedia plot synopsis for this one as well. I'm finding a strange phenomenon with Bresson where the very minimalism of his films makes me wonder if I wasn't paying attention for a moment and missed some key element of the story.

Mouchette (Nadine Nortier) is an odd duck teenage girl who lives with a dying mother, alcoholic father and baby brother, and is treated as an outcast at her school (though interestingly, she seems to initiate as many run-ins with the school's "bullies" as they do, sometimes hiding and throwing clumps of dirt at them unprovoked). She follows the movements of animal poachers near her house and becomes involved in an incident where she appears to witness one of them strangling another to death. She then develops a weird sexual relationship -- possibly consensual, possibly not -- with the one who appears to have committed the murder.

This film might be even harder on Mouchette than the other is on Balthazar. At one point her teacher humiliates her for singing off key by forcing her ear down into the piano keyboard. Her family members are verbally abusive to her/dismissive of her in various ways, and even townspeople with whom she has not previously interacted in the film call her a slut and degrade her in other ways, apparently without provocation. This is the type of miserabilism I'm talking about, and that I generally do not like. Why is the world so cruel to Mouchette? Because that's what the world is like.

There's one central scene at a carnival where Mouchette appears to have the chance to have kind of a normal relationship with someone, a boy her age who appears to like her. They are on the bumper cars together, bumping in that way that seems sort of startling and aggressive in the moment but is really just part and parcel to that activity. They both have big grins on their faces, though the sound of the cars bumping into each other are like gunshots on the soundtrack, in what I thought was a very compelling choice. The fact that this episode is isolated, and she doesn't interact with the boy again (that I recall), tells you something about Bresson's perspective on the chances someone like Mouchette has in this world.

The overall thrust of Mouchette feels episodic and quite random, but individual scenes were quite compelling to me, such as the one described above. I also noticed some really interesting choices by Bresson about how to set up the camera in a way that defies our usual expectations, but conveys the same visual information in perhaps a more immediate way. As one example, and the details of what was actually going on were fuzzy, there's a scene where some bootleggers appear to be transporting some kind of alcohol under a sheet on the back of a truck. As they are unloading it, an authority figure comes within range, and they quickly cover the alcohol with the sheet. As they wait for the threat to pass, the camera is not on their waiting faces, looking nervously in the direction of the threat. Rather, it shows only their hands on the top of the sheet covering the alcohol, as we may be left to imagine the expression on their faces. I can't explain why I found this so profound, but it's one of a number of examples of Bresson's mastery of camera setups and their psychological impact on us.

My two Bresson viewings leave me a bit unresolved about the man. I described myself as "not getting" him and still believe that's true in some essential sense, but even in the course of writing this I've identified very distinct and memorable moments in his work that struck me in a way that felt fresh and original. As with any great artist, I'd like to continue making my way through his work and reckoning with it.

I'm a bit undecided on my subject for May, though Kanopy does leave me some options. I'll need to start digging deeper soon, possibly considering different candidates who were not on my initial list ... or (ahem) alternate methods for sourcing the movies I can't find.

The gravity of the situation

Note: Spoilers for Gravity. 

My experience of watching Gravity has been one, perhaps inevitably, of watching it on increasingly smaller screens ... and becoming increasingly less impressed with it.

It would have been hard to top my first viewing back in October of 2013, when I saw it on what bills itself as the world's third-largest IMAX screen, at the Melbourne Museum. Socks = knocked off.

A month later I saw it again on a "regular" movie screen, not in 3D, but still larger than ... well, if not larger than life, then at least larger than my TV screen. Socks = less knocked off.

When I finally did watch it a third time, last night, it was of course on my TV screen. Socks = dangling from my toes.

I guess at this rate, to keep things going, I'll need to watch it on a smartphone next, at which point the backs of my heels might not get cold.

The thing is, the parts that were supposed to impress me still impressed me. It just became harder to ignore the schmaltzy parts, of which there are many.

