In Scream, no one can see your Roman numerals

Flush with confidence after last year's Scream reboot was considered a success, the studio is already back with another Scream movie this March.

The title is right there in that poster, but I wouldn't be surprised if you didn't notice it. 

See Paramount Pictures didn't go the extremely confusing route that Rob Zombie's Halloween reboot series went, where not only was the reboot also named Halloween, just like the original, but the sequel was also named Halloween 2, just like the original sequel.

They did manage to confuse things a bit though.

Instead of doing what the more recent Halloween reboot series did, calling the movies things like Scream Kills or Scream Rises or Scream Goes to the Bathroom, the Scream movies have picked up with the original numbering of the series -- even though there was never a Scream 5.

Scream VI is a direct sequel to last year's Scream reboot, which was effectively if not actually Scream 5, and it is indeed the sixth movie in the series, but keeping everything else straight may be a tall task.

And for young people who haven't seen a lot of movies that use to a Roman numeral to denote the sequel number, they might not even see the bloody VI in this poster.

So there's at least a chance that some people will think that the sequel to Scream is also called Scream.

I kind of think the only reason they chose this title was because someone had the brainwave that they could fit a Roman numeral six into the letter M. That's pretty flimsy if you ask me.

Oh and the Alien reference in the subject of this post isn't just random. I got a promotional email about the release of Scream VI in which they use a tagline "In a city of millions, no one hears you scream." (See it's set in New York. Okay, something new at least.)

This is pretty lame -- either they fucked up the reference by using "no one hears" rather than "no one can hear," or they deliberately avoided it to steer clear of a lawsuit, in which case, they should have just gone with something else entirely.

I was one of those who thought the Scream reboot was pretty good, so I guess I'll probably see Scream VI as well. Ghostface chasing a victim to the top of the Statue of Liberty's torch is going to be epic. 

Settling the Scorsese: Kundun

This is the final installment in my 2022 bi-monthly series in which I finish watching the feature films of Martin Scorsese that I hadn't seen. There are still a couple random documentaries that might or might not be feature length.

I've known a fair number of people who were really into Tibet and the Dalai Lama.

I have never been one of them.

I have the basic idea of his permanent exile in India and how lots of people want to free Tibet from Chinese rule. That'd be cool. I'm all for it. But do I have a huge amount invested in it one way or another? No.

I don't know if 1997's Kundun, the final Scorsese film I had not yet seen, resonates more for the people who are invested in Tibet than it does for me, but it didn't resonate for me very much at all.

A number of problems here:

1) The acting. The two primary actors chosen to depict the man born Tenzin Gyatso -- identified in his infancy as the 14th Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader -- are, like, not good. This is not their fault any more than it was Jake Lloyd's fault he wasn't good as Annakin Skywalker. Tenzin Thuthob Tsarong and Gyurme Tethong are as good as they had any reasonable expectation to be, but unfortunately, the reasonable expectations were pretty low. They just can't carry the weight of the drama.

2) The drama. But that's also the problem: the weight of the drama is diffuse and unspecific. Scorsese and screenwriter Melissa Mathison are not able to create many moments in this film that feel any more significant than any other moments. Kundun tries to build a thematic structure that goes beyond just retelling moments from the first quarter century of the Dalai Lama's life -- the still-living Dalai Lama was born in 1935 and escaped to India in 1959, which is when the film ends -- but either that structure doesn't register, or the significant events of his life, beyond his actual escape, just aren't very cinematic. Then again, neither is his escape as depicted here.

3) The score. When unable to produce narrative peaks unto themselves, Scorsese compensates by draping Philip Glass' oppressively earnest score over the whole thing. We rarely get a respite from the score, which I'm sure is not bad musically, but is used so consistently that it wears out its appeal in really short order. And when the music is telling you in every single moment of the film just how important this all is, none of it feels important.

I could go into a lot more specifics of why Kundun didn't work for me, but it's the end of the year and I have a lot more pressing things to spend my time on. Plus, I suspect I don't need to convince you that the film is mediocre. It has the reputation of being one of Scorsese's least remembered films, which seems like an especial failure considering how prestigious the subject matter is and how much it clearly means to so many people.

But hey, at least the thing wasn't chockablock with Catholic iconography.

I will finish with one final thought on why the film didn't register with me. I said earlier that I know a number of people who are/were really into Tibet and the Dalai Lama. Well, I actually know at least one person who has met him, a guy I grew up with and have known since we were maybe six years old.

