Freedom isn't free - except when it is

Warning: This post contains spoilers about Just Mercy.

The subject of this post is my playful way of telling you -- too playful for the subject matter, probably -- that I watched Destin Daniel Cretton's Just Mercy last night.

Which was, in the wise judgment of the good people at Warner Brothers, made free to rent during the month of June for anyone with an iTunes account, in the wake of the protests on police bruality. Actually, you could get it on any streaming platform, I believe, but iTunes is what I use most.

There were other films that were also free, from other studios, but as June is now over, I can't recall all the titles. I believe Glory and Blindspotting were both among them. I do know that Just Mercy was the only one I hadn't yet seen.

And Just Mercy does indeed showcase plenty of police brutality. It ranges from the in-the-moment specifics that we tend to associate with the term, like handling a suspect too roughly after detaining him with too little cause, to the long-term brutality of imprisoning someone -- nay, sentencing him to death row -- for a crime the preponderence of evidence suggests he did not commit.

And therefore it is also about freedom -- the literal quest for it, among wrongly accused death row inmates, and the metaphorical wish to be free from being born guilty, as Jamie Foxx's Walter "Johnny D" McMillian correctly realizes that he is.

It doesn't seem like a screenwriter could cook up such a flimsy case against McMillian and have you believe that the courts would really send him away with such little certainty of his guilt. And in truth, he or she probably could not. A story like this has to be based on true events, as in fact Just Mercy was.

I'm not going to say it recreates anything essential about the form for "wrongfully imprisoned/righteous lawyer" movies, of which this is a fairly typical example. However, I will say that it is passionately made, felt and acted, and that the best examples of even familiar narratives will always shine through. Especially when the extent to which they are sadly familiar is part of the point.

As it's no longer June, I believe your opportunity to rent this for free has lapsed. But that doesn't matter because we should pay for the things that are worth paying for. And Just Mercy certainly is.

It's called voting with your wallet. It's telling the bean counters that stories like this should continue to be told. In a way, I'm sorry I did get it for free, though I know I wouldn't have prioritized watching it as soon if I had waited for it to come up as a 99 cent rental, which is usually how I handle recent releases that I didn't catch in the theater in time to rank them for the year in question. Seeing that it was available for free, I thought, "Well, that's even a better deal than 99 cents."

And for those who thought like I did, it's good we're seeing this now, as it means we can recommend it to others all the sooner -- like I am doing now.

Maybe I'll even rent it again and just let the 30 days expire without watching it ... or maybe I will watch it again.

Whatever I myself do, Just Mercy deserves to be seen by you, as a reminder of how important it is to help pay for the freedom of those who can't afford it themselves. The lawyer played by Michael B. Jordan, Bryan Stevenson, set up a law practice on a government grant to help inmates on death row, who obviously couldn't pay for the type of legal defense that would free them from that condemnation. Since that practice was set up in the late 1980s, Stevenson et al have helped 140 others in the position that Walter McMillian was in.

Instead of dying by electrocution back in the 1990s, McMillian lived until 2013, when he was claimed by dementia -- the same thing that got my own mother less than a month ago. Unlike my mother, McMillian's dementia appears to have been brought on by the trauma of his imprisonment.

Even if his death was hastened, though, McMillian got to live among a loving family for 20 more years before he died of what were, in most respects, natural causes.

Every wrongly imprisoned black man in America should be so lucky.

How Florida became the backdrop for great independent filmmaking

Florida is among the most peculiar of the continental United States. Hawaii and Alaska may have a leg up in being separated from the rest of the country by miles and miles of ocean or miles and miles of Canada, but among states that are actually connected to other states, there may be no greater odd duck. It's kind of the south, but it's kind of cosmopolitan. It's got swampland and it's got coastal beauty. It has a huge demographic diversity, from rednecks to senior citizens to African-Americans to displaced Cubans. It plays a pivotal role in every presidential election. It attracts such weirdness and such oddity that a Los Angeles morning radio show I used to listen to had a game called "Germany or Florida?", where some outlandish little news item was proffered and you had to guess which of those locations spawned it.

Perhaps all of this has helped make it the go-to destination for independent filmmakers trying to explore serious issues of culture, identity and the American dream, all with the option of palm trees in the background.

The title of this post suggests I'm going to explain how that happened. In fact, I can't do that, though it's possible if I went on the internet and pulled some threads, I might find out. It might be nothing more profound than that Florida offers good tax breaks for films that want to shoot there. Really, I just liked how that title sounded.

The latest example, the movie that gave the idea the critical mass in my head necessary to write this post, is Trey Edward Shults' Waves, a film whose late release date caused it to get kind of lost in the shuffle at the end of 2019. In fact, it hasn't yet debuted here in Australia, an eventuality that will arrive late next week. That release date may have been delayed by coronavirus but it may not have. Sometimes, late-year American releases don't come out in Australia until the following summer -- which is winter here, of course.

I myself saw it as a 99 cent rental on my American version of iTunes. That's also not the first time that has happened, that a U.S. film has reached that point where it's no longer a new video release, so can appear at a discount price for one week, but it still hasn't made its debut everywhere in the world.

One thing setting a film in Florida does is it allows for the collision of dissimilar types, who might not otherwise inhabit the same space. My first example, from back in 2013, does that very well. That's Harmony Korine's Spring Breakers, in which we get the science experiment of what happens when you combine college girls on spring break with drug dealers. Only in Florida, right? In that film -- which you know I think is brilliant, as I ranked it my second favorite of the last decade -- it allows for the college girls to find the drug dealers in themselves, and the drug dealer to find his inner college girl. That's all perfectly encapsulated in a single scene, where James Franco's Alien sits at an outdoor piano and delicately plinks out the notes for the Britney Spears ballad "Everytime," while the college girls in question dance around him wearing pink balaclavas and brandishing machine guns. Only in Florida, right?

The next film, chronologically, deals with a different sort of collision of things that seem diametrically opposed to one another, though they shouldn't. That's Barry Jenkins' Moonlight in 2016, which made my top ten of the year. Here you have the story of Chiron, who has a drug addicted mother and whose best male role model is himself a drug dealer. The twist is, of course, that Chiron is gay, a sexual preference that has a shameful history of acceptance in society in general, and in the African-American community in particular. There's something particularly Floridian about this coming of age story, as Chiron's formative sexual experience takes place on a beach by the titular moonlight. The image of Chiron being dipped in the waves by Juan, that drug dealer with a heart of gold, suggests a kind of baptism into a life of acceptance -- and also, indirectly, a life of crime.

The very next year, Sean Baker came back with The Florida Project, which, like Moonlight, also yielded a best supporting actor nomination, though Willem Dafoe did not win the statue that Mahershala Ali did. Like Moonlight, it also finished in my top ten for the year. The clash of apparent opposites here is between extreme poverty and Disney World. Baker stages the lives of children and their absent parents in a long-term motel that's adjacent to Disney World -- several miles adjacent, but close enough that the reflected glory still rests upon it, and the motels are given the types of names that might ensnare less discerning tourists. That the kids should be free to walk around in abandoned homes, and even set them ablaze, gives an indication of the duty to them that has been forfeited, and the chaos that exists just beneath what in many respects is a pretty surface. That chaos encapsulates Florida in general.