One of the most consistent complaints about Alfonso Cuaron's movie is the way the astronauts foolishly fritter away their small reserves of oxygen on chit chat. I think the scene that's most cited is when George Clooney and Sandra Bullock are floating over toward the International Space Station, relying on infrequent bursts from his thrusters and a hope that they are on the right trajectory. Her oxygen is at like 1%, yet he insists on peppering her with questions about what she'd be doing if she were home right now, and if there's a "Mr. Stone." The most ridiculous thing about that is not, perhaps, that he'd be wasting the oxygen, as you could argue that he's trying to keep her alert so she doesn't pass out. What's most ridiculous is that he wouldn't know the answer to his questions about her family already. If an astronaut were going to space and had lost a child to a freak playground accident, it would be in some kind of dossier he would have read at the very least, and more likely, it would have been the subject of a hundred newspaper feature pieces.

That one I noticed on both my first and second viewing. What I may not have noted those times, but definitely did this time, is the conversation he has with her after becoming untethered from her with no hope of survival. Now sure, he may just be indulging in the last minutes of chitter chatter he'll ever have. But before she has reached safety, when she's still trying to fumble with the lid of some hatch to get in to the ISS, he's peppering her with questions about whether she found him attractive or not. I suppose you could say that he's also becoming untethered from his own rational thoughts, except in the same breath he's also giving her instructions about what she needs to look for and what she needs to do when she gets there.

All this failure to understand the gravity of the situation, as it were, is clearly intended to spoon feed the audience what it needs to relate to these characters. But it's laid on a bit thick. On this viewing I noticed how awkward it was when, right before strapping on a pair and deciding to face her destiny with an open mind and a vigilant heart, Ryan Stone gives the deceased Clooney in her mind orders to go talk to her daughter in heaven and tell her that her mother loves her. It's a nice sentiment but her little speech goes on for like 90 seconds. That's 90 seconds that would be used much better on logistics related to your situation and the goal of arriving back home to terra firma.

One thing I couldn't help be distracted by is some of the film's retrograde gender politics. I wouldn't have noticed them at the time, but in the last few year's of increased sensitivity to these matters, I couldn't help but be aware of them. Although on the surface, Ryan Stone is a very strong female character, she has to be saved -- multiple times -- by Matt Kowalski. Her failure to disengage early enough from the arm to which she is attached means that she goes waaaaay off further into space than she otherwise would have. And while this sets up one of the film's best and most awe-inspiring shots, it also requires Matt to use most of his available thrusters to come out and pick her up, a rescue mission with an extremely low probability of success to begin with. He then later sacrifices himself for her by letting go of the tether so he won't drag her off, thus foiling her attempt to return the favor and save him. She also doesn't stop her repair task outside the shuttle until he tells her about the third time, leading to a slower response to the debris storm, though the film makes certain to absolve her of any guilt related to that. It's Matt, of course, who has to do the absolving, giving him yet another paternal aspect related to her child-like character. Now of course, there is a major disparity in their outer space experience, as he's trying to set a spacewalk record while she is on her first trip, but that doesn't do much to reduce the sense of a gender imbalance in the script.

I'd thought this viewing would be useful in helping determine if Gravity might be an outside contender for my top 25 of the 2010s, a list I will be forming a little more than 18 months from now. It was only my ninth ranked film of 2013, though that did come along with a five-star rating from the original socks-knocking incident. A third viewing might tell me which was more accurate, the five-star rating (which would certainly make it a contender for my top 25) or the ranking of ninth from the year (which, extrapolated outward, might make it only ranked somewhere in the 80s for the decade).

And yeah, technical brilliance and all, the writing in this movie is just too distracting to reward it with those kind of accolades. I still like the movie quite a bit, and felt the tension and stress of that debris field as much as I ever had. But that star rating is more appropriately 4.5 or even (gasp) four than it truly is five.

Thank goodness that technical brilliance is a very important factor for me, because Gravity is a movie I'm glad to support. I may just wait for a future incarnation in which it's available on a big screen, rather than my smartphone, for my eventual fourth viewing.

It's a long, long, long, long movie

You'd expect to see an intermission in a 1960s historical epic like Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago or The Sound of Music.

But you know it was a decade of cinematic bloat when even the all-star ensemble comedy, the Cannonball Run of its day, has a prelude, intermission and postlude, and runs an enormous 154 minutes.