I'm not actually sure what he's doing now, but the early stages of his career involved both Tibet and work in the music/entertainment industry that brought him into the orbit of guys like the Beastie Boys and Spike Jonze, who were both big into Buddhism and Tibet. Now that I'm googling it, I think my friend (we would have been friendly once, though it was more a proximity friendship than an actual one) must have been involved in the production of the documentary Free Tibet, about the 1996 Tibetan Freedom Concert in San Francisco, on which Jonze worked as a cinematographer while the Beasties organized and headlined the concert. The timeline would have been exactly right for that.

In any case, rumor among mutual friends was that this guy met the Dalai Lama, but what's more, the Dalai Lama was charmed by the goatee he wore at the time and gave it a little tug while chuckling playfully. It's a great story to say you had your goatee tugged by the Dalai Lama.

But that's not the Dalai Lama I saw here. This Dalai Lama was bland and humorless and given to awkward pauses that lasted a lot longer than they should have. (Where's Thelma Schoonmaker stepping in to tighten things up?) I was hoping Kundun would showcase a Dalai Lama with the lightness and sense of humor demonstrated in the goatee-tugging incident, the traits I now identify with the man, both from this story and from other footage I see of him. Scorsese couldn't figure out how to get even one moment like that, nor am I certain that his actors would have been able to deliver it.

One final, really final, thought: I had always thought the movie was pronounced "KOON-DOON," but from hearing characters in the movie say it, it seems it's more like "KUN-dun." For some reason this qualifies as one final disappointment.

Well I must say the Settling the Scorsese series was itself a disappointment. I didn't really care for any of the first three films I saw, Who's That Knocking at My Door, followed by New York, New York and The Color of Money. Things did perk up with New York Stories, especially Scorsese's segment, but that was only a short film's worth of work from him. The Age of Innocence was a standout, finally, but Kundun just brought things back to earth with a thud. Oh well. I guess I'd just been wise with my previous selections from the filmography of a man who remains, without a doubt, one of the all-time greats.

My disappointment with my unseen Scorsese does not translate to a disappointment with this sort of bi-monthly format for finishing off the filmography of a great director. And I already have my subject -- or possibly subjects? -- picked out for 2023. I'll let you know about that sometime in January. 

I had almost forgotten that 3D was a thing

There are probably plenty of funny entry points to discussing my Wednesday night viewing of Avatar: The Way of Water. Here is a couple I will note but ultimately reject:

1) Of the two other people who were supposed to go with me, one couldn't go and one couldn't get there until the movie was nearly 15 minutes old. It's not funny except that one of them is a millennial and the other is a slightly older millennial, and this is very millennial behavior.

2) There was a 1:45 a.m. showing of this 192-minute movie, meaning it would get out around 5 a.m. I've heard of that sort of thing on opening nights of new Star Wars movies that can't start until after midnight, but not when there are showings at a very reasonable 6 p.m., like the one I went to.

But here's the one I did go with:

I couldn't remember the last time I had worn 3D glasses to a movie. 

Yeah we've had the pandemic and all that, but it was way before that. In fact, I doubt I'd have any way of figuring it out for sure. I was going to 3D movies fairly often (at least three to four times a year, anyway), and had no reason to believe that activity was about ready to subside. It's like that extremely melancholy concept that states "The last time you went outside to play with your friends, nobody knew it was the last time." I did nothing to mark the anticipated demise of 3D because I didn't know it was coming.

But then I wondered, is it possible that 3D has continued to be available, only I just haven't been going?

Now granted, I do see most movies in the theater for free with my critics card, which excludes novelties like 3D, IMAX or other oversized screens. (There's a thing here called X-Treme screen and another thing called VMAX, and I believe both are excluded from free passes.) 

But if so, then I'm not seeing it advertised on the posters anymore. There used to be something like "See it in 3D!" on the poster and you would actually consider doing that, depending on the movie.

And I think the glasses have had another technological upgrade, as they did this sort of thing where they synched themselves up, plus gave me a momentary panic about going blind. The first 3D trailer (I believe it was for the next Guardians of the Galaxy movie) led directly to something that was decidedly not 3D, and at least the guy next to me and I thought we might have lost vision in our right eye. It was disconcerting to say the least, having a black square of emptiness in that eye.

But I'm glad 3D was back for Avatar, because yes, the thing looked absolutely crazy once again. 

I don't know how I would really look at them side by side to tell you what was so different. I guess I'll just say it was more. More immersive, more grandiose, more imaginative -- just more. 