And finally we come to 2019 with Waves, which didn't yield any nominations of any kind, nor get the attention it deserved. Because I had no way to see it in time for my own best of 2019 list, it couldn't make the top ten, but I can pretty much assure you it would have made the top five if I had. Here is our first mismatch between the race of the filmmaker (white) and the race of his characters (black, with a few exceptions). Even six months later that disjuncture might already now seem problematic, but not the way Shults handles it, which is fair and credible and never assumes to know more than it does. The apparent contradiction in this story is that it revolves around an affluent black family -- and that, unfortunately, itself is a sad contradiction in what we expect from our depictions of African-Americans at the movies. Even though the members of this family have worked hard to rise above the limitations society tries to place on them, tragedy still reaches them, blurring the accomplishments of a successful businessman and his overachieving wrestler son. As much as the movie is not "about" race, racial issues bleed around the edges, and again, Florida is both the backdrop for this tarnished American dream, and in some ways, its cause. (The image above even recalls the Moonlight baptism scene.)

Four movies in six years does not a trend make, you might say. It could just be a coincidence that four superlative movies set in Florida, with similarly gorgeous looks, made by similarly visionary directors, happened to come out loosely within the space of a decade. The fact that it's closer to half a decade certainly strengthens the case, but it's still possible it's a coincidence.

However, it could also be true that there is something about the American soul that we need to wrestle with right now -- no pun intended -- that achieves its most profound dramatization in that oddest duck of states.

I'll put it this way: If in 2021 I see another Florida-set film advertised that reminds me of Spring Breakers, Moonlight, The Florida Project or Waves, I will be the first damn person in line.

Reverse Idiocracy

I didn't expect I'd have the occasion to write about Idiocracy again so soon after my recent May viewing.

But the anti-maskers -- note the similarity in that name to anti-vaxxers -- have made it so.

Of the many ways I have disagreed with the people in the MAGA crowd in the last four years, and especially in the last four months, the unwillingness to wear a mask is the one I want to talk about today. (I was going to say "the sharpest and most absurd," but truly, I consider it to be a sharper disagreement between us, and a more absurd thing to disagree about, that they hate black people.)

I should start by saying that I don't wear a mask, either. But I live in Australia, where maybe only one in 30 people can be seen wearing a mask. We just don't have coronavirus here like you do in America.

That said, when my wife diligently responded to having a sore throat by getting a COVID test, we made sure to isolate ourselves while awaiting the result. (She was negative.) And in fact, before she had a test and was just mulling over the idea, I did wear a basic surgical mask to the supermarket, as a means of protecting others from a contamination with which I might infect them.

If we lived in the U.S., we'd be wearing masks as a matter of course. We'd probably have some bespoke designer masks that we had acquired somewhere along the way these past four months.

Some people will not wear masks. They're largely of the MAGA persuasion, but not all. They don't care if they get coronavirus or give it to someone else.

Their reasoning, it appears, is that it is a restriction on their rights. That's what the sign above would indicate, but in this case, the whole "my body/my choice" argument is extremely hypocritical, if we are going to take it one step further and assume that the person carrying this sign is anti-abortion -- as the pro choice movement is, of course, where that phrasing originated. I should say, this person could be both pro choice and anti-mask -- again, trying not to make any more assumptions than necessary on who believes what.

The reason they seem to feel it infringes on their rights, though, is that they feel like a mask means you are hiding something. That's what I suspect, anyway. Whether that thing you're hiding is your own infection -- in which case, you aren't really "hiding" it, but rather, graciously trying to protect others from it -- or some secret agenda to overthrow the government -- the federal government now being something conservatives apparently support -- it's not clear. It's just that with a mask on, you can't be trusted. It's like what they used to say about people who grew beards.

One of the most absurd examples of this was when some conservative dickhead tweeted a photo of Joe Biden wearing a mask, as if the mere image were self-evidently ridiculous and/or untrustworthy. Biden was also wearing sunglasses in that shot, taking the level of "deception" one step further.

I don't actually really want to debate this issue in this post. And yes, I'm getting to the part that relates to movies.

Mike Judge's great 2006 satire, Idiocracy, presupposes that liberals who think too much are less, rather than more, likely to procreate. In an opening section that's an equal opportunity offender, these egghead liberals are lambasted for their tendency to wait on having children until they are financially stable or otherwise prepared for parenthood, mentally or emotionally. Meanwhile, careless rednecks are seen spreading their seed as far and wide as possible, causing an explosion in the population of people who have the same intellect and values that they do. And then, that population steadily weeding out everyone else over the course of 500 years.

Part of the reason it's so funny is that we secretly believe it's true. You just don't see as many conservative people waiting until they're 40 to have children as you see liberals. My wife and I are perfect examples. She's nearly 40 years older than our oldest child. We didn't wait because we were waiting to get settled in our careers, but rather, because we didn't meet each other until we were each a couple years into our 30s, and didn't marry until a few years after that. Still, others in our shoes might have been on second or third marriages by then, and already had teenagers.

What's occurring right now, though, seems to reverse Idiocracy's biological assumptions. People with conservative mindsets are now willingly taking part in behaviors that will decrease their chances of procreating, rather than increase them.

Although the more tasteful ones would scarcely own up to it, some liberals secretly rejoiced that Donald Trump held a campaign rally in Tulsa last weekend. Almost no one who attended would be caught dead wearing a mask -- and I have to wonder how those who did wear a mask explained themselves to those who didn't. Of course, not being caught dead wearing a mask meant that you could, very soon, be caught dead not wearing one. The secret rejoicing was over the notion that COVID-infected people not wearing masks would spread their infection to others, and that those people would take it home and infect their like-minded family members and acquaintances. There was an expected chain reaction of death that would purge the voter rolls of some likely Trump voters.

I don't like to openly engage in that line of reasoning because I tend to think "WWOD"? As in, What Would Obama Do? One of the great things about Barack Obama is that he taught us how to fight hard while still staying above the fray. God, I miss that guy.

But I'd be lying if I said I never thought about a thing like that, as merely a practical consideration. If nothing else, I am practical when it comes to Democratic politics. I haven't approached this election season with the idea of which Democratic candidate aligns most with my values. I've always wanted the person with the best chance of beating Trump to win the nomination, and I think we have that in Joe Biden. And if he adds Kamala Harris to his ticket, I think that will further strengthen the ticket on a practical level.

Practically speaking, having fewer voters alive who will vote for Trump also helps.

But it still amazes me that we could get to a point where conservatives -- whom we loosely and sometimes unfairly characterize as people who are only out for themselves -- would put themselves in a position where a reverse Idiocracy could be possible. Shouldn't the implied selfishness of their position make them even more likely to wear a mask? It's like they are embracing a traditionally liberal value -- the belief that society is helpful to the general cause, rather than harmful -- while liberals are telling us to be afraid of others in society, just as they should be afraid of us.

Yes indeed, somehow, it's the over-thinking liberals who are in a position to survive the current pandemic, while the conservatives will die for their beliefs.

Before Trump was elected, I had been hopeful that we would be heading towards a permanent Republican minority. Backwards ways of thinking would be steadily purged out of society as human beings inevitably evolved to be more loving and accepting of others. The election caused me to seriously rethink some of that.

But I didn't ultimately waver in my belief that society is heading in a good direction, rather than a bad one. And it's not that the bad people should be killed off, Idiocracy-style, so that the good ones may prevail. My hope was that the bad ones would steadily realize the errors of their ways as the human race evolved, and would opt to move us toward an Enligthenocracy rather than standing in its way.