When I put on It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World yesterday, as afternoon viewing for my earache, I thought it was an hour and 54 minutes, not 154 minutes. You can tell I was running at some percentage of my usual capacity to make a mistake like that. But I had plenty of time to finish it ... and it took plenty of time. With naps and other interruptions, I was probably watching it for the better part of five hours.

Even with upwards of 70 of the day's most famous comedic performers (or so it felt), there's no reason this movie should have run two hours and 30 minutes. No reason. And it steadily wore away at my good will until I finally gave it only 3 out of 5 stars, when I'd been having a 3.5-star or even 4-star experience for parts of the film.

On the one hand it was really fun to identify all the cameos, some of which were previewed in the (extremely bloated) opening credits, and some of which were not. As I am not necessarily an aficionado of the films of that era, I wasn't immediately able to supply names for everyone. There were a lot of "that guys" and a lot of time spent consulting IMDB. For instance, I even had to look up Sid Caesar, a "Hollywood old guy" from when I was first coming of age as a kid -- in part because I didn't know if I'd actually seen him in anything outside of Bob Hope specials, and he was 20 years younger than that here. It was also great to see Ethel Merman in something, as I knew her only from that very brief cameo in Airplane!

But my goodness, in the end, a little of Mad Mad goes a long way. I took a basic silly joy in all the various planes, trains, bicycles and automobiles they used to try to make it to the treasure spot in the fictitious Santa Rosita. But each episode could have been 40 percent shorter and achieved the same effect, while bringing the thing in under two hours -- and without an intermission.

The final scene is like a ridiculous slapstick culmination of everything we've seen before then, with a firetruck ladder swaying back and forth (is that a thing that happens?) of its own volition, tossing Caesar, Milton Berle, Mickey Rooney, Buddy Hackett, Peter Falk and Spencer Tracey this way and that. They all end up in traction in a hospital, contemplating their miserable fate and their likelihood of long prison sentences, and then Merman comes in and slips on a banana, ending the movie in gales of laughter from all.

It's hard to watch a movie like this today as an audience of the time would have watched it, as it's probably a bit racist and definitely a bit sexist, plus everything is ludicrous in a way that feels out of scale with what we would attempt today.

But I did have fun. I just wish I'd had less than five hours of fun.

Days of translating poorly

Remember that great meme, one of the original memes, All Your Base Are Belong to Us? It was the humorously poor English translation of video game dialogue written originally in another language, and if you've never seen it, well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fvTxv46ano

I was getting AYBABTU flashbacks while watching Wong Kar-wai's Days of Being Wild last night.

When the film was released in 1990 in Hong Kong (and elsewhere around the world the next year), it was not yet the work of an internationally celebrated director. Wong had made only one previous film, 1988's As Tears Go By, and Chungking Express, In the Mood for Love and The Grandmaster all still lay on the horizon.

So it should be no surprise that the subtitles seem like they were written by someone who was trying to do a racist impression of a Chinese person.

Of course, it's much more innocent than that. Likely the person who did these subtitles was trying their best, perhaps literally translating when he or she should have translated colloquially. But few of the subtitles are actually grammatically correct in English, and in many other instances where they are grammatically correct, they're just not phrased the way a western person would phrase them.

That's not the only example of shoddy subtitle work, though. The length of time the subtitles stay on the screen is often highly problematic as well, as sentences containing six to ten words sometimes stay up for less than two seconds. This is necessary when the dialogue is coming out in a rapid stream, but the words were disappearing even in situations where a thoughtful pause came before the next spoken words.

Examples are probably beside the point, but after a while, I couldn't stop jotting them down. Here are some:

"You want a revenge."

"Please don't dessert me."

"May I have a look of your house."

"He gets my phone number."

"Don't stand on my way."

"It's bored to stay in one place for a long time."

"I owe you this meal. I'll be the banker next time."

I think that last one is my favorite. It's the most Base Belongingest.

Listing any more examples would start to blur the line between someone criticizing a racist impression of a Chinese person, and actually making such an impression, if it has not already. But you get the picture.