Now this is not to say I am giving it my top rating or anything. It's still an Avatar movie, and I firmly believe an Avatar movie has sort of a ceiling on it. But I definitely liked it better than the first. You can read my whole review here.

As for the length? Honestly, it felt like about 2:30. That's a huge compliment. In fact, so little did I need to go to the bathroom, I didn't actually go upon leaving the theater, I didn't actually go after sharing a pitcher of beer with my one friend who did make the screening, and I only finally relieved myself at the train station -- but not the departing side, the arriving side. I was able to hold it on on the whole ride home before deciding not to wait the extra five minutes for the bike ride back to my house. 

And it does look like at least the next Guardians of the Galaxy movie is coming out in 3D, so maybe I'll be donning the glasses again at some point in the not-too-distant future.

Movies I learned existed from the Golden Globe nominations

I'm never going to get that watchlist down am I.

As it does seemingly every year, the release of this year's Golden Globe nominations put several films I had no idea about on my radar. Did I have no idea about them because my head was in the sand or because the Hollywood Foreign Press has bizarre and indefensible taste in movies? Probably a little from column A and a little from column B.

But, since I'm now adding them to my watchlist, I thought I might as well tell you about them.

1) Empire of Light
Nomination: Best actress in a drama (Olivia Colman)

The fact that I didn't know about a new Sam Mendes movie points a bit more to the head in the sand explanation above, but the fact is, I had not heard about this at all until yesterday, when I finally checked the nominee list while waiting for Avatar to start. (More on Avatar tomorrow probably.) As tends to happen, I then the next day immediately heard two people discuss it on a podcast, with pretty lukewarm feelings about it. So maybe it's not a must-see.

2) Living
Nomination: Best actor in a drama (Bill Nighy)

So the writers on this are novelist Kazuo Ishigiru (Remains of the Day) and Akira Kurosawa. How is that possible, Vance? Isn't he dead? It appears to be an adaptation of Kurosawa's Ikiru. I can't remember if that's one of the ones I've seen or not. (Quick check: no.) Not to generalize too much here, but it's usually the female acting nominations that come from movies I've never heard of, if we are following the regrettable Oscars pattern. 

3) The Inspection
Nomination: Best actor in a drama (Jeremy Pope)

Okay now it's not only the movie I've never heard of, it's the actor. That could be because this is only his sixth credit. This reminds me that I still haven't caught One Night in Miami, in which he played Jackie Wilson.

4) Inu-Oh
Nomination: Best animated feature

IMDB logline: "A cursed dancer and a musician stun society with electrifying concerts in this animated rock opera." After reading that, I remember that I did indeed hear this mentioned on one of my podcasts at the very beginning of the year, but I mustn't have remembered to add it to my watchlist and it got lost in the torrent of titles that has come along since.

The best foreign language film category includes three films I've never heard of, but that's par for the course.

If you are keeping track at home, my watchlist is up to 103 movies now. I just ... can't ... get down to double digits.

26th of 26

Okay, done with that.

Last night I watched the 26th and final of my former #1s, finishing off a whole calendar year of doing that, and now I can start dueling them against each other in a special Flickchart account devoted to just those 26.

When I got down to my final three, I had envisioned either First Reformed or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which were two of the three I'd happened to watch in 2021 before deciding to start this project, as my last movie. Instead, logistical considerations caused them both to jump ahead of Beyond the Hills, which finished things off last night.

When it became clear I was going to need to miss a day of work (which ended up becoming two) following my tooth extraction a couple weeks ago, I thought that made a perfect opportunity to watch the 2012 Cristian Mungiu film that runs two hours and 32 minutes. I had already requested to borrow it from the library, but the tooth issue actually prevented me from getting into the city for work that week, meaning I also couldn't get to the library where it was held in reserve for me.

But surprisingly, it wasn't available for rental via either iTunes or Amazon, so I'm glad there was indeed a DVD copy floating around the Melbourne Public Library system. I'd already watched First Reformed, and I watched Eternal Sunshine on day two of tooth extraction convalescence, which left me Beyond the Hills for last night. 

It might have suited me to wait until a different night, given that I was coming off watching two-plus hour movies on each of the previous two nights (Tar and Emancipation), the former of which I didn't finish until the following afternoon despite a valiant effort to stay up for it, the latter of which I did finish, but at nearly 2 a.m. Another extremely long movie -- one in a foreign language, no less -- could have killed me.