And if not wearing masks helps get rid of some of those who will never evolve, and it's their violently expressed choice not to wear them, then I guess, so be it.

Finish What You Started: The Man Who Fell to Earth

This is the third in my bi-monthly 2020 series in which I finish movies that I had to leave unfinished at some point in the past.

It looks like I'm going to have to try a third time at some point with The Man Who Fell to Earth.

Oh, I watched the whole thing this time. I just didn't follow it very well. Or, like, at all.

When I read the plot synopsis on Wikipedia afterward, I determined I had not absorbed a significant number of plot points. Now, I was very tired. I did a five-mile run on Sunday afternoon before dinner. And I did have to nap in it because I foolishly waited until almost ten to start this two hour and twenty minute movie. But I paused during those naps and resumed only when I was sure I was awake.

This was actually the first Finish What You Started movie I've already written a post about failing to finish, that post coming back in 2012 and being called "Finishing what I started." Ha, that was probably in my subconscious when I selected the name for this series. A later choice in the series is also mentioned in that post. I probably wouldn't have remembered I'd written this post previously, except that when I was typing The Man Who Fell to Earth into the labels section of this post, it auto-completed, meaning I'd already used the label at least once before.

I see that similar circumstances thwarted my first attempt to watch it some ten years ago. Again it was a Sunday night, and again my window of opportunity was closing. In that case, the movie was due back at the library the next day, and I just started it too damn late. This time, I still had five days left on the iTunes rental before it expired, but I calculated my nights this week and determined that Sunday night would be my best chance to watch it.

But it's quite possible I just will never "get" this movie under any circumstances.

I was hoping that would not be the case. The director, Nicolas Roeg, made a film I really love, one of my formative movies in film class back in college. That is Don't Look Now, a film I've seen about four times, most recently about two years ago. One of the most famous scenes in that movie involves images of Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie having sex, intercut with images of them getting dressed afterward. It's quite memorable, especially since there's a lot of frank 70s nudity from both genders.

Well, you can definitely tell this is the same director, three years later, as there are any number of scenes of David Bowie or Rip Torn rolling around in bed with various naked young women, shot very similarly to that scene in Don't Look Now, and also intercut or cross cut with other material. It's almost a Rip Off rather than a Rip Torn, if you will. (Sorry, that was bad.) It being the same director probably relieves it of those accusations.

It's the non-sexual material, though, that left me cold in this one, where it engaged me so much in Don't Look Now.

The story that I couldn't follow involves Bowie's alien coming to earth to help relieve a drought on his home planet. We see his family in their alien space suits on this drought-stricken planet a couple times during the movie -- not enough for my liking, I'll say. Every time the action shifted to this setting in flashback, even for a moment, I really sat up and took notice.

But there's way too much in this film that isn't that, and worse, is stuff that I would lump into the category of material you'd find in one of John Cassavetes' more self-indulgent films. Not that I don't like Cassavetes, but when I don't like him, I really don't like him. His movie Faces is in that last category, and it involves entirely too much sex, drinking, and conversations that seem like they don't go anywhere. In other words, self-indulgence.

The Man Who Fell to Earth is, of course, far more abstract, but I still felt it had far too much pedestrian, behind-closed-doors wrangling between people. I suppose Roeg's purpose here is to explore how a pure alien life form can come to Earth and be corrupted by its influences, like alcohol and sex. I value that agenda. In fact, one of my favorite movies of last decade -- Under the Skin -- is sort of exploring the same thing.

Under the Skin accomplishes what it does better and with enviable economy. Its 108-minute running time prevents it from getting sidetracked in the way Roeg does over the course of 138 minutes. Now, having been in a pretty loose state of consciousness for a while there, I'd be hard pressed to tell you exactly what those tangents were. But I can tell you that if this movie had done more work to get me on board at the start, I think it could have kept my attention better. In recent years I've found that when you fall asleep during a movie, it's usually because the director is not doing the work to keep you. I don't fall asleep during movies in which I'm fully engaged, a prime example of that being that I don't fall asleep in movies I know I love, even though falling asleep would not be fatal to the viewing since I've already seen them. If I like the movie, and it holds my attention, it doesn't matter how tired I am.

Even if I couldn't tell you exactly what happened in The Man Who Fell to Earth -- the blame for which I share with Roeg -- I now know it is not, in fact, worth it to me to give it that third viewing, and second complete viewing, sometime in the future. This just isn't my movie, and it never will be.

I did want to mention, before leaving, that there is a funny coincidence between this movie and another I saw this weekend, whose coincidences with yet a third movie I saw this weekend were written about yesterday. Dorian Gray, which I saw on Friday night, has some similar themes to The Man Who Fell From Earth, which, in its final stages, presents us aged versions of the main characters, while Bowie's alien remains forever young -- and paralyzed in a purgatory of addiction and human excess, not unlike Dorian.

See, there are some good themes in here -- it's just Roeg couldn't focus on them enough to make a movie that spoke to me.

In August I will likely watch either Paddington or Withnail & I.

Pandemic reading list adaptation weekend, with butling by Pip Torrens

I didn't have a pandemic reading list per se, but when I worried I was piddling away my quarantine on comic books (Watchmen) and weirdly sex-obsessed Philip Roth novels (Sabbath's Theater), I started to kind of formulate one.

I followed Sabbath's Theater with a much-needed dip into the classics with Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. Ordinarily I don't go with two classics in a row, but circumstance pushed me to Jane Austen as next on my to-read list, with her classic, Pride and Prejudice. (And, as an English major, it shames me to say it was the first Austen I had ever read.)

The "circumstance" in question was that I drew Joe Wright's 2005 adaptation of Austen's most famous novel as my latest monthly selection in Flickchart Friends Favorites Fiesta. It's a Facebook group that is associated with the Flickchart movie-dueling website, and each month, you are randomly assigned the highest ranked movie on another person's Flickchart that you haven't yet seen.

Because that's the way I roll, I am very particular about completing the viewing within the month it is assigned. I can only remember two instances of missing my deadline, and in both cases, it was that I couldn't source the movie by the end of the month it was assigned, but did so within the first few days of the new month.

Pride and Prejudice presented me a slightly different obstacle. Although I've seen the Bollywood variation on the novel, Bride and Prejudice, as well as the genre mashup Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, I had never yet seen a straightforward adaptation of the book, and therefore, knew only vague things about the plot. I knew that there was some guy named Mr. Darcy and I knew that he ended up with the heroine, but beyond that, it was pretty foreign to me. Which, I suppose, says something about the two cinematic variations listed above.

Upon having the movie assigned to me, I was suddenly struck by the certainty that this was my last, best chance to actually read the book, assuming I wanted to read it before watching and didn't want to forfeit my assignment. So on the last Sunday before the month began, I went to my local bookseller and scooped it up.

Simply put, I loved it. I gobbled it up in pretty much record time for a 367-page novel -- at my slow reading pace, I mean -- which was 25 days. I finished this past Thursday.

So I always knew I was going to watch Pride and Prejudice -- or, properly, Pride & Prejudice, with the ampersand favored by Wright -- this weekend. That viewing ended up landing on Sunday morning. What I didn't know, couldn't have known, was that I would also watch an adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray on Friday night.