If Days of Being Wild were just some one-off from a director who never made anything again, I might expect the subtitles to be in any form, just as likely to be worthy of wisecracks from the Mystery Science Theater 3000 crew as to read coherently. But Wong is a major director, and the reason I chose this movie on a night I was sick with an earache is because I'd heard it discussed in glowing terms. (And because it was only 90 minutes, though in retrospect I would have chosen something that qualified as comfort food, and was in English.)

The answer, of course -- though I had to post in my Flickcharters group on Facebook in order to find it -- is that this is one of several versions of Days of Being Wild in existence. It doesn't yet have a Criterion release, despite several convincing fan mock-ups of Criterion posters, but commenters on my post said they'd seen translations of the Chinese that were unremarkable at worst. The streaming service on which I watched the movie, Stan, just doesn't have access to these other versions, or perhaps doesn't realize that it plucked an inferior version from its available resources. (It would probably be useful if I understood a bit better the logistics involved in streaming licensing, but I won't pretend to.)

The interesting thing is that this version of Days actually does do something quite well in its translation, something I wish other films did more. It translates the money. When money is spoken of in the movie, it's not listed in Yuan, but rather, in USD, so you know the total that's actually at stake. Sure, that's good for me as an American, but the U.S. dollar is the most internationally known currency as well, so if you're going to select just one currency, might as well be the dollar. It even mentions it in a rather shrewd way, as "USD" appears in the subtitles after the first mention of money, then doesn't for a while, then does again, just to remind us in case we've forgotten, kind of like the chyron appearing under the picture of a documentary subject at some point later in the movie, just so we don't forget who we've been interviewing.

I suppose it's a reality that at least two sets of English subtitles might exist for any given movie, to say nothing of the sets of subtitles for the world's other 20 most prominent languages. But I kind of feel like once a set of subtitles that's considered the definitive version comes into existence, it should suppress all other available subtitles -- something that's a lot easier said than done, of course. I mean, if someone were really concerned about it, they could remove this inferior copy of Days of Being Wild from the rotation, though perhaps that was the reason Stan was able to license it in the first place, because it costs less than the version where the translator actually understood how people speak English.

And I suppose there's also value to viewing something as an artifact of its time. If I got only the corrected version of this movie, I might not have the appreciation of how English-speaking audiences originally experienced it. Apparently, they were not as thrown by it as I was, as they surely helped elevate the movie to its place of respect in the Wong canon. Or, they were more accustomed to films being translated poorly than I am, as I cannot think of another instance of watching a movie that had worse than very minor spelling and grammatical errors.

The problem is that I have difficulty knowing how much I really like this movie because of the circumstances of my viewing. Evidently it did become a distraction for me, else I wouldn't have written this whole post.

I do think that it was a bit of a poor bet for me in the first place, as I'm not a fan of the third movie in the informal thematic trilogy that began with this movie, 2046, and I highly respect but still don't probably love In the Mood for Love, the trilogy's middle film. I don't tend to love films where men and women torment each other while lying around in tank tops around smoke-filled flophouses, which is a not totally inaccurate description of much of the first half of this film, and is why for a long time I bristled at the early films of Jim Jarmusch. So Days of Being Wild may never have been totally my thing, but the subtitles certainly didn't help.

Of course, any time you watch a film while suffering from a painful earache, you should not expect it to become your favorite.

Knowing the given names of stray animals

I’ll tell you why I don’t like Ferdinand.

Actually, there are a number of reasons, but only one of them is distinctive enough to be worth writing about.

Okay, so the story starts on a bunch of young bulls growing up on a Spanish ranch where they’re bred and trained to become bullfighting bulls. We see the expected spectrum of personality types among the kids, and the way those types have been established by their fathers – no bulls are born bad but they learn by modelling their parents’ behavior, yada yada yada. You get the drift.

One of these bulls is named Ferdinand, and as you might expect from the fish-out-of-water narratives that suffocate today’s animation landscape, he’s a lover not a fighter. He spends his time trying to cultivate flowers, presumably in the hope of becoming either a florist or a gardener, rather than dying in the ring like his father. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. First, the father has a pep talk with Ferdinand, who doesn’t want to follow his proscribed path, and says to his son, “You know, Ferd, I wish we lived in that type of world.” Those are, of course, his last words to young Ferd.