But as I told you yesterday, I'm seeing Avatar tomorrow night, and tonight will be a blissful respite from watching movies to catch up on Survivor and write Christmas cards. So Monday night was the night.

Besides, I'd like to give myself at least two weeks to duel these movies before I post my rankings of #1 to #26 somewhere around New Year's. 

I won't tip my hand about where Beyond the Hills might land, but I will note that it is one of my most obscure #1 movies. If you know a film by Mungiu, you're much more likely to know 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. His follow-up -- a 2012 release in Romania, but a 2013 release elsewhere, making it my #1 in 2013 -- was certainly critically acclaimed, but I just don't think it was that widely seen. 

I've seen it four times now -- the second time in 2015 for pleasure, the third in 2019 to consider it among my top 25 of the last decade (it landed at #11) and this time for this project. But only once before now have I even tagged it on this blog, which was for that year-end post in early 2014 where I named it my #1. I'm not going to check right now, but that might be my fewest tags for any movie I've named #1, making it comparatively obscure for me as well.

Well, I'm glad to come to the end of this viewing project without any misses. I had some close calls. I had to buy a copy of Todd Solondz' Happiness and have it shipped from America in order to watch it. I already owned a copy of Al Pacino's Looking for Richard (which I hadn't watched in nearly ten years of owning it), but I might have had similar sourcing issues there as well. Many of the films were available for free on a streamer to which I already subscribed, but a surprising number were not -- in fact, I couldn't find the aforementioned Eternal Sunshine on any of about five services, so I had to pay for a rental. (Which meant I was pretty lazy that night, since I own a Region 1 DVD, but in my state of tooth extraction recovery, it seemed easier just to pay for a rental rather than hook up my tired old laptop that's been set up with Region 1 as its DVD region.)

Now I look forward to some intense ranking to see what surprises this project still has in store.

Tune back in near the end of the month to have all the answers revealed!

The unconscionable length of Avatar 2 is galling

I'm going to Avatar: The Way of Water on Wednesday in order to have a review up before the weekend, and because a friend suggested we go see it, and I suggested $35 seats at the IMAX cinema at the museum because might as well.

I had no idea, though, that I might need to clear my schedule for the whole day.

This movie is an absurd 192 minutes long. That's only two minutes shorter than Titanic.

Insert joke here about Titanic definitely not needing to be that length, but I will shoot that joke down if you try to. I value every single moment of Titanic, and there are many others out there who agree with me.

Avatar is a completely different story.

If James Cameron's idea were to fit every last bit of Pandora and Na'avi and Unobtanium that's floating around in his head into one movie, I get the three hours and 12 minutes. But Cameron has potentially three more Avatar movies still rolling around up there, though he's acknowledged it will only be one if The Way of Water flops.

Which, I've got to be honest, I think it will. 

As strange as it may seem to say this, Cameron has actually been a filmmaker of some restraint throughout his career. He hasn't pushed every success he's had to its breaking point. Only once before has he directed a sequel to one of his own movies, and it was actually arguably his best movie in Terminator 2. He made a dynamite sequel to someone else's movie in Aliens, but then disembarked the franchise at that point. He never pushed for a sequel to The Abyss, to True Lies, or, it may be obvious to say, to Titanic. 

The length of Avatar: The Way of Water in itself may not be out of character for Cameron, but its length, combined with its visit to a world we stopped caring about as soon as we left the theater in 2009, is. In the past, Cameron has always known what we've wanted and given it to us. Now, he thinks we want four more Avatar movies when there is no conceivable way that we do.

Maybe we'd want four more movies if this one were a reasonable length, meaning Cameron was planning to tell discrete, distinct stories, almost like episodes of a long-running TV series. A 100-minute Avatar movie? Sign me up.

But The Way of Water is 17 minutes longer than the longest 2022 movie I had been aware of to this point, that being The Batman. And that's part of a series that has proven time and again that we are willing to back to the well for more material.

Making any sequels to Avatar always felt like a gamble. So what if Jake Sully awakened in fully realized Na'avi mode at the end of that movie, ready for more Na'avi adventures. Just because he wanted them didn't mean we did.

The really silly thing about this is that this has the potential to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Cameron took the unusual proactive approach of acknowledging that the world might have moved on from Avatar and that he may only be able to justify one more movie financially. At three hours and 12 minutes, he's made it a virtual certainty that the movie won't garner the sort of repeat viewings that made Titanic and Avatar (a modest 162 minutes) such gargantuan hits. Without making bank from people going a second and third and fourth time, is there even a path to viewing this movie as a hit?