Yet I found myself in that circumstance while flipping through the options on Stan. After going through pages and pages of "trending" movies, nine out of every ten of which I'd seen, I landed on Oliver Parker's 2009 adaptation of his namesake's only novel, called simply Dorian Gray. At the time, the future connection with Pride & Prejudice didn't even occur to me. I just knew it would be interesting to see a recent adaptation of this book fresh off the reading of it, even though I was vaguely wary that the movie wasn't really on my radar in 2009, despite it being a period of great cinematic sentience for me in general.

I should say, I also loved The Picture of Dorian Gray. I did not love Dorian Gray, but there were things I admired about it quite a bit. For one, it had a very "wax stamp" type of production design -- that's the umbrella term I use for any movie that either has, or could have, a letter sealed with a wax stamp. The "wax stamp" here was a close-up of the acrylic paint as the artist squeezes it out and dabs it on the canvas.

The adaptation was generally faithful, with a few things changed for narrative convenience. I liked the actor chosen to portray the title character, Ben Barnes, whose name is familiar to me, but I couldn't immediately place him. (Ah, yes, he's in Westworld.) He's got an appearance suited to the role, seeming quite innocent and beautiful, but then quite believably being able to be corrupted into evil.

In the second half, the combining of characters and circumstances becomes a bit more unbalanced, and things become a lot more overheated, so it kind of heads toward a pulpy, effects-laden finale. I shouldn't criticize the effects, though, because I must admit, one of the bits of great interest to me was how sinister they would make the aging painting at the film's center. Ultimately, it's not a huge surprise this wasn't something I considered in 2009 when formulating my year-end list, as it isn't that worthy of an effort in the end. Still enjoyable, but just not quite there.

The comparatively pedestrian look of Dorian Gray was drawn into sharp relief when I got to Pride & Prejudice on Sunday morning. That movie was about a painting, but this one looks like one. I was in awe of Wright's compositions and the way Roman Osin photographs them. I was reminded also that Wright is the man behind the extended Dunkirk beach single take in Atonement. I hadn't expected much cinematic derring do going in, but Wright gives us a breathtaking single shot in this film in which the camera weaves through a busy ball, catching all manner of characters in the midst of all manner of interactions, and frequently, the same characters a different time, interacting with different characters. I positively gaped at that one.

It was really useful to have just read the book, though Deborah Moggach's script is so clear and concise that I mightn't have needed it anyway. In fact, near the start of the book I found my head spinning a bit at the number of characters introduced, and though Moggach and Wright introduce them all here as well, I feel quite certain that on the evidence of the script alone I would have kept them straight in this case.

I've written too much about other things to turn this into the full-on Pride & Prejudice gush-fest I want to give you, but I can't depart without discussing the performances. Keira Knightley is wonderful in this film, a true revelation. Such a stellar cast: Donald Sutherland, Brenda Blethyn, Rosamund Pike, Tom Hollander, Judi Densch, Jena Malone and Carey Mulligan -- the last before anyone had heard of her, I think. If I first saw Pike in this rather than one of her later roles, I wouldn't probably have started out thinking she had dead eyes, which is something I wrote about back in this post. As for Matthew MacFadyen as Mr. Darcy ... he didn't look at all as I imagined him while reading, but he's very definitely convincing as a person who doesn't start out very charming. As Elizabeth Bennet grows to love him, I sort of did too.

But I can't take off, either, without explaining what the hell I meant by the second half of the subject of this post. "Butling by Pip Torrens"?

This is a good one.

When I started watching Dorian Gray, I instantly recognized Pip Torrens as the title character's butler/footman/what have you. Not by name, but by role. Before I looked up his name, I knew Torrens played the queen's secretary on The Crown, Tommy Lascelles. Here he is:

The same qualities that make him a logical choice to play Tommy Lascelles also make him a logical choice to play butlers.

You'll notice I said "butlers," plural. Because lo and behold, who should be waiting on the well-to-do in Pride & Prejudice, as well? That's right, good ol' Pip Torrens -- possibly only in one scene, but I saw him. I caught that distinctive mug, confirmed it online, and laughed my fool head off.

There's one more coincidence between the two movies that's worth pointing out, especially on a blog that likes coincidences as much as this one does. An actor I haven't mentioned in Dorian Gray -- well, I only mentioned one in the first place -- is Colin Firth as Henry Wotton, the libertine who sets Dorian on his path to ruin. Firth does fit what I imagined for that role, and he classes up the joint whenever he's on screen. (As does Rebecca Hall, I should say.)

The reason that's funny is that Firth is known to BBC audiences for one of the earliest roles that thrust him into the spotlight: A one Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy in the 1995 television minseries version of Pride and Prejudice.

And that's all I have to say about that.

Tenet-pole

As goes Tenet, so goes the entire film industry.

Christopher Nolan's latest has been pushed back a second time. Whereas once it was set to debut on July 17th, then that dropped two weeks later to July 31st. Now it is has fallen again, another 12 days, to August 12th.

This matters not because I am dying to see Tenet, though I guess I am -- really, I'm just dying to see anything that does not look like it was made for Netflix, or seemed like a perfectly logical candidate to end up there.

No, it's because no one else seems ready to do a damn thing until Tenet figures out what it's doing.

This is not entirely true -- the most recent plan was to have Disney bring out Mulan a week earlier than that, on July 24th. I have not heard that this has been postponed yet, but in the wake of Tenet's decision, it may now be.

The theory for some time now is that Tenet, with its massive girth, length and Christopher Nolan-ness, would point the way for every other movie with aspirations to open while it's still summer in the U.S. It was fashioned -- if not by official assignation, then by group consensus -- as a kind of tentpole for the whole summer movie season. A Tenet-pole, if you will.

But as the film continues to recede toward autumn, I'm wondering if movie theaters can take it.

We've got some open here. And even though they are not the ones with the biggest screens -- those seem to be waiting for a steady flow of Hollywood releases -- you get the sense that they, too, are hanging on in anticipation; waiting, if not for Tenet itself, then at least for Tenet's run-off.

But instead of providing run-off, Tenet has just run off.

I'm not saying it's the wrong decision. We're second-waving it even here in Australia. In fact, whereas things looked pretty optimistic a couple weeks ago, now I'm actually hearing that there are runs on the grocery stores again. Seriously? That's so fucking March, people.

But I feel like, in a very real sense, whole giant swaths of the economy are wrapped up in Tenet's giant, gangly legs, and as it trips, so does everything else. I feel like there are theaters that may have targeted Tenet's opening weekend as a time to finally throw open their doors, to put Tenet on all ten damn screens in the place at once, so they can reduce available capacity in each screening space by two-thirds.

If that was their plan, now they will have to wait 12 days longer, and that's 12 further days that hungry theater staff won't be working, and that their employers will not be making any revenue in order to pay them. How long can it continue?

You know what, I'm pretty much jack of all this COVID-19 shit.

Joyfully shameless

I've had my doubts about how big of a film fan my older son is likely to become.

I don't worry quite so much about the six-year-old as the nine-year-old. The younger one has always gravitated a bit more toward long-form content, while his older brother tends to prefer video games during so-called "quiet time" -- the time each day that Mummy and Daddy take for themselves.

But a movie about a kid going up against adult professional wrestlers taught me I may not have anything worry about.

The Main Event on Netflix had been on our radar for a couple months now. My wife told me I recommended it as an option for a sleepover at their auntie's house, but I don't remember that. That viewing didn't happen, but the kids put it on yesterday when we gave them some "quiet time" on a Thursday afternoon after school got out.