Because of Ferdinand’s, or Ferd’s, non-violent disposition, one day he sees an opportunity and he bolts from the ranch. Lost and alone, through rainstorms and the like (yes, this movie is as cliché as it sounds), he is discovered by a young girl, who takes him home to her bucolic farm to become her pet.

And she calls him Ferdinand. Or, more to the point, she knows that his name is Ferdinand.

Now, this is not some movie where animals and humans talk to each other. That almost never happens in animated movies that fancy themselves as being tethered to some version of reality. They’ll have a bunch of animals team up to drive a car – yes, that happens here, just as it did in Finding Dory and The Secret Lives of Pets – but they’ll almost never cross that sacred line of having the animals and humans communicate using a common spoken language. You might say that would actually be more realistic than animals who drive cars. But it’s a line most movies won’t cross.

Then how did she know his name is Ferdinand?

It didn’t occur to me at first, and I had to rewind on the seatback entertainment (watched this on the way back from Bali yesterday) to be sure it was not explained away somehow. But no indeed, there’s no explanation for how she knows his name. She just knows his name is Ferdinand. Or perhaps he just looks so much like a Ferdinand that the only name she can think to give him is Ferdinand.

I can certainly understand why they just avoided the whole problem of his name. If he’s called one thing on the ranch with the other young bulls, and another thing when the girl finds him, that would be too confusing for the little kids at whom this is aimed. But they could have figured out some way to incorporate it into the narrative, like that the young bulls wear dog collars with their names on them. (Of course, that would have its own problems – then Ferdinand is no longer a stray bull, but a bull with an actual name and contact information, leading to a moral responsibility by the girl and her father to return the bull to its rightful owner.)

But Ferdinand is clumsy enough overall that I think it just didn’t occur to the writers that the girl would not know this bull’s name. I mean, the movie is called Ferdinand, and this is Ferdinand. Plain as day, right?

Forehead slap.

Thor: Ragna-broke

I thought I was going to blog every day in Indonesia. Fortunately, that hasn't been the case. You don't really want to blog every day on your vacation, do you?

There's been some stuff to blog about, though.

I could have told you about watching Star Wars: The Last Jedi for a second time on the plane, and liking it much better this time. That probably deserves more consideration at some point.

I could have told you about deciding not to go see a movie while I'm here. I could have told you about checking the local listings and seeing that A Quiet Place and Rampage both seemed to be some of the only movies playing in the two accessible locations, and deciding that A Quiet Place would be dub-proof, if it were dubbed rather than subtitled, because almost the whole movie is silent (or so I'm told), though it probably wouldn't have been as most people speak English here anyway (tourism). I could have then told you about learning that the theater was not actually very accessible, requiring either a 30-minute drive or a 90-minute walk, and being easily dissuaded out of doing it by my wife, which I agreed was the best course of action.

I could have told you about my movie-per-day pace nonetheless, and the movies I watched for the first time (Game Over, Man!, Murder on the Orient Express, I, Tonya and Colonia) or the movies I revisited (Grimsby and Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets).

Instead I'll tell you about the movie we have not watched, despite considerable efforts to do so.

But first I need to give you some background.

I've been up to some shenanigans with my iTunes. It isn't something I've wanted to do. I've been happy being a loyal customer of the American iTunes store with the American account I've had for years. It gets new releases faster, much faster, and the rentals are generally less expensive (though the exchange rate is not 1-to-1).

But in the past six months I've received not one, but two iTunes gift cards, purchased in Australia and valid only in the Australian iTunes store. When I first got one of these years ago, sent by Australian relatives when I did not yet live in Australian, Apple had a different policy toward them. With some effort, I was able to convert them to be valid in American iTunes. Well, no more. They've decided to become isolationist. No more international cooperation between various branches of the same company.

So I reluctantly, with great angst and concern, connected to the iTunes store with an email address my wife uses in the Australian store. I was worried that I'd flag myself with Apple as someone who was trying to circumvent their rules, and it might do anything from disabling one of my accounts to deleting my whole iTunes library, music and all. But I had $80 to spend at the Australian iTunes store, and dammit, I wanted to spend it.