But maybe it's a picture that becomes clearer the more we look at it. Maybe Cameron already knows he's not making Avatar 4 and Avatar 5 and has front-loaded the story he wanted to end up with into the second and third movies, the latter of which must already be a fait accompli. How else to justify three and a quarter hours with characters we never even liked that much to begin with?

The other issue with the future Avatar movies is that too little time will elapse between them for each to represent a big technological jump forward from the previous one, the sort of technological jump we implicitly crave as viewers. Clearly we are thrilled by the possibilities of how the technology has advanced, in ways we might not have even imagined, in the 13 years since Avatar. When there's only two years elapsing between releases, and they are being made simultaneously with presumably similar technology, that part completely drops out of the equation.

And yet I have ponied up $35 to see it on the largest screen possible on Wednesday.

I don't want to root against Avatar: The Way of Water. I think cinema is a better place when there are wunderkinds willing to push the technology to its breaking point to give us breathtaking escapism. 

But I've already decided that if I have to leave in the middle of The Way of Water to go to the bathroom, so be it. I wouldn't have done that during Avengers: Infinity War, which was 12 minutes shorter, but I'm going to assume that the sea of Avatar blue will not miss me for five minutes at some point in the middle of this behemoth. 

What even are these movies

I thought the "pre-Christmas new release slowdown" was only an Australian thing, but apparently not.

Even without specifically having Boxing Day as a major national holiday upon which you heap anywhere from six to ten new releases, like Australia does, the U.S. is running on pre-holiday fumes, if this weekend's movies playing at the Mission Tiki Drive-In in Montclair, California are any indication. 

I no longer live in California, of course, but even after being gone for nine years, I still get the Mission Tiki emails.

I suppose there are two unique different shocks I could register over this weekend's offerings.

The first is, as the title suggests, the very random nature of two of these four movies. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever? Sure. Major hit. Violent Night? A Christmas movie that most people seem to like, even if I am not one of those people.

But what even are these other two movies?

Christmas Bloody Christmas? What the hell is that?

Just when you assume that all this year's Christmas movies have been released, along comes this not-ready-for-primetime nugget of seeming awfulness. It stars (checks notes) Riley Dandy, Sam Delich and Jonah Ray. You know, Jonah Ray. It was directed by (checks notes) Joe Begos.

If you look down far enough in the cast on IMDB, you will see exactly one name you recognize, but maybe only if you watched ER and Parker Lewis Can't Lose back in the 1990s. That's Abraham Benrubi as Santa Claus.

For what it's worth, the film was also released on the internet on the same day, which was Friday.

Savage Salvation? What the hell is that?

This movie at least has recognizable stars, though you can't trust them not to have crossed over into that phase of their careers where they are happy enough to take the same sorts of roles as Nicolas Cage, John Travolta and (before he retired) Bruce Willis. Robert De Niro and John Malkovich star, though De Niro is a whisper away from 80 and Malkovich a whisper away from 70. (In fact, Malkovich celebrated his 69th birthday on Friday with the release of this film. That may be more a curse than a blessing.)

This film is directed by Randall Emmett, as you do. And wouldn't you know it, he did direct Willis in Midnight in the Switchgrass, a 2021 film co-starring Megan Fox that earned multiple Golden Raspberry nominations, not to mention a similar essentially straight-to-video fate.

Except this one isn't straight to video. It's playing at the Mission Tiki Drive-In.

This is the place my wife and I used to go when we were poor and wanted to see two new first-run movies at a discount rate, while bringing in whatever snacks and drinks we saw fit. Which brings me to my second point of criticism:

All four of the movies that are playing are playing as a double feature with themselves.

I've seen Mission Tiki pull this nonsense before, but it's usually only on one screen. I noticed it specifically with last week's email, where Black Panther was playing back-to-back on the one screen. Since they don't let you drive around and change screens between movies -- a lesson I learned the hard way once --  I figured they considered Black Panther to be a marquee enough attraction that they could essentially charge you the price of two features to see just the one. Sure, you could stay and watch it again, but most people probably wouldn't. And those cars would be replaced by the ones who drove in for the later showing.

But each screen showing only one film, played a second time on the same screen?

That's some bullshit, or maybe, sadly, just a sign that times are hard for Mission Tiki.