I was, of course, not watching with them -- though I suppose I could have been, given my vacuum cleaner mentality toward all movies I haven't seen. I was, however, in the room as the film was reaching its climax, as I was folding laundry while my wife prepared dinner.

The younger one had actually lost interest on this one and was griping about it being "his choose," which is a problematic scenario when you are watching a movie -- one person's "choose," in this case, lasts upwards of 90 minutes.

But the older one was rapt, deeply involved in the story of a very young kid (like, probably my son's age) wrestling someone who was literally five times his weight and twice his height. The visual was so funny that I laughed, thinking it had to be intended as a joke (and Ken Marino was in the scene on the sidelines, increasing the association with comedy). But my son wasn't laughing as he remained deeply invested in the film's climax.

There were three things I took from observing my son during the last 15 minutes of this film:

1) Even though I was laughing, and even though that was not apparently the correct reaction to the material, my son didn't shoosh me or tell me I was ruining the viewing. And believe me, he's capable of that. No, he just continued watching.

2) He similarly was not bothered by my hovering. You can't fold laundry without hovering, and I know it would drive me to distraction if my wife were doing that while I was watching a movie, especially its ending. (Or if my kids were doing it, but ... that would never happen.)

3) When the inevitable triumphant finish arrived, my son yelled out "Yes!!" and had a big goofy grin on his face. He didn't look around to notice who had caught him out getting caught up in the big climax. He was just joyfully shameless.

Any time you can become so transported by the ending of a movie like The Main Event, there's no end to the possibilities for your future as a cinephile.

I hope he maintains this joyful shamelessness throughout the rest of his viewing career.

Joel Schumacher's five best films

It took me until three days later to learn of the death of Joel Schumacher. I must have been hiding in my COVID hole even more than usual this week.

Schumacher was known as one of cinema's great punching bags, a hack who was an easy go-to any time you were looking for someone quick to dump on. He was also known as a bit of a dandy, as he was openly gay for the majority of his career, which seems quite courageous and did nothing to impede his upward mobility. (The claim that he had slept with 20,000 men sounds as absurd as when Wilt Chamberlain said the same thing about women. If true, it's a miracle that he died of cancer rather than AIDS.)

And yeah, he made his share of turds. But making your share of turds is something that happens when you average .76 films per year over a feature directing career that lasted exactly 30 years (1981 to 2011). The man liked to work, and if all his choices didn't land critically, he didn't care. He just moved on to the next one.

I probably did my share of dumping on Joel Schumacher over the years; every critic did. I mean, he did direct Batman & Robin. But I had a soft spot for the guy, as he also made a handful of films I liked more than most other people did. Today I want to talk about my five favorite.

5. The Lost Boys (1987) - As this is probably Schumacher's most beloved film and I'm trying to highlight his films that were underappreciated, this makes for a good entry to start with at #5. Besides, I've actually only seen The Lost Boys once, even though it is a childhood favorite for people in my age group. I'm sure this film would feel quite dated if I cued it up today, but at the time, I remember The Lost Boys having a real sense of atmosphere and danger. (I also liked the song "Cry Little Sister," which I found haunting in a teen-angsty type of way.) It was Twilight two decades before Twilight, only good.

4. The Phantom of the Opera (2004) - I remember this movie did not do well and was generally dismissed by critics and audiences alike, but I had quite a different experience with it. I really admired the art direction, and considered it dramatically potent to boot. Emmy Rossum was perfectly ethereal in the Christine role, and fun fact: Did you remember that this is where most of the world -- those who saw it, anyway -- was first introduced to Gerard Butler? I'm sure an affection for Andrew Lloyd Weber's original show had something to do with my appreciation, but I'm hardly the only person in the audience who could make that claim, and I liked it more than they did.

3. Falling Down (1993) - Another film that was generally rejected that really struck a chord with me. And no, that wasn't for the reasons it got discussed in the media at the time, as an encapsulation of the rage of the white male who feels like he's losing his country to women and immigrants. No, I actually
wrote an extended piece in a film class about this movie, which I believe likened Michael Douglas' main character (known only by his license plate number, DFENS) to Frankenstein's monster. It was a film class on German Expressionism. I probably couldn't rehash my argument at all now, but the themes I identified spoke to me at that time.

2. Flatliners (1990) - That mood I mentioned in The Lost Boys? It's in Flatliners too. (As is Kiefer Sutherland -- maybe he's the common ingredient.) I think there's something to the idea that Schumacher had a way of engaging with young people's nascent grappling with death, or maybe just this young person, as I would have been 16 at the time I saw this. I remember being specifically haunted by the character of Julia Roberts' father, who killed himself. This movie was in my wheelhouse when I saw it and I was disappointed (though not surprised) that the remake, which I saw earlier this year, couldn't accomplish anything like what Schumacher did the first time around.

1. A Time to Kill (1996) - And Kiefer Sutherland makes his third appearance on this list. I can't really tell you why A Time to Kill lodged itself in my brain and wouldn't shake free -- seeing it with a girlfriend I was head over heels for could have had something to do with it -- but I can tell you that I ranked it tenth out of the films I saw in 1996. Schumacher was known for identifying young male actors with bright futures ahead of them (natch) and so it was with this film, which gave us Matthew McConaughey. I'm sure this film is way too overwrought and overheated for its own good, but something about it really clicked for me, and I always remember the performance McConaughey gives when he's doubled over with emotion in his climactic summation.

Rest in peace, Joel. You weren't always great, but you were a constant during three decades of important cinematic maturation for me, and for that I thank you.

Needing no introduction

I did get to Resistance, the movie I was supposed to see in the theater on Monday night, on Tuesday night instead. As I think I mentioned in yesterday's post, I had the option of a screener link to watch, and availed myself of that option in order to put up a review.

It was fine. I haven't written my review yet. I'm still trying to decide whether to marginally recommend people see it or marginally steer them clear.

First, though, I want to write about a peculiarity in the movie's closing credits.

One of the first faces you see in the movie is Edgar Ramirez, who, through the dumb luck of production and release schedules, is appearing in the second of three new releases I will see before the month is out. He had a starring role in The Last Days of American Crime, which I reviewed back at the beginning of the month, and appears to have a similar sized role in Olivier Assayas' Wasp Network, which I expect to watch and subsequently review on Thursday. His role is much smaller here, and I didn't come here today to talk to you about Edgar Ramirez.

But another of the first faces you see is a young actress named Bella Ramsey, who was very familiar to me. It took me until after the closing credits rolled to figure out why:

That's right, she's the badass preteen noblewoman of the north, Lyanna Mormont, from Game of Thrones, who has twice the courage of men twice her age.

I probably would not have looked her up at all, though -- and would have remained ignorant of the connection -- if it weren't for the peculiar placing of her name in the credits.

After about eight of the movie's adult stars are listed, her name comes on screen as follows: "Introducing Bella Ramsey as Elsbeth."

Given that I know how the "introducing" credit is typically used, I knew it had to be her, even though I didn't know her character's name was Lisbeth. (I was paying attention, really I was.) But then I thought "Well, that can't be her, because I know I know that actress, even though I can't remember from where. They wouldn't 'introduce' an actress I know, would they?"

As it turns out, they would.