At first there were no issues. I could go back and forth between the two stores just fine. All I had to do was log in with a different email address. It would tell me that this account was only valid in a particular country's iTunes store, and it would just switch me to that store. No deleting of iTunes libraries to be seen. I purchased songs and rented movies with no apparent consequences. All seemed right.

But as I was loading up on rentals for this trip, something broke.

I'd rented Mom and Dad (which I actually ended up watching before the trip), I, Tonya and Murder on the Orient Express from the American store, because none of them was yet available for rent in Australia. Thor: Ragnarok was available, so I decided to deplete some of my gift card balance rather than shelling out more U.S. dollars on it. That's when the trouble began.

It processed the rental fine, reducing my balance by the $5.99 rental fee, but then it told me that this computer was already registered to a different iTunes account, and that if I wanted to switch authorizations, I could not switch back for 90 days. This froze me dead in my tracks.

Suddenly the movies I'd rented seemed vulnerable to deletion, and who knew what else. I also had a 99 cent rental of The Florida Project from the U.S. store, not particularly for the trip, but just because the movie was in my top ten of last year, I wanted to see it again, and it's only 99 cents for one week, so I had to act.

The poster for Thor never filled in on my rented movies on iTunes, leaving just a blank square with the title underneath, but I decided I'd deal with that later. We'd go on the trip, watch the other movies first, and then I would commit myself to 90 days exclusively in the Australian store. During which I would eat up all my remaining balance and not worry about that account again. If they needed to delete the movies I'd rented from the U.S., that wouldn't matter because we'd have already watched them.

But then funny things started to happen.

I watched Mom and Dad fine, but noticed some curious behavior with it. When I paused and tried to play again, it crashed iTunes. In fact, I had to restart my whole computer on that one, which is no short commitment as my computer seems to labor on startup, running through a variety of startup tasks. I could probably disable them -- I'm an IT professional, after all -- but with my own devices, sometimes I act more like a user than an IT guy.

I finished that movie without any more pauses, but then noticed another funny thing. The clock never started ticking. It told me that I'd have 48 hours to watch it once I started watching it, but when I finished, I noticed that it still said I had 27 days remaining to watch it, or whatever the actual day count was at the time.

This wasn't bothersome, of course, as it was only a benefit to me. I liked the movie enough that I might actually watch it again before the month was up, if I had such an easy opportunity to do so. We might even watch it on the trip. It did mean that I might have to actively delete it if I were running out of space -- I'm operating within a few gigs of my total allotment at any given time -- but that was a minor issue.

But it did concern me as an indication of something being wrong. And that continued in Indonesia.

Pauses during Orient Express and Tonya both also required restarting iTunes, though not restarting the computer at least. And when it was time to finally watch Thor, which was to have happened on Saturday night, and which was by far the movie my wife was most interested in, it wasn't possible to do so.

iTunes showed it was downloading Thor, but it said only that it was downloading it, not an estimated time remaining or a total bytes downloaded.

Well, downloading isn't the only option for viewing content on iTunes these days. You can also stream it. And when I was logged into the Australian account, it did show a poster for Thor. Concerning, however, was that it also showed the blank poster. So there were two Thors appearing in my rented movies, both at various stages of availability.

And neither of them actually available. When I clicked the play button on one to stream it, it showed only a black screen, one that never progressed forward. I could see the total time bar at the bottom, with 0:00 to 2:10 on either side, but it wouldn't move from 0:00 to 0:01 and onward. No errors, just not moving.

When I clicked the other one, without a poster, it showed only a time bar at the top of iTunes, like it was one very long song. Which also would not start.

I fidgeted with it for an hour, switching stores and trying whatever I could think of. If I at least got that message advising to switch stores for 90 days, that would be something. But that would not come. I thought about downloading it again from the American store, which would give me three Thors, and also about contacting customer support. But I decided either approach would draw undue attention to my situation, which might only make it worse.

So I watched Colonia that night and my wife watched a couple episodes of Jessica Jones.

It's too bad because Thor would have made the perfect "vacation movie." We tried to scratch that itch with Valerian, and it was partially scratched, as my wife commented that it made for a good "vacation movie." At the end, though, she also commented that she'd "liked parts of it," which is a fair assessment of Valerian.