Maybe there aren't a lot of new releases right now, but I'm a bit shocked that they had to scrounge to get two movies that were no better than straight-to-VOD -- and then not even give you two of them for the price of one ticket. 

I'll have to monitor the health of Mission Tiki from here, but I wouldn't be surprised if next week's email has Avatar: The Way of Water on all four screens -- back-to-back as a double feature with itself, of course. 

Immediate promotions

You know how I've been telling you that I have a hundred 2022 films in my watchlist and yet I keep watching 2022 movies that were never in it?

Well maybe I didn't tell you that second part. But I have been.

Of the three movies I watched last weekend -- Troll, Violent Night and The Perfumier -- only Violent Night had been on my radar for more than a week, and it wasn't much more. It's not very satisfying to remove movies from your watchlist that had only been on there for a day or two, or are not on there at all.

That happened in the extreme on Friday night.

As my wife and I were getting ready to watch episode 6 of the third season of The Boys with our dinner, the one ad that appears before everything you watch on Amazon was for a movie I'd never heard of called The People We Hate at the Wedding.

An hour later, I was watching it.

Why did I engage in this sort of instant promotion?

1) It was already 10 o'clock on a Friday night. It's been a long and busy week.

2) My rental of Tar still has another two weeks left. No way I'm starting a 158-minute movie after 10 on a Friday night.

3) Not only was it late, but we have a birthday party for my younger son today at the house. (He doesn't turn nine until January 1st, but all the kids get scattered to the winds in the summer so you need to have the party a few weeks early.)

4) Not only are we having a birthday party for my younger son today at the house, but I had already planned to mop the floor in our hardwood kitchen and living room after whatever I watched, so it would be dry by morning without anyone needing to walk on it.

5) That title. It's a good title.

And of course Kristen Bell. Bell has transformed herself into one of our funniest and most likeable screen presences for women of a Certain Age -- she's actually only 42, but I better enjoy her now because Hollywood could ruthlessly put her out to pasture any old time.

Although within this same film there's also a woman who has repeatedly defied the typical Hollywood age ceiling, as a 63-year-old Allison Janney still looks great (there's a scene where she's trying on dresses and she really looks fit), and more to the point, still brings both the comedy and the pathos. (This movie has a surprising amount of the latter, making up for the fact that the former isn't quite to the level you would hope it would be.)

I was also happy to see Dear Evan Hansen star Ben Platt in a movie that showcased his abilities a lot better than the role he's known for. 

Then there was also Dustin Milligan, who played one of Alexis Rose's boyfriends on Schitt's Creek, who I always liked on that show.

Anyway, the whole thing finished a lot more satisfyingly than it started out, though it also finished after 12:45 a.m. after I snoozed my alarm three consecutive times after a ten-minute "nap."

And now I have to start getting the house ready for this party. 

But from here I think I really need to cut out these immediate promotions from watchlist -- yes I did actually add The People We Hate at the Wedding to my watchlist for the sake of posterity -- to screen. Fortunately, we're about to go into a release dead zone before Christmas, where almost everything that's still hitting theaters in December doesn't debut until Boxing Day (Avatar being the lone main exception). 

I'll need this time to finally start sending the watchlist in the other direction.

Bill wasn't so menacing

I've only seen Kill Bill Vol. 2 once, but there's one scene that always sticks with me.

It involves David Carradine's title character cutting up a peanut butter sandwich with a large knife. You know the scene. It sticks with you too. (Kind of like peanut butter.)

But the reason it stuck with me originally is not the reason it sticks with me now. 

Originally, I thought "Wow, what a badass. Cutting a sandwich with a ginsu knife in order to assert subtle dominance and a sense of mortal threat. And telling some story about Superman." (I'm pretty sure I'm remembering that correctly. It's Tarantino so it was some story about some pop culture figure, anyway.)

Now, I think "What a practical way to cut a sandwich."

Using such a knife to cut a peanut butter sandwich once seemed like overkill. But now I have kids and I cut sandwiches five days a week.

One of my kids, the older one, wants two of the crusts cut off, leaving the other two on. I suppose they function sort of as handles once you've cut the sandwich in half, diagonally of course.

The other son, the younger one, wants no crusts, and then he wants what remains to be cut into four triangular wedges.

Just imagine trying to do this with a bread knife. 

It would require a lot more sawing. And because individual slices of bread have varying levels of thickness and structural integrity, you're starting to pull it apart with each motion back and forth. Not to mention that the contents of the sandwich create a tension with the bread that only exacerbates the stress on it, increasing the likelihood that it will fall apart.