Ramsey was actually "introduced" to us ages ago. She first appeared on GOT as long ago as 2016, when she was a wee young lass of 13, or possibly even 12. (And no, she's not from Scotland, but I thought it fit here.) She went on to appear in eight more episodes.

Investigating further into the use, or possible misuse, of the "introducing" credit, I found Wikipedia has this to say on the matter:

"If an unfamiliar actor has the lead role, he may be listed last in the list of principal supporting actors, his name prefixed with 'and introducing' (as Peter O'Toole was in Lawrence of Arabia). However 'and introducing' is now mostly used in feature films by a young actor (usually a child) who appears for the first time in a motion picture."

So I thought that maybe this is the explanation, that while Ramsey had appeared in a TV show, she may never yet have appeared in a movie. Well, no, that's not it either. Prior to Resistance, Ramsey also had the following movie credits:

Two for Joy (2018) as "Miranda"
Holmes & Watson (2018) as "Flotsam"
Princess Emmy (2019) as "Princess Gizana"
Judy (2019) as "Lorna Luft"

To say nothing of the five short films she has also appeared in.

And why wouldn't she be in all these films, given how she commands the screen so memorably in a relatively short amount of screen time on Game of Thrones? (Er, memorably enough for me to know I knew her, if not immediately to know how.)

Resistance may be the most central to any film she's been in. But in one of those other films (Judy) she plays an actual person, the daughter of the title character, and she's also been on four other TV shows in addition to GOT.

In other words, thanks but no thanks. The special spotlight she gets in the credits is nice and all, but you don't need to "introduce" us to Bella Ramsey, thank you very much.

In fact, if you're not careful, she might introduce you to the cold steel of her blade, and then spit on your corpse.

Thus ends my life's longest theater drought

The last time I went to the movies, things were heading Downhill. My return to the cinema was met with Resistance, but then ultimately, I got to have the Hearts and Bones of the theatrical moviegoing experience I had been missing.

Or here's another way I could have started:

Okay, smart guy, I know what you're going to say. "What, you really never had a drought this long without going to a movie theater, even when you were a baby?"

Yes, sure, when I was a baby. But I think it's possible that ever since Star Wars was my first movie back in 1977, when I was not yet four years old, I may never have gone this long without going to the movies -- be it a new release, a Disney re-release, or even Star Wars again.

How long, exactly?

That would be 104 days.

Yes indeed, I saw the Force Majeure Hollywood remake Downhill back on March 10th, and did not see my next movie in the theater, the Australian film Hearts and Bones, until last night, June 22nd.

It needn't have been quite that long, as the theaters didn't close in Australia for nearly two weeks after I saw Downhill. But there was nothing I really wanted to see at that time -- I hemmed and hawed on Bloodshot, as I wrote about here -- and then the doors were closed and locked at most theaters.

For the next three months.

Finally, as restrictions have started to loosen, a couple of the arthouse theaters announced they would open their doors again on June 22nd, the first day the government permitted it, a couple weeks ahead of their multiplex counterparts.

You better bet that I was there on opening night.

The stuff that's playing now is a weird mixture of movies that had not quite finished their theatrical run when COVID hit (like The Invisible Man), movies being brought back out just to excite people who missed them the first time (like Parasite), and movies that had a VOD release during the lockdown.

That last category includes the movie I ended up seeing, Hearts and Bones, as well as the movie I was supposed to see, Resistance. Resistance is the story of Marcel Marceau before his miming days, when he was a resistance fighter in World War II, and he's played by Jessie Eisenberg. I had the offer of a free screener of this movie in order to review it, but I set it aside as my big "return-to-the-theater" movie.

But now I'll need that free screener, as Resistance was sold out when I got there. And while that might seem like a really encouraging sign for the health of theater-going as an experience with ongoing relevance in our society, "sold out" in this case means that the maximum 20 tickets per screening room were sold. I had considered booking online -- my critics card is not being accepted in the short run anyway, and Cinema Lido in Hawthorn is doing $10 tickets all week -- but I ultimately did not.

So Hearts and Bones it was. It's a story of a war photographer (Hugo Weaving) whose work is about to be exhibited as a sort of career retrospective, until a South Sudanese Sydneysider (that being the name for people who live in Sydney) asks him to spare the world the pain of revisiting the traumas of a massacre in his village. I liked it.

Because my intention in this post is not really to write about either of those movies, the one I saw and the one I didn't, I'll just tell you what it was like to finally return to a movie theater.

For one, their ticket kiosk at street level was not open. As that hermetically sealed space actually has a built-in protection against the spread of disease, that may have been an unrelated operational decision. I bought my tickets from the candy bar, as it is called here in Australia, after squirting hand sanitizer on my hands at the entrance. A similar hand sanitation station greeted us at the ticket taker's spot.

I had thought there might be seats blocked off, ensuring that social distancing was preserved. But blocking off particular seats might prevent full groups from sitting together, and that ended up being the mandate -- leave 1.5 meters distance between yourself and another group, though you can sit consecutively with members of your own group. I guess the theory is, if you decided to come to the movies with them, you probably either shared a car or a domestic space anyway.

Oh, and I almost forgot to mention -- or rather, did forget, and am now updating the post several hours later -- that I had to give my name and phone number, in case they need to call me to tell me I have gotten coronavirus from their seats. But that's been standard practice most of the public places I've gone recently.

People seemed happy to be back. I mean, I didn't specifically hear anyone say "It's so good to be back at the movies!", but there was enough of a general buzz that this can be inferred.

Still, I had to wonder what kind of model this could be for a theater going forward. Not a profitable one, to be sure. Selling a maximum of twenty $10 tickets per theater per viewing block limits how much money you can legitimately make, especially since there seemed to be as many as seven or eight staff working. I made sure to buy some candy, just to help that little extra bit.

I don't suppose the theaters are in it for the money, at least not right now. They'd have to be doing it out of the goodness of providing this service to the people ... and perhaps building in some customer loyalty for the future, when times are better.

If that future ever gets here. As we have started opening things up lately here in Victoria, we have also created the conditions for a second wave. There are something like 20 new cases of coronavirus per day being announced in this state, and some people are worried that could bring us right back into lockdown -- perhaps even a more severe version of the lockdown than the one we had previously.

This has all happened in the last week, and the suddenness of it has probably prevented the government from scuttling the reopening of movie theaters. Still, I'm glad I went last night, because if momentum toward another lockdown gains steam this week, I could be looking at another 100 days away from movie theaters.

Remembering Ian Holm, and also my mother

I said I wasn't going to memorialize my mother again on this blog, but I never said memories of her wouldn't creep into other posts accidentally. (Besides, grieving is an unpredictable thing ... you probably should not make too many rules.)

I wasn't going to write a proper "in memoriam" post for Ian Holm, either, maybe especially on the heels of remembering my mother on this blog. The first return to fondly remembering another deceased cinematic luminary needed to be someone really important to me, not someone more on the margins like Holm.

But then the movie in which I first met him entered my head, and pushed its way past the other candidates for a Saturday night viewing.

Many people who have been remembering Ian Holm in the past day or so, since his death at age 88 was announced, have been focused on what are considered his signature roles in major contributions to the zeitgeist, like Alien and Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. In fact, he is so fondly remembered as Bilbo Baggins that you almost forget, for a moment, that he never played this character as the star of his own movie. When it was time to tell Bilbo's story, Martin Freeman was the choice, which makes sense, given that Holm was in his late 70s.