Who knows what I have to look forward to in terms of future iTunes shenanigans. My next attempt to purchase something will give me some indication.

I don't think Apple wants to freeze me out as a customer. If I do need to contact customer support, I'll just plead ignorance and they'll help me right the ship. Their customer support has always been great in the past.

I just wish they'd drop all these restrictions on what can be used where, and by whom. The thing all the stores have in common is that they are getting my hard-earned dollar, or at least the hard-earned dollar of one of my relatives. That should be all that matters to them.

Blogging in Bali

I’m writing to notify you that I’m going on vacation again, but NOT necessarily to expect a break in my blogging. In fact, I might even write more than usual.

That’s because for the first time since we got married, and possibly ever for me, my wife and I are taking a trip where we’re just going to sit on our asses and enjoy ourselves.

Enjoying myself happens to include writing, if I feel like it.

We’re going to Bali, Indonesia -- one of the nearest foreign country playlands for Australians. As far as I can tell, they use it the way Americans use Mexico.

It’ll be my first time setting foot on Asian soil, and what do I plan to do?

Sit on my ass and enjoy myself.

That’s because we’re parents, goddammit, and parents get tired. And because it’s our tenth wedding anniversary.

Oh, did I mention that the kids aren’t coming with us?

My lovely mother-in-law and sister-in-law are staying with our two boys for the seven days we’ll be gone. I’ll actually be gone nine days, as I’m staying two extra nights to visit with a friend of mine who lives in Jakarta. I was actually going to go to Jakarta, but he told me Jakarta is not great for visits. So he’s visiting me in Bali, and we will do a little more exploring, and a little less sitting on our asses, for those two days.

My wife and I have had our relaxing holidays before, before we had kids, but even our honeymoon had some harrowing, exhausting adventures, the kind we don't plan to undertake this time. So this will probably be our relaxingest joint vacation ever, and as I said, for me, maybe my relaxingest ever, overall. 

In the place where we’re staying, we have our own private pool, among other amenities that will make it easy for us never to leave the place. We’ll leave, but maybe not that much. I don’t know a single word of Indonesian (that’s what the plane ride is for) so I’m not planning to do all that much leaving. Then again, the Bali locals cater to Australians for all of their tourism needs, so I imagine most of them will speak English anyway.

The resort where we’re staying also figures to have WiFi, so I may spend plenty of time online. And that means blogging, among other things. Probably.

But if I do allow myself to disconnect and just read three books (my other big ambition), then maybe you won’t get another post from me for a week to ten days. And if so, you’ll know why.

But there’s a good chance I’ll have plenty of new material, as I’m bringing like 25 movies with me (a combo of digital and physical), to say nothing of any options that may exist there. And speaking of options that exist there, I’d love to see a movie in the theater while I’m there, just for the novelty of it. There seem to be at least three options for that, and you better bet if it happens, I’m going to tell you about it.

So stay tuned. The next post from me may be on Indonesian time.

An odd pitch to girls

Hollywood is slowly (quickly) becoming aware of the need to cater more to their female viewers, as data has shown that women are more likely to dictate the financial expenditures of families, and therefore have a greater say in what movies get watched.

I saw one of the oddest examples of that at the toy store the other day.

We were picking up a present for a birthday party my younger son is attending next weekend. I asked him to select a Hot Wheels car to go along with the main present, which I didn't deem quite expensive enough. He did a pretty poor job of that, preferring to run the aisles instead, which left me lingering around the Hot Wheels section for longer than I expected to.

Long enough to notice a very odd way to get girls into Hot Wheels, though not inconsistent with the trend we're seeing in the movies.

The first I noticed was the one pictured above: a van with She-Hulk on the side. Now I'm not familiar with every corner of the Marvel comic book universe, but at least in the movies, She-Hulk has yet to make her appearance. Yet Marvel and Hot Wheels think that a She-Hulk van might sell like hot cakes. Well, there were a lot of them still there, I can tell you that.

Then next I saw:

Again now. They've only just introduced Spider-Man into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and Spider-Woman has yet to be heard from, though I'm sure she's been in the comics for years. But as with She-Hulk, I doubt they are trying to sell a Spider-Woman van off the backs of any comic books. It's just a pandering "here's a Hot Wheels girls will like" move. (Though I guess I should be happy they aren't just trying to pedal Hot Wheels that are colored pink. This is definitely a step up from that.)