A big, sharp knife just does the job with no fuss or muss.

Mine doesn't look like Bill's, and might not be as lethal. It's white and made of ceramic. But I've given myself nicks with it before and it's no fun.

The big difference between me and Bill is that I'm not telling my kids a story about Superman and vaguely threatening to slit their throats.

Mary Vernieu 1, Avy Kaufman 0

I wrote my first (and so far only) post about a casting director six years ago when I finally acquainted myself with the credits of Avy Kaufman, and learned that she was a woman, not a man. You can read the post here, if you like.

At the time, I didn't know any other casting director by name, and speculated that Kaufman's 223 credits on IMDB must be among the most for any working professional.

Mary Vernieu took that as a personal insult. 

And then she took it as a challenge.

I haven't seen Kaufman's name so much recently, but I've seen Vernieu's everywhere. In fact, three of the last five films I've watched were cast by Mary Vernieu, those being The Menu, The Whale and Violent Night. She must regret having been too young to cast Stephen Frears' Hero in 1992, and she was probably never going to work with Claire Denis (Stars at Noon). But the way Vernieu works it could have easily been 5-for-my-last-5. (And John Leguizamo is in two of those movies, so I guess she digs him.) 

Those three films bring her total number of credits to ... 425. 

With 39 more scheduled for release in 2023 and 2024. 

(IMDB has started dividing credits by past and future, in case you haven't noticed.)

Wow.

Kaufman has accumulated her share of credits since I wrote that post in 2016, but that still brings her total to only a "paltry" 294, with seven more yet to release. While she celebrates passing the hallowed 300-credit mark in the near future, Vernieu is well on her way to 500.

Wow.

I think she deserves a picture, just as Kaufman got in that post:

Vernieu makes an especially interesting point of comparison with Kaufman because of the nearly identical duration of their careers. She's had a little longer to accumulate these credits than Kaufman, but not much. Vernieu's first casting credit was in 1993, while Kaufman didn't get her first until 1995. But Vernieu only had a total of three credits in 1993 and 1994 before getting five in 1995 ... and never looking back.

Do they have an actual rivalry? If they don't, they should.

Unfortunately for Kaufman, Vernieu seems to be the champion in most respects. Not only does she have a greater number of overall credits, but she blows Kaufman's best year (19 in 2014) out of the water, having eclipsed 20 credits more than a half-dozen times, with a personal best of 26 in both 2017 and 2019. That includes TV as well, of course, but then Kaufman's credits also include TV.

So I guess the question is: Why didn't I notice her name before the last year or two?

Hard to say. The first name Avy is more distinctive than the first name Mary. Maybe that's it. Remember, the last post was inspired by thinking Kaufman was a man before realizing she was a woman. I'd obviously built up a little narrative in my head about Avy Kaufman.

The narrative about Mary Vernieu is just that she's one of the most dominant forces ever in casting.

Of course, if I researched it further I might find that Vernieu's 425 credits are "nothing." I wouldn't be surprised to discover that in the 1940s and 50s, there were only two casting directors in Hollywood and they both had 800 credits over the course of their careers.

But I don't like research, and I'm not going to take that crown from Vernieu after I've only just handed it to her.

When small movies have great posters

This probably isn't the sort of promotion one of my publicity contacts wanted when he emailed me about this movie, but maybe it's better than nothing.

To give you a little background, as part of my role as editor of ReelGood, I get lots of promotional emails from publicists about movies coming out -- many of them very small movies that are available for VOD rental or purchase only. Realistically, I don't have the space or bandwidth to review or otherwise write about these movies on our site, not when I'm already missing many of the big releases that will be of much more interest to our readers.

But during COVID it was a little different. The paucity of new theatrical releases, even when there were plenty of streaming releases, did prompt me to give some of these movies my attention. Unfortunately, most movies that can't find any distribution do, in fact, live down to our expectations given their budgetary restrictions. 

But just because you aren't going to be worth my time, realistically speaking, doesn't mean you can't have a damn great poster.

Like this one for The Death of April.

This poster is so great that I did glance at the creative talent involved to see if I could convince myself to watch it and review it. I decided I couldn't, especially not with all the prestige movies coming out during awards season, but hey, at least this post on my alternate means of interacting with the movie world gives them some additional visibility. 

The poster reminds me of the one I've always loved for the Sandra Bullock vehicle Premonition, which you can see here:

Maybe I'm just a sucker for tree branches. (An observation I just realized I already made in this post, ha ha.)