For me, though, Ian Holm was first and foremost Napoleon Bonaparte in Time Bandits, a role with only about ten minutes of screen time -- which, I guess, is something it has in common with Bilbo.

Like The Cable Guy, which I wrote about yesterday, Time Bandits is also in an extremely elevated position on my Flickchart, all the way up at #25 overall. Like The Cable Guy, I had only once previously tagged it on this blog. Though in a way that's even stranger than only writing about The Cable Guy once, as Time Bandits has been around for 15 years longer and was one of the movies I wore out on VHS when I was growing up. I'm sure that's due in large part to the fact that before this viewing, I hadn't watched it since 2007, which was two years before this blog existed.

If you aren't familiar with the basic set-up of Terry Gilliam's best film, well, you have some homework to do. But I'll nutshell it here for you. It involves a group of little people who steal a map from the Supreme Being, for whom they worked in helping create the world. The map shows the time holes that were left when they had to create the whole earth in only seven days, and they can travel through these portals to other periods of history, where they can steal the riches of famous people and then vanish into thin air, quite literally. (Well, it actually involves running through a cool black door-sized portal that opens and stays open for about a minute.) Along the way they acquire our protagonist, 11-year-old Kevin, after ending up in his bedroom in modern-day England.

As they select their targets, their first stop is to make off with Napoleon's riches. The whole sequence is masterfully absurd. The famous diminutive military leader is in the process of sacking an Italian city during the Napoleonic Wars, and he has basically driven the local population into total submission. However, instead of ordering a halt to the attacks, and accepting the surrender of the locals -- a measure his two trusted advisers urge him to make post haste -- he wants to watch a Punch and Judy show featuring two puppets smacking each other with sticks. Any attempt to divert him from this diversion is met with great anger and frustration. When the puppeteer is shot and killed, the desperate stage manager hustles the band of robbers on stage, as an alternative to shooting himself in the head. It's an accidental masterstroke, as the size-obsessed dictator professes to like "Little things, hitting each other!"

The bulk of Holm's time on screen involves snapping at his generals and laughing like a loon at the entertainment options proffered for him. But then there's also the following scene where a pickled Napoleon lists a succession of former great military and political leaders who were shorter than he is. He passes out and the little people, made generals in the stead of their disappointing precursors, steal a bunch of paintings, jewelry and gold goblets that happen to be piled up in the very banquet hall where Napoleon loses consciousness.

It would be a stretch to say that Holm plays any significant role in making Time Bandits as great as it is, at least not in comparison to any of the other stars who have about the same amount of screen time as he does (among them Sean Connery). But it's always the first role that comes to mind for me for a great actor whose presence on screen always portended good things.

It wasn't Holm's contributions to the film -- which are over by the 20-minute mark -- that comprised the largest share of my takeaway from Time Bandits on this viewing. In fact, as I was watching, I kept on being reminded how much my mother loved this movie, especially the parts that made her laugh.

I don't ever remember sitting down to watch Time Bandits with my mother on VHS. As a parent now, I am only too aware how important it is to get stuff done during the precious time when the TV is keeping your children engaged. But my mom would have definitely been with us when we saw it in the theater, and I have a memory now of her lingering by the TV to watch certain key moments -- as I also now do when my children are watching a movie I love.

Specifically, I remember her reacting so enthusiastically to the moments involving Gilliam's fellow Monty Pythons, John Cleese and Michael Palin. Which is kind of a mind-blowing revelation, in fact, because I'd always thought my love for Monty Python came more from my dad than from my mom. My dad and I have actually performed Monty Python skits live together, but the evidence of Time Bandits shows that my mom was equally tickled by Python's antics. I guess it was something they had in common.

In fact, had my mother lingered at just the right time -- as she did on multiple occasions, I would guess -- she would have gotten to see both moments that I specifically remember making her laugh. The first of these is when the bandits are arriving in the Middle Ages, and they land on a carriage being pulled by horses and containing Palin and Shelley Duvall. Palin, a real dandy and a poor sample of masculinity, and Duvall, a goofy and frivolous woman, are talking about their future together, and the conversation turns to Palin's embarrassing "personal problem." What this problem is, exactly, is never unveiled, but we are meant to assume it relates either to his sexual stamina, or to incontinence. I remember my mother loved this particular exchange:

Duvall: "So you don't still have to wear the special --?"
Palin: "No, I don't have to wear the -- special -- anymore."

The delivery of Palin's line always made my mother guffaw, as it contains the perfect awkward pause as Palin leaves out the key word in the sentence, which neither of them dare speak. (Humorously, the two actors return later, on the Titanic, I guess suggesting that silly prats and their silly would-be fiancees are an ever-recurring dynamic throughout time.)

A few minutes after a fleeing Palin and Duvall are robbed and tied to a tree -- "The problem! THE PROBLEM!" he cries -- the bandits come across Robin Hood, played by Cleese. This Robin Hood is a cheery, charming fellow who talks the bandits into donating their early 19th century treasures to the poor merely by power of suggestion -- or, also, the implication that his goons and ruffians will beat the robbers senseless should they refuse. (We see an example of this as one particularly rough character insists on punching each poor person after gifting them with a shiny object.)

As the bandits are making off with at least their lives if not their loot, Hood (as he introduces himself) waves at them and says "Thank you very much. Thank you very, very, very, very, very much." When he's sure they're out of earshot, he says under his breath "What awful people."

That always got my mom, too.

As I looked in on the last time I wrote about Time Bandits in 2010, I noticed the film was mentioned in the context of me talking about movies I had requested from my family for Christmas that year. And in that post I wrote this:

"I chose Time Bandits as the art for this post because that's the one I'm most likely to get. In her response to my email, my mom said she was glad that Time Bandits still held such a place in my heart all these years later. I wore out our VHS copy of it back in the 1980s, and though I don't remember watching it with her very often, neither does it surprise me that she loved it too."

Aww.

I suppose there is one last person -- or rather, group of people -- who I want to memorialize in this post. And that is the bandits themselves.

Now, many adults who appeared in a movie that came out in 1981, nearly 40 years ago, could be dead now for any number of reasons. When the adult in question has dwarfism, though, that is far more likely of an outcome. And as I was watching Time Bandits on this occasion, it occurred to me that not only could all the bandits have passed on, it was by far the most likely outcome.

When the film ended, I decided to look it up.

Randall, the leader of the bandits (even though they agreed no leader, according to Strutter), was played by David Rappaport. Rappaport died only nine years after Time Bandits, and his death was not related to his condition -- at least not directly. He suffered from depression, and ended up killing himself in 1990, at only age 38. Very sad. During this viewing, I made note of what a good actor I thought Rappaport was. They're all good, really -- it shouldn't be assumed that someone with dwarfism is somehow limited in their acting skills -- but as the bandit with the most screen time, he carries more of the acting burden than the others. And carries it wonderfully.

Kenny Baker, who played Fidgit (and of course, also, R2D2), lived a good long life for a person with dwarfism, surviving until age 81 at his death in 2016. Wikipedia just says he had a "brief illness." It's heartening that he at least received a proper send-off when he passed four years ago, even though it was a bit hard to quantify his contribution to R2D2 because his face was never seen on screen. I was always affected by his performance here since he's the only bandit who "dies" in the movie. (Which of course the Supreme Being ultimately reverses.)

Jack Purvis, who played Wally, lived until age 60. He actually managed to live six more years after becoming a quadriplegic during a car repair accident in 1991. I just now learned that it was the death of Rappaport and the incapacitation of Purvis that caused Gilliam to shelve a Time Bandits sequel. Probably best that we never got that sequel for other reasons, but it's sad that these were the actual reasons.

Malcolm Dixon, the actor who played Strutter, might be the most interesting case of all. Wikipedia does not have a birth date for Dixon, but it does have a death date, and that date is only just two months ago on April 9, 2020. Considering that Strutter always struck me as the oldest-looking bandit, and that he has credits as long ago as the 1960s, he might have been even older than Baker when he died. The cause of death had not been released when the article was written. Jeez, it might have been COVID.

Tiny Ross, who played the omnivore Vermin, is the only actor among the bandits who does not have his own Wikipedia page. But looking on google tells me he died in 1994. IMDB tells me he filmed the climactic scene of Time Bandits with a broken arm he sustained during filming. The sling is hidden by the knight riding the horse on which he's also riding. Good on him.

That leaves only one more bandit, Og, played by Mike Edmonds.

And you know what?

Mike Edmonds is still alive.

He's 76. And here's what he looked like in 2014, when he was 70:

Thank heavens for small favors -- and for the ability to end this "in memoriam" piece on a positive note.

Ben Stiller's unlikely coterie of 1996 collaborators

It seems impossible to believe that I have only tagged The Cable Guy once on this blog. It has to have come up more than once, but only once did I consider that the discussion merited giving it a "label" (the tags appearing at the bottom of the post), which enables you to search the blog by subject matter. And in that post, I didn't even use its poster, so according to my own rules for never using the same poster art twice on the blog, its poster still remains available for use in this here post today.

This lack of Cable Guy love on my blog surprises me because the movie is in my top 20 all time on Flickchart. It doesn't just barely eke into the top 20, either. It is my full-on #12 movie of all time, so it's closer to my top 10 than my 20-30.

It is by far the most surprising choice in my top 20. I won't go on at length about how it scaled these heights in my personal film rankings, nor will I apologize for it or feel guilty about it. On what was probably my tenth viewing of it on Thursday night -- I only have the last three recorded, so that's just an estimate -- I still loved it. Just to give you some explanation, I first saw it under the absolute perfect circumstances to appreciate it, and it became a minor religion for a couple friends and me for years afterward, as we would quote it incessantly. In fact, the reason for my viewing on Thursday, my first in six years, was having a phone call with one of those friends, and still being able to quote lines to each other like we'd just seen it last week rather than 24 years ago.

So while The Cable Guy undoubtedly deserves some post where I plumb the controversial depths of its brilliance -- I'm reminded, from recently exposing it to other film fans in a monthly project to watch each others' highest ranked films, that few people like it as much as I do -- today I am instead going to focus on something I gleaned from the movie for the first time on my tenth viewing.

The Cable Guy and Flirting With Disaster were in close proximity on my 1996 year-end rankings, the first such one I ever did, coming in at #4 and #2, respectively. (For the record, Fargo, which is now ahead of them both, was my #3, and Looking for Richard, which I have only seen once, was my #1.) But I have never actually watched them in close proximity until now, as my most recent Flirting viewing was just at the end of May.

The thing these two films have in common, other than their release year and being squirm-inducing comedies that focus on socially awkward scenarios, is Ben Stiller. So, pretty great year for Ben Stiller, at least in my corner of the world. He's the star of Flirting With Disaster and the director of The Cable Guy. (Didn't know that, did you?) He also appears in a small role, or actually a small dual role, in The Cable Guy, as twin child actors Sam and Stan Sweet, the one of whom grew up to murder the other, whose trial is a running bit throughout the movie. One of the movie's many sharp satires of the tabloid entertainment machine of the mid-1990s.

But Stiller is not the only thing the movies have in common, and as I was watching on Thursday night, I kept noticing them.

The first one I have always known, which is that comic actor George Segal appears in both. In both films he plays the father, Stiller's adopted father in Flirting, and the biological father of the character Stiller would have played had he starred in The Cable Guy rather than directing it, which is instead played by Matthew Broderick. (I would never switch out Broderick for Stiller, since Broderick's performance is one of the reasons this movie is so good.) Checking on Wikipedia just now, I am pleased to see that Segal is still alive. For some reason I thought he had died.

Here's George from The Cable Guy. You know him:

But you may not know Shawn Michael Howard, who has not had quite the career Segal's had, though he's been busy enough over the years. Here's Shawn from around that same time, though I can't find any pictures of him from either movie, since his role is so small:

Only on this viewing did I realize that the guy who attempts to "car-jack" Stiller and company in Fliriting -- who is actually a member of a church group trying to return Stiller's lost jacket -- is the same guy who appears in the basketball scene in The Cable Guy, where Jim Carrey shatters the backboard after a monstrous dunk.

Neither film's Wikipedia page reveals when the movies were shot, and I can't be bothered to dig deeper on the internet to find out. But if we are to assume that they had the same delays between shooting and release as each other, and Flirting was released three months before The Cable Guy, I can see Stiller working with Howard on Flirting and then offering him a role in The Cable Guy.

The same basic timeframe and sequence of events could apply to Cynthia LaMontagne, whom you also probably don't know, but whose picture I could find in one of the films, in this case, Fliriting. Here is Cynthia:

She's the one on the left.

Her role in Flirting is memorable enough, as she has maybe five to ten lines of dialogue in a five-minute scene, where she's one of the potential biological sisters of Stiller's Mel Copeland, though of course the adoption agency made an error. Her presence in The Cable Guy may have been the real forehead-smacking find on this viewing, as it's really of the blink-and-you'll-miss-it variety. She plays the restaurant hostess seen for just a couple seconds when Leslie Mann goes on her date with Owen Wilson.

Alas, as women are never allowed to stick around Hollywood as long as men, she hasn't had a role in anything in 12 years.

The interesting thing is that their collaborations with Stiller were indeed limited to that year. LaMontagne didn't appear in another Stiller film, though she did work with Judd Apatow, the Cable Guy producer, again in her final role, as a bartender in Forgetting Sarah Marshall. (I noticed that IMDB lists her as "Female Bartender," which should go without saying -- why do you need to clarify the gender?) And though Howard is still working, I don't see any other credit in his IMDB that relates to Stiller, though he did appear on an episode of Mr. Show, which features Cable Guy cameos David Cross and Bob Odenkirk, before they were famous enough to be considered cameos. (Interesting to note that when you search Howard on IMDB, the brief description that clarifies who he is says "Actor, The Cable Guy (1996)." I'm not even sure he has a line of dialogue.)

With Segal, the one most likely to have worked with Stiller again, I could not find anything that had even a couple degrees of Kevin Bacon separation from Stiller.

I'm wondering whether Stiller would have worked with these three again if The Cable Guy had not been such a massive flop, and if he were not so eager to purge anything and everything about it from his memory. Too bad. I always planned to tell Stiller, if I met him, how much I loved The Cable Guy, but I chickened out on my lone opportunity, when he and I were both in the same bathroom during intermission for a play.

I'm sure these sightings are not nearly as interesting to you as they are to me, but I think I also might be one of the only people who could even make them in the first place. Who else out there happens not only to love these movies enough, but watch them enough, to make the connection?

Ben Stiller's parents, maybe. (Rest in peace, Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara.)