The third one is at least someone I recognize:

Elizabeth Olson plays Scarlet Witch in the MCU, though I don't remember her skin being pink, and I don't remember an outfit anything like that either. And what is that, a bakery truck? The flames are cool. The pink skin, not so much.

Now we're getting somewhere more along the lines of what I would expect:

Black Widow is probably Marvel's best and most famous offering among a relatively limited number of female characters. Though damn, they might have tried to make her look more like Scarlett Johansson. And what's with that giant stack of red hair? And is that one of those trucks that takes large quantities of money to and from the bank?

Lastly we have:

At least they're on brand with this one, with a picture that is clearly Zoe Saldana and the familiar font that has appeared on movie posters for Guardians of the Galaxy 2. Plus, it's a car, which wins. Why do girls have to play with boxy trucks?

I mightn't have found the whole thing so odd if there were equivalents for Marvel's male superheroes. But there wasn't a one. The options among Hot Wheels were either female Marvel superheroes, or all other cars, dressed normally as cars.

If it is pandering, as I am kind of suggesting it is, at least it's better pandering than if they put forth a bunch of pink cars with petunias on them. At least let these girls aspire to be badass.

But more than anything I think it calls attention to the dearth of female comic book heroes, rather than celebrating the ones that exist, as it surely intends to. You can go about 40 deep with male Marvel stars. The fact that you can't even go five deep here, without hauling out two "girl version of" heroes that no one has heard of outside of imagining that they must exist because obviously they do, is just sort of sad.

In a year or two you'll be able to add Captain Marvel to this list, I suppose.

But do you bump out She-Hulk or Spider-Woman?

Perfect Pauses: Mom and Dad

I haven't done a "Perfect Pauses" post in a while, not since Alien 3 in June of last year. Then again,
this is actually the shortest interim between two of these posts since I've been doing them, as the previous one was in January of 2016, and before that I hadn't even considered the idea since a 2011 post called "Great pauses in movie history."

Anyway, I'll get on with it.

My previous two had been on rewatches, but last night it was a first-time viewing of Mom and Dad, the new(ish) Nicolas Cage vehicle from Brian Taylor -- half of Neveldine and Taylor, the duo responsible for the Crank movies.

And boy did I love this movie. As it's still early in the year, I don't mind telling you that it instantly leap-frogged the other dozen 2018 movies I've seen, becoming my new #1 of the year. Which means it'll probably ultimately land in the 15-20 range, though I could see this one sticking in the top ten. I like it that much.

If you want some of what you got in Crank and the other Neveldine/Taylor movies -- outlandish, jittery visuals with a penchant for the sleazy -- then Mom and Dad will be right up your alley. However, it's also got a brain in its head, saving some of its sizable quantity of energy for subtle social commentary that'll make every parent in the audience say "Yep, uh huh."

If you don't want to know the setup for the film, which is known to most people but perhaps not to you, you may not want to read the next paragraph. However, I think most people learn about this film as a result of knowing what it's about, so I'm not spoiling anything beyond that. Besides, it's necessary for contextualizing the pause I've chosen.

Mom and Dad concerns a mysterious, never-explained phenomenon that causes all the world's parents to want to murder their children. Not any children, not all children -- just their own. It's a great premise, and you can imagine the ways Nicolas Cage delivers on it. (Giving a performance that can be described as good in a more traditional sense: Selma Blair, pictured, as his wife.)

This pause happened to come right at the moment when Blair's murderous intent locks in. She's been driving home in a state of confusion, and as she reaches her house -- which contains her two kids inside -- this is the look she gets in her eyes.

Of course, the premise behind "Perfect Pauses" is not that I find a great image in the film and pause on it. It's that I genuinely need to pause the movie -- to go to the bathroom, to deal with a child who needs something -- and this is what comes up. I think it was the bathroom in this case, as I think my kids were asleep by this point. I hope they were, anyway.

Oh, and if you need any more enticement to watch this movie, I'll give you three words, or really, five: Nicolas Cage. Pool table. Sledgehammer.