You might wonder why I don't just give the movie a watch and then later decide whether to invest the additional time to review it. Well for one, that 90 minutes is precious to me, especially this time of the year. But more importantly, you enter into a contract when you request a screener for a movie. It's not a legally enforceable contract, of course, but you're going to really disappoint the publicist if you don't review it, and maybe they won't send you additional emails. Probably depends on how desperate they are. It's probably something you can get away with once, or maybe twice, but you'd have some really annoyed correspondence to deal with. (And yeah, I don't really care if a publicist who only publicizes very small movies stops sending me emails, but there's an element of human decency involved with the whole thing as well.)

But who knows, maybe someone reading this will be intrigued enough by The Death of April to give it their attention if it crosses their path of immediate availability. 

After all, some movies with microscopic budgets are great. I just don't think a great poster is enough to convince me that this might be one of those exceptions. 

Welcome to the PCU (Perfume Cinematic Universe)

If you've been reading this blog you likely know my affection for Tom Tykwer's 2006 film Perfume: The Story of a Murderer. This will be the eighth time I've tagged the movie on this blog, which is pretty high for a movie that isn't Star Wars or some other cultural touchstone that comes up for discussion on a regular basis.

So when I heard that Netflix was streaming another take on Patrick Suskind's 1985 novel that was adapted into Tykwer's film, of course I had to make it a priority.

If this poster is accurate, it actually came to Netflix more than two months ago, but I only just heard about it this week, it being a German language film and not highly promoted. A friend on Facebook had posted about seeing it, and about how much she had loved Tykwer's film -- which gave me all the feels, since I was the one who first recommended it to her as part of a movie challenge.

Well I can see why Netflix didn't promote it. It wasn't very good.

But I'm not here today to talk about the quality of The Perfumier (or Dar Parfumeur). Rather, I want to talk about the brand that Suskind seems to have unwittingly introduced into our world.

The Perfumier is not an adaptation of Suskind's novel, which was set in 18th century France. Rather, the film is billed as "Based on thematic elements of the novel Perfume by Patrick Suskind."

True enough, if you were familiar with the novel, you could not watch this movie and escape noticing that the ideas discussed -- murdering women to extract their scent, creating perfumes that overpower people into loving other people, people who have no sense of smell or give off no smell -- are straight out of Suskind's novel. To not credit him would have probably resulted in a lawsuit. 

However, the story is really pretty different from that in the novel. It's not just a 21st century update set in Germany and in the world of a police procedural. The protagonist is a cop rather than the perfumer (or perfumier), there are other sorts of olfactory potions that Suskind never wrote about, and the perfumer has an accomplice who makes no appearance in Suskind's text. Enough is different that they might almost have gotten away with not crediting Suskind. (Making that more difficult would have been the line of voiceover at the beginning that drives home not only the similarity the novel, but to Tykwer's film, as the narrator says "This is also the story of a murderer.")

Given that he clearly has an intellectual ownership over this material on some level -- and that this film clearly shows the potentially widespread application of that material's themes -- it made me wonder if it wouldn't be possible to construct an entire cinematic universe out of Suskind's IP.

Just think about the sort of other movies you could make:

1) A gifted scent maker who concocts specific smells to use as weapons. If he's being chased by someone, for example, he throws a capsule that releases an overpowering shit or vomit smell at their feet, and they double over wretching. It would be kind of like that character in Trey Parker and Matt Stone's Orgazmo who has a gun that makes people instantly ejaculate when they are hit with it, only far less pleasant. 

2) The story of a mute man and his blind father, where a con man kills and captures the scent of the mute man, dousing himself with it to fool the blind father into thinking it's his son, then proceeding to bilk him out of all his money. (I guess it wouldn't really work to have a mute son and a blind father. Communicating only by touch is difficult. Maybe the con man would have to also get plastic surgery to really pull it off.)

3) A horse breeder who captures the smell of a superior horse and sprays it on an inferior horse in order to get an actual superior horse to breed with it.

Okay it's clear I don't have all the ideas. I'm not a screenwriter.

But the point is that there's a high concept here that has multiple potential applications. Maybe it would work better with short films, like The Animatrix, that anthology film that came out a month after The Matrix Reloaded and whetted our appetites for The Matrix Revolutions.

Or I could be making entirely too much out of a random filmmaker who had a single variation on Suskind's novel, and not a very good one at that.

Then again, why does The Audient exist if not to make too much out of